Dead Air

"...an engineered death is merely a polite euphemism for murder!"

- Jeffery Blackburn (Max Afford's "Poison Can Be Puzzling," collected in Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn, 2008)

Max Afford was an Australian playwright and novelist who was previously discussed on this blog when I reviewed a slender volume of short fiction, Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008), which included a pair of stories featuring his series characters – a genius amateur, named Jeffery Blackburn, and the laconic Inspector Read.

Blackburn and Read appeared in roughly half a dozen full-length novels and four of them were catalogued by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). You'd assume that would make Afford's work of special interest to devotees of impossible crime fiction, but even now that they're readily available again, they continue to be fairly obscure and overlooked by locked room enthusiasts. So let's change that and take one of them for a test-ride. 

The Dead Are Blind (1937) is the third entry in the Blackburn series and Afford drew on his own experience as a producer and writer of radio-plays, which furnished the plot of the story with an interesting backdrop. The story begins with Jeffery Blackburn reflecting how the evenings have become rather dull, because "all the super-criminals appear to have turned their nefarious attentions to dinner-hour radio thrillers." Luckily, Read was supplied with invitations for the opening of a new subsidiary studio of BBC.

A radio-play will be performed during opening night, entitled Darkness is Danger, which is produced by a former talkie-director, Carl von Bethke, who brought an innovative perspective from the big screen to the radio studio – innovations that nearly provided a cover for an almost perfect crime. Near perfect is a key phrase that perfectly sums up the events preceding the opening of the studio: a technical break-down occurs between the special effects room in the basement and the dramatic studio, which means that the effect will have to be done in the same studio as the artists. Just as it was "in the early days of broadcasting."

However, one of the stars of the show, Olga Lusinska, raises proper Hell over these improvisations and refuses to "act among brooms and buckets and mops," but these are minor snags compared to what happened during the live broadcast.

There's a scene in the radio-play in which the characters are "plunged in darkness" and in order to strengthen the effect the lights are dimmed in the studio, but when they come back on there’s somewhat of a problem: the twisted body of one of the actresses, Mary Marlowe, lay on the floor of the studio. The key to the door of the dramatic studio is firmly clasped in one of her cold, stiffened hands, which prevented anyone from entering or leaving the room.

A doctor pronounces the death of Mary Marlowe to be "one of the best authenticated cases of heart failure" he had "ever seen," but there are several dissenting voices who suggest they might be looking at the end results of an audacious crime – which include Blackburn and a close-friend of the victim. Initially, Blackburn suspects the cause of death might be one of those forbidden and untraceable poisons, but a long and intensive post-mortem examinations yields surprising results.

Slowly, but surely, the layers covering up the method are peeled away and the plot begins to resemble a proper, classically structured locked room mystery. Showing how the murder was a locked room killing actually answered the question of how it was carried out, which is an unusual, but clever and original, approach to the locked room problem. Never seen that route taken before that I can remember. The idea behind the explanation anticipates one of John Dickson Carr's locked room novels and is tangibly related to a non-impossible crime mystery I reviewed very recently on here, which was helpful in gauging the nature of the method.

The set-up of this well disguised locked room murder, subsequent investigations and eventual explanation covers the first six and best chapters of the book.

What follows is digging around in the past of the victim, which involved a fatal fire, dope smuggling, coded messages and two more murders that reeked of offal to pad-out the story, but Afford redeemed himself in the end – since they stuck to the main plot better than I expected from their presentation.

The method for the second murder could've easily been presented as a quasi-impossible crime, if done in a public place with lots of eyewitnesses, and was foreshadowed in the early chapters of the book. And the third body is a classic one that threw me off the scent of the murderer for a brief moment. So they hardly qualify as padding and that was pleasantly surprising. I was not as thrilled by the spot of danger Blackburn found himself in, which had the murderer cartoonishly confessing to everything and promising that "if it is the last thing" this person does "upon this Earth," but Blackburn was going to end up somewhere were he'll not be able to do any of his "damned investigating."

So, all in all, The Dead Are Blind has an original structured locked room plot insulated by a fairly decent, if not always perfect, detective story, but as a whole it's well worth a read.

An Air of Suspense

"Tonight's story, I confess, intrigues me; it is another instance from my notebook of the miracles which turn out to be no miracle. You are warned, good friends, that I shall try to deceive you until the end."

- Narrator (John Dickson Carr's "Death Has Many Faces," collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly and Other Mysteries from Radio's Golden Age, 1983) 

A week ago, I posted a review of an obscure, Golden Age mystery novel, namely The Crystal Beads Murder (1930) by Annie Haynes, which is a blog-post I titled for equally obscure reasons "The Devil in the Summer-House" – that also happened to be the title of a radio-play by everyone's favorite composer of seemingly impossible problems.

This prompted a comment from Sergio, who thought it cheeky to caption the post in such a Carrian fashion and how it gave him expectations for "a classic radio review."

I hadn't planned on doing such a review, but I need very, very little encouragement where John Dickson Carr's work is concerned. So why not, I thought, why not listen back to a small selection of Carr's radio-plays and ramble about this often neglected part of his writing career – which tends to be even more overlooked than his contributions as a writer of historical mysteries.

"Cabin B-13" is arguably Carr's most accomplished piece to hit the airwaves and a classic example of the old-time radio shows, which was performed twice on Suspense in 1943.

What's not as widely known is that the episode became the premise for an eponymous titled spin-off series on CBS. Cabin B-13 starred Arnold Moss as Dr. Fabian, an all-but-forgotten series character from Carr's body of work, who's a ship surgeon aboard the luxurious S.S. Maurevania and invited to listeners to come to his cabin to share some horrifying tales of "the strange and the sinister." 

There are only a few episodes that survived the passage of time, but the ones that did are distinctively Carrian in nature.

"The Bride Vanishes" is one of the shipwrecked survivors of this show and the nature of the problem is one of those pesky, apparently impossible problems – a "miracle" if you will. A newlywed couple, Tom and Lucy Courtney, found an inexpensive, but lavishly furnished, abode on the sun-soaked island of Capri, Italy, which comes to no surprise when they learn about the haunted "balcony of death" attached to the villa.

A girl by the name of Josephine Adams "disappeared like soapbubbles" from that balcony in what appeared to be "a first grade miracle." She was "all alone" on that "balcony forty feet up a cliff," which was as "smooth as glass," but she couldn't have fallen or thrown off because "there was no sound of a splash" – and she couldn't have come back because "her mother and sisters were in front of the only door." This vanishing-act happened in less than 15-seconds.

It's remarked upon that Lucy is a spitting image of Josephine and people from the local, English-speaking colony are warning them to stay clear of the balcony or even return to Naples, but that would've made for a very dull story – wouldn't it?

Well, Lucy vanishes under similar, unexplainable circumstances as Josephine and the story begins to uncoil itself during the subsequent search, but even in a suspense story Carr managed to chuck in a few clues to help you piece together the method – which reminded me of a Baynard Kendrick novel and that helped me figuring out the method.

All in all, a good, nice and a well put together story that was nicely brought to life by the performance of the cast. So, yes, I enjoyed this particular play.

The Great John Dickson Carr!

"The Sleep of Death" is another shipwrecked survivor from this series and tells a story of Ned Whitehead, a young American, who has bright, diplomatic career ahead of him and recently has fallen in love with a girl from an old French-Hungarian family – only her stern "dragon uncle," a Hungarian count, "who looks as black as a thundercloud" stands in the way of their marriage.

To proof himself to his future in-laws, Ned proposes to spend a night in "the circular bedroom," better known as the Tapestry Room, which is situated "high in the castle tower" of the family's French chateau. The walls are " hung with rare tapestries" and permeates with "a haunting atmosphere of witchcraft and death." For two hundred years, everyone who slept in that room died without a mark to be found on their body!

If the premise sounds familiar, you would be correct, because it's a slightly altered version of "The Devil’s Saint," originally written for Suspense, which cast Peter Lorre perfectly as the caliginous count. That's really all that can be said in disfavor of this episode: 1) it's a rewrite 2) it lacked Lorre. Otherwise, it's as excellent a suspense story as the original with a nifty twist ending and a logical, fairly clued explanation as to how the previous occupants of the Tapestry Room died – which made the original version a classic episode of that show.

Finally, "London Adventure," also known under the titles "Bill and Brenda Leslie" and "A Razor in Fleet Street," which is one of Carr's Baghdad-on-the-Thames stories and has Bill remarking in the opening scenes of the episode: "It [London] has put a spell on my imagination ever since I was a boy so-high," followed by "Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Fu-Manchu" and "hansom cabs rattling down the fog." Yes, the smell of adventure is in the air!

And, as if on cue, a police-official from Scotland Yard swings by and has brought some bad news for the newly arrived couple. It appears that Bill Leslie, an American diplomat, is a dead ringer for "Flash Morgan," a man wanted for several ripper-style murders, and he might be interested in stealing Leslie's identity – because slipping out of the country is a lot easier when you have the perks that comes with diplomatic immunity.

The inspector urges them to stay in the hotel, but Bill smells adventure and soon finds himself in tight, tension-filled spot when he flees inside a barbershop in Fleet Street. There's an apparently impossible throat-slashing inside the locked barbershop, while Bill and the barber swear they never left each other out of sight, but the locked room is merely the topping on a great (if short) adventure story that Carr's characters always seem to yearn for.

It's another episode I would definitely recommend, especially if your taste or somewhat similar to mine, Bill Leslie and Carr. It's that kind of story.

I hope this classic radio review has earned a few tips from Sergio's fedora and let me end by pointing out the review I posted yesterday of Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders (1956), which also contains a locked room mystery. Because you can never have enough of those. Never!

Have I Got News For You!

"Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not place reliance on nor making use of Devine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, coincidence or the Act of God?"

-  The oath of the Detection Club

The Detection Club was founded in 1928 by Anthony Berkeley in London, therefore it's often referred to as the London Detection Club, which began to officially function in 1930 with G.K. Chesterton serving as its first honorary president – occupying that seat until passing away in 1936.

A number of round-robin novels and volumes of shorter fiction has appeared under the byline of "The Detection Club," such as the amazingly consistent The Floating Admiral (1931), but their first collaboration didn't appear in book form until half a century later. The Scoop & Behind the Screen (1983) were originally broadcast as weekly serials on the BBC in the early 1930s and the scripts of the plays were published a week later in a radio magazine, The Listener.

The Scoop (1931) was penned by an impressive collection of names, Agatha Christie, E.C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts and Clemence Dane, whom all contributed two or more chapters to the story.

First of all, the contributions by Berkeley and Sayers were the highlights of this volume, which was a showcase of their writing abilities. In the opening chapter, Sayers sketches a great picture of the impatient hum at a news paper office, the Morning Star, waiting for a last-minute break in connection with a big story – foreshadowing the hustle and bustle of the advertising agency in Murder Must Advertise (1933).

Morning Star expects front-page, breaking news in the "Lonely Bungalow Mystery," which is what the papers have dubbed the question riddled stabbing-death of Geraldine Tracey. The police failed to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime, but one of their reporters, a Mr. Johnson, called the office to report that he found the knife. Johnson was supposed to return, by the next train, but never made it back. His body is eventually discovered in a telephone boot at Victoria Station. And, of course, the murder weapon has, once again, vanished!

One of their most experienced star-reporters, Denis Oliver, is put on the story and does a considerable amount of snooping into Tracey's missing husband, the possibility of double-identities, tracing a pair of jade-headed objects from Bond Street to Broad Street and testing the soundness of a couple of alibis – which often seem to directly lead back to the offices of the Morning Star.

These old-school, journalistic endeavors are occasionally interrupted with chapters from Croft, which gave Scotland Yard's take on the ongoing proceedings, but it was Christie who left a very discernible mark on the plot – with the "Eternal Triangle" being the most obvious one.

So, all in all, The Scoop was a good, enjoyable mystery that remained consistent in spite of the number of writers involved.

Behind the Screen (1930) aired a year before The Scoop and the writers of this piece were: Agatha Christie, Hugh Walpole, E.C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley and Ronald Knox. The story is also listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but, in reality, it's the literary embodiment of a drawing room-style mystery.

The story focuses on the Ellis-family and Wilfred Hope, engaged to Amy Ellis, who's worried about the negative, unhealthy atmosphere their paying guest, Paul Dudden, has on the family. And on Amy. One evening, in the drawing room of the Ellises, Hope discovers Dudden's bleeding body behind a large, old-fashioned Japanese screen. The problem is that everyone in the drawing room could be accounted for, but forensic evidence about the nature of the stab wounds and witness testimonies give more wriggle room – which is why I place this closer to a drawing room mystery (e.g. Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table, 1936) than a proper impossible crime.

I quite enjoyed the bits and pieces of building up, and tearing down, theories and the possibility of playing a game with two suspects (who gave the fatal jab?), but Knox took the amateurish part of the final chapter somewhat literarily. A shoehorn was whipped out to make everything fit and the rules of fair play weren't entirely observed, which made for an underwhelming ending.

The only interesting part (for me) to arise from Behind the Screen was that the plot contained germs of ideas that obviously manifested, fully developed, a couple of years down the line in one of the most famous Hercule Poirot novel from the series.

The Scoop & Behind the Screen is that proverbial mixed bag of tricks, but the first story is too good for a curiosity to be ignored by connoisseurs of Golden Age mysteries and definitely of interest to the rabid Agatha Christie fan.

The Sound of Detection

"This is The Man in Black, here again to introduce Columbia's program, Suspense... If you've been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution... until the last possible moment... we again hope to keep you in... Suspense!"

John Dickson Carr, to me, was simply the greatest detective writer who ever lived. Who else, but Carr, was able to combine a gripping narrative with an eerie, often menacing, atmosphere, first-rate plotting and dexterous clueing? Name one other writer in the genre who was able to walk as easily that fine tight-rope between sheer terror and utter farce without reducing the impact of either? Who of my readers, who haunt this blog with a certain degree of regularity, can claim they weren't swooned off their feet by the unapologetic manner in which basked in the fact that he didn't write great literature or any such nonsense? He freely admitted that he merely wrote daring tales of mystery, adventure and romance and their only objective is to lead you by hand into his beloved, fog-enwrapped London of Sherlock Holmes – "where high adventure awaits all who would seek it, in hansom cap or under a gas lamp in an Inverness cape." 

In short: how can you not love an unapologetic romanticist who continued the grand tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Gaston Leroux, G.K. Chesterton, R.L. Stevenson, Jules Verne and Conan Doyle – and absolutely revelled in it? However, this doesn't mean that his books, stories and plays haven't left us without any valuable lessons and observations. They've enriched my life by showing that simply being alive and having dreams is something worth fighting for!

The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983) is a collection of radio plays that are great examples of this attitude and exhibits the talents that earned him his reputation as the undisputed master of all things impossible!

The Black Minute

The opening play of this collection perfectly demonstrates how effective his ability in conjuring up a spine-chilling atmosphere, to function as the backdrop of a seemingly impossible murder, actually was – as listeners were encouraged to turn-off the lights. This not only assisted in setting the mood, but also placed them in the same darkened, windowless chamber as where the story is set and the gargantuan Dr. Gideon Fell effortlessly solves the baffling murder of a disreputable medium during a séance. The spiritualist was securely tied to an armchair, preventing any trickery on his part, while the other occupants of the room formed an unbroken circle by linking hands, but when the lights were extinguished someone, within the room, managed to stab him in the throat – and, needless to say, the only door was dead-bolted from the inside. The ease with which Carr puts forward a maddening impossible situation and then explains it away as if it was nothing is a testament to his talents both as a natural storyteller as well as one of the shrewdest plotters the genre has ever seen!

The Devil's Saint

As the preface of the play notes, this is one of Carr's several takes on a cursed room that kills everyone daring enough to venture pass its threshold. The man who's brave enough to take on the challenge in this story is a young nobleman who plans to marry a girl, but has to convince her ward, a Hungarian count, that he's sincere – and makes a bet with him that will earn him his niece's hand if he can survive a night in the accursed Tapestry Room at his estate. This is, however, not a locked room problem, like The Red Widow Murders (1935), but more a remarkably well-told suspense story with an howdunit angle thrown into mix and a neatly done twist ending. I recommend you listen to the original broadcast before reading this story and marvel at Peter Lorre's performance as Count Kohary.

The Dragon in the Pool

This play, in essence, is one long dénouement, in which a young woman assembles all the key players in the unresolved death of her father – and extracts a particular brutal revenge by giving the responsible person a dose of his own medicine. The method for concealing a knife in plain sight won't stump many readers today, but it was a pretty novel idea at the time. A decent enough story, but not the best of the pile that makes up this collection.

The Dead Sleep Lightly

The tale of a man who's being haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife has always been one of my favorites of John Dickson Carr's shorter works, and the initial version he wrote for Suspense is very well-known, but this extended adaptation of that story is even better than its original! First of all, he had more time to tell the story and these extra minutes were put to use to add Dr. Gideon Fell and Superintendent Hadley to the cast of characters. It also has everything you come to expect from him: gripping story telling, eerie atmospheric touches and a clever, spooky impossible crime presenting itself as a spectral voice, speaking from beyond the grave, through a disconnected telephone, but the solution is, interestingly enough, more typical of John Rhode than of Carr himself.  

By the way, I absolutely love this line: "But the dead sleep lightly. And they can be lonely too." These simple words were uttered by the ghostly voice over the dead telephone, but carry the eerie implication that the big sleep does not necessary mean internal slumber and that the dead can stir from their long nap in search for companionship. 

Death Has Four Faces

A young man lost his shirt in a French casino and is approached by a shady character to sneak a bottle of pills pass customs service in exchange for a wad of money, but later that night everything collapses as he witnesses how his new "employer" is stabbed to death in an empty street by an apparent invisible assailant. The trick that made the murderer imperceptible to onlookers is a good one, but devotees of Carr have probably seen him put this gambit to use before.

Vampire Tower

The theme of this play is trust and that of Harvey Drake is put to the test when Dr. George Grimaud, the Home Office Pathologist posing as a palmist and crystal gazer at a country bazaar, informs him that he suspects his fiancée of being a feared poisoners – and his him marked as his next target. There's also an impossible angle, hovering in the background, as to how poison could've been introduced in the food and drinks of pass victims, but that's, once again, a clever ruse we've seen before. However, it's still overall a pretty good story with a neat little twist at the ending.

The Devil's Manuscript

Here we have Carr reworking a ghost story, Bierce's "The Suitable Surrounding," into a thrilling tale of suspense with a naturalistic conclusion, and propounds the following question to the readers: can words that make up a manuscript of a horror story induce enough fear to kill its reader? Well, in Carr's stories you can practically have everything, and teaches us the invaluable lesson to never accept any challenge proposed by a writer of ghost stories. They're creeps!

White Tiger Passage

This story is very much in the tradition of the slapstick approach of some of the Sir Henry Merrivale stories, in which a journalist and his female companion stalk the blood streaked trail of a notorious serial killer from Paris – and it's littered with "coincidences worthy of P.G. Wodehouse, combined with the subtle clues worthy of John Dickson Carr." This is how farce should be combined with a proper detective story. You can chalk this one up in the column of favorite stories by the best detective writer this genre has ever known!

The Villa of the Damned

The impossible premise of this story, in which not only an entire suburb disappears but also, for a brief moment, an entire century, is probably one of his most daring ones – and in combination with a solid plot makes for a pretty memorable story all around. However, like miracle problems involving houses and trains being spirited-away, the range of possible solutions are very limited and you don't have to be Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale to immediately stumble to the mechanics of the trick. 

All in all, a pretty strong collection of plays that merge the golden eras of both the detective story and radio drama, and the only (minor) complaint I can make is that I knew most of the stories from previous incarnations or have seen certain gimmicks before in other stories. But if you're, like me, hopelessly devoted to Carr, than you definitely have to fill in an empty spot on your shelves with a copy of this book. I also highly recommend this collection to people who enjoyed Ellery Queen's The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries (2006) and Anthony Boucher's The Casebook of Gregory Hood, Radio Plays (2009).