Golden Rain (1980) by Douglas Clark

In my previous two blog-posts, I reviewed Douglas Clark's The Libertines (1978) and Roger Ormerod's An Alibi Too Soon (1987), two British genre conservationists, who attempted to modernize the great detective stories of yore during the post-WWII decades and why I grouped them together as modern, neo-traditionalists – which may need a small correction or footnote. Having read two of their novels back-to-back, I noticed a subtle difference in the way they tried to mix the traditional with the modern. 

Ormerod evidently was closer aligned to the modern, psychological and character-driven crime novels (e.g. The Key to the Case, 1992) than Clark, but with unmistakably traditionalists bend. And reveled in the use of double-edged clues, red herrings, twisted alibis and locked room mysteries (e.g. A Shot at Nothing, 1993). Clark was much more covert in his approach and his novels not only masquerade as modern police procedurals, but apparently tend to underplay the traditional elements of the plot a little. Or, to be more accurately, disguising his plots as pharmaceutical mysteries and poison-puzzles. You can do and get away with a lot of trickery that involves poisons, medicine or the victim's medical condition. An approach that allowed so much room that Clark was even able to wrote something as incomparable as The Longest Pleasure (1981).

However, I've only read a handful of Clark's novels and my observation could be completely wrong. So why not read another one to see if the pattern repeats and what better to use than one of his reputed, uncatalogued locked room mystery novels? 

Golden Rain (1980) is the thirteenth title in Clark's Master and Green series and takes place at Bramthorpe College for Girls, "always referred to simply as Bramthorpe," where Miss Mabel Holland reigns in her double role as beloved headmistress and benevolent dictator – as "discipline was strict and punishments were few." She reformed the school most diplomatically, economized without austerity and was very cross when learning one house had saved money on catering one term. Because "the school was not in business to make a profit out of the girls' food fees." Everything was done under her watch to ensure the girls could realize their full potential that, in turn, raised the academic standard of the school. So nobody could have possibly have had a reason to kill her, but Miss Holland becomes the subject of a precarious murder inquiry. An inquiry in which even Scotland Yard has to tread carefully.

Miss Holland lives in the School House and shares the place with a housekeeper, Mrs. Gibson, who has Tuesday as her day off, but, upon her return, she smelled vomit. A trail lead to the bedroom where she discovered the body of Miss Holland. An autopsy revealed she had been poisoned with laburnum seeds, which grow from a poisonous plant with pea-like, yellow flowers commonly called Golden Rain. Miss Holland was "chock full of the seeds," but the local police is more than willing to settle on an accidental poisoning or suicide. She was alone the house, locked up tight, with "no signs of forcible entry," but some people close to her have good reasons to believe she neither committed suicide or accidentally poisoned herself.

Miss Holland was a level-headed, cheerful and happy woman who looked forward to her holiday in Malta and had written her mother to tell she had "a lovely surprise" that would overjoy her, which hardly suggests a suicidal frame of mind. Secondly, Miss Holland was a biologist and botanist who would be able to identify laburnum seeds and know of their toxic qualities. But how do you force a spoonful of crushed laburnum down someone's throat in a locked house without a struggle or a trace of poison anywhere? So what they needed was a big bug from Scotland Yard to clear up this messy case.

Funnily enough, I've read some recent reviews criticizing Clark's overstaffed cast of police characters as a massive waste of resources and manpower, which made me wonder if he faced similar criticism during his lifetime – because it becomes kind of plot-thread in the first-half of the story. The local police is divided with Detective Inspector Lovegrove intending to squash the case at the inquest to get a verdict of suicide or accidental death. Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Green with Detective Sergeants Reed and Berger arrived less than a day before the inquest, which gives them precious little time to come up with evidence to the contrary. And the prickly, autocratic coroner wants plain facts to bring in any other verdict. The presence of a specialized Scotland Yard team "cost money and time," which makes an exhaustive investigation hard to justify without a shred of evidence in "the face of a coroner's unfavourable verdict."

Unfortunately, this angle is only used to pad out the first-half with Clark holding back all the good and clever bits for the second-half.

First of all, the locked room situation is, as expected, completely underplayed and barely acknowledged, but the locked doors and windows were, sort of, incidental. Some of you likely would not even label it as a locked room mystery or impossible crime. Miss Holland was poisoned in a locked house, but the deviously clever piece of plotting is in the poisoning-trick that's almost as good as the one from Detective Conan's "The Loan Shark Murder Case." But it's not merely a trick. Clark skillfully dovetailed the poisoning-trick with all the other facets of the story and employed something common in schools as an original piece of camouflage. Something that threw me off the scent and was initially a little disappointed as it introduced an until then unknown character into the solution. There was no reason to be disappointed. Clark used it to give the murder something "strange for a major crime" like murder, which revealed the camouflage the murderer draped across the poisoning-trick.

I was equally impressed with the late problem of three sets of fingerprints discovered at School House and particular the third set poses a tricky problem, but the explanation either makes you want to slap Clark's shoulder like a good sport or strangle him with his own necktie – nicely fitted the setting and period. Only problem is that it didn't give enough room to be used to its full potential and give the solution more of a punch. But, other than that, the ending and solution placed Clark back on the same footing with Ormerod as a top-tier, neo-traditionalist mystery writer.

Where they differ is Clark's clandestine alliance to the classics as he tries to sneak all the good stuff pass the reader (or critics?) without trying to draw attention to them like a closeted alcoholic lacing his coffee with booze. Almost like he felt it was necessary to lure the reader in with the premise of a contemporary police procedural before hitting them with the more traditional stuff disguised, or presented, as a pharmaceutical or poisoning mystery. Death After Evensong (1969) appears to be an exception to the rule, but than again, there's nothing subtle about shooting someone point blank with a magic-bullet. However, it showed that his work could have been even better had he continued to embrace and indulge in the traditional, plot-driven side of his detective novels.

So, all things considered, Golden Rain begins slowly and delays the most important plot developments and clues until the second-half, but the end result is an excellent, first-class take on the classic, college-set mystery novel and an admirable dovetailing act. Recommended to everyone who appreciate a good, old-fashioned puzzle plot or detective stories that take place in the world of academia.

Just a heads up, I might bookend these two Douglas Clark posts with reviews of Ormerod. So the next one might be one of Ormerod's 1990s mysteries, but haven't made up my mind yet. However, I'll will return to the Golden Age in one of the next two posts. So don't touch that dial!

The Libertines (1978) by Douglas Clark

In my previous review, I mentioned several modern classicists like the pharmacist of crime, Douglas Clark, who specialized in medical mysteries and ingenious, sometimes impossible poisonings that were quite popular in the 1970s and '80s – only to disappear into obscurity upon his death in 1993. Strangely enough, these retro mystery writers tended to vanished quicker and more thoroughly from popular culture than their Golden Age counterparts. But they, too, are being rediscovered today. 

Douglas Clark has been fortunately enough to have all twenty-six of his Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Green reprinted over the past five years by Lume Books (formerly Endeavour Media).

So, technically, the series is available again to the public, but they're very much hidden in plain sight. Lume Books is a small indie publisher that pumps out novels ("...over 3000 books written by 800 authors"), but settled on a bleak, unimaginative style of generic and uniform cover-art that gives the impression Clark wrote dark, psychological crime thrillers – which couldn't be further from the truth. Clark wrote traditional, fairly clued detective novels posing as a police procedurals with a pharmaceutical gimmick. And eschewed cheap thrills or plunging the murky depths of the human psyche. For example, the most rounded and fleshed out character in The Longest Pleasure (1981) is the botulism bacteria. Clark simply wrote pure, Golden Age-style detectives and howdunits.

The Libertines (1978) is the tenth title in the series and takes place on Samuel Verity's Ravendale Farm, situated in Ravendale Bridge, Yorkshire, which hosts a yearly cricket fortnight during high summer. Versity is one of the founding members of a cricket club, the Libertines, when none of the members had much money. So they were determined that it should not become a rich man's club, but "a cricket club anybody could afford to join" with everyone contributing something to hold the Libertines' fortnight. A tradition that began right after the war ended.

Three decades later, there are only three original members left. Samuel Verity and his long-time friend and London solicitor, William Dunstable, whose family will become intertwined as his son, Stephen, is dating Sarah – who's the daughter of Samuel and Sally Verity. But not everything is roses and sunshine. Old Tom Middleton, "an irascible old devil," is the third surviving member whose behavior is tolerated because he's a wine-shipper and furnishes the bar for the fortnight at wholesale rates. But he has become worse as his health declined. And very venomous.

Last year, Tom advised Sally Verity to keep "a motherly eye" on her daughter, because he had witnessed Sarah and Stephen "misbehaving at nights in the copse" when he was out on a light night walks. She called him "a dirty old peeping-tom" and Sarah not only denied it, but she was "quite willing to have old Dr Michaelson examine her to prove she was still intact." Stephen is less than pleased when he learns of this a year later and her brother, Teddy, also gets the Middleton treatment. Soon the younger members of the team are talking among themselves about "breaking the old bastard's neck" and that "the best place to dispose of the body would be the dung tank," which sets the stages for murder. Tom is not the first to bow out of the story with his nose in the air.

Nick Larter is an elderly, ailing and retired window cleaner who's not a Libertine, but he's been barman for the fortnight ever since it began. A fun, exciting summertime job that earned him a few extra pounds, but his health has been deteriorating rapidly and, while shaking Middleton's customary three drops of bitters in a gin glass, he collapses behind the bar – dying a few minutes later. A death that hardly surprises his doctor and unhesitatingly signed the certificate, but, three days later, Middleton dies in the wake of the first cricket game. So the local authorities order post mortems on both bodies, which revealed the presence of the quick-acting poison nicotine.

Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Green are dispatched to Ravendale Bridge to untangle this poisonous puzzle.

A double poisoning Green described as "one by a chance which is mathematically impossible" and "the other by a means which is physically impossible," but whether or not they count as impossible crimes depends on your generosity. I don't think Middleton's death has any claim to it, but Larter's poisoning is a different story. While serving behind the bar, Larter slipped with the bottle-opener and snagged his right forefinger on the serrated edge of the crown top, "a trifling cut," but he died minutes later with "a qualified doctor and a score of others as witnesses." But nobody could daub nicotine on a crown top expecting the victim would touch it, "let alone scratch his finger on it." However, the trick here is figuring out how the two poisonings can be linked together. Don't read it solely for the impossible crime element.

Clark excellently contrasted the death of the "poor old retired window cleaner" with the murder of the "well-heeled wine importer who lived hundred of miles apart" and "the only possible link between those two was this annual cricket lark." This makes it a double murder that could have only taken place at Ravendale Farm during those two weeks of summer. A very well done and convincing closed-circle of suspects situation.

You can say contrast is the overarching theme of the story with the older characters struggling to keep up with a changing world and social mores, while the younger generation try to live up to the standards of the old-world while trying to find their own way and voice. Good examples of this are the conversation between Sally and Sarah concerning Middleton's accusation and Sam and Teddy trying to balance traditional and modern methods to run the family farm. I thought that made for a more interesting backdrop than the cricket scenes, which I don't understand and everything related to it completely went over my head, but I know it's supposed to be a boring, excruciating slow-paced game with older players taking naps – which doesn't seem like a sport that can be played with "a savage intensity." Playing cricket savagely sounds like a brutal game of curling or a grueling round of golf. Anyway...

So the characters, setting and setup are good and sound, but what about the plot, you ask? Not too bad. Admittedly, the clueing is a little sparse, but Clark's approach here wasn't without interest. Masters and Green begin to hunt for "anomalies in the conversations" conducted with the club members in lieu of physical clues to see if they can "explain away that which is odd or out of character." When they've sniffed out such anomalies, they "look very closely at those involved." Not wholly unlike Agatha Christie with one remark unmistakably echoing one of her 1940s mysteries ("Guvf qevax vf svygul"), but Masters and Green also have to search for a piece of physical evidence hidden somewhere on the farm. Where this piece of evidence was hidden points straight to the murderer, because only the murderer could have hidden it there. You can figure out where it's hidden and, in combination with the anomalies, identity the murderer with only the motive requiring a bit of educated guesswork. The whole puzzle is pretty solvable without being too obvious from the beginning. If you pay attention to what's being said and done, you can see where and how all the puzzle pieces fit.

There are, however, two (minor) drawbacks. The ending felt a little flat with Masters cutting a deal with the nonthreatening and even sympathetic murderer, but rather liked the final lines of the story. I already said Clark created a murder mystery that could only have taken place at Ravendale Farm during those summer weeks, which turns out to have been 100% preventable. Secondly, I don't think The Libertines is a good title for this kind of detective story. I don't think it really fitted the story. The Libertines' Fortnight or the more genre-driven Sudden Death would have been better titles. Looking at a glossary of cricket terms, Contrived Circumstances or Farm the Strike would have been even better titles for this cricket-themed detective novel.

But all things considered, The Libertines stands as a good, rock-solid and competently plotted continuation of the British Golden Age detective story with a poisoning-trick that would have received the nodding approval of the Queen of Crime herself. However, if you're new to the series, I still recommend you begin with the excellent Death After Evensong (1969).

Inspector De Klerck and the Corpse in Transit (2021) by P. Dieudonné

Last year, I reviewed P. Dieudonné's third novel, Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020), which spectacularly broke away from the Amsterdam School of Dutch politieromans (police novels) to present a classically-styled detective novel coated with a modern varnish – centering on no less than three fantastically done, dare devil impossible crimes. Not something you would expect from A.C. Baantjer or his followers. 

So I wondered what, exactly, Dieudonné had in store with his fourth novel, Rechercheur De Klerck en het lijk in transito (Inspector De Klerck and the Corpse in Transit, 2021). An unbreakable alibi? A dying message? Another impossible crime or locked room mystery? The story turned out to be a straightforward, Baantjer-style police novel, like Rechercheur De Klerck en het doodvonnis (Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence, 2019), but with more plot-threads, solid piece of misdirection and a genuine whodunit pull.

Alexander van Oldenborgh is the fourth-generation director of Van Oldenborgh International Movers, specialized in removals on a global scale, who came to Inspectors Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver, of the Rotterdam police, to file a report – as he has been receiving telephone calls and letters with "a threatening, insinuating undertone." The threats come from an ex-employee, Jos van Trijffel, who raped a female co-worker thirty years ago and "simply disappeared from the face of the earth." Shortly after Van Oldenborch's departure, De Klerck and Klaver are dispatched to a brothel where a man has been shot and killed before he could get back in his car.

The victim happens to be a long-time employee of Van Oldenborch's company, Wilbert de Zeeuw, who caught Van Trijffel in the act thirty years ago before he escaped and disappeared. But is there a connection or merely a coincidence? De Zeeuw was talking with a man at the club, named Eddy, who was overheard saying to the victim "don't think I'm going to save your ass." He also had more money than can be accounted by his salary. So was De Zeeuw a casualty of "a heated conflict among criminals" or the victim of a revenge killing? De Klerck and Klaver have more on their plate than just this one murder. 

Inspector De Klerck and the Corpse in Transit opened with Klaver telling De Klerck that the half-decomposed, unidentified remains of a man was discovered that morning on the Maasvlakte inside a shipping container from New Jersey. He was shot to death with the crime scene likely being on the other side of the world, which is a nightmare for both the American and Dutch police. So they're glad the case is a problem for the harbor police, but, as you probably guessed, there's a link with their investigation. However, the solution to this plot-thread is not as obvious as it appeared to be on first sight. On a somewhat lighter note is the friendly competition playing out in the background between the police of Rotterdam and Utrecht to catch a slippery lingerie thief.

Somehow, one way or another, everything is linked with the elusive, ever-present Van Trijffel in the background who might actually be responsible for thinning out the ranks of suspects as all of the murders carry the same M.O. – two gunshots to the chest. Dieudonné played a marvelous, but risky, hand in tying everything together while trying to distract the reader away from the murderer. I had my suspicions about the murderer, but this character was such a strange, oddly-behaving piece of the puzzle that I didn't know where, or how, it exactly fitted into the plot. So when that was explained, I felt a little cheated at first, but it really wasn't a cheat at all. Just a clever bit of misdirection that walked a fine, slippery tightrope with the stone cold motive being hardest part to swallow. Something that initially didn't ring entirely true, but, on second thought, it made sense and was (kind of) hinted at. Let's just say Dieudonné and De Klerck got the better of me here. 

Inspector De Klerck and the Corpse in Transit can be summed as an old school whodunit, masquerading as a contemporary police novel, which gratefully exploited the modern world to create a knottier, more intricate plot than usually found in these type of police novels of the Amsterdam School. More importantly, Dieudonné figured out how to write a Baantjer-style novel without becoming a pale, watered-down imitation. So many have tried over the decades. For example, they gave the 2000s TV adaptation of Janwillem van de Wetering's Grijpstra & De Gier a diluted, Baantjer-like formula. Even the man himself, Appie Baantjer, tried to catch lightening in a bottle twice when he co-created the Bureau Raampoort series with Simon de Waal in 2009, but they never got it down quite right. Most of them were more concerned with the recreating the superficial features that sold close to ten million copies and kept millions of viewers glued to the TV for more than a decade.

So most of his imitators and following have little more to offer than a nostalgic placebo, but Dieudonné created with Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver that can breath on its own without being weighed down by the comparison, because he did two things radically different. Dieudonné smartly moved away from Amsterdam as a setting, which has been done to death, but also the attention given to the plots makes the series standout. Very few Dutch writers who tried their hands at one of these police novels gives this much care and attention to the plot, clueing and misdirection or continually showed improvement.

Needless to say, this series comes highly recommended to all my Dutch readers and look forward to the next installment.

Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors (1935) by Roger East

Roger d'Este Burford was an English diplomat, poet, novelist and a screenwriter who made a small splash in the early 1930s, as "Roger East," with a handful of detective novels promising the arrival of a really first-class detective novelist, but practically stopped writing in the mid-1930s – sporadically returning to the genre in the '50s and '60s. So he's not all that well remembered today. This is a pity as the Roger East novels discussed online are generally positive and praised as intelligently written and characterized stories with often intricately worked out plots. 

A few attempts have been made over the years to rescue East from the purgatory of biblioblivion, but without a lasting result. H.R.F. Keating picked the brilliantly-titled Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors (1935) for his 1980s "Disappearing Detective" series, which was an early attempt to bring obscure, long-forgotten writers and novels back into print. Back in 2017, Mad Sheep published another reissue of Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors, but that edition and publisher vanished as quickly as they appeared. I believe that 2017 edition is even harder to get now than the original or any of the other reprints!

Nevertheless, Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors is East's most well-known detective novel and the easiest one to get your hands on. I eventually lucked across a cheap copy and can understand now why his scarcity is lamented by so many of my fellow detective addicts. 

Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors is the fourth and last outing for East's series-detective, Superintendent Simmy Simmonds, who Keating described as "something of a phenomenon in crime fiction," especially in 1930s Britain, as he's essentially the hero of a series of police procedurals – a sub-genre that would not become popular in Britain until the 1950s. Anthony Abbot, Helen Reilly and I believe Lawrence Treat were already experimenting with the police procedural in America. Superintendent Simmonds retired from Scotland Yard by the time of this fourth novel, but a forceful personality and a large fee gives him one last case as delightfully outlandish as Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of a Queen (1935) and Peter Dickinson's The Poison Oracle (1974). 

Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors is set in a fictitious island nation, San Rocco, which is "a pocket-sized republic" in the West Indies where President Miguel and his wife, Carlotta, rule the roost. But they're financed by the millionaire owner of the Acropolis Theatre, Cinema and Hotel, Pero Zaragoza.

Zaragoza invested a lot of time and money to transform San Rocco into the most talked of resort in the Atlantic, "the Jewel of the West Indies," but things begin to go south and Zaragoza believes "some unknown saboteur is at work." First they had to kill a rumor that there was an outbreak of yellow fever in the hotel and then the clean linen of every guest is cut to ribbons. Next the world famous, ticket selling headline dancer of the Acropolis Theatre, the Carnation, is kidnapped to prevent her from performing and the house detective has disappeared – probably "bribed or intimidated." So he reached out to the recently retired ex-Superintendent Simmonds, but Simmonds is of the opinion that he has "wrestled with enough problems" for one lifetime. However, simple curiosity and a check got the best of him. There is, however, a small problem.

Back in Britain, Simmonds was backed by the entire, well-oiled machine of Scotland Yard, but in San Rocco he's a one-man show and his client agrees that the task is to complicated to be handled by a single man. So he ensures Simmonds not only gets all the assistants needed to properly investigate, but creating an entirely new department to give him both authority and an official position. Zaragoza goes to the president to ask him to create a new criminal investigation department with Simmonds as its (temporary) head, which is where the splendid book-title comes into play.

President Miguel agrees and gives the new Captain Simmonds, Chief of Detectives, the defunct, largely abandoned Ministry of Sanitation and their old uniforms, which only needed a change of buttons to turn them into police uniforms. The last man on his post at the defunct ministry is the ex-Minister of Sanitation, Aubrey Wilkinson, who's an overly enthusiastic and energetic young Englishman. Aubrey doesn't let any grass grow over the resurrection of his ministry as a criminal investigation department and began enrolling his ex-sanitary inspectors as plain-clothes detective. Yeah, the uniforms didn't go anywhere. Even with an official position, his own department and a "comic opera detective force" at his disposal, things don't get any easier for Simmonds as one of his detectives is murdered in an old-world way and there's attempted murder on his client – which killed one of his pet pumas. He also has to contend with San Rocco's Chief of Police, Colonel Sixola.

Some readers will probably scratch their head halfway through as they wonder if the plot is going anywhere and if it's enough for a rewarding payoff. The storytelling and characterization is amusing enough with its fish-out-of-water situation and the snippets of San Rocco politics has a tinge of Yes, Minister. But the plot began to give cause for concern.

I don't know if it was a good idea to go all out with the misdirection to the point where a lot of readers can't see the forest for the trees, but Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors turned out to be first-class example of under promising and over delivering. First of all, two-thirds of the way through someone is murdered in a watched and guarded office. Sure, the solution is not blistering original, but fitted the circumstances of the crime. Much better was the brilliant, cleverly hidden alibi-trick that had been sneaked pass Simmonds and the reader, but these are merely the mechanics of the overall the plot. The real punch is in the who-and why. A knockout punch that doesn't come until the last chapter when the murderer is confronted and the original motive is revealed, which also revealed how deviously I had been hoodwinked. Well played, East. Well played. So you can expect it to make an appearance on my 2021 best-of list.

Roger East was not only an excellent writer, but evidently knew a thing, or two, about plotting and if Murder Rehearsal (1933), Candidate for Lilies (1934) and The Bell is Answered (1935) are anywhere near as good as Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors, he deserves to be reprinted. Is there a publisher out there who wants to adopt this unjustly neglected GAD writer? Have a heart and give him a home.

The Hotel of the Three Roses (1936) by Augusto de Angelis

Back in 2016, Pushkin Vertigo introduced the world to the father of the Italian detective story, Augusto de Angelis, who created a homegrown detective story from scratch in the mid-1930s and faced tough opposition from snobby critics and Benito Mussolini's regime – declaring it was either absurd or dangerous to depict Italy as anything less than "a harmonious idyll." Sadly, the regime failed to see the irony in opposing the detective story and murdering De Angelis in 1944. 

You can't suppress the detective story by saying it's slanderous to a sleepy, peaceful Mediterranean country and then kick a mystery writer to death in the streets. It only proves that amateur reasoner of some celebrity had a point when he stated that crime is common and logic rare. Anyway...

During that nine-year period between 1935 and 1944, De Angelis managed to produce twenty detective novels starring his series-character, Inspector Carlo de Vincenzi. A detective who's "more complex than the British 'thinking machine' typified by Sherlock Holmes" and "more sensitive than the tough-guy American private eye," which would become a fairly typical description of the continental policeman character during the post-WWII era. For example, you can find them all over Dutch politieromans and German krimis.

I read Il banchiere assassinato (The Murdered Banker, 1935) in 2016 and immediately proved that the Italian detective story can't catch a break by (sort of) forgetting all about him. De Angelis only resumed his climb to the top of Mt. To-Be-Read when learning Kazabo Publishing had released a translation of Sei donne e un libro (Death in a Bookstore, 1936) in 2019 and almost coincided with Locked Room International publishing a translation of Franco Vailati's Ill mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) – one of Italy's most famous and iconic locked room mysteries. So it was about time I returned to Milan to watch De Vincenzi disentangle another knotty problem. 

L'albergo delle tre rose (The Hotel of the Three Roses, 1936) is the seventh title in the series and takes place in December, 1919, at a dodgy, third-rate hotel where the guests "gamble furiously all night" as "if it were forced labour." The group of people staying, or living, at the Hotel of the Three Roses is as diverse and strange as you'd expect.

There's Bardi, the hunchback, who's been living at the hotel for ten years and is a "perpetual busybody." Giorgio Novarreno is a self-styled necromancer who rashly caved to his desire to demonstrate his divinatory powers to the grounded Inspector De Vincenzi. Carlo da Como used to have money, but is now down on his luck and scraps a living together by gambling, which does not prevent him from refusing to sell his last remaining property to his elder sisters out of spite. Vilfredo Engel is another permanent resident of the hotel, a gambler and friend of Da Como. Nicola Al Righetti is an American of Italian origin and claims to come from New York, but how he deals with a police interrogation shows he normally lives in Chicago. Stella Essington is a drug addicted actress who soothed her "the feverish agitation of her nerves" with cello music. Carin Nolan is a Norwegian girl about 19-years-old and presumably "the threatened innocent" of the story. Signora Mary Alton Vendramini is the heavily veiled widow of Major Alton and it was his will that summoned her to the hotel, which is also why his lawyer, George Flemington, is present. A pretty odd assortment of characters!

Inspector De Vincenzi receives an anonymous letter that the Hotel of the Three Roses is "a gathering of addicts and degenerates" where now "a horrible drama is brewing," which will blow up if they don't intervene in time – a warning that comes too late. Shortly after reading the note, De Vincenzi is called to the hotel to investigate the death of a young Englishman, Douglas Layng, whose body is hanging from a ceiling beam on the landing. However, the doctor determines he had been killed hours before the body was found by a stab in the back and that makes it a quasi-impossible crime. Where did the murderer hide the body all the time? Why did the murderer redressed the body? How did the murderer get the body to the landing? Everything the murderer did increased "difficulty and risks a hundredfold" and it wouldn't be the last the time the murderer had more freedom of movement than circumstances should have allowed for.

Inspector De Vincenzi is not only frustrated by suspects and witnesses unwilling to talk, give half-truths or simply stall before getting to the point, but even his own subordinates were very slapdash in carrying out his simple orders. Several times, the murderer was handed an opportunity to strike because the policemen tasked with guarding the place were not at their post. A second victim is murdered behind a locked door with the wide open window overlooking a wet, unguarded garden and the excuse of his second-in-command is that he didn't have "the heart to send a man out to stand in the rain." A third attack happens and the murderer appears to have been able to enter a room, unseen, while an officer sat guard outside in the corridor, but not as diligently as instructed. So the result is that the reader is constantly teased with potential locked room mysteries before they're immediately dispelled and snatched away.

There is, however, so much more to give De Vincenzi a headache than just lying suspects, unwilling witnesses and cavalier subordinates. Why did some of the guests brought a flaxen-haired, porcelain doll to the hotel and can the dolls be connected to the murders or a long-forgotten, Doylean episode that took place in the Transvaal during the Boer War, which involves crocodiles, diamonds and a "ghostly avenger" – whom everyone feared could be behind the murders. So, yeah, a lively detective novel with an oddball collection of gargoyles who frustrate the investigation every step of the way while the attacks continue right under the nose of the police. This makes for a fun, fast-paced detective story, but the finer details of the plot leaves something to be desired.

De Angelis unfortunately gave more attention and care to the red herrings and misdirecting the reader than properly clueing and dressing the bare bones of the plot, which hid a decent, perfectly acceptable scheme. So you can't really arrive at the (full) solution with the clues, or lack thereof, you're given and that always detracts from the overall quality of a detective story. No matter how good the storytelling or characterization is. What you're left with is a fun and amusing, but unmistakably second-string, mystery novel standing in the shadow of its American and British contemporaries.

Nonetheless, while not entirely perfect, the historical and political baggage of the Italian detective story makes even a second-string mystery novel an interesting exploration. You can see how government censorship had a hand in shaping the Italian Golden Age detective story as it eventually became illegal to depict Italians as criminals. So mystery writers had to resort to non-Italian characters, or foreign-born Italians, who were likely tainted. I wonder how many hotel and transportation mysteries there are from this period of the Italian detective story, because it would be most convenient way to write a story around a cast of mostly foreign characters. Since there are two more of De Angelis' novels available in English, I'll try to get to one of them before the end of 2021.

The Grassy Knoll (1993) by William Harrington

William Harrington was an American writer who ended his own life in 2000 and left behind a self-written obituary in which he revealed to have ghostwritten the detective novels credited to the daughter of President Harry S. Truman, Margaret Truman, but his claim has been disputed – describing his role as that of a research collaborator. So, while not the celebrity ghostwriter he claimed to have been, Harrington had written many novels under his own name since the 1960s and penned six original Columbo TV tie-in novels during the 1990s. Now that's something he should have bragged about in his obituary! 

The Grassy Knoll (1993) is the first of Harrington's six Columbo TV tie-in novels and he took an interesting approach to translating the series format, or formula, to the printed page.

All of the usual stuff is there with Columbo and the reader knowing who committed the murder and how it was done, but not why and figuring out the motive gives Columbo an opportunity to act as a proper homicide cop. So it's not merely Columbo stalking to the killers and waging a war on their nerves. It's an inverted whydunit presented as a modern police procedural that unmistakably takes place in the early '90s. 

The Paul Drury Show is the most popular show on the KWLF Los Angeles television station, which is basically a televised radio talk show with call-ins, whose well-known host is obsessed with one of the most famous murder cases in the history of the United States – namely the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Paul Drury had dedicated forty-eight episodes of his show to the JFK murder case, amusingly pitting dogged detectives and researchers against "some asshole who's read three books about it," which made those episodes the most popular of the show. The opening chapter shows that forty-eighth episode about the assassination that include some of the call-ins ("Have you ever heard of the Society of the Illuminati? Nothing happens those guys don't sanction").

So it was a good show and episode, but the would end very badly for Paul Drury. When he arrived home, there were two people waiting for him in his garage, Alicia Graham Drury and Peter Edmonds.

Peter is the producer of The Paul Drury Show and Alicia is his assistant producer, as well as his girlfriend and Paul's ex-wife, who have fabricated an alibi by leaving a time-stamped message with a recording Paul's voice on an telephone answering machine – using a cutting-edge piece of technology known as Sony Walkman. They also staged a burglary and finished the job by putting two bullets in the back of Paul's head. Alicia and Peter hardly can believe their luck when they meet the disheveled Lieutenant Columbo with his tousled head of hair, crumpled raincoat and wandering mind ("what a dolt!"), because, if they could have "picked a detective to investigate this case," they "couldn't have done better than him." But they pretty soon discover that Columbo is "not as dumb as he acts" as he inches towards a solution.

I was tempted to use the locked room and impossible crime tags for this review, because had the book been played as who-and howdunit, the murder Paul Drury would have looked like a quasi-impossible crime. The house is protected with burglar-alarms, hyper sensitive motion detectors and PIN card system that deactivates the system. There's not much of a mystery about it: Alicia simply held on to a spare card and Columbo knows it. The murderers were also a little to familiar with the layout of the house to have been an outsider, but there's another, somewhat dated, technological aspect to the plot.

Paul Drury was with the times and had compiled a "private electronic library" on his computer that contained "the world's largest collection of assassination minutiae," which has "the equivalent of thousands of volumes of information stored in it," but the harddisk had been wiped clean by "an outlaw instruction code" – i.e. a telephone transmitted computer virus. But did he make copies of his digital library? There's a collection of microdiskettes, or floppies, that will come to play an important role in the case. Naturally, Columbo needs some modern experts to help him make sense of these modern-day clues, which is really what sets this book apart from the TV-series.

Columbo is not depicted here as a lone wolf relentlessly stalking and pestering the murderers, like prey, but as a cog in the machine of a large police apparatus and even has an assistant, Detective Martha Zimmer. She proves very helpful in resolving another rather amusing plot-thread as Columbo has is ordered to report at the pistol range to requalify with his service revolver. Only problem is that never carries his revolver, lost it and can't shoot to save his life. More importantly, Columbo relies on the expertise of his colleagues to shed light on the various aspects of the case.

For example, the pathologist and an audio-technician proved very useful in helping breakdown the murderer's alibi, but the lack of a clear motive also forced Columbo to delve deeper into the background of his suspects and interviews several witnesses – which eventually brings him to a Las Vegas casino and Caesars Palace. What he comes across are the last remnants of the glory days of the Italian mafia, the legacy of right wing militias and newly discovered photographs that could shed new light on the Kennedy assassination. Those old, grainy photographs revealed their long-held, hidden details when they're "computer enhanced" and touched-up by an artist. So this may very well be one of the earliest examples of the zoom-and-enhance TV trope and it was used in a TV tie-in novel.

Anyway, you can see how The Grassy Knoll is a little bit different from your average Columbo episode, but Columbo is still Columbo, whose sharp mind is cloaked in a disheveled wardrobe, deceiving befuddlement, cheap cigars and homely anecdotes about Mrs. Columbo. Slowly, but surely, Columbo continues to chip away at the case and closes in on the murderers. Columbo is not able to close the whole case as the historical JFK plot-thread ended up raising more questions than it answered. But then again, I suppose that was kind of the point. I just wish Columbo actually came up with a clever solution to the mystery. Even if he couldn't officially solve it.

Nevertheless, the murder of President Kennedy had an interesting connection to the motive and story proposed an alternative motive that has to be turned into a detective or thriller novel. Columbo learns that the assassination has become "a multimillion-dollar industry" with books, documentaries, movies and television series, but those millions would dry up if Drury had "absolute evidence" proving who did kill Kennedy. It would kill a very lucrative industry, because people enjoy "some deep, dark conspiracy" more than the truth. 

So, on a whole, The Grassy Knoll is not exactly Columbo as seen on TV, but Harrington deserves praise for understanding that a few hundred pages can tell a more fully realized story than roughly 90-minutes of TV and decided to use it to flesh-out the other aspects of the police investigation – while remaining faithful to the original character. Columbo is still Columbo, but Harrington gave fans a little extra by showing more of Columbo as a homicide cop. I enjoyed it and can heartily recommended to other Columbo fans and mystery readers.

You can definitely expect more from Harrington's Columbo novels sometime in the future as I'm already eyeing The Helter Skelter Murders (1994), The Hoffa Connection (1995) and The Hoover Files (1998). But my next read is going to be an obscure, somewhat hard-to-get (locked room) mystery novel from the 1990s. I actually wanted to return to Christopher Bush or Brian Flynn, but that one arrived today and decided not to let it linger too long. So don't touch that dial!

Death in Half-Light (1954) by W.H. van Eemlandt

Last year, I reviewed W.H. van Eemlandt's tightly-plotted Kogels bij het dessert (Dessert with Bullets, 1954), a classically-styled Dutch locked room mystery, of sorts, with all the technical expertise of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode – resulting in a novel that can be measured against its Anglo-American counterparts. Something that's always gratifying to find in a country that has been everything but fertile ground for the traditional detective story. Naturally, it was an invitation to return to Van Eemlandt sooner rather than later. So here we are! 

One novel that has always fascinated me is the fifth title in the Commissioner Arend van Houthem series, Dood in schemer (Death in Half-Light, 1954), which has a fascinating premise. A murder at the moment surpême of a scientific observation of a solar eclipse on the summit of a mountain in the Fiji Islands. 

Death in Half-Light is structured very differently from Dessert with Bullets and uses the first half of the book to introduce the characters, setting the scene and building towards the one of the most inevitable murders in all of detective fiction.

The spider in the web of Death in Half-Light is a professor of astrophysics, Doctor Arthur Suringa, who comes from an old, moneyed Amsterdam family that produced one or two notable figures every generation. Suringa family tree has its branches adorned with "distinguished generals, well-known scholars, famous scholars and writers" as well as "wealthy regents and merchants," but there were also some notable eccentrics – like mystics, zealots and crackpots. Dr. Arthur Suringa can be placed somewhere in the middle of his illustrious and eccentric ancestors. A largely absent, overworked father and an over indulgent mother turned him into a cold, egocentric and treacherous man with a devil of temper. Nonetheless, Suringa made his name as a promising physicist when he was only 28-years-old and thirty years later, he's patiently preparing the crowning achievement on his life work.

Suringa had to swallow his pride and went, cap in hand, to people he considered beneath contempt to bring together the funds needed to finance a scientific expedition to Koro Island. There he wants to use the latest, cutting edge scientific and technical marvels of the 1950s to observe and document the sun's corona during a full, 316-seconds long eclipse. The results of the observation could have "a long-lasting impact on the cosmogony of the future." So, with the money in the bank, he gathered a crack team of scientists, technicians and other people who are needed for their eclipse expedition.

Doctor Gerard Eggeling Hoves, obviously despised by Suringa, but someone who's still has his use to him "as a tool in the hand of a master." Doctor Hélène Daling is a beautiful young scientist with a growing international reputation as a spectroscopic analyst who's engaged to the engineer of the expedition, Karel Brandma, which adds another layer of tension to the expedition – as Suringa showers her with unwanted attention and innuendos. Doctor engineer Merelaer (no first name given) is one of the foremost experts in the world on astro-photography and is responsible for the photo-technical aspect of the expedition, but his death mask-like face and wooden, automatronic movements unnerves Suringa. Captain Leopoldsen is a retired administrative officer of the former KNIL (Dutch colonial army) who's in charge of the accounts and bookkeeping, but some "unclear, unresolved irregularities" placed a smudge on his record. There are a few last-minute additions to the party. Ann Narracott is an American astronomer who joined the expedition in San Francisco and Suringa's nephew, Rolf Teding, who's a promising scientist in his own right. Lastly, there's a newspaper reporter, Hidde Haima, who's there under the guise of free and laudatory publicity, but in actuality, he's there as a secretive peacekeeper per request of his long-time friend, Brandsma.

Commissioner Van Houthem briefly appears in the first half of the story when he receives an anonymous letter, posted to his home address, promising a perfect murder that has been planned to the second with "scientific certainty."

After this foreshadowing, the story moves to Koro Island where the expedition members setup camp and begin the long, arduous months of preparing and rehearsing their observation down to the last millisecond. Something that's not always easy when someone, like Suringa, is the head of the expedition and the long months don't pass without incidents. Most notably, Suringa nearly gets the whole expedition exiled from the island when he blundered into a holy place without the proper preparations or ceremony, which disturbed "the good spirit of Koro" who lives where they want to setup camp. Some unorthodox diplomacy was needed to put things right as Brandsma tells the natives that the sun will be attacked by evil spirits and the mountain top is the best place to successfully battle "the enemies of the sun."

When the eclipse finally came and went, the scientists got their data that will forever etch their names in their respective fields and the natives got to watch "a group of Westerns delivering the sun from the clutches of her captors," but the man of the hour sat silently slumped against the base of his telescope – a small, poison-smeared thorn sticking in his neck! Natives weren't anywhere close enough to the camp to have used a blowpipe and an analysis of the poison proves it was not indigenous to the island. So that means one of the observers must have fired, or stuck, the poisoned thorn into Suringa's neck, but they all have practically airtight alibis. Suringa was killed in a wide, open space during the most important phase of the eclipse and every fraction of a second was analyzed, which means that none of the suspects had even a second to spare to commit a murder. This makes it a borderline impossible crime and one of the character calls the murder a physical impossibility.

The local authorities, represented by the British Ashton (Good chap! Very tolerant of my compatriots), were unable to find a satisfactory answer to the death of Suringa and it takes some time before the file ends up Van Houthem's desk. Regrettable, the quality of the storytelling drops in the second half like a weighted down canal corpse and the explanation to the fascinatingly posed, quasi-impossible murder turned out to be a damp squib.

Firstly, the second half is waist deep in dragging-the-marshes territory with Van Houthem acting as an armchair detective as he smokes his pipe, reads documents and questions the expedition members, which largely goes over ground that has already been covered and can best be described as sifting everything that's known, or said, about the case through a sieve. This would have been perfectly acceptable had the clueing not been so ramshackle, or that you can only make an educated guess about the motive, but the worst part is how easy you can identify the murderer and that there was nothing clever, or inspired, about the alibi-trick and plot. It turned out to be the most simplistic answer that had already been alluded to earlier on the story.

I've praised detective writers in the past for getting more out of plot than they initially put into it. Such as Rupert Penny's Policeman's Evidence (1938), but Van Eemlandt did the complete opposite with Death in Half-Light. Van Eemlandt front loaded Death in Half-Light with potential gold and emerged with a few pieces of scrap metal, like reverse alchemy, which was really surprising considering the whole setup and was already vigorously padding myself on the back – assuming I seen through the elaborate and dastardly deception. I figured Suringa wrote the anonymous letter to Van Houthem and the story made it abundantly clear that the professor was not above hatching a nefarious scheme, but one of the expedition members turned the tables on him. There was one alibi, in particular, which left some room for a little trick that would allow this person the time to kill Suringa while everyone else were deeply concentrated on their tasks. Well, I was right about the murderer, but the trickery, or lack thereof, was deeply disappointing. Van Eemlandt also threw in a bit of mental instability to solve the problem that the Dutch police have no official standing in the case. Van Houthem can only identify the murderer and very little else.

So, yeah, I really wanted to like Death in Half-Light, which has good first half with a fascinating, well-done premise, but the second half was repetitive with a poorly clued and disappointing solution. What a step down from the clever, tightly-plotted Dessert with Bullets. But it show that the quality of the Dutch detective story, even when confined to a single writer, is all over the place. I'll stubbornly carry on with Van Eemlandt and already have an eye Code duizendpoot (The Centipede Code, 1955), which probably going to be a stupid gamble as its a Cold War novel with number stations and an on-air murder during a radio-play. Yes, the stove is hot. And, yet, I must touch it.

Speaking of touching hot stoves, my next read is going to be another gamble with an obscure, long out-of-print Dutch detective novel that can be either great, average or a complete disappointment. Why do it? The novel in question has a theme making too perfect not to use as a followup to Death in Half-Light. Fingers crossed!

About the Murder of a Circus Queen (1932) by Anthony Abbot

Back in November, I reviewed an excellent short story by Anthony Abbot, "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932), which might not have been much as an impossible crime story, but the who-and why were splendidly and detailed clued – punctuated with a well-done and satisfying ending. A glittering gem of the short Golden Age detective story that begs the question why Abbot still hasn't returned to the printed page. 

So it was time to do some detective work and track down a secondhand copy of one of his long out-of-print novels, which brought one of Abbot's most striking detective novels my way. A novel with a "classic crime in Madison Square Garden" and a mention Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). 

About the Murder of a Circus Queen (1932), alternatively published as The Murder of a Circus Queen, marked the fourth appearance of Commissioner Thatcher Colt, of Centre Street, who's visited in the opening chapter by Colonel Tod Robinson – owner and manager of the Combined Greatest Shows on Earth. Colonel Robinson is "the last of the large independents" and recently obtained an engagement at Madison Square Garden, which required a large investment, but ever since the circus has been plagued by costly accidents. A train wreck destroyed two display floats and a gondola loaded with bleachers and grandstand seats. Sickness broke out along the elephant line, a "peculiar malady" attacked the bulls, their prize lion died of indigestion and trained clown mule broke its leg and had to be shot.

All of that could have been put down to a string of bad luck, but then the star performers began to receive threatening letters warning them, under penalty of death, "not to exhibit their best tricks during the New York engagement."

Initially, a little skeptical ("...I suppose you are advising the newspapers that in spite of these thrilling threats, your star performers are positively going to appear..."), Colt decides to personally tackle the case when the news reaches them that a mechanic had toppled off a high platform. So the police is confronted with a colorful cast of characters who form a closed community that's next to impossible to penetrate and "the black magic of dark ages" that filled the hardened New York policemen with horror.

The star of the show is the Queen of the Air, Josie LaTour, who's "paid the biggest salary in the history of the business" and Colt is an attendance when her flying body performed death defying stunts, but all of a sudden, she began to shake and struggle to keep her grip on the rings – uttering a cry before plunging to her death. Colt knows what he saw was not an accident. An impossible crime with nearly twenty thousand possible suspects and witnesses!

As a quick aside, to my knowledge, there's only been one other detective novel MSG as a setting, Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933), which came a year after About the Murder of a Circus Queen. There's something else in About the Murder of Circus Queen that makes me suspect it might have given Queen an idea that was turned into The American Gun Mystery.

Anyway, Abbot made excellent use of the circus background of the case to fill the MSG with a pool of colorful, sometimes even lurid, suspects. There's the victim's husband, Flandrin, who's a rising young trapeze artist and really seemed to have loved his wife, but also has motives and opportunities to spare. They employed a husband-and-wife team of catchers, Flandreau and Flandra. Marburg Lovell is the millionaire backer of Colonel Robinson who had a side-interest in the Queen of the Air, which appeared to have earned him a black eye. Signor Sebastian is known as the King of the Air, but he's getting older and might be on his way down the ladder. The most curious of the bunch are undoubtedly the Ubangis, of the Mazzi tribe, who only speak a tribal dialect. Something that will become a stumbling as only their witch doctor, the educated Keblia, speaks English and he's conducting his own investigation.

Even more troublesome, the Unbangis possibly have a motive as the temperamental LaTour ("just a human tiger") savagely whipped two of them when she found them snooping around in her dressing room. Understandably, the Unbangis were quite sore at her and had closed door meeting. Throughout their investigation, the police come across "crude, awkwardly shaped" mud images that nevertheless "bore a definite and forceful resemblance to Josie LaTour" with long, sharp needles driven straight through the heart. Some of you are probably gritting your teeth at this point, but the depiction and treatment is not as harsh, or unflattering, as this plot-thread suggests. You'll probably be surprised how their role in the story is played out. Yes, it's a bit rough and unpolished by today's standards, but it's certainly not another The Stingaree Murders (1932).

So what more could you want from a vintage, 1930s mystery novel? A plot, you say. Abbot has you covered there!

Abbot plotted About the Murder of a Circus Queen like a chess player who willingly sacrificed (i.e. gave away) part of the solution to successfully misdirect the reader (this one anyway), not once, but twice. The observant, or seasoned, armchair detective will likely spot something that apparently gives the whole game away, but you'll probably get suspicious along the way, because the police is only too willing to go along with the obvious solution – particular the unlikable D.A. who loves third-degreeing suspects a little too much (see About the Murder of Geraldine Foster, 1930). Regardless, I figured the solution (how it was done) was not as obvious in 1932 as it's in 2021 and assumed Abbot banked on its relative newness to be more carefree with his clues and hints. A line halfway through the story, "what curious motives may exist in the terra incognita of the circus," gave me pause for thought and another suspect occurred to me. Someone who fitted the role of murderer perfectly and the clue of the second (not exactly) impossible crime also appeared to point towards this person.

So I had it all figured out, who, why and how, but then Colt began to talk about enclosing the murderer in "a narrow circle of deduction," a circle growing smaller and smaller, until an unexpected name remained – leaving me with egg and greasepaint on my face. It was comforting to know Colt worked on the exactly the same "false theory" before arriving at the correct solution, but none of that changes the fact that this was another one of my famous Roger Sheringham moments.

Only thing that can be said against the solution is that it only accomplished to skillfully sneak the murderer pass the reader, who's likely too busy with turning red herrings into fantastic theories, while either of the incorrect theories would have given the story a better, more fitting and darker ending. The actual solution is more in the "tadaah, surprise!" category.

But who cares? About the Murder of a Circus Queen is a genuine, fair play detective novel with a fascinating, vividly realized backdrop and a masterly-done piece of double-layered misdirection designed to teach readers who like to pretend they're the flesh-and-blood incarnation Mycroft Holmes a lesson. A small, plot-technical marvel and a fine piece of old-fashioned craftsmanship showing why the 1930s were the Golden Years of the Golden Age. Abbot deserves to be reprinted!

Premedicated Murder (1975) by Douglas Clark

Last year, I reviewed Douglas Clark's The Longest Pleasure (1981), an odd duck of a detective novel, which blended elements of the medical thriller, scientific mystery and serial killer story and presented as a modern police procedural – centered on a manufactured outbreak of botulism. Amazingly, for a modern police procedural, the botulism bacteria emerged as the best fleshed out character of the story. 

An anonymous comment left on my review pointed out The Longest Pleasure is a story where "a scientific idea is the center of idea" and "closer to being a science fiction novel than some readers might like." I was reminded of that comment when reading the subject of today's review. 

Premedicated Murder (1975) is the sixth novel in Clark's series of pharmaceutical mysteries about Superintendent George Masters and Inspector Bill Green. At this early point in the series, Masters and Green can't stand the sight of one another with a "long overdue, flaming row" hanging in the air, but until the storm breaks, they have to find a nasty poisoner in "one of the most lovely villages in the commuter belt," Lowther Close. Roger Harte was a war hero who was severely injured in France, which left him crippled and a promising engineering career in ruins, but he still managed to make a living as a consultant and electric expert. And even had his own workshop where he labored on a prototype of "a mechanical heart."

Roger Harte was "the little tin god" of the village, "albeit a pleasant, benevolent sort of god," who went out of his way to help his neighbors. Such as the unpopular newcomer, Milton Rencory, who has an almost natural gift to offend the villagers. If the beloved Harte had not asked everyone to be decent to Milton and Maisie Rencory, they would have been shunned by the whole community.

On the day of his death, Harte visited the Rencorys when he began to show symptoms of poisoning, dying in their house about three hours later, which puts Rencory in a tight, prejudiced spot – reason why the local authorities called upon Scotland Yard. So who poisoned "an apparently good-hearted, popular man" and why use such a rare, slow-working poison like ricin? A toxic agent extracted from castor oil seeds and there's a chapter explaining why it's difficult to produce and hard to obtain. Very unusual to come across a case of ricin poisoning in murder cases.

The bits and pieces with the man-made heart and the poison reminded me of that anonymous comment, but the quickly recede in the background to make place for a much more straightforward detective story.

Masters and Green begin dragging-the-marsh and interview everyone involved about the universally beloved Harte and the cordially disliked Rencordy, which revealed a delightful array of bizarre clues. Such as the snowy reception on a brand new TV set, a sealed hedge gate, a garden trash fire, a rubbery smell and a very subtle, low-key kind of kindness. Some of these clues a very nasty, double-edged clues that cleverly utilized to hide the murderer from the reader and the nicely done twist at the end didn't over strain credulity, which can be put down to the clueing – demonstrating Clark was the genuine article. A man out-of-time who would have been more at home in the 1930s than '70s or '80s and slipped through the filter by disguising his traditionally-plotted, Golden Age-style detective novels as police procedurals with a pharmaceutical gimmick tacked on. And it worked!

There are, however, two minor imperfections that makes Premedicated Murder not quite as good as Death After Evensong (1969) or even the very late Plain Sailing (1987). Premedicated Murder is closer to a novella than a novel with only seven relatively short chapters, which prevented the story and plot to develop to its full potential. Not every single clue is handled with the same skill, or attention, as others and kept my attention on another possibility suggested by the clues that were given more consideration. Yes, I completely failed to spot the murderer. Secondly, there was a four-year gap between Premedicated Murder and its predecessor, Sick to Death (1971), which would explain why the story was so rough, unpolished and so much shorter in length than his other novels.

Nevertheless, if Clark wrote Premedicated Murder as a warmup exercise to knock off the rust of a four-year hiatus, it's an impressive flexing-while-stretching tune-up act and can understand why it was recommended to me several times. A small, flawed gem of the British village mystery novel and comes recommended unless you're new to the series. In that case, I advise you to begin with Death After Evensong.