Here Be Dragons: "The Donnington Affair" (1914) by G.K. Chesterton and Max Pemberton

I've commented before that the size and scope of the traditional detective story never ceases to amaze me. Every time you think you know the lay of the land, a completely forgotten, long out-of-print writer is rediscovered or the growing popularity of translations breaking open a previously inaccessible part of the genre – like a large and open world that can be perpetually explored. Over the years, I've stumbled down an obscure rabbit hole, or two, but you don't always have to navigate uncharted waters to find dragons. 

I knew G.K. Chesterton wrote two uncollected Father Brown stories, "The Vampire of the Village" (1936) and "The Mask of Midas" (1936), when he was practically on his deathbed, but only recently discovered he co-wrote a proto-Detection Club tale during the early months of the Great War.

Max Pemberton was a British writer of crime-and adventure fiction who's a "somewhat of artistically minor member of the Rogue school" and published an unfinished crime story in the October, 1914, issue of The Premier. The open-ended story, "The Donnington Affair," posed a challenge "to several leading mystery writers of the day" to come up with a solution to the murder Pemberton so carefully described. Chesterton appears to have been the only one who picked up the gauntlet and neatly tidied up the whole problem in "Father Brown and the Donnington Affair," which was published in the November issue of The Premier and then promptly forgotten about until the 1980s – when it was rediscovered and reprinted in The Chesterton Review. The two halves have since been reprinted as a single story and can be found in The Complete Father Brown Stories (2012). But why "The Donnington Affair" remains so little-known today is a mystery as it has the kind of plot complexity you'd expect from the detective story of the 1930s and '40s.

The first half of the story introduces the Priest-in-charge of the Parish of Borrow-in-the-Vale, John Barrington Cope, who's engaged to Harriet Donnington, but her home life is an unhappy one. Harriet and Evelyn live at Borrow Close under the thumb of their domineering, old-world father, Sir Borrow Donnington, who "shut the doors alike upon the old world and the new" when his wife passed away. Ever since Lady Donnington's death, the place "has become mediæval in its isolation" with Cope being the only visitor as a future member of the family. That makes him the lucky one. Sir Borrow rudely showed Evelyn's suitor, Captain Kennington, the door and disowned his only, troublesome son. A "disgraceful affair" ended Southby Donnington's university career and became "a derelict in the dangerous seas of London's underworld," which ended with him being arrested on a charge of forgery and sentenced to three years in prison. So his father "swore that Southby should never enter his house again," but that becomes a sticky situation when he escapes from prison with a cellmate. Before too long, the grounds of Borrow Close are swarming with suspicious-looking characters (policemen in disguise) and culminates with a tragic murder of one of the family members.

Pemberton's portion of the story ends with the line "God send us enlightenment that the guilty may be punished" and Chesterton, acting as deputy deity, dispatched Father Brown to the scene of the crime.

Father Brown is true to form. Appearing unexpectedly as "a stumpy, apologetic person with a big hat and a bad umbrella" who sees meaning in seemingly meaningless statements and unimportant things. Such as pointing out "that in a murder case the guiltiest person is not always the murderer" or that the key to the case might be found in the statement that Southby's cellmate was "the cheeriest person possible." Slowly, but surely, Father Brown bicycles the reader through a surprisingly complex plot towards a solution that felt both logical and enviable to the point where you almost believe Chesterton and Pemberton had the whole thing planned out from the beginning!

There were, however, two aspects that were a little hard to swallow. Such as (ROT13) gung jubyr pbireg cbyvpr bcrengvba bire jung'f ernyyl abguvat zber guna n fvzcyr sbetrel pnfr and I was rather skeptical of gur snzvyvny erfrzoynapr va unaqjevgvat “nyzbfg nzbhagvat gb snpfvzvyr," but the latter seems to have some truth to it. So why has almost never been used in a detective stories? You would expect mystery writers to be all over such a handy piece of misdirection.

Chesterton wrote much better, more memorable Father Brown stories, but his collaboration with Pemberton is still far above the average detective story of the 1910s and historically significant as an ancestor of future round-robin mystery novels – like The Floating Admiral (1931) and The President's Mystery Plot (1936). More than deserving of being re-rediscovered today. And, perhaps, there's more to be uncovered or even added. Who were the other leading mystery writers of the day Pemberton challenged to find a solution? Did anyone beside Chesterton accept the challenge? What happened to their story? There seem to be some clues and hints in Pemberton's half that could potentially have opened the door for other writers. The story mentioned that one of the characters knows “half the crooks in Europe” and one of its most well-known crooks is E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles. Chesterton glossed over "terrible wound in the throat" of the victim, but a murder weapon was never identified and could have attracted the attention R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke or any of the other scientific detectives from that era. A collection with all of their different takes on Pemberton's problem would have been an iconic work of the pre-GAD era. A murder that takes place across the mystery multiverse and solved by the best detectives of that era in their respective universes. Ah, the road not taken!

So why didn't it happen? Probably bad timing. Hornung stopped writing fiction in 1914 and Freeman, like so many at the time, become involved with that little skirmish known as the First World War.

Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective: "The Man With Nine Lives" (1914) and "The Bullet from Nowhere" (1914) by Hugh C. Weir

Hugh C. Weir was an American author, magazine editor and screenwriter who started out as a newspaper reporter for the Springfield Sun, in Ohio, when only sixteen-years-old and moved on from there to become a prolific writer of short stories, magazine articles and nearly three-hundred screenplays – together with Catherine McNelis he founded the McNelis-Weir Advertising Agency and Tower Magazines. A very industrious individual, to say the least, but he has been forgotten today and you can only find slight traces of him online.

Weir has an IMDb page listing such nuggets of trivia as his friendship with President Teddy Roosevelt or how personally wrapped "the hundreds of Christmas gifts" he gave out each year. A 2009 post on a now dormant blog mentioned Weir was an avid Charles Dickens collector and apparently had "one of the best and most complete collections of first editions" in the country.

Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective

These scraps offer a glimpse of a pleasant and successful man, but Otto Penzler revealed in the introduction to one of Weir's short stories, collected in The Big Book of Female Detectives (2018), that initial success of Tower Magazines ended abruptly in 1935 when the company went bankrupt – which was preceded by advertisers who claimed they had been "defrauded with inflated circulation numbers." McNelis was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. You didn't see that twist coming, now did you?

Weir died an early death in 1934, at the age of 49, while still being the editorial director of Tower Magazines and the world had soon forgotten about him. There is, however, one piece of his literary legacy that's slowly coming back to the attention of mystery readers.

During the early 1910s, Weir not only created one of the more originally realized "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes," but also one of the earlier female detectives, Miss Madelyne Mack ("what newspaper reader does not know the name?"). A former college girl who was "confronted suddenly with the necessity of earning a living" and decided to become a full-time detective when she nabbed a notorious shoplifter in a New York Department Store. A simple case that was to be first of many, often highly publicized exploits, such as placing "the chief of the firebug trust" in the docks and solving "the riddle of the double Peterson murder," which were chronicled by Miss Mack's loyal friend and narrator, Miss Nora Noraker – a newspaper reporter addicted to cola berries. So this series is a relatively late addition to the Sherlockian, casebook-style detective stories that were at the height of their popularity at the turn of the century.

However, Miss Mack and good, old Nora are not mere copies of Holmes and Dr. Watson in a dress with lipstick smeared across their faces. They're own characters with their own methods, opinions and philosophy on detective work.

Miss Mack explains that there are only two rules for a successful detective, "hard work and common sense," which, unlike the "uncommon sense" of Holmes (her words, not mine!), is simple, common business sense with a dash of imagination and likens it to solving a mathematical problem – instead of figures she works with "human motives." A simple approach of building, or subtracting, on the facts given until you arrive at the correct answer. Nora is a little closer to the archetypal, Watson-like narrator, but a very likable, affable Watson.

So how did this obscure, long-overlooked series of short detective stories appear on my radar? Two of the stories were listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991).

"The Man With Nine Lives" and "The Bullet from Nowhere" were reportedly first published in the July and October, 1914, issues of Macleans and collected in Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective (1914). However, I discovered "The Bullet from Nowhere" was previously published in the January, 1912, issue of The Cavalier and the Scrapbook, but was unable to find any earlier publication date for "The Man With Nine Lives." A story that was obviously the first in the series! So, not to make things needlessly confusing, I'll stick with 1914 as the accepted year of publication.

"The Man With Nine Lives" opens strongly with a good, lively introduction of the series-characters and setting the stage that begins when a letter arrives with a desperate plea for help.

Wendell Marsh is "one of the greatest newspaper copy-makers that ever dodged an interviewer" who writes to Miss Mack that no fewer than eight attempts have been made on his life during the past five months. Marsh has been dodging bullets, cars, thugs and has even found "a cunning little dose of cyanide of potassium" in his cherry pie, but believes his luck has run out and convinced a ninth attempt will be successful – imploring Miss Mack to come poste haste. But when they arrive, they're told that Marsh has been found dead in the library under inexplicable circumstances.

The library was "a wreck of a room" with shattered vases littering the ground, books were "savagely ripped apart" and the "curtains were hanging in ribbons," suggesting a violent struggle, but the only door was locked from the inside with the windows fastened as tight as a drum. So how did the murderer got out of the locked library? Even stranger, an examination showed there are no marks on the body or any trace of poison in it!

Unfortunately, the story belonged to a previous era of crime fiction and the painfully bad solution showed this in two ways. Firstly, the locked room is as dated as it's embarrassingly ridiculous and could have only been forgiven had it been written in the 1800s. But than again, I've come across exactly the same locked room setup, in a library, with nearly identical solutions in an episode of Jonathan Creek and a short story from Gigi Pandian's The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018). So this idea is still being used today, but "The Man With Nine Lives" is where it may have originated. Secondly, not to be outdone by the terrible locked room-trick, the revelation of the murderer's identity was an even bigger embarrassment. I can't say anything more than that.

A story that opened promisingly, but got mired in a jumble of poorly handled, badly dated and cliched tropes in the end. My advise to read the introductory pages and move on to the next story. You're not missing anything.

Notes for the curious: (1) food and drinks feature prominently in the story (cherry piece, strawberry shortcakes, chocolate ice-cream sodas and berries) and now wonder what an ice-cream soda from 1914 would taste like (2) I discovered a Dutch hoorspel (radio-play) from 1993 of this story, "De man met de negen levens," on the Internet Archive. The play was directed by Hans Karsenbarg who played the police pathologist, Dr. Den Koninghe, in the Baantjer TV-series. What an obscure link to the series that introduced me to the detective story!

The second and final impossible crime story of the series, "The Bullet from Nowhere," hasn't aged gracefully either, but, on a whole, worked much better as a locked room story with a more conventional setup and execution of the trick – one that was fairly original at the time. The scene of the crime here is the music-room of Homer Hendricks, a talented musician, whose climax to "the wild spirit" of the storm scene from William Tell is cut short by "the sudden, muffled report of a revolver." When the door is broken down, Hendricks is found huddled on the floor next to the piano with a bullet in his head. But where's the gun? And how did the murderer vanish from the locked music-room?

Lieutenant Perry believes the household is either "covering up the fact of suicide" or "trying to shield the murderer." So they call in the services of Miss Mack and Nora.

"The Bullet from Nowhere" benefits from being shorter in length and ending with a solution that probably was a bit more novel in 1914 than in 2019. Some of you probably already have an idea how the locked room-trick works, but appreciated that it was not as godawful as the one from "The Man With Nine Lives." And the place of the bullet wound even threw me off for a couple of seconds. A piece of misdirection mystery writers would come to better utilize in the succeeding decades.

All in all, "The Man With Nine Lives" and "The Bullet from Nowhere" are, plot-wise, nothing more than curios with some historical interest as possible originators of two (locked room) solutions, but the main draw of the series are the leading characters, Miss Mack and Nora – who were more engaging and original than the cases they got to solve. So the series only really has something to offer to genre historians or readers with a special interest in female detective-characters.

I probably won't read the rest of the series anytime soon, but, if you're interested, Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective is available as a dirt cheap ebook from Black Heath or as a 4-in-1 paperback anthology from Coachwhip Publications (together with three other short story collections). Or you can just grab it from the Internet Archive.

Sexton Blake Returns: "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909)

Back in March, I reviewed Derek Smith's Model for Murder (1952), a surprisingly cerebral entry in the colossal Sexton Blake Library, which is probably why the novel remained unpublished for more than six decades until John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, got his hands on the manuscript – publishing it as part of The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014). A splendid volume that includes the all-time classic Whistle Up the Devil (1954) and Come to Paddington Fair (1997).

The Sexton Blake Library consists of roughly two-thousand short stories, novels, stage plays and comic books, written by over two hundred writers, but ended my review by saying I would likely never read another Blake story during my lifetime. A well-known problem with the Sexton Blake series is quantity over quality that helped it acquire a reputation of a badly dated, second-rate pulp-series.

Hardly a year has gone by since my review of Model for Murder, but I recently came across a short Sexton Blake story that actually looked promising. And the story delivered on its promise!

"The Grosvenor Square Mystery" was anonymously published on October 26, 1909, in Answers and is a bone-fide locked room mystery with a solution that cleverly moved away from the secret passages of eighteenth century detective fiction.

The setting of the story is the house of Sir George Hilton, in Grosvenor Square, which is an ancient mansion furnished "the heavy style of the early Victorian era" and has "prevailing air of solidity" with its solid doors, locks and bolts – solid shutters on all the windows. However, this was not enough to keep out a thief and valuables began to disappear from the locked apartment "sacred to the use" of Sir George and his wife.

An apartment has four interconnecting doors: two of them lead to the rooms Sir George and Lady Hilton, one to a boudoir and the last one to a bathroom, which pretty much eliminated a secret passageway or hidden trick-door. You can only enter the apartment through one of these four doors. All of the doors were fitted with "patent locks, bolts and burglar alarm," but despite these security measures valuable rings, necklaces, scarf-pins, a pearl pendant and a purseful of sovereigns were taken from that locked apartment. This culminated in the theft of "a packet of State papers."

These inexplicable string of thefts began to foster "an actual spirit of mutual suspicion" and mistrust between Sir George and Lady Hilton. So they decided to take Blake as an undercover house guest and have him bust open their locked room conundrum.

Blake makes short work of the case and the revelation of the thief doesn't come as an astonishing, gut-wrenching surprise, but, where the plot becomes interesting, is the explanation to the problem of the locked apartment – a solution that was original, inventive and clever for the period. You can say that the unknown author of this story took a locked room idea from the eighteenth century reworked it by applying some of that twentieth century ingenuity that G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr would bring to the impossible crime story in the subsequent decades.

A note for the curious: the Kindaichi series has a locked room story that uses this exact same idea, but made it even better by elaborating on it and the result was awesome.

So, considering the poor reputation of the Sexton Blake series, "The Grosvenor Square Mystery," as a second-string Sherlock Holmes imitation, wasn't all that bad and the locked room angle was surprisingly good. Particularly for 1909. The plot lacked proper clueing and the culprit was obvious, but the impossible crime and solution makes this story potential anthology material.

You can read story here.

The Forest Lake Mystery (1903) by Palle Rosenkrantz

Back in January, I read Jernvognen (The Iron Chariot, 1909) by "Stein Riverton," a pseudonym of Sven Elvestad, who can be described as the Norwegian Conan Doyle and his work helped the detective story gain a foothold in his country – an important contribution punctuated by an annual award, Rivertonprisen (Riverton Prize), named in his honor. The Iron Chariot was published in a dozen different languages, but an English edition did not appear until 2017. A 108 years after its original publication in Norway!

An independent e-publisher, The Abandoned Bookshop, dedicated to uncovering "the best books we've forgotten, lost sight of, or never even knew existed in the first place" finally introduced Riverton's celebrated detective novel to a world-wide audience. Scott Pack of The Abandoned Bookshop left a comment on my review that a translation of "one of the first ever Danish crime novels" was in the works and scheduled for publication later this year. Well, that book was actually published in late February and is going to be subject of today's review.

Baron Palle Rosenkrantz was a lawyer with "expensive house-building habits" with "a reputation for unauthorized use of public funds," which resulted in an arrest record and bankruptcy, but he turned his life around when he began to work as a journalist and write fiction in order to keep the wolves from his door – producing stage plays, silent movie scripts and close to eighty novels. An unusual career path somewhat similar to that of two of his fellow mystery writers, Henry Leverage and Robin Forsythe.

An early work by Rosenkrantz, Hvad skovsøen gemte (The Forest Lake Mystery, 1903), is generally accepted as Denmark's first mystery novel and the fact that he was the first made him, ipso facto, the "godfather of Danish crime." The Danske Kriminalakademi (Danish Crime Academy) named their annual Palle Rosenkrantz Prize after him.

So The Forest Lake Mystery is a landmark mystery novel and earned Rosenkrantz ever-lasting fame in Denmark, but how does the story measure up to its more well-known, internationally acclaimed contemporaries?

Well, the answer to that question wholly depends on what the individual reader considers to be good crime-fiction from the days before the genre's Golden Age.

Riverton's The Iron Chariot obviously took its cue from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and read like a sultry, summer-like take on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), while Rosenkrantz's The Forest Lake Mystery followed the lead of Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and reads like a modern crime novel – emphasizing character and story-telling over plotting and clueing. So, as a plot-oriented mystery reader with an undying love for intricate plots, clueing and red herrings, I was slightly less enthusiastic about this second translation from The Abandoned Bookshop. But let's begin at the beginning.

The protagonist of The Forest Lake Mystery is a promising, twenty-six year old sergeant with the Copenhagen police, named Eigil Holst, who was in need of fresh air and decided to take a holiday into the countryside.

The Forest Lake Mystery (1903)

Holst is has reclusive personality and would sit for hours, alone with his thoughts, by a small marl pit on the edge of the forest and staring down into a small, dark lake. One day, Holst's solitude is breached by a Swedish gentleman, Arvid von Ankerkrone, who served as a Captain with Scania Dragoons and is accompanied by his daughter, Miss Ulla – who'll fulfill the role of love-interest for the young detective. However, during their time together, two gruesome discoveries are made in the lonely forest lake.

The body of a murdered infant, looking like a mummy, is floating near the bank of the lake and subsequent dragging reveals the body of a naked woman. A pair of short, strong ropes were tied around her feet and neck with a heavy stone fastened to it. The postmortem reveals she had been poisoned before being sunk to the bottom.

Holst is entrusted with handling the case, but his investigation doesn't focus on how the murder was committed or even who responsible. Not directly. The investigation is largely concerned with identifying the victim and reconstructing her life, which means that Holst has to follow an obscure, scattered trail that cuts across the mainland of Europe – from Denmark to Sweden and Italy and back again to Denmark. Only to find out, like the reader did early on, that the truth to the case had been within arm reach the entire time.

Admittedly, this part of the story, after the excellent opening chapters, were not badly written and the depiction of Europe during the first decade of the previous century has its charm, but my interest in the plot slowly began to wane after the halfway mark. And pretty much evaporated after the only lengthy chapter in the book that went over a whole stack of letters, notes and diary entrees. The story had obviously run its course by that point, but there was still a quarter of the book left to go and rattled on to an underwhelming, unimpressive ending. And there's one plot-thread I did not entirely understand, regarding the dead baby, but perhaps I missed something halfway through the story.

Anyway, I wish I could be as positive about The Forest Lake Mystery as I was about The Iron Chariot, because I want The Abandoned Bookshop to do more of these obscure translations, but this one simply didn't do it for me. Historically, it's an interesting title, as it's an ancestor of the modern-day, Scandinavian crime novel, but I'm a hopeless classicist whose taste runs in a very different direction.

So you have to keep that in mind, because most of you will probably be able to appreciate The Forest Lake Mystery more than I have.

Harbinger of Death

"An investigator needs facts and not legends or rumors."
- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

Sven Elvestad was a Norwegian journalist and author best known in his own country for his detective stories, published as by "Stein Riverton," who lended his (pen) name to an annual award for the best piece of Norwegian crime fiction – called the Rivertonprisen (Riverton Prize). A versatile prize that can be awarded to a novel, short story, stage play or screen play.

As a novelist, Elvestad appears to have been prolific with over a hundred titles in his bibliography, but one his earliest endeavors, Jernvognen (The Iron Chariot, 1909), proved to be the capstone of his literary career. The book came in second in "a poll of the greatest Norwegian crime novels of all time" and was translated into a dozen different languages, which makes it one of the greatest international successes Norway has had in the genre. So it was about time that this Norwegian classic got a long overdue publication in English.

The Iron Chariot received its long-awaited English translation at the hands of Lucy Moffatt and published by the Abandoned Bookshop in early 2017.

I think it's great that a relatively small, independent e-publisher took a chance on a translation of 1909 detective novel from Norway and have to admit, shamefully, that the book would have very likely passed me by had it not been for "JJ" of The Invisible Event – who posted an announcement and a review on his blog. So very grateful that he pointed my attention in the direction of the Abandoned Bookshop, because I noticed that they've reissued a number of detective novels by Clifton Robbins. A very obscure, Golden Age-period mystery writer and Dusty Death (1931), The Man Without a Face (1932) and Methylated Murder (1935) sound like they could be good reads, but they're detective stories to be investigated in a future blog-post.

The Iron Chariot takes place on an immense, rugged island, "an exceedingly popular destination for summer guests," where the nameless narrator of the story arrives at the dawn of summer. He arrives early in the holiday season and there only half a dozen guests present at the boarding house, but the sultry peace is shattered when the body of a man is found at the edge of the forest. The body belongs to Forestry Inspector Blinde and someone "smashed the casing of his brain like china."

In the first chapter, the narrator recalls two peculiar events that occurred on the night preceding the discovery of the body. One of these events happened when he decided two pay a visit to two friends, a brother and sister named Carsten and Hilde Gjærnæs, who live at Gjærnæs Farm, but, when he arrived there, the farm steward showed him the door – telling him that "the squire cannot be disturbed right now." However, the steward looked deadly pale. Obviously, they were trying to hide something. The second event occurs when, on his way back, he meets an elderly fisherman, Jan Jansen, who's a firm believer in the titular legend of the region. 

 

An "old legend" tells a peculiar story of man who used to own the farm a hundred years ago, "a reserved, eccentric type," with a passion half-crazed inventions. He had squandered his inheritance on this hobby. The last of these inventions was a horse-drawn, iron carriage and he drove it to his untimely dead one night. According to the locals, you always heard "the iron chariot rattling its way across the plain" whenever someone was about to die. The narrator and the fisherman had both heard the rattling sound of metal links on the night of the murder.

Evidently, this is not your common, garden-variety murder and requires the expertise of a specialist. So they called in a famous detective from Kristiania (present-day Oslo).

But when Asbøjrn Krag arrives, he behaved entirely like "a holidaying gentleman." Krag spends all his time taking walks, reading, eating and bathing. He's even there when a second body is found in exactly the same place as the previous one, but the Great Detective remained passive. However, the experienced armchair detective will quickly catch on that Krag is playing a cat-and-mouse game with the rather obvious murderer. Regardless, Riverton has to be commended for having the foresight, 1909, to foreshadow the murderer's guilt. Not exactly fine-tuned clueing, but ghosts of hints were dropped here and there. The plot is also very ambitious for the time.

Jernvognen (The Iron Chariot, 1909)

Krag explains that the central problem of the case is the murder of the Forestry Inspector, but through "accidental associations" other events got entangled in it. One of these events is what happened at the farm on the night of the murder and how this related to a death four years ago, which is also when the rattling was heard by the fisherman. The second plot-thread is the truth behind the ghostly chariot, but the answer to this problem will hardly excite modern readers. However, the borderline impossibility of ghostly chariot that leaves no tracks behind was a nice touch. All of these plot-threads are tangibly related to the first murder and gives the plot its complexity.

However, the most important aspect of the plot is the role of murderer in the story, because The Iron Chariot now stands as the earliest known example of a very particular trick and Riverton probably originated it. So this makes of it historical interest to people interested in how the detective developed.

As a detective novel, The Iron Chariot reads like a sultry premonition of the coming Golden Age, even if it will hardly pose a challenge to the modern reader, but the story has more to offer than an early example of the Golden Age mystery novel – namely an excellent translation of Riverton's period prose. Riverton essentially wrote a humid, stuffily atmospheric equivalent of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Riverton simply replaced the dark, misty moors for a sunny, rugged island in the south of Oslo, but The Iron Chariot is (almost) as atmospheric as Doyle's famous yarn.

So readers who love the atmospheric detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot and Clifford Orr will probably be able to appreciate this story.

Riverton's writing also reminded me of the work of one of contemporaries, "Ivans," who was a Dutch mystery writer. Granted, I read only one of his books, De bosgeest (The Forest Spirit, 1926), but the plot of that one book also revolved around a forest ranger who was beaten to death in the woods. You have to wonder how many mystery writers in other European countries, like Britain or the Netherlands, were aware of their Norwegian partner in crime. Although he died in 1934 and that might have thrown him into obscurity outside of Norway.

In any case, The Iron Chariot was a fascinating, well written excursion into the genre's past and one that, until recently, had been without our reach behind that pesky language barrier. I really appreciate the people who made this historical important detective available and would like to end this review by channeling the spirit of the late President Ronald Reagan by telling the Abandoned Bookshop to tear down that barrier. There's more where this one came from!

Wired for Destruction

"Knowledge is progress. We gain knowledge through observation and logic—inevitable logic. And logic tells us that two and two make four—not sometimes but all the time."

- Prof. Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen (Jacques Futrelle's "The Leak," collected in The Jacques Futrelle Megapack: Tales of the Thinking Machine and Others, 2013)

Henry Leverage's name is little-known today and even the GAD Wiki doesn't have him listed among their legion of obscure mystery writers. However, he filled the popular slick and pulp magazines of his day, such as Cosmopolitan, Black Mask, Argosy All-Story and Detective Story Magazine, but what set Leverage apart is that his career, as a writer, really began when he was an inmate of Sing-Sing Prison – where he fulfilled the duty of editor of the prison magazine, The Star of Hope.

The scant crumbs of information on the web does not mention the reason for Leverage's incarceration, as you don't "interrogate a prisoner concerning his past," but he was released in 1919 and used his personal experience to write "crook fiction." In 1925, he created a unique-sounding series-character, Big Scar Guffman, who is a prisoner serving "a life sentence plus fifteen years" and struck me as a hardboiled counterpart to the usual assortment of charming thieves, conmen and swindlers found in rogue fiction.

Despite his proclivity for stories that center around criminals and prison inmates, Leverage wrote (at least) one cerebral detective novel in the tradition of the American mystery writers who valued ratiocination.

Whispering Wires (1918) was published almost a century ago and must have been written when Leverage was still behind bars, but the plot of the story is genuine interesting and stands on the border dividing two distinct periods in the history of the genre – namely the Doylean Era of crime-fiction and the coming Golden Age. Good news is that the Golden Age-like elements have the upper hand here. The story plays entirely fair with the reader and one of the main focal points of the plot is an apparently impossible murder.

A locked room mystery boosting a solution that must have been very impressive and novel for the period, but I am getting ahead of myself here.

Triggy Drew is a private-investigator who operates "the greatest city of the modern world," New York City, who did not "overrate his own powers" and built a reputation on hard, solid work. He wasn't always perfect at the job, but good enough to net him a wealthy client who always called on him when he needed a detective.

Montgomery Stockbridge is a Munitions Magnate and the first time he had hired Drew was to track down an absconder, which he did to the full satisfaction of his employer. So when Stockbridge went up against Mortimer Morphy, "the Wolf of the Ticker," Drew was tasked with gathering evidence proving "the gentleman bank-wrecker" had appropriated large amounts of money and wrecked a score of homes – culminating with a conviction at the end of a long, drawn-out court battle. When he was sentenced to ten to twenty years in state prison, Morphy swore he would get back at Stockbridge "if it took the longest day of his life." And a bizarre death-threat brings Drew back into the employ of Stockbridge.

Someone used the name of Stockbridge's physician to order the superintendent of Ridgwood Cemetery to have a grave dug in the family plot, because "a death was about to occur in the Stockbridge family." A threat punctuated by a whispering voice over the telephone promising that they would go after his daughter, Loris, as soon as they were finished with him. So Drew takes the case and leaves his client behind inside a sealed room, a "double-locked and triple-watched library," but, at the end of the day, they're forced to take an ax to the sturdy library door.

The telephone in the library was engaged, but Stockbridge remained unresponsive and when the ax had done its work they discover why: Stockbridge lay crumpled on the floor with a gunshot wound to the side of the head and the only living presence in the library was his pet magpie – screaming, "Ah, Sing," over and over again. So how did the murderer entered, or exited, a sealed room? A room with thick walls, a hardwood floor and a smoothly plastered ceiling. One with all the windows and doors securely locked from the inside and closely watched from the outside.

As one of the characters observed, the shooting of the Munitions Magnate appears to be a complete and utter impossibility!

I mentioned earlier on this review how the book fits within the tradition of the American detective story of the ratiocinative variety. Leverage makes several allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, as he refers to the impossible murder as "a second Rue Morgue" and described the magpie "as stately as a raven" who seemed to crow "Nevermore," but there are also, what I believe to be, several subtle nods to Jacques Futrelle – who's known as the creator of the Thinking Machine.

The Thinking Machine is known to snap at everyone who dares to suggest a problem appears to be an impossible one, because "nothing is impossible." Drew gave a similar response by stating that there's no such word and invoking it is "a fool's excuse." You can add to that a character who's plotting behind bars (c.f. "The Problem of Cell 13," 1905) and the technical nature of the solution, which is reminiscent of Futrelle's scientific-and technological based detective stories.

So I found it intriguing to see the (possible) influences of these two early, pre-GAD writers on a detective story is, essentially, a Golden Age mystery. Well, for the most part anyway.

Another element that makes Whispering Wires a Golden Age-style tale of ratiocination is the presence of several clues that, when spotted, reveal the whole truth behind the murder. You should be able to the deduce the who-and how of the murder based on the clues hidden in the story. Once you grasp the truth behind the locked room trick, you should be able to deduce the well-hidden murderer, because the nature of the trick and motive leaves only one possible suspect. Admittedly, the identity of the murderer is less interesting than how this person to shoot someone in a sealed and watched room, but they nicely tied together by the clues. So you really have no excuse to not get it right with this one.

Some of you might dismiss the book, based on my review, as being too transparent, but keep in mind that the passage of time has dulled the originality of the plot. The technical side of the story, such as the crossed wires and smooth bullets, is not as exciting to us jaded, modern-day readers as it probably was to the average reader of 1918 – when telephones had just experienced its first commercial growth and the cleverest detective stories were still ahead of them. I can imagine readers at the time being impressed by the plot and the innovations it contained. After all, a "threat-by-wire" was a new and novel way of telling someone they were going to enjoy the unwelcome comforts of an early grave. We take instant death-threats for granted today! ;)

Additionally, the readers were given a very real shot at solving the problem of the locked room and identifying the shooter themselves. Sure, the clues are easier spotted today than they were back then, but even then they were planted in the text for the observant reader to find and interpret. And that's pretty nifty for a mystery published in 1918.

Long story short, I liked this simple, straightforward and well-clued detective novel with a locked room murder that slammed the door on all hoary, moth-eaten bag of tricks from the previous century. No secret passages of trained, gun-wielding monkey within the pages of this yarn!

So, if this overlong, semi-coherent babbling managed to produce a spark of curiosity, you can pull Leverage's Whispering Wires from Gutenberg and read the story for yourself.

Oh, a final note of warning: try to avoid looking at the original book cover. It spoils an important part of the solution. The reader has been warned!