"Don't you get any foolish ideas that magic will solve all your problems, because it won't."- Merlin (The Sword in the Stone, 1963)
Richard Hunt is the
author of seven Detective-Inspector Sidney Walsh mysteries and a pair of
standalone novels, but otherwise, precious little is known about him.
The back flap of Deadlocked (1994)
briefly describes Hunt as "an accountant with a special interest in violin
making" and lived at the time of publication in Norfolk, England, which is
the only verified information I can share with you. However, I also found a
Wikipedia page for a Richard Hunt, a
magazine editor and green activist, who has several of his non-fiction books
listed on the same GoodReads
page as the Sidney Walsh series – which suggests they're one and the same
person. One clue supporting this assumption are the animal rights activists who
play a minor role in Deadlocked.
Even so, this could very well be an
understandable mix-up, because there are likely more than just one Richard
Hunt's traipsing around the British Isles. So, with Hunt's introductory out of
the way, it's time to take a closer at one of his detective novels.
Deadlocked
is Hunt's fourth piece of crime-fiction and the second case for Detective Chief
Inspector Sidney J. Walsh of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary's CID, which is,
as you probably guessed, an impossible crime novel, but the plot also has an
Arthurian theme that can be found in two recently reviewed locked room novels –
i.e. Paul Halter's Le
cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996) and Richard
Forrest's Death
at King Arthur's Court (2005). So did I stumble across a forgotten
sub-category of the locked room mystery? Anyway...
Dr. Arthur C. King was a research
scientist for PZB Testing Ltd, where they test "the long-term effects of
drugs, medicines, and pesticides," which once used live animals, but have
since substituted their guinea pigs for body tissues. Regardless, King has
received a number of death-threats pertaining to his research work and the
police advised him to upgrade his home security. Well, the unpopular researcher
has a "mania about King Arthur" and turned his house into a twentieth
century fortress.
The house is "guarded by a highly
sophisticated alarm system," originally designed to protect "big
multi-room places with valuable contents," such as galleries and museums,
which consists of special locks, cameras, floodlights and computer-operated
motion sensors. And they know when a second or unauthorized person enters the
premise. If the homeowner does not authorize the detected entry within several
minutes, the system automatically rings the police station. So the house seems
to be as safe as a small fortress and the security precautions reminded me of
the locked room situation from M.P.O. Books' Een
afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013). And in both cases these
modern and sophisticated alarm systems utterly failed to offer any protection
to their owners.
Dr. King is discovered by his neighbor,
who peered through a window, with "a ruddy great bronze sword sticking in
his chest," engraved with "EXCALIBUR" and "MADE IN INDIA," but
the meat of the problem is that the body was found inside locked-and bolted
room within a highly secured house surrounded by freshly fallen snow – which
showed the paw prints of a dog and footprints going to the locked windows. They
offer no explanation how the murdered managed to enter and leave the premise
without triggering the alarms.
So the crime-scene is handed over to
Detective Chief Inspector Sidney Walsh and the members of his Serious Crimes
team, which are mainly represented by Detective Constable Brenda Phipps and
Detective Sergeant Reginald Finch. I think their investigation constitutes the
best aspect of Deadlocked.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries,
Hunt's writing is not crippled by grand delusions of being a great novelist and
simply attempted to merge a traditional (locked room) mystery with a modern
police procedural. As a result, the plot is practically bare of any side
distractions that usually emerge from the private lives of the
series-characters and nearly all of their attention is focused on solving the
murder by talking to the family members, colleagues and enemies of King – as well
as giving considerable thought to the impossible aspect of the case.
Obviously, Hunt did try to give the book
a touch of realism by observing rudimentary police procedure and pointing out
some of the unpleasant aspects of real police work, such as attending
autopsies, but the structure of the plot is that of a detective story. So you would
assume I made a great discovery here. Unfortunately, I have to report that the
plot fell apart in the final chapters.
First of all, the elaborate,
multi-layered premise of the locked room problem was far better than the given
solutions: the answer to the strange footprints in the snow was ridiculous. The
explanation for the locked and bolted room within the house was routine and not
very original, but made for a proper locked room. Finally, I was profoundly
disappointed when I learned how the security system was bypassed and how this
method was connected to the murderer. A murderer whose revelation (and motive)
was somewhat of a cheat and the complicated scheme this person executed had far
more success than is believable.
