The Darkest Fathoms: "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) by Desmond Reid

The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014) is one of the most important publications to have come out of John Pugmire's Locked Room International as it collected the classic locked room novel Whistle Up the Devil (1954), the exceedingly rare Come to Paddington Fair (1997) and the previously unpublished Model for Murder (1952) – a long-lost contribution to the massive Sexton Blake Library. Pugmire speculated Smith's Model for Murder was probably "too cerebral for the audience" and thought it very unlikely I would ever read another Sexton Blake novel or short story. 

Less than a year later, I came across an anonymously published short Sexton Blake story, "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909), which turned out to be a surprisingly decent locked room mystery for the period. Suddenly, I began to notice how many Sexton Blake novels and short stories were listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). One title in particular beckoned my attention. 

Caribbean Crisis (1962) is a novella, a chapbook really, representing the first published work by noted science-fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock, which he co-wrote with Jim Cawthorne and published under a house name, "Desmond Reid" – a name that was shared between at least thirty authors for SBL. Adey's Locked Room Murders described a fascinating impossibility concerning a murder and disappearance from a submerged bathysphere (diving bell)! I also found it interesting Caribbean Crisis was published in the same year as Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962).

I naturally tempered my expectations, as it would be unfair to expect something along the lines of Joseph Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968), but the presentation and explanation to the impossible murder and disappearance were unexpectedly good. Something that deserved to have been in a better (detective) story. 

Caribbean Crisis opens on the research ship of the famous "boy-professor" and marine biologist, Hoddard Curtis, who perfected a new kind of bathysphere and is ready to explore "the deepest marine valley known to man." Curtis hopes to find evidence at the bottom of the Tanangas Deep of "a prehistoric fish," or creature, because stranger things have been found in the lower ocean ("fragments of bone and scales the size of dinner plates"). So he spent years and thousands of dollars to find out what "lurks down there unknown," but, the moment his dreams began to be realized, tragedy struck in the most unexpected way.

During his time away from the research ship, two of his assistants, Jules Harben and Jim Linwood, took the bathysphere for "a joy-ride in the deep," but, when they reached a depth of seven hundred feet, the radiophone began to crackle with frantic calls to pull them back up – in between screams of "it's awful" and "it's going to kill us." Shortly followed by unearthly sound, like "the bellow of some enormous sea-beast erupted from the ocean," and the bathysphere being torn from the fine, woven cords of steel. The bathysphere began to sink to the bottom of the Tanangas Deep! But it gets better.

Curtis puts on a large, heavy and untested deep-sea diving suit in an attempt to find his brainchild and this diving scene is the best one of the story. Miraculously, the damaged bathysphere is resting on a rocky ledge and can be salvaged, but, when Curtis shines his torch through the porthole, he discovers "one of its two occupants had disappeared." The body of the other man was floating in the sphere with a knife in his back! The hatch could not have been opened, or closed again, at that depth and the pressure would have killed anyone who tried to escape the sphere. And the newspaper called it "a mystery worthy of a Holmes or a Blake."

What a marvelous and original setup for a double barreled impossible crime story with a diving bell serving as a claustrophobic sealed room slowly descending into a silent, alien-like world of slime-green, swirling darkness where only God knows what may be lurking – ready to strike at anyone, or anything, disturbing its peace. I truly wish the name on the cover had either been Theodore Roscoe or Hake Talbot. The premise and locked room-trick would have turned into gold in their hands!

Unfortunately, Caribbean Crisis is not that kind of detective story. Sexton Blake reads about the bathysphere mystery in the newspaper and makes a personal inquiry, but what brings him to the island Republic of Maliba (where the ship is anchored) is a rich client. Sir Gordon Sellingham is a sugar millionaire who owns "a great deal of the Maliban sugar industry," but the current, potentially explosive political situation in the Caribbean is threatening both his business and his idealistic son. Peter Sellingham is using his mother's inheritance to bankroll a rebel group who want to overthrow the government and there might be a communist element to the impending rebellion.

Blake is not only a private detective, but also a Special Service Operative of the British government and it falls on him to prevent "a repetition of the Castro business in Cuba" and stop Maliba from becoming another Russian satellite. So the poor man's Sherlock Holmes becomes some kind of Poundland James Bond as he goes undercover as an insurance investigator and gets caught in a three-way dance between the government of Present Nonales, the rebel outlaws in the hill and communist infiltrators – tangling along the way with double agents and dodgy allies. I can't say these chapters were a chore to read, but the Cold War spy thriller is not my kind of crime fiction. I love pure, undiluted detective stories crammed with double-edged clues, treacherous red herrings, dying messages and locked rooms solved by either competent policemen or a clever amateur.

For me, the only time Caribbean Crisis came close to matching its opening chapters was Blake's explanation of the miraculous murder and disappearance, "when the impossible has been eliminated, what remains must be the truth," which turned out to be so much better than expected. A good, fairly original idea that was wasted on this otherwise run-of-the-mill, Cold War-style pulp thriller.

So, on a whole, the first chapters and locked room-trick had all the ingredients and potential necessary to craft a classic, timeless detective novel, but Caribbean Crisis allowed all of that to go to waste and therefore can only recommend it to the fantastical locked room reader as an interesting curiosity.

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.

Model for Murder (1952) by Derek Smith

On December 20, 1893, The Half-Penny Marvel published "The Missing Millionaire" by "Hal Meredeth," a penname of Harry Blythe, which marked the first appearance of the most prolific Sherlock Holmes imitators in all of popular fiction, Sexton Blake, whose bibliography comprises of an astonishing 4,000 stories – written by over 200 different writers. A prolific run of eight decades that ended up encompassing short stories, novels, stage plays, comic books, silent movies, talkies, radio serials and even a TV-series in the 1960s.

So the sheer size and volume of the Sexton Blake Library has earned the series its own separate wing in the crime-genre, but, as everyone knows, quantity is rarely a substitute for quality. And this series is no exception.

Sexton Blake is synonymous with tawdry, formulaic thrillers with run-of-the-mill action scenes, pulpy gangsters and super-human villains (i.e. Waldo the Wonderman). That may be why I was never compelled to explore this series. A chronic lack of interest that persisted even when I learned that one of the greatest authorities on the impossible crime story, Derek Smith, had tried his hands at one that faced Blake with "a sealed room murder," which is usually more than enough to get my full attention – except that this time even that didn't work. A Sexton Blake novel simply did not appeal to me. No matter who wrote it.

That is, until that infernal nuisance, "JJ," posted a review on his blog claiming Smith's wrote "a legitimate excellent" Blake story filled "lovely clues." Showing what could have been had the writers not turned Blake in bargain basement cross between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

So I decided to get myself a copy of Model for Murder (1952), which went unpublished during Smith's lifetime, but was finally printed in The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014) along with Whistle Up the Devil (1954), Come to Paddington Fair (1997) and a short story – titled "The Imperfect Crime." Admittedly, the story was better than I expected even after the positive review from JJ. Most notably the opening chapters and a conclusion that resembles a contortion act!

John Pugmire's Locked Room International published The Derek Smith Omnibus and speculated Model for Murder was probably "too cerebral for the audience," which would explain why it collected dust for sixty years. Anyway...

Model for Murder, or Model Murder, begins when an artist's model, Linda Martin, hurries to Baker Street on behalf of her employer, Leo Garvary, a once well-known sculptor who has been receiving anonymous letters of a threatening nature. That morning, Garvary received another threatening letter, but this he confided in Martin that he finally guessed who sent him and asked her to fetch Blake – who happens to be abroad on a case of national importance. So the task falls on the shoulders of his assistant, Tinker, whose role in this story genuinely surprised me.

Tinker is definitely not your regular Dr. Watson or Capt. Hastings, more of an Archie Goodwin-type of character, who actually solves the locked room problem before Blake officially enters the picture. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When Tinker and Martin arrive at the studio, they see the eccentric Garvary standing by the door of his soundproof studio. He looks at them, enters the studio, slams and locks the door behind him and that's the last time they see him alive, because when a spare key from the desk clerk opens the door they find an empty studio. All of the windows are "securely latched" from the inside. A transom was secured by a triple notched bar and a second door was locked and bolted on the studio side. After a brief search, they find Garvary's body in one of the cupboards lining the left and right hand wall, but not an atom of proof someone had been present in the room to fire the gun.

Firstly, the locked room trick is not as ingenious as the one from Whistle Up the Devil and basically reuses an age-old technique to leave behind a locked crime-scene. So you should not go into the book expecting a knock-out classic like his second impossible crime novel, but admittedly, Smith used this technique with the expertise of locked room expert. Smith mentioned two potential explanations, trick-windows that slide into the wall and a hollow statue, which gave me an idea for an alternative explanation.

When the possibility of a hollow statue was mentioned, my mind immediately conjured up the image of a Russian nesting doll. You see, there were three cupboards on each side of the room.

Just imagine the studio used to have two, large storage closets, but these closets were converted into six, separate cupboards and this would open the possibility that the walls separating the middle cupboard from the first and third cupboard is very thin, no more than wooden panels, which perhaps consists of two halves that can slide into one another – to make more room when needed. So the murderer could have been hidden in the second cupboard and, when this person heard Tinker close the door of the first cupboard, crawled into it through the sliding wall panel. Like a human shell game. And simply slip out of the room when everyone's attention was somewhere else (like inspecting the inner room).

However, the solution to the locked room murder turned out to be very different. Surprisingly, Tinker not only worked out the locked room trick, but demonstrated the trick to a baffled police constable, who demanded answers, which he refused to do until he had spoken to his employer – only to get shot and seriously wounded a short time later. A shooting briefly presented as a (semi) impossibility, but this aspect is quickly dispelled by a discovery in the hearth.

In any case, this murderous attempt effectively removed Tinker from the stage and left Blake with the daunting task to work out an explanation based on the breadcrumbs of information his assistant left behind. However, the pure detective elements from the opening chapters began to dilute in the middle section.

The reader knows by this point who shot Tinker and that this person has a connection with a shadowy underworld figure, but, more importantly, the gunman is determined to get his hands on a little black book filled with information of his criminal enterprise. So the seedy thriller elements really kick in here and this person even kidnaps and physically abuses Martin. This portion of the plot is the part that adheres to the formula of the series.

Luckily, Smith came back strong in the final stages of the story by serving a triple-layered solution to the reader. A solution that volleyed the guilt of the murder between two characters. This is likely the part that was too cerebral for its intended audience, because the conclusion is everything you'd expect from a legitimate expert on the traditional detective story. Model for Murder should have been a model for this series during its twilight years. It would be funny if this series had gone against the trend

In summation, Model for Murder is an interesting experiment of a traditional-minded mystery writer attempting to worm a puzzle-plot into the formula of a cheap, action-oriented series of pulp-thrillers and defied expectations by succeeding – better than he had any right to. I probably will never read another Sexton Blake story in my life, but glad I took a change on this one. I really like Smith and this world is a poorer place for the fact that he only wrote three (locked room) novels.

Finally, I referred to JJ's review earlier and in it he mentioned a confusing fact regarding the locked door of the studio. JJ said that the door was described as not having a keyhole, but was unlocked with a key a few pages later. I think JJ misunderstood this. The door didn't have an old-fashioned keyhole that you can look through, which were still common (indoors) in the fifties, but there was a modern lock on the door. A yale lock. So Smith didn't make a sloppy mistake there.