Vanishing Act

"You've solved murders by your shrewd observation of tricks. You're keen to catch an error."

- The Great Xanthe (Jospeh Commings' "Death by Black Magic," from Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner, 2004)

Recently, I reviewed One Remained Seated (1946) and Death in Silhouette (1950), which are part of the Maria Black series by John Russell Fearn, but the series consist of only five titles and knocking those two of my list left me with, reputedly, the least appealing book of the fivesome – namely Maria Marches On (1945) that has been republished as The Murdered Schoolgirl. Luckily, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books, who wrote "Neglected Detectives: Maria Black, MA," recommended me to move on to the Dr. Hiram Carruthers series.

Dr. Hiram Carruthers is a well-known physicist and "ex back-room expert of the war department," who strongly resembles the popular bust of Beethoven, but also garnered a reputation as a "scientific specialist to Scotland Yard." And his specialism as a consulting scientist-detective are crimes that appear to be (scientifically) impossible. So you can call Dr. Carruthers a cross between John Rhode's Dr. Lancelot Priestley and Arthur Porges' Cyriack Skinner Grey.

The Silvered Cage (1955) appears to have been the last book in the series, originally published as by "Hugo Blayn," one of Fearn's numerous pennames, which is really more of a novella than a full-fledged novel – counting roughly a hundred pages of fairly large-print. However, the plot of the story sports two impossible situations: an onstage disappearance during a magic show and an inexplicable death inside a locked room.

Robert Adey said in Locked Room Murders (1991) that The Silvered Cage was "not a bad little book" with a couple of impossibilities of "a highly technical nature" that still sound as if they might work. Even if they stretch credulity just a little bit. I think the book, as a locked room mystery, has some points of interest, but, as a detective story, it's not a very impressive piece of work. Somewhat flawed even. But more on that later.

Dr. Carruthers only appears very late in the story and basically fulfills the role of deus ex machina by descending from the heavens above to solve the problems that plague us mere mortals. The mortals are represented here by Detective-Sergeant Whittaker and Chief-Inspector Garth of the Yard. And their problems are brought to them by the daughter of a very wealthy business tycoon.

The young lady with a pretty face, innocent blue eyes and a gold tooth is Vera de Maine-Kestrel and she wants police protection, because she fears for her life. On the details she remains sketchy, alluding to her fiancé, certain monetary deals and "an incident in the past," but she knows when the attack upon her will be made, which will be at her home on the following day during "a big magical display" that's part of a dinner party – where she'll be playing the part of "vanishing lady."

 

Admittedly, the performance of this amazing vanishing act is easily the best part of the plot. A truly grand performance! What's even more amazing is the secret behind the illusion. One that might be hard to swallow, but it is a true original.

The illusion revolves around "a giant edition of normal birdcage," around six feet high, suspended two feet above the floor by a strong, brightly glittering chain and the silver-looking bars are about six inches apart. Everyone in the audience could see through it, under it and around it. No mirrors. No trapdoors. No switcheroo in the gloom of a half-darkened room. The Great Crafto works in bright lights, covered the cage with a cloth, and upon its removal Vera had appeared inside the cage, but the cover is not used for the disappearance part of the trick.

Vera spoke a few words to the audience and then proceeded to gradually fade away into nothingness! She "smeared mysteriously" and "vanished in dim vapours," but when the moment came to reappear the cage remained empty. So, of course, this causes some commotion, because she couldn't really have vanished, but the magician refuses to divulge the secret of his illusion to the police. And this is were the first flaw of the plot becomes apparent.

When she requested police protection, Vera told Whittaker that Crafto had to tell her how the trick worked, in order to make it effective, but she blabbed about it and told several people – including her own fiancé, Sidney Laycock. He's even a potential suspect, but it never occurred to the police to ask him how the trick was pulled off. Or track down any of Vera's friend who might have been told about the trick. Not even when the magician dies under suspicious circumstances.

That brings us to the second impossibility of the book: Douglas Ward, a.k.a. The Great Crafto, lived at a boarding house that caters to stage performers and his landlady was awakened one early morning by a "devil of a row" coming from his room. He was shouting for help and sounded as if he was tumbling around on the floor. However, the room was entirely locked from the inside and they had to break down the door. What they found was a dead magician and a peculiar smell lingered in the room. It appeared as he had been gassed, but what kind of gas and how it could have been introduced into the room is a complete mystery.

The locked room murder of Crafto is less technically complicated and easier to understand than the vanishing trick, but part of the method cozied up the science-fiction genre. However, the idea behind the trick is definitely possible and Fearn played around with a more elegant and workable idea in Black Maria, M.A. (1944). One of his characters used this trick in a stage-play to polish off a crystal gazer and version sounded a lot more plausible.

I should also point out that there are two Jonathan Creek episodes with impossibilities that are very similar in nature to the locked room situations from The Silvered Cage. There's a special that basically uses the same method employed here to kill the magician, but what's more interesting is that there's an episode that helped me get an idea how the vanishing of Vera was accomplished. The disappearance trick from the Creek episode was quite different, but that episode and this book basically used the same tools to create the effect that someone, or something, had vanished into thin air. I thought it was very interesting how both locked room situations were very similar to two different Creek episodes.

Well, that's about all that can be said about the impossible crimes from The Silvered Cage. So what about the plot as whole? It's not exactly a classic of its kind and the scheme behind the crimes felt a bit uninspired, which also tended to be sloppy where the details were concerned. For example, there's an unsolved murder case hovering in the background and it is mentioned that the victim was shot, but later it was said the victim had struck his head on the firestand – making it all of a sudden an accidental death!

I think this goes to show how much of a difference in quality there's between Fearn's Miss Maria Black series and his other detective stories. Fearn really appears to have put a great deal of time, effort and love in writing the former, while the latter were obviously written with less care and attention. Something I also noticed in The Crimson Rambler (1948), which was not bad and also showed some ingenuity, but does not come anywhere near any of the Maria Black novels. Fearn really wanted to write proper detective novels when using her as the protagonist. I wonder if there was a reason why he cared so much about that series.

Anyhow, The Silvered Cage has some points of interest as a locked room novel, but, as a detective story, comes up short and remains undistinguished. So I can only really recommend it to readers who are either interested in locked room stories or simply fans of Fearn's writing.

Well, I rambled on long enough. So let me close this blog-post by pointing your attention to my previous review of Capwell Wyckoff's The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol (1929) and I'll probably be back with something really old.

There's a Reason for Everything

"People kill other people... for all sorts of reasons that don't seem to make sense to anyone else."

- Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce (Francis Duncan's In at the Death, 1952)

Over the past three months, I've been working my way through a small stack of detective novels by Francis Duncan, which were reprinted last year by Vintage and counts now five of (reportedly) nine titles from the author's series about a retired tobacconist, Mordecai Tremaine – who's also an amateur criminologist and professional murder-magnet.

Regardless of his attraction to violent crimes, Tremaine is a hopeless romanticist and a "sworn friend of lovers." A sentimental soul whose "chief delights" is reading the bright, "refreshingly idealistic fiction"  published in Romantic Stories and this colors his role as detective. So you can basically sum him up as a literary relative of Agatha Christie's Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite (who are also described as friends of lovers). Simply a delightful and sympathetic character, but one who, somehow, got tossed on the trash heap of obscurity and waned there until 2015 – when the previously mentioned published reissued Murder for Christmas (1949). A success that lead them to reissue four additional titles in 2016.

I mentioned in my previous reviews how Duncan evidently knew how to put a plot together, but he also had an eye for the backdrop of his stories and this is illustrated in the bright, eye-catching covers of the new editions. Three of the four recent reprints were all set near the sea: an isolated house on the cliffs (So Pretty a Problem, 1950), a seaport town (In at the Death, 1952) and a sun-soaked island (Behold a Fair Woman, 1954), but one of the earliest books in the series has a far more traditional setting – a quintessential village in the English countryside.

Murder Has a Motive (1947) reminded me of Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952) with a slight touch of the gloomy lunacy of Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931).

The backdrop of the book is a small, snug and seemingly idyllic village, named Dalmering, but there's a dark, disturbing undercurrent beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday village life. A "shadow of evil lay heavily over the loveliness of Dalmering." The idea and aesthetics of the treacherous tranquility of village life has been run into the ground on the Midsomer Murders, but when Duncan tackled the subject it was still fresh enough. And he even had a somewhat original take on it.

Dalmering's population is divided into two camps: one of them consist of the permanent, long-time residents ("the older Dalmering, the true Dalmering") who've lived there for many generations, while the second camp, known as the "Colony," are only temporary residents of the place from London – who had discovered "its unspoilt beauty." Tremaine travels down to Dalmering to spend a holiday with two old friends, Paul and Jean Russell, who run a busy country practice and invest a great deal in the social life of the village, but tragedy has struck the place on the eve of his arrival. A member of their community has become the victim of a "dark, brutal murder."

Lydia Dare moved around in the circle of the Londoners and was engaged to Gerald Farrant, but, on the evening of her death, she had dinner with Martin Vaughan. A self-made man with archaeology as his hobby and it was known he was in love with Dare, which gave one of the strongest motives when she was murdered on her way back to home. She was found stabbed to death in the early hours of the morning on a well-worn pathway through a small copse.

As said before, Tremaine sympathies were "on the side of romance" and the fact that the victim was about to be married "weighed with him the most." To strike at the young and happy was "to arouse him to wrath" and awakened "the smouldering, deep-seated chivalry of the Galahad who dwelt within him," but the case is far more complicated than it first seems. For one thing, his friends and hosts received a small, but useful, legacy as a result of Dare's death. Giving them a ghost of a motive. However, there are also the intertwined, often hidden relationships and potential motives of the other villagers, which all seem to be connected to the local amateur dramatics society. They're rehearsing for an interesting stage play in three acts, Murder Has a Motive by Alexis Kent.

Well, from here on out, it becomes difficult to discuss the plot in close detail, because Murder Has a Motive is Duncan's most descriptive and character-driven mystery novels to date, which also has some very nebulous clueing. There are some physical clues, such as a pair of "roomy, wooden-soled Somerset clogs," but the solution is reasoned from what certain characters knew, did or must have done. So, technically, the reader has a shot at solving the crimes, however, this is not an easy task since the murderer is batshit crazy, which makes the book-title a bit ironic.

All of that being said, the book still worked as a detective story, albeit more along the lines of Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949), which also gave a glimmer of the real-life effects a homicidal maniac can have on a community.

The killer from Duncan's tale committed three murders (last one was particular gruesome) and this placed the village in "the blinding glare of frightening publicity," which begins to worry the police after the second and third murder – because the press-hounds will be showering the investigators with scorn, accusations and bitter criticism. You also get a taste of the vivid newspaper prose from some of Fleet Street's most colorful writers after the second body is found. So, in that regard, the story really gave you the feeling that a large, outside world had cast its eyes on this small, secluded place when the murders started to happen.

I also want to point out the opening of the third chapter, in which Tremaine and Inspector Boyce bump into each other near the scene of the crime. Boyce immediately hurls an accusation at his old friend that, "whenever anyone gets killed," he discovers the body or is nearby. And how he should be called "the murder magnet." Tremaine defends himself by pointing out that the murder was all over when he arrived, but it's interesting to see how this series used that exact term. Other GAD-period writers have pointed out how their characters attracted murders wherever they went, but Duncan actually used the term "murder magnet." It's something worth pointing out.

Well, I wish this review had a bit more substance to it, but, suffice to say, Murder Has a Motive is an unconventional village mystery and a fairly solid entry in a wonderful series of detective novels. A genuine rediscovery worthy of our current Renaissance Era. I sincerely hope Vintage decides to complete this series by reissuing the remaining titles. Here's hoping!

Opening Night

"I've never before seen anything on the stage that impressed me so deeply."

- Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn (Ngaio Marsh's Enter a Murderer, 1935)

Alan Melville was a consummate entertainer with a varied and wide-ranging résumé: playwright, lyricist, actor, producer and raconteur, but gained name recognition as one of Britain's first television personalities, which he did as host of A to Z and as a panelist on a host of popular programs – such as The Brains Trust and What's My Line? Sadly, these accomplishments overshadowed his short-lived career as a mystery novelist.

During "a short burst of energy when he was in his twenties," Melville produced a number of light-hearted and humorous detective novels, but they were soon forgotten about and passed into literary oblivion. Fortunately, the British Library noticed them and reprinted two of them: Quick Curtain (1934) and Death of Anton (1936). I reviewed the latter several months ago and the very amusing, circus-set detective story recalled the works of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. I was also reminded of Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon's satirical A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) and the equally fun Casino for Sale (1938). 

So I ushered the other reprint on to the short-list of detective novels to be relieved from the Mount-to-be-Read and my previous read, Come to Paddington Fair (1997) by Derek Smith, provided me with an excuse to pick up Quick Curtain – as both are theatrical mysteries about the on-stage shooting of a thespian. But they both take a vastly different approach in storytelling and resolving what is, essentially, the same problem.

Quick Curtain opens, fittingly, with a playbill of Blue Music, a musical comedy operetta, which is billed as a Douglas B. Douglas production. Douglas is "a master of publicity," of the subtle variety, who had London rumoring about the show before it had even been written. There were even a number of women, members of the Brandon Baker Gallery Club, who had parked themselves, two days before the opening, outside the entrance of the Grosvenor Theatre. What they got as a reward for their dedication, besides stiff necks and sore backs, was being present for the unexpected swan song of their idol.

Brandon Baker's character, "Jack," is shot in Act Two by "Phillipo," played by Hilary Foster, but when the trigger is squeezed the lead actress, Miss Eve Turner ("Coletta"), responds in a way that reminds one of the attending critics of "the famous tragediennes" of the stage – not without reason. The weapon seems to have been loaded with a live round and the man who discharged the fatal shot immediately disappears from the stage, but is soon found in his dressing-room "hanging by the neck." It looks like an open-and-shut case.

There is, however, one person in attendance who sees the hand of an unknown murderer at work: Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard. He was in the audience with his son, Derek, who is a reporter on the Gazette and they immediately take charge of the case, which is done without much regard for proper police procedure, but they are a fun and memorable pair of characters – with a large depository of banter between them. I also have to add them to the short list of father-and-son detective teams mentioned in blog-post about Clifford Orr's The Dartmouth Murders (1929).

Inspector Wilson and Derek make an actual attempt at reconstructing and explaining the crime, but the comedic tone and some sparks of insanity prevail. However, these make for some fun scenes and sequences. I particularly loved the funeral scene! Several members of the Gallery Club obtained admission to the church and they "stormed the pews like a mass attack going over the top in the trenches," which had its objective the securing of a number of mementos and resulted in them ripping "the church bare of its lilies, carnations and lilac inside a couple of minutes." They even removed chunks from the prayer-books and hymnals strewn on the pews. I think the Brandon Baker Gallery Club is one of the earliest depictions in pop-culture of the creature known as the rabid fangirl.

Derek also contributes some fun to the case by following a potential lead to Crailes, a village in Buckinghamshire, which he does under an alias, "J. Hopkinson," but this will land him a spot of trouble after dispatching a chain of cryptically worded telegrams to his father – eventually arousing suspicion in the local postmistress, Miss Ethel Prune. After the body of a woman is found in Craile Woods, Derek is taken into custody when the local constable learns of the odd telegrams and alias.

So, as a comedic spoof of the detective story, the book is a roaring success, but, purely as a mystery, the plot got the short end of the stick.

Sure, the false solution by Inspector Wilson was not exactly a jaw-dropper, but perfectly acceptable, which even had a fairly clever, if simple, use for the stage in relation to the supposed direction of the shot. But then the letters were delivered. Letters that poked the detective story in the eye, punched it in the nose and buried a knee in its groin. Dorothy L. Sayers was correct when she said Melville blasted "the solemn structure of the detective novel sky-high" and this approach did not exactly do any miracles for the concept of fair-play either.

Quick Curtain is really a light-comedy that uses the detective story as a vehicle, but the book is still a very fun and amusing read. So, if you don't mind the author poking a finger between your ribs, the book comes very much recommended to even the staunchest purist. However, if you want to read something amusing with a more traditional plot-structure by Melville, I recommend you pick up Death of Anton.

Gun Play

"Murder isn’t like love, it doesn't happen at first sight."

- Jeff Troy (Kelley Roos' Made Up to Kill, 1940)

Several years ago, I reviewed Whistle Up the Devil (1954) by Derek "Howe-Dun-It" Smith, a beloved book collector and crime-fiction enthusiast, who wrote a handful of detective novels in the vein of John Dickson Carr – which were consigned to obscurity for over half a century. As obscure as the book may be, Whistle Up the Devil has always enjoyed a solid reputation among the connoisseurs of the impossible crime stories and could be obtained on the secondhand book market. But its sequel became one of the scarcest collectibles in the genre.

Smith failed to secure a publisher for his second Algy Lawrence mystery, Come to Paddington Fair (1997), but a Japanese collector, Mori Hideo (?), took the manuscript home and financed a limited print-run of less than one hundred copies – published by Murder by the Press in English. So you could, technically, get hold of a copy, but I assume the book was not widely read upon its initial publication. Still, I bet collectors had an easier time acquiring one of these limited editions than finding copies of Ayresome Johns' Pattern of Terror (1987) and A Spectre-Room of Fancy (1989). 

John Pugmire of Locked Room International rescued Smith from the dreaded fate of biblioblivion and published The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014), which consisted of three novels and one short story. As well as an introduction by one of the genre's most noted locked room experts, Robert Adey, who knew Smith personally. A year later, Pugmire published Whistle Up the Devil and Come to Paddington Fair separately. However, the third novel from the omnibus edition, Model for Murder (1952), was branded by reviewers as mediocre and was not reissued by itself. 

But all of Smith's impossible crime fiction is finally available and the twosome of Algy Lawrence mysteries are a feast for everyone who loves traditional detective stories. 

Come to Paddington Fair is dedicated to the memory of John Dickson Carr, "Lord of the Sorcerers," but the structure of the plot resembles the work of another Golden Ager, namely Ngaio Marsh, who was the undisputed Queen of the Theatrical Mystery and wrote a score of detective stories set in the spotlight of the stage – such as Enter a Murderer (1935), Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) and Off with His Head (1957). However, the book (IMHO) still qualifies as an impossible crime story, but Algy and Chief Inspector Castle do not realize, until right before the end, they were trying to solve "the mystery of yet another crime which couldn't possible have been committed." 

So we have an impossible crime novel posing as a Marsh-style theatrical mystery, but the opening of the book tore a page from the hardboiled playbook.

Chinese edition

Richard Mervan is a low-grade bank clerk and one who briefly became a hero when he fought off a street mugger, which left him with a blood-stained shirt and a sore neck. His assailant attempted to snatch his briefcase, belonging to the bank, but Mervan never felt his employers appreciated what he did and this planted the seed for an audacious crime – which ended with a stretch in prison for looting the bank's strong-room. And his capture and imprisonment was the result of a double-cross by his partner in crime and love interest, Miss Lesley Barre. This made Mervan very, very resentful and a bit murderous. 

Chief Inspector Steve Castle pays a visit to Mervan in his prison cell and offers him a final opportunity to come clean, because he likes "to tie up all the loose ends neatly." Castle knew he had an accomplice, who betrayed him and took the money, but Mervan refused to take a reduced sentence in exchange for the whole story and this worried the inspector. He knows the prisoner is a broken man with an obsession and that makes him very dangerous. However, Mervan remains stalwart in his silence and only the readers hears him muttering an oath that he'll find and kill Lesley.

Skip ahead several years and Castle received and Castle received, anonymously send, "tickets for the matinee at the Janus," which are for a mystery play, entitled The Final Trophy, but the theatre tickets came with "a curious message" printed on a piece of pasteboard: "COME TO PADDINGTON FAIR." So he consults Algy Lawrence, a bright young man with "lazy blue eyes," who gained a reputation as an amateur detective and they decide to attend the play. However, the play was given a slightly different ending by the hand of an unknown murderer and this person effectively gave them a front row seat to the on-stage murder of the lead actress, Lesley Christopher. 

During the third act, the character played by Lesley, "Marilyn," is shot by "Regan," played by Philip Trent, but this time a real bullet struck her in the chest and laughter is heard coming from one of the theatre boxes – as "the lights faded in a complete black-out." 

Luckily, Algy immediately sprang to action and helped apprehend Mervan. He was the one who laughed and found to be in possession of the proverbial smoking gun, but the case is not as easily solved as all that. The fatal bullet was not fired with Mervan's gun and this forces the detectives to poke around behind the stage-set, because it seems that someone had tempered with the stage revolver. Someone, "an unknown hand," had taken out the blank cartridges and had "filled it with six shiny messengers of death." 

A Packed House!

So one of the main questions is who was in a position to switch the blanks for live rounds, but they also have to wade through the undercurrents and cut a pathway through the dense web of cross-relationships dominating the world behind the stage – which keeps them both occupied for the better part of the book. Once they removed all of the extraneous matter, they're confronted witness who turns this fairly strange shooting into "a dark miracle." It was an impossible crime all along! Several pages later, the reader is confronted with an Ellery Queen-style "Challenge to the Reader," which is a request to the reader to "PAUSE FOR REFLECTION" and "play the great game of WHODUNIT? and HOW?"

The final twist, that turned this into an impossible murder, is very clever and tricky, which showed Smith's talent for crafting multi-layered plots, but I was able to (roughly) work out how the shooting was pulled off – because the shooting resembled an impossibility from one of Carr's stage-plays from the early 1940s (c.f. 13 to the Gallows, 2008). Whereas Carr's trick is simple and elegant, Smith opted for pure intricacy and got a lot of mileage out of it. 

Granted, the impossible angle should probably have been introduced earlier on in the story, but regardless, the book is an excellent specimen of the theatrical mystery and the impossibility should be seen as the cherry on top. Only thing that can be really said against Come to Paddington Fair is that it doesn't bat in the same league as its predecessor, Whistle Up the Devil, but both novels make you mourn the fact that Smith was never allowed to expand the series pass those two superb mystery novels. 

Finally, if you, like me, enjoyed Come to Paddington Fair, you might find the following theatrical mysteries equally appealing, because they also happen to feature a locked room problem:  Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948), Ngaio Marsh's Off with His Head, Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Deadline (1984), The Gold Curse (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989).
 

By the way, the title of this blog-post is a reference to another theatrical mystery. Can you guess which novel I'm referencing? 

So far this blog-post and I'll try to pick a non-impossible crime story for the next one.

Doom's Caravan

"Eeee... what a luvly night for a murder."

 - Archie (Leo Bruce's Case with Four Clowns, 1939)

Alan Melville was a jack-of-all-trades in the world of entertainment and occupied many different roles around the stage, ranging from being a playwright and musical lyricist to acting and producing gigs, but really gained name recognition as one of Britain's first television personalities – appearing on programs like What's My Line? and hosting a satiric revue series called Alan Melville's A to Z. It was a rich, varied career, but one of the most interesting chapters from his rise to fame seemed, until recently, to have been largely forgotten.

When Melville was still a young man in his twenties, he wrote a handful of mystery novels reminiscent of the works of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. However, they rapidly vanished from the public conscience and eventually became so obscure that even the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, a veritable Who's Who of Who the Hell Are They, has no mention of Melville or any of his detective stories, which goes to show just how obscure he has gotten as a mystery writer – considering the site has pages for such unknowns as Pierre Audemars, Hector Hawton and Inez Oellrichs. One of the oldest mentions of his work I could find was a review from 2009 of Quick Curtain (1934), but the dust soon settled down and slowly began to accumulate again. 

That is until last year, when the Poisoned Pen Press, under the banner of the British Library Crime Classics, reissued two of Melville's six mystery novels: the aforementioned Quick Curtain and Death of Anton (1936). Both of them were well received and highly praised by some of my fellow connoisseurs in murder. So I had to sample one of those two for myself.

Death of Anton lifts one of the tent-flaps to give the reader a glimpse of what lies beyond the sandy rink of the circus, which turns out to be an ill-tempered tiger, jealousy and about half a dozen potential motives for bloody murder – all of them belonging to a troupe of potential, colorful and promising would-be murderers.

The story begins with an introduction of the circus artist who are in the employ of Joseph Carey's World-Famous Circus and Menagerie, which is owned and ran by the man whose name is plastered across the circus' banner, Mr. Joseph Carey. As the proprietor, Carey always puts his employees up in hotels or boarding-houses, but he's always to be found "on the scene of the battle," in a green-and-white caravan, which is where night-time visitors are seen whistling to a closed front door. According to the rumor-mill, he also received some (married) women and one of his nightly rendezvous got him in a knife-fight with an Italian high-wire walker. So that in itself would have been enough material for a single detective story, but there are more characters trampling around the circus tents.

Loretta and Lorimer were high-flying trapeze artists and had shown "a complete disregard for the laws of gravity" since their childhood, but, lately, Lorimer has been hearing rumors about Loretta and Carey. One of the places where they decide to have a marital quarrel is while flying through the air in the Big Top and they laughed "at the idea of using a net in their act." Ernest Mayhew is billed on the posters as "Dodo," King of Clowns, but without a face full of greasepaint he impresses people as a meddlesome inspector of education who lugs around an impressive looking copy of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) – which he does in order to create the impression of being an intelligent man who can afford to pay thirty shillings for a book. Lars Peterson is fond of a drink or two and is the personal trainer of Horace, "The World's Most Intelligent Performing Sea-Lion," and Miller used to be part of the circus’ main act, but is now reduced to being one of the ringside assistants and drinking. 

The star of the main act is Herr Ludwig Kranz, billed as "Anton," who performs an exciting act with his seven Bengal tigers, but one of them, Peter, engages Anton in a battle of willpower for dominance. So nobody is surprised when Anton's body is found on the floor of the cage, "red with blood," but a closer examination of the body reveals three bullet holes – proving he was not mauled to death by the tigers.  

Luckily, a policeman from Scotland Yard, Detective-Inspector Minto, who had been in town on a family-related matter: his sister, Claire, has a penchant for getting herself in trouble and had once hopped on a train to Milan, after Britons became very unpopular, to opine "in a loud voice that Signor Mussolini was an ass," but this time she had outdone herself. She had gotten herself engaged to a dull, colorless salesman of vacuum cleaners.

They also have a brother, a Catholic priest, to whom the murderer confesses his crime, but he's bound to secrecy. However, it suggests to Minto that the murderer must have been a Catholic, which is a plot strand that should have been expanded upon. It's mainly used to discredit a false solution, confine Minto's attention to a small circle of suspects and confirming his suspicion – by tricking his poor brother into revealing more than he wished to. So this clue serves primarily as a plot-mover. It kept the story going when a perfectly good and acceptable solution had presented itself to the characters, which could have easily taken the wind out of the sails of the story and plot.

It was put to use in service of the story, but I feel a clever clue could have been carved out of this fact.

Anyhow, the introduction of all of these characters, life in a traveling circus and Minto's investigation is told with zest and humor, which is filled with funny exchanges and winking at the detective story. Something that's demonstrated when Minto compiles a list of Questions and Answers to order his thoughts or when he (somewhat illegally) poses as a Housing Inspector to gain access to a building. Or when he removes (i.e. steals) a piece of evidence from a pawnshop. It makes for a fun, fast and mostly light-hearted story in the spirit of the comedy-of-manners and tongue-in-cheek style of mysteries, such as Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon's delightful A Bullet in the Balled (1937), but there's a rather dark, jarring side-note to the last quarter of the book.

Minto decided to set a trap for the murderer and he used one of the innocent characters as human bait, but this has horrible consequences and the fate this person suffered is arguably worse than getting shot, stabbed or bludgeoned by a killer desperately trying to get rid of some loose ends – which made Minto "most grateful for the five minutes' grace" the unfolding tragedy had given him. Well, he was sorry, "very sorry indeed," and there's a bit of a cop-out in the final chapter ("He'll be all right"), but the whole incident made Minto a slightly less sympathetic and fun character.

Well, that being said, I very much enjoyed the overall book. It was a fun, quirky story with an interesting backdrop for the plot and made good use of the tigers. I was able to identify the murderer fairly early on in the game, but the second plot-thread niftily tied every character and plot-points together – which resulted in a mass arrest, for one thing or another, which fitted the overall plot of the story. And that made for a good ending. Still, I would not give this one the full five stars that some have given it, but completely agree Death of Anton is a worthy addition to the British Library and one that's definitely recommended. Particularly if your one of those readers who's still mourning about the fact that you have run through all of the Edmund Crispin and Leo Bruce mysteries on your TBR-pile.

I do hope this review has done some justice to this book, because time forced me to bang out this review in a very short time. So there's my defense for the mistakes/typos that usually find their way into my blog-posts. Finally, I have a legitimate excuse for them!

Child's Play

"Why, you little blockhead, I'll whittle you down to a coat hanger..."

- W.C. Fields

Thirteen years ago, Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House (2003) was published and introduced what, arguably, are the first Great Detective of the 21st century: two nonagenarian detectives, named Arthur Bryant and John May, who have been leading a contingent of special investigators since the 1940s – known as the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

Peculiar Crimes Unit was founded "soon after the outbreak of the Second World War" as "part of the government initiative to ease the burden on London’s overstretched Metropolitan Police Force."

Staff members have always comprised of outsiders and radical freethinkers who were, initially, tasked with handling investigations "deemed uniquely sensitive" and "a high risk to public morale." But over the decades, not everyone understood that peculiar was originally meant in the sense of particular. 

Consequently, the unit found themselves in charge of a large number of extraordinary, bizarre and seemingly impossible crimes – which even included several locked room murders. So it's not surprising the series was part of the first wave of contemporary mysteries that slowly convinced me that, perhaps, not everything written after the Golden Age was complete tripe.

I discovered the Peculiar Crimes Unit series in 2007 and was an unapologetic, fundamental classicist in those days, but, despite my rabid hatred for modern, character-orientated and socially concerned crime novels, I plunged headfirst into Full Dark House, The Water Room (2004), Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005) and Ten Second Staircase (2006). They challenged my preconceived notion of the genre and genuinely loved the journey, but, sadly, my interest began to wane after White Corridor (2007). The books morphed from wildly imaginative, neo-Victorian crime novels into regular police procedurals with some weird elements.

After reading Off the Rails (2010), I decided to take a break from the series, which continued until this very blog-post, but only a year after dropping out I began to read how The Memory of Blood (2011) had reinvigorated the series by cutting back on the social commentary and refocused on the plot – going back to what the series originally was. And it only took me about five years to verify this for myself.

The Memory of Blood is the ninth entry in the series and, just like the first book, has a theatrical setting. So it really is a rebirth, of sorts, for the PCU.

Robert "Julius" Kramer is a self-made man who became a millionaire before his twenty-fifth birthday, which he celebrated by "informing his loyal girlfriend that he was now rich" and "dumping her." Kramer is not a pleasant person, but that’s to be expected from someone whose role model is Mr. Punch. It allows him to be as "pugnacious, amoral, murderously strong-willed" as he wants in order to "rise above mere morality" and he bought the New Strand Theatre to indulge in his theatrical hobby. He even slapped his own theater company together.

The first of his lurid, trashy and sensational plays, The Two Murderers, is about to open and to celebrate the occasion Kramer is hosting a party at his London penthouse, but there's a bad and tense atmosphere – amplified by the gloomy weather outside. You would expect this to be the moment a steak knife is plunged in Kramer's back, but the murderer among them has struck somewhere else in the house.

Kramer's second, much younger wife, Judith, finds the door to the upstairs room of their infant son, Noah, locked from the inside and the door has to be broken down. What they found is unsettling: a window that was supposed to be locked was wide open and an antique, grotesque-looking puppet of Mr. Punch was lying in the middle of the room. The small body of Noah was found beneath the window and a post-mortem examination reveals he was violently shaken, strangled and flung out of the window, but what's really remarkable is that Mr. Punch's hands "exactly fit the bruises on Noah Kramer's neck" – suggesting that the Victorian-era puppet had come to life to fulfill "his mythical destiny to become a murderer." All of that happened inside a locked nursery with an open window affording no escape to a murderer.

It's a dark, grisly and gruesome murder, but finding the person who's responsible turns out to be very similar to "playing some elaborate version of Cluedo" and they’ve some work to do before they can identify their "Colonel Mustard in the sodding library with the lead pipe."

There's no shortage of potential suspects: there's the leading man, Marcus Sigler, who has been having an affair with Judith and sneaked out of the party with the new assistant stage manager, Gail Strong, which gave Robert Kramer a strong motive as well. Ray Pryce is the "archetypical angry playwright" and part of the anger comes from the greediness of the producer, Gregory Baine, who has stopped salaries and put everyone on a profit-share. Something that can be manipulated by fiddling with the books and therefore Kramer and Baine would've to payout less to the cast and crew. One of them is a brilliant set-designer, Ella Maltby, who's responsible for bringing a wax dummy to life during the first act of the play and that's an interesting talent when you're dealing with an apparent homicidal puppet, but these are only a handful of people who were present at the party and could've fulfilled the role of killer – since everyone in close proximity to Kramer seems to have had a reason to harm or hurt him.

The investigation takes place while the PCU is settling into their new office building, which was once the dwelling of the infamous Aleister Crowley, but their situation seems to get gradually a bit better. Bryant found a new member to the team hidden in the attic: a dusty, cobweb-covered automaton of a fortune-teller that spits out cards with vague, cautiously worded predictions on them. Of course, Bryant has a pocketful of old coins to feed to automaton. Even Raymond Land, who has been the temporary acting head of the PCU for many years, seems to finally come to peace with his fate of being stuck there.

However, there are some things that never change: the ever-subversive Oskar Kasavian is still attempting to get the PCU shutdown and a new, ongoing sub-plot appears to have been set-up in the background, which happens when the editor of Bryant's memoirs succumbs to bacteria poisoning and something rather important is missing – a disc containing information of a number of important cases from the unit's past. The Leicester Square Vampire, who killed John May's daughter, and the storyline about Mr. Fox from the previous two books, covered such previous plot-strands that ran through several books. I have no idea which direction this storyline will take, but, as of now, it seems interesting.

But all of that takes place in the background. The Memory of Blood is a very plot-oriented detective story, but one with sharp characterization and a great theatrical background that's steeped in puppet lore and London's unique history. That has always been a major asset to the PCU series: Fowler's deep-rooted love for London's history. I don't remember any of the other books to be as sound in plot as this one. The clueing is a bit clunky here and there, they were too obvious or given too late, but they were present and Fowler provided answers as to why (and how) the handprints of a puppet were on the throat of a dead baby. Or how the murderer was able to improvise a locked room trick on the spot. It's a simple method that's derived from an old trick, but I rather liked it when place in the overall plot of the book.

So, all in all, to cut this overlong, drawling review short, I would mark The Memory of Blood as my favorite entry in the PCU series and the only downside is that I waited so long to return to Arthur Bryant and John May.