The Triple Bite (1931) by Brian Flynn

Last year, the indispensable Dean Street Press reissued ten detective novels of one of the unsung, long-forgotten mystery writers of the past, Brian Flynn, who was unearthed by the Puzzle Doctor, Steve Barge, when he found a copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) among his Christmas presents in 2016 – he has been beating Flynn's drum ever since. Fast-forward two years, Flynn got his long overdue reprints and these new editions came with introductions written by the newly-minted crime fiction historian, Steve Barge.

The Triple Bite (1931) is the tenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, "out of all of the first ten Brian Flynn novel," it was by far the rarest of the lot. A novel which had never before been reprinted and only a single copy was located outside of the British Library! So this might be the rarest title DSP has reprinted to date.

The introduction aptly describes The Triple Bite as a "love-letter to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" with a mysterious cipher, hidden treasure and a villain who could have been member of The Red-Headed League.

Young Cecilia Cameron is the story's narrator and she relates the unbelievable events that took place in "a big, ten-roomed bungalow" in Dallow Corner, Sussex, which Colonel Ian Cameron was prompted to buy by a friend of his son, Nigel Strachan – who had a very peculiar reason for doing so. Strachan is a barrister and six months ago, he was called upon to defend "a born thief," Sam Trout, who got a reduction in sentence. Something the old career criminal gratefully remembered when he was dying of pneumonia. Trout wrote a letter to Strachan telling him he had been one of only two people who ever lifted a finger to help him and gives them "an equal chance of a fortune."

An opportunity encoded in "a piece of doggerel" and the only part Strachan had been able to decipher is a location, Dallow Corner, which is why he brought the bungalow to Colonel Cameron's attention. But there are pirates on the horizon!

Colonel Cameron and Cecilia caught whispered fragments of a conversation in a restaurant mentioning Dallow Corner and salmon-fishing, but there's not a stretch of water big enough for such a thing as salmon-fishing within ten miles of Dallow Corner. Someone else is looking for Sam Trout's fortune is confirmed when they're visited by a red-headed giant of a man, "Flame" Lampard, who introduced himself as "the bearer of a warning" and advises Colonel Cameron to immediately leave Dallow Corner. Otherwise, it may be too late. What treads on the heels of this ominous visit is best described as a siege on the bungalow and echoes the plot of Flynn's tremendously enjoyable Invisible Death (1929).

Shots are fired at the bungalow in the middle of the night. The housekeeper is tied to a chair and gagged, while the intruders excavated the garden, which culminated in the apparently death by heart failure of Colonel Cameron – whose body was found lying against the hedge between the bungalow and their neighbor's house. Cecilia is convinced her uncle had been murdered and "send for Anthony Bathurst first thing in the morning." Bathurst not only agrees with her opinion Colonel Cameron had been murdered, but found the page that had been torn from his notebook curled against the hedge. A piece of paper with the dying man's "last message to the world" scrawled on it, "for God's sake, mind the red thing that flies." More than once, this last message is referred to as "the dying message of Colonel Cameron."

Brian Flynn

The dying message is a trope closely associated with Ellery Queen, but this association began with two novels post-dating The Triple Bite, namely The Tragedy of X (1932) and The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), which makes Flynn's novel one of the earliest examples of the dying message story. There are, however, a number of short stories and novels predating The Triple Bite, but I believe Flynn was the first to use the phrase "dying message." Interestingly, Flynn was perhaps the first to use another trope inextricably linked to another American writer, S.S. van Dine, who introduced to concept of a collector's private museum in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). Something that became somewhat of a trope with Van Dine and his followers, such as Clyde B. Clason (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1938), but Flynn was there first with The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928). Flynn was a little ahead of the curve when it came to the Golden Age mindset!

A second, typical American aspect of The Triple Bite are the brief, but unmistakable, "Had-I-But-Known" moments in Cecilia's narrative. A very specific brand of suspenseful mysteries almost exclusively written by American female novelists such as Mary Robert Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

You can find the clearest example of HIBK in the final lines of the opening chapter when Cecilia writer, "had I known, however, what lay in store for us," from "the coming of "Flame" Lampard" to "the night of horror in the darkened room" when the last scene was enacted, she would not have responded so flippantly to salmon-fishing. So not style you expect to find among the works of a male, British mystery writer who debuted in the 1920s.

Anyway, Colonel Cameron's dying message is one of the practically unusable clues to the fanciful method employed to dispose of two men in the story, which also includes "the puffy pink marks" on the bodies, a pink smear of blood and "a ghastly whirring kind of noise" – like "something was zipping through the air." I gathered from these clues and the many allusions to fishing that the murderer was fooling around with a rod and a hook smeared with some kind of exotic poison, but the solution was something else altogether! John Norris described this utterly bizarre method as something "right out of the weird menace pulps." I agree!

Fascinatingly, the method was based on an obscure line from a Sherlock Holmes story, which helped Bathurst tumble to the solution, but he refers to Holmes and Dr. Watson as actual people. And not as fictional characters like he did in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Flynn was such a massive fanboy!

The who-and why were much easier spotted and the coded message, or parts of it, can be deciphered by the reader, but everything is draped in the style of the 19th century detective story and pulp-thrillers. Some bits of the plot might be hard to swallow for the Golden Age purists, but The Triple Bite stands as a warm homage to Conan Doyle and is as enjoyable as the previously mentioned Invisible Death. Just pure, pulpy fun! I think pulp readers and Sherlockians will get the most out of this classic rendition of their favorite reading material.

Well, this leaves me with only two more of Flynn's novels, The Five Red Fingers (1929) and The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930). So, hopefully, we don't have to wait too long for DSP's second serving of Anthony Bathurst cases.

Seven Dead (1939) by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Last year, Martin Edward reported on his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name, that there were some exciting reprints forthcoming in the Crime Classics imprint of the British Library in 2020, which will include a pair of once obscure, long out-of-print locked room mysteries – namely John Bude's Death Knows No Calendar (1942) and Peter Shaffer's The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). So, in anticipation of these impending reissues, I picked a British Library title from the highlands of my to-be-read pile.

I've read less than a handful of J. Jefferson Farjeon's novels, but the superbly realized child narrator from Holiday Express (1935) and the gentle, snowy magic of Mystery in White (1937) indicated he was a less than conventional mystery novelist. Even the more traditionally presentable The Third Victim (1941) ended on an unconventional note with a solution hearkening back to the days of 19th century sensationalist fiction. And the only truly conservative aspect of Seven Dead (1939) is its continuation of that tradition.

Seven Dead has a strong, memorable opening with a hungry thief, named Ted Lyte, who's nervously graduating from "petty pilfering and pickpocketing" to housebreaking.

Lyte comes across a lonely place, Haven House, with an open gate, shuttered windows and half-dressed in dilapidated vines. So he grabs his courage together and finds a way into the house, where he helps himself to the silverware and food in the pantry, but, when he entered the shuttered room, he vacated the premise "as if he had been fired out of it from a cannon" – only to be apprehended outside. But the shocked man is unable to utter a word. When the police decides to inspect the burgled house, they make a horrifying discovery.

The shuttered drawing-room resembled a Chamber of Horrors with seven bodies strewn across the room, six men and one woman, who are "emaciated, filthily clothed" and "nothing on any of them to identify any one of them." As if they had gone through a Hellish ordeal. The shutters weren't merely bolted, they were nailed shut. A bullet hole disfigured a picture of a young girl hanging in the dining room and on the mantelpiece stands a slender silver vase with "an old cricket ball," green-yellow with age, on top. Most tantalizing clue is a crumpled piece of paper bearing the message "with apologies from the Suicide Club" and a cryptically penciled note scribbled on the other side of the paper.

One hell of a way to start a hard-to-define crime story! What follows is a two-pronged investigation by the protagonists, Detective Inspector Kendall and Tom Hazeldean.

Tom Hazeldean is a freelance reporter and yachtsman, who helped to apprehend Lyte, but his "romantic disposition" makes him want to meet the girl in the picture, Dora Fenner, who's the niece of the owner of Haven House, John Fenner – who has taken Dora to Boulogne. Hazeldean sets sail to France to find Dora and finds himself in the middle, what some have called, a romantic thriller with suspicious servants and silk merchant who seems to follow him around. Back in England, Detective Inspector Kendall conducts an investigation more in line with Freeman Wills Crofts as he reconstructs how, and why, the picture was fired upon, tracking down tire tracks and scrutinizing footprints. This is the only piece of genuine detective work in the story.

Just like Mystery in White, I think Seven Dead is too gentle to be a thriller (in spite of the body-count) and too light on detection to be a proper detective story, which you can only solve, if you happen to be a clairvoyant. And to a purist, like myself, that's an unpardonable sin. And then came that sublime ending! A conclusion that more than made up for any shortcomings the story has as either a detective or thriller story. If there's anything to complain about, it's that story has been told the wrong way round.

Seven Dead should have started out with that disastrous tragedy and expending those fascinating diary entries to fill the middle portion of the story, because who wouldn't want to read a detailed account of people battling an army of penguins? The last quarter should have told of the return to England, culminating in wholesale murder, ending with the discovery of the bodies and perhaps a newspaper clipping – reporting on the gruesome, inexplicable crime discovered at Haven House. I think this would have turned the story in a timeless classic and a lovely inversion of a famous detective novel published around the same time. Alas, the road not taken...

Farjeon was not your average, Golden Age mystery novelist, but a writer who spun fanciful yarns of wonder and imagination, which just so happen to take the shape and form of the detective and thriller story. Seven Dead is a fine example of how impossible it's to pigeon-hole Farjeon and his work. So he comes highly recommended to mystery readers who are looking for something a little different in their vintage crime fiction.

And if anyone from the British Library happens to stumble across this review, you should consider reprinting the splendid and highly original Holiday Express. If there's one obscure, long out-of-print novel by Farjeon deserving to be reprinted it's Holiday Express.

A Devil on the Court: Case Closed, vol. 71 by Gosho Aoyama

The 71st volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published in Japan as Detective Conan, is an unusual entry in the series as the only two stories in it, a short and a long one, focus entirely on breaking codes and finding hidden messages – only hint at murder is tucked away in the grim back-story of one of the characters. So, if memory serves me correctly, this is one of only two volumes without a single murder case.

This volume opens with a short, so-called slice-of-life mysteries and takes place in the audio/visual storage room of Teitan Elementary.

Ms. Kobayashi recruits Conan and the Junior Detective League to help her find a videotape in the A.V. storage room, crammed with thousands of tapes with faded or hard-to-read labels, but they also find a former student of the school rummaging around in there. Detective Chiba, of the Metropolitan Police, was a member of the A.V. club and had a crush on a girl who was about to move away. So he wrote her a love letter. She wrote cryptically wrote back that she left her answer in the A.V. storage room and hoped it leave on a mark on him, but Chiba "searched the room from top to bottom." And he couldn't find anything. Now a class reunion is just around the corner and Chiba is determined to find that 13-year-old reply.

A charming story, as most these slice-of-life stories tend to be, with Aoyama's favorite trope (long-lost) childhood friends with a romantic interest. My only problem is that the hidden message seems a little bit too clever to have been concocted by such a young child. And on such a short notice.

The second story covers the remainder of the volume, nine of the eleven chapters, which begins with a hint of the Had-I-But-Known School. A story that "began with a strawberry" and Conan "never imagined that this would set off an adventure" – both "sweet and sour." A lucky incident with a strawberry and cat gave Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore to visit England during a school holiday. Conan is a huge Sherlock Holmes fanboy and he can't wait to visit all the places from Conan Doyle's stories. There are, however, some obstacles to overcome. Such as the pesky problem of his double identity. Just read the series and you'll understand.

Conan eventually makes it to London to embark on his "Sherlock Holmes pilgrimage," something only mystery fans will understand, but he finds several hurdles on his path.

On the doorstep of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, on 221B Baker Street, Conan meets an eight-year-old boy, Apollo Glass, who's the kid brother of tennis-star and "the top-ranked Queen of the Grass Court," Minerva Glass. Earlier that day, Apollo was at the tennis court when he was approached by a man telling him that he'll get "a greater thrill" than he would expect. Someone, somewhere in London, will be murdered in front of him and to tell Scotland Yard – if it doesn't make any sense to "leave it to Holmes." So this mysterious event plunges Conan in hunt around London for Holmesian-themed clues and codes. This part of the story almost reads like a travelogue with the characters hunting around all the London landmarks for clues.

As to be expected, not everything goes smoothly and Conan forgets himself for a moment and makes a mistake. One of several mistakes in this volume. In the first story, he talks as if he was a long-time student at Teitan Elementary, but officially, he has been there for only a year or two. At the start of this story, Conan starts speaking fluently English in front of Rachel and Richard Moore. Conan's third mistake convinces Rachel that Jimmy Kudo is London and has purposely avoiding here.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again, the relationship story-line between Jimmy/Conan and Rachel has become stagnant and a weakness at this point in the series.

I concede that it made absolute sense keeping Jimmy's predicament from Rachel when the series started, but, in the series, nearly two years have passed since the first volume and continuing to keep the secret is now only used as a story-telling device – in order to create these needlessly complicated situations. Logically, Rachel should have been told by now as she would have been valuable alley/cover for his Conan identity. Seriously, I begin to suspect that the final volume will reveal that all these stories were told by Jimmy and Rachel on the coach of an incredulous, harassed-looking relationship counselor. Mark my words!

The penultimate chapter of this story, which will be concluded in the next volume, takes place on the court and the tennis match is one that could only be played in an anime or manga series (e.g. The Prince of Tennis). And even for this series, or anime/manga in general, the code cracking in this part of the story stretched credulity a little too far.

Still this was a fun, if somewhat weird, story and look forward to the last chapter, but don't think it will stand as a classic story-arc in the series. However, I do think this volume, as a whole, stands as a notable example of the code cracking detective story and a Holmesian homage to boot!

Invisible Death (1929) by Brian Flynn

Invisible Death (1929) is the sixth novel about Brian Flynn's Holmesian gentleman detective, Anthony Bathurst, which has the distinct honor of being the most unconventional, but very memorable, entry in the series – written and structured like a turn-of-the-century shilling shocker. I think Flynn intended to write the book as an homage to Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Valley of Fear (1915), but ended up being more reminiscent of Agatha Christie's The Big Four (1927). Only Invisible Death has much more consistency than the patchwork plotting and story-telling of The Big Four.

Anthony Bathurst receives a letter from Constance Whittaker, a cousin of Diana Prendergast from The Murders Near Mapleton (1929), who pleads for him to come down to Shallowcliff Hall in Lacashire. The letter strongly hinted that "something very dark and very sinister" had placed her husband, Major Guy S. Whittaker, in "grave danger."

So, since he never lets a cry for help go unheeded, Bathurst sets out for Shallowcliff Hall, but, the moment he sets foot in Liverpool, he finds there are some nasty-looking shadows close on his tail.

There's a man with a withered arm. A fat, silky-voiced slug of a man. A huge man with a, dirty, brown-beard. Lastly, a man with mutilated lips who turns out to be the leader of the group. Bathurst later learns these men are what remains of a Russian society, The Silver Troika, who were decimated by Major Whittaker during a special in the Great War – returning to England with the documents, papers and minute-books of the society. Now they want it back! Since the favorite afternoon pastime of the Troika is the same as the evening occupation, namely murder, only "a trifle more so," Bathurst decides to enlist the help of an old acquaintance.

Peter Daventry is the young lawyer who brought Bathurst into The Case of the Twenty-Two Black (1928), but here, to fit occasion, Flynn transformed him into one of those posh, smart-aleck men of action. A handy person to have around when you find yourself in the middle of a chase thriller.

Bathurst and Daventry attempt to sneak their way up to Shallowcliff Hall unseen and have to go through several middle-men, give them passwords and cross Ugford Moor, locally known as The Knype, into the eerie, foggy Little Knype Wood. Needless to say, this is quite a departure from the more conventional novels that preceded it, like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928), but I thought it was very well done. And an excellent premise for what is about to happen!

Shallowcliff Hall eventually comes under siege by the Silver Troika, but, before they can get their murderous hands on Major Whittaker, he suddenly drops dead without anyone being nowhere near him and a post-mortem reveals he had been cleverly murdered – poisoned with a "tincture of aconite." Only question is how the poison could have been administrated without being seen. This poses a two-sides problem: on the one hand, Bathurst has to deal with the Silver Troika, while on the other hand he has to figure out who poisoned Major Whittaker. And how. A pretty and unusual puzzle comprising of such pieces as a stolen letter and the presence of an American entomologist, Horace Garland-Isherwood, who has the habit of surreptitiously sneaking around the garden.

The only plot-thread here that can really be discussed, without spoilers, is the impossible murder, but there's one part about the siege of the Silver Troika that needs to be highlighted.

There's a brief, uncharacteristic torture-scene in which the Troika try to extract from Major Whittaker's batman, Neville, with a so-called "Persuader." A tool that left Neville's right thumb "a piece of red, raw pulp." You practically never find this kind of gory violence in the work of writers associated with the traditional detective story and, if you ignore the rare third-degreeing at the hands of the police, the only other example I can think of is Rex Stout's The Golden Spiders (1953) – in which Archie uses some physical persuasion to make someone talk. Stout had the excuse of being an American. So this is just a very small example of how unusual a mystery this one really is.

However, you're not here to read about the professional proclivities of a bunch of homicidal villains who were plucked from the pages of a dime pulp. You're here for the impossible crime! Why else would you come here?

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who wrote the introductions for these new Dean Street Press editions said in his 2017 review that the poisoning method, as far as knew, "original for the time." This is kind of true. The trick has been used since 1929, one example can be found in a late '90s episode from the Dutch TV-series Baantjer, but there's a little-known short story from 1928 that used a similar poisoning-trick. Nonetheless, the book may be a first in another department.

Invisible Death intriguingly merged the impossible crime story with the dime thriller by setting it in a house under siege by criminals. An original premise more famously used in T.H. White's Darkness at Pemberley (1932) and Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935), but Flynn's Invisible Death was there first.

Admittedly, the book is, plot-wise, the lightest so far encountered, but what it lacked in complexity was made up by the sheer joy of the story-telling, the weirdness of the plot and the evil, pulp-style villains – something that would have sunk it in the hands of a lesser writer. This is how you book evil foreign heels! As usually, Flynn's undying love for Sherlock Holmes bleeds through the pages and it's starting to have its effect on me. I now want to reread The Sign of Four or The Hound of the Baskervilles before the year draws to a close.

So, in closing, I highly recommend Invisible Death to everyone who already has read some of Flynn's conventional detective novels, because he'll be giving you something completely different here that worked surprisingly well. Invisible Death is easily one of the most fun detective stories that I have read this year.

Terror Tower (1935) by Gerald Verner

Several months ago, I read two detective novels by the prolific "Gerald Verner," a penname of John R.S. Pringle, of which the Paul Halter-like homage to John Dickson Carr, Sorcerer's House (1956), encouraged me to delve deeper into his work – which brought me to Terror Tower (1935). A pulp-style take on the quintessential English village mystery.

Terror Tower is set in a little place named Stonehurst, an old-world village on the Kentish coast, where the building plans for a factory in the middle of the village has split the community in two groups. On the one hand, you have the villagers who believe a factory will turn Stonehurst from "a village to a prosperous town." On the other hand, you have "the more conservative members of the community" who wish to preserve the village for themselves. And they have a majority vote.

John Tarley is the leading voice of this conservative faction and proposes to raise the money to pay for the several acres of land that was mortgaged by the now late owner, Owen Winslow, but five thousand pounds is more than "the village could rake up in a century." So they decide to make an appeal to the new owner of the village and the ancient Greytower, Jim Winslow, Old Winslow's nephew.

Greytower was "an ancient creeper-covered building," originally an old fort, "standing in its own well-wooded grounds in the centre of the village" and was expanded with a left-hand wing in 1890s – where Owen Winslow lived as a recluse. Jim Winslow inherited the place from his uncle and arrived in the village with a friend in tow, Ian McWraith, but almost immediately they got a taste of the "atmosphere of terror" which brooded over the whole place. Greytower is run by a butler and housekeeper, a Mr. and Mrs. North, who act very suspiciously. There's a mysterious, solidly locked door underneath the spiral staircase that can't be opened, because they have no idea what happened to the key. McWraith's nightcap is doctored with a sleeping drought. Winslow witnesses from his bedroom window how a shadowy figure pushes around a wheeled-ambulance with the body of a man on it!

On the following morning, the body of a stranger is found at the cross-roads just outside the village a bullet in his head. And this is not the only problem that has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard.

Over a two year period, a number of police-detectives have disappeared within the vicinity of Stonehurst and the last disappearance occurred only three weeks ago. So the Yard puts one of their best man on the case, Inspector Shadgold, who immediately turned to his talented friend, Trevor Lowe – a dramatist and amateur criminologist. Lowe opened strongly, in the third chapter, as he critiqued and sniffed savagely at the "so-called psychological novels."

His secretary, Arnold White, asks Lowe about the book he has been reading and answers that there isn't "a solitary character in it who isn't cross and nasty." They all have "kinks of some sort or another." These characters spend pages analyzing themselves "to find out what they are" and "pages more to find out why they've got them!" 

A pernicious type of literature that only "portrays a crumb" of the world as a whole, because the world is made up of mostly of decent, hardworking people who are too busy earning a living to inhibitions. Lowe shudders to think the effect such dreary books have on people who are just reaching adolescence. Young men and women who dig down into their subconscious to try discovering "things that don't exist" and have their minds poisoned by "a long dose of this 'nothing-is-worth-while' creed." It teaches self-analysis in the wrong way. Hear, hear! Go to Hell with your drab, mundane realism! I want ingeniously constructed, labyrinthine plots full of danger, romance and murder! I want hansom cabs rattling through the London fog and a track of footprints in the snow that impossibly end in the middle of an open clearing! Give me the Great Detectives of yore!

Yeah, in spite of some of his shortcomings as a plotter and storyteller, I'm beginning to warm to Verner.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the story, Terror Tower slowly changes from a, more or less, conventional village mystery into an old-timely, dime thriller complete with gangsters, but first, the reader is treated to a classic cliché and trope of the traditional detective story – courtesy of a murderer with a good sense for dramatic timing. One of the suspects is about to sing like a canary, but is shot in front of the detectives by a murderer who makes a successful escape. A second suspect is poisoned in a locked and bolted bedroom, but the impossible crime was only a very minor aspect of the plot. However, the solution made me wonder what Agatha Christie could have done with this idea for a locked room poisoning. There was something about the trick that fitted her work like a glove.

Sherlock Holmes stated in A Study in Scarlet (1887) that, criminally, "there's nothing new under the sun" and that "it has all been done before," but the central plot-idea that emerged when Terror Tower turned into a thriller struck me as completely original. I'm not as familiar with these dime thrillers as with the classic detective story, but the overarching scheme of the villains seemed pretty original to me. There was even a touch, or suggestion, of the horror story when that evil scheme began to emerge and take shape. A slightly better writer might have gotten more out of the idea, but Terror Tower was an entertaining, old-timely gangster thriller, fraught with danger, presented as a village mystery. And I appreciated the bits of foreshadowing.

So, all things considered, Terror Tower can hardly be labeled as one of the greatest pieces of crime fiction from the genre's Golden Age, but still made for a good read with an exciting ending and perhaps a truly original idea at the heart of the plot – neatly tied to the missing policemen and (locked room) murders. Yeah, I'm now convinced I have found my next John Russell Fearn.

The Back-Seat Murder (1931) by Herman Landon

Herman Landon was a Swedish-born American writer best remembered for his pulp stories and novels about a reformed arch-criminal, "The Gray Phantom," but how did the obscure, largely forgotten Landon appear on my radar – since he was even omitted from the GADWiki. Well, Robert Adey listed two of his regular mystery novels in Locked Room Murders (1991). I know, I know. You're stunned with surprise.

The two impossible crime novels listed in Locked Room Murders are the plainly-titled Mystery Mansion (1928) and the more intriguing-sounding Three Brass Elephants (1930), alternatively published as Whispering Shadows, which concerns the disappearance of "a red-and-black room that had contained a body." I haven't tracked down either of these titles yet, but I did stumble across another one of Landon's locked room mysteries. One that was entirely overlooked by Adey!

The Back-Seat Murder (1931) immediately plunges the reader in the middle of a dark, murky and ominous plot that begins in the cellar of Peekacre. The country home of a well-to-do businessman, Christopher Marsh.

Leonard Harrington is the private secretary of Christopher Marsh and, "a little after two o'clock in the morning," is raking an ash pile in the cellar, but he's caught in the act by the live-in nurse of Mrs. Marsh, Theresa Lanyard – who asks him a startling question. She asks him if he thinks the cellar is "the place where David Mooreland was murdered." Seven months before, Mooreland disappeared before he could "lay certain unpleasant facts before the authorities" that would probably have resulted in a lengthy prison term for Marsh. Mooreland had visited Peekacre on the day of his disappearance, but the house was searched and not a trace was found.

So the pseudo-private secretary believes Marsh has destroyed the body to the best of his ability, but had "failed to realize that even in a raging fire a body can't be completely obliterated." Harrington has found a gold tooth in the ash pile that already been identified. Who are Harrington and Lanyard? What links them to the missing and presumably dead Mooreland?

All these questions remain unanswered, for the time being, but they decide to work together to prove Marsh has murdered Mooreland to save his own neck. And here the plot begins to thicken considerably.

On the following morning, Marsh dictates a letter addressed to the attorney prosecutor of the county, James C. Whittaker, but the content is unsettling to Harrison. Marsh brazenly accuses the newly-minted partners in crime, Harrington and Lanyard, of plotting his murder and the former is ordered to deliver the incriminating letter, in person, to Whittaker – which is when two utterly impossible situations follow each other in short succession. The first impossibility occurs when Harrington has been driving for forty-five minutes and glances in the rear-view mirror to see "the course, crafty and malevolent countenance of Christopher Marsh" in the back-seat.

Harrington had been going between thirty-five and forty miles an hour. He was the sole occupant of the car, which is confirmed by the garage owner who changed the car-battery after he left Peekacre, but somehow, Marsh had miraculously appeared in the back-seat of the car! An impossibility very reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "The Theft of the Bermuda Penny," collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (1978), but in that short story someone disappeared from the back-seat of a car going seventy miles an hour.

Marsh has a gun and tells Harrington to drive to an old, abandoned mountain top hotel, where he plans to dispose of him, but, when they arrive, Marsh is murdered in the back-seat – stabbed in the neck while Harrington was looking him in the eyes! They were the sole occupants of the car. Three of the four doors were locked and the fourth door, unlocked, was on the right side of the driver, but no mere mortal could pull off "a murder in such stealthy fashion" without being seen by Harrington. The windows were closed and there were no footprints in the soggy dirt road surrounding the car.

A solid premise with an intriguing, double-barreled impossible situation, but Landon was unquestionably a second-string mystery writer and The Back-Seat Murder reads like a cheap dime novel.

There a number of shady and sinister personalities moving in-and out of the story. Such as the scrawny blackmailer, Samuel B. Tarkin. After Marsh is murdered, Harrinton finds Lanyard in the abandoned hotel with strange man, Harry Stoddard, who calls her "a lying, cheating, two-faced, double-crossing crook." The elderly and obliging Martin Carmody had lent his car and chauffeur to Lanyard on her "mysterious mission" to the hotel. Rounding out the list of suspects is the dangerous, thickset Roscoe Carstairs.

They're all unconvincingly-drawn, paper thin stock-characters who are annoying secretive about their motivations and act only in service of the plot, which makes it appear only the murderer acted semi-logical throughout the story – because this character actually had a reason to act like that. But, on a whole, the characterization is very poor.

However, there's a good, undeveloped pulp-style short impossible crime story buried in The Back-Seat Murder. The attorney prosecutor, Whittaker, acts as the primary detective of the story, but a chunk of the credit for the work has to go to a county policeman, Storm, who has "the right kind of brains for this sort of job." Admittedly, they did a fine job in selling the impossibilities as they go over all the possibilities and this convinced me the solutions were either going to be good or pretty bad. Luckily, they were more good than bad.

The solution to the seemingly impossible appearance of Marsh in the back-seat of a speeding car was something you would expect from a locked room yarn by Hoch. I assumed Marsh had simply emerged from the empty space under the back-seat, but this was a pleasant surprised. The second impossibility, stabbing in a locked car with an innocent eye-witness, is rooted in the traditions of the pulpiest of impossible crimes (c.f. John Russell Fearn's Account Settled, 1949) and certainly is an original, one-of-a-kind trick, but a lack of clues made it hard to swallow. However, Landon made a sporting attempt to produce a fairly clued, last-minute surprise, but one of the chapter-titles in the table of content ruined that party. So avoid it like its Julian Symons.

I don't remember who of you said that a case can be made that good ideas should be taken away from bad writers, but The Back-Seat Murder should be entered as Exhibit A. The impossible situations in the locked car were original and genuinely baffling, which were actually played to good effect, but Landon simply was not good enough to fully deliver on them. So you'll end up with a mixed, poorly written bag of tricks.

Still... I didn't entirely disliked it. Yes, this mainly has to do with the originality of the two impossible crimes. Landon was a second-string (perhaps even third-string) writer of pulp stories and dime novels, but appeared to have contributed some interesting and original titles to the locked room library. So you can expect me to return to Landon at some point in the future, because I'm an unrepentent locked room fanboy.

The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

My last three reads can be described as a varied lot, coming from two different countries and periods, but they had one thing common: a solid idea, such as the locked room-tricks from A. Roothaert's Onrust op Raubrakken (Unrest at Raubrakken, 1935) and Robert Innes' Flatline (2018), which were stuck in middling to mediocre novel. This resulted in some mixed reviews. So I decided to return to a mystery writer who I enjoyed reading very much in 2018.

Christopher St. John Sprigg's The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935) is the penultimate mystery novel published during his lifetime, which was followed by the excellent Death of a Queen (1935), after which he enlisted in the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War – where he was killed in the valley of Jarama during his first day of battle on February 12th, 1937. The Six Queer Things (1937) was published posthumously.

The Corpse with the Sunburned Face cements the fact that Sprigg was not only a good writer and a proficient plotter, but also possessed a wealth of imagination.

A fascinating, splendidly realized detective story comprising of two parts that are poles apart, a satirical village mystery and a thriller set in West Africa, which together form one of those rare anthropological mysteries.

The first part of the story begins with Rev. Samuel Wykeham, vicar of Little Whippering, complaining to himself that nothing ever happened in the village. This proved to be the proverbial famous last words, because at that very moment a small boy shot down a hill accompanied by "screams of terror." William Bundling had a close encounter with "The Invisible Man" who had threatened the boy to slit his belly open, if he ever caught him sneaking around the house.

Sam O'Leary is the mysterious person, known locally as The Invisible Man, who arrived in the village with "his face hidden behind a scarf" and "nobody's seen him by daylight." A recluse has taken possession of the Wilderness, "an eyesore of a cottage," where only tradesman are allowed and groceries enter the home through a little flap in the front door – everyone else can expect to be insulted at gunpoint. Reverend Samuel decides to pay his new parishioner a visit, but is greeted with a barrel of a gun and gets twenty seconds to vacate the premise or he'll blast his goddamned head off ("devil-dodger or no devil-dodger"). Police Constable Collop is treated with a little bit more respect, but O'Leary still calls him a bastard and a "blasted bluebottle."

This last confrontation ends with O'Leary warning Collop that, if anyone else dares to disturb him, they can expect "a charge of buckshot in their gizzards to help them on their way."

So this is grist on the rumor mill of Little Whippering. Some believe O'Leary is a murderer in hiding, while others think he's a leper or a gold hoarder, but, despite the legend growing around him, the isolated miser became a part of the fabric of the little, old-world village. Several years later, a bearded man, George Crumbles, descended upon the village looking for O'Leary, but Crumbles is found a short time later dangling from a rope in his hotel room and the police demands O'Leary discards his disguise – revealing to them an inexplicable sunburned face and an exciting back-story that took place in West Africa. A story about an expedition to steal the treasure of the African Kingdom of Balooma and betrayal among the perpetrators, which is why O'Leary had buried himself in a small English village.

Obviously, this part of the story was inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and The Valley of Fear (1914).

However, if you think this is merely another play on the shopworn Birlstone Gambit, you're dead wrong. Sprigg played a dazzling game of three-card monte, but replaced the cards with "an amazing confusion" of identities and clues. Like I said, Sprigg was a proficient plotter.

One more thing I should mention is that the first half of the story is an amusing, satirical look at English village life centering around the vicarage. Reverend Samuel is expecting two guests, Mr. Neptune Jones, who is to become a permanent boarding guest at the vicarage, but Jones turns out to be a black man from West Africa. Very much to the shock of Mrs. Wykeham. The second guest is Dr. Ridge, an American anthropologist, but this person also defies Rev. Samuel's expectations and these two characters show Sprigg had been deeply immersed in Marxism at the time. Neptune Jones and Dr. Ridge obviously were meant as subversive, outside elements in the old, conservative-minded village. However, I appreciate he had a sense of humor about it.

For example, Dr. Ridge has come to Little Whippering to obtain records of the customs of European villages, "which are rapidly dying out," before it's too late and makes observations about their May-Day fertility rites and vegetation God (Jack-of-May) – noting "a certain resemblance to the social tenets of the Wahina tribe." Some of these characters will turn up again in the second half.

The second half begins when a gruesome, ritual murder is committed at the Wilderness and Inspector Archibald Campbell decides to go Africa to unearth the truth behind these deaths. The opening of the second part is basically an overview of the previous half, which untangles the mess of identities and gives a solution to the murders, but there's not much else what I can say without giving anything away. Suffice to say, Campbell runs into a spot of trouble and one of the last chapters has a well-imagined scene of a sacred and secret ritual. This links The Corpse with the Sunburned Face to the detective fiction of such Australian mystery writers like S.H. Courtier and Arthur W. Upfield.

All in all, The Corpse with the Sunburned Face is a rich, colorful and well-written detective story that has both its darker and lighter moments, but, more importantly, it has a cleverly constructed, slightly unorthodox plot. The result is one of Sprigg's more memorable detective novels.