Thom MacWalter was a
Scotsman who had studied architecture, painted and supposedly
had an amateur interest in acting, but the onset of the First World
War likely put his artistic ambitions on hold and worked for the
British Intelligence – reportedly was badly wounded in the
Gallipoli Campaign. After the war, MacWalter began to write fiction
under the name of "Victor
MacClure."
The most well-known, best
remembered work under the MacClure name appears to be a
science-fiction novel, The Ark of the Covenant (1924), but,
more importantly, MacClure wrote a quartet of detective novels during
the early 1930s. Detective-Inspector Archie Burford of the Criminal
Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, stands at the helm of
this short-lived series.
A series that began with
the intriguingly titled The Crying Pig Murder (1930), but the
one that predictably caught my eye was Death Behind the Door
(1933). The plot is briefly described in Robert Adey's Locked Room
Murders (1991) as a murder in a cloakroom, which reminded me of
the impossible situation from John Rhode's Invisible
Weapons (1938), but never expected to find a detective story
that could have actually been written by Rhode.
A story with a plot firmly rooted in the traditions of the great
triumvirate of the "humdrum" school, J.J.
Connington, Freeman
Wills Crofts and Rhode.
Detective-Inspector
Archie Burford is on a well deserved holiday in the English
countryside and has gotten permission from Colonel Selburn, Chief
Constable of the county, to fish the "carefully preserved
waters" of the region, but when he was pitting his wits against "a salmon of mettle" a uniformed man appeared on the river
bank – a village policeman with an important message. Burford
responds by asking his ghillie to maim or murder the policeman in
various ways, because there's nothing "more important than a
twenty-pound salmon." Only flash of genuine humor in this
deliberate, methodical and leisurely-paced detective story.
The village policeman
brought the news to Burford and Colonel Selburn that a well-known art
critic, Graeme Wakeling, was killed at his home in a shooting
incident.
Wakeling lives in a
reconstructed farmhouse, The Ford, which is up river and had been
found shot by his friend, Rupert Kyle, in the cloakroom with a
sporting gun belonging to another friend and house-guest, Mrs. Edna
Cayne. Burford accompanies Colonel Selburn to The Ford and, together
with Superintendent Groves, begin to methodically examine every crumb
of evidence and inch of the cloakroom. They learn who handled or
cleaned the gun, and when, scrutinize fingerprints and question the
small pool of potential suspects. A painstaking examination that
allows them to eliminate the possibility of a tragic accident or an
unfortunate suicide.
As an aside, I loath and
detest it when a murder turns out to be a suicide, particularly in a
locked room story, but I have to give props here to Superintendent
Groves for his elegant, properly motivated (false) solution
suggesting that Wakeling had committed suicide after all – Kyle had
removed evidence from the scene to ensure "his friend 'll have a
Christian burial." Normally, a victim disguises his suicide as
a murder or suspicious looking accident to either make trouble for
someone or the circumvent the suicide clause of their insurance
policy. I have never seen a suicide turned into a murder, by a friend
or relative, for this very human and understandable reason. Anyway...
So the shooting incident
in the cloakroom is murder and the challenge staring the police in
the face is how the deed was done. However, this is not an impossible
crime! Wakeling was alone in the cloakroom when the shot was fired,
but not only was the cloakroom unlocked, "the door was standing
open a little" when Kyle found the body and this makes the book
a how-was-it-done very much like Christopher Bush's Dead
Man Twice (1930). A status cemented when one of only two
suspects, Cayne and Kyle, emerged as the murderer halfway through the
story with the remainder spent on building a case against this
person.
The case Burford and
Colonel Selburn are building forces them to thoroughly reexamine the
suspicious death of "the wickedly vicious, spiteful and
indecent" ex-wife of the victim, Mrs. Wakeling, who died
unexpectedly eighteen months previously of aspirin poisoning –
taking a headache powder that inexplicably contained acetylsalicylic
acid. Mrs. Wakeling had received a sample packet in the mail and how
it ended up in a machine-packed dose of headache powder is another
how-was-it-done rather than a pure impossible problem. Still, this
was a interesting side-track to the investigation.
Up to this point, Death
Behind the Door only had a pair of good murder methods and some
clever, old-fashioned police work in the "humdrum" tradition, but
the murderer's personality, attitudes and motivation makes the book
stand out.
Firstly, the murderer
turns out to stand on equal footing with the detective and the ending
is best described as a stalemate between the two. You have to read
for yourself how this transpires and is resolved. Secondly, the
motivational drive of the murderer is something out of the ordinary.
And there's something tacked to the motive at the end that was very
not-done at the time.
So, all things
considered, Death Behind the Door is a methodically plotted
detective story with the focus on the mechanics of the crimes,
instead of figuring out who-has-done-it, which will be most
appreciated by fans of Crofts, Connington and Rhode.
