The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967) by John Holbrook Vance

Last time, I read the engaging, lively written and plotted The Fox Valley Murders (1966) by John Holbrook Vance, who's better known to fantasy and science-fiction readers as Jack Vance, which presented the traditional, Golden Age detective story as a thick slice of small-town Americana in the 1960s – sprinkled with a variety of impossible crimes. A sadly short-lived, unfinished series that ended when Vance abandoned the partially completed The Genesee Slough Murders. It would have been the third novel to have featured Vance's series-detective, Sheriff Joe Bain of San Rodrigo County, California.

I decided to read the two novels and the unclothed, skeleton manuscript of the third book back-to-back, because I'll probably appreciate the unpolished manuscript better with the two completed novels fresh in my mind. So today, I'll be looking at the second novel in the series, The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967).

There's a notable difference in approach to plotting and storytelling between The Fox Valley Murders and The Pleasant Grove Murders.

The Fox Valley Murders is a packed, constantly moving story in which a series of suspicious looking, seemingly impossible accidents and natural deaths coincide with the return of a convicted murderer to the community and an important election – which don't always link up in expected ways. The Pleasant Grove Murders is mostly focused on the first of three hammer murders and the suspects living on Madrone Way where the crime was committed. This made for a clearer, tighter and better clued detective story than The Fox Valley Murders!

An introduction of the primary players opens the story, covering numerous years, beginning with the destruction of a tree house as children to a failed marriage and an engagement.

Sam and Miriam Shortridge are "small-town aristocrats" and became the elite by being the proprietors of Pleasant Grove's largest department store, which is reflected in their children, Marsh and Starr, who have been described as "absolutely feudal." Starr was a haughty child who had "compared herself to the rank and file of humanity" and "humanity had come off second best," while her older brother simply is a prig. A very different child is the "extremely pretty girl of Starr's age," Alice, who lives next door with her parents, Guy and Grace Benjamin. And much lower on the social totem pole of Pleasant Grove are two boys, Ken Moody and Bill Whipple. One way, or another, they all have a role to play in a series of murders around the time Alice became engaged to Marsh.

Ken Mooney had become a mail deliveryman and, on an early June morning, he turned his mail van into Madrone Way, where he was murdered, but the body and van with undelivered mail vanished until the following morning – when all were found at the blind end of Madrone Way. Mooney had been killed with "just three good raps" from an ordinary carpenter's hammer and copy of Life magazine was lying under his head. Someone had torn off the address label. This was the only piece of undelivered mail that had been tampered with. So the postal authorities "relinquished the case to Sheriff Joe Bain."

There are two more murders, committed relatively late into the story, which makes the bludgeoning of Mooney the central problem and what happened during the twenty-four hours between the murder and discovery of the body is "a source of enormous puzzlement." A lot of time is spend in figuring out the movement of suspects, combing for a motive and checking alibis and checking magazine subscriptions. One central question, or problem, is was he killed "because he was the mailman or because he was Ken?" So the setting has less of a presence here than in the previous novel with the focus on just one neighborhood.

Nevertheless, there are still distinct traces of those small-town life, politics and some minor side plot-threads. Sheriff Bain has another tussle with the owner and editor of the Pleasant Grove Messenger, Howard Griselda, who wants "an up-to-date progressive law-enforcement system" and doesn't believe Bain is "the man for the job." Sometimes, the investigation is interrupted when the sheriff's office has to respond to a madman, armed with .22 rifle, who had climbed to the top of a silo and started "shooting at everything in sight" or visiting a woman, named Luna, who believes she came to Earth from a distant planet, Arthemisia – on a mission which has not yet been revealed to her. A very weird, unimportant plot-thread that felt out-of-place and thought it might be a reference, or even a crossover appearance, linked to Vance's science-fiction work. But apparently not.

One other side-thread worth mentioning is Bain's intention to buy a nearly 100-year-old roadhouse and turn it an old country hotel together with his daughter and mother. Vance was already thinking of retiring the character, but don't ask me why. This series is great!

The Pleasant Grove Murders is not chocking with impossible crime material, like The Fox Valley Murders, but what it lacked in quantity, it made it up with quality and the result is easily one of the best pure whodunits of the 1960s. A detective story with one of those delightfully constructed ladders of clues, logically fitting every piece of the story together, which is even more impressive when you consider most of the (important) clues were hidden in the personalities or actions of the characters – barely any physical and tangible clues. Funnily enough, the ending of the story acknowledged that "the entire case of the prosecution was circumstantial, indirect and hypothetical," but "judge instructed the jury that circumstantial evidence was as good as any" and "they were not required to invent improbable or fantastic alternate hypotheses."

Yet, the circumstantial clues and evidence are more than sufficient to work out this clever little detective story and loved the spot in the book when a tiny detail made everything click together in my head. Very satisfying! If there's anything to nitpick about, it's that Vance was overly generous with his reader by giving one of his clues a distinctly New England flavor. But if something is too good, you really have nothing to complain about.

The Pleasant Grove Murders was written during that dark, dreary decade when publishers had largely moved away from the traditional detective story, but the bright light of the Golden Age shimmered on in the Sheriff Joe Bain series. I don't know why Vance abandoned the series, but the lost is entirely ours.

A note for the curious: I drew some comparison in my review of The Fox Valley Murders with other American mystery writers who used small-town settings, but this series is perhaps closer to Kip Chase's Justine Carmichael series. Chase is a now long-forgotten writer who tried to bring the Golden Age mystery into the 1960s, but he never got past his third novel. Strangely enough, their novels are pleasing mirror images of each other. Chase's Where There's a Will (1961) is a whodunit with a closed-circle of suspects, while The Fox Valley Murders is an impossible crime novel, but Murder Most Ingenious (1962) is a locked room mystery and The Pleasant Grove Murders a whodunit. One has a former, big city homicide cap as detective and the other series a small-town sheriff. Even though their settings aren't that far apart, they obviously take place in different parts of California. Chase and Vance showed what could have been!

The Fox Valley Murders (1966) by John Holbrook Vance

So, after finishing Colin Robertson's Demons' Moon (1951), I intended to take a short break from the impossible crime story and was off to a good start with Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943), but Hampton Stone's The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) soiled my promise with the inclusion of a (minor) locked room problem – giving me a paper thin excuse to dip into one more impossible crime novel. A cross between Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Herbert Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) with no less than four impossibilities listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). How can you see no to that?

John Holbrook Vance is better known as Jack Vance, a well-known, celebrated fantasy and science-fiction author, who occasionally turned to the detective and thriller story. Vance even ghosted three of the late period Ellery Queen novels, The Four Johns (1964), A Room to Die In (1965) and The Madman Theory (1966).

During the same period, Vance wrote two mystery novels about Sheriff Joe Bain, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967), which take place in the old-world surroundings of San Rodrigo County, California. Vance had been working on a third novel, The Genesee Slough Murders, but left the book unfinished and photocopies of a typescript draft have "circulated among collectors for years" that outlined the entire story with some near complete chapters – lacking only "a final polish." The manuscript outline was published in The Joe Bain Mysteries (2013).

Joe Bain used to be "the tall hell-raising lad from Castle Mountain," a run-a-way kid who came to San Rodrigo County, "where he consorted with Mexicans and fruit tramps." An unlikely boy to eventually become sheriff, but a broken marriage left him with a daughter to support and used his G.I. benefits to attend classics at the Chapman Institute of Criminology, which landed him a job as deputy-sheriff under Sheriff Ernest Cucchinello.

The Fox Valley Murders opens two days after the untimely passing of Sheriff Cucchinello and Bain was appointed to serve out the last months of his term as Acting-Sheriff. Bain is planning to the challenge the odds-on favorite, Lee Gervase, who's "a vigorous and progressive young lawyer" predicted to "sweep unopposed into office" in the next election. This election is one of three, closely intertwined, plot-threads that run through the story. A plot-thread that sees Bain trying to drum up support in the community and cleaning out the office of any petty, small-town corruption.

The second plot-thread is the hostile response of the community to the return of one of its most notorious and hated inhabitants, Ausley Wyett. Sixteen years ago, Wyett had been found digging a hole "with close at hand the body of Tissie McAllister." A young schoolgirl who had been brutally abused and murdered. Wyett protested his innocence, but there were five witnesses whose testimonies showed only he could have killed the girl and was sentenced to life imprisonment – narrowly avoiding the death penalty. A month ago, Wyett was paroled out of San Quentin and returned to the home farm, which already unsettled the locals, but then he begins sending letters around. 

All of the witnesses receive a letter with the question, "how do you plan to make this up to me?" When the witnesses begin to die, one by one, Bain begins to fear he might soon find Wyett "swinging from a tree."

Finally, we come to the meat of the plot! A series of suspiciously-looking accidents and natural causes that befall the witnesses who testified against Wyett.

A former school bus driver, Bus Hacker, died in front of Bain when he had a heart attack on his front porch. Charly Blankenship, "a well-known mushroom fancier," inexplicably picked, cooked and consumed an easily recognizable, poisonous mushrooms. Willis Neff apparently died in a hunting accident in an open glade high in the Santa Lucia Mountains, of Monterey County, where a witness would turn the shooting accident in an open-air locked room mystery in case of murder. Oliver Viera was all alone when he fell sixty feet to his death from a ladder perched too close to a ravine. A bizarre string of suspicious accidents and deaths, but, as Bain remarked, "you feel a fool saying accident" and "you feel a fool claiming foul play."

I think the poisoning-trick and the hunting accident are more accurately described as borderline impossible crimes, but appreciated the variety and two of the murders showed some ingenuity.

The murder of Bus Hacker is a genuine impossible crime with a good solution, but you should be able to (roughly) work out how it was done and the explanation for the dish of poisoned mushrooms, while not strictly an impossibility, was something completely new – furnished the plot with an important clue. Technically, you can call the hunting accident an open-air locked room murder, but the trick should have been used in another story to give a murderer one of those hard-to-break alibis. The deadly fall from the ladder has, sadly, the most simplistic solution imaginable. But when you pull them together, you have a very satisfying and original take on the impossible crime and perfect murder tropes with a memorable, vividly-drawn backdrop and characters.

I've already compared The Fox Valley Murders to Christie's Murder is Easy and Brean's Wilders Walk Away, which is an accurate comparison when describing the bare bones of the plot, but the story is dressed in thick slices of small-town Americana. You have the small-town politics of Erle Stanley Gardner's Doug Selby series (c.f. The D.A. Draws a Circle, 1939), the hum of every day, small-town life that filled Theodore Roscoe's crime novelettes in The Argosy Library: Four Corner, vol. 1 (2015) and a populace that begins to feel deprived of justice. Although the threat of an old-fashioned lynching is not as imminent here as it was in Queen's The Glass Village (1954). A skillful, wonderfully done combination of characters, plot and setting that made The Fox Valley Murders a beautifully written and constructed detective story. And one of the better locked room mysteries from the 1960s era.

There is, however, a flaw in this little gem. A big, important chunk of the plot is driven by Wyett's illogical, mule-headed stubbornness and actions, which began when he found McAllister's body in his barn and tried to bury it. Something that is never satisfactory explained beyond that he lost his head when he found the body. What he did when he was paroled became convenient smokescreen for the murderer. Wyett acts as a plot-device to drive certain parts of the story and it stands out here, because everything else feels so natural. A second thing that kept nagging at me is Wyett continuously saying he was completely innocent when he didn't report a murder, destroyed the crime scene and tried to bury the body – three counts that, knowing Americans, probably adds up to a pretty stiff prison sentence. A small blemish on an otherwise excellent detective novel, but more of an annoyance than a serious drawback.

So, all in all, The Fox Valley Murders stands as a fascinating, well-written detective novel with a slightly unusual plot and beautifully evoked, pleasantly busy setting that brought the place alive in all its facets and complexities. Not everything is absolutely perfect, but, reading the book, you wouldn't think the genre's Golden Age had ended. You can expect one of my ramblings on The Pleasant Grove Murders and The Genesee Slough Murders before too long!

The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) by Hampton Stone

Aaron Marc Stein was an American journalist with a degree in archaeology from Princeton University, New Jersey, who became "a full-time fiction writer" with the publication of the first Inspector Schmidt mystery, Murder at the Piano (1935), which was followed by over a hundred detective novels – receiving the Grand Master Edgar in 1979 for his contributions "to the craft of mystery writing." These contributions consist of four, long-running series published under three different (pen) names. And the one with the most name recognition is probably "George Bagby."

I've been aware of Stein for years as one of those reliable, mid-list writers who once were "the backbone of publishing and public libraries." A writer who appeared to have been a cross between Anthony Abbot and Erle Stanley Gardner, but never came across one of his novels until recently. Honestly, Stein was much better than most mystery writers who have been branded second-stringers on this blog!

The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953), published as by "Hampton Stone," is the sixth, of eighteen, titles about the New York Assistant District Attorneys, Jeremiah X. Gibbon and Malcolm T. Macauley – usually their names are shortened to Gibby and Mac. Mac is the S.S. van Dine-style narrator of the series and is often assigned to Gibby to hold him "somewhere within the limits of legality and prudence" or "a cautious approach" is warranted in regard to some of "the town's more gilt-edged reputations." The murder of one of the vice-presidents of Fiveborough National Bank requires Mac's "special talent" in spades!

Fiveborough National Bank is a big, solid and respectable New York institution, firmly rooted in "the financial tradition of Alexander Hamilton," with branch banks all over New York City that all look like "a little neighborhood Sub-treasury."

Every year, the Bank Club throws an exclusive dinner party at the Butterfield Hotel. Only this time, the "three-star binge" spilled all over the fifth floor where the body of Homer G. Coleman is found in one of the rooms. Coleman had "died horribly" with a black canvas strap pulled tightly around his throat, but Gibby and Mac immediately smack headfirst into an enormous contradiction. The victim was universally loved. Everyone liked and respected the guy, which actually made for a nice change. Stein put it to good use in the last chapter.

There are, however, many more complications surrounding the murders including two burglaries with stolen keys, two (attempted) murders, three assaults with a candlestick and traces of blood of third, unknown victim. But the bulk of the story concerns the plot-threads centering on two of the suspects, Art Fuller and Miss Ross Salvaggi.

Art Fuller has served time in Sing Sing and is now out on parole, but tried to split when the police recognized him at the hotel and the story he gave them is shakey, to say the least, which is why they "fix him up with a tail" – who'll keep a close eye on him over the next twenty-four hours. Surprisingly, this plot-thread turned into a minor locked room mystery when Fuller left and returned to his home without being observed by his unshakable tail. The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends is not listed in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and had no idea the plot contained a small locked room puzzle. I honestly tried to take a break from the impossible crime tale, but they won't leave me alone! Miss Salvaggi, on the other hands, acts as a human roadblock and evidently knows more than she's willing to tell, but she eventually finds her match in the stubborn, outspoken Gibby. She didn't went down in the first couple of rounds and Gibby had to take a dirty, roundabout way to get his hands on the full story.

So these (side) problems cover a large swath of the story and this comes at the expense of, what should have been, the central plot-thread that was already scantily clued. That's a pity because the identity of the murderer, along with the motive, were interesting and made the murder of Coleman a genuine tragedy. More importantly, it gave the story an ending you don't often see in these classic detective stories as everyone turned on the murderer the moment this person was revealed. Gibby has to tell the victim's friends they have to save the murderer for a jury followed by some banter ("Where do you go to find the peers of a thing like that? What are you going to use for a jury, bedbugs?").

The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends is an engagingly written, busily plotted detective story with a fun detective who's not above a little housebreaking or playing dirty, but Stein lacked the coincidence in the main plot-thread, covered it up with extraneous story-lines and went light on clueing – dragging down an otherwise excellent detective novel to the second ranks. Still a good, entertaining read with some good ideas and I'll definitely return to Stein in the future. I want to try one of his detective novels about his archaeologist sleuths, Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt.

A note for the curious: Mercury Publications edition had a $1000 cash prize for "the best new title submitted for this novel by September 28, 1954," but The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends has never appeared under any other title. So, whoever won the contest, the winning title was not used.

The Art School Murders (1943) by Moray Dalton

Last year, Dean Street Press reissued five novels by the then forgotten mystery novelist Katherine M. Renoir, who wrote twenty-nine detective novels as "Moray Dalton," which our resident genre-historian and blogger, Curt Evans, described as "the finest British crime fiction" of the mid-century period – originally published between 1929 and 1951. I thought The Strange Case of Harriet Hale (1936) was overpraised, but The Night of Fear (1931) and Death in the Cup (1932) were good examples of the sophisticated, character-driven mystery novel closely associated with the Crime Queens.

So it was encouraging to see these new editions were successful enough to bring more of Dalton's long out-of-print, nigh forgotten mystery novels back in print. DSP reissued five further titles in March and, while The Black Death (1934) was not reprinted, the line-up still looked promising!

The Art School Murders (1943) is erroneously listed online as a non-series novel, but Evans reckons it's the tenth title in the Inspector Hugh Collier series. A mystery novel tantalizingly combining three popular mise-en-scènes of the Golden Age detective story: murder at a school for artists during the blacked-out nights of the Blitz.

Aldo Morosini is a well-known, celebrated Italian artist who founded the Morosini School of Art with the lofty dreams of discoursing through its hallways "surrounded by an adoring crowd of students," but the eager, hard-working students were unable to "feed his hungry vanity" and the school ceased to amuse him – still "a paying proposition." So he now only comes around at the end of each term to decide who's to be promoted to the life class and has left the teaching in the hands of two staff masters, John Kent and Mr. Hollis. Not surprisingly, the overly expensive art school is dying a slow death with more students leaving than enrolling. War isn't exactly helping, either. Nor is the presence of a femme fatale.

Miss Althea Greville used to be the favorite model of "a big noise in the art world" and went to pieces when he died, but she retained enough of her beauty and allure to continue working as an artistic model. A year previously, Miss Greville was engaged as a model at the school and turned the heads of many of the male students ("you'd never credit the harm a woman like that can do in three weeks"). At the time, one of the masters had pegged her as "potentially dangerous," but she was allowed to come back when another model canceled and this gig ended with the discovery of her blood drenched body behind the screen in the life classroom!

The local police is confronted with "a formidable list of suspects," forty-five students, two masters, one secretary and the caretaker, who all had access to the school and could have been there at the time of murder without attracting any attention – which is quite a departure from all the locked room mysteries of late. So they decide to immediately call in Scotland Yard, but, before Inspector Hugh Collier really can get to work, a second murder is reported!

One of the students, Betty Hayden, is an avid moviegoer who regularly patronized "a small picture-house," the Corona, catering to people "who would rather see a good old film than a poor one fresh from the Hollywood mint." She always sat all the way in back, on the balcony, which is where her body is found. Someone had stabbed her silently, in the dark, while Fred Astaire was singing on the screen. Betty had been hinting that she had seen someone lurking around who shouldn't have been there.

Usually, these so-called "emergency murders" of pesky witnesses or people who simply know too much add very little to the plot, or story-telling, except to help tighten the noose around the murderer's neck. But that was not entirely the case here.

This second murder places Betty's school friend, Cherry Garth, in possible danger, because the murderer might be under the assumption that Betty shared her secret with Cherry. So this second murder actually furthered the plot and story-telling, but just as interesting was the scene of the crime. Surprisingly, I can only name six detective novels and one short story that use a darkened cinema as a stage for murder and have only read four of them. You have Rex Hardinge's very obscure short story, "The Cinema Murder Mystery" (1927). P.R. Shore's extremely obscure The Death Film (1932). One of the victim's in Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) is stabbed inside a movie theater and Gerald Verner's The Whispering Woman (1949) is on my to-be-read pile. John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and Pattern of Murder (2006) made the best use of the cinema setting.

If you cheat a little, you can add E.R. Punshon's Death of a Beauty Queen (1935) and Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, 2002), but Dalton's The Art School Murders is a genuine, if unusual, addition to the list – using the setting more as a psychological clue rather than a convenient place to silently knife someone. The murderer is someone with "an unusual degree of callousness" and this murder showed it.

Collier whittled down the list with fifty potential suspects down to five, which is mostly done by interviewing suspects and witnesses. Brad, of Ah, Sweet Mystery, calls this approach "dragging-the-marsh," in honor of Ngaio Marsh, which can bog down a story. Once again, that was not the case here as the story never flagged, but all of the clues and hints were hidden in the statements and movements of the characters. This has always been a precarious way to clue a detective story to the full satisfaction of pesky armchair detective, but it can be done and the opportunity was present here. Only problem is that this particular murderer needed more, stronger clueing to have been an good, effective surprise. Now it felt like a wombat being pulled out of top hat. You'll understand why when you read it.

The Art School Murders is not as good as The Night of Fear, or Death in the Cup, but certainly better than The Strange Case of Harriet Hale with a plot that made interesting use of the second murder, cinema setting and the nighttime black-outs – seriously hampering the police in keeping "tabs on anyone after dark." Recommended to mystery readers with a special affinity for the (uncrowned) Queens of Crime.

Demons' Moon (1951) by Colin Robertson

I promised in my review of Jerry Coleman's Action Comics story, "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" (1958), that I would done with trimming down my stack of newly acquired locked room mystery and impossible crime novels by the end of the month – bringing back a little variety to the blog. This post marks the end of the deluge of locked room and impossible crime reviews that have flooded this place since February.

I've already lined up some non-impossible crime novels by Christopher Bush, Moray Dalton and E.R. Punshon, but my to-be-read pile and wishlist remain infested with locked room stories. So expect that variety to be heavily seasoned with miraculous murders and insoluble problems. But for now, I bring you a curiosity that has been hermetically sealed in obscurity for nearly seven decades.

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) has pages filled with entries of obscure, long out-of-print titles, oddities and some apparent anomalies.

You have genuine rarities such as Eric Aldhouse's The Crime at the Quay Inn (1934), B.C. Black's The Draughtsman's Pen (1948), Nigel Brent's The Leopard Died Too (1957) and Sinclair Gluck's intriguing, somewhat familiar, sounding Sea Shroud (1934) in which a murder is committed in a locked and bolted room with barred windows – one window has "a hole from a rifle shot" in it. When it comes to the oddities, you have the previously mentioned "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" and Stephan M. Arleaux's plagiarized edition (The Locked Study Murder, 2017) of A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922). There's even some odd praise for David Louis Marsh's Dead Box (2004), an atrocity on the level of the living conditions in the trenches of the First World War, but Skupin admitted "the solution is a terrible letdown." So there's that. And there were a couple of entries that looked anomalous.

Skupin spotlighted Maisie Birmingham's The Mountain by Night (1997) in his introduction as a 1990s locked room novel "worthy of note" and was published only twenty-three years ago, but there are less than a dozen references to it on the internet. No copies! Something tells me The Mountain by Night was privately published, because she published her three previous mysteries in the 1970s and Amazon gives "M.P. Birmingham" as the publisher of The Mountain by Night – explaining the lack of copies. So perhaps an interesting title for John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, to reprint in the future as a companion for Derek Smith's Come to Paddington Fair (1997). Esther Fonseca's The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom (1937) is another weird one, reportedly reprinted in 2012, but only found a short review and have to assume the 2012 edition belonged to another entry. Christopher Fowler has a number of entries on the opposite page.

Lastly, we have the subject of today's rambling review. A locked room mystery novel from the early 1950s that, at first, didn't appear to exist at all!

Entry #2955 in Locked Room Murders: Supplement is Colin Robertson's Demon's Roost, published by Forge in 2004, but this time the internet came up with zero results. The book was not mentioned, or listed, anywhere on the internet and that would have made for a record-setting death plunge into obscurity, but noticed that Demon's Roost was the last entry on page 160 and Madeleine Robins' Petty Treason (2004) was the first title listed on the next page. Yes, it was published by Forge. So that cleared up that problem, but what about the title? Some detective work brought me to the profile page of a prolific, British mystery novelist, Colin Robertson, who wrote detective, pulp and thriller novels under several different names – one of the novels published under his own name is titled Demons' Moon (1951). I focused on that title and discovered that the names of the detectives listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement were the same as in Demons' Moon. Never underestimate the tenacity and laser-focused autism of a rabid fanboy! :)

So, after all that detective work, I wanted to know what the book was about and the description of the impossibility, "a dead man seen in a room through the keyhole" and "only moments later the body is gone," had me intrigued. What I found was a little out of the ordinary for a locked room mystery.

Demons' Moon begins with a sickly, middle-aged spinster, Rowena Penhaven, who lost her domineering mother six months ago and now lives all alone behind "the grey, moss-covered walls of the Penhaven estate." Beechwood Close even has the family crypt cozily standing on its uninviting, fenced-in grounds. Rowena was "bound hand and foot" to "her tartar of a mother" as an unpaid servant, but the death of Mrs. Penhaven snapped the chains of her mind and she began to suffer from lapses of memory and hallucinations – seeing ghosts, snakes and the Thing. Every so often, the key to her mother's old bedroom goes missing and when she looks through the key-hole, the Thing is always there. A "macabre tableau" of a man lying on a bloodstained carpet with "a hideous, gaping wound in the back of his head" and "an ugly stain" on the front of his shirt. Scene is always the same!

Eventually, the key is returned and when Rowena goes into the bedroom, the dead man has "vanished without leaving a trace." Only to reappear in the locked bedroom days, or weeks, later. And this has been going on for months!

So, during one of her lucid moments, Rowena decides to call in outside help and picked a detective agency from the telephone directory, but the detective who answered the call, David MacLeod, found a crazy woman coming out of the family crypt. Rowena is rambling about a ghost "wearing a shroud" and "things in the house." But there's no ghost. No blood. No body in the bedroom. MacLeod promises to come back the next day, but reads in the morning newspaper that the body of Rowena Penhaven had been pulled from a small stream running through the estate. She had died shortly after he had left her behind!

Unfortunately, he needs a client before he can make himself "a thorough nuisance" without risking his license and one unexpectedly comes to him with a hundred a week paycheck. Sadie MacLeod soon joins her husband on his investigation.

You can't deny Demons' Moon has a solid premise. A tale of domestic suspense, in the style of Anthony Gilbert, with a strong, Gothic flavor and the problem of the ghostly scenes in the locked bedroom, but the second and third act of the story convinced me Robertson had no idea where the story would end when he penned the opening chapters – making it up as he went along. Second part of the story is pure, pulp-style dime thriller with a scheming villain who keeps cobra's as pets and idiotically wastes his time with drugging or playing games with MacLeod. Just not as good or engaging as the pulp detective/thriller yarns by, oh let's say, Gerald Verner (e.g. Terror Tower, 1935). Robertson than attempted to walk back on this second act with a horrendously botched play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but the twist only pulled the rug from under the plot and the whole story fell flat on its face. So not a pretty ending to a story that began so promising!

Honestly, the only good things I can say about Demons' Moon is the original, strangely compelling way in which MacLeod was brought into the case and Robertson updated a locked room-trick that was famously used in a short story from the 1930s. Sadly, the problem of the locked room is not given any thought until Chapter XXIV when briefly a number of possibilities are considered and eliminated ("...and can't believe that a dummy was used either"). And they accidentally stumble across the solution in Chapter XXVI. You say about John Russell Fearn what you want, but he would have wrested a good pulp story out of this locked room-trick. A detective story that would have given the reader a hint of the possibilities of this new marvel.

So, yeah, Demons' Moon is a good example why some novels and writers are forgotten today, but, every once in a while, you have to read one to appreciate the truly talented and entertaining mystery writers all over again.

Death of a Frightened Editor (1959) by E. and M.A. Radford

Earlier this month, Dean Street Press revived three obscure, long out-of-print novels by a forgotten mystery writing couple, Edwin and Mona A. Radford, who collaborated on thirty-eight forensic, puzzle-driven detective novels that were originally published between 1944 and 1972 – most of them starring their series-detective, Dr. Harry Manson. A detective with the unique dual role of being "in charge of the Crime Laboratory at Scotland Yard" as "the chief of the Homicide Squad."

Back in February, in anticipation of these releases, I reviewed the Radford's nostalgic adieu to the detective story's Golden Age, Death and the Professor (1961). A standalone detective novel presented as a collection of short (locked room) stories, but the nostalgia came at the expense of the ingenuity and originality that can be found in their Dr. Manson novels (e.g. Who Killed Dick Whittington?, 1947). So my next stop was going to be, unsurprisingly, the reprint of one of the Radford's impossible crime novels, Death of a Frightened Editor (1959). I was not disappointed.

Death of a Frightened Editor is the eleventh entry in the Dr. Harry Manson series and revolves around an inexplicable poisoning aboard the first-class Pullman coach of the 5.20 Victoria to Brighton train.

Over a stretch of six months, a group of seven men and one woman traveled together in the same coach, occupying the same seats, five nights a week and the Pullman had slowly become "a traveling club" – where "conversation was mutual" and "drinks were stood round by round." A mixed company made up of a dreary general manager of an insurance office, Marriott Edgar. A wealthy and ponderous stockbroker, William Phillips. A charity worker and a prominent executive of the Unmarried Mothers' Association, Mrs. Freda Harrison. A manager of the share-buying department of a great bank, Alfred Starmer. A well-known crime reporter for a London morning paper, Edwin Crispin (no relation of Edmund Crispin). An eminent Harley Street surgeon, Thomas Betterton, and a jolly Cockney bookmaker, Honest Sam Mackie. The group is rounded out by the soon-to-be-dead Alexis Mortensen.

Mortensen is the editor and owner of Society, "a scurrilous rag-bag of gossip and pictures," whose extremely rigid body is found inside the locked lavatory of the coach. Fortunately, Dr. Manson was traveling in the next first-class coach and immediately takes charge of the case.

The cause of death is strychnine poisoning, but suicide is unlikely, because "there are other and less painful means," which is an assumption cemented by such clues as a stolen keyring and a small, crumpled piece of paper found on the lavatory floor – convincing Dr. Manson the editor had been poisoned. There's just one problem. Strychnine "acts within a quarter-of-an-hour" and Mortensen "had gone double that time without having taken anything in food or drink."

So murder appears to be a complete impossibility with the additional complication that it's "exceedingly hard to obtain." But the how is merely a single piece of the puzzle.

The whole police apparatus, headed by Dr. Manson, is set in motion to disentangle a procession of double and false-identities, play a game of three-card monte with private safes and bank deposits boxes and digging out a cache of long-buried secrets and potential motives – all tied to the reason why the victim had acted so frightened leading up to his death. There are more points that need consideration. Such as a free-for-all bottle of Bismuth that was passed around the coach, a string of unsolved burglaries and the mysterious woman who had been secretly living with the victim.

Slowly, but surely, piece by piece, the murder and its background are reconstructed until the full picture emerges. Only downside is that certain pieces of vital information arrived a little late to the story. Nonetheless, the step-by-step reconstruction, eliminating possibilities and testing theories makes Death of a Frightened Editor a pleasantly complex and engaging detective story with a well-done impossible poisoning.

Death of a Frightened Editor shows Edwin Radford was "an avid reader" of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke mysteries with its use of forensic science to find the murderer, but the solution to the impossible murder is pure John Dickson Carr. A clever, ultimately simplistic, twist on a poisoning-trick that I've only seen once before. And made for a great play on the Carrian blinkin' cussedness of things in general. I don't think many readers will have a problem with working out the motive or how that tied-in with the gossip columns in Society and the secreted content in the deposit boxes, but getting there made for some engaging and fun police work. And the murderer was a nice surprise. I didn't (quite) expect that person to have been the one who gave Mortensen the poison.

So, on a whole, Death of a Frightened Editor is a well-written detective novel with a tricky plot and a good impossible crime, but the clueing was a little shaky and this is probably why the Radford's didn't include a single challenge to the reader. Regardless, the murder-among-commuters plot makes Death of a Frightened Editor standout as an original take on the train-set mystery novel and that alone makes it worth a read.

By the way, Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) lists another impossible crime novel by the Radford's, Trunk Call to Murder (1968), in which safes are mysteriously looted. Just throwing that out there.