My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries II: Short Stories and Novellas

"The inside is a maze of doors. Anyone wishing to know it must dare to enter it."

- Grograman, the Many-Colored Death (The Never-Ending Story, 1983).

Well, I have not been granted an opportunity to (slow) burn through another detective novel and slapping together the second installment of locked room favorites may appear as a lame attempt to come across as productive, but I have noticed that people appreciate them and have been providing two bloggers with reading material (On the Threshold of Chaos and Lay on the Crime).

I have to mention, before taking them down from the top, that I'm not the biggest consumer of short stories and this list may lack the depth and obscure gems of my list of full-length locked room mysteries. 

Robert Arthur's "The Glass Bridge."

A well-known mystery novelist, Mark Hillyer, makes a female blackmailer disappear from his home and the lack of footprints in the snow show that she never left the premise, but the house is completely empty – and Hillyer's fragile condition makes it unlikely that he buried or chopped-up the body. A story that should be better known.

Robert Arthur's "The 51st Sealed Room."

A copious writer of locked room mysteries is found decapitated inside a sealed cabin, propped up in front of his type writer and his severed head overseeing the scene from atop a book case, but the many cameos from MWA members is what really makes this story – as most of the clues turn out to be nothing more than red herrings. Still a fun and solid read, though. 

William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr."

(see my previous post for a synopsis and opinion)

Fredric Brown's "The Spherical Ghoul."

The only thing that the narrator of this story is sure of, is that something slinked into a locked mortuary and gnawed off the face of one of the corpses, but what and how? A classic!

John Dickson Carr & Adrian Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Gold Hunter."

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson look into the deaths of a squire and a man who apparently died from a supernatural bedside visitation, because the presence of a human murder seems impossible.

John Dickson Carr & Adrian Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Sealed Room."

The previously untold story of Colonel Warburton's madness, who wounded his wife and then shot himself in his study, which was locked and bolted from the inside, but Holmes builds up an impressive case against a third party from such clues as cigar smoke and broken glass. 

John Dickson Carr's "The Dead Sleep Lightly."

Originally written as a radio play for Suspense, this is one of Carr's most eerie tales of a man haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife and the impossibility is not just a nagging wife from beyond the grave who refuses to accept that death parted them, but also a spectral voice that speaks the following chilling words over a dead telephone: "But the dead sleep lightly. And they can be lonely too." I recommend the version with Dr. Gideon Fell and was published in the collection The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983). 

G.K. Chesterton's "The Arrow from Heaven."

A millionaire is shot to death in a locked room with an arrow and the solution for this puzzle introduces one the authors classic, and often copied, gambits that toys with the readers presumptions – famously revisited in one of Agatha Christie's more well-known novels.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog."

A man is stabbed to death in a watched summerhouse and the wrong man is about to be collared, based on the testimony of a dog, but, of course, Father Brown is the only one who was really listening to what the dog had to say.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Miracle of Moon Cresent."

For one reason or another, this has always been one of my favorite Father Brown stories and always thought it was grossly underrated as a locked room mystery – which is that of the disappearance of a man from a watched room and was later found hanging in the gardens below. The solution is what you can expect from Chesterton.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Secret Garden."

This eerie tale of a dark, impenetrable garden and a beheading anticipates early Carr and seems to have been a model for the Japanese-style of plotting – especially of locked room mysteries.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man."

Only here because of its pedigree and to keep you from asking why I didn’t include it in this list.

G.K. Chesterton's "The Fairytale of Father Brown."

Plot-wise, not his best story, but what a fantastic premise! Father Brown assumes the role of armchair detective to explain how a man could've been shot in a country without guns.

 

Agatha Christie's "The Dream."

My favorite of the Poirot short stories, in which Christie perfectly knitted two impossibilities, a predictive dream and a murder in a watched room, in a fascinating pattern and with a satisfying solution.

Joseph Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones."

An excellent story of a diver who was stabbed while alone in a shipwreck. 

Joseph Commings' "Murder Under Glass."

Commings had one of the most versatile minds when it came to finding new variations and perspectives on the impossible problem: like putting a corpse on display in a glass room that's bolted on the inside and delivering the kind of solution you expect from such an original premise. 

Joseph Commings' "The X Street Murders."

His most celebrated short story and often tagged as his master piece, in which someone is shot in an office under constant observation and the smoking gun is delivered within minutes inside a sealed envelope. I have to re-read and review that collection one of these days.

Edmund Crispin's "The Name on the Window."

A dead man is found inside a house and the only footprints leading up to it belong to the unfortunate victim.

David Stuart Davies' "The Curzon Street Conundrum."

A shipping magnate is murdered at his Curzon Street mansion, again, inside a locked room, and the solution is incredible cheeky, but clever, and a trick I had never seen before – which is why I still remember it after all these years.

Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood."

Twenty years before the opening of this story, a young girl, named Vicky, disappeared from a house that was locked and bolted from the inside – only to reappear a week later with a story that she had been living with the fairies. When she returns to the house two decades later, she disappears again under similar circumstances, but this time it becomes a grim fairy-tale.

Carter Dickson's "The Silver Curtain."

A young man looses everything, except his ticket to return home, in a French casino and is approached by a shady characters who offers him a wad of money in exchange for a favor: he has to sneak a bottle of pills pass custom services. However, the entire plan collapses like a house of cards when he witnesses how an invisible assailant stabs his new employer in an empty cul-de-sac. I have to come to the conclusion that this is perhaps one of my favorite tricks for this kind of impossible crime. So simple and effective.

Lois H. Gresh & Robert Weinberg's "Death Rides the Elevator."

This story almost reads like a homage to Rex Stout and John Dickson Carr, in which a man is decapitated while riding alone in his private elevator and Penelope Peters, a female Nero Wolfe, and Sean O'Brien, her Archie Goodwin, look into the matter.

Note: I solved the locked room before reading the story. I'm that good. :)

Susanna Gregory's "Ice Elation."

A research team on the Antarctic Continent are about to drill their way to an ancient repository of water, sealed between the rocks and ice since the dawn of men, and who knows what evolution concocted and created in that natural "locked room" – which is a fear that is becoming reality when members of the team begin to disappear one after another under baffling circumstances. Scooby Doo for grown ups!

Paul Halter's "The Abominable Snowman."

A seemingly innocent snowman, dressed up as a soldier, is magically endowed with life and witnesses see him savaging a man with a rifle before resuming an innocent posture.

Paul Halter's "The Flower Girl."

This is perhaps my favorite Paul Halter story, in which Santa Claus may have murdered an extremely unpleasant, Scrooge-like man. Pure Gladys Mitchell, if she had written locked room mysteries.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Impossible Murder."

A man is murdered, while alone in his car, in the middle of a traffic jam and the explanation is wonderfully simple. Hoch's brain must have been a beehive of crime with all those plot ideas buzzing around. It's unbelievable he penned close to a 1000 stories in his lifetime and it's a shame he was not given a few more years to reach that magical number. It would've been more than deserving!

Edward D. Hoch's "The Long Way Down." 

Here's another example of that devilish brain of his: a man falls from a skyscraper and does not mess up the pavement until a few hours later. Realism be damned; more of this please!

Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery."

My first meeting with Edward Hoch and Dr. Hawthorne, who's specialized in taking away those feverish hallucinations of hobgoblins, invisible men and curses that can often be the side effect of an impossible crime. This time a fresh corpse is found in a coffin that lay undisturbed in the soil for decades. Hoch was much closer to Commings than to Carr, IMO.

H. Edward Hunsburger's "Eternally Yours."

This is one of my all-time favorite detective stories, in which an artist for hard covers uncovers the secrets of his new apartment. The previous tenant died behind locked doors after an apparent domestic accident, but his ghost keeps sending letters to a chess buddy from beyond the grave.

MacKinlay Kantor's "The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz."

The disappearance of a baby grand piano from a top-floor apartment presents a poor-man's amateur detective with an opportunity of a lifetime. The ending is simply perfect.

H.R.F. Keating's "The Legs That Walked."

A pair of severed legs from a murdered man vanish from a locked and guarded tent and it's up the downtrodden Ghote to find a logical explanation.

Note: Keating ripped-off Edmund Crispin for the solution, but also improved it and neatly tied it in with Indian culture and I hated that Crispin story anyway. So I can forgive him for taking something lousy and turning into something great, which this story is.

Ronald Knox's "Solved by Inspection."

The closest anyone ever came to writing a story that feels like it could've been penned by G.K. Chesterton, in which a man starved himself to death in his locked bedroom while he was surrounded with food. Knox's series detective, Miles Bredon, proves that the man was murdered under extremely cruel circumstances.

William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus."

(see my previous post for a synopsis and opinion)

Keith McCarthy's "The Invisible Gunman."

A master clock maker is shot to death in his shop and the murderer must have been his brother, who had a shop of his own across the street and he hated his brother, but he had a cast-iron alibi for the time of the murder. A story that fits together like the innards of a Swiss watch and has a nifty twist on an otherwise hackneyed plot-device.

Hugh Pentecost's "The Day the Children Vanished."

A small town is thrown into a panic when a bus full of children drive into a dugway and failed to show up on the other end. It's just a very satisfying mystery, but also a very well told story with a smash ending and a great detective.

Arthur Porges' "No Killer Has Wings."

The body of a man is found on a small beach and the only footprints on the beach are those of the victim and his dog. Porges provides this problem with one of the best solutions for the no-footprints tricks. Absolutely brilliant!

Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Wife Killer."

A man under grave suspicion of having buried his previous wives prematurely electrocutes his latest wife, inside a bolted bathroom, without any electric appliances in the room and her husband was miles away at the time of her death. One of those rare, but successful, inverted mysteries in which the impossible situation replaces the whodunit aspect.

Bill Pronzini's "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle."

One of the most complex short stories in this particular sub-genre, in which a convicted murderer disappears from a locked and guarded execution shack less than a minute after he was dropped through its roof with a stiff rope around his neck. Improbably? Yes, but also absolutely awesome.

Bill Pronzini's "Booktaker."

Nameless takes on an undercover assignment at a bookstore where a wraithlike thief has been smuggling valuable maps past a perfect operating security system. The solution is uncomplicated, workable and first class.

Bill Pronzini's "Medium Rare."

Arguably the best story in this collection, in which Quincannon and Carpenter, masquerading as the fictitious Mr. and Mrs. John Quinn, set-out to expose professor Vargas, head of the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses, as a fraudulent medium – who made an art out of financially draining the grieving. The professor puts on a fantastic spook show in his locked and darkened séance room, where tables move on their own accord and luminous faces from the spirit world take a peek at our plain of existence, but then the Grim Reaper puts in an appearance – and Vargas is stabbed while everyone was holding hands and the locked door prevented any outsider from coming in!

I have a sneaking suspicion that this tale was penned as a tribute to John Dickson Carr. The story has an atmospheric setting and a premise that revolves around apparently supernatural occurrences and an impossible stabbing, but there were also a few laugh-out-loud moments – as Carpenter and Quincannon were channeling the spirit of Sir Henry Merrivale when it was their turn to ask the spirits questions! Full marks for this story!

Bill Pronzini's "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?"

Nameless is laboring under the naïve assumption that he's earning an easy fee, when he agrees to fill-in as a temporary night watchman for an importing company. The facility he has to guard already resembles an impenetrable fortress, where he can kick back with a pulp magazine most of the time, but it takes more than locks and shuttered windows to stop the detective curse – and before long he has to find an explanation as to how a body could be introduced into a building that is the equal to a sealed box. The solution to the reversed locked room problem is as simple as it's clever as well as the identity and motive of the murderer. Great title, by the way!

Ellery Queen's “The Lamp of God.” 

The miracle problem was not a specialty of Ellery Queen, but when they dabbled into it it was nearly always memorable, if not always successful. A locked room that turned inside out, a train that disappears between two stations or, in this case, an entire house.

Edogawa Rampo's "The Stalker in the Attic."

One of those rare, but successful, inverted locked room mysteries from the Japanese father of the detective story and perhaps the most interesting mystery from his hand that has thus far appeared in the English language. 

Clayton Rawson's "From Another World."

This story was the result of a sporting challenge between Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr, in which they competed against one another to see who could come up with the best possible solution to the following premise: a murder has taken place in a room that's not only locked from the inside, but also completely sealed shut with tape! It's one of Rawson's finest tales and I think it won him this little wager with the grandmaster himself.

You can find John Dickson Carr's answer to this challenge in He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) – published under the byline Carter Dickson.

Craig Rice's "One More Clue."

A straight forward locked room mystery from the Queen of Screwball Comedy with an inventive and original solution.

John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand."

An award-winning short story that landed the author a contract to pen the locked room classic Black Aura (1974), but in this story his detective, Thackeray Phin, is confronted with a strangulation in a locked and windowless apartment and consults the Dr. Fell and Father Brown stories for a solution.

Hal White's "Murder at An Island Mansion."

The author strings together no less than three murders of the no-footprints variety and they appear to be work of a menacing ghost. Not exactly of the same caliber as Carr or Talbot, atmosphere or plot-wise, but therefore not any less enjoyable. Hopefully, White has not retired from this field. We need neo-orthodox writers like him! 

Hal White's "Murder on a Caribbean Cruise."

Reverend Dean takes a cruise to relax and reflex on his life, but than someone is murdered and the scene of the crime is a locked cabin – turning this pleasure cruise in a regular Busman's Holiday for the modern-day Father Brown.

"Murder on a Carribbean Cruise" would’ve been a great alternative title for this story. Ok. I deserve to be punched in the face for that pun.

Cornell Woolrich's "The Room With Something Wrong."

From all the Rooms-That-Kill stories I have read, this one ranks at the very top and concerns a hotel room with a will of its own and decides when guests have overstayed their welcome by hurdling them out of the window in the dead of night.

James Yaffe's "The Problem of the Emperor's Mushroom."

Paul Dawn, the only member of the Homicide Squad's Department of Impossible Crimes, listens to Professor Bottle's historical account of the murder of the Roman Emperor Claudius – and the impossible angle to his demise. A poison was administered in his favorite dish of mushrooms that didn't affect the Emperor's food-taster, but threw him in a violent convulsion. I reveled at the double layered structure of the story, that runs for only 14 pages, and James Yaffe, who was only sixteen at the time he wrote it, should be commended for it. A thoroughly enjoyable story!

Israel Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery."

One of the corner stones of the locked room genre and one of the first stories that rose above the banality of hidden passages, venomous creatures and unknown poisons. Unfortunately, the solution has been copied to death, but that should never reflect back on this story. It may also have introduced the multiple solution ploy that is usually associated Anthony Berkeley and Ellery Queen. 

Sealed Rooms and Ghoulish Laughter: Tributes to John Dickson Carr

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

The man who explained miracles...

After perusing the article "C is for... John Dickson Carr," an unabashed piece of hero worship from fellow blogger Sergio, a germ of an idea began to fester and grow in my mind, but with it came a knock on the door and found a problem on my doorstep. The instrument I exert to trumpet his praise broke after beating a dead horse with it and more than enough people are already of the opinion that I should get a room for me and the ghost of John Dickson Carr. So I decided to adjust my focus for this post and take a look at some of the stories that he inspired others to write.

Well, I guess I have to start with the late William Brittain, a novelist and school teacher, who scattered the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine with an abundance of short stories – including "The Man Who Read" series. It's a series of stand-alone mysteries centering on readers of detective fiction that are put in a position where they have to apply the knowledge culled from the stories of their favorite mystery writer to solve a problem of their own... or to create one.

William Brittain (1930-2011)

"The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" is a young orphan, named Edgar Gault, who discovered the undisputed master of the locked room mystery at the impressionable age of fourteen, imbuing him with the conviction that, one day, he will bring his stories to life – preferably with his unpleasant uncle as the victim. The trick of the locked door is almost as good as the final sentence of the story, which is a real kicker, and it's just overall an amusing and a very rich story. It places the inverted mystery in the convinces of the locked room and even gives you, somewhat, of a character study of the protagonist, but, above all, it's just fun story to read. I wish the entire series, all ten of them, were gathered in one easily accessible volume. Messrs Crippen and Landru, are you taking notes? Until then, you can find this story in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998).

Norma Schier was another mystery writer who had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek when she began to pen a series of short stories for The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, in which she harlequinade her most famous predecessors – from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh to Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr. Most of her stories perfectly captured the heart and soul of the originals and have the added bonus of being anagram puzzles. You can figure out whodunit and who's being spoofed by simply decoding the anagrams.

"Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (published under the byline Handon C. Jorricks) was her nod to John Dickson Carr, which takes place in a reputable restaurant where it's not the custom to spike a glass of champagne with poison and then pass it around, but that's exactly what happened. Enter Sir Marvin Rhyerlee! Who's miffed that he can't enjoy a quiet lunch without someone dying under impossible circumstances. Schier admitted that her little pastiche does little justice to Carr's plotting technique and knack for coming up with impossible situations, but the attempt that was made here is definitely being appreciated. You can find this story in the collection The Anagram Detectives (1979).

Alex Atkinson wrote another parody, "Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains," which is more a spoof on Carr's detectives than his plotting technique and someone on the JDCarr forum noted that the more Carr you've read the more you'll appreciate it. I agree. It's a brief, but fun, distraction and can be read in the anthology Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990). 

Another humorous excerpt, lampooning Dr. Gideon Fell, comes from the word processor of one of our very own, Barry Ergang, who was inspired to write "Dr. Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" after a comment from Nick Fuller berating the atrocity that was The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries – a TV series that butchered a number of Gladys Mitchell's most enjoyable novels. Here is Nick's full-comment that can double as a synopsis for Barry's story: "It is like adapting Carr, and making Dr. Fell a cantankerous hard-drinking medico on the sleazy streets of London's East End who deals with professional crime of the hard-boiled variety and with an awful number of demented blondes, without an impossible crime in sight." The story can still be read by clicking here (GAD archive).

William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" was written in a more serious and darker vein, when the author was only 18-years-old, and almost reads like a love letter to John Dickson Carr and the locked room mystery. Krohn's introduction to the genre came a few years previously, when he read The Three Coffins (1935) and the Cult of Carr welcomed another member in their midst. The story itself dribs with Carrian influences, involving the stabbing of a magician in closed and moving elevator, with a solution that does not rely on gizmos like a certain other story I could mention – and I can only imagine that Carr himself must have beamed with pride after finishing the story (it was published during his lifetime). Krohn penned a second story for the EQMM, but it was rejected as too complex and eventually moved away from detective fiction to become a film critic and expert on Alfred Hitchcock. I wonder if a copy of that story survived. Anyway, as Darrell from The Study Lamp remarked, the story has been deservedly reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2007).

By the same token, I should also mention Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987), whose Dr. Alan Twist is a "thinly" disguised version of Dr. Gideon Fell, and Jean-Paul Török's The Riddle of Monte Verita (2007), but I already discussed them in depth on this blog. However, Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1997) should be mentioned, even if it's more of a general wink at the genre than one specifically meant for Carr. The bloodhounds of the title are a group of fanatical mystery fans, ranging from locked room enthusiasts to hardboiled fanatics, who meet once a week to discuss detective stories – until one of them is murdered aboard a locked houseboat. A very clever, fun and eerily recognizable book that should belong on the shelves of everyone who's permanently under the weather with the sleuth flu. It's about us!

I probably missed a few and could probably find more, but I think this was more than enough hero worship for this Sunday. My next sermon will be on how Carr has fed our hungry brains and banished mediocrity from our bookshelves. Thank you Carr for unlocking doors and forgiving our sins, like you did with the murderers in so many of your books, past, present and future. In name of the Father (Edgar Allan Poe), the Son (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the Holy Spirit (G.K. Chesterton). Amen.  

Still Life

"When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor."

- E.C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case, 1913).

Max Murray (1901-1956) was an Australian mystery novelist, who began as a bush boy

and did odd jobs in American lumber camps and on freight yards, before he began to work his way up in the world of journalism – holding positions as a foreign correspondent for News Chronicle and during WWII he was the writer/editor of Radio Newsreel for the BBC. When the war ended, Marruy devoted most of his time to writing fiction and cranked out a dozen detective novels, all but one of them hoisted in a uniform title, but they have individual personalities as they lacked a series detective. As Xavier Lechard remarked on the GADgroup last week in reference to Pat McGerr, "not having a series character may often be a good thing artistically but it never does wonders in terms of sales and recognition," which is why Murray is referred to nowadays as Max Who.

The Sunshine Corpse (1954) is Murray's eight stand-alone mystery and opens with Arnold Emeny, a traveling marine biologist, wandering into a fruit stall in Florida, the Sunshine State, to buy a oranges – only to find a corpse sprawled in a chair, amidst souvenirs and fruit, and a man, the artist Bignal Hycer, busy sketching the body. This is probably the best part of the book, soaked in juicy, imaginary scenes and touches of humor (e.g. Arnold's staring match with the corpse, which he lost). 

Lattimer Kell was the name that went with the body and was regarded as an outsider, who did very little to make himself agreeable or blend in with the community. On the contrary, as even his son, Bill, and the woman he wishes to marry, Lili, turn out to be in possession of some very good motives, but then again, everyone seems to have wanted him dead. Like Sarah Jo Chansey and her brother, John, two members of one of the regions oldest family and the preacher Sherman Jones, whose rifle was used to shoot Kell, and his two charges: two young boys named Palmer and Willie.

Normally, I wince when children are introduced into a mystery, because, most of the time, they are portrayed as either miniature adults or as a character from Children of the Corn (i.e. unhinged), which, luckily, was not the case here and Murray appears to have had the same knack as Gladys Mitchell when it came to characterizing children – making it less of trial when they regularly appeared after the sheriff began printing wanted bills with Sherman's face on it. The direct result of a second murder of one of the locals, who was found floating face-up and staring at the sun.

Sherman's escape from town shows that Murray could plot, but this never carried over into the solution, which was a bit muddled and a lot of things were withhold from the reader (and the clues were already thin on the ground to begin with). Signs that a new era was dawning and characterization was beginning to take president over plotting. So I can't really recommend The Sunshine Corpse to Golden Age aficionados, unless they want something different for a change. But don't expect too much from it as a proper detective story.

A year or two ago, I read The Neat Little Corpse (1951) and that one I can recommend, even if it's not exactly a paradigm of Golden Age plotting either, however, it's a cracking good yarn involving a sunken pirate ship, off the coast of Jamaica, stuffed with treasure, local superstition and dark secrets as unfathomable as the depths of the sea itself. I really enjoyed it and was tempted to put it in my list of favorite mysteries, but it just wasn't good enough no matter how enjoyable the story itself actually was. But decide for yourself if you ever happen to stumble across a copy. 

Well, I hope this one was obscure enough.

Max Murray bibliography:

The Voice of the Corpse (1948)

The King and the Corpse (1949)

No Duty on a Corpse (1950; a.k.a. The Queen and the Corpse)

The Neat Little Corpse (1951)

The Right Honourable Corpse (1952)

Good Luck to the Corpse (1953)

The Doctor and the Corpse (1953)

The Sunshine Corpse (1954)

Royal Bed for a Corpse (1955)

Breakfast with a Corpse (1956; A Corpse for Breakfast)

Twilight at Dawn (1957)

Wait for a Corpse (1957)

Until Death Tore Them Apart

"Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth."

- Hercule Poirot (Death on the Nile, 1937)

The primary focus of this blog is to judge mysteries of a particular vintage, uncovered from the dust-covered shelves of the endangered, second-hand bookstores or plucked from the catalogue of an online book dealer, occasionally venturing out of the obscure to discuss one of the modern guises of the traditional detective story, but, notably, I have mostly left the familiar brand names alone. This has a practical reason: I already covered most of them before I began blogging, from G.K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle and Ellery Queen to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Edmund Crispin, forcing this Sommelier of Crime to descend into the dark and mouldy cellar of the genre to hunt among the cobwebs and dust bunnies for more, but after patching up my list of favorites I wanted to revisit some of these old favorite – already resulting in a review of a novel that I'm particular fond of. It also dawned on me that it had been ages since I read Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937), or any story from her hand for that matter, which is an oversight that needed to be corrected ASAP.

Death on the Nile has a plot as classic and well-known as two other of Christie's most famous novels, The Murder on the Orient (1934) and And Then There Were None (1939), and writing a synopsis is almost superfluous, but hey, it would be a very short review otherwise – so here we go anyway. 

Death on the Nile is, for me, the quintessential Agatha Christie novel and her most successful treatment of The Internal Triangle, which in turn produced a set of her best and most convincingly drawn characters. The rich and glamorous Linnet Ridgeway, the girl who had everything and wanted Simon Doyle, the man of her friend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, as well and snatches him away from her like Arsène Lupin relieves a cantankerous Duchess of her pearl necklace. Betrayed and broken-hearted, the hot-blooded Jacqueline begins to stalk the newly wed couple during their honeymoon in a particular nasty, but effective, way, eventually cumulating in a shooting incident in the saloon of the S.S. Karnak – gliding over the waters of the ancient Nile.

During a heated and emotional scene, Jacqueline whipped out a small pistol and bored a bullet through Simon’s leg bone, practically leaving him an invalid, after which she immediately wanted to kill herself and needed to be sedated with a nurse standing guard over here the entire night. However, when everything began to quiet down, someone seized the moment and purloined to gun, sneaked into Linnet's cabin and squeezed the trigger with the muzzle pressed almost against her head. With Simon and Jacqueline scratched off as suspects, Poirot and Colonel Race have to look among the cast of gargoyles that make up the remainder of the passengers for an assassin and they are remembered of a remark from Linnet how she was surrounded by enemies. As Milward Kennedy remarked, "a peach of a case for Poirot." 

Having not touched any of Christie's books for several years, it had slipped my mind how good she actually was and how the title of the Queen of Crime is no exaggeration in any way – even after all these decades and with the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) looming at the horizon. It also surprised me how still remembering the solution enhanced my enjoyment of the book instead of deterring it. I simply marveled at recognizing all the carefully planted clues, both physical and psychological ones, and it's almost inconceivable that anyone could miss them when you know how obvious they actually are, but that's the craft of the mystery novelist for you – and Christie was at the very top of the game. I always thought of Death on the Nile as one of the grand whodunits, but I think I appreciate it now more than I did back then when I read it for the very first time. There's also something else I appreciated, but I can't tell without running the risk of giving too much away to the clever and observant reader.

All in all, Death on the Nile comes fairly close to being a perfect detective story, with a plot and characters that balance each other out to a tee, and may very well be one of the Seven Wonders of the Golden Age.

Yes, I will (probably) dust-off one of the Christie's forgotten, attention-starved contemporaries for my next post. Maybe.  

"Shine on this life that's burnin' out"

Kurt: "You gotta learn not to awaken the dragon, alright."

Mondo: "That's when I'll be breathing fire."

- Generation X: The Movie (1996)

The last time I left The Nameless Detective, he was coming from one of the worst weeks in his life. Professionally, he had to deal with a very dissatisfied and mentally unstable client, who accused him of bungling up a case she had given him, and begins a media campaign to get his private investigators license revoked – as well as picking the lock of three baffling and, to all appearances, impossible crimes. A backlash of these problems is felt in his personal life when his relationship with Kerry Wade begins to unravel and things are about to get worse. Much, much worse.

Dragonfire (1982) takes place not long after the events in Scattershot (1982) and Nameless is no longer a private investigator or in a relationship, which is something his friend Lieutenant Eberhardt can sympathize with. His wife has walked out on him. So the sad dopes sit in the backyard, gulping down beers and throwing strips of meat on the barbecue, feeling miserable when the doorbell rang. On the doorstep they find an Asian-looking man who immediately opens fire: sending Eberhardt into a deep coma and Nameless to the hospital with a metal slug in his arm, but within a week he's back on the street – as pissed off as a fire breathing dragon with the morning blues.

The two books preceding this one, Hoodwink (1981) and Scattershot, were unapologetically classical in tone, stringing together no less than five locked room mysteries in total, while Dragonfire is outspokenly hardboiled. But do not assume that, after being released from the hospital, that Nameless goes full Mike Hammer on the inhabitants of Chinatown. It's hardboiled in the way that it leads you away from the safe tourist strip of that neighborhood to a seamier part of town, filled with gambling holes and gang members, where prying strangers aren't always the recipient of Chinese hospitality. Oh, and in case anyone is getting the wrong idea here, Dragonfire is not an updated Yellow Peril story. On the contrary, Pronzini depicts the Chinese characters in this book respectfully, honest, but respectfully and without a trace of racism.

Anyhow, in defiance of another attempt on his life, and Eberhardt still fighting for his, Nameless deals with the problems in front of him in a surprisingly rational manner – acting as a detective should by following up leads and connecting the spaces between the dots. The ending and the character of the murderer were also very well handled and probably my favorite part of the book. The plot was a bit simpler than in the previous books, mentioned here above, but that it had a plot to begin with, when it could have easily been a full-out thriller filled with gun smoke and the dull cracking of shattered bones, shows why I am rarely disappointed when I pull a Nameless novel from my shelves. 

It's also why I have been rather summary in my description of this book. A lot more happens as Nameless gauges for the truth and the theme's in it (making choices and how you are sometimes forced to be able to differentiate between bad and Bad) makes for a good read, if you're familiar with the characters, and therefore I think that Dragonfire is unable to disappoint any true fan of this series.

Last but not least: Pronzini and Muller's The Bughouse Affair will be released on January 9, 2013.

*rubs hands in gleeful anticipation*

All the books I reviewd by Bill Pronzini: 
 

Twospot (1978; with Collin Wilcox)

Hoodwink (1981)
Scattershot (1982) 

Dragonfire (1982)
Casefile (1983)
Double (1984; with Marcia Muller)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)
Carpenter and Quincannon (1998) - an addendum

Nightcrawlers (2005)

Savages (2006) - co-reviewed with Patrick

Life of the Party

"For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..."

- Agatha Christie's After the Funeral (1953)

On February 19, 2011, I published a summary review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946) on this blog. It was the first serious review I wrote and have been babbling incessantly on here ever since. So after I was done remodeling and re-branding this place, I thought it would be a nice, symbolic touch to return to this criminally neglected mystery writer and dug one of her books out of my pile of unread books – and she did not disappoint! Without further ado, here’s the first new review on this new and (hopefully) improved blog:

"Oh my, Rocky has a few screws loose!"

Follow As the Night (1951; also published as Your Loving Victim) plunges straight into the story with its prologue, which, retrospectively, could also function as an epilogue – depicting the shape of a human silhouette falling from a balcony clinging to the exterior of one of the expensive, top-floor penthouse suits. The tenant is one Lawrence "Larry" Rock, a syndicated newspaper columnist and writer, who clawed a way from his roots, extending all the way down to the lowest strata of society, up to the nectar-filled blossoms of the upper class. But one of the women in his life has the power to undo all of his hard work and that put him in the mood for a killer party.

A poorly looked after, raggedly balcony provides Rock with a cover for murder and summons his four tormentors, women he used to get on in life, to come over for a party and this assemblage include his first and second wives, the red-head Shannon Moore and the gorgeous Claire Forrest, as well as his domineering mistress, the illustrator Maggie Lang, and his young and pregnant mistress Dee Inglesby – who also happens to be the daughter of his boss. There is, however, one snag: the reader is kept in the dark on whom of these four women is the intended victim until the final chapter, or, if you're observant enough, figure it out before you arrive there.

The pages between the prologue and solution are taken up, for the most part anyway, with flashbacks and memories that tell the story of Larry Rock and the four who were a part of an important period of that life – showing that McGerr's grasp on characterization had not weakened. However, Follow As the Night is not just another variation on her "who-will-be-done-in" gambit, which was her favorite ploy, but mixes a bit of suspense and turns this in a bit of a cat-and-mouse game when his ex-wife, Shannon, stumbles to his plans and stands guard over the other three women.

It's almost like a bizarre, inverted, game of clue, in which you possess the winning combination of cards that spell out the solution ("It was Larry Red Rock, on the balcony, with a loose guard rail...") without getting any nearer to the conclusion. You really have to reason from the given information to find that final piece of the puzzle before it's being given to you in the final chapter, which is what keeps her name ascending on my list of favorites. McGerr's take on the genre made the books I read not only a pleasure for a classicist like me, who appreciate a clever plot and fair-play clueing, but also to a contemporary audience whose preference goes to crime novels and thrillers.

Follow As the Night would also lend itself perfectly for a television drama. You could even set the story in modern times, and it would still work. That is, if such an adaptation would stay true to its source material, but that should go without saying. One last interesting thing I noticed about this book is that it sort of borrowed the backdrops of the previous two books I read. Pick Your Victim took place on the work floor, while The Seven Deadly Sisters (1948) was strictly a domestic affair. Follow As the Night combines the two as the four women in this book came into Rock's life through his work at the newspaper. 

But to sum it all up: Pat McGerr, simply the best at what she did!

Having a Wonderful Crime

"And time began seriously to pass."

- Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987)

I've always considered the phrase "beach-chair literature" to be a misnomer, not only because it insinuates that a book has no value whatsoever, except to kill a few insipid hours on a beach or in a garden during a warm summer day, but also because it has been used way too much as a curse word to denote genre fiction – i.e. the literary equivalent of schoolyard name calling (Eew! detective, science-fiction and romance novels have icky cooties!). However, I have to admit that the mystery genre, as a whole, does resemble a holiday resort, of sorts, where you can participate in the Grandest Game in the World. It's an attraction more alluring than the Lorelei and drew such visitors as the children's book author A.A. Milne, the humorist Damon Runyon and the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor to its shores and that last name happens to be subject of today's talk.

MacKinlay Kantor was a prolific novelist, screenwriter and journalist whose 1955 historical novel, Andersonville, set at a Confederate prison camp, landed him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize the following year, but his prose also smattered the pages of pulp magazines (Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, etc.) and "slicks" like Collier's – and two fist full of criminally inclined stories, originally published during the late 1920s and 30s, were collected thirty years later in a volume garnished with the punning title It's About Crime (1960). A book title Craig Rice would've approved.

It should be noted, however, that this collection of short stories wasn't my first run-in with Kantor. The anthology Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982), edited by SF-legend Isaac Asimov, collected one of his stories, "The Light at Three 'O Clock," which turned out to be one of only two stories in that collection really worth reading. Robert Adey described it as “pure John Dickson Carr” and not entirely without reason! The opening of the story, concerning the spook phone calls from a locked apartment received by a switchboard operator, does suggest Carrian influences, but the solution belonged on the pages of a detective story from a previous era. Still, it was a marvelous read and when I read that a few of his stories were collected, including several focusing on impossible crimes, I simply had to have it sooner or later – and the latter happened to be last week.

Before I take the stories down from the top, I have to point out something that I noticed while reading these morsels of crime: Kantor was a mystery writer who was closer to the hardboiled school than to the ratiocinative detective stories and they're not always paradigms of fair-play, either. On the other hand, the quality of the writing is excellent and the text scattered with fascinating ideas or imaginative scenes.

Rogues' Gallery

A short-short story, in which a bum, who's also a gifted sand sculptor, has a run-in with a gang while working on a depiction of the crucifixion. The gang quickly takes care of the poor man, but they forget that silent witnesses often have more to tell to the police than any stool pigeon, which, in this case, happened to be the sand sculpture itself. A very competent crime story with an original dying message. 

Nobody Saw Him Fall

A Christmas tale that almost put Santa Claus behind bars. Well, not exactly like that, but the janitor of the Farmers National Bank, who plays Santa each year, was looking at the possibility of a long term prison sentence (or worse) when someone murdered his boss, Lewis Hermans, and the only person who could've done it and carried off the murder weapon was him! Not exactly fair play, but the solution really makes this a holiday themed mystery.

The Shadow Points

One of those "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories, in which a poor landscaper shoots one of the burglars who looted his employers safe and keeps the stolen goods for himself. It's a fun and amusing read, but you can see the twist coming from a mile away when he buries part of the stolen goods, marking the spot with the stand of the shadow from the flagpole at a specific time and date, and then runs for foreign soil – before he returns a decade later.

Robert Arthur wrote a similar, but much better, story, entitled "Mr. Manning's Money Tree," collected in Mystery and More Mystery (1966).

Sparrow Cop

A rookie policeman wants to prove himself to his elder brother, who's a decorated policeman himself, and does so in a shoot-out with a bunch of gangsters. It's not a bad story, but nor is it particular good or memorable.

The Grave Grass Quivers

One of the two stand-out stories of this collection, in which a small-town doctor, comfortably leaning against his pension, tells his successor of his father and brother – both of whom disappeared over 60 years ago. It's one of those unsolved mysteries from which rumors and ghost stories can be tapped for generations on end, but recent events in town eventually dredged up the truth and this provided a memorable scene as well as a satisfying conclusion.

The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz

Maxwell Grame is a poor-man's Sherlock Holmes, specialized in tracing lost pets and determining the authorship of anonymous letters, but then he's finally presented with a case worth his mettle: a baby grand piano is whisked away under impossible circumstances from a second floor apartment. I immediately figured out the method, but that did nothing to diminish the fun and the ending was simply perfect!

Something Like Salmon

A very, very weak entry in this collection, in which the owner of a lunch shop and sole witness of a bloody bank robbery helps the police in identifying one of them based on how this person behaved when he was in his shop prior to the robbery – which I didn't buy for a moment. Nobody behaves like that, especially if you're planning to rob the bank opposite of the shop and trying to keep a low profile. The salmon part, OK, but the numbers part? Get out of here!

Blue-Jay Takes the Trail

The proceeds of a charity event, a small-town fair, are, once again, violently taken by a bunch of desperados and they are taken care of by the man who ran a gaming stand – drawing on his past as a conman and carny to take care of these gangsters. Not bad for a crime story.

The Light at Three 'O Clock

A good story that begins as a nicely done, atmospheric ghost story when a switchboard operator begins to receive midnight calls from an empty and locked apartment from which the tenant disappeared the day before – presumed dead. The only weak spot is a routine solution you expect from a detective story written before the 1920s, but if you can banish the locked room ploy from your mind, it's an excellent read from start to finish.

Wolf! Wolf!

A string of threatening letters, signed by "Wolf," announcing the impending death of a prominent citizen, sows confusion with the local police – until they receive an unsigned letter and the person mentioned in it is shot to death in his library. The murderer appeares to have been standing on the balcony, but the rust and soot of years argued against this theory and left the police with a bone-fide locked room mystery. Again, it lacks fair play clueing, but it has Kantor's cleverest solution for an impossible situation. So a victory for Kantor on technical points?

The Watchman

A short-short story, in which the passing of time wreaks havoc on an ex-convict plans of revenge. Meh. I would've ended this collection with one of the two previous stories.

All in all, not a bad collection of stories from someone who was not seen as a mystery writer, but than again, that may also be biggest weakness for some of these stories – as they clearly lacked the experienced hand of a Carr or Queen. But, as I noted above, the excellent and often imaginative writing compensates a lot of their shortcomings.   

On a final note, I extended my list of favorite mysteries from 100 to 150. :P