Fool's Gold

"I never deny the possibilities of any new scientific discovery. The X-rays, and the transmutation of elements were incredible enough when they first came to light, though they're commonplaces today."

- Magnum (Max Rittenberg's "The Mystery of the Vanishing Gold," collected in The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant, 2016)

Over the past couple of months, I had a pretty good run when it came to disinterring some excellent, long-lost, detective novels, captivating reads and a few rewarding oddities. Even the poorer titles tended to be readable yarns. You've to go back to early October for the last monumental dud that passed through my hands, but nothing truly bad, or crushingly disappointing, had come my way since then – until now. And this disappointment came at the hands of my favorite second-stringer, John Russell Fearn. Oh, the betrayal!

Fearn's Robbery Without Violence (1957) is a novella, originally published in the December 14, 1957, issue of the Toronto Star Weekly and the 2012 reprint edition has a short story, titled "Death at the Observatory," tacked on at the end. The short story was first published in Modern Wonder, in 1938, which was later expanded by Fearn into a full-length science-fiction mystery, The Lonely Astronomer (1954), but more on that later.

Robbery Without Violence begins promising enough with the arrival of "no less than £50,000,000 worth of yellow metal," in one consignment, at Mackingley's Bank. A lump-sum of gold representing practically "the entire wealth of a certain small foreign state" and it "produced headaches in all directions."

The gold is stacked ceiling-high in an empty "strong vault" with an impregnable, time-locked door, set to open once every twenty-four hours, which is when the head cashier, Clive Burton, inspects the gold. After which the door is time-locked for another twenty-four hour period. Only two men knew the combination of the time-lock, Burton and Joseph Mackingley, who is the managing director of the bank. Finally, the impenetrable strong room is located in the basement of the guarded bank building and the entrance is surveillanced by an early 1950s version of closed-circuit TV cameras.

As to be expected from a prolific science-fiction writer, Fearn was well aware of this developing technology in the 1950s and used it accordingly. On a historical side-note, CCTV is one of the technological inheritances of World War II and the first time it was used was in Germany, 1942, to monitor the launch of V-2 rockets.

Anyway, the gold is as safe from thieves as if it been stored on the surface of the moon, but, when the vault door is opened again, Burton is greeted by blank, steel-enforced walls. The strong room had been emptied out! Every single brick of gold had vanished into thin air! Chief Inspector Hargraves of Scotland Yard is completely flummoxed and he decided to call in an expert specialized in these seemingly impossible conundrums. 

 

Sawley Garson is "an ex-government scientist" and "something of a nut," who also appears in the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005), but he's basically a blander and flatter incarnation of a similar series-character, Dr. Hiram Carruthers – whose recorded cases include Vision Sinister (1954) and The Silvered Cage (1955). Garson immediately notices the importance of the watchman's radio, which could not be listened on the night of the theft on account of an (electrical) interference. However, this is also the point where the wheels are starting to come off the story.

I should have expected what was coming, because the plot had been described as having "a distinctly science fictional flavour," but assumed the locked room theft would turn out to be along the lines of the scientific impossibilities as imagined by Max Rittenberg, Vincent Cornier and Arthur Porges. Fearn himself wrote a number of mysteries that belong in that scientific category, but this was, indeed, purely science fictional. And a complete and utter cheat in this normal, everyday setting.

The science-fiction trick also struck me as lazy hackwork. I'm not an expert when it comes to science-fiction tropes, but I would not be surprised if science-fiction readers look upon this aspect of the plot in the same way as I look at detective stories with secret passages, unknown poisons or surprise twins.

John Russell Fearn

Fearn might as well have said that the universe burped inside that sealed vault and all of the gold had slipped into a black hole or something. It would have been more original than what we got.

What definitively sank the story is the unpardonable crime of being as dull and boring as an essay on gravel extraction. Once the plot begins to edge towards science-fiction territory, there was nothing left to hold my interest. The impossibility was being explained away by the magic of science-fiction science and the brains behind the theft was obvious from the start. Embarrassingly, this character morphs into a bad comic book-style villain ("I can—and will—give you the earth in time") with a super weapon that could very well have placed the world in the palm of his hand.

So I was glad this was only a novella, because I probably would have been able to finish it had it been a full-length novel. And arriving at that final page felt like a merciful shot of Novocaine to my brain. Sweet release at last! So, no, I did not enjoy reading Robbery Without Violence and regret I picked this one over Within That Room (1946), which is one of Fearn's legitimate locked room mystery novellas. Oh, well. Maybe next time.

Finally, there's the short story, "Death at the Observatory," which is actually closer to the scientific (locked room) mysteries by the previously mentioned Rittenberg, Cornier and Porges, but the explanation still flirts heavily with the science-fiction genre. However, it is actually an original explanation.

The story takes place at the new Richmond Observatory where the chief of the astronomical staff, Dr. James Crayson, is found "sprawled below the platform of the mighty new 400-inch reflector" with a fatal head wound. Dr. Crayson's assistant, Charles Bradmore, stands over him with a metal bar in his hands and is subsequently arrested, but claims to be absolutely innocent of any wrong doing. Only person who takes his word for it is his best friend, Dick Warland, who consults a well-known scientist, named Scott Marlo, with "an enviable reputation for solving mysteries through scientific deductions." By the way, Marlo is cast from the exactly same mold as Dr. Carruthers and Garson.

Warland is convinced that "nothing but a scientific cause could have killed Crayson" and Marlo has a pretty good idea where to find the source of this scientific cause, but I had already read The Lonely Astronomer. So the explanation hardly came as a surprise. However, it was a nice attempt at combining the formal detective story with a science-fiction plot and its sole weakness is the lack of fair play. I don't think you can really arrive at the same conclusion as Marlo, but regardless, it was a nice little yarn that somewhat (but not much) made up for its predecessor.

All things considered, Robbery Without Violence was an uncharacteristically poor work by Fearn. Even by the standards of a pulpy second-stringer and genuinely wished there were some redeemable qualities about the story. But after the intriguing opening, the story and plot simply falls flat. And don't forget the disappointment.

On the bright side, I received a certain impossible crime novel in the mail recently and that one will be next on the hit-list. So, once again, don't you dare touch that dial!

The "Guy Fawkes" Affair

"The unknown quantity, who may upset all our calculations. It's fatal to forget him. Whenever you make a list of possible criminals, you are apt to put yourself in blinkers and forget that anyone exists outside your list. Always put in X, and keep a sharp lookout for him."

- Inspector Mallett (Cyril Hare's Tenant for Death, 1937)

The previous book discussed on here, Joan Fleming's Polly Put the Kettle On (1952), was a modern-style, character-driven crime novel with a slow buildup and a dark, noir-ish soul, but the subject of today's review is the antithesis of that – a crafty, puzzle-oriented detective yarn from the 1930s. A detective story that toys with an array of identities, water-tight alibis and the severed parts of its titular body.

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Bonfire Body (1936), known alternatively as The Body in the Bonfire, is the fifteenth of sixty-three mystery novels about his series-character, Ludovic Travers.

Travers is an "authority on economic history" and the celebrated author of a famous piece of literature, The Economics of a Spendthrift, who acted in the earlier books as the head of a Durangos Limited, which is the company that initially inserted him in numerous police cases – e.g. The Perfect Murder Case (1929) and Cut Throat (1932). Here, on the other hand, he plays the consummate amateur detective.

The Case of the Bonfire Body begins on the foggy evening preceding Guy Fawkes' Night and Travers is being driven home by his chauffeur, Palmer, when all of a sudden a running man emerges from the swirling fog. Curiously, the man, who "ran like the wicked," was dressed like a clergyman. Rev. Giles Ropeling is a local scoutmaster and his troop had erected a pyre for the annual bonfire, but that evening the B.B.C. had broadcast an interview with an expert and this person gave tips how to make a proper bonfire. So the reverend had decided to "pull down the crude mountain" with his scouts and reassemble it scientifically. However, when they pulled down the wooden edifice they made a gruesome discovery.

A headless body, like "a huge white slug," lay among the scattered pieces of wood, but not only the head had been cut-off. There were two bloody stumps where the hands were supposed to be. So the murderer had hidden the body inside the bonfire in the hopes that it would not be found until it had been "burnt to a charred mass."

Obviously, this body was going to pose a challenge to the investigators, but Travers has no idea how big of a challenge until he gets a phone-call from his friend, Superintendent Wharton of Scotland Yard, who tells him that a Dr. Bendall of Wimbeck Street had been murdered – stabbed to death in his own surgery. A note was found in the doctor's inside pocket that placed him on the scene of the previous murder.

I begin to suspect that these intricately-linked, double murders (committed around the same time) was a preferred plot-device of Bush, because he also constructed elaborate plots around double murders in Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the April Fools (1933). All three have very different situations surrounding their respective double murders and they all come with their own unique solutions. So Bush appears to have gotten a lot of mileage out of this approach.

Apparently, the link between Dr. Bendall and the bonfire body, referred to throughout the story as "Guy Fawkes," is a burglary case from a decade ago. Dr. Bendall had caught two burglars in his home and one of them was the son-in-law he detested, which ended in a struggle and the sound of a gunshot. The son-in-law, Rolland Johnson, claimed his father-in-law had "snatched a gun from a drawer" and "deliberately tried to kill him." Evidently with the idea of freeing his daughter of a rogue. Dr. Bendall claimed that Johnson had pulled a gun on him and this side of the story was, surprisingly, backed up by his confederate, Henry Luke, who testified that Johnson was always armed on the job and claimed to have warned him of the potential consequences – which ended in a lengthy prison term for Johnson. The police detective, who had investigated the case at the time, believed Johnson was setup by Dr. Bendall, but there was nothing he could do about it.

So Johnson had a scores to settle upon his release from prison, but nothing in this case is as it appears on the surface and becomes increasingly complicated when one of the severed hands is found in a sewer.

The severed hand proves that the bonfire body did not belong to the person the police had assumed it would be and this also provided the plot with a quasi-impossible situation, because the prints on the knife that killed the doctor matches the fingerprints of the dead man's hand. Even though the bonfire body had died before the doctor! The eventual discovery of the severed head could also have been played as an impossibility. However, as I learned from my previous reads, Bush only roams the borders between the regular detective story and the impossible crime, but rarely crossed the line separating the two – only the previously mentioned The Perfect Murder Case ventured pass it.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to see how closely related Bush was to some of the well-known locked room artisans of the period and these borderline impossibilities still make for pleasantly complex, twisty and involved detective stories. And if there's one thing Bush loved doing, it was piling on complexities.

The Case of the Bonfire Body has an abundance of complexities, which does not only deal with the identity of a mutilated corpse, but also has a particular ingenious alibi-trick to offer and grandly plays around with assumed identities. This game of alibis and identities even throws the murderer off his game! There's "a regular plague of burglaries" in the background of the story and there the problem of a rare coin, known as a Limerick Crown, which Travers had bought for his brother-in-law at an auction and had accidentally given to a street beggar selling matchsticks – who, as to be expected, is linked to both murders. And then there are the numerous references by Travers to "X," or "The Unknown Man," whose role in the murders they had not taken into consideration. 

On a whole, Bush splendidly tied all of these plot-threads together and the end result is a classic, but minor, example of the ambitious, puzzle-oriented detective stories that were the standard-bearers of the genre's Golden Age.

My only complaint is that Travers and Wharton appeared to have been affected by the dense November fog permeating, because they each had moments of uncharacteristic density. Nick Fuller mentioned in his (spoiler-ish) review that Travers failed to draw the obvious conclusion when the Limerick Crown was found on the body of an unknown tramp, but Wharton had an equally dense moment. Wharton is not a character from the Lestrade school of fictional policemen and could easily carry a solo-novel without Travers, but here he was unnecessarily dense and obsessive when it came to the identity of the bonfire body. He preferred to accept that there were two murderers active in the same area, who littered the place with severed hands, rather than accept he was wrong. Only the pathologist's expert opinion that the severed hand fitted the bonfire body convinced him to finally abandon his pet theory. Wharton was not this dense in the preceding books.

Otherwise, The Case of the Bonfire Body is a cleverly conceived, tightly plotted affair with more than enough twists, turns and clues to keep even the most ardent armchair detective occupied for a couple of hours. I definitely found it a rewarding read and can recommend it without hesitation to everyone who loves a dense, puzzle-focused detective stories. And the good news is that this title will be among the second batch of Bush reprints by Dean Street Press, which are scheduled for release in late December or early January of 2018. So you better start updating that wish list of yours! ;)

Diary of a Jailbird

"Three blind mice, three blind mice.

See how they run, see how they run.

They all ran after the farmer's wife,

who cut off their tail with a carving knife.

Did you ever see such a sight in your life,

as three blind mice?"

- Nursery Rhyme

Joan Fleming was a British author who, according to her bio, was "one of the most original and literate crime writers of her generation." She embarked on her literary career with a handful of children's books, but swiftly moved on to crime-fiction and notably penned a pair of crime novels about a philosophical Turkish detective and the first one, When I Grow Rich (1962), earned her a CWA Gold Dagger – a prize she would win a second time with Young Man, I Think You're Dying (1970).

However, the lion's share of her output apparently consists of modern-day, character-driven crime novels with a decidedly noir-ish bend. So what the hell am I, a pious traditionalist, doing with this "genre-critter," you ask? You can blame John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books.

Back in 2015, John published an enticing review on his blog of Fleming's sole locked room detective novel, Polly Put the Kettle On (1952), which struck him as an homage to James M. Cain and called it "a very fine crime novel" that blended elements of the tradition detective story with aspects of the noir-ish thriller – resulting in a book that "would impress Cain and [Patricia] Highsmith." So my interest was aroused and placed the book on my never-ending wish list.

And I'll say this beforehand, while the book does not quite fit my personal preferences in (classical) crime-fiction, I can't deny that this well written, character-focused novel was cleverly conceived and executed. I would not be as adversarial towards contemporary crime-fiction had more of them been written along the lines of Polly Put the Kettle On. So let's take a peek at this noir-ish tale with a locked room sub-plot.

The narrator of Polly Put the Kettle On is an ex-jailbird, named George Sudley, who was released from Parkhurst prison, on the Isle of Wright, in the opening chapter and received parting advice from the chaplain to find a physically demanding (outdoor) job – one that makes immediately fall to sleep the moment his head hits the pillow. It's a tried-and-tested remedy to keep out of trouble. Sudley agrees that, what he needs, is an outdoors job and allowed to fate to decide where he would go by blindly stabbing a finger at a random page in a travel guide. This eventually brought him to Hill Farm, which stands in the tiny and out-of-the-way hamlet of Cloud.

Hill Farm is owned by a sixty-year-old farmer, Eli Edge, who has been running the worn, dilapidated farm in exactly the same way as his father, grand-father and great-grand father. Edge has stubbornly refused every piece of modern improvement that could be made to his farm. Such as milking-machines, mechanical separators and electric churns, but the upside of doing all the backbreaking work manually is that Edge did not had to invest capital in upgrading his farm. As Sudley observed, "it was all money pouring in and none going out." Recently, Edge has been laid up with sciatica and needs a farm hand to milk the cows and whatnot.

However, the existence of a 19th century farmboy does not exactly appeal to the ex-convict and had already turned around on his way, but on his way out his eyes came to rest on Edge's beautiful and much younger wife, Polly – who always seems to bask in attention of men. One of them is the lanky, twenty-two year old son of their next door neighbor, John Merry, who, at one point, gets into a physical altercation with Sudley. The other man is Sudley's German predecessor, Eyvind, who returns to the farm and he would become somewhat of a problem to Sudley.

I wonder whether Fleming had initially designed this story around the nursery rhyme of "Three Blind Mind," but changed it to the more innocuous "Polly Put the Kettle On" when she learned Agatha Christie was coming, in 1952, with a stage-play based on the title story from Three Blind Mice and Other Stories (1950).

Anyway, the first half of the book hardly reads like a crime or detective novel at all. You might easily mistake it for a literary mainstream novel about a stranger with a past getting injected into a small, peaceful community and how this introduction uproots the tranquility of the tiny hamlet, but that's exactly where the story slowly begins to snowball into a (impossible) crime story. During this slow buildup, the reader not only follows how the relationship between Polly and Sudley develops, but also the influence of the new farmhand on the household. Edge is very tightfisted when it comes to spending money, but Sudley convinces him to buy a Land Rover (with near fatal consequences) and a gas-stove, which will have fatal consequences.

Pass the halfway mark, Edge is found dead in the locked and bolted living room of the farmhouse. Edge lay, as he always did, on the mud-colored sofa with "a couple of dead cats beside him," which makes it abundantly clear that the cause of death was not a natural one. Edge appears to have been gassed to death and, somehow, his dog, Argo, escaped from the locked and bolted living room. But how did the dog managed to do that? The answer as to how the dog escaped from the room will also provide an answer to the problem of the locked living room, which is brazenly simple and audaciously clued.

Fleming briefly dangles the truth behind the locked room in front of the reader and then simply waits for those readers, who're observant enough, to put two-and-two together. So not really an impossible crime that bats in the same league as the best by John Dickson Carr or Edward D. Hoch, but the simplicity of the trick fitted the nature of this story – which went for a darker, grittier and more realistic tone than your average countryside mystery of the 1930-and 40s. So I did not dislike, or was disappointed, by this (minor) locked room sub-plot.

One interesting aspect about the overall plot, which is not acknowledged by Fleming, is how animals, dead or alive, play a guiding role in the story. The dead cats that were found besides the body immediately rule out a death by natural causes. Argo's escape from that room proves to be the key to solving the locked room problem and there's a "beastly little stuffed owl," encased in glass, standing on a big chest at the top of the stairs. And one of the characters realizes too late that the owl was trying to tell something.

The ruinous aftermath of Edge's murder truly is a tragic one and the ending of the book is the inevitable culmination of every decision, and move, taken during the first half. I half suspected the direction the ending was heading towards, but not that the author went for the darkest shade of gloom imaginable. I expected one particular revelation from the second half to be a small seed of hope, one that required a sacrifice to grow, but Fleming had no qualms about cruelly snuffing out that small flicker of hope. And she still took that final sacrifice! Nevertheless, I can't say I didn't enjoy the book, which was something different, and blazed through the pages like an enthusiatic forest fire.

Polly Put the Kettle On is not a crime novel for readers who dislike detective stories with a short fuse or bleak endings, but if you're a patient reader, who can take a stiff dose of doom and gloom, you will probably be able to appreciate this one for what it is – an intriguing blend of traditional detective elements with domestic suspense and pure noir. And the locked room was a nice little extra!

I'm not sure what will be next on this blog, but after my previous two or three reviews, I think I'll dig up something truly traditional. So don't touch that dial, folks!

Forty Fathoms Down

"Still water runs deep—and the devil lays at the bottom."

- Sheriff Ives (Joseph Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones," collected in The Locked Room Reader: Stories of Impossible Crimes and Escapes, 1968)

Captain Allan R. Bosworth served in the U.S. Navy (Reserve) for 38 years and had a secondary career as a journalist and newspaper editor in San Francisco, California, which he used as a springboard to the world of popular fiction – going on to write several novels and more than 500 short stories. Bosworth was "especially prolific in Western tales," but he also penned, at least, two novel-length detective stories. One of them was recently brought back into circulation by Coachwhip Publications.

Full Crash Dive (1942) was originally serialized under the title The Submarine Signaled... Murder in an unknown periodical and was re-serialized as Murder Goes to Sea in Argosy Weekly.

As you probably deduced from the various story titles, Bosworth drew on his Naval background for the plot and this resulted in a fairly original detective-cum-thriller novel. A story with a backdrop, cast-of-characters and a central problem that are almost as distinct and unique as those found in Franklyn Pell's Hangman's Hill (1947) and Michael Gilbert's The Danger Within (1952). Although the Second World War plays no role, whatsoever, in Full Crash Dive.

Full Crash Dive was partially written aboard "a rolling and pitching destroyer in the North Atlantic patrol service," but the book opens forty fathoms below the surface as a new, six-million-dollar submarine met with disaster when it made a trial crash dive – which left twenty-two crew members dead and thirty-three men "remained entombed alive on the sea's bottom." The Navy scrambles to rescue the surviving crew members of the Starfish, but after the rescue (diving) bell takes the first eight people back to the surface they lose the down haul cable. So the mission to extricate the remaining twenty-five crew members from the wrecked submarine has to be postponed. But with those eight people, they also scooped a boatload of trouble from the ocean floor.

A group that consists of the following people: Lt. Everett Brill II commanded the Starfish , whose career was "dogged by misfortune for several years," and it was supposed to be his "privilege to stay until the last," but he had a nasty cough and one of his subordinates knocked him out – so he could be send to the surface for medical treatment. And he may have been drinking before the accident occurred.

The crew members that were among those who were rescues are chief torpedoman and expert diver, Mike Way, whose ribs were painfully bruised during the disaster. An engineer officer, Lt. McQuaid, managed to get out of the flooding after-compartment and had shut a sealed door that prevented the entire submarine to be flooded. However, he had heard several men, who had reached the door too late, beating against it with their fist. One of these unfortunate souls was the brother of the machinist's mate, Cardoni, who assaults and seriously wounds McQuaid. There's also a sailor, Kowalski, and a jittery skipper, John Thorpe, who's a mere boy of seventeen. And the accident appears to have left him shell shocked. Lastly, there were two civilian observers from Westco Iron Works aboard the submarine: a chief engineer, Victor Melhorne, and a naval architect, Foster Bedell.

Coachwhip Edition

A problem that begins when Lt. McQuaid, recovering from surgery, was "clubbed to death in his bed." Before he was operated on, McQuaid had been muttering about a smell and how he had known that particular smell. McQuaid had also been overheard having an argument with Brill about his drinking. And this not only makes the commander a suspect, but also his 22-year-old daughter, Evelyn Brill, who's a Navy nurse. A bloodstained nurse's cap was found on the balcony outside of the murdered man's room.

There's always the possibility that the submarine builder, Martin West, silenced a witness to a potential mechanical failure in order to secure his government contracts to build more submarines.

Lt. Vincent "Vince" Ayres, a naval surgeon, is (for some reason) placed in charge of the investigation, but the person who eventually clears up the case is an "old sea dog," Admiral J.K. Wetherbee, who's laid up with a broken leg in the Sick Officer's Quarters – where he keeps a Captain's Log of the events as they unfold. And these log entries are peppered throughout the narrative. Anyway, the Starfish survivors, as well as everyone else tangibly related to the case, are "shanghaied" to sea aboard the hospital ship Consolation and they sail to the spot where the submarine had its mysterious accident. 

However, the events are further complicated by an additional murder, several attempts at murdering potential witnesses and someone goes inconveniently missing. All the while, rescue attempts continue in the background of the story.

On a (historical) side-note, I reviewed Vernon Loder's Death by the Gaff (1932) and pointed out in my post that it was one of the few classical mystery novels, or short stories, in which the old-school diver of the early part of the previous century played a role – with the only other examples being Max Murray's The Neat Little Corpse (1950-51) and the short story that provided the opening quote for this review. Less than a month later and I stumbled across a novel that gives a pretty sizable role to the bell-helmet diver with an surface air-pump. And the story gives considerable consideration to the dangers faced by these early divers.

One of them is that one of the divers is seen getting a serious case of decompression sickness ("the bends"), but Bosworth also used the danger known as "the squeeze." A failure in properly regulating the pressure inside the old-fashioned diving suit could result in the diver being compressed "to pulp and forced into the small globular space of their unyielding helmets" by such squeezes. Such a fate awaits one of the rescue divers in the last leg of the story.

There's also a very memorable, and haunting, scene in which a diver enters the flooded compartment of the Starfish and sees "men floating" overhead against "the maze of pipes and electrical conduits." And there's something else waiting for the diver in the flooded compartments of the submarine!

So, on a whole, Full Crash Dive is a very well written crime novel with the aftermath of a submarine disaster as a memorable background and the subsequent events that result in a number of (attempted) murders, but, it has to be said, the clues are thinly spread around and they're not enough to help you arrive at the same conclusion as Admiral Wetherbee – making this more of a crime novel with thriller-elements rather than a proper detective story. However, the lack of a fair play plot did, in this particular instance, not negatively impact my overall enjoyment of the book (too much). There was more than enough here to hold my interest and found the use of the bell-helmet divers in this story to be very interesting. Particularly towards the end of the book.

Sure, it would have been nice Full Crash Dive been a first-class, clue-stuffed detective novel, as well as an original naval crime-thriller, but what are you gonna do? So read this one without your thinking cap, or deerstalker, on and try to enjoy it for what it is: a damn good read!

Finally, I've selected a reputedly good and unusually-styled locked room novel for my next read, because it has been eons since I tackled an impossible crime story, right guys?

The Eternal Triangle

"I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues."

- Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter," collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1893)

Last week, I reviewed a Dutch collection of short stories, De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries (The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries, 2017) by Anne van Doorn, which was published by a small, independent, press called E-Pulp Publishers – who recently put out a book that beckoned my attention. A story that's perhaps best described as an infernally cheeky, ill-mannered, parody of the private-eye novel, but with a classically-styled plot and solution. And comes with a surprising amount of fair play towards the reader.

Eugenius M. Quak is not only the name of the author, prominently splashed across the book-cover of Gruwelijk is het huwelijk (Marriage is Gruesome, 2017), but also the narrator and protagonist of the story. As the main-character, Quak is something of an egoistical anti-hero who makes Philo Vance look like a someone you could spend a year with on a desert island.

Quak is a character described as a jack-of-all-trades with the ever-expanding ego of Zaphod Beeblebrox ("if there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now") and a career path as unusual as that of Eugène Vidocq. The opening chapter gives an overview of his life story and detailed how he became hopelessly "entangled in crime," but during one of his spells in prison he "got hooked on detective novels" and read all of the well-known classics – Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. These stories gave him a new calling in life: he wanted to become a privé detective himself.

However, I have to stop here and warn the reader that the opening chapter requires patience and a persevering attitude to get through, because the narrative style, tone and personality of the Quak takes time to get use to. I believe the author, whoever he is, also needed a chapter to find his grooves with this character and crank out some of the cringe. But there's a notable uptick towards the end of this chapter when Quak begins his own detective agency without the proper paperwork or license.

So Eugenius Quak Private Detecting (EQPD) lacked all of the legal paperwork, rubber stamps and official signatures, but this gave the one-man detective bureau an edge over its competitors. Quak did not have to observe the rules and ethics governing normal private-investigators. Only problem is that he also lacked clients and this threatened to sink his business.

Thankfully, a filthy rich client came out of nowhere to save the day. I think Quak would have urged his reader to use the words "filthy" and "rich" independently, because the man who stormed into his office was "a monstrous person" with "a fleshy face full of pimples" – whose repellent mouth-and body odor are referenced throughout the story by Quak. The name of this ugly giant is Lourens Rotting and he had been minister in "one of those acid green or deep purple cabinets." After which he had become a captain of industry and raked in a seven-figure paycheck every year. Evidently, the man who had appeared before Quak was a not looker, but that paycheck netted him an extremely beautiful wife, Pippilotta Buitelaar, who may have an extramarital affair. Rotting wants an unassuming, little-known, detective to figure out the identity of this secret lover.

This is where Marriage is Gruesome actually distinguishes itself from other detectives novels, new and old, because the plot concerns itself with the kind of problem that other fictional detectives, like Nero Wolfe, would never sully their reputation on – let alone actually touching it. But to be honest, Quak is primarily engaged with trying to figure out ways to extract as much money as possible from his rich client. He has a small army of completely imaginary field agents working for him and writes several "peppered bills" for their reported legwork. These bills are written with, what we mockingly refer to in my country as, a "double pen."

Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that the inflated personality and antics of Quak helped carry this part of the book. A simplistic case of infidelity would have had a hard time sustaining the reader's interest had the investigation been a straightforward one with a respectable, serious-minded detective-character at the helm.

A good portion of the first half of the book takes place at the remote home of Rotting, named Groot Beukenstein, where Quak passes himself off as a former study friend of his client and tests his "Miss Marple Methodiek" – making everyone believe his scatter-brained and harmless. But during his stay, Quak discovers that Rotting is extremely jealous and hellbent on revenge. So this culminates with the discovery of a body floating in the swimming pool, which occurs during the final quarter of the book, but during Quak's "Hercule Poirot Moment," my favorite part of the book, it is demonstrated that clues were planted throughout the story.

Quak mockingly challenges the reader at the start of the sixteenth chapter, titled "Hoe ik de moordenaar ontmaskerde" ("How I Unmasked the Murderer"), in which he claims that the murderer's identity can be deduced from all of the information he gave in his report. The clues he had scattered throughout his narrative, "sown thickly on the ground," that you could almost trip over them. And this solution is as fairly clues as it is classical. The only thing you can say against it is that it hardly turns over a new, unwritten leaf in the annals of crime-fiction, but it is a grand and novel play on Christie's favorite motif of the internal triangle.

I strongly suspected the game that was being played by the murderer, but there was one tiny aspect that prevented from putting all my money on this character as the murderer.

All in all, despite my initial reservations and a lead character who requires time to warm up to, I ended up liking Marriage is Gruesome more than I expected. During the opening pages, I began to fear I had picked my worst read of 2017, but the story pulled itself together in the subsequent chapters. And the fairly clued, classically-styled ending contributed hugely to definitively swinging my opinion to a positive one. I'm more than willing to forgive imperfections when plot, particularly how it sticks or comes together, is actually good or clever. I'm glad to report that happened to be case here.

A second novel has already been planned for next year and the book-title is a bit hard to translate, but this is what I was able to make of it: Hoteldebotel in een hotel (Pell-mell in a Hotel, 2018). So I have that to look forward to. And in the meantime, I'll try to dig up something good and obscure from the Golden Age for the next post. So stay tuned!