Specialist in the Impossible: "Sorcery in the Death House" (1943) by Curtiss T. Gardner

Curtiss T. Gardner is a now obscure, long-forgotten mystery and pulp writer from Maryland, United States, who wrote short stories during the 1940s for such magazines as Thrilling Detective, Popular Detective and G-Men Detective. Gardner also penned a few detective novels and Anthony Boucher noted that he introduced "the first big business detective on record" in Bones Don't Lie (1946), but not much else known about him or his work.

However, I made an interesting discovery when thumbing through my copy of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and came across four entries for Gardner, all of them short stories, of which three belonged to a series with an intriguing sounding protagonist, Val Vickers – who's known as "the one and only Specialist in the Impossible." This short-lived series was originally published in Dime Mystery, from 1943 to 1944, which had some fascinating, pulp-like premises.

"Satan's Insidious Chessmen" has a murder with a poisoned dart in a room in which the victim was alone playing chess with an automaton and "In Bed We Die" concerns a death by electrocution in a house where a storm had taken out the main electrical power supply. But the first of these three stories, entitled "Sorcery in the Death House," had a locked room situation I simply had to read for myself.

"Sorcery in the Death House" was originally published in the September, 1943, issue of Dime Mystery and can be read on archive.org.

Val Vickers is asked to put a stop to an arch-criminal, named Merlin the Wizard, who has already spirited two condemned men from the electric chair in the death house and it looked as if it was done by magic, but Vickers is of the opinion that, "whatever laws Merlin may have broken," the "laws of nature aren't among them" – which is why he's attending the execution of Pete Audia with a concealed photographic apparatus. So he can immortalize the vanishing-trick on the photographic plate.

Just like on the previous occasions, the "glaring death house lights went black" and "a flash of fire puffed up from in front of the death chair." When the lights came back on in the smoke-filled execution chamber, there was a wounded guard on the ground and the death chair was empty! There is, however, not a nook or cranny in the death house "to conceal a broom stick" and the exists were being guarded, but Audia is nowhere to be found on the premises of the prison. Once again, Merlin has saved a condemned murderer from the electric chair.

Vickers succeeded in snapping a picture when the lights went out, but the murderer assaults him in the dark room and the photographic plate is destroyed. So he has to do it the old-fashioned way and reason his way to an explanation, which is path fraught with danger and botches an attempt to catch Merling using another condemned prisoner as bait. He also has to tangle with a beautiful woman, Marylee Church. Basically everything you'd expect from a pulp-detective.

Adey unfairly dismisses this story as "pretty feeble." Sure, the locked room trick, which is the main attraction of the story, is not one of the all-time greats on par with the best from John Dickson Carr and Edward D. Hoch. Nonetheless, this was perhaps the only way you could make a condemned prisoner, strapped to Old Sparky, disappear from the death house and nearly all of the components of the trick fitted the information supplied to reader – which deserved the proverbial A for effort. And the motive for helping condemned murderers escape the chair has a shimmer of originality to it.

My only complaint is that the death house setting was not played up to its full, sinister effect. Just imagine how different this story would have read had it been written by Carr. Even if exactly the same solution was used.

So, all in all, not one of the greatest locked room mysteries ever written, but still a fairly good, fun and pulpy detective story with a great setting that could perhaps have been better exploited. Nevertheless, I'll definitely be returning to Gardner in the hopefully not so distant future, because Wildside Press has reissued the previously mentioned Bones Don't Lie. Of course, I'll be on the lookout for the other Val Vickers stories.

On a final, semi-related note: Bill Pronzini has written a great short story, "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle," collected in All But Impossible (1981), in which a condemned prisoner has a noose placed round his neck and the trapdoor is sprung, but the locked and guarded execution shed underneath is scaffold is found to be empty – somehow, as the trapdoor opened, the prisoner simply vanished into thin air! Pronzini's solution is more original and involved than the one found in Gardner's "Sorcery in the Death House." So you might want to check that one out.

The Locked Room Reader IX: The Problem of the Intoxicated Thespian: An Addendum

Several years ago, I cobbled together a series of blog-posts about real-life examples of locked room mysteries and impossible problems, which you can read by following these links: I, II, III, IV, V and VI. In my first post, "Just About As Strange As Fiction," I went over six of such examples and christened the first one The Problem of the Intoxicated Thespian.

Wilfred Lawson

I found this locked room anecdote on another blog, Shadowplay, which has a 2008 blog-post, simply titled "Locked Room Mystery," recounting the story of a "character actor and celebrated inebriate," Wilfred Lawson – who could "function quite well with a skinful." According to one story, Lawson was to do a live radio show and a minder was given "the task of keeping him from the demon drink." A sober Lawson was escorted to a windowless dressing room and was locked inside with the only key in the custody of the minder.

The dressing room had previously been the subject of thorough search and not a single drop of alcohol was found, but, when the minder returned an hour later, he found Lawson "utterly rat-assed, pissed beyond language." So how did he manage to get completely smashed when he was locked inside a room?

As the resident locked room fanboy, I have to compliment the comment-section of Shadowplay, because they came up with a treasure trove of potential (false) solution in the tradition of Anthony Berkeley and Ellery Queen – here are some great examples:

1: Lawson acted intoxicated and got drunk after being released from the dressing room.

2: An accomplice disconnected the water supply and pumps whiskey into the room, which would be "a drunkard's dream" to "drink booze from the fawcett of a sink."

3: An accomplice pushed a drinking straw through the keyhole.

4: Lawson had swallowed a condom filled with booze and regurgitated it as soon as he was left alone (yes, disgusting).

5: A normal, healthy looking orange injected with liquor.

6: Vodka ice cubes.

Well, I provided an alternative explanation in my blog-post, which goes as follow: a character actor is likely to pick up certain skills for their roles, such as pick-pocketing, but a professional alcoholic would know a sly trick or two in any case. So what if Lawson came to the radio studio armed with a flask of hard liquor and

I provided an alternative explanation in my blog-post, which goes as follow: a character actor is likely to pick up certain tricks for their roles, such as pick-pocketing, but a professional drunkard would have trick or two up his sleeve in any case. So what if Lawson came to the radio studio armed with a flask of hard liquor and slipped into the pocket of the minder. Before being locked inside the dressing room, Lawson shook the hand of the minder or padded his shoulder. He had to do this so the minder wouldn't feel, or notice, how the actor fished the flask from his pocket with the other hand. When the minder returned, the flask was secretly put back in his pocket and, when they found no alcohol on either the actor or inside the dressing room, he again fished the flask from the minders pocket – leaving everyone baffled. Lawson basically turned the poor minder in unwilling drug mule.

Recently, I read back this old blog-post of mine and only then I noticed a glaring flaw in my reasoning. You see, I doubt a single flask is sufficient to render a veteran boozer, like Lawson, completely shitfaced, but immediately another explanation occurred to me. A solution inspired by and based on the comments that were posted on Shadowplay. So I would like to pause here for a moment and pose a challenge to the reader.

You have to keep in mind that the problem here is not how the alcohol could have been smuggled inside the dressing room, but, as the comments suggests, the quantity and disposal of the container. Some of the ideas presented in the (false) solutions form many of the puzzle pieces. One last hint: think back of the scene from The Seer of the Sands (2004) when Jonathan Creek explained the ghostly message in the bottle to Carla.

So take a moment to go over all of the information and turn it over your mind. Let's see if we arrived at the same conclusion.

"Well, you've seen all the clues. Have you get it? I think I do."

 

My solution depends on how much time Lawson had at his disposal to prepare, but if had known in advance that they would lock him inside his dressing room, he could have found an accomplice at the radio studio. A monetary compensation would have done the trick. After all, this was not a crime. A stone-cold sober Lawson is locked inside a dressing room without a drop of alcohol, but he took an empty balloon with him and, when the accomplice softly knocks on the door, Lawson places the mouth of the balloon over the keyhole – while the accomplice fills the balloon with a short, spray-gun powered tube. Lawson literally has a skinful at his disposal!

After he finishes his skinful, he can simply rinses out the balloon at the sink and buries it at the bottom of the waste bucket. Who would think a balloon in the waste bucket was used as a modern-day wine-skin? A relatively simple trick, if you can find an accomplice, but it gets the job done. 

So we have arrived at the end of this filler-post, but you enjoyed it and perhaps gave you an idea why I love locked room puzzles so much. Or why I can't get enough of them. 

The Sleeping Island (1951) by Francis Vivian

This month, Dean Street Press reissued the entire Detective-Inspector Gordon Knollis series by Arthur Ernest Ashley, who wrote as "Francis Vivian," which were originally published from 1941 to 1956 and reviewed two of these titles in September – namely The Singing Masons (1950) and The Elusive Bowman (1951). I liked them enough to delay my return to Christopher Bush and read another one of these once rare, long-overlooked mystery novels.

The Sleeping Island (1951) is the eighth title in the series and is a slightly darker, more somber story than the previous two books I read. A gloomy, old-fashionably told detective story with some of the trappings of a modern-day, character-orientated crime novel.

During the Second World War, Paul Murray was stationed on Lampedusa Island, in the Mediterranean Sea, together with Peter Fairfax and the Palmer brothers, Dennis and Roy. One of them, Dennis Palmer, was in enviable position: he was engaged to Brenda Morley and had a good job waiting for him back home, but Palmer was also the trustee of the family fortune – a then princely sum of eight thousand pounds. Palmer's grandfather hated lawyers and objected to paying death duties. So he had handed Dennis a cheque for the whole eight thousand pounds. But when he enlisted, Dennis became worried what would happen to the money if he was killed in action. So he handed over the cheque to Brenda to hold on to until he returns.

Tragically, Dennis is killed in an unfortunate drowning accident. Or so it appears. Only a short time later, Paul Murray began courting Brenda and they married within six weeks. Oh, they kept the money. The Palmer's never saw a dime back of their own money back.

However, everyone believes there was something fishy about Dennis Palmer's drowning on Lampedusa. Some are even convinced Murray has cleverly engineered a perfect murder to get his hands on the money, but everyone is flummoxed about how he was able to murder Palmer, because, when he met his death at the bottom of a cliff at Point Ailaimo, Murray was bathing in Creta Bay – in the presence of several witnesses. So nobody could "prove it was anything else but death by misadventure." But the marriage between Paul and Brenda Murray was not a happy one.

Brenda has been unable to forget Dennis and, when the story opens, has "established a half-yearly wake" during which she wallows in "a bath of self-pity and sentimentality." Something that has begun to irk Murray. He has had enough that a ghost from their past is constantly haunting the dinning-room, the lounge and even the bedroom. So an argument ensues between the two and Murray leaves the house, but after he left, Brenda receives a visitor. Roy Palmer demands money to treat his terminally ill mother, because it was their money. He also tells her that Murray has never stopped seeing his first fiance, Gloria Dickinson, who was put up in a nice flat from "Den's money" and has lived off it ever since – everyone apparently knew it. She ends up giving Roy three-hundred pounds and tells him her lawyer is drafting a new will that gives everything back to his family. Only she never got to sign it.

 

When Murray returned home later in the evening, he finds the home empty and when venturing out into the darkened garden he finds Brenda's lifeless body. Drowned in the lily pond! A gruesome detail is that her cat has also been brutally killed by having its neck pulled and throat squashed.

The local police telephone Scotland Yard and Detective-Inspector Gordon Knollis is sent to the scene of the crime, but this time he not only has to untie a complicated, closely-knit web of linked motives, suspects and their movements – he has to contend with a pesky, stubborn suspect who openly sabotages his investigation. Peter Fairfax was slinking around the house at the time of the murder and he intends "to flummox up the evidence so thoroughly" that Paul "hasn't anything to stand on but a trapdoor in an execution-cell." Fairfax is convinced Paul had murdered Dennis and Roy had killed Brenda, which another motivation to temper with evidence and obstructing the course of justice. He simply believes Paul deserved to be hanged for one murder or another.

I think this is easily the best part of The Sleeping Island. Fairfax found a great place to hide a pair of shoes and he thought he was very clever with the kippers, but Knollis exposes his meddling with skill and experience. Something that really complimented the efforts of the police-characters. I also think this almost has a Anthony Berkeley-like quality to it (c.f. Trial and Error, 1934). Unfortunately, the ending has two problems that drags it down my previous two reads in this series.

Francis Vivian evidently preferred to work with a small, close-knit cast of characters with only three or four suspects. Here he told an engaging story of domestic murder with a dark, potentially second murder hidden in the past and, as a reader, you want the resolution to come out of this back-story that has dominated the entire story up till the ending – only to end with a disappointing anti-climax. This murderer could have worked, but not in this story. Secondly, I believe the alibi-trick on Lampedusa Island remained unexplained.

It could have been my fractured reading of the book, but a solution was only alluded to or hinted at, but never actually explained. Knollis talked about the death of Dennis Palmer as a perfect murder that looked like an accident and "can never be proved." So perhaps this was done to contrast a perfect murder with a not so perfect murder? Either way, it didn't work out for me. So a well-written and characterized story of crime, but not all that impressive as a  detective story.

Regrettably, The Sleeping Island was not as good a detective story as either The Elusive Bowman or The Singing Masons, but better luck with the next one. One disappointment is not going to deter me from the promising, intriguing sounding Sable Messenger (1947), The Threefold Cord (1947) and The Laughing Dog (1949). To be continued.

Clue Club: The Real Gone Gondola (1976)

Previously, I reviewed a book recommended by "JJ" of The Invisible Event, namely Impossible Bliss (2001), which was written by Lee Sheldon, a game designer and scriptwriter, who published the book independently, but the overall quality of the story is notably better than your average self-published novel – particularly the splendid detective-character, Herman Bliss. Sheldon stumbled across JJ's review and left some interesting comments.

In one of his comments, Sheldon posted a list of all the impossible crime fiction he has written and tacked on some brief, but enticing, plot-description. A story-line from the mystery-themed soap opera, The Edge of Night, has a "murder by strangulation with a chain in a gazebo surrounded by snow" with "only the victim's footprints leading to the gazebo." There are a number of episodes from Blacke's Magic listed and an unpublished, untitled short story about a murder inside "a glass revolving door" with only "the victim inside and police both inside and out." Surprisingly, the one that intrigued me the most came from an obscure, 1970s cartoon show.

The Real Gone Gondola (1976) is the third episode of the Hanna-Barbera produced Clue Club, a bargain basement Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, which has an elderly, wheelchair bound woman evaporating from a closely observed ski-lift gondola as it rises up a mountain – commenting that he's certain that "the solution to this one has never been used." I'm afraid I have some bad news about that, but I'll get to that later.

Clue Club originally aired on CBS from August 14, 1976 to September 3, 1977 and had replaced Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in the Saturday morning lineup.

The one-season series had sixteen episodes that followed the escapades of a group of teenage detectives, Larry, Pepper, D.D. and Dottie, who are accompanied by two dogs, Woofer and Whimper. The dogs here can only talk with each other, but the whole setup really can only be described as a discount Scooby-Doo. This made the cleverly constructed puzzle of a vanishing woman from a moving, closely observed gondola stand out like a sore thumb. Who would expect an authentic impossible disappearance with actual clues in an obscure cartoon show like this?

Mrs. Coldwell is the elderly, wheelchair bound woman and owner of the Blizzard Mountain ski resort, but lately, she has been receiving threatening letters from "some cook," signing his letters as Vortex, demanding two million dollars – or else "he'll disintegrate her." Sheriff Bagley and Larry of the Clue Club watch how Mrs. Coldwell is wheeled into the gondola by her nephew, Tom Coldwell, who goes back to fetch her a blanket, but she already started the gondola when he comes running back. And when it reached the top of the mountain, Sheriff Bagley and Larry are greeted by an empty wheelchair with a hat and a pile of clothes on it! Vortex had made good on his promise!

Admittedly, this is a grand premise for an impossible crime and this series has no right to something as good as this, but it didn't stop with a neatly posed and baffling disappearance.

A false solution is (briefly) raised when it was suggested Mrs. Coldwell could have been moved into an adjacent gondola traveling downward, which is not a bad idea had the door of the downward gondola not have been on the opposite side. Even then, you probably would not have enough time to make the switch. There are clues to the two, separate parts of the vanishing-trick. The clue to the first part of the trick is one of those tell-tale clues that practically tell you all that you need to know and showed that the obvious suspect was indeed guilty, but the target audience probably wouldn't be able to figure out the second part – which is more technical in nature. So the impossible problem really stands as something exceptionally good in an otherwise mediocre, knock-off cartoon.

A second, quasi-impossible situation occurs when the Clue Club encounters a snow mobile patrolling the area, but without a driver on it. You can easily guess the solution to this one. However, it was a nice little extra and sort of is another nod at the guilt of the culprit. The rest of the episode is fluff and filler with the two dogs acting as comedy fodder. Mrs. Coldwell's disappearance from a closed, moving and watched gondola is the only reason to watch this episode. So only to be recommended to locked room and impossible crime addicts.

Sheldon had said he was certain the solution to this impossible situation has never been used and mentioned here above that I had some bad news. Well, it has been used before. More than once. There's a short story from the same period as this episode that uses exactly the same trick and a locked room novel from 1942 uses an interesting variation. Another variation on this idea can be found in locked room novel from 1940.

So not exactly a first, but still a well done impossible crime story that deserved a better medium than this show to be told in.

Lastly, Sheldon wrote another locked room mystery for Clue Club, entitled The Walking House Caper (1976), in which an "impregnable safe built in a room vanishes" even though "it is too large to pass through any doors or windows." So I might return to this series for just that one episode, but first I want to see if I can track down those Edge of Midnight episodes.

Impossible Bliss (2001) by Lee Sheldon

Last year, my fellow impossible crime addict, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, posted a review in one of his ongoing series, "Adventures in Self-Publishing," which bravely tackles independently published detective novels. A corner of publishing industry that is not always synonymous with quality, but this time around, he unearthed a minor gem.

Lee Sheldon is an American game designer, television producer and scriptwriter, who happened to write the screenplay for a particular Blacke's Magic episode, Address Unknown (1986), which I reviewed back in late 2016 and concerned the inexplicable disappearance of an entire street – akin to John Dickson Carr's The Lost Gallows (1931) and Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005). However, this was not the only time Sheldon brought the impossible crime story to the small screen.

Sheldon penned an Edgar nominated episode of the short-lived The Eddie Capra Mysteries, entitled Murder on the Flip Side, that has a locked room murder with the only possible suspect being entirely innocent. He also introduced the locked room conundrum in further episodes of Blacke's Magic, Charlie's Angels, The Edge of Night and Father Murphy. What's even more interesting is that Sheldon used to collect first editions of impossible crime novels. A collection that included "a complete run of Carr" with "the Roger Fairbairn book" and was a credited contributor to the second, revised edition of Robert Adey's recently reissued Locked Room Murders (1991).

So with credentials like these, it was only a matter of time before Sheldon signed his name to a full-fledged impossible crime novel of his own. You can clearly see Carr's influence on Sheldon in the detective-character of Impossible Bliss (2001).

Herman de Portola Bliss is an often blunt, capricious and impossible character cut from the same cloth as Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale and Christopher Fowler's Arthur Bryant. Bliss is presented to the reader as "an atrocious painter" and "an unrepentant felon" with an extensive arrest record for numerous misdemeanors such as "trespassing, loitering, public nuisances, inciting to riot" and "even public indecency" – a list of complaints that numbered "close to four hundred." A record for petty criminality, but none of these cases ever reached the court. You have to read for yourself to find out why Bliss never went in front of a judge for his behavior.

One of the characters described Bliss as a clinging vine who "prods and pushes his way into cracks of your life until there's no dislodging him." Newly appointed Chief of Police of Carmel, California, Dan Shepard, finds this out the hard way when Bliss turns up as a witness when he looked into a bizarre disappearance.

Impossible Bliss begins with four businessmen, Alex Wagner, Loren Holly, Ben Webb and Leonard Romaine, strolling onto the golf course of the luxurious Carmel Bay Country Club for an early morning round of golf. Wagner is a mediocre golfer and one of his shots landed in the bunker. So he took a sand wedge from his bag, climbed inside the sand trap and the ball came sailing out of the trap, which landed eight feet from the pin and rolled into the cup for his par – a "miraculous shot." However, Wagner never emerged from the trap to gloat and, when they went over to look, he had simply disappeared. Something that simply could not have happened. A single set of tracks lead from the fairway to the edge of the bunker and the only way out of the bunker, unseen by onlookers, was over a patch of "thickly woven grass" with "a heavy rime of dew." Or to put it more simply, the grass was not walked or crawled over at the time Wagner was miraculously spirited away from the spot. And then there's the painter who had been overlooking the scene from a hillside, Herman Bliss!

Chief of Police Dan Shepard had read Bliss' police file, a hefty tome, but this had hardly prepared the poor man from unexpected, face-to-face encounter with the man. Bliss immediately clung to Shepard like catch-weed and immediately started shooting roots in his investigation, which he does in his own, inimitable manner that includes burglary and impersonating a police officer. Shepard is an honest, straight-laced policeman, who earned his position, but all of his attempts to hold Bliss legally accountable for his action were doomed to fail – even placing him under arrest barely slowed him down. Just imagine Merrivale in The Skeleton in the Clock (1948) and Graveyard to Let (1949), but without the angelic pretense of being "a good as gold" and "not bothering anybody." This unlikely alliance between Bliss and Shepard is undoubtedly the main attraction of the book.

A good second is the double (quasi) impossibility of Wagner's disappearance from the bunker and the miraculously golf shot he made before second before, which tied together nicely and are properly motivated. I agree with JJ that near-impossible golf shot helped the overall effect of vanishing-trick. I don't believe the trick, by itself, would help the book get onto a top 10 list of all-time best impossible crime novels, but it was a pretty decent trick and obviously inspired by one of the Merrivale titles – only in reverse. Or maybe I remember the trick differently, because JJ definitely had another Carr title in mind.

There's a good reason why these impossibilities had to happen and the whole scheme was cleverly screwed together with a great back-story and backdrop, but only marred by its uneven, even unfair clueing. Some aspects of the plot were definitely foreshadowed. However, this was hardly enough for the reader to figure out the who or why of the plot. You can't really lock-in on the murderer and the motive, arising from that great back-story, is given very late in the game.

So this one is best read for the nuts and bolts of the crime or for the exploits of the impossible Bliss. Either way, you won't be disappointed.

Two quick observations, the story struck me as being a good 10-15 years older than the publishing date suggests. There are references to DNA in the story, but forensics were primarily working with the victim's blood group and could have been written-in when Sheldon revised and updated the final draft – before it was finally published. The story read as one of those 1980s locked room novels. Secondly, Sheldon treats his readers to a mental image of Bliss playing tennis and I have not seen a character make a ball travel “according to its own physical laws” since I attempted to watch Prince of Tennis.

On a whole, I very much liked and enjoyed reading Impossible Bliss. The clueing could have been a lot fairer, where the murderer and motive are concerned, but the problem of the evaporated golfer and his miraculous shot are the meat of the plot. And they were clued. Sheldon is a good egg who showed here that, even in this day and age, there's still room on the printed page for the figure of the Great Detective. I sincerely hope he finds a publisher for The Beast of Big Sur, because I would like to see Herman Bliss return. He also has an unpublished short story about the impossible stabbing in a glass revolving door. S-should we start pestering John Pugmire?

The Six Queer Things (1937) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

Christopher St. John Sprigg was a British writer who left school at the age of fifteen to work as a cub reporter on a now defunct newspaper, Yorkshire Observer, where his father had been a literary editor, before becoming the editor of British Malaya, but earned his literary stripes as a young, versatile novelist – writing reams of poetry, ghost stories, plays and aeronautics textbooks. During a brief, five-year period in the 1930s, Sprigg produced seven well received, highly regarded and cleverly constructed detective novels.

Some of them were praised by Dorothy L. Sayers for being "full of good puzzles" and bubbling with "zest and vitality."

Unfortunately, Sprigg contracted Marxism in 1934 and came to regard his detective fiction as trash he wrote to make money. Two years later, he joined the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War against General Francisco Franco, where he became a machine-gun instructor and editor of the Battalion Wall, but was tragically killed on his first day in the field – during the Battle of Jarama in February, 1937. I guess you could say communism kills.

Sprigg's untimely passing plunged his mystery novels into total obscurity and his books became scarce, expensive and hard to come by for regular readers. Ironically, this meant his books were primarily accessible to deep-pocketed collectors. Until recently, that is.

Back in 2015, British Library Crime Classics reissued Death of an Airman (1935) and earlier this year Valancourt Books published The Six Queer Things (1937). By the time this blog-post goes live, Moonstone Press has probably printed brand new editions of Crime in Kensington (1933), The Perfect Alibi (1934) and Death of a Queen (1935). So Sprigg is gradually being wrested from the dust of obscurity and wanted to knock The Six Queer Things from my list before the Moonstone Press releases become available.

The Six Queer Things was Sprigg's last, posthumously published detective novel and the story dragged the Victorian-era damsel-in-distress into the Golden Age with an eclectic plot encompassing mystery, suspense, fake occultism and an impossible poisoning – which tempted me to place the book in the John Dickson Carr-Hake Talbot school of detective-fiction. However, the dark, grim and humorless tone made it inherently different from Carr's wondrous "Baghdad-on-the-Thames" stories or Talbot's delightfully, thrill-filled hair-raisers. So what made this menacing, claustrophobic and often unpleasant story a great, but unusual, read was its excellent story-telling and plotting.

Miss Majorie Easton is a twenty-year-old, junior shorthand typist earning a modest wage at the Brixton Cardboard Box Works and is engaged to be married to Ted Wainwright. A young, hardworking man expected to become a foreman in the press shop of Bilford Metal Furniture Company, but, until they can afford it, Majorie has to live with her "stingy louse" of an uncle, Samuel Burton.

During one of their arguments over money, Burton tells her its time to stand on her own two feet and find a job that has more to offer than a 26-shillings-a-week salary. Shortly after this confrontation, Majorie is approached in a tea shop by a curious-looking, yellow-faced man and his sister, Michael and Bella Crispin – who tell her she may possess a talent of which she had been unaware. And they offer her a well paying job as their research assistant. Michael and Bella Crispin are psychical researchers and have gathered a group around them, Immortality Circle, with whom they hold weekly séances at their home. The only strings attached is that Majorie has to live with the Crispins and be available to them at all times of the day.

Slowly, but surely, Majorie becomes a believer as "phosphorescent shapes" took "visible bodily form" before her eyes. She witnessed how "disembodied voices" gradually acquired "an ectoplasmic face" and had felt "the touch of spirit hands." Even the ghostly, disembodied voice of her dead mother spoke to her through Crispin. Majorie eventually begins to develop her own mediumistic abilities, but in the process she began "to become more isolated" and "withdrawn into herself." This severed all her ties to the outside world and isolated her from Ted.

I suppose the most experienced mystery readers probably has an inkling of what's going on in that house, but these events are only the preliminaries and the story becomes really interesting, as well as more complex, towards the end of the first half – when the séance room becomes the stage of an apparently impossible poisoning. Once Majorie stopped attending the séances, Ted infiltrates the circle under the name of George Robinson. At the end of one of these séances, an exhausted Crispin asks Ted to get him a glass of water from the little sink and tap in the corner of the room. Ted went to the sink and held a glass under the tap, rinsing it out once or twice, before filling it. Then he brought it to Crispin, but, as he sipped the water, yelled out "you devil" and accused Ted of having poisoned him. After this accusation, Crispin dropped to the ground, convulsed and died!

This is the point where the plot splits in two distinctively different, but closely intertwined, story-lines combining police detection with a stiff dose of dark suspense.

Detective-Inspector Charles Morgan is a meticulous, detail-oriented policeman who tackles the detection end of the plot and has to find an answer to a number of pressing questions. Such as how it was possible that "clear, unpoisoned water had flowed out of the tap," but when it reached Crispin it contained a large dose of strychnine. Why was a small bottle with traces of prussic acid found in Ted's pocket? What is the meaning behind the six queer things Morgan found in a locked drawer Where are Bella and Majorie? They disappeared around the time of the murder and Morgan's investigation is interspersed with scenes of Majorie being held captive, which gives the plot its Gothic resonance, but can't tell too much about this end of the story without giving anything away. However, I can say that the suspense part of the plot was very well written and handled.

Most surprisingly, Morgan's meticulous detective work and the technical nature of the impossible poisoning-trick in the séance room (largely) reminded me of John Rhode's plotting-style (c.f. Invisible Weapons, 1938), which the unimaginative, fact-based policeman solved by an unexpected hunch "without any basis in hard fact" – which he uncharacteristically followed with "a shamefaced feeling." Perhaps the only real hint of humor in the whole story. Only facet of the plot that let me down was the explanation for the titular six queer things. I had expected more from these items, but that's my only real complaint. And a very minor complaint at that.

So, all in all, The Six Queer Things is a suspensefully written, solidly crafted story of detection and suspense, dripping with sinister gloom, which successfully transplanted the anxious, Gothic-style damsel-in-distress to the genre's Golden Age. The Six Queer Things certainly is not your typical, traditionally-styled impossible crime novel, but turned to be a surprisingly good and rewarding read. One that has made look forward to the upcoming reprints. Definitely recommended.