Wanton Wonders

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, 1890)

Martin Edwards is a decorated crime novelist, genre-historian and author of the award-winning The Golden Age of Murder (2015), which I still haven't read, but currently he's also engaged as the resident anthologist of the British Library – compiling such themed anthologies as Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015) and Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries (2016). Last week, the greatest title in the series yet rolled off the printing presses.

Yes, that's my personal, opinionated bias bleeding through. I love locked room mysteries. Deal with it.

Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017) gathered sixteen short stories that were never, or rarely, collected in similar themed anthologies. A good portion of the stories came from the hands of such luminaries as Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, but Edwards complemented their work with several obscure, long-overlooked impossible crime tales by Grenville Robbins, Christopher St. John Sprigg and E. Charles Vivian – resulting in a pleasantly balanced collection of short stories. So let's take a closer look at the content of this newest anthology of miracle crimes.

However, I gave the following handful of stories a pass, because I didn't feel like re-reading them or discussed them previously on this blog: Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special," William Hope Hodgson's "The Thing Invisible," R. Austin Freeman's "The Aluminium Dagger," Nicholas Olde's "The Invisible Weapon" and Michael Innes' "The Sands of Thyme." Even with these stories eliminated from the line-up, this is still going to be one of those bloated blog-posts that grows at the same speed as Erle Stanley Gardner's bibliography. Strap in, everyone. This is going to be a long ride!

So that makes the first story under examination Sax Rohmer's "The Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room," originally published in the April 1913 issue of The New Magazine, which starred one of his obscure, short-lived series-character, Moris Klaw – whose cases were collected in The Dream Detective (1920). Klaw is an antique dealer and an occult detective who prefers to spend the night at the scene of a crime, which reproduces clue-like images of the victim's last thoughts in his dreams (hence the book-title). Scene of the crime in this series-opener is the Greek Room of the Menzies Museum.

A night attendant got his neck broken in the Greek Room, but how an outsider could've entered and left the premise is a complete mystery. There are only two entrances to the room, a public and a private one, which were both securely locked and the windows were fitted with iron bars. And there was no place where even "a mouse could find shelter." Klaw is allowed to camp out in the room and received a psychic photograph "a woman dressed all in white," but also got the impression the night watchman had a "great fear for the Athenean Harp" - a gemstone in the museum's collection. Honestly, I did not expect too much from this story, but, while dated, the plot was fairly decent and well-put together. Granted, some of the finer details about the exact cause of death and murder method were as ridiculous as they were dated.

However, as much as some aspects of the explanation stretches credulity, they were still surprisingly down to earth for a detective story from an occult mystery series. I also have to earmark the impossible problem, and its solution, as an early example of a particular type of impossibility that would turn up again in the works of John Dickson Carr, Ken Greenwald and David Renwick.

The next entry is one of favorite stories from G.K. Chesterton's celebrated Father Brown series, "The Miracle of Moon Crescent," which came from a collection of short stories saturated with impossible crime material – aptly titled The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). I've always been fond of this story on account of the originality and brilliance of its locked room problem.

A problem concerning the miraculous disappearance of an American philanthropist, Warren Wynd, who vanished from a watched room on the fourteenth floor of the apartment complex called Moon Crescent. Equally inexplicable is his reappearance at the end of a rope in the garden below. Luckily, Father Brown is at hand to alleviate the minds of the baffled, "hard-shelled materialists" that were present outside of Wynd's room and explain this apparent miracle. The priest based his explanation on a madman he had seen firing a blank at the building, which told him how the philanthropist was whisked away from a closely observed room and why he was found hanging from a tree branch. Absolutely ingenious! Only weakness of the plot is the rather silly, far-fetched motive, but even that was somewhat original.

Marten Cumberland's "The Diary of Death" was first published in The Strand Magazine of January, 1928, which has a premise that should've been explored at novel length: a once popular musical singer, Lilian Hope, had disappeared from the spotlight into "obscurity and direst poverty" - where "she died in a miserable garret." During her waning years, Hope kept a diary in which she poured out "vindictive and bitter accusations" against her former friends. Naming everyone who she felt had abandoned her and refused any kind of help. Someone got a hold of this diary and begins to extract revenge on everyone mentioned in it. Leaving behind a torn page from the diary after every murder.

So the police have their hands full with the "Death Diary Murders," but the one who gets an opportunity to put a stop to the killings is an amateur criminologist, Loreto Santos. At a house party, Santos is approached by the person who's "next on the list," Sir George Frame. He used be a friend of Hope, but the money he mailed to the poor woman was intercepted by his wife. So she never received an answer or a penny and dedicated some bitter words to Sir George in her diary. And now he has received a torn page in the mail.

Sadly, Santos is unable to avert Sir George's impending doom, because the following morning they've to batter down the locked-and bolted door of his bedroom door with a Crusader's mace and they find his body in the middle of the room – a knife-handle protruding from his back. A story with an intriguing and solid premise, however, its resolution was a bit too simplistic. I easily spotted the murderer and the problem of the locked room hinged on an old trick (c.f. "The Locked Room Lecture" from Carr's The Hollow Man, 1935), but still found it an enjoyable story.

Grenville Robbins' "The Broadcast Murder," originally published in Pearson's Magazine of July, 1928, which is one of the earliest examples of a detective story set in the world of radio. I think the story also demonstrate that mystery writers from the first half of the twentieth century had no problem incorporating new technologies into their plot. In this case, hundreds of thousands listeners heard how the radio announcer suddenly yelled "help!" followed by "the lights have gone out" and "someone's trying to strangle me," but the fate of the announcer remains unknown – since his body disappeared from "a hermetically sealed studio." The trick is relatively simple one, using old-fashioned misdirection, but the reason for staging such an illusion at a radio studio shows the Golden Age was about to go in full bloom.

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists a second short story by Robbins, "The Broadcast Body," which was published in the June, 1934, issue of 20-Story Magazine and deals with a professor who vanished from a guarded room "in which he was carrying out a matter-transference experiment." So that might be a potential candidate for inclusion in a future anthology of this kind.

The next story, "The Music Room," was lifted from the pages of the pseudonymous Sapper's Ask for Ronald Standish (1936), which reportedly collects some of his more detective-orientated crime-fiction and features his second-string sleuth, Standish.

Standish is a guest at a, sort of, house warming party during which the host, Sir John Crawsham, entertains the party by telling about an unsolved mystery that came with the property. Nearly half a century ago, the then lodge-keeper found the body of an unknown man in the music-room, "lower part of his face had literally been battered into a pulp," but the real mystery is how his assailant could have entered or left the room – because the door had to be broken open and the key was on the inside of the door. As to be expected, someone else dies inside the locked music-room, crushed by a chandelier, before too long. 

However, the explanation is hardly inventive and even a bit disappointing, but appreciated how the potential presence of a hidden passage was used. Otherwise, it's not really a remarkable story at all.

Back in 2015, Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935) was republished as a British Library Crime Classic and this brand new edition was as well received as the original edition. So readers might be glad to know that this anthology contains one of his obscure short stories.

"Death at 8:30" was salvaged from the pages of the May 25, 1935, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly and can be classified as a sensationalist thriller with a mild puzzle plot, similar to Anthony Berkeley's Death in the House (1939), but superior in every way imaginable – one of them being is that this story does not overstay its welcome. A murderous blackmailer, known only as "X.K.," demanded exorbitant sums of money in exchange to be left alone, but, when a victim refused, they would be swiftly dispatched to the Great Hereafter. There were three men who refused to comply with the demands and they were all murdered under mysterious circumstances. The fourth person who refuses to pay is no less a figure than the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Jauntley, which demands extreme and extraordinary security precautions.

The vaults of the Bank of England was put at their disposal and the Home Secretary was encased in "a cell of thick bullet-proof glass," surrounded by armed men, but, at the time announced by “X.K.,” the Home Secretary began to writhe in agony and died within mere seconds – poisoned! However, there were no apparent ways of how the poison could have been introduced inside the sealed, bullet-proof and air-filtered glass tube. One that was located in a sealed and heavily guarded bank vault. I suppose I've been reading too many impossible crime stories, because I immediately spotted the tale-tell clue that told me how it was done. But how the murderer was dealt with was something else all together. So, yes, not bad for a sensational thriller story.

G.D.H. and Margaret Cole's "Too Clever by Half" was included in The Detection Club's Detection Medley (1939) and is a semi-inverted mystery, in which the narrator, Dr. Benjamin Tancred, tells about a clever murderer he once met. 

Samuel Bennett was the brainy licensee of the "Golden Eagle," an inn in the remote Willis Hill, where he was in the process of murdering his brother-in-law when Dr. Tancred turned up. The victim was found in an upstairs bedroom, locked from the inside, with a bullet-hole in his head. On the surface, it looks like a simple case of suicide, but Dr. Tancred suspects murder based on the inn-keepers behavior, a lighted keyhole, the angle of the fatal bullet and the smell of gun powder in the corridor.

This is not really a story that allows you to puzzle along with the detective, but it's fun to watch the detective dismantle, what could have been, a clever and near perfect murder without breaking a sweat.

E. Charles Vivian's "Locked In," originally collected in My Best Mystery Story (1939), was a disappointing and forgettable tale of a supposed suicide in a locked room. I did not care for it. Moving on...

Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Haunted Policeman" was first published in the February, 1938, issue of Harper's Bazaar and was posthumously collected in Striding Folly (1971), but remains one of her most criminally underrated pieces of fiction. The story represents one of her most imaginative and strongest puzzle-plot, which could easily have been a Carter Dickson yarn in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940)!

The story opens on the night when Lord Peter Wimsey's first son is born and, shortly thereafter, meets a confused policeman. One who has a very interesting ghost story to tell. P.C. Alfred Burt was pounding pavement in Merriman's End, "a long cul-de-sac," where his eye fell upon "a rough-looking fellow" in "a baggy old coat" was lurking suspicious in the shadow, but when he was about to ask the character what he was doing when someone yelled bloody murder – which seemed to come from Number 13. Nobody answered the door. But the policeman did take a peek through the letter-flap and saw a man laying the hall with a carving-knife in his throat. However, when he returned, alongside a colleague, all of the houses in the street have even numbers. There's no number 13! And none of the house they visited have an interior that resembles what he observed through the letter-flap. The house, alongside the body, vanished into the dark of the night.

The explanation for this apparent impossibility is as satisfying as it's cleverly simple. And, as noted here above, the plot of the story is very Carrish in nature and could have easily been a case for Colonel March of Department D-3. After all, he handled a similar kind of problem in "The Crime in Nobody's Room."

The next story is Edmund Crispin's "Beware of the Trains," originally published in The London Evening Standard in 1949, which has Gervase Fen assisting his policeman friend, Detective-Inspector Humbleby, when a motorman disappeared from a moving train. At the same time, the police had surrounded the small station to collar a burglary. So nobody could have slipped out unobserved. A well-known and competent enough story, but hardly one of Crispin's best impossible crime stories. There are a pair of lesser-known, but far stronger, locked room stories in Crispin's repertoire, namely "A Country to Sell" and "Death Behind Bars," which appeared in a posthumous collection – entitled Fen Country: Twenty-Six Stories (1979). Hopefully, one of them will be considered for a future anthology of locked room mysteries.

Finally, we have the youngest story in the collection, Margery Allingham's "The Villa Marie Celeste," which was first published in the October, 1960, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Personally, I'm not really a big fan of Allingham, but this has to be one of the niftiest domestic mysteries I ever came across. A young couple, married for three years, disappeared from their comely home in Chestnut Grove. They apparent vacated a half-eaten breakfast on a washing-day, took some sheets and vanished "like a stain under a bleach." Technically, this story does not really qualify as an impossible crime, but the quality of the story makes that a forgivable offense.

Some of you might want to know that the unusual, but original, motive makes it a close relative of a genuine locked room mystery from the 1980s, "The Locked Bathroom" by H.R.F. Keating, which I reviewed here. Funnily enough, both stories have a solution that involves laundry.

Mercifully, that brings us at the end of this bloated, drawn out and badly written review!

All in all, the short stories collected in Miraculous Mysteries were very consistent in quality. There were only two real stinkers, Freeman (ripped off a well-known story) and Innes (completely ridiculous), but skipped those two and that left only one (minor) disappointment (i.e. Vivian). All of the other entries were either decent, good or historically interesting. So no real complaints about the overall quality of the collection. 

However, it was a small let down that this anthology did not collect any new sparkling classics that were completely unknown to me, but that's the price one pays for consuming ridiculous amounts of impossible crime-fiction. That being said, this anthology is a welcome addition to the slowly growing row of locked room themed short story collections of which there can never, ever, be enough.

So, despite my annoying nitpicking, I do hope this will not be the last locked room anthology Edwards will compile for the British Library, because I really do love impossible crime stories. And I'm only, like, halfway through all of the novels and short stories listed by Adey in Locked Room Murders. I really, really need more anthologies to complete that task and reach full enlightenment. 

And, as always, I'll try to keep my next review a whole lot shorter.  

Under a Cloud of Suspicion

"A little malice adds a certain savor to life."

- Mr. Treves (Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, 1944)

Over a period of half a century, Lucy Beatrice Malleson wrote nearly seventy detective-and suspense novels and employed a handful of pennames, but the one that garnered her the most success was that of "Anthony Gilbert" and she used the name for the fifty-some books about her series-character – a morally ambiguous lawyer named Arthur Crook. A likable antihero cut from the same cloth as Craig Rice's John J. Malone and Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. 

 

I've only read six of her novels, a mere fraction of her complete output, but my sampling showed how she danced between domestic suspense (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942) and the formal detective story format (e.g. Death Knocks Three Times, 1949). My impression is that she was more gifted when writing tales of suspense, but was not entirely inept when handling a puzzle-oriented plot. And that brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.

She Shall Die (1961) came late in Malleson's career and as a rule I tend to be little hesitant when it comes to detective novels published after 1959, but this particular title has been on my wishlist ever since I came across a short review by Nick Fuller on the GADWiki – who described it as a "really good" mystery with a "well-clued Agatha Christie-type solution." He also accurately described Crook as having "something of the gusto of H.M." So it was about time I finally knocked this title of my list.

Hattie Savage is the attractive "daughter of a rich tycoon" and she has a knack for attracting both men and trouble, which eventually lands her in a police cell on suspicion of murder.

The trouble began for Hettie when a young man, Richard Sheridan, proposed to her, but she rejected him and Sheridan did not take that very well. Sheridan told Hattie he would not be able to live if she did not accept him and threatened to put "a bullet through his brain," but instead of walking away from the situation Hattie did the unthinkable – she handed him sleeping tablets and told how many it would take to kill himself. So the next morning there's a policeman on her parents doorstep with the news that Sheridan had been found dead in his bed. The doctor had no doubt that he died from taking an overdose of barbiturates.

As to be expected, Hattie receives very little public sympathy and at the inquest "the coroner barely concealed his sense of outrage," but the jury returned an open verdict and she's free to go. She was not cleared from any wrong doings in the court of public opinion and within twenty-four hours of the verdict the anonymous letters-and telephone calls began, which made her decide to escape the limelight and "flee to Paris." However, the real trouble began to manifest itself during her absence.

During the inquest, Marguerite Grey, "a saleswoman in the glove department of Booties," came forward and claimed to have been engaged to Sheridan, which would throw serious doubt on Hattie's story, but Marguerite is unable to produce any proof and nothing was done with statement. But the small cast-of-characters who surrounded Hattie and Sheridan had not seen the last of her.

Marguerite is determined to wriggle her way into the community and begins with Sheridan's aunt, Miss Alison Sheridan, who runs a popular restaurant and she is the first to discover that the girl is a regular snake in the grass – one with a penchant for blackmail. Marguerite knows something about her dead nephew that has to be kept a secret. Miss Sheridan has to allow Marguerite into her home, but her blackmailing antics doesn't stop there and even tries to sink her claws into Hattie when she returns with a husband in tow.

However, Marguerite had "the natural vanity of the blackmailer" and it never occurred to her "she might be in danger herself." Unsurprisingly, someone ends up planting a knife between her shoulder blades.

U.S. edition

Hattie is placed under arrest and her new husband, Philip Cobb, rushes off to get the help of Arthur Crook, "that rogue elephant among lawyers," who only appears in the last five chapters, but that's all he needs to clear up this mess and even provides a false solution based on A.E.W. Mason's At the Villa Rose (1910) – which succeeded in completely throwing me off my game for a moment. The false solution was presented very convincingly and briefly assumed I had been foolishly trailing a well-placed red herring. Luckily, I was not entirely wrong about the explanation.

I correctly figured out what was at the heart of both deaths (spotted all the clues!) and this allowed me to identity the murderer, but got a thing or two wrong about how this information fitted the overall picture. Still, I was more right than wrong and loved the level of fairness that allowed me to play along on an equal footing with Crook.

She Shall Die may be a relatively short domestic tale with a small, intimate cast-of-characters, but the structure of the plot and placing of the clues is what one would expect from the Grandest of the Golden Age. On top of that, there are certain components of the plot that show some strokes of originality. So to know that such a classically-styled, fairplay mystery novel was published during that dark decade for our genre, the sixties, was very heartwarming, because there are not that many examples from the same period.

The only other (classical) examples I can think of are Robert van Gulik's The Red Pavilion (1961) and Helen McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968). I'm sure there are a few more, but this was literary all I could think of at the moment.

However, while the plot burned and shimmered with all the brilliance of the 1930s, the cultural references clearly showed that the story was set in a completely different time. One of the characters mentioned they were living in "the shadow of the atom-bomb." Khrushchev gets a throw-away reference. A refugee committee hovers in the background and suspect they dealt with people who fled Eastern Europeans. A police sergeant is mourning the fact that "even the television had lined itself up with the wrong side," because they were giving away all the secrets of police work. I've always found these cultural and (now) historical references to be interesting ornaments on my detective stories.

Anyhow, She Shall Die is a well-written, fairly clued and soundly plotted detective novel that gives the reader all the room needed to arrive at the same conclusion as Crook, which should please every self-proclaimed armchair detective. I can therefore recommend the book to everyone who loves a fair shot at beating the detective to the solution. And you should be able to do it, if you're observant enough.

Well, let me cut-off this overlong review here and tell you that the next review will fall into the locked room-and impossible crime category, because I received some interesting titles in the mail this week. I just have to make a decision which one of those titles will be devoured first.

Dead in the Water

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."
- Andrew Lippincott (Agatha Christie's Endless Night, 1967)

Back in 2015, I finally got around to reading a couple of Freeman Wills Crofts' detective novels, The Cask (1920) and The Sea Mystery (1928), which were excellent and showed the hand of an intelligent, technically-minded and no-nonsense writer – who has been unfairly labeled as a humdrum. I wanted to continue exploring his work, but got distracted by the deluge of reprints mentioned in my previous blog-post.

Luckily, Crofts is one of the authors currently being reissued en masse. Several of his earlier books appear to be in the public domain (e.g. The Pit-Prop Syndicate, 1922), but the British Library and Collins Crime Club have both reprinted a number of titles from the late 1920-and 30s. So far, they've brought back such interesting titles as Sir John Magill's Last Journey (1930) and The Hog's Back Mystery (1933), but there was another title that caught my attention.

Mystery in the Channel (1931), or Mystery in the English Channel, is the seventh book about Crofts plain, but highly competent, policeman-character, Inspector Joseph French. What attracted my attention was its tantalizing premise.

A cross-channel steamer of the Southern Railway Company, Chichester, passed the halfway mark on their journey through the English Channel when they came across a motionless yacht. The name of the vessel is the Nymph and as they come nearer to the boat they see a man "lying in a heap on the deck." Upon closer inspection, the crew members of the steamer discover that there are two dead men aboard the pleasure yacht, shot through the head, but are unable to locate a gun – eliminating the possibility of a murder-suicide. So one of the crew members is tasked with sailing the "rich man's toy" back to England and handing the floating crime-scene over to the authorities.

The victim's are quickly identified as Paul A. Moxon and Sydney Deeping, the chairman and vice-chairman of Moxon's General Securities, which finds itself at the center of a financial disaster when they become unable to meet its liabilities. The total deficit is believed to approach eight million pounds, left thousands ruined and according to the newspapers "the tale of disaster is not yet complete." And they weren't wrong.

Bryce Raymond and Joshua Esdale, a third partner and chief accountant, are nowhere to be found, but they're not the only ones who are unaccounted for: a large sum of cash money, "a million and a half sterling," have disappeared from the company's strong-room – which makes for a pretty bundle of trouble.

Inspector French goes about his task with dogged determination and shrewdly reconstructed what roughly happened aboard based on blood-stains and a pool of blood. Equally impressive is chapter nine, titled "Distance Over Time Equals Speed," in which French reconstructs the movements of the various vessels involved and tries "to fix the point of the murders." Something he calls Point M. By the way, I think that would have been a better title for the book than the more mundane and less imaginative Mystery in the Channel.

Anyway, the investigation is not a solo performance on French's part and his success depends on the large, sprawling police apparatus of two countries.

As an overseas colleague said to French, "this is no longer a job for one man," but "a case for the organization" that could field hundreds, or even thousands, of men to follow up on every single lead. Crofts eagerly gives his readers a glimpse of the machination of these organizations and assigns various policemen to such background tasks as following "a trail of numbered banknotes" or trying to locate one of the missing men, which is painstaking work stretched out over several weeks – one throw-away remark revealed the case had been dragging on for six weeks.

So you can say that this series, particularly this title, is an early predecessor of the modern police procedural, but the plots are unquestionably a product of their time (i.e. pure Golden Age). The devilish clever and twisted plot here was unraveled by slow, determined police work, but carries all the hallmarks of a vintage detective novel and a notable aspect of this was the pool of blood aboard the yacht. French's first conclusion proved to be not entirely correct and emerging evidence showed there was a second explanation for what, initially, seemed fairly straightforward. Just what you'd expect from a classic mystery novel from the early 1930s!

I also loved the fiendishly clever, slightly technical, but ultimately simple, alibi-trick of the murderer. Or how the explanation has answers to the questions I began to ask myself while reading the book. Like why didn't the murderer threw the bodies overboard and scuttled the yacht? It would have made it all but impossible for the police to solve the case, but the solution provided a satisfying answer for these question.

I should also point out that Mystery in the Channel, like so many mysteries from the 1930s, was rife with condemnation for the figureheads in the financial calamities that left thousands of people "irretrievable ruined." On several occasions, Crofts gives brief details how people were ruined (e.g. "elderly men, having to start life again. And heaven knows where they'll get jobs."). Such characters as bankers, stockbrokers and financiers were not the most popular characters in the detective-fiction of the post-1929 world.

Apparently, Crofts loved ships and was personally very interested in the inner-workings of large business enterprises, which both come to the foreground in Mystery in the Channel and he erected a first-rate plot around these two pet subjects – in which every piece of evidence and event fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Crofts may not have been a writer with too many literary pretensions, but he was a plotter of the first water and I should make an excursion to his work more often.

On a final note, I sure hope Sudden Death (1932) and The End of Andrew Harrison (1938) are considered for reprinting in the hopefully not so distant future. So, if any of you publishing people are reading this, you might want to scribble those two titles down.

Spell Bound

"Who can be shown to be the one person, and the only one, with direct access to the toys of both withcraft and murder?"

- Dr. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge, 1938)

I wrote several years ago how the traditional detective story is in the middle of a renaissance and this era began as a slow drip of reissues of long-forgotten, out-of-print mystery novels during the 2000s that became today's flood of truly rare titles – making it all but impossible to keep up with all the releases. Ah, luxury problems!

There is one particular title, recently reissued, that caught my eye, because its emergence out of the dark abyss of literary oblivion might have set a new speed record for comebacks.

Back in October of 2016, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books posted a glowing review of The Hex Murder (1935). The book was written by Alexander Williams, using the nom-de-plume of "Forrester Hazard," which Norris described as a remarkable modern, fast paced, well told and gripping story steeped in the old religions and superstitions brought to the Americas by the German settlers known as the Pennsylvania Dutch – labeling the book as, what he called, "country noir." Norris ended the review with a lamentation that there were hardly any copies for "anyone to get their hands on to enjoy." Well, that situation persisted for only four more months!

In February of this year, Coachwhip brought The Hex Murder back into circulation and this brand new edition is introduced by one of the usual suspects, Curt Evans. According to the introduction, Williams wrote three more detective novels, The Jinx Theatre Murder (1933), Death Over Newark (1933) and Murder in the W.P.A. (1937), which are all scheduled to be reprinted by Coachwhip. Some of those titles are really tantalizing, but sincerely hope they've a stronger plot than the subject of today's blog-post.

Yes, I fear my review of the book is going to be a cold drizzle on Evans and Norris' infectious enthusiasm. So you've been warned!

You can divide the plot of the story into two separate parts: the first half that takes place in bohemian Greenwich Village, New York, where a ghastly murder is discovered and an innocent man is arrested. And the second half that takes the investigation to the backwoods of Amish country, Pennsylvania, where the roots of the crime are buried. But let's begin at the beginning.

The Hex Murder opens with Patrolman James Bates pounding the pavement on his beat when he hears someone yelling, "Help! Help! Police!" A man clad in pajamas, "splotched and spattered with blood," tells him there's a woman bleeding to death, but when Bates enters the apartment he discovers the body of a woman with her throat viciously cut – a "terrible wound" that had nearly severed the head from the body. The name of the woman is Marguerite Scholl and she's in a modern relationship with the man in the pajamas, Bob Crocker, who's a struggling artist and the small apartment they occupied is a known source of trouble in the neighborhood. They regularly host loud, late-night drinking parties. On the night of the murder was no different.

However, Crocker's memory is very foggy and since his hands are caked with blood (basically covered in the stuff) they arrest him on suspicion of murder. The police end of the case, detailed in the opening chapters, reads like a hardboiled police procedural. Crocker is on the receiving end of long, exhaustive (verbal) third degree and has a desk lamp, "a burning horror," shown full in his face during the many hours of questioning. Even the policemen talk and quip like you expect from a stereotypical, 1930s homicide cop ("Oh, she got that slit throat from a cough, did she?"). Crocker would have been headed to the chair if it weren't for the interference of a young newshound.

Peter Adams of the New York City News Association is the first reporter to nose around the scene of the crime and believes Crocker to be innocent, but the District Attorney believes the evidence is more than sufficient "to force the jury to bring in a verdict of murder in the first degree" and some of the evidence was found by Adams – i.e. a bloody razor blade. So the reporter takes a leave of absence to follow up on some clues that point to Erwinna, Pennsylvania. The small home town of the victim.

Admittedly, the second half of the book seems to have broken new ground in the genre. As Norris said in his review (and he should know), The Hex Murder may be "the first cultural detective novel of its kind" with a plot that relies "so heavily on Amish life, culture and folklore." I agree that this second half of the story constitutes the best part of the book.

Adams is accompanied to this part of the United States by a friend of Crocker, Miss Houston King, who wants to help clear his name and they come across a host of unusual characters in the rural community. First of all, there is Marguerite's dying father and the old man appears to have been very upset that his daughter defied his wish, which would see her married off to their neighbor, Conrad Reifmayer, who's a religious fanatic and powwow man – reputedly hexed his neighbors. She had a much more forgiving mother and the letters she had been secretly sending to her daughter was one of the clues that lead Adams to their doorstep. The household also has a son, Henry Kruger, a "tall, ungainly youth" who, as it turns out, knows more about what took place in his home than his other relatives.

Adams and King receive help from Sheriff John Reed and Doctor Schneider. They provide a lot of background information about the community and their customs, religion and superstitions.

So that alone makes this part of the book an interesting read and culminates with the destruction of the murderer's cover during a public stunt involving an apparently stupid dog herding a flock of sheep. Norris rightfully called this scene one of the "better and more original denouement in a Golden Age detective novel." However, the gruesome details of the murder, the hexing business, the rural setting, the cultural snippets and some admittedly well written scenes are only the dressing on the bare bones of the plot, which not only failed to impress me in any way, but also left me completely disappointed – because the book had so much going for itself. You can not really deduce the identity (or motive) of the murderer based on the given information, but you can, instinctively, guess who did the throat-cutting after while. But that's hardly a satisfying way to reach a conclusion. Not to mention that said conclusion was really sordid and underwhelming.

Well, I guess I should have expected a sordid, simplistic explanation for a novel described as "country noir," but really hoped for something grander. Particularly since the entire book was pretty much structured like a slightly hardboiled detective novel.

So, The Hex Murder is definitely an interesting read, as far as its background and cultural elements are concerned, but the plot missed that final knock-out punch to elevate it to the status of a genuinely great and classical detective novel. And that's a real pity. However, you should keep in mind that my opinion on this one appears to be a minority one. If you were initially intrigued, you should allow me to keep you from acquiring a copy.

Well, now that I'm done raining on this effort of bringing a truly obscure title back into print, I'll promise to get my hands on that delicious sounding impossible crime novel Coachwhip recently reissued. So stay tuned!