Mathematician at Law

"Life is a collection of ifs. We go from the buts of doubting childhood to the ands of accumulating knowledge, and finally to the ifs of questioning wisdom."

- Dr. D.V. Leonardo (Leonardo’s Law, 1978)

Before appraising yet another locked room mystery, I have to apologize for the slapdash job I did on the previous review. After going over it today, I was tempted for a moment to expunge it from this blog and replace it with a rewrite, but the opposition, consisting of the always present lack of time and just plain laziness, voted down that proposition – which means that it will stay up as a memento mori. This will hopefully teach me not to post stuff online that was scrawled when my mind was already drifting off to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

But enough of this palaver, and onto today's feature: Warren B. Murphy's Leonardo's Law (1978), which has an inviting byline, "A Locked Door Mystery," plastered across its classy front cover. The effigy that passes for a scan really doesn't do the cover any justice. Anyway, I accidentally chanced upon a copy of this book and unhesitatingly picked it up, but without the strained expectancy of having uncovered the literary equivalent of a lost Rembrandt – which made for a nice surprise when I actually found a satisfying and interesting impossible crime story wedged between its covers.

Some of you might wonder why I'm still skeptical towards detective stories that rolled off the presses after the 1940s, when they so prominently manifested themselves on this blog for the past two months. It's true that writers like William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini continued a tradition that started with Edgar Allan Poe, but even their exquisite, neo-orthodox mysteries haven't entirely subdued the nightmarish flashbacks to Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and Frederick Ramsay's Stranger Room (2008) – atrocities second only to Hitler's genocide. But that's a story for another day.

Leonardo's Law is set against the scenery of a small Connecticut town, populated with an artsy, liberal orientated citizenry governed by a conservative municipality, which provides with an intriguing backdrop for the murder of Barry Dawson – an acclaimed novelist of sleazily written and sloppily plotted mysteries. Dawson may have been a noted man of letters, but he wasn't on the short-list for Walton's most popular citizen trophy and when someone bludgeons him to death with a claw hammer the region proves to be fertile with suspects and motives. However, the key problem facing the investigators is not figuring out who had written him off and for what reason, but explaining how the crime was perpetrated.  

Barry Dawson was found in his newly erected studio with the windows securely fastened and with the only door locked from the inside. The lock in the door is antiquated, but this makes the problem only more puzzling. It can only be locked and opened from the inside, with an old-fashioned brass key, which Dawson was clutching tightly between his stiffening fingers – making it an impossible feat for anyone to have slipped in and out of that studio.

Enter Lieutenant Anthony Jezail and Dr. David Vincent Leonardo! The novel is seen through the cynical eyes of the police lieutenant, whose narrative voice is wry, sardonic and occasionally laced with prejudice against gays – which probably explains why this book hasn't been wrung through the inner workings of a printing press for over three decades. On the other hand, it must be noted that Jezail constantly vexes his chief for being a cretinous racist who assumes that black people must've committed every misdeed in town. This makes Jezail somewhat of a schizophrenic character who can be lewd and funny on one page and boneheaded and embarrassing on the next. Dr. Leonardo is a literary descendant from the line of academic and scientific detectives, which includes the likes of The Thinking Machine and Dr. Lancelot Priestley, who's a mathematician with an expanding collection of honorable doctorates and a cushy teaching gig at a local university – and every once in a while acts as a special consultant to the police in cases they find difficult to crack. Going by the clues and hints strewn throughout the book, suggests that we should perceive him as the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci. 

As a locked room mystery, this book proved to be an engaging read that throws one or two compelling ideas around. For instance, there's a false solution that implicated Dawson's research assistant, Alfred Needles, because his tie-tack was found on his employer – which suggested to the police that Dawson locked the door himself to safeguard the evidence that would help them convict his murderer. I admit that it would've been a disappointing solution to the premise of the sealed studio, but there's a touch of mad genius about a victim accidentally creating a locked room problem to protect a tell-tale clue before finally collapsing.

The enigma's surrounding the murder of Barry Dawson are eventually satisfyingly explained, during a hearing in court by Leonardo who acts as an expert-witness for the defense, but Murphy walked a very fine tight-rope to get there. The identify of the murderer was perhaps too well hidden from the reader and the clues a trifle weak (one of them needed a floor plan to really have made it an effective hint as to how the locked room illusion was created), however, the most notably flaw was perhaps that both characters and publisher touted this book as a case that "turns the classical locked door mystery on its ear," but the ingenious explanation proffered to problem of the locked studio came straight from the pages of a detective story from the 1960s. Nevertheless, I disliked that particular book from start to finish and prefer this stories interpretation of that crafty, but simplistic, locked room gambit. Oh, and did I mention that Leonardo recapped Dr. Gideon Fell's locked room lecture from The Hollow Man (1935)?

All in all, Leonardo's Law is a satisfying, if somewhat flawed, detective story littered with some really nasty and repugnant characters, but Murphy's derisive and cynical writing style usually puts them in their place – which makes for another fine example of combining hardboiled story telling with orthodox plotting. It's therefore a shame that he only wrote one book in what could've been an excellent series.

Definitely recommended, but let the individual reader be warned about some of the opinions spouted by the characters that inhabit the pages of this book.

As If By Magic

"...that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and bolt."

- Captain Hook (Peter Pan, 1911).

In my previous review, I briefly touched upon the fact that neo-orthodox detective stories, all of a sudden, started to hog all of the limelight in this place for themselves – which can be simply put down as a pattern that emerges in ones reading habits without malice aforethought. It's like natural selection, but driven by an ego's futile attempts to steer and control its evolvement. This is why, for the time being, the current domineering species, such as Herbert Resnicow and Paul Doherty, will continue to detract from their forbearers. But rest assured, I will never list their predecessors as extinct and for today's review I will even highlight one of them.

Darwin Teilhet's The Ticking Terror Murders (1935) added with Baron Franz Maximilian Karagôz von Kaz, an Austrian aristocrat in exile, another accumulation of oddities to a swelling crowd of eccentric detectives, but whereas Hercule Poirot and Henri Bencolin have a dash of continental quaintness the Baron is merely capricious – which sometimes borders on sheer malevolence. Admittedly, the Baron is at his best when he's at his worst behavior, like breaking and entering a premise for a private investigation or braining a shopkeeper with his trusty green umbrella in order to make a free phone call, but for the most time he's just an anomaly.

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, Baron von Kaz is a member of the Austrian nobility who was forced to escape his native stomping ground after a botched political plot to restore the monarch and fled to the land of opportunities to set-up as a consulting detective – and his first client is brought to him to by an American woman he met and helped before back in Vienna.

Lucille Tarn made a name as an actress before wedding herself to a rising political star, but recently she found herself having an extramarital affair with a famous screenwriter, Henry Kerby, who's being haunted after dark by inexplicable and indeterminable ticking noises. Kerby suspects that Lucille's husband, Charles Tarn, became wise of their affair and is extracting revenge with these subtle, but disturbing, night-time noises. However, the Baron believes there's something more to these tickings than reaches the ears and convinces the Hollywood scenarist to retain him to identify its source. But before he can unsnarl this problem another one presents itself: Lucille Tarn is murdered as if by magic! 

While attending a performance of Dacrokoff, a celebrated magician, Lucille Tarn is asked to take place in a cabinet to make her disappear, which is exactly what happens, but when her form reappears she's sprawled on the bottom of the contraption with a poisoned hatpin protruding from her chest. The arrangement and execution of the locked cabinet trick turned out to be as clever as it's simple, but I think Teilhet's sleigh of hand made a slip when he divulged the solution at 1/3 of the book.

Technically, it's understandably why the solution had to be thrown out at that point in the book, but it would've benefited the overarching story if more had been done with it or at least procured a better spot between its covers – such as the middle portion of the book. But I have to praise the inclusion of three, highly detailed diagrams depicting every step necessary to conjure up a deceptive image that instilled the audience with the false notion of having just witnessed a murder that should not have been possible – even though it's not a complex trick that can only be comprehended with visual aids.

Plot-wise, there's a drop-off in quality after Baron von Kaz solves the mystery encompassing the magician's cabinet and unmasks an accomplice – who's promptly disposed off under circumstances that simply begged for another locked room mystery. The rest of book seems, for the most part, dedicated to filling up time with mad cows, nocturnal adventures and a kidnapping of sorts, before reaching the simple and inevitable conclusion – in spite of the fact that there were still clues to be picked up along the way.

I'm afraid that the negative underpinning of this review hasn't given a too favorable impression of this book, but let me assure you that overall I found it a very enjoyable read. As a detective story, it's just very uneven in quality which failed to deliver the goods in the end. Nonetheless, despite a faulty structure it's still worth a read – especially if you're an enthusiast of impossible crime stories.

And thus ends this slovenly scribbled critique of The Ticking Terror Murders and was planning to announce here that, whenever time would permit me, I would take another look at Herbert Resnicow. But I came across something interesting and obscure that will require my attention first. It involves a dead mystery writer and a locked room. 

The Baron von Kaz series: 

The Ticking Terror Murders (1935)

The Crimson Hair Murders (1936)

The Feather Cloak Murders (1937)

The Broken Face Murders (1940)

A Query for Mystery Buffs: Come Into Our Parlor

"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay!" 

- Sherlock Holmes.

The morose and sulky visage of the clock has not been too liberally, as of late, with providing me with the amount of minutes needed to arrive at the final chapter of Darwin Teilhet's The Ticking Terror Murders (1935) and write about it with a feigned air of intelligence. So I decided to exorcise a ghost that has been haunting my thoughts for the better part of a month now and hastily scribble these lines to prevent this place from reaching a standstill, however, the enquiry below isn't just an accumulation of throwaway lines to get things moving again – since I think it's an genuinely interesting question that we can have some fun with.

Detective stories have always been one of the most popular and engaging personalities in the class room of genre fiction, alongside its buddies science-fiction and horror, which almost naturally attracted an array of individuals from outside the field – who wanted to participate in what we affectionately refer to as the Grandest Game in the World. The Queen of Burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee, indited two comical mystery novels, The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942), and novelist Isreal Zangwill penned the novella "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891), which was aptly dubbed as the flagship of the modern locked room story, but the most successful visitor was perhaps science-fiction legend, Isaac Asimov. The Caves of Steel (1953) is the exempli gratia of the hybrid mystery novel done right. And let us not forget that the detective story was created by someone who qualifies as a visitor, Edgar Allan Poe, who's still primarily known for his tales of terror and hauntingly beautiful poems.

But as I ramble on here, you are probably starting to wonder where I want to go with this. It's really simple and I could've limited this to a simple, one-paragraph post: if you could send in an invite to someone outside of the field to write a detective story, who would it be and why?

If you'd ask me to whom I would dispatch a note of invitation, I would not have to think for even a second and promptly blurt out the names of the Las Vegas magicians, Penn & Teller. 

Penn & Teller

This idea began to take shape when I was listening to a very funny interview with Penn, in which he told how Teller has one of the best minds in magic today and can look at a complex stage illusion and tell how it was pulled off – which sort of became the premise of their television show, Fool Us.

Look, no strings!

I don't think it will come as a surprise to most of you when I say that I saw opportunities for at least one stunning impossible crime novel, but preferably a series, in which Teller provides a clever, multi-layered plot while Penn comes up with the lines to dress up the story – exactly like in their on-stage act and television shows. Plot-wise, these two stage magicians possess the knowledge and experience needed to possibly outdo a masterpiece such as John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), in which a member of a spiritualist circle is murdered while apparently levitating in mid-air, or even teach the master himself, John Dickson Carr, a trick or two on how to create a locked room or new ways to make stuff disappear. The only thing I am iffy about is whether they would understand the concept and necessity of fair-play clueing.

For these same reasons, I would also love to see James Randi try his hands at a locked room mystery. James Randi is a magician who dedicated his life to explaining miracles and seems therefore almost a shoo-in to pick up the plot threads that were left behind by John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot, Joseph Commings, Edward Hoch and Clayton Rawson. After all, this is the man who was confronted with someone who could apparently leaf through the pages of a phone book with the power of his mind and was not in the least impressed. Naturally, this warlock was exposed as the fraud he really was by this real-life counterpart of Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

So... let me know whom you would like to see firing up his or her computer and write a detective story. Oh, and they don't have to be necessarily alive. You could, for example, say how great it would've been if Michael Ende had written a mystery. Drop a comment here or compose a blog post of your own. I'm looking forward to hear from you!

Corpse de Ballet

"We watched the ghostly dancers spin

To sound of horn and violin,

Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,

Slim silhouetted skeletons

Went sidling through the slow quadrille."

- Oscar Wilde (The Harlot's House, 1885)

The sometimes absently-minded proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books, John Norris, dropped a comment on another blog, in which he was clearly amused at how hopelessly stuck me and Patrick are in the post-GAD era – and how we'll probably never find the yellow brick road back to the past if we continue to look the other way when Paul Doherty, Bill Pronzini and Paul Halter mischievously lock up the ghosts of John Dickson Carr, Kelley Roos and Ellery Queen in the cupboard. But in our defense, we infelicitously picked the phrase post-GAD to label the books we discuss on here that were published after the 1940s, when Neo-GAD would've been a far more accurate description.

And none of these contemporary writers, emerging during the last four decades, radiated with a brighter afterglow than the late Herbert Resnicow – who was a living and breathing fossil in his day. Not only did he keep the form alive with elaborate plotting and fair-play clueing, but his stories read and feel like genuine GAD mysteries resettled in the 1980s. The fact that every single one of them copes with a murder committed under apparently impossible circumstances is the coup de grâce!

The Gold Deadline (1984) opens with Alexander and Norma Gold receiving an invitation from billionaire Max Baron to attend a performance of the Boguslav Ballet, which has to serve as a cover that dresses up business talk as a social engagement – since he doesn't want the world to know that he's consulting a private detective. But halfway through the performance, the curtain separating them from the adjoining box-seat parted, and like an apparition at the bedside of Ebenezer Scrooge, the paling countenance of Max's son, Jeffrey, appears to inform them that his employer has been stabbed while he was alone with him in the box – and guess who cops want to tag for that murder?

Max Baron takes on Alexander and Norma Gold to exonerate Jeffrey from the murder charge that is suspended over his head like the Sword of Damocles, but they have a deadline of less than three days to do so and collect the biggest paycheck in their lives.

If you never had an opportunity to meet and watch the bantering behemoths at work, than you've been missing out on a few good chuckles. Alexander and Norma could've been the result of splicing and stitching together the genetic materials of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with those of Jeff and Haila Troy, but don't presume that they are merely theatrical puppets with clowns make-up on who solve a murder in-between bouncing risible comments off each other. They are well-characterized personages, however, their literary father wasn't laboring under the misapprehension that he was writing fiction that addressed the disintegration of society but simply 200-pages of intelligent escapism – and therefore allowed his characters to have a bit fun besides dealing with lives problems. As a result (and I have to warn the literary thriller fans here), Alexander and Norma are allowed to play detectives to their hearts content and spend a considerable amount of time on working out how the murder was executed and who was responsible.

The murder of the detestable impresario, Viktor Boguslav, is a doozy. Not only do the wedded gumshoes have to figure out a way to enter a theatre box, when the only door is latched from the inside, stab Boguslav without disturbing a snoozing Jeffrew or being witnessed by anyone of the hundreds of spectators and sneak out again undetected – not to mention the baffling fact that the impresario didn't struggle with his assailant or called out for help.

In a previous review, I pointed out that Resnicow's closed environment diverged from the traditional sealed rooms and guarded spaces. The locked rooms in his novels are wide-open spaces, from an entire top-floor apartment to a multi-level archaic chamber, but still manage to lock them as tightly shut as the typical locked study or bedroom. A theatre box seems therefore a little bit claustrophobic in comparison with previous stories, but the way in which practically employs the entire building through out the story not only reflects the experience of civil engineer with a lifelong working experience in construction work, but also that of a bona fide talent in constructing complex plots.

The solution, perhaps, stretches credulity, but you have to give Resnicow props here for coming up with yet another original take on the locked room and adroitly avoiding one of the most dangerous pitfalls of all by logically explaining why anyone would go to such insane and risky lengths to create the illusion of an impossible murder.

All in all, this is an immensely amusing and interesting detective novel, which does not only spin an enigmatic problem for the reader, but also allows you to catch a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtains of a ballet company and the characters that prance around there. Resnicow openly confessed his love and respect for ballet at the opening of the book and this is reflected in the story, especially when Norma lovely describes her favorite piece, Petrouchka, in which a rag-doll comes to life, falls in love and is killed for his humanity.

Resnicow shows here that entertainment can be both lighthearted as well as intellectually satisfying. Why he's all but forgotten today is beyond me.

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

What's Up in the Attic?

"Enjoy the fantasy, the fun, the stories... but make sure there is a clear sharp line drawn on the floor, so you can step back behind that mark and re-embrace reality... to do otherwise is to embrace madness."

- James Randi, the magician who explains miracles.

Paul Halter

When I first learned of the detective stories penned by Paul Halter, it was the name of John Dickson Carr that captured the attention of this locked room enthusiast. Halter naturally found, what can be described as, divine inspiration in the myriad of books left to us mere mortals by the Greatest Player who ever participated in the Grandest Game in the World – and his most ardent followers were ready to tear his mantle from Edward Hoch's back and drape it across Halter's shoulder. That piqued my interest, to say the least, and the collection of short stories, The Night of the Wolf (2006), entailed a lot of promise and contains one or two gems, like "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Flower Girl," that will most likely became staples of future locked room anthologies.

This probably explains why I ended up disillusioned with Paul Halter, after reading The Lord of Misrule (1994) earlier this year. I expected to witness first hand the second advent of the greatest mystery writer who had ever lived, but instead was treated to a fairly standard and flawed detective story. In spite of its fantastical premise, it lacked the atmospheric touches and clueing you'd expect from John Dickson Carr's heir. But worst of all, there was no sense of time and place, which is not an unimportant element if you decide to set a story at the turn of the previous century, and the ghost-like presence of the masked figure, cloaked in black, who's accompanied by the tinkling of sleigh-bells never became the terrifying hobgoblin like any of the nightmares dreamed up by Carr and Talbot.

So evidently, I concluded that this Gallic scribe has a heart that beats in the right place and valorously tries to continue a tradition that's truly worthy of being preserved, but that he was only a second-stringer at best – at least as far as novel length narratives are concerned. Well, last night I blazed through his second roman fleuve, The Fourth Door (1987), and I was wrong. Stylistically, it has the same flaws as The Lord of Misrule, but plot-wise, it has nearly everything you hope to find in a locked room story – and the patterns that emerge from the plot will both fascinate and please the most demanding mystery readers.

The Fourth Door is set in a small, undesignated hamlet during the early 1950s where three befriended households, the Whites, the Stevenses and the Darnleys, are torn asunder by supernatural events and several, seemingly impossible, murders with most of the otherworldly activity coming from the attic room in the home of Mr. Darnley – where his wife killed herself years previously. At least, it was presumed to be a suicide since the door and windows were locked and fastened on the inside. Lodgers reported footsteps emanating from the room and neighbors witnessed a glowing light passing the attic windows. Needless to say, none of these lodgers roomed very long with Mr. Darnley.

That is, until Patrick and Alice Latimer arrive in town, one of them apparently endowed with the mediumistic gift to communicate with the spirit realm, who promptly take up their residence at the reputedly haunted house – and from there on out the fabric of reality begins to slowly disintegrate. The events that followed include a séance, during which Alice Latimer is able to answer a question written down and sealed away in an envelope, and someone who's seen at two different location, at exactly the same moment, before disappearing for the stretch of three years are only a prelude to an even more baffling occurance – a murder in a sealed attic room!

As an experiment, in the hopes of establishing a better line of communication with the ghost of Mrs. Darnley to find out who murdered her, the spiritualist Patrick Latimer will hold an all-night vigil in the haunted room, which is not only locked but also sealed with wax and stamped with an imprint of a rare and unique coin – picked at the last moment from a collection of 600 of such specimens and never left the hands of the witness after the room was sealed up. But when they break open the door, Patrick Latimer has evanesced and in his place, sprawled on the floor, lies body of another man with the handle of a knife protruding from his back!

The construction of the sealed room illusion is quite simply brilliant and I feel very smug for having stumbled on the main gist of the trick before it was even put up for performance. When the corridor and lay-out of the attic was described, I immediately knew how the trick would be pulled off and only missed out on the finer, more subtle details. The part I got wrong was actually embarrassing clumsy compared to what actually happened. I also have to commend Halter here for motivating this elaborate set-up and why anyone should go to all that trouble to create a supernatural crime.

There's also a second murder, committed in a house whose immediate surrounding is carpeted in an expanse of un-trodden snow, which has a delightfully simple, as well as shocking, solution – and even better motivated than the first one. As noted in the story, it's quite possibly unique in the genre. No mean feat!

Plot-wise, this is as good as they come and the cleverly constructed, multi-layered solutions are the impetus that drives our undying love for these stories. Nevertheless, I have to state here, empathically, that in spite of these triumphs I still wouldn't rank Paul Halter alongside John Dickson Carr. The fact that he writes detective stories in which people are bumped off in sealed environments at the hands of apparent supernatural agencies are not the main reason why we read the tales from the grandmaster of this particular sub-genre, but for the gripping narrative that gradually tightens its iron-glad grip around your throat and impresses you with the dread that every shadowy nook harbors unimaginable horrors.

I never had even as much as an inkling of this feeling with this book nor was there any genuine sense of time and place. There were several references to the mounting terror in the village, but merely stating that the atmosphere was threatening does very little to convey that feeling to the reader. The only time he came close was the part with "the cold hands," but that arose from the plot that had become so complex and turned upside down at that point in the story that you couldn't help but feel bewildered. Another problem was the village setting. Which village? Throughout the story you get the idea the entire village consists of only three houses and is only inhabited by the characters that live in them.

So I would have to disagree with those who stated that Paul Halter did everything right in The Fourth Door, but I will concede that he more than delivered on the parts that really mattered. It's one of the most intricately constructed detective stories I have read this year, with a plot that twists and coils like a boa-constrictor in an epileptic fit, and I was enthralled with the patterns that emerged from the plot. I said it best in my review of Marco Books' De laatste kans (2011), "It's not entirely unlike watching someone emanating perfect circles of smoke that seem to playfully interact with one another."

To sum it up, this is nothing short of a tour-de-force of plotting and restored the faith I had lost after the previous novel – and the mystery community owes John Pugmire one for his untiringly efforts to bring his stories to an international audience. You can help him with this by simply picking up a copy of The Fourth Door and enjoying the story, and, if possibly, share your thoughts with the rest of us.

The Slaying of the Slayers

"Total slaughter, total slaughter.

I won't leave a single a man alive.

La de da de dai, genocide.

La de da de duh, an ocean of blood.

Let's begin the killing time."

- Genocide Song (Trigun)

Before I pull the next tome from its drawer and cart its stiffened pages into the autopsy room to provide you with an in-depth, post-mortem examination of its plot and writing, I have to nudge you in the direction of another review of mine that was co-written with a fellow Connoisseur of Crime and put up on his blog. Over At the Scene of the Crime, Patrick is marking the occasion of his 100th post with a series of collaborative reviews and for our joint effort we looked at Paul Doherty's first Judge Amerotke novel – The Mask of Ra (1998), in which Pharaoh Tuthmosis II succumbs to the noxious effects of an apparently impossible snakebite. I recommend going over that crime-scene after you're done here.

Today's tale of intrigue and murder also happens to be a volume from the set of books chronicling the storied career of the Chief Judge of Thebes, The Slayers of Seth (2001), which is Lord Amerotke's fourth recorded outing – and turned out to be quite a different story than the one I was expecting to find. It was tipped to me as a locked room mystery, but unlike its predecessors, there were no impossibilities and it was more of a thriller than a proper detective story. Granted, it's an excellent, blood-curdling yarn, however, I was hoping to find a plot that could match, or even out do, The Anubis Slayings (2000).

The characters who have a central role in this story are the titular slayers of the red-haired god of death, a small band of veteran soldiers who brought the grandfather of the reigning Pharaoh-Queen, Hatusu, a decisive victory over the invading armies of the Hyksos by courageously infiltrating an enemy campside and chopping-off the head of their mascot witch – who proclaimed to be the earthly reincarnation of the snake goddess Meretseger. This broke the heart and soul of their enemy and they were easily trampled in the succeeding battle.

When they returned home, the brave soldiers were treated to a hero's homecoming and the spoils of conquest consisted of a severed head, sacred Scorpion Cups and a glorious victory over a sworn enemy. Individually, they were bestowed with enermous riches, awarded honorable titles and their exploits on the battlefield became the stuff of legends, but the curse of the witch, spoken mere second before losing her head completely, looms over them like the blood-tinged shadow of their patron saint – and after the sands of time covered three decades a cloaked and masked figure appears out of nothing and begins picking them off one after another. And somehow, this deluge of bloodshed is closely connected with the poisoning of a young, ambitious scribe whose ambition was to become the betrothed of the daughter of one of the slayers and this youthful girl is now on trial in The Hall of Two Truths for his murder. But Amerotke believes there's more beneath the exterior of this case then meets the eye and more than once he nearly paid with his life for venturing too close to the truth.

As a tale of blood-soaked vengeance, adrenaline fuelled thrills and antediluvian perils wrapped up as a suspenseful serial killer story it's first rate, no argument there, but I think Doherty cheated himself out of creating a minor masterpiece with not even hiding a single clue – which would've made the excellent dénouement also a satisfying one. 

This self-appointed slayer of the slayers, whose presence is that like of a shadow, is the best culprit I encountered in this series thus far and when this person finally sheds the stained cloak and mask you find someone who's both remorseless as well as very human – with a very powerful and understandable motive. But the lack of clueing makes it impossible to anticipate or feel pleasantly surprised and there was definitely a missed opportunity with the murder of one of the generals by not securely locking the door and windows of The Red Chapel from the inside. Clues and a locked room killing could've easily turned this story in a thriller-cum-detective story rivaling John Dickson Carr's Captain Cut-Throat (1955), in which an apparently invisible assailant roams one of Napoleon's military camps and stabs his sentries under seemingly impossible circumstances. It remains one of my favorite historical detective stories.

But I have to be fair here and not be tempted into decrying this book merely because it's not what I wanted it to be. The plot is still a good example of craftsmanship and populated with interestingly drawn characters, especially the general's daughter who's accused of poisoning her lover and the militaristic heroes who give credence to the old adage "how the mighty have fallen," thrusted into dangerous and exciting situations. My favorite scenes are the prologue, in which the enemy's camp is being infiltrated and when they return thirty years later, alongside Amerotke, to investigate the makeshift tomb of Meretseger – only to discover it empty and trapped in a ambush. Great stuff!

In summation, this wasn't exactly what I was looking for when I picked up this book, but not once did I had to stifle a yawn and overall it's an engrossing, fast-paced read which will not fail to entertain the fans of this series. But I hope the next entry is a return to the previous books with a puzzling locked room mystery and at least one or two clues to mull over while traveling from one chapter to another.

Speaking of locked room stories, the next mystery on the list will definitely be one. I have more than enough of them in cold storage, but picking one will proof to be the real challenge. 

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

The Mask of Ra (1998)

The Horus Killings (1999)

The Anubis Slayings (2000)

The Slayers of Seth (2001)

The Assassins of Isis (2004)

The Poisoner of Ptah (2007)

The Spies of Sobeck (2008)

Rated to Kill

"When your Monday has consisted of murder, two sessions with a boss who doesn't like you, a trip to the country, the chase and capture of a fleeing man, a tough softball game, and a tête à tête with a beautiful psycho who more or less announces that at a more convenient time and place for her she intends to have your body, whatever it will do to your life, it tends to bode ill for the rest of the week."

- Matt Cobb (Killed in Fringe Time, 1995)

What can I possibly say about William DeAndrea, as a preface to this review, that I haven't already touched upon in previous blog entries dedicated to his work? Chronologically, he was a crime writer of the modern, post-GAD era, but if you carefully peruse his books and short stories, it won't be too hard to notice the iron-clad links that connect the far past with the here and now – and hopefully the distant future as well. The hardboiled tone of story telling, resonating with the voices of Archie Goodwin and Philip Marlowe, partnered with an orthodox sense of plotting set against the décor of a television network, not only picked up the threads of tradition but also weaves new patterns. 

In the opening of Killed in Fringe Time (1995), Matt Cobb, the Vice-President in charge of Special Projects, who's responsible for handling everything that's too insecure for security and too private for Public Relations, is lulled into running an errand for Richard Bentyne – who recently signed a multi-million dollar contract to battle on The Network's behalf in the trenches of the late-night war against Jay Leno and David Letterman. The prime-time prima donna managed to snare "The Mountain Man," an eccentric billionaire hermit, for his show and wants the troubleshooter to pick him up from the airport – even though it's not part of his job description he indulges their newest acquisition for the sake of the station. But allowing a well-off solitudinarian, who estranged himself from society, to hitch a ride from him to the studio will proof to be the least of his worries.

As you've probably noticed by now, Richard Bentyne is the proverbial victim whose elephantine ego leaves absolutely no room for friends and compensated this with an impressive collection of enemies, but this, strangely enough, didn't turn him into a stock character or plot device. Before stuffing him into body bag, DeAndrea humanizes his character with a personal revelation that came up in a conversation between Bentyne and Cobb – making the murder somewhat less impersonal. Sure, he's as insufferable and asinine as they come, but hardly a Mr. Ratchett or Mary Gregor whose murderers could be cheered on without the risk of spraining your conscience.

Unfortunately, for the new face of late-night television, the murderer wasn't privy when he lay bare the faint traces of a genuine human being in his personality and before tapping the show his acid laced tongue tastes the numbing effect of fatal dose of poison. But what's really cruel is that the murderer doctored his specially prepared dish of chicken wings peppered with snippets of garlic. I personally could live with chomping down an alarming quantity of arsenic, but to have the taste of fried chicken lingering in your mouth before you depart from this world seems to me a faith worse than death.

It's up to Matt Cobb, leading force behind Special Projects, to keep the damage to The Network to a minim, which simply means sniffing out the murderer himself and handing this person over to the police. However, that's easier said than done when your lists of suspects consists of, among other, a delusional old woman, who believes the talk-show host was her long lost son, a producer who's also a live-in ex-girlfriend and a psychotic associate producer who could've crept from the pages of a second-rate, cliché riddled private eye story, nor does it help to be oblivious to the clues that are practically dangled in front of your eyes – which was also the case with this reader.

In my defense, some of the clues required a particular knowledge to perceive them as such, but there's not a legit excuse, other than brain leakage, for missing the main clue, which, retrospectively, was a dead giveaway – and I feel embarrassed for having missed it. So, well played, Mr. DeAndrea. Well played. But I'll get your next time Gadget! I will spot your cutesy, but oh so cleverly hidden, clues and unsnarl your tangled plot before that troubleshooter of yours does – and that's a promise! Well, look at that, it's nearly time for my medication. That means the moment has come to wrap things up here.  

Killed in Fringe Time is a prime-time showcase of the talents scribbled down in the opening paragraph, in which DeAndrea summons the phantasms of a bygone era that seamlessly blends into a contemporary setting. The result is a story that manages to feel both retro and fresh at the same time. It's also a perfectly fair detective story with enough twists, turns and dangerous situations to satisfy a wide arrange of fans within the genre.

It also whetted my appetite for Killed in the Act (1981), but I have to put off that one for just a few more weeks – while I reduce the pile of impossible crime stories by Paul Doherty and Herbert Resnicow. It's a job fraught with temptations, peril and sacrifice, but somebody has to do it!

The Matt Cobb series:

Killed in the Ratings (1978)

Killed in the Act (1981)

Killed with a Passion (1983)

Killed on the Ice (1984)

Killed in Paradise (1988)

Killed on the Rocks (1990)

Killed in Fringe Time (1995)

Killed in the Fog (1996)
Murder – All Kinds (2003)

Open Season

Bugs Bunny: "Just between the two of us, what season is it, really?"

Daffy Duck: "Ha, ha, ha! Don't be so naive, buster. Why, everybody knows it's really duck hunting season."

Back in December, I picked up a copy of Baynard Kendrick's The Whistling Hangman (1937), which spurred an altogether too short, but nonetheless riveting, reading binge – during which I covered several tomes from the Captain Duncan Maclain and Miles Standish Rice series. A review of The Last Express (1937) even made it to this blog. 

Though every bit as readable, Blood on Lake Louisa (1934) is an early effort that sets itself apart from the crime riddled chronicles of Maclain and Rice. In the first place, it's a standalone novel situated in a small town, Orange Crest, and has a distinct regional flavor – and the case is reported to the reader from a first-person point of view. The always clued-up Mike Grost also noted on his website that the plot was structured on the basic principles of an Had-I-But-Known story, which is strange for a masculine book set against the background of outdoors sportsmen and moon shiners with an almost entirely male cast – making this book somewhat of a curiosity. 

The person narrating the story is a small town physician, simply known to his family and friends as Doc Ryan, who reflects back at "the events that threw the whole of our little community into an uproar," which was set in motion when one evening he took a boat out to the lake to fish under the pale and sorrowful visage of the moon and take pot shots at the snoozing ducks between the reeds – but when he wants to retrieve a wounded bird he finds the corpse of a friend tingeing the dark blue waters with a splash of crimson red.

On the surface, the untimely demise of David Mitchell, a local banker, has all the earmarks of an unfortunate hunting accident, but a primarily investigation shows that the ammunition in the medico's rifle was of a different brand than the discharge that ended up killing Mitchell – making this a clear case of murder as he was already dead when the doctor emptied a cartridge at the feathered shooting targets.

Blood on Lake Louisa is very competent in keeping your eyes and mind from straying off the printed pages, from throwing a pocket watch hidden in a coffee pot at you to a confrontation with a dying man who utters a cryptic warning message, while moon shining and counterfeiting hover inconspicuously in the background – but the most engrossing parts were the lines that reflected the time and era. The first copies rolled off the press in 1934, but it was probably written at the tail end of the Prohibition Era. It's drenched with bootlegging references and several characters have bottles of hard liquor stored away, including the doctor and the sheriff, and shows how that particular decade in history taught Americans how to be unlawful – especially on a domestic level.

Less endearing was the stereotypical portrayal of minorities. I'm the farthest removed from a political correct, censor happy prick but even I cringed at some of the scenes in this book. Laughing at comedians who make edgy jokes is something completely different as being confronted with the uncouth, racial attitude of the 1930s and the reason why we'll never see another Baynard Kendrick print run until he drops into the public domain – which is a shame, really, in spite of this embarrassing character flaw.

All in all, this is a fairly well written and adequately plotted detective story, which keeps the reader occupied by littering the place with mystifying clues and stuffing shadowy nooks with mortal dangers, and while the solution doesn't come off as the mind-blowing surprise it was intended to be – it was still a nice first try and I appreciate it. However, I recommend you start off with The Whistling Hangman before examining Baynard Kendrick's other detective stories.

Once again, I have to end on an unrelated note. But today I received a package stuffed with impossible crime novels. So you know what to expect in the upcoming weeks here.

An Obituary for a Poet

"Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences."

- Nero Wolfe (Too Many Cooks, 1938)

One of the drawbacks of roaming the remnants of a genre whose memories have become a fading echo in the recollection of the populace, is that's it difficult to keep your aim focus on one specific name or phase for an extended period of time. The map of the genre, for me, is still dotted with stretches of terra incognita, just waiting to be rediscovered and explored, which makes loitering almost a criminal offense – and a convenient excuse to explain away why it took me nearly a year to get back at Jack Iams after a favorable first impression.

Just about a year ago, I pored over one of his standalone novels, The Body Missed the Boat (1947), which was a very quick, but nonetheless amusing, read and left me wanting to sample more work from this little known author – so I ordered Death Draws the Line (1949) and What Rhymes with Murder? (1950). But it took me until this week to finally pick one of them up. The book I selected and finished reading yesterday was the enigmatically titled What Rhymes with Murder? 

As a detective story, it was interesting enough but not entirely satisfactory as the plot was very uneven in quality. But before examining the pros and cons, I have to drop a line or two here on how similar everything felt to one of William DeAndrea's Matt Cobb stories. It wasn't as good, of course, but the tone was very much the same – just like the voice that guided the readers through the events as they went down. The narrator, Stanley "Rocky" Rockwell, even holds a somewhat similar position as Matt Cobb as the fighting editor of one the cities biggest newspapers, The Record, and the problems he has to tackle arises from this job. Just for that, devotees of William DeAndrea and Matt Cobb should hunt down a copy for their collection. But on to the story.

In the opening chapter, Rocky relates how their only competitor, the Eagle, went into suspended animation after the local dynasty, who owned the news outlet, unexpectedly tipped over, but was brought back into circulation by a chain of rag sheets with a reputation for sensationalism and yellow journalism – and the first one to receive a treatment with their acid-based ink is a British poet en route to the United States. 

Ariel Banks was definitely a polarizing figure, a Bohemian versifier known as The Great Lover, but the editor of The Record hardly finds this to be sufficient justification for the Eagle to mobilize masses of self-righteous drones to protest his arrival and picket the train station – and since the poet has been invited to speak at the Tuesday Ladies' Club there's a double-edged stake in it for Rocky. First off, his long-time fiancée, Jane Hewes, is a leading member of the club and has to take care of the amative pen knight, which sits not well with him, to say the least, but at the same time he's obliged to oppose their rival competitors in what's rapidly shaping up to be a paper war.

Crime Map on the Back Cover

But when Monk Sparle, the callous editor of the Eagle, and his female field operator Amy Race, give Rocky the multiple choice option to either ascend the career ladder at their outfit or be trodden under foot everything becomes far more personal than a contact ad in a lonely hearts column – especially after a dead-shot plugs the poet's ticker with a slug in front of his fiancée.

What Rhymes with Murder? has a lot going for itself, from the crisp narration of the protagonist to the astute plotting on the authors part, but the clues impressed me as a trifle weak and the coincidences just made it come up short from being front page material – but the only real erratum was the trivialization of Rocky's presence when a secondary character suddenly donned the deerstalker for the dénouement aboard a night train bound for the Capitol.   

All in all, this is a very decent effort at crafting a detective story and a fascinating example of a work published at the tail end of that prosperous, golden era when the puzzle orientated stories were receding into the background to make place for the action-filled, hardboiled private eye tales that ran mainly on booze, cigarettes, gunoil and testosterone. You can find elements from both epochs tucked away between the pages of this book, making it sort of a transitional fossil of paper. So even though this is not a prime example of the classic detective story, it still has enough to offer to us fans to make it worth our time.

Now only one question remains: how long will it take me before I get around to reading Death Draws the Line? Place your bets now!

On a final, unrelated note: I hate it when one review, more or less, writes itself while others put up a real struggle when it comes to finding the right words and phrases – like was the case with this one. After the first paragraph, I started to blank out. The above is what I was able to churn out after numerous rewrites. Yeah, I blow.

Bibliography:

The Body Missed the Boat (1947)

Girl Meets Body (1947)

Prematurely Gay (1948)

Death Draws the Line (1949)

Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949)

A Shot of Murder (1950)

What Rhymes With Murder? (1950)

Into Thin Air (1952)

A Corpse of the Old School (1955)