In the Shadow of the Gallows

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

- Honoré de Balzac

Maurice B. Dix was an author of detective and thriller fiction who contributed to the Sexton Blake Library, publishing most of his stories before World War II, but the passage of time, unkind as ever, obliterated nearly every trace of the man – even the Golden Age of Detection Wiki came up blank when I searched for his name.

I couldn't tell if Murder at Grassmere Abbey (1934) is a standalone crime novel or a volume from a series of mysteries, starring the intuitive inspector Gordon Frewin and the man-of-facts Chief Inspector Jimmy Miller, but the plot is a smorgasbord of tropes, clichés and dust particles of good ideas.

When the story opens, two separate cases are staring Gordon and Miller in the face. The first consists of a gang of dope peddlers, using a fishing fleet to smuggle cocaine into the country, and one of the men, "Steamboat Bill," a skipper of a fish tender, Saucy Nan, threw a man overboard after finding him in bed with his wife. The man died and Bill is facing a charge of manslaughter, however, Gordon is convinced that it was carefully planted murder by the mastermind behind the drug ring, but with the man on trial, he's summoned to look into another case.

At Grassmere Abbey, Sir James Arnold was shot in his own library by an intruder and his neighbor, John Forsythe, was arrested as the responsible party. The murder weapon, which Forsythe admits throwing into the pond near the estate at the night of the murder, belongs to him. He was also overheard having a violent quarrel with Sir James. The local constabulary lacks any doubting shadows nipping at their heels about Forsythe's guilt, but the prisoner has powerful and popular friends who want a second opinion from Scotland Yard's finest. It's interesting to note how police-friendly this book is. Aside from the local police, they are portrayed as intelligent, well-trained, witty and caring people who go out of their way to protect the innocent – even treading carefully to not startle the highly strung skeletons in the overstuffed closets of the local gentry any further.

Gordon and Miller were also the only "real" characters in the book, but only because you could follow their trend of thoughts. You get to know them more as policeman than as actual people. And no. I don't count that love affair of Gordon as characterization. Oh, but there was one brief moment when they were speculating on Miller's hatred for drugs, before it was shrugged off, which felt as a willful act of non-characterization!

Obviously, a clue turns up (i.e. a cylinder of cocaine) that ties together the two cases just in time for the murderer to strike down a second victim: P.C. Brown was standing guard on the scene of the crime when a bullet struck him in the face, but the police seals on the doors and windows were intact. But don't expect too much from the solution, which is almost insulting and belongs on the pages of one the detective genres primordial ancestors from the 1800s. The same can be said for most of the answers given in this story. Very disappointing.

Yes, I did dream up an explanation of my own to account for the unbroken police seals on the doors and windows of the library, which is not only better, but would've also smoothed out some imperfections (no spoilers for the actual solution):  

The only way to have made the murder of P.C. Brown work as a proper locked room mystery, is if he had been killed by one of the "unknown" gang members, which is a role I would've assigned to the local constable, Maples. He would've had access to the house and was in a position to remove the seals, retrieve any evidence and reseal the room with an official police seal. Unfortunately, he didn't counted on P.C. Brown and a struggle ensued, in which he fatally struck his head on the fireplace. To delay the discovery, he still applies a fresh police seal to the door. This would've also accounted for why he was satisfied with the circumstantial case against Forsythe and having Maples as co-killer would fit the pattern of the story to a T.

But in the end, Murder at Grassmere Abbey was just a bad, but readable, book that began to teeter on the brink of idiocy once the pile-up of tropes and clichés, dragged kicking and screaming from retirement, became apparent. Dix basically took every preconceived notion that non-mystery fans have of classic whodunits and shoehorned them in a book of just a little more than three hundred pages. Recommended as a curiosity only.

On the Dragon's Tail

"The way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!"

- Alice (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

A perusal glance at the ever expanding quantity of impossible crime fiction, discussed on here with accelerating regularity, persuaded me to go easy on the old hobby horse and mix things up a bit. But the book I fixed upon, for a much-needed change of pace, almost feels out of place on this blog and it still concerns an impossibility depending on your criteria. After all, it's a wild goose chase for a missing dragon on Valentine's Day!

Mike Resnick was an unfamiliar name to me when I chanced upon Stalking the Dragon: A Fable of Tonight (2009) at the Boekenfestijn (Book Fest), where excess stock is disposed of at bargain prices, and I have to admit, I was drawn to this book by its fantastic cover illustration – evoking an image of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) set in the Land of Oz. I simply had to own a copy! By the way, I checked up on Resnick and he's a huge name in the SF/Fantasy genre, sweeping up five Hugo Awards during his career, and producing a steady stream of fiction since the late 1960s. All in all, an image of a modern-day fictioneer.

John Justin Mallory is an old-fashioned gumshoe with an ample supply of snappy comebacks, who made his first appearance in Stalking the Unicorn (1987), in which an elf named Mürgenstürm transports Mallory to an alternative Earth in order to find a stolen unicorn. I want to read that book just to watch a less jaded Mallory interact with the fairytale world he suddenly finds himself in. It oddly reminds me of the premise of the BBC series Life on Mars (2006/07), in which a modern day policeman awakes in the early 1970s of his childhood and has to adjust himself while figuring out what's happened to him. One of the few modern, character-driven crime series I enjoyed watching and first season was solid gold.

In Stalking the Dragon, Mallory has already adapted himself to his new surroundings and it hardly surprises him when a distraught client, Buffalo Bill Brody, engages him to find his tiny dragon, Fluffy, who's the heavy favorite for the Eastminster pet show to be held the following day. Mallory suspects Brody's competitor Grundy, a powerful demon, and plans to make quick work of the case, but Evil Incarnate fancies himself a sportsman and doubles Mallory's fee if he can bring back Fluffy in time – and it's during this nocturnal quest that mystery and fantasy tropes really begin to intermingle. It should also be noted that Grundy knows what really happened, due to his demonic powers, but refuses to help Mallory in order to keep things fair. Well, that's one way of dealing with supernatural beings in a mystery.

Anyway, when the case began, Mallory was accompanied by just Felina, resident office cat-person, a walking appetite with a penchant for mischief and one of my favorite characters in this book, but along the way they begin to pick up an assortment of characters that any other sane person would've left at the side of the road.

Would you have picked up Dead End Dugan, professional zombie and slowest thinker on the otherworldly side of Manhattan, a cell-phone named Belle, who constantly tries to seduce Mallory, or a samurai sword-wielding goblin? But together they tramp those mean streets like Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion strolled down the yellow brick road and just as in the journeys of Atreyu (The Never-Ending Story,1979) and Stach (Koning van Katoren, 1971; translated as How to Become King), they visit many memorable sites. My personal favorite was the neglected wax museum where the figures of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart are perpetual hunched over a statue of a bird – occasionally coming to life to threaten and scare any lost soul who wandered in by mistake.

On a whole, Stalking the Dragon was an enjoyable read and can be classified as a proper detective story, adhering to the basic structure and keeping the fabulous abilities of imaginary creatures out of the explanation also helped a lot, but the overall plot hardly poses a challenge to a seasoned reader of whodunits. It's something to bear in mind, but not something that should deter you from reading the book. Resnick obviously wrote it to amuse his readers and not to baffle them. I think he succeeded in doing so.

The Man Who Leaped Through Time

"I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own."

- H.G. Wells.

I only recently learned that the missing and presumed dead Jonathan Creek series has resurfaced to hopefully redeem itself, after an ungraceful plunge into mediocre in the abysmal The Judas Tree (2010), in an as-of-yet untitled Easter special – to be filmed in early 2013. The episode was originally planned as a Christmas special, but Alan Davies' touring commitment delayed the production a few months. 

Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Personally, I'm as thrilled as an early 1900s shilling shocker! Jonathan Creek has always been a very hit-and-miss series and The Judas Tree represented an all-time low, illogical to the extreme and riddled with plot holes, but the show's creator, David Renwick, also penned a few solid contributions to the impossible crime genre (e.g. Jack-in-the-Box (1997) and Black Canary, 1998). And hey, if we can forgive John Dickson Carr for Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956), we can certainly forgive Renwick for The Judas Tree.

And as we eagerly await the first snippets of information on this new episode, I wanted to take a look at an older one from the second season, Time Waits for Norman (1998), which nobody seems to like except me.

To be fair, Time Waits for Norman is an unusual episode – even for Jonathan Creek! The impossibilities, up to this episode, involved tangible miracles like a body inside a sealed nuclear bunker or a murderer, dressed-up as a skeleton, vanishing from a closely guarded garage, but here it's a domestic phenomenon of a man who only does things by his watch.

Maddy's publisher, Antonia Stangerson, finds herself confronted with irrefutable proof that her husband, Norman, was in America and England around the same time! It begins when an employee of a burger joint returns the wallet of her husband, which he left behind, but that’s highly unlikely because: a) Norman is a vegetarian and b) he was in New York at the time the man says he was eating a hamburger in the city. The man's story is on the threshold of convincibility, but Norman's employer confirms that he attended an early morning meeting.

A most singular problem, if you have to believe the evidence. Norman had a mere seven hours to hop on a flight back to the UK, to apparently enjoy a burger at his leisure, and hurried back to Manhattan in time for an important meeting. Maddy becomes interested and automatically draws in Jonathan to pick Norman’s story apart. Clues vary from a photo of Norman, taken in the UK when he was suppose to be in a meeting, a cryptic note and a scald mark on Norman's foot corresponding with the story of him spilling coffee in the burger tent. 

It's all Shakespeare to them

I guess this makes it for some people a dull and unexciting story to watch, because it’s basically tearing an alibi asunder without a proper crime to go with. At least, not a legal one. The motivation behind it all was very well done, even better than the solution itself, but Renwick's biggest achievement with this episode was showing a modern crime story that integrated a completely impossible situation, crossing space and time, in a believable scenario – and understanding what makes Norman ticks is key to understanding what actually happened. It's also what made me enjoy this episode even more. Norman dreads the passing of time and as a bit of chronophobiac myself, I felt empathy for the poor sod and loved the idea that it was used as a basis for an impossible crime story.

In my opinion, Time Waits for Norman is a criminally underrated and overlooked episode from this series.

The Demons' Night-Parade

"And grizzly ghouls from every tomb,

are closing in to seal your doom."

- Vincent Price (Thriller)

Lou Cameron (1924-2010) illustrated comic books before ditching the drawing table for a typewriter and, from the 1960s onward, became a fictioneer who banged out war stories, science-fiction, westerns and tie-in novels, but, from what I gathered, he achieved ever lasting fame among pulp-fiction devotees for creating Longarm – a U.S. Deputy Marshall from the 1880s who appeared in more than 400 novels!

What put me on Cameron's trail, was an entry for Behind the Scarlet Door (1971) in my well thumbed-through enchiridion of impossible crime stories and the summations of the problems in this book appeared almost identical to those in Hake Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942). Corpses decompose with supernatural speed and an assault is carried out in a locked room, but these resemblances are merely superficial and I would associate the book with Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935). It's written in the same pulpy style, cloaked in shades of noir, and the plot involves a coven of witches, druids, Welsh legends, zombies, an invisible cat-like creature, body parts, zombie witches and an immortal. I'm sure I forgot to list one or two more ingredients of this witches' brew.  

Sgt. Morgan Price originally hauled from Wales, but came to America to live with his uncle and aunt, after his parents passed away, and because he speaks the language he's dispatched to the City Morgue to join Lt. Brewster and Sgt. Curstis. They are watching as the docters are cutting up the body of a young woman, Cynthia Powell, who came to them a few days ago with a story as unlikely as her own death. Cynthia also came from Wales and was making a living here chirping folk songs and got an offer to come along to a Black Mass orgy in a blue-bricked house with a red door. She witnessed how a man whipped out a gun and shot one of the hooded attendants, but when the police began to checkout her story they were unable to locate the house. She turns up dead a few days later. Well, days later...

The coroner is pretty sure that the girl had been dead for week, or more, before turning up at the police station with her unlikely story and they speak with others who turn out to have been dead all along – and it's not just the zombies dead weighting their investigation. They also meet an old Welsh man, deeply involved with the coven, who claims to have been around for five-hundred years and the lie-detector backs him all the way. Price is attacked when he wants to enter his darkened apartment, after a cat-like creature is heard inside, but nothing, alive or dead, is hiding there and still this only described a fraction of the entire story.

I became a bit of a skeptic, halfway through the book, as to how Cameron was going to explain away this pile-up of apparently supernatural occurrences and outrageous plot twits, without consulting the occult for an answer, but I have to say, he delivered the goods.

It's what you would more or less expect from a story as pulpy as this, but not a letdown at all, and I admire Cameron for keeping in control when the plot seemed to be running all over the place. The clueing is a bit flimsy though, but then again, that's a charge that can be laid against a lot of crime novels published after the Golden Era and you can still come pretty far in this one.

I initially bought Behind the Scarlet Door as comparison material, not expecting too much from it, but the book turned out to be a pleasant surprise that stands on its own merit and comes especially recommended now that All Hallows' Eve is approaching.

Mine Your Own Business

"A box without hinges, key or lid; yet a golden treasure inside is hid."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

The elderly, gentle minded professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, a scholar whose expertise encompasses the Roman Empire, was the brainchild of mystery author Clyde B. Clason who produced ten detective novels during the mid 1930s-and early 40s.

Clason belongs to the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection and was clearly influenced by its members, from stories centering on collectors with private museums stuffed with artifacts from erstwhile civilizations (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1939) to taking a murder tour in a business enterprise or institution like perfume manufactures (e.g. Poison Jasmine, 1940), but more importantly, they were cleverly crafted and minutely analyzed mysteries. Sad to say, Clason's insistency to hang on to that particular branch of crime fiction also meant that, once the sex and violence school of Mickey Spillane began to pick up momentum, he felt there was no longer a place for the cerebral detective of yesteryear and never wrote a follow-up to Green Shiver (1941) – which thus became Professor Westborough's last (recorded) case.

However, Clason left us with a small, but memorable, body of work and a notable one for connoisseurs of miracle problems, because more than half of them contain a variation on the impossible crime. Granted, they're not exactly spectacular illusions that are pulled off with the routine of a Las Vegas stage magician, but simple, workable (and convincing) gimmicks that are cogs in the machine of the overall plot. Clason is one of those writers you can get an overall enjoyment from: stories as intelligently written as they are plotted and populated with interesting characters that move around in specialized fields.

For his third outing, Blind Drifts (1937), Clason took a shot at explaining how someone could be hit with a bullet fired from a non-existent gun in front of seven witnesses in a mineshaft at a depth greater than the height of the Empire State Building and to do so he dispatches Westborough from Chicago to Colorado as one of the shareholders of the Virgin Queen Gold Mine – inherited from his late brother. Barely out of the plane, the mild-mannered professor is thrust into a feud between Mrs. Edmonds, major stockholder, and Jeff LaRue, owner of the neighboring Buenaventure Mine, who wants to lease the Virgin Queen. This also gives Clason an opportunity to illuminate his readers on the inner workings of a gold mining company.  

As Westborough takes a few days to inform himself, he also looks into a local mystery that may have ties to his current predicament, a department store owner and a Virgin Queen director, George Villars, disappeared without a trace, but it's the ongoing dispute between Edmonds and LaRue that ends up providing the main puzzle for the mild-mannered professor. Instigated by the suspicious mind of Cornalue Edmonds, they descend into the belly of the Virgin Queen, where, inside one of the blind drifts and in front of a number of witnesses, Edmonds is felled with a bullet, severely injuring her, and a smoking gun fails to turn up in the subsequent search.

It's the side-puzzle of the dissolved gun that contributes the most satisfying portion of the overall solution, simple and therefore convincing, but the remainder of Westborough's problems, including a pair of successful murders, are marred by a convoluted explanation. I love ingenious, complexly woven plots that consist of multiple layers, but juggling with timetables and travel schedules just doesn't do it for me.  

All in all, Blind Drifts is a solid, but not the highest rated, entry in this, altogether too short, series and will be appreciated by both fans of Westborough and puzzle-oriented mysteries.

Clason's work is fairly obscure and older editions of his books come with a hefty price-tag attached to them, however, the Rue Morgue Press has reissued a seven of his ten books and Blind Drifts is their latest offering.

Columbo: Miracles for Sale

"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."

- Dr. Samuel Johnson

Columbo Goes to the Guillotine (1989) was the opening episode of the eight series and marked the return to the airwaves of the disheveled homicide detective after a hiatus that lasted more than a decade, but the intervening period had not dulled the lieutenants prey drive or his duplicitous appearance – never missing a beat as he doggedly pursues an opponent who's in the business of selling miracles.  

Elliott Blake is a self-professed psychic medium, who’s trying to weasel his way into a well-funded military think-tank program that studies claims of extraordinary sensory perception and finding a military purpose for it. Naturally, Blake's claims are as a legit as a stack of counterfeit bank notes and the only reason he has been getting away with his duplicity is because he has someone on the inside, Dr. Paula Hall, to help him achieve the desired results. But it also gives the heads of the think-tank hope that they finally got their hands on a genuine psychic specimen, who can perform miracles on demand and plan to stage another test conducted under the supervision of Max Dyson – an ex-magician exposing fraudulent mediums and explaining supernatural phenomena. 

Before the test, Blake and Dyson meet on a bridge cloaked in the rags and tatters of a misty evening and we learn that the gentlemen were imprisoned together in an African goal, where Dyson got out of before Blake, and the two opponents part ways like two duelists taking their paces. A very Doylean scene, if you ask me, somewhat reminiscent to Jonathan Small's story in Sign of Four (1890).

Dyson's experiment involves distant viewing and Blake is positioned in an isolation chamber, while three soldiers are scattered throughout the city in unmarked cars each with a small suitcase consisting of a blind fold, a marker, a city map book, a rubber band and a Polaroid camera. The soldiers have to blindfold themselves, flip through the book to mark a random location and drive to it in order to snap a picture and send it to HQ. Meanwhile, Blake is probing the minds of the soldiers, drawing pictures of what they photographed, and they match up pretty good! What I liked about the solution is that's basically textbook stuff, as Jonathan Creek would've said, that only works on paper, but what made it work here was that the trick was pulled-off under rigorous test conditions. It's so clever that the one trick that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off becomes possible when you put a few obstacles in its way to prevent cheating. 

One, none-spoilorish, question though: were the really handheld scanners like that back in 1988/9?

The penetrating stare of a first-rate mind.

Anyway, performing a magic trick in front of a captivated audience, insistent on being fooled, is not, necessarily, a crime that garners the attention of one of the homicide squads finest, but Blake went back to Dyson when he was tinkering with his guillotine and leaves his old cellmate headless in his sealed apartment – and before long Columbo comes knocking on his door.

When the lock is cut out of the door, the lieutenant is confronted with what appears to be either a bizarre accident or a grotesque suicide, but the detective makes a few astute deductions that convince him that he's dealing with a murder. A magician friend of Dyson, Bert Spindler, puts Columbo on the trail of Elliott Blake and a battle-of-wits and deceit commences. Even though we know the murderer's identity from the outset, Columbo's observations on a screwdriver, groceries, tears shed at a funeral and the fact that Dyson died a day after his first defeat at the hands of a psychic are more clues and hints than is necessary for inverted mystery that plays out in front of your very eyes, but I love that the writer took the time to explain his suspicions. Not as much attention is bestowed on the problem of the locked doors and windows, Columbo finds the solution in a book entitled Locked Room Magic, however, I can forgive this since there was already a grand trick in this episode with Columbo reconstructing it towards the end. So I was already more than satisfied in that department.

Unfortunately, Blake is a lousy foil for the Great Detective, but only because he was accurately characterized. Blake's whole shtick is essentially being this enlightened being who unlocked the secret powers of his mind, but when you take that away you're left with a rather dumb, gullible person who gets by on a few tricks taught to him by Dyson and Columbo played him like a violin throughout the episode. Fun enough, absolutely, but I revel when Columbo has to chase a murderer as clever as him and one who sees right through him – often resulting in a nifty character sketch of the tousle headed sleuth.  

Here's the murderer from Prescription: Murder (1967):

"You never stop, do you? ... The insinuations, the change of pace. You're a bag of tricks, Columbo, right down to that prop cigar you use... I'm going to tell you something about yourself. You think you need a psychologist. Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you are a textbook example of compensation... Compensation. Adaptability. You're an intelligent man, Columbo, but you hide it. You pretend you're something you're not. Why, because of your appearance you think you can't get by on looks or polish, so you turn a defect into a virtue. You take people by surprise. They underestimate you. And that's where you trip them up."

The killer's opinion on Columbo who was hounded by him in Ransom for a Dead Man (1971):

"You know Columbo, you're almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it's the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks... The humility, the seeming absentmindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family, the wife, you know... Yeah, Lt. Columbo fumbling and stumbling along but it's always the jugular that he's after. And I imagine that more often than not he's successful."

 And a final character analysis comes from Columbo's opponent from How to Dial a Murder (1978):

"You're a fascinating man, Lieutenant... You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

I love it when Columbo has to fight a duel-of-wits on equal grounds, but that does take nothing away from the pleasure or cleverness of Columbo Goes to the Guillotine and enthusiasts of locked rooms should queue this in their to-watch-list – even if you've already seen it. Murder is just so much more fun when Lt. Columbo is fumbling and stumbling through a case, even in the re-run! 

I also reviewed Columbo Likes the Nightlife (2003).

A Three-Puff Problem

"I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sign of Four, 1890)

You might recall that, back in early April, I reviewed W. Shepard Pleasants' interesting, but problematic, The Stingaree Murders (1932), which wrung out an unusual and pleasing (pardon the pun with malice aforethought) story from the premise of a host of people cut-off from the outside world – with an apparent invisible killer picking them off one-by-one. If judged only on originality, Pleasants' book should be among the more better known locked room novels, if only for the sheer audacity of the last of three miraculous occurrences that he strung together, but the uncouth racial attitude of the characters is what probably kept this book away from the printers for a reissue.

I met with a similar problem when leisurely strolling through Joseph Baker Carr's The Man With Bated Breath (1934), a story as disentangled from the shackles of reality as Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) and Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935), set at the family plantation of the Gobelin clan in Georgia where a whiff of old southern racism lingers in the air. The Man With Bated Breath is not of the same caliber in reputation or content as the two novels mentioned here before, however, it could've made a name for itself as a marijuana-induced premonition of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man (1935) – including a two-chapter scene as memorable as the locked room lecture entitled "The Sin Party" and "The Sin Party, Continued." But more on that later.

Like his namesake would've done, Joseph Carr picked a young hero, named Frederick "Freddie" Carewe, as one of the central characters who's en route to Lookinghaven plantation, where he's to don the chauffeur's pet for his new employer, but before he can ring the doorbell he is confronted with a gun-toting dame and the body of a man. The woman turns out to be Marigold Theby, a relative of the Gobelin's, who stumbled across their dead lawyer. It's a death that, at first, does not seem to matter to the family, because the inoffensive man was, more or less, an outsider without an enemy in the world and they regard the affair as unpleasant intrusion from outside, but they remain unshaken throughout the story and one should not expect too much from this mystery in the characterization department.

The authors intent was writing a proper detective story and made few, if any, excuses in the execution of that plan – like turning Carewe into Ruper Carnal's unofficial sidekick. Just so he can be there when Carnal, who represents the local law, examines the half obliterated mud print of a face and questions Gil Gobelin on his unexplainable fit of laughter. It's just more fun to have Watson, but when that same Gil calls in a private detective the plot slowly begins to resemble the landscape of a John Dickson Carr novel.

Ocealo Archer is a gargantuan detective with an insatiable appetite (I also considered to title this post The Hungry Goblin or Feed Me More) and the demeanor of a jolly Santa Claus, but still waters run deep and underestimating him is a fatal error. Sounds familiar? I made a similar assumption, but you have to read the ending of this book to realize how different Archer and Fell really are. But I’ll say this, if this book was published a decade later, nothing could’ve convinced me that it was not written a conscious mock parody of John Dickson Carr and Dr. Gideon Fell. Nothing! Oh, there's also a jewel merchant, Waldemar de Windt, there to purchase a jewel knowns as the "Pekinese," who sets himself up as a rival detective – playing the Simon Brimmer to other detectives Ellery Queen.

Anyway, everyone knows that the presence of a great detective does not prevent a murderer from striking again. On the contrary, killers are drawn to them like a moth to a flame and this nefarious person deserves bonus points for efforts. One of the rooms in the plantation is a disused, empty gable-room that becomes the source of a crashing noise that everyone, immediately, responds to. Four of the family members make it into the room, after which they got locked in, followed by gunfire. There's an open window, but a policeman below on the grounds closely guards that one. When they enter the room bodies are scattered in the four corners of the room: two of them are dead and the others are (severely) wounded. The room is as bare of furniture as it's of hiding places for a smoking gun, however, none turns up and the two survivors were physically incapable of making it vanish. Not to mention that the policeman swears nothing was dropped from or thrown out of the window and the victims were in such a position that it eliminates the possibility of a sniper.

The solution is up to scratch though not with the vivacity of the original Carr (and the murderer was easy to spot), but you have to give this one props for pulling off the vanishing murder weapon convincingly, which seems to be harder than it appears. I find them to be very hit-or-miss. Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933) should've been one of the more famous novels from their earlier period, where it not for the botched and unconvincing explanation for the dissolving gun, while John Dickson Carr probably came up with one of the best and most simple answers in one of his stage play, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air," collected in 13 to the Gallows (2008). A willingness to fairly dispense clues also helps in overlooking some of its shortcomings. One of the worst may just be that Carr neglected to weave the family story of one of their ancestor, Mordecai Gobelin, who was hanged as a highwayman, done to replenish the family fortune, with the abandoned gable-room. A ghost of a condemned highwayman would’ve been the finishing touch and betrays that this is not a work from the hand of the real grandmaster of the locked room mystery.

By the way, I think the method would be perfect for one of Paul Doherty's Sir Hugh Corbett stories and it would be a lot more convincing in a medieval setting. If you know the solution, imagine it being done in a sealed, snow covered tower with a vast expense of unbroken snow surrounding it. Perfect!

Then we come to the "Sin Party," a gathering similar to Dr. Fell's "Locked Room Lecture," except that Archer deals out marijuana cigarettes to stimulate the mind and gives a defense for its use, but not before getting a lengthy description of its effect on poor Freddie. What a great take on the wool gathering technique of the armchair detective, but it has made me very suspicious of Nero Wolfe's appetite and his insistency on privacy when he's up with Theo on the rooftop greenhouse. And remember Rex Stout's remark about rolling their own? A Freudian slip of the tongue, as they say? If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth and I think the truth is that Wolfe's greenhouse is the most exclusive coffee shop in the world.

Well, I have to leave you at that and recommend this book to collectors of alternative crime novels, fans of John Dickson Carr who want to read it for comparison, and locked room enthusiasts like me, but let the read be warned, the book may tax some readers sensibility as much as their deductive abilities. But remember, we came a long way since this book was written and this kind of old-fashioned racism should be taken as seriously as John Cleese goose-stepping in Fawlty Towers. 

Update 6 Oct. 2012: Douglas Greene posted additional information on Joseph B. Carr on the GADetection Group.

Message in a Bottle

"Everything has a beginning and an end. Life is just a cycle of starts and stops. There are ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable, we have to face them. It's what being human is all about."

- Jet Black (Cowboy Bebop)

First of all, I want to beg your forgiveness for indulging, three times in the span of four weeks, in those pesky, untranslated detective stories, but Cor Docter has captured my fascination and this review will round out the trilogy of books featuring Commissioner Daan Vissering – a kind and intelligent policeman. Even more good news, I have in my possession a little known, disregarded locked room mystery from the 1930s and it's up next, but for the time being, bear with me as I babble about one more of these books.  

Now that I have read all three volumes in this series, I understand what Docter set-out to do with them and it's an effort that I very much appreciate: Droeve poedel in Delfshaven (Melancholic Poodle in Delfshaven, 1970) was a Grand Whodunit in the tradition of Agatha Christie, Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) re-opened John Dickson Carr's beloved Locked Room Mystery for business and Rein geheim op rijksweg 13 (Pure Secrecy on Highway 13, 1971) mimics the signature trademark of Ellery Queen, the Dying Message. However, as mentioned before in these reviews, they're hardly throwbacks, but more of an overhaul that resettles them in the modern world of the early 1970s – populated with mostly working and lower class people who are caught in the meshes of intrigue.

Highway 13 was one of the busiest highways of the country and there’s always someone traveling down that road, no matter what hour of the day it is, which makes the plan of two petty thieves, Sander Wils and Peter Ruivenvoorde, all the more audacious. They want to strip a delivery van, abandoned on the emergency lane, of its valuable parts, but what they find in the back of the car throws a spoke in their wheels: slumped between scattered protest signs there’s the body of a man, hit over the head, and one hand resting in an open canister of red paint. On the inside of the van the dying man had scrawled "16NK2-" and it’s definitely a sign that Vissering's plan for Charles Dickens-style Christmas is in jeopardy. The scene of the crime also provided me with the post title, because the stranded van, containing the dead man's message, reminded me of a bottle that had just drifted on shore after an exhausting journey – with the lights and sound of passing cars standing in for the murmur of the sea and a cone of light from a nearby lighthouse. I thought it was an interesting image.

The thorough investigation of Vissering and his men uncover a number of plot threads that run in various directions, but still appear to be connected to the body in the van. There are the signs protesting the pollution of the air with garish slogans and this turns up a second death, a suicide of the wife of one of the members of a protest group, and a glass of diluted bleach is one of the key clues in this little side puzzle. You need a piece of trivial, household knowledge from this particular period to completely solve it, but it's actually quite clever and could've easily been used to give a satisfying explanation to a locked room scenario that turns out to be nothing more than a simple suicide. Docter only had to let Ella van der Klup jump from an open window inside her locked apartment, instead from the gallery outside, with her husband snoozing in the other room.

Vissering also has to tangle with "Boere-Bram," a Lombard, of sorts, of scrap metal and junk, who has a link with the murdered man, who turns out to be the straight up brother of a convicted criminal who has stashed away his loot, hundred fifty thousand guilders, as a nest egg for when he gets out – which is sooner than everyone expected! There’s also an old, mysterious man, named Siem Bijl, bumping into Vissering wherever the investigation takes him and a German bayonet is also thrust into the case. As to be expected by now, Docter pulls off a conclusion as classical as it's satisfying. It's like the back blurb said, "This time no Carter Dickson effects, but 'keys' that are reminiscent of the best plots of Ellery Queen, Peter Quentin (sic) or the immortal Dorothy Sayers.”

Lastly, I should mention that Pure Secrecy is also very strong in its commentary on modern society and its condemnation of the annexation of Overschie by Rotterdam – polluted and defaced in the process. Highway 13 was carved right through it and "housing barracks" (i.e. flats) tore the old atmosphere and community asunder. Docter already warned and apologized in his introduction that his description of the then present-day Overschie would be a very colored one – because the old Overschie was very dear to his heart.

Docter's detective novels may be steeped in old traditions, but he made a valiant effort at updating them to modern times and, more often than not, succeeded in doing so and this  earned himself a place among the ranks of post-GAD writers who proved the old adage that a classic never goes out of style.

Bifurcated Hearts

"Everywhere, as he knew, there were husbands and lovers who cherished the scars of their boyhood and who lived like dreamers in a world of reality."

- Dr. Eustace Hailey (The Red Scar, 1928)

Robert McNair Wilson, a Scottish physician, wrote a score of mystery novels, under the assumed name of "Anthony Wynne," during the first half of the twentieth century and his series detective, Dr. Eustace Hailey, preferred Occam's Razor over a lancet to dissect a miracle problem.

Dr. Hailey is a specialist on the human mind, who constantly plunders his snuffbox and acts as an unofficial consultant when a case is taking on all the appearances of a mystifying, storybook crime – investigated and solved by the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. Over a dozen of these recorded cases involves murderers who defied more than just man made laws as they left their victims behind the sturdy doors of locked rooms or struck them down in front of witnesses, while appearing to be completely invisible! Naturally, this penchant for locked rooms attracted my attention and last year I had an opportunity to sample two of his novels, The Silver Scale Mystery (1931) and The Green Knife (1932), and expected The Red Scar (1928) to be more of the same, but this one can hardly be compared, in any shape or form, to the previous entries I have read.

For one thing, The Red Scar hardly qualifies as a locked room mystery and the impossible situation described in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) is a semi-impossible at best and not even the focus of the plot. Heck, the only references to locked doors and impenetrable walls were allusions to a prison facility. But even more interesting was that it read like a masculine take on Agatha Christie's Eternal Triangle and more. It riffs on an old cliché, pulls a least likely suspect and a serious attempt is made at a surprise twist, but an alert and knowledgeable reader can anticipate a few of the surprises.

The plot of The Red Scar revolves around a small cluster of people, who, in turn, revolve around Raoul Featherstone – a painter with an insatiable appetite for women. The other players include the sculptor Alaistar Diarmid, his cousin Phyllis and her husband, Major Lionel Leyland, and the beautiful Echo Wildermere. You guessed it, both women are involved with Raoul, much to the chagrin of both gentlemen, and before long a tragedy unfolds in the artist's studio and the aftermath muddles the water considerably. Raoul is mortally wounded with a knife, Lionel is beaten up and Echo's clothes are torn and drenched in blood. Raoul’s body disappears under Alistair’s nose, when he attempts to cover-up the crime in order to protect Echo. A tangled mess that Hailey has to unsnarl, however, keeping his head is more of a trial than keeping it cool.

There's a decidedly hardboiled slate to this story with a lot a physical altercations and Dr. Hailey gets the brunt of it, but that's all I can tell without spoiling any of the fun.

Anyway, Raoul's charred remains are eventually retrieved from a burned out car, halfway through the story, and two people are charged and placed in the dock to answer for a murder they might not have committed. Dr. Hailey is convinced that there's more to the case and continues his investigation as well as a race against the clock, which had a good touch of suspense. I have to admit, though, that I was skeptical at first and feared one of his overly melodramatic finals, but he efficiently tied everything together with a sobering explanation. In my review of The Green Knife, I mentioned that Wynne read like a writer who arrived on the scene thirty to forty years too late, but here it felt like he was a few years ahead of time – looking back on the detective stories from the past twenty years or so. At least, that’s the impression I got from the book and the solution. Minus the satire, of course.

I have to mention one downside and that’s fluctuating quality of the writing, but then again, that might just have been my fractured reading of the book. All in all, this just might be a more accomplished detective story than The Silver Scale Mystery, in spite of lacking an ingenious contrived locked room trick, and a better novel overall than you would expect from a writer often criticized for his overwrought writing and cardboard characters.

 

The Chesterton-Effect

"You had those typical neighborhood murder cases, with the remarkable intimacy of a John Dickson Carr story or Agatha Christie's train murder... This seemed such a closed ward murder, bound to the invisible walls of the rayon."

- Commissioner Daan Vissering (Droeve poedel in Delfshaven, 1970)

Earlier this month, I reviewed Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) by Cor Docter, a pulp writer who had a trilogy of full-fledged detective novels to his credit that merged the style of the Dutch topographical police story with the type of fantastic plots usually found in the most imaginative works of John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, and flung in an seemingly impossible situation for good measure. Needless to say, I was intrigued, even if some parts of the solution gave pause for thought, and now I feel even more drawn to his work after finishing Droeve poedel in Delfshaven (Melancholic Poodle in Delfshaven, 1970).

Melancholic Poodle in Delfshaven opens with the muffled howls of a dog, muzzle smeared with blood and a trail of identical substance leading to the doorsteps of a house abandoned by its owner. Commissioner Daan Vissering is holding the leash of the investigation and he and his team begin to sniff around for clues.

The missing homeowner is one Gerrit Vledser, a shady moneylender, who, according to the evidence, was hit over the head with the dog’s food bowl – before he was either taken away or fled from his attacker(s). They find a hand drawn map, with markings, and Vissering drags information from the neighbor that includes shreds of a heated conversation, the time Vledser may have been hit and two young men who associated with him. More than enough to go on, but other problems are emerging that ask for the commissioner's attention.

Exploding fireworks cloak the statue of Admiral Piet Hein in smoke, noise and confusion. Somewhere else, an exploding smoke bomb has the same effect. Senseless pranks or is there a darker meaning? Vissering has his own thoughts about it and suspects a connection, which is confirmed when the young men turn up and knock one of his men, Grijphand, into the hospital. And before long, Vledser turns up again. Behind the statue of Van 't Hoff. His head caved in... again!

Scene of the Crime: Van 't Hoff statue

Melancholic Poodle progresses in the same, absolutely delightful, way as Cold Woman, thickening the plot with each succeeding chapter, however, I found this to be less of a throwback than the other one – which dribbed with the influences from Anthony Abbot, John Dickson Carr and S.S. van Dine. Not that I have any complaints about that, but the publisher advertised this series as classic detective stories reinvented and this book definitely felt like it delivered on that promise. 

There was, for one, more emphasize on characters, or, at least, a series of interesting character portraits. One of them told the story of one of those many, and often forgotten, tragedies from the war, but even more interesting was the back story of Grijphand. Docter only needed a few pages to make you understand what made that man tick instead of drawing those events from his youth out over a couple of hundred pages. It was just a pleasant balance between plot and character. Although, there may have been a tad bit more plot than character.

The plot unfolds at a slow, methodical pace, peppered with a suspenseful wrap-up of one of their problems, before the murderer is confronted in a classic denouement and receives a lecture from Vissering on the Chesterton-effect – which is nothing short of brilliant. Yes. The identity of the murderer is a revelation in the best GAD tradition, but with a decidedly modern touch. 

Docter showed a skillful hand at tying all the plot threads together and make it logically click on every layer of the story. All in all, a very fun and clever detective story to read.   

The Unpleasantness at the Gambit Club

"A player surprised is half beaten."

- Proverb.

In previous postings dealing with that duet of gumshoes, the armchair bound Nero Wolfe and the quick-witted Archie Goodwin, I explained that my enjoyment of this series does not come from ingeniously contrived plots, which they seldom sport, but from the characters and spending a few hours in their company. However, it's always a treat, served as one of Fritz's opulent banquets, when Rex Stout put some thought and effort into his intrigues – making Gambit (1962) a noteworthy entry in the late-period corpus.

When Gambit opens, we find Nero Wolfe tearing the pages from a copy of a 3rd edition of Webster's dictionary, deeming it as "intolerably offensive," as Archie Goodwin ushers a prospective client into the office. Sally Blount has $22.000 in cash on her and wants Wolfe to prove her father innocent of the murder of Paul Jerin, a chess maven who was poisoned at the Gambit Club under peculiar circumstances. Paul Jerin was taking on twelve opponents, at once, under "blindfold" conditions, while alone in a room, separated from the other players, with only messengers moving between them to whisper the moves.

The twelve-man blindfold match was Matthew Blount's idea, who wanted to publicly humiliate Jerin and concocted a scheme, however, when Jerin is taking ill mid-match and dies in the hospital from arsenic poison – Blount is arrested as his murderer. After all, it was Blount who was kind enough to supply Jerin with his customary cup of hot chocolate, which appears to have been the container for the poison, but Sally refuses to believe that her father's plans had included murder and has very little faith in his attorney, Dan Kalmus, who's apparently in love with her mother. Wolfe and Goodwin have their work cut out for them!

I have to admit that the who-and howdunit angles weren't particular difficult to solve and most of their work consisted of prying loose a piece of information from Blount and Kalmus, which merely confirms a suspicion Wolfe and his readers have been harboring all along, but it's hard not to notice the effort Stout put into constructing this plot. I appreciate that, especially from this writer, and that's not something that can be said of all his books from this period. Even at gun point, I would be unable to supply even a synopsis of The Final Deduction (1961) or Please, Pass the Guilt (1973), and I don't think I have read them that long before I began blogging.

But how Wolfe wraps up this case does not only take a slice of the cake, but the whole thing and you know he has the appetite for it! I also wanted to glare daggers at the writing team who worked on the splendid A&E TV-series for not considering this book! Wolfe's gambit tears a page (another sacrilege against the printed word between the covers of this novel) from the playbook he used in The Doorbell Rang (1965) with the adaptation being even better and the last twenty-or-so minutes, in which Wolfe springs his trap, with one favorite scene following another favorite scene, easily makes it one of my all time favorite episodes from any detective series.

Wolfe mentioned in this last portion of the story that books could be written on the varieties of conduct of men in a pickle. If he even wants  to read such a book, I can recommend him Gambit by Rex Stout. 

I also reviewed: 

Where There's a Will (1940)

Too Many Women (1947)

And Four to Go (1958)

Gambit (1962)

Here's to the Night

"Those who plot the destruction of others often fall themselves."

- Phaedrus.

I once read either an article or a review, which floated somewhere on the web, concerning historical mysteries and it mentioned in passing that ancient Rome, as a backdrop for these tales, has become one of the most well-trodden periods in history and that made a lot of sense – remembering their penchant for cloak-and-dagger politics and poisonous intrigues. 

Take Emperor Nero, the John Rhode of the Ancient World, who ordered the construction of a particular ingenious death trap, a collapsible boat, to kill his mother Agrippina. After having failed to take his mother out, Nero simply dispatches a band of assassins and according to one of the stories, Agrippina ordered the mercenaries to bury a dagger in her womb. The stories practically write themselves!

Paul Doherty's The Queen of the Night (2006) takes place in August, 314 AD, when Emperor Constantine and his mother, Empress Helena, took the western Roman empire from Emperor Maxentius and plan to snatch away the eastern territories from Emperor Licinius, but first they have to quench the flames of unrest that are licking at the homes of Rome’s powerful elite.

One part has to look on, helplessly, as their children are whisked away and held to ransom, while veterans of a small band of Constantine's army, lauded for trapping and cutting down a group of Picts, are brutally murdered and mutilated, one after another, according to the practices of their old enemies. Empress Helena puts Claudia, a secret agent, on the case, scouring for clues like a mouse scurrying for bits of food, but a third problem, much closer to home, also demands her attention. Her uncle Polybius disinterred the corpse of a perfectly preserved girl from his garden and it's assumed to be the remains of a Christian martyr.

More than enough twisted threads for a good yarn, however, The Queen of the Night, plot-wise, turned out to be one of the least challenging and unoriginal historical mysteries I have read from Doherty.

The perfectly preserved remains of the young woman hardly poses a challenge for any modern reader, especially ones specialized in detective stories, and eventually peters out. Just as easy is figuring out who masterminded the kidnapping and the only interesting part was how the strand of the army killings intertwined with the kidnappings. I really got the idea that Doherty half-assed the plot here, taking bits and pieces from his other novels, and resettled them in Imperial Rome – like the murdered veterans from The Slayers of Seth (2001).

The Queen of the Night is as readable as any of Doherty's other, and more successful, efforts, but the plot shows that he either had an off-day or feels more at home in the castle strewn landscapes of mediaeval England or the sun blasted deserts of ancient Egypt. For completists only.  

I think that this was one of shortest reviews I have ever done.

A list of all the Paul Doherty novels reviewed on this blog:

The Devil's Hunt (1996)
The Mask of Ra (1998) - co-reviewed with Patrick
The Demon Archer (1999)
The Horus Killings (1999)
The Anubis Slayings (2000) 
The Slayers of Seth (2001) 
The Plague Lord (2002)
The Assassins of Isis (2004)

The Queen of the Night (2006) 

The Poisoner of Ptah (2007)

The Spies of Sobeck (2008)

The Mysterium (2010)