"Who is in charge of the clattering train..."

"...Death is in charge of the clattering train!"

- Edwin J. Milliken (Death and his Brother Sleep) 

C. Daly King opened one of his lauded mystery novels, Obelists Fly High (1935), with the epilogue of the story and thought it would be a nice touch to begin this post on Todd Downing's Vultures in the Sky (1935) in a similar vein: it's as if we have entered a period of redemption!

As the post-title and opening quote suggests, Vultures in the Sky takes place aboard a passenger train bound for Mexico City, but sundry shadows are cast over the journey and not all of them are from the zopilotes (vultures) dotting the desert sky. Rumor filled compartments of an impending railway strike and saboteurs of the Cristeros (a religious splinter faction) become the prowling ground of a murderer who snuffed out a passenger before he even boarded the train! There's even talk that there may be people aboard who are connected to an infamous kidnapping case, which is not entirely coincidental, as Curt mentioned in his review that Downing had "read Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) the year he began writing Vultures and he immediately praised the Crime Queen's novel unreservedly" – giving perhaps the first of many nods to one of the most famous whodunits ever written.

Downing's regular detective, Hugh Rennert of the United States Treasury Department, Custom Services, tries to take charge when he suspects foul play after one of the passengers, an American of Mexican extraction named Torner, dies while they passed through a darkened railway tunnel and Rennert does not entertain the theory that it was the bad air in the tunnel that got to him. He receives official clearance to take charge of the case, until they reach their destination and the proper authorities can take it from his hands, but this murderer is not deterred by red tape and continues to plough through the list of passengers.

I wonder if Vultures inspired the opening sequence of Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937), in which Inspector Oscar Piper is on a train heading for Mexico City when a customs inspector takes a sniff from a bottle of cheap perfume and falls to the floor in a dead faint.

The plot rattles along at a nice, but brisk, pace and Hugh Rennert functioned as both a knowledgeable guide, who speaks his languages and appreciates the culture and history of the land, and as a proper detective – trying to make sense of hatboxes and the movement of suspects. In many ways, this was the kind of detective story that I was hoping to find when I picked up Downing's The Cat Screams (1934), actually two years ago this week, and I think my poorly written, two-year-old review still conveys my lack of enthusiasm for the book. I actually referred to Clyde B. Clason in that review and I think Vultures compares best to his work except that we move from the remnants of an erstwhile civilization, piled up in a private museum or library, to a railway track carving through the deserts of Mexico – where everything is very much alive as opposed to dusty museum pieces in the possession of a soon to be murdered private collector (c.f. about half of Clason's output).

Downing redeemed himself with Vultures, after my initial disappointment over Cat, and second chances appears as of late to be a trend on this blog. Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1942) was a marked improvement over her slapdash performance in Murder in the Mist (1940) and Kay Cleaver Strahan's Death Traps (1930) made the award-wining Footprints (1929) look even worse in retrospect: it's as if we have entered a period of redemption! 

Lets hope this trend continues and I will definitely check back on Downing. All of his books have been reprinted by Coachwhip and have an introduction by Curt Evans (a.k.a. The Passing Tramp).

This also reminds me how horrible behind I am on my reading and working off my wish list.

Trouble Next Door

“Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.”  

- The Fat Man (The Maltese Falcon, 1930)

The award-winning curiosity, Footprints (1929), was my first foray into Kay Cleaver Strahan's writing, and while it was an engaging story depicting life on a Oregon ranch during the early 1900s, it lacked finesse as a proper detective story – i.e. neglecting to supply the full solution. We learn the name of the murderer, in an off-handed way, but not how this person escaped from one of the locked bedrooms or walked over a field of snow surrounding the house without leaving the titular footprints.

However, as little known as Strahan is today, she was known as a versatile mystery writer who penned variegated detective stories, varying her approach to the genre with each novel, which seems tenable after having read Death Traps (1930). Footprints may have been a more captivating story, but in the end, Death Traps proved to be a better mystery novel! The main protagonists in Death Trap are two old codgers, a Mr. Lucky and a Mr. Fisbee, and large portions of the story consists of conversations between the two discussing the crimes that have taken place in their respective homes, "death traps," as Mr. Lucky calls them, situated in an exclusive residential district, Calla Heights, in San Francisco. 

Mr. Bezaleel "Uncle Buzz" Lucky is a self-styled millionaire and retired green grocer from Yoncalla, Washington, and a guest at the home of Judge Amos Dexter where a mysterious shooting takes place in the sunroom: Gerald Dexter, son of, is shot and wounded, and his brother, Bob, is presumed guilty. A cover-up, of sorts, takes place. Guns are taken or turn up. A French window that may have been latched suggests a locked room problem, but there's no mistake about the impossible circumstances surrounding two deaths next door. Mr. Timothy Fisbee is a fidgety, suspiciously-minded old man who stays with relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Justin Veerneg, both of whom, one faithful morning, fail to answer the persistent knocking on their bedroom door (locked from the inside, of course!). The police had to cut a hole in the window screen and found the two peacefully slumbering in their bed, dead for several hours and many more to come! The house wasn't piped for gas and poison seems unlikely, but how then did the Veernegs die?

Strahan's series detective and seasoned crime analyst, Lynn MacDonald, provides an answer for this locked room conundrum, but otherwise, she's a non-entity who only really appears towards the end as a deus ex machina – just not exactly as we mean when we use that phrase. Just read the book.

Anyhow, the solution to the locked room is a good one and I did a bang-up job at solving it too, but than again, I had an almost identical idea for a similar impossible situation. So I caught on fairly quickly. Unfortunately, there's one method now that I have to dump from my bag of dirty tricks and murderous ideas! 

I guess the rest of the story is somewhat marred with many irrelevancies and prattle from the main characters, but I rather enjoyed how they were engrossed in the problems facing them and came up with false solutions and dummy cases – in the spirit of the dodgy characters populating Christianna Brand's detective stories. Death Traps may not be the best mystery novel produced during the 1930s, but with its excellent locked room and good enough solution, a fairly well played hand with the least-likely suspect card, it was a mountainous improvement that looms over its predecessor. I think I'll give Strahan another shot somewhere down the line.

On a completely unrelated note, but halfway through writing this review, I came to the stunning discovery that "unwakeable" is not a word, which makes me want to find a detective story about a murdered lexicologist so I can use the post title, "The Unwakeable Lexicographer." Childish, I know. 

The Babel-Fish Puzzle

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."

- Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988)

In a recent post annotating the second anniversary of this blog, I alluded to a "germ of an idea" festering in my mind, and if it had worked, I would've had an impossible situation for you armchair detectives to unravel – unfortunately, it proved itself to be untenable. 

Janwillem van de Wetering

The Pledge:

If it had worked, the following would have transpired: a guest review from one of my fellow bloggers/mystery enthusiasts would've appeared discussing Janwillem van de Wetering's Een Oosterse huivering (An Eastern Shiver, 1980). It's a compendium of short stories in the vein of Edogawa Rampo's Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956), but offering a wider selection of goods from all over Asia. The guest reviewer would've briefly touched upon all the stories, capsule reviews of sorts, as well as providing critical commentary on Van de Wetering as an anthologist – remarking how disappointing the reviewer was that he included stories by himself and Robert van Gulik but not one of Judge Ooka's cases by Bertus Aafjes.

The Turn:

There is, however, something curious and faintly miraculous about this review: the anthology has only appeared in Dutch and the reviewer I would've picked does not speak that language! But before I pull a "Masked Illusionist," and reveal how this trick can be done, I'd like to point out that I have already furnished you with several clues. Oh, and shame on you, if you're the first answer that popped into your head was that I had "ghostwritten" the review or translated the stories. That would be cheating!

The Prestige:

So how can I make a person understand a language he does not understand for just this one book? The answer is as simple as it’s obvious and as Nathan Ford remarked on his own methods, "I just pretty it up a bit, add this and that," and how well it would've worked depended on the presentation – and the willingness of the sleuth hounds that roam this blog not to run straight for google.

The biggest stumbling block in actually putting this up was the obviousness of it all, once part(s) of the solution clicks in place. And from there on, you can fill in the blanks.

An Eastern Shiver

Let's consider the clues given in the summation above: it's a collection of stories from all over the Asian continent (e.g. Japan, China, India, etc.) and the absence of Bertus Aafjes. The first should’ve clued you in that they probably weren't original translations by Van de Wetering (who was also known as English/Dutch translator) and the second that, if this anthology had contained a Judge Ooka story, it would've been categorically impossible for anyone who doesn't understand Dutch to have read the book – because they've never been translated into English. Van de Wetering culled these stories from pages of such collections as Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen (1978), Stories from a Ming Collection (1958) and Seven Japanese Tales (1963) and pieced them together as An Eastern Shiver. Never translated before or again... together... in Dutch. Hence my insistency on mentioning Aafjes, a distortion in the illusion that alludes to the truth, and the post-title.

But this would have put a lot of work on the plate of my co-conspirator, who would've had to collect, read and review all the separate stories and that's just asking too much for something that can be solved in matter of minutes or even seconds. There was also the problem that one of the stories, a standalone by Van de Wetering, appears to be untranslated and that would've meant cheating on one of 'em – and that just isn't the sporting thing to do.

Well, that was my idea for a "one-of-a-kind impossible situation" with the blogosphere and a creepy black-and-white picture of a dead mystery writer as a backdrop fizzling out into an off-hand dénouement, but I hope, at least, you found the idea of my Babel-Fish puzzle interesting or were amused by it. 

Tight Corners

"Are we never to get out of the valley of fear?"
-  Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear (1915)

It's September, 314 AD, when a fiendish ripper, known as the Nefandus, reemerges in the Caelian Quarter, "a rat warren of alleyways," after years of dormancy and vents his ire on the local prostitutes while tearing through the neighborhood. In another part of Rome, in far more august circles, Emperor Constantine and his mother, Empress Helena, are making plans for their empire, but not before smoothing out a few creases and turn to their trusted agentes in rebus, Claudia, for the job. 

Murder's Immortal Mask (2008) is a typical fair back in time, entailing practically all the elements, readers have come to expect from one of Paul Doherty's historical mysteries: like an uncaught murderer who crawled out of time's abyss and the recluse whose military past is the source of an all-consuming secret. 

Attius Enobarbus was a cohort of the fallen emperor Maxentius, snuffing out Christians and plundering their shrines during his reign, but times have changed and the only reason he's tolerated hinges on important knowledge he may possess – such as the secret location of the tomb of Peter the Galilean. But lately, Attius' wariness confined him to his chamber, which could double as a vault, however, secure and sealed rooms can be about as dangerous as a lonely track way – especially in Doherty's fancies. An assassin managed to slink in and out of the room unnoticed, stabbing Attius in the interim, but simplicity, if not to say banality, is the crux of the illusion here. I've noted before that Doherty's locked room tricks can be either simply clever or disappointingly simple, but the one he proposed here fits neither of those descriptions and felt like an inceptive idea that was left unexplored. I'm afraid this one was a bit too basic to meet my demands.

Fortunately, Murder's Immortal Mask did not depend solely on the deliverance of the locked-room angle to succeed as a historical novel of crime. That was just one facet of the plot.

The Nefandus' killing spree in the Caelian Quarter is somewhat reminiscent of Jack the Ripper's reign of terror over Whitechapel in London's East End of the late 1800s, and such persons, as Doherty remarked in his endnotes, must have existed in such places during that time. But what makes it interesting is how the Nefandus ties-in with the many twisted strands of this story, the dangerous, but colorful, backdrop it provides for Claudia and it's better clued than you'd expect – one clue a medical man gave on one of the Nefandus' victims was interesting to say the least. Well, it does give the reader a nudge in the right direction. 

On a whole, Murder's Immortal Mask is a fun blend of the ratiocinative detective and the serial killer story, set during a tumultive period of political and religious upheaval in Ancient Rome, in which Doherty plays his formula like a violin – and should please fans of his work and this series. But to be honest, while not unsuccessful as a mystery, it was kind of bland and I haven't enjoyed this series half as much as those that follow Sir Hugh Corbett and Judge Amerotke around, but than again, that's personal preference speaking.

 

And in case you missed it, I posted a notice of the two year anniversary of this blog a few days ago.

Time Served: Two Years in the Blogosphere

"Lots of things take time..."

- Michael Ende

Celebrating with John Dickson Carr & Co.

On February 19, 2011, I posted a compact review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946), which was the first of many posts dripping into an ever-widening stain on the crime-orientated section of the blogosphere – discussing everything from locked room mysteries to foreign detective series. OK. Granted, not everything, but considering how classical my tastes are, I think I touched upon a wide variety of mysteries over the past twenty-four months. It's progress... for me.

Anyway, I have nothing special lined up to mark this occasion, but I have a germ of an idea for a one-of-a-kind "impossible situation" that, if it works, will play out right here on this blog. I first need to check up on something and lay the groundwork, but even if it turns out to be impossible to pull off, I will let you all know what the plan was – including the solution.

So for now, I want to thank everyone who has been following this blog, new and old, and I hope you'll all be on my tail for this third year of endless babbeling on detective stories.

No Way Out

"Five people -- five frightened people. Five people who watched each other, who now hardly troubled to hide their state of nervous tension..."

- Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None, 1939)

Michael Carmichael was a man of great wealth and poor health, whose passing may proof to be very profitable for a handful of distant relatives, but the fine print has more in store for them than they originally bargained for – which does not even include the freak flood that cut them off from the outside world or the murderer prowling among them.

This is a preliminary sketch of Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1941), in which her department store detective, Mary Carner, accompanies one of the sale girls, Veronica Carmichael, to the home of her late benefactor in Pennsylvania. A journalist from the Morning Globe, who wrote up her story, found an inconsistency and advised her to take someone along – putting all the pieces in place for an old-fashioned game of who-dun-it. But what a nice collection of grotesque game pieces.

The prospective legatees are a corpulent and gaudy "night-club derelict," Ruby, and a stammering farmer named Wallace. A former prizefighter who prefers to go by the name of "Joe Palooka" and a doctor of metaphysics, Cyril, who doesn't even have two pennies to rub together, but Carmichael left them each $250.000 (including Veronica). 

However, there's a catch (isn't there always?): during the reading of the will by Eli Yarrow, friend and lawyer to the late Carmichael, they have to hear how every slice of the pie is topped with jocundly accusations (ranging from loose morals to murder) and accepting their inheritance means accepting the charges and certain scandal. But even less fortunate are Carmichael's sister and nephew, Tessie and Peter Whipple, who are mentioned but have nothing to show for it.  Oh, and individual shares can swell if someone turns down or is unable to collect their quarter of a million of dollars, which Carner fears may be an incentive for murder when a flood ensures that they're at each others mercy for the next day or two.

The flood does not pose a direct threat to the characters trapped in the house, as oppose to the raging forest fire in Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933) or the fortress under siege in Robert van Gulik's The Monkey and the Tiger (1965), but Popkin did a meritorious job in depicting its effect on the region – conveying a feeling of helplessness and furnishing the plot with a number of memorable scenes. News bulletins on the wireless are accompanied with requests for information on missing persons and local school turned into an emergency center. Classrooms are crowded with mothers feeding their babies, while in the Principle's Office a woman mourns the lost of her husband (drowned) with the physics lab turned into a make-shift county jail.

As to be expected, one of them dies under very peculiar circumstances, hanged by the throat from the antlers of a stuffed wapiti, in a submerged staircase, but this murder is just a by-product of a far more ingenious murder – which, when it's finally revealed, turns out to be a cleverly disguised variation on the impossible crime story. One of the suspects blurts out that Carner's solution is "too fantastic," but it might work if the right circumstances align and Popkin did a bang-up job in making that situation sound completely plausible. All in all, an enormous improvement over the slapdash plotting in her previous outing, Murder in the Mist (1940), which I reviewed on here nearly two years ago.

Zelda Popkin may not have been a contemporary rival of Agatha Christie and Christianna Brand, adepts of the closed-circle of suspects, but Dead Man's Gift is an interesting and well-done example of what many now consider a clichéd situation of a group of people isolated from the outside world – and it's slightly skewed approach makes it interesting for seasoned and beginning mystery readers alike. It's something pleasantly different without wandering away too far from the detective story.

Bibiography:

Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938)

Murder in the Mist (1940)

Time Off for Murder (1940)

Dead Man's Gift (1941)

No Crime for a Lady (1942)

So Much Blood (1944)

A Death of Innocence (1971)

Following the Crumbs

"This is your native country. It was you and your brothers, black and white, who let me come here and live, and I hope you'll let me say, without getting maudlin, that I'm grateful to you for it."

- Nero Wolfe (Too Many Cooks, 1938)

Arthur W. Upfield was an English-born mystery writer who moved to Australia as a young man, where he wandered the outback as a jack-of-all-trades, before finally settling down behind his typewriter to carve out his legacy: twenty-nine novels featuring Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte.

Bony is an "half-caste" Aboriginal and somewhat ahead of his time, when he first stepped on the scene in The Barrakee Mystery (1929), as an educated and well-spoken man of mixed race who moved up through the ranks to become a DI – relaying on his wits as well as his aborigine tracking skills and hunting instinct. He's basically a predator in a suit and, as he describes his own behavior, has "...no respect for rules and regulations" or "when engaged on a murder hunt... no scruples and no ethics." Bony can stake out a spot for weeks, track a suspect for miles over sun-blasted plains and read the behavior of animals to find water or bodies. A method of detection that's amplified by Upfield's talent for painting, like an Old Master, the landscape of his adopted country with words.

This already resulted in three unusual, but original and memorable, detective stories. Death of a Lake (1954) takes place around a draught stricken area where a dying lake is about to give up its secret. Man of Two Tribes (1956) has Bony exploring the desolate Nullarbor Plain for an acquitted murderess who wandered off a train and The Valley of Smugglers (1960) is more a Doylean novel than a mystery (i.e. second part of The Valley of Fear, 1914), but Cake in the Hat Box (1954) is the best one yet – in which Upfield evidently had more consideration than usual for the plot while continuing to sketch some striking scenes.

Agar's Lagoon is a small, dried up inland desert settlement hemmed-in by an ever-widening ring of empty bottles, estimated to total a thousand tons, because it's economically unprofitable to return them. Constable Martin Stenhouse presides over this district and is considered competent, but neither admired or loved, which leaves few to mourn him when a truck driver announces that he found Stenhouse, shot dead, sitting in his jeep on the road to Agar's Lagoon – and his Aboriginal tracker, Jack Musgrave, is missing and presumed guilty.

The murder of Constable Stenhouse appears to be a close-and-shut against Musgrave, with his apprehension and conviction only a mere formality, but Bony's keen eye for detail spots a few inconsistencies and proves a set-up. However, he's not the only one looking for justice as smoke signals tell him that the natives may be looking for their own particular brand of justice for Musgrave. It's not just a case of catching whoever's responsible for the murder of Stenhouse and the disappearance of Musgrave, but doing it before a spear does, which, I have heard, are very hard to outrun. 

Cake in the Hat Box is a wonderful tour of a dusty nook of the Australian continent, from the desert lagoon with its halo of glass to meteorites streaking across the night sky, becoming through Upfield's words almost a character in itself – populated with the kind of unusual, often rugged outback people you'd expect to find in a place like that. But the finishing touch was a satisfying, twisty plot that had a delightfully classic surprise in store that I didn't saw coming. Upfield proved in Man of Two Tribes that he had a wealth of imagination and here he showed he also knew what to do with it.

In closing, the back cover of Cake in the Hat Box asks: Are YOU an Upfield fan? My answer: I'm getting there! 

A Thieving Lot

"He thinks he's Sherlock Holmes in the flesh."

- Robert Arthur's "The Adventure of the Single Footprint" (Mystery and More Mystery, 1966)

In November of 2011, I reviewed Carpenterand Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998), a collection of short stories originally penned during the 1990s, in which John Quincannon abandoned a dwindling career with the United States Secret Service to begin his own detective agency with Sabine Carpenter, a former Pinkerton operative, in San Francisco of the 1890s.

The collection turned out to be a splendid farrago of period stories filled with colorful character and beloved tropes that trudge around in evocative settings, but the finishing touch came when Bill Pronzini informed me that he and Marcia Muller were collaborating on series of Carpenter and Quincannon novels – and gave me permission to announce The Bughouse Affair (2013) and The Spook Light Affair (2014) to the public. And yes. Considering the fact that I had the scoop, I should've reviewed this one a lot sooner. I was late with placing the order, and when the book finally arrived, I was deeply immersed in Jan Ekström's Deadly Reunion (1975). But enough excuses. 

In this first of what's hopefully to be an annual affair, Carpenter and Quincannon have separate assignments to take care of that are a part of the daily routine of a detective agency. 

Sabina has to snuff out an elusive and particular nasty pickpocket from the crowds patronizing an amusement park, a torch-lit bazaar and the throng of people walking the evening Cocktail Route, but the trail soon leads away from San Francisco's entertainment district to a seamier part of town. And a rather nasty murder. Somewhere else, John Carpenter is spending an uncomfortable evening in the shrubbery to stake out a house, in the hopes of catching a burglar in the act, but when his reward is almost within in his grasp he lets it literally slips through his fingers. Oh, and he's also held at gunpoint, mistaken as a fleeing thief in the night, by a venerable colleague from England. Or at least he claims to be.

During the opening of The Bughouse Affair, a newspaper scribbling by Ambrose Bierce touted that the world's most-celebrated detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, has emerged from Reichenbach Falls and found his way to their city where's spending a period of leisure a the home of a prominent family – who happened to be neighboring the burgled house. Quincannon shares Bierce's opinion that he's a crackbrain, adding that he also has the routine of a conman, and that appears to be the opinion of everyone who's aware that Sherlock Holmes disappeared alongside his arch nemesis in the gorge of Reichenbach Falls, which makes it even funnier if you imagine Jeremy Brett as the bughouse Holmes.

Whether he's an impostor or the actual Sherlock Holmes, he's playing the role like a violin, and even accompanies Quincannon on his next stake-out, where the case goes from bad to worse after the furtive burglar assaults the owner of the house – leaving him dead inside a locked room and than manages to disappear from the house unseen!

Pronzini usually dabbles in two kinds of illusions: practical ones that might actually work off-page and complex trickery that would not disgrace the stage of a famous illusionist (e.g. "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle," collected All But Impossible, 1981). I won't divulge under which header I place this impossible crime, but I definitely enjoyed it. Now that I think about it, the only one of these kind of stories (by Pronzini) that I disliked was "Proof of Guilt" (collected in Murder Impossible, 1990), which left me under whelmed after the editors praised it as "one of the very best impossible shorts written over the past 50 years." The solution was also a take-off on a trick that I loath and, IMHO, as dated as poisonous snakes and trapdoors. I hated it when Clayton Rawson used it and hated when Pronzini gave it a spin. Not to mention that Pronzini wrote at least a handful of other impossible shorts that were miles better (e.g. "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" and "Booktaker," collected in Casefile, 1983, or "Medium Rare" in the previously mentioned Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services). Anyway, back to the review at hand! 

As to be expected in a detective story, evidence from Sabina’s pickpocket case turns up in Quincannon’s investigation, and slowly, everything begins to come together in a most satisfying way. The manner in which Quincannon, Sabina and the presumptive Mr. Sherlock Holmes take part in the explanation was very reminiscent of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) – especially how the bughouse detective's solution echoed one of the tales from the canon. A conscious nod to one of their predecessors whose most famous novel is also one of the most successful parodies of the storybook detective ever written?

The Bughouse Affair is more than just flight-of-fancy through a time and place now long gone by, however, the busy tourist strip, chute-rides at the amusement park, fire-lit bazaars, crowded brothels, moldy pawnshops and the many gaudy underworld figures that populate this story adds color and details to an already imaginative and absorbing plot.

If your taste runs in the direction of a classically-styled whodunit, inexplicable crimes committed in sealed rooms, Holmesian pastiches and/or historical fiction than The Bughouse Affair is your book and I recommend you track down a copy ASAP. It might give publishers an incentive to publish more of these stories.   

The Golden Hag

"To know that one of your relatives is a murderer is bad enough..."

- Sally Bowen (The Seven Deadly Sisters, 1948)

With a nickname like the "Swedish John Dickson Carr," it was inevitable that Jan Ekström's Ättestupan (Deadly Reunion, 1975) ended up on my prodigious pile of books to read, but as John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books pointed out in his review, it has more in common (stylistically) with Ross Macdonald than Carr. However, the plot's exposition is as clever and twisty as those of Ekström's predecessors, and I would place the book a lot closer to Christianna Brand than Carr – who provided a wonderful blurb for this novel, "a beautifully twisted, many-colored skein which it was a pleasure to try to unravel." Do I agree with her. Yes! Let's find out. 

You could call Aunt Charlotte Lethander blessed, an elderly woman of great wealth whose ninetieth birthday is looming, and has one more thing to accomplish in her life time: consolidating the three warring branches of her family and summons them to her home. And they come swooping down like a flock of vultures. 

John mentioned "the story is filled with the kind of brooding aura and dark family secrets that fill the cases of Lew Archer," and this style is apparently quite common in Scandinavian crime fiction, but this dark and brooding ambiance also reminded me of the German TV-krimi Derrick – in particular the episode Der Fall Weidau (1986). Contrary to the usual tone of the series, Der Fall Weidau had a classically-structured plot in which the dour-looking Oberinspektor of the Munich Kriminalpolizei, Stephan Derrick, has to visit a country estate to look into the poisoning of a young family member and I suspect that the ending was made as depressing as possible to make up for any fun viewers may have experienced while figuring out who-dun-it. Ekström's story is more tragic than depressing and a clever one at that.

Problems arise when Victor Bernheim, a womanizing photographer, runs low on funds and decides to cash-in on a "security," a letter containing incriminating information, which he offers up for sale to his father, Martin, for the sweet sum of 15.000 kronor. What we have here is a classic set-up for an old-fashioned murder, however, it's not a case where the blackmailer or the victim is rubbed out... but both of them!

On first impression, there is nothing to dispute that Martin, after having shot Victor, locked himself into his bedroom and took his own life by filling the room with the noxious fumes from the bedside fireplace, but Bertil Durrell agrees with the opinion of the family that there's more to it than just a simple case of murder/suicide – and soon uncovers evidence to support their theory. But a lot of those clues make the affair look even twistier and more impossible than when they first assumed foul play. The gun found in Martin's room is not the murder weapon and the damper was open, making it impossible to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, but that’s how Martin died. The smoldering family secrets, brooding relationships, rivalries and even an unresolved death from the past, which all may have a bearing on the murders of Victor and Martin – showing why I think Deadly Reunion is closer to Brand than Carr (e.g. London Particular, 1952).

UK edition

Brand's stories usually concern a closed circle of suspects that drive the plot and she turned her hand to the locked room from time to time. If this was a Carrian story, the ancestral precipice and its ghostly legends would've been a more prominent presence in the book, than just a story from an old lady, and probably have been the backdrop for a spine-chilling scene, played out underneath a pale moon, before the murderers downfall. I can only imagine what Paul Halter would've done with the death of Stella Corn, who was found at the foot of the precipice several years before the opening of this story, which he would no doubt turn into an impossible murder. Definitely not a Carr, but the solution to the locked room doesn't disappoint nor does the rest of the explanation. I can recommend Deadly Reunion to anyone from ardent whodunit fans to avid readers of crime/thriller novels.   

Jan Ekström appears to have been a part of an international wave of mystery writers, emerging on the scene during the 1970-and 80s, who made an admirable attempt at bridging the gap between the detective stories of yesteryear and contemporary crime novels. Not surprisingly, these are the mystery writers from the post-Golden Age period that I enjoy the most, but alas, their voice was not the prevailing one. 

But it does make one wonder... did the Silver Age we've all been longing for passed-by unnoticed, decades ago, like Chesterton's "invisible man"? Or did the deluge of spy and thriller fiction act as Carr's "silver curtain"? On the upside, we seem to be in the spring of another, brighter period for the traditional detective story and the next book on my pile may end up proving that we're on the right track. 

Oh, and yes, despite my hammering that Deadly Reunion is not really all that Carrish, I still picked "The Golden Hag" as a post title, but how could I not, after the fabulously rich Charlotte Lethander uttered "for an ancient hag it would be eminently suitable" and better than "Lock, (Family) Stock and Two Smoking Barrels." 

The New Zealand Bird Mystery

"A man will turn over half a library to make one book."

- Samuel Johnson

Contrary to the usual modus operandi of Clyde B. Clason, The Purple Parrot (1937), fourth in the series featuring the meek little professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, was written from the perspective of one of the characters, Barry Foster, a lawyer who's hopelessly in love with the ward of one of his clients – a rich and influential book collector named Hezekiah Morse.

Morse has hand picked a suitor for his granddaughter Sylvia, a personal friend and next door neighbor, Thomas Vail, and has drawn up a will that effectively disinherits her if she dares to marry anyone else except for a paltry statuette of a purple parrot from New Zealand.

As one of Morse's lawyers, Foster is more than aware of this new development and has decided to confront him, but someone beat him to it and stuck a knife in the old bibliophile! What's worse, all of the evidence seems to be pointing an accusing finger at Sylvia. Morse was stabbed in his study/library and one of the doors was locked from the inside and Sylvia was in the adjoining room holding the only unlocked door under constant observation, but no one was seen either entering or leaving the room (and premise) since their arrival. She also has plenty of motives for wanting her grandfather out of the way.

Luckily, Lt. Johnny Mack, "a bluff, old-school Chicago police detective," owed a favor to that quiet professor of Roman history, Westborough, and gave him permission to follow him around during his next assignment – and he's not convinced of Sylvia's guilt and attaches great importance to the missing statuette of the bird. But why would anyone kill in order to obtain something that isn't even worth the trouble of stealing in the first place? Westborough has a lot of woolgathering to do before he can even begin to disentangle a plot involving, among other threads, a bootlegger and a well stocked wine cellar, a library filled with rare editions and how the psychology of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" fits in with the ancient tomes stored on its shelves and the life-saving role of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

Clason was a writer from the Van Dine-Queen School and his work is exemplary for this school, but The Purple Parrot felt as the most Van Dine-like of his books (The Parrot Murder Case!). Here Westborough isn't visiting an estate to make a discreet enquiry into the disappearance of a jade figurine of a Taoist goddess or descending into a Colorado goldmine as one of the shareholders, but here he plays the Philo Vance to Mack's Markham and with Morse's residence (with its private library full of rare, first editions) as the center of all the action – it really helped establish that Van Dinean feeling. Minus the annoying presence of Vance, but with the insightful tidbits of information and lectures! The part were the police were analyzing the pool of blood and compared it with the witness statement, in order to determine a more exact time of death, was especially interesting and gives the reader a peek through a window in time showing forensic science before the DNA/digital era.

That's why I don't get the solution. I mean, I understand who stabbed Hezekiah Morse, and all that, but not why Clason opted for an explanation that effectively turned an intelligently written story into a gaudy parody of a shilling shocker. This book was published in 1937! What was Clason attempting to do here? By all accounts, Clason was an intelligent man and I refuse to believe that this was his idea of a "spoof" or a "least-likely-suspect"-scenario. I'm even more baffled that it came as a follow-up to a far more convincing solution, and Clason knew it was good, because he retooled it for one of his later novels. Maybe it was challenge to make this particular scenario as convincing as possible or perhaps we're all missing the punch-line of a now long forgotten inside joke.

All in all, I would still recommend The Purple Parrot to fans of the series, but I advice readers new to Clason and Westborough to start off with The Man from Tibet (1938) or Poison Jasmine (1940). The wonderful Rue Morgue Press has made most of Clason’s work available again.

Speaking of the Rue Morgue Press, they haven't updated their website since 2011 (?), but new books were still being published until September of last year. And then it just stopped. I'm aware that this is my own interest speaking, but I hope Tom Schantz will continue to save out-of-print detective stories from biblioblivion for me us to read. They introduced me to Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer, Glyn Carr, Clyde Clason, Torrey Chanslor, and one of my all-time favorites, Kelley Roos. They made collecting Gladys Mitchell actually look easy and inexpensive! We simply can't afford to lose the Rue Morgue Press! Of course, we also genuinely care, but let's face the facts, we're addicts and we need our regular fix! ;)

On a final note, Less Blatt also reviewed The Purple Parrot in one of his weekly audio reviews.