Cream of the Crop

"I hope the bastard appreciates this, yanking out my twat hairs by the root so I look good in a sundress."

- Otto & George 

Painted for the Kill (1943) was the first of only three (comedic) mystery novels by Russian born Lucy Cores, whose family packed up and left their home country behind after the Communist Revolution – hiding out in Poland and France before arriving in the United States in 1921. There they made themselves a new home and, twenty odd years later, Cores achieved the American dream by adding her name to one of the grandest pillars of human civilization with the publication of her first detective novel.

The center of commotion and many shenanigans in Painted for the Kill is The House of Lais, a beauty salon patronized by the upper crust of New York's socialite, which is ruled over by Lais Karaides and her reign resembles that of a small-country dictator. Every morning, at 8:30 sharp, there's a mandatory pep talk before the store opens and the store-manager, Mlle. Illona, drills home the pointers on how to behave towards customers and the importance of brand loyalty. If this book would not pre-date George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), I would've suspected Cores of spoofing the Stalinist shadow of Big Brother. That very same, dark shadow that caused her family to fled her home... Just a coincidence or the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler. Moving on.

Cores satirizes everyone and everything, however, it’s not a mere comedy of manners and more closely related to the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection. The story is set in New York among the upper denizens of the city and the scene of the crime is a building, The House of Lais, consisting of multiple floors, through which characters move around – movements which are analyzed and scrutinized. There's a tour of the inner workings of the company. And the detectives are essentially amateurs who quickly develop a friendly relationship with the official police force, in this case Police Captain Andrew Torrent, but the exception here is that they aren't dilettante amateurs killing time by snooping around a fresh crime scene for clues.

Tony Ney is the dark-haired exercise director at Lais and Eric Skeets writes copy for the advertisement department, normally two completely segregated floors, and as to be expected, there's a mutual interest in one another. There developing relationship gives the story ties to the mystery solving couples. As a matter of fact, I was reminded at times of Kelley Roos' debut novel, Made Up to Kill (1940), in which Jeff and Haila Troy were engaged and secured a supporting role in a Broadway play – where murder quickly ensued. Except here the glitter and glamour of the theatre are replaced with the luxurious surrounding of an expensive beauty salon, where the daily routine is disturbed when Lili Michaud, a famous French movie star/refugee, drops in for a special treatment with the Winogradow mudpack.

Before Painted for the Kill morphs into mystery, the hustle and bustle at the beauty salon reminded me of British comedy series like Are You Being Served? So imagine my surprise when Eric Skeets channels Mrs. Slocombe when visiting Tony's apartment and meets Tony's gray Persian, Tom Jones, and remarks "nice pussy," adding, "you and I are going to be great friends, ha, ha." The humor is otherwise more sophisticated than that and Tom shows his disapproval of Eric by favoring Captain Torrent.

BAD PUN ALERT!: Beauty Sleeps & Dirt Maps

Anyhow, Lili Michaud has been left alone in a private-room with a mudpack on her face and quickly fell asleep, but after a while they found out that she's dead and a police investigation reveals that the cause of death was a jujitsu-like blow to the throat. 

A murder is feared to be disastrous for business, considering they could only just prevent the press hounds, who followed Lili around, from having an exclusive photo-op with the corpse, but they're booked full the next day – some of them even insisting on being massaged and mudded up in the "Murder Room." Satirizing continues when the detectives, official and non-official, are making up the balance and conclude that, while people had opportunities, they lacked a good motive for the murder of someone who was practically a stranger to them. Their problem is apparently solved when someone else dies under circumstances that appear so identical that it must be another murder, however, the throat of this body is not crushed. Did the murderer's heart succumb under the strain of a guilty conscience? Suicide? Or was it murder after all? And did murder become a little bit more careful?

When the cause of death is revealed I immediately recognized it as a red herring, if Cores hadn't been too careless in revealing the solution and had withheld vital information, because it suggests a solution that genre savvy readers will be more than familiar with. Edmund Crispin and Nicholas Blake wrote two of the better-known examples and if you know your classics, you'll know what I mean when you read the book. I had to reject it because it didn't tally with the information from the story and the actual solution was therefore much better in that it was more original and the arrival came through some well-clued detective work. The solution (and the story as a whole) makes Painted for the Kill also literary ancestor of Herbert Resnicow's Alexander and Norma Gold mysteries. So the only complaint I could possibly have is that Lucy Cores did not went all the way and found a way to this closed-circle of suspects into a bone-fide locked room mystery. Lets call it a cosmetic imperfection in an otherwise excellent mystery.

That leaves us with one unanswered question though: did the Cores family smuggle a time-viewing crystal out of Russia to keep themselves entertained with futuristic pop-culture and prepare for their new lives in America? 

Stuff of the Dead

"Strange things move beneath the surface of the years."

 - Miss Silver

The names of Patricia Wentworth, the pseudonym of Indian born Doris Turnbull, and her elderly ex-governess turned professional sleuth, Miss Silver, have been sifting in-and out of my peripheral vision for years, but never took the plunge – because the constant comparisons with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple were very off putting. What can I say? I'm just not a fan of the Miss Marple series.

"Wait a moment before going in there, hun..."

Somehow, somewhere, I acquired a 2006 reissue by Hodder and Stoughton of The Benevent Treasure (1956) and I'm fairly sure it wasn't on account of the comely illustration on the front cover. The synopsis on the back, on the other hand, painted a different picture that explained how it might have ended up on the pile and made me finally decide to give Wentworth-Silver tandem a shot.

The Benevent Treasure was published in the twilight years of Wentworth's writing career and the story is driven by undercurrents from the Victorian era, but the plot opens with a prologue – showing a then 15-year-old Candida Sayle clutching for her life to a narrow ledge of an overseas cliff. A young man named Stephen Eversley saves her, but they don't meet again until the following five years have come and gone. An aunt brought up Candida and in turn, she took care of her until she passed away – leaving her all alone until a letter arrives.

Candida's great-aunt, Olivia Benevent, has kept eyes and ears on the estranged side of the family and, as her last surviving relative, invited to spend some time at the ancestral family home – a Victorian monstrosity known as Underhill. The starched Olivia is the typical, domineering shrew who keeps her sister, great-aunt Cara, under the thumb, and generally, acts very, very patrician. There's the adopted secretary, Derek Burdon, whom they hope to marry off to Candido and the servants, Joseph and Anne. Stephen Eversley turns up to do some work on the house. Over this an old-fashioned cloak of family secrecy is thrown, which gives raise to motives for mutual suspicions and perhaps even murder. In the background lingers the legend surrounding the Benevent Treasure, which was smuggled into the country by one of their ancestors, after defecting from Italy, and hidden somewhere on the premise of Underhill. There's even a rhyme that turns up:

"Touch not nor try,

Sell not nor buy,

Give not nor take,

For dear life’s sake." 

The multitude of plot-threads seemed more than sufficient to justify its 350+ pages, at merely a quarter into the book, but when Miss Silver arrives on the scene, knitting in the compartment of train, a Mr. Puncheon asks her if she's in the consulting detective he has heard about. Miss Silver's reputation has preceded her and Mr. Puncheon wants her help in finding out if his stepson, Alan Thompson, former secretary of the Benevents, stole money and jewelry from his employer – before dropping off the map. Everyone, including Mr. Puncheon himself, assumed he was guilty and it killed his mother. Remorseful, Mr. Puncheon now wants to know if there's a chance to clear Alan's name.   

"Super cereal literature!" - Al Gore

Here is where the story begins to bog down and fall apart. The "Had-I-But-Known" atmosphere that permeated through out the beginning of the story disintegrated and the interaction between the characters began to drag down the flow of the narrative. Eventually, there's a murder clumsily disguised as an accident, when someone is found sprawled at the foot of the staircase, but once you reached the ending you realize you could have just skipped there instead of wading to through all that muck. 

The solution obviously owed some debt to Conan Doyle's "The Musgrave Ritual," collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893) and G.K. Chesterton's "The Curse of the Golden Cross," from The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), but everything seemed tired and a bit on the confusing side of my consciousness – even a last ditch effort at something original with a last-minute murder through an unusual method of poisoning. Well, unusual and original, maybe it would've been in the era that Wentworth attempted to emulate. And that includes a nightly/ghostly intruder in Candida's bedroom and secret passageways.  

After, and it must be said, good opening, I was hoping it would drag itself out the slum and pick up again towards the ending, because the tedious and repetitive family business recalled the slumming drag you had endure in Rupert Penny's Sealed Room Murder (1941) – before rewarding its readers with a short detective story in the final quarter of the book. That didn't happen. Instead, it treaded dangerously close to George Bellairs' The Cursing Stones Murder (1954).

So, no, I did not like it and had I but known that my curiosity for the Benevent treasure would result in the lost of several precious hours, I would never have given that book a second glance!    

To end the review on a positive note (and a spot deification), but mysteries like The Benevent Treasure and The Cursing Stones Murder makes you appreciate later-period John Dickson Carr. The recently reviewed The Cavalier's Cup (1953), published under the Carter Dickson byline, which was deemed as indefensible (because it's mediocre by Carr's own standard), blows those two away and one of them was written in the middle of the authors career! Because that's how great he was. Sorry. That's all I had left in the tank for this review. Writing reviews of books you ended up disliking can be a strain on your creativity. 

Putting the Pieces Together

"Because murder is more fun away from home."

- motto of Detectives Beyond Borders.

Seicho Matsumoto was a Japanese crime writer from post-WWII Japan, who enjoyed a handful of translations that were well-received by Western readers, praised for possessing a social conscience, but, as Ho-Ling observed in his review of Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958), they only illuminated one aspect of his work. Personally, I wouldn't place Matsumoto among my favorite mystery writers, but he has some good and fun stories to his name that can be appreciated by crime readers across the board – and Points and Lines comes especially recommended.

Unfortunately, De Amsterdamse koffermoord (The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder, 1979), a collection of Dutch translations of a novella and three short stories, has only partially appeared in English. The novella, as far as I'm aware, has not been translated in English, but the short stories can be found in The Voice and Other Stories (1995). More on those stories later.

Still Waters (Run Deep)

The titular novella, The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder, appeared originally as Amusuterudamu-unga satsuyin-jiken (The Amsterdam Canal Murder Case, 1969) in the weekly Shukan Asahi and the plot was modeled on an actual, unsolved homicide – which captured the attention of the media in both Europe and Japan. I learned of this sensational murder case when I read my first true-crime book, A.C. Baantjer's Doden spreken niet: veertig onopgeloste moorden (The Dead Don't Speak: Forty Unsolved Murders, 1966; revised in 1981), who was a policeman in Amsterdam at the time of the murder and mentioned the case in the book. Baantjer's description of the case and comments definitely added an extra dimension to Matsumoto's artistic interpretation of the facts.

The names of the people, for one, are altered as are some of the facts (and some were left out all together) to fit the explanation for Matsumoto's fictional case. Matsumoto grounded his story in reality, but drew heavily on his artistic license. The story also notes problems in sharing information between the Dutch and Belgium police, which Baantjer confirms at the end of his piece by saying that they needed the cooperation of the Brussels police to continue the investigation, but that never happened – even though the world was watching them. Baantjer also wrote that one of the police detectives remarked, after the sudden death of a second witness, "even a detective-writer could not come up with an ending for this mystery." Someone must have felt like he was being challenged.

So on to the story, which begins, for the world, on 26th of August, 1965, when a child's attention is caught by a silver colored, metal-like suitcase floating on the Westside of the Jacob van Lennepkade between two houseboats. The macabre content of the suitcase consists of the torso of a man from which the head, hands and legs had been cut-off – alongside shredded, bloodstained pieces of clothing. Chief-Inspector Hendrik van Berkum from Bureau Leidseplein is put in charge of the investigation and immediately reaches out to Interpol and the Japanese police, while they run down the list of missing people closer at home. They eventually make an identification, but the case is shelved when one of the people, although completely cleared from any suspicion, fatally, and "suspiciously," crashes his car in Belgium.

And this is where Matsumoto introduces a narrator and a detective character in the style of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. This is even preceded with a chapter that breaks down the fourth wall and introduces them in a reference to Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Roget," which was also modeled on a real-life, unsolved murder – making it a wonderful homage to both Poe and Dupin. There are also the obligatory references to Sherlock Holmes.

The duo tramps around the Netherlands and Belgium, speaking to witnesses, analyzing facts and theorizing, while drinking in the scenery and sometimes blatantly following the tourists trail. They even visit the Anne Frank House where the detective, who the narrator calls for the purpose of this story Dr. Ukichi Kuma, muses in the hidden room how the Dutch houses are traps that can hold and make people disappear – if that's what its owner desires. I like the idea that, somehow, over the centuries, our historical buildings became sentient, but dog loyal, beings, e.g. moving churches from Jan Terlouw's Koning van Katoren (translated as: How to Become King, 1971).

So the descriptive passages do have the touch of the Dutch police procedurals/mysteries by Appie Baantjer and Simon de Waal, but the observations are clearly from the eyes of a Japanese writer and Matsumoto's explanation for the chopped-up body did not disappoint. There's always another reason in Japanese detective fiction for body mutilations/decapitations besides to make it easier to dispose of a body or make identification of the victim as difficult as possible. There have even been entire (locked room) plots build upon mutilated bodies and the few Japanese mysteries that were translated in English can vouch for their craftiness when it comes playing around with body parts.

The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder was, for me, the highlight of this volume, but there were also three other and much shorter stories. They put more emphasis on characters that drive the story rather than the plot, but two of the three were quite good for what they are.

"The Face" ("Kou") was published in August, '56 edition of Shosetsu Shincho and won a mystery prize the following year, however, this was the only story from the collection I ended up disliking. The premise was good enough to build a solid story on as an actor is slowly gaining traction as an actor and is starting to receive minor parts in movies, but the problem is that he may be recognized by the one person who could identify him as the murderer of a young woman – several years earlier. Every time you think the story is going somewhere, it peters out, before ending predictably.  

"The Cancelled Subscription" ("Chibo-shi wo kau onna") appeared on April, 1957 in the previously mentioned magazine and, basically, it’s the same story but done much better. A woman takes a subscription of a small-town newspaper filled with uninteresting local news on account of an exiting story they're running as a serial, but cancels it after a month and the small-time writers decides to find out why. The only complaint I have is that the story ended with a written confession when it, stylistically, would’ve been if the story had ended with flashback/prologue that tied up the loose ends – and an ambiguous ending would've strengthened the overall effect of the scene that came before the explanation. The plot also suggests that Matsumoto was already playing with ideas for/in the process of writing Points and Lines.

I think this story appeared in The Voice and Other Stories under the title "The Serial."

On July 1958, again in the same magazine, "The Woman Who Wrote Haiku" ("Kanto-ku no onna") was brought into circulation for the first time and has two editors of a monthly haiku publication worrying of a gifted amateur committed to a hospital. She has failed to send in a new haiku for the past three months and they decide to go investigate her faith for themselves. The reader, again, learns of highly illegal things you can do with a corpse and was surprise to read that doctors were (are?) allowed in Japan to lie to their patients, if they think it's in their best interest. 

I drew (heavily) for the publication info from the afterword of the translator, Miyako Vos-Kobayashi. 

All in all, I would say that Matsumoto's The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder was a successful cultural exchange.

A Vein of Poison

"We're in a sort of hodge-podge of fantasy and harum-scarum adventure that isn't a proper detective story at all. We might be by Michael Innes."  
- Michael Innes (The Daffodil Affair, 1942)

A remarkable property of detective stories is that they can be seamlessly integrated with every type of (genre) fiction imaginable, without producing a preposterous and forced sounding premise such as cowboys or vampires in space. They can take place in the distant past or the faraway future, alternate or completely different realities, but still work on both plains – depending on who's writing and plotting, of course.

Peter Dickinson's The Poison Oracle (1974) satisfied itself with roaming the borders of the genre, blurring instead of crossing them, but, personally, I would rank the book among the best attempts of its kind.

Wesley Morris is a psycholinguistic who's learning Dinah, an unusual bright and pre-verbal chimpanzee, to understand language and to communicate through plastic symbols. An old friend from Oxford, the Sultan of Q'Kut, is bankrolling the experiment and has them brought over to his palace – which has a private zoo attached to it! You guessed it, this is going to be an impossible crime story, but before plunging into a murder enquiry, Dickinson builds a marvelous sand castle in the sky. Q'Kut is a tiny, oil-saturated sultanate with its own culture and history, which is weaved into the tapestry of the plot.

The relationship between the ruling Arabs of Q'Kut and the primitive Marshmen were especially interesting, because the isolated condition of the Marshmen created their own, unique and barely translatable language that's unlike any other. There's a verbal treaty, "the Bond," between the Arabs and the Marshmen stating that the latter would accept the former as their overlords, if they have the marshes for themselves and one of the clans provides a bodyguard for their ruler. As I said before, the treaty isn't written down, but performed once a year in an epic song chronicling the history of the Marshmen and the Bond – which reminded me of the dioramas depicting the Aborigine story of creation in S.H. Courtier's Death in Dream Time (1959). There's a Ngaio Marsh reference in there somewhere.

Dickinson did on a smaller scale what Isaac Asimov did on a universal scale in such books as The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957): building a civilization with a history, language, social structure and characters, too! 

There's the relationship between Morris and Dinah, which in itself provides enough material and ideas for a separate story. The relationship and communication between Morris and Dinah was somewhat reminiscent of the way Captain Bridger from SeaQuest DSV tried to communicate with Darwin, a dolphin, before meeting Lucas – who broke the code of their language and invented a communicator. As noted, Dickinson roved the edges of the genre without actually crossing them, so no fancy SF-like gadgets here. There's also the heir to the throne, the young Prince Hadiq, who's learning English with the help of a stack of Batman comic books, Akuli bin Zair, "major domo of the Palace and effectively Prime Minister of Q'Kut," and Dyal – a loyal bodyguard for Sultan from one of the clans in the Marshlands. And finally, there's "Anne," who crash-landed in a skyjacked airliner and her influence begins to have its effect on the Sultan. So much that rumors begin to escape from the Women's Quarter that the Sultan’s first wife wants to start sowing poison around the palace.

However, it's the Sultan and his bodyguard who appear to have killed each other with poison-laced, hypodermic darts fired from a set of spring-guns and nobody else appears to have been able to have had a hand in both deaths. The solution is a curious, but satisfying, mishmash of ideas that was molded in something new(-ish) that merged wonderfully well with the overall plot of the story. 

Anyhow, the neighboring friends and allays of the Sultan are outraged that Marshmen broke the Bond and murdered their friend, which demands for punitive measures to be taken against them, but the marshes are impenetrable and likely to be booby-trapped with poison-dripping spears – and they will fight to the last man. Caught in between are Morris and Dinah, who become an unlikely detective duo as Morris tries to figure out what happened, including a dangerous trip into the marshes, while trying to pry loose what Dinah knows about the murders in a way that he, and others, can understand. 

If you have to say anything in disfavor of The Poison Oracle, it's that its depiction of imperialism, slavery and the existence of a Women's Quarter, even if it takes place on a completely imaginary spot of land bordering on fairytale land, probably won't get the stamp of approval from the PC crowd, but how else do you write about a clash of cultures, times and traditions? It's basically a tale of a primitive tribe (Marshmen) coexisting with the settlers (Arabs) in a land that’s encroached upon by Western influences (zoo, new palace, plane crash, etc.) and what happens if they butt heads in the middle – presented as Mitchellian fantasy of crime.

Sometimes a story is just a story and this was darn good one. If Scheherazade were still telling her stories, The Poison Oracle could've easily been one of them.

Fade to Black

"Trouble shared is trouble halved."

- Lord Peter Wimsey (Five Red Herrings, 1931)

The Golden Age of Detection Wiki has a summery biography for Morna Doris MacTaggart, whose penname, “Elizabeth X. Ferrars,” was plastered on the covers of more than sixty mystery novels – appearing for the first time in print at the dawn of WWII and the last one rolled off the presses in 1997!

That's a prolific writing career covering a significant chunk of the previous century, during which she garnered praise for her novels and was compared with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but the absence of a solid lead character in her detective stories may have contributed to her descend into literary obscurity. I know she had two, albeit minor, series characters in Toby Dyke and Jonas P. Jonas, but from what I gathered, the majority of her work consists of stand-alone novels and the rule of thumb with Golden Age mysteries is that the lack of an iconic detective figure rarely bodes well for a writers longevity. Who remembers now Pat McGerr, a true post-WWII era innovator, or the man who penned the delightful The Neat Little Corpse (1951), Max Murray, but a handful of fervent "Connoisseurs in Murder."

Murder Among Friends (1946) is one of those stand-alone mysteries that was selected by the late H.R.F. Keating as one of his "one hundred best crime and mystery books" and Ferrar's regular publisher apparently rejected the manuscript, because the content was too steamy for a proper detective story, however, you shouldn't rush off to order a copy on account of its explicit content – which is adorably tame by today's standard that probably would even consider P.D. James as one of the "cozies."

(added per request by E.F.'s original publisher)

Ferrar's coated the plot of Murder Among Friends in the style of the classic, British drawing room mysteries, in which the roar of the war is reduced to a murmur from the outside world penetrating the blacked out windows of the home of Cecily Lightfood – who's throwing a party for a closed circle of artistic friends. The main objective of the party is to lift the spirit of a lauded playwright, Aubrey Ritter, after his wife, Rosamund, killed herself the month before. However, the guest of honor no-shows, and before long, they find out why: someone busted open his head in his upstairs apartment with a fire iron. The American soldier who discovered the dying Ritter heard him mutter the name Janet. One of the titular friends is a Janet Markland, who even makes an admission, which is immediately detracted, but the damage has been done and she's convicted for the murder of Aubrey Ritter – and sentenced to be hanged by the neck.

Everyone seems to accept the official reading of the murder and the sentencing, except for Alice Church, who feels not so sure if the evidence is complete or even if they're aware of the full truth. Alice begins to talk with the people who knew Janet personally and creates a picture of a woman of whom she's convinced could not have committed the murder. These four conversations and combined with the fact everyone accepts the murder as a closed and shut case, gives the plot a murder-in-retrospect structure and may have been influenced by Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs (1943) and (maybe) Sparkling Cyanide (1945). The downside is that story has the pace and urgency of a dying mountain stream. The ending is mixed bag of treats and there were some clever edges to the solution, but found the explanation for fingerprints on the murder weapon to be very convenient for the purpose of the plot.

In summation: Murder Among Friends is a very chatty, British-styled drawing room mystery that openly flirts with certain elements of the psychological crime novel and still has some clever, sharp edges that mystery fans can enjoy. Not great, but not all that shabby either. 

Throwing Down the Gauntlet: An Insane Locked-Room Puzzle

"There's just something missing."

- Michael Ende (The Never-Ending Story, 1979)

In the on-going series, "Pretending to Post," I have constructed a locked room riddle based on an idea that sort-of popped-up in my head, but the insanity of the explanation probably makes it an insoluble problem. However, the dark annexes forming the crime-ridden corners of the blogosphere teem with inquisitive foxes that'll jump on any challenge. So I hope they have fun sinking their teeth in this one!

Bacherlorhood in Victorian times

The mise-en-scène is a well-attended costume party and two of the attendees, garbed as Jack the Ripper and Tarzan, retreat themselves into a windowless room and bolted the door behind them. On the opposite of the room door is a wide niche, where someone is sitting to take and hand back coats and bags to visitors, generally to keep an eye on things, and swears nobody entered or left the room for quite some time – until the door suddenly opened and a Voodoo priest appears!

This apparition waves around a staff with a skull on top of it and has rug sack-sized, animal skin-type bag slung over his over his other shoulder. There's a bone-fingered necklace hanging from his neck and strings with bones and glass bottles of dark potions clatter around his body. He does a ritual, slow motion dance through the hallway, into the filled-up party hall, and disappears in a crowd of partying monsters. The room is bare except for a roaring fire in the hearth and lifeless furniture. It's as if Jack and Tarzan never entered that room at all.

So what happened? The facts are that two men entered a windowless room and the chimney is too narrow to allow a grown man to climb through it and let the other guy light a fire, change costumes and burn the original one the fire - before leaving the room. If the room would be subjected to a forensic investigation, they would barely find any DNA or cremated remains in the hearth. Except for burned pieces of cloth. Two people entered that room, but only one of them, perhaps even an unknown person, walked out of that sealed and watched room.

But how? If you've a shimmer of an idea, it might be fun to post it before you read further.

SPOILER, highlight text or press CTRL+A to read: upon entering the room, Jack the Ripper stunned Tarzan with his Victorian-era walking stick and took a roll of plastic from his surgeon's kit and covered a piece of the floor. He draped his cloak on top of the plastic and rolled the unconscious Tarzan on top of it.

Yes, but...

SPOILER, (...): Jack the Ripper than proceeded to kill Tarzan and threw his own costume into the fire, after ripping off the buttons, and slipped on the Tarzan slip – after which he gutted and dismembered Tarzan. Remember, the surgical knives are part of the Ripper attire, albeit a personal customization on the murderer's part.  

That still doesn't explain how only one person walked out of windowless and guarded room without leaving any traces!

SPOILER, (...): Oh, ye of little faith! The murderer proceeded to make his macabre ornaments out of the body parts and reusing parts of his own costume. The staff with the skull was the Ripper's walking stick with Tarzan's skinned head on it, and well, you know what he did with the bones. The organs were put in the bottles that were in the kit and wrapped the other stuff up in (more) plastic and put in the kit or the animal-skin, plastic-lined bag that he wore under his cloak when he entered the room. When the body had disappeared and had adorned him with his slain victim, he wrapped up the blood-drenched cloak and plastic – stuffing it in the kit that went in the bag with the rest and that was slung over his shoulder. The murderer than put up his little act in the hallway and strutted into crowd, towards the backdoor and into history.

W-why? Why would anyone do that?! To be completely honest with you, that's kind of the weak point, which is why I threw it out here for the fun of it, but there's a way to properly motivate it in universe where people go through such insane lengths for a disappearing act.

SPOILER, (...): To pull it off in the first place, you've to be a skilled pathologist and so what if the man under the Ripper costume was a well-renowned pathologist with a skeleton or two in closet. Maybe he illegally sold body parts. Who knows. And Tarzan was a blackmailer, a low-level criminal who found out and made the connection, and fixed a rendezvous at the party and felt secure to meet him behind the locked door of that room when there was someone standing guard outside. Nobody knew of his side job or that somebody found out about it, and thus nobody knew he had solid motive for making this person thoroughly disappear. He might have had van park near by where he could chance and carefully remove the remains he's carrying. Safely home, he could practically put the skull on his desk without ever attracting attention.

No. The ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler does not possess me.

A Fish Out of Water

"Things were certainly bad when a respectable communications officer began playing gumshoe."

- Lt. Chuck Masters (Murder in the Navy, 1955) 

A year before the late Evan Hunter adopted the Ed McBain moniker for the 87th Precinct series, which ran for fifty years, there was a crime novel with the stylistic trappings of a traditional whodunit, Murder in the Navy, published under the Richard Marsten byline – later reissued as Death of a Nurse (1955) as by Ed McBain.

U.S.S. Sykes is a U.S. Navy destroyer and the backdrop for Death of a Nurse, on which the well-oiled, but routine, existence of the sailors is disrupted by Navy Day sight-seers and the discovery of the body of a Navy nurse in the radar shack. The reader witnesses how her boyfriend throttles Claire Cole to death without learning his identity and the case becomes a brass concern.

An investigative board of naval officers is formed, one of them being Lt. Chuck Masters, the story's protagonist, and a pair of FBI agents are send down to look into the case – which promised a nice contrasting of amateur and professional detective work. Frederick Norton and Matthew Dickason are G-Men, however, they look and act more like a snotty amateur reasoner of some celebrity of a bygone age and his Dr. Watson, but they let the captain know who's in charge of the inquiry – restricting the investigative board to gathering facts for the ship log. Nonetheless, they scooped up a handful of names from the sea of suspects by employing the same method: who were in possession of the keys to the radar shack and were, at one time or another, committed to the hospital ward and on leave during a specific period.

They had four names to pick from and that makes for a joyful game of whodunit, but, unfortunately, a second murder is written off as the suicide of Claire Cole's murderer. Consumed by remorse or feeling the hangman's noose tighten and preferred to chuck himself overboard, but the reader witnessed the unknown, shadowy assailant attacking and rolling him into the water beneath them. Here the official and investigative board, under pressure and after roughly sixty pages, closes the case and that takes the urgency out of the story – which rapidly deteriorates into a run-of-the-mill crime novel.

Lt. Masters is convinced that the murderer is still at large, but is forced to stop snooping around and ordered to accept the official explanation. Meanwhile, Masters and the unknown murderer are developing an interest in nurse Jean Dvorak, but at this point in the story, I was only able to marvel at the breathtaking stupidity at how some of the characters were poking and agitating the murderer – especially the last one to fall. He was one step away from dropping on his knees and popping out a small, velvet lined box containing a shiny cyanide capsule and asking, "will you murder me?"

McBain probably realized this and tried to excuse the victim by letting Jean confess that he was a good boy inside, who loved to violate classic compositions on his violin. The defense should probably take note of that. Hey, I try to keep this review up beat and you should sing my praise for not going with "Through a Keel-Haul" as a post-title for this shoddily written review.

Anyway, to whom did Jean make this confession, alongside a truckload of pesky questions about Cole Claire, while pretending to fall for this persons advances? The man who she happens to gravely suspect of having killed three people and successfully eluded investigators from different bureaus and organizations... while alone and slowly being undressed. Three of the four (would-be) victims could've easily aired their suspicions in saver environment to officials, but they practically went in front of him (the second one on an abandoned part of the ship in the dark) while saying, "I know what you did and it's going to ruin your life." I accept one dummy like that, but there were all together three of them (minus Claire Cole, who was the true victim of this book) and only one of them survived.

Death of a Nurse is well written as a story of crime, but lousy as a detective novel and that was what it posed like for the first quarter of the book. I expected more from the author of Killer's Wedge (1957) and Tricks (1987).

Finally, I wanted to come back on my previous review and I wanted to make a separate post for it, but it would've been a very short one. Anyhow, Marco Books pointed out one of the "Easter Eggs" that he had hidden in Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), which I had shamefully missed. I mentioned in my review that the video security of the house showed a lot of animals passing by and the first to "discover" the murder was an inquisitive tomcat, who tried to further investigate the trail of blood, but, ironically, couldn't get in on account of a locked front door and plaintively meows like the cat from A.C. Baantjer's DeKok and the Sorrowing Tomcat (1969). Again, thank you for that wonderful cameo(w)! 

And will I be stopped before spinning the purr-fect pun? Find out in the next blog post.

The Raven and the Criminal

"You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light."

- Edward Abbey 

Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) is the seventh entry in M.P.O. Books' District Heuvelrug series, which takes place directly after the events from the previous novel, De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012), and everything added to one of his most impressive juggling acts – going all the way this time in combining the best of two eras into a contemporary crime novel.

Fred Duijster was one of the figureheads of the Dutch criminal underworld, whose name turned up in a number of high-profile investigations without a single conviction to show for it. His fortified home can vouch that Duijster was not a man you were likely to catch off guard. The windows were secured with steel shutters and the premises are monitored with motion sensors that trigger overhead lights and cameras. Back and front. They are so sensitive that birds, cats, hedgehogs and prying neighbors can set them off. You could basically splice the security footage from the garden together to create an episode for The Animals of Farthing Wood.

Duijster allowed a handful of people into his home and fewer knew he lived there, but despite these precautions, someone still got to him. Brutally got him! Beaten and gutted with a kitchen knife.

An investigation is launched by the police, but here's where we get the first clue that this, stylistically, is going to be a different kind of story because Inspector Bram Petersen is sidelined for this investigation – after his wife suffered a stroke and her life is hanging by a thread. This sounds like typically police procedural stuff, but Petersen is just a background character here that makes a few brief appearances. That doesn't mean that his wife's critical condition or his grief is not shown or addressed, but it's not intruded upon, which I find to be infinitely more realistic than a long, drawn-out account of her dying process.

The man they found to replace Petersen is a transfer from Utrecht, Inspector Arthur van der Camp, who garnered praise there for his tough opposition against (organized) crime and thus the man to lead the investigation – which turns into a slam dunk case after an analysis of the security footage. The video clearly shows only one person entered and left the house at the time of the murder, a self-professed reformed criminal named Rafaël du Mez, alias "Raaf," who denies any involvement and demands a lawyer. Of course, nothing goes as smooth as it should be going due to internal struggles.

Here the plot takes another departure from the norm of the series: the sister of the suspect, Elvira, hires Sjoerd Guikema as her brother's defense counsel, and all of the sudden, where in an American mystery novel from the 1940s! Well, that's how my brain translated it. Guikema is overworked as it's and has no interest whatsoever in taking the case. That's until he sees Elvira and is suddenly inspired with an all-consuming will to help clear her brothers' name.

The parts of the story tag around with them smack of the amateur mystery solving couples that kept up the spirits of the English speaking nations during the war years. Books experimented before with an amateur sleuth in the trappings of a police procedural in the titular novella from the short story collection Dodelijke Hobby (Deadly Hobby, 2012), but this was by far the better of the two and both of them offered a false solution as to how someone could've entered the house undetected. They were surprisingly classical as well! Giekema's solution was definitely a nod to Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890), one of Books' favorite mystery writers, while Elvira's reminded me of Fergus Hume's The Silent House (1899) – if I remember that particular story correctly.

How the murderer circumvented the surveillance cameras and censors, gained access without tempering the locks or shutters, survive a knife fight with a dangerous criminal, and left again under the same circumstances was fairly easy (apart from the knife fight bit, of course). But that's often the beauty of a locked mystery, which appears to be completely impossible, when the answer is actually quite simple. Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Solution (1983) have a similar premise as A Sealed House, in which a single person is fingered as a cold blooded murderer, because another suspect is a physical impossibility, and while I don't think it was quite on par with the former, I definitely think it was better than the latter. The Gold Solution is actually comparable to A Sealed House, because it also revolves around a fortified crime scene with a state of the art security system designed to keep people out or locked them in. So I have no complaints in that department.

If I have any complaints, it's that if criminals were as smart as they are portrayed here, I would be known the world over as the Sherlock Holmes of the modern age and the ending was a bit, uhm, what's the word... overkill? It has been commented upon before that writers like Bill Pronzini and William DeAndrea don't shy away from a dramatic climax at gunpoint, but Books must have been on fire when he wrote those chapters! I think he didn't hear the ghost of Mickey Spillane over the gunfire-like banging of his keyboard to tone it down just a little bit.

For the non-Dutch readers who are curious (a MILD SPOILER, select to read): a hostage situation erupts when the murderer is cornered and to prove the demands were not being made in jest, two very, very dead bodies were wormed out of window down to a street filled with policemen, onlookers and I think even a rolling camera or two.

Those mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are far more uglier below sea level. Anyway, to round this long, rambling review off, A Sealed House is an explosion of creativity scattering across various areas of the genre: the crime offered a classic locked room problem with some old-fashioned amateur snooping on the side, while the official police investigation of the murder further fleshed out some of the people who do that work and the milieu of the story gave everything a hardboiled edge. I also liked how the book set-up characters and storylines for down the line, because I doubt we've seen the last of Guikema or Van der Camp. The plot for the next book was also foreshadowed as a special police team is being formed. 

Long, long story short, A Sealed House is one of the best in the series that have been published up to this point and I'm eagerly anticipating the next installment. 

District Heuvelrug series: 

Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004)

De bloedzuiger (The Bloodsucker, 2005)

Gedragen haat (Hatred Borne, 2006)

De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010)

De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011)

De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012)
Dodelijke hobby (Deadly Hobby, 2012)

Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013)