When Words Collide

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"

- The Mad Hatter (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

So recently, I reviewed a locked room mystery by Philip Wylie, entitled Corpses at Indian Stones (1943), in which I referenced a second detective novel by Wylie that was catalogued by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crime (1991) – namely the tantalizingly titled Five Fatal Words (1932). I promised a review would soon follow and, well, here you are.

Five Fatal Words was co-authored by Edwin Balmer and appears to have been the first collaboration between Wylie and Balmer, but it wouldn't be the last. In the following years, they penned two science-fiction novels, When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934), which seem to be still fairly well remembered among science-fiction readers – as well as giving me a punning post-title for this review. I know it'll probably make some people cringe, but I couldn't let it pass.

Interestingly, there are some mild science-fiction elements evoked in the second half of the book, but the first part seems to have taken its cue from the Victorian-era detective stories.

I found the opening chapter and immediate aftermath to be somewhat reminiscent of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), which begins with an unusual advertisement in the "Help Wanted—Female" column – asking for a young lady who "must have no ties" and "willing to devote entire time for one year" to her job.

Melicent Waring has been out of a job for nine weeks and is becoming desperate now that her money, and that of her friend and roommate, has dwindled to a grand total of seven dollars and forty-two cents. So, of course, she goes to the job interview and the person who placed the advertisement, Mr. Robert Reese, turns out to be very reputable lawyer.

The advertisement was placed on behalf Miss Hannah Cornwall, who belongs to one of the wealthiest families in the world and has a habit of replacing her entire staff once a year. Miss Waring assumes she merely has "to read" and "be polite to a rich old lady of sixty who wants a lot of attention," but she soon figures out that her new job also consists of having to share her new employers fear and dread – which she fully comes to realize when she has to switch beds with Miss Hannah on her first night at the Cornwall estate.

Miss Hannah Cornwall's fear is rooted in the will of her long-departed father, Silas Cornwall, who bequeathed his six children a regular income drawn from his two hundred million dollar estate, but the only person who can inherit it all is the last survivor. That's simply asking for trouble!

A recent letter Miss Hannah received from a nephew in Dutch Guiana has greatly disturbed her: one of her brothers, Daniel Cornwall, has possibly succumbed from poisoning after receiving a weird and cryptic five letter message – which read "Doubtless Even a Tulip Hopes." A second brother, Everitt, dies under her roof and behind the locked-and bolted door of a bathroom after receiving a cryptic message saying "Don't Ever Alter These Horoscopes." There are more brothers and sisters who'll follow their unfortunate fate.

Destruction on a larger scale

I've always associated the tontine-scheme and sole survivor plot-line with Ellery Queen, who successfully played up this device in "The Inner Circle" and "The Gettysburg Bugle," collected in Calendar of Crime (1952), but it's also present in Will Levinrew's little-known Death Points a Finger (1933) – which appeared a year after Five Fatal Words. So maybe there was a cross-pollination of ideas there.

In any case, Five Fatal Words and Death Points a Finger are of interest to Ellery Queen fans as being early examples (and possible) inspirations for that typical Queen-ish plot-device.

Well, after the suspicious-looking death in the bolted bathroom and discovery of a potential, tale-tell clue to a possible explanation they're being abruptly forced from the estate. This marks an unfortunate decline in the plot and begins a thug-of-war with the reader’s credulity.

First of all, they make a brief excursion to Belgium, where a sister of Miss Hannah lives in a chateau on the river, but death even follows them there and strikes in a most unusual way – a deadly, poisonous mist smothers Domrey Valley and Alice Cornwall died alongside "sixty other old people" in "the Belgian fog."

If it’s murder, the murderer racked up quite a body count to get to one person, but be prepared to throw the book across the room when you reach the "explanation" for this death-mist. I always thought Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913) had a cop-out ending, but Balmer and Wylie showed him!

The quality briefly picks up again when they go back to America to visit Theodore Cornwall in New York.

Theodore Cornwall is a health-obsessed vegetarian who paradoxically praises science that "has made it possible for us the extend" the "great gift" that’s life, but completely allows astrology to dictate his life. A man who trusted science with his health believed "stars and constellations so immense and far away that the mind could not encompass their distances" concerned themselves with the "petty, individual, human fates and affairs," which seems to be confirmed when Theodore has a close-encounter with a "bit of cosmic debris" – when "a shred of some star" is catapulted into his bedroom.

The meteorite failed to kill him and, obviously, it had fallen from space long before it was hurled through Theodore’s bedroom window, but it was interesting to see how the science-fiction background of the writers crept into this story. It just struck a false note in the overall structure of the book. The bits and pieces with Theodore seemed to have been more at home in the pages of a screwball-type of mystery instead of dark, dreadful crime story about the slow extermination of a family.

I probably should mention Michael Innes' The Weight of Evidence (1944) here, which has a nifty, well-done murder with a chunk of meteorite an English university.

Anyhow, I guess the overall theme of the story is that everything seemed of the mark. The death messages were mystifying and had an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about them, especially the first two or so, but they were just side dressing to the plot. The locked room mystery was interesting, but was only a minor part of the overall plot and one part of the explanation left me unsatisfied. The deadly mist was obviously meant to make the murderer look omnipotent, but how it ended up fitting into the story makes you want to bludgeon the authors with a ball-peen hammer. The final explanation... well, I can't say I was either impressed or surprised by it, but the unusual chase at the end was nice.

I'm afraid Five Fatal Words is a little more than a curiosity of the Golden Age of the American detective story. A curiosity with some points of interest, but a curiosity nonetheless. So read it at your own discretion. 

And thus ends one of my longest runs of reviews of good, great and downright excellent mysteries. Well, hope to pick it up again with the next one. Stay tuned! 

Sequence of Evil

"If you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas."

- proverb

Genre historian and author of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012), Curt Evans, proclaimed Harriet Rutland as "one of the Golden Age English mystery fiction's most original and interesting writers," which is a claim backed by empirical evidence – e.g. Knock, Murderer, Knock (1938) and Bleeding Hooks (1940). However, Rutland's third and final outing as a mystery novelist was something different altogether.

Blue Murder (1942) appears to have been heavily influenced by the turmoil in the author's personal life.

You'll have to read Evans' introduction for the finer details, but suffice to say that the care of an infant son and a deteriorating marriage ending in divorce, against the background of the biggest conflict this world has ever seen, ended up coloring the plot of this dark, sardonically written detective novel. It also changed the approach Rutland took in handling the plot.

Contrary to the previous two novels, Blue Murder is a character-driven mystery that's very low on (physical) detection.

The official police-investigators, Northshire's Superintendent Cheam and Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Alan Driver, question all of the potential suspects and discuss the details of the case, but they barely have any tangible clues to work on – only the personalities and actions of the characters involved in the murders. Luckily, Rutland assembled exactly the type of characters of that could carry such a plot.

Blue Murder takes place in a small, sleepy village, called Nether Naughton, where the elderly, lecherous and sadistic Mr. Hardstaffe precedes over the village school as its hated headmaster. Hardstaffe lusts after "the youngest and prettiest of his staff," Miss Charity Fuller, but refuses to return his attention "as long as she is alive."

She is, of course, Mrs. Hardstaffe: a bothersome hypochondriac who keeps "a copy of Medical Hints under the Bible besides her bed" to "simulate new complaints" in the morning, but developing a poor health in the Hardstaffe home seems like a real possibility – especially in light of what their grown daughter's passion.

Leda Hardstaffe is a typical, English countrywoman in tweeds with a kennel of Sealyham terriers, but the little monsters have been allowed to overrun the home and they aren’t house-trained, which gave a whole new meaning to getting carpet bombed.

It doesn't appear to be a place to entertain guests for a long period of time, but they take in Arnold Smith, a scribbler of "novels of weak adventure, sugared with ladylike romance," who wanted to escape wartime atmosphere of London and work on the next chapter of his literary career: a detective novel. The idea came from his literary agent, "only thing is to turn to murder," but Smith, confessedly, knows nothing about writing detective stories and wondered how to "possibly get into the atmosphere of crime?"

Rejected cover

Well, in that regard, Nether Naughton proved to be an unexpected well of inspiration for an aspiring mystery writer: Mrs. Hardstaffe is found expired in her bed from an overdose of morphine and evidence that emerged argues against it being an accident or suicide.

The poisoning of Mrs. Hardstaffe mainly functions as a prelude to another, far more violent tragedy at the house, but also introduced a cast of new characters and potential suspects. There's the return of a prodigal son, named Stanton, who left after a fall-out with his father and brought along his wife and infant son, which was good for some friction here and there. Mr. Hardstaffe also found himself on the other end of a "threatening fist" when the father of one of his pupils, a Mr. Ramsbottom, came for an explanation for the unnecessary thrashing he gave his son with a cane, which happened earlier on in the story. Of course, Mr. Hardstaffe is remorseless and afterwards basically call parents "queer creatures" and basically compares them to wild animals with a superiority complex-by-proxy where their child is concerned.

So, as I said previously, there's a lack of physical and tangible clues, such fingerprints and blood-spatters, which were replaced by the psychological nature of the characters and how they acted upon the events they're confronted with – which is a game Rutland played very well and drew attention away from the murderer. Yes. Just like in Knock, Murderer, Knock, I pointed to the wrong person as the murderer.

The final revelation of the murderer was very well done. It was an incredibly dark, grim and gritty ending, but seemed very fitting for the seemingly never-ending darkness the world found itself in at the time.

That's something else I found noteworthy about Blue Murder: the World War II material was very interesting and places the book in the same category as such classical WWII mystery novels as Carter Dickson's Nine-and Death Makes Ten (1940), Christianna Brand's Green for Danger (1944) and Michael Gilbert's The Danger Within (1952).

The story is peppered with references of war-time England, which range from food shortages ("this meal isn't enough to feed a cat on") and a throw-away remark to a inquest on a baby ("left unattended in its gas-helmet during a mock attack") to quips about Hitler and Mussolini ("Blame Hitler. I didn't start the war").

There's also a character you won't often come across in mysteries from this era: a German-Jewish refugee, a scatter-brained maid named Frieda Braun, who's at the receiving end of the Hardstaffes casual anti-Semitism, but her most interesting contribution to the plot were her brief, contrasting memories of Germany – one which was still full of kindness and gemütlichkeit and the other the one she had flee from.

Well, I appear to have rambled on after I had already written the concluding part of this review, because I always seem to fumble the summing up part of a blog-post. So, I'll end it here by saying Blue Murder was an interesting, character-driven mystery novel with a heap of interesting WWII material and a dark, but memorable, ending. However, I still think Bleeding Hooks is the best of Rutland's trio of mystery novels. Blue Murder is good and a close second, but Bleeding Hooks is (IMHO) a genuine masterpiece. But discover Rutland and her altogether small output for yourself, because they are now available again thanks to tag-team work of our fellow "Connoisseur in Murder," Curt Evans, and the great Dean Street Press.

Death Trap

"I often think that a highly expert archaeologist would make a perfect detective. He has the education that the best of professional policemen often lack and the knowledge of things as such that the theorist and literary man never has at all."

- Canon Burbery (Stanley Casson's Murder by Burial, 1938)

In his introduction for Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (2010), Bill Pronzini described Philip Wylie as a versatile writer who had a broad range of interests, encompassing many fields of expertise, such as science, education, deep-sea fishing, UFOs and pretty much every kind of genre-fiction out there – including our beloved detective-and thriller stories.

Wylie's detective stories that are of special interest to me are, of course, those catalogued in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). Hey, I came close to churning out five successive blog-posts without touching upon a single locked room mystery or rambling semi-coherently about impossible crime stories in general. It was an untenable state of affairs and you know it!

Corpses at Indian Stones (1943) is, reportedly, the only mystery novel Wylie wrote single-handedly and collaborated with Edwin Balmer on some of his other forays into the genre such as Five Fatal Words (1932) – which also happened to be a locked room novel and one I'll be reading before long. But lets get this review out of the way first.

I think the first thing I should mention about Corpses at Indian Stones is that Wylie used both the figure of the amateur sleuth and the traditional mystery as vehicles for a very peculiar coming-of-age story. One with a protagonist who's already in his thirties.

The detective duties in Corpses at Indian Stones are relegated to an introversive, classically named professor of anthropology and distinguished archaeologist, Agamemnon Telemachus Plum, who'd spend most of his days digging up old bones and excavating ancient cities.

Professor Plum is referred to by everyone as "Aggie" and has come to "prefer a book to a tea dance" and "an assorted stack of petrified bones to a pack of playing cards," which came from spending his days "seal-hunting in kayaks" and "pushing dugouts into the Everglades and up the reaches of the Amazon" – basically living in the boys' adventure stories from his youth.

Unfortunately, for Aggie, his aunt, Sarah, has plans to drastically change all of that. She believes the time has come for Aggie to get a wife and making sure the family name lives on. Luckily, for her, they're going on holiday together and therefore has ample opportunity to find a suitable match for her nephew.

They'll be spending the summer days together at a place where Aggie left some memories from his youth, a place named Indian Stones in upstate New York, which brings him back into contact with people he hadn't seen for decades.

However, his first, genuine recorded emotion in this story was getting misty-eyed when being reunited with the objects from his childhood, such as "banners, pictures, trophies, knickknacks and books," in his old bedroom – which is fitting for a misanthropic archaeologist. He also retraces some of the routes he had memorized as a teenager of the surrounding woods, but that's where the trouble begins as he stumbles across the first, suspicious-looking death in the area.

Jim Calder was an unpopular figure at Indian Stones. He had managed the finances of several prominent residents with varying degrees of success, which made Calder's presence at such a tranquil place like having "a ghoul at a feast," but did this provoke someone in doing something irrevocable? Calder's cold, lifeless body is found trapped between a pair of heavy logs of a deadfall, which is a bear trap and the trigger seems to have required a heavy pull. And that places a prominent question mark behind the possibility of it being an accident. 

The intended victim of a deadfall-trap

Aggie begins to act as a sort of unofficial deputy to Captain Wesley "Wes" Wickman, a good-humored state trooper, who doesn't seem to mind all too much that someone's meddling in his case – which he's willing to write-off as a simple accident.

So, while the professor is slowly becoming used to socializing (read: being domesticated) he wades through such nebulous clues as a fox with a dog collar and a calling card pinned with a knife to a door. A guest who didn't show up and a submerged car with veal bones as its "cargo." A forgotten, hidden piece of architecture of the place they're staying and it's connection to the financial panic of 1907, Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the gold hoarding during the 1930s, but the best possible evidence for murder proved to be a second body.

The local doctor, George Davis, was seen taking photographs of the accident-site and evidently made someone very nervous, because he's discovered in his makeshift darkroom with a hunting knife buried in his chest. However, complicating a verdict of a plain and simple homicide is the locked-and bolted door and a window the size of a book, which makes the doctor's violent passing either a case of suicide or an impossible murder.

Because the reader knows just as well as Aggie that the Dr. Davis was murdered, but the question is how the killer left a door locked-and bolted on the inside or a passed through a tiny window. 

The answer to that particular question was disappointingly simplistic, but there were other interesting aspect about the explanation that should be pointed out. It's one of those tricks that's hard to believe was pulled off in one go, especially considering the lack of wiggle room the murderer had to work with, but Wylie carefully avoided that particular pitfall and in the process provided an original explanation as to why the telephone lines were pulled down. A more original explanation would've been preferred, but Wylie worked well with what he put into the plot. 

Well, I feel like I've been droning on without saying too much of substance, because Corpses at Indian Stones is essentially a light-weight mystery novel with an easily discernable plot, which is why I have been dancing around the finer plot-details – afraid of giving away anything of importance. But I liked it, because despite its shortcomings and simplicity, it's a very enjoyable detective story with an interesting sleuth who solves a couple of bizarre murder during one of the most important weeks of his personal life. I also loved how his background and skills as an archaeologist was used to literarily unearth parts of the truth towards the end and even dug up something a little more animated than your basic, run-of-the-mill skeletons.   

So, yes, Corpses at Indian Stones is less than perfect as a detective story, but I still very much enjoyed the read and the book comes recommended if you simply love a fun, little detective story – or an attempt at one. I'd also recommend reading John Norris' review on Pretty Sinister Books, which interestingly contrasts the book with Wylie's other, non-mystery novels.

Well, that was almost two pages worth of text with very little to no substance at all, but, as always, I'll try to do better in my next post.

The Baited Hook

"Why does fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms?"

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891)

Last week, I wrote a fervidly enthusiastic and laudable review of Harriet Rutland's debut novel, Knock, Murderer, Knock (1938), but now I've read her second novel and fear I might have over-praised her maiden effort – because Bleeding Hooks (1940) is the real-deal.

Knock, Murderer, Knock is an odd, quirky portrayal of the closed-circle of suspects with an eccentric cast of characters and a string of bizarre, grotesque murders with knitting-needles. On the surface, it's a classically-styled detective story with a clever plot straying from the beaten track. So, in that regard, it's very satisfying and attractive book for the experienced armchair detective.

Bleeding Hooks is a brightly written, colorful story with a plot strolling along a more traditional route, which is strewn with twists and turns. The characters toddling along a beautiful, evocative drawn Welsh setting and the double-layered explanation has a last-minute with a dusting of originality.

The backdrop of the story is Aberllyn, a quaint fishing village in Wales, where a picturesque inn stands, named The Fisherman's Rest, which is a snug, cozy place that can easily compete with the larger Lakeside Hotel and often finds hotel-guests on its doorstep – to "beg for a room" no matter how "small and poorly furnished."

Only drawback for the holidaymakers is having to put with Mrs. Ruby Mumsby: a vulgar, slug-like widow who'd "ran after anything in trousers" and the dread of the local ghillies (a fishing-and hunting guide). It's a small discomfort that seemingly sorted itself out when Mrs. Mumby's body is found at the side of a lake with a salmon fly deeply embedded in her hand.

Dr. Roberts determines death was caused by a combination of poor health and shock from the deep wound, which caused her heart to give out, but a vacationing Mr. Winkley harbors suspicion of foul play and discreetly starts to investigate the sudden death – assisted by a pair of "Bright Young Things."

Pansy Partridge and Vyvyan Gunn, primarily referred to be their nicknames of "Pussy" and "Piggy," enthusiastically throw themselves into the roles of amateur sleuths, which furnished the plot with a pleasant amount of layman detection.

In his introduction for the Dean Street Press edition, Curt Evans likened Pussy and Piggy to Tommy and Tuppence from such Agatha Christie novels as The Secret Adversary (1922) and Partners in Crime (1929). Which is a fair comparison. However, they reminded me of two other partners in mischief, namely Vanya and Lucinda, from Helen McCloy's marvelous Mr. Splitfoot (1968) with a dash of Kelley Roos' Jeff and Haila Troy.

Well, they go about their self-imposed task with the zest and zeal befitting of a pair of amateur detectives, but their poking around and questioning aren't making them exactly popular with their fellow guests – which eventually results in an attempt on the life of Pussy.

The cast of potential killers, by the way, consists of the owners of the inn, Mr. and Mrs. Evans. Mrs. Mumsby long-suffering ghillie, John Jones. A veteran of the Great War, Sir General Courtney Haddox and his spinster sister, Ethel, who behaved suspiciously when the body was discovered. Pussy's mother, Mrs. Partridge. A couple, Mr. and Mrs. Pindar, who are affectionately referred to as the Pandas by Pussy. A prattling sport fisher, Major Jeans, who prefers to make his own fish flies and frequently utters "bleeding hooks," which gave the book its title. Mr. Weston and his young son, Claude, who's promising music-hall performer and quickly became my favorite character in the story, because I love magician-characters and magic-acts in detective stories.

So, while Piggy and Pussy are antagonizing or annoying everyone around them, Winkley has been far more subtle, which eventually gives him the opportunity to bait a hook, cast a line and patiently wait for a nibble – before reeling in the murderer. And it's quite a catch!

I also feel redeemed for having spotted the murderer and the motive, because in Knock, Murderer, Knock I only managed to get hold of a bunch of red herrings. However, Rutland did include a final pull of the rug that surprised both me and Mr. Winkley. I agree with John Norris, who reviewed the book under its US title, The Poison Fly Murder, that this final revelation makes the book somewhat of a minor masterpiece.

There's literally nothing I did not like about Bleeding Hooks, which is rare, because I can usually find something to nitpick about. But this one of those rare mysteries in which every aspect of the story seemed to co-exist in perfect harmony with one another. The plot, characters, background and atmosphere as well as the small, but interesting, tidbits about fly fishing and everything surrounding it made this easily (one of) the best reads of 2015.

I sincerely hope Rutland's third and final mystery novel, Blue Murder (1942), is able to hold itself up against its predecessor, because Bleeding Hooks is a tough act to follow. 

Some Kind of Monkey Business

"Why, the English countryside is one congealed mass of intrigue and petty spite. That is why almost every murder story is placed in a country town or in some remote village, where all the natural passions have free play."

- Miss Boddick (Stanley Casson's Murder by Burial, 1938)

On the back-cover of my Pan Books edition of Death Comes to Cambers (1935), Dorothy L. Sayers asks "what is distinction," which is not easy to define, but, instinctively, it's recognized in those few who achieved it and ascended to the first ranks.

Sayers asserts that we recognize it in the Sherlock Holmes canon, E.C. Bentley's Trent’s Last Case (1913), A.E.W. Mason's At the Villa Rose (1910), G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories and "in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time" – which I tend to agree with after reading three of his detective novels.

Death Comes to Cambers has Punshon's series-character, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, staying as a guest at Cambers House. Lady Cambers has reasons to believe burglars are sneaking about the house, coveting her expensive collection of jewelry, but Owen soon finds himself engaged in a murder-investigation.

One morning, her ladyship fails to appear for breakfast and her bed hasn’t been slept in, which eventually leads to the discovery of her body on a damp, cold and trampled field just outside of the house – strangled to death! As to be expected, the centerpiece of Lady Cambers' collection, "Cleopatra's Pearl," is missing from her safe and there are signs someone had been staking out the house during the night. But robbery isn't the only possible motive for the murder.

Lady Cambers' husband, Sir Albert, wanted to separate from his wife, one way or another, in order to marry another woman. There's a nephew, Tim Sterling, who became her heir, but resented the way in which she wanted to run his life and bumping off his aunt would've brought freedom – in addition to a considerable lump of money.

A motive of a different nature comes from the local vicar, Mr. Andrews, who's a rabid creationist and objected fiercely to Lady Cambers financing an archeological excavation in Frost Field. Which is where her body was found. The excavations are being carried out by an equal fanatical and arrogant Darwinist, named Eddy Dene, who hoped his theory about the true genesis of man "would make as big a sensation as Darwin's Origin of Species."

Those are only the obvious lines of enquiry, but there are more suspects and motives strewn about the place. It makes for a nice, if somewhat typical, 1920s-style country house/village mystery.

However, John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books remarked in his review of the book that it took a considerable amount of pages to move away from routine police work and "enter the realm of originality," which is a valid complaint.

Bobby Owen and Colonel Lawson, chief constable of the country, do have a spot of routine work to take care of, before Owen can get to the meat of the plot: which consists of a pair of clever ciphers, posted in the agony column, and a genuine original, if somewhat bizarre, alibi-trick. But how much this preliminary groundwork and series of interviews is a reduction in quality really depends on how much you care about relatable or likeable characters, because there aren't many of them in this story and can bog down some readers in its first half – which wasn't a problem for me.

What I did found disappointing about the first half is that the feud between Dene and Andrews wasn't used to greater effect, which would've benefited the overall story if such vignettes had been interspersed with the interview.

The parts that did touch upon this feud were interesting and even had a bit of a Chestertonian flavor, because "the age-old conflict of the priest and the scientist," who are "both right and both wrong," has a paradoxal quality about it when their relationship was described as follow: "the one mistrusting too much reason, and daring to doubt where truth may lead," while the other mistrusted "too much faith, and daring to doubt where love might go" – concluding that both are "so tremendously right" and at the same time "so presumptuously wrong."

I wish there had been more of that, as well as more on the archaeological excavations, but Death Comes to Cambers is a very well written and (eventually) cleverly plotted mystery novel, which demonstrates why Punshon was so highly regarded during his lifetime.

If you want to take a crack at this book yourself, there's a new edition from Dean Street Press with an introduction penned by our very own Curt Evans.

Needled to Death

"When people say things behind your back there is nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumors go on growing and growing, and no one can stop them."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's "The Thumb Mark of St. Peter," from The Tuesday Club Murders, 1928)

Genre historian Curt Evans, author of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012), and Rupert Heath of the Dean Street Press are promptly becoming the usual suspects in the revival of obscure, long-forgotten mystery writers – having already brought E.R. Punshon, Ianthe Jerrold and Annie Hayes back into the fray.

The next name on their hit list is "Harriet Rutland," whose real name was Olive Shimwell, and wrote "three of the most unjustly neglected English mysteries from the Golden Age of detective fiction." It's an opinion echoed by John Norris in his reviews of Knock, Murderer, Knock (1938) and Bleeding Hooks (1940). So that was all the encouragement I needed to pounce on Rutland's debut novel!

Knock, Murderer, Knock takes place at a hydro-hotel, called Presteignton Hydro, perked above a private beach in Devonshire Bay and the sprawling building provided a home to "a collection of oddities" – most of whom are permanent resident patients of the place.

Rutland succeeded in coating her satirical illustrations of this cast of gossiping gargoyles with a layer of gravity, which complemented the equally unusual plot.

Personally, I was very fond of Mrs. Dawson, who had failed to find a publisher for the thriller novels she had written and sniped at the reader by observing how "the reading public nowadays is never satisfied with only one murder" and there needed to be "two or three, at least." Which would become prophetic!

Ah, but there are more personages of interest: Colonel Simcox, a sock-knitting veteran of the Great War and a working class aristocrat, Lady Warme, who inherited her title from her green-grocer, philanthropic husband, but that's a private-embarrassment. There's also a pious Miss Astill and a batty Mrs. Napier, among others, who are overseen by a staff and a professional nurse under the guidance of Dr. Williams – owner of the resort.

None of these characters or their behavior can be easily pigeonholed as typical, stock-in-trade clichés of the genre, which can be considered as a triumph of characterization. They're all a bit daft or eccentric, which can be an object of fun, but it's their buggy behavior that makes the story swing between satire and brooding seriousness.

But, enough about the characters, lets shift the focus of this review to the plot. A plot with no less than three murders knitted in its design and the first body is that of the beautiful, evocative Miss Kane, who turned the heads of the men and scandalized the women, found slumped on a settee in the lounge – a knitting-needle jammed into the base of her neck.

A 25-cent Dutch edition Knock, Murderer, Knock

Inspector Palk is saddled with the responsibility of ferreting out the murderer and is assisted by Sergeant Jago, who laments that the "craze for detective fiction" gives "the general public too much information about finger-prints and police procedure." Of course, the sergeant loves reading thrillers, but it's all right for him because it's his job. Needless to say, I took as much of a liking to sergeant as I did to Mrs. Dawson.

Anyhow, Palk struck me as a poor man's Inspector Roderick Alleyn. At the end of a series of interviews, Palk does make an arrest and assumes the murder is solved, but, "before the week ended," he and his "band of constables" would be back – to resume those "grueling hours of police questioning" after someone else got poked with a knitting-needle. 

In his introduction, Evans compares Knock, Murderer, Knock to the works of some of Rutland's "Great British Crime Queen Contemporaries," which has all the familiar names, but neglects to mention Christianna Brand and Gladys Mitchell.

The book reminded me the most of a combination of both their works. The relationship between the first victim and the rest of the cast reminded me of London Particular (1952), in which an outsider is murdered within a close-knit group of people and it doesn't seem to matter – until another murder strikes a lot closer to home. It's even pointed out that Miss Blake and the assumed murderer "had been like visitants from some other world whose actions left them entirely unaffected" and how the situation "might have been different if any of the older residents had been involved in the murder."

Of course, the main difference is that people in Brand's closed group of insiders genuine cared for each other, but that lack of humanity and mental quips would've been food for Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley. Who's not unfamiliar elements of abnormal psychology in her murder cases.

Well, Palk seems insistent on flubbing the case by looking for a copycat-killer the second time around, but soon finds himself in the company of a mysterious guest at the hotel, Mr. Winkley, who swiftly acquired a reputation as a crime-fiction enthusiast. Initially, Winkley seems to be playing a poor man's Roger Sharingham, but there's a clever mind behind his fumbling and bumbling, which succeeded in drawing out the murderer and the explanation was very much in line with the psychological nature of the story.

The only disappointment was how very, very wrong my own solution was. I had dumped all of my eggs into one basket and was wrong on every count, which revolved around a description of one of the woman at the resort: described as a big woman with "large, capable hands" and "exquisitely corseted," but the "illusion of femininity" was marred by the "masculine tones of a deep, resonant voice." Nurse Hawkins had mentioned once or twice how the Victorian-minded patients "don’t like to be naked altogether," which would be a perfect cover for something that was very not done during the 1930s and the people who stumbled to this secret ended up with knitting-needle in their neck.

I was so sure I had figured it all out, but the actual solution and motivation was slightly more conventional and less modern than that. 

However, Knock, Murderer, Knock is a very good, well-written story and one that'll be especially appreciated by seasoned mystery readers, because it's something off the beaten track. Definitely recommended!

Soaked in Tragedy

"The cautious murderer, in his anxiety to make himself secure, does too much; and it is this excess of precaution that leads to detection." 

- Dr. John Thorndyke (R. Austin Freeman's The Eye of Osiris, 1911)

Last month, I posted a review of The Cask (1920), which is an early classic from the Golden Age and embarked Freeman Wills Crofts on a career as one of the genre's more technically minded plotters – and was even considered as one of the "Big Five" British detective writers of the 1920-and 30s.

The plot of Freeman's debut novel concerned a cask "sent from France to London" and "was found to contain the body of a young married Frenchwoman." It required the combined efforts of Scotland Yard, Sûreté and the services of a private investigator to prevent the case from being shelved as unsolved.

I quite enjoyed that monument of a crime-novel with its old-world air, but the reason for bringing it up here is that Inspector French mentioned it in The Sea Mystery (1928), in which he observes that his current problem shared some similarities with "a case investigated several years ago by my old friend Inspector Burnley" – who has since retired from the force.

Funny how French's spoiler-ridden comments on The Cask confirmed my initial, unsubstantiated hunch of it being a companion piece to The Sea Mystery.

The Sea Mystery opens on a pleasant, balmy evening in September on the calm, smooth surface of the Burry Inlet, "on the south coast of Wales," where 14-year-old Evan Morgan is spending his last day-off fishing with his father. However, the only thing they managed to catch that day are the remnants of a perfect crime. Or an attempt at one anyway.

What they hooked was a solid, wooden packing crate, which was bare of "any helpful marks," but the same can’t be said for its putrid content: consisting of a horrendously decomposed body of a man, clad only in underclothes, whose features "had been brutally battered in" and "entirely obliterated" until "only an awful pulp remained." The medical-evidence places the crime five to six weeks ago.

Inspector French is faced with a problem that "seems absolutely insoluble," but believes "it is almost impossible to commit a murder without leaving a clue" and a logical, methodical mind, combined with experience, can get you pretty far.

So, first things first, French sets out to reconstruct how the crate got to the bottom of the inlet, which is done with a bit of math and a practical experiment. These first, preliminary inquiries have a pleasant amount of logical, science-based detective work, but there's a potential plot-hole.

Very early on, French determines a crane-lorry was used in the disposal of the crate, which is traced to a motorcar company, who rented out such a machine and they asked for a 300-pound deposit – which was quite a lump of money in those days. But it's never investigated if such a sum was drawn and re-deposit from a bank account around the time the crane-lorry was taken out. Which I assumed would be a rational route to follow in an investigation that, up to that point, was starved for solid, tangible clues.

A second plot-thread is introduced and involves a double disappearance from a location that'll immediately capture the attention and imagination of every mystery reader: namely the desolate, haunted and treacherous bogs and mires of Dartmoor – inextricably linked to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

One night in August, a pair of businessmen, named Charles Berlyn and Stanley Pyke, where on their way back home when their car broke down and they attempted to cross the moors and were never seen again in this world. The well-read, observant mystery reader should note the similarities between the plot of The Stoneware Monkey (1939) by R. Austin Freeman and the theories arising from the possible connections between both cases, which I thought was interesting. But not as interesting as the eventual explanation!

Crofts only provided French with a small pool of suspect to fish in, but managed to drag a clever and classically styled solution from it that was pure Golden Age. It won't leave the seasoned armchair detective god smacked, but they'll admire the well-clued, intricate plot solved by an intelligent and competent policeman – who's nonetheless as fallible and prone to mistakes as you and me.

Which made French more relatable than I expected and permanently shattered the preconceived notion, I once held, of Crofts as a dull, boring writer who had turned detective-stories into math homework assignments. Not the case at all! I'll definitely return to Crofts before too long. I just hope my tired brain has done some justice to The Sea Mystery. 

Well, I'll be back soon with another review of a vintage, Golden Age mystery.