On a Dark, Grimy Night

"When you follow two separate chains of thoughts, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate to the truth."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax," from His Last Bow: Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, 1917) 

Lenore Glen Offord wrote only eight mystery novels during her lifetime, but amassed a bulky body of work as a critic and served as a reviewer on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicler for over thirty years – a gig which landed her an Edgar Award for Outstanding Criticism in 1952. Nonetheless, it would be a capital mistake to overlook Offord as a mystery novelist.

The Glass Mask (1944) successfully employed a "perfect murder" ploy and refused to fall back on a cop-out for a happy ending, which firmly anchored the book on my list of all-time favorite detective stories. It's also one of the better village mysteries I have read. My True Love Lies (1947) revealed it self as a wonderful, artistically themed standalone novel with an equally wondrous, double-twisted ending and provided a clever answer as to why a murderer would hide a body inside a clay model.

So I was glad to learn Felony & Mayhem had reissued Skeleton Key (1943), which offered an avenue for further exploration of her work and introduced her series-characters – Georgine Wyeth and pulp-writer Todd McKinnon. Georgine Wyeth was introduced to the reader as a strikingly modern character: a workingwoman and widowed mother of a seven-year-old girl, which left her barely with any time for a personal life. It's during one of her ungrateful jobs that the reader catches a first glimpse of her.

Georgine is roaming a cul-de-sac in Berkeley, California, called Grettry Road, carrying a miniature briefcase full of magazine-subscriptions, but they so far remained blank. Nobody seemed interested and there even appeared to be "a sudden wave of sales resistance," which lead to the reflection that she couldn't "sell water to a desert tank corpse," but an opportunity presents itself when a case of mistaken identity gains her entrance to the home of an eccentric professor – who, according to "the consensus of the neighborhood," is perfecting "a Death Ray" in his laboratory!

In actuality, the suspiciously minded scientist, Alexis Paev, is looking for a scientific-illiterate typist to convert his large collection of notes into typescript. It's a job worth a hundred bucks. Luckily, Georgine is fabulously ignorant of such subjects as chemistry, physics and bacteriology. So why not paunch on the opportunity to earn some extra money?

However, the job requires her to be a temporary resident of the dead-end street, because the professor is adamant that not a single page is carried off the premise.

As a new resident, Georgine "noted with amusement" how much Grettry Road "resembled a village," in its semi-isolation, but without the public knowledge of everyone’s private affairs and the inhabitants viewed her as "a fresh mind on which everyone was eager to stamp his own impressions" – which positioned her in the role of social observer. It's in this position that she involuntarily amasses an astonishing amount of knowledge about the locals.

A wealth of information that proved its worth when the local air-raid warden, Roy Hollister, is killed during a blackout in what appears to have been a freak accident, which occurred when "a driverless car plunged downhill" and "struck him as he was going on his rounds." Georgine had noticed during a block meeting Hollister "wardened harder" than anyone she ever saw and how "he had sort of impact on people" that she "couldn’t define or explain." Obviously, there are one or two potential motives hidden just beneath the surface.

The semi-isolation, village-esque quality of Grettry Road begs for a comparison with the English village mysteries of Agatha Christie, but what truly gave the book a British twang was the blackout angle. It's a part of World War II that's seldom played up in American mysteries from the period and therefore became closely associated with English mysteries, which was used by practically every writer active at the time. But the only other American mystery novel I can think of (from the top of my head) using/mentioning blackouts was Frances Crane's The Pink Umbrella (1943).

A well-drawn backdrop, affected by America's entry into the war, coupled with an interesting, somewhat original motive lifted the plot slightly above average, which was a nice result since the book was evidently a vehicle to introduce and establish the new series-characters – by bringing Georgine and Todd together. The only part of the book I found truly disappointing was how the disappearance of one of the characters was presented as an impossible problem,  someone was heard running up a flight of stairs and "at the top had vanished into thin air," but the magic was quickly dispelled and revealed as merely a misundertood situation on the part of Georgine. Oh well.

All in all, it was still a nicely written mixture of plot and characters that resulted in a good, but not outstanding, detective novel with an interesting WWII background.

Well, that's the best I could do with this review and I'm not if I can squeeze in another review before the end of the year, but there will be a best-of/worst-of list. I just haven't decided yet if they're going to be separate lists or simply merge them into one long, rambling blog-post. So stay tuned.

The Enemy Within

"Never was anything great achieved without danger."

- Niccolò Machiavelli 

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed Let Him Lie (1940) by Ianthe Jerrold and noted that it was the first of her final two contributions to the genre, which were published a decade after The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930) under the pseudonym of "Geraldine Bridgman."

The main difference between Let Him Lie and its predecessors was that it's a standalone novel with a character-oriented plot, but Jerrold's final novel differed from all three of its forebears. There May Be Danger (1948) falls in the category of spy-cum-adventure thriller. However, I'd say its unusually structured plot also clung to the traditional mystery, which was abandoned in the end, but it had a grasp on it.

In his introduction, genre historian and author of Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012), Curt Evans, wonders if There May Be Danger was composed in the early 1940s "as a war-time follow up to Let Him Lie" and may have been turned down "on the grounds that it was more a war-time thriller than a classic detective novel" – which could explain how the book ended up eight years later with the same publisher as The Private Life of Adolf Hitler: The Intimate Notes and Diaries of Eva Braun (1949). 

All the same, I think the book stands (IMHO) alongside Dead Man's Quarry as Jerrold's finest piece of crime-fiction. I found it an immensely satisfying story and appreciated the unorthodox structure of the plot, which, I imagine, even diverted from your stock-in-trade spy yarn.

One of the main attractions of There May Be Danger is the protagonist, Kate Mayhew, who used to be a "stage-manager and general factotum" of a small repertory company in London, but a "receding tide of theatre-going" followed the bombers in the sky and the ever-increasing familiar sight of air-raid wardens and gasmasks in the streets below – effectively putting her out of a job. She's contemplating her next course of action when a handbill pasted to a shop window attracts her attention.

The handbill asks "PLEASE HELP" in regards to a missing twelve-year-old London evacuee, named Sidney Brentwood, who resided with a couple in a sparsely populated village in Radnorshire, Wales, but has been missing for several weeks. It seems Sydney "got up in the middle of the night" and "went off on his bicycle" without "saying a word to anybody" and "simply never came back."

Kate concerns herself over the fate of the missing boy and decides to go out there and search for him, which is an undertaking that begins with a visit to Sydney's cat-obsessed aunt in London. But she soon finds herself roaming the streets of the small, Welsh village of Hastry and the surrounding area that's strewn with old homes, neglected building and ancient tumuli – providing the tantalizing possibilities of long-lost hidden passages and chambered barrows.

That's why I enjoyed Kate Mayhew over Jeanie Halliday, the leading heroine from Let Him Lie, because she was a passive character, unwittingly picking up pieces of the puzzle, while Kate went out of her way to find a child she had never met before. It's a premise that energized an already excitingly original plot. A plot that begins somewhat as a traditional mystery novel, but the familiar murder enquiry is ditched in favor of a missing child and nobody even believes there was a crime. Such as Sydney's schoolteacher, who believes he has met with an unfortunate accident, which gives the story an unusual sense of dread, urgency and mystery. Because you want to reach the ending to find out what has happened to Sydney.

Interestingly, there's an archeological-angle to the plot with its burial mounds, possible underground passages from long-ago and a 9th century silver penny of Ceowulf, but, by the end of the book, the story begins to encroach on the territory of blood-curdling thrillers and treacherous espionage novels.

As a large-scale consumer of traditional mysteries, I found the hybrid structure of an espionage-thriller posing for a large part as an atypical detective story to be a pleasant divergent from the norm. I'm just afraid that my review has not done the book any justice, because I glossed over a lot of plot details and fun characters that I did not want to give away.

There May Be Danger is one of those novels you should try and discover for yourself, which I can especially recommend to readers who appreciated the more adventurous outings of Agatha Christie's Tommy & Tuppence (e.g. The Secret Adversary (1922) and N or M?, 1941). Or simply are a fan of Jerrold. Or fond of discovering obscure, long-forgotten vintage crime novels. The wonderful Dean Street Press is reissuing the book in January, 2016.

I'll return to the traditional mystery for my next review, but I've not yet decided whether it'll be an impossible crime novel or a war-time mystery.

In a Mound of Trouble

"...murder sneaked out and invaded the village, upsetting its routine and disarranging the regularity of its program."

- Maureen Sarsfield (Green December Fills the Graveyard a.k.a. Murder at Shots Hall, 1945)  

Earlier this year, I reviewed a pair of mystery novels by Ianthe Jerrold, The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930), which were assumed to have been her sole contributions to the genre, but there were two additional novels – published under the pseudonym of "Geraldine Bridgman." However, they differ in a few ways: both are standalones with different lead characters operating in separate branches of the genre.

Let Him Lie (1940) is a genuine, Golden Age detective, but lacks the presence of Jerrold's series characters, John Christmas, and There May Be Danger (1948) is a World War II spy-thriller. You can probably guess which of the two novels is going to be the subject of this review.

A decade separated Dead Man's Quarry from Let Him Lie and Jerrold appeared to have inched away from the "Great Detectives" that dominated the pre-World War II scene, which accounts for the absence of her brilliant series characters, John Christmas. He has been replaced by a former arts student, Jeanie Halliday, who has settled herself "in proud and lonely independence" at Yew Tree Cottage in Gloucestershire. 

Halliday differs from Christmas in that she does not "create a theory out of the broad characteristics of the case" and then "test the facts," or simply actively detects, but inconspicuously buzzes around the involved with the case and picks up spores of information along the way – which eventually leads to a nasty murderer. Guess you can compare the method of detection in this mystery with pollination.

Anyhow, the opening of Let Him Lie sets the tone of the book: Halliday takes an interest in the welfare of thirteen-year-old Sarah Molyneux and experiences first hand how "confederacy between the adult and the child has its difficulties," which begins when her "queer, neurotic and unhappy mother," Myfanwy Peel, turns up brandishing a service revolver. Sarah was left in the care of her uncle, Robert Molyneux, after being dragged across "Europe in the course of two more ill-starred marriages and one or two less regular alliances."

Lately, Peel has been nurturing "a maternal sentiment" and demanded her former brother-in-law to return Sarah to her. Even saying to the unwilling child that she would not like the be returned to her mother by force of law and how she would not like her daughter as much as she does now. Well, that makes her an obvious first suspect in the murder that soon followed her arrival.

Ianthe Jerrold, 1936
© National Portrait Gallery

Robert Molyneux was busy in his orchard, pruning the branches of an apple tree, when he dropped to the ground, but he did not accidentally slipped and fell to his death – because there was a bullet-hole in the left side of head. Someone had simply shot him out of the apple tree!

There are, however, more people with a motive for murdering the apparent nice and inoffensive Molyneux. A former secretary, Peter Johnson, was fired earlier in the year for stealing, but has returned to the region with an additional motive involving the wife of her former employer. Agnes Molyneux was an old acquaintance of Jeanie, but her marriage has transformed her in a very selfish, unfriendly and money spending woman, which caused many quarrels in the household. The locals have a different ideas about what lays at the heart of the murder: namely the curse of an ancient burial mound, locally known as "Grim's Grave," which he had given permission to excavate and this was especially opposed by Mr. Fone – a local poet and armchair historian obsessed with the men of the Neolithic era and would've "done anything to stop it."

Jeanie moves around these people, inadvertently picking up crumbs of information, which combined with such clues as a dead, snow-white kitten, the directional sound of a gunshot and a broken string of pearls lands her in the obligatory spot of hot water.

In the decade that separated Dead Man's Quarry from Let Him Lie, Jerrold wrote a number of mainstream novels, which had an obvious effect on this book: the writing and characters have matured from the pure game aspect of her late 1920-and early 30s mysteries. It's very reflective of the changes that would sweep across the genre in the coming decades, but retained the structure and necessary ingredients of a proper, classically-styled detective story.

I was actually reminded of the debut novel of another writer with a short-lived career in the field: Murder at Shots Hall (1945) by Maureen Sarsfield, which has a young, artistic (sculptor) woman as the main protagonist confronted with murder at a small English village dominated by a grand old tower. But, more importantly, you have to wonder how the genre had looked if the short-lived careers of such writers as Jerrold and Sarsfield had extended pass the 1940s. Would writers such as Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh still be considered Crime Queens today?

Let Him Lie has a good plot that's populated with convincingly drawn characters and its only short-coming is that it does not reach the same, lofty heights as its predecessor, which some of us consider to be somewhat of a masterpiece. But that's only an issue if you're a spoiled, impudent brat, like yours truly, because the book should be judge as a standalone effort – which was (IMHO) a success.

Let Him Lie and There May Be Danger are scheduled for republication in January, 2016 and the responsible parties are, of course, Dean Street Press and Curt Evans. Evans has traditionally written an introduction and him vetting the books for DSP is as close as you can possible get, as a publishing house, to stamping a seal of quality on your products. 

A Breath-Taking Miracle

"I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death."

- Harry Houdini

Daniel Stashower is a freelance journalist and an award-winning author of such biographical works as Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (1999) and The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder (2006), but Stashower is probably better known for several historical crime novels – usually with Harry Houdini as one of the main protagonists.

I had previously only read Elephants in the Distance (1989), which is a memorable and excellent standalone about a reunion of elderly magicians that came with a body count. It's one of those post-GAD mysteries, read during my pre-blogging days, that suggested that, perhaps, not everything published after 1960 was complete and utter tripe.

However, I took my sweet time in returning to Stashower, but the Harry Houdini mysteries have always been in my peripheral. There was something about the plot descriptions I found intriguing and captivating. If only I can remember what exactly it was. Oh, yes: the impossible crimes!

The Floating Lady Murder (2000) is the second of three historical mystery novels about Harry Houdini, which is book-ended by The Dime Museum Murders (1999) and The Houdini Specter (2001), but the detective turned out to be Theodore "Dash" Hardeen – who was Houdini's younger brother and an accomplished escape artist/magician himself. Interestingly, Hardeen is also the chronicler and therefore assumes the roles of both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

I picked The Floating Lady Murder for one simple reason: the seemingly impossible situation sounded epic and one-of-a-kind!

The book opens in 1898 and Dash, in the function as Harry's manager, spots a notice in the New York Dramatic Mirror, in which opportunities are offered with the "Dean of American Magicians," Harry Kellar, for the '98-'99 season, but his brother resists on account that "The Great Houdini is no mere stagehand" or "a simple lackey to be ordered about." It takes a bit of manipulation from Harry's wife to change his mind to go to the audition.

Well, they're taken in after helping subdue an escaped lion, but Houdini's mind is as welcome a presence as his nerves of steel, because Kellar is staring a problem in the face: he wants to debut the lifelong dream of his late mentor, "The Wizard of Kalliffa," which is the illusion of the floating lady and he came very close a quarter of century before – except that tragedy intervened and his wife plunged to her death. Kellar had patiently waited his entire professional career for mechanical engineering to evolve to the point it would deliver "necessary mechanics" to complete the trick, but, at the dawn of the twentieth century, there are rival magicians working on a similar trick. The illusion is far from perfect (or even complete) and a deadline is looming at the horizon.

A good chunk of the first half of The Floating Lady Murder consists of Houdini, Dash and Bess being ingrained into the group and helping to perfect the illusion as they prepare for opening night. That’s where the trouble really begins.

"Now she is almost beyond our earthly grasp," echoes the voice of the old magician on opening night, "surely the gods themselves must watch in wonder as she floats up towards the vault of heaven," but the astonished audience becomes horrified when something goes horribly wrong. Everyone watched in horror as the hovering figure "dipped and tossed" as "though it were a marionette whose strings were being snapped one by one" and finally the floating lady plummeted seventy-two feet to her death.

On first appearance, Miss Moore death seems like a tragic and unfortunate accident, but a post-mortem examination reveals the presence of water in her lungs and there can only be one conclusion drawn from that – she drowned in mid-air! It's not an accident, but an impossible crime and a blatant one at that!

First of all, I want to note here that Stashower crafted a fine and well-characterized historical novel, wonderfully capturing the spirit of the era, but as a detective story it did not entirely conform to the basic rules of fair pay. I can forgive Hardeen for withholding the tell-all clue he found in the newspaper morgue, but I was a bit miffed when I found out I had been shooed away from the correct explanation for the "aerial wizardry" that caused the mid-air drowning. There's basically one logical answer for this apparent miracle, but there's a character who swears that explanation was as impossible as the situation itself, which made my hope rise for an original explanation and labor on an intricate solution of myself. However, the ending revealed that the solution did run along the lines of that one logical answer and clues to it where not fairly shared with the reader.

It's kind of understandable why Stashower played those cards close to his chest, because revealing them would've given the entire game away well before the end, but this blog uses the Golden Age standard and therefore I'm obliged to nitpick about the fairness of the plot.

I did enjoy the book as a whole, but I wish the plot had adhered to the rules of Golden Age fair play, because I had the sincere hope The Floating Lady Murder would reveal itself as a companion to John Sladek's Black Aura (1974) – which has a similar, but fairly-clued, miracle problem about a mid-air murder. 

However, I will not be deterred from trying the other two books in the Harry Houdini series, which have apparently more traditional locked room problems. So this will be continued!

Post Mortem

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."

- Aristide Valentin (G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Ever since its inception, The London-based Detection Club produced some interesting and experimental volumes of collaborative detective fiction, which consists mainly of round-robin novels (e.g. The Floating Admiral, 1932), but The Anatomy of Murder (1936) took a break from fictional crimes with plots constructed like an obstacle course. 

The Anatomy of Murder is a collection of true crime articles and cast the contributors in the role of armchair criminologists. It's a short who's who of the early Detection Club: Dorothy L. Sayers, E.R. Punshon, Helen Simpson, Margaret Cole and Anthony Berkeley – appearing here under his penname of "Francis Iles."

They're tasked with re-examining five infamous cases from the late 1800s and early twentieth century, but these literary exhumations consist mainly of going over the facts and consider their implications. So don't expect any mind-blowing, alternative explanations being spun from the giving facts. It's a dry and factual collection, but interesting from a historical perspective and a particular item of interest for avid consumers of true crime stories.

Note that I'll be keeping the case descriptions as short and summary as possible, because murderers operating outside of the printed page are generally unconcerned with creating a clear, straightforward and clue-filled plot – unlike their fictional counterparts. 

Helen Simpson wrote the first chapter, "Death of Henry Kinder," which could also have been titled "Crime in Australia" and is a textbook example of "an unsatisfactory crime" from "the point of view of a reader of detection stories."

Henry Kinder was a chief teller in the City Bank of Sydney and appeared respectable, but was very fond of hard liquor and his drinking habits had began to affect his health in the months preceding his death. On October 2nd, 1865, the news of Kinder's suicide startled many of his respectable friends in the city and a jury brought in a verdict death "by the discharge of a pistol with his own hand," but by that time the rumor mill had started – with subsequent events revealing Kinder may have been polished off with a dose of poison by his wife's lover. Henry Louis Bernard was put on trial and Simpson's report, peppered with diary entrants, letters and pieces of court transcripts, shows how the chain of events clanked "to a madman’s fandango," which lead to a very unsatisfactory conclusion.

Well, unsatisfactory if this had been a piece of fiction, but, as a criminal case from history, it demonstrated that even if the perceptive story book detectives had existed their singular talents be rendered pretty much useless in cases lacking their own clarity of mind. You can read an extensive description of the case here. 

Margaret Cole's penned the second chapter and deals with "The Case of Adelaide Bartlett," which is better known as the "Pimlico Mystery" and shares some similarities with the previous case: in both cases a spouse is fatally poisoned after a previous incident relegated them to a sick bed. In the case of Henry Kinder, it was an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, but in the 1886 death of Thomas Edwin Bartlett it was mercurial poisoning – which he claimed was self-ingested. However, it was not the poison that would end up killing him.

A month later, Bartlett passed away and a post-mortem examination revealed a fatal quantity of chloroform in his stomach. The inquest yielded a verdict of willful murder and Adeleide Bartlett was indicted, but acquitted under "immense cheering" in the courtroom. As Cole noted, it was one of the most interesting trials of its day, because it was not "a tale of horror or brutality." None of the people, however odd or foolish, were monsters and tried "to be as nice as impossible under rather difficult circumstances." It was an interesting study in characters and motives that were somewhat ahead of their time.

However, it must be noted as well that one of the main reason for acquittal was failing in providing an answer how the poison could've been administrated without a struggle, since chloroform burns, but Cole makes a valid suggestion based on the characteristics of the people involved – and had the jury considered this possibility "she would have never gone free." A very odd case to say the least.

Interestingly, Cole's account includes a list of nineteenth century medicines and remedies given to Thomas Bartlett after his mercurial poisoning, which did not sound very appetizing.

For the third chapter, E.R. Punshon gives "An Impression of the Landru Case," which deals with the "incredible reincarnation of the Bluebeard of the nursery tales." Henri Désiré Landru was one of the neatest and charming serial killers who ever stalked the European continent. Known as "The Bluebeard of Gambais," Landru operated "during that four-year feast of horror and of terror we remember as the war" and responsible for the complete disappearance of eleven people in such a manner "that nothing can be declared with certainty" – concluding that "no jury" would've brought in "a verdict of guilty" had "each case stood alone." It's an accumulation of those eleven disappearances in close proximity of Landru, a methodical kept notebook and a storage room with a "strange collection" of items "once the property of a woman who once had known Landru and now was known to none" that became his undoing.

Punshon sketches an interesting, but unsettling, picture of charming confidence man with the predatory nature of "Jack the Ripper," but with more self-control and enjoyed to play the game until the very end – which in Landru's instance was up to the moment he was lead to the guillotines. You almost have to admire the guts and brawn of such an imperturbable character, but I’m sure France could've used such talents elsewhere at that specific point in time.

Dorothy L. Sayers goes over one of the England's most infamous "unsolved" murder cases in it's criminal history, "The Murder of Julia Wallace," which has captured the imagination of several post-WWII crime-writers – including a couple of Golden Agers. The books it has inspired include George Goodchild and C.E. Bechhofer's The Jury Disagree (1934), Winifred Duke's Skin for Skin (1935), John Rhode's The Telephone Call (1948) and P.D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982).

You can understand why mystery writers tend to be intrigued, because if William Wallace was guilty of bludgeoning his wife to death "he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels," but if he was innocent "then the real murderer was still more typically of the classic villain of fiction." Where do you begin to describe a case that includes all of the classic ingredients of a detective story: a blood-stained mackintosh, a mysterious phone call from a non-existent person calling himself "R.M. Qualtrough" and an apparent contrived alibi. Then there are the conflicting witness statements: such as a constable who assumed he saw Wallace crying in the streets, but the clients he met after this apparent encounter with the policeman reported he was his usual self.

It was a dark, murky and muddled case, but despite every scrap of evidence against Wallace being circumstantial, which included an exonerating testimony from the local milk delivery boy, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, Court of Criminal appeal quashed the verdict in what was at the time an unprecedented move, which left open that intriguing question: who killed Julia Wallace? This was easily my favorite chapter from the book.

Finally, Anthony Berkeley, writing as "Francis Iles," delivers the longest-written chapter from the book as he rides his hobbyhorse, called criminal psychology, across a hundred pages describing the sordid mess known as "The Rattenbury Case." I did not find the case as interesting as Berkeley, but I can understand why people interesting psychological crimes can rattle on about it for page-after-page: a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Rattenbury, living together with her much older husband and her very young lover in a villa, which leads to battering-death with a mallet. Probably not the best chapter to end the book on, but I'm sure there are readers out there, especially readers of psychological thrillers, who'll be as intrigued by chapter as I was by Wallace chapter.

Well, there you have it: five cases re-examined by members of the Detection Club. The cases have something of interest to offer, one way or another, but I think the main draw is that the articles/chapters were written by famous mystery writers from the Golden Age – rather than for the cases themselves. I think it would've been better if they re-examined unsolved cases and provided a possible solution, which was, after all, their job.

However, it was a good, historically interesting diversion from the fictional murders the authors usually reveled in, but I'll be returning to those fictional murders for the next review.

A Swarm of Villainy

"Rouse yourself, my friend, rouse yourself. And look – look where I am pointing. There on the bank, close by that tree root. See you, the wasps returning home, placid at the end of the day? In a little hour, there will be destruction, and they know it not."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's "Wasps' Nest," from Poirot's Early Cases, 1974)

One of my first blog-posts was a review of a once rare and coveted locked room mystery, Death of Jezebel (1948), which came from the hands of a criminally underrated mystery novelist who deserves a place among the "Crime Queen" – namely the very talented Christianna Brand.

Brand was a late arrival on the scene, debuting with Death in High Heels (1941) during the Second World War, but I consider her to be on equal footing with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. She had a similar fondness for seemingly impossible situations as the latter and was as apt with the closed-circle of suspects as the former, e.g. Green for Danger (1944) and London Particular (1952).

However, in spite of my opinion of Brand, I seem to have grossly neglected her after that initial review, but began to crave good writing, interesting characterization and solid plotting after struggling through Mavis Doriel Hay's mind-numbingly boring The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) – which led me back to Brand. So I decided to treat myself to one of her collections of short stories: What Dread Hand? (1968). Because a single, novel-length detective story simply wasn't enough to wash away the bad taste the previous one had left behind. 

The first story from the collection is "The Hornets' Nest," perhaps better known under its original title, "Twist for Twist," which is a promise that’s delivered on in spades and shows Brand was in the same league as Christie!

It's an ingeniously complex story centering on the poisoning of Cyrus Caxton: a "horrid old man" who "had been horrid to his first wife" and "was quite evidently going to be horrid to his second" – who had been the late Mrs. Caxton's nurse. There were a number of men in her life willing to protect her, but were they willing enough to fool around with a tin of cyanide? Inspector Cockrill is at hand to straighten out the tangled, twisted mess and even constructs a false solution reminiscent of The Murder on the Orient Express (1934). One of the best stories from the collection!

"Aren't Our Police Wonderful?" is what's known in the genre as a "Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard," in which a brother tries secure his inheritance by bumping off his brother and was inspired by "a case that happened a hundred years ago or more." However, as Mark Twain observed: history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes and that becomes the murderers undoing. A quick, fun story.

The third story from this collection, "The Merry-Go-Round," has something to offer to both readers of classical detective stories and modern crime stories: a recently widowed woman is being blackmailed with a collection of lurid photographs found in a private drawer at the office of her late husband. A revolver stashed away in his bedside drawer provides relief for his widow. However, the blackmail angle does not stop there, but simply continues from a different angle. I loved the wonderfully sardonic ending and wished more modern crime fiction were in this mold.

The titular "Blood Brothers" from the fourth story are named David and Jonathan, who are actually twins from a small village, but even the locals are unable to tell them apart, which is cleverly exploited when they in a hit-and-run that killed a child – setting the stage for a premeditated murder. Inspector Cockrill tries to piece everything together, but whether or not he was successful is debatable. A splendid demonstration how twins can be properly used in a fair-play detective story. Even when said story is structured as an inverted mystery.

"Dear Mr. Editor..." begins with a short letter from Christianna Brand to her editor, in which she apologizes for having been unable to provide him with a freshly written story for his anthology. However, Brand did include a copy of a document written by "a poor creature," who "was quite mad," and was addressed to her editor. It's a thriller-ish suspense story with a twist, but one most readers will probably spot well before the ending.

"The Rose" is a short-short story and a postscript reveals it as an early endeavor of the author, which kind of shows. A loving husband is planning to dispose of his wife by hoisting and shoving her from the balcony, but these seemingly perfect schemes seldom pan out as planned. You’ll probably guess it as well.

The following story, "Akin to Love," is an odd inclusion, because it combines the romance story with the ghost yarn, in which a young woman spends the night in a room haunted by the ghost of a young man – who had "joined one of the Hell Fire Clubs" and "sold his soul to the devil." The man had sinned against "womankind" and can only be set free if a woman forgave and loved him. Sort of like Beauty and The Beast, but not really my kind of stuff.

I wanted to enjoy "The Death of Don Juan," but ended up not caring for it: Vicomte Coqauvin, "Don Juan," is going to settle down and breaks up a pendant, known as the "Collar of Tears," to give all of his mistresses a diamond drop as a memento. The entire undertaking had "been a nightmare of threatened suicides," but the final woman on his list was angry enough to empty a pistol on him. A Duchess sets out to reassemble the pendant and by the end it's revealed she had an unexpected role in the murder. It's not a bad story and some will like it, but I'm not one of them.

The quality picks up again with "Double Cross," which is a story fans of classic Ellery Queen will appreciate: Sir Thomas Cross had been "an unaccommodating relative to his heirs" by living too long, spending too much money and extracting revenge for his murder with an "equally unaccommodating will" – condemning his three cousins and potential murderers to live together in the "gloomy glories of Halberd Hall." A failure to comply excluded the absentee from further interest in the estate and basically amounted to a Tontine scheme, which is at the heart of several short EQ stories and radio plays. The solution is a good play on the least-likely-suspect and most-likely-suspect gambit. I liked it.

"The Sins of the Father" is a pure horror story and is about sin-eaters, who "flourished in Wales" up "to the end of the seventeenth century," but might have been around as recent as a hundred years ago. They eat the sins of men and send the dead with a clean slate into the afterworld, but are treated abominably for taking "sins upon them" – being cast out for being "doomed for all eternity" and "heavy with the load of other men's transgressions." In this story a young sin-eater is called upon to relief a dead man of his sins and "eat from the breast of a corpse." It's not a mystery, but very intriguing nonetheless.

"After the Event" is one of the longer stories from the collection, in which the "Grand Old Man of Detection" gives an expose of the Othello case. A case in which he collared the murderer by building up "a water-tight case against him" and "triumphantly brought to trial," but the jury failed to convict. However, Inspector Cockrill is present as well and found himself in "the position of the small boy at a party who knows how the conjurer does his tricks," which the observant and seasoned armchair detective can largely follow. And that's the most attractive part of this elaborate and theatrical story: rival detectives butting heads.

Note: I'm refraining from giving any details about the Othello case, because it really is an elaborate story. Read if for yourself.

"Death of a Ghost" is a story-within-story: a family secret is being divulged about a cousin who took deadly tumble down a flight of stairs and the ghost of a "Wicked Earl" from the eighteenth-century, which are closely tied-together. I kind of liked the story except for the feeling more could've been done with it.

"The Kite" is another minor, stand-alone story, but one I did not care about or remember anything about it. Skippable at best.

"Hic Jacet..." is another inverted mystery playing on the "Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard," in which Mr. Fletcher-Store is plotting the murder of his wife by drowning, but his plan horrendously backfired and the R.A.F. jacket he purchased in the pub is part to blame. I really enjoy these type of stories, but I rare come across them and only found a small selection of them in two collection of short stories: Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998), which has a selection of such stories containing the brilliant "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson, and Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2008), which has the amusing "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National."

Finally, there's "Murder Game," which is better known among locked room enthusiasts as "The Gemminy Cricket Case," and has an impossible crime plot as complicated as it's classical.

It's another one of those story-within-a-story structured story, in which Giles Carberry tells "the old man" about the Gemminy case. Thomas Gemminy is a London-based solicitor "dealing largely in criminal cases," but was "kind and compassionate" with a trust fund for those "who had passed through his hand" and "might turn for help in time of need." His home had also been open to the pitiful children who usually had no idea what their parents had been up to. So not really your typical story-book victim, but Gemminy is brutally murdered inside his office: tied to a chair with a cord and handkerchief knotted tightly around his neck, but the finishing blow came from knife-thrust between the shoulder blades – and the wound was still bleeding when the door was broken down. A door that was locked and bolted from the inside. On top of that, the office was set on fire and the victim was heard screaming something "vanishing into thin air" and "the long arms."

It's an extremely knotty, twisted affair and the solution is clever, but, it has to be said, a composite of some time-honored tricks. However, Brand found a way to twist it in a new direction and came up with a logical and clever answer why the second victim suffered a similar fate as the bleeding heart lawyer. But the best part is the final revelation, which makes this a very, very dark story and explained where the murderer found the guts for such to pull off such a locked room trick.

Well, that were the tales murder and horror collected in What Dread Hand? and, hopefully, I have done them some measure justice, because I enjoyed the vast majority of them and were exactly what I needed after the previous disappointment.

So, if you've never read Christianna Brand before, I have only thing to say to you: stop being a filthy heretic and find a copy of Green for Danger!

No Mourning in the Family

"There we were, all gathered together for a Christmas party, and plunged suddenly into the gloom and menace of official enquiry."

- Malcolm Warren (C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas, 1934)

In my previous blog-post, I hinted that a review of a Christmas-themed country house mystery was in the pipeline, but before taking the plunge I want to direct your attention to a compilation post from several years ago – titled The Naughty List: A Modest Selection of Lesser-Known Holiday Mysteries.

As the title says, it's a very modest selection of Christmas mysteries offering a handful of alternatives to Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972).

It's a list that includes Pierre Véry's L'Assassinat du père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) and Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936), but currently misses the recently reviewed C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941). I'll probably amend the list at a later date, but one title that'll certainly be absent from it is The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) by Mavis Doriel Hay, which I found to be mind-numbingly boring.

I became so bogged down in the book that I needed a breather and read the stories by Max Afford reviewed in the previous blog-post. So don't expect too much from this review.

Mavis Doriel Hay was a British novelist and an expert in rural handicraft, on which she wrote several books, but she also has three Golden Age mysteries to her name: Murder Underground (1935), Death on the Cherwell (1935) and The Santa Klaus Murder. Last year, award-winning crime-writer Martin Edwards noted on his blog how "Hay’s detective fiction seems to be making more of an impact now than it did on its first appearance in the 1930s" and that's "thanks to the British Library's very welcome decision to reprint her three long-neglected novels," which makes me wish I could be more positive about my first encounter with Hay. But it turned out to be closer to Curt Evans' experience with Murder Underground than to the more positive encounter John Norris had with The Santa Klaus Murder.

The Santa Klaus Murder has all the necessary ingredients for a traditional country house mystery, which includes a wealthy patriarch, a gathering of dependent family members and a will that might get some new beneficiaries – giving the large cast of children and in-laws ample motive for murder.

In his younger days, Sir Osmond Melbury scandalized his old-world family by going into business and "made a nice little fortune out of biscuits," which he carefully used to secure a desired baronetcy and fitted the "old house with electric light and sumptuous bathrooms." However, Sir Osmond wasn't simply content with refurbishing Flaxmere: he wanted to gentrify his own family and "made it known to his children that they should be liberally endowed if they married suitably." This approach already misfired with his eldest daughter, but this only made him more subtle and conniving when another daughter appeared with an undesirable partner on his doorstep.

On Christmas Day, while the children are playing with their new toys in the hall and pulling crackers, Santa Klaus discovers the body of Sir Osmond in his private-study: slumped in a chair with a bullet hole in the side of his head, but physical evidence quickly rules out suicide. It’s a case for the police.

I hoped interest would pick up after the characters were introduced and the body was discovered, but I rapidly began to lose interest with each passing chapter – until I either had to take a break or give up on it altogether.

Some of you will probably be of the opinion that I'm being unfair here, but I found reading The Santa Klaus Murder to be a draining experience.

The investigation was largely repetitive: going over who was where and when without adding much of importance to the overall plot. It was devoid of atmosphere and the solution was severely disappointing. The tabulation in the postscript showed there was some fair play, as far as guilty-knowledge and opportunity goes, but the motivation of the murderer can only be guessed – since the entire murder was nothing more than one big risky gamble based on the murderer's own assumptions! It's one of the shakiest motives I've came across in a long, long time!

I love rediscovering obscure, long-forgotten mystery writers and I wish I could've been more positive about Hay, but it's books like The Santa Klaus Murder that makes you understand and appreciate why mystery writers such as Agatha Christie are still being widely read today.

Well, this was the poorest and most negative reviews since I had the misfortune of stumbling across Eric Keith's Nine Men's Murder (2011), but between that one and this review I had pretty good run of good (if sometimes imperfect) to excellent mysteries. I'll try to pick up that thread with the next review and already picked a collection of short stories from a mystery writer whose name is synonymous with good writing, excellent characterization and solid plotting. So stay tuned!