Life Ticks Away

"Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again."

- Paul Edgecomb (The Green Mile, 1999)

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed The Green Ace (1950) by Stuart Palmer. The plot of the book focused on proving the innocence of an inmate of the death-house, a week before his scheduled execution, which heavily influenced my decision on what to read next – namely Headed for a Hearse (1935) by Jonathan Latimer. It offers a much darker treatment of the race-against-time plot device that Palmer toyed with in The Green Ace.

Professionally, Latimer and Palmer had more in common than just being writers of crime and mystery novels: they were both worked as screenwriters in Hollywood where, reportedly, they collaborated with a colleague of theirs – "Craig Rice," the Queen of the Screwball Mystery. However, that's where the commonalities end. Latimer's work has some of the structural framework of the classic whodunit and several of his novels are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but everything in between is firmly rooted in those mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I guess Latimer could be considered, content-wise, to be a literary ancestor of a contemporary hardboiled enthusiast of locked room mysteries, Bill Pronzini. Anyhow...

Headed for a Hearse, also published as The Westland Case, opens in "the dim cavern" of Robert Westland's condemned cell in the death-house – where he awaits his execution for the murder of his wife. A reviewer on the GADWiki observed that the book actually consists of two separate stories: a hardboiled mystery that's closely intertwined with a short story about Westland in the condemned cell. I agree with that observation, because, despite the interlacing characters, they read as two completely different stories.

Westland shares his looming fate and final dwelling place with two other prisoners: Dave Connor, a labor racketeer, who bumped off "a couple of New York torpedoes hired to fog" him, but the place where he unloaded his gun turned out to be swarming with cops – which, retrospectively, was not the best place "for fogging those Canzoneri brothers." The prisoner is a whimpering, crying and borderline psychopath, named Isadore Varecha, who gutted a prostitute and now spends most of his time on his cot muttering "Jesus Christ" and "I don’ wanta die."

They have to deal with an unpleasant prison guard, Percival Galt, who enjoys taunting the prisoners, such as spilling a meal on the cement floor and saying he "can't help it if a prisoner throws his food into the hall," which reminded me of Percy Wetmore from The Green Mile (1999).

Initially, Westland acquiesced in the hopelessness of his situation and was prepared to die on the electric chair, but a semi-anonymous letter gave him a change in attitude. The letter, initialed "MG," is from someone who had no business being in the building at the time of the murder, but if something can be fixed, so he doesn't "have no trouble," he’s willing to the D.A. what he knows. There is, however, a minor problem: all of this happened a week before Westland is strapped to the hot-seat! So Westland engages a high-price attorney, Charley Finklestein, but the evidence is stacked against him.

Westland lived separate from his wife, Joan, but still retained a key to her apartment, which becomes a huge problem when her body is found there – shot through the back of the head. The only door giving entrance to the apartment had to be broken down and was outfitted with "a special lock" of "the kind that doesn't snap," but "has to be turned with the key." There were only two keys that fitted the lock: one of them was found inside the apartment and the other was in constant possession of Westland. All of the windows were locked from the inside and twenty-three floors from the ground. The small package entry in the kitchen was not big enough to have even allowed a trained monkey passage. What was really damning is that the neighbors heard the report of a gunshot at the time Westland admitted he was in the apartment.

It's this package of evidence that send Westland en-route to the death-house. So Finklestein decided to fly-in a pair of private-investigators from New York, Bill Crane and Doc Williams, to reevaluate the evidence against the condemned man – before his time is up and they do so in typical hardboiled fashion. They got shot at from a car with a sub-machine gun, which leads to them roughing-up a suspect. There are several additional murders. They royally water themselves with drinks, take big meals and occasionally leer at women.

However, there's also some genuine detective work on the part of Crane, which confirmed the traditionalist streak his plots reportedly contained. Crane provides a cleverly old-fashioned, but false, explanation for the problem of the locked apartment with a ball of string and a pin. This false explanation echoed the trick from L. Frank Baum's "The Suicide of Kiaros," which is an inverted locked room tale from 1896 and collected nearly a century later in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories (1987). Unfortunately, the solution to the impossible crime aspect was disappointingly simple and routine. A type of "trick," or "misdirection," I have seen too often and I can honestly (and arrogantly) say I preferred my own explanation. But what can you do?

Crane also finds the proverbial needle in a haystack with the assistance of a long, expensive cab-ride and even more expensive professional diver. It's an investigative operation that has put "more men to work than Roosevelt's recovery program."

All of this tallies up to an interesting, often fun and occasionally even stirring, but ultimately uneven, debut novel. The gap in quality between the excellent death-house scenes and the investigative parts of the novel are hard to miss, which makes the somewhat disappointing conclusion to the case extra noticeable. Overall, Headed for a Hearse is not a bad book. It's just not a masterpiece of its kind.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I finally got to sample Latimer, but I wish I had started with Murder in the Madhouse (1935) or The Dead Don't Care (1938). They seem like interesting combinations of the hardboiled narrative with a classic locked room problem at their core. So I guess those are for a later date. 

A Sentence of Death

"But suppose, as in the old story about the man who played cards on an ocean liner with the devil, her adversary should choose to lead out the green ace of Hippogriffs?"

- Miss Hildegarde Withers (Stuart Palmer's Miss Withers Regrets, 1947)

The terms "Golden Age Detectives" and "Classic Mysteries" are inextricably linked to the British Isles, but, over the years, I have cultivated a strong affinity for their American contemporaries – which includes such luminaries as Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos, Clyde B. Clason, Helen McCloy, Craig Rice and Rex Stout. One of my personal favorites from this place and period in time is the funny and clever Stuart Palmer.

Stuart Palmer was a screenwriter and novelist who wrote a host of mysteries. A lion's share of them featured that "meddlesome old battleaxe," Miss Hildegarde Withers, who made her first appearance in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) – followed by thirteen additional novels and a handful of short collections. Some of my favorites from in this series are The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934), Nipped in the Bud (1952) and Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), but, inexplicably, I had not returned to this series for many years. A situation that could no longer stand!

So I picked up a copy of The Green Ace (1950). It's one of the last books in the series, only four more would follow over a period of twenty years, and has a plot modeled around a race-against-the-clock type gimmick.

On an early, barmy Saturday morning, two police officers witness how a speeding car ignores a stop-signal and smashes into a parked delivery truck. Routinely, a ticket, an accident report and a stern warning would've been enough to delegate this incident to the dustbin of history, but one of the officers notices that "there was something crammed against the back seat" covered with "an old army blanket" – which obscured the naked body of dead woman. The driver of the car, Andrew "Andy" Rowan, is "a former hack newspaperman turned press-agent" and the "big glamazon" of a body, Midge Harrington, was his client and an aspiring Miss America.

Rowan is held responsible for her murder and was unable to convince the authorities of his innocence. As a consequence, he’s tried, convicted and scheduled for execution within a year of his arrest. However, this was only the prelude of the story. A story that begins when Rowan is in the death-house and the clock begins to tick away the final days of his life.

Somehow, the condemned man "managed to hang onto $3500" and drafted a will, in which he left the three-and-a-half grand to Inspector Oscar Piper. There is, of course, a catch: Piper has to use the money "to make a full and impartial investigation of the murder for which he is being unjustly executed." Inspector Piper is wary that the press will get wind of this "screwball will," but his old friend, Miss Hildegarde Withers, reminds him there's time left before Rowan "walks that long last mile through the little green door to the hot-sit" and does what she does best – sticking her nose where it has no business of being.

Quickly, it becomes apparent what sets the ex-school teacher apart from other amateur detectives: Hildegarde Withers is not content with merely woolgathering or observing from an armchair. Withers prefers to actively pursue the truth, which has varying degrees of success and her actions often drive the plot itself forward. Her actions also tend to lend a comedic touch to the stories. For example, The Green Ace has her unsuccessfully impersonating the condemned man's wife and is arrested for shoplifting, but her shenanigans during an attempted identifications of a suspect with an "extremely prominent nose" put a strain on the friendship between her and Piper. So it's not all fun and games.

However, besides stumbling from one situation into another, making "a shot in the dark" and "play hunches," Withers is an ardent Sherlockian. She learned from the greatest of all detectives and applied his methods, of which the most successful one is a network of grownup-counterparts of the Bakerstreet Irregulars. As an ex-school teacher, "generations of grubby urchins had passed through her tutelage" and "had risen to positions of importance and influence," which she could call up on "just as Sherlock Holmes did on his Irregulars."

Well, it's this combination of delightfully busy leg-work and recognizable Sherlockian wisdome ("the curious incident of the lipstick in the nighttime") that leads Withers to the logical explanation of a case that involves a deadly necklace, mysterious phone calls, hysterical laughter and a murdered medium – who was brained with her crystal ball. The most impressive aspect of the plot was how the reader's attention was diverted away from the obvious suspect and how a clichéd-ending was avoided. A gross miscarriage of justice was avoided, but not in the way you'd probably expect.

So Palmer managed to do something original this plot-device and therefore warrants a read, but, if you're new to the series, I would recommend getting acquainted with characters first in their previous outings.

On a final note, I have to point out how of a 1950s novel The Green Ace is, which includes a number of references to the dawning "days of television." Notably, there's a description of the apprehension of a suspect, as "newsreel cameras whirred” and "a man with a portable microphone ran forward," but "say something for the television audience" was met with a response that turned Channel Four "dark all over the nation" – not soon enough "to prevent the kiddies from learning some new words." There are also references to the H-Bomb, flying saucers and "under-the-counter Billie Holiday numbers." I found it interesting how these (now historical) references hinted at the changes in pop-culture and it's only natural that Palmer, as a writer for Hollywood, was aware of them and they found their way into his work.

Well, that was it for this review and now comes the excruciating process of deciding what to devour next. A locked room mystery? The Three Investigators? Something hardboiled? A historical detective? Maybe finally wrote that blog-post about what makes a good impossible crime? Choices, choices, choices!   

An Eye for An Eye

"You’ll forgive me for being skeptical."

- Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Revival Tent," collected in More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2006)  

Only last month, I reviewed The Dead Are Blind (1937) by Max Afford and I had not planned on returning to him so soon, but JJ, who blogs at The Invisible Event, wrote a very enticing review of Death's Mannikens (1937). So I'll be using that review as a convenient excuse for yet another blog-post about a locked room mystery, because there have only been about two hundred of them on this blog. 

Blood On His Hands (1936) was Afford's debut as a mystery novelist and introduced a brace of characters, Jeffery Blackburn and Chief Inspector Read, who would fulfill the roles of detectives in four additional novels and several short stories – two of which were collected in Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008).

Chief Inspector William Read is introduced as a well-dressed man with a military bearing and bristling mustache stuck on a ruddy face, while Jeffery Blackburn is presented as a clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties with "the face of a scholar" and "a pair of gray eyes that twinkled humorously." The way in which Read took Blackburn by the arm and how the latter's long fingers clasped around a walking stick was very reminiscent of the way Inspector Queen and Ellery Queen wandered onto the scene of the crime in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), which was their first recorded case. However, JJ made a similar observation about the resemblances between both duos and even Read's habit of referring to people as "son" ("what do you mean, son?").

The scene of the crime in Blood On His Hands is Carnavon Chambers, a new block of city apartments, where Judge Sheldon had a private rooms, but, evidently, the place was unable to guarantee his personal safety – since his body is found slumped behind a desk inside an inner room of the apartment complex. He has been stabbed with a peculiar blade and his right ear has been sliced off!

It's only to be expected of a High Court judge to have made an enemy or two, but, in the judge’s private life, Blackburn and Read uncover an infestation of motives that had the potential of leading to murder.

Judge Sheldon treated his poor wife, Lady Sheldon, abysmally, which is why he kept a private dwelling place. A place where he received a score of women. Sometimes as many as "half a dozen in a week," which was not exactly a well-kept secret. As a result, Lady Sheldon retreated in an emotional sanctuary and convinced herself that her first husband, "believed to be dead in the war," was still alive and would eventually return to her – which became an obsession to her. This supplied the daughter from that first marriage, Miss Valerie Sheldon, with a valid reason to hate her stepfather and she had "already begun to make a name for herself" with "her brilliant detective novels." On paper, she's considered "an expert at the perfect murder theory," but did she put one of her theoretical plots into practice?

Alternative title/edition

There are additional suspects uncovered: Miss Gloria Grey, "a former musical-comedy actress," who became addicted to heroine tablets and her regular supplier was, what you would call, the least-likely-suspect in polite society. She had recently joined a Gospel Tent Mission, which was inaugurated by black-bearded man named Alfred Torrance. He was "erroneously reported dead in the war" and lost "his memory in an air-raid upon London." Yes, there were German air raids on London during World War I. It's just not as well remembered, because those raids paled in comparison to the hellfire that rained down on London in the next war.

Anyway, there are enough people surrounding the judge who did not mourn his passing, but that only covers possible answers to who and why and not the how aspect, which concerns the locked room angle of the murder. Judge Sheldon is found in a room on the eight floor of the apartment building with windows, locked from the inside, looking out on tiny balconies "hanging over a sheer drop of ninety feet to the ground." The door is locked from the inside as well and "the only existing key to the apartment" is "found in the dead man’s top-waistcoat pocket."

It's an intriguing, classically styled set-up for a proper locked room murder, but the explanation is essentially an old, simple, but elaborately presented, gimmick that only worked because police methods aren't always up to snuff in detective stories. Later on in the series, Afford would show he had a crafty and original mind for devising impossible crime plots, but that was not the case with his first throw at one.

There is, however, a second locked room in the book, which was slightly better, but not as clever or inspired as those from The Dead Are Blind, "Poison Can Be Puzzling" and "The Vanishing Trick," which involved an apparently unrelated murder of a shopkeeper.

A green grocer is slaughtered in his shop, stabbed multiple times and his right hand cut-off, but the only entrance, a side door, was locked from the inside and the front of the shop was under constant observation by an innocent witness – who swears nobody entered or left the building while she was watching. The method for this locked room trick has a rather simple and pragmatic explanation, workmanlike rather than inspired, but it did the trick and had a semblance of originality. It's the kind of gambit you'd expect to find in a Dr. Sam Hawthorne story by Edward D. Hoch.

Well, I guess I have to give a debuting Afford some props for twisting the unusual prologue, a pair of locked room killings and an additional murder together into a coherent narrative, but the final explanation was covered with the bloody paw-prints of the sensationalist novel/thriller – which, surprisingly, shared some plot similarities with John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street (1928). So I experienced Blood On His Hands as a very uneven novel and a troublesome one to write a proper review about, because I wanted to like the book more than I did by the end. Everything else I read by Afford was excellent, but I’m afraid this one simply did not do it for me.

Hopefully, I'll pick something better for my next review, but, in the meantime, you can read my enthusiastic prattling about Gladys Mitchell's Late, Late in the Evening (1976), which was the book I previously reviewed on here. So stay tuned!

In Days Gone By

"Has it ever struck you... that the majority of these so-called and self-styled grown-ups behave very, very much worse, more stupidly, more selfishly, than they would ever expect children to behave?"

- Mrs. Bradley (Gladys Mitchell's Tom Brown's Body, 1949) 

Late, Late in the Evening (1976) was the fiftieth novel in Gladys Mitchell's voluminous Mrs. Bradley series, which lasted from 1929 to 1984, and to mark the momentous occasion Mitchell returned to an earlier point in the books – when Dame Beatrice was still Mrs. Bradley. One of the characters mentions that, "many years later," they were the first to congratulate Mrs. Bradley when she was made a DBE. So the book takes place some time before Watson's Choice (1955), which was the last book before Mrs. Bradley received her Damehood.

The story is laced with nostalgia and reads as if the genre itself is reminiscing about its childhood days spent in the many small, quaint and picturesque villages that stud the English countryside. You can even read the description of the book's setting, Hill Village, as an allegory of the changes the landscape of the detective story has seen in the decades succeeding World War II.

It's described how the village has "become an urban overspill" where "factories have grown up," a "motorway runs nearby" and "council houses and tall blocks of flats" were erected on a vast common once known as The Marsh, but story being told takes place long before progress marched across its rustic landscape – during a period when a charming village could still play host to one or two murders without being shamed as hopelessly old-fashioned. However, being hopelessly old-fashioned is an accusation not easily leveled against even the most traditionally structured and plotted of Mitchell's mystery novels (e.g. The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop, 1929). Late, Late in the Evening is no exception to that rule!

There are several narrators in the story, but the best-drawn and most memorable ones are a brother and sister, eight-year-old Kenneth and ten-year-old Margaret, who came down from London to spend their school holidays with their grandfather. The first quarter of the book is a lovely depiction of village-life in the early part of the previous century, which imparted such important knowledge on whether to buy sweets from old Mother Honour's post-office and general store or Miss Summers' bread and confectionary store – both of them offered advantages and disadvantages to the village children.

We also get to learn the layout of the village and some of the people who live there. Where and with whom they play. How they struck up a friendship with a boy, Lionel, who's the grandson of the local matriarch, which becomes important later on in the story and everything is littered with references to food: brandy balls, sugared mice, chocolate cream rabbits, biscuits and bars of chocolate cream. Mitchell had an uncanny knack for creating believable child characters that were neither miniature adults nor could be cast as Damien in The Omen, but I don't remember reading a novel of her before, which prominently featured children, that were this obsessed with sweets. It was just very noticeable.

 

Anyhow, the highlight of their story is attending the yearly village fair, which had "its roots in the dim and distant Middle Ages," but the "only remaining vestiges of its original function," besides the trade from outside merchants, are the small stalls, boots, tents, roundabouts, swings and other "exciting and noisy pleasures." It's an annual happening children save up for all year to have money to spend on the fair grounds. A significant part of this chapter takes place inside a tent to a watch, what would be considered today, an American-style wrestling match and the contest is between Tiger-Cat Bellamy Smith and Jacques Collins. Of course, one of the attendees is heard muttering how it's a rigged game, because "the winner knew he was booked to win and the loser knew he was to lose" as they "both knew exactly when the dénouement would come." It was a fun, lively and interesting chapter, but you're probably wondering at this point what happened to the plot.

A quarter into the book, Mrs. Kempton, local matriarch and Lionel's grandmother, writes a letter to Mrs. Bradley about her troublesome and supposed brother, Mr. Ward, whose back story echoes John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938) and E.R. Punshon's Ten Star Clues (1941). Ward is a lodger of the next-door neighbors of the Clifton's grandfather and Mrs. Kempton is worried about his mental health, because he was seen digging apparent random holes all over the village. She also fears for the safety of her grandson. Lionel is an obstacle to a full-inheritance.

It's a fear that seems justified when a birthday party Mrs. Kempton threw for her granddaughter, Amabel, ended with the discovery of the battered body of a young girl in a dinosaur costume. Lionel was seen wearing a similar outfit and Ward is nowhere to be found, which is suspicious to say the least.

There are not many suspects and the observant, experienced reader will probably identify the murderer early on in the story, but the scarce number of suspects was handled with more skill than I expected from late-period Mitchell. Gladys Mitchell is somewhat of an acquired taste and some of her work misses the lucidity once expects from detective stories, because Mitchell saw her books as fairy tales and rarely took crime itself seriously – which can result in an incomprehensible mess (Hangman's Curfew, 1941) or a what-the-hell type of story (The Rising of the Moon, 1945). But when she gave her plots and clues as much attention as the writing you were in for a rare and original treat: Come Away, Death (1937) is one of my all-time favorite mysteries and St. Peter's Finger (1938) is still one of the book I would recommend to lure people to both Mitchell and Golden Age mysteries.

Plot-wise, I would rank Late, Late in the Evening somewhere below Mitchell's best work, but above most of her middling-efforts. However, the best (and saddest) aspect of the book is its depiction of how effectively time can obliterate the past. When the book opens, the village no longer exists and all of the events that are described took place many years before. The final chapter takes place a year after the murders and Kenneth and Margaret pass by the village, but they don't "want to go any further," because the changes had already began to manifest themselves. And then there's Margaret's question to Kenneth, "do you believe there was every any treasure hidden," which is answered with the final line of the book: "I did when I was younger."

I think those last lines are a good description of the genre and how it changed from the days of Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie. When there was high-adventure waiting everyone who would dare seek it, but then the genre was forced to "grow up" and forgot how to dream and wonder as it wallowed in the soul-murdering drabness of modern realism. So Late, Late in the Evening is a fond, but sad, reminiscence of the genre’s earlier and happier days. On that account alone, I would recommend the book.

Anyhow, I've blabbered on long enough and will cut-off the blog-post here, before I start ranting and raving about the contemporary crime novel. I'll return with something less bittersweet for the next review.  

Grim Memories

"It's a dangerous piece of knowledge to possess, and it's well known that one murder leads to another."

- Mr. Winkley (Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks, 1940) 

Morna Doris MacTaggert was the birth-name of "Elizabeth Ferrars," or "E.X. Ferrars," whose career as a mystery novelist spanned five decades, from 1940 to the mid-1990s, during which she wrote over seventy crime novels and numerous short stories – some of them were posthumously collected (e.g. The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries, 2012).

Ferrars has been called the closet of all mystery novelists to Agatha Christie in "style, plotting and general milieu," but I suspect this to be an arbitrary, superficial comparison similar to how the late P.D. James was once heralded as her "Crown Princess." They were female mystery writers who were, at one point in time, contemporaries of one another, which is where the similarities come to a halt. I've read only two of Ferrars' detective stories, but I think the subject of this blog-post showed a writer who fundamentally differed from Christie. As well as poking the popular notion that detective stories from the Golden Era only dwelled in the stuffy, hearth-warmed drawing rooms of ancestral mansions in the eye.

I, Said the Fly (1945) was published in the final year of World War II, but opens in 1941 in a bombed-out street in London and proceeds to tell the story of what happened there in the year preceding the war.

Before the bombs, Little Carberry Street had already lost a lot of its eighteenth century respectability and became dominated by the squalor of the poor. The windows were hung with "curtains of soiled yellow lace," bug-infested rooms and the street "filled by the shrill voices of swarms of illdressed, underfed children" and the disturbing "singing of homegoing drunks" – interspersed with "screams and shouts" and "fighting in the street." Kay Bryant found herself occupying a cheap bed-sitting-room on the top floor of No. 10 Little Carberry Street after she drifted away from her husband and had an "extreme shortage of money."

She returned to the place "to see what the blitz had done to it" and began to remember the grim, horrifying events that took place there. It began when Kay's neighbor, Pamela Fuller, convinced their landlady, Miss Lingard, to install a gas-fire in her room, but the gas-fitters found something beneath the floorboards that delayed the job: a revolver swaddled in a dust cloth!

The firearm is linked by the police to a murder that occurred a fortnight before the floorboards were lifted: a naked, mutilated body of a woman, shot through the heart, was discovered on Hampstead Heath and the victim is identified as a former tenant – which makes it very likely that the murderer is an occupant of No. 10. There are more than enough potential suspects for Inspector Corey to review.

Tovey is the caretaker of the place who shuffles around the place to make "symbolic gestures of cleaning" and can usually be "found outside a door or round a bend in the staircase," which does not make him a very popular figure. He often verbally abuses Miss Lingard, but excuses him as being "quite a character" and "had trouble with his poor old head" after being wounded in World War I. Ted Hay and Melissa Ivory share a room and live a "dark life of sin." Hay makes his loving "in a hand-to-mouth fashion on the edge of the world of journalism" and "knew who was going to marry whose wife" or "who was homosexual." Ivory was simply "a very odd person" and attempting to figure her out got nobody anywhere. Charlie Boyce is a tenant on the first-floor and loves to wake everyone up whenever he has forgotten his latch-key and Kay would not be surprised that his whole existence was made up of "one unmentionable crime after another." Mrs. Flower lives on the ground floor and "loans her front room to a lot of her girlfriends and their gentlemen acquaintances," which presumably comes with "a commission on the transaction" that helps her pay the rent.

Well, I said Ferrars did not struck me as an Agatha Christie-type mystery writer and the backdrop, characters and even the plot of I, Said the Fly can testify to that. However, Ferrars was still a product of the Golden Age and that becomes very evident towards the end of the book when some of the characters begin to draw-up dummy cases against each other, which was (plot-wise) my favorite part of the book – because I liked them better than the eventual explanation. Not that the solution was thoroughly bad, or anything, but I simply enjoyed how the characters were airing their suspicions and attempted to make the evidence fit their pet-theories. I was pleasantly reminded of Anthony Berkeley! But it also made the real explanation somewhat underwhelming.

So don't expect an Agatha Christie-tier rug puller that'll leave you dumbstruck with surprise, but I would still warmly recommend the book to the loyal readers of the Crime Queens who have nearly depleted their pile of Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngiao Marsh, Christianna Brand, Margery Allingham, Gladys Mitchell and the others. I'd wager the backdrop op the story will be interesting to genre historians and scholars of popular culture, because it goes contrary to the image a lot of people have of a British whodunit from the 1940s. 

A Stuffed Bag of Tricks

"There was a bang, a plock, and a hiss, then a smell of beer incongruously spreading into the air."

- Nicholas Blake (There's Trouble Brewing, 1937)

The Plague of Thieves Affair (2016) is the fourth in a series of historical mystery novels by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, which began with The Bughouse Affair (2013), but originated in a Western-style novel, Quincannon (1985), that spawned a long-running series of short detective stories – some of which were collected in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998).

John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter solved a preponderance of their cases in magazine stories and the basic structure of the plot of The Plague of Thieves Affair seems to hark back to the short story form. There are a number of cases in the book that solved without wasting any time and could easily stand by their own as short stories.

The Plague of Thieves Affair embarks with Quincannon nearing the final stages of an investigation at Golden State Steam Beer. Owner of the brewery, John Willard, engaged the services of Quincannon to probe the bizarre death of the head brew-master, Otto Ackermann, who had been stunned with a blow to the head and pitched into a "vat of fermenting beer to drown" – which differs from the scenario of a freak-accident that the "incompetent minions of the law" had pieced together "after a cursory investigation." Obviously, the motive was the appropriation of the brew-master's secret recipe and implicated a rival brewery lead by "a morally bankrupt businessman."

Meanwhile, Sabina Carpenter has a meeting with several clients: Marcel Carreaux and Andrew Rayburn are the first arrivals. Carreaux is the assistant curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris and Rayburn is the owner of the "well-regarded Rayburn Art Gallery on Post Street," who were brought together by an exhibition of "rare and valuable antique ladies' handbags" – dubbed "Reticules Through the Ages." One of the items on display is the Marie Antoinette chatelaine bag, valued at several thousand dollars, which requires special protection because "thieves abound in the Barbary Coast." It's the reason why they approached Carpenter and Quincannon.

A dandy, "gay blade," by the name of Roland W. Fairchild, is the second client of the day and he wants to hire the agency to find his missing cousin, Charles P. Fairchild III, who became the sole inheritor of a multi-million dollar estate and Carpenter is "uniquely qualified to locate him" – since the patrician-sounding cousin is none other than the scattered-brain, bughouse Holmes who made his first appearance in The Bughouse Affair. A growing case-load, but manageable as long as complications are kept at bay, which is not going to be case.

Quincannon practically has the murderer by the scruff of the neck, but the person has cornered himself inside a building that houses the utility-and storage rooms. There are two solid oak doors, "installed as a deterrent to both rodents and human pilferage," separating Quincannon from his quarry. However, the report of a gunshot is heard inside and when the doors are finally opened they find the body of the suspect sprawled on the ground: a gunshot wound in the chest and a revolver near at hand. Quincannon privately scoffs at the idea of suicide, but murder requires a gunman and nobody was found hiding in the storage room. It was Quincannon who stood guard at the only door giving access to the rooms and heard the gunshot. But nobody entered or left the room while he was standing there!

It's a classic locked room murder, but not a particular difficult one to explain and this plot-thread soon becomes part of a chase-type of story, in which Quincannon pursues a second, slippery customer with bloody hands and attempts to locate the stolen recipe – which brings him to several interesting locations and comes across some colorful folks.

However, Sabina is faced with a number of complications as well as a seemingly impossible problem. During the exhibit of the antique handbags, the lights are extinguished for "a period of no more than two minutes" and when they came on again the Marie Antoinette bag was gone! All of the exits were guarded, but a thorough search of the premises failed to retrieve the stolen handbag. Luckily, the crackbrain Sherlock turned up again to help Sabina wrap up the case in record-time.

Sabina was also hired to find the self-proclaimed Holmes by supposed relatives of him, but that soon developed in a case of murder with the bughouse Holmes as the chief-suspect, which they also solved within the length of a short story – and could have easily been called, "as the good Doctor Watson might have" titled it, "The Adventure of the Wrong Detective."

It's these short story-like plot-threads, in combination with the compartmentalized nature of Quincannon's investigation, that gives the impression of reading a collection of short stories converted into a novel with bridging material. Pronzini has done that previously with Scattershot (1982), but I'm not sure if a similar route was taken with The Plague of Thieves Affair.

However, the rather unfortunate result is that The Plague of Thieves Affair comes across as a relatively minor series-entry, which mainly contributed character-development to ongoing story lines – such as the back-story of the bughouse Holmes and the relationship between the series protagonists. 

As a fan of the series, I very much enjoyed reading The Plague of Thieves Affair, but, judged purely as a mystery novel, it's a notch below the previous books in the series.

The Carpenter & Quincannon reviews:

Beyond the Grave (1986)

Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998)
The Bughouse Affair (2013)
The Spook Lights Affair (2013)
The Body Snatchers Affair (2015)

The Plague of Thieves Affair (2016)

A Riddle in Verse

"For murder, though it has no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ."

- William Shakespeare (Hamlet, 1600-02) 

During the first couple of years on this blog, I read a whole slew of historical mystery novels from a very prolific scribbler, Paul Doherty, but the flood was stemmed to a trickle by the rapidly expanding gamut of procurable Golden Age and neo-classical mysteries.

I've read only two of Doherty's historical fancies in just as many years: The Nightingale Gallery (1991) and Song of a Dark Angel (1994). So I thought a return to his work was in order and picked the inaugural novel in what seems like a very promising series. A series that'll see me back before 2017 rolls around!

The White Rose Murders (1991) was the first in a series of six, originally published under the nom-de-plume of "Michael Clynes," which all have the long and descriptive subtitle of "Journal of Sir Roger Shallot" that concerns "certain wicked conspiracies and horrible murders perpetrated in the reign of King Henry VIII" – a premise pregnant with promise and vast possibilities.

Sir Roger Shallot was "born with the quickest wits" and "fastest legs in Christendom," who has probably bedded as many women as a certain Mongolian warlord, but has a profound lack of courage and often took what he could carry. Usually valuables that did not belong to him. Shallot has not led an altogether honorable life, but one that brought him to his ninetieth summer and not everyone was able to reach that pinnacle in the 16th century.

However, in his old days, Shallot has become a haunted man as the "clip-clop of spectral hooves on the peddle-strewn path in front of the manor" herald the ghosts of his pasts as they form an "army of silent witnesses" around his bed – taunting him with jeering cries of being a liar, thief and a coward. Shallot tells the story behind these ghostly faces as he dictates his memoirs to a chaplain in the center of a maze, which protects him from "the importunate pleadings" of his "brood of children" and the "soft footfall of the assassin" from one of the many secret societies who'd like to see him depart from the world. You'll understand why once you learn his story. Shallot has a penchant for landing in trouble and making the occasional enemy on the side.

First of all, The White Rose Murders is an original story that tells of Sir Roger Shallot's humble beginnings: a child born during a time of terror "when the great Sweating Sickness swept into London" and Henry VII reigned over the country, but a life of mischief in bad company nearly condemned him to death by hanging and was saved by an offer to enlist in the King's Army to march against the Scots – where he "hid beneath a wagon until the slaughter had finished" and "came out with the rest of the English Army to claim a great victory." Well, being a "war hero" did not prevent Shallot from a second meeting with the hangman, but this time he was spared by interference of an old and influential school friend, Benjamin Daunbey.

Daunbey is the favorite nephew of Cardinal Wolsey, the ruling scepter in the hand of King Henry VIII, who took Shallot as his manservant and through this connection they become encumbered in a Royal assignment.

A potential deadly chore that began when James IV of Scotland is killed on the battlefield of Flodden and his widow, Queen Margaret, fled to England and had to leave her infant son behind under a Council of Regency. Queen Margaret is the sister of Henry VIII and seeing her restored to the Scottish throne is in the best interest of England, which brings Shallot and Daunbey in the picture: Cardinal Wolsey has imprisoned Alexander Selkirk, "formerly physician to the late King James," to draw information from him that could assist Queen Margaret's return to Scotland and he's suspected of being a member of Les Blancs Sangiers – a secret coven of Yorkist conspirators that plots the overthrow of the Tudor Monarchy. The only obstacle to obtaining this information is the fact that Selkirk's mind has wandered away from him and spends his time writing "doggerel poetry" and staring "blankly at the walls of his cell," which is not very helpful. But he was still considered a danger by some.

One morning, Selkirk's is discovered dead in his prison cell, "brutally murdered by poison," but the question is how the murderer managed to administrate the deadly potion: the door of the chamber was locked and bolted. There were two guards at the foot of the steps and two who stood outside the prisoner's chamber. Guards who tasted every scrap of food and sipped every drop of claret that entered the room without showing any signs of the ill effects of poisoning. The murder room had high-up, arrow-slit windows inside a sheer wall of thirty feet, but these proved minor obstacles to an apparently ghost-like killer who also left white rose on the victim's desk – The White Rose of York and the mark of Les Blancs Sangliers!

Shallot and Daubney find themselves confronted with an entire string of murders, containing a second impossible poisoning in a sealed chamber, which they suspect sprang from the inner-circle of Queen Margaret's household. A suspicion that's confirmed when they join the Queen’s retinue to meet a Scottish envoy to negotiate her return to Scotland, but murder is dogging their every step: from a lush priory and the vile back alleys of London to the City of Paris, which "seethes like a hissing snake" and "full of intrigue, subtle plots and traders who could cheat a beggar out of his skin" – which makes you wonder how Shallot managed to life for nearly a full century.

Doherty handles all of these plot-threads with remarkable skill and strewn about ample clues to many of the proposed mysteries, which were hidden in a scrap of poetry, a cat who refused to die and the embalmed corpse of King James. The locked rooms were handled equally well and the explanations for them were quite acceptable and reasonable. Not the best examples the genre has to offer, but they were still pretty good and poisonings in locked rooms are difficult to pull off convincingly.

I guess the only point I could bring against the plot is that the murderer had nearly dissipated the small pool of suspects by the end of the book, which made this person stand out, but even that compensated by the fact that Daubney suspected the wrong person. You should discover for yourself why that point is important.

However, the most attractive feature of The White Rose Murders is Shallot's delightful narrative, which is often interrupted to rebuke the chaplain for sneering at his cowardice or calling him a hypocrite for condemning his loose morals. Shallot's narrative is also interspersed with such prosperous claims as having met one of the Princes in the Tower (who was supposed to be dead) and having been friends with William Shakespeare!

In summation: The White Rose Murders has a soundly constructed, reasonable clued plot that's wrapped in a grand and amusing narrative, which is told by what's arguably the best character Doherty has created. It's a pity he was abandoned after only six novels, but I still have six of them to go and I'll be eliminating some of them from my TBR-list before the year draws to an end. 

The Journals of Sir Roger Shallot:

The White Rose Murders (1991)
The Poisoned Chalice (1992)
The Grail Murders (1993)
A Brood of Vipers (1994)
The Gallows Murders (1995)
The Relic Murders (1996)