Stamping Out Crime

"Philately... is a curious hobby. It seems to afflict its victims with a species of mania. I don't doubt these stamp-collecting fellows would murder each other for one of the things."

- Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen's "The Adventure of the One-Penny Black," collected in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933-34) 

Harriette Ashbrook, who also wrote under the penname of "Susannah Shane," was an American mystery novelist from the genre's Golden Era, but one who was, reportedly, overlooked, forgotten and overshadowed when she was still plying her trade – which makes her output one of the more neglected nooks in the genre. It must have been a glumly, unprofitable honor for Ashbrook, but we get to explore an author a large swath of mystery readers in the 1930s missed out on. That's one of the perks of ferociously consuming detective fiction in the 21st century.

Anyhow, the page for Ashbrook on the Golden Age of Detection Wiki says she "was never taken seriously in the mystery arena." She never garnered any of favorably reviews, which led to her being ignored by leading paperback houses, but there's been one modern critic who spoke kindly about her work in the field – John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books. Well, that's a good enough endorsement for me!

John notes in her Wiki article how her early books "show an obvious love for the genre" with lively characters, realistic detection, insight into forensic police work and a smart-aleck playboy detective "who is much more interesting and funny than Philo Vance." Her later books, which were published under the name of "Susannah Shane," warranted a "comparison with Alice Tilton and Craig Rice," but the plots "often surpass the story mechanics of those two better known writers." You can find a closer examination of some of those plots in an insightful blog-post, The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook, which had some encouraging words for A Most Immoral Murder (1935) and again mentions how the detective was "one of the better Vance impersonators" – something I have to agree with.

A Most Immoral Murder was originally published as He Killed a Thousand Men in the July 1935 issue of Mystery Magazine, which was a periodical that was exclusively sold in Woolworth stores. Later in that same year, it was published as a proper book and began its long, undeserved descend into obscurity.

We find the detective of this forgotten series, Philip "Spike" Tracy, in a similar mood as Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," collected in His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (1917), which is in a state of complete and utter boredom. Spike has engaged the services of a battered prize-fighter to act as a Wodehousean butler and combat the tediousness of everyday life, but the monotonous spell is only broken when Pug Beasley answers the door to find drenched, wild and haggardly looking woman on the doorstep – who promptly collapses and is put to bed immediately.

The woman turns out to be Linda Crossley and the police are very interested in her whereabouts, because she has been missing ever since her grandfather was found hunched over a desk in his private library. A dark stain on his back proved to be blood from a deep stab wound.

Prentice Crossley was an avaricious collector of rare and desirable stamps, whose collection was worth a queen’s ransom, but were they worth enough to someone to kill over? Apparently, that appears to be the case, because "more than $85,000 worth of stamps are missing" from the collection. Amazingly, that prize-tag represents the combined value of only a handful of stamps! There's also a string of interesting snippets of background material on stamp collecting and the history of stamps, such as "howlers," which are "stamps with crazy mistakes in them" like "ships with their flag blowing against the wind." So I probably learned something from this book.

However, it's not just the philatelic element and the presence of collectors that firmly plants the book in the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection, but also the fact that Spike Tracy is the younger brother of the District Attorney – which provides him with access to the crime-scene and detailed information on the case. You can compare this to the father-and-son team of Ellery Queen and Inspector Richard Queen or a similar combination of siblings from Amelia Reynolds Long's Death Has a Will (1944), in which a lawyer, by the name of Stephen Carter, assists his brother, Jeff Carter, who's a District Attorney.

It's the combination of Spike, his brother and Inspector Herschman, "head of the homicide squad," who take a closer look at the small group of people who surrounded the victim in life, which includes his lawyer, John Fairleigh, a dealer, named Kurt Koenig, Jason Fream of the Acme Stamp Company and Homer Watson – who was "known in philatelic circles as a keen rival of Crossley." But another element is introduced to the story when the murderer strikes a second time.

An elderly woman, Mrs. Deborah Ealing, is found stabbed to death in her apartment. The weapon is a bayonet and identified by her daughter, Maysie Ealing, as a war souvenir from her long-lost brother, who never returned from the war, but what tied both crimes together is a rare stamp in the dead woman's hand. However, this new element has to do with the long shadow cast by the events in the First World War and how it affected those who fought in its trenches, but, in combination with the stamp business, it provided a surprisingly original and interesting motive for a double murder. I could not think of a similarly motivated detective novel from the Golden Age.

The only problem is that, while you can figure out the identity of the murderer, gauging this characters original piece of motivation is a lot harder, but I find that a forgivable offense – in this particular case anyway. I had a much bigger problem with the colossal and cosmic coincidence that, from all the houses, Linda Crossley accidentally stumbled into the humble abode of Spike Tracy. Or how Spike covered up the murders. I can understand the sympathy one might feel towards this murderer and understand this persons motivation, but is it really an excuse to plunge a bayonet in the back of an old lady?

Anyway, I was still impressed how Ashbrook linked the horrifying ordeals suffered in the trenches to such an innocent hobby as stamp collecting, an old photograph, a newspaper advertisement and a family secret, which made for an interesting and original mystery. I have mentioned in the past how detective stories closely tied to the World Wars hold my interest, but tales in which the Great War has a strong presence are very sparse in comparison to the World War II era mysteries. The only other example I can think of, in which the First World War has such a presence as in A Most Immoral Murder, is Was it Murder? (1931) by James Hilton.  

Guess I'll end this review here and recommend A Most Immoral Murder to fans of S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen and Clyde Clason. If you enjoyed those writers, you'll enjoy Ashbrook. And if any of her books were like this one, she definitely got the short end of the stick in her lifetime.

The Saint in the Clouds

"My first rockets went up like iron balloons. Somehow, most people were slow to perceive a genius had been launched, except me."

- Leslie Charteris 

The Hindenburg Murders (2000) is the second in a string of six standalone novels, known collectively as the "Disaster Series," in which Max Allan Collins slyly blended historical facts with pure fiction by positioning past masters of the written word in the role of detective on the eve of a tragic event – only the reader is aware of the impending doom. 

It's an unusual approach to a series of historical mysteries about disasters, but I derived great pleasure from the gradual thickening of suspense as history slowly takes over the reigns of a story. You know what's going to happen, and yet, you can't find yourself on the next page soon enough!

Over the past several years, I reviewed The Titanic Murders (1999), The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) and The Lusitania Murders (2002). During my pre-blogging days, I read the dark, grimly The London Blitz Murders (2004) and the splendid The War of the Worlds Murder (2005) – which remains my personal favorite and the crown jewel of this series. So that makes The Hindenburg Murders the last one of the lot. Luckily, Collins is a prolific author and has an extensive bibliography of crime-fiction to explore, but first I have to get this review out of the way.

The protagonist of The Hindenburg Murders is Leslie Charteris, creator of "The Saint," a Robin Hood-type of character who first appeared in Enter the Tiger (1928) and was played by Roger Moore in a 1960s TV-series – before he would lend his face to James Bond. However, my exposure to Charteris has been limited to one or two short stories and the Val Kilmer movie from the mid-1990s, which probably does not count for much.

So I'll refrain from making any uninformed, potentially cringe inducing comments about The Saint to spare the enamel on the teeth of genuine fans of the series, because there still seem to be plenty of them around.

Lets move on to the book itself. Or, rather, the after word, entitled "A Tip of the Halo," in which Collins lists of all the sources he consulted and gives an answer to the question if Charteris was actually a passenger on the Hindenburg – which is answered with "a resounding, absolute yes," well, "sort of." Charteris was one of the "well-publicized passengers aboard the airship's maiden voyage," but the account of his presence on its final journey is wholly made-up by Collins. The reason for bringing this up is a 38 second video-clip I found of Charteris reporting on that voyage, which I recommend watching before reading the book. It's like a short teaser for the book. 

Japanese edition of The Hindenburg Murders

The Hindenburg Murders begins on May 3, 1937, as the Titanic-sized zeppelin is being prepared in Frankfurt, Germany for its trans-Atlantic crossing to the United States. As to be expected, they were real Nazis about airport security in those days: bulky X-ray machines probed the content of baggage, suitcase lining was regularly knifed loose, gifts rudely unwrapped, shaving kits disassembled and even children's toys confiscated. All of this added to annoyance of the dapper-clad gentleman with the monocle, named Leslie Charteris, who begins here to bounce witticisms off the humorless Nazis and later on in conversations with his fellow passengers – which gave me the impression of him having been a real-life counterpart of Archie Goodwin.

Nevertheless, the pesky, but efficient, gründlichkeit of German customs seems not to have been entirely without reason, because the presence of Nazi officials aboard seems to confirm there’s a genuine fear of saboteurs and bombs. After all, the Hindenburg is filled with hydrogen, one of "the most flammable, hottest-burning gas in the world," and even a small spark could light the entire ship up like a Christmas tree. Something is going on becomes very clear when Charteris' roommate, an SS-informer named Eric Knoecher, vanishes in the night, but evidence left behind suggest he was flung out of a port window – plunging 2,100 feet into the freezing waters below. The question is whether this has anything to do with a possible plot by saboteurs or that he posed a danger to one of the passengers, because there were Jews and Jewish sympathizers among them.

Charteris is asked to carry out a discreet investigation by lying through his teeth: he tells everyone that his roommate has come down with a severe case of the cold and will be staying in their cabin. Only the murderer would be aware of this lie, but this potential interesting way of making a killer, subtly, betray himself turns out to be nothing more than a wild goose chase and the guilty party revealed by bungling part of the job than by ratiocination on Charteris parts – which makes this series entry slightly disappointing in the detection department.

The Hindenburg Murders is mostly rewarding for its use of the historical content and its depiction of life about a gigantic airship: from the sumptuous dinners and the lavish passenger accommodation to the hermetically sealed smoking room and water rationing in the shower cabins. It makes you wonder why, as far as I'm aware, there aren't any Golden Age-era mysteries that employed one of these floating ships as a backdrop for a classic whodunit. I should also mention the ending of the book, which gives a harrowing depiction of the aftermath of the disaster and that made for great, if gruesome, ending during which a final surprise was sprang on the reader. That's something I can always appreciate.

So, while The Hindenburg Murders was not the best or my favorite entry in this series, I still found it to be an excellently written, well-researched piece of historical/speculative (crime) fiction. Of course, it has something to offer to the fans of Charteris and The Saint, because Collins is a fan and noted, in the previously mentioned after word, how there are numerous references that can "be found by the keen-eyed Charteris fan" – as well as the tongue-in-cheek chapter titles that were apparently firmly planted in the Charteris tradition of his "Immortal Works."

On a final note, I might not have been wildly enthusiastic about The Hindenburg Murders, but loved the series as a whole and have a particular fondness for The Titanic Murders and The War of the World Murder. I really hope this series, one day, will awaken from its slumber, because there are still a number of possible books that can be added to this series: R. Austin Freeman served in the First World War as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corpse (The Great War Murders) and surely Edogawa Rampo's war effort for Japan can, for the sake of a good story, be tied to murder connected to Hiroshima or Nagasaki not long before the U.S. drops by.

Well, here's hoping!

Literally Dead

"One reader's literature is another reader's garbage can liner... whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."

- Elizabeth George 

Arthur W. Upfield was an Englishman transplanted to Australia and exploring the outback as a Jack-of-all-trades provided him with an opportunity to accumulate a vast wealth of knowledge, experience and understanding about his adopted homeland – which served him well when he finally settled down behind a typewriter. However, the aim of his literary ambitions reached far beyond a volume of reflections on his Australian experiences.

Upfield was far above mere literature and pursued one of the noblest ambitions of man: to craft and forge great, imperishable detective stories that'll be with us long after their creators became dust. This was a task that lasted for several decades, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, which saw the publications of twenty-nine novels about Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte of the Queensland Police.

The Barrekee Mystery (1929) introduced and added a detective to the genre who was truly unique in every single aspect of his character. Bony is of mixed race, a "half-caste," who drew on both his white and aborigine heritage to ascend the ranks of the police force. A tracker and hunter in a suit who can stake out a desolate location for weeks, track across endless, sun-blasted planes and dust choked flatlands or hunt down anyone who sought refuge from the law in the dense bushes of the Australian outback – giving this series a distinct and unique character of its own. But, sometimes, Upfield confronted his creation with, what could be labeled, as a domesticated murder case.

An Author Bites the Dust (1948) is the 11th entry in the series and takes place in the fictitious town of Yarrabo, situated in the valley of the real Yarra River, where two of the ringleaders of the Australian literati have settled down. Mervyn Blake is a novelist, critic and president of the Australian Society of Creative Writers, but, above everything else, he's a snob with a bloated opinion about the importance of his own contribution to the field of Australian literature. His wife, Janet, only published several short stories and some verses, but she is right beside her husband as they organize weekend parties for a small coterie of back-slapping authors/critics – who go through great pains to differentiate "between literature and commercial fiction."

As to be expected, they fancied themselves to be the pedestal the first column was erected on, but the Australian public response was, "if this was literature," they "would have nothing to do with it." Hear, hear!

You'll get a glimpse of the nature of these people when the reader is allowed, briefly, to be a silent observer at one of their gathering. There's a haughty response to detective-and commercial fiction when, while "discussing the novel and novelists," someone accidentally mentioned "the atrocious efforts of a 'whodunit' writer," because their sole interest is Australian literature and the influence their small clique "may exert upon its development." It is also stated "there was never yet a best-seller that had any claims to being good literature" and with literature they meant the kind that is "understood by the cultured." Thankfully, the end of that particular chapter reports to the reader the unexpected and inexplicable passing of Mervyn Blake.

Blake is found on the floor of his writing room, clawing the closed door, but the local authorities are unable to determine how he had died and the result is an open verdict, which leads the case to grow cold over the stretch of several months. Until, that is, Superintendent Bolt puts Bony on the case, because he did not want the case to become stone cold and believed the peculiar circumstances would interest him – which it did.

So Bony becomes a paid lodger of the next-door neighbor of the Blakes, Miss Pinkney, who shares her home with the memories of her dearly departed brother and an enormous all-black cat. The animal listens to the name Mr. Pickwick and is fond of playing with an old, gnawed ping-pong ball, which will eventually provide Bony with an important clue that puts him on the path towards the solution.

In spite of the months that have passed and the scattered group of suspects, An Author Bites the Dust can still be classified as a traditional mystery with a closed-circle of suspects. Considering the characteristics and profession of the victim, as well as that of his potential murderers, I got the impression Upfield purposely lifted Bony from his preferred surroundings in order to explore a traditionally plotted murder in a domestic surrounding – because he reportedly really hated those kind of critics and some of them were apparently modeled on real-life examples. The story also impressed me as an unabashed homage to his fellow mystery writers and everyone who attempted to write exciting stories. Upfield mentioned Joseph Conrad, John Buchan and S.S. van Dine, but there's also a character in the book, a mystery writer by the name of Clarence B. Bagshott, who impressed me as the Ariadne Oliver to Upfield's Agatha Christie.

Now that I’ve mentioned Christie, the story and plot seems like a conscious imitation of one of the British Crime Queen: there's a very bizarre, but original, poison used that you would expect to find an Edgar Allan Poe story, but a Van Dinean footnote assured the reader the substance was not an unknown poison as it was authenticated by Prof. Alfred Swaine Taylor – which can be looked up in a dusty old book titled The Principles and Practices of Medical Jurisprudence (1873). There's the depiction of Miss Pinkney, which is one of the kindest and warmest I have seen of a spinster in mystery fiction, but also the type of character you'd expect to find in Crime Queen novel.

But the most attractive aspect of the book is Upfield giving a well-crafted finger to the no fun having literary crowd who look down their nose at, what they call in Australia, commercial fiction.

So, An Author Bites the Dust was a bit different from the books that initially lured me to the series, such as Death of a Lake (1954), Cake in the Hate Box (1954) and Man of Two Tribes (1956), but, as is obvious from this review, I enjoyed this little sidetrack in the series. And I think it's safe to say that I share some opinions with Upfield on what's good fiction. Even though I still haven't read Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), which I have remedy one of these days.

Child's Play

"Why, you little blockhead, I'll whittle you down to a coat hanger..."

- W.C. Fields

Thirteen years ago, Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House (2003) was published and introduced what, arguably, are the first Great Detective of the 21st century: two nonagenarian detectives, named Arthur Bryant and John May, who have been leading a contingent of special investigators since the 1940s – known as the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

Peculiar Crimes Unit was founded "soon after the outbreak of the Second World War" as "part of the government initiative to ease the burden on London’s overstretched Metropolitan Police Force."

Staff members have always comprised of outsiders and radical freethinkers who were, initially, tasked with handling investigations "deemed uniquely sensitive" and "a high risk to public morale." But over the decades, not everyone understood that peculiar was originally meant in the sense of particular. 

Consequently, the unit found themselves in charge of a large number of extraordinary, bizarre and seemingly impossible crimes – which even included several locked room murders. So it's not surprising the series was part of the first wave of contemporary mysteries that slowly convinced me that, perhaps, not everything written after the Golden Age was complete tripe.

I discovered the Peculiar Crimes Unit series in 2007 and was an unapologetic, fundamental classicist in those days, but, despite my rabid hatred for modern, character-orientated and socially concerned crime novels, I plunged headfirst into Full Dark House, The Water Room (2004), Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005) and Ten Second Staircase (2006). They challenged my preconceived notion of the genre and genuinely loved the journey, but, sadly, my interest began to wane after White Corridor (2007). The books morphed from wildly imaginative, neo-Victorian crime novels into regular police procedurals with some weird elements.

After reading Off the Rails (2010), I decided to take a break from the series, which continued until this very blog-post, but only a year after dropping out I began to read how The Memory of Blood (2011) had reinvigorated the series by cutting back on the social commentary and refocused on the plot – going back to what the series originally was. And it only took me about five years to verify this for myself.

The Memory of Blood is the ninth entry in the series and, just like the first book, has a theatrical setting. So it really is a rebirth, of sorts, for the PCU.

Robert "Julius" Kramer is a self-made man who became a millionaire before his twenty-fifth birthday, which he celebrated by "informing his loyal girlfriend that he was now rich" and "dumping her." Kramer is not a pleasant person, but that’s to be expected from someone whose role model is Mr. Punch. It allows him to be as "pugnacious, amoral, murderously strong-willed" as he wants in order to "rise above mere morality" and he bought the New Strand Theatre to indulge in his theatrical hobby. He even slapped his own theater company together.

The first of his lurid, trashy and sensational plays, The Two Murderers, is about to open and to celebrate the occasion Kramer is hosting a party at his London penthouse, but there's a bad and tense atmosphere – amplified by the gloomy weather outside. You would expect this to be the moment a steak knife is plunged in Kramer's back, but the murderer among them has struck somewhere else in the house.

Kramer's second, much younger wife, Judith, finds the door to the upstairs room of their infant son, Noah, locked from the inside and the door has to be broken down. What they found is unsettling: a window that was supposed to be locked was wide open and an antique, grotesque-looking puppet of Mr. Punch was lying in the middle of the room. The small body of Noah was found beneath the window and a post-mortem examination reveals he was violently shaken, strangled and flung out of the window, but what's really remarkable is that Mr. Punch's hands "exactly fit the bruises on Noah Kramer's neck" – suggesting that the Victorian-era puppet had come to life to fulfill "his mythical destiny to become a murderer." All of that happened inside a locked nursery with an open window affording no escape to a murderer.

It's a dark, grisly and gruesome murder, but finding the person who's responsible turns out to be very similar to "playing some elaborate version of Cluedo" and they’ve some work to do before they can identify their "Colonel Mustard in the sodding library with the lead pipe."

There's no shortage of potential suspects: there's the leading man, Marcus Sigler, who has been having an affair with Judith and sneaked out of the party with the new assistant stage manager, Gail Strong, which gave Robert Kramer a strong motive as well. Ray Pryce is the "archetypical angry playwright" and part of the anger comes from the greediness of the producer, Gregory Baine, who has stopped salaries and put everyone on a profit-share. Something that can be manipulated by fiddling with the books and therefore Kramer and Baine would've to payout less to the cast and crew. One of them is a brilliant set-designer, Ella Maltby, who's responsible for bringing a wax dummy to life during the first act of the play and that's an interesting talent when you're dealing with an apparent homicidal puppet, but these are only a handful of people who were present at the party and could've fulfilled the role of killer – since everyone in close proximity to Kramer seems to have had a reason to harm or hurt him.

The investigation takes place while the PCU is settling into their new office building, which was once the dwelling of the infamous Aleister Crowley, but their situation seems to get gradually a bit better. Bryant found a new member to the team hidden in the attic: a dusty, cobweb-covered automaton of a fortune-teller that spits out cards with vague, cautiously worded predictions on them. Of course, Bryant has a pocketful of old coins to feed to automaton. Even Raymond Land, who has been the temporary acting head of the PCU for many years, seems to finally come to peace with his fate of being stuck there.

However, there are some things that never change: the ever-subversive Oskar Kasavian is still attempting to get the PCU shutdown and a new, ongoing sub-plot appears to have been set-up in the background, which happens when the editor of Bryant's memoirs succumbs to bacteria poisoning and something rather important is missing – a disc containing information of a number of important cases from the unit's past. The Leicester Square Vampire, who killed John May's daughter, and the storyline about Mr. Fox from the previous two books, covered such previous plot-strands that ran through several books. I have no idea which direction this storyline will take, but, as of now, it seems interesting.

But all of that takes place in the background. The Memory of Blood is a very plot-oriented detective story, but one with sharp characterization and a great theatrical background that's steeped in puppet lore and London's unique history. That has always been a major asset to the PCU series: Fowler's deep-rooted love for London's history. I don't remember any of the other books to be as sound in plot as this one. The clueing is a bit clunky here and there, they were too obvious or given too late, but they were present and Fowler provided answers as to why (and how) the handprints of a puppet were on the throat of a dead baby. Or how the murderer was able to improvise a locked room trick on the spot. It's a simple method that's derived from an old trick, but I rather liked it when place in the overall plot of the book.

So, all in all, to cut this overlong, drawling review short, I would mark The Memory of Blood as my favorite entry in the PCU series and the only downside is that I waited so long to return to Arthur Bryant and John May.

A Window into the Past

"Elephants can remember... that was the idea I started on. And people can remember things that happened a long time ago just like elephants can. Not all people, of course, but they can usually remember something."

- Ariadne Oliver (Agatha Christie's Elephants Can Remember, 1972)

During the final quarter of 2015, the already indispensable Dean Street Press reissued half of Annie Haynes' neglected, long-forgotten and out-of-print body of work, which consisted of seven mystery novels starring either Inspector Stoddart or Inspector Furnival – all of them furnished with an insightful introduction by our very own genre historian, Curt Evans. Now they are going to complete their reissues of Annie Haynes' crime-fiction with the scheduled release of all five of her standalone novels.

Rupert Heath of the Dean Street Press offered a review copy and I requested The Witness on the Roof (1925), because I was fascinated by the book’s plot description.

The Witness on the Roof begins in early May, 1897, in Grove Street, "a precinct which had undoubtedly known better days," where the only "remnants of past greatness" are the lofty rooms and large windows. A young, impish child, called "Polly," has taken refuge between the chimneystacks on the rooftop to escape from the rough blows and verbal abuse leveled at her by her stepmother. At first, Polly is looking upon this rooftop world like "a conqueror exploring some unknown world," but she began to wonder what happened behind all those blinds and peeked into a window of a studio apartment – where she saw something that would come back to haunt her as an adult.

Polly observes a room stacked with unfinished canvases, an untidy litter of paint tubes and a big easel in the middle of the room, but what really attracts the child's attention is what looks like "a heap of white drapery" near the fireplace. There's also a man present in the room. A tall, broad shouldered man who's busy tearing up papers, photographs and books, which were then tossed into the bright, open fire that roared on the hearth.

As Polly witnesses this strange scene, she slowly comes to the realization that the "tangled mess of drapery heaped upon the rug" is the body of a young woman! She sees how the man places a gun near the dead woman's hand and gives herself away. However, the only thing the man sees is a child "scuttling over the roofs" until she's out of his sight. There would be many years before anyone else learns that there was a witness to, what the newspapers called, the Grove Street Mystery. 

It's not long thereafter that Polly is whisked away from the slums of Grove Street to live with the

well-born family of her late mother.

A decade came and went and the passing of the years turned the "small, grimy-looking child" with "ragged brown hair" into a proper lady. Living with her cold, uncaring grandmother was not a full improvement on her previous situation, but, recently, the world started looking favorably upon Polly – who's now known to everyone as Joan Davenant. Her grandmother's will named her beloved, long-lost sister, Evie, as the main beneficiary, which means people were finally going to look for her. On top of that, Joan has married a wealthy, titled gentleman and became Lady Warchester.

Everything appeared to have worked out for her in the end, but when she takes an innocent stroll down a garden path, snaking around her home, she sees something that awakened memories that have lain dormant for a decade. She glanced at one of the windows of her home and sees someone moving around that room that suddenly reminded her very much of the man she saw on the roof in Grove Street as a child. It’s someone very close to her!

I've already seen The Witness on the Roof being compared with Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder (1976), which was originally penned during World War II, but it should be pointed out that the plot also has certain points of resemblance with 4:50 from Paddington (1957). The Witness on the Roof shares a child witness and a crime in the past with Sleeping Murder, but the window scenes described above were very reminiscent of how Mrs. McGillicuddy saw a murder being committed and identified the murderer by the end of 4:50 from Paddington. You can see Haynes' story as a combination of these two plots.

Stylistically, The Witness on the Roof seemed like Baroness Orczy expended one of her short stories into a full-length novel, because "The Grove Street Mystery" could easily have been the title of one of the stories from The Old Man in the Corner (1909). The plot also followed the pattern of the type of crime-fiction that was writing during the time the story was set in, i.e. the late-1800s and early 1900s.

There were a number of characters acting as detective, searching for answers to such pertinent questions as the identity of the murdered woman, while other answers were supplied by characters confessing to their part in the drama or showing their true colors. It makes for a nice, extremely old-fashioned detective story that's only marred by the cosmic coincidence that connected certain characters so long after the murder in Grove Street. You can argue it's the kind of singular coincidence that streaked sensationalist fiction from the Victorian-era and showed Haynes belonged to an earlier period in the genre's history, but if you love both crime-fiction from the days of Conan Doyle and Fergus Hume than you might want to give The Witness on the Roof a look.

I feel as if I have not done the book complete justice with this lousy review (distractions, distractions), but I definitely enjoyed the book, because I was in the mood for something genuinely old-fashioned and Haynes filled that order with a well-written, very satisfying book reflecting an earlier period of the genre that preceded the Golden Age. Considering it was published in the mid-1920s, you can say it still counts as a transitional mystery novel, albeit a late one, but still a transitional one.

I previously reviewed Who Killed Charmian Karslake? (1929) and The Crystal Beads Murder (1930) by Haynes.

Trampled Justice

"Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest."

- Cicero 

Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee garnered their fame under a joint pseudonym, "Ellery Queen," which became a franchise that spawned radio plays, TV-series, movies, comic books, board games, jigsaw puzzles and the illustrious Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. All of that sprang from a bibliography as labyrinthine as one of their plots.

After The Finishing Stroke (1958), Lee was plagued by writer's block and the tandem decided to summon a flurry of ghostwriters to flesh-out Dannay's skeletal manuscripts, which was kept under wraps at the time, but the list of writers who operated as Ellery Queen included some interesting names – such as Avram Davidson and Edward D. Hoch. You can easily confuse one ghostwriter for the other, but I wasted a good fifteen minutes searching (angrily) for the hired hand behind The Glass Village (1954). It turned out there was none!

The Glass Village is a non-series novel and therefore I presumed, erroneously, it had to be ghostwritten, but I eventually stumbled to the fact that it was an Ellery Queen original. One of the few Dannay and Lee wrote without Ellery or Richard Queen.

It's an unusual, character-driven courtroom drama/legal thriller set in a sparsely populated, dying backwater, called Shinn Corners, tucked away in the New England countryside.

Shinn Corners lies in a valley, "looking like a cluster of boils on an old man’s neck," with stretches of "untidy land," the dried-up remains of what had "once been a prosperous river" and "the huddle of once white buildings" – giving a home to a dwindling community that has been "reduced to a total population of thirty-six." Over the past hundred years, the towns surrounding the valley had slowly lured away a lot of the working force of the tiny hamlet. The scattered "ruins of houses and barns and mills" and the remnants of a factory building are tangible reminders of a period when the village prospered, which now, in spite of its constant struggle for existence, keeps getting poorer every year. But at least it's a peaceful place.

Judge Lewis Shinn explains to a visiting relative from New York, Johnny Shinn, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, how the grim specter of murder has graced the village only three times in "two hundred and fifty some years" – which occurred between 1739 and fifteen years before the events described in the book. A local boy was killed in an act of self-defense by a hired farm hand from outside of the community, "a furriner," who was acquitted by a court in a neighboring town and that left the villagers feeling deprived of justice. It will have some far-reaching consequences when murder returns to Shinn Corners about a century ahead of schedule.

Ninety-one year old Aunt Fanny, described as "a fabulous old lady," was born in Shinn Corners and became a minor celebrity in her eighties when she began to paint. She made "a fortune out of her Christmas cards, wallpaper and textile designs" and her paintings can fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars. A brief conversation she had with Johnny Shinn revealed her as one of the more kinder, understanding people of the village, but, of course, that was not to last – as someone obliterated her skull with a fire-poker in her paint room.

The brutal murder of Aunt Fanny coincides with the arrival in the village of a Polish tramp, named Josef Kowalczyk, who had been admitted to the United States in 1947, but the villagers, naturally suspicious of outsiders, want swift justice against the foreign element they hold responsible for the death of one of their own. They have evidence backing them: a hundred and twenty-four dollars was missing from a cinnamon jar from Aunt Fanny's home and that amount was discovered "in a dirty knotted handkerchief tied to a rope slung around Kowalczyk's naked waist," which clinches it for the angry villagers.

They refuse to hand over Kowalczyk to outside authorities, remembering what happened fifteen years previously, which lead to an armed standoff with a dozen state troopers. In order to prevent a blood bath, Judge Shinn convinces those outside authorities, including the governor, to stage a show trail in the village. It's a ruse "to allow tempers to cool down so the prisoner can be got safely away" and "tried in the regular way in a court of proper jurisdiction." The trial has to be purposely botched so it can be overturned at a later date.  

Judge Shinn describes himself as "an unmitigated scoundrel" where "defending constitutional democracy and due process is concerned," which is forgivable, but his personal motivation seems a bit snooty and self-aggrandizing – stating that “even in a democracy” people "can't always be trusted" and basically have to be protected from themselves by "individuals here and there." Individuals such as himself. The inhabitants of Shinn Corners are portrayed throughout the book as bone-headed bigots, but the judge is really no different, except that his bigotry appears respectable, by "critically" gazing inwards instead of focusing on outsiders.

You've got to cut the people of Shinn Corner some slack, because here you have a small, dwindling and largely isolated community of hardworking, but very poor, people confronted with a stranger in possession of money that was stolen from one of their own who had just been murdered. It does not excuse the formation of a lynch mob, but I expected at least a small amount of understanding and sympathy for the villagers. There was, however, not a drop of that to be found.

Anyhow, the trial takes up the second part of the book and this is the point where the detective-element of the plot finally begins to manifest itself, which had previously been wrapped up in character-introductions, a tour of the village, a man-hunt and snippets of social commentary about justice, communism, war and McCarthyism. Everyone's whereabouts at the time of the murder are subtly checked, the final painting of Aunt Fanny receives a closer examination and there's the all-important clue of the missing pile of chopped firewood. All of this reveals the real killer in time to prevent a second attempt at lynching the hapless tramp.

The heart of the plot, clues and alibi-trick might have been better suited for a short story or novella, but, on a whole, I found The Glass Village a fascinating read and surprised it was never adapted as a TV-movie or mini-series. It would lend itself perfect for that and today's audience would probably enjoy the morally ambiguous cast of characters. Anyway, it was a very interesting, unusual and surprisingly successful attempt on Ellery Queen's part at writing a more serious crime novel. Because they made similar attempts before and some of them were outright disastrous (e.g. Calamity Town, 1942). It's also the reason why I could not bring myself to title this blog-post The Polish Tramp Mystery.

Well, I guess I did not entirely succeed in picking an orthodox mystery to review, but there's always next time.

Death Has No Friends

"I mean they were not even normal murders... the man who is hounding us all to death is a hell-hound, and his power is from hell."

- Mr. Arnold Aylmer (G.K. Chesterton's The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926)

The Bath Mysteries (1936) is the seventh entry in E.R. Punshon's Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen series, which has an indefinable plot patterned after the infamous "Brides in the Bath Murders" from the 1910s and offered a brief glimpse at Owen's aristocratic side of the family – one of them who died under suspicious circumstances.

Bobby Owen is summoned to the ancestral seat of his kin and the opening chapter finds him assessing the place's "interminable and depressing length," which has become unaffordable as a permanent residence, but the reason for his summons had nothing to do with the family coffers. It concerns one of his cousins, Ronald "Ronnie" Owen, who vanished over three years ago.

The departure of Ronnie Owen coincided with a "disastrous and scandalous divorce case," after which "he had vanished from the ken of all his former friends and acquaintances," including Cora – his "justly offended wife." Owen seems to expect that Ronnie's drunken habit has finally caught up with him, but what is being revealed is far more serious and sinister than he could have possibly imagined. A woman who identified herself as the widow of man named Ronald Oliver, the presumed alias of Ronnie, pawned a signet ring that bore the family crest, which happened only a day after she collected 20,000 pounds from an insurance company. People had been murdered for far less in those days!

There is, however, one problem: the body of the man, who called himself "Ronald Oliver," died in a bathtub from "the effects of boiling water coming from a lighted geyser" that "pour continuously for a day and a half." He was boiled alive! The police assumed the victim wanted a bath to sober up and was overcome by the steam, which led to a verdict of "Death by Misadventure," but his actual widow, Cora, disagrees with this interpretation – believing he was murdered. So the family draws on their influence to put Bobby in charge of a discreet investigation.

It's not an easy or grateful task, because Bobby is fully aware that in an investigation "a time-lag of a few minutes is often of such importance as to make the difference between success and failure" and here there was an interval of months. And for "guilt there is no cloak like the lapse of time." However, that's not the only problem staring Bobby in the face: Ronnie had shuttered himself away in a small flat, cut off from his former life, which barely left anyone to interrogate.

A problem amplified when Bobby comes across several potential victims, lonely men "who had fallen or been thrown from their places in society" and "deliberately cut themselves entirely adrift," but, somehow, still had their lives insured for several thousands of pounds – which in those days amounted to a small fortune. It's not surprising Bobby begins to suspect he's up against "a kind of murder factory," but it's also where the book begins to diverge from your typical, 1930s Golden Age-style detective novel.

The plot of The Bath Mysteries is hard to define, because it consists of a lot of different elements: deceptively starting as a classic whodunit, but soon becoming more thriller-like with a conspiratorial nature that gives the story a sinister and unsettling touch. But underneath all of that, The Bath Mysteries is an early predecessor of the British police procedural. Instead of fretting about muddy footprints, cigarette buds and alibis, Bobby is pounding pavement and doing what looks like legitimate police-work, which can be experienced (when contrasted with the other elements) as dull and disappointing – because it's essentially routine police-work. There are also several characters who would feel quite at home in a modern-style crime novel by the likes of P.D. James or Reginald Hill: a woman trying to leave her life as a prostitute behind her, an ex-convict who mentally has never healed from a flogging he received in prison and an elderly, stick-fingered lady as old as she's experienced in evil. The book ends with these three characters as they find some redemption, which was a nice touch, but you have to read the book yourself to find out how.

Punshon really strayed away from the Golden Age here, but, from a historical perspective, it's an interesting predictive book that anticipated the crime novels and police procedurals of the post-World War II era. He did so in the mid-1930s! The only weakness is that he also anticipated that murderers would not be as well-hidden as they were during his days, which is a pity, but the upside is that the book can be used as lure to draw readers of contemporary crime stories to our side.

Speaking of historical content, The Bath Mysteries has one of the earliest references to the early days of television: Bobby is given a tour of a luxurious apartment and was "shown the television screen," but, "unfortunately," there was "no television programme on at the moment." You can watch a snippet of television from the year this book was published here. But I have prattled on long enough. I'll be back before long with a review of something slightly more orthodox. At least, I hope so. That was basically the plan when I picked up The Bath Mysteries to read.