A Devil of a Time

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

- George Santayana 

If you're one of those souls who haunt this place with a certain degree of regularity, then you have probably spotted my glowing opinion on the greatest mystery writer who ever lived, the wonderful John Dickson Carr, who's still rightfully regarded as the undisputed master of the locked room mystery. But he also dabbled in another field of the genre that's often overlooked: historical mysteries and adventure stories.

During the 1950s, Carr became slightly disillusioned with the modern, post-war world and he began to retreat into historical fiction, which would come to dominate his output in the last decades of his life – beginning with the highly regarded The Bride of Newgate (1950) and ending with the very rare The Hungry Goblin (1972).

As I said before, Carr is seldom recognized for helping popularizing the historical detective story, but even rarer is seeing an acknowledgment for his contributions to an extremely obscure niche within this particular sub-genre: namely time-slip novels!

Carr wrote three of such stories in which the twentieth century protagonists are transported back in time and have to piece together certain events among the ghosts of the past. The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957) are relatively well known to both his fans and readers of historical detective stories, but Fear is the Same (1956) seems to be completely forgotten by everyone and appeared, for some reason, under his penname of "Carter Dickson" – which he primarily used for his Sir Henry Merrivale series. Its neglect is hard to explain and entirely undeserved, because it's as good a story as its two companions.

Fear is the Same has two characters caught in a time-slip, Lord Philip Clavering and Jennifer Baird, who were passionate lovers in the mid-1950s, but "a clap of thunder" and "a roar" flung them back in time – all the way back to the Regency Era in 1795. The experience has pulled a veil over their memory, but one that only vaguely obscured their knowledge of their life in the future. Memories come rushing back when they meet again, "it seems a little ridiculous to ask whether we have met before," but their new situation in this old world is as fraught with complications as their past lives a hundred and fifty some years in the future.

Philip found himself in the body of a rich, but spineless coward, Lord Glenarvon, who's married to a woman he intensely dislikes, named Chloris. Jennifer is a relative and ward of Lady Oldham, who has given her blessing to a marriage between Jenny and Richard Thornton. He's the son of Colonel Tobias Thornton, "of the King's Royal Dragoons," who serves as the story's antagonist and has several confrontations with Philip, which consists of what you probably expect from a rivalry in a period yarn from Carr's hands – fisticuffs and a bit of dueling! Again, what did you expect? It's Carr!

Anyway, there were also the bleary recollections of a murder more than a hundred years in the future. A murder they were so hard on the run for that they ended up in the 18th century, but the consequences seem to be inescapable, because similar events begin to unfold in front of the two lovers.

The maid of the Glenarvons, Molly, has been doubling for her mistress when she was out of the house and this may have resulted in her death, because her body is found in Chrloris' bedroom – strangled to death with a bell rope. Superficially, Philip looks to be guilty of the deed and the magistrate is on his way to procure an arrest, which makes him flee for a second time. This time has to look out for the Robin Redbreasts from the Bow Street Runners. However, the whodunit element is a surprisingly underplayed part of this historical romance and adventure story: there's a sort of set up in the early chapters, the murder itself (chapter 8), a late investigation in chapter 14 and an explanation chapters 19 and 20. The plots in Carr's historical novels tend to be less elaborate than in his regular series, but they're usually nicely done. I found the one in Fear is the Same to be somewhat routine, but it was acceptable enough.

What's written between the detective story is, as said before, a romance adventure set in the Regency Era, but Carr had a strong a love for history as he had for detective stories and it shows. Philip has to outwit Colonel Thornton in a close quartered pistol duel and gets drawn into a fistfight with a guy known as the "Bristol Smasher," which followed by a boxing match towards the end of their journey. But Philip and Jennifer also crossed the path of several historical characters. The most notable is the Prince of Wales, who would be later known as King George IV, who "the lampoonists," of the future, "show as popinjay and jack-fool," but was cast here in a fairly sympathetic light. Carr always had a royalist streak in his historical writing.

Then there are the moments when Philip accidentally betrayed knowledge he was not supposed to have in the 1790s, which includes being familiar with certain people who have not yet risen to prominence ("Who the devil’s Napoleon?") or knowledge of court secrets for which "proofs had been discovered" in "modern times."

So, all of this makes for a well-written, eventful and, above all, a fun historical narrative, in which a mystery plot is expertly wrapped in thick elements of romance and adventure. The ending had a hint of Charles Dickens, which I found slightly disappointing, because I had predicted a very dark ending based on the clap of thunder that threw back into the past. I suspected it was them dying in the 50s and somehow woke up in a parallel time-line, in the past, where they to go threw it again, but this time try to stay alive. But that's more a fault of my expectations. In short: if you enjoyed some of the other historical novels mentioned in this blog-post, you'll probably appreciate Fear is the Same.

Out of His Mind

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

- Edgar Allan Poe

Back in February, I reviewed Jonathan Latimer's Headed for a Hearse (1935), a hardboiled locked room mystery, which I erroneously labeled as his first foray into the genre, but the always helpful comment section pointed out several sources that list Murder in the Madhouse (1935) as the first entry in his five-part Bill Crane series – which was published in the same year as Headed for a Hearse. It’s an understandable mistake to make, right? So lets try this again!

Jonathan Latimer began his writing career as a reporter for the Chicago Herald Examiner, but eventually left the newsroom behind to become a novelist and scenarist in Hollywood. As a screenwriter, Latimer wrote episodes for Perry Mason, Columbo, The Lone Wolf and adapted several hardboiled novels for the big screen, which included Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key (1931) and some of his own work – e.g. The Lady in the Morgue (1935). But he's primarily remembered by the mystery readers of today for the darkly humorous, alcohol fueled hardboiled and sometimes slightly controversial screwball novels about Bill Crane.

Connoisseurs of the private-eye novel will likely point out that Latimer's greatest contribution to the genre was in a far more serious vein, Solomon's Vineyard (1941), but that's a story for another day. So, lets finally take a look at Latimer's debut novel!

Murder in the Madhouse opens with Bill Crane in the back of an ambulance, hands cuffed, en route to a private sanatorium. Crane is being brought in on account of his delusions, "a fixation that he's a great detective," but not any old detective. Oh no! Crane has laid claim to the name of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and gave "a demonstration in elementary deduction" upon his arrival, which immediately caused friction between Dr. Livermore and Dr. Eastman – who run the entire sanatorium. It would not be the last exhibition he gave of elementary and advanced feats of deduction.

Of course, the delusions of Crane are simply a ruse to get into the place and the reason for his presence is an undercover assignment: one of the sanatorium's patients, Miss Van Kamp, sent a distressing message to her brother and he hired Crane to find out what has happened.

Miss Van Kamp was in possession of a small strongbox, stuffed with "about four hundred thousand dollars worth of bonds," but equally important is that the box contained one of two keys necessary to open a safety-deposit box in New York City. A deposit box holding an additional eight hundred thousand dollars in cash, jewelry and bonds, which makes for a grand total of 1.2 million dollars! Obviously, people have been lured onto a path of crime for a fraction of that kind of money and someone was more than just tempted, because the strongbox went missing from its hiding place, but the purloiner is willing to a go a lot farther than mere thievery to became a millionaire – which becomes evident when a body is found underneath Miss Van Kamp's bed.

A good and kind man, named Pittsfield, who "thought he was Abraham Lincoln," was found strangled to death in Van Kamp's room. He would not be the last: the murderer switched from a black woolen cord to bone-handled knives and this enabled the guilty party to stack-up several bodies over a relatively short period of time. Crane has to figure out who's currently in possession of the strongbox and is willing to kill for it, while keeping up the pretence of being mentally slightly off balance and has to do so among potential suspects who genuinely are unbalanced. There are also the doctors and staff members to consider!

The combination of the setting and Crane's situation made for both an interesting and engaging detective story, but the plot and story-telling is also flecked with hints of the books relationship with the Hardboiled School – even revealing it as an early ancestor of the contemporary crime novel. As Latimer's profile on Thrilling Detective state, he was dogged by controversy, because he dared to dare the reader by showing them the grimier side of life, which even today seems to be able to shock and titillate some people.

There are, of course, the spots of physical altercations, but they're par of the course for a hardboiled private-eye novel. I don't remember ever reading one without several characters getting punched, kicked and bruised. However, here we also have one of the patients getting bloodied in a third-degree by the orderlies of the sanatorium. A gross abuse of power which is also present in the way the doctors conduct themselves. Who initially refused to alert the authorities about the murders that were taking place in the sanatorium, but that's just the surface stuff.

The same orderlies, who also drove Crane around in the ambulance, were overheard by him in the first chapter bragging how great an ambulance is to pick up "babes," because you don't have to pay for a hotel room and how the best part is "that they can scream their damn heads off" and "nobody will pay any attention" – which sounded kind of rapey. There were a number of references and descriptions to the consumption of illegally obtained moonshine, which was topped off with a spot of casual racism.

So I can imagine Murder in the Madhouse would have some modern readers sprinting to the nearest designated safe-space and fling themselves on the first therapy dog they find there. But if you have the historical awareness that the early twentieth century wasn't like a Walt Disney movie, you can probably handle Latimer's crime-fiction. And there's a small bonus for the readers who can make it to the end of the book.

Murder in the Madhouse is mentioned in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but the impossible situation does not occur until the very end of the book. The seemingly impossible murder is used as way to identify the guilty part and expunge any possible doubt about the guilt of this person. I’m not going to reveal too much about this situation, but it does involve a body being flung from an upper-floor room that had only one, high up and seemingly inaccessible window. It was the room where the murderer was being detained. So that was nicely done, I thought.

Murder in the Madhouse was engagingly written, competently plotted and found an original way to introduce a series characters. The final explanation missed the ingenuity of many of Latimer's Golden Age contemporaries, but, as I said before, it was a competently done and not every hardboiled writers constructed his plots like an old-fashioned whodunit – and I prefer my hardboiled detective stories to have a plot. So I should try and refrain from complaining and simply end this review by saying I enjoyed this outing even more than Headed for a Hearse.

A Thorny Problem

"It is a thorn. You may pick it out. But be careful, for it is poisoned."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, 1890)

John G.H. Vehey was a writer from Belfast, Ireland, who mass-produced crime-fiction during a relatively short period of time, from the late 1920s until his death in 1938, which was done under half-a-dozen different pennames, such as "Henrietta Clandon," "Anthony Lang" and "John Mowbray," but he was at his most prolific as "Vernon Loder" – a name that was plastered across the covers of more than twenty of his novels.

Loder is largely forgotten by the readers of today. Only a handful of genre historians, scholars and collectors, like John Norris and Curt Evans, were aware of his existence, but the genre’s renaissance era continues to bring back even the most obscure names and titles back into circulation.

Recently, the resuscitated Detective Club, which is an imprint of HarperCollins, reissued a number of classic crime novels and Loder was one of the writers who were dragged from the bowels of obscurity.  

The Mystery at Stowe (1928) takes place during one of those weekend parties that were all the rage in detective stories from the early twentieth century. The large manor-house were the party is gathered is called Stowe House and the property is in the hands of a good-natured host, Mr. Barley, who never enjoyed a good education or belonged to the upper-layers of the social strata, but he loved society and cultivating his behavior enabled him "to fill his house with decent people of the upper-middle classes" – basically people who were not bothered or shown "open scorn for the humble upbringing of their host." One of them is a well-known explorer and lecturer, Elaine Gurdon.

Elaine Gurdon is known as "the heroine of an expedition into the wilds of Patagonia" and "an enterprise which had penetrated the Chaco," but, regardless of her fame, she still has to go around with a begging bowl to finance her next trip into uncharted territory.

Luckily, one of the other guests, Edward Tollard, is a good-looking junior partner in a banking firm and he's willing to finance Gurdon's trip. However, this does not go over particular well with his wife, Margery, who fears the professional relationship might be a cover for a personal one – which is an opinion shared by two fellow guests, Mrs. Gailey and Miss Sayers, who regard the adventuress "as a poacher." So, since this is a 1920s detective story, you can probably guess the outcome of this situation.

The body of Margery Tollard is found on the floor of her bedroom. She was discovered in front of an open window and that's an important fact, because the medical examiner plucks "a dark wooden sliver," or "long thorn," from between her shoulder blades. It was taken from a quiver of poisoned darts that was hung alongside a blowpipe in the front hall as decoration. Gurdon brought them into the house and gave a demonstration how to operate, which makes her even more suspect, but the detective of story, Jim Carton, is determined to prove her hands free of both poison and blood.

Jim Carton is an old friend of Gurdon and "a bit of a policeman" himself. He served as an Assistant Commissioner in West Africa and philosophizes that "all crimes are much the same," which means they usually follow a familiar set of motives, but poison-smeared thorns are unfamiliar terrain for the English policemen – providing an opportunity to Carton to put his experiences into practice on home soil.

It's this background of the poisoned darts, blowpipes and Carton attempting to figure out alternative methods for propelling a venomous sliver of wood that lifts The Mystery at Stowe slightly above your standard fare country-house mystery from the period. Usually, I only come across these kind of detective stories in mystery novels as references, often peppered with scorn and ridicule, but this is only the second example I read that actually played around with poisoned darts and kept a straight face while doing so. Death in the House (1939) by Anthony Berkeley is the other one. Agatha Christie had some fun with blowpipes in Death in the Clouds (1935), but with her tongue firmly planted in her cheek and one of the characters even wrote Edgar Wallace-style sensational thrillers about murders with snake venom. Perhaps the best example of a detective story to employ poison-laced darts is Peter Dickinson's marvelous The Poison Oracle (1974), but that's a different story altogether.

The Mystery at Stowe is trailing slightly behind those three books, but, admittedly, Loder competently twisted together the situation, motivation and explanation in what may be to some a satisfying explanation. Yes, I have a problem with the solution. I actually have two problems with the solution: 1) I'm not a fan of this type of twist, because it feels like a cheat 2) the heart of the plot and the nature of the final twist was modeled around a famous Conan Doyle story from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). The title of this blog-post sort of alludes to that particular story. Anyhow...

Technically speaking, the remodeling of the plot was admirably done, but I found the ending to be depressingly disappointing and the fact that I could see beneath the fresh coat of paint didn’t do the book any favors either. I would not recommend The Mystery at Stowe to be used as bait to lure new readers to the genre, but seasoned mystery readers might want to give it look.

You can chalk this poorly written review up to my disappointment over the book. I hope to pick something better for my next read.

Strong Medicine

"There is a great deal of wickedness in village life. I hope you dear young people will never realize how very wicked the world is."
- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's "The Blood-Stained Pavement," collected in The Thirteen Problems, 1933)

The ingenious and sardonic Anthony Berkeley was one of the founding members of the London-based Detection Club, who foresaw and participated in the popularization of the psychological crime novel, which he did under the byline of "Francis Iles," but he's primarily remembered today as one of the more original and innovative minds from the genre's classical period.

Berkeley's ingenuity sprang from a cunning mind that was willing to experiment with the form of the detective story and embrace new ideas. This is very evident in the characteristics of one of his series characters, the energetic Roger Sheringham, who's one of the most likable amateurs to ever don the figurative deerstalker, but as prone to fingering the wrong culprit as the reader – which also makes him one of the most relatable detectives in the genre. Sheringham snugly fits the mold of "the fallible detective," which was cast by E.C. Bentley in Trent's Last Case (1913), but Sheringham was unparalleled when it came to being wrong (e.g. The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and Jumping Jenny, 1933).

Just like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton, Berkeley has a number of tricks, plots and storytelling ideas to his credit that were adapted and turned up in the works of other writers: a false solution from Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) fuelled the plots of some well-known detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin. The basic plot-structure of The Silk Stocking Murders (1928) became the basis for Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) and Panic Party (1934) seems to have been the model for And Then There Were None (1939) and William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954).

These influential works are accompanied by some excellent, first-rate detective stories such as The Piccadilly Murder (1929), Jumping Jenny, Trial and Error (1934) and the subject of this blog-post – a splendidly written, cleverly plotted and well characterized tale of a poisoning case in a small village that would have made Christie proud.

Not to Be Taken (1938) is a standalone novel and is narrated by Douglas Sewell, a fruit farmer and a countryside gentleman, who notes halfway through the story that, if his account "is to be considered as a detective story," he's telling it quite wrongly. As he had only just reached "the point at which a detective story usually begins," but reconstructing the recent past and bringing "the dead to life again in all the trivial details of everyday life" is necessary for assigning the roles for the engaging, fully fledged cast of characters who are about to play a part in a small-scale drama. Berkeley was not only a shrewd plotter, he also knew how to write a story around those plots populated with fairly convincing characters.

The narrative spun by Sewell begins with his next door neighbors, the Waterhouses, where the first signs of a domestic tragedy begin to manifest themselves.

John Waterhouse is a retired electrical engineer with a distinguished career behind him as "a kind of roving contractor," who was known, particularly in the East, as the man to call "when any native ruler with plenty of money" and "yearning for bright lights" was contemplating to wire his jungle capital – which resulted in several adventurous episodes and a respectable bank account. He settled down in the small village of Anneypenny, Dorset, to please his wife, Angela, but the restless workhorse soon picked up a hobby: masonry and construction. 

Construction is a useful pastime that provides the villagers with work and extra money, but Waterhouse has never been a penny-pincher, which made him a popular figure in Anneypenny. However, when the story opens, "the embodiment of robust health" has fallen ill and has been plagued with severe bouts of indigestion. The cause of the illness is placed on a developing gastric ulcer and his doctor advised him to cut down on his smoking, follow a diet and take his medicine. But that was to no avail: he "died a painful and a messy death" after a sick bed of five excruciating days.

The US title of Not to Be Taken

His doctor and a close friend of Sewell, Glen Brougham, was somewhat surprised, but signed a death certificate stating epidemic diarrhoea as the cause of death and Waterhouse would have been buried as one of those many examples, littering graveyards everywhere, of an unfortunate soul who passed away before his time – if it weren't for the interference of his brother. 

Cyril Waterhouse is very skeptical towards the official cause of death and Sewell wonders whether he had picked up grains from the local rumor-mill, before deciding to descend on the village, but a post-mortem examination supports his suspicions.

A quantity of arsenic is discovered in the body of John Waterhouse and this casts a wide net of suspicion. Cyril strongly suspects his sister-in-law, Angela, who's the sole beneficiary under her husband's will and can look forward to a fat paycheck from his life insurance – which is as good a motive for murder as her extra-marital affair. It’s also suggested Glen Brougham might have made a mistake in preparing the prescription, which would make it manslaughter and might cost him his career as a physician. The Waterhouses employed a German woman, Miss Mitzi Bergmann, who acted as a companion-secretary to Angela and was often ragged by John about the Nazi system, but on the eve of the inquest she flees from the country.

These are just a handful of the possible combination arising from the character-driven prelude of the first half and an examination of the hard facts during the inquest in the second half, which also involves Sewell himself, his wife, Frances, and the doctor’s sister, Rona. Before the final chapter, Berkeley threw down the gauntlet and wrote an Ellery Queen-style "Challenge to Reader," which asks several questions pertaining to who and how John Waterhouse was poisoned – as well as asking the reader if he thinks if the story contained, what he called, a "Dominant Clue." Berkeley delivers on the promise given by the premise and the tantalizing challenge, because the explanation is very clever and satisfying. I completely missed the central and dominant clue, but was pleasantly surprised to see the murderer give the kind of response I always wanted to see a murderer give to an old-fashioned deduction. However, I do not think this one really deserved to get away with it.

The final sentence closed the book on a note that was so unusual, unconventional and open-ended that it can only be described as stereotypical Berkeley. It was good and strong enough for Nicholas Blake to use it as an ending for his admitted masterpiece, Head of a Traveller (1949). So there's another piece of work seemingly inspired by Berkeley.

So, all in all, Not to Be Taken is another example of why Berkeley remains such a popular writer among connoisseurs of vintage crime-and mystery stories: he simply was one of the best.

Archery, Blackmail and Chalkboards

"There's something very convincing about a bow and arrow, but really, when you come to think of it..."

- Sgt. Beef (Leo Bruce's "I, Said the Sparrow," collected in Murder in Miniature and Other Stories, 1992)  

Rupert Croft-Cooke was the birth name of "Leo Bruce," writer and satirist, who penned a string of clever genre spoofs about a beer guzzling and darts playing village constable-turned-private investigator, but the novels about Sgt. Beef covered only a small portion of his total work – eight novels and a smattering of short stories stretched out over a period of sixteen years. Bruce was far more prolific with his secondary and lesser-known series about a schoolteacher and "a free-lance amateur" in the game of detection, Carolus Deene.

Deene took on the detective duties in twenty-three mystery novels, which were published between the mid-1950s and the early 70s, but they're a far cry from the inventive, tongue-in-cheek parodies of the genre that made up the Sgt. Beef series. They're more attuned with the darker mood and morose tone of the genre post-World War II.

Some years ago, I sampled one of the volumes from the Deene series, Death in Albert Park (1964), but I was repelled by the gloomy ambiance, plodding storytelling and a plot that was lifted from a rather famous mystery novel – i.e. Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936). Granted, I probably should not have read Death in Albert Park on the heels of Bruce's masterpiece, Case for Three Detectives (1936), but fact remains I was disappointed enough to angrily dismiss the entire series as bottom-of-the-barrel material.

I found an old comment on the GADetection Group, by Curt Evans, responding to my dismissal of the series by stating that in his view "reading the Deene books would be desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel" and how "Academy Chicago does not publish barrel scrapings" – followed by an assurance that "some of the Deenes have ingenious twists." Well, this was not the only instance in which someone, whose opinion on the detective story I hold in high regard, pleaded in favor of this series. So why not finally take that postponed second look at the series. I wanted to read something by Bruce and reading a Carolus Deene novel would prolong the inevitable end to the Sgt. Beef series, of which there only two more left on the big pile of unread detective stories.

The novel I picked to reacquaint myself with Carolus Deene was Death at St. Asprey's School (1967) and there were two reasons for that: I love a scholastic setting as much as a shipboard or war-time mystery and the plot description promised something along the lines of Gladys Mitchell's Tom Brown's Body (1949).

St. Asprey's Preparatory School is a private and expensive boarding school for young boys of high repute, but, lately, a chain of "ugly and frightening events" has plagued the place. Several of the students, "serious youngsters of twelve and thirteen years," swore they saw a figure they variously called "the Monk, the Old Friar or the Abbot," who has been described as a bearded man in gray passing through the dormitory like a ghost – while "mumbling Latin." Footsteps had been heard at night and lights had been "seen moving about the grounds."

Ghosts, lights and footsteps are something the teachers could have coped with, but soon the "satanic figure" became more "hostile and corruptive." Six rabbits were brutally battered to death in their hutch and a fox terrier puppy got its throat cut in the stables. It was obvious to everyone "some tragic event was pending," but nobody could have foreseen it was an attempt at murdering one of the teachers!

Colin Sime is one of the assistant masters and is very popular among the boys, but not with his colleagues in the common-room and he, miraculously, survives tumbling down a narrow, worn-out spiral staircase in an old church tower – which escaped only with a broken leg. However, Sime swears he was pushed and an aspiring killer could potentially ruin the reputation of the school. So they call in an expert to take over Sime's classes.

Carolus Deene is described as a slim, adolescent looking widower in his forties and the owner of a large private income, which made teaching and playing detective merely occupations to kill time "because he could not live idly." He had already established a reputation for himself as an amateur sleuth by the time the St. Asprey's School business presented itself, because it's asked of him if he could elucidate the matter without a murder. Usually, a murder or two before Deene successfully reaches the end of an investigation.

Sadly, for the victim, Deene is unable to prevent a second and far more successful attempt on Sime’s life: who's found propped up in his bed, in front of an open window, with the shaft of an arrow embedded in his throat. Interestingly, the practice of archery provided the best aspects for both the plot and storytelling. Archery is all the craze at the school and everyone is practicing it, which made sure there were enough people around when the deadly arrow was loosened, but there were also interesting scraps of background information on the sport – complete with the obligatory references to both Robin Hood and William Tell.

The method for the murder is a reworking of a short story from Bruce's very own Murder in Miniature and Other Stories (1992) and the idea had been previously explored by G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr, but the trick was competently presented and pulled off in this version. Surrounding this trick is a rather common place, garden-variety plot: a blackmailing victim who received his comeuppance, but my main complaint is how the interesting plot-threads, ghostly figure and animal killings, were relegated to the background – instead of being played up to their fullest in order to dress-up and distinguish a simplistic, standard and shopworn plot. Like the archery elements and snippets of school life did for the story, which were my favorite parts of the book.

So, to cut this already overlong review short, I would say Death at St. Asprey's School was a better reading experience than Death in Albert Park, but I still would not place it anywhere near to the Sgt. Beef series. I probably should have read one of the titles that were actually recommended to me, such as Furious Old Women (1960) or Nothing Like Blood (1962), but they were not within reach of my covetous claws. However, I'll keep them in mind for when I'll return to this series, but, for now, I'm still a Beef kind of guy. 

Call a Policeman

"Different policemen have different methods..."

- Morse (Inspector Morse, Episode S05-E01: Second Time Around, 1991) 

The professional career of Sir Basil Thomson was as rich and varied as a vividly colored, intricately patterned tapestry and its textural richness included such snapshots as stints as a colonial officer, prison governor, intelligence officer, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard and working alongside the Prime Minister of Tonga – according to some "he was the Prime Minister of Tonga." During his time on these jobs, he was a thorn in the side of the suffragettes, spies from Imperial Germany, Irish nationalists and British Marxists.

So with such a résumé, we can be forgiven for not remembering Thomson was also one of the pioneering minds of the English police procedural during the detective story's Golden Age. 

Fortunately, the Dean Street Press is in the process of filling this gaping lacuna in our collective memory by reissuing all of Thomson's police novels about Inspector Richardson, which tell the story of a Scottish policeman "climbing through the ranks of Scotland Yard." All of these eight books are clad in softly colored, uniformly designed book covers and are introduced by an accomplished crime novelist and genre historian, Martin Edwards. You can read more about Thomson's fascinating life in Edwards' introduction, which includes interrogation of Mata Hari, Roger Casement and a sensational conviction for "an offense of indecency" in Hyde Park – resulting in a fine of five pounds! But lets move on to the first book in a series that was praised by Dorothy L. Sayers, Jacques Barzun and Wendell H. Taylor.

Richardson's First Case (1933) begins on a wet, misty and depressing November afternoon in Baker Street where a young policeman, P.C. Richardson, is standing at his post. The "stream of traffic" had "splashed him with mud to his knees," his waterproof cape glistened with moisture and he "was wondering how he could win admission to the Criminal Investigation Department," but even he would probably have been surprised if he knew the traffic accident he was about to witness would offer him an escape from the humdrum routine of the uniformed police constable.

An old man, who "dashed across as if the devil was after him," got blindsided by a car and looked like "a bundle of old clothes" entangled with "the spring and the front axle." One of the witnesses on the pavement heard him say, "very well, then, I'll call a policeman," before dashing off, which complicated an apparent simple traffic accident – nor would it be the last complication in the case.

The name of the victim, who died on his way to the hospital, was John Catchpool. He was a registered moneylender and a shopkeeper of an antique store, who "had many other irons in the fire," but what they find in his store completely convoluted the whole matter.

What they found inside the store of the old man is the body of his wife, Mrs. Catchpool, who was strangled to death and the problem that arises from this discovery is a decidedly classical one. John Catchpool has a will that leaves everything to his wife and her beneficiary is a nephew, a naval officer called Lieutenant Sharp, but if his wife died before he did everything would go to his nephew upon his death – a man by the name of Herbert Reece. So the will provides both cousins with a potential motive for murder and asks the question of who died first, but there are more suspects to consider.

Sir Basil Thomson (1861-1939)

Richardson found a slip of paper in the clothes of Catchpool, which bore the name and address of Arthur Harris, "a thin, weedy kind of youth," who has a fondness for drinking and reckless driving. Harris initially denies even the slightest acquaintance with Catchpool, but the old moneylender's ledger shows an entry in Harris' name for an outstanding loan of two hundred pounds. A second, potential suspect from the outside comes in the guise of a shivering, broken-down wreck of a man, named Frank Cronin, who's an artist and a picture-cleaner who illegally pawned an interesting picture that he was supposed to clean. The picture depicts a bunch of "licentious Spanish soldiers," during the occupation of the Low Countries, murdering and raping "the virtuous Dutchmen in the village" – which is burning down in the background. I wager it's a depiction of the Siege of Oudewater, but that’s a side observation.

So there's enough to investigate for the police, but where Thomson's crime-fiction differed from his contemporaries is the emphasis on teamwork and police procedural. As Edwards pointed out in the introduction, "such as focus on police team-working is very familiar to present day crime fiction fans," but it was a fresh and novel approach to the detective story in the 1930s. I have read about James Oliver Curwood who wrote books about the Mounted Police in the Canada of the 19th century, which reputedly blends elements of the police procedural with tracking-type of adventure/mystery stories in frozen, untamed lands. However, the comparisons seem superficial. Craig Rice had her detectives operate as a team, but they were amateurs from the forties with no regards for proper procedure and rules. So Thomson really was an innovative writer during the thirties, because this type of crime-fiction would not gain traction until the 1950s when such writers as Ed McBain began to carve a name for themselves.

I really found it interesting to see a series characters from a Golden Age police series start out as uniformed constable, pounding pavement, who slowly begins his rise in the ranks and is told by his superior to "apply for the plain-clothes allowance." Retrospectively, it seems so logical to use a police force as a series "character," but it goes to show how strong a precedent Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes were for the genre.

I've one complaint to make about Richardson's First Case, which concerns the rather abrupt ending to the investigation. Richardson arrested the murderer and found a key-piece of evidence in the murderer's possession that this person was conveniently carrying around. The explanation also made a lot of the interesting plot-threads inconsequential to the actual solution, which was disappointing, but, as a whole, the book was very interesting – especially as a predecessor of the modern police procedural.

Anyway, I'll definitely return to this series for a second look, because my interest has been piqued in one particular title, The Millner's Hat Mystery (1937), which provided a clever idea for Operation Mincemeat during the Second World War. The introduction also kindled my interest in Frank Froest's The Grell Mystery (1913). So, choices, choices, choices!

The Book Case

"But in any case, after another crime, we shall know infinitely more. Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, 1936) 

Thus far, 2016 has been a reasonably solid year for reading and discovering detective fiction. There were a handful of mystery novels that were uneven in quality, sparsely clued or stumbled in the final chapter, but none of them deserves to be qualified as a complete train wreck – unlike my worst read from last year.

So I was glad that my return to the works of Rex Stout not only continued this positive trend, but also uncovered one of the best stories from the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin series.

The UK edition of Plot It Yourself

As I've stated in the past, the Nero Wolfe corpus is one of the rare exceptions in which I prefer characters to plot and there's a good excuse to justify such heresy. Stout had an uncanny knack for writing dialogue that gave his cast of regular characters a breath of life and endowed them with a mind of their own, but even more importantly, they're characters you would love to sit down with in real-life – in spite of their personal flaws. Who would not love to share a dinner table with Wolfe or have a front row seat for one of the many head-on collisions between him and the cigar-mangling Inspector Cramer? Or have a verbal exchange with the witty, sharp-tongued Archie or simply a guided tour of the brownstone with its rooftop greenhouse and the kitchen where their live-in chef, Fritz, prepares five-star meals. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Stout's talent manifested itself mainly in writing great lines for characters, who are both larger-than-life and yet very human, does not mean he was hopelessly lost when entering the plotting department. Some of my favorite entries in this series came with the added bonus of a soundly constructed plot: Too Many Cooks (1938), Some Buried Caesar (1939), Not Quite Dead Enough (1944) and And Be a Villain (1948). You can now expand that list with the wonderful Plot It Yourself (1959).

First of all, it should be pointed out that Rex Stout served as president of both the Authors Guild and the Mystery Writers of America, which is probably where he found the ideas and inspiration for Plot It Yourself – which has a clever and fairly original plot. Stout even found a new interpretation for the term "copycat killer," but the most ingenious part of the plot is the plagiarism racket that swindled a small group of authors and publishers out of large chunk of pocket money.

The case begins when a small contingent of people visits the office of Wolfe and Goodwin: Philip Harvey (author), Mortimer Oshin (playwright), Amy Wynn (author), Thomas Dexter (publisher), Reuben Imhoff (publisher) and Gerald Knapp (publisher). They form a Joint Committee on Plagiarism, selected from the ranks of the Book Publishers of America (BPA) and the National Association of Authors and Dramatists (NAAD), who are tasked with looking into a series of accusation of plagiarism that begin to follow a suspicious pattern – there "have been five major charges of plagiarism" so far. All of them seem to follow a similar script.

A book is ascending the bestseller list or a play begins to garner success when a letter arrives, in which the writer claims the plot, characters or even the dialogue were cribbed from a submitted, but unpublished, manuscript – a manuscript nobody remembers ever having seen or read. However, the manuscripts are found in drawers of the authors and archives of the publishers, which forced them to settle for tens of thousands of dollars.

Obviously, they were fake and planted on the victims, but there's a gaping ravine between a feeling of certainty and proof that will stand up in court. So the committee decided to hire the services of the best detectives money could get them and it's problem right up Wolfe’s alley.

Wolfe really hates to do any actual work (i.e. physical action), but he has to rent his remarkable brain in order to indulge in his expensive pastimes: growing orchids and lavish meals, which require the services of a resident orchid nurse and a live-in chef. Not as costly are his well-stocked bookshelves. Wolfe is an avid reader and Archie guesses he reads "two hundred or so books" a year. So it's not entirely surprising to find Wolfe doing some actual detective work in the initial stages of the investigation, instead of parking his one-seventh of a ton in his "oversized made-to-order chair" and synthesize the information brought to him by Archie, which he simply does by reading the fraudulent manuscripts. Hey, it was still work for Wolfe!

There were four different claimants, Alice Porter, Simon Jacobs, Jane Ogilvy and Kenneth Rennert, but Wolfe astutely deduces all of their manuscripts that their claims were based on were written by one and the same person – based on "the internal evidence" of diction, syntax and paragraphing. As Wolfe states, "a clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style," but there’s one exception, namely paragraphing, which comes from "the depths of personality."

However, the discovery of a common link between the claimants requires an extensive, all-encompassing and costly "kind of investigation," which falls outside of Wolfe's expertise. Regardless, he offers his clients a short-cut solution for their problem by offering one of the claimants a chunk of money and exemption from legal repercussions in exchange for a name. The name of the person who wrote those manuscript and basically the brains behind the whole scheme, but this person is well-aware of what is being planned and begins to remove all of the loose ends.

Archie is send around to the home of one of the claimants, Simon Jacobs, but is greeted ("not you") by Sgt. Purley Stebbins of Homicide West. Jacobs' body was found that afternoon behind a bush in Van Cortlandt Park, "dragged across the grass from the edge," which means he probably taken there from a car and the cause of death was a stab wound in chest – he would not be the last person to go out of this world with a knife buried in his chest. The body's pile-up in the final half of the book and Wolfe realizes he gave away too much information to the swindler-turned-murderer. It makes him roar "in a language that was probably the one he had used as a boy in Montenegro," but Wolfe redeems himself by trapping a strong-minded, very determined witness in giving away the identity of the murderer in order to wrap up the case to the satisfactory of his clients. And to earn his fee.

My favorite part of Plot It Yourself is the first half, which deals with the fraudulent accusations of plagiarism, because it's cleverly done and challenges Sherlock Holmes' assertion that "it has all been done before" and "there's nothing new under sun." But how it turned into a murder case and the identity of the murderer was also very nicely done. Considering the book was published in the final months of 1959, it's almost as if the book represented that final glance over the shoulder before the door closed on that Golden period in the genre's history.

So, all in all, Plot It Yourself has all the familiar faces and elements that made readers return to that notorious brownstone, on West 35th Street, for many decades and several generations, but the excellent and original plot also makes the book one of those brightly glowing embers in the hearth were once the mighty fire of the Golden Age roared.

Simply put: I very much enjoyed Plot It Yourself.