Everything is Possible

"Nothing is impossible... The mind is master of all things. When science fully recognizes that fact a great advance will have been made."

- Prof. Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen (Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," collected in The Thinking Machine, 1907)

Jacques Futrelle was a journalist, theatrical manager and an author of detective fiction who fathered one of the iconic characters of the genre's early period, "The Thinking Machine," which is the byname of Prof. Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen – considered by many mystery readers to be the American equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. Or at least one of his most notable rivals in the Americas.

Inexcusably, my reading of Futrelle and Van Dusen has been limited to a volume of short stories from the Modern Library, The Thinking Machine: The Enigmatic Problems of Prof. S.F.X. van Dusen (2003), which was edited and introduced by Harlan Ellison. As well as a number of short stories, such as "The Grinning God" and "The House That Was," scattered across several anthologies, e.g. Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories (1987).

Recently, I developed a yearning to return to Futrelle and read some of his stories I missed out on the first time around, which is when I was suddenly struck by Newton's apple – why not work my way through the ones Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991)? It's both ingenious and something completely unexpected for this blog! Right guys? 

The first story under examination, "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom," presents a seemingly impossible situation in the guise of a ghost story. A stock broker, Ernest Weston, is engaged to be married to the daughter of a banker and wants to renovate his ancestral home as a summer residence, but a "gang of laborers" were the first one to be confronted with the malevolent presence in the reception hall – a creature of "about nine feet high" and "blazing from head to foot as if he was burning up." It was a waving a long knife and laughed at the frightened men as they fled from the home.

The ghost story attracted the attention of the press and they dispatched a "nerveless young man," Hutchington Hatch, but even the fearless reported had to fled after witnessing the burning ghost for himself. There was even an additional impossibility: Hatch saw how the ghost, "on the very face of the air," wrote with his finger the word BEWARE!

So he fled to his old friend, Prof. S.F.X. van Dusen, on whom he bestowed the nickname of "The Thinking Machine," who does not give any credence to the notion that something is impossible and demonstrates why. Van Dusen provides a rational and logical, if somewhat convoluted, explanation for the apparent supernatural phenomena, which he based on such clues as a lack of a particular smell and a slight noise "attributed to a rat running across the floor" – which is a surprisingly amount of fair play for a detective story published in 1905. I also loved how the impossible premise, in combination with the motive, places the story firmly in Scooby Doo territory.

Futrelle conjured up an impressive, imaginative and elaborate piece of charlatanism in "The Problem of the Crystal Gazer," in which an enthusiastic investigator of the occult, Mr. Howard Varick, is shown an unsettling glimpse of the future by a seer – an East Indian mystic named Adhem Singh. Varick peers into the crystal ball, which was "faintly visible by its own mystic luminosity," before "a veil seemed lifted" and "the globe grew brighter" to show him his own death at the hands of an unknown man. He saw himself sitting his study, which was miles away, as a man slipped into the room and planted a knife in his back! The problem is brought to Prof. van Dusen and he believes there was something prophetic in the vision shown in the crystal ball, but it was brought about with a great deal of cheating and theatrics. He even declares, "the affair is perfectly simple."

However, the trickery involved to create the illusionary vision is everything but simple. Clever and original, but not simple. The explanation for the trick is tentatively related to the plot of the previous story, "The Flaming Phantom," and Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Haunted Policeman," which was first collected Striding Folly (1972).

The next one, "Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire," began as a very promising and intriguing story, but the plot fell prey to one of the hoary tropes of the period: a fourteen months old heir to an immense fortune, Douglas Blake, waddles into the snow-covered backyard and simply vanishes into thin air. There's a track of "regular toddling steps of a baby," but they came to an abrupt ending as if the baby had shot up into the air. Ransom notes only serve to obscure the matter and I genuinely wish the snatching eagle had not been passed by as an improbability, because it would have been slightly better than the eventual explanation. I regard this story as the first serious disappointment of 2016!

In "The Last Radium," a colleague of the famous scientific detective, Professor Dexter, procured a precious supply of radium, which consists of no more than one ounce – representing "practically the world's entire supply of that singular and seemingly inexhaustible force." Fortuitously, a widow of a French scientist, Mme. Therese du Chastaigny, has a leftover supply of radium from her husband and is willing to part with it for every reasonable offer, but her visit coincides with the disappearance of Dexter's radium from the laboratory.

A laboratory with windows that were set high up in the walls, fastened from the inside, and there's a guard stationed at the sole door, but Van Dusen sees what everyone else, including Dexter, completely overlooked. The explanation was a bit carny and would have preferred the one Van Dusen hinted at, suggesting someone "fished out the radium through a window in the glass roof by some ingenious contrivance," but it was pretty passable for something from the early 1900s. I also appreciated the off-page cameo Mme. Curie.

"The Problem of the Missing Necklace" is a fun, semi-inverted mystery story in the tradition of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles. Scotland Yard regards a famous jewel thief, Mr. Bradlee Cunnyngham Leighton, as a crook, but one of "the cleverest in the world," because they have never been able to put a finger on him – which drives one of their chief operators, Herbert Conway, up the wall. On his latest job, Leighton swiped the pearls from Lady Verron and has booked himself a trip to the United States, but finds Conway as one of his fellow passengers.

However, an illegal search of Leighton's cabin and a subsequent search by custom-officers were unsuccessful in locating the pearls. So Conway asks the famous American scientist-cum-detective for help and he quickly points out a place that overlooked by the officers, which makes this only a semi-impossible crime. However, the method for smuggling the pearls of the boat was clever and was later reused by a famous mystery writer for a similar impossible theft of jewels.

I hated the next story, "The Roswell Tiara," which involves a precious stone pried from a tiara that was locked away in a wall vault and only the owner knew the combination to open it, but the explanation is a combination of tired old tropes and coincidences. I disliked it pretty much for the same reason "Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire" disappointed me. You can safely skip this one. 

"The Problem of the Perfect Alibi" revolves around what appears to be a cut and dry case for the police: a young man of some social prominence, Mr. De Forrest, was found stabbed to death in the sitting room of his suit and as he was dying from his injuries he scribbled a number of helpful notes – such as the name of his murderer, motive and hearing the clock strike two. There is, however, just one problem: the murderer was sitting in the dentist chair for an emergency treatment at the time of the murder and he can supply the police with several creditable witnesses. Unfortunately, it’s a ramshackle alibi and the trick is really not all that impressive, which would be considered amateurish stuff during the Golden Age. So it's not all that noteworthy how Van Dusen tears it to shreds.

"The Mystery of the Scarlet Thread" offers a classic, if somewhat dated, locked room mystery, which begins with several attempts at ending the life of Weldon Henley.

Henley is a young broker who occupies a handsome suit in "a fashionable establishment," which is luxuriously furnished, spacious corridors, staff and the modern miracles of both "the gas and electric systems of lighting." When he moved in, he had all the electric apparatuses removed and only employed gas for the purpose of lightning. Often kept "one of his gas jets burning low all night." A habit that nearly did him in: one night he woke up nearly asphyxiated by the gas, because the gas jet he had left burning had gone out and the tightly locked room had slowly filled with the noxious fumes – which is presumed to have been an accident. But these apparent accidents keep happening. They are assumed to be accidents on account of the carefully locked and barred door and windows of the suit, which precluded any outside interference.

The case is brought to the attention of The Thinking Machine by Hutchington Hatch, a reporter for The Daily New Yorker, who figures out the method based on a scarlet thread that was found on a flagpole and the way early twentieth century gas fittings functioned. I'm sure this particular gas outfitting would not be allowed today and everyone who would install it would probably be dragged in front of a judge.

I found the next story, "The Vanishing Man,"to be very unusual in its ordinariness and revolves around a promising business tycoon, Charles Carroll, who took the reigns of a successful brokerage concern as its young president, but not everyone agreed with his rapid ascension in the company – leaving "a residue of rankling envy." Nevertheless, Carroll functions above expectations and money is pouring into the company, but then strange things started to happen: Carroll seems to be able to vanish from his watched or locked private office at will and reappear there with the same ease.

These bouts of temporarily invisibility coincides with a prospected theft of gold bonds, but how these plot-threads intertwine with the overarching motive is what this both an original and unusual story. Only questionable part is the huge gamble Carroll took. A really, really big gamble. The locked room trick was incredibly simple and only a minor part of the overall story, which was perhaps for the best. Finally, I would like to observe this story was from 1907 and modern moneymakers, like Carroll, seemed to have still been admired as the financial wizards of the new century, but that would all change after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. A character like Carroll was more seen as pure villains than the daring anti-hero that Futrelle sketched in this story.

"The Haunted Bell" is a fairly, but over-elaborated, tale of a man, named Franklin Philips, who's being plagued by the ringing of a Japanese gong, which he received as a gift from his wife. The piece of antique consists of "six bells on a silken cord" and seems to ring of its own volition. Philips initially puts it down as a trick of his nerves, but calls in Prof. Van Dusen to help silence the ghost of the bells. Only problem is that the ghost yarn has turned into a crime story by that time and involves a shady curio-dealer, a dead burglar, a vanished servant and Japanese houseguest who had a great deal of veneration for the bells. A fun, but simple, story that could have easily been plucked from the pages of L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898), which is one of the first collections of impossible crime stories – because its solution seemed to fit the type of stories from in that volume.

Finally, I decided to re-read one of the stories, "The Phantom Motor," which stood up to reexamination. The setting of the story is a small, peaceful place called Yarborough County, but it had a fully engaged police force of several dozens of men who were stationed upon its highways, because the county was very particular about their speeding laws. It has superbly kept roads, "level as a floor," which tempted many drivers and provided the county with a steady income – in particular from a place known locally as The Trap.

The Trap is described as a "perfectly macadamized road bed" situated "between two tall stone walls" with "only enough of a sinuous twist in it to make each end invisible from the other," which have a Special Constable stationed at each end. There was telephonic communication between both officers and they could warn each other if one failed to stop a car or get the registration number, but there's one speeding automobile that manages to vanish impossibly from the speed trap. Not once, but several times! A well-known reporter, Hatch, has an opportunity to witness the ghost car for himself and decides to call in the help of his old friend, Van Dusen. Of course, he manages to find a completely rational explanation for the apparently supernatural quality of the speeding car and how managed to disappear from a closely observed and guarded speed trap. I only have one minor complaint: could two trained and experience traffic officers really be fooled by what they saw. Surely, they would see that one was not like the other. Regardless, I found this to be a fun impossible crime story from the early 1800s.

Well, that's it for this review and I know what you think: what about stories such "The Problem of Cell 13," but rest assured, I'll certainly do a follow up to this post and read/re-read more Thinking Machine stories to review. So this will definitely be continued. I just can't say/promise when that will be. However, I can promise that the next review won't be a week from now.

Dead Man's Quest

"And now, Jim, we're to go in for this here treasure-hunting, with sealed orders too, and I don't like it; and you and me must stick close, back to back like, and we'll save our necks in spite o' fate and fortune."

- Long John Silver (R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, 1883)

Dennis Lynds was an American author who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, such as "Mark Sadler" and "John Crowe," but his most well known penname was "Michael Collins," under which a series of novels was published about a one-armed private-eye – named Dan Fortune. One of the Fortune stories, "No One Likes to Be Played for a Sucker," is favorite locked room short of mine and was anthologized by Edward D. Hoch in All But Impossible! (1981).

So I was slightly astonished to learn Lynds, a writer of hardboiled private-eye stories, was the man behind the name of "William Arden," which appeared on the cover of more than twelve juvenile mysteries in The Three Investigator series.

Last year, I reviewed The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) and The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966). They were among the first half dozen entrants in the series and were penned by the creator of the three boy detectives, Robert Arthur, but for my next read I wanted to sample something by one of the authors who continued the series after his passing and Lynds had credentials as a bone-fide crime novelist – which helped settling down on my next read.

The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) is a treasure hunt story in the tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Musgrave Ritual," from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), which begins when Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Peter Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are chartered by Jupe's aunt, Mathilda Jones, to help move a collection from a closed down roadside museum. The place had "specialized in relics from old seafaring days" and the small collection was bought for resale in The Jones Salvage Yard, which included "an ornate Oriental teakwood chest" that's "bound with heavily decorated brass." It's a chest with a long, storied history and holds many secrets: one of them being a hidden compartment with a spring-powered contraption that hurled a dagger at Jupe. A booby trap that had been sprung over a hundred years ago, but still worked like it was rigged up yesterday. That's some old-fashioned craftsmanship for you! 

However, even more important is the story surrounding the old sea-chest and the secret that was tucked away in the hidden compartment. But first...

There's a name stamped on the chest, Argyll Queen, which turns out to belong to a square-rigger that "sunk just off Rocky Beach about a hundred years ago." The ship wreck has always attracted whispered and hopeful rumors of possible treasure. Rumors that can be linked to another tragedy that seemed to be connected to the Argyll Queen: one of the survivors, "a Scottish sailor named Angus Gunn," settled not far from Rocky Beach, but was murdered there by four men in 1872 – all four of them were lynched before they could tell why they had done it.

A salient detail was that one of the men was the Captain of the Argyll Queen, which fueled the rumors he was after something Gunn had taken from the ship. There may be glimmer of truth behind these rumors, because what they found in the compartment was a long-lost journal that belonged to Angus Gunn and the seemingly mundane notations turn out to be hints to Angus' long sought after treasure. But they have some work to do and dangers to face down before they can lay their hands on their reward.

One of those dangers is an old, scar-faced sailors, named "Java Jim," who has an aura of the Old Sea Cook about him and appeared on the scene to claim ownership of the sea-chest the moment they laid eyes on it, but they refused to hand it over unless he could show proof of ownership – which did not sit well with the sailor ("there's danger in that chest, you hear?") and comes back on several occasional to attempt theft. But he's not the only one interested in the search for the treasure: a mysterious individual is following them around in a green car and is identified by the local historian, Professor Shay, as one of his former assistants who served a prison term for attempting "to sell valuable historical items from the Society's museum."

They also meet Mr. Rory McNab, a distant cousin of the direct descendants of Angus Gunn, which are respectively Mrs. Flora Gunn, a widow, and her young son, Cluny, who still life on the estate he left behind – which is called Phantom Lake. As the Gunn family explained, the valley where their castle-like home stands reminded Angus of his old home in the Scottish Highlands and therefore built a replication of Gunn Loch there. They certainly could use the money that a treasure brings with it for the uptake of the place, but Rory is perpetually skeptic of the entire operation and does not believe anyone could succeed to find the treasure after more than a century. If there ever was a treasure.

Well, these people seem to turn up wherever Jupe, Pete and Bob seem to go, which includes an abandoned mining town and a mist enshrouded island with phantom-shaped trees.

Of course, they find themselves in several tight or uncomfortable spots as someone, obviously, tries to slow them down, but the most eye-catching aspect of the plot is how a bunch of teenagers accurately reconstruct seemingly meaningless notes from over a hundred years ago. Simply notes about purchasing lumber, stone and other items. They even track down several stores that are still being run by descendants of the tradesman who sold Gunn those items in the 1800s and there are several references how some archives and records from "before 1900 were lost in an earthquake."

So I really liked that aspect of the plot and reminded me somewhat of Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaka satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaka Murders, 1983), in which an attempt is made to figure out the true identity of a famous woodblock printer from the late 1700s and the clues were equally old and nebulous.

In short: The Secret of Phantom Lake is not as filled with the kind of dangerous or exciting situations as the previous two books I read, but enjoyed the historical frame of the plot and appreciated the larger cast of characters that Arden played around with. The revelation of the culprit and how some of the characters were not what they seemed came straight out of the least-likely-suspect playbook, but somewhat dumb down to accommodate a younger reading audience. Still, it was fairly well down and liked the overall story. So that's really all for this lackluster review.

Finally, I want to draw your attention to the review I posted just only yesterday, which took a look at one of John Dickson Carr's most overlooked historical mysteries.

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.