Besieged in Paradise

"Look down the valley... I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn."

- Brother Morris (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, 1915)

M.M. Kaye was a writer of children's stories, historical fiction and tales of romance who was born in Simla, India, to a military family and her grandfather, brother and husband all served the British Raj, but as the wife of an army officer she also lived in places such as Egypt, Kenya and post-World War II Germany – which she drew upon for a handful of standalone mysteries that appeared from 1953 to 1960. This places the series in the twilight years of the genre's Golden Era.

The books are collectively called "The Death In..." series and they are known for their foreign, often exotic and sun-drenched, backdrops. So I figured my introduction to this series would make for a nice follow-up to my previous review of Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015).

For this purpose, I picked the fourth one, Death in Kenya (1958), which was originally published as Later Than You Think, because the plot description intrigued me.

Death in Kenya is set during a period when the Mau Mau Revolt, which the settlers of the day referred to as "The Emergency," was slowly ebbing into the history books, but the land was still rife with whispers of "remnants of Mau Mau gangs hiding in the swamps" and rumors how they were being fed by African farmhands – who fulfilled, by daylight, the role of "faithful and trusted servants of the settlers." One of those places, hemmed in by dark, perfidious swamps, is a small farming estate, simply called Flamingo, tucked away in the lushness of the Rift Valley.

The first chapter is dedicated to painting vivid, brightly colored pictures of the lush, sun-soaked habitat of the book, which are echoed throughout the entirety of the story. These descriptive passages evoke a sweltering atmosphere and give the reader a genuine sense of time and place. Kaye has been compared to Agatha Christie for simply being a female mystery novelist, but her apparent preference for sultry locations and talent to bring them to life places her nearer to writers such as Elspeth Huxley, Juanita Sheridan and Arthur W. Upfield than to any of the English Crime Queens.

Anyhow, the opening of the book also covers several generations worth of family history, which went over how the "acres and acres of virgin land" were turned into farmland and how Flamingo went from "a crude mud and wattle hut" to "a small stone-built house" and eventually the heap of stones were replaced by "a huge, sprawling single-storeyed house" with "wide verandahs and spacious rooms" – all done under the guiding spirit of the family matriarch, Lady Emily DeBrett. Who's known as Em DeBrett of Flamingo.

Opening of Death in Kenya also introduces the reader to the cast of characters who live, or have lived, on that farm in the Rift Valley. A number people who have died are mentioned, such as Em’s husband and son, but the persons of interest are the ones who were still alive when the story opened, which first and foremost consist of her grandson, Eden, and his wife, Alice – who sees Kenya as "a savage and uncivilized land full of brooding menace" and would love nothing more than to return to England. There's Gilly Markham, the farm manager, whose wife, Lisa, is in love with Eden. Alice also has a not-so-secret admirer: the adolescent son of their next-door neighbors, Ken Brandon, who has an "unsnubbable infatuation" for her and has threatened to shoot himself over her. There's also Zacharia, an old, grey-headed Kikuyu, who has served Em for four decades and Drew Stratton, a neighboring settler, who has seen action in the scuffles between the settlers and natives. Finally, there's Victoria Caryll, Em’s niece and formerly engaged to Eden, but she's still on her way to Kenya when a series of bizarre incidents culminate in a gruesome murder.

It appeared as if an "invisible vandal had been taken to haunting the house," an entity referred to throughout the story as "the Poltergeist," who had toppled over a K'ang Hsi vase, spilled a bottle of red ink on the carpet and one of Em's favorite long-playing records had been smashed into a dozen pieces. They were malicious acts of vandalism, but still fairly innocuous compared to the discovery of the stiffened cadaver of the housedog, Simba, contorted from the deadly effects of poison, which they fear is only a prelude to the murder of one of them and someone is butchered in the garden of the home with a panga – which is described as "a heavy knife that the Africans used for chopping wood and cutting grass."

Aftermath of the killing is largely observed through the eyes of Victoria, who arrives there several days after the murder. She provides an outside perspective to the events that taken place there, but her presence also functions as a complicating factor to the people at Flamingo and one of these factors is her lingering feelings for Eden. As well as the reason why he suddenly broke off their engagement.

However, this subplot of strained romanticism is only a small part of the overall story. Kaye takes her time to elaborately sketch out the characters and paint evocative pictures of their surroundings, but the same skill and amount of time is taken to plot and the result is satisfying enough – employing such clues the previously mentioned instances of vandalism, a blood-stained cushion, a missing piece of garment, fragments of piano music and bits of Shakespeare. A second death by poisoning occurred during a picnic and the murderer attempted to disguise the murder as an attack by a puff adder, which involved a clever piece of misdirection that could have potentially destroyed vital evidence. And the destruction of the evidence would have been done by a completely innocent, well-meaning person! Of course, for the sake of the story, that was not allowed to happen, but it's a very cunning trick that actually does warrant a comparison with Christie. Anyhow, the trick could have been elaborated on and used as the foundation for a completely different story. It's actually a pity the trick was buried in the other (admittedly rich) material of this book.

Kaye liberally smears a coating of suspicion on her characters and my interest was maintained throughout the story, which a beautiful and fairly well-balance of plot, character, setting and showing life in the colonies before they completely crumbled – which was done with such skill and talent that I wanted to go out and colonize some foreign, sun-drenched lands (who's with me?). I also loved that the solution showed Kaye as a poker player who was not afraid to bluff. Well played, Mrs. Kaye. Well played.

My only complaint is that the plot, more or less, uncoiled itself and the finer details of the motive can only be guessed at, but those are only small specks on an excellently written and competently plotted detective story. 

So you can definitely expect my return to this series in the not so distant future! 

Busman's Holiday

"It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, 1941)

Recently, I have made several references to Martin Edwards, an award-winning crime writer and genre-historian, who has been providing the Poisoned Pen Press with introductions for their line of British Library Crime Classics, but Edwards also edited a number of themed anthologies for them – such as a collection of detective stories that take place in the countryside and one about crimes perpetrated in the city of London. 

So I thought, why not take a stab at one of those anthologies and Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015) seemed like a good place to start.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle opened this anthology with a story taken from His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (1917), "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," which was originally published in 1910 and is set on the Cornish coast. Holmes has been advised to "lay aside all his cases" and "surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to advert an absolute breakdown." So he finds himself on an holiday excursion to Cornwall where he roams through the "traces of some vanished race" that "left as its sole record strange monuments of stone" and "curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife" – which is something that seemed to appeal to his imagination. Nonetheless, Holmes and Dr. Watson are quickly drawn back to old, familiar territory when a devil of a case occurred in the neighborhood.

On his early morning walk, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis crossed paths with the local physician, Dr. Richards, who informs him he has received an urgent call to hurry to Mr. Tregennis' old family home, Tredannick Wartha, where they make an unsettling discovery: his two brothers, Owen and George, acted as madmen and gave the impression of having "the senses stricken clean out of them." His sister, Brenda, "lay back stone-dead in her chair," but there's nothing in the home that could explain who or what "dashed the light of reason from their minds." The explanation belonged to the pages of the sensational crime/horror stories from the nineteenth century and breaks one of the sacred tenants of the Golden Age, but the old-fashioned murder method seemed to fit the ancient atmosphere of the setting. So that's a minor complaint and the story, as a whole, is still a pretty solid entry in the canon.

The second story comes from Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, who's best remembered for his rogue stories about a gentleman-burglar, named A.J. Raffles, but the characters he created to enforce the law appear to be all but forgotten today – such as the rather unique character who appeared in a collection of short stories entitled The Crime Doctor (1914).

Dr. John Dollar presents himself as a crime doctor and prefers curing criminals, "while they’re still worth saving," to traditional detective work and the story Edwards picked for this anthology, "A Schoolmaster Abroad," is an interesting example of the doctor's philosophy. Dr. Dollar is on holiday in Switzerland when he hears about a medical scandal: a local practitioner has been caught "prescribing strychnine pills warranted to kill in twenty minutes," but the practitioner is the same doctor who once saved Dollar's life. There's also the matter of a once promising young man who has become very sullen, downcast and apparently prone to near death experiences. Luckily, Dr. Dollar finds a commonality between the medical and criminal problem, which allows him to stave off the hand of a would-be murderer and this concentration on crime-prevention is what gives this story a rather unique angle – somewhat comparable to Agatha Christie's "Wasps' Nest" from Poirot's Early Cases (1974).

One of Arnold Bennett's short stories from 1927, simply called "Murder," is the third entry for this anthology and the story was far better written than it was thought out. The plot of the story revolves around two men, Lomax Harder and John Franting, who the reader meets in a gun store: one of them legally buys a firearm, while the other steals one. However, the stolen gun is used to commit, what is called is described in the story as a "justified murder as a social act," which leads the murderer to contemplate his act and flee from the possible consequences – helped by shoddy police work and Bennett's attempt at thumbing his nose at "the great amateur detective." I guess Anthony Berkeley, Leo Bruce and Ellery Queen have spoiled me when it comes to the fallible detective. Oh, and the story took place at seaside resort, which justified its inclusion.

M. McDonnell Bodkin was an Irish barrister, journalist, politician and writer of detective stories from the Doylean Era and his legacy consists of having created the first family of meddlesome snoops: the protagonists from Paul Beck, the Rule of Thumb Detective (1898) and Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900) married and had a son – who followed in his parents footsteps in Young Beck, A Chip Off the Old Block (1911). The story from this anthology, "The Murder on the Golf Links," was lifted from the pages of The Quests of Paul Beck (1908) and largely takes place on the titular link of a seaside hotel. Miss Meg Hazel takes Paul Beck into confidence about her engagement to Mr. Samuel Hawkins, a diamond merchant, but she has second thoughts about her promise and a young electrical engineer, Ned Ryan, probably influenced this change of mind.

As to be expected, one of them is found battered to death "in the great, sandy bunker that guarded the seventeenth green" and Beck seems to have stumbled across the evidence needed to secure a conviction, but did that piece of evidence he found point to the real murderer? The story is well written and the plot passable for its time (a bit iffy on fair play), but what endeared this story to me was the fact the final act (surprisingly) was played out in my country!

Hey, I love it when fictional detectives visit my country and, one day, I’ll get around to reading Gladys Mitchell's Death of a Delft Blue (1964) and Patricia Moyes' Death and the Dutch Uncle (1968). Just you wait!

Anyhow, the next story, "The Finger of Stone," comes from G.K. Chesterton's The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (1929), which takes place during a walking-tour in France as a group of three men arrive in the small town of Carillon – a place "famous for its fine old Byzantine monastery" and "having been the scene of the labours of Boyg." Professor Boyg is considered to be "a great discoverer," but recently has disappeared and some assume him to be dead. Murdered even! The explanation is typical of a Chesterton plot and the only that can be said against the story is that it was not Father Brown who came up with an answer for this conundrum.

Only two months ago, I reviewed Richardson's First Case (1933) by Sir Basil Thomson, who has recently been resurrected from the slumber of literary oblivion, but one snippet of his legacy has always lingered in the subconscious of popular culture and concerns the plot of one of his short stories – namely "The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser" from Mr. Pepper, Investigator (1925). The story revolves around Mrs. Fraser and her daughter, Mary, who "had been passing the winter in Naples," but her mother fell ill on the way home and they stopped at a respectable looking Parisian hotel. Mary is asked by the local doctor to fetch medication, but when she returns her mother has disappeared and nobody seems to remember them. The hotel room in which she had left her mother has completely changed and their name does not appear in the hotel registry!

I already knew the explanation to these problems, but I was still glad to finally have had an opportunity to read this historically important and influential story that has inspired (or fine-tuned) a famous urban legend as well as providing a premise for several detective stories – ranging from John Dickson Carr's famous radio-play, "Cabin B-13," to Simon de Waal's Spelen met Vuur (Playing With Fire, 2004).

The next stop in this rapidly expanding post is R. Austin Freeman's "A Mystery of the Sand-Hills," which is originally included in The Puzzle Lock (1925), but the story is not representative of his best work. Dr. John Thorndyke is taking a stroll down the beach when he comes across several "impressions of bare feet in the sand" and "a heap of clothes." It's the beginning of a curious case and Dr. Thorndyke uncovers the truth by closely examining grains of sand, which helped him understand "the character of the cliffs, rocks and other large masses that occur in the locality," but that was more interesting than the eventual explanation – which was extremely disappointing and unsatisfying. So lets move on to the next story.

H.C. Bailey is represented here by a short story, entitled "The Hazel Ice," taken from Mr. Fortune Speaking (1929) and has a plot reminiscent of the mountaineering mysteries by Glyn Carr. You can consider the story as a literary ancestor of Carr. The story takes place in an Alpine resort in Switzerland, where Reggie Fortune is holidaying, but he ends up helping the local police, represented by Herr Stein, when an injured hotel guest returns without his climbing companion – who was lost in a sudden rockslide. Bailey's descriptions of the Swiss mountains, possible dangers mountain-climbers have to face and the nature of the crime is what brought the work of Glyn Carr to mind, but also has solid characterization and interaction between Bailey and Stein, which made this a fun and fairly clever story. Even if it lacked basic fair play. But still a well-written and excellently told story.

The next tale was a bit of a rarity: Anthony Berkeley's "Razor Edge" was published only once in a short story collection, The Roger Sheringham Stories (1994), which was "an edition limited to a mere 93 copies." So this is really the first time a wider audience got to read, what is essentially, a brand new story by Berkeley!

Roger Sheringham is spending a couple of days at the seaside resort of Penhampton, where bathing in the sea is "notoriously dangerous" and as a consequence the local mortuary is larger than usual, because "swimmers are obstinate people." It's no surprise to anyone when the police has remove a body from between the rocks of a sunny, seaside cove and everyone assumed the man had simply drowned, but Sheringham reminds his host, the chief constable of Penhampton, that people had been murdered by drowning before – even though the small district had never seen a murder in modern times. Sheringham is proved to be correct and his hunch was based on some astute deduction about victim's cut lip, chin stubble, scratches on his back and his bathing suit, which makes this one of his triumphs as an amateur detective. A nice change of pace from being one of those fallible detectives and glad the story was rescued from complete obscurity, even if it was not as grand as one of his full-length mystery novels. And, hey, it's basically a brand new Sheringham story, which is definitely a huge plus in favor of this story!

The next stop is a short-short by Leo Bruce, "Holiday Task," which came from Murder in Miniature and Other Stories (1992) and takes place on the coast of Normandy, France. Sgt. Beef is described as "deliberately enjoying his holiday" when he meets an old friend, Léotard of the Sûrété, who's investigating the apparently accidental death of reputedly "the most detested man in the French prison system," but when one assumes the prison governor was murdered the case becomes an impossible one – because the question has to be answered how the governor and his car vanished from a guarded prison complex. It has a simple, elegant explanation, but one locked room enthusiasts has seen before in a story that's well known to us.

Helen Simpson follows Leo Bruce with a short-short of her own, "A Posteriori," which takes a comedy-of-manners style of approach to the espionage genre and the ensuing result is a very funny, scandalous and original story. You have to read it for yourself, because it's very short and going into details would probably spoil it.

The following story from this collection, "Where is Mr. Manetot?," was penned by Phyllis Bentley and was salvaged by Edwards from the pages of a long-forgotten anthology, Missing from Their Home (1936), which is filled with missing person stories. I have no idea about the overall quality of that anthology, but Bentley's contribution proved itself to be a small, shimmering gem of crime-fiction. The story opens with a brief report on Mr. Manetot, who has gone missing from his home, before moving to an unknown man in the lounge of a seaside hotel who has been listening to the report on the radio and pulls several sheets of papers from an envelope and begins to read them.

It's a written account from an unknown person who tells a story of how favor to a friend placed him in a position "to hang a murderer" and story gets progressively unsettling from there on out. There's one particular evocative scene, when the narrator peeks through a window of a locked door at a train station, showing Bentley would have made a good scenarist and especially loved how the whole world around him seemed to snap back to normal when he stopped looking. Conclusion of the story is well done and the open-ended conclusion worked even better. One of my favorite stories from this anthology!

The next story, Gerald Findler's "The House of Screams," was extricated by Robert Adey from an issue of an extremely obscure, illustrated publication called Doidge's Western Counties Annual and included it in Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990) – which he co-edited with Jack Adrian. Adey’s introduction to this story from that anthology noted Findler's tale showed "inventiveness and originality," combined with "a flair for the dramatic," which "leaves one wishing he had written more." I agree with the opinion of the late Adey. It's an excellent story that can be read as a ghost story with a logical explanation. The nameless narrator of the story finds a rundown, overgrown house that's "wrapped up in solitude" and has a "To Let" sign on it, which is exactly a place he has been looking for the escape from modern life. He only wants "to write, write, and write," but one night his peace of mind is disturbed by the ghostly screams of a woman echoing through the house. The answer for the disembodied screaming is found in a locked attic room and in the local cemetery, which makes for a nice, atmospheric story.

I was reminded of John Dickson Carr's "The Dead Sleep Lightly," from The Dead Sleep Lightly and Other Mysteries from Radio’s Golden Age (1983), and the plot bore some resemblances to the second murder from the first story in this collection, Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot."

Finally, this collection closes with a short-short by Michael Gilbert, which is entitled "Cousin Once Removed," which can be categorized as a Hoist-on-Their-Own-Petard tale and concerns a man who wants to remove his cousin to cash in on their grandfather's inheritance. However, his scheme to commit the perfect murder proves to be a double-edged sword and he cuts himself badly.

So, all in all, Resorting to Murder is an interesting selection of detective stories that have not often found their way in similar collections, but (it must be said) most of the stories here derive their interest mainly from their historical significance or rarity. Not all that many stone-cold classics (except for Phyllis Bentley). I also missed one of the best and most famous of all short holiday mysteries: Agatha Christie's "Triangle at Rhodes" from Murder in the Mews and Other Stories (1937). Not a very original pick, but it's one of the stories of its kind.

Anyhow, I'll end the review here, because this has already been four or five pages of me sloppily typing about only a dozen or so short stories. My review of short story collections always end up being my longest blog-posts. I will try to have something shorter for my next post. So stay tuned!   

There Are No Minor Cases

"The deeper one digs, the closer together they are."

- Yor, the Blind Miner (Michael Ende's The Never-Ending Story, 1979)

The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966) is the fifth entry in a long-running series of fun, adventurous and imaginative juvenile detective stories about The Three Investigators, which was penned by the series creator, Robert Arthur, who only wrote the first ten of the total of forty-three novels – before passing away in 1969. But the general opinion seems to be that he contributed some of the best stories to the series.

I picked The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure as my next read from this series on the strength of this particular review and the book delivered on the promise of being a lively, roller-coaster of a tale. It was also a pleasure to learn that there was a seemingly impossible theft from a museum attached to one of the plot-threads, which is where the story begins for the three young investigators.

Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are un-mathematically outvoted, "one to two," by Jupiter "Jupe" Jones to exchange an afternoon of scuba-diving lessons for a trip to the Peterson Museum.

At the moment, the museum is hosting an exhibition by the Nagasami Jewelry Company and the centerpiece of the exhibit is "a special display of fabulous jewels," which comprises of the legendary Rainbow Jewels and an emerald-studded belt of heavy golden plates – which represents a combined value of several million dollars. Jupe is of the belief they could gain valuable experience, for "solving future jewel robberies," by trying "to figure out whether or not the Nagasami jewels could be stolen." However, the only piece of knowledge they can take away from their excursion is that Jupe was not the only person who gave the subject of stolen jewels some thoughts.

The trio of detectives went to the museum on Children's Day and as a result the place is swarming with Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts, which causes the place to drown in pantomime and "a bedlam of sound" when the lights are cut and alarm bells began to wail. Security immediately rushes to the center of the room and form a protective ring around the famed Rainbow Jewels, but when the lights come back on they discover that the glass case, which held the Golden Belt, is smashed to pieces – leaving a painfully empty spot where a treasure was displayed only mere seconds ago. But nobody seems to have been in a position to smuggle the belt out of the building.

No one could have slipped out of the back entrance, because "it had been sealed immediately after the alarm sounded" with "a guard posted outside." All of the windows had been bricked up when the place was converted into a museum and "everyone had been searched," but nobody was carrying the belt. The place itself was searched, top to bottom, but nothing was found. Naturally, the boys offer their assistance to the head of security, Mr. Saito Togati, but he dismissed them as "silly American boys" and stated "this is work for men, not for children." It seems they had no other option than letting this case slip through their fingers.

Luckily, they're soon contacted by their friend and mentor, famous movie-director Alfred Hitchcock, who has a problem for them to look into: one of his friends, Miss Agatha Agawam, is a retired author of children's fiction, but recently she has been plagued by the fabled creatures from her own stories – a gang of pickaxe wielding gnomes! They sneak into Miss Agatha's home to throw stuff about and she wakes up in the middle of the night to "the sound of someone using a pickaxe to dig," which seems to come from basement. She also saw the gnomes in her garden playing leapfrog and doing somersaults! 

As unbelievable as that sounds, Bob is soon convinced gnomes roam the place as one of them, "wearing a peaked cap" and carrying "a tiny pickaxe over its shoulder," is "scowling ferociously" at him through the window. It is decided that they should hold a nighttime vigil to capture one of them on film or even attempt to catch one of them, but Bob has family obligations. So this ungrateful job falls on the shoulders of the other two and their encounter (and scuffle) with the gnomes must have given some of the youngest readers of this series nightmares.

It's an encounter leading them straight to an abandoned, rundown and bat-infested theatre, which is where Jupe and Pete find both an explanation for the gnomes and a considerable amount of danger – one of those dangerous spots provided an image for the cover-illustration. I really like that cover image!  

I’ll refrain from elaborating on the thriller-ish and adventurous parts of the story, which you should discover and enjoy for yourself, but I have to commend Arthur for his excellent and convincing motivation. I guess most of you can probably deduce the true nature of the gnomes and how it related to certain plot-threads, but Arthur uses them to full effect and provides a logical answer as to why there are so many of them in the neighborhood. I thought it made sense. 

It's still extremely pulpy and carny, but the good kind of pulp. Like something from a Fredric Brown story. 

Finally, there's the impossible theft from the museum, which is most prominently used in the opening and closing chapters of the book, but the truly enjoyable parts of this plot-thread are the many proposed solutions. Before the theft happened, Pete suggested a method echoing Hergé's Le Sceptre d'Ottokar (King Ottokar's Sceptre, 1939) and Jupe's first explanation was a variation on Edgar Wallace's "The Missing Romney," which I read in Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990). David Renwick used a very similar explanation for the Jonathan Creek episode The Scented Room (1998).

The final explanation for the impossible theft was fairly routine and the false explanations were definitely better, but I won't complain about that, because the overall story was solid and fun to read. So I'll continue to dip in and out of this series for the foreseeable future.

I also reviewed the following books from this series: The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965), The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966), The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966), The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) and The Mystery of the Invisible Dog (1975).

A Barrel Full of Red Herrings

"A quarrel is like buttermilk: once it's out of the churn, the more you shake it, the more sour it grows."

- proverb 

On the tail of my review of Death in the Tunnel (1936), the Puzzle Doctor announced his embarkation on a month-long Rhode-a-Thon and Vintage Pop Fictions posted an enticing review of Death at Low Tide (1938), which managed to immediately lure me back to the works of John Street – who penned over a hundred of plot-driven mystery novels as "John Rhode," "Miles Burton" and "Cecil Waye." Initially, I wanted to read one of his Dr. Lancelot Priestley novels, but ended up settling for the book that preceded Death in the Tunnel.

The Milk-Churn Murder (1935), alternatively known as The Clue of the Silver Brush, began very promising as the opening chapter painted a charming picture of rural dairy farming in "the small hamlet of Tolsham." A place called Starvesparrow Farm, owned and run by the short-tempered Mr. Hollybud, is used an example to illustrate how the milk is transported from the local farms to the dairies for processing.

But one day, the working routine is broken by a sensational and gruesome discovery that "set the police a problem which at one time it seemed they would never solve."

The break in routine came when a lorry-driver from the dairy picked up an extra, unaccountable milk-churn from Mr. Hollybud's farm and at first glance the content seems to be pig-wash, but the "curious liquid" turns out to be something more disgusting than simple pig-wash – a pottage of milk, water, formalin and the dismembered body parts of a man. Only the head was missing! There were also an assortment of particulars found in the churn: a sharpened, ivory-handled carving-knife, an old leather wallet, horn-rimmed spectacles without lenses, a railway guide and a key to a hotel room, which were wrapped inside a blood-stained flannel vest. Some of these items also had initials scrawled on them, namely "A.L.S."

Chief Constable of Wessex immediately put in a call for assistance to Scotland Yard and that same afternoon Inspector Arnold from the Criminal Investigation Department arrived in the vicinity, but there's barely a chapter between his primarily investigation and him sending an invitation to his friend, Desmond Merrion – who has made a name for himself as an amateur detective. Here's where the story slowly began to sour for me.

Merrion comes to the conclusion that "the murderer is a pretty cunning bloke," but is also "one of those people who can't resist the temptation to gild the lily" and seems to be very "fond of red herrings," which he seems to have dragged across every trail they uncovered.

However, the first problem is that Merrion seems a bit too omniscient when it comes to separating the manufactured pieces of evidence from the real ones. Or when correctly guessed there might have been as second person who left bread crumbs for the police to find. It also makes you wonder why the murderer did not simply drove the innocently looking milk-churn to a quiet, remote and rarely frequented spot in the English countryside and simply buried it, but that would have been entirely forgivable as the investigate parts of the story were not bad – which seems to be the best parts of the Miles Burton books.  

What I have a problem with is that the murderer turned out to be an unknown element in the story and only made an appearance when this person was identified, but the story did not end there. Unmercifully, the plot began to drag itself out and two additional bodies failed to sustain or renew my interest in the story. One of the murders was suppose to make it very personal for one of the detectives, but the personal note of the second murder was not done very convincing and the final murder, presented as a suicide, was very frustrating – because it stretched the story out over another chapter. Even the inspector eventually remarked that he was "sick to death of this infernal case."

Considering the renewed interest in Rhode/Burton, I really wish I had a better story to report back on, but this is what I found and it simply was not that good. I might take down a third Rhode/Burton title later this month and hope it'll even out this negative review, but The Milk-Churn Murder is a title that can only really be recommended to completists.

Hopefully, I'll have something better for my next blog-post.

The Golden Link

"You will consider your verdict."

-  Mr. Justice Springfellow (Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve, 1940)

As you can probably deduce from my 2013 review of The Benevent Treasure (1956), I was not overly impressed with Patricia Wentworth and have ignored her work ever since, but Rupert Heath from Dean Street Press ever so kindly provided me with a review copy of one of her standalone novels – which sounded more appealing than any of her Miss Silver stories.

Silence in Court (1945) is the book in question and this brand new edition is prefaced by our very own genre-historian, Curt Evans, whose brief introduction is packed with potential material for a biography about Wentworth's family.

Wentworth was born to an Angelo-Indian military family during the heyday of the British Raj. Both her father and uncle had distinguished careers in the army, but perhaps the most interesting snippets of her family history concerned the lives of one of her stepsons and a younger brother during World War I and II.

One of her stepsons, George Dillon, was mining in Colorado when war was declared and he "worked his passage from Galveston, Texas to Bristol, England as a shipboard muleteer" and died at the Somme in 1916 – when he was only 29. Her younger brother, Hugh Elles, rose to the rank of brigadier-general in the Great War and "he was tasked with leading the defense of southwestern England" during the Second World War, which would have been an important role if the Battle of Britain had been fought on land instead of in the air.

So I thought that was a genuinely interesting part of Wentworth's family life, but how did the book itself measure up to my previous experience? Well, it was without a question better than The Benevent Treasure.

The protagonist of Silence in Court is a young woman, named Carey Silence, who suffered from shock when the train she was traveling in was machine-gunned from the air by the Nazis. She was told to take several months of rest, but her employer had been killed in the attack and was effectively out of a job, which in her case meant she had "no more than three pounds to cover the three months during which she had been ordered not to work." Fortuitously, a cousin and childhood friend of Carey's late grandmother, a Mrs. Honoria Maquisten, saw her name in the papers and offered the penniless girl a room in her London home.

Carey is not the only relative who lives under Honoria's roof: she has two live-in nieces, Nora Hull and Honor King, and two nephews, but only Dennis Harland, a wounded RAF pilot, has a room there – a second nephew, Robert Maquisten, is merely a regular visitor to the place. Finally, there's a starchy nurse, called Magda Brayle, and Honoria's fiercely loyal maid, named Ellen.

What binds this household together, referred to by one of the characters as "the golden link," is Honoria's petulant game of musical chairs with the prospective inheritors of her small fortune.

Honoria summons about twice a month her solicitor, Mr. Aylwin, to do "a little juggling with her will," which she does for no other reason than her own amusement, but everyone is well aware that "some day the music will stop" and "somebody won't have anything to sit down on." Carey soon becomes a favorite in this game of Honoria and is written into her will. However, the situation changes as quickly as predicted, but this time there seems to have been a tangible reason for her change of mind, which came in the form of a hand delivered letter – a letter that made her bristle with anger. Only problem is that her solicitor is abroad and her will is locked away in his safe. So she summoned his managing clerk and "dictated provisions for bequests dividing her property into four," but her comes the kicker, there were "blanks left for the insertion of the names of the legatees." Someone was about to be disinherited, but they did not know who until the document was officially signed and witnessed.

Honoria gave a cryptic hint when "she quoted a proverb about going up with a rocket and coming down with a stick," but somebody refused to allow her to affix her signature to yet another will and tempered with her sleeping draught – making sure "she had about three times the number of tablets she ought to have taken." The person the police holds responsible for this is Carey.

The introduction of the characters, setting up Honoria's death and a short investigation by a rather annoying police-inspector gobbles up the first half of the book, which makes for a very character-driven detective story. Second half finds Carey in court and this portion of the book flip-flops between a good, well-written courtroom drama and a dry, repetitive courtroom procedure that kept going over the same events. Or wanted to assert how angry Honoria actually was upon receiving the letter.

However, the only real problem and weakness of this half of the story is the surprise witness, who popped-up like a jack-in-the-box, which was needed to free Carey and identify the guilty party. I thought that was blemish on the plot and overall story.

Otherwise, Silence in Court was a better story than I expected and feel compelled now to take a third shot at Wentworth. So recommendations are more than welcome.

Devilish Conspiracy

"The affair attracted enormous attention at the time, not only because of the arresting nature of the events, but even more for the absolute mystery in which they were shrouded."

- Freeman Wills Crofts' "The Mystery of the Sleeping Car-Express" (1921), collected in The Mystery of the Sleeping Car-Express and Other Stories (1956)

I have covered John Street, or "John Rhode," before on this blog, but not as often as I would have liked to.

Rhode had a technical mind and he could be described as a mechanic of detective fiction who engineered and constructed over a hundred tricky plots, which was not necessarily restricted to his own body of work – as he was credited by John Dickson Carr as the co-author of Fatal Descent (1939) for his relatively small, but very technical, contribution to the plot. But his reputation as a wholesaler of clever and ingenious contrived plots is best illustrated in an anecdote from Christianna Brand. She once suffered from a pesky case of writer's block and Rhode kindly offered the then young novelist to come down to his place, examine his bookshelves and help herself to one of his plots. Assuring her that she was "most welcome" to do so. What a gentleman!

Evidently, Rhode was a man who knew his way around a plot and his output was probably the closest you could get to an emporium of nefarious schemes, devilish plots and cleverly fabricated puzzles, but they tended to be technical in nature – which earned him an undeserved reputation in the post-World War II landscape of the genre as a boring, sleep inducing writer. You only have to read such titles as The House on Tollard Ridge (1929), Death on the Board (1937) and Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943) to know how wrong the detractors of the so-called humdrum writers were about Rhode. He was first and foremost a plotter, which meant characterization often took a backseat in favor of the plot.

One of the negative side effects of being reputedly dull was Rhode's name sliding into obscurity and a large swath of his work became rare or fairly hard to get, which naturally meant prize-tags with double, triple or even quadruple digits scrawled on them – effectively keeping them out of the hands of ordinary readers. So I have been carefully rationing the small stack of his books acquired over the years, but, recently, they appear to have reached the front of the line of Golden Age mysteries that were waiting to be reprinted. That brings us to the subject of today's review.

Death in the Tunnel (1936) originally appeared under Rhode's second byline, "Miles Burton," which has recently been republished by the Poisoned Pen Press as a British Library Crime Classic and is prefaced with an excellent introduction by Martin Edwards – who recently swooped up an Edgar statuette for The Golden Age of Murder (2015).

Sir Wilfred Saxonby is the president of an import company, Wigland & Bunthorne Ltd, who serves his community as the chairman of the local Bench of magistrates, but he "was a man of temperate" and "frugal habits." As a magistrate, his philosophy was that "the law was an excellent thing" and considered himself "a firm supporter of it," but it was made for a different class of people and did not always felt bound by it himself – which did not prevent him from being reluctant "to temper justice with mercy" when acting in the capacity of magistrate. So not exactly "the sort of character who inspires affection."

There seems to have been something very irregular on Sir Wilfred's mind when he boarded the train from London's Cannon Street to his home in Stourford for the very last time. He pressed a one-pound note in the hands of the train guard, Mr. Turner, to find him a first-class carriage to himself, which he was able to do and locked him into the compartment. Sir Wilfred is left to his own devices, but when Turner returns to the supposedly secure and impromptu private-compartment he discovers the body of his once generous passenger. Shot through the heart!

Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is assigned to the case and the problem confronting him is rife with contradictory evidence. The death of Sir Wilfred is either a case of suicide or murder. There are some points in favor of the former: a small, automatic pistol engraved with his initials is found near the body, the request for private carriage that was locked and he sent his children abroad – which could have been done to make sure that they would not be suspected if the authorities mistook his death for a murder. Only problem is that he lacked a clear and conceivable motive for taking his own life. Business was thriving and he was opposed to the idea of suicide, but the presence of a mysterious murderer seems, literarily, an impossibility.

So Arnold turns to his good friend, Desmond Merrion, who's "something of an amateur criminologist" and even he remarks how "there is at least as much evidence in support of the theory of suicide as there is against it," which makes for an engrossing and meticulous investigation – as they sift through the evidence and hypothesize about the various clues. The best part of their investigation is figuring out what exactly happened when the train went into the titular tunnel on that fateful journey. A situation that forms the meat of the impossible situation of the plot.

When the train entered the Blackdown Tunnel, the driver claims to have been "held up by a man waving a red lamp," assuming it was simply someone working on the line, and "clapped on the brakes," but then the light changed to green and the train rattled on without losing too much time. There is, however, one peculiarity about this seemingly unimportant incident: nobody was reported or scheduled to work in the tunnel at the time and "some unauthorized person" could not have entered the tunnel, because at each end there's a signal cabin and "nobody could possibly get in without being seen by the men on duty."

My favorite part of the book is probably the exploration of the tunnel as trains murderously roared past them and more than once they had to crawl into one of refuges in the wall for safety. Arnold and Merrion are well rewarded for braving these dangers, because they discover some important pieces of evidence, such as shattered fragments of glass, which seem to indicate Sir Wilfed was the victim of a vast, strange and sinister conspiracy. But even better is the explanation they work out for entering and leaving a sealed and watched train tunnel, which does not hinge upon a spare uniform from a railway worker.

The method is very involved and perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, but you have to admire Rhode for finding a hidden Judas window inside a train tunnel!

Anyway, Death in the Tunnel concerns itself almost entirely with the reconstruction of the shooting and the particulars found on the body, which is both a major strength and weakness of the book. If you love pure, unadulterated detective work this book is for you, but, as a consequence, even I found the characters to be cardboard-like. I can usually forgive shallow characterization, if the plot is good, but even I can't deny the characters here where nothing more than chessmen. Death in the Tunnel is also primarily a how-dun-it and this came at the cost of the who and why, which is what bars the book from a place in the top ranks of the genre because the plot-thread explaining the motivation for this admittedly devilish ingenious conspiracy was introduced in the final part of the story.

I believe that could've been handled a bit better by a professional plotter, which Rhode was, but, if you read the book purely as a how dun it, they become fairly minor complaints. Above all, it's simply a lot of old-fashioned fun to read how Arnold and Merrion take apart the mechanics of a very tricky criminal conspiracy. It makes for an engaging and involved reading experience.  

Finally, Death in the Tunnel also made me want to read more from the so-called school of humdrum detectives, which even include writers I have not even touched yet! Scandalous, I know. How dare I label myself as rabid and fanatical when it comes to vintage mysteries, but give me some time. I'll get there and, in the mean time, you can look forward to more of these reviews. Oh, you lucky, you!