Le Secret de Venus

"Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy."

- Paracelsus (1493-1541)

Back in November of 2015, I posted a review of Crime at Christmas (1935) by C.H.B. Kitchin, a British novelist and affluent dilettante, who authored a quartet of mystery novels about Malcolm Warren – a lowly-paid office worker in a stockbroker's firm.

The first one of these four novels, Death of My Aunt (1929), can stake the claim of having weathered the sands of time and has been fairly well remembered by readers of detective fiction. During the previous decade, I regularly stumbled across comments or simple references to the book, which tended to be positive, even if some of those comments turned out to have been references to Richard Hull's similarly titled The Murder of My Aunt (1934). A common mistake in those days.

Well, I remembered enough of those days to avoid making the same mistake as them, but it would have been somewhat amusing, or gallingly annoying, if this shoddy introduction was followed by a review of Hull's The Murder of My Aunt – which would completely ignore both the opening of this blog-post and Kitchin’s Dead of My Aunt. I should probably start planning some of these blog-posts and reviews in advance. That's a missed opportunity right there. But that's enough palaver for one introduction. Let's get this review on the road.

Usually, the first entry in a series, even a short-lived one, suffers from several weaknesses: a writer is figuring out the ropes or a portion of the story is dedicated to delineating the characters, which tends to come at the cost of the plot, but Kitchin niftily sidestepped the latter in Death of My Aunt – in which he intertwined the introduction of his detective character with the setup of the plot. The title of the book probably gives away how he managed to achieve that.

Death of My Aunt finds Kitchin's nominal hero and narrator, Malcolm Warren, strolling home from his "two pounds a week" office job to his modest bachelor-chamber in Gloucester Place, which is where a telegram is waiting for him on his doormat. It's an immediate summons to the home of his tante a heritage, Aunt Catherine, for the upcoming weekend.

The reader is then given an introductory rundown of Warren's family and he tells how his aunt inherited half a million from her first husband, over which she had unfettered control and absolute power of disposition. It placed her in a position to crown herself "queen of the family" and Warren gives a list of those who "submitted to her rule." I thought this was an original, smart and double-pronged approach to both laying the groundwork of the plot and sketching a picture of the series character – which nicely intertwine from start to finish.

Some writers have been praised over the pass hundred years for their crisp, economic writing style, but the framework of this novel demonstrates there’s also such a thing as economic plotting.

Warren arrives fairly late at the home of his aunt, who has already gone off to bed, but she left him a wax sealed envelope, which contains a letter and a key to a bureau in the boudoir. The letter informs Warren that he'll find an investment book in the drawer of the bureau and she wants him to study its content, but insists nobody else is shown the book or told what's in it. So, of course, the key seems to have been replaced the following morning.

But that's not all. Warren also finds something in the drawer that he had, somehow, missed on the previous evening: a flat bottle of pink glass, "not unlike a large scent-bottle," which "bore an ornate label," stamped with the name of "Le Secret de Venus," in gold letters. When he shows the bottle to his aunt, she identifies it as "a very special tonic" and immediately prepares a dose by shaking some of the crystals in a tumbler of hot water, but the bitter preparation seems like a drastic measure to prevent any future diseases – because her body begins to violently spasm and dies in a matter of minutes. Warren is shocked by the sudden and swift death of his aunt, which happened when he was reading the pamphlet of the preparation, but the doctor is very suspicious and soon there's a police-surgeon, an inspector and constable buzzing around the house. 

A favored approach Warren takes to tackling the problems, which surround the sudden death of his aunt, is making lists or committing his thoughts to paper. So they can be "pruned of some extravagant offshoots." The first one, after the family introduction, has him deciding as what kind of detective he’s going to operate: a professional policeman or the brilliant amateur, which he calls a "plain man or superior person," but ended up deciding in favor of the latter – since he could not possible hope to "beat the police at their own game." So he passed on measuring footprints or hunting for cigarette ends to talk with his family and eavesdropping on the police. It's amateur detection at its most amateurish.

One of the things emerging from his narrative and meditations, is that Warren is not the stodgy, old-fashioned conservative that a lot readers think he is. I've always seen him being referred to as a conservative stockbroker, such as in this review of Death of His Uncle (1939), but he shares some of his very liberal views on crime and punishment – stating that he does "not believe in retributive punishment." He does not even believe "murder is always the most awful of all sins," but confesses he would "not be terribly distressed" if some of his least favorite relatives, like his Uncle Terence, were "taken away quietly and executed" – which is not very consistent with his opinion on the death penalty. Combined with him creeping about the house "like a guilty ghost," as he eavesdrop, writes and rummages, which does not make him a very convincing, or likeable, hero. Warren realizes this himself.

As the ending of the book drew closer, Warren has a moment of self reflection and admits that, so far, he has not been able "to lay a fair claim to any admiration" nor were his actions "worthy of applause." He also admits that none of his thoughts has been "illuminating in its grandeur," but promises that his "hour of heroism" is close at hand: he pens a false confession and uses it as bait as he tries to goad one of his relatives into murdering him!

If I had not known Death of My Aunt was the first in a series of four novels, I would have suspected Kitchin of playing a magnificent piece of bluff. Because Warren would have fitted the role of murderer and unreliable narrator perfectly. After all, who's one of the person who could have used the money? Warren! Not just for himself, but his mother and sisters would also inherit from Aunt Catherine as well. Who had a key to the drawer that contained the bottle? Warren! Who handed Aunt Catherine the doctored bottle of tonic? Warren! It could have been one of the most simplistic detective stories in history of the genre, which was only complicated because the murderer was purposely leading the reader down the garden path.

Well, the actual solution is competent enough for a debuting mystery novelist, but the finer details of the murderer's motive hung vaguely in the background, until it was brought to the foreground during the explaination, although it was clear from the start the reason for the murder came down to money. So that's hardly worth mentioning. However, what I should point out is how one component of the solution is never properly shared with the reader, which is the relationship between the murderer and the poison.

The poison in question, oxalic acid, has a practical use and Warren learns that one of his relatives has an occupation requiring that very specific poison, but the reader is never given a hint about this particular occupation of the murderer. Not as much as a nod. I think that could have been safely done, because how many readers would know enough about poisons to make the connection.

Anyway, in spite of the sketchy details surrounding the motive and some of the clues, Death of My Aunt is a good, interesting and well written debut novel. Its successor, Crime at Christmas, showed an improvement on the (minor) flaws I was nitpicking about just a moment ago. So I now want to see what Kitchin was able to do with Death of His Uncle and The Cornish Fox (1949), but, for my next read, I feel compelled to look at another mystery novel first. You can probably guess which one that'll be.

More Deadly Than the Male

"And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable... their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Second Stain," from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1904)

Four Strange Women (1940) is the fourteenth mystery novel in E.R. Punshon's Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen series and was republished only last year by the Dean Street Press, which means there's brief, but informative, introduction by genre-historian and fellow crime connoisseur, Curt Evans – who can be found blogging over at The Passing Tramp. It's was his introduction that convinced me to toss this one on the top of the pile.

In his preface, Evans goes over the plot and overarching theme of the story, namely the female of the species, which, as the title of this blog-post gives away, is often more deadlier than the male. A theme that compelled Ellery Queen to compile one of their better-known anthologies of detective fiction, The Female of the Species (1943). But that's literary a different story.

Punshon's exploration of the theme is described as a portrayal of the "darker potentialities in romantic relationships between men and women" and is, justly, likened to a darker, grittier reimagination of The ABC Murders (1936) by Agatha Christie, but what ignited my interest a mention of everyone's favorite mystery writer. The introduction revealed Punshon as a huge admirer of John Dickson Carr and he used to shovel a ton of praise on his work when he reviewed books for the Manchester Guardian, which is illustrated by a handful of quotes about The Hollow Man (1935), The Burning Court (1937) and The Reader is Warned (1939) – noting that readers should detect a "resemblance to the memorable Grand Guignol" from "Carr's shuddery shockers" in Four Strange Women. Indisputably, the man had an impeccable and refined taste for the detective stories! Let's see if the comparison to Carr stands.

Four Strange Women follows closely on the events from the previous book, Murder Abroad (1939), in which an important society figure, Lady Markham, engaged the services of Owen to perform a semi-private investigation into the death of a family member in France. As a reward, she would use her influence to get him an appointment as an inspector and private-secretary to the elderly Colonel Glynne, Chief Constable of Wychshire, but the night before his departure he finds a problem on his doorstep – brought to him by the impish looking Lord Henry Darmoor and his fiancée, Gwen Barton.

It's from them that Bobby learns of the sudden, inexplicable deaths of two of their acquaintances: Viscount Byatt of Byatt was found dead in his car, somewhere in the middle of Dartmoor, he had "been dead for a week or two before he was found," which made it difficult to find an exact cause of death. Second man to pass away under peculiar circumstances was Andy White, a second-generation millionaire, who was found in a cottage, "miles from everywhere in Wales," and he had been dead for at least a month. Before they were found dead, they were "getting rid of pots of money," which pertains to the women they were seeing at the time, but some of the expensive jewelry they had been buying has vanished without a trace – which definitely makes the sudden deaths of both men suspicious as hell. Lord Darmoor and Barton fear a mutual friend of them, Billy Baird, is marked for a third victim.

Evidently, the plot of Four Strange Women echoes elements from a previous entry in this series, The Bath Mysteries (1936), in which men who were forgotten by society were found dead in bathtubs. Punshon was apparently not done with exploring potentialities of thus subject, but used rich, successful society men as the victims for this book. And he threw the bathtubs out. 

Anyway, Bobby soon realizes that this case will place him between a rock and a hard place, because all of the women who had links to the dead men are friends of one another, but the worst part is that one of them is the daughter of his new superior – previously mentioned Colonel Glynne. As if the situation was not complicated enough, the charred remains of Billy Baird are recovered from the burned out debris of his touring caravan in a secluded spot of Wychwood Forest.

After this setup, the book begins to echo the story of The Bath Mysteries again, which is, structural an early serial killer novel, but dressed as a police procedural and Four Strange Woman is not much different in that regard. Bobby occupies himself with talking to the people he encounters and poking between the wreckage of the destroyed lives he finds, which allows him to slowly build up a picture of the murderer. However, I would hardly call the slow, plodding advance to the truth a Carrian tale of shocks, shudders and horrors. There are a number of characters who claim that "the powers of hell have broken loose" or how there was "some horror they dared not contemplate," but the atmosphere was only stated as being terrifying and the only genuine piece of Grand Guignol revealed itself in the final chapters of the book – when Bobby tumbled down and explored a dark basement. What he found there uncovered a cleverly hidden plot-thread.

Plot-wise, that plot-thread also gave the book a new and interesting prospective, because it basically turned the entire story in one big prologue to that second plot-thread. Even more interesting, Punshon could have written a detective story that revolved and began with the discovery in the basement, which would have involved the same plot-strands and cast of characters, but would have made for a completely different story – using the serial killer-angle as a dish of clue-sprinkled red herrings in the background. I found that to be a curious, but interesting, aspect of the overall plot of the story.

In any case, Four Strange Women is notable as an early example of the serial killer novel, which would become a cornerstone of the contemporary, post-WWII crime novel. It's kind of astonishing that a man from Punshon's generation, who was born in the 1870s and saw the emergence of the era of electricity, wrote detective stories in the Golden Age of the genre which seemed very modern or predictive of the modern crime novels of today.

But then again, it has been remarked how Fergus Hume's The Mystery of Hansom Cab (1886) and the short stories from J.E. Preston-Muddock's Dick Donovan: The Glasgow Detective (collected in 2005) have a peculiar modern feel about them. So maybe the modern crime novel is inherently regressive. Sorry, but I could not resist that small jab, which should not be perceived as a backhanded slight at Punshon. I've become very fond of his mystery novels and while some of his experimental works, such as The Bath Mysteries and Four Strange Women, will not always fully satisfy the purist, I can heartily recommend some of his more traditionally crafted stories, e.g. Information Received (1933), Death Comes to Cambers (1935) and Ten Star Clues (1941).

Doom's Caravan

"Eeee... what a luvly night for a murder."

 - Archie (Leo Bruce's Case with Four Clowns, 1939)

Alan Melville was a jack-of-all-trades in the world of entertainment and occupied many different roles around the stage, ranging from being a playwright and musical lyricist to acting and producing gigs, but really gained name recognition as one of Britain's first television personalities – appearing on programs like What's My Line? and hosting a satiric revue series called Alan Melville's A to Z. It was a rich, varied career, but one of the most interesting chapters from his rise to fame seemed, until recently, to have been largely forgotten.

When Melville was still a young man in his twenties, he wrote a handful of mystery novels reminiscent of the works of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. However, they rapidly vanished from the public conscience and eventually became so obscure that even the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, a veritable Who's Who of Who the Hell Are They, has no mention of Melville or any of his detective stories, which goes to show just how obscure he has gotten as a mystery writer – considering the site has pages for such unknowns as Pierre Audemars, Hector Hawton and Inez Oellrichs. One of the oldest mentions of his work I could find was a review from 2009 of Quick Curtain (1934), but the dust soon settled down and slowly began to accumulate again. 

That is until last year, when the Poisoned Pen Press, under the banner of the British Library Crime Classics, reissued two of Melville's six mystery novels: the aforementioned Quick Curtain and Death of Anton (1936). Both of them were well received and highly praised by some of my fellow connoisseurs in murder. So I had to sample one of those two for myself.

Death of Anton lifts one of the tent-flaps to give the reader a glimpse of what lies beyond the sandy rink of the circus, which turns out to be an ill-tempered tiger, jealousy and about half a dozen potential motives for bloody murder – all of them belonging to a troupe of potential, colorful and promising would-be murderers.

The story begins with an introduction of the circus artist who are in the employ of Joseph Carey's World-Famous Circus and Menagerie, which is owned and ran by the man whose name is plastered across the circus' banner, Mr. Joseph Carey. As the proprietor, Carey always puts his employees up in hotels or boarding-houses, but he's always to be found "on the scene of the battle," in a green-and-white caravan, which is where night-time visitors are seen whistling to a closed front door. According to the rumor-mill, he also received some (married) women and one of his nightly rendezvous got him in a knife-fight with an Italian high-wire walker. So that in itself would have been enough material for a single detective story, but there are more characters trampling around the circus tents.

Loretta and Lorimer were high-flying trapeze artists and had shown "a complete disregard for the laws of gravity" since their childhood, but, lately, Lorimer has been hearing rumors about Loretta and Carey. One of the places where they decide to have a marital quarrel is while flying through the air in the Big Top and they laughed "at the idea of using a net in their act." Ernest Mayhew is billed on the posters as "Dodo," King of Clowns, but without a face full of greasepaint he impresses people as a meddlesome inspector of education who lugs around an impressive looking copy of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) – which he does in order to create the impression of being an intelligent man who can afford to pay thirty shillings for a book. Lars Peterson is fond of a drink or two and is the personal trainer of Horace, "The World's Most Intelligent Performing Sea-Lion," and Miller used to be part of the circus’ main act, but is now reduced to being one of the ringside assistants and drinking. 

The star of the main act is Herr Ludwig Kranz, billed as "Anton," who performs an exciting act with his seven Bengal tigers, but one of them, Peter, engages Anton in a battle of willpower for dominance. So nobody is surprised when Anton's body is found on the floor of the cage, "red with blood," but a closer examination of the body reveals three bullet holes – proving he was not mauled to death by the tigers.  

Luckily, a policeman from Scotland Yard, Detective-Inspector Minto, who had been in town on a family-related matter: his sister, Claire, has a penchant for getting herself in trouble and had once hopped on a train to Milan, after Britons became very unpopular, to opine "in a loud voice that Signor Mussolini was an ass," but this time she had outdone herself. She had gotten herself engaged to a dull, colorless salesman of vacuum cleaners.

They also have a brother, a Catholic priest, to whom the murderer confesses his crime, but he's bound to secrecy. However, it suggests to Minto that the murderer must have been a Catholic, which is a plot strand that should have been expanded upon. It's mainly used to discredit a false solution, confine Minto's attention to a small circle of suspects and confirming his suspicion – by tricking his poor brother into revealing more than he wished to. So this clue serves primarily as a plot-mover. It kept the story going when a perfectly good and acceptable solution had presented itself to the characters, which could have easily taken the wind out of the sails of the story and plot.

It was put to use in service of the story, but I feel a clever clue could have been carved out of this fact.

Anyhow, the introduction of all of these characters, life in a traveling circus and Minto's investigation is told with zest and humor, which is filled with funny exchanges and winking at the detective story. Something that's demonstrated when Minto compiles a list of Questions and Answers to order his thoughts or when he (somewhat illegally) poses as a Housing Inspector to gain access to a building. Or when he removes (i.e. steals) a piece of evidence from a pawnshop. It makes for a fun, fast and mostly light-hearted story in the spirit of the comedy-of-manners and tongue-in-cheek style of mysteries, such as Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon's delightful A Bullet in the Balled (1937), but there's a rather dark, jarring side-note to the last quarter of the book.

Minto decided to set a trap for the murderer and he used one of the innocent characters as human bait, but this has horrible consequences and the fate this person suffered is arguably worse than getting shot, stabbed or bludgeoned by a killer desperately trying to get rid of some loose ends – which made Minto "most grateful for the five minutes' grace" the unfolding tragedy had given him. Well, he was sorry, "very sorry indeed," and there's a bit of a cop-out in the final chapter ("He'll be all right"), but the whole incident made Minto a slightly less sympathetic and fun character.

Well, that being said, I very much enjoyed the overall book. It was a fun, quirky story with an interesting backdrop for the plot and made good use of the tigers. I was able to identify the murderer fairly early on in the game, but the second plot-thread niftily tied every character and plot-points together – which resulted in a mass arrest, for one thing or another, which fitted the overall plot of the story. And that made for a good ending. Still, I would not give this one the full five stars that some have given it, but completely agree Death of Anton is a worthy addition to the British Library and one that's definitely recommended. Particularly if your one of those readers who's still mourning about the fact that you have run through all of the Edmund Crispin and Leo Bruce mysteries on your TBR-pile.

I do hope this review has done some justice to this book, because time forced me to bang out this review in a very short time. So there's my defense for the mistakes/typos that usually find their way into my blog-posts. Finally, I have a legitimate excuse for them!

An International Affair

"I have fought for the defense of order, in the name of justice, as soldiers fight for the defense of their country, beneath the flag of their regiment. I had no epaulettes, but I ran as many risks as they, and I exposed my life everyday as they do."

- Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857)

During World War II, a small group of British intelligence officers contrived a strategy with the objective of convincing the Axis Powers that an Allied invasion of the Nazi occupied territories of Greece and Sardinia was imminent, which was done to shift their attention and defenses away from the actual target of the Allies – the Italian-held island of Sicily. A daring piece of deception, which was codenamed "Operation Mincemeat," and the history books show it was a success.

The deception by the Allies was accomplished by simply planting false documents on a corpse, dressed as a downed airman, who had been given a new identity and dumped for this purpose on the Spanish coast. It was an outlandish plan that had been suggested by Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame, but the idea was not original to him. He had gotten the idea from a detective story.

Fleming compiled an inter-departmental note, dubbed by his superior as the "Trout Memo," in which he brought up the following suggestion that was used in a book by Sir Basil Thomson: a body clad in the uniform of an airman, "with dispatches in his pocket," could be dropped on the coast and landed there as a result from "a parachute that failed" – ending on a note that "there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Navel Hospital." The book in question is The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937) and the plot of the story pits the police of two countries against a gang of international dope peddlers.

The Milliner’s Hat Mystery begins with the inquest on the body of a murdered man, shot through the head, who was found in a barn by a couple of innocent motorists seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. Documents, papers and business cards found on the slain man identify him as "John Whitaker," but the addresses and phone numbers proved to be all dead-end leads.

So the coroner decided "to adjourn the inquest until the police have had time to complete their enquiries" and the time is well used to probe deeper into the case.

A fractured car window is found at a garage, several miles down the road from the barn, which was obviously damaged by a pistol shot. It proves to be the first of a handful of tangible clues that help them to establish the dead man's real identity. A man who turns out to have lived a double life: one as a modest accountant of the Asiatic Bank and the other as an extravagant man of apparently "private means," but it becomes apparent his income did not sprang from a legal source and this appears to be connected to a couple of American gentlemen, a Mr. Blake and Mr. Lewis – every piece of evidence indicates that the dead man may have been "taken for a ride" by them.

However, the most important scrap of evidence is found in a coat pocket, "a milliner’s bill from the Maison Germaine in the rue Duphot," a Parisian hat shop, which states "a hundred thousand francs' worth of ladies' hats" was spent by the victim! It was a clue pointing straight across the channel.

This is the point where the book begins to change into a different kind of story, but, to be honest, The Milliner's Hat Mystery can be categorized under a number of different sub-genres: an early police procedural, a semi-inverted mystery, a mild adventure/thriller yarn and a chase tale, but, in the end, I think it can best be labeled as a story about detectives rather than a detective story. Something that's demonstrated in the policemen who populate the pages of this book. 

Thomson's series character, a policeman named Richardson, who was introduced in Richardson's First Case (1933), has climbed the ranks to the position of Chief Constable, but he’s merely a background character here and his contribution to the investigation is limited to rubberstamping Chief Inspector Vincent's trip abroad.

It is Chief Inspector Vincent who the reader follows on his journey, peddling between England and France, as he and his French colleagues attempt to find the two Americans, uncover a corrupt politician and assisted the French authorities in shutting down "another of these poison factories," which, surprisingly, made for the best part of the story. The murder is not as solidly attached to the drug trafficking business as it first appeared and the explanation was poorly handled.

But maybe I'm too harsh about that point, because the plot-threads regarding the drug smuggling business seem to indicate that Thomson did not set out to write a traditional murder mystery. The murder and opening chapters impressed me as a vehicle to explore the problem of drugs, dope pushers and their victims. Usually, these drug-related plot-threads hovered discretely in the background of classic detective stories, such as Agatha Christie's Peril at End House (1932), Ngaio Marsh's Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) and John Rowland's Calamity in Kent (1950), but here it was pushed to the foreground – even showing in one of the characters the devastating effects of a heroine habit.

So, while I would not call The Milliner's Hat Mystery a classic example of traditional crime-fiction, I would recommend the book on the strength of its historical importance. The Milliner's Hat Mystery not only provided an idea to an important mission from World War II, but genre-historians might also want to give it a glance as an early predecessor of the modern crime novel. On top of that, Thomson's writing is, even after eighty years, extremely readable. Martin Edwards noted in his introduction "there is a zest about the stories," which, surprisingly, came from "a man in his seventies." I agree. In this regard, Thomson seems to have been the equivalent of Rex Stout, whose stories from the 1980s were as crisp and readable as those from the first decades of his writing career.

Well, that’s the end of this review and the next one will probably be of something slightly more traditional than The Milliner's Hat Mystery.

The Fourth Alternative

"To every reasonable theory of the cause of his death they raised some technical objection."

- Inspector Arnold (Miles Burton's Death Leaves No Card, 1944)

Earlier this month, "Puzzle Doctor," who blogs over at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, announced he was embarking on a month-long Rhode-a-Thon, called #IReadRhode, which came shortly after my review of Death in the Tunnel (1936) and was swiftly followed by a blog-post about that book's immediate predecessor – namely the slightly disappointing The Milk-Churn Murder (1935).

Well, I had done my miles on the Rhode less traveled, but Death in the Tunnel and The Milk-Churn Murder both came from the Desmond Merrion series, published under the byline of "Miles Burton," and it had been a while since I read one of his Dr. Lancelot Priestley novels. So, I reasoned, why not use this convenient excuse of a Rhode-a-Thon to return to Rhode's work for a third time this month. The book I ended up with has been praised by the likes of Jacques Barzun for its clever, innovative and unique plot: Death in Harley Street (1946).

Death in Harley Street opens in the study of Dr. Lancelot Priestley, "an eminent if somewhat eccentric scientist" who "had adopted as his hobby the whole theory of criminal investigation," where a small clutch of his friends had assembled: a retired Superintendent Hanslet, Superintendent Waghorn and an elderly, successful general practitioner, Dr. Oldland – who found himself in a comfortable state of semi-retirement. It was not the first time they gathered in that study and it was tradition for Priestley to enthrone himself behind his desk, "apparently in a state of complete torpor," to listen to the problems of the police.

As the equal eminent Dr. Oldland remarks on this occasion, it's usually the pair of coppers "who take the floor and hardly let a chap get a word in edgeways," but on this particular evening he wants to hear Dr. Priestley's opinion on the strange death that befell one of his colleagues.

Dr. Richard Mawsley of Harley Street, "the leading authority on glandular diseases," was alone in his consulting-room when his butler, Phepson, heard a dull thud and the rattle of a door handle, which was followed by the faint, muffled sounds of movement from the adjoining dispensary. Suddenly, there was "a blood-curdling cry and a sickening crash." Dr. Mawsley was discovered on the floor of his dispensary, "writhing in agony," with the coat sleeve and cuff of his left forearm rolled up, which revealed a fresh puncture mark and near him lay the pieces of a broken hypodermic syringe – on the bench stood a phial, the rubber cap torn off, which bore a label identifying its content as strychnine.

Evidently, the gland specialist had been injected with a lethal dose of poison, but how this came about seems to be an unanswerable question.

Suicide appears to be out of the question: Dr. Mawsley was a reserved, self-centered man who loved to see his wealth accumulate and on the evening of his death he received incredible good news from a visiting lawyer. One of his first patients had remembered him in her will and he found himself the recipient of a generous, entirely unexpected legacy. A legacy to the tune of five thousand pounds. The lawyer, who was the doctor's last visitor, left him in the best of spirits, which is another strike against the possibility of suicide. Murder is equally improbable for a litany of reasons, but the most obvious ones are that there were no signs of a struggle or an opportunity for a nebulous murderer to enter (and leave) a room that was under constant observation.

So everyone, including the courts, settled for the easiest possible explanation, namely accidental death, but, as Oldland remarked, for "a medical man of his experience" to "make such a mistake was extraordinary" – even though it appears to be the only answer that made remotely sense.

Well, Dr. Priestley agrees that the case is exceptional and states that the circumstances exclude accident, suicide or murder and "a fourth alternative should be sought," which got him permission to reopen the case with Jimmy Waghorn as his legman. First the thing you’ll notice from the subsequent investigation is that Rhode gave more than his usual consideration to characterization and in particular the personality of the dead doctor.

At his best, Dr. Mawsley was considered as a man of "all head and no heart." A man widely respected in the medical world as one of the best gland specialist of his time, but this respect never extended to the person behind the reputation. At his absolute worst, he was considered to be "an inveterate fee-snatcher" and he had no interest in seeing people whose primary source of income was a weekly pay envelope, which resulted in the unnecessary death of several people.

So combine this piece of well-done characterization, especially by Rhode's own standard, with the baffling premise, as well as its clever and original explanation, and you got a potential classic on your hands, but what keeps the book from attaining a place in the first ranks of the genre is the conversational-style of the plot – which gave the story the pace of a dying snail. I do not believe the pace should take anything away from the shimmering brilliance of the plot, but there's no getting away from the fact that Death in Harley Street is an incredible slow moving story and you should keep that in mind.

As you probably gathered from this padded review, the conversational approach Rhode took to the plot and writing makes it kind of hard to make any pointed observation. Not without giving something of importance away. I mean, I noticed one part of the solution, which did not involve the fourth alternative, strongly resembled the plot of an Agatha Christie novel, but naming that specific book would probably give away the identity of the murderer and motive to a perceptive reader.

But rest assured, the book is well worth the attention of fans of vintage mysteries and if you happen to be one of those readers, like yours truly, who loves to play armchair detective than you'll enjoy trying to figure out what the fourth alternative is. In that case, the slow pace of the book might even be a positive attribute, because it gives you the time needed to consider all of the evidence.

For my next read, I have selected a detective story with a plot that reportedly contributed a piece of military strategy for the Allied invasion of Nazi occupied Europe.

Diablo's Domain

"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!"

- Villain of the Week (Scooby Doo, Where Are You?)

The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968) is the tenth entry in a long-running series of juvenile detective stories, starring "those three lads who call themselves The Three Investigators," but it was the first one that came from the hands of Dennis Lynds – a decorated crime-writer and pen-for-hire who operated for these books under the penname of "William Arden." He would become one of the three most prolific contributors to the series and his stories appear to have been on par with those of his predecessor, Robert Arthur. So let's take a look at his first story about those three lads.

One of three investigators, Pete Crenshaw, is spending a two-week vacation with Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, the new owners of the Crooked-Y Ranch, which is situated in the Moaning Valley of sun-soaked California and the place has a history as rich as a prospector's dream! The place had "earned its strange name from ancient Indian legends" and "some violent events of old Spanish days," but one of the old legends, sounds of eerie moaning coming from El Diablo's Cave, seems to have stirred from its slumber – after "fifty years of silence." But that's not all.

A growing number of ranch hands sustained injuries in suspicious looking accidents and their misfortunes occurred simultaneously with the return of the spooky groans, grunts and moans emanating from the bowels of Devil Mountain. Pete soon came to realization that his hosts, the Daltons, were extremely worried about the situation: an extensive exploration of the cave "had revealed no explanation" and "the sheriff could not pursue ghosts or legends." So Pete called in the help of Jupe and Bob.

The opening chapter of the book has Jupe, Pete and Bob experiencing many of the strange occurrences first hand, which begins when they hear a long, drawn-out and chilling "Aaoooahhhhhh—ooooooooooooo—ooooo—oo" coming from the mouth of the cave, but they also stumble across another site of an accident. One of the ranchers was surprised by a rock fall and is found with his leg twisted beneath a pile of stones.

I thought the opening of the story was a trifle confusing, since it began smack in the middle of these events, but subsequent chapters filled in the blanks and told some of the legendary tales from the region – all of them related to the honeycomb of caves inside the belly of Devil Mountain.

There is an old Indian legend about "a black and shiny monster," called The Old One, living in a pool deep inside the cave, but the most famous story revolves around the short life of an illustrious and notorious young bandit from the late 19th century. Gaspar Delgado was the last of his family and the land that was granted to his ancestors by the Spanish Crown was, acre by acre, given away, lost or simply stolen by the English settlers from the East Coast – which made the eighteen year old long "to avenge his family and regain his land." He became a plague to the region, scaring away tax collectors and raiding government offices, which earned him the nickname of "El Diablo," but he was eventually caught, stood trial and was sentenced to hang.

However, the story did not end there: El Diablo made "a daring daylight escape" from the prison and was wounded in the process by the sheriff and his posse. He fled into the titular cave and the place was surrounded by the sheriff, but the only thing they ever caught of the young bandit were the sounds of his grunts and moans coming from the mouth of the cave. A body was never recovered from the honeycomb of caves.

So one of the questions the boys are facing is how these stories relate to the moaning cave, but there are some practical questions that require some thinking. Such as why the cave suddenly stops moaning every time they come near it and how they can slip inside without being observed by the invisible watchman.

Well, Jupe is the brain of the outfit and he has to give these problems some thought. He does his thinking in a scene evoking the image of Sherlock Holmes from "The Man with the Twisted Lip," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), in which a bathrobe-clad Holmes sits cross-legged on a mountain of pillows and drags on his clay-pipe – while giving full attention to the case in front of him. Pete and Bob wake up in the upstairs bedroom of the Crooked-Y to find Jupe sitting cross-legged on the floor, "looking like a small Buddha in his bathrobe," with a large sheet of paper spread out in front of him. The paper is covered with pencil lines. Bob explains to Pete that he had been sitting like that for an hour and when he stirs back to life, Jupe tells them he was "ascertaining the exact topographical arrangement of Moaning Valley" and how the key to the solution "lies in the physical pattern."

Well, the rest of the book has them roaming around the cave, collecting bits of information and talking with the people in the area, such as a visiting history professor and an old prospector, which also places them in several dangerous spots – dangers that were somewhat reminiscent of what they had to endure in The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966). Like having a scare while scuba-diving and being trapped in a cavern. They were trapped there by a true legend!

All I can say about these adventurous bits and pieces is that they were, as usual, fun to read and made for an engaging story, but the plotting and clueing was a bit iffy. Arden made good use of the motive and found a somewhat original angle to it, but you can hardly expect children/young teenagers to deduce the exact truth from "the rough, blackish stone" Jupe "had found in the mine-shaft passage." No. It's not entirely what you think it is. That's where the second problem comes into play: one of the plot-threads, regarding the explanation, is not shown until the ending and that makes it truly impossible to piece together the answer for yourself.

The Mystery of the Moaning Cave should really be read and enjoyed on cruise control, because it is not as fair as an adventure-filled mystery novel as some of the others, but, regardless of that, still a very enjoyable read. So you still haven't seen the last of The Three Investigators on this blog.

Other books reviewed in this series: The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965), The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966), The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966), The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968), The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) and The Mystery of the Invisible Dog (1975).

The Policeman Cometh

"The true work, it is done from within. The little grey cells – remember always the little grey cells, mon ami."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Links, 1923)

Previously, I reviewed a mystery novel set in colonial Kenya and a collection of holiday-themed detective stories, which seemed like a fun theme to explore further and there happened to be a sundry of mysteries on my pile of unread books that would lend themselves to that end – such as the fittingly titled subject of this blog-post.

Murder Abroad (1939) is the thirteenth novel from E.R. Punshon's series of detective stories about Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen and was hauled from the bowels of obscurity by the Dean Street Press. As to be expected, genre-historian and professional mystery addict, Curt Evans, wrote an insightful introduction in which he pointed out that the plot of the story was "partially based on a then notorious unsolved crime" – a case that became "a press sensation" with "accounts of the affair appearing in newspapers around the world." It added an extra layer of depth to an already compelling and involved detective story.

Bobby Owen is engaged to Olive Farrar, owner of a West End hat shop, but his modest police salary and her meager earnings are hardly sufficient to found a household upon. Providentially, one of Farrar's dependable, socially-connected customers, Lady Markham, has a proposal for them that would net them enough money to get married. What does the proposal entail?

Lady Markham had a sister, Miss Polthwaite, who was living the life of an artiste-peintre in Citry-sur-l'eau, a picturesque village in the French Auvergne, but her seemingly quiet, peaceful existence was cut short when her body was retrieved from the bottom of a nearby well – a paintbrush was clasped in her hand and a picture was found on her easel.

Local authorities washed their hands from the affair and shelved the matter as a tragic case of suicide. However, the family believes she was murdered and the police admitted as much in private, but refused to state their suspicions openly "for fear of harming the tourist trade." A fear supported by a potential motive that's applicably to nearly everyone in the district: Miss Polthwaite was an eccentric bird and believed a revolution was on the horizon, "with guillotines in Trafalgar Square and everyone with any money shot at dawn," which is why she began to convert her money into diamonds – mainly uncut stones. Only problem is the police were unable to find any of them in the refurbished mill she was living in and her family is convinced she has hidden them somewhere on the premise.

If Bobby can find the stones, he earns himself an eight thousand pound finder's fee and Lady Markham has promised to use her influence to get him appointed as the private secretary of their local chief constable. So he finds himself on a "sort of a threefold mission," as he's asked to find the diamonds, the murderer and the truth, which has to do in an unofficial capacity and in the guise of a sketch-artist of the amateurish kind. But he has to do so in order to secure his future with Olive and soon finds himself descending on the unsuspected citizenry of the French village.

The detective work in Murder Abroad consists largely of talking to the locals and fellow visitors to the region, but Punshon provided Bobby with a palette of truly colorful characters. They make for "a formidable list of possibles."

One of the first people Bobby exchanges opinions with is the local schoolmaster, Eudes, who's a rabid anti-clerical communist and very eager to secure funds "to establish a journal of liberty and enlightenment." Diametrically opposed to him is Abbé Granges, Curé of Citry-sur-l'eau, who has wild dreams of restoring both the church and the faith of the villagers to its former glory. But he's not the only man of the cloth residing in the area: the hill-tops of the village have become the home of Abbé Taylour and there are whispered rumors of him being an excommunicated priest, but his presence seems to have no bearing on the death that took place in the valley below. The person favored by the villagers to fulfill the role of murderer is young Charles Camion, son of the proprietor of the local hotel, rumored to have been the lover of the dead woman and "needed money to realize ambitions Miss Polthwaite had herself aroused," but they were also overhead having a violent exchange of words. She might have refused to give him the money and as an answer he might have shoved her down the well. There is another young man, Henry Volny, who is the son of a wealthy farmer, but his father keeps him on a short leash and refused to pay for his dream of becoming a professional boxer. Volny was also a rival of Camion for the affection of a local girl.

Further more, there are several of Bobby's compatriots in the vicinity: Basil Shields is an artist who acted as the dead woman's art teacher and her renovated mill-house has been let to a Mr. and Mrs. Williams – who seem to be everything but reputable folks.

Finally, there is, arguably, the best and finest drafted character from the cast: a blind beggar, named Père Trouché, who heard so well that people doubted his blindness. I think Punshon missed a golden opportunity here to introduce a secondary detective to his repertoire, because Trouché would have shined in the role of a blind, homeless and disreputable detective character roaming the French countryside. Sadly, we have to settle for his memorable performance in this story and the great, but sad, sendoff he got towards the end of the story.

Anyway, a significant portion of the story consists of Bobby having conversations with this motley bunch of characters, which slowly expose the "many currents and cross-currents at work" in the once quiet and peaceful village – many of them "resulted from the Polthwaite tragedy." Bobby also spends time sketching and when his tired brain refuses to work he took long, tiring walks across "the slopes of the Bornay Massif." He also observes in these moments that playing detective is a lot easier when done in an official capacity with a machine, like Scotland Yard, at your back.

So this is genuinely a detective story with a strong, well-conceived holiday atmosphere, but the conversational plot, the brief excursions across the French hillsides and Punshon's wordy, decorative writing-style also gave Murder Abroad a pace similar to that of quiet, slow-moving mountain stream – which suddenly begins to rush violently towards the end of the story and places Bobby in precarious position. I've no doubt that this part of the story will cause some confusion, because there's a hoard of characters who apparently wanted to be in on the action and there's a moment where it's not clear who's responsible for what. However, the confusion is quickly dispelled and it becomes clear as to what happened to whom, but the best part of these final chapters is a very unusual scene involving the final moments of one of the characters. It's something you would expect from the very unorthodox Gladys Mitchell (e.g. Tom Brown's Body, 1949).

Anyhow, I have prattled on long enough and I'll end this reviewing by saying that Murder Abroad is a perfect read for the summer holidays, because the plot and story requires the reader to have several hours of leisure to stroll (not race) across its many pages and chapters.

Well, I have one or two more of these foreign-set, holiday-themed mysteries on the pile, but the next one will be a much lighter (and probably faster) read than this one. So you can probably expect the next review before the end of this week. Stay tuned!