A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."

- Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972) is numbered eighteen in a prolific series of juvenile mystery-and adventure stories about a "trio of lads," who refer to themselves as The Three Investigators, which was written by the late Dennis Lynds – a decorated crime-writer and pen-for-hire who operated for this series under the num-de-plume of "William Arden."

Arden entered a surprisingly cerebral and complex tale into this series, which employed such traditional plot-devices as a hidden object puzzle, a locked room mystery and even a dying message!

The story begins when Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews accompany Uncle Titus, of the Jones Salvage Yard, on a business related trip to the old, largely empty home of Professor Carswell in Remuda Canyon on the outskirts of Rocky Beach, California. Professor Carswell rented out the old caretaker's cottage to make ends meet, but the last tenant, Joshua Cameron, suddenly passed away and never fully settled the bill. So the professor hopes to recuperate a few dollars by selling Cameron's meager, earthly possessions to Uncle Titus.

What they find is a collection of trifling, nickel-and-dime items such as an old-fashioned dress suit, paint supplies, a stuffed owl, a small statue of Venus and a pile of twenty canvases – all of them depicting the cottage from various distances and this gives the illusion of a shrinking house. Or is it really shrinking? In any case, it is the work of an amateur and as worthless as most of the stuff the reclusive artist left behind, but Jupe, Pete and Bob quickly come to the conclusion that "everyone is interest in him" now "that he's dead." After all, they witnessed a shadowy figure fleeing from the home of the professor and tried to chase it, but, pretty soon, they find themselves a client who has a personal tie to the poor man's legacy of the dead artist.

One afternoon, the Jones Salvage Yard receives an important visitor: a Countess and her debonair-looking estate manager, Mr. Armand Marechal. She identifies herself as the sister of the dead painter and wishes to buy back the personal belongings of her brother, but the boys discover that most of his stuff has already been resold – even the pile of canvases. So the Countess and Mr. Marechal task the trio of young sleuths to help them find all of the buyers, which they first attempt to do with something they call a Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup.

The Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup is a system in which each of the boys call five (outside) friends and ask them to keep their eyes peeled for something or someone, but not before each of them called five of their friends with the same request – which could, potentially, mobilize every kid in Rocky Beach and some as far as Los Angeles. In theory, it's pretty similar to the way in which Sherlock Holmes employed his Baker Street Irregulars (e.g. The Sign of Four, 1890), but, as can be seen in this book, the system is prone to error and liable to attract unwanted attention.

First of all, a misunderstanding in the message that was send out resulted in the yard being swarmed with children, but a misunderstanding in the communiqué they send out swarmed the salvage yard with children. It also caught the attention of two dubious characters: the first one is their long-time nemesis, "Skinny" Norris, who appears to be in possession of one of old Joshua Cameron's last works and wants to know what all the fuzz is about. The second person is a compatriot of mine, Mr. De Groot, who introduces himself as an art dealer from the Netherlands and shows a great deal of interest in the paintings, but he evidently has an ulterior motive as he places Jupe, Pete and Bob in some very tight spots – consisting of an escape from a hotel room and a flight from a subterranean tunnel.

Regardless of these obligatory spots of danger, the primary interest of the book lays in the intellectual challenges facing the teenagers. The first of these challenges consist of identifying what Joshua Cameron possessed that was so valuable to everyone and finding the place where he has hidden this coveted treasure, which directly ties-in to the angle of the dying message. On his deathbed, Cameron rambled deliriously about "zig when zag" and "wrong to zigzag," which proofs to be the key to a large chunk of the mystery. But there's also a locked room mystery introduced at the halfway mark of the story.

Over the course of their investigation, Jupe, Pete and Bob come across a local artist, Mr. Maxwell James, who has a peculiar problem of his own: an apparently haunted studio!

During the last few days, James found, upon his return to his studio in the morning, that "paintings had moved during the night" and "other objects were out of place," but there's only one problem: at night the studio resembles an impenetrable fortress. The studio is "a stone building" with "heavily barred windows and a massive iron door," which is equipped with a modern, burglar-proof lock – one that takes "an expert an hour to pick" and "there are no marks on it." The skylight did not open and the floor itself was of solid stone. Shortly put, the place is "a simple, solid, fortress-like room" with a single door as an entrance and exit. So how's it possible things got moved around in a locked studio?

Well, in order to find an answer to this seemingly impossible question, one of them, namely Pete, stays behind in the studio, hidden away in a supply closet, while the others lay in wake outside of the building. And this makes for a very interesting scene for more than one reason. Pete is crammed inside the small, hot and stuffy cupboard and he realizes, too late, that the heat is filling his cubbyhole with fumes from the cans of paint thinners and solvents – which made his head feel very light and he could not stop himself from dozing off. When he regained consciousness, he was not even sure whether he was actually awake or still asleep. It was as if "his mind seemed to swim in a thick haze" and the intruder appeared to him as an eerie, floating shape in a moonlit glow. Like an actual ghost.

So, yeah, I guess you can say Pete was unintentionally enjoying one of the recreational sub-cultures of the 1970s.

Anyway, the explanation for the mystery of the movement in the locked studio is fairly easy, but, combined with the other plot-threads, it was pretty satisfying and added to the overall quality of the novel.

The Mystery of the Shrinking House provides a surprisingly rich and intricate tapestry of plot-threads, which range from the (hidden) secret of the dead painter and his cryptic last words to the driving motive of all the characters and a small locked room problem as the cherry on top – which results in a really involved and complicated plot. Once again, I was pleasantly surprise to find such a plot in a series of detective stories targeting younger readers. One of the three best I have read from this series thus far! 

On a final, semi-related note: as a huge fan of Detective Conan, I found this page with illustrations from the Japanese editions of The Three Investigators to be both interesting and funny. The ones from The Mystery of the Fiery Eyes (1967) makes it look as if the series was a combination of Detective Conan and The Kindaichi Case Files.

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 Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972), The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) and The Mystery of the Invisible Dog (1975).

A Prevision of Evil

"...it was a dead face. There was a tap, tap, tap on the window. And then I saw a face, a dead face, ghastly and grinning against the pane. I screamed and screamed... and they said there wasn't anything there!"

- Mrs. Louise Leidner (Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936)

Last week, I read and reviewed The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929), which impressed me favorable enough to warrant an early return to Annie Haynes' novels, but the problem lay in picking one from a hand of promising looking titles – such as The Abbey Court Murder (1923) and The Bungalow Mystery (1923). Fortunately, the comment-section came to the rescue and recommended one that, up until then, had only been hovering in my peripheral.

The House in Charlton Crescent (1926) was suggested by Kate, who can be found blogging over at Cross Examining Crime, calling it one of Haynes' stronger mysteries where the puzzle-plot element is concerned. Quality-wise, it can definitely stand up to The Crime at Tattenham Corner. So let's take a look at the second of three books about her first series character, Detective-Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard, which began with The Abbey Court Murder and ended with The Crow's Inn Tragedy (1927).

Lady Anne Daventry is the main cog in the wheel of the plot of The House in Charlton Crescent and she's known as a difficult, cantankerous old woman, but "life had not been kind to Lady Anne." At a very young age, she lost both of her parents and was betrayed by her first fiancé, which lead to an uneasy marriage to Square Daventry and there were only two points of light in her life – the birth of her two sons. But then the First World War began to rage across Western Europe and they both perished "fighting for England and freedom."

On top of all that, Lady Anne's health began to deteriorate and chronic rheumatism made her home-bound, which turned her into "a distinctly cross and unpleasant old lady." However, the well drawn character-sketch of Lady Anne leaves room for some compassion and sympathy, because you can understand that someone with her back story would become "snappy and irritable" during the twilight years of her life.

If losing her only children and a permanent stiffness of the limbs was not enough to make her crabby and crotchety, she now has a good reason to believe someone has marked her down for extermination!

This unknown person doctored her pills, which her chemist found to contain enough hyoscine "to kill ten women," and poisoned her late-night milk, but Lady Anne wants to prevent a public scandal and engages the services of a private investigation firm – which brings Bruce Cardyn to her home. Cardyn is a junior partner in a respected firm and enters Lady Anne's household under the guise of her new secretary, but even he, as a complete outsider, appears to possess ulterior motives for being there.

On paper, there are more than enough suspects living or hovering about the place in Charlton Crescent: there are two nieces, Maureen and Dorothy Fyvert. The former is a mischievous, troublesome schoolgirl of twelve and the later is a young woman of twenty who was once dragged from a burning building by Cardyn. But now she is, sort of, engaged to John Daventry. He is the nephew of Lady Anne's late husband and succeeded to the estate when his two cousins died during the war. A recent addition to the household is Margaret Balmaine, the granddaughter from Lady Anne's husband’s first marriage, who recently turned up out of nowhere from Australia – which is a nice variation on the time-worn trope of the long-lost uncle from down under.

Well, this cast of potential suspects is further augmented by the servants: a loyal butler, named Soames, a pair of maids and the recently fired secretary, David Branksome, who still floats around in the background.

Cardyn took his place in Lady Anne's household, acting as her new secretary, while trying to figure out who tampered with the pill box and how to prevent this from happening again in the future, but he seems to be unable to keep the police out of the house – as a rope of pearls, worth several thousands of pounds, has disappeared from a hidden desk drawer. Detective-Inspector Furnival is called upon to investigate, but a crime of an entirely different nature requires his attention when he arrives at the place.

A large chunk of the household had gathered round the fire in the sitting-room for tea and hot cakes, but this cozy image is disturbed by two events: the first is that of an appearance of "a chalk-white face," outside of the window, "so close to the pane that it seemed to be pressing against it" with "a kind of vague, intangible mist round it." Secondly, one of the people who were present appears to have used this distraction to plunge a dagger in the chest of Lady Anne!

Detective-Inspector Furnival has his work cut-out for him and not only has he to figure out who used this very narrow window of opportunity to commit murder, but also who engineered the appearance of the ghostly face on the outside and this relates to a singular pair of footmarks – which were found in the flower border below the window. But there's also the theft of the pearls to consider and the witness testimony of a shopkeeper who swears it was Lady Anne who offered them up for sale. Or whether the person who wielded the dagger was the same as the person who attempted murder by poison. There are also additional complications when one of the family members goes missing, the secret of Cardyn and whispers of a mysterious Cat Burglar.

All of this makes The House in Charlton Crescent a busy, bubbling and brewing detective story, which has none of the pesky shortcomings that marred some of Hayes' other mystery novels. Such as loose, unexplained plot-threads (Who Killed Charmian Karslake, 1929), convenient, last minute confessions (The Crime at Tattenham Corner) or clues that were withheld or overlooked (The Crystal Beads Murder, 1930). It made for her most soundly plotted detective stories to date.

However, I have to nitpick about one thing: the ghostly face by the window and the manner in which the murder was committed has been compared to Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) and Cards on the Table (1936) by Agatha Christie, but Haynes did not deliver the Christie-like rug-puller of a revelation that the splendid premise deserved. As a matter of fact, the eventual revelation of the murderer's identity and motivation was actually pretty mundane and a bit of a let down, which is why I place The Crime at Tattenham Corner slightly above this (in spite of the convenient, last-minute confession), because it had an overall more original conclusion.

Otherwise, The House on Charlton Crescent is a well-written detective story with good characterization and a pleasantly busy plot, which only lacked that extra pinch of ingenuity that would have elevated the book to a different league.  

The Voice of Reason

"Our lives are drawing towards eventide and old faces and old scenes are gone forever. And yet, as I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, for a while the past rises up to obscure the present and I see before me the yellow fogs of Baker Street and I hear once more the voice of the best and wisest man whom I have ever known: 'Come, Watson, the game's afoot.'"

- Dr. John H. Watson (John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Red Widow," from The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, 1954) 

The 1930-and 40s are generally considered to be the glory years of the detective story, but what's often overlooked is that the genre prospered around the same time as radio dramas experienced their golden age and detective stories thrived as much on the airwaves as they did on the printed page – reaching an audience of millions of listeners.

During that time, there was a wide variety of crime shows to be found across the radio dial. Radio shows such as Suspense, Murder by Experts, Cabin B-13 and The Inner Sanctum offered episodic, standalone stories, but there was also a whole slew of recognizable sleuths who got their own regular program. These shows included The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, Casey, Crime Photographer and The Adventures of Sam Spade.

You probably noticed I omitted one very well-known and recognizable name from that short overview, but rest assured, I had not forgotten about the immortal Sherlock Holmes and the indispensable Dr. Watson. Who could forget about them?

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was one of the popular radio shows of the day, which ran from 1939 to 1947, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson – cementing a place for itself in the Holmes fandom. But enthusiasts of classic mysteries also remember the show, because the series was co-written by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green. Both men collaborated on another popular show, The Casebook of Gregory Hood, and Boucher himself was a very respected as both a mystery novelist and reviewer. 

During the late 1980s-and early 90s, the series experienced a brief resurgence when a whole slew episodes were released on cassette tape and these eventually numbered twenty-six volumes in total. However, the object of interest of this blog-post is the book spawned by this project, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1989), which consists of about a dozen short stories adapted from the original radio-plays by Boucher and Green.

Ken Greenwald is the author of the book and the introduction goes over how this collection of short stories came into being, which stretched all the way back to when he was ten years old, "tucked safely in bed with the lights out," listening to the show on a small radio next to his bed and these childhood memories came back in the late 1980s – when, as one of the archivists for a radio museum, he "learned of a long run of missing Sherlock Holmes radio shows from 1945." This lead to the episodes being released and his colleagues came to him with the suggestion of writing a book based on radio-plays, which was grateful task and the end result is a charming homage to the work of Boucher, Green, Rathbone and Bruce.

As Greenwald stresses, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is not a close imitation of the writing by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but instead tried "to be true to the writings of Green and Boucher" and utilize as much of their material as possible – which seems to have succeeded at. He also emphasizes that he adapted these stories with the original (voice) actors in mind and asks the reader to "think of Rathbone and Bruce in the roles of the great detective and his companion."

So now that we got that out of the way, lets take these stories down from the top and I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. I'm painfully aware that the size reviews of short story collection tend to resemble a bloated canal corpse.

The opening story, "The Adventure of the Second Generation," takes place after Sherlock Holmes retired to the countryside and dedicated all of his attention to tending his bees, but an extended visit from his old friend, Dr. Watson, coincided with a plea for help from the daughter of Irene Adler – who finds herself in the clutches of a blackmailer. She is being blackmailed by Holmes' awful neighbor, Mr. Litton-Stanley, who has "some rather indiscreet letters" in his possession and expects a small fortune for their return, but Holmes and Watson encounter a snag when they try to retrieve them. There's also a nifty twist towards the ending that I actually foresaw. A charming little story. 

The second story, "The Adventure of the April Fool's Adventure," occurred not long after the first meeting between Holmes and Watson, which makes the latter slightly uncomfortable when a friend, James Murphy, draws him in a conspiracy with the objective of pulling a prank on the promising detective. Lady Ann is going to call on Holmes and ask him to help her find the famous Elfenstone Emerald. Apparently, the stone was lifted from her wall safe and the joke is that all of the planted clues identify Holmes as the thief, but, after they all had a laugh at his expense, the stone vanishes for real – and he has to figure out who used the prank as a cover for the theft. You can probably guess the hiding place for the stone, but the real surprise is the secret identity of the thief.

I'm afraid I didn’t care for the third story, "The Case of the Amateur Mendicants," in which Watson is called upon by a woman, "dressed in rags and tatters," who, in a surprisingly cultured voice, assures she came on "a matter of life and death." So he allows her to bring him to a luxuriously furnished basement, strangely filled with dirty looking beggars, where he's shown a dead man with a broken neck. However, the people there are opposed to his presence and he quickly takes his leave, but, alongside Holmes, returns to that basement and uncovers a dark conspiracy that could endanger the whole of England. A story with an interesting premise, but I was impressed with the resolution of the plot.

Luckily, the fourth entry, "The Adventure of the Out-of-Date Murder," turned out to be one of my favorite stories from this collection. Holmes has been overworking himself and Watson senses "an attack of nerves and total breakdown approaching," which makes him decide to pull his friend out of his private laboratory for a holiday in Eastbourne. Both men decide to meet up with an old acquaintance, Professor Whitnell, who recently garnered fame with the discovery of a network of underground caverns – saturated with "a heavy deposit of lime" that have "the property of rapidly mummifying any flesh," human or animal, "deposited in them." What they find in them pertains to several men who went missing in the area over the past two-or three hundred years. I love archeological mysteries and this story should have been adapted for the Jeremy Brett TV-series.

The next story, "The Case of the Demon Barber," has a theatrical background and concerns a well-known actor, Mark Humphries, who is playing the lead role in Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but now fears the personality of Sweeney Todd has taken possession of his subconscious. Several times, he has woken up to find that his boots were caked with mud and his razorblade stained with blood. A good and tantalizing premise, but the attraction of the plot is mainly derived from using the tale of Sweeney Todd as a template and Holmes taking over the role from Humphries – after he apparently committed suicide in his dressing room. 

In "Murder Beyond the Mountains," Holmes finally tells Watson about one of his many adventures in Tibet, which read like one of Glyn Carr's mountaineering mysteries as perceived by Robert van Gulik. 

Holmes is braving the harsh conditions of the Tibetan mountains, as Olaf Sigerson, in the hope of getting permission at the monastery of Puncha-Pushpah to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa, but his traveling party and equipment gets obliterated in an avalanche – wandering delirious in the white, desolate mountains of Tibet. Luckily, he's saved by an American missionary, Miss Farley, who travels with him to the monastery and they're joined by a Russian envoy, Borodin. All of them seek permission to enter the forbidden city, but the Chinese emissary, Wah-tzun, refuses to give permission. So, before long, Holmes has to investigate the murder of the emissary, which is a relatively simple affair. The main strength here definitely lies in the backdrop of the story.

The following story, "The Case of the Uneasy Easy Chair," provides the collection with its first or three (borderline) impossible crime stories, which is brought to Holmes and Watson by a young woman, Miss Harriet Irvin. Her father, Sir Edward Irvin, was stabbed to death in his study and "the only entrance to the study through an anteroom," but that room was occupied by his secretary, Robert Binyon, who "swore that no one had entered or left the study." The problem is that Sir Edward was strongly opposed to the blossoming love between his daughter and secretary, which provided the young man with both a motive and opportunity. So the police arrested him on suspicion of murder. Well, the how-aspect of the crime is easily solved, but whodunit-angle had a small surprise that showed even Holmes was prone to misjudging a situation.

Initially, I really wanted to like the next story, "The Case of the Baconian Cipher," but ended up not caring for it. Holmes is engaged in a discussion with a French colleague and friendly rival, Francois la Villard, who asserts that "the English criminal is a very dull dog" and in order to prove him wrong Holmes introduces him to The Agony Column – which is "liable to contain anything from a lover’s frantic appeal" to "a ransom note." Immediately, they find a coded message that could be a call for help and this lead them to a house where a wheel chair bound man might be in mortal danger. But the only interesting aspect of the plot is Mycroft Holmes' off-page cameo and how this affected the events in the story.

The next story, "The Case of the Headless Monk," is a very atmospheric, Carrian tale that offered a borderline impossible crime to Holmes and Watson. A restless Holmes and Watson are bound to their rooms in Baker Street by a thick, impenetrable mist that drowned the city of London for the better part of a week, but rescue came when they received a visit from Mortimer Harley – a specialist in the supernatural. Harley has been presented with a rare opportunity to investigate one of Cornwall's legendary ghosts, the Headless Monk of Trevenice Chapel, which has recently become very active again. The specialist of the supernatural wants to know whether the phenomena is genuine or driven by human agency, in which case it's a problem for someone like Holmes.

Holmes and Watson gratefully accept this unusual invitation to escape from foggy London and accompany him to Cornwall, but they are unable to prevent a deadly stabbing in the disused and closely watched chapel. However, the explanation for the semi-impossible circumstances of the murder will be considered a cheat by many readers, but, technically, the witness did not lie. I still kind of liked the story. But, yes, I recognize that these type of plots have been done better and far more competent than this. So keep that mind when you read it for yourself.

The plot of "The Case of the Camberwell Poisoners" began as a classic tontine-scheme: Edmund Lovelace comes to Baker Street to ask Holmes if wants to save four lives. Lovelace lives with four cousins in an old house in Camberwall, which was left to them by their grandfather, but the place and a sizable fortune came to them under the sole condition that they "live together and maintain the family unit" – everything will eventually go to the last surviving cousin. The problem arose with his cousin Gerald, administrator of the estate, who was found to be in possession of cyanide-filled syringe, but upon their arrival in Camberwall it becomes apparent that the story was going to be one of human interest. One with a rather obvious explanation. But not too bad of a story.

The next story, "The Adventure of the Iron Box," is a fine and fun yarn, which is definitely one of the highlights from this collection. An old friend, Sir Walter Dunbar, invites Dr. Watson to spend the New Year's Eve at Dunbar Castle in Scotland. Of course, Holmes accompanies him there. Sir Walter has a very special reason for inviting his friend and personal chronicler of Europe's most celebrated detective. The late father of the current lair of the castle, Sir Thomas Dunbar, returned severely wounded from the battle of Waterloo and left his unborn child an iron box filled with gold, but there was a condition attached to this legacy: the box was to be given to his son on New Year's Eve before his twenty-first birthday.

There is, however, one snag that Sir Thomas did not foresee on his deathbed: his son was born on February 29th, which made him a "leapling" and therefore had to wait for over eight decades before to finally come into his inheritance. Unfortunately, Holmes has to play the specter at the feast and informs everyone that, due to a technicality, 1900 is not going to be a leap year. So the old Lord has to wait another four years. As to be expected, this casts a shadow over the proceedings and leads to the unsettling discovery that Sir Walter has disappeared. It's a very Ellery Queen-ish story (c.f. "The Mad Tea Party" from The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933) and another example of a plot that would have lent itself perfectly for a television adaptation.

The next story, "The Case of the Girl with the Gazelle," is the last of the three locked room stories from this collection, which has the ominous presence of Moriarty hanging over the case of a stolen painting. In the opening of the story, the reader is informed that illustrious Napoleon of Crime has particular love for the paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze and his hand is clearly at work when an authority on the work of that famous painter vanishes from his hotel room in London – which puts Holmes and Watson on the trail of recently purchased work by Greuze. Sir Henry Davenant paid a small fortune for the titular painting and has safely stored away in a small, steel-walled strong room equipped with a combination-and time lock, but, somehow, someone managed to switch the real painting for a fake.

The explanation for the theft from the secured strong room is almost disappointingly simple, but it is very workable and its simplicity nearly fooled Holmes. As a result, this nearly ended in a tie between Holmes and Moriarty, but I think round should go to Holmes – because he prevented the theft of the painting. All in all, a pretty nice and fun little story.

Finally, "The Adventure of the Notorious Canary Trainer" began as a messy story as Holmes and Watson, during a holiday, are confronted with a young woman who's being stalked by a man she is trying to escape from, but this man turns out to be attached to the Foreign Office and knows Mycroft Holmes. A second plot-strand involves Wilson, the notorious canary trainer, who Holmes had sent to prison in 1895, but he escaped and since then he has apparently assumed the identity of a Mr. Wilson. However, when he notices Holmes he confesses to a murder at the inn and commits suicide in front of Holmes and Watson, but nobody is aware anyone had died at the inn. Let alone murdered. Here the plot begins to become a bit clearer and the suicide of Wilson proves to be a cleverly disguised story. So a decent story to round out this collection.

I should also note that Watson meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this story and Holmes reveals he has collaborated with Dr. John Thorndyke in R. Austin Freeman's The Red Thumbmark (1907), which was a nice touch and nod.

So, all in all, a nice and pleasant collection of short stories, which may not be overflowing with stone-cold classics, but a fun bundle of stories nonetheless and that's coming from someone who usually hates (Holmesian) pastiches. I'm often annoyed at the liberties some writers take with someone else's creation, but this was an obvious labor of love and that makes every minor inconsistency in the characters or canon somewhat easier to forgive. Anyhow, recommended to everyone who loves Sherlock Holmes and Basil Rathbone's interpretation of the famous detective.

Well, I completely failed to keep this review as short as possible. Oh well. I just hope this blog-post was not too much of a mess and I'll try to keep somewhat shorter for the next post.

Place Your Bets!

"The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Silver Blaze," from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894)

Annie Haynes' The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929) is the second of four books about one of her series characters, Detective-Inspector William Stoddart of Scotland Yard, who first appeared on the scene in The Man with the Dark Beard (1928) and bowed out in the posthumously published The Crystal Beads Murder (1930) – which was left behind as a partially-finished manuscript and completed with the assistance of an unknown writer.

The Crime at Tattenham Corner was recommended to me in the comment-section of one of my previous reviews of Haynes' work and was praised, alongside The Abbey Court Murder (1923), as one of her best mystery novels. And I have to concur with this opinion: The Crime at Tattenham Corner proved to be her most rewarding detective story to date.

The plot of the book hangs on the shocking murder of Sir John Burslem, a well-known financier and race-horse owner, who was found dead in Hughlin’s Wood, "face downwards in the stagnant water of a ditch," not far from Tattenham Corner – shot through the lower part of his face. Sir John had been shot and killed on the eve of the highly-anticipated Derby Day, which has immediate consequences for the race and the shoo-in winner of that event.

Sir John was the proud owner of a fine, well-bred race horse, named Peep o' Day, who was "a dead cert for the Derby," but, under Derby rules, the death of an owner "renders void all his horses' nominations and entries." This effectively means that Peep o' Day has been scratched from the Derby.

So was Sir John murdered to influence the outcome of the race? If that's the case, the obvious suspect seems to be his rival, Sir Charles Stanyard, who is called "the sporting baronet" and owns the number two favorite in the race, Perlyon, but there's also a personal connection between the race-horse enthusiasts – as the latter had once been engaged to the wife of the former. As the reader is made aware of, Lady Burslem, or simply Sophie, has something to hide that seems to be directly related to the shooting of her late husband. Something that looks as if it could very incriminating and very, very hard to explain to the police. Sir John also has a daughter from a previous marriage, named Pamela, who naturally wants her father to be avenged, but she has been completely omitted from an impromptu will that was drafted mere hours before the murder. Everything was left to his wife.

This gives rise to the question as to why Sir John felt compelled to hurriedly draw up a new will and why he completely left out his daughter, brother and sister-in-law, but that's not the only complication occupying the police's attention.

The valet and personal gentleman of the victim, Robert Ellerby, vanished without a trace and there's a spiritual element hovering in the background. Sir John's sister-in-law, Mrs. Kitty Burslem, is a huge proponent of séances and believes she has received messages from Sir John – which makes some wonder why he, who detested the woman in life, would communicate with her after death. But several people seem to be convinced she receives messages from the Great Beyond and some of them relate directly to potential investments.

Well, Detective-Inspector William Stoddart of Scotland Yard and his able-handed assistant, Sergeant Alfred Harbord, set out "to trace every clue" that may help "to elucidate the mystery of Sir John Burslem's death," which they accomplish with routine police work and some of the unorthodox tricks of a good looking, single amateur dilettante – i.e. using their male charm on some of women in the case. Not what you'd expect from a proper police-inspector.

But they, slowly but surely, stumble to the same conclusion as most of the seasoned mystery readers and my initial response was, "oh, this old gag again," but Haynes managed to wrangle an alternative explanation out of that moldy, time-worn trick. And not a bad one either. At the first, the false explanation is convincingly, and sensationally, presented as the correct one, which is very pleasing to the reader who was one step ahead of Stoddart the entire time. But then the court room scenes begin and it becomes very clear that this clever, classically-styled, explanation leaves several questions unanswered. Such very important question as to who rolled the body into the ditch after the shooting, because the person in the dock denies having done this.

So this one managed to pull a nice and logical surprise on the reader, but one that puts two (minor) smudges on the overall quality of the plot: the case is cleared up when a confession from the real criminal reaches the court room and this makes the police (i.e. Stoddart) look very foolish and somewhat incompetent. After all, he nearly delivered an innocent person to the hangman!

However, this may've been done intentionally, because Haynes was, reportedly, as big of a fan of true-crime as she was of horse-racing and this might have been an attempt on her part at giving the story a gleam of realism. 

In any case, The Crime at Tattenham Corner has one of Haynes' strongest, clearest and most intricate puzzle-plots, which turned a new page on a familiar trick and this provided the ending of the story with a nice little surprise. Something that's always welcome in a classic detective story. It also whetted my appetite for The Abbey Court Murder, but that’s a story for another time. 

The Mouse Trap

"Give a man enough rope and he'll hang himself."

- American proverb 

Last month, I reviewed a Gothic-style mystery novel, called Venom House (1952), which received a glowing notice from my side and concluded that blog-post with a promise to return to Arthur W. Upfield's crime-fiction more often. So here we're again!

Bony and the Mouse (1959) has an alluring sounding, alternative book-title, namely Journey to the Hangman, but the original one fits the plot better. The book is a late entry in the Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte series, but follows a familiar pattern of the series: a terrible crime has been committed in a far-flung corner of the Australian continent and the passage of time deadened the trail – at which point the authorities assign the cold-case to Bony.

Bony is a blue-eyed, brown-complexioned man of mixed heritage, a "half-caste," who can be accurately described as a relentless, but patient, man hunter in a three-piece suit with a police badge. He can stake out a spot for weeks, follow any trail across miles of desert land or dense bushes and find a body by observing the behavior of scavengers. Simply put, he is the ideal investigator to break open a cold, dead-end investigation. You can find aspects of all of these elements in Bony and the Mouse, which was written and published on the tail-end of the genre's Golden Era.

The backdrop of the story is a small, fictional mining town, called Daybreak, which Upfield placed in the Western part of Australia. But the place is best known as the land of Melody Sam.

Daybreak is a one-pub town and the place is founded, owned and ran by an old-time prospector, Melody Sam. He financed and built the general store, church and even a school of arts, but was prevented, by the authorities, to do the same for the police station and post-office – preventing him from completely dominating the town. Well, on paper, anyway.

Even so, Melody Sam turns out to be a rather sympathetic, if a somewhat eccentric, character who means well and his personality plays nicely off Bony. Particularly towards the end of the story. As the town patriarch, he took care of the town and it was as peaceful a place as one can expect from such an outpost, but then the murders happened.

The first victim was an aborigine girl, named Mary, who was employed by the parson and his wife as a maid, but, one night, she was lured from the house and had her head clubbed in – which was, initially, written off as a tribal killing. Then a second inhabitant of Daybreak was brutally murdered: the wife of a cattleman, Mrs. Lorelli, was chocked to death in the kitchen of her homestead. Finally, a young lad who worked at the local garage got a knife across his windpipe near the mine. Your name does not have to be Sherlock Holmes to observe that "there was no pattern in method," but the murderer left an abundance of footprints that apparently belonged to a person with "a slight limp in the right leg."

A youthful delinquent, Tony Carr, seems an obvious suspect, but the local police is unable to bring any direct evidence home to the young boy and he has some people within the town who are on his side – closing the book on the murders as fast as they had began. And thus the trail began to grow cold. So the Australian police apparatus dispatched Bony to the small town and he assumed the identity of an itinerant horse-breaker, Nat Bonnar.

As Nat the horse-breaker, Bony takes approaches the problem from several different angles. One of the town's people, Sister Jenks from the hospital, recognized him as Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte and he employs her as "the magnifying glass" to examine both the victims and "all others living in and about Daybreak" – as well as interacting with the locals as a newly arrived yardman. He's also given an opportunity to display some rudimentary tracking skills when inspecting a fresh track of footprints, but, mostly, he has to confine himself to playing the part of the patient cat who lays in wait for a fidgety mouse.

One of the latter chapters, titled "Bony Smells a Mouse," gives an exposition of the psychology of the patient cat and the fidgety mouse, which illustrates the relationship between the undercover police-inspector and the hidden killer. After the cat "sniffs at the hole," assuring there's a mouse within, he "settles in a coma of patience," but the mouse, "being a natural fidget," cannot stay inactive for very long – and he must adventure. Every time, the mouse ventures further out of his hole and this will eventually prove fatal for the pip-squeak.

There is, however, one downside to this method of patience: a fourth murder is nearly impossible to prevent, but it shows there's truth in the old adage that if you give a man enough rope he'll hang himself. And the illustration of the cat and mouse proved prophetic for the capture of the murderer, which is done in a great scene spread across the final chapters. It shows that Upfield really knew how to write a yarn.

However, I have one single complaint about the plot of Bony and the Mouse: the motivation that fueled the murders was not very original and Upfield was not even the first mystery writer to refurbish this plot-idea by 1959, which was slightly disappointing. I suspected such a game was being played, but I was hoping Upfield would pull-off a different kind of solution. Regardless, Bony and the Mouse was still a very readable detective story with lots of great characters, atmosphere, some unusual detective work and lots of vivid local color – which truly never fails to impress me in this series. Obviously, the English-born Upfield loved his adopted homeland and setting has always been one of his strong suits.

I also reviewed: The Bone is Pointed (1938), An Author Bites the Dust (1948), Venom House (1952) and Cake in the Hat Box (1954)

Death of a Mystery Writer

"But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quite simple fact—some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification comes in covering it up, in leading men's thought away from it."
- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Queer Feet," from The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911) 

The 56th volume of Case Closed, known to everyone outside of the English-speaking world as Detective Conan, begins with a story that can be described as a tale of two rings and a large chunk of the plot concerns a fatal poisoning in a locked room.

The opening story is, what is called in this series, a Metropolitan Police Love Story and begins in the cigarette smoke-filled squad room of the homicide division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the police detectives are very inquisitive about the ring they spotted on the left-hand ring-finger of Detective Sato – which suggests she recently got engaged. Takagi denies it was him who finally scraped together the courage to pop the question to her. So who put a ring on her finger? The squad room is not given copious amounts of time to ponder this question, because a murder is reported and the plot then goes on to show what happened twelve hours before that phone-call. 

Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan are guests at the home of a well-known, prolific and popular mystery writer, Masataka Moroguchi, where they have come together for a special magazine interview about "the dawn of a new era of mystery novels." However, the novelist showcases a thoroughly unpleasant, even abusive, personality and he mentions in passing how he misses his previous editor – who apparently committed suicide in a room that was locked tight from the inside. This reference to the dead editor had a visible effect on the other people who were present: an assistant writer, a magazine editor and a photographer.

Conan reflects how he always seems to stumble over a dead body whenever he comes to a place smothered by "that thick, chocking atmosphere" and this time it is no different. Their host is found poisoned behind the locked door of his bedroom and the only key to the room was found clasped in his hand, but evidence begins to accumulate that seems to preclude suicide – one of those pieces of evidence concerns the victim's diamond-studded ring. So they put in a call to the Metropolitan Police Station.

I was able to work out the identity of the murderer and figure out the mechanics of this person's method, but that was mainly due to the fact that I remembered the locked room trick from volumes 18 and 19 – of which this one was a reworking. But, overall, a well-done detective story, which had some fun with churning out alternative solutions for the impossible poisoning.

The next case is a simplistic, but pleasant, story, which managed to make me slip over a red herring or two and ended up settling for the wrong suspect. Shame on me!

Once again, Doc Agasa is tasked with supervising a camping trip in the mountains for the Junior Detective League, but, as a dark evening began to dawn, they blew a front tire and the professor had completely forgotten to pack spares. So they are forced to seek shelter for the night in a dark, ominous looking house.

A house whose sole occupant is an elderly woman who fits the description of a storybook witch or a legendary mountain hag, but the real problem arises when a second group of stranded travelers arrive to ask for shelter. One of them, a young woman, gets her throat slit that very night and the identification of the unusual murder weapon is presented as the main objective of the plot – which made me lose sight of the whodunit aspect of the story. However, that aspect was not as secondary or unimportant to plot as I assumed it was. Oh well. You can't win them all.

The second half of this volume, consisting of five chapters, intertwines two minor stories with one of the series' main plot-threads: the back-story of Eisuke Hondo and the exact nature of his ties to Rena Mizunashi. Harley Hartwell even has a small role in this story!

Harley calls Conan to inform him Eisuke used to live in Osaka with his father and how they used to frequent a local restaurant, but what’s important is that the grandson of the restaurant owner has a photograph of them in his possession – and he happens to live in the same city as Conan and Doc Agasa. So they immediately establish contact and come up with an excuse to get their hands on the photograph, but someone seems to have gone through the guy's apartment. The photo album has vanished from a bookshelf and a folder of pictures was wiped from the computer hard drive.

However, Conan deduces the burglary happened minutes before they arrived and the intruder still had to be present in the apartment, which turned the story into a semi-locked room mystery. If you're observant enough, you can guess the hiding place by studying the artwork, but there are also two descriptive clues pointing straight to the hiding place and even revealing the identity of the burglar. So, a very simple, but surprisingly solid constructed detective story.

In the final chapters, the focus returns to the investigation into Eisuke's background and Conan learns he has been visiting hospitals all over the city. Apparently, Eisuke has been searching for his missing sister and she happens to look exactly like Rena Mizunashi, but the resemblance seems to be coincidental – because the blood types of these two characters do not match. Over the course of these chapters, Conan also prevents a couple of small-time conmen from pulling off a bank-transfer scam.

All in all, a nice, well-balanced volume of mostly cleverly plotted stories and even a bit of development in the ongoing story line of the series. I was amused! And the next volume of stories looks interesting. But for my next read, I have a detective story from the tail end of the Golden Age. So don't touch that dial!