Sweets Are a Child's Poison

"It's a dirty business, my lad: poisoning kids."

- Superintendent Hadley (John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule, 1939)

Elizabeth Daly was an American novelist who, during the forties of the previous century, penned sixteen sophisticated mystery novels about a professional bibliophile and amateur snoop, Henry Gamadge, which earned her an Edgar statuette – awarded a decade after the publication of her last novel, The Book of the Crime (1951). Reportedly, one of Daly's most famous admirer was no less a figure than Agatha Christie.

So she had excellent credentials, but when I took a look at Daly, some time ago now, I was very disappointed with what I found. The book that turned me away from her work was Murders in Volume 2 (1941), which had an alluring premise, but the plot never delivered the goods and the story progressed excruciatingly slow – comparable to the pace of a morphine drip. There are parts of my brain that think they're still reading the damn book! But enough time has passed to warrant a second glance at Daly and Gamadge.

Deadly Nightshade (1940) was Daly's second mystery novel and finds Gamadge in his private library, "where he followed the occupation of consulting expert on old or pseudo-old books, manuscripts and autographs," but his attention is divided between a yellowed fragment of paper, war news rattling from the wireless and memories of State Detective Mitchell – whom he met in first recorded case, Unexpected Night (1940), when he was "inveigled by circumstances" to play amateur detective. Coincidently, the phone rings a few minutes later and it is a long distance call from Maine. Mitchell has a case on his hands that might interest Gamadge.

A rash of nightshade poisonings of small children plagued the vicinity between Oakport and Harper's Rock, which claimed at least three victims. A group of children got their hands on some poisonous berries and the resulting tragedies varied greatly: the youngest son of Albert Ormiston, a relatively well-known artist, fully recovered, but the daughter of Carroll Bartram, a manufacturer of artificial silk, was allergic to atropine and died. A third girl, Sarah Beasley, evidently had eaten some of the berries, but, in a poisonous stupor, "wandered off and got in the marsh" – she has not been found.

There are also suspicions of a fourth poisoning, involving one of the children from a gypsy camp, which is giving the locals a reason "to start pestering the gypsies," but Mitchell have reasons to believe that the affair is slightly more complicated then that. The boy who survived, Tommy, says "a lady in a car gave him the berries." Only problem is that the poison has a confusing effect on its victim and there can't be a value put on the boy's statement. These poisonings coincided with a fatal motorcycle accident of a young state trooper named Trainor. But was it really an accident?

Gamadge and Mitchell have to dig through a lot of back-stories and family history in order to unsnarl all of the links in the chain of tragedies that rocked the small Maine community. Rooting around in other people's past live can be an unpleasant occupation and this was touched upon when they visited the gypsy camp. Gamadge has his fortune told by an elderly lady, Mrs. Stuart, who told him he was "born under a dark star," the companion of Sirius, which is "so dark that no mortal eye has ever seen it" and is only known through "the perturbation of orbits" – condemning the bibliophile-detective "to perturb the orbits of others" while "remaining unsuspected and unseen." Perturbing is exactly what he does.

In one of the households, he finds the survivor of a forgotten tragedy, the wholesale poisoning of family with arsenic, which also concerned a lost child. He also gets on the trail of woman, a Miss Humphrey, who claimed to work for a magazine and went around snapping pictures of children for a competition to crown the finest child in Maine. However, some of the more interesting plot-threads were introduced to the story through the Bartram family.

Carroll's brother, George, sold his part in the silk mill to his brother and moved to the Netherlands, where married and had a little girl, but the European situation scared him and moved his family to the United States. Surprising his brother on a very short notice. Naturally, I perked up when the background of these characters were pointed out and the plot was littered with references to their past lives in the Netherlands, but their return also brought an additional complication to the plot: the late father of Carroll and George lost a "mythical nest egg" of at least four hundred thousand dollars and there's a mention of a collection of pictures he bought in 1927, which may have included a long-lost painting by Vermeer of Delft. Yes. There was one of those in the recently reviewed There's a Reason for Everything (1945) by E.R. Punshon.

Well, I guess it's time to make up the balance: Deadly Nightshade does not only setup a premise full of promise, but, on this occasion, delivered on it and the explanation for the plot was as original as its premise. I can easily see now why someone like Christie would be a fan of her work. Only drawbacks are Daly's feeble grasp on the concept of pacing (i.e. slow moving) and the sub-plot of the murdered state trooper was unnecessary. I think the story could have done without it, but Daly probably felt a detective story needed a clear-cut murder.

To make a long story short, I wish Deadly Nightshade had been my introduction to Daly's work instead of the seemingly never-ending and soul-deadening Murders in Volume 2.

Finally, allow me to draw your attention to the website of Les Blatt, Classic Mysteries, who is a fan of Daly and reviewed thirteen of her sixteen Henry Gamadge mysteries, which is how this series never left my peripheral field of view.  

A Chimerical Impossibility

"One of the most extraordinary cases Ellery has ever investigated. The newspaper called it "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean;" more specific identification may not be given here. It is one of the few problems, to my knowledge, which stalemated Ellery; and it is still an unsolved crime."

- J. McC. (Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery, 1935)

Last month, I wrote a blog-post, headed "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," that used a line from an essay by Donald A. Yates, titled "The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, But Not Dead Yet," which attracted the attention of our resident archivist, Mike Gray – who can be found blogging at Ontos. This resulted in a compilation post with links to the essay, articles, blog-posts, a short video-clip and a short story by Yates.

Yates' short story, "The Wounded Tyrolean," began as a Watsonian reference in Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935), which was meant as a nod and a wink at the unrecorded cases noted by Dr. Watson in the official Sherlock Holmes canon. As Ellery Queen observed, Dr. Watson's allusions have "sent Sherlockians screaming into the night hunting for the reference source and finding only a ghostly chuckle," but the consequence of these tantalizing allusions is that people began to write their own Sherlock Holmes stories – which has grown into a sub-genre of its own. The mountain of Holmesian pastiches, parodies and semi-official sequels dwarfs the number of original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So it was only to be expected that Ellery Queen's oblique reference to "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean" would result in at least one write-up.

According to this blog-post, Yates wrote "The Wounded Tyrolean" during the early fifties and at the time he was "trying repeatedly to write a story" that "he [Fred Dannay] would accept for EQMM." One of the editors, Mildred Falk, suggested writing a story that could carry the title "The Wounded Tyrolean" and "be so perplexing that even Ellery himself had not been able to solve it." Yates picked up the gauntlet and decided to turn his hand to the classic locked room mystery, determined "to come up with a new solution that had never been devised before," but the fruit of his labor was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and only a Spanish translation of the story made into print – appearing in the Argentine magazine Leoplán in July of 1955. Fifty-seven years after being published in Argentina, the story appeared in English in the Fall 2012 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, published in Ann Arbor, the "very setting where the action of the baffling locked-room murder had been situated." So, let's take a look at the story.

The Austrian-born Professor Behring of the Middleton University physics department is "The Wounded Tyrolean," whose "characteristic limp was the consequence of a leg wound he had suffered in the First World War," but the "indelible figure" of the old professor was cruelly snatched away from the campus-town – stabbed to death in his study. There was a sense of the unreal clinging to the circumstances of the crime, because, from all perceivable angles, it seems like an impossible murder.

Donald A. Yates

Professor Behring had scheduled an appointment with Dr. Gaines and Wenley, the College President, but nobody appeared to be home and when they entered the premise found that only the study door was locked. Dr. Gained and Wenley forced open the door and discovered the body of the professor in the middle of the room, "the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from his back," but they found nobody else inside the windowless room, which had walls lined with bookshelves. The only door was locked from the inside and the modest furnishings, a desk and some chairs, offered no hiding place for the killer.

The rundown of these facts showed a missed opportunity for a false solution and one that would have been as classic as the locked room problem itself, which would have been very similar to such short stories as Agatha Christie's "The Idol House of Astarte" (The Thirteen Problems, 1932) and Peter Godfrey's "The Flung-Back Lit" (The Newtonian Egg, 2002). Essentially, it would have been a play on the "replacement of space-and time" illusion and this trick would have fitted the given facts, but Yates deserves some points for trying to come up with an explanation that was a little bit different.

A bright senior and editor of the student newspaper, John Rossiter, eventually stumbled to the truth "through a feat of inspired logic," but "never revealed the solution to a soul." I think the best part of the plot is explaining how someone like Ellery Queen could have failed to reach the correct answer. I can easily imagine Queen would've read about the case and came to the campus-town to investigate it himself, but by that time, Rossiter had already swept the whole affair under the rug and the tell-tale clues expunged – which makes it very difficult for even the best logicians to reach a sensible and rational conclusion.

With that being said, the locked room facet of the plot under-performed to the who-and why, which were far better imagined and linked than how the trick was pulled off. The locked room was pretty incidental to the whole thing. Not to mention borderline insane and extremely risky. If it weren't for the high concentration of spoilers, I would probably slap together a re-imagining of this plot, because I see an alternative explanation for the locked room that would've served the purpose of the guilty party a whole lot better.

Regardless, "The Wounded Tyrolean" is a good and laudable attempt at an original locked room story by a then still young and ardent mystery enthusiast, which, arguably, required some polishing. But you can read and judge the story for yourself by clicking here.

The Naked Truth

"The world is filled with mysteries... many very intelligent people work solving them. My skill lies in making that talent pay."

- Penelope Peters (Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg's "Death Rides the Elevator," from The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, 2000)  

Erle Stanley Gardner was an incredible productive novelist, who had his roots in the pulps, but garnered everlasting fame in the genre as the author of more than eighty mysteries about a lawyer and courtroom wizard, named Perry Mason – which have the tendency to overshadow all of his other work.

Gardner also wrote a few short-lived series about such characters as Gramps Wiggins (e.g. The Case of the Smoking Chimney, 1941), Terry Clane (e.g. The Case of the Backward Mule, 1946) and Sheriff Bill Eldon (e.g. Two Clues, 1947). However, they only lasted for a couple of novels or a handful of novellas. The life-span of Doug Selby, the D.A. of fictitious town, stretched across nine novels, but, volume-wise, only one of Gardner's secondary series came (somewhat) close to matching the sheer prolificacy of the Perry Mason mysteries.

Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are at the front of twenty-nine novels, initially published under the name of "A.A. Fair," who were defined by the Thrilling Detective website as "one of the all-time great mismatched team ups in detective fiction" and "a real blast of fresh air." During the introduction of Cool and Lam (1958), an unsold pilot for CBS, Gardner described Lam as "a little thinking machine" and Cool as his "big, penny-pinching partner," which is all very appetizing, but I found myself in a quandary – where to begin? I was torn between The Bigger They Come (1939), Top of the Heap (1952) and The Count of Nine (1958), but settled, predictably, on the last one. Why is it predictable, you ask? Why, it's an impossible crime story! What else did you expect from me?

A globetrotter and gentleman-explorer, Dean Crockett, engaged Cool and Lam to keep out sticky-fingered gatecrashers from his upcoming social gathering. Or to prevent any potential intruders from leaving the place with a valuable item from his exhibition room. The last time he threw a party someone lifted "a jade statue worth six thousand bucks," but this time Crockett turned his penthouse into a mousetrap: the place is at the twentieth floor and can only be reached by a special elevator, which runs up to a vestibule-like room "that opened out from the twentieth floor hallway." You need to be let in or have a key to get inside the penthouse, but that’s not the only precaution that was taken.

Cool stationed herself by the door, in charge of checking invitations of the guests, while the elevator has been secretly out fitted with an x-ray machine. This turned the elevator in a primitive body scanner. Regardless of these obstacles, a second jade statue and a five feet long blow-pipe from Borneo were taken from the tightly watched and secured penthouse. It seems like a complete impossibility!

I've to make an annotation here that, at this point in the book, the story really began to show how wrong my assumptions about the characters were. I assumed Cool and Lam were, partially, inspired or based on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but it was Lam who most of the brain-and leg work – basically all of it after the theft was discovered. After Cool bungled the job, she receded into the background and occasionally hurled abuse at poor Lam ("I'll take a swing at you right here in front of all these people"). But it was her partner, not her, who figured out how a long, cumbersome blow-pipe and a jade statue were carried, unnoticed, out of a guarded apartment.

The explanation for the theft of the blow-pipe was logical, fairly well clued and not too difficult to solve yourself, but I can't say the same for how the carved jade Buddha was smuggled out of the apartment – which was revealed without giving any real clues. You could probably make a good guess how the statue was lifted, but it would be a pretty long shot. So I would say The Count of Nine is decent, but not stellar, as a locked room novel, but the seemingly impossible theft of a blow-pipe and a hunk of jade are not the only crimes confronting Cool and Lam. There's also a murder a little later on in the novel.

Dean Crockett’s lifeless body is found inside his so-called hibernation room, where he retreated to write travel articles and books, with "a dart from a blowgun embedded in his chest a short distance below the throat." The dart was fired into the room through the open window and the shot likely originated from the studio of his wife, Phyllis, who was painting a portrait of a nude model, Sylvia Hadley. She has a link to Crockett's personal photographer, Lionel Palmer, who has an interesting collection of photographs and gives Lam some pickup tricks. Finally, there is Crockett's public relations man, Melvin Otis Olney, and a receiver of stolen good hovering in the background.

All of these potential suspects dance around the body of the dead explorer, but the who and why of the murder were uninspired, bland and run-of-the-mill. Only the how-part of the explanation lifted this part of the plot slightly above the ordinary. Gardner toyed with ideas from G.K. Chesterton's "The Arrow of Heaven," collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), and Agatha Christie's Death in the Clouds (1935), but the clueing is a bit iffy – as the only proper hint was an observation that a second dart was "shot with sufficient force so that the point was deeply embedded in the wood" of a closet.

So I found The Count of Nine to be a very uneven mystery novel: there were definitely aspects of the story I liked, but there were also a lot of aspects that left me completely underwhelmed and unimpressed. Honestly, I expected a bit more from the author of Perry Mason, because those books had a fairly high and consistent quality of plots. But maybe I should try some of the earlier ones.

Well, that's all I have to say about The Count of Nine as a detective story, but there's one thing I need to point out to everyone. The book mentions vending machines at airports for insurance policies, which actually existed. I found the following link that briefly goes over the history of these vending machines and mentions how several airplanes were blown up with these insurance policies as a motive. One of these cases is the infamous 1955 bombing case of United States Flight 629, which resulted in 44 fatalities.

Finally, I have some good news that connects this review with a recent blog-post, "The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories," in which I went over a number of lost and unpublished manuscripts. Today, I learned Gardner's publisher shelves the second book in this series, The Knife Slipped, because they objected to Cool's tendency to "talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes and try to gyp people," which happened to be exactly the kind of gal Hard Case Crime likes – who'll be publishing the book for the first time in December of this year. You can read more about the book here.

So that's one detective story we can scratch from that lamentable list of lost detective stories!

Vermeer's Ghost

"Suddenly, all around us, there sounded a drip, drip, drip, upon the floor of the great hall. I thrilled with a queer, realizing emotion, and a sense of a very real and present danger—imminent. The 'blood-drip' had commenced. And the grim question was now whether the Barriers could save us from whatever had come into the huge room."

- Thomas Carnacki (William Hope Hodgson's "The House Among the Laurels," from Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, 1913)

There's a Reason for Everything (1945) is E.R. Punshon's twenty-first book from his voluminous series about policeman Bobby Owen, now Deputy Chief Constable of Wychshire, which has one of the authors patent carpets of densely knotted plot-threads, but the emerging patterns usually form a logical, well-defined image. This one is no exception in that regard!

Bobby Owen has risen through the ranks of the Wychshire police department and has now become the Deputy Chief Constable, but he felt "both a trifle unemployed and a trifle grand" in his new office. The daily grind of the police apparatus were now taken care of by the men below him, like his assistance Inspector Payne, which is "a loss he was inclined occasionally to regret." Opportunely, the new Deputy Chief Constable receives an unusual invitation that places him on the spot of a fresh crime-scene.

Dr. Clem Jones, of Wessex and Mercia University, secured permission to investigate "the rumors or renewed hauntings" at Nonpareil, the ancient seat of the Tallebois family, where blood once flowed like beer at an Irish pub – which packed the house to the rafters with ghosts. There were some pretty famous ghost stories associated with Nonpareil.

During the English Civil War, a Cavalier's family sought refuge from a troop of marauding Roundheads in its great cellars, but they were locked in and died of starvation. On the anniversary of this tragedy, their disembodied "groans and lamentations" can be heard coming from the basements. Another story involves twin brothers, rivals in love, who fought a duel to the death in one of the rooms, but the ghost they left behind is that of their grief-stricken mother – who was often seen hastily walking through the corridors in search of her sons. A third story is closely intertwined with the second one: a bloodstain is often seen in the room where the twins perished, usually after their mother is seen walking the hallways, which then gradually begins to fade away. According to the legend, the "appearance of the bloodstain is a sign of an approaching death."

Dr. Jones and one of his colleagues, Mr. Parkinson, reported to have found a fresh bloodstain in the room where, reputedly, the tragic duel took place. Naturally, bloodstains are of professional interest to Owen. So he decided to poke around the place, but what he found there had very little to do with ghost stories.

Nonpareil is a dark, abandoned and largely empty house. Only a row of statues in the picture gallery are a reminder of its glory days, but a stone bust, "of a Roman emperor apparently," was toppled over the balustrade of the inner hall – nearly crushing Owen, Payne and Parkinson. And that’s just for starters! The second problem concerns the ghostly bloodstain: Dr. Jones and Mr. Parkinson drew a chalk outline round the stain and sealed the room, which was done by placing "threads in position across the crack of the door" and "a small paper wad fixed between the doorpost and the door." So that if would fall if the door were opened. Parkinson claims these "most effective precautions" makes it impossible for anyone to have been there during absence, but the only traces they find on the bare, wooden floorboards is a chalk outline. The bloodstain has completely vanished!

I first assumed the bloodstain-angle was some kind of chemical trick, which made it fade from a sealed room, but the actual explanation, given one or two chapters later, hinges on a common gambit of the locked room mystery. However, this very explanation betrays a very shaky claim to the status of a locked room, but, considering the premise and explanation, I still decided to tag this blog-post as an impossible crime – which I also had to do with Punshon's Crossword Mystery (1934).

Finally, there's a third complication that'll provide a great deal of trouble for Bobby Owen: between the space of a statue of a prostrate stag and a posturing goddess are the strangled remains of the paranormal investigator, Dr. Clem Jones.

The introduction, written by genre-historian Curt Evans, notes how "haunted houses figured in Golden Age detective fiction with some frequency," which include such notable examples like John Dickson Carr's Hag's Nook (1933), Carter Dickson's The Plague Court Murders (1934), Gladys Mitchell's When Last I Died (1941) and John Rhode's Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943). It's a rich enough background to draw on for a good, old-fashioned detective story, but Punshon never seemed to be satisfied unless he was clutching a whole jumble of apparently confusing plot-threads.

This is what makes his books seem so complex. But, by the end, they usually reveal themselves to have a logical and comprehensible plot-structure, which is perhaps Punshon's greatest accomplishments as a mystery novelist: being able to manipulate a multitude of plot-strands without getting entangled in them. So let's have a quick look at the plot threads.

One of those plot-threads triggered Owen's interest in the bloodstain at Nonpareil. Owen had read in one of Inspector Payne's daily reports how Constable Reed and Major Hardman, who lived at The Tulips, had heard a gunshot coming from the direction of Wychwood forest – which is not unusual for the countryside. But it had been late in the evening and Major Hardman was worried about his young, troublesome nephew, Francis "Frank" Hardman. He had been discharged from the army as medically unfit, but had already caused trouble in the village, which did not sit very well with both his uncle and twin sister, Frances. Major Hardman had given his nephew a five-pound note and told him to get a decent job if he wanted another penny, but, since then, he seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. How does the gunshot and disappearance of Frank Hardman ties in with an attempted burglary at the village of Major Hardman?

A different plot-thread involves a young woman, Miss Betty Anson, who works in Wychwood and takes a footpath through the forest when going homeward, which means she might have heard the shot. She has hurt her foot and a footprint, corresponding with her size shoes, was found near a spend cartridge and something seems to be weighing on her mind. But the question is whether or not any of this is related to the murder at Nonpareil or tied to the unidentified corpse that was found in Midwych Canal with two bullet holes in his back.

However, the most important of all the plot-threads from this novel concerns "a first-class, long-lost Vermeer," which, as a Dutchman, I always find an interesting angle for a detective story (e.g. Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Frame, 1986). I should also point out that Evans' introduction makes a connection between this plot-thread and a famous, real-life forgery case from my country, which could have inspired Punshon. However, this book has very little to do with forgers.   

Apparently, the lost masterpiece is "a view of Rotterdam in sun and rain" and Vermeer described it in a letter as one of his best works, but parted with the panel when an English lord made a generous offer, forty guineas in gold, which he was unable to refuse – after which the painting vanished from the history books. But now there are several people hunting for the painting. A Mr. Marmaduke Clavering, "an Honourable," who entered the story as an art expert who assessed the value of those "deplorable specimens of sculpture" in the picture gallery of Nonpareil, but it becomes apparent that what he's really after is the lost Vermeer. And he has a rival: a junior partner of a Mayfair Square picture dealer, Mr. Tails, who's "not too particular in his business methods."

As you can probably deduce, There's a Reason for Everything is made up of an intricate, multifarious and complex web of plot-threads, but Punshon laces all of these plot-threads up tightly. There are also a fair amount of clues and hints dropped along the corridors and rooms of this maze-like plot, which should point out the truth to the observant reader. It also provided another demonstration of Punshon ability to navigate the reader through a labyrinthine plot. I also like how he handled the abundance of twins appearing in this story and how he sidestepped the clichéd fate that usually befalls long-lost paintings and manuscripts in detective stories.

So, all in all, I found There's a Reason for Everything to be a rewarding read and even slightly better than Punshon's much touted masterpiece, Diabolic Candelabra (1942), which really was more along the lines of a Mitchellian crime fantasy than that of a traditional whodunit. And I begin to believe that I'm becoming a fan of Punshon.

Well, I guess that's a good a place to end this drawn-out review and let's see what I'll fish up for my blog-post.

The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories

"It is the manuscript of a completely unknown story by Edgar Allan Poe..."

- Sir William Bitton (John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933) 

One of the well-worn tropes of the traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a cliché, but John Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste Dupin tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that ended in the most tragic loss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost manuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence.

From all of the missing and unpublished manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of this.

Edward D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and mentions how C. Daly King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946 or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945 by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable list of lost and unpublished detective stories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last, currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one. On his blog, Curt Evans dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois, who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Once a lost, unpublished story

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later years." Her papers are archived at the City University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942), The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned by such writers as Robert Arthur, William Arden and M.V. Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number of websites, dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here are two of them.

Officially, Anthony Boucher's first novel, The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and editor who compiled a volume of Christianna Brand's short fiction, entitled The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character, Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage, there's a future opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost, forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks, which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit – called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up!

Devil's Delicacies

"The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the forest, has a voice and a secret all its own..."

- Gladys Mitchell (The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, 1929)

Diabolic Candelabra (1942) is numbered seventeen in E.R. Punshon's Inspector Bobby Owen series, now attached to the Wychshire County Police, where he doubled "the parts of head of the somewhat scanty Wychshire C.I.D. with that of secretary to the chief constable," but this enigmatically titled entry is generally considered to be one of Bobby Owen's best performances – navigating through a complex and labyrinthine plot of Mitchellian imagination.

One review even stated "that in the construction of mazes," Punshon's "only rival was John Dickson Carr." You can understand, as someone who admirers both Carr and Mitchell, that this particular title has been hovering around my wish list for many years.

So I was elated when the Dean Street Press announced they were resuming their series of reprints of Punshon’s work and our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, wrote new introduction for each title, which usually provide a back story for the book in question – e.g. an account of the real-life murder case that inspired the plot of Murder Abroad (1939). The introduction for Diabolic Candelabra tells of no such real-world connection, which, considering the fairytale-like plot, seems very fitting. 

However, I should note that Evans mentioned that the book appeared on his 2010 list of 150 Favorite Golden Age British Detective Novels. Under his list of favorite Punshon novels, Evans says he has been "undeservingly out-of-print." Well, that has changed in recent years, hasn't it?

Diabolic Candelabra has a dense, intricate plot with as many different branches as the titular candelabra, but one that's as solid as a brass candlestick, which begins with a recipe for "the most scrumptious chocolates that ever were." Or to be more precise, the story begins with a quest for this furtive recipe.

Mrs. Weston gave Olive, the wife of Bobby Owen, a sample of these "miracle chocolates," but the gift came with a request for help: she wants to sell these heavenly treats at a church bazaar, however, she has no idea where to find the person who makes them – a Miss Mary Floyd. She sells the chocolates through a place called "Walters," a tea shop, but they've no idea where exactly she lives. So Bobby and Olive are going to chase "a chocolate to its lair."

The lair in question is in actuality a small, lonely cottage tucked away in the thick, overgrown and sprawling forest of Wychwood. Miss Floyd shares the modest dwelling with several of her relatives: a poor, invalid mother, a stepfather of ill-repute and a nine-year-old sister, "Loo," who prefers the live among the animals of the forest. She is a character very reminiscent of Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894).

Bobby and Olive learn from Miss Floyd that the recipe for the special chocolates is a secret, but one that belongs to a local legend.

Peter the Hermit is an elderly herbalist who lives deep in the woods in a ramshackle, one-room hut and never took a dime for his remedies, if he liked you, but often chased people away with an axe – which, nonetheless, gave him some popularity. But not with everyone. The local physician, Dr. Maskell, labeled him as "a public danger" and thinks of him as "nothing more than a licensed murderer," because there's "half a dozen in their graves" who ought to be alive. Add to this the persistent rumor that the hermit was sitting on a stash of gold and it becomes to be expected Bobby finds an abandoned, ransacked hut with a bloodstain on the floor. Both the axe and the hermit were missing.

For most mystery writers, this would've been more than enough to write a story around, but Punshon kept tying plot-threads to the main storyline: the owner of the previously mentioned tea shop, Charles Clayfoot, has gone missing around the same time and place as the Peter the Hermit. A very fat, red-haired man has been asking around for the chocolate recipe and Bobby saw a young man washing his hands by a small stream, but this person picked up his briefcase and fled the moment he noticed he was being watched. 

Bobby is also told about an unsolved mystery: fifty years ago, two El Greco paintings vanished mysteriously from Barsley Abbey and there seems to be a renewed interest in the village to find them again. These missing paintings play an important part in the story, but there's another object that disappeared around the same time, The Diabolic Candelabra, which is attributed to Benvenuto Cellini and "each branch was carved in the likeness of a human face twisted into every variety of hate and malice" – both of them are linked to the family history of the local gentry. And they bring their own set of problems and complications to the case that is unfolding in front Bobby's eyes. 

This all makes for a very intricate, maze-like and memorable story, which, despite of its many intricacies and peculiarities, becomes very simple and easy to understand by the end of the book. I feel proud for having spotted the cleverly hidden murderer long before the final chapter, but was equally surprise when Punshon, very briefly, hid this person again during that wonderful, candlelit scene in that dark, atmospheric place – which made me think for a moment my solution was completely wrong. What I also liked about the book is how it reminded me of Gladys Mitchell's Come Away, Death (1937), which had similarly structured story: a ball of strange and unusual plot-thread that eventually lead to the discovery of a body in the final quarter of the book.

Well, I sincerely hope I've done the plot of Diabolic Candelabra some measure of justice with this review, because I found the plot a bit tricky to describe, but one that's as rich as pure chocolate and as intricate as a hand woven tapestry. Undoubtedly, one of his better and most original mystery novels.

My other reviews of Punshon's Bobby Owen mysteries: 

Crossword Mystery (1934)
Death Comes to Cambers (1935)
The Bath Mysteries (1936)
Comes a Stranger (1938)
Murder Abroad (1939)
Four Strange Women (1940) 
Ten Star Clues (1941)