The Imperfect Cell

"No prison on earth is airtight."

- Richard Michaelson (Michael Bowen's Washington Deceased, 1990)

Donald Bayne Hobart was a productive pulpeteer, who primarily focused on mysteries and westerns, but also wrote comic book stories and he was even credited as a coloring artist, which allowed him to earn a living over the span of half a century – covering the decades between 1920 and 1970. During this period, Hobart also penned a whole slew of novels, mostly westerns, but his output also included a handful of obscure, long-forgotten detective novels. Surprisingly, two of them are easily available!

Back in 2014, Coachwhip reissued The Clue of the Leather Noose (1929) and The Cell Murder Mystery (1931) as a twofer volume. As you were probably able to gauge from the post-title and opening quote, I went for the second book contained within this volume and my reason for this was as simple as it's predictable: Robert Adey listed The Cell Murder Mystery in Locked Room Murders (1991). It's getting tiresome, isn't it?

However, The Murder Cell Mystery has something in common with the previous mystery novel I reviewed, which is that neither can really be labeled as an authentic locked room mystery. Technically, Hobart's take on this particular type of detective story can be considered an impossible crime, but the claim is a shaky one and the explanation probably disqualify it such to many readers – which was both embarrassingly stupid and a blatant cheat. But I'll return to this aspect of the plot presently. Fortunately, the story barely gave any attention to the impossible angle and the first chapter opened with a very different kind of crime: a burglary and a stabbing.

Ted Ames is moving "stealthily through the grounds of the vast, gloomy estate" of Fosdick Martin, a wealthy banker, who is the owner of a famous collection of unset diamonds. A collection Ames was ordered to steal on behalf of a sinister figure, known as "The Lizard," who is "one of the most ruthless and cold-blooded criminals" of the underworld, but the reader is quickly made aware of the fact that there's more than one prowler on the premise – one of them a masked man in the shadow-strewn garden and an unknown woman. And they're both very much aware of Ames' movement. Ames notices some very peculiar activity himself inside the house.

Martin is overheard bitterly quarreling with someone in the study and he sees the banker's private-secretary, Perry Fulson, leaning against the closed door and with one "ear pressed tightly against the panel as he listened to the conversation in the room beyond." So, there are a lot of people sneaking about the premise, but was one of them responsible for seriously wounding Martin with a knife when the room was plunged into darkness? Who was the woman who warned Ames that the police was called?

Enter the Chief of the North City Police Department, John Kenny, alongside his right-hand man, Detective-Sergeant Tim O'Shay, who immediately detain two of the people who were present at the crime-scene as material witnesses. One of them is the private-secretary, Fulson, while the other one, Grant Ellery, was the person overheard fighting with the victim. He was a business partner and Fulson "had hysterically accused Ellery of murdering Martin," but he asks Chief Kenny time to think things over, before making a statement, which ends up costing him his life – as someone managed to gain access to his holding cell and stab him to death. This is where I have the biggest problem with the story.

Chief Kenny is described as "a man to be reckoned with," both mentally and physically, which reportedly made "the best chief of police North City had ever possessed." However, that proved to be a sad comment on the competence of his predecessors.

He never shows to be shocked or is worried that someone, somehow, wandered into his prison cells, opened one of them and killed an important witness in a high-profile case. But it gets worse! The explanation shows this was only possible because Kenny had been very careless in one regard, which eventually led to a second stabbing in those very same prison cells and another prisoner was able to escape from them – resulting in yet another deadly knife-attack. And the killer's method for entering the prison cell and Kenny's mistake were also never hinted at. So don't try and figure it out.

Not a very competent chief of police, if you ask me, and had Ellery Queen known about this case he would've probably been less guilt-ridden about his own mistake in Ten Days' Wonder (1948).

All of that being said, The Cell Murder Mystery is still a well-told, nicely paced and very pulpy crime story with a large, sprawling cast of characters, which does an excellent job at throwing the reader from one situation and revelation into another – clearly showing the author had his roots in the pulps and magazine publications of his time. The emphasis here is obviously on entertaining storytelling rather than crafting an intricate puzzle that poses a tricky challenge to armchair detectives.

So I found the lack of a proper puzzle-plot and the idiotic locked room to be slightly disappointing, but overall, the book was not a drag to read and blitzkrieged through the chapters. I was definitely entertained. It's just a very pulpy kind of mystery and you've to keep that in mind when you pick this one up.

Murder's a Horrid Business

"We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

Everybody Always Tells (1950) is the twenty-seventh entry in E.R. Punshon's prolific Bobby Owen series, who's "quite an important person nowadays at Scotland Yard," which tantalizingly promised "a fatal knife-blow" delivered to a patent agent and scientific adviser to a well-known law-firm – a blow that's reportedly delivered inside a locked room. So, of course, the book attracted my attention and assumed it would be a great followup to the recently reviewed Six Were Present (1956).

However, this is not an impossible crime novel in any way, shape or form, but more about the supposed locked room angle later.

Everybody Always Tells opens in a swanky London department store, where Owen plays the role of pack mule for his wife, Olive, but their bargain safari takes a strange turn when a store-detective, Miss Rice, approaches Owen. She just saw how "a peer of the realm," Lord Newdagonby, took a pearl necklace from the jewelry counter and furtively slipped it into Olive's handbag. Owen does not appreciate people "who push necklaces into other people's handbags" and decides to call upon his lordship, but that's where the problems begin to snowball out of control.

Lord Newdagonby resides at Dagonby House, "a wilderness of a place," consisting of a "twisted, twinning labyrinth of passages," corners, alcoves and empty, cobweb strewn rooms, which were vacated during the war – as "footmen turned into guardsmen" and "kitchen maids into munition workers." The post-war years saw the domestic staff of such sprawling estates shrink and eventually vanish forever.

So the Lord now lives there with his sole daughter, Mrs. Sibby Findley, who shed all respectability of the previous generation and scandalously left an Anglican sisterhood on the ground that she had found there was nothing to religion. She even publicly announced her intention to sample sin to see what that has to offer her and reputedly blackmailed her husband into marriage. Mr. Ivor Findley is a patent expert and scientific adviser, who has his own workroom/laboratory in the house, where he prefers to retreat to work in quiet solitude.

There's also a friend of Mrs. Findley present, one Charley Acton, who can be described as a dilettante inventor currently working on "an everlasting razor blade" and wrote a controversial article suggesting envisioning the manufacture of "a smaller artificial sun to accompany the planet Mars in its orbit," which would eventually make the planet available for human habitation. But the great visionary struck Owen as a pet dog (on a leash) trotting after its mistress.

Even for the post-war world, this is not a stereotypical, 1950s-era household and Owen learns the reason Lord Newdagonby tried to attract his attention, with the pearls, is a prospective murder. There were several mysterious phone calls made to the house and they sounded alarming, but Bobby doesn't have to wait long to find out how serious these warnings were: Mrs Findley is unable to get a response from her husband, who has locked himself inside his work room, but swears she could hear him groaning. So Bobby uses his, "quite unofficial," skills as a locksmith to pick the simplistic and token lock on the door of the workroom. And what he finds inside is the mortally wounded body of Findley. The handle of a sharpened kitchen knife was sticking out of his back.

E.R. Punshon

However, as noted in the opening of this blog-post, Everybody Always Tells is not a locked room novel, because the keys to the door were not found inside the room. While it was not explicitly mentioned that the murderer locked the door, as this person fled from the crime-scene, but it appears to be the only logical conclusion as no other feasible explanation was given for the locked nature of the room. So this aspect of the plot was, uncharacteristically, sloppy work on the part of Punshon, but then again, the book does seem to be written in a bit of a hurry.

Usually, Punshon manipulates half a dozen related, and unrelated, plot-threads with the skilled, nimble fingers of a seasoned puppeteer, but, this time around, the plot was surprisingly slender – focusing on this sole murder and the small circle of suspects surrounding it. This makes identifying the murderer a cakewalk for veteran armchair detectives. So in that regard Punshon really under performed, as a writer, in this outing, because (plot-wise) we know can do so much better than this.

Luckily, Everybody Always Tells still reflects Punshon's talent as a story-teller and plotter, which is, perhaps, best shown in the unusual clue of the empty guinea pig cage. A cage that had fresh food and water, but the two guinea pigs were nowhere to be found and their fate is directly tied to the stabbing and the somewhat unusual motive. I'm not entirely sure how (scientifically) accurate one aspect of this clue and motive actually is, however, it shows Punshon (in his late seventies) was still very much aware of the world around him. You can say this part of the story is a stereotypical plot-device of the fifties, but the book was published when that decade had only just began and this may very well be one of the earliest examples of it turning up crime-and thriller fiction from the era.

So not bad for a man whose formative years took place in the last period that preceded the Age of Electricity!

Finally, it has to be pointed out that Punshon, similar to John Dickson Carr, would probably have found equal success as a writer of ghost stories. There's a delightful and haunting scene towards the end, which takes place over an open well, that recalls a similar scene, involving an open grave, from The Dark Garden (1941). Punshon's talent for macabre, old-fashioned set pieces is the only thing that betrayed his heart and soul matured during the nineteenth century.

All in all, Everybody Always Tells is not one of Punshon's topnotch performances as a mystery novelist, but this will not deter fans of Bobby Owen from enjoying this specific entry in the series.

Well, as things stand now, my pick for favorite Punshon on my best-of list for 2017 is going to be a three-cornered fight between Diabolic Candelabra (1942), There's a Reason for Everything (1945) and the previously mentioned Six Were Present.

House Call

"I have had too much experience of life to believe in the infallibility of doctors."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's "The Thumb Mark of St. Peter," from The Thirteen Problems, 1932)

William Underhill was the man behind an, until recently, long-forgotten and obscure pseudonym, "Francis Duncan," which was plastered across the front-covers of roughly twenty detective-and thriller novels – mostly published between the late 1930s and early 50s. Duncan employed two specific series-characters, Peter Justice and Mordecai Tremaine, but they slipped from the public conscience not long after their creator retired from writing. They remained all but forgotten until very recently.

Last year, Random House, under the banner of their Vintage Murder Mysteries, which also includes reprints of Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin and Gladys Mitchell, published a brand new edition of Duncan's Murder for Christmas (1949). It was the second entry in the short-lived Tremaine series and was warmly received by readers, but, at the time, nobody really knew anything about the author. Even the publisher was unable to find any biographical information.

As reported in this article, the publisher send out a call for information and they received an answer when Duncan's son spotted a copy of Murder for Christmas at his local bookstore. What a surprise that must have been!

So now they had an actual name and a back-story for the author, which was put to good use for their next spate of reprints and this run seems to encompass the remaining titles from the Tremaine series – all of them wrapped in beautiful, colorfully illustrated book-covers. Yes, the pretty colored covers is what really attracted my attention to Duncan. What can I say? I may be autistic. Anyway...

I decided to sample one of his mystery novels and ended up settling for the fourth one in the series, entitled In at the Death (1952), which had a tantalizing synopsis. And the plot definitely has an interesting take on the figure of the nosy, meddlesome amateur snoop.

Mordecai Tremaine is a retired tobacconist and a sentimental soul with a weakness for romance fiction, but the elderly gentleman also acquired "a reputation as a solver of mysteries" and Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce, of Scotland Yard, once described him "as a murder-magnet" - which could very well be the first time this term was used to describe an amateur detective. There is, however, one difference between Tremaine and his colleagues: Boyce was able to use the reputation of his friend to convince the Commissioner to have Tremaine "accompany him on his next case." So he can watch an official police investigation from the start in "the role of unofficial observer."

This agreement is pretty much the setup for In at the Death, which begins with an interrupted game of chess between Tremaine and Boyce. The telephone call summons them to the seaside town of Bridgton, but first, they have to collect "the murder bag" from the offices of Scotland Yard. As is told in the first chapter, there's always a murder bag packed and ready at the Yard. The content of each bag can be termed as "the first-aid equipment of detection," but, sadly, this interesting tool of the professional police-investigator was soon forgotten about by the author.

Tremaine was initially thrilled and excited when he saw the bag and assumed the tools in them would be used as a contrast to the woolgathering method of the amateur detective. Unfortunately, this was not the case, but still a very minor blemish on an otherwise fairly solid plot.

The plot concerns the sudden and brutal death of a local doctor, Graham Hardene, who was found in the hallway of an empty, derelict house by a patrolling police-constable. Dr. Hardene was murderously struck on the side of the head with a lump of stone and this suggested to the local authorities that murderer just might be the internal tramp of crime-fiction, but soon the "highly satisfactory ingredients" of "an interesting murder" began to manifest themselves to Tremaine and Boyce.

Why was the doctor carrying a firearm? Who lured him to the deserted house with an emergency call? What frightened his receptionist and what did his housekeeper refuse to tell the police? Can the motive for his murder be found in his recent meddling in local politics, which put him in direct opposition with one of the town's most prominent citizens? What role do the crabby patient, the mysterious sailor and the cub-reporter play in the whole affair? And is there a link between the death of Dr. Hardene and two previous, seemingly unrelated and unsolved, murders in the district? Questions, questions, questions!

These questions are, largely, answered in a process of elimination as Tremaine and Boyce gather information and talk with, mostly, unwilling participants in the case. But, one by one, they scratch names and potential motives from the list and the only black mark against the story is that a vital piece of information, regarding the back-story of the doctor, is only given in the final quarter of the book – which seriously hampers the readers' ability to arrive at the correct solution before the halfway mark. Once you know the back-story of the victim, you should be able to identity the guilty party. Although the suggested false-solution, towards the end, which suggested an interesting, but ultimately disappointing, least-likely-suspect, can easily throw one off the scent again.

So, plot-wise, In at the Death is not a picture-perfect detective story, but still good enough to not disappoint and technically still qualifies as a fair-play mystery. But, again, some of the information should not have given at such a late stage in the story.

However, the best aspects of the book were definitely the solid story-telling, setting and the kind character of Tremaine. Duncan knew how to spin a yarn and conjured up a peculiar atmosphere with the backdrop of the story, which is "a fascinating mixture of the old and new" of "the romantic and the practical" typical of old places that became thriving (industrial) towns – showing the relentless change modern life has wrought on the developed world in the post-WWII world. However, modern readers will find that the town of Bridgton still has some of those delightful, old-fashioned remnants, such as tradesmen (i.e. milkmen and bakers) making home deliveries, which adds considerable charm to the overall story. Tremaine is simply a kind, likable character who has a special affinity for young, happy couples. He somewhat reminded me of Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite.

So I did not regret this gamble at all and will definitely return to this series in 2017. The plot descriptions of So Pretty a Problem (1950) and Behold a Fair Woman (1954) still hold my interest. As do the bright, pretty colors of their cover illustrations.

The Great Beyond

"You can't evade ghosts in any case, and it looks as if they're going to play a big part in this mystery. The air here is full of them."

- Anthony "Algernon" Vereker (Robin Forsythe's The Spirit Murder Mystery, 1936)

Back in June(-ish) of 2015, the Dean Street Press and Curt Evans embarked on the arduous task of salvaging the legacy of the criminally neglected E.R. Punshon, once a giant from the genre's Golden Era, who wrote thirty-five police novels about Bobby Owen – a once humble constable who climbed to the rank of Commander of Scotland Yard. Over the course of a year and a half, this collaboration brought the entire Bobby Owen-series back into print and these brand new editions were introduced by Evans, which also offered glimpses at the life and work of Punshon's colleagues.

On January 2, 2017, the Dean Street Press is going to complete their reissue program of the entire series and comprises of the last ten novels Punshon wrote during the last years of his life. A period that covers the years between 1949 and 1956. Interestingly, this last batch of Punshon's "contain lots of extra goodies," such as short stories and an entire script of a never before published BBC radio-play, but also a newly written and slightly depressing introduction.

Under the title "Detective Stories, the Detection Club and Death: The Final Years of E.R. Punshon," Evans describes how "time had wrought cruel changes" on the members of the London-based Detection Club after the long interval of the war years. John Dickson Carr noted how everyone looked decidedly "greyer and more worn," but, by that time, eight of the original club members had already passed away and the relentless march of time would continue to thin their ranks – eventually taking Punshon in the mid-1950s. But the introduction also contains such snippets of information about his scrap with Anthony Berkeley, one of the "crankiest and most cantankerous," or how Christopher Bush allowed him recuperating from an operation at his home.

However, the bits and pieces on the final days of some of our favorite mystery writers are overwhelmingly depressing. Such as Sayers' passing, who was found a week before Christmas, at the foot of her stairs, "surrounded by bereaved cats."

Only a few months before her death, Sayers received a copy from Punshon's widow of his last published detective novel, Six Were Present (1956), which Evans described as "charmingly introspective," since she always appreciated her husband's books – famously asking "what is distinction?" and then pointing to a stack Bobby Owen mysteries. One distinction that's undeniable is the amazing consistency in the quality of his plots and writing. Six Were Present was written by a man in his eighties and who was probably already on Death's doorstep, but there's hardly any wear and easily one of my favorite Owen novels so far.

You see, Six Were Present is Punshon's take on the Carr-Talbot School of (Impossible) Crime-Fiction. So, yes, the book sort of catered to my personal taste.

Six Were Present is the thirty-fifth and final entry in the Bobby Owen-series, which saw him rise to the rank of Commander, but in his last recorded case he acts in an unofficial capacity in what is, essentially, a family affair – as a message from his cousin brings him back to the place of his childhood.

Bobby has taken leave from Scotland Yard and took his wife, Olive, for a motoring tour of the English countryside, which brought him to a bewildering standstill at the remnant background decor of his childhood days. However, as bewildering as the changed landscape is the household he finds: his cousin, Myra, is married to Val Outers, a retired Colonial Officer from South Africa, who is a specialist in African folklore and the dubious owner of a genuine Witch-doctor's medicine bag – which is said to contain a moldering dead man's hand and a hand drawn map of an unclaimed uranium field. Sadly, Outer's fascination for "the Unknown Powers the Africans believe in" may have caused the death of his twin sons. Myra and their daughter, Rosamund, always suspected Val of having ordered the boys to spy on a secret initiation rite. And when they were found out by the Natives, they were sacrificed to "The Dark Ones."

So that kind of baggage might make family dinners around Christmastime a bit tense, but now a psychic medium, Teddy Peek, became a regular visitor to the household. And in the background, Rosamund as three admirers moving around: a guy known as BB, Ludo Manners and a hunchback, named Dewey James, who lives with his invalid, but nimble, mother.

I think this cast-of-characters, background props and premise show Punshon's imagination was unaffected by old-age, but the storytelling, however, was affected. There's about of fuzziness about the details and the best example of this is the haunting memory of the twins, which hang as a pair of silent ghosts over the plot, but their names are never mentioned. They're always referred to as "the boys." The strongest aspect of the plot is the impossible murder and the plot-threads that were woven around it were not as firmly grasped as in previous books. Some of them appear to be nothing more than window dressing and disappeared (unresolved) into the background (e.g. the African seen by the side of the road). However, the murder plot is a wonderful take on the impossible stabbing during a séance inside a locked (tower) room.

Bobby is informed by Mr. Nixon, who's not a crook, but the West Midshire Chief Constable, about the murder of Val Outers. During a sitting in the Tower Room of the estate, Val was violently stabbed and the weapon vanished from locked and watched room. The room was pitch-black and the door were both locked bolted, while the windows were heavily curtained. Everyone was sitting around a round table. And in these conditions someone struck a deadly knife-blow, which killed instantly. But how did the knife manage to vanish from the room? And how did the killer manage to strike such a precise and powerful blow?

E.R. Punshon

Well, I actually (brag, brag) managed to solve the impossible angle very quickly and this is another case, when you know how it was done, you know who has done, because the method fitted this character like a glove. After that, you can easly guess why it was done. Or roughly guess. However, the killer and motive were absolute grand, which fitted the method very well. One that hinges on the Chestertonian paradox of "when is a knife not a knife?" So, perhaps not a stone-cold classic locked room mystery, but overall, a very competent and spirited effort for the annals of the impossible crime story. For someone like me, that's not a bad way to bow out of this world as a mystery novelist. Yes, I'm biased in favor of authors who made a genuine effort at writing a good locked room. It makes you sort of family.

So, all in all, Six Were Present is a wonderfully lucid mystery novel, with flashes of originality, from a writer who was in his eighties and published his first novel in 1907. Some of Punshon's colleagues have bowed out on less gracious terms. Agatha Christie's muddled Postern of Fate (1974) stood in stark contrast to the work that garnering her the reputation as the Queen of Crime. Luckily, she had prepared Curtain (1975) and Sleeping Murder (1976) well ahead to cover up that abortion of a novel. Speaking of abortions, the reputation of Carr's sad swan-song, The Hungry Goblin (1972), has always prevented it from being reprinted and turned it into one of his rarest novels. Edmund Crispin's The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) was, at best, an unnecessary afterthought to an otherwise excellent series.

Well, you get the idea. Six Were Present ended the series on a high-note and that was not always the case for even the best of the Golden Agers. And as a fan of the series, locked rooms and Carrian plot-devices, I would even place the book among my personal favorites in the series. So perhaps not recommended as a starting point in the series, but one you must read once you have become a fan. It gives a nice sense of closure. Luckily, I still have about twenty of them left on the TBR-pile and at least one other is a locked room mystery! So, I guess my next stop in the series will be Everybody Always Tells (1950). 

Finally, the book also contains the script of a radio-play, "Death on the Up-Lift," which I'll safe for a separate review (read: filler-post).

A Flight of Fancy

"You always forget... that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Mistake of the Machine," from The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914)

Last week, I reviewed Death Through the Looking Glass (1978) by Richard Forrest, which concerned itself with the shenanigans surrounding the discovery of a murder victim inside the wreck of a crashed airplane and the premise was reminder that there were a number of aircraft mysteries languishing on my TBR-pile – one of the more prominent ones being Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935).

During his (short-lived) life, Sprigg earned his stripes as a versatile author and signed his name to poems, ghost stories and aeronautical textbooks. But where really garnered praise as a writer was during his brief stint as a mystery novelist. A short period of success that began with the publication of Crime in Kensington (1933) and ended five novels later with The Six Queer Things (1937), which were, incidentally, both listed by Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). 

They were well received and garnered praise from the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, who said his work "bubbles with zest and vitality" and stuffed with "good puzzles and discoveries," but his premature death threw them into obscurity – where they became scarce and expensive collector items. Thankfully, one of them has, once again, become available to us poor mortals!

Last year, the Poisoned Pen Press, under the banner of the British Library Crime Classics, reintroduced Sprigg to the present-day horde of mystery readers with a brand-new edition of Death of an Airman. The first one to roll off a printing press in eight decades!

Death of an Airman largely takes place on the tarmac of the Baston Aero Club and the opening has them welcoming a fresh pupil: Dr. Edwin Merriott, the Bishop in Cootamundra, Australia, who wants to take flying lesson to travel from one end of his diocese to the other – which takes several weeks with then conventional ground-based travel. Upon his arrival, the Bishop immediately meets with some of the club notable members, which include the manager and secretary of the club, Sarah "Sally" Sackbut and Lady Laura.

However, one of the most notable characters on the airfield is the scar-faced flight instructor, Major George Furnace, who's first seen when takes a young, inexperienced student, Thomas Vane, for a tailspin. He also creates a scene with another member, Mrs. Angevin, who is told by WWI fighter-pilot to stop "making every decent person's gorge rise" by turning herself into "a cheap circus."

So this sets the stage for, what appears to be, a tragic accident: Furnace's aeroplane is seen doing air spins, when it suddenly loses height, as "the flickering toy vanished behind the trees." Furnace has crashed his plane and his body is found in the wreckage with a deadly head wound, however, not all is what it seems and here's where the medically trained Bishop makes his biggest contribution to the case – perceptively noting the lack of rigor mortis. A fact that's confirmed by the doctor some time later, but the whole affair truly begins to resemble an impossible crime when the pathologist extracts a bullet from Furnace's skull!

The murder can be aptly described as a borderline impossible crime and the circumstances, in which Furnace perished, are genuinely baffling, but it's far from the only component providing a problem for the police.

Inspector Creighton of the Thameshire Constabulary uncovers a potential blackmail angle with direct ties to a dope-smuggling organization, which peddles cocaine across the Channel from Continental Europe. So this leads Creighton to the desk of Inspector Bernard Bray of New Scotland Yard, who has been investigating "the white-drug traffic in Britain for the Home Office," which, in turn, leads to such places as Glasgow and Paris – where Bray receives assistance from M. Jules Durand of the Sûreté (a name closely associated with "the most wildly romantic trials of French criminology").

This warm, friendly collaboration between the English and French police, in a dope-peddling case, recalled Basil Thomson's The Milliner's Hat Mystery (1937). As an additional coincidence, in both cases the police were on the lookout for one or two "Americans" who appeared to be involved in the drug trafficking business. One has to wonder if Thomson was aware of this book and decided to flesh out the smuggling angle into a full-fledged crime-novel. Anyway...

Well, there a lot of people working on the case or giving their two-cents, which provided the plot with a couple of false solutions, which are always fun, but the final explanation as to how the murder was accomplished was devilish cheeky. A piece of trickery that almost seems as impossible to pull off as the effect it ended up creating, but then again, the guilty party in this book always seem take the long way round in order to achieve their goals – whether it's the disposal of a potential dangerous person or smuggling illegal substances. It always has to be done as difficult as humanly possible.

Not that I am complaining about plot complexity, mind you. But I can imagine some readers would be annoyed to learn Sprigg was being difficult for the sake of being difficult, because these crimes certainly did not came about organically. However, I don't want to complain about a complex and juicy plot. I've a reputation to think of!

So, that being said, Death of an Airman is still a very well-written and plotted mystery novel, which also brings the author's insight and personal experience in aviation to the table. A field that has rarely, if ever, been explored by other Golden Age writers and this gives the book somewhat of a unique feeling. I genuine hope the British Library decides to republish his other mystery novels as well, because Crime in Kensington sounds like a must read for any self-respecting locked room fanboy.

On a final note, I cranked out this review on a short time-limit. So that saved you (at least) a page-worth of vague, semi-coherent rambling and arguing with myself on whether or not the book qualified as an impossible crime. As you probably noticed, I decided to go with a borderline impossible crime and have not labeled this blog-post as a locked room mystery.

However, the next blog-post may or may not be a review of a locked room novel. Who knows? Wait and see!

Clatter on the Roof

"When he discovered the wondrous stage of the attic, that predilection for crime... came rushing back..."

- Edogawa Rampo ("The Stalker in the Attic," 1926; collected in The Edogawa Rampo Reader, 2008)

Constance and Gwenyth Little were two Australian-born sisters from East Orange, New Jersey, who were called "the reigning queens of the screwball mystery comedy" and they earned this reputation as the co-authors of twenty-one wacky, "screwball cozies" - all of them standalone novels published between 1938 and 1953.

Unfortunately, the genre has seldom been kind to the memory and legacy of prolific authors of standalones (e.g. Max Murray). So the work of the Little sisters quickly fell into neglect when publishers began to move away from the traditional detective story during the fifties. As a consequence, they were doomed to wallow in literary oblivion, but, one day, two saviors appeared on the horizon.

Tom and Enid Schantz of the now, lamentably, defunct Rue Morgue Press were arguably the biggest fans of the Littles and they practically adopted them as the flagship authors for their publishing house.

During the late 1990s, the Rue Morgie Press began to reissue the then long-forgotten work of the sisters and they became a mainstay of their catalog over the course of the succeeding decade – which saw reprints of all of their work. As a matter of fact, some of the earlier reprints (e.g. Great Black Kanba, 1944) had gone out-of-print again by the time they closed down for business.

I've been aware of the Littles for some time now, but never got around to sample their work and my excuses vary from decade to decade: back in the 2000s, I was still fully immersed in my fundamental period and I would not deign to touch wacky crime novels. I had not yet been exposed to the wonderfully funny, alcohol-fueled and punch-drunk madness of the screwball mysteries by Craig Rice. So, I hope that, somehow, excuses my ignorance at the time. And this decade, we have been flooded by a deluge of reprints and translations, which has put most of the reprints from the 2000s on the back-burner.

However, the festive season that's almost upon us provided me with a convenient excuse to plunge headfirst into one of their first detective stories.

The Black-Headed Pins (1938) was the second novel by the Littles, but the first one to have "black" in the title and takes place in "a dilapidated, creepy old barn" situated in "the wilds of Sussex County," New Jersey, which belongs to a Scrooge-like lady, Mrs. Mabel Ballinger – who puts "every penny through a mangle before parting with it." She cheaply employed the narrator of the story, Leigh Smith, as a live-in companion. Or, as she refers to herself, a general slave.

Luckily, Mrs. Ballinger decided to invite several relatives over for Christmas and Leigh is relieved to know she won't be alone with her employer, during the holidays, in the large, sprawling and gloomy barn. But a shadow is cast over this prospect when an old family ghost stirs from his slumber.

Over a hundred years ago, the nonagenarian Edward Ballinger lived there with a handful of servants and he broke his leg when alone in the attic room. He was not found until one of the servants heard him trying to drag himself across the floor towards the stairs. The old was brought to his bedroom and a doctor was summoned, but the only thing he could do was sign a death certificate. However, this is not where the story ends: when the undertaker arrived the following morning they found the body on the floor over on the other side of the room, but the doctor swore he was dead the first time he examined the body. And thus a family legend was born.

The story goes that "if ever there is a dragging noise across the attic floor" someone with Ballinger blood will meet with "a fatal accident," but if the body is not watched until it's buried, "it will walk." That's right, zombies!

I've to point out here that the dragging noise from the attic qualifies as a borderline impossible crime, because the solution would have lend itself perfectly for a locked room situation. And the dragging noise really should have emanated from a locked attic. It would have been a nice touch to the overall story, but what's really unforgivable is how the authors missed out on a scene that would have practically written itself. Several of the characters, including the local policeman, staged a stakeout in the attic to catch whatever made the unnerving sound, but there should've been a scene in which they bolted from the attic, down the stairs, as the dragging noise from an invisible source was crawling into their direction – which would fit the method for the trick perfectly. Oh, well.

Thankfully, the Little sisters used the second part of the family legend, about the walking corpses, to full effect.

John Ballinger is Mrs. Ballinger's favorite nephew, which is a practical affection, because he has a "fondness for tools and repair jobs." It was his form of recreation and there was more than enough odd jobs to do for him in the large, half neglected home of his aunt, but that's when the family legend lives up to its reputation. John was repairing the leaky roof when he fell to his death and physical evidence shows someone had tempered with the scaffold he was standing on. So it's a case of murder.

After the death of John, the sisters did a commendable job in balancing the story between a dark, doom-laden narrative and lighthearted, good natured detective work.

The ghostly back-story and the walking corpses result give some excellent set-pieces to the plot, but the doom and gloom also springs from the personal circumstances of the characters. One example is John's widow, Rhynda, who was pregnant at the time of his death and one of the unexpected guests to the house, Richard Jones, has shown a certain interest in her – as well as in our narrator. But there's also a good deal of enthusiastic sleuthing on the part of Leigh and some of the relatives and friends in the house. I also loved Mrs. Ballinger's horror over the expanding costs of her Christmas party and all of the extra mouths she has to feed.

It keeps the reader engaged, interested and (more importantly) entertained, which made it forgivable that the story continued pass the point when the story should've ended. The Black-Headed Pins should have been a novella with thirty or forty pages shaved off it, but, as said before, the Littles knew how to entertain and captivate their audience. So this is really not that big of a deal. Hell, I was sufficiently entertained that, while having a decent conclusion, the plot lacked the proper fairplay to help you reach the same conclusion as the character. After all, you have to take into account that storytelling and humor take center-stage in the work of these sisters.

What I do object against are the titular black-headed pins, which were meaningless red herrings and an unnecessary distraction. They meant nothing in the end and I suspect they were only added to the plot to give the story a name with black in the book-title.

But, all in all, The Black-Headed Pins turned out to be one of the more memorable Christmas-time mysteries and comes very much recommended, especially if you enjoy reading such holiday-themed detective stories around this time of the year. Plot-wise, it might not be as solid or fair as some of the others of its kind, but it's better written and far more original than most Yuletide mysteries – which tend to be cast from the same mold as Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas (1938).