There's No Such Thing as Magic

"The impossible situation, by its very uniqueness, ultimately limits the possibilities."

- The Great Merlini (Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat, 1938)

Clayton Rawson was an illusionist, editor and mystery writer, who's mostly remembered for his detective stories about The Great Merlini, but he also authored a second, short-lived series about another magician detective, Don Diavolo – originally published, as by "Stuart Towne," in Red Star Mystery during the early 1940s. All of the stories were collected in two volumes, Death Out of Thin Air (1941) and Death from Nowhere (1943), which comprises of four novellas.

A fifth novella, entitled "Murder from the Grave," was scheduled for the February, 1941 issue of Red Star Mystery, but was never published. Considering the title of the story, I strongly suspect Rawson refurbished it as a Merlini novel and released it a year later as No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). And that brings us to the subject of today's review.

Last month, "JJ," who blogs at The Invisible Event, reviewed No Coffin for the Corpse and the Don Diavolo novellas were brought up in the tail of comments.

I opined that the Great Merlini series was written as proper, straightforward detective stories, while the Don Diavolo ones were pure pulp, however, my observation about the latter was based on just one story, "Death Out of Thin Air" - which I read in the elephantine The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014) and reviewed here. So I wanted to see how correct, or incorrect, my assumption was and picked one of the two volumes from the big pile.

Death from Nowhere opens with a novella that's part detective story and part pulp thriller, but both sections of the plot establishes Don Diavolo, the Scarlet Wizard, as a master escapist.

The first story, "Claws of Satan," was first published in the June, 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery and begin with Don Diavolo, bound and manacled, inside a submerged "double cocoon of glass and metal." It's an escape trick that tied him to his basement workshop for the past week, but an unpleasant business affair forces him to venture outside. A disreputable circus owner, R.J. Hagenbaugh, bought a new guillotine trick from Diavolo's outfit, but stopped payment on the check he wrote him. Now the fear is that he'll take apart the illusion and put up for sale in the catalog of his Outdoor Amusement Supply House. And the Scarlet Wizard won't see a dime of it!

So, of course, Diavolo did not leave his workshop to have a respectful disagreement with Hagenbough, "mentally trying to compose a few sentences whose edges would be sharp enough to penetrate" Hagenbaugh's thick hide, but the magician would be engaged in trouble once he mendaciously gained access to his private office – getting knocked from behind by an unknown occupant of the room. Once he regained consciousness, Hagenbaugh is slumped behind his desk, dead as a door nail, with "five long parallel scratches" along the right side of his face and neck. A chair was tipped back against the door, top jammed beneath the doorknob, while his arch nemesis, Inspector Church, was banging against it! Diavolo had some explaining to do.

Interestingly, the first half of this novella reads like a proper detective story in the Van Dine-Queen mold: the crime-scene is thoroughly investigated, which yields such clues as a missing shoelace, a damp sponge and water on the floor, but also the discovery of another crime and several revelations. Additionally, there are some false solutions. However, the best part is perhaps how this section of the story ended. Diavolo is arrested, handcuffed to both Inspector Church and Lieutenant Brophy, but he still manages to vanish... from a locked and watched elevator!

The second half of the story is more carny pulp and has a deadly tight rope act as well as Diavolo tangling with some circus folk. Of course, this will land him in another spot of danger that requires him to pull off another escape act. Seriously, this series show what Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin series would've been like had the character been a detective instead of a gentleman thief.

Luckily, the solution is satisfying enough and properly clued. I loved the clue of the cryptic message, "SNOW LEOPARD," and how that tied in to the motive, but locked room angle is also properly handled with sober explanation. The trick of the barricaded door is fairly routine, but not all that bad. It's very believable. Not as good is how the murderer remained unseen from the secretary outside of the office. It's not something everyone will swallow and basically ripped off from a famous, but disputed, short story that some even seem to hate. As a whole, the story is not bad and really like it. Especially the first half.

The second novella, "The Enchanted Dagger," came from the December, 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery and is, for better and for worse, sensationalist pulp from start to finish – topped with some Fu Manchu-style shenanigans.

Diavolo is challenged by a crusty, old champion of the paranormal, Mr. Nicholas Sayre, who has "a deep-seated distaste for magicians." Sayre is a multi-millionaire fascinated by "the subject of Tibetan and Indian sorcery" and is a fierce proponent of the supernormal, but Diavolo once proved that the president of psychic research society was a fraud. And that why he particularly disapproves of the Scarlet Wizard.

However, Sayre has come across a man who can do everything: a mystic by the name of Shivara. He can vanish front of your very eyes, summon an astral projection of himself and read minds. So, the millionaire wants to pit the powers of the mystic against the skeptical-minded Diavolo, which results in a stunning array of seemingly impossible situations – such as a poker moving by its own, a disappearance from a library and a murder by the titular dagger. A dagger that was thrust between someone's shoulder-blades!

This plot-thread closely linked to the disappearance of a body from a hotel room, an archaeologist who supposedly died in Persia (present-day Iran) and the long-lost treasure of Alexander the Great. I found this to be one of the more appealing plot-threads of the novella, because the impossible crimes and supernatural feats had a profoundly disappointing explanation. You can even say it was a bit of a cheat.

The answer as to how a poker and dagger could be moved by invisible hands, the disappearance from locked and watched library and the astral projection all had the same, disappointing answer. One that rolled two of the most underwhelming and unfair explanations into one. Diavolo even used it to do the Indian Rope trick. I know, it sounds intriguing, but believe me, it's not. We give the Master of the Locked Room himself, the Great John Dickson Carr, flack for his dagger trick and cheating in Seeing is Believing (1941), but that's actually ingenious compared to this.

So, all in all, I would say that my observation about the differences between Rawson's Merlini and Diavolo stories was pretty spot on. The former are written as proper detective stories and the latter are firmly grounded in pulp territory, which the second half of the first story and the entire second story clearly shows. However, they make for a good read and the sheer imagination of all those impossible situations, false solutions and dangerous escapes make them very energetic tales. Even if their ending doesn't always live up their wonderful premise.

Well, that's two more locked room mysteries I can scratch off the big list.

Closing Credits

"A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins."

- Orson Welles

Last week, I reviewed The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941) by Stuart Palmer, which used a film studio as a backdrop and there are several detective novels that take the reader behind the scenes of a movie shoot, such as Carter Dickson's And So to Murder (1940) and Edmund Crispin's Frequent Hearses (1950), but seldom is a cinema the scene of the crime – where a murder is committed in front of the silver screen. One of the last victims in Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) was stabbed inside a movie theater, but that murder was only a minor cog in the machine of the overall plot.

So the only example I can present you with is the subject of today's blog-post: John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946), originally published as by "John Slate," in which a movie-goer never made it to the end credits. However, I should mention that Palmer wrote a short story about a similar kind of murder, namely "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" from Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), but the setting of that story was a Planetarium and not a movie theater. Well, that filled my quota of Palmer references for this Fearn review!

One Remained Seated is the third in the Miss Maria Black series and the plot draws on one of her hobbies that was mentioned in her debut, Black Maria, M.A. (1944), which are American gangster movies. Miss Black always patronizes a local movie theater, Langhorn Cinema, where "crime films hold sway," but on her latest visit several things go horribly wrong: a crime picture was advertised, Death Strikes Tomorrow, but the renters made a last-minute switch and gave them a copy of Love on the Highway – which she disliked and called her experience "a glaring case of taking money under false pretenses."

Oh, and there's also a dead man slumped in seat A-11, inside the circle, with a small, neatly drilled hole in his forehead and the deadly projectile was "a slug of solid copper." Apparently, the metallic-like pellet was homemade and fired with an air-rifle.

Well, the first observation that has to be made about the book is that, unlike the other entries in the series, this is not an impossible crime story. John Norris said in his blog-post about this series, "Neglected Detectives: Maria Black, MA," that the plot concerned "a man found stabbed in a movie theater," while "no one was sitting or seen anywhere near him," but, as you now know, that's not the exactly the premise of the book.

Surprisingly, the book turned out to be strange amalgamation of the Realist School and Intuitionist School. It has a leg in a classroom of both schools.

First of all, there's the location of the story, Langhorn Cinema, which is the linchpin of the plot, but also offers the reader a peek behind the silver screen and shows the work floor atmosphere of the cinema – both of them closely tied to the how-aspect of the murder. A look at the inner workings of institutions (e.g. universities) and companies are a hallmark of the Realists School. However, the plot was not completely immersed in the minutia of the day-to-day work routine of a late-1940s cinema, but you get a fairly good idea what the place is about. And there are some technical tidbits strewn throughout the plot. Such as when they tried to determine the exact position of the rifleman, which brought Miss Black and Inspector Morgan behind the actual projection screen.

I also have to give a nod to the portrayal of the ordinary people who there and the role they played in the murder. Particularly, the young projectionist of the place, Fred Allerton, who's engaged to one of the usherettes, Nancy Crane, but also has a talent for making himself suspect in the eyes of the police – because he ran into the victim with his bike on the night of the murder. So, in that regard, One Remained Seated is yet another piece of classic crime-fiction showing that the Golden Age was not just about the upper classes encountering murder in their Victorian mansions. You can say that about the entire Maria Black series. Well, the ones I have read.

A second, if somewhat slight, aspect of the Realist School is the breakdown of the identity of the murdered man. The police suspects very early on in the story that the name he used in the local hotel is a false one, but his name and full back-story is not revealed until they re-watched the movie.

Originally, the intention was to determine when the shot was fired, because it had to coincide with the shots fired in the movie, but Miss Black notices something about one of the characters. This also reveals the true identity of one of the on-screen characters. But there's yet another character in the story with an alter ego: a pot-bellied man with an Old Bill mustache who has been asking favors from the young man who work at the cinema (no, not those kind of favors).

So there's more than enough detective work to sort out for Miss Black and the reader, which includes the rather original clue of the movie poster and a craftily conceived alibi. One that's used for a second, brutal murder of an usherette, but the alibi really fitted the movie-theme of the book. It's exactly what you'd expect from a murderer who hangs around a cinema. The only real drawback is that the murder is very obvious. You can hardly ignore this character in the role of murderer once you begin to grasp the main lines of the plot. I was also slightly annoyed by the vague details about the past crime that was buried in the heart of the plot, but, otherwise, I liked it as much as the other titles from this series.

The Maria Black series:

Black Maria, M.A. (1944)

Maria Marches On (1945)

One Remained Seated (1946)

Thy Arm Alone (1947)

Death in Silhouette (1950)

I also reviewed Fearn's The Crimson Rambler (1948) and The Lonely Astronomer (1954).

On a final, semi-related note: I began this blog-post without any real examples of detective novels with a movie theater setting for their murders, but one suddenly occurred to me, P.R. Shore's The Death Film (1932). Curt Evans (who else?) mentioned the book in a 2010 blog-post on MysteryFile. However, it is, apparently, an extremely scarce title and the only thing we know about it is that someone is killed during the screening of a movie. So that makes a grand total of... two cinema mysteries? Two and a half, if you count the one by Christie?  

The Renaissance Era: Returns from the Bowels of Obscurity

"By a route obscure and lonely..."

- Edgar Allan Poe (Dreamland, 1844)

I've several ideas for blog-posts (read: filler-posts) on the back burner, such as my favorite impossible crimes from Case Closed or updating the best-of lists, which has actually been requested numerous times, but they require actually time and preparation ("show prep") - placing them at the back of my priority list. So I decided to finally start cleaning out the Augean stables.

You should not expect them to appear all at once over the next couple of weeks or months, because I plan to spread them out over the entirety of 2017. And that probably means that some won't get written and posted until 2018. However, I'll make a genuine effort to get around to as many of them as possible and particularly my best-of lists, but still haven't decided on whether I'll update the old posts or simply re-post them as new lists.

Anyway, we'll eventually see how long it will take for this ship to crash on the rocky shores of broken promises. But for now, I actually have something for you that came from the backseat of my priority list.

Back in December of 2014, I posted a blog-post about the revival of the traditional detective story, entitled "The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction," which commented on the smash success of a reprint edition by J.J. Farjeon's obscure Mystery in White (1937) – becoming a runaway bestseller that sold over 60.000 copies! I said in my post how this change had been in the air for over a decade. When the advent of the internet reestablished a middle market where secondhand book dealers and small, independent publishers found a willing audience for the long-neglected detective stories of yore.

Since that post, we've been buried in an avalanche of reprints and thought the time was ripe to write an addendum to it, because there was another important side-effect to the internet opening up a new and open market place – namely making it easier for the casual readers to explore the never-ending rabbit hole that's our genre.

Before the internet, you could easily get your hands on such writers as Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout. They never really went out-of-print and their work saturated the secondhand book market, but going beyond the usual suspects required specialization, serendipitous luck and some money. Basically, you had to be a fan with the fanaticism of a true believer. Just look at the slew of new names and book titles regularly excavated by Curt Evans and John Norris. I'm not exactly a casual mystery reader and consider myself to be a fairly knowledgeable fan, but I never cease to amaze at what has been lost and how rich a history our genre has. So imagine how unlikely it must have been for a casual readers to get an easy opportunity to read Robin Forsythe, Kelley Roos and Joseph Commings in the pre-internet days. The changes were very, very slim.

I wanted to do a post looking at the authors who were (IMHO) most successful in riding the wave of this Renaissance Era and succeeded in either reclaiming their past glory or even proved to be more successful than they probably were in their own lifetime. And the first name might surprise you know.

Anthony Berkeley was, arguably, one of the most important British mystery writers of the 1930s and some of his work has definitely inspired some of Christie's most celebrated novels (c.f. The Silk Stockings Murders (1928) with The ABC Murders, 1936). His share to the first round-robin novel by the Detection Club is what made The Floating Admiral (1931) surprisingly successful, because he tied everything logically together in the final chapter. He also predicted the rise of the psychological thriller, but, by the 2000s, Berkeley had been all but forgotten. Until a publishing outfit, The House of Stratus, started to reprint his mystery novels.

I always got the impression from browsing the archives of the old GAD Yahoo Group that Berkeley found a whole new audience in the early 2000s. Many of the readers on that group, whose opinions and reviews were my guidebook through the genre, acquired there first Berkeley's through HoS and avid collectors were able to add or even complete the series. I believe the new editions of The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) were welcomed with open arms.

The House of Stratus were very important with helping kick-start the Renaissance Era by bringing this historically important writer back in print, but they also brought back other, once big-name, writers: Michael Innes, Freeman Wills Crofts and Edgar Wallace. However, I think Berkeley is the big winner of the lot, because he was the first big name to make a return and his work may have been as instrumental in bringing this new era about as he was during the Golden. Hey, you know what they say: a classic never goes out of style.

On a side note, "JJ," from The Invisible Event, placed a crown on Berkeley's brow as one of the Crime Kings. The post is titled "The Kings of Crime – III: Anthony Berkeley, the King of Diamonds."

A second name I have pointed out before, but must noted, is that of the Empress of the Renaissance Era, the Great Gladys Mitchell. Down, JJ. Down! Allow me to explain. Nobody has made a return as big and thorough as Mitchell. She was one of the most obscure writers of the genre in the early 2000s. Most of her books were never reprinted as paperbacks and were mostly available to collectors who were willing to spend money to possess rare hardcover editions. One of the few titles that were relatively easy to get was a paperback edition of Watson's Choice (1950) and some Green penguins.

There were two names during that time who helped kept her work alive: Nick Fuller who now infrequently blogs at "Escape to Adventure" and the man behind "The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site." They made a great case for Mitchell and were very honest about her flaws, but pleaded that she was an acquired taste who deserved a chance. Personally, I'm very glad I did, because Mrs. Bradley is one of my favorite detective characters and when her creator had a firm grasp of all her plot-threads the books were often excellent. She made a good impression when the now defunct Rue Morgue Press reissued such titles as Death at the Opera (1934) and When Last I Died (1941), which Crippen & Landru compiled a collection of all her short stories under the title Sleuth's Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others (2005). Soon, Mitchell's rarest titles, such as Brazen Tongue (1940) and The Worsted Viper (1943), were reissued by the Minnow Press as hardcover editions and they apparently had a limited print run – because they went out-of-print within a blink of an eye. Eventually, she was picked up by Vintage/Penguin and they reissued all of her mystery novels. I think she has been more read in the past few years than during her own lifetime.

Let's continue with two more odd-ones-out: the first is the previously mentioned Farjeon, who was the least likely writer to reappear from obscurity, but Mystery in White came at the right time and was read more than during its original publication – ensuring further reprints. Farjeon is, like Mitchell, an acquired taste, but his comeback was amazing! Maurice Leblanc is the other odd name, one of the leading lights of the Rogue School, but I don't think his name was well-remembered outside of the Francophone world before the 2000s. But then Wildeside Press began to reissue translations, which consisted of the marvelous The Exploits of Arsène Lupin (1907) and 813 (1910). Leblanc is still not one of the most widely read names in the genre, but he probably would not even have been known about without these editions.

I already mentioned the Rue Morgue Press and their role in Mitchell's return, but they had an extensive catalog that included Nicholas Blake, Glyn Carr, Clyde B. Clason, Kelley Roos and Craig Rice. However, the one that seems to have really stuck around, after they closed down for business, is Stuart Palmer. The run of reprints by the RMP saw the return in print of the extremely scarce The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934) and a good swath of Palmer's mystery novels are still available as ebooks. So I found it interesting Palmer is the one who emerged as sort of a mainstay, because his competition included the great John Dickson Carr, Craig Rice and Delano Ames. But it is good that he's being read again.

Leo Bruce also deserves a mention as pretty much all of his mystery novels, featuring either Sgt. Beef or Carolus Deene, were brought back into circulation by Chicago Press, which included the much touted Case for Three Detectives (1936) and the obscure Case with Four Clowns (1939) – once considered as one of the scarcest books by a well-known Golden Age authors. Curt Evans also made him the subject of an essay, “The Man Who Was Leo Bruce.” A name who's (justly) well-regarded among connoisseurs of detective stories and glad to see his work is easy to get nowadays. Particularly, the Sgt. Beef series.

Lately, we have seen an outpouring of reprints from such publishers as the British Library Crime Classics-wing of the Poisoned Pen Press, The Detective Club from HarperCollins, Coachwhip Books, Ramble House and the Dean Street Press. A profusion of once well-known and completely obscure, long-forgotten writers were republished by them in the past few years, which makes it hard to say who will end up leaving a somewhat lasting impression, but there already some remarkable comebacks in this tsunami of reprints. 

 

E.R.Punshon is one of those familiar names from a bygone era and was highly regarded among both his readers and peers. Sayers once famously asked, "what is distinction," followed by holding up one of Punshon's mysteries and pointed to it, but he fell quickly from public memory after his death in the 1950s. 

Over the past few years, his work has been brought back into by print on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by two different publishers – one of them printing paperback editions and the other ebooks. My regularly readers are well aware of my high opinion on Punshon and regard his return to our bookshelves as important as the rediscovery of Berkeley. I would have loved to know what "kindly Mr. Punshon" would have thought of the renewed interest in his work in that far-flung year of 2016.

Dean Street Press, who did digital end of Punshon's comeback, has also brought back a number of unjustly neglected woman mystery writers. Some who could have easily claimed the title of Crime Queen had they written more of some novels that currently found their way back into our hands. Ianthe Jerrold wrote the traditionally-styled classic Dead Man's Quarry (1930) and Harriet Rutland was the authoress of the delightful Bleeding Hooks (1940), but all of the books from their small body of work is well wroth a read and sincerely hope they will stand the test of time – because they could have been serious rivals to the other Crime Queens. But time will tell.

The British Library also did their fair share in bringing a host of long-forgotten mystery writers back in the limelight, but the most interesting reprints were Anthony Wynne's The Silver Scale Mystery (as Murder of a Lady, 1931) and Christopher St. Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935), because we all want to see more from these authors – as they are obscure and secondhand editions of Wynne come with a hefty price-tag. So, hopefully, they'll break through as well. But we're drifting away from the purpose of this overlong, rambling blog-post that begins to eerily begins to resemble sponsored content. Badly written sponsored content. But rest assured, I do this for free.

Wow, this "addendum" is really about the size of a Van Dinean footnote! Anyhow, let's get going.

One of the strangest appearance on the scene is a Golden Age-style writer who's still alive, namely Paul Halter, who was known in the early 2000s as the second coming of Carr, but John Pugmire had trouble finding a publisher for his translations – since nobody wanted to touch a live GAD writer. So he went into business for himself and founded Locked Room International, but we, as the thoroughly spoiled children that we are, began to pick like a child at the English editions. Going, "well, this is not what expected." And then to think we sacrificed children to get the translations.

However, we're all very grateful to finally get an opportunity to read his locked room novels. Pugmire is still diligently working on a catalog of impossible crime fiction from France, Sweden, England and Japan.

Japan gave us another peculiar, living specimen from Japan's neo-orthodox movement, Keigo Higashino. The first novel to be published, Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005), was chosen by the American Library Association as Best Mystery Novel of 2012. On the cover was affix "A Novel," but it was a mystery novel at heart. Even though that point was heavily debated. But some of the subsequent translation were more purer mystery novels and I think Higashino garnered the most mainstream recognition from all the writers mentioned thus far.

Well, I feel as if I lost the thread of this blog-post halfway through, because I wanted to write about the successes of some returns, but churned out a simple, drawn-out rundown. Not one that's even all that complete, but this one gone long enough. Well, I never claimed to have been anything more than your resident hack reviewer. I'll try to keep future blog-posts of this nature shorter and keep them on the intended course. Next blog-post will be regular review. So you can keep an eye out for that.

There's a Reason for Everything

"People kill other people... for all sorts of reasons that don't seem to make sense to anyone else."

- Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce (Francis Duncan's In at the Death, 1952)

Over the past three months, I've been working my way through a small stack of detective novels by Francis Duncan, which were reprinted last year by Vintage and counts now five of (reportedly) nine titles from the author's series about a retired tobacconist, Mordecai Tremaine – who's also an amateur criminologist and professional murder-magnet.

Regardless of his attraction to violent crimes, Tremaine is a hopeless romanticist and a "sworn friend of lovers." A sentimental soul whose "chief delights" is reading the bright, "refreshingly idealistic fiction"  published in Romantic Stories and this colors his role as detective. So you can basically sum him up as a literary relative of Agatha Christie's Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite (who are also described as friends of lovers). Simply a delightful and sympathetic character, but one who, somehow, got tossed on the trash heap of obscurity and waned there until 2015 – when the previously mentioned published reissued Murder for Christmas (1949). A success that lead them to reissue four additional titles in 2016.

I mentioned in my previous reviews how Duncan evidently knew how to put a plot together, but he also had an eye for the backdrop of his stories and this is illustrated in the bright, eye-catching covers of the new editions. Three of the four recent reprints were all set near the sea: an isolated house on the cliffs (So Pretty a Problem, 1950), a seaport town (In at the Death, 1952) and a sun-soaked island (Behold a Fair Woman, 1954), but one of the earliest books in the series has a far more traditional setting – a quintessential village in the English countryside.

Murder Has a Motive (1947) reminded me of Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952) with a slight touch of the gloomy lunacy of Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931).

The backdrop of the book is a small, snug and seemingly idyllic village, named Dalmering, but there's a dark, disturbing undercurrent beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday village life. A "shadow of evil lay heavily over the loveliness of Dalmering." The idea and aesthetics of the treacherous tranquility of village life has been run into the ground on the Midsomer Murders, but when Duncan tackled the subject it was still fresh enough. And he even had a somewhat original take on it.

Dalmering's population is divided into two camps: one of them consist of the permanent, long-time residents ("the older Dalmering, the true Dalmering") who've lived there for many generations, while the second camp, known as the "Colony," are only temporary residents of the place from London – who had discovered "its unspoilt beauty." Tremaine travels down to Dalmering to spend a holiday with two old friends, Paul and Jean Russell, who run a busy country practice and invest a great deal in the social life of the village, but tragedy has struck the place on the eve of his arrival. A member of their community has become the victim of a "dark, brutal murder."

Lydia Dare moved around in the circle of the Londoners and was engaged to Gerald Farrant, but, on the evening of her death, she had dinner with Martin Vaughan. A self-made man with archaeology as his hobby and it was known he was in love with Dare, which gave one of the strongest motives when she was murdered on her way back to home. She was found stabbed to death in the early hours of the morning on a well-worn pathway through a small copse.

As said before, Tremaine sympathies were "on the side of romance" and the fact that the victim was about to be married "weighed with him the most." To strike at the young and happy was "to arouse him to wrath" and awakened "the smouldering, deep-seated chivalry of the Galahad who dwelt within him," but the case is far more complicated than it first seems. For one thing, his friends and hosts received a small, but useful, legacy as a result of Dare's death. Giving them a ghost of a motive. However, there are also the intertwined, often hidden relationships and potential motives of the other villagers, which all seem to be connected to the local amateur dramatics society. They're rehearsing for an interesting stage play in three acts, Murder Has a Motive by Alexis Kent.

Well, from here on out, it becomes difficult to discuss the plot in close detail, because Murder Has a Motive is Duncan's most descriptive and character-driven mystery novels to date, which also has some very nebulous clueing. There are some physical clues, such as a pair of "roomy, wooden-soled Somerset clogs," but the solution is reasoned from what certain characters knew, did or must have done. So, technically, the reader has a shot at solving the crimes, however, this is not an easy task since the murderer is batshit crazy, which makes the book-title a bit ironic.

All of that being said, the book still worked as a detective story, albeit more along the lines of Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949), which also gave a glimmer of the real-life effects a homicidal maniac can have on a community.

The killer from Duncan's tale committed three murders (last one was particular gruesome) and this placed the village in "the blinding glare of frightening publicity," which begins to worry the police after the second and third murder – because the press-hounds will be showering the investigators with scorn, accusations and bitter criticism. You also get a taste of the vivid newspaper prose from some of Fleet Street's most colorful writers after the second body is found. So, in that regard, the story really gave you the feeling that a large, outside world had cast its eyes on this small, secluded place when the murders started to happen.

I also want to point out the opening of the third chapter, in which Tremaine and Inspector Boyce bump into each other near the scene of the crime. Boyce immediately hurls an accusation at his old friend that, "whenever anyone gets killed," he discovers the body or is nearby. And how he should be called "the murder magnet." Tremaine defends himself by pointing out that the murder was all over when he arrived, but it's interesting to see how this series used that exact term. Other GAD-period writers have pointed out how their characters attracted murders wherever they went, but Duncan actually used the term "murder magnet." It's something worth pointing out.

Well, I wish this review had a bit more substance to it, but, suffice to say, Murder Has a Motive is an unconventional village mystery and a fairly solid entry in a wonderful series of detective novels. A genuine rediscovery worthy of our current Renaissance Era. I sincerely hope Vintage decides to complete this series by reissuing the remaining titles. Here's hoping!

The Bigger Picture

"To Hollywood, city of screwballs! Drink 'er down."

 - Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen's The Four of Hearts, 1938)

My previous blog-post was a review of John Russell Fearn's Death in Silhouette (1950), which was the last entry in his series about Miss Maria Black, who I compared to Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers and thought reviewing a title from the Withers series would be a nice follow-up. So I airlifted The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941) from the desolate, snow-capped peaks of Mt. To-be-Read.

Palmer was a Hollywood screenwriter and one of my favorite American mystery writers from the genre's Golden Age. A first-rate writer whose bibliography consists of fourteen Miss Withers novels, a handful of short story collections and non-series mysteries as well as numerous credits as a screenwriter – penning scripts for such famous B-movies series Bulldog Drummond and The Falcon. However, the books about his beloved series-character, Miss Withers, usually are top-drawer stuff and counts such classics as The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934) and Nipped in the Bud (1952).

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan is not one of Palmer's masterpieces, but it's a pleasant, mildly humorous detective story with a plot and setting that draws on his background as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Miss Hildegarde Withers is on a six-month sabbatical from her job as a third-grade teacher at Jefferson School and she was looking forward to a Mediterranean cruise, but then Hitler started blitzkrieging across the European continent – which required rescheduling her vacation and she ended up exploring the West Coast of the United States. She's in Hollywood to be precise and an unusual meeting at a restaurant landed her consulting gig.

A talent agent, by the name of Harry Wagman, recognized the schoolteacher from her picture in the newspaper and asked her, accusingly, whether she was "the Murder Lady." He also asked if she was interested in a well-paid job as a technical adviser on a movie about the infamous Lizzie Borden case. One of the big Hollywood producers, Thorwald L. Nincom, plans to make a film epic in technicolor based on the case and Wagman wants to sell her expertise in criminology to the producer, which would net her three-hundred dollars a week. Wagman only wants "a measly ten per cent."

Usually, Miss Withers' presence, as an amateur criminologist, was neither requested or wanted. It always was "in spite of hell and high water" that her "insatiable curiosity had managed to get her into a case," which made her go along with her new agent and meet the famous producer. Even though this was far from a proper murder case. However, she soon finds herself in her familiar role of an unwanted snoop when an inexplicable death occurs on the premises of Mammoth Studio.

Saul Stafford and Virgil Dobie are "one of the highest-paid writing teams in the business," who also garnered a well-earned reputation as the biggest pranksters in Hollywood, but, when Miss Withers meets Stafford, the self-styled comedian suffers from "a mild case of paranoia" - plagued by strange accidents and funny-tasting drinks. Two hours later, she found him sprawled on the floor of his office with a broken neck, next to an overturned chair, with a giant poster on the ceiling hanging from a single thumbtack. It has all the hallmarks of a freak accident, but Miss Withers is convinced she has stumbled across, what she called, an "impossible murder."

Sadly, this is not an impossible crime story and the way in which Palmer handled this angle of the plot is, somewhat, incomprehensible.

There are several broken necks throughout the story and a big deal is made about the apparent impossibility of these deaths. A police-surgeon even mentions he doesn't believe "it physically possible for any person to break another's neck," because "the neck muscles are too strong." So, since there were no signs of a struggle or any noise was heard coming from the office, I began to suspect the victims died by the hangman's drop and the poster on the ceiling and the location of the offices gave me that idea – because, I suppose, offices on a studio plot aren't as solid constructed as a brownstone building.

I figured that, perhaps, panels or parts of the ceiling could be removed and create an improvised trapdoor to drop someone through with a (padded) rope around his neck. This would explain why nobody heard a thing, because the victim was dropped into his office from the floor above and reeled back in, to cut the rope, and then dropped back again in his office – which would also explain the New York victim who was found beneath a window in a soft flower bed. The hangman's drop seemed to be the obvious explanation, but, when the method was revealed, I was baffled that Palmer made such a big deal about the cause of death. Even trying to make it seem like an impossible crime.

It's akin to writing a story in which someone is found murdered inside a locked room and the key to the door was found in the victim's pocket, which is made a focal point of the plot, but then explain it away that the murderer used a spare key. Why bother dressing up the crime as a seemingly impossible murder if that's the angle you're taking? Simply baffling!

On top of that, the murderer was fairly obvious. So this could have easily translated into a rare disappointment in the series, but the book still had some solid, well-done plot-threads and moments. First of all, there's the plot-thread about a mysterious individual, known as Derek or Dick Laval, who appears to have been neck-deep in the New York murder, which was skillfully tied to the overall plot and was a high-note of the book – showing that Palmer could do better than the business about the broken necks. I also loved the touching and sad scenes that placed Miss Withers in genuine danger and had her friend, Inspector Oscar Piper, rushing down from New York to help. I think fans of these two characters will particular appreciate this portion of the story.

Befitting a movie-themed mystery novel, the plot has several fun Easter eggs, nods and winks. At one point in the book, Inspector Piper describes Miss Withers suitcase to a cabdriver and mentions it has labels from London and Mexico City on it, which are subtle references to The Puzzle of the Silver Persian (1935) and The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937). Miss Withers is also mistaken for Edna May Oliver who played her character in the movies based on the earlier books in the series (e.g. The Penguin Pool Murder, 1932).

So, all in all, the overall plot was not one of Palmer's strongest, but the writing and characters were up to his usual standards and made for a fun, fast-paced read. However, I would recommend new readers to start somewhere else and save this one for later, because I think fans of the series will be able to appreciate it more than new readers.