Fatal Flaws: A Short Overview of Ruined Detective Stories

"These little things a very significant."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, 1976)

Earlier this month, I reviewed Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls, which took an unconventional approach to telling an inverted detective story and the narrative had all the elements of a genre-classic, but was unable to sustain itself and ended with a whimper – an open-ending that managed to be simultaneously lazy and pretentious. So hardly a satisfying and rewarding read. However, the book made me reflect back on similar detective novels that were on their way of becoming (minor) classics, but slipped with the finish-line in sight.

It has been a while since I slapped together a filler-post and thought doing a quick rundown of a handful of them would make for a nice fluff piece. You may abandon this post, if you want, and come back for one of my regular review, which should be up within the next day or so. Or stick around. It's entirely up to you.

I'll be running through this short list in non-specific order and will begin with Agatha Christie. Or rather with an observation about one of her series-characters, Miss Jane Marple, who's one of Christie's two iconic detective figures, but there's remarkable difference between the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series – namely a severe lack of classic titles in the former. Miss Marple never handled a case of the same caliber as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A.B.C. Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). However, there's one Miss Marple novel that came close to matching the brilliance of her Belgian counterpart.

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) has an American starlet of the silver screen, Marina Gregg, descending upon the sleepy village of St. Mary Mead, but soon learns that an English village can be as dangerous as a dark, grimy back alley in the States. One of her house-guests dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail and the explanation for this specific murder was one of Christie's last triumphs.

The relationship between the victim and murderer, combined with the powerful and well-hidden motive, stuck together with simplistic brilliance, but the equally powerful effect the explanation could've achieved was ruined when Christie allowed the murderer to become completely unhinged – committing several additional murders along the way. It cheapened and lessened the impact of the reason behind the first murder, which robbed the series of a book that could've stood toe-to-toe with such Poirot titles as Peril at End House (1932), Sad Cypress (1940) and Five Little Pigs (1943).

Logically, the murderer should've been stone cold sane, completely unrepentant and never went pass that first murder, which had a solid, original and very human reason behind it. I've always wondered if a much younger Christie would've made the same mistake. A textbook example that sometimes less can be more.

You can also ruin a potential series-classic by punctuating the plot of the story with sheer stupidity. Case in point: The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen.

The American Gun Mystery had all the potential to be one of the best entries from Ellery Queen's plot-orientated nationality series, which has a great premise and a memorable backdrop: a sports arena, the Colosseum, where a horseback rider is gunned down during a rodeo show with twenty thousand potential suspects and eyewitnesses in attendance – topped off with the impossible disappearance of the murder weapon. I distinctly remember how much I had been enjoying this slice of old-fashioned Americana, presented as an original puzzle detective, but all of that enthusiasm dissipated upon learning how the gun was made to vanish. It was one of those rare instances I actually wanted to fling a book across the room in frustration and the hiding place of the gun seems to be a stumbling block for most readers.

And that's why The American Gun Mystery is never mentioned in the same breath as The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) and The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932).

Sometimes you can be on the right track, but simply bite off more than you could chew and a good example of this is Herbert Brean's still beloved Wilders Walk Away (1948).

Curt Evans described the plot of the book as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr," which is an apt description, because the story is basically one of Queen's Wrightsville novels as perceived by Carr. The protagonist is a freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who travels to Wilders Lane, Vermon, which is named after the founding family of the place. A family with a peculiar tradition dating back to eighteenth century: members of the Wilders clan have the tendency to escape the yawning grave by simply vanishing into thin air.

So what's not to like, you might ask? Well, the solutions to all of the impossibilities have some of the most routine, common-place explanations you could imagine. It stands in stark contrast with everything that came previous in the book. Barry Ergang hit the nail on the head, in his review, when observing that Wilders Walk Away appeared as "a companion to The Three Coffins (1935) and Rim of the Pit (1944) for ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" and that's how I felt when reading the book. A very likable and readable detective story, but the wasted potential is painful to behold. Everything about the book screamed classic... until you reached the ending.

Brean would go on to redeem himself with the superb Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1952), the equally good The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) and the very amusing The Traces of Brillhart (1961), but they (sadly) never garnered the same attention as Wilders Walks Away.

Finally, I have a prize-winning book, Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929), which could have become a personal favorite of mine, but shot itself in the foot in a way that's very similar to Rolls' Family Matters.

Footprints garnered some attention upon its publication for toying with conventions and plot-devices that were not very well established or popular at the time. One of them is that the book qualifies as a semi-historical mystery novel and this past story is entirely told through a series of old, crumbling letters. A story that took place on an Oregon farm in the early 1900s, which has, rather originally, a murder that could one of two types of impossible crimes: either the murderer escaped from a locked room to get to the victim or passed over a field of snow without leaving any footprints.

So you can imagine I was completely hooked by the halfway mark. I loved the depiction of family life on an American farm in the early twentieth century with an apparently innovative impossible crime plot at its core, but the vaguely written ending only hinted at the murderer's identity. And not a single letter was wasted on attempting to explain the impossible situation. A postmodernist would no doubt love such an ending in a structured genre like us, but I wanted, as Carr would say, strangle the author and lynch the publisher. They were really lucky they had already kicked the bucket when I finished the book.

Cleaver did redeem herself with her second locked room novel, Death Traps (1930), which was a competent, if rather conversational, piece of work with an actual ending!

So far my lamentations on several detective novels I really wanted to like, but proved to be a let down, in one way or another, when the final chapter rolled around. I hope this will be, for now, the last blog-post with my whining about bad or disappointing detective stories. My next review looks to be that of a good mystery novel and have something interesting (and untranslated) for the one after that. And both of them fall in the locked room category. Please try to act a little bit surprise about that!

Murder Adrift

"If it comes to swinging, swing all, say I."

- Billy Bones (R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, 1883)

Eric Elrington Addis was a retired Lieutenant-Commander of the British Royal Navy and a barrister-at-law at the Admiralty bar, but was "recalled to the Navy upon the outbreak of the Second World War" and served as Commander on HMS Warspite during the Norwegian campaign of 1940 – notably during the Second Battle of Narvik. One year later, Addis was mortally wounded in a German air-raid on the British Royal Navy base at Alexandria, Egypt. Addis left behind a wife, two children and a small body of crime-fiction.

As the pseudonymous "Peter Drax," Addis was one of the "exponents and practitioners of realism in the British crime novel" and published six novels between 1936 and 1939. A seventh novel was left unfinished upon his death, but was eventually completed by his wife and posthumously published in 1944. However, Drax's contributions to the Realist School were soon forgotten and never considered as reprint material. Until this month.

Dean Street Press is bringing back five of the six novels published during the thirties and the posthumous book, which come with an introduction by genre-historian and professional fanboy, Curt Evans – who can be found blogging as The Passing Tramp. The only title not being reissued is Murder by Proxy (1937). Since the books have become really obscure, I suppose there were no secondhand copies available to scan.

High Seas Murder (1939) was the last book published during Drax's lifetime and demonstrated his literary ambitions "to tell a story that was credible," which resulted, according to Evans, in "one of the most important bodies of realistic crime fiction" of the early twentieth century. 

I think this specific title clearly showed Drax was a subversive voice within the genre, because the slender plot is completely antithetical to the image most readers have of the typical, 1930s ship-bound mystery novel.

The first half of the book tells the story of two unlucky ships, a trawler and a cargo-ship, which are passing one another in their respective hours of need.

Carl Swanson is "recognized as the best ship's captain in the fishing town of Gilsboro" and is assembling a small crew of fishermen to take out a new ship, named the John Goodwin, but the maiden voyage of the trawler is plagued by bad luck and losses – two men and both trawlers were lost to the sea. They also had a run-in with a gunboat when they were caught poaching. So the fishermen were looking at missing out on a good chunk of money when they serendipitously came across an apparently derelict steamship.

The steamship Ivanhoe, owned by Captain MacTaggart, was badly damaged and the crew had abandoned ship when it looked as if it were going to sink. Somehow, the ship managed to stay afloat and when the John Goodwin sighted the Ivanhoe they assumed they could make up their lost by salvaging the derelict ship and its cargo. However, they found that the captain was still on board, who had refused to abandon ship, which is going to "cut down" on anything Swanson expected to get for salvage – which becomes very apparent in the way MacTaggart approaches those "damn' pirates." 

So, as to be expected, these two captains have a confrontation that ended with Swanson striking MacTaggart. Assuming he has just killed a man, Swanson threw the body into the sea and told the others he had fallen overboard by accident, because the ship was in poor condition. He also told them they could get more money, if they simply told authorities they found the Ivanhoe completely derelict and abandoned.

And there you have it. The first half of the book and all of the plot material of High Seas Murder.

During the second half, they return to port and put in their salvage claim, but, slowly, Swanson's lies come unstuck, which began with the unexpected recovery of the captain's body from the sea – something he had not counted on. Once again, this unraveling of lies shows Drax was a contrarian voice, within the genre, during the 1930s, because this process hardly resembles anything you'd expect from a classic detective story. The reader is already aware of all the facts and mistakes, which are gradually revealed without any real detective work. Swanson's lies gradually begin to collapse in on themselves, because he's not really all that clever and a poor liar on top of that. So not really your typical vintage criminal.

As you can probably understand, High Seas Murder wasn't really the sort of crime story I typically enjoy reading, but the first half was both intriguing and well-written. I did not care as much about the second leg of the book, but, again, this is not the kind of story that was written for readers like yours truly. However, if you really like the work of such realists writers like Georges Simenon and Seicho Matsumoto, you might want to add Drax to your wish list. 

On a final note...

DRAX THE (NAVY) DESTROYER 

 

Sorry, I couldn't resist.  

Speak Like a Child

"Anyway... this is just the sort of case that suits you down to the ground. It pleases your tortuous mind."

- Inspector Japp (Agatha Christie and Charles Osborne's Black Coffee, 1998)

After my last two reads ended in utter disappointment, I wanted a guarantee of quality from my next read and turned to the one detective series that has rarely, if ever, let me down: Gosho Aoyama's seemingly never-ending detective story entitled Case Closed. The series is known outside of North America as Detective Conan and is still running strong in Japan with currently over ninety volumes, but the English releases are not quite there yet. But give them time.

The 60th volume of Case Closed opens with the conclusion of the final Eisuke Hondo story, which began in the previous book with the discovery of a body in the karaoke bar he visited with Conan, Rachel and Serena.

A man was found bludgeoned to death with the proverbial blunt instrument in Room 5 of the karaoke bar and security footage showed only four of their customers were in a position to strike the fatal blows, but one of these four potential suspects is Eisuke – which makes even Conan suspicious of him ("you're still a suspect in my book"). However, there's also the additional, quasi-impossible problem concerning the missing murder weapon. A weapon that "changed shape and vanished." The answer to the problem of the missing weapon and identity of the murderer is hidden in the items all of the suspects were carrying.

So this makes for a pretty solid case, but the ending is perhaps the most interesting part of the story. Eisuke is leaving Japan for the United States and, as he says goodbye, tricks Conan into admitting his real identity. Something Eisuke has suspected from the moment he first appeared in the series.

The next three chapters form a Junior Detective League story and has a small boy from their school asking them for help.

Kaito is the name of the boy and he's the son of the landlord of a small apartment building, which has only three tenants, but "one of the residents has been up to something suspicious every night" and the boys wants the Junior Detective League to get to the bottom of it – only to be met with unsettling news the following day. The boy and his father have been hospitalized after the home burned to the ground. Obviously, one of the three tenants attempted to radically eradicate any trace of his perfidious behavior, but Conan has only three very obscure clues to work with. There's the scorched diary of Kaito talking about Mr. Red, Mr. White and Mr. Yellow, which identified the latter as the one who had a fight with his father. But who of the three tenants is Mr. Yellow? Conan deduces his identity with the help of the other clues: a large collection of toy cars and the nickname Kaito gave him (i.e. "Kuroshi-kun").

Conan has to think here like an actual first-grader to figure out the coded clues and his deductions seem to take a bit of a leap, but, when you think about it, they do make perfect sense. I also liked how the meaning of Conan's nickname dovetailed with the color-names and toy cars.

The story also introduced a new character, Subaru Okiya, who's a graduate student and one of the suspected residents in the house fire, but everything suggests he may also be an agent of the Black Organization – codenamed Bourbon. However, he's also a fan of Conan Doyle and, as Conan remarked, "no one who likes Sherlock Holmes could be a bad person." Only the future (releases) will tell how right, or wrong, he was.

Original edition

I found the following story to be surprisingly weak, dull and very easy to figure out. The Hammer Man is an urban legend of "a monster over six feet tall" who "only attacks long-haired women," but this legendary creature actually leaves bodies in his wake. However, during the last attack he was disturbed by a drunk man who managed to follow him back to an apartment building and warned the authorities. The police has the place surrounded, but when they enter the apartment someone has struck down the suspected killer. Only three people visited the place during the stakeout: a pizza delivery man, a motor cycle courier and a delivery man.

I immediately suspected what was going on and who the culprit was, which was confirmed by the clues of the clinically clean apartment room, the missing underwear and the unplugged electric razor. A filler story at best.

Luckily, this landmark volume closed with a (minor) classic. A superb impossible crime story showing what the modern crime novel could have been had they adhered to the high standards of the Golden Age, because there's a human element at the heart of this story with an explanation that gives a yank on the heartstrings – ending this volume on a melancholic note. Someone like Bill Pronzini would probably describe this story as a textbook example of humanist crime-fiction.

The story opens with Richard Moore being approached by a TV producer, Shogo Somei, who offers him a one-off special on Touto TV, but the reader soon learns there's an unscrupulous TV executive hovering in the background. Raisaku Nakame wants Somei to "pad the production budget" and hand the extra cash over to him, but he would also accept Somei's assistant producer, Maiko Kuzumi, as special "payment." So that pretty much sets the stage for murder.

Somei takes Moore, Conan and Rachel to the top-floor condo of the TV executive, but find the front door locked and chained from the inside without a sign of life coming from the other side of the door. So the door is unlocked by superintendent of the building and the chain cut, which leads them to the discovery of the executive's body with "an almond scent around his mouth." The nature of a coffee stain clearly demonstrated someone had been in the room after the victim died and that makes this an impossible murder, because there appears to have been no way the poisoner could have escaped and left everything locked from the inside – which even threw Conan off the trail for a moment.

However, a soaking wet coat and a desperate attempt by the producer to obfuscate the truth, as well as making a false confession, eventually reveals the real tragedy behind the murder. A tragedy closely tied to the locked room method, which is stunningly clever and simple, but (again) also very tragic. One of Aoyama's better locked room mysteries!

Well, as you can judge by the length of this review, I really enjoyed most of the stories in this volume and really needed the last one after the previous two disappointments. So I'll end this overlong review by stating the obvious: I really, really love Detective Conan!

Take Your Medicine

"All things are poison, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison."

- Paracelsus

C.E. Vulliamy was a Welsh author, biographer, historian and an archaeologist who dedicated two distinct periods in his writing career to the detective story. During the first period, covering a brief span between 1932 and 1934, Vulliamy produced four detective novels, published as by "Anthony Rolls," while using his own name decades later for six additional crime novels – which began with Don Among the Dead Men (1952) and ended with Floral Tribute (1963). Until recently, these books have been languishing in absolute obscurity.

Only a few weeks ago, the British Library Crime Classics reissued two of Vulliamy's earlier detective novels, Family Matters (1933) and Scarweather (1934), of which the former was recommended to me by both Curt Evans and John Norris.

Last year, I reviewed Richard Hull's The Murder of My Aunt (1934) and wondered whether the book was the first example of the "Amateur Murderer" story, but Norris mentioned several examples in the comment-section. Family Matters was one of them and Evans posted a brief comment stating that it was a good detective story. So I pounced on this reprint edition to see if it measured up to other inverted mysteries of its kind, such as Leo Bruce's Case for Sergeant Beef (1947), which actually came within inches of attaining the status of genre-classic, but robbed itself of that position with a lazily pretentious ending. But more on that later. First of all, lets take a gander at what made the book come within spitting distance of classical status.

Family Matters takes place in a small place called Shufflecester, "one of the most English of English towns," where Robert Arthur Kewdingham resides with his family in "one of the less fashionable quarters" of the town.

Kewdingham had been an engineer for twenty-one years, but the post-war slump forced his employer to release two-hundred members of the company's engineering staff. As a consequence, Kewdingham became unemployed and this placed his household on a small, tight budget, however, this financial constraint failed to keep him pursuing a number of hobbies and interests – such as collecting "an astounding medley of junk," studying the occult and politics. These hobbies appear to be harmless enough until you realize the collection of junk takes up a lot of space in the small home. The politics involve an unpopular movement, called the Rule Britannia League, and the mysticism has to do with dreams about his past life as the High-Priest of Atlantis. A subject he loves to wax lyrically about.

Needless to say, Kewdingham could be a difficult person to be around and particularly his long-suffering wife, Bertha, has become the primary victim of this "fool's marriage." She has slipped into an isolated existence within her own home. The relationship with her husband resembles a Cold War-era détente with occasional flareups, while their only son, Michael, is away to school, which leaves her alone with her husband and father-in-law – who occupies an upstairs room and is very hostile towards her. Understandably, Bertha seizes every opportunity to socialize with people from outside the household, such as her husband's cousin, John Harrigal, which is not something her husband really approves of.

So, slowly but surely, the story reaches the point where the removal of Kewdingham becomes desirable to Bertha and she turns to a poison known as lead acelate. She administrated "a very considerable amount of heavy metal," but, miraculously, her husband showed no ill-effects from the large quantity of poisonous lead in his food. What's even more astonishing is that his health began to improve after she began to poison him!

Someone who's equally baffled by Kewdingham's improved health is the local doctor, Wilson Bagge, who has been secretly using his patient as a guinea pig.

Kewdingham was also described as "a wretched hypochondriac," a self-professed "disciple of Paracelsus," with hundreds of bottles, tubes and jars of medicine and patent remedies in his bathroom cupboard – which made him the perfect test subject. Dr. Bagge had been studying the medical use of aluminum and he had succeeded in producing an alum compound, but needed to test "the effect of this compound on the human organism." So he picked the person who had no problem in taking an unknown substance presented as a medicine. However, the lead acelate and alum chlorate counteracted one another, which left the both poisoners baffled.

A splendid situation that reaches it zenith when Kewdingham eventually passes away and a post-mortem examination reveals he had been "bombarded with poisons." In additional to the previous mentioned poisons, Kewdingham also received a fatal dose of arsenic and atropine! But the experts are unable to "assign any priority of action" to any of the poisons. As the expert said, it's like getting "stabbed through the heart and shot through the brain at the same moment."

How this poisonous puzzle is resolved should have placed this book among the (minor) classics of the genre, but Rolls basically walked away from the story and let the reader sort out the mess he created. I'm not even kidding. The last, open-ended chapter and epilogue were supposed to be very clever and ambiguous, but was really nothing more than pretentious laziness. Martin Edwards warned in the introduction that Rolls found it easier "to come up with intriguing and unusual narrative premises" than "to sustain and resolve a complicated plot," but never expected he would simply walk away from an unresolved story – especially when the text provided a solution that would offer both closure and an ambiguous ending.

The book ended with an inquest, trial and acquittal of one of the characters, but should have ended with the conviction and hanging of Dr. Bagge. There was a tell-tale clue that would be hard to explain in court, namely "falsifying his prescription-book," which would be delayed justice for the undetected (and experimental) murder he had committed in the past. A death only Bagge and the reader knows about.

Finally, the epilogue would have briefly revealed the private thoughts of everyone who had given poison to Kewdingham and left their judgment to the reader. Rolls could have even revealed old Kewdingham as one of the poisoners. One if the few things the old man had to do was pottering about in the small, scrubby garden at the back of the house and could have had something like monk's hood there. He could have intended to poison his daughter-in-law, but his son ended up taking his poison by accident.

So much could have been done with this wonderful and original premise, but the ending reduced this near classic to nothing more than a mere curiosity.

However, this may be my purist streak talking, because everyone else appears to love it. Kate from Cross Examining Crime gave it a near perfect score of 4.5/5 and Norris called it "a minor masterpiece" in his review.

Return from the Grave

"If Dr. Fell could not cure this devil case, then perhaps Father Brown could exorcise it."

- Thackeray Phin (John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand," from Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek, 2002)

Andrew M. Greeley was a Roman Catholic priest, a sociologist, newspaper columnist and a bestselling author of novels and non-fiction books, but the themes dominating all of his writing were religion and social issues. So how did such an author managed to find his way on to this blog, you ask? A good chunk of Father Greeley's novels are detective stories with a proclivity for impossible crimes. Yes, I'm very predictable.

Of the more than fifty novels, there are seventeen titles that make up Greeley's once popular series about his clergyman detective, Bishop Blackie Ryan, who has acquired a reputation as a debunker of paranormal phenomena and solver of locked room puzzles – one of his recorded cases concerns an impossible murder in a haunted tower room. So I assumed that would be a good place to start.

Happy Are Those Who Mourn (1995) is the seventh book in the Blackie Ryan series and begins with Cardinal Sean Cronin stating "that there will be no haunted rectories" in his Archdiocese. Apparently, the late and unpopular pastor of the parish of Saints Peter and Paul, situated in the fictional Chicago suburb of Woodridge, has apparently stirred from the grave to haunt and pester his successor, Father Peter Finnegan.

Monsignor Charles "Jolly Cholly" McInery was "the meanest, nastiest, most vicious nut" in "the whole history of the Archdiocese," but, according to his successor, McInery still strenuously objected "to being murdered in his bed" and has therefore come back to haunt the place – like switching the TV and lights on-and off. There are, however, some facts arguing against the phenomena being caused by the restless and unavenged spirit of a murdered man. One of them is that the cause of death was determined to be a massive cerebral hemorrhage and the other one is that the body was found inside a locked tower room.

So the Cardinal tasks Blackie with laying the ghost to rest by uncovering the truth behind the pastor's death and his investigation is the proverbial mixed bag of tricks.

The early chapters detailing Blackie's initial investigation of the haunted tower room has an excellent scene, which could have been plucked from either a Hake Talbot novel or a knock-off of The Exorcist (1973). Blackie is met with "a barrage of magic tricks" when he entered the room. Desk doors opened and shut on their own accord. The TV flipped on. A crucifix on the wall tilted sharply to one side and a grandfather clock chimed manically. Blackie just walked through the room and muttered, "cheap magic."

However, you should not expect too much from these ghostly activities or the locked room puzzle. Sure, the problem of the tower room has some architectural points of interest, but the crux of the trick is something that should've stayed in the nineteenth century and not reused in the twilight years of the twentieth century – except, perhaps, in a tongue-in-cheek detective story. And this was definitely not a cheerfully written, comically-styled mystery novel.

Still, this slightly updated, but still outdated, locked room artifice was far better than the explanation for the supernatural phenomena, because those so-called cheap tricks were explained away as genuine poltergeist activity. Sure, Blackie gives some halfhearted, pseudo-scientific explanation about how the "memories of the agony and horror" left a "psychic imprint on the place," but that's not the kind of explanation you want from a detective novel billed as a locked room mystery. Luckily, the impossible crime and the haunting were not the primary focus of the plot.

Essentially, Happy Are Those Who Mourn is a character-driven crime novel and Blackie is mostly occupied with attempting to unsnarl the webwork of complicated relationships and long-guarded secrets, which also involves financial shenanigans with ten million dollars of missing church funds. At times, all of these revelation of hidden, or embarrassing, secrets and relationships pushed the book in the direction of soap opera territory, but showed Greeley was capable of plot construction. Sadly, it was used on the characters instead of strengthening the "intricate, serpentine conspiracy" at the heart of the plot.

As you can probably judge by this review, I have not all that much to say about the plot and ended up feeling very indifferent about the book.

The most promising aspects of the story, such as the potential the locked tower offered, petered out into nothing and was not particularly invested in the characters. I imagine readers, who do care about all of the character-development, will be annoyed by the two messy and completely unnecessary murders crammed into the final quarter of the book, which have very little to do with the main plot-threads. I suppose Greeley only included these murders to pad out the story and reach the page-count his publisher desired.

Despite having all the ingredients of a classically-styled locked room mystery, Happy Are Those Who Mourn was really a modern crime novel masquerading as a traditional, old-fashioned detective story. So you might end up not caring for the book, or even hating it, if your taste in crime-fiction runs along the same lines as mine. However, I'll probably give Greeley a second look if I ever stumble across a copy of Happy Are the Meek (1985), because that one sounds like it could be a proper locked room mystery.

So this was the second contemporary impossible crime novel, in short succession, that was less than impressive. And just like the last time, I'll try to dig up something good to make up for this poor, lackluster review. So don't touch that dial! 

An Almost Perfect Crime

"If ever you make up your mind to commit a murder, don't make the mistake of trying to be clever."

- Dr. Benjamin Trancred (G.H.D. & M. Cole's "Too Clever by Half," collected in Detection Medley, 1939)

Except for One Thing (1947) seem to have been the debut for one of John Russell Fearn's myriad of pennames, namely "Hugo Blayn," which he used for two of his series-characters, Chief Inspector Garth and Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who occasionally worked together on the same case – e.g. Vision Sinister (1954) and The Silvered Cage (1955). So the book also marked the first appearance of Garth.

There is, however, a structural difference between Except for One Thing and the subsequent titles published under the Blayn byline, such as The Five Matchboxes (1948), which were all impossible crime novels. All except for this first one.

Except for One Thing can best be described as a Columbo-style inverted detective story with some of the trappings of an Anthony Berkeley crime novel (c.f. Trial and Error, 1937). And the plot is about as good as anything associated with two names. I've only read less than ten of Fearn's detective novels, but this one ranks as one of his best and has a killer twist in the tail regarding the disposal of the body.

The opening of the book introduces the lead character, Richard Harvey, who finds himself with two lives on his conscience before too long, but some readers today may find his motive to be wholly unconvincing – since it would hardly be a reason to kill someone in today's society. However, you could be sued for "a breach of promise" when you broke your promise to marry and this could have ruined a man in the past.

So this could lead to a very unpleasant situation when the woman in question refuses her "heart balm," or severance pay, and insists on trapping her reluctant fiance in a loveless marriage.

Valerie Hadfield is a beautiful blonde, but ice-cold, actress playing a lead role in a long-running musical comedy, which is where Harvey saw her for the first time. Harvey became completely enamored with her, but had to come to the sad conclusion that the woman he had seen laughing, singing and making love on the stage was in actuality "carved out of a glacier." Slowly, Harvey came to the realization that had fallen for the role she was playing and that their (secret) engagement was a mistake, but Valerie simply refuses to break the engagement and has enough to potentially ruin his reputation – such as a pile of passionate love letters and an inscribed cigarette box. She's determined to marry him in order to climb the social ladder in polite society.

You see, Harvey is a wealthy and distinguished research chemist, who occasionally works for Scotland Yard, but Valerie promises to start a scandal that'll tarnish his name "in every club and scientific association in town." And this would effectively prevent him from marrying the girl he has been seeing for the past eight months, Joyce Prescott.

So "an insidious thought" began to fester in his mind. A thought that, ironically, germinated into tangible plans after a chance encounter with his policeman friend, Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth. At the Stag Club, Garth was explaining to a follow member the difficulties of committing "the perfect crime" in an age of science, because "it's impossible to be rid of a corpse so completely that nobody can find it" and referred to several celebrated failures – like the gruesome murders committed by Dr. Crippen and William Sheward. Harvey is of the opinion that "perfect crimes do exist" and we never hear of them "because they're perfect."

Harvey has known Garth for many years and has come to look upon him as a machine, "a brilliant analytical thinker," but the inspector himself admitted he was not infallible. So could he lead Garth down the garden path?

What follows gives the reader a front-row seat to the planning, and execution, of a carefully plotted murder, which has both flashes of brilliance and nuggets of utter stupidity. One of the more cleverest aspects of the plan is his creation of an alter ego, named "Rixton Williams," who's cast as Valerie's secret admirer and prime-suspect in her disappearance. Harvey had a pretty clever reason for using such a rare and unusual name like Rixton, but the observant armchair detective will also pick up on some of his first small mistakes.

Like the withdrawal of two thousand pounds and depositing the money at a different bank under the name of Rixton Williams. However, the real mistakes begin to pile up the moment he finishes strangling Valerie.

Someone saw him, as Rixton, carrying Valerie's body to his car, but told this witness that she was blind drunk. There is, however, only a single bottle of champagne found at the home he got under his alias and the place where the murder was committed, but Garth, astutely, observed that's impossible to get dead drunk "a third of a bottle of champagne." A second witness, Valerie's chauffeur, forces Harvey to improvise a "second and entirely unrehearsed murder," which both provide all the material for a good, old-fashioned cat-and-mouse game between the Scotland Yard detective and the well-known research chemist – recalling the best from Columbo. A comparison strengthened when Garth tries to involve Harvey in the investigation. And the latter is never quite sure how much Garth really knows.

There is also a human aspect to the story, as Harvey is seriously suffering under the strain of having snuffed out two lives, which causes him to lose a lot of sleep and slowly his mind begins to deteriorate. When the story began, you could still sympathize with his situation, but, by the end, he has become functionally unhinged and even began to taunt Garth by sneakily showing him the truth. And gloated over how he had outsmarted the man from Scotland Yard. One component of his plan definitely warranted some gloating on his part.

I alluded to this at the beginning of the blog-post, but what really helped made this book standout is the answer to the only question readers have to figure out themselves before reaching the end of the story: how did Harvey manage to dispose of Valerie's body without leaving "an atom of proof that murder was done." The solution is fairly clued and the method is as clever as it's inventive. You'll never forget where the body ended up. I would rank this aspect of the plot alongside the John Dickson Carr's classic "The House in Goblin Wood" (collected in The Third Bullet and Other Stories of Detection, 1954). The solutions for the disappearance of a body are very different in both stories, but you'll never forget either explanation!

I guess that's what attracts me to Fearn's work. He may have been a second-string pulp writer, but he evidently was very fond of constructing plots and always seemed to try to be as original as possible. Or, at least, attempt to find a different angle to an old trick. Occasionally, this resulted in a plot elevating one of his books above what a second-stringer should be capable of doing. Thy Arm Alone (1947) is one example of this and Except for One Thing is another. 

Highly recommended to everyone who loves Columbo, inverted detective stories or a good and original how-dun-it. So you can expect more reviews of Fearn in the future.