Devil's Drought

"The devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?"
- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) is the sixth recorded case of her psycho-analyst detective, Mrs. Bradley, which was reportedly inspired by lecture on witchcraft given by her personal friend and fellow mystery novelist, Helen Simpson – who famously gave Mrs. Bradley her second name, Adela, when they exchanged detectives in Ask a Policeman (1933).

The Devil at Saxon Wall has a hell of a reputation with Mitchell's acolytes and has often been cited as one of her best novels. Nick Fuller even listed the book alongside the well-known masterworks by Anthony Berkeley, Christianna Brand, John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie, but can the book hold its own in such esteemed company? Let's find out!

The story begins with what is, essentially, a lengthy prologue covering the first three chapters, which take place during the early years of the 1920s and tells the gloomy tale of Constance Palliner. A story that ended in a double tragedy.

Constance had been an unhappy woman, destined to the existence of a spinster, but her life took an unexpected turn when, at age twenty-four, she accompanied her parents to Naples, Italy, where she met Hanley Middleton at Pompeii – a physician attached to the R.A.M.C. Middleton proposed to Constance mere hours after they first met and she accepted. So they return to England and took possession of a large, old house, called Neot House, standing in an ancient village with a slightly backwards population. And that's where the problems begin to manifest themselves.

The village of Saxon Wall lies in "a remote part of Hampshire" and gives the impression of a place out-of-time. A holdover from the days before Alfred the Great ruled over the island. The villagers looked like a pre-medieval population, described as having "thick, dirty, fair hair, unkempt and more like frayed rope," who "feared and loathed" witchcraft and paganism as much as they participated in it – such as the practice of fertility rituals. I think the depiction of pagan survival in a dark, dilatory village, as old as the hills, is the best aspect of the book. You can feel the presence of history and an ancient history all around the place, which Mitchell used to great effect to further the plot.

Hanley is a silent, preoccupied man, "enamored of long lonely walks" and "whiskey by the half bottle," but a change occurred after the passage of nearly two years and his personality took a turn for the worse. One day, he brought a woman home from a conference and she left after a fortnight with a bruised eye-socket. He began to ill-treat animals and manhandled Constance when she happened to be in his way.

Briefly, Constance leaves her husband and returns to her parents, but when she comes back her husband has descended into debauchery and she finds him with their half-clad maidservant in his arms, Martha Fluke – who's the daughter of the local witch. Old Mrs. Fluke is said to have made a pact with the devil and rumored to have the ability to make adders "dance on their tails by moonlight." Or make them "spell the names of the angels of darkness" at witches' sabbaths. She is said to have a hand in all evil going on in the village and was even implicated by the doctor in the death of her infant grandson. A child who had been born during Constance's absence and had died in her own house. Something she should have taken as a cue to turn around and leave cartoon smoke in her wake, but she stuck around and in the end gave birth to a baby boy, Richard, but passed away soon thereafter. Hanley followed suit when he died during an emergency operation.

A period of almost ten years passed and "the village peaceable returns to its dirt." The wickedness died down for the most part and the new vicar, Rev. Merlin Hallam, immediately put a stop to the cock-fighting, which had enjoyed "an unbroken survival from the fourteenth century or earlier." On top of that, a persistent drought is slowly resulting in a water shortage and the vicar wants to use this as a leverage against the pagan ways of the villagers. Because his well still holds plenty of water.

So a relatively peaceful period for the village, but it ended when an outsider arrived in their midst.

Hannibal Jones had earned "a dishonest livelihood for seventeen years" by "writing sentimental novels," but suffered a nervous breakdown and severe case of writers block. So he consulted the famous psycho-analyst, Mrs. Bradley, who poked him between the ribs with a yellow claw, cackled horribly, and gave him an unusual piece of advice: go on a hunt for a secluded village and become a part of it – without trying to write about them. After nineteen days of driving, Jones ended up in the remote, drought-stricken village of Saxon Wall and there he blissfully sank into peaceful obscurity.

However, his task to immerse himself in local affairs exposes a number of skeleton and lays bare one of the most twisted, serpentine plots Mitchell ever conceived. A tortuous plot that hard to discuss without giving anything away, but let's take a shot at it anyway.

Jones hears of the deaths of Constance and Hanley Middleton, who had been dead for the better part of a decade now, but local rumors whisper that their child, Richard, was mixed with the supposedly dead baby of the maid – which would guarantee trouble when the boys came of age. One of the boys is believed to be a changeling. There's another tall tale telling of Hanley Middleton's supposed twin brother, Carswell, who was patiently waiting to claim his inheritance. Or the story of a local sailor, Pike, who vanished from his sickbed around the same time Hanley died on the operating table.

All of these whispers are suggestive, mostly unsubstantiated, gossip stories compounded by local obfuscation and plain old superstition. But then a very real and tangible murder is committed at Neot House.

Hanley Middleton's hypothetical twin brother, Carswell Middleton, proved to be more substantially than assumed, because his body was found at the vacant house of his late brother – bludgeoned to death with a poker. Jones dispatches a telegram to Mrs. Bradley, requesting her presence at Saxon Wall, who arrives "grinning like an alligator" and "dressed like a macaw." And luckily she's at the top of her game when she started to pluck at the threads of this intricate skein.

I should remark here that, while the plot is admittedly ingenious, it just might be a little but too much of the good stuff. I know, I know. What is this world coming to when even I begin to complain about a detective story having too much plot, but I think there's an important difference between a complex mystery novel (e.g. The Echoing Stranger, 1952) and a convoluted detective story – which here required an addendum to the final chapter, titled "End Papers," clearing up all the loose ends. Once again, the plot is absolutely ingenious and Mitchell deserves admiration for not losing herself in this labyrinthine story, but this is type of detective novel that can easily leave a reader disoriented. And unsure whether he understood the solution.

However, when you have everything figured out, checked the "End Papers," you can't help the artificial conveniences Mitchell had strewn throughout the book that kept this plot from going. One of these conveniences is that the real Richard must be color-blind, which is used to determine the real identities of both nine-year-old boys. A second one is the handy fact that "the inhabitants of Saxon Wall were incapable of making straight-forward statements" or how the murderer's madness is used as an equally handy linchpin to keep a number of the plot-threads together.

For a third time, you have to admire the intricacy of the plot and how Mitchell plotted a route through this contorted maze, but it all felt very, very contrived. Mitchell has handled similar, trickily constructed, plots with more aplomb (e.g. Come Away, Death, 1937) and grace (e.g. St. Peter's Finger, 1938).

So, plot-wise, Mitchell has done better, but the story-telling is, as always, absolutely top-notch. Something that's exemplified in the final chapter when the murderer's demise coincidences with a massive downpour relieving and cleansing the long-suffering people of Saxon Wall. A powerful scene that has been likened to the fall of Lucifer and the manifestation of God's mercy. But what else could you expect from the Great Gladys.

Overall, The Devil at Saxon Wall went completely into the deep end with the plot, but the story-telling and characterization is vintage Mitchell, which, on a whole, might not have resulted in her best detective novel, but the book definitely deserves a place among her better and more memorable titles. Just take the time to carefully read the explanation and the explanatory addendum cleaning up all the loose ends.

The Gypsy Detective

"Is there anything that I can do for you?"

- Hagar (Fergus Hume's "The Sixth Customer and the Silver Teapot" collected in Hagar of the Pawn-Shop, 1899)

The late Edward D. Hoch was arguably the most prolific mystery writer of short stories from the previous century, producing nearly a thousand stories during his lifetime, which were published in such publications as Famous Detective Stories, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine – most impressively is the unbroken string of monthly appearances in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that lasted from 1973 to 2008. A streak that will likely never be broken.

During his fifty-three year career, Hoch wrote more than a dozen series and created a whole host of memorable, and popular, detective-characters.

Simon Ark is one of his most iconic series-character, who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest, but equally popular are his thief-for-hire, Nick Velvet, and Dr. Sam Hawthorne – a country physician specialized in solving seemingly impossible crimes. One of Hoch's lesser-known series-character is Michael Vlado, the Gypsy Detective, who was specially created for an anthology from the mid-1980s.

Bill Pronzini invited Hoch to contribute a short story to The Ethnic Detective (1985), a collection he was editing with Martin H. Greenberg, which might have given us "an Eskimo detective," but the choice fell on a Romanian Gypsy.

Michael Vlado is a leading member of a tribe of Gypsies who stopped wandering the globe over a century ago and settled down in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps in Central Romania where they farm the land and breed horses. Formally, King Carranza is the leader of the tribal village, named Gravita, but the elderly man is crippled and unable to rule. So the power was exercised by Michael and this meant that he presided over "an informal court," called a kris, but his decisions were usually honored by the community and as a community leader he was often consulted on all kinds of problems. Surprisingly, a good portion of Michael's cases are brought to him by Captain Nicol Segar of the Government Militia.

You can say the series brimmed with potential and the fact that they were written by Hoch should've been a guarantee seal of plot-quality, but sadly, the characters, settings and political background of Communist Romania and the political upheavals in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s were used as a gimmick – a crutch that the plots heavily leaned on. Consequently, the plots are notably weaker than those found in the short stories about Simon Ark or Dr. Hawthorne.

On the bright side, the fifteen short stories collected in The Iron Angel and Other Tales of the Gypsy Sleuth (2003) contained only one real stinker and two (minor) gems, while the remainder of the stories managed to be consistent in being pretty average at best. So maybe the overall quality of the stories is not as bad as I made it out to be, but the series is definitely a notch, or two, below Hoch's other work, but for now, let's take the stories from this collection down from the top!

"The Luck of the Gypsy" is the series-opener and was originally written for the previously mentioned anthology, The Ethnic Detective, which introduces the reader to the two main characters, Michael Vlado and Captain Segar – who descended upon the hillside village on official business. A caravan of Gypsies had crossed the border into Romania and underneath one of the trucks several gold ingots were found, but by that time most of the caravan had been ushered through the checkpoint. And now the Communist government fears "counterrevolutionary activities" are brewing and that the gold might have been smuggled into the country in order "to foment unrest."

Captain Segar has been ordered to stay in the area, in case the caravan passes through the village, which is exactly what happens only an hour later, but not an ounce of gold is found inside the vehicle carrying two strange Gypsies. However, the occupants are gunned down a short while later and Michael figures out the culprit based on a dirty license plate. This is actually not too bad a story with a decent enough plot that made good use of an opportunistic murderer who's in possession of a better motive than simply personal greed.

"Odds on a Gypsy" was the first story from this series to be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), which appeared in the July, 1985 issue and can best be described as a travelogue. Captain Segar has a brother in the Agriculture Ministry in Moscow, Konrad Segar, who's one of the government officials in charge of running the only horse race track in the capital – a place famously known as the Hippodrome. So a young Gypsy farmhand, named Tanti Slatina, with a passion for horse-riding is given a golden opportunity to race Michael's horse, Rom Way, at the Hippodrome.

Michael accompanies the young member of his tribal village to Moscow and the best aspect of this story is its depiction of "squalid grandeur" of the once magnificent race track, which has badly worn marble steps and soiled walls. A mere shadow of what it was when the building was erected in the 1800s. However, a body is eventually found in the stables of the race track, but the explanation for this murder was rather obvious and this killed the effect the revelation was trying to aim for. Not a bad story, but nothing special either.

"Blood of a Gypsy" appeared in the January, 1986 publication of EQMM and is the first locked room mystery of the series.

Once again, Captain Segar travels to the hillside village of Gravita and asks Michael "to represent his people at a state function in Bucharest," but Michael suggests another respected and educated member of the Gypsy community, Nicolae Gallipeau – who had attended school in Bucharest. Nicolae is also a controversial person who took a younger lover after his wife had passed away, which placed him at odds with his brother and a much younger rival. So there are several potential suspects when Nicolae is found in his home with his throat slit, but the problem is that Michael and Captain Segar were standing in front of the house at the time of the murder. And the backdoor, while unlatched, opened on a field of unbroken snow. How did the murderer managed to do the dirty deed without being seen or leaving footprints in the snow?

Well, the murderer had to improvise the locked room trick, on account of the witnesses at the door, which is well done for the most part, but the last act of the trick is hardly credible.

"The Gypsy Treasure" was first printed in the May 1986 issue of EQMM and takes place a month after the previous story. Michael has taken the place of the murdered Nicolae as a representative of his people at the state function in Bucharest, but longs to return to his wife and home village. However, the journey back home has to be put off when "the daughter of an old Gypsy king" approaches him with news that her uncle, Greystone, had been fatally stabbed. And this compelled Michael to attend a Gypsy festival on the Hungarian border where a long guarded secret from World War II will be revealed.

At the outbreak of the war, the Gypsies of Hungary and Romania "banded together" to "keep their gold and jewelry from falling into the hands of the Nazis." The treasure was hidden on the grounds of the festival and the whereabouts was entrusted to five men, "each of whom was given a portion of the secret." A secret encoded in five worn playing cards with the name of a location scrawled across it and you can actually crack this code, but you have to be observant and know your card games. And in case you were wondering, I embarrassingly failed to notice the obvious and crack the code.

"Punishment for a Gypsy" was originally published in the January 1987 issue of EQMM and is one of the two gems of this collection, which, technically, also qualifies as an impossible crime story!

Michael relates a story to Captain Segar about the day he took a shortcut and passed through a small mountain settlement, a village called Bistritz, where local superstition is compounded by Gypsy lore and vampire myths – which Michael learned first hand when he stopped his pickup truck in the center of the village. A small group of people had gathered at the crossroad and they immediately pulled him out of the truck, while yelling "we have us a Gypsy." One of the men informs Michael that a Gypsy, Arad Bercovia, is to be executed for murder at high noon and they were following an "ancient law" stating that "the first Gypsy met on the road is to serve as his executioner."

Barcovia had seduced the daughter of the local shopkeeper, Marco Rapnell, who swore he would kill the traveling Gypsy, but it was Bercovia who was seen throwing a knife through the open window of the shopkeeper's house and the locals believed "a Gypsy curse guided around a corner to its target" - since the victim was found in the kitchen next to the room with the open window. And all of the other doors and windows were locked and bolted from the inside. So that leaves Michael with only an hour to find a way out of this dire situation and the ending is an unexpected twist in what is arguably the best story from this collection. That's all I can say about this story without giving anything away.

"The Gypsy Wizard" made its first appearance in May 1987 issue of EQMM and brings Michael to the Italian city of Milan. One of the former inhabitants of Gravita, Josef Patronne, left the region of the Carpathian Mountains forty years ago and settled in Northern Italy after the war – where he became known as a wizard. Patronne's brother saw his picture in the newspaper, under the headline "FIFTY WIZARDS KEPT FROM THE POPE," which prompted him to ask Michael to go and check up on his brother.

Patronne claims the power of flight and, not long after Michael's arrival, the wizard's body is found at the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele and the first impression is that he fell to his death after attempting to fly. However, the autopsy shows he had been drugged and could not have climbed to the roof by himself. So not really a bad story, but the ending tore a page from a very famous and celebrated detective novel.

"Murder of a Gypsy King" was first published in EQMM of July, 1988 and is an important story on account of the brutal murder of a relatively important side-character, King Carranza, whose death allows Michael to take his place – officially becomes the Gypsy King of Gravita. The story also introduces a character, Jennifer Beatty, who will return in one of the later stories.

Jennifer Beatty had been touring the Balkans on the backseat of her boyfriends motorcycle, but "the inevitable finish" came and she simply took Peter's ride. She was directed to the village of Gravita by Captain Segar and shortly after arriving there the King is found beaten to death in his home. Plot-wise, the story is not very complicated and the truth behind the murder is a very sordid one. Nevertheless, the story is not without interest, providing an outsider's perspective of Michael's village, and the consequences of King Carranza's death makes this an important entry in the series.

"Gypsy at Sea" comes from the December 1988 issue of EQMM and is a spy-cum-detective story with a predictable sequence of plot-twists. Michael receives a letter from a woman who had known long ago in Greece, but she had drowned in the Aegean Sea twenty-five years ago and he had identified the body himself. So he travels down to Athens to see her and learns she had been working as a spy for a private information gathering agency. As to be expected, shortly after their reunion, she ends up being murdered. The truth behind her death, and the subsequent, twist were very predictable and made for a rather bland crime/spy story.

"The Gypsy Delegate" was originally published in the October 1990 issue of EQMM and takes place mere weeks after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. So Captain Segar now serves the new government, who placed him in charge of the region, but they also have a special mission for Michael.

King Michael I of Romania was forced to abdicate at the end of 1947, when the Communists took over, but the King is still alive (even today at age 95) and has been living in exile in Geneva, Switzerland. The new government wants to send an unofficial delegation to the disposed king and Michael, who was named after the king, was picked as a representative of the Gypsy population of the country. A five-men delegation boards a train to Geneva, but en route a delegate is found stabbed to death in his compartment and Michael's explanation foiled a terrorist plot. However, the solution was balanced on a single clue. So, once again, not a terribly bad story, but not a particular good one either.

"The Iron Angel" came from the October 1992 issue of EQMM and is the second story to involve the American tourist, Jennifer Beatty, who arrived at the village when the previous leader, King Carranza, was murdered in his own home. But this time, she's a person of interest in a drug-related stabbing death of a Gypsy in Bucharest. She was in a cellar, or drug den, getting high when a mortally wounded man stumbled into the place and mumbled something about "the three eyes on the iron angel."

A story with some potential, but hampered by its short length. I believe the story could have been expended into a novella or even full-length novel with the titular angel being as unnerving a presence as The Golden Hag from John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938).

"The Puzzle Garden" was first published in the February 1994 issue of EQMM and involves a treasure hunt in a long-neglected, overgrown garden on an estate that has been returned to the family of the original owners after the overthrow of the Socialist government in 1989. Before the Communists began the collectivization, the Sibiu family buried a valuable statue in the Garden of the Apostles and the only clue mentioned the last Apostle. So this makes for a fun little tale about the search of a hidden treasure and the plot-patterns created when they start digging are pleasing, but the presence of the dead Gypsy, who was found in the garden with a knife in his back, was an unnecessary addition to the plot – slightly spoiling the effect of what was found in the whole they had dug. And the subsequent discovery.

"The Gypsy's Paw" was published in the September 1994 issue of EQMM and is one of the two gems in this collection, which is best described as an impossible crime story reminiscent of John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot – with a dash of G.K. Chesterton.

Michael learns from his wife, Rosanna, that there's "a Rom with magic powers" plying her trade in the neighboring village of Agula. She is an elderly woman, Esmeralda, who carries around an old, severed bear's paw and takes money in exchange for wish-fulfillment, which might lead to trouble down the road. So Michael decides to drive down to the village and, as a local leader, have a talk with the old crone, but what he gets is a front-row seat to a first-rate miracle. She's about to call on "a wealthy couple with a missing son" and Michael accompanies her as an observer.

The demonstration does not work as Esmeralda had planned, because the missing son does not return when he's called upon with the bear's paw and a telephone call tells them their son had drowned several days ago. Suddenly, the loud knocking on the front door freezes everyone solid and the other son of the couple grabs the bear's paw to wish his brother in his watery grave. And when the distraught mother tore open the door, the only they saw was "a line of recent footprints leading to the front door." Whoever made the footprints either walked through "the bolted door" or simply "vanished without a trace."

A splendid story rich in both atmosphere and clues with an eerie impossible situation worthy of the previously mentioned artisans of the locked room story.

"The Clockwork Rat" originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of EQMM and is an unusual, bizarre and colorful tale that takes place in post-Soviet Moscow, which at the time was dominated by the Russian mafia. Michael is visited by Old Caspian who tells him about his grandson, Maksim, who's a dwarf with a talent for training rats. But the debts incurred by his father made him practically a slave to the mobsters who run a fancy nightclub. So Michael has to come up with a way to free Maksim from forced servitude, but that's easier than done and even becomes complicated when mobster dies when a windup toy-rat explodes in his hands.

Not much else I can say about this entry except that it has a decent enough plot and some excellent, almost surrealistic, story-telling that begs to be compared to the detective stories by Craig Rice.

"The Starkworth Atrocity" was published in the September-October 1998 double-issue of EQMM and the story is an absolute train-wreck. An uncharacteristically bad and sloppy job by Hoch.

The political upheavals in Eastern Europe maneuvered Michael in a position that he was constantly "summoned to a faraway place" to plead "the cause of Romanies seeking political asylum." Lately, he was acting on behalf of the European Union to observe the stream of Gypsy refugees pouring into the British Isles. At first glance, the story shaped up to be a politically-tinged narrative, which would have been bad enough, but the plot quickly degenerated when over fifty refugees were gassed to death at the nursing home where they were temporarily stored – which turns out to have been deliberately. Michael does some parrying with the press and solves a throat-cutting that had been thrown in for good measure, but the solution for the mass murder makes no sense and is even incomplete! One of the characters even says, "I suppose we'll never know any more." Really, Hoch?

Finally, "A Wall Too High" from the June 2000 issue of EQMM is more of the same, but with a coherent, if obvious, plot. Michael is commissioned by a human rights organization to go down to the Czech Republic and plead that the wall separating the Roma section in Masarak Street to be torn down. So he simply has to play the role of Ronald "Tear Down This Wall" Reagan, but the situation becomes volatile when a policeman is killed at the wall and authorities issued a twenty-four hour ultimatum for the murderer to surrender – or else the police and militia will clear all Gypsies from Masarak Street. Unfortunately, the plot was rather predictable and my suspicion was confirmed when Michael was told that the body of police lieutenant had been cremated.

Well, that's the end of The Iron Angel and Other Tales of the Gypsy Sleuth, which left me internally very divided. On the one hand, the collection contained two lovely gems and the quality of the remaining stories were consistent throughout. However, as you probably noticed, I was not exactly smitten by the series as a whole and had I read any of the stories beforehand, I probably would have opted for one of the short story collections about Nick Velvet, Jeffery Rand or Ben Snow.

So, yeah, sorry for this lukewarm, overlong and probably poorly written blog-post, but it was cranked out when I was running low on enthusiasm. I guess I'll pick one of those other collections, before too long, to make up for this one.

Torn Twins

"Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them."

- Msgr. Ronald A. Knox (A Decalogue: Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction, 1929)

The Echoing Strangers (1952) is Gladys Mitchell's twenty-fifth mystery novel about her incomparable, witch-like series-character, Mrs. Bradley, who is a consulting psychiatrist to the Home Office and probably had the longest lifespan of any detective from the genre's Golden Age – debuting in Speedy Death (1929) and bowing out in the posthumously published The Crozier Pharaohs (1984). During that fifty-five year period, Mrs. Bradley's cases filled the pages of sixty-six books and one collection of short stories (i.e. Sleuth's Alchemy, 2005).

As a mystery novelist, Mitchell was as prolific as she was original and imaginative. However, she was not always as consistent in the quality department and even her greatest admirers acknowledged her output suffered a decline during the 1950s, which lasted until the seventies – when she reportedly returned to the fantastic plot-elements that defined her earlier detective stories (e.g. The Greenstone Griffins, 1983).

So that would place The Echoing Strangers in Mitchell's dodgy period, but the book is still held in high regard by Nick Fuller and Jason Half of The Stone House. And was recommended to me personally by John Norris in the comments on my review of Late, Late in the Evening (1976). Purportedly, the book is a bizarre mixture of identical twins, a homicidal grandfather, blackmail and cricket, but also stronger than usual on detection and clueing.

Naturally, my interest was piqued and placed the book on top of my to-be-read pile, but forgot all about it until my previous review brought it back to my attention for obvious reasons. Since it has been a year since the last time I looked at one of Mitchell's novels, I decided to finally pluck this often praised title from the big pile.

The Echoing Strangers opens with Mrs. Bradley traveling down to the village of Wetwode, situated on the River Burwater in Norfolk, where she planned to a pay a visit to an old school-friend of hers, but upon her arrival she discovers that a family emergency called her school-friend to Gateshead – which leads her to hire a boat and sail down the river. When she navigated "a pronounced bend" in the river, Mrs. Bradley witnessed a bizarre scene on the lawn of one of the river-side bungalows. A middle-aged woman being pushed into the water by "a slender, handsome youth."

The adolescent is a seventeen year old deaf-and-dumb boy, named Francis Caux, who was orphaned at age seven and subsequently separated from his twin brother, Derek, which done by their despicable grandfather, Sir Adrian. A truly villainous character reminiscent of Dr. Grimsby Roylott from Conan Doyle's "The Speckled Band" (from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892).

Sir Adrian Caux abandoned his damaged grandson and placed him under the wing of a guardian, Miss Higgs, who Mrs. Bradley witnessed being pushed into the river by her ward. On the other hand, Derek was brought back to Sir Adrian's home in the village of Mede. Consequentially, Francis and Derek have not seen one another for nearly ten years. Or so everyone assumed. But the river incident places Mrs. Bradley on the scene when the first, of two, murders is committed that are closely intertwined with the Gemini game the brothers have been secretly playing.

Mr. Campbell is "a misanthropic naturalist" and local blackmailer, who loved to observe "courting couples through his field-glasses," but someone had battered in his skull and his assailant found an original way to dispose of the body – attaching the remains to the bottom of dinghy by iron bands and staples. And the dinghy belongs to Francis!

Meanwhile, Sir Adrian engages a schoolteacher, named Tom Donagh, as a holiday tutor for Derek, but specified in the advertisement an "opening batsman and slip fielder" is "preferred." Even asking any applicants to supply their "last season's batting average." Sir Adrian loves cricket and heads the village cricket team, which in one scene has to play against the patients and doctors of "a sort of second-class Broadmoor." However, the main event is the annual game against the team of the village's longtime rival, the neighboring village of Bruke, but the game ends with the murder of the visiting captain, Mr. Witt, whose body was found in the showers of the cricket pavilion – beaten to death with his own cricket bat. Once again, the victim was a known blackmailer and Derek lacked a much needed alibi.

Evidently, this is a case requiring the hand of an expert and, luckily, Mrs. Bradley is in superb form with her eccentricities almost completely expunged. So she doesn't poke any ribs with a yellow claw or let loose a sudden, pterodactyl-like shriek that can be interpreted as a form of laughter. She sinks a lot of time in questioning the people occupying the neighboring bungalows in Wetwode case or theorizing about the role of the twins in the cricket murder in Mede. Despite being in top form, Mrs. Bradley is slightly reluctant to solve both murders.

After all, the victims were known blackmailers and they were about as popular during the Golden Age as kiddie diddlers are today. Mrs. Bradley is of the opinion that blackmailers are worse than murderers and considered the killing of these "poisonous pests" to be "a distinct gain to society," which is a sentiment often found in detective stories up to the 1960s and a very famous example can be found in Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" – collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). She would not have touched the case had she not been plagued by "a personal desire" to know if and how the twin brothers are involved. And the role Francis and Derek played in the story also showed Mitchell was at the top of her game.

Mitchell does not underestimate the intelligence of her readers and confirms before the halfway mark what most have probably figured out by that point, but this revelation only complicates the case even further. And it definitively turns the story in who-did-what-and-why instead of a traditional who-dun-it, which actually makes the book more mystifying than you would expect. The presence of identical twins in a detective story can be a spotty business, but The Echoing Strangers is one of the rare exceptions and arguably the best possible use of the Gemini gimmick. I would even argue that the twins were put to better use here than a certain and somewhat famous Ellery Queen novel from the 1950s, because the reader here is mystified by throwing pretty much all of the cards on the table.

This well-written, cleverly constructed story succeeded in being both utterly simplistic and maddeningly complex at the same time. Not an easy accomplish, but Mitchell pulled it off. She also deserves praise for the creative explanation that answered why the murderer used such a round-a-bout way to dispose of Campbell's body. Mitchell always had a penchant for bizarre murders (e.g. severed head in the snake-box in Come Away, Death, 1937), but this was a particularly good one. It showed the truth behind the Shakespearan saying that, sometimes, there's method to someone's madness!

Once everything has been revealed and explained, a dark, grim shadow falls across the characters and the story ends on a tragic, but inevitable, note driving home the truth that this is one of Mitchell's greatest triumphs. One that ranks alongside the previously mentioned Come Away, Death, The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929) and St. Peter's Finger (1938).

Personally, I'll never understand people who don't like Mitchell, but The Echoing Stranger has convinced me to return more often to her fantastic detective stories. Luckily, I have several of her reputedly good and excellent titles on the big pile, which includes The Longer Bodies (1930), the illustrious The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935), Brazen Tongue (1940) and Groaning Spinney (1950). I also want to know whether Laurels Are Poison (1942) is as good as scholastic mystery as Tom Brown's Body (1949) and want to read Death of a Delft Blue (1964) for obvious reasons. So don't touch that dial!

Through the Labyrinth

"Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue..."

- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Alfred W. Stewart was a Scottish chemist and university lecturer who penned seventeen detective novels, all of them published under the name of "J.J. Connington," which were well received by readers and garnered praise from high-profile critics – such as T.S. Eliot and Jacques Barzun. Yet, despite all of the praise and popularity accumulated over a two decade career, Connington slipped into almost complete obscurity after passing away in 1947.

Only a handful of dedicated readers and genre historians were aware of Connington's Sir Clinton Driffield mysteries at the dawn of this century. Something that's only recently begun to be remedied when his work appeared on the radar of several (reprint) publishers.

Lately, Coachwhip and Murder Room republished practically every single title in Connington's bibliography. Since then, I keep coming across reviews, here and there, continuously reminding me that there's a beaten-up, yellowed paperback edition of Murder in the Maze (1927) on my bookshelves – which had been stuck there for the better part of a decade. So finally decided to take it down and see what all the fuzz is about.

Murder in the Maze is Connington's third mystery novel and constituted the debut of his series-character, Sir Clinton Driffield, who is the Chief Constable of a fictitious county and has a local landowner, Square Wendover, acting as his Cap. Arthur Hastings. Some readers have compared him to Dr. Watson, but Wendover impressed me more as a character along the lines of Hercule Poirot's loyal companion. Anyway, Sir Clinton happened to be staying with Wendover at Talgarth Grange when a double murder occurred in the neighborhood.

Neville and Roger Shandon are two elderly twin brothers, living at an estate called Whistlefield, who made a name for themselves in different fields and earned some money along the way.

Neville is a barrister, or King's Counsil, with the reputation of being "a brutal and domineering cross-examiner." On the day after tomorrow, Neville is expected in court to cross-examine the head-figure in the Hackleton case, "an infernal tangle," which will be transferred from the Law Court to the Criminal Court when a breach of contract can be demonstrated – which would make Neville's removal very convenient. Something that's pointed out by his own family. Roger's "rise to prosperity" is very shady and all what's known is that he made his money in South Africa and South America, but the ghosts of his "disreputable past" have come back to haunt him.

So they both could use some privacy, to work or simply be alone, which is where the titular, double-centered, hedge maze down by the river comes into play.

The Whistlefield Maze is "a relic of earlier days," when garden labyrinths were fashionable, but the place was well kept and is exceedingly more complex in comparison to the mazes at Hatfield and Hampton Court. There was more than half a mile of twisty passages, dead ends and byways with "the shortest route to either of the centers" being at least "two hundred and fifty yards in length." So you really have to know the maze in order to find your way to Helen's Bowen (center 1) or the Pool of Narcissus (center 2) without getting lost.

The centers are probably the best places to get away from the world, because there couldn't be possibly that many people wandering around its winding passages on any given day, right? Well, this is a 1920s detective novel and that means there were more people, than usual, walking around the maze around the same time a murderer struck. Twice!

Howard Torrance and Vera Forrest, who are guests of Sylvia Hawkhurst, a niece of the Shandon brothers, decided to have a frolic in the maze and make a little game out of their exploration, but suddenly, they hear "an inarticulate cry" – followed by an eerie silence. Someone had shot Neville and Roger with curare-dipped darts and the murderer was still running around the hedge maze, which makes for an excellent and memorable scene with a frightened Vera stumbling around the maze. And eventually coming across one of the bodies in the second center of the hedge maze.

Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield immediately takes control of the case and is confronted with a tangle of complicated possibilities and a liberal serving of red herrings. One of those complications is the possibility that the murders are connected to either the Hackleton affair or Roger's dark past, because they were twins and one of them could have been shot by mistake. After all, a shady person, named Tim Costock, was plucked out of the maze with a loaded pistol in his pocket.

There are, however, several possibilities a lot closer at home: Neville and Roger have a brother, Ernest, who was financially depended on them, but also a complete and utter coward. Sylvia has a younger brother, Arthur, who suffers from "occasionally flashes of abnormality" ever since "the attack of encephalitis lethargica." Arthur was an annoyance to his uncles and loved playing around with airguns, which gave the young man a potential motive and the means to kill his uncles. Lastly, there is Roger's private secretary, Ivor Stenness, who possesses the "efficiency of a machine," but turns out he also had something to hide.

As Sir Clinton attempts to piece together this labyrinthine puzzle, the murderer makes several additional attempts on the lives of the other family members. The house is burgled and an answer has to be found to a small side problem concerning a forged cheque.

So you would expect that such a rich, well written and fast-moving plot would result in a rug-puller of a detective story, but there's an unfortunate flaw in the whole scheme: the murderer's identity is painfully obvious. In fact, the murderer was so easy to spot that, initially, I rejected this person as simply being a red herring. This was, however, not the case and is what keeps the book from a place in the first rank. Nevertheless, the book still has a lot going for itself.

As obvious as the murderer may be, the plot is not bad. Obvious, but not bad. And very well written with some excellent scenes set in the hedge maze, which is effectively used by Connington throughout the story. The maze is a marvelous backdrop for a murky crime and lends itself perfectly for a suspenseful chase scene (c.f. Edmund Crispin's Frequent Hearses, 1950), but equally great is how Sir Clinton used the maze in order to engineer the murderer's demise. And that's something else that makes Murder in the Maze an interesting excursion.

Sir Clinton is described as a slight, unassuming man with a bored expression in his eyes, but, occasionally, they betrayed "the activity of the brain behind them." Most of the time he plays the fool and appears to be making mistakes, which begs a comparison with Columbo. However, the way in which Sir Clinton dealt with the villain squarely placed him alongside H.C. Bailey's Reginald Fortune and Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley. A group of detectives you don't want to tangle with when you have just committed a morally indefensible murder, because they have their own ambiguous interpretation of law and justice. I always find such detective characters to be endlessly fascinating.

All in all, Murder in the Maze is not a flawless detective story, but certainly an interesting one that was excellently written and characterized, which is perhaps best read as an introduction to Connington and Sir Clinton. However, I have to read more to know for sure whether he improved with time or was simply not all that good at hiding his murderers from his readers. So I'll get back to Connington in the hopefully not so distant future. Stay tuned!