Cold Cases

"I cannot understand how the police could have been so blind..."

- The Old Man (Baroness Orczy's "The York Mystery," collected in The Old Man in the Corner, 1908)

Back in May, I reviewed a Dutch short (locked room) story by Anne van Doorn, titled "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In"), which was offered at the time as a freebie by E-Pulp Publishers. A small, independent, publishing outfit that had turned its back on the drab, gloomy realism of the psychological school of modern crime-fiction and vowed to return to "the time of pulp fiction" when mystery and imagination would await all who would seek it – be it in a short story or a full-length novel. So you'll not find a single title in their catalog with the predicate "literary thriller" emblazoned on the front-cover.

Several months have passed since my previously mentioned blog-post and a number of potentially interesting titles were published during that period. One of these releases was Van Doorn's De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries (The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries, 2017), which is a rare, modern-day, collection of short stories and includes "The Poet Who Locked Himself In."

The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries consists of five short stories about Van Doorn's series-characters, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong, who are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in oude zaken (old cases) that the police were unable to successfully bring to a close – which vary from long-standing missing person cases to unsolved murders. Corbijn is both the head and brains of Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover, while De Jong acts as his assistant, pupil and chronicler. She pretty much plays the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. They work from an apartment in a residential tower, called the Kolos van Cronesteyn, standing on the outskirts of Leiden, South-Holland.

This compendium opens with a brief opmerking vooraf (comment in advance), in which Van Doorn laments the lack of room in today's literary landscape for the short story and professed an admiration for the short detective stories by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Baroness Orczy. And told that the five stories that make up this collection were written in the tradition of those three classic mystery writers. Lastly, Van Doorn ended with the suggestion to read the stories in the order they appear and no more than a day, because "each story only comes into its own when you read no more than one per day."

Apparently, that's how Van Doorn learned to read and appreciate short stories. Well, I succeeded in reading them in order, but burned through them in less than five days. What can I say? I'm a wholesale consumer of detective fiction. So, let's take down these stories from the top.

The first story in this collection is the locked room yarn I reviewed back in May, "The Poet Who Locked Himself In," which is why I'm not going to discuss it here again, but, needless to say, it's always a special treat to come across an impossible crime story in my own language – particularly when the locked room trick is a good one. And it was this specific story that inspired me to compile a list of Dutch-language locked room novels and short stories, which you can find here.

The second story lends its name to this collection, "De geliefde die in het veen verdween" ("The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog"), which begins as a modern-day crime story about a missing property developer, who had ties with the underworld, but ended in the most classical way imaginable.

Corbijn and De Jong are approached by the woman living next to the office, Letty Kreft, whose niece, Ingeborg Greshoff, has a boyfriend who has been missing for six-and-a-half years. Guido Eickhout was a project developer and an ardent hiker, but on his last hike in the Belgian Ardennes, in the Hoge Vennen, he simply vanished from the face of the Earth. Tragically, Greshoff learned that he had ordered golden engagement rings and planned to propose to her upon his return.

The local police believes Eickhout had been murdered by one of his criminal associates and the body had been hidden somewhere in "the outstretched forests, marshy peatlands, bogs" and the heathlands. Greshoff is well aware that the murderer might never be caught or has perhaps been killed himself in another criminal related shooting, which is why she now only wants to find the body and give her would-be-fiance a decent burial. Corbijn accepts the case and travels to the misty, boggy Ardennes and slowly begins to unravel the tapestry of a plot as clever and intricate as anything found in Ellery Queen or Edward D. Hoch. A plot that consists of such tricky puzzle-pieces as "a man with a red sports bag," the pealing of the warning bell at a small chapel, once used as a "beacon for wandering hikers," and a local story from the 19th century – about two lovers who got lost on the fens and perished in a snowstorm.

Plot-wise, "The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog" is the strongest of the five stories in this collection and one of my two personal favorites, which goes to show that even in this country some form of shin honkaku detective fiction can exist.

The next story is titled "De arts die de weg kwijt was" ("The Doctor Who Got Lost On the Way") and is a departure from the cold case formula of the series, because the problem at hand is only a couple of days old. And consists of no less than two seemingly impossible situations!

A doctor from the Laakkwartier in Den Haag (The Hague), named Thomas van Ooijen, is in desperate need for an answer as to what has happened to him several days ago. One night, he was called on his smartphone by a patient, who needed special care, but when he arrived in the street where his patient lived he was waited upon by an unknown man and was ushered to a top-floor apartment – where he found a young woman strapped to a bed with an inflamed gunshot wound. A second man, who was present in the room, came across very threateningly and made it abundantly clear that it was in his best interest to help the girl without asking questions. This situation recalls the premise of R. Austin Freeman's The Mystery of 31, New Inn (1912), but what happens next takes the story in an entirely different direction.

When Van Ooijen finished working on the woman, he blacked out and was found later that night by two policemen inside his locked car that had been parked near the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He had a splitting headache, the smell of alcohol clung to him and the keys, with remote control attached to it, lay on the dash board. Only he himself could have locked himself into his own car. So the police had a hard time believing his story, but what made Van Ooijen doubt himself is when the police accompanied him to the address and discovered that the place was a ground-floor house. The stairs and the entire top-floor apartment had disappeared!

The premise of the story and the explanation for the two impossibilities constitute the best aspects of this story. Corbijn practically solves the problem of the vanishing top-floor apartment from his armchair by consulting Google Maps, but the mystery of the locked car is a little bit more involved and requires a practical demonstration to show how it was done. I've seen the principle behind this particular trick before, but to apply this idea to a modern car with a remote control key is a new ripple.

However, I was not very impressed by the ending of the story or how an all-important plot-thread was left dangling in the wind. The story literally ended with “we will probably never know why [redacted] did so much to save her life.” What? That was, like, the entire mainspring of the plot and you leave it hanging in the air! Very, very disappointing. And the reason why this story ended up as the weakest entry in this collection. It began strong, but ended weakly.

Luckily, the next story in this collection, “Het joch dat grenzen overschreed” (“The Brat Who Went Too Far”), is my second favorite and is a good example of, what Bill Pronzini calls, humanist detective fiction. A sad and tragic murder case that would “never have become a case if there was no loneliness.” Or rather if the people involved had someone close to them to care about.

A lawyer, Elvira Guikema, calls in the help of Corbijn and De Jong on behalf of one of her clients, Geertruida Smelinck, who has been convicted for the premeditated murder of her neighbor's nine-year-old son, Ward Koehoorn – who was a regular Denis the Menace. The backdrop of this case is a glumly, dead-end side street with only three houses. It's a neglected neighborhood where people on one of the bottom rungs of society live a dismal, monotonous life. 

Smelinck was a recluse with a dark past and the mother of the victim, Debby, had begun to prostitute herself after she was abandoned by Ward's father. An elderly retiree, Mr. Van den Ham, lived in the third home and filled his days by taking care of his sick wife and was an important witness as to what happened that fateful day. The last person is their landlord, Dirk van Grijpskerk, who lives far more comfortable than his tenants in a brand new bungalow.

On this already gloomy, dismal existence, Ward was an additional burden and the boy had picked Smelinck as his favorite target. So there was no question about her guilt when the boy was found in her garden with a rusty rod sticking out of his body. A year before, Ward had stolen all of the apples from the tree in her garden and everyone assumed he was caught and killed when he tried to repeat it a second time. 

However, Smelinck maintained her innocence and Corbijn, alongside De Jong, travel to the province of Groningen to visit the desolate place where the murder took place three years ago. The plot is not overly complicated and the evidence, consisting of a key of the garden door, fingerprints and the witness statements, eventually bears out the simple truth. A simple truth I almost completely missed, because I was staring myself blind on my own pet hypothesis. I was only correct on a single technical aspect of the plot, but hey, being proven wrong can be as fun as completely solving the case. And really liked the background and story-telling of this one.

Finally, the last story of the lot, "De vluchteling die alles achterliet" ("The Refugee Who Left Everything Behind"), is yet another nail in the coffin of the ludicrous claim that the advance of forensic science, such as DNA, has made clever and classically-styled detective plots absolute – which is simply not true. This claim had already been shattered, decades before it was made, by Isaac Asimov in The Caves of Steel (1954) and again demonstrated to be false by Keigo Higashino's controversial Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005). Van Doorn approach to this is not as grand as those by Asimov and Higashino, but it nonetheless shows how DNA can be used as misdirection when manipulated and/or misinterpreted.

The background of the story has its roots in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. A Bosnian refugee, Zlatko Hodzic, came to the Netherlands in 1994 and vanished from an asylum center in 1996 without a trace.

One day earlier, Susanne Westera, disappeared under equally inexplicable circumstances from her home on the Wadden Island of Terschelling. A thorough police investigation determined that Zlatko and Susanna were in secret relationship, which was confirmed by DNA found in her home, but nothing else materialized from this discovery and they were relegated to never-ending list of missing persons who were never found. And the case remained unresolved for more than twenty years. Now the father of Susanne is terminally ill and wants to make a last ditch effort to clear up the case, which brings Corbijn and De Jong into the picture.

This story is, structurally, similar to the title story of this collection as both begin as apparently modern-crime stories, with a problem rooted in contemporary times, but the resolutions to these two stories are classic examples of old-fashioned misdirection and craftsman-like plotting – topped, in this case, with a nifty trick to get rid of a pesky body. So not a bad story to close out this collection.

All in all, The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries is a solid collection of contemporary detective stories in the classic mold and a fine showcase of the all-but-lost art form known as the short story format. A form preferred by the early Titans of the genre. So it does me great joy to see a mystery writer from my own country continuing this age-old tradition and a second short story collection has already been announced for next year, De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, 2018).

Finally, I want to point out my own objectivity. There were two impossible crime stories in this volume, but my two favorites were "The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog" and "The Brat Who Went Too Far." So maybe my obsession with locked room mysteries hasn't really gone all that far after all! But is that a good thing or have I just let down the spirit of John Dickson Carr?

After the Ball

"If you ask me, there very likely wouldn't have been a murder at all if it hadn't been for him getting ideas about peace and goodwill, and assembling all these highly uncongenial people under the same roof at the same time."

- Inspector Hemingway (Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca, 1941)

Early last month, Dean Street Press published the first ten titles in a surge of reprints that aim to bring back all sixty-three of Christopher Bush's detective novels about his series-character, Ludovic Travers, who's a financial expert and director of Durangos Ltd – a factotum company offering various services to wealthy clients and large businesses. These services include the use of a discreet private-investigator, John Franklin, who sometimes takes over the role as lead detective from Travers (e.g. The Perfect Murder Case, 1929).

The previous three titles I reviewed in this series, which include Cut Throat (1932) and The Case of the April Fools (1933), propelled Bush to my list of potentially favorite mystery authors. What's not to like about a mystery writer who's halfway between John Dickson Carr and Freeman Wills Crofts? So I eagerly look forward to the new editions of such promising titles as The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935) and The Case of the Missing Minutes (1937), but the second batch of reprints probably won't be published until next year.

Until then, I have to do with the remaining seven Travers mysteries that were reissued last month and decided to pick Bush's take on the snowed-in manor house from the big pile.

Dancing Death (1931) is the fifth entry in the series and is billed on the front-cover as "A Christmas Mystery," but this is misleading as the events of the story take place around New Year's Eve and the cold, snowy days of early January – making this more of a wintertime mystery rather than a holiday one. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of a murderous party at a snowbound manor house remains present regardless of the occasion the characters are celebrating.

A fancy-dress ball is "an annual affair for New Year's Eve" at the ancestral home of Martin Braishe, Little Levington Hall, which he had inherited from his late father a year ago and had several reason for continuing the tradition. One of these reasons is that a party was in order to celebrate his invention of a gas with "amazingly lethal properties." A gas that the War Office had taken a great interest in.

Ludovic Travers and John Franklin, of Durangos Limited, are two of the nine guests who remain at the hall after the ball ended and the following morning confronts them with a host of problems.

During the night, the rooms of several guests had been burgled and money, jewelry and two miniatures from the drawing room had been taken. A safe that was hidden behind a bookcase had been opened and "a siphon of gas" had been taken. An uninvited guest, Crawshaw, was sitting at the diner table, consuming a hearty breakfast, while telling them that he was a schoolteacher whose car was "conked out altogether in the drift" – forcing him to seek refuge at the hall. The worst is yet to come: one of the nine guests, Miranda Quest, was found, still in costume, stuffed beneath her bed with a knife-handle protruding from her chest. A second body is found in the pegoda on the former croquet lawn, which temporarily homed a novelist, Denis Fewne, who lies contorted on his bed. All around him on the floor were splashes of color, "the skeletons of toy balloons," which had been part of his costume.

Franklin gives his host the advice to immediately call the special branch of Scotland Yard, but, not only has the telephone-cord been cut, but the telephone itself has been removed from its cabinet! So Franklin decided to brave the snow and fetch the police himself, while Travers stays behind to begin collecting evidence to hand over to the police when they arrive. And this is the point where the plot becomes tricky to discuss.

Dancing Death has a plot as complex as the innards of a Swiss timepiece, but the gears moved and ticked according to "the blinkin' cussedness of things in general." Even the parts that were meticulously planned ahead of time had to bow to the spontaneous, irrational or inexplicable actions of the people involved. One example of these impulsive actions, with dire consequences, is that two characters had swapped rooms without anyone knowing.

So this aspect alone enmeshes the burglaries and the double murder in a tangle of (random) plot-threads, but the case is further complicated by a third murder and witnesses who have seen a second, unaccountable, harlequin during the fancy-dress party. The presence of this second harlequin becomes an important plot-point and recalls Agatha Christie's "The Affair at the Victory Ball," collected in The Underdog and Other Stories (1951), but the nature of plot clearly demonstrates how closely related Bush was, as a mystery writer, to Carr. Not only for the Merrivalean general cussedness of all things, but also for the impossible crime-material sprinkled throughout the story.

For example, the peculiar death of Denis Fewne was a hair's breadth away from being an impossible murder of the no-footprints variety. The pegado in which he was found was "a sort of summerhouse," converted to a small residence, which at the time of his death was completely surrounded by a thick blanket of snow – only his own footprints lead to the front-door of the one-room structure. This situation could have easily been turned into a full-blown locked room mystery. And why not. The murder had already been committed "under circumstances as fantastic as a nightmare." So you might as well have gone all the way.

Another example of this is the tracing of a track of footprints in the snow back to their original starting point. Only to discover that they suddenly ended. This part is not presented or meant to be taken as an impossibility, but you can imagine how it impressed an impossible crime addict like myself. Finally, there's a scene in which the burglar escapes from a guarded room and the misdirection he uses to escape from his warder could also have been used to stage a seemingly impossible disappearance mystery from that very same room. One that would probably be solved the moment they investigated the grounds beneath the smashed window, but this could have been retooled into a (brief) locked room mystery.

Bush never pulled the trigger on any of these potentially impossible situations. Probably because he already had more than enough plot-material on his plate to work with and work he did! And so does his detective.

Travers does an admirable and superb job in bringing order into chaos and separating all of the relevant clues from the red herrings, which makes Dancing Death a pleasantly involved and intelligently plotted detective story with a coherent and satisfying solution – resulting in one of the strongest holiday, or wintry, themed mysteries I have come across to date.

I only need to read two, or three, more titles by Bush that show the same kind of ingenuity as Dancing Death, Cut Throat and The Case of the April Fools and has cemented a top-spot on my list of all-time favorite mystery writers. Bush may be my favorite discovery, alongside Nicholas Brady, of 2017. So Dean Street Press better hurry with that second serving of Bush and Travers!

A Monster in the Closet

"If, in the unhealthy atmosphere of an old house, the inmates got talking of ghosts and goblins, it might be that the consequences would be dangerous..."

- Dr. Lascelles (Fergus Hume's "The Ghost's Touch," collected in The Dancer in Red, 1906)

Edward Gellibrand is one of those mystery writers from the early part of the previous century who had the misfortune to have his work obscured or even obliterated from popular memory by the passage of time.

I can only say for sure that the name of Edward Gellibrand appeared on the book-covers of two locked room mysteries, The End of a Cigarette (1924) and The Windblow Mystery (1926), which have the character of Kenneth O'Brien in common and both titles were listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991) – the sole reason I even knew these books existed. Even the comprehensive GADWiki has no references to either Gellibrand or any of his detective stories.

Consequently, the only known detective novels by Gellibrand have been all but forgotten today and secondhand copies, while not eye-gougingly expensive, tend to be scarce and not widely available to ordinary readers. So imagine my delight when I came across a dirt cheap reprint edition of The Windblow Mystery when I was sifting through the catalog of Black Heath Editions. Yes, that's the same publishing outfit that brought the wonderful Rev. Ebenezer Buckle mysteries by Nicholas Brady back into circulation.

The Windblow Mystery has a plot that plays on the "room that kills" motif and is comparable to John Dickson Carr's "The Devil's Saint" (The Dead Sleep Lightly, 1983) and Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990), but Gellibrand wrote in the style and spirit of Conan Doyle and Fergus Hume. I think the late 19th century writing style greatly enhanced the atmosphere of the haunted bedroom that apparently possessed the terrifying power to persuade its occupants into taking their own lives.

The haunted room in question is the largest bedroom in a centuries old manor house, called Windblow, which is currently owned by an eccentric believer in the supernatural, Morden Croker, who's also a social creature with "a mania for having his house full" and one of the people he roped in is a no-nonsense oil millionaire, Alexander Caulfield – who had reluctantly accepted the invitation. A decision he had come to regret, because the first evening at the manor house were filled with discussions about "unaccountable noises, strange lights, mysterious footsteps in the dead of night" and the age-old legend of the haunted bedroom.

Whenever a man sleeps in the cursed room with "some strong, evil passion," nursed in secret, the ghost haunting the bedroom will appear to confront this person and the occupant, in a fit of fright or madness or even remorse, does away with himself. Only possible way to escape death is the prospected victim has "pluck enough to go and meet his ghostly enemy." The last victim of the ghost was the previous owner, Richard Henderson, who, one morning, was found hanging from a hook in the cupboard of the bedroom. And that cupboard was more of a large, spacious closet.

Croker placed Caulfield in the haunted bedroom, assuming that the "practical, level-headed business" lacked believe in ghosts nor nursed any secret vices, but the nighttime weakens Caulfield's skepticism and begins reflect on how his all consuming passion for accumulating wealth has destroyed his family – which is when he gets a glimpse of the ghost. Caulfield sees a light from his bedroom window in the deserted portion of the house. A light of a pale, bluish color. On the following morning, the body of the millionaire is found hanging by the cord of his dressing-gown in the big wall cupboard of the bedroom. Dead as a door-nail.

The next part of the story tells of the arrival of Kenneth O'Brien and Alan Dawson, who are on a walking tour as part of their summer holiday, but they decided to end their tour and stay in the charming hamlet of Drayton's Oak. Soon enough, they not only learned about the suicide room at the nearby house of Windblow, but were also invited by Croker to spend some time there. And there they get a front-row seat to two additional dramas in the cursed and haunted bedroom of Windblow.

One of the other guests is a popular actor, Edward Payton, who wants to prove to everyone that "a man can sleep in that room without coming to harm." However, the following morning he's found dead, hanging from the cord of his dressing-gown, in the cupboard. It turns out that Payton, just like the previous victims, nursed a secret vice. Henderson was a hypocritical drunkard who preached at temperance meetings. Caulfield was a money-grubber who had neglected his wife and became estranged from his own son. Payton was secretly addicted to cocaine.

A fourth, seemingly impossible, hanging occurs when a friend of the actor, Piers Logan, engages a private-investigator, named Theodore, who is willing to spend a night in the haunted room, while everyone else is locked inside their bedroom by the local police constable, who keeps all of the keys on his person – making it impossible for anyone in the house to move around the premise. Nevertheless, the private detective is found hanging inside the cupboard when the bedroom is entered on the following morning!

A quick note for the curious: the unusual impossible situation of the suspects, instead of the prospected victim, being locked inside their bedrooms anticipated the (unresolved) locked room problem from Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929).

Kenneth O'Brien becomes obsessed with finding the truth behind the "ghostly hangman" of Windblow and begins his own investigation, which revealed that a number of locals had seen lights moving around in the disused wing of Windblow. Some even claim to have seen a horned figure with a beard and carrying a burning candle around. Personally, O'Brien witnessed the senior partner of the local estate agency, Sebastian Rowe, surreptitiously enter the by then abandoned manor house after nightfall. O'Brien even strongly suspect him of being the hangman.

So all of this makes for an well-written and genuinely engaging read, one that really transports you back to the beginning of the twentieth century, but, as a mystery novelist, Gellibrand was a holdover from a previous era of crime-fiction and he did not at all adhere to the rules and standards that were slowly emerging at the time this book was published. A notable aspect is that O'Brien's own investigation is best described as groping around in the dark rather than actual detective work. He does talk with people and receives relevant information from them, but his most important discoveries are made when he's literary stumbling around in the dark.

There's also the problem of the murderer's identity, which is obvious, and the reason behind this sequence of apparent suicides is not properly clued at all, but was ingenious for the time. A devious little criminal enterprise that was made all the more believable, because a number of things went wrong. One of them being the presence of the inquisitive O'Brien. Equally novel and diabolical is the murder method that partially explained the locked room angle of the plot. Once again, it betrayed that Gellibrand really belonged to a previous, much earlier, era of crime-fiction, but I simply could not help myself from liking it. Stuff of nightmares!

William Marwood, the Gentleman Hangman

That being said, I have to comment on the incompetent doctor who examined the victims, particularly Payton, because he could have prevented at least one murder. After the body of Payton is found, the reader is told that the medical examiner determined that "the neck had been dislocated," resulting in instant death, which apparently happened after the victim jumped off a small table with the cord tied around his neck. And here's the problem: a short drop inside a wall closet does not dislocate either the 2nd and 3rd or 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae, which requires a stretched rope (not a slip-knot cord) and a number of calculations that take the victim's weight and height into consideration – a method developed by a famous hangman, William Marwood.

If the doctor had pointed this out, the jury at the inquest would have returned a verdict of willful murder. The police, or even Scotland Yard, would have gotten involved and they would have looked into everyone's background, which would have revealed the connection that now only became apparent at the end of the story. This might have saved, at the very least, the life of the private detective, Theodore. I was annoyed his incompetence was never pointed out in the final chapter.

But enough of this nitpicking. The Windblow Mystery is, admittedly, a less than perfect detective novel that read like it was written twenty or thirty years before it was actually published, but this is what gave the story charm and character. On top of that, the explanation for the murders in the haunted bedroom reveal some flashes of ingenuity. Such as the how and why behind the hangings.

So, all in all, The Windblow Mystery is a well-written, engrossing detective story, but one you should read and enjoy on autopilot, because you'll not be able to piece together to full picture. And that'll only leave you frustrated.

On a final, semi-related note, I'll be sampling a handful of titles from Black Heath in the coming weeks. There were several detective novels in their catalog that looked promising enough to snap them up, but I'll probably return to Brady before tackling my newer acquisitions. So stay tuned everyone!

The Great Escape

"We have in effect put all our rotten eggs in one basket. And we intend to watch this basket carefully."

- Colonel Von Luger (The Great Escape, 1963)

Recently, Dan of "The Reader is Warned" compiled a two-part list, titled "5 Impossible Crime 'Thrillers' to Try” and "5 More Impossible 'Thrillers' to Try," which made a decent attempt at listing all the notable, high-paced thrillers with a locked room or impossible crime element, but both lists omitted the best specimen of this particular blend of crime-fiction – namely Michael Gilbert's outstanding Death in Captivity (1952). After littering Dan's comment-section with recommendations for the book, I decided to take down my copy from the shelves to see if it could stand re-reading. And it absolutely did!

Death in Captivity was reprinted in 2007 by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press, under its US title The Danger Within, which came with a foreword by Tom and Enid Schantz briefly going over Gilbert's personal experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Italy during World War II.

The foreword is titled "The Escapes of Michael Gilbert" and gives the modern reader an idea just how extraordinary this piece of detective-and thriller fiction truly is. Not only are the plot and setting practically unique within the genre, but many of the events in the book were inspired by Gilbert's first-hand experiences as both a POW and an escapee in enemy territory – which gave everything a chilling veneer of authenticity. Particular the depictions of everyday life at the prison camp, the secret tunneling activities in the various huts and the occasional pestering of the Italian prison guards ("a bit of sentry-baiting").

Another aspect that sets this book apart from other World War II mystery-and thriller novels is that it deals primarily with the Fascisti of Italy rather than the Nazis of Germany.

The Danger Within takes place in Campo 127, "easily the best camp" one of the prisoners had been in, but perhaps the most "comfortably lodged" group of prisoners are the six men held in Room 10 in Hut C. As a rule, the rooms were designed to hold eight men and usually overflowed with "ten or even twelve less fortunate prisoners." Captain Benucci had ordered the men, all of them notorious escapees, to occupy the same room. Reasoning that if he had "six dangerous criminals to watch, it was easier, on a whole, to have them together," but that only pooled all of their knowledge and experience in one place – resulting in "the oldest of existing undiscovered tunnels in the camp." A tunnel Colonnello Aletti, Commandant of Campo 127, claimed simply could not exist.

The entrance to this tunnel lay in the kitchen of Hut C and in the middle of this cookery, set in a six-foot slab of concrete let into the tiled floor, stood a stove. A huge cauldron, shaped like "a laundry copper," which hid a trapdoor to the tunnel and could only be revealed by the combined effort of four strong men with assistance of double pulleys – effectively evading discovery by being "too big to see." I thought this was a nice little Chestertonian touch to the all-important secret tunnel that will play a key role throughout the entirety of the story.

One day, the protagonist of the story, Captain Henry "Cuckoo" Goyles, crawls down to the tunnel to continue work, but discovers that during the night part of the roof had come down. Inexplicably, there's a body underneath the pile of fallen sand at the end of the tunnel. Something that should not be possible, because this person could not have gained access to the tunnel on his own nor could an outside group have entered the locked Hut C after nightfall. Even more troublesome is that the victim is identified as a Greek POW, Cyriakos Coutoules, who's suspected by everyone of being a stool-pigeon for the Italians or even a double-agent in the employ of the Nazis.

Two of the special detainees in Hut C, Captain Roger Byles and Captain Alex Overstrand, had previously uttered threats to lynch Coutoules. However, their immediate problem of Hut C and Colonel Baird, head of the Escape Committee, is how to tackle the problem of a dead man cluttering the best tunnel they had. So they decide to dump the body in a smaller tunnel, located in Hut A, that had been "allotted low priority by the Escape Committee" and stage a roof collapse there, but how they move the body from one hut to another, under the nose of the guards, is one of my favorite and funniest scenes of the entire story – something of a cross between 'Allo, 'Allo (war-time setting) and Fawlty Towers (the episode Kipper and the Corpse, 1979).

You occasionally get these brief burst of typical British humor. Such as when some of the prisoners are preparing a stage-play and they pick one in which one of the characters, rapturously, exclaims "Italy! Oh, it's hard to take in even the bare possibility of going there. My promised land, Doctor, which I never thought to see otherwise than in dreams." Needless to say, that line brought the house down.

But, on a whole, the story-telling tends to be serious in tone, because the myriad of (potential) problems facing the POWs of Campo 127 are no laughing matter.

The events at the POW camp take place against the backdrop of the impending invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland by Allies, eventually culminating in the disposal of Benito Mussolini, but the consequences of an Allied victory in Italy is a double-edged knife for both parties at the camp. On the one hand, the POWs fully realize the Germans aren't going to set free the sixty thousand prisoners in Italy and that, one day, they could simply find themselves being put on a train "to Krautland." On the other hand, the card-carrying members of the Fascist Party, such as Captain Benucci and the sinister Mordaci of the Carabinieri Reali, know they'll be put in front of a military tribunal when the Allies arrive – which would probably end with them having to face a firing squad.

So the inexplicable death of Coutoules and the accompanying cloud of suspicions does very little to improve the slightly strained situation at the camp, but the situation becomes rather serious when Captain Byles is charged by Benucci with the murder of the Greek POW and is placed in solitary confinement – condemned to die in several days time. Captain "Cuckoo" Goyles is asked by the Escape Committee to investigate who killed Coutoules, why and where. And, most importantly, how his body ended up in the tunnel.

In my opinion, the explanation for the impossible appearance of a body in a hermetically sealed, air-tight and blocked tunnel is as simplistic and logical as it's original. A one-of-a-kind impossibility in a completely unique crime novel that performed a perfect juggling act with its detective story elements, thriller components and spy material. Gilbert never allowed one of those elements to overshadow the other, but neither were they diluted. They worked in perfect harmony with one another. For example, the clues that will help you solve the detective story elements are provided by some of the more gruesome, thriller-ish aspects of the plot. You'll know what I mean when you get to it.

The Danger Within is an impressive and perfect latticework of differing genres, which is what makes it impossible to pigeonhole the book, but the climax of the story is a fine piece of wartime fiction as the inmates of Campo 127 prepare themselves to make "The Great Crawl." A fitting end to this semi-autobiographical wartime crime story. An ending that fitted like the final piece of the puzzle that completed the whole picture of this marvelously clever and exciting story. I simply can't recommend this one enough.

I'll end this review by saying that re-reading The Danger Within has inspired me to finally airlift my other Gilbert titled from the snow-capped tops of Mt. To-Be-Read. I'm not sure which titles actually reside there, but I believe they were Close Quarters (1947), Death Has Deep Roots (1951) and The Killing of Katie Steelstock (1980). So you can look forward to a review of one of those titles in the hopefully not so distant future.

Finally, Kate at Cross Examining Crime and Mike of Only Detect also reviewed the book (here and here), while Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed the 1959 movie based on the book (here).

Stratagems in the Snow

"But I'd much sooner have a jolly good murder in the village. A jolly good murder... would make Christmas jolly well worth it."

- Denis Lestrange (Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris, 1936)

Gladys Mitchell's Groaning Spinney (1950) is the fiftieth title in her series of wonderfully written, often unconventionally plotted, mystery novels about her cackling, basilisk-like psycho-analyst and criminologist, Mrs. Bradley – described by Mitchellites as a wintry story with "a vivid, picturesque seasonal backdrop" and one of her "most satisfyingly, well-clued solutions." Excitedly, this book is about to be reissued as a special Christmas edition, under the title Murder in the Snow, which is scheduled for release in early November.

So this fairly recent tradition of republishing classic, often obscure, Christmas-themed mystery novels continues to snowball ever larger. This year also saw the republication of Christopher Bush's Dancing Dead (1931), Anne Meredith's Portrait of a Murderer (1933) and Cyril Hare's An English Murder (1951). Curiously, the detective novel by Hare has not been reissued under its alternative title, The Christmas Murder, while Ellery Queen's The Finishing Stroke (1958) remains completely ignored in this category.

But who knows? Maybe next year some of these publishers will set their sights on these kind of holiday detective stories from the United States. But for now, I'll be looking at an earlier edition of Groaning Spinney.

Groaning Spinney takes place in the Cotswolds, nestled in south central England, which is famous for its ancient landscape with its rolling hills, rustic villages and charming hamlets. Jonathan Bradley and his wife, Deborah, had chosen the place to settle down and had purchased an old manor house, which came with a plot of land in a hilly, partially wooded area with "a dashing stream" and "a very well-authenticated ghost" of a nineteenth century parson, Rev. Horatius Pile – who can be seen hanging over a gate on moonlight nights. So the perfect place to raise a family.

Deborah had acted as a Mrs. Bradley's Sub-Warden at Cartaret College, in Laurels Are Poison (1943), where she was introduced to Mrs. Bradley's nephew, Jonathan, which led to their engagement by the end of the book. At the time, Mrs. Bradley had "greatly desired to find place in the family circle for the lovely Deborah" and her nephew had been "the vehicle for this inclusion." So Jonathan and Deborah invited their "Aunt Adela" to spend the Christmas holiday with them in their new home, but her arrival marked the beginning of a series of events that resulted in several deaths. And it all started very innocently.

On the morning after Christmas, the priestly ghost had left a trail of footprints, "like stockinged feet," in the snow and a witness claimed to have glimpsed the parson by "the snow-laden ghost-gate" at the top of the wood known as Groaning Spinney. But these locals stories of a ghost in the snow takes a macabre turn when Jonathan finds a corporeal form "slumped over the five-barred gate" and the body was "dusted over into ghostliness" by the last fall of the snow.

The body at the ghost-gate belonged to one of two cousins, Bill Fullalove, who lived with his relative, Tiny, as bachelors and according to the police examiner he had died of heart-failure due to cold and exposure, but a year ago he got himself medically examined for a life insurance policy and the company doctor had never seen a healthier man – or "tested a heart in better condition." So could the winter cold and snow have killed a healthy and robust man like Bill Fullalove?

It should be noted here that Mitchell was not necessarily a mystery novelist who was known for crafting elaborate, overly ingenious, murder methods, but she did come up with a couple of original gimmicks (e.g. The Man Who Grew Tomatoes, 1959) and this definitely one of them. A murder method as cold and clever as the one from Rex Stout's "A Window for Death" (collected in Three for the Chair, 1957).

Interestingly, the death of Bill Fullalove turns out to be nothing less than a perfect crime, because Mrs. Bradley admits that obtaining proof of murder is practically impossible. She does piece together how the murderer brought about heart-failure, based on such clues as dog-chains and trees, but dealing with the guilty party requires an unorthodox approach. Mrs. Bradley admits around the halfway mark that, "in this instance," revenge is her aim. And if you have read Speedy Death (1929), you know what she means by that.

There are, however, other problems complicating the matter of the dead man at the ghost-gate. An anonymous letter writer is littering the village with poison-pen letters and one of them suggests that the dead man had been murdered – even accusing the local doctor of "conspiring to hush it up." Another letter tells the cousin of the dead man, Tiny, that the police suspects murder and advises him to prepare for an exhumation. The doctor observed that this "sort of round-robin stuff can have serious consequences" and these words prove to be prophetic when the poisoned remains of the Fullaloves' missing housekeeper, Mrs. Dalby Whittier, is found in a deep dip in one of the farmer's fields.

And from these various plot-threads, Mitchell weaved an intricate, but discernible, tapestry of a potential insurance fraud, disputable identities, missing animals, wholesale blackmail and a double murderer. Mitchell really deserves praise here, not only for crafting a clever and well-imagined plot, but also for telling the story in clear and straightforward manner without getting entangled in a confusing web of plot-threads, which (admittedly) was not something she always succeeded in doing – c.f. Hangman's Curfew (1941) and The Worsted Viper (1943).

One other thing that has to be mentioned about the plot is that certain plot-strands evidently took their cue from Agatha Christie's Peril at End House (1932), which pertained to both the insurance policy and an attempt to use a "ghost" to bring the murderer to heel. Nevertheless, that should not be taken as criticism of Groaning Spinney, because the book by Christie had only been used as a source of inspiration. But you'll see what I mean when you get to it.

If Groaning Spinney has any flaws, particularly when measured against her own body of work, it is that the murderer's revelation does not come as an earth-shattering surprise and the ghost-element is not used to full-effect. Mitchell can do so much better with ghostly legends. I also missed the presence of one of her convincingly drawn, plucky children or teenage characters. Such as Mrs. Bradley's great-nephew, Denis, who provided the opening quote for this blog-post. I believe the presence of such a character would have greatly enhanced the already excellent atmosphere and cast-of-characters of the book.

Otherwise, Groaning Spinney is pleasantly lucid, well-written and lively entry in the Mrs. Bradley series with an ingenious murder method and an active detective with a sense of humor. But what is perhaps the strongest aspect of the book is its splendidly realized country-side setting. Whether it is the wintry, snow-laden landscape of the opening chapters or the approaching spring thaw of the later half, you have to admit that bringing a setting to life with mere words is a talent she shared with her Arthur W. Upfield.

So this was an auspicious, and early, beginning of my 2017 reading of the Yuletide Mystery Novel. There are three additional titles on my TBR-list and might add one or two more to that list. So stay tuned.