Dangerous Driving

"You'll get pinched for reckless driving."

- Captain Stoyner (William Gore's There's Death in the Churchyard, 1934)

The 63rd volume of Gosho Aoyama's ever-expanding series, known around the world as either Case Closed or Detective Conan, begins with the final two chapters of the story that ended the previous volume and concerns a locked car mystery – reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "Captain Leopold and the Impossible Murder" (collected in Murder Impossible, 1990). A car driven by a dead man who was the only occupant of the vehicle!

This miraculous situation followed immediately upon the events of the main story-arc in the previous volume and occurred when our hero's were driving homeward.

A car sped past them on the freeway and came to a standstill against the guardrail, but when they investigated they found a dead man behind the wheel with ligature marks across his throat. The man had been throttled to death. Only problem is that he was only person found inside the car. A peculiar problem that finally offers a case for the dream-team of Jimmy Kudo and Harley Hartwell, "the two biggest teen detectives in Japan," who immediately begin to check out the cars that were netted in a road blockade by the police and they picked three cars with potential suspects – all of whom turned out to have a personal connection with the murdered man.

The victim is identified as the leader of a street racing team, The Red Comets, who was involved in a deadly accident and, as to be expected, that past tragedy proves to be the heart and soul of the case. But the brainy part is definitely the devious trick used to murder a lonely driver, inside his car, while speeding down the freeway. Hoch could not have imagined a better explanation to this particular impossible problem!

An additional complication of this story is that Kudo's serum is rapidly losing its potency and this gives him a limited amount of time to solve the case, because the maintenance of his long-guarded secret depends on it. Goddammit, Kudo! Just tell her already!

The next three chapters form a nifty little impossible crime story about "a murder that could only be committed with sushi."

Doc Agasa takes Conan and the Junior Detective League to a revolving sushi bar where the various dishes, like squid, sea bream and flounder, pass the customers on a conveyor belt and they only have to take the dishes they wish to eat – after which the number of empty plates make up the bill. At the sushi bar, they meet a well-known, but unpleasant and feared food critic, who has no less than three enemies around him. So there are three prime suspects when the food critic drops dead from cyanide poisoning.

Only problem is how the murderer managed to make the victim taking "the poisoned plate" from the conveyor belt without anyone else accidentally picking it.

The story has a cracking false solution, playing on the left handedness of the victim, but the actual explanation neatly plays on the clue of the grains of rice stuck to the victim's finger and the customs of a sushi bar. My only complaint is that the murderer's motive was a trifle weak. Apart from that, I though this was a clever and original impossible poisoning story that excellently made use of the sushi bar setting.

However, I did not care all that much about the third story, which also consists of three chapters.

On the behest of Gonsaku Kaminski, Chairman of the Kaminski Group, Nichiuri TV is organized a multi-event competition for men who share the chairman's family name and "a genuine ink painting by the famous artist and priest Sankyu" is the grand prize of the tournament. The competitive events are a fitness test, a singing contest and a written kanji test, but the best contests aren't the ones who are making it to the next round. And then the event comes to a sudden end when one of the three finalists pushes the chairman down a flight of stairs.

This story has two (minor) points of interest: 1) one of the suspected finalists is the father of a member of the Junior Detective League and 2) the kanji-based clue can actually be used by Western readers who are willing to closely scrutinize the text and art-work – which is not always the case with the language-based clues and stories in this series. So that was nice change, but the story, as a whole, is unremarkable.

You surely can't label the final story in this collection as unremarkable, because it's an engine-revving impossible crime tale about a drag racer whose car can reputedly fly! 

Richard Moore learns of the resurrection of "the untouchable driver," The Silver Witch of Fuyuna Pass, who "turned Mt. Fuyuna upside down a few years ago," but the silver-white Mazda of the Witch has recently reemerged and this has atracted a crowd of drag racers who challenged her – resulting in a number of accidents. So the police is trying to put an end to it. There is, however, a supernatural aspect to the case, because the Mazda can apparently fly. One of the witnesses even claims she saw the Witch step out of the car, standing in mid-air, and waved at her.

Moore, Rachel and Conan get to witness this apparent impossibility first-hand when the Mazda sped past them and drove, or rather passed, through a guardrail above a cliff. However, the car did not plunge into the dark depths, but simply drove on, in mid-air, with nothing but a thick mist-bank as the road underneath its wheels.

The police stops three white Mazdas, each with two occupants, and Conan deduces the culprits based on the items found in the cars, which subsequently also reveals how the flying car illusion was done. Interestingly, the explanation closely resembles the false solution Ken Holt and Sandy Allen imagined for a very similar impossibility in Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953). Aoyama's take on the ghost car trick was slightly more cartoony than the (false) science-project solution by Campbell, but absolutely allowable on the pages of a comic book detective.

So, all in all, this was an almost rock solid volume, comprising of three excellent impossible crime stories, which more than made up for the weaker story about the curious competition.

On a final note, the next blog-post is going to my best-of list of 2017 and will go live on Saturday. A week earlier than usual, I know, but it worked out better like that this time. So glue those eyes to your screen, because it's coming!

A Vicious Substance

"Stale venom might take longer to kill."

- Elaine Gurdon (Vernon Loder's The Mystery at Stowe, 1928)

Jan Gordon was born as Godfrey Jervis Gordon in England, 1882, who studied mine engineering at the Truro School of Mining and worked in Malaysia as a mine manager, but spend his spare time drawing and this inspired him to pursue a more artistic vocation upon his return to England – enrolling into the London School of Art. Gordon would go on from there to become a noted writer, musician and artist known for his paintings of the First World War and camouflage art.

You can call me bias, if you want, but I believe Gordon peaked as an artist during the 1930s when he penned three detective novels, There's Death in the Churchyard (1934), Death in the Wheelbarrow (1935) and Murder Most Artistic (1937), all written under the nom-de-plume of "William Gore." According to "The Jan and Cora Gordon Pages," these detective stories bestowed "the nickname of 'Bloody Bill' upon Jan" and told how he had to admit that writing them "drove him potty," because he found "the crime genre far more difficult than that of travel writing." So that would explain why he wrote only three of them.

Recently, two of his William Gore detective novels were reissued as dirt cheap ebooks by Black Heath Editions.

I did a background check on the most appealing sounding titles in their catalog and came across a promising review of There's Death in the Churchyard by William F. Deeck, posted on Mystery File, who described it as "a well-plotted, well-written and amusing novel." The comments underneath his post showed how rare the book was at the time the review was published, because there were only two copies available on the internet that had hefty price-tags attached to them – an ex-library copy would have set you back $80 and a second-printing in DJ (in poor condition) went for $200. So this brand new edition is a splendid alternative for ordinary readers, like myself, who merely want an opportunity to read these rare, long-forgotten detective stories.

One of the central character of There's Death in the Churchyard is Captain Richard Stoyner, the Squire of Sutton Eacham, who's a war hero, a famous explorer and "a scientist of local repute."

Captain Stoyner is trying to produce "a cheap and satisfactory carburant," or motor spirit, from waste vegetable products. This potentially revolutionary research is bankrolled by Pondersby Jonson, but Stoyner had no idea Jonson was "a financial shark of the worst order." A bloodsucker who had "ruined dozens" with his dirty, underhanded tricks.

The person who alerts Stoyner to Jonson's shady business ethics is a past victim of the financier, Harold Gunning, who had since then been making a name as a landscape artist and had been painting around Sutton Hall all summer long – which is where he learned of Jonson's involvement with Stoyner. This resulted in a confrontation between them and "the City shark" told him to hand over full control over his project in exchange for the few thousand necessary to complete his research, but a furious Stoyner reminded him that without him completing his work he would not be able to reap the benefits of his invention. So this clash ended in a stalemate that slightly favored the financier. However, the confrontation cast the long shadow of suspicion over Stoyner when his bogeyman unexpectedly died during a Sunday morning church service.

Jonson was staying the week-end at Stoyner's ancestral home and decided to accompany his host to church, but during the service he becomes gravely ill and Stoyner tries to rush him out of the place. But they don't make it pass the churchyard.

A horror-stricken Jonson, "fear twitching his every feature," pushes Stoyner away and loudly denounces him as a murderer, mutters the word poison and collapses on the churchyard walk. The poison in question belonged to the curare group, used during witch-doctors' ceremonies in South America, which Stoyner obtained during a dangerous expedition into the hinterlands of Brazil and he had an opportunity to introduce the poison into the victim's bloodstream – when he treated a cut in his finger before going to church. Such poisons can have delayed actions. Particularly when the substance is deteriorated by time and therefore slower in action.

So the situation looks very dire for the local Squire and war hero, but the village is crawling with detectives, professional and amateur alike, who try to get to the bottom of the case. The book could very well have been titled Too Many Detectives.

Superintendent Priddom and Colonel Henderby, the Chief Constable, find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the prime suspect is a pillar of the community, but, on the other one, even the community believes him to be guilty. And this is what lands Stoyner in the docks to stand trial for murder. The end of the trial has a great scene centering on his manservant and assistant, Burrows, who gives a public demonstration of old-school loyalty and friendship. It made him my favorite character in the book!

Anyway, there are enough people, like Burrows, who believe him to be innocent and they go out of their way to prove it (e.g. Burrows' courtroom shenanigans).

Belle is the sister-in-law of the vicar and in love with Stoyner, everyone around them expected a proposal to marry, sooner or later, which is why she engages "a private inquiry agent," Mr. Elkings, who pokes around the village for clues. Elkings gets entangled in a minor feud with Gunning, who he tags as the potential murderer, but the painter also knows how to play detective and makes some astute observations outing Elkings as a detective – much to his annoyance. Belle also has a young niece, Ally, who could have wandered from the pages of a Gladys Mitchell novels. She's a very convincingly drawn child and forms "the Captain Dick rescue gang" with the choir boys and they actually bring part of the solution to the adult characters.

However, the one who eventually stumbles to the truth is Reverend James Cliffe. During a church service, he suddenly sees the whole truth by asking himself the obvious question that nobody, up to that point, asked themselves. What really surprised me about to the explanation is how incredibly close my initial inkling was, but abandoned that line of reasoning when the story appeared to had morphed into a how-was-it-done type of detective story.

I knew There's Death in the Churchyard was praised by Dorothy L. Sayers and she had once stated that it was much more interesting to try to figure out how the crime was committed than identifying the murderer. So the direction of the plot made me presume the book was plotted in a similar fashion as Sayers' own Whose Body? (1923), Unnatural Death (1927) and Strong Poison (1930), which would explain her warm praise for the book. But, instead, it turned out to be more along the lines of Agatha Christie's least-likely-suspect gambit without the rug-puller of a surprise (feeling) fastened to it.   

An observant and experience mystery reader can work out the solution for themselves, but only if you don't make my mistake by thinking halfway through that you're reading a how-dun-it instead of a regular who-dun-it. 

One more thing about the how of the murder: I think a very well-known mystery writer, who was usually known as a true original and innovator, might have appropriated the poisoning trick for a novel about an entire series of curare killings (click here for a review of that book). The solutions are eerily similar.

So, all in all, There's Death in the Churchyard is (indeed) an amusing, well-written detective novel with a competent and solvable enough plot, which (so far) stands alongside Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933) and Ebenezer Investigates (1934) as one of the more stronger titles in the catalog of Black Heath Editions.

Finally, the next post on this blog is most likely going to be my best-of list of 2017 and will go up before Christmas, but not entirely sure whether I'll get around to posting anything else until after Christmas. So this might be the last regular review until then.

A Big Killing

"...one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Sins of Prince Saradine," collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

John V. Turner's detective stories about Rev. Ebenezer Buckle, published as by "Nicholas Brady," is perhaps my favorite discovery of 2017 and the two books I read by him, The Fair Murder (1933) and Ebenezer Investigates (1934), are shoe-ins for my best-of list of this year – which will be posted at the end of this month. So I wanted to read one more of Rev. Buckle novels before the year draws to a close and picked Week-end Murder (1934).

All four Rev. Buckle titles have been reprinted by a small publishing outfit, Black Heath Editions, who recently also reissued a fifth title with the Brady byline, Coupons for Death (1944), but that one appears to be a standalone. Nevertheless, the book used to be obscure enough that when John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books finally acquired a hardcover, dust-jacketed copy he referred to it as an "amazing coup." And if that doesn't qualify as a Stamp of Authentic Obscurity, I don't know what does.

Week-end Murder is divided into six (longish) chapters and the leisurely paced opening chapter paints an interesting picture of the story's backdrop, Bellingham Bay, which plays a key role in the plot.

Bellingham Bay had been known to generations of local fishermen as Mellerton Bay, but "decay had hovered over the bay for more than a century" and only fifty of its denizens had clung to their "desolate cottages" by the time the 1920s drew to a close. By then, the once plentiful fish in the bay had retreated when a nearby town began to use it as a sewer outlet. So all that remained for the locals were the meager catchings of herring fishing and digging for the elusive lug worms, known as the "Mellerton Lugs," which were sold at "tenpence a score" to passing anglers as delectable bait and this slow decay continued until it was accelerated by the arrival of a stranger, Percival Bellingham – who bought the ground of the village and leveled the place.

The "poverty-stricken fishermen were turned out of their homes" and the public house was knocked down, but rose only three months later as a beer palace encircled by two-hundred new bungalows. Bellingham had brought "The Eden on the Kentish Coast" to fruition and it was a unmitigated disaster. And a huge financial lost.

A year later, the "Kentish Eden" had a deficit of £24,000. Bellingham had fled from the ghost town of two-hundred empty bungalows and over three-hundred angry investors. What he left behind was a crumbling promenade and the publican of the beer hall who had remained as one of the last remaining inhabitants of the bay. So the village would had been, once again, consigned to obscurity, but the arrival of a buyer once again thoroughly transformed the character of the once ancient fishing village. 

 

Mackay Saunders bought the "flock of bungalows" and the village, like all of his places, procured a reputation that made men snicker, women blush and evoked scathing comments from the judges presiding over the Divorce Courts. Saunders doesn't give a penny for Victorian-era morals and prefers that his places are "filled at week-ends by broad-minded people." So the place, under direction of its new owner, became quickly known as "Immorality Corner." A week-end resort where nobody appeared to register under their actual name or brought their own spouse with them.

Mrs. Weatherby-Weatherby Elkin "clucked like an aggravated hen" to Rev. Ebenezer Buckle about that "terrible, pestilential spot," but Buckle is not too keen on visiting the place and, when he finally decides to drop by, he immediately walks onto the scene of a crime – living up to his reputation that he and murder "grew side by side." Fortunately, Buckle is "a man who mixes homicide with horticulture."

A man who had registered under the name of Percy Emerson is shot to death inside his bungalow. The fatal shot was fired mere minutes before Buckle arrived on the scene, which gives him a golden opportunity to immediately horn in on the case and demonstrate his "skill as a criminologist." I believe fans of the pure detective stories will take joy from Buckle's initial survey of the crime-scene. As he makes a number of (astute) observations about the direction of the shot, entrance-and departure of the shooter and the fact that the victim's collar and tie are missing. Buckle later supplements these observations with a series of cryptic, seemingly unrelated, questions directed at the woman, Dolly, who had accompanied the victim to the village. These questions are in regards to a tank of rain water outside the bungalow and the wages she earned as a waitress.

This approach is what made John Norris compare Rev. Buckle to one of John Dickson Carr's well-known series-detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell, who both prefer to be enigmatic wool-gatherers with a preference to "think in solitude" – until they've reached "definite and provable conclusions." So you can almost view this short-lived series as a (missing) link between G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories and Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell series.

At the end of the second chapter, the story takes a sharp, 180° turn when the victim is properly identified and this revelation changes the whole dynamic of the book. Inspector Dace muttered "that finishes me" and calls in the big guns at Scotland Yard.

Rev. Buckle calls in the help of his brother, Assistant Commissioner Stanley Buckle, whose familial ties has served the parson well whenever he wanted "to break through the wall of police officialdom." However, the importance of the victim's identity provided the Buckle brothers with an opportunity to collaborate on a case and the discovery of a second body, found in a garden of a vacant house in London, forces the investigators to divide into two groups. Interestingly, the shooting at the bungalow in Bellingham Bay and the murder in London are tightly linked together with little time between them, which recalls the earlier work of Christopher Bush (e.g. Dancing Death, 1931) that often hinged of the complexities of an intricately linked double murder.

Nevertheless, the London murder proves to be the weak link in a large-scale criminal operation and the Buckle brothers make quick work of tying together that second murder. They roll up practically the entire London-end of the case in record time, which places the murderer at Bellingham Bay, who's completely oblivious about what's going in London, in an ever-tighter corner.

Brady neatly fitted every component of the plot together to form a logical, entirely coherent, picture of the murders and the criminal enterprise that rested at the heart of the story. There is, however, a blemish on the story. At the end, Rev. Buckle confessed himself that it was "a most unsatisfactory case," because the pure detective-elements were lost somewhere along the way. What looked like "a mental exercise" had "deteriorated into a game of playing one human nature against another" with clues being few and far between. Rev. Buckle's deductions were primarily educated guesses that were, at times, too easily accepted as facts.

Regardless, Week-end Murder was not a bad read and how the detectives dismantled of a gang of criminals also made it an interesting read, but the overall plot simply was not as good, impressive or memorable as those Brady crafted for The Fair Murder and Ebenezer Investigates.

Sorry to have to end this review on a slightly sour note, but it is what it is and might tackle the last remaining title in this series sooner rather than later. The House of Strange Guests (1932) is reputedly a good detective novel with a locked room angle. So it's probably a better title to end this series with than Week-end Murder.

The Leading Light

"We've lost a room."

- Ronald Denham (Carter Dickson's "The Crime in Nobody's Room," collected in The Department of Queer Complaints, 1940)

Vision Sinister (1954) revived two of John Russell Fearn's popular series-detectives, Dr. Hiram Carruthers and Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth, but the return of these two characters to the printed page was not entirely spotless. The background details behind the original publication of "this long-lost impossible crime" was supplied to me by the sage of all things Fearn, Philip Harbottle.

During the early 1950s, Fearn signed "an exclusive 5 year contract" with Scion, which obliged him to deliver them two science-fiction novels every year and nothing else – legally forbidding him "to write any other kind of fiction" or work for another publisher. Only exception is that Fearn was allowed to continue writing (short) novels for the Toronto Star Weekly. A very lucrative deal for a full-time writer of popular fiction, but the downside of this "manacling agreement" is that it "put the kibosh" on the detective novels he was putting out as "John Slate" and "Hugo Blayn." Harbottle accurately described this as "a criminal act."

This contract lasted until the Autumn of 1952, when Scion was "fined for gangster obscenity" and the financial strain forced them to default on Fearn's payment. Fearn canceled the contract and briefly freelanced in all genres. Even reselling some of his older material.

Scion eventually recovered and asked Fearn to resume his old contract, but he cleverly renegotiated the terms and was allowed to write whatever he wanted, as long as he delivered them two science-fiction novels every month, which proved to be no problem whatsoever – writing all kinds of fiction for various publications and publishers. A year later the contract changed again when Scion asked Fearn to take over the editing of Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine. Fearn would now deliver "one issue of his magazine in lieu of one SF novel," but, more importantly, the second book in his contract were now allowed to be westerns, romances or detective novels. And only occasionally a science-fiction novel.

So Carruthers and Garth were brought back out of retirement and, as "Hugo Blayn," Fearn delivered a manuscript to Scion of Vision Sinister, but was horrified when they slapped "the Nat Karta sleaze detective label on it." A house-name that originated with Muir-Watson and was sold to Scion. The house-name was used "on more than 40 lurid American gangster novels."  On top of that, the printer erroneously placed "Phil Casey Crime Reporter Plays It Tough" as a banner headline on the front-cover. It was "a template they were using at the time on the previous Nat Karta title."

Fearn "played hell" over these mistakes and the Blayn name was restored on his next book,
The Silvered Cage (1955), but when the contract with Scion's successors, Dragon Books, expired in November, 1955, he "refused to renew it."

Like nearly all of his work, Vision Sinister drifted into obscurity upon Fearn's passing in 1960 and the only person who appears to have discussed the book in recent years is John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books. This persistent obscurity is despite two relatively recent reprints. Vision Sinister was reissued as a (limited) large-print edition by the Linford Mystery Library in 2005 and a regular paperback edition was published by Borgo Press in 2012.

So how does the plot stack up? The central problem of the plot, a witnessed murder in a room that vanishes alongside its occupants, recalled the impossibilities from two novels by two of Fearn's fellow fellows of the locked room master, John Dickson Carr – namely the visions from Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) and the impossible murder from Jean-Paul Török's L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of the Monte Verita, 2007). John Norris even called the trick behind the disappearing room "the closest thing he came to matching his idol in sheer ingenuity," but with an explanation that is more in line with the scientific (locked room) stories by Arthur Porges. A writer he's perhaps closer related to than Carr

Vision Sinister begins when Cynthia Harwood takes her friend, Janice Worthing, to the photographic laboratory of her fiance, Terry Hewlett, which is located in a basement room in "a dismal neighborhood of fitfully winking gaslights and damply gleaming pavements." The door to the laboratory has a small plate screwed to it with the following message and instruction:

"Terence Hewlett, Photographer. Dark Room. Please look through Inspection Shutter and if Red Light is On there will be delay in answering door."

Cynthia drew back "a small eye-width slide set in the door" and peered through it, but what she say beyond the locked door horrified her. A slim, mid-blonde girl in an amethyst-colored evening dress is laying across a heavy table and is struggling with a man in a white overall who's towering above her. Cynthia recognizes the man as her fiance, Terry, while Janice has to see how the glittering knife he was holding is plunged into the girl. Their subsequent screams attracts the attention of the caretaker and he immediately fetches a policeman, before opening the door with a spare key, but what they find behind the locked door astonished the two women – a bare and empty room!

So "two perfectly sane young women" observed a fully equipped photographic laboratory in which a murder was committed and, while they never moved an inch from the spot at the door, the murderer, his victim and "the whole works" had simply evaporated from existence.

A short time later, the body of a young woman, clad in an amethyst-colored dress and a stab wound in the chest, is found partially buried in a place McCarthy's Slag.

The dead woman is identified as a model and amateur actress, Sandra Melbrane, who was "one of the leading lights" in a local cine club, of which Hewlett was the chairman, as well as being connected to the Yellow Room Players – a local dramatic group. So this established a link between the various characters involved, but left the police with a pretty puzzle of how she, along with her murderer, vanished from a locked and guarded basement room. Or how every piece of equipment disappeared alongside with them.

The dyspeptic Chief Inspector Mortimer "Morty" Garth is completely baffled and decides to call in the help of the ex-boffin "who looks like a bust of Beethoven," Dr. Hiram Carruthers, but his initial inspection of the basement room even puzzles him. Carruthers even briefly shows a human emotion known as self-doubt ("it surely isn't possible that I—Carruthers—can be wrong in my theory?"). Nevertheless, he slowly, but surely, pieces together an answer to the vanished room based on such clues as a curve in the wall, a broken bell and a plug socket. An this answer is as ingenious as it's original, which is both a strength and a weakness of the plot. 

I think the case-hardened armchair detective, or simply an observant reader, can discern the shapes and shadows that outline the truth. You should not have too much of a problem with identifying the murderer or this person's motive. You can probably even make a good guess as to the nature of the locked room trick, but the exact, technical, details is a different story altogether, but the fantastic illusion is certainly possible and the founding principle behind this technique has very deep roots – which extend as far back as the early-and mid 1800s. My only qualm is how this trick was introduced into that basement room. Was this really possible in the 1950s?

Anyway, the locked room trick is not the only aspect of the plot that betrayed Fearn's credentials as a science-fiction author who had a finger on the pulse of scientific and technological progress.

Fascinatingly, the story features an early model of an answering machine with a tape recorder, which is used by Carruthers to match the voice of the murderer with the person who left a message on the answering machine. A technique that involved a film projector and photo-electric equipment, which showed whether two different voice recordings were by the same person when "the jumping lines on the screen" exactly synchronized. So this book is not only a locked room mystery, but also qualifies as a scientific detective story.

Agatha Christie once said in one of her books that "crime is terribly revealing" and this is definitely the case with Vision Sinister, because the fingerprints of Fearn's personality are all over the plot and writing.

Fearn wrote Vision Sinister after he had been absent from the genre for several years, due to his contractual obligations, but upon his return, he sank his entire heart and soul into the plot. There's the elaborate, ambitiously constructed (impossible) crime and the presence of then cutting-edge technology. This really is what distinguishes Fearn's work from other mystery writers. And then there's the presence of a cine club in the story's background, which is a personal touch as Fearn himself stood at the head of a similar club (c.f. my review of Pattern of Murder, 2006).

All in all, Vision Sinister is, plot-wise, perhaps not the most perfect example of the traditional, fair-play detective story, but agree with John Norris that the sheer ingenuity of the (locked room) plot is something to be admired. And the same goes for the technological aspect of the story. Something that can only be described as visionary and the analyses of voice recordings anticipates modern-day forensic detective-series such as CSI. So, yeah, I found this to be an interesting and engrossing read for all of those reasons.

I read and reviewed three of Fearn's detective novels, back to back, but I'll be taking a break from his work for the moment. However, you've not read the last about him on this blog, because there are a ton of his titles cluttering my TBR-pile and wish list, but I'll probably save most of them for 2018. Yes, that leaves open the possibility for one before this year draws to a close. Who knows. So stay tuned.

Update 13-12-2017: Philip Harbottle emailed me to kindly point out a number of mistakes in my post, which have now been corrected. And, in my own defense, I reconstructed the back-story of Fearn, Scion and Vision Sinister from a scattershot of sources and emails. A piss-poor defense, I know, but it's the only one I have to offer.

Clockwork Vengeance

"I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905)

On the last day of November, I hosted a guest-blog by Philip Harbottle, titled "The Detective Fiction of John Russell Fearn," which detailed his untiring, decades-long trek that lead to the republication of Fearn's entire body of work and recommended eleven of his detective novels – two of his recommendations specifically caught my fancy. I've already reviewed Pattern of Murder (2006) and was not letdown by either the authenticity of the cinema setting or the quality of the plot.

The second title that caught my eye was Account Settled (1949), because yours truly is a predictable hack of the first water who has already tagged close to 350 blog-posts with the "locked room" toe-tag. What about The Man Who Was Not (2005), you ask? A story that "positively bristled" with impossible crime material and comes across as S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928) as perceived by Paul Halter. Don't worry, I already added that one to the pile and will be covered in a future review.

Account Settled was originally published under one of Fearn's least subtle pennames, "John Russell," but this did not prevent the book from remaining "completely unknown for many decades" until Harbottle rediscovered it and presented a copy to the late Robert Adey – who had been "unaware of its locked room credentials." I've a little surprise regarding that meeting between Adey and Harbottle at the end of this review (don't peek!). Anyway...

Account Settled is without doubt one of Fearn's pulpier crime stories, but without the plot dissolving into hackery as was, sadly, the case with Robbery Without Violence (1957).

The tale is a diverting and highly readable potboiler bubbling over with cut-throat business practices, betrayal, brutal reprisals and a number of inexplicable murders. However, it takes two-thirds of the book to get those impossible crimes and they only play a minor part in the overall plot. So keep that in mind when you decide to dip into this one.

Rajek Quinton had been "a master-watchmaker since the age of twenty" and left his native country of Switzerland behind in order to sell his world-altering invention in the United Kingdom. Quinton has found "a way to make matter pass through matter" by forcing "the atoms to obey magnetism," which neutralizes their "normal obstructive power" and designed a "self-sinking atomic bomb" – which means that the bomb can "go anywhere, through anything, and remain hidden." Until the time-fuse fires it. A terrifying weapon that could bring any country in the world "to its knees in twenty-four hours."

Quinton had attempted to contact the War Office, but there was such a delay that he decided to make an offer to a well-known financier, Emerson Drew, who stands at the head of the Drew Financial Trust. Drew is definitely interested in this "colossal invention" and exchanges a signed receipt for the blueprints, which he wants to have looked over by the head of his own scientific research department, Bruce Valant. And Valant doesn't need much time to confirm Quinton's claims.

Drew is not only the head of a mighty finance company, but also the leader of a small, shadowy cabal of tycoons who have no qualms when it comes to, as they call it, "a necessary extermination."

This tiny, tight-knit, group of industrial moguls consists of the financier himself, Joseph K. Darnhome of Darnhome Metals Corporation and Marvin de Brock of Independent Atomics. Drew's private chauffeur, Douglas Brant, is employed to do the dirty work and is ordered to take Quinton out of the picture and ensure his body is never found or identified – leading to a gruesome attempt on the watchmaker's life. Brant disfigured Quinton's face with nitric acid and pushed him into a quagmire at the bottom of an abandoned mine-shaft. However, Quinton is not dead and he will come back to haunt all of them.

And in the meantime, their assumed murder has kicked up more dust then the group had intended to happen. Quinton has a sick daughter, Jaline Quinton, who comes to Drew's office to ask what happened to her father and she finds an unexpected ally in Drew's private-secretary, Janet Kayne. Together they go to Scotland Yard and speak with Chief Inspector Poole (the same Poole as Henry Wade's series-detective? I like to think so!), but talking to the Yard turns out to have deadly consequences. Miss Quinton vanishes and Drew orders Brant to remove Kayne from this plane of existence, but then the disfigured Quinton returns from the dead and takes out Brant.

These deaths leaves Drew with two vacancies in his personal staff, which are filled by Joyce Sutton, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the missing Jaline Quinton, and a man by the name of Peter Maxton – who's actually Larry Clarke of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police. Clarke and Sutton begin to work together in an attempt to gather evidence against the three men. They try to accomplish this by installing a spy-window, using the then brand new "X-ray glass" (polarized one-way glass), in Drew's private-office.

Where the story becomes really interesting is when Quinton lures Drew, Darnhome, De Brock and Valant to a remote house he has converted into a giant death trap for the purpose of extracting his revenge.

The doors in the house are electrically sealed. The windows are blocked with steel shutters and even the walls and floor are steel-lined. So the place pretty much resembles "a steel box." After they dined in the strange house, they find a note by Quinton stating that it's his "avowed intention" to destroy all of them, "one by one," which makes for a situation that strongly reminded me of Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning's The Invisible Host (1930). I would not all be surprised if Fearn had Bristow and Manning in mind when he wrote the last portion of Account Settled, because the way in which Quinton deals out death is very reminiscent to the many murders in The Invisible Host.

Anyway, two of the murders are of the impossible variety: one of them has "a dagger buried to the hilt between his shoulder blades" in a gloomy, dimly-lighted, but deserted, hallway bare of any hiding places. 

So nobody appears to have been in a position to deliver the fatal dagger thrust. Another member of the party is found strangled to death behind the locked door of a bedroom. As said previously, these two impossible murders only form a minor part of the overall plot and were quickly dispelled. The death in the locked bedroom is almost immediately solved.

Nevertheless, you have to admire Fearn for waving away the "hoary, hackneyed melodrama" of hidden panels and secret passageways. The explanations are without question pure, undiluted pulp, but perfectly acceptable within the confines of this particular story. I also want to add that this is what, more or less, I had hoped to find when I cracked open Kate Wilhem's Smart House (1989). Fearn succeeded, where Wilhem failed, without the use of (somewhat) modern computers!

Naturally, the danger infested house also provides an exciting ending for the two innocent characters, Clarke and Sutton, who were caught in between Quinton's desire for revenge and his victims.

On a whole, Account Settled is a diverting pulp-thriller with an and-then-there-were-none ending that included two fairly original impossible crimes, which makes for a great tag-along read. Yes, this is a book that you should read without your deerstalker on, because there's nothing here for the ardent armchair detective to solve. You just have to sit back and read how a group particularly nasty, high-class criminals get their long deserved comeuppance.

Lastly, I promised a little surprise earlier in this post concerning the meeting between Adey and Harbottle.

During their first meeting at Adey's home, Harbottle presented him with his spare copy of Account Settled, which he called "a vintage locked room" that Adey and "all his stateside pals like Doug Greene" had never seen or heard of. Adey also had two items in his collection Harbottle missed in his collection: a long-sought after title, Lonely Road Murder (1954), which Fearn had written under the Brown Watson house name of “Elton Westward.” Secondly, there was a book with a cover by his favorite artist, Ron Turner, which he has since reused for the Wildside Press edition of Account Settled. Here's the photograph of that exchange (taken by Harbottle's daughter): 

Robert Adey & Philip Harbottle

Just one more thing, I know some of you are probably sick and tired by now of us fanboying around Fearn, like a gaggle of internet fangirls in heat, but a package arrived recently with another one of his locked room novels. So... I'm definitely going for the hat trick. After that, I'll even try to review some non-locked room mysteries again. ;)