Death in the Cup (1932) by Moray Dalton

A month ago, I reviewed The Night of Fear (1931) by "Moray Dalton," a pseudonym of Katherine M. Renoir, who was an all but forgotten author of twenty-nine "finely polished" mystery novels until Dean Street Press reissued five of them back in March – complete with an introduction by the Dean of Classic Crime Fiction, Curt Evans. The Night of Fear proved to be a huge improvement on the generously praised The Strange Case of the Harriet Hale (1936) and decided to move the second title that was recommended to me to the top of the pile.

Death in the Cup (1932) is the last of three novels about Dalton's private inquiry agent, Hermann Glide, who reminded Evans of the enigmatic Mr. Gody. A minor recurring character who was introduced by Agatha Christie in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) and appeared in three additional Hercule Poirot novels.

Only difference between Mr. Gody and Mr. Glide is that the latter reaches the end of a case without being upstaged by a bloody little Belgian!

Death in the Cup is, like her other work, a character-driven mystery in which the desires, emotions and personalities of the people involved propel the plot and how they acted on them here had dire consequences – complicating the case before it eventually helped Glide solve two murders. A story that begins with the woes of "a professional gigolo."

Mark Armour left his home as an eighteen-year-old when he forged his father's name on a cheque and joined the army when the Great War broke out a few weeks later. When he returned, the handsome Armour began "cadging around" by "making love to silly old women" and hauling them across a dance floor, but a broken leg left him with a permanent limp. And a meager three-half pence in his pocket. So he's forced to stay with his genteel, but scandal-ridden, highly dysfunctional and isolated, relatives in the provencial town of Dennyford. A madhouse household that strongly reminded of the family in Arthur W. Upfield's Venom House (1952).

They live on the outskirts of the town, in the White House, but their chequered past keeps "the family outside the social pale" of the community and were avoided as much as humanly possible.

The roost is ruled by Mark's belligerent, domineering half-sister, Bertha, who's "given to finding fault" and everyone hated her ("nag, nag, nag, all day long"). Winnie is their odd, soft-minded (half) sister and deeply in love with a young doctor, Ian Cardew. She moons all day outside the poor doctor's practice, rings his bell, writes embarrassing love letters and pushes flowers through his letter box. George is the half-witted brother of the family and spends his days cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them into albums. A character very similar to the mentally arrested Morris Answerth from Upfield's Venom House. Their youngest sister, Claire, is free of the family "taint of insanity" and she had endured them for years, but recently, she has fallen in love with gardener, Richard Lee – which would not have been accepted by Bertha. She not the only one in the household carrying on affair behind the back of the family matriarch. Miss Lucy Rivers is the daughter of Colonel Rivers, a local magistrate, who would certainly disapprove of her relationship with Mark Armour. A disreputable member of the local outcasts and a financial dependent of Bertha. Who would also disapprove of the relationship.

This concentration of clashing personalities, hidden-or unanswered passions, financial dependency and mental illness proved to be a volatile cocktail with disastrous results. Someone spiked the glass of milk on Bertha's bedside table with "a thundering big dose" of arsenic. She died the next day and Mark becomes the police's primary suspect.

The series-detective of fifteen of Dalton's mystery novels, Inspector Hugh Collier of Scotland Yard, is only mentioned by name and the case is officially handled by Superintendent Brisling, but Lucy's uncle and confident, Geoffrey Raynham, interferes in the investigation on her behalf – until he calls in that wizened inquiry agent, Hermann Glide. Glide appears on the scene, fumbling his lump of modeling wax, but a second death with the features of an accident, natural causes and murder takes the focus off Mark. And redirects the attention of the police to another set of suspects in the Armour household.

I thought this plot-thread was a well-done and original divergence from the customary second murder often used to liven up, or muddle the waters, of the story.

Sadly, the murderer is easily spotted and, initially, rejected this possibility as too obvious and began to suspect another character who had a similar kind of motive, but my first impression turned out to be the correct one. However, this is the only blemish on an otherwise excellently written mystery novel with strong characterization. Death in the Cup is not merely a grotesque portrait of a family of dysfunctional gargoyles, but showed, for better or worse, their humanity.

There are also a number of good, kindhearted characters who try to help the people in the story who find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. Such as Lucy's concerned uncle and the kindly Mrs. Trant. You can't but feel sorry when something bad happens to them. Mrs. Trant is carried out of the story on a stretcher with a broken leg and the consequences of the police investigation forces the family to place George with a specialized doctor, which he does bravely, but tears were in his round, childlike eyes – which was a little depressing. George was the only person living in the White House who was completely blameless, but suffered the consequences.

So, all in all, Death in the Cup is not as strong as a pure detective story as The Night of Fear, but the book stands as a fine example of the sophisticated, character-oriented mystery novels commonly associated with the literary-minded Queens of Crime. I think readers who especially appreciate the old Crime Queens, like Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers, will find in Dalton a legitimate claimant to one of their crowns.

Going for a Stroll: "The Stalker in the Attic" (1925) by Edogawa Rampo

Recently, I read the very first Japanese locked room mystery, entitled "D zaka no satsujin-jiken" ("The Case of the Murder on D. Hill," 1925), written by the father of the Japanese detective story, Edogawa Rampo, who penned it as a response to the critics of his time – who asserted that it was impossible to use the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan as a stage for a Western-inspired mystery. Rampo proved them wrong by writing a short locked room story set in a traditional Japanese house with paper walls, sliding doors and tatami-matted floors.

Historically, "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" is an important cornerstone of the Japanese detective story and handed a blueprint to both his contemporaries and successors to follow, but, purely as an impossible crime story, it's not really impressive. Rampo merely showed it was possible to stage a locked room murder in a wood-and-paper house without showing any ingenuity in the solution. Something he would rectify in another story from the same year.

"Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic") was originally published in the August, 1925, issue of Shin-Seinen and a translation was published in a collection of short stories and essays, The Edogawa Rampo Reader (2008), which gave 1926 as the story's original year of publication – which has to be wrong. The story is an inverted locked room mystery and remarkably modern in its subject matter.

Gōda Saburō is a restless, ennui-ridden and perpetual bored twenty-five year old man who left "no stone unturned in his search for amusement." A generous allowance from his parents allowed him to act with "reckless abandon" and regularly changed lodgings. There were two events that placed Gōda on the path of murder: one of them was becoming acquainted with Rampo's famous amateur detective, Akechi Kogorō, whose "wealth of fascinating crime stories" entertained Gōda. Akechi seemed to take an interest in his pathological personality.

The second event was discovering that the closet in his room, in a recently built boarding house, has a panel in the ceiling giving access to a normally inaccessible attic!

Tōeikan boarding house encircles a courtyard to form a square and the attic follows this shape, which means Gōda can walk around in a circle and return where he started, but the cherry on top is that the boardinghouse was "shoddily built" and the ceiling boards are riddled with gaps and knotholes – giving him a thrilling opportunity to spy on his neighbors. You read that right. A 1920s detective story about voyeurism and genre historians might want to take note of this story, but I'm unrepentant Golden Age detective fanboy and there were other features of the plot that fascinated me.

Firstly, there are the architectures features which are integrated into the plot in the tradition of the finest Golden Age detective stories.

"The Stalker in the Attic" solved the problem Rampo addressed in "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" by merging the traditional Japanese houses with a Western-type building. The Tōeikan boarding house has sleek, sturdy walls of painted wood and doors fitted with "metal locks," which allowed for more privacy, but the interior of the rooms very much resembled a traditional Japanese house – especially when seen from above as "every item in the room is framed by tatami mats." Secondly, the movement of Gōda during his so-called "attic walks" is fascinating as he freely moves around the squared circle and spies on his fellow boarders in their rooms on the second floor. During one of his excursions, Gōda changes on a way to commit the perfect murder inside a locked room.

Gōda absolutely detests one of his fellow boarders, Endō, but, when he discovers the open mouth of the loudly snoring Endō lies smack dab under a knothole, he realizes the criminal potential of the situation. He can drip poison along a drawstring into his wide, open mouth and push a small bottle of poison through the knothole. Endō always locked his door and window before going to bed, which made it "impossible for someone to enter from the outside" and made his untimely death appear like a suicide.

So, purely as an impossible crime story, "The Stalker in the Attic" is not only the first truly Japanese locked room mystery, but the direct ancestor of the bizarre architecture so often found in the modern shin honkaku detective novels.

The way Rampo integrated the features of the boarding house into the plot reminded me of Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982), Yukito Ayatsuri's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Szu-Yen Lin's Death in the House of Rain (2005) and the many stories from The Kindaichi Case Files – e.g. The Alchemy Murder Case, The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Antlion Murder Case. I was also reminded of Max Rittenberg's 1914 short story "The Invisible Bullet," collected in The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant (2016), which deals with an impossible murder in a fencing academy situated on the top floor of a tall building. The way in which the layout of buildings are used in service of the plot and the original locked room-tricks showed that Rampo's "The Stalker in the Attic" and Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" were ahead of their time in their respective regions. I seriously wonder if Rampo, who could read English, was aware of this particular story.

Akechi Kogorō appears on the scene in the final ten pages of the story to play a little cat-and-mouse game with Gōda, but this merely to give the story, which has already been told by this point, a tidy ending.

So very much like my rereading of Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948), I appreciated "The Stalker in the Attic" a whole lot more the second time around. An important and well-done story that ought to be better known among a Western (locked room) mystery readers. Highly recommended!

A couple of notes for the curious: "The Stalker in the Attic" is the only good story collected in The Edogawa Rampo Reader, but the essays are really interesting and recommend "Fingerprint Novels of the Meiji Era," "Dickens and Poe" and "An Eccentric Idea" to every genre historian/scholar. Secondly, there's a Western hybrid of the detective and horror story, namely Ed Bryant's "The Lurker in the Bedroom" (1971), which reads like it was inspired by Rampo. Lastly, I clearly remember there was a floor plan of the boarding house, showing the attic route, but apparently, my memory deceived me. There's no floor plan.

The Spiked Lion (1933) by Brian Flynn

This month, Dean Street Press is finally reissuing the first ten Anthony Bathurst by an unsung Golden Age mystery writer, Brian Flynn, who was all but forgotten until the Puzzle Doctor, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, began raving about Flynn in 2017 and pestering DSP with requests to bring Flynn back into print – a strategy which has now borne fruit. I was even enticed to "sample" the series ahead of the reprints with The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927) and The Murders Near Mapleton (1929).

There's one more sample on my plate that has to be taken care of before I can dive into those tantalizing reprints of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1929), Invisible Death (1929), Murder En Route (1930) and The Orange Axe (1931).

The Spiked Lion (1933) is the thirteenth title in the series and the first chapter immediately comes to business with Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, who consults Anthony Bathurst on an extraordinary case. John Pender Blundell was a comparatively well-to-do man with a "particular penchant" for ciphers and cryptograms, on which he wrote two books and worked for the Intelligence department during the Great War. A fortnight ago, Blundell disappeared from his home and was found two weeks later in Bushy Park, "dead as a doornail," with a fractured skull, broken bones and "a peculiar jagged slash" down his right cheek – which were non-fatal injuries. So what did kill him? A whiff of cyanide of potassium sprayed up his nostrils!

A creased fragment of notepaper with faint, incomplete writing is found in Blundell's pocket. The writing that's legible speaks of a "crackling voice" and a spiked animal.

Bathurst plays the role of armchair detective in this nicely done set piece as he "extracted just the germ of an idea" without ever leaving Sir Austin's office. This leads to the discovery of a second victim on the list of missing persons, Hubert Athelstan Wingfield, who was a recognized authority on legendary inscriptions (Heraldry), but one day, he vanished without a trace. A month later, the bruised and broken body of Wingfield is found in the Valley of Ferns, but the cause of death is cyanide of potassium sprayed, in some way, up the nostrils! And this is still only the beginning of the case.

Chief-Inspector MacMorran had a lengthy interview with Blundell's nephew, Hugh Guest, who was granted an extended leave from Oxford and stays with Sir Richard and Lady Ingle at Beech Knoll, on the Isle of Wight, where the usual group of house guests have gathered – as dark, treacherous intrigues are afoot. The people at Beech Knoll are the aforementioned hosts and the daughter of the house, Ella. Hugh and his sister, Celia. Barry Covington who warned Hugh something strange was going on that involved him. Finally, there's a friend of the host, Slingsby Raphael, who wrote many books dealing with "the mysticism and occultism of the East."

Hugh Guest is murdered behind the locked door of his bedroom with the only key found inside his breast pocket and "a cat couldn't have got away from that window-ledge."

So "the fatal circle" in the relationship between the first and last victim makes Bathurst decide to focus his attention on the Isle of Wight, which is when the story becomes an intricate play on the Tichborne claimants. Sir Richard was set to inherit a title and Tresham Castle when the elderly Lord Tresham passed away, but his long-lost, presumed dead, black sheep son, Nicholas, turns up out of nowhere to claim his inheritance. Nicholas has cast-iron evidence to back up his claim: a birth certificate, documents, genetic traits and "a set of rectangular mother-of-pearl counters" gifted to the family by Pope Adrian IV. So how is this new development connected to the three bizarre poisonings?

Early in the story, I noticed something that gave part of the game away and feared this was going to be a lukewarm review, but slipped on, what may have been, a red herring placing my focus on the wrong person – allowing a (more) complete picture of what happened to elude me longer than normally. Nevertheless, I figured out the locked room-trick (very easy) and why two of the victims were a mass of bruises and broken bones. And for that, I'll pad myself on the shoulder.

So you can easily collect all of the puzzle pieces, but putting them together requires a little bit more work (especially if you missed one) resulting in a largely satisfying detective story.

Just like in the previous two novels, Bathurst is merely here to play the role Great Detective, but a pleasantly active one, who travels all over the map to visit the crime scenes and talk with suspects, relatives and suspects to mine for clues and information. I particularly liked his one-man brainstorming session in which he tried to find a common link between all of the victims. His conclusion has him scrambling to Sir Austin with a request to exhume the bodies! Coincidentally, their discovery gives The Spiked Lion something in common with my previous read, Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948). Something you don't often see in the detective novels from this period.

What struck me the most is how different The Spiked Lion compared to the other two I read. The Billiard-Room Mystery is a very conservative, but above average, 1920s country house mystery, while The Murders Near Mapleton is classic Christmas mystery, but The Spiked Lion had a pulp-style plot presented as a straightforward detective story. The explanation to the wounds on the bodies is a good example of something you would expect to find in the pulps. In a way, I was reminded of similar, pulp-style detective novels like Herman Landon's The Back-Seat Murder (1931), Philip Wylie's Five Fatal Words (1932), Gerald Verner's Terror Tower (1935) and John Russell Fearn in general, but Flynn had a much tighter grip on the various plot-threads – even if he glossed over some important details in the end. Such as how the murderer exactly entered the bedroom and the murder method.

On a whole, The Spiked Lion is not a pitch-perfect detective novel, but had a good plot that strayed a little from the beaten path and, more importantly, I enjoyed my time with it. So, if you thought Puzzle Doctor was bad with his constant Flynn reviews, just you wait until the reprints are finally released, because I'm really starting to like Flynn. A man who simply wanted to write good and entertaining detective stories is a man after my own heart!

The Tattoo Murder Case (1948) by Akimitsu Takagi

Over the past nine months, I've read and reread a spate of Japanese detective novels and short stories by such mystery writers as Takemaru Abiko, Rintaro Norizuki, Edogawa Rampo, Soji Shimada and the man with the palindromic name, "NisiOisiN" – coming in addition of my regular reading of manga series like Case Closed, The Kindaichi Case Files and Q.E.D. So why not continue this trend and revisit a particular title I wanted to reread ever since reading John Russell Fearn's The Tattoo Murders (1949).

"Akimitsu Takagi" was the penname of Seiichi Takagi and worked for the Nakajima Aircraft Company during the Second World War, but lost his position when the company had to close down when the Occupational Military Government (US) banned all military industries in Japan. Reportedly, Takagi decided to become a writer on the advice of a fortune-teller.

So, along with his contemporaries, Tetsuya Ayukawa and Seishi Yokomizo, Takagi became one of the pioneers of the original, distinctly Japanese honkaku-style of detective fiction.

Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) is, as Ho-Ling Wong perfectly described it in his own review, "a surprisingly well-polished debut novel" takes place against the backdrop of the messy, bombed-out ruins, shuttered buildings and makeshift shops of post-war Tokyo – where "ragged crowds" meander aimlessly and mingle with American soldiers. After sunset, the rubble-strewn streets "teemed with prostitutes, petty criminals and vagabonds" with occasional gunshot shattering the "uneasy silence of the night." However, the plot is deeply rooted in that "shadowy, sensual world" of tattoos and this is "the tragic story of three of those tattoos."

Horiyasu was a famous tattoo master with three children, Kinue, Tamae and Tsunetaro, two daughters and a son, who he tattooed with one of the most taboo of all tattoos, the Three Curses.

The Three Curses is the legendary tale of three sorcerers, Tsunedahime, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru, who lived in the depths of Mount Togakushi, in Nagano Prefecture, where they competed "to see who could create the wickedest, most powerful spells." Sorcerers are closely associated with three large creatures: Tsunedahime rides on an enormous slug, Jiraiya on a giant toad and Orochimaru has a huge, long snake. According to the superstition, the tattooing of a snake, a toad and slug on the people with the same blood flowing through their veins, like siblings, "the three creatures would fight to the death" – which means Horiyasu placed a deadly curse on his three children. Tamae and Tsunetaro were killed in the war. Kinue has no reason to be believe her full-body, Orochimaru tattoo will allow her to live a long, prosperous live.

Professor Heishiro Hayakawa is better known as "Doctor Tattoo" and is the curator of the beautifully macabre collection of "vividly colored, intricately-tattooed skins hanging on the walls" or "suspended from the ceiling" in the Specimen Room of Tokyo University. Professor Hayakawa works hard to expend the collection and considers Kinue's tattoo to be a national treasure, wishing to preserve it for posterity, but she keeps turning down the old "skin-peeler." Uncharacteristically, Kinue takes part in a competition of the first post-war meeting of the Edo Tattoo Society and there she meets Kenzo Matsushita.

Kenzo Matsushita is a graduate student at the medical school of Tokyo University, where he studies forensic medicine to eventually join the police medical staff, because his older brother is Detective Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita of the Metropolitan Police Department. So he attended the exhibition purely out professional curiosity and bumps into an old high-school friend, Hisashi Mogami, whose brother, Takezo, is married to Kinue and their uncle is Professor Hayakawa! And this is where the trouble really begins. Kenzo falls hard for Kinue, as if "bewitched by foxes," and they begin a short-lived, but passionate, relationship cut short by her murder.

Kenzo and Professor Hayakawa find, whatever remained, of Kinue in her bathroom: a severed head, two forearms and two long legs from the knees down were laid out on the tile floor, but the body's torso was missing and the murderer apparently vanished into thin air – because the horizontal bar on the door was firmly pushed in place and the window was tightly locked from the inside. A murder as gruesome as it's utterly impossible!

I first read The Tattoo Murder Case in 2006, or 2007, which was one of my first Japanese detective novels and remember liking it, but the book has gotten its share of criticism over the years. A notable example is the tepid, two-star review by "JJ," of The Invisible Event, who called the book a mix bag. So this was another reason why I wanted to reread the book. Honestly, I liked the book on my first reading, but loved it the second time around (sorry, JJ!). The Tattoo Murder Case is such a fascinating, richly detailed and smartly plotted detective story. That being said, some of the criticism is not entirely unfounded.

Firstly, the solution to the locked room puzzle is a mechanical variation on an age-old trick and recalls an impossible crime from a well-known American writer, which was handicapped by being poorly motivated (you had a point there, JJ). Nonetheless, I thought it was a clever variation that made good use of the bathroom setting. Ho-Ling pointed out in his previously mentioned review that the impossible crime element is historically important, because the story is set in a Japanese-style house that "pre-war critics thought to be unsuitable for locked room mysteries" and The Tattoo Murder Case was one of the first counter arguments.

The explanation as to how the murderer removed the tattooed torso from the locked bathroom even had a glimmer of Chestertonian brilliance!

Secondly, the story is, while not great, competently plotted with some genuinely inspired bits and pieces, but weren't always utilized to their full potential – showing a promising, but inexperienced, mystery writer. A good example is the back-story of the cursed tattoos and how the murder is supposed to look like the fulfillment of a curse, but this aspect is never played up. This would have been a very different story in the hands of John Dickson Carr, Paul Halter or Hake Talbot! Another problem is that the small selection of Japanese mysteries available in English comprises largely of novels with often more ambitious, better executed and original plots. If I would compile a top 10 of translations, The Tattoo Murder Case would be in the bottom five, but still good enough to make the top 10.

Takagi didn't simply use "the world of sharp needles and vermilion ink" as an immersive, vividly colored canvas to play out a detective story in front, like a stage set, but the history and superstitions of this world provided clues, answers and even clever bit of misdirection to the plot. Particularly the historical bits, character backstories and the outside, post-war malaise that had shattered the old order makes for engrossing reading. Another point of historical interest is the detective of the story, Kyosuke Kamizu, who appears very late in the game.

Two months later, the murder of Kinue remains unsolved and two additional bodies have been found in abandoned and burned-out buildings. So Kenzo decides to consult an old school chum, Kyosuke Kamizu, who as a youth of nineteen spoke six foreign languages and was christened by his fellow students "Boy Genius" – a nickname he always despised. Now he does special research in forensic medicine at the Tokyo University Medical School. Kyosuke appears to have been created as a younger and more likable version of S.S. van Dine's Philo Vance, but I recognized in him a rough prototype of the high-school/university student detectives that dominate so many anime-and manga mystery series.

Kyosuke makes quick work of the locked room problem and solves the whole case in the last one-hundred pages with his pet theory of "criminal economics." A satisfactorily conclusion to a (historically) engrossing detective story.

The Tattoo Murder Case is a mystery rich in history with an, especially at the time, original and a well-done plot, which has since been overshadowed by translations of his shin honkaku decedents. But that only adds to the story's historical importance and interest. If I were to compile a Haycraft-Queen-like Cornerstones of the Locked Room Mystery, The Tattoo Murder Case would be on it. So, long story short, I really liked it.

Where There's a Will (1961) by Kip Chase

Previously, I reviewed F. van Wyck Mason's Seeds of Murder (1930) and a short story by Paul Charles, "The Riddle of the Humming Bee" (2017), which were long overdue returns to writers I discovered in 2018 and decided to go for the hat-trick.

Last year, I read Murder Most Ingenious (1962) by "Kip Chase," a pseudonym of Trevett C. Chase, who impressed me as a member of that lost second generation of Golden Age mystery writers, but Chase succeeded in getting at least three of his novels published – giving us a glimpse of what could have been had publishers not stumbled in the opposite direction. I blame Julian Symons.

Anyway, the modestly-titled Murder Most Ingenious certainly lived up to its claim with a cleverly handled plot about a stolen painting, shady development deals and the lingering effects of the Korean War. Not to mention a very original locked room-trick and a fascinating detective-character. So more than enough reason to finally return to this unjustly, long-forgotten mystery writer.

Where There's a Will (1961) was the first of only three novels by Chase and was written on "a Remington portable typewriter on the fender of a Ford panel truck," carrying navigational equipment for an offshore geophysical crew, "along the coastline of Trinidad." Chase dictated his next two novels, Murder Most Ingenious and Killer Be Killed (1963), to a tape recorder while commuting to his next job at Vandenberg Air Force.

This short-lived series introduced the first wheelchair-bound detective, Justine Carmichael, preceding both Arthur Porges' Cyriack Skinner Grey and the iconic TV-detective, Robert T. Ironside.

Justine Carmichael is the former, highly regarded chief of the Los Angeles Police Department's Homicide Division, but "a thirty-eight calibre, 158-grain slug" put him in a wheelchair and forced him to retire early from a decorated career in the force – which happened four years before the opening of the story. However, Carmichael is still called upon by his former colleagues as "an unofficial adviser." One of these old colleagues is Louis Delmar, Police Chief of San Margaret, who asks his help with the murder of "a big society grande dame."

Where There's a Will opens with the murder of an incredibly rich widow, Mrs. Constance DeVoors, who enjoyed castigating servants, embarrassing people publicly and took pleasure in knowing people hated her, but "were powerless to do her harm because of her wealth." Obviously, the person who entered her bedroom and strangled her with a necktie proved that was a deadly assumption. So this leaves Chief Delmar with a bunch of oddball house guests, staff and relatives as potential suspects equipped with strong motives and shaky alibis to sort out.

These oddball house guests comprise of a representative of the yogi-cult, Sra Kuru, who received a monthly donation from Mrs. DeVoors. Two phony Russian aristocrats, Count and Countess Ivanov. Mr. Augustus Veblen is a writer and a semi-permanent house guest, of sorts, who "leaves everybody alone and vice versa." Mrs. DeVoors was strangled with the necktie that belongs to her nephew, Dr. Jack Newton, who was cut out of her will after one hell of row, but he claims he was with his father, Old Philip Norton – who's the caretaker of his sister's lodge up in the San Bernardino mountains. Jack claims to have been with his father on the night of the murder, but Philip has gone horseback riding in the woods. And is practically impossible to get hold of until he comes back. Since this is an updated Golden Age mystery, you can't entirely write off the household staff. You have a surely butler-chauffeur, George Awlsen, who loves to talk about his amorous exploits. A tanned, blonde secretary, Miss Elinor Wycliff, who has given her employer looks of "pure venom." Lastly, a bible-reading maid and a perfectly happy cook. All of them have a story to tell, but which of those stories are relevant to the solution?

A classic and traditionally-structured premise for a good, old-fashioned detective story, but Chase tried here, as he did in his next novel, to place the story in the real world. The murder of Mrs. DeVoors is treated as the exception to the rule, because murders are mostly cases of "husband shoots wife, wife shoots husband" or "man gets hit a little too hard in a bar fight" – there's "very seldom any "mystery" about it." A nice example of this is when Carmichael shows his grandson, "Pinkie," who's an aspiring policeman, a report sheet with ninety-nine percent of daily police work (e.g. disturbance calls and runaway juveniles).

Regardless, the solution is still in the grand, fair play tradition of the Golden Age detective story. Admirably, Chase tried to fuse the best of the genre's past and present together, which makes it so frustrating he only got to write three novels, because in my opinion he succeeded. Chase was evidently an avid mystery reader and knew what makes a good plot tick. More importantly, how to put one together himself.

When the details begin to emerge about the provisions in Mrs. DeVoors' scewball will and the circumstances of a second, apparently botched, murder, the perceptive reader should be able to separate the red herrings from the clues – work out what happened, who's responsible and why. Carmichael credits "a dead deer and a baseball player" as the vital clues that solved the case, but the baseball-clue was badly telegraphed. I immediately spotted it and knew how it was going to be used!

So, if you pay close attention to the clues, you can solve the case when you reach the final quarter of the story, but Where There's a Will still stands as a strong debut with an inspired, cleverly handled plot and story that tried to do something new with old tropes. Something the story succeeded in admirably, I think. I especially liked the last, final lines of the story beautifully tiptoeing between the classic detective story and modern crime novel. What I appreciated the most was the inspired plotting that reminded me of early Christopher Bush with something I can only describe as negative or reverse alibi. You know what I mean when you figure out or read the solution.

A long story short, I recommend Chase's Where There's a Will and Murder Most Ingenious unreservedly as rare examples of finely crafted detective novels from the sixties not written by an established Golden Age writer. And in a normal, rational and functionally world, Chase would have went on to become a leading light of a Second Golden Age we never got. Once again, I blame Julian Symons.

Behind the Music: "The Riddle of the Humming Bee" (2017) by Paul Charles

Just like my previous blog-post, this is a return to a mystery writer I only discovered last year, namely Paul Charles, who's a concert promoter, manager and an avid consumer of detective stories from Northern Ireland.

Paul Charles was inspired by Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse to create his own series-detective, Detective-Inspector Christy Kennedy, who made his first appearance in I Love the Sound of Broken Glass (1997), but I started with the fourth title in the series, The Ballad of Sean and Wilko (2000) – a modern locked room mystery with two impossible murders deeply immersed in the British music scene. And that last bit seems fairly typical for Charles' output.

I wanted to make his second locked room mystery, The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room (2001), my next stop in the series, but recently discovered Charles has penned a short, inverted-like impossible crime story.

"The Riddle of the Humming Bee" was originally published in the CWA Anthology of Short Stories: Mystery Tour (2017), edited by Martin Edwards, which takes place during a tour of the Humming Bees. A band who had "a reasonable first flush of success" with their first album and had a popular song on their second, "Skybird," but the lead-singer, Harry Hammond, could "only dream about the success that had so far evaded the band." So the Humming Bees are pretty much on the road to obscurity and the story opens when the band has arrived at the 149-year-old Ulster Hall in Bedford Street, Belfast, where the body of the lead guitarist, Barry "Joey" Simpson, is found face down in a five-hundred-gallon water tank – a guitar string still embedded deeply in his neck. Inspector McCusker doesn't know "a lot about pop music or musicians," but the burden falls on him to untangle this knotty problem.

Firstly, "The Riddle of the Humming Bee" is rich in detail when it comes to the history of the band and the relationship between the main band members.

Obviously, Charles enjoyed fleshing out the background of the Humming Bees, which humbly began as "an Everly Brothers kind of act," but Joey's brother, Brian, had "no stomach for the road" and Harry Hammond was enlisted to take his place. However, Brian was a good song writer and their first album consisted entirely of his songs. And their best-known song was also from his hands. This collaboration ended when the brothers had a fallout and the band began to decline in popularity.

You can find a similar exploration of the back-story of a once popular band during a seventies revival in The Ballad of Sean and Wilko, which is definitely a strength of the series, because the pop-music scene is not a backdrop often used in these kind of traditionally-structured mysteries – giving it a touch of authenticity and infectious enthusiasm by the author's first-hand knowledge and love for the subject matter. Unfortunately, in the short story format, this came at the cost of the plot.

A warning to the reader: the weird structure of the story, as discussed below, made some spoilers unavailable. Nonetheless, I tried to be as short and vague as humanly possible. So the reader has been warned!

"The Riddle of the Humming Bee" begins with setting up, what appears to be, a classic locked room situation, but this leads to the discovery of a non-impossible murder and the beginning of a whodunit. Only for McCusker to decide 2/3 into the story that people with "nice tidy alibis" are suspicious, which turns the story into an inverted impossible crime tale, as the murderer had locked himself into his hotel room that was under observation. The locked room-trick is very involved and depends on the architecture of the building, but the scene of the crime is never explored and this makes the explanation feel like a bit of a cheat, because it hinges on a lot that we're never told about. Such as what was right outside the window.

END OF SPOILERS!

"The Riddle of the Humming Bee" has an interesting premise with a good, fleshed out background, but the way in which the story was told and structured prevented the plot from playing fair with the reader. I think could have been prevented had the story been played as an inverted locked room mystery from the start. So the story left me a little disappointed. However, this minor letdown won't deter me from trying The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room in the future.