The Longstreet Legacy (1951) by Douglas Ashe

John Franklin Bardin was an American crime writer best remembered today as the author of three early psychological thrillers, whose admirers were as diverse as Edmund Crispin and Julian Symons, but, under the name "Gregory Tree," he produced two courtroom dramas and an impossible crime novel, A Shroud for Grandmama (1951) – which comes with all the trappings of a gloomy, old-fashioned Gothic romance. A Shroud for Grandmama was reprinted under yet another penname, namely "Douglas Ashe," as The Longstreet Legacy.

Back in 2014, John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, posted a review on his blog calling A Shroud for Grandmama "a lively and entertaining detective" with a fantastic and engaging narrator, but warned that it "is somewhat scarce in either hardcover or paperback." So the book lingered on my wishlist, like an earthbound spirit, when recently, I lucked upon an inexpensive, well-worn copy.

Miss Abigail Longstreet is a young, beautiful woman in her late twenties, but speaks and dresses as a woman from the turn-of-the-century. Abigail preferred "the joys of introspection and the lady arts" to the people of her own age and the modern world, which she deemed as "vulgar and footling." This meant she lived quite a solitary existence, but not to the same extent as her eccentric grandmother, Ella Longstreet, who lives like a hermit in a dark, imposing New York mansion – where she has denied the existence of the outside world for the past fifteen years. Abigail is the only line of communication between her grandmother and their greedy relatives who are always in need of money. And this is why she's the only one of the family who knows that Ella is completely blind.

So, naturally, she was quite perplexed when a man, Arthur Crump, turned up on her doorstep with a crumpled note, saying "come in haste," with her grandmother's engraved wedding wrapped inside. Crump tells her the package had struck his head in the streets and thinks it had been thrown at him from an upstairs window, which could mean that her grandmother is in trouble. Nothing could have prepared Abigail for what she found when crossing the threshold of the great house where she had spent her girlhood.

Ella Longstreet's emaciated, nearly naked body, scantily dressed in "one of those scandalous swimming suits," a bikini, lying at the bottom of the staircase on the dust covered parquetry of the long, two-storied hallway, but the body is surrounded by "a circle of waltzing footprints" – as if "someone had gone round it" in "a frenzied haste." Inexplicably, there were no other footprints going to, or leaving, the circle on the thick layer of dust carpeting the hallway! Abigail does exactly what her grandmother would have wanted, avoiding a scandal, by destroying the evidence and carrying her grandmother's body to her bedroom to put some decent clothes on her to face the undertaker. However, she discovers that the closet is empty with the exception of a stiff, grim-looking funeral shroud!

Shortly after Abigail finished tidying up the crime scene, the doorbell pealed and she found Deputy Chief Inspector Stephen Eliot standing on the doorstep.

According to Eliot, there are more than a thousand known recluses, on all levels of society, in the jurisdiction of Manhattan and Ella Longstreet was "the wealthiest and most notorious." A nominal supervision is kept of all of them, wherever possible. Abigail learns from Eliot that the house of her grandmother resembled a busy thoroughfare on the day of her dead, which attracted the attention of the beat cops.

Apparently, the whole family visited Ella that day with a written invitation in hand that also contained references to the notorious family ghost, Sybil. A poltergeist with an undying love for dancing and pelting people with objects.

An utterly bizarre and impossible problem, but Eliot is a sharp, tricky customer who loves to set out verbal traps and somewhat reminded me of Lt. Columbo. His questioning of the family is illuminating to both Abigail and the reader. Abigail comes to see many of her relatives in a different light and learns more about herself than she would have been comfortable with in the first chapter, but these interviews also provide the reader with pieces of the puzzle, which gives answers to some of the more outre aspects of the case – such as why the body was dressed in a bikini. Slowly, but surely, a picture begins to emerge of the truth and the keen-eyed reader will be able to fill-in the blank spaces, but beware the slippery red herring. Because your ego can break its neck when you slip on the neatly positioned red herrings in this story! Yeah, I sort of Roger Sheringhamed it.

But, for me, the absolute highlight of The Longstreet Legacy was not the who, or why, but how the murderer was able to place the body in a circle of footprints without disturbing the dust that covered the rest of the floor. A fantastic and entirely new solution to the no-footprints problem. However, while the solution is entirely original, you can easily see which well-known impossible crime novel gave Bardin the idea, which is to his credit, because I would have never thought of using it like that in a million years!

So, on this count alone, The Longstreet Legacy comes highly recommended to fans of the impossible crime story and particularly those fans with a special affinity for the no-footprints puzzle.

The Longstreet Legacy is an excellent throwback, or homage, to the turn-of-the-century Gothic tale, full of dark, long-held secrets, a ghost and family skeletons, but told with a traditional slant on it and a great detective who cuts through the web of lies and deceit. Honestly, my only complaint is how fast I burned through the pages of this immensely enjoyable detective yarn and I'm baffled that it has been out-of-print for so many decades. It deserves to be reprinted. But, in the mean time, I recommend you keep an eye out for an affordable, secondhand copy, because you want to have this one in your collection.

Murder at Beechlands (1948) by Maureen Sarsfield

Maureen K. Heard was a British author who had a brief, fleeting career as a fiction writer during the 1940s, producing sevens novel from 1943 to 1948, comprises of four children's books, two detective novels and a mainstream book – published either under her married name or penname, "Maureen Sarsfield." Those two, once long-forgotten, detective novels have been hailed in more recent times as "gems of the British school."

In 2003, the still sorely missed Rue Morgue Press reprinted Sarsfield's Green December Fills the Graveyard (1945) and A Party for Lawty (1948), but gave their editions new, more genre-driven, titles, Murder at Shots Hall and Murder at Beechlands.

Tom and Enid Schantz explained their decision that the original, nondescript titles "may have been partly to blame" for, what they assumed, "were unimpressive sales." I kind of liked the original titles. Sure, they're perhaps "a bit too literary," but fitted the smartly written, character-driven detective novels that can be ranked alongside the works of Dorothy Bowers, Moray Dalton, Joan Cowdroy and Elizabeth Gill. The new titles are too simple and generic.

Sarsfield's lead-character is a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Lane Parry, who "twice finds evil deeds in the backwaters of Sussex" and remember enjoying Murder at Shots Hall with a slew of poisonings surrounding a bombed, partially destroyed manor house, but Parry got upstaged by one of the characters, Flikka – a young sculptor who lives and works at the manor house. So I always wanted to read the second novel and, looking for a non-locked room mystery, I decided to finally take Murder at Beechlands from the big pile.

Murder at Beechlands finds Inspector Lane Parry stranded in a drift by the side of the road, "feet deep in snow," with his car refusing to move another inch. A raging snowstorm has turned the Sussex landscape into a white, practically impassable, hellscape.

Parry decides to follow "an enormously high, forbidding stone wall" on foot in the hope of finding a lodge or gate, but half expects to find a derelict mansion, prison or a mental institution behind the fortified wall obviously intended "either to keep people out or to keep them in." What he found convinced Parry he had stumbled his way to a private lunatic asylum, where the inmates were loudly screeching ("Lawty! Lawty! Lawty!") and fighting in the snow, but the woman, Mrs. Anabel Adams, who he had pecked as the matron turned out to be the owner of Beechlands Hotel. A small, financially troubled country hotel with a less than spotless reputation in the region. And they were hosting a party in honor of a well-known, womanizing World War II Wing Commander, Lawton "Lawty" Lawrence.

A party not everyone turned up to on account of the snowstorm and the hotel is practically empty when Parry arrived.

The people who did make it to the hotel are Jim Bridges, severely burned during the war, who had lost his wife to Lawty when he lay "all mashed up in hospital" and Christie Layne had lost her virtue to the bomber pilot, but they were there strictly on the invitation of Mrs. Adams. Cintra Norton is "the greatest film star we ever sent to Hollywood" and used to be friends with Lawty before he went abroad. Marigold Trent is a natural platinum blonde, who was sent down by some very old friends of Mrs. Adams, but she hadn't paid her bills since she arrived. Lastly, the party is rounded out by the hotel receptionist, Miss Killigrew, and two London businessmen, Julian Frake and Paul Livington, who might be willing to invest money in Beechlands – one of the reasons why they were invited by Mrs. Adams. She wanted to "suitably impress" them. 

And now, this unlikely party is trapped together in the partially empty hotel for the night. Something that would not have been a problem had it not been for Lawty's battered body underneath the window of his room. Parry quickly deduces Lawty's death wasn't an accident or suicide, but cold blooded murder!

Normally, a raging snowstorm is used as nothing more than a device to confine the characters to a single location, but Sarsfield used it to wage a war of nerves on her characters as the lights begin to slowly die and incidents keep happening. A second body is discovered in the boiler room, but Parry keeps this second death a secret "to keep everyone on such tenterhooks" that, whoever committed the murders, "get in such a state of nerves he'll give himself away." Parry is assisted in mounting the tension by several attacks, professionally disabled phone lines and the unlucky past of the hotel with its unnerving, ghostly taps said to be heard before someone dies, but even Parry is not immune to his gloomy, nerve-stricken surroundings and wonders how long he would "be able to go on keeping his temper."

So, when it comes to handling atmosphere and tension, Sarsfield's Murder at Beechlands is what Ngaio Marsh tried to do with the abysmal Death and the Dancing Footman (1942).

Where the plot is concerned, the journey to the ending was better than the solution, which was not bad or atrociously clued, but found it underwhelming with only the motive standing out, because usually, this type of motive is only mentioned in (Golden Age) detective stories – not often used as an actual motive for the murderer. One of many (small) signs in this book that times were slowly starting to change for the traditional detective story. Nevertheless, Murder at Beechlands is a busily plotted, eventful detective story that keeps you reading and has a few memorable setpieces.

I mentioned that one of my reasons for picking Murder at Beechlands is that it's supposed to be a non-impossible crime novel, but technically, I should label this post as a locked room mystery. And there two of them!

Firstly, there's knocking and yelling from behind the locked door of the room where the bodies are kept, but they never get an opportunity to consider it a locked room mystery because the situation immediately resolves itself with a very simplistic explanation. But still, it made for a great scene. Secondly, one of the characters vanishes from the snowbound hotel and is not found when the place is searched, which gives it the appearance of locked room mystery, until you learn the solution. So these minor, quasi-impossibilities doesn't make Murder at Beechlands a long-overlooked locked room novel, but appreciated Sarsfield flirted so heavily with my favorite detective story trope. It also gave me this dreadful feeling that she actually wrote and completed a third, full-blown impossible crime novel, but the unpublished manuscript got lost and any trace of it was lost to time. Because that's how it usually goes.

So, all in all, Murder at Beechlands is a mostly well-written, excellently characterized and atmospheric treatment of the snowbound murder mystery, only marred by an underwhelming solution, but, like RMP, you have to wonder where Sarsfield's career would have brought her had "she continued in the vein of these two books."

Conundrums with Corpses: Q.E.D, vol. 5 by Motohiro Katou

I've remarked in past reviews that Motohiro Katou took a different route to other, more well-known, anime-and manga detective series when it came to the characterization of the protagonists, the type of cases they get to solve and volume structure – making Q.E.D. vastly different compared to Case Closed, Detective Academy Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. The previous volume was a perfect example of these dissimilarities with a scam story and a quasi-techno thriller, but the cases in volume 5 were unexpectedly close to the kind of stories littering the Case Closed series!

The first of two stories, "The Distorted Melody," is an inverted detective story, a la Columbo, but with a quasi-impossible problem of where the body was hidden at the time the murderer was orchestrating an unimpeachable alibi.

Hirai Reiji is a world-famous young cellist and an equally celebrated symphony orchestra had added him as their main attraction for an upcoming concert, but the President of Kouwa Industries, Okabe Kousuke, canceled their long-running sponsorship. A decision Hirai, "a slave to a great art," simply could not allow to stand. So, when Okabe visits him at his remote, cliff side cabin, Hirai strangles him and sews together an alibi by inviting a small party of high-school students, which includes Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara – only they arrived a little too early. This leaves Hirai with mere minutes at his disposal to hide the body inside a small, sparsely furnished cabin without any apparent hiding places. Somehow, he managed to do it, but how? And, no, the body wasn't stuffed inside the cello case.

Two days later, Okade's body is found at his home, crammed inside a disused, filled-in water well, but "the kids testified that there was no corpse in the house" and supporting evidence, namely a train ticket and a phone call, cemented Hirai's alibi.

Touma believes the young cellist murdered the tightfisted businessman and begins, piece by piece, to tear down both his story and carefully constructed alibi. The solution hinges on the use of the cello, a piece of classical music and cellphone feedback, but the highlight of the solution is the place where the body had been hidden. A simple and elegant solution marred only slightly by the lack of (visual) clueing, but still a clever take on the hidden object puzzle.

As an aside, this story was loaded with translator's note and had a floor plan of the cabin, which, in combination with the search for a missing, cleverly hidden object, also made the story vaguely feel like an American Golden Age detective story.

Where's the body?

 

The second and last story of this volume, entitled "The Afterimage of Light," is, story-wise, right up there with "Rokubu's Treasure" and "The Fading of Star Map," as one of the better tales so far and serves the reader a bizarre, neatly posed locked room mystery – buried in the dimly remembered past. A story that begins, or ended, when Touma and Mizuhara buy an old camera on a flea market only to discover a role of undeveloped film inside. A film with five snapshots of a doll, a storage house, three children, a mountain and a blurry picture of a man's shoulder.

So they decide to follow the clues of the camera and pictures original to Otowamura, a small mountain village, where they find the "surprisingly small," windowless storage that turned out to have a weird and sad history behind it. Once upon a time, it was simply used to store rice and farming tools, but when tuberculous reared its ugly head in the region, it was converted into a sanatorium. A lot of people died in there. However, the weirdest story to come out of the store house is that of a little girl, Kuwano Taki, who had tuberculous and was confined to the windowless store house. But, every day, the girl told her visiting mother what had happened that day outside the storage house and replicated this ability in public experiments. She was "shut up in a big box" from "where she would tell people what was outside," but this is only of two locked room puzzles the story has to offer!

Touma and Mizuhara, with the unwilling assistance of a local policeman, break open the door of the storage house, because the key had gone missing of thirty years ago and nobody appears to have entered it during that period. Curiously, while the walls are crumbling, one of then looks whiter than the other as it was plastered over in the past, but part of the wall disintegrated upon being touched – revealing a decomposed skeleton behind it. The sole, long-lost store house key had been in the pocket of the body all this time. So how was the murderer able to leave a locked door behind and who did the murderer hide in the wall? And how does this long-hidden murder linked to the photos, the now three grownup children and the story of the clairvoyant girl?

The Locked Room Mystery

A really well done detective with many moving, interlocking parts that beautifully dovetail together in the end. Once again, the clueing is not always pitch-perfect and one clue, in particular, is impossible to correctly interpret, but enough of the plot can be worked out to satisfy most armchair detectives.

I think a good chunk of readers will be able to work out the clairvoyant images of the little girl, which is a surprisingly modern take on the naturalistic impossible crime fiction that was somewhat popular during the turn of the previous century (e.g. L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898). The result is something pleasingly different than what you usually get in these stories about faked psychic abilities. I liked the explanation as to how the skeleton ended up behind the wall of a locked room, but worked out the trick when I read Ho-Ling Wong's double review of volume 4 and 5. I misunderstood the exact situation of the locked room, but the hint in my comment (mild spoilers) was spot on! To be honest, there's really only one way that specific locked room-trick could have been worked. I still liked it.

The strength of the story is how all these plot-threads were tied together and the fact that the statute of limitation has ran out, which means that the murderer not only gets away with killing an innocent person, but is not even confronted by Touma – reminding the reader that Q.E.D. is not like the other manga detective series. Even when it tries to be!

So, all in all, this is easily my favorite volume up to this point in the series and, while not entirely spotless, I found the stories to be excellent with some original ideas and tricks. Definitely recommended!

White for a Shroud (1947) by Don Cameron

Donald Clough Cameron was an American journalist who worked as a crime reporter for the Detroit Free Press and the Windsor Star, a Canadian newspaper, in the 1920s, but in the 1930s Cameron moved to fiction and began writing detective novels, pulp stories and comic books – reportedly making some notable contributions to the Batman mythos. Such as creating a precursor to the Batcave and introducing Alfred as Bruce Wayne's butler. Cameron also co-created and wrote the earliest Superboy stories in More Fun Comics. But what about his legacy as a mystery writer?

Cameron wrote six detective novels, three of which, Murder's Coming (1939), Grave Without Grass (1940) and And So He Had to Die (1941), featured a young criminologist, Abelard Voss. The other three titles, Death at Her Elbow (1940), Dig Another Grave (1946) and White for a Shroud (1947), appear to be standalone novels, but none of them have been reprinted since the mid-1950s. And they've all been pretty much forgotten today.

I know Anthony Boucher lukewarmly praised Dig Another Grave, a story of newsmen, racketeering and cafe society, as "acceptable" in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary (2009). So not very encouraging to start digging around, but what secured this long-forgotten writer a spot on my wishlist was a 2014 review, posted on Past Offenses, of White for a Shroud. A review describing a fascinating detective story set in a small, isolated Michigan town paralyzed by an unforgiving blizzard, an avalanche of snow and frozen corpses – dug out of the snowbanks all over town. White for a Shroud finally made it to the snow-topped peak of Mt.-to-be-Read!

Red Rock County is a small community of "1,300-odd men, women and children" are facing "a storm that may rank with the worst on record," which will isolate them to their tiny corner of the world for the better part of a week.

The "snow was an aerial avalanche of glassy points" that choked highways, ditches and streets, blotted out railways and "rose like floodwater in the Upper Michigan forests." Snow blocked the doorways of houses and stores that were laboriously excavated, replacing the familiar storefronts with "doorways in the snow," reinforced by planks and bearing makeshift signs. A wide and lofty tunnel had been dug from a local bar to the keep the local day laborers warm as everything around them has come to a grinding halt. So, as all they can do is sit around, drink cheap whiskey and hate, there are still "plenty of barroom fights."

Andrew Brant, editor and owner of the Red Rock Reporter, remarks to Sheriff Ed Worth that, statistically, there are two murderers in Red Rock because "one in every six hundred and fifty will commit murder" and its 1,300-odd citizens have now "anything to do but murder" – a remark that would come back to haunt him later that day. And the problem concerns two of his loyal, long-time friends, John and Ella Macfarlane, who get stuck up to their necks in coldblooded murder! Brant picked up the rumor that Macfarlane is closing down his paper mill for the rest of the winter, but when goes out to investigate, he discovers Macfarlane's unconscious body on the floor of the foreman's room. A hunting cap, a fur-lined mitten and blood on the conveyor belt of the wood chopper suggests the unpopular straw boss, Ralston Crane, had been disposed of in "the thousands of gallons of pulp and acid" of the paper mill's pulp room. A perfect murder with "no possible way of proving the corpis delicti."

Macfarlane has no memory of what happened, but thinks he could have thrown him in and turned on the machine. Brant is not prepared to hand over his friend to the police and decided to make everyone believe Crane lost his way in the snow, which apparently was not uncommon at the time. Brant expects stories to appear in the newspapers about "farmer who had died between their barns and houses, motorists who had frozen in their car" and "children who had lost their ways and would never return home." Unfortunately, Macfarlane is shot and seriously wounded that night. And then, the frozen bodies begin to turn up.

This is where the plot of the story becomes nigh impossible to discuss in detail without tearing through the paper-thin layers that make up the whole plot.

I guess the plot is best described as a chain reaction, one thing leading to another, which gives the illusion of a tangled scheme, but there's really nothing clever, or inspired, to be found in any of the razor thin, poorly clued plot-strands – except for the storyline between Brant, John and Ella. White for a Shroud is an average detective novel with a, on a whole, a weak plot that was propped up the beautifully depicted, snow-buried setting. So still a perfectly acceptable, relatively short book to kill two or three hours with during one of those long, cold winter days. As long as you don't expect a stone cold classic.

Unfinished Business: "The Genesee Slough Murders" (1966) by John Holbrook Vance

In my previous posts, I reviewed the only two Sheriff Joe Bain novels John Holbrook Vance completed, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967), which were excellent, but this only left me with third, partially finished and unpolished manuscript of the third novel, "The Genesee Slough Murders" (1966) – a novella-length plot outline eventually published in The Work of Jack Vance (1994) and The Joe Bain Mysteries (2013). Photocopies of the typescript draft had circulated among collectors for many years.

I expected the manuscript to be similar to the outline of Ellery Queen's unfinished novel, collected in The Tragedy of Errors (1999), but "The Genesee Slough Murders" is not as detailed and much more of bare bones outline. But the whole plot is there. Frustratingly, if it had been finished, it would probably have been the best of three Sheriff Joe Bain novels!

The Fox Valley Murders was a detective story about the people of San Rodrigo County, while The Pleasant Grove Murders focuses on the suspects living along Madrone Way, but "The Genesee Slough Murders" would have dealt with literal, tree hugging hippies – descending on the county to protect the trees growing on the levees. A conflict that would have provided the backdrop for "The Genesee Slough Murders."

The line of division between land and water, "namely the levees," have become "a cause of bitter conflict." The trees growing on there weaken the levees with their roots and, in order to protect the waterways, they have begun to remove the trees, but protesters have gathered along Genesee Slough "to prevent any further stripping of the levees." Sheriff Bain is observing the protest in the second chapter, but takes a very hands-off approach when it comes to policing the protest. Very much to the annoyance of his long-time nemesis, Howard Griselda, who runs the local newspaper. Griselda would like to see nothing more than Bain getting replaced by a modern, efficient and progressive sheriff.

Vance fleshed out some parts, here and there, but mostly it's a rough outline of how the story is going to progress with its main plot-line, side stories and characters.

Bain deftly solves a home burglary and the way in which he resolved the issue showed Griselda had a point when he labeled the sheriff an ethical relativist in a previous novel. Not necessarily a bad thing when trying to resolve problems in a small, tight-knit community. There's also a hit-and-run accident, mysterious phone calls to his daughter and "a grisly discovery" is made when the low tide revealed a sunken car in the slough with two bodies inside – a young woman and a baby. Two days later, three people are gunned down in a single night with bullets fired from the same gun!

Vance gives a very brief, bare bone outline of the solution, but the idea behind the murders is really clever and you can see how well it would have worked had it been presented as a completed detective story. I have to stress that the motive for the three murders, more important here than normally, is so original that I know of only one other detective story that used it. One of the anime-and manga detective series used a nearly identical plot and motive for one its stories, but can't tell you any more than that without giving anything away.

Even if "The Genesee Slough Murders" is only a scantily dressed plot outline, I think it's still worth reading, if only to see how the sausage is made.

So, after having read two novels and an unfinished manuscript, I'm left wondering why Vance abandoned the series, because, had he continued writing mystery novels, he would have become one of the top-tier writers of the post-GAD era. And perhaps the one who could have lit the flame of a Silver Age. Luckily, I still have The Four Johns (1964) and The Madman Theory (1966) that he wrote as Ellery Queen on the big pile, but next up, is a return to the Golden Age with a truly obscure title. So stay tuned!

The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967) by John Holbrook Vance

Last time, I read the engaging, lively written and plotted The Fox Valley Murders (1966) by John Holbrook Vance, who's better known to fantasy and science-fiction readers as Jack Vance, which presented the traditional, Golden Age detective story as a thick slice of small-town Americana in the 1960s – sprinkled with a variety of impossible crimes. A sadly short-lived, unfinished series that ended when Vance abandoned the partially completed The Genesee Slough Murders. It would have been the third novel to have featured Vance's series-detective, Sheriff Joe Bain of San Rodrigo County, California.

I decided to read the two novels and the unclothed, skeleton manuscript of the third book back-to-back, because I'll probably appreciate the unpolished manuscript better with the two completed novels fresh in my mind. So today, I'll be looking at the second novel in the series, The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967).

There's a notable difference in approach to plotting and storytelling between The Fox Valley Murders and The Pleasant Grove Murders.

The Fox Valley Murders is a packed, constantly moving story in which a series of suspicious looking, seemingly impossible accidents and natural deaths coincide with the return of a convicted murderer to the community and an important election – which don't always link up in expected ways. The Pleasant Grove Murders is mostly focused on the first of three hammer murders and the suspects living on Madrone Way where the crime was committed. This made for a clearer, tighter and better clued detective story than The Fox Valley Murders!

An introduction of the primary players opens the story, covering numerous years, beginning with the destruction of a tree house as children to a failed marriage and an engagement.

Sam and Miriam Shortridge are "small-town aristocrats" and became the elite by being the proprietors of Pleasant Grove's largest department store, which is reflected in their children, Marsh and Starr, who have been described as "absolutely feudal." Starr was a haughty child who had "compared herself to the rank and file of humanity" and "humanity had come off second best," while her older brother simply is a prig. A very different child is the "extremely pretty girl of Starr's age," Alice, who lives next door with her parents, Guy and Grace Benjamin. And much lower on the social totem pole of Pleasant Grove are two boys, Ken Moody and Bill Whipple. One way, or another, they all have a role to play in a series of murders around the time Alice became engaged to Marsh.

Ken Mooney had become a mail deliveryman and, on an early June morning, he turned his mail van into Madrone Way, where he was murdered, but the body and van with undelivered mail vanished until the following morning – when all were found at the blind end of Madrone Way. Mooney had been killed with "just three good raps" from an ordinary carpenter's hammer and copy of Life magazine was lying under his head. Someone had torn off the address label. This was the only piece of undelivered mail that had been tampered with. So the postal authorities "relinquished the case to Sheriff Joe Bain."

There are two more murders, committed relatively late into the story, which makes the bludgeoning of Mooney the central problem and what happened during the twenty-four hours between the murder and discovery of the body is "a source of enormous puzzlement." A lot of time is spend in figuring out the movement of suspects, combing for a motive and checking alibis and checking magazine subscriptions. One central question, or problem, is was he killed "because he was the mailman or because he was Ken?" So the setting has less of a presence here than in the previous novel with the focus on just one neighborhood.

Nevertheless, there are still distinct traces of those small-town life, politics and some minor side plot-threads. Sheriff Bain has another tussle with the owner and editor of the Pleasant Grove Messenger, Howard Griselda, who wants "an up-to-date progressive law-enforcement system" and doesn't believe Bain is "the man for the job." Sometimes, the investigation is interrupted when the sheriff's office has to respond to a madman, armed with .22 rifle, who had climbed to the top of a silo and started "shooting at everything in sight" or visiting a woman, named Luna, who believes she came to Earth from a distant planet, Arthemisia – on a mission which has not yet been revealed to her. A very weird, unimportant plot-thread that felt out-of-place and thought it might be a reference, or even a crossover appearance, linked to Vance's science-fiction work. But apparently not.

One other side-thread worth mentioning is Bain's intention to buy a nearly 100-year-old roadhouse and turn it an old country hotel together with his daughter and mother. Vance was already thinking of retiring the character, but don't ask me why. This series is great!

The Pleasant Grove Murders is not chocking with impossible crime material, like The Fox Valley Murders, but what it lacked in quantity, it made it up with quality and the result is easily one of the best pure whodunits of the 1960s. A detective story with one of those delightfully constructed ladders of clues, logically fitting every piece of the story together, which is even more impressive when you consider most of the (important) clues were hidden in the personalities or actions of the characters – barely any physical and tangible clues. Funnily enough, the ending of the story acknowledged that "the entire case of the prosecution was circumstantial, indirect and hypothetical," but "judge instructed the jury that circumstantial evidence was as good as any" and "they were not required to invent improbable or fantastic alternate hypotheses."

Yet, the circumstantial clues and evidence are more than sufficient to work out this clever little detective story and loved the spot in the book when a tiny detail made everything click together in my head. Very satisfying! If there's anything to nitpick about, it's that Vance was overly generous with his reader by giving one of his clues a distinctly New England flavor. But if something is too good, you really have nothing to complain about.

The Pleasant Grove Murders was written during that dark, dreary decade when publishers had largely moved away from the traditional detective story, but the bright light of the Golden Age shimmered on in the Sheriff Joe Bain series. I don't know why Vance abandoned the series, but the lost is entirely ours.

A note for the curious: I drew some comparison in my review of The Fox Valley Murders with other American mystery writers who used small-town settings, but this series is perhaps closer to Kip Chase's Justine Carmichael series. Chase is a now long-forgotten writer who tried to bring the Golden Age mystery into the 1960s, but he never got past his third novel. Strangely enough, their novels are pleasing mirror images of each other. Chase's Where There's a Will (1961) is a whodunit with a closed-circle of suspects, while The Fox Valley Murders is an impossible crime novel, but Murder Most Ingenious (1962) is a locked room mystery and The Pleasant Grove Murders a whodunit. One has a former, big city homicide cap as detective and the other series a small-town sheriff. Even though their settings aren't that far apart, they obviously take place in different parts of California. Chase and Vance showed what could have been!

The Fox Valley Murders (1966) by John Holbrook Vance

So, after finishing Colin Robertson's Demons' Moon (1951), I intended to take a short break from the impossible crime story and was off to a good start with Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943), but Hampton Stone's The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) soiled my promise with the inclusion of a (minor) locked room problem – giving me a paper thin excuse to dip into one more impossible crime novel. A cross between Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Herbert Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) with no less than four impossibilities listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). How can you see no to that?

John Holbrook Vance is better known as Jack Vance, a well-known, celebrated fantasy and science-fiction author, who occasionally turned to the detective and thriller story. Vance even ghosted three of the late period Ellery Queen novels, The Four Johns (1964), A Room to Die In (1965) and The Madman Theory (1966).

During the same period, Vance wrote two mystery novels about Sheriff Joe Bain, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967), which take place in the old-world surroundings of San Rodrigo County, California. Vance had been working on a third novel, The Genesee Slough Murders, but left the book unfinished and photocopies of a typescript draft have "circulated among collectors for years" that outlined the entire story with some near complete chapters – lacking only "a final polish." The manuscript outline was published in The Joe Bain Mysteries (2013).

Joe Bain used to be "the tall hell-raising lad from Castle Mountain," a run-a-way kid who came to San Rodrigo County, "where he consorted with Mexicans and fruit tramps." An unlikely boy to eventually become sheriff, but a broken marriage left him with a daughter to support and used his G.I. benefits to attend classics at the Chapman Institute of Criminology, which landed him a job as deputy-sheriff under Sheriff Ernest Cucchinello.

The Fox Valley Murders opens two days after the untimely passing of Sheriff Cucchinello and Bain was appointed to serve out the last months of his term as Acting-Sheriff. Bain is planning to the challenge the odds-on favorite, Lee Gervase, who's "a vigorous and progressive young lawyer" predicted to "sweep unopposed into office" in the next election. This election is one of three, closely intertwined, plot-threads that run through the story. A plot-thread that sees Bain trying to drum up support in the community and cleaning out the office of any petty, small-town corruption.

The second plot-thread is the hostile response of the community to the return of one of its most notorious and hated inhabitants, Ausley Wyett. Sixteen years ago, Wyett had been found digging a hole "with close at hand the body of Tissie McAllister." A young schoolgirl who had been brutally abused and murdered. Wyett protested his innocence, but there were five witnesses whose testimonies showed only he could have killed the girl and was sentenced to life imprisonment – narrowly avoiding the death penalty. A month ago, Wyett was paroled out of San Quentin and returned to the home farm, which already unsettled the locals, but then he begins sending letters around. 

All of the witnesses receive a letter with the question, "how do you plan to make this up to me?" When the witnesses begin to die, one by one, Bain begins to fear he might soon find Wyett "swinging from a tree."

Finally, we come to the meat of the plot! A series of suspiciously-looking accidents and natural causes that befall the witnesses who testified against Wyett.

A former school bus driver, Bus Hacker, died in front of Bain when he had a heart attack on his front porch. Charly Blankenship, "a well-known mushroom fancier," inexplicably picked, cooked and consumed an easily recognizable, poisonous mushrooms. Willis Neff apparently died in a hunting accident in an open glade high in the Santa Lucia Mountains, of Monterey County, where a witness would turn the shooting accident in an open-air locked room mystery in case of murder. Oliver Viera was all alone when he fell sixty feet to his death from a ladder perched too close to a ravine. A bizarre string of suspicious accidents and deaths, but, as Bain remarked, "you feel a fool saying accident" and "you feel a fool claiming foul play."

I think the poisoning-trick and the hunting accident are more accurately described as borderline impossible crimes, but appreciated the variety and two of the murders showed some ingenuity.

The murder of Bus Hacker is a genuine impossible crime with a good solution, but you should be able to (roughly) work out how it was done and the explanation for the dish of poisoned mushrooms, while not strictly an impossibility, was something completely new – furnished the plot with an important clue. Technically, you can call the hunting accident an open-air locked room murder, but the trick should have been used in another story to give a murderer one of those hard-to-break alibis. The deadly fall from the ladder has, sadly, the most simplistic solution imaginable. But when you pull them together, you have a very satisfying and original take on the impossible crime and perfect murder tropes with a memorable, vividly-drawn backdrop and characters.

I've already compared The Fox Valley Murders to Christie's Murder is Easy and Brean's Wilders Walk Away, which is an accurate comparison when describing the bare bones of the plot, but the story is dressed in thick slices of small-town Americana. You have the small-town politics of Erle Stanley Gardner's Doug Selby series (c.f. The D.A. Draws a Circle, 1939), the hum of every day, small-town life that filled Theodore Roscoe's crime novelettes in The Argosy Library: Four Corner, vol. 1 (2015) and a populace that begins to feel deprived of justice. Although the threat of an old-fashioned lynching is not as imminent here as it was in Queen's The Glass Village (1954). A skillful, wonderfully done combination of characters, plot and setting that made The Fox Valley Murders a beautifully written and constructed detective story. And one of the better locked room mysteries from the 1960s era.

There is, however, a flaw in this little gem. A big, important chunk of the plot is driven by Wyett's illogical, mule-headed stubbornness and actions, which began when he found McAllister's body in his barn and tried to bury it. Something that is never satisfactory explained beyond that he lost his head when he found the body. What he did when he was paroled became convenient smokescreen for the murderer. Wyett acts as a plot-device to drive certain parts of the story and it stands out here, because everything else feels so natural. A second thing that kept nagging at me is Wyett continuously saying he was completely innocent when he didn't report a murder, destroyed the crime scene and tried to bury the body – three counts that, knowing Americans, probably adds up to a pretty stiff prison sentence. A small blemish on an otherwise excellent detective novel, but more of an annoyance than a serious drawback.

So, all in all, The Fox Valley Murders stands as a fascinating, well-written detective novel with a slightly unusual plot and beautifully evoked, pleasantly busy setting that brought the place alive in all its facets and complexities. Not everything is absolutely perfect, but, reading the book, you wouldn't think the genre's Golden Age had ended. You can expect one of my ramblings on The Pleasant Grove Murders and The Genesee Slough Murders before too long!