The White Lady (2020) by Paul Halter

Last year, John Pugmire's Locked Room International published a worldwide exclusive, La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019) by Paul Halter, which was released in Chinese, English and Japanese before it finally appeared in French – as well as marking his return to the novel-length locked room mystery. There was a five year gap between Le masque du vampire (The Mask of the Vampire, 2014) and The Gold Watch, but Halter is back and up to his old tricks again.

Le mystére de la Dame Blanche (translated as The White Lady, 2020) is Halter and Pugmire's second "worldwide exclusive in celebration of LRI's 10th anniversary year." What better way to celebrate that milestone that with a ghostly locked room mystery!

Halter uses the opening chapter to grab the reader, spin them around a few times and push them, slightly disoriented, straight into the story, which must have been done to prevent even the most experienced reader from immediately getting a foothold on the case – while not neglecting to drop a clue or two. So the readers gets a lot to digest in the first two chapters, but the gist is that Major John and Margot Peel are en route to Buckworth Manor. Margot has been summoned there by her sister, Ann Corsham, because their father, Sir Matthew Richards, unexpectedly married his private secretary, Vivian Marsh. Ann believes Vivian to be "a vulgar schemer" whose "plan is obvious to everyone" except their father. She wants Margot and John to come down to help "take the wool from over father's eye."

However, this family reunion doesn't breakdown in an outright civil war. On the contrary, the sisters slowly warmed to their much younger stepmother and the whole situation became kind of friendly, but then another woman entered the household. The White Lady! A ghost which has haunted Buckworth for centuries and she has uncanny knack to vanish, as if by magic, every time she's cornered.

One night, Sir Matthew wakes up, cold to the bone, turns on the light and sees the figure of a woman standing in the middle of the room. A woman dressed in a long, white cape and a white shawl over her head. She smiles, raised her hand and contemplated touching Sir Matthew, but shook her head and disappeared through the bedroom door with Sir Matthew on her heels – who followed her into a small study at the end of a corridor. Sir Matthew saw her open and shut the door behind her, but, when he went after, "the strange apparition had mysteriously vanished." There was no place, or room, in the study to hide (for long) and window was closed. And this was actually not the first appearance of the White Lady at Buckworth Manor.

In early summer, Sir Matthew's other son-in-law, Peter Corsham, was a approached in the park by the ghostly figure of a woman, "in all white," but she quickly turned around and saw her go straight through a six-feet high, wire fence "as if it didn't exist." So is the village haunted or is someone playing the ghost to frighten the people at the manor? The White Lady makes another appearance, but this time, she strikes away from the manor house. And she leaves a body behind!

Billy, Jack and Harry are ten-year-old boys and the village troublemakers who are arguing over their latest scheme when Billy tells Harry to go chew grass. So, in response, Harry tore some leaved twigs from a nearby bush, stuffed them in his mouth and started chewing, but they were twigs of hemlock. And when Harry begins to feel sick, the White Lady appears and touches him on the brow. Harry "staggered and dropped to the ground" as a terrified Jack and Billy "watched her slowly disappear into the darkness of the woods."

Inspector Richard Lewis is the Buckworth policeman charged with investigating the initial White Lady sightings and, when the child died, he contacted Scotland Yard, but Superintendent Frank Wedekind has too many cases on his plate and handed over this brainteaser to his old friend, Owen Burns – an aesthete who appreciates murder as a fine art. Burns tells his friend and Watson-like chronicler that they're up against "the most implacable enemy of all" against "whom one can do nothing." Burns acts as much as an enigma as the murderer and shows full mastery over "the art of uttering mystifying words" and keeping everyone else in the dark about "the fruit of his cogitations." He also shows a great deal of interest in the village recluse, Lethia Seagrave, who lives alone with her animals and earns money with fortune telling. But is she the White Lady? Neither the police or Burns seem to get to a speedy conclusion. All the while, the White Lady continues to terrorize Buckworth Manor like some demented Scooby Doo villain!

The Gold Watch

In one instance, the White Lady managed to disappear from a corridor when all the exists were under observation and this impossibilities comes with a floorplan, but an accumulation of impossible situations and inexplicable apparitions is a double-edged sword. Especially with Halter. On the one hand, it makes for an exciting and fun read, but delivering good, or original, solutions for multiple impossibilities usually proves to be a bridge too far. Halter's Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997) is a textbook example of biting off more than you can chew and The White Lady unfortunately is no exception.

Two of the miraculous vanishings have such disappointing solutions that you have to wonder why they were presented as locked rooms in the first place. One of them actually had a good reason to be underwhelming, but it would have been better if the White Lady in these two instances had simply disappeared behind a corner or tree, because as badly done impossible crimes, they kind of knocked down the whole story a peg or two – instead of enhancing the plot. These two poorly handled disappearances are a serious blotch on an otherwise well done and typical Halter detective novel.

Halter showed more ingenuity with the two murders and his presentation of the White Lady throughout the story. The seemingly accidental poisoning of Harry and the ghostly appearance was more in line with what readers expect from an impossible crime and the second death was not unjustly described by Burns as "a Machiavellian murder." A cruelly executed, nearly perfect, murder that the killer could have gotten away with had it not been for those meddling detectives. I compared the White Lady with a demented Scooby Doo villain, which is how she's presented and it worked for me. Halter didn't take the Hake Talbot route by loading the story with an eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere in which a phantom-like entity appears as easily as she disappears, but admits there's something strange and earthly about the ghost. A ghost who sometimes "traverses walls and wire fences without difficulty" but, at other times, "she opens doors and windows in her path." It drives home the idea that someone, somewhere, is playing a deep game. This is what makes it so disappointing that only one of the impossible crimes is up to scratch and the result is that The White Lady doesn't come anywhere near to matching its marvelous and ambitious predecessor, The Gold Watch.

So, on a whole, The White Lady was a good and fun read, but very much a mid-tier Halter novel in line with Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988), La mort vous invite (Death Invites You, 1988) and the previously mentioned The Seven Wonders of Crime. And that's disappointing coming right after a time-shattering detective novel with a plot covering an entire century! Honestly, I begin to believe Halter is actually better at handling and exploring wondrous themes than hammering out hard locked room-tricks. La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990), Le septième hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991), Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996), L'homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) and The Gold Watch are some of his best and most memorable novels, which don't lean heavily on their impossible crimes. Even when they're really good.

I can only recommend The White Lady to long-time Halter fans and advise readers who are new to his work to start somewhere else.

The Ebony Bed Murder (1932) by Rufus Gillmore

Previously, I reviewed "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) by Anthony Abbot, an often overlooked and forgotten member of the Van Dine-Queen School, which reminded me there's another obscure Van Dinean pupil languishing on the big pile, Rufus Gillmore – who wrote three detective novels in the early 1910s. After a gap of nearly two decades, The Ebony Bed Murder (1932) was published. Gillmore's fourth and last detective novel.

The Ebony Bed Murder is most definitely a Van Dinean detective novel with a certain Rufus Gillmore acting as a narrator and Watson figure to Griffin Scott, but, as pointed out elsewhere, Scott is not a social aristocrat. Scott is the owner and creative force behind an advertising agency who's on good terms with Detective Sergeant Mullens and D.A. Randolph Hutchinson. Why shouldn't they? Scott had began to apply his creative mind and imagination to detective work, which proved to be instrumental in saving Sergeant Mullens from "blundering badly on the Lopez case" and prevented the arrest of an innocent, shell-shocked man in the Cronk murder case. So, purely as a Van Dinean writer, I would place Gillmore alongside Clyde B. Clason and Kirke Mechem, but The Ebony Bed Murder has this curious, mediumboiled and pulpy edge to it.

Scott has a secretive, high-tech workshop with a library, a carpenter's bench, tool chests and a fully equipped chemical laboratory, which can be transformed into an office, study or laboratory by simply pulling a lever – electric juiced-wires move around the furniture. This recalls the high-tech, gadget studded "batcave" from Baynard Kendrick's Captain Duncan Maclain novels. There's also a lot of smart-alecky, tough guy talk and banter which some have likened to the dialogue from a 1930s gangster movie. So not entirely a typical example of the Van Dinean detective novel, but it certainly makes for an interesting take on that school.

The Ebony Bed Murder opens with Rufus Gillmore, a newspaper reporter, finally having tracked down Griffin Scott ("you've discovered my real name, haven't you?") to probe him for details on the Lopez case. But while he's playing chess with Scott, the news reaches them of "the suicide of a modern Cleopatra."

Helen Brill Kent came from a small Kentucky town, but the dazzling blonde became "a celebrity the world around" by marrying early and often. She had five ex-husbands and every divorce expanded either her wealth or social status, which made her eyes of the world a female Henry VIII or "the Cleopatra of today." Now she lying in her bedroom, shot through the mouth, but the supposed suicide is quickly proven to have been murder. And that's where the real trouble begins.

How could she have been shot through the mouth without seeing the revolver or showing any fear? Why had an apparently unimportant clue been stolen right after it was discovered and who knocked out Gillmore's light? More importantly, who pulled the trigger? They have a house full of suspects to pick from and they all look as suspicious as a magician playing poker. Jess Brill is Helen's tosh-talking father who's more interested in what his daughter leaves behind than who murdered her, which is a sentiment shared by his even more unlikable, rat-like son, Napoleon, who inherits everything under her will – father and son alibi each other. Ethel Cushing is Helen's surprisingly homely daughter and pretty much the complete opposite of her worldly mother. Mrs. Vroom was Helen's stage mother who learned her all the tricks of the trade and acted as her protector, but now her own daughter, Dorothy, has become the police's No. 1 suspect. And then there's the one truly innocent character of the household, Shah. A smoke Persian cat who glides through the story with "kingly hauteur" and, like a Haroun al Raschid, demanded through his orange eyes how much the humans "understood about what had happened here" and
what they "were going to do about it." Helen gave them all motives by kicking them all out of the house without a penny to their name.

There are also some other characters lurking in the background of the story. Such as the ex husbands, a son who was sold back to his father for half a million dollars and a potentially six husband discreetly waiting in the wings.

So there's more than enough to keep the plot going and Gillmore makes good use in moving all the characters around the crime scene, before, during and after the murder, which quickly results in a second murder with a truly unexpected victim. And this second murder is as hardboiled as the story gets. Very Dashiell Hammett! But does the book stack up as a proper, fair play detective novel? Well, yes and no, but firstly I've to clear up The Ebony Bed Murder status as a locked room mystery.

Robert Adey listed The Ebony Bed Murder in Locked Room Murders (1991), but the murder is never presented or treated as an impossible crime, because there were six keys to her bedroom in circulation and the window was standing open – although it's quickly eliminated that the bullet came through the window. You either have to wait until the solution, or figure it before then, to understand how it can be construed as a locked room mystery. But you have to be a little generous to go along with it. So don't read it just as an impossible crime novel.

Unfortunately, the ending is where The Ebony Bed Murder is at its weakest with the murderer's identity only coming as a kind of surprise because the interesting, much deeper, motive was insufficiently clued. A seasoned mystery reader will cast suspicious glances at this character on principle, but it's hard to pin an exact motive on this person. However, the less-than-perfect ending wasn't enough to sink the whole novel. The Ebony Bed Murder is a bit stiff and mechanical in its storytelling and plotting, betraying the writer came from an earlier era, but appreciated the good and sometimes solid detective work, which include some good, but hastily brushed away, false solutions (more like suggestions). Scott also has to lock horns with Mullens and Hutchinson and engage in a spirited test-of-wills with a particular stubborn suspect, which was preceded by the use of mustard-and tear gas and an thriller-ish encounter in Scott's private batcave (making the story a little pulpier).

So my time with Gillmore's The Ebony Bed Murder was more or less the same as with the previous two detective novels I've read: a good, easy to read and a mostly well told detective story with striking characters and sometimes interesting ideas, but marred and weakened by an uninspired, weakly clued solution. Only recommended, if you have nothing else on your to-be-read pile.

Well, I'll try to pick something really good for the next one. I still have that new Paul Halter novel lying around or could return to Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D.

Forever Hold Your Peace: "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) by Anthony Abbot

Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, critic, editor and writer, who's best known for his bestselling book The Greatest Story Ever Told (1949), but, as "Anthony Abbot," he produced a short-lived, now obscure, series of detective novels and short stories – which were firmly rooted in the traditions of the Van Dine-Queen School of Mystery Fiction. There is, however, one notable difference: Abbot's series-character is not a dilettante detective, like Philo Vance or Spike Tracy, but a sharply dressed New York police commissioner, Thatcher Colt.

Anthony Abbot has been rightly praised as "one of the most important of the "little known" mystery writers" whose novels are distinguished by "a wonderful plot complexity" and a good hand at misdirection, but they have been out-of-print for decades. And there are no apparent plans to reprint the series anytime soon.

Luckily, Alexander, of the Writer's Desk blog, provided me with one of his short stories that was listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

"About the Disappearance of Agatha King" was originally published in the June, 1932, issue of Cosmopolitan and reprinted years later in The Mystery Book (1939), but has since vanished from sight, which is a shame, because Abbot came up with a new solution to Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" – collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). Some would even argue Abbot improved on the original idea by adding an impossible disappearance to the mix. ;)

Reggie Wallis is "the patron saint" of the New York nightclub scene and “some day soon he would come into two ancestral fortunes,” but, when the story opens, he's about to marry the blond and beautiful Agatha King. A match that greatly pleases her ward, General King, because the marriage is his "pawn ticket to redeem the family fortune." But a day before the wedding, Reggie is sitting in Thatcher Colt's office to ask for police protection.

Once upon a time, Agatha was deeply in love with an old friend of Reggie, Jim Dwight, but old General King naturally disapproved and trouble began, which ended in them splitting up and him moving away. Unfortunately, trouble kept dogging Jim's footsteps and was sentenced to ten years in chains after intervening in the beating of a black man in the deep South. So he asked Reggie to tell everyone at home that he was dead and that's where things would have remained, but Reggie wrote him that he was going to marry Agatha and Jim wrote back that he would murder him, Agatha and the whole damn world – promising he would "smash the universe that had smashed him." Reggie becomes nervous when he learns Jim had broken out of prison.

Thatcher Colt immediately removed Agatha from her home and places her in a hotel, registered under an alias, where "every corridor was manned with sentries." Not a single fire escape, air shaft or exit was left unobserved. Somehow, Agatha King vanished without a trace from a locked and closely guarded suite of rooms!

Admittedly, the locked room-trick is nothing special and the story should not be read solely as an impossible crime, but what makes "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" a fantastic detective story is the splendid and detailed clueing of the who-and why – punctuated by a very well done and satisfying ending. A fine and glittering example of the short Golden Age detective story more than deserving to be reprinted. It would be a perfect story for that hypothetical, American-themed British Library Crime Classics anthology, Bloody Colonials.

Swing Low, Swing Death (1946) by R.T. Campbell

Ruthven Campbell Todd was a Scottish-born artist, critic and poet who wrote eight lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek detective novels in the mid-1940s, published as by "R.T. Campbell," which mostly star his botanist and amateur meddler, Professor John Stubbs – a character who was obviously modeled on John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. These amusing takes on the detective story seemed to be well on their way to being forgotten, until Dover Publications started reprinting the series in 2018.

I've already read and reviewed Unholy Dying (1945) and Death for Madame (1946), which left me with Swing Low, Swing Death (1946), but the book turned out to be, for better and worse, the weirdest, most unorthodox, of the lot. Now, before I can get to the good stuff, I need to talk about the bad first.

Firstly, there's a continuity issue that really bugged me. Peter Main wrote an introduction for the new Dover editions and provided a list of all published Professor Stubbs novels "in the order they were presumably written," based "on references that appear within them to previously occurring events," but Swing Low, Swing Death is listed last and introduces a character, Ben Carr, who had a prominent role in a previous novel – namely Death for Madame. So it can't have been a very close examination of the series, because this continuity error stands out the moment his name is mentioned. There's another character, Douglas Newsome, who previously appeared in The Death Cap (1946), which has its solution (name of murderer + method) spoiled on the third page "Part 2-Chapter 1: The Joy of Return." So the reader has been warned!

Sure, these are very minor issues, smudges really, which should not negatively affect the overall story, or plot, but that's where the biggest problem of the book rears its ugly snout: Swing Low, Swing Death is not a detective novel.

Technically speaking, Swing Low, Swing Death qualifies as a detective novel, but it really is a satire on modern art cloaked in the feathers of a detective story. There's a body, a murderer, a closed circle of suspects and a detective with his Dr. Watson in tow, but there are barely any clues to mull over and the murderer stands out like a jarring piece of modern architecture. And the body doesn't make a public appearance until the second half of the story. Something that will grate and test the patience of readers who detest long buildups to the murder.

So what happens until the murder finally happens? Campbell shows the reader the preparations for the opening of Miss Emily Wallenstein's Museum of Modern Art and takes the piss out of the whole situation and the characters. You would almost get the impression he hated modern art and its puffy champions.

Miss Wallenstein is a millionaire's daughter with "a penchant for all that was modern" and surrounded herself with all kinds of modern monstrosities, such as fur-lined teacups, colored tubes of sand and pieces of junk, but she's about to open Pandora's Box on the unsuspecting populace of London with her Museum of Modern Art – first of its kind in London. She's advised by a pompous art-critic and "fashionable arbiter of taste," Cornelius Bellamy, who believes that his books are "the absolute essentials to anything in the way of an understanding of, say, a Miró, a Klee, or a Picasso." Bellamy latest discovery is Ben Carr, now an interior decorator, who festoons walls with disregarded rubbish. Carr himself "could not quite understand how he had become an interior decorator," but, if people wanted to pay him to cover their walls with rubbish, "he saw no reason why he should not humour them in their fancy." A job's a job. Douglas Newsome is a quasi-alcoholic poet who, somehow, became the gloomy librarian of the museum and tries to complete a catalog before the opening. The cast is rounded out by a gallery owner, Julian Ambleside, and an art expert, Francis Varley.

So, while they prepare a "brutal and forthright" exhibition with the sole aim to leave the visitors "insulted and outraged" and "to commit a mental rape upon their virgin security," the authenticity of a Chirico painting is questioned. A file is taken from the library archive, photographs disappear and a painting is slashed to ribbons, which culminates on opening night when the unveiling of a painting reveals a body dangling from a picture hook. This is the point where Chief Inspector Bishop, Professor John Stubbs and his long-suffering chronicler, Max Boyle, enter the picture. But don't expect much in the way of an actual detective story.

I suspect Campbell probably would have preferred continuing his satire of the modern art scene as his heart just wasn't in it during the second act. There a few bright spots. Such as Ben Carr's centenarian, gin-soaked mother and her "crazy logic," a cameo by Ruthven Todd and the final confrontation with murderer on the rooftop of the museum, but nothing more than that. Professor Stubbs was not as lively, or disruptive, as in previous novels and Boyle futilely hacked up his familiar lines ("I want a quiet life with nothing going faster than the germination of a seed"). The only real clue is a slip-of-the-tongue that could have had a perfectly normal explanation, which Bishop pointed out in the last chapter. Not that you needed that clue to spot the murderer, but it's all a little disappointing coming after Unholy Dying and Death for Madame. Luckily, I still have Take Thee a Sharp Knife (1946) and Adventure with a Goat (1946) to look forward to.

So, purely as a detective novel, I can't recommend Swing Low, Swing Death unless you're a fan of the series, British comedy or hate modern art. And, in the last case, you don't have to read the second act.

The Marloe Mansions Murder (1928) by Adam Gordon Macleod

Adam Gordon Macleod is one of those thoroughly forgotten mystery novelists, who's so obscure that the Golden Age of Detection Wiki doesn't even list his name, but five minutes of playing internet detective revealed that he was an engineer and a World War I veteran – who passed away in 1945 aged 62 (dates check out). During the 1920s and '30s, Macleod signed his name to (at least) four detective novel and one of them is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). You're surprised, I know.

The Marloe Mansions Murder (1928) was reprinted as a two-part serial in the March 14 and 21, 1936, issues of The Thriller under the titles "The Marloe Mansion Murder" and "The Murderer of Mr. Slyne." And that was the last time the story appeared in print until Black Heath reissued it as an ebook in 2017. Nearly 90 years later!

The Marloe Mansions Murder seems to be the first novel starring Sir William Burrill, late of the Yard, who was the younger son of a younger son with far-off expectations of an inheritance, but unexpectedly succeeded to baronetcy. So he retired holding the rank Detective Superintendent and retreated to the family seat, Scawdel Hall, where he dedicates his time to fishing, shooting, stamp collection, writing a standard work on criminology and maintaining "a full-bodied beard," which had been "born and nursed to maturity during the long watches of 1914-1918" – while mine-sweeping in the North Sea. Sir William is accompanied in The Marloe Mansions Murders by his fair, blue eyed and clean shaven nephew, Robert "Bobby" Burrill, who wears a patch over his right eye. A souvenir from "a very gallant performance some years ago by one Temporary Second-Lieutenant R. Burrill." The ghosts of the First World War lurk in the dark and shadowy corners of the story.

Sir Burrill enters the story not as a detective, but as a stamp collector who goes to Marloe Mansions, London, to see Ganthony Slyne (a villainous name, if there ever was one) on some rare postage stamps. But when they arrive, the elevator door opened to reveal the huddled and bloodied remains of Slyne!

They immediately notify Scotland Yard and Inspector Ellershaw is dispatched to Marloe Mansions, but when they go to investigate the victim's apartment, plunged in darkness, Ellershaw "vanished as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed him." The hall door had been locked behind them and all the windows were securely fastened on the inside, which makes his disappearance next to impossible without him being hidden somewhere. Ellershaw is nowhere to be found... until his body turns up in an unlikely place somewhere else in the building.

So the investigation, and style, of the story is split in two parts: Bobby is chasing the mystery woman of the story, Miss Sheelagh Vaile, who was seen leaving the building right after the body was discovered and Bobby is determined to clear her of every ounce of suspicion – which is easier said than done because Miss Vaile believes she killed Slyne. This is mostly done behind the backs of Sir William and Inspector Brett. Bobby's share of the story is, for the most part, a typical and mild thriller of the period with the only jarring note being Bobby threatening to torture information from a suspect using a red hot poker. You rarely come across such scenes in a traditional detective and, despite its thriller-ish trappings, The Marloe Mansions Murder is very much a traditional detective story.

Sir William stays behind with Inspector Brett to continue the investigation and he does some surprising scientific detective work. Such as determining whether a tiny hole in one of the window panes was drilled from the outside or the inside and there was a clever piece of trick photography, which felt a little out of place, or time, but special effects are almost as old as photography itself. So it feels out of place/time because it's not very often used in these vintage mysteries. A second point in favor of the plot is the locked room-trick, which is crude and clunky by Golden Age standards, but not as crude and clunky as a secret passage or "one of those fantastic doors of fiction" with hinged and movable frames. The locked room idea is much better than that and somewhat ahead of its time, because it would be another 70-80 years until two locked room artisans used this idea to its full potential.

I don't want to overpraise The Marloe Mansions Murder too much, because it's a very minor detective novel and, on a whole, the book is nothing more than an amusing curiosity, but it gives you the idea its better than it really is. The opening chapters braced the reader for a lurid, badly dated thriller with detective interruptions and half-expected, based on a bloody print of a mutilated hand, the murderer to be a disfigured WWI veteran who Slyne had hidden away from the world and it would place a line from the prologue ("Am I so repellent?") in a very different light – only it turned out to be a detective novel with a few thriller-ish interruptions. I don't think the eventual solution will blow anyone away and it's not particularly well clued, but those final lines were genuinely sad and tragic.

So, yeah, The Marloe Mansions Murder is an old-fashioned and uneven, but interesting, curiosity from the 1920s that is perhaps best read as a transitional mystery novel with some good and fresh ideas and two detective characters who stand out. But it was mostly handled and presented as a crude turn-of-the-century dime novel, which will never make it anymore than that. Nonetheless, I might still try one of his two 1930s novels, The Case of Matthew Crake (1932) and Death Stalked the Fells (1937).

A note for the curious: a plot linking a harmless hobby, like stamp collecting, to the horrors of the First World War is unusual, but it was done successfully in Harriette Ashbrook's A Most Immoral Murder (1935).

Handle with Care (1948) by A.R. Brent

Alfred Rodrigues-Brent was a Dutch-Portuguese journalist, a World War II resistance fighter and, like Rex Stout, a World Federalist who wrote a detective novel and at least two short stories, "De dame in the rij" ("The Lady in the Queue") and "Moord in den morgen" ("Murder in the Morning") – published in the nondescript Detective Magazine. An obscure, short-lived publication from the late 1940s, but have been unable to locate these short stories anywhere. Fortunately, it was a lot easier to obtain an affordable copy of Brent's sole detective novel.

Voorzichtig behandelen (Handle with Care, 1948) is, as far as I can tell, the only recorded case of Chief Inspector Albert Joosten, of the Rijksrecherche (National Department of Criminal Investigation), who resembles "a well-fed baker" with a huge blind spot for official procedure and red tape. Joosten has a very personal and unorthodox methods that had raised some eyebrows in the higher echelons of the Dutch police apparatus, but even his superiors couldn't deny that, every now and then, his methods "produced brilliant results." So why get rid of a difficult, but excellent, police detective when you can simply add a little correction. A correction that came in the guise of an ambitious and promising young policeman, Inspector Sterck, but there's no animosity, or rivalry, between Joosten and Sterck. And when the story opens, Joosten admitted to the reader he had already succeeded in winning over the young inspector and, more or less, "bend him to his will."

Handle with Care begins with two longshoremen loading cargo from a ship onto a rail car when one of them notices a crate, marked "VOORZICHTIG BEHANDELEN," with three bullet holes in it.

Chief Inspector Joosten personally comes down to the docks to oversee the opening of the crate and discover the body of a woman, wrapped in a piece of tarp, who had cracked her skull in "the way an eggshell is smashed with a spoon" and she been dead for some time – somewhere between eight and fourteen days. So what about the bullet holes and, more importantly, who was the victim? What follows are excerpts from the autopsy report, chemical analyzes and answers to request for information from all over Europe, but much more amusing was Sterck's short excursion to France.

The crate had been shipped from Cannes, France, where Sterck's northern frame of mind and logic struggled with the southern logic of the French police. They were entrenched in their opinion that Sterck's "countrymen had abused French hospitality to settle their disputes on French soil" and "the possibility that any French citizens were involved was rejected out of hand." And this is why not being French is the foundation stone of Dutch and British identity.

Anyway, the body remained unidentified and, without any further leads, the case is temporarily shelved until new information or clues come to light.

So with an opening, like that, I expected this longer than usual detective novel to be Brent's take on Freeman Wills Crofts' massive debut novel, The Cask (1920), but the second part of the story was not, what you would call, a typical humdrum affair and strongly reminded me of a certain French mystery novel – namely Gaston Boca's Les invités de minuit (The Seventh Guest, 1935). The crate, one of many, came from the French villa of the elderly Otto van Everdingen and contained his household effects that were shipped to villa in the Netherlands. Van Everdingen had planned to permanently move back to his home country, but died before he could and now his relatives have gathered at his Dutch villa to divide the inheritance. They represent branches of two different families, Van Everdingen and Harms van Beuningen, who were tied by two or three marriages. Admittedly, the family ties can be a little confusing at times, especially in the beginning, which is not helped by a mistake in the family tree on the first page. According to the family tree, Frits remarried Marie's second husband, Gerard Voortman, which would have been a good fifty years ahead of its time. So my advise is to just read the story to get a handle on who's who.

When the family patriarch passed away, "the monarchy changed into a family republic" and that would have been difficult enough without a string of bizarre, inexplicable and ghostly incidents happening at the villa. A piece of paper appears in the middle of a room with "I wish to know where I stand, tonight. I will not be mocked" written on it, while other letters disappear as easily as they reappear. Strange laughter is heard and suitcases are searched. There are only two possible explanations: either one of them is searching for something or someone has gained access to the village and is creeping around them like "some kind of invisible man." Sadly, the closest Brent came to including a full-fledged impossibility is when the intruder was spotted in a hallway and vanished, but this situation is almost immediately explained. And hardly qualifies as an impossible crime.

Joosten reenters the picture when, in the middle of the night, a painting is torn off the wall and burned, which could have set the whole house on fire, but he struggles with the plethora of incidents and mysteries facing him – which reaches it boiling point when one of them is nearly beaten to death. On the up side, these incidents finally revealed to him the identity of the dead woman in the crate and how her murder is tied to the people in the house... and the unseen prowler. This is also the point where the strength and weaknesses of the story became apparent.

So let's begin with the good: the plot comprised of many loose and moving parts, often operating independently, which could have easily resulted in an absolute mess, but Brent remained in full control and provided logical and rational answers to every single plot-thread. Some of the answers were very clever indeed. Such as why Otto Jr. gave Winnifred Smit the cold shoulder when they were reunited at the villa or why there were bullet holes in the crate, which was preceded by a false solution to the problem. The murderer was skillfully hidden and, while I spotted this character, it's the kind of revelation you hope to find in a vintage detective novel. Even if you anticipate it with a quarter, or so, of the story left to go.

On the downside, Handle with Care missed the polish of a more experienced mystery writer and the last leg of the story, in particular, was entirely absorbed by tying up all the loose ends, false solutions and eliminating suspects. Somewhat of a recommendation to Ellery Queen loyalists, but it can become tedious and the dated, old-fashioned writing style slackened my reading pace, which sometimes made it feel like those last dozen chapters never ended – taking some shine of an otherwise excellent detective novel. Another drawback diminishing, what should have been, a grand revelation is the patchwork nature of the plot. A plot driven by misunderstood actions and incidents. A shrewd use of a series of misunderstandings and incidents, but you expect something much grander from the premise. I can't help but wonder what the plot could have been in the hands of an expert plotter and master stylist (like John Dickson Carr).

Nevertheless, Brent spins a great deal of complexity around an ultimately simple situation and its always a pleasure to come across an authentic Golden Age detective novel written in my own language. Regardless of some of its shortcomings, Handle with Care is one of half-a-dozen Dutch detective novels I unhesitatingly recommend as a candidate to be translated. Most of its (stylistic) flaws can easily be ironed out in a modern translation. So, yeah, recommended with some very minor reservations.

A note for curious: if you're curious about my other recommendations... M.P.O. Books' De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011) is one of the best Dutch whodunits with one of the all-time greatest clue that you either immediately spot or miss completely. Books also wrote two excellent locked room mysteries, Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) and De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019; published as by Anne van Doorn). Cor Docter wrote three pure detective novels in the early 1970s that were structured as a whodunit, a locked room mystery and a dying message. Droeve poedel in Delfshaven (Sad Poodle in Delfshaven, 1970) is a superb whodunit, but can't remember why I changed the title to Melancholic Poodle in Delfshaven in 2012. I suppose “sad” didn't really fit the story. Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) gives the reader an entirely new locked room situation with an original solution that I've seen before or since again. Rein geheim op rijksweg 13 (Pure Secrecy on Highway 13, 1971) is a solid ending to the Commissioner Vissering trilogy. Eugenius Quak's Gruwelijk is het huwelijk (Marriage is gruesome, 2017) would be a challenge to translate, but a pleasantly weird blend of the modern (style) and classic (plot) detective story. Ted O'Sickens' De man die 'n paar maal vermoord was (The Man Who Had Been Murdered a Few Times, 1942) is very minor, but spirited, detective story with a literary relative of Dr. Gideon Fell playing the role of Great Detective. I also give my vote to (new) translations for Bertus Aafjes and A.C. Baantjer.

Dessert with Bullets (1954) by W.H. van Eemlandt

Willem Hendrik Haasse was a civil servant in the Dutch East Indies and spend the duration of the Second World War interned in a Japanese prison camp, but, after the occupation ended, briefly returned to his old position – until ill health forced him to return to the Netherlands. Haasse retired in 1950 and began to write detective novels in the Anglo-American tradition at the age of 64! And he produced them at a prodigious rate.

Under the penname of "W.H. van Eemlandt," Haasse penned no less than a dozen detective novels during a three year period, between 1953 and 1955. Four more novels were published posthumously with the last two based on unfinished manuscripts that were completed by Hella Haasse and Joop van den Broek. Hella Haasse was his daughter an an accomplished novelist in her own right, which is why her father adopted a pseudonym. Van den Broek was the author of the first Dutch hardboiled thriller, Parels voor Nadra (Pearls for Nadra, 1953).

I've been aware of Van Eemlandt's Commissioner Arend van Houthem series for years, but, somehow, he never made it to my to-be-read pile until I recently coming across two comments describing Kogels bij het dessert (Dessert with Bullets, 1954) as a variation on the locked room mystery on par with Carter Dickson – which is enough to catch my full attention. A second and closer scrutiny of Van Eemlandt revealed that he was quite an traditionalist, old-school mystery novelist who appeared to have been the Dutch S.S. van Dine or Ellery Queen. But now that I've read Dessert with Bullets, I can only group him with the members of the much maligned British "humdrum" school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. Dessert with Bullets particularly reminded me of Victor MacClure's Death Behind the Door (1933) and Raymond Robins' Murder at Bayside (1933). So let's take a look at the plot.

Commissioner Van Houthem, of the Amsterdam police, is invited to a homely dinner with his wife at the home of a respected notary, Mr. Arnold Baerling, who wanted to add the Commissioner of Police to his already interesting list of dinner guests.

Eduard Després is a world traveler, financial speculator and an old friend of Baerling, who's in the country for a few days, which netted him an invitation to the dinner, but he brought along his latest girlfriend, Madame Zadova – who works as a commercial artist in Paris. Evert van Hooghveldt is a young lawyer and a criminology student who's engaged to Baerling's niece, Betty Gertling. Bert Verdoorn is "the writer of extremely exciting detective novels" and is accompanied to the dinner by his wife. Baerling assures Van Houthem they're all good company to spent an evening with, but the conversation during the dinner party quickly goes to murder. And the difference between theory and practice.

Van Houthem guarantees the table that even "the cleverest writer of detective novels" would find himself neck deep in trouble "when we confront him with reality," because the moment the police arrives on the scene, "the facts are immutably fixed." The image that the investigator sees is real, "even if that reality seems to contain deceptive suggestions." The murderer, unlike a mystery writer, can't go back to alter the facts, or change what he has said, once murder has been done. It's those facts, jumbled as they may be, that will be "scrutinized, disentangled, analyzed and cross referenced with other clues" until "every fiber of the intricate pattern has been examined." So an amateur murderer stands no chance against such an experienced, well-oiled machine as the police, which is an opinion that will be seriously tested that same evening.

After dinner, the table was cleared for coffee and sweets (dessert) and Després offered to get a box of cigars from Baerling's private office, but, as the coffee is poured, two gunshots are heard followed a more muffled noise – as if somewhere a door was slammed shut. Van Houthem needs 10 seconds to get to the office where he finds Després body with two very neat bullet wounds in his forehead and the balcony door had been forced open. So, on first sight, it appears as if Després surprised a burglar who was taking a crack at the office safe, but this hypothesis collapsed when all of the known facts are considered. And what emerges is somewhat of an impossible crime.

Firstly, the balcony door had been forced when it was unlocked and the murderer didn't have enough time, between firing the shots and Van Houthem's arrival, to collect the shell casings and disappear, which is only 10-15 seconds. Secondly, the shots, according to medical examiner, "had been fired with near supernatural precision" and that murderer must have had "a perfectly steady hand," because the shots were aimed at exactly the same point. Only reason why there were two bullet holes, instead of one with two bullets, is that Després was walking when he was shot.

Van Eemlandt once said that "I expect intelligence from my readers" and he respected it here by acknowledging the machine-like nature of the shooting, but the possible presence of a deadly gadget only makes the murder even more of possibility. Such a device would have needed to be mounted onto something, which should have visible left traces, but none were found. What happened to it right after the shooting, because the murderer had no opportunity to dispose of it. Nearly everyone was alibied by Van Houthem with exception of Verdoorn, who was on the toilet with indigestion, but he could only have gotten rid of the gun, or a device, by eating it or flushing it – neither of which is the case. So here we have a murder in an unlocked room that time and opportunity turned into a tightly sealed room.

Van Houthem's investigation runs along two different tracks: working out the exact circumstances of the shooting and sorting out the sordid past of the villainous victim, which furnishes the plot with a classic motive. This is done in the slow, methodical pace of the humdrum school in which every inch and possibility of the case is closely examined and tested. I know the humdrum school is not popular with everyone (Hi, Kate), but, if you're more interested in the intellectual machinations of the detective rather than his private life, or personal music taste, you'll enjoy being able to observe the inner-workings of Van Houthem's mind as he struggles with the problem. A 220-page mental catch-as-catch-can wrestling match between common sense and the lying truth.

Interestingly, the first and second chapter immediately suggest an obvious solution, but a solution that makes no sense on account of the apparent randomness of the shooting. For example, the murderer couldn't possibly have known it would be Després who went into the office to get the cigars, but who would want to kill Baerling? So the lion's share of the investigation is done in clearing up this picture and the effect was very pleasing with the highlight being the answer why the room had to be physically unlocked. Van Houthem acknowledged that the murder could have been presented as a classic locked room scenario with all the doors and windows locked on the inside, but there was a very sound reason why the murderer didn't do this.

So, yes, the murderer is obvious from the beginning with the plot hinging on getting a clear picture of what exactly happened, why it happened, and how to prove it. You'll find the same approach in MacClure, Rhode and Robins.

But even with the murderer standing out, I half-suspected the mystery writer, Verdoorn, who could have used a homemade, double-barreled, revolver (no shell casings) that he disassembled on the toilet and disguised the loose parts as "pocket litter" – such as pens, a lighter, matchbox, etc. Some of the small parts could even be mixed with the coins in his wallet. The actual locked room-trick, of the unlocked room, is perhaps a little contentious in nature. Van Eemlandt didn't cheat and fairly clued the solution, but, stylistically, I can see why some readers might feel cheated and cry foul. And other readers simply don't like this type of locked room-trick.

Either way, I personally liked Dessert with Bullets as an original, but tricky, take on both the locked room mystery and the British humdrum school, which makes it all the better that it was penned by a Dutchman. I can't help but feel proud whenever I come across a Dutch detective novel that can stand with its American-Anglo counterparts. So you can expect Van Eemlandt to make a return to this blog sometime in the near future. I already have Moord met muziek (Murder with Music, 1954) on the big pile and have my eyes on Arabeske in purper (Arabesque in purple, 1953), Dood in schemer (Death at Dusk, 1954), Zwarte kunst (Black Art, 1955) and Duister duel (Dark Duel, 1955).