Checkmate to Murder (1944) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Rivett was a British detective novelist who wrote more than 70 mysteries under two different pseudonyms, "Carol Carnac" and "E.C.R. Lorac," which can best be categorized as John Rhode-like "humdrum" novels reminiscent of Ngaio Marsh, but my limited experience with Lorac has been spotty – mostly pedestrian and forgettable. So why pick such an uneven, second-string writer on the heels of several underwhelming detective novels?

British Library Crime Classics has reissued seven of her novels over the past two, or three, years and their latest reprint, Checkmate to Murder (1944), sounded too good to ignore. I'm glad to report it's the best Lorac I've read so far.

This brand new edition is subtitled "A Second World War Mystery" and Martin Edwards wrote in his introduction that the book is a fascinating account of "a domestic crime committed at a time of national crisis." Lorac certainly exploited the blacked-out London setting backdrop better here than in Murder by Matchlight (1945) and more memorable than the depiction of post-war Britain in Fire in the Thatch (1946), which are two of her best known mysteries. But barely remember either. Something that's less likely to happen with Checkmate to Murder.

Checkmate to Murder largely takes place in, and around, the large, grimy and beetle-infested Hampstead studio of a little-known painter, Bruce Manaton, who shares the place with his fastidious and artistic sister, Rosanne – who had been badly hit by the war. And now they were constantly swinging back and forth between being broke and absolutely broke. Story opens on a cold, foggy winter evening in January and five people were gathered in that grimy, dimly lit studio. An obscure actor, André Delaunier, who sits on a model's platform garbed in a scarlet robe and a broad-rimmed Cardinal's hat. Opposite the sitter, Manaton is furiously attacking a canvas with a piece of charcoal and occasionally utterers orders at Delaunier ("Chin up, chin up—to the right a little"). On the other end of the studio, two men were playing an absorbing game of chess under a single light bulb. Robert Cavenish is an elderly, highly respected Civil Servant and the younger Ian Mackellon is "a first-class chemist" in government employ. Rosanne is preparing supper in the kitchen and occasionally pops her head around the door.

A quiet, peaceful evening in Bohemian squalor rudely disturbed when a Special Constable bursts into the studio with a limping Canadian soldier in tow. Neil Folliner is the grand-nephew of the Manaton's misery landlord, Albert Folliner, who's "a nasty old skinflint" and was either as poor as a church mouse or hoarded money.

Albert Folliner lived alone in a largely empty house, using his bedroom as a living room, which is where his grand-nephew found his body with a bullet in his head. An empty cash-box and pistol lay on the floor. Only a few seconds after discovering the body, a Special Constable enters the bedroom and chases the soldier who he saw making a bee-line to the studio "as though for a deliberate reason." So the situation looks very dire for the young soldier, but Detective Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald takes nothing for granted.

Macdonald is not the most distinguished, or colorful, of the Golden Age inspectors, but always thought their quietly competent, purely professional and dogged police work should be seen as a payoff for the lack of a personality, eccentricities or (God forbid) a private life – ensuring there are no outside distractions. Macdonald focus here is entirely on the case as he reduces the number of suspects to half-a-dozen, inquires into the previous tenants of the studio and asks what role the Special Constable had to play in the murder or why he looked so frightened. All the while, the grimness of the war hangs heavily over the story like a dark black-out curtain!

The introduction notes Checkmate to Murder takes place during "a period of British history when blackouts, fire-watching, and air raid precautions were an everyday fact of life" and "black-out regulations were a nightmare" to Rosanne, but her brother was always forgetting them and "the probability of being fined always hung over their heads." She unwittingly robbed herself of an alibi when she went outside to inspect the black-out curtains, but the whole district is dotted with derelict, or bombed-out, buildings awaiting demolition and it's mentioned that a lot of capital is tied-up in it now that the war has brought everything to a grinding halt. So this gives everyone a one-size fits-all motive to shoot the old man, because they all could use a bit of money. Lorac also showed how the war impacted people in much smaller ways. Such as how Rosanne had treasured, "like fine gold," some China tea against an emergency for months and a colleague of Macdonald had to feed a hungry witness.

There are, however, some smudges on the plot that held it back a little. Firstly, it's not difficult to figure out who did it and how. Secondly, the problem of the cast-iron alibis is acknowledged, but never explored, or discussed, as usually the case with alibi-breakers (see Christopher Bush) and can understand why Lorac danced around this issue – because a discussion would have lead to an obvious question. A question that would have given the whole game away. So if you can figure what question to ask and answer it, you'll have no problem identifying the murderer. Lastly, Lorac demonstrated her status as a second-stringer by giving the motive a personal dimension. An unnecessary, last-minute addition that actually cheapened the solution. Checkmate to Murder had worked towards the solution by showing how hard life had become during the war, "what with taxation and cost of living," which made the cash-box a perfectly acceptable motive. And fitted the overall theme of the story. So no idea why Lorac decided to add an ulterior layer to the motive.

Nevertheless, Checkmate to Murder is mostly a solid, well written and competently plotted detective novel with some finely drawn characters, an excellently realized backdrop and some good ideas (like the alibi-trick). Not everything is perfectly executed, but it's her best novel to date and comparable to some of Marsh's better efforts, e.g. Death in a White Tie (1938) and Overture to Death (1939). So recommended to readers who previously didn't have much luck with Lorac or with a special interest World War II period British mystery novels.

Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death (2020) by P. Dieudonné

P. Dieudonné's Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020) is the third novel in the series of Rotterdam politieromans (police novels) about Inspector Lucien de Klerck and his assistant, Ruben Klaver, but this time, Dieudonné breaks the mold of the Amsterdam School of the Dutch police novel – popularized by the late A.C. Baantjer. Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death is a traditional-styled detective novel, updated to the 21st century, with not one, not two, but three impossible disappearances! These impossibilities are something else compared to your garden variety no-footprints situation or a homely locked room murder.

The story begins with a cleaning lady finding the body of her employer, Romano Pasqualini, lying in the front room on the first floor of his home, in Delfshaven, with the back of his head resembling "a mushy mess of blood and hair." An important detail ensuring the reader there was a man in that room who was as dead as a doornail. She immediately alerted the police and posted herself at the front door until they arrived.

A short time later, De Klerck is cycling to work when he notices the squad car and stops to offer his assistance to the two policemen, but what greets him on the first floor landing is "a suffocating smoke" coming through the cracks of the door – inside the room a fire was spreading rapidly. But what he didn't see was a body! When the firefighters had done their work, they discover that the windows were locked from the inside with exception of a small skylight that's "too small to squeeze through" and "virtually inaccessible." Nobody could have escaped through the front door with either the cleaning lady or the police standing there. So how did the body vanish with the same question applying to the person who made it disappear and attempted to torch the place?

De Klerck and Klaver have their work cut out for them and the disappearance of Romano Pasqualini's body is not the only complication in this uncertain, elusive murder case. Romano was 25-years-old and lived in an expensive, 17th century house, but made a living delivering pizzas and his prospective father-in-law is not exactly thrilled that he was seeing his daughter. Apparently not without reason.

De Klerck is approached by private detective, Fred Kroon, who working on behalf of an insurance company to track down a tightly organized gang specialized in jewel robberies and spectacular, seemingly impossible, escaped. One such occasion saw the police in hot pursuit of two gang members on a motorcycle, two police cars on their tail and a third meeting them head on, but, somewhere mid-way, they simply vanished into thin air – as the three police cars passed each other. There's a slope on both sides, overgrown with trees, with fences behind it. So it was not possible to disappear from that stretch of road. And yet... they did. A trick repeated later on in the story when a dare devil races through the city, performing dangerous stunts and leading the police on a merry-go-round, which seems to come to an end when he drives into a tunnel cordoned off by the police. Just like that, the motor cyclist disappears again and magically reappears some distance behind the police cordon, which is captured by security cameras inside the tunnel and witnessed by a police helicopter pilot in the sky!

This is why Kroon suspects Damiano Pasqualini and his young brother, Romano, play a key role in the gang, because Romano has a YouTube channel on which he uploaded videos of himself performing very risky, death defying motorcycle stunts – radiating with pride and sheer joy. Romano's dead. So he couldn't have been the one who raised hell in the city and used as a sealed tunnel as a portal to reappear behind the police cordon. I expect to find this kind of stuff in Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series (e.g. vol. 61) or the work of Soji Shimada (e.g. "The Running Dead," 1985), but not in, what has been up to this point, a typically Dutch series of police novels. However, I'm not against this becoming the new norm.

Coming across a Dutch locked room mystery is always a special treat. I remember that shiver of excitement when reading Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) in which a group of people had gathered in front of a locked bedroom door and someone flings the key under the crack of the door into the hallway. But when they open the door, all they find is a dead woman. Anne van Doorn's De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019) was a rare treat with two well executed impossible crimes, but Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death not only added one more for good measure, but went all out in how they were presented. But what about the solutions, you ask?

The strange disappearance of the body, and murderer, from the locked, watched and burning, smoke-filled house is the best of the three with a solution breathing new life in an old idea that had been experimented with before – only it never really worked in the past. Reason why it never worked (unless staged under tightly controlled circumstances) is it required something that's not as easy to come by as it's made out to be. Even then there's no guarantee it would work. However, the present smoothed out that problem and provided something that made the trick work in a way that wouldn't have been possible in the 1930s or '40s. Dieudonné seized it with both hands and the characterization helped to reinforce the locked room-trick.

Diedonné tipped his hand with a clue to the second impossibility that gave away how it was done, but suspect this was done on purpose to make third disappearance, and reappearance, look even more impossible. Solution to how the motorcycle went up in smoke doesn't explain how it materialized outside the tunnel. So that was nicely done. And in spite of the reckless, dare devil antics, the solutions are simple and surprisingly believable. Just as a contemporary take on the impossible crime novel, Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death is excellent and it was a joy to read.

There's more to the story than a string of miraculous vanishings. De Klerck and Klaver have to figure out what happened to the body and who's responsible, which was handled a trifle weaker than the other plot-threads. A coincidence, or two, were needed to tie everything together with one of the coincidences stretching things a little, but hardly enough to dampen my enjoyment of the book. E-Pulp gives us a glimpse with Dieudonné of the genre's Golden Age when writers were given the time and opportunities to hone their skills, improve and finding a voice of their own – hopefully building an audience along the way. Rechercheur De Klerck en het doodvonnis (Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence, 2019) was written as an homage to Appie Baantjer, but the plot was very light and the solution to the fascinatingly presented bridge-murders lacked ingenuity. Rechercheur De Klerck en het duivelse spel (Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game, 2020) used the tried and tested Baantjer formula to write a much more traditional detective story with improved clueing and a new trick to create a cast-iron alibi. Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death is a full-blown detective novel with a tricky, complicated plot, more improved clueing and three daringly executed impossible crimes. I found this to be very rewarding and can't wait to see what the fourth, tantalizingly-titled Rechercheur De Klerck en het lijk in transit (Inspector De Klerck and the Corpse in Transit, 2021) has in store! 

Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death continues to improve on its predecessors and did in a most spectacular way with three originally posed and solved impossible crimes, which are too rare in this country. So highly recommended to all the Dutch-speaking readers of my blog and publishers looking for non-English crime-and detective fiction to translate.

Note to the reader: sorry for two back-to-back 2020 reviews, in as many days, but they are recent publications and didn't want to wait with posting the reviews until November. So they were squeezed in after the fact.    

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).