Stone Cold Dead (1995) by Roger Ormerod

My previous reviews took a closer look at two of Roger Ormerod's detective novels, One Deathless Hour (1981) and When the Old Man Died (1991), which were published a decade apart and represented two distinctly different periods in his writing career – respectively his private eye and neo-traditional periods. Only thing that both novels have in common is Ormerod's creative and often original bend of mind when it comes to plot-construction. So I decided to go for the hat-trick and pick another one of his nineties mystery novels, but don't worry. I'll return to the Golden Age in my post. 

Stone Cold Dead (1995) is listed online as the final entry in the Richard and Amelia Patton series, but The Night She Died (1997) is the title that closes out the series. This is almost a pity as Stone Cold Dead is Ormerod's most traditionally-styled mystery from this period with a surprisingly uncomplicated plot.

There are no shattered clocks, fabricated alibis, apparent impossibilities or messing around with cars and target pistols. Just a deceivingly simple murder in a small, tightly-knit community "firmly and delightfully living in the past" in a (socially) isolated location. A place that resisted and shown the modern world the door for two centuries. 

Stone Cold Dead begins with the Pattons traveling to Flight House to visit Amelia's goddaughter, Amelia "Mellie" Ruby Fulton, who's celebrating both her eighteenth birthday and her engagement to a young police constable, Raymond "Ray" Torrance – who spend £800 pounds on an engagement ring. Mellie is the daughter of Amelia's old school friend, Ruby Fulton, who's married to an old-fashioned, old-world country lawyer, Gerald Fulton. But his household situation is a little out of the ordinary. Gerald Fulton pays his son, Colin Fulton, a nominal rent to live there. Flight House looks down on a canal basin with locks, pounds and an old toll booth with people living "all the year round in their houseboats" on the canals. So there has to be a permanent lock-keeper, Colin, who was preceded by his uncle and grandfather.

The canal is privately owned by "three old dears," Adolphus, Alexandra and Victoria, who buried themselves even deeper into the past than the people populating their farms, villages and canals. Nowadays, Flight House is presented rent free to the lock-keeper with no salary, but the tradition is to tip the lock-keeper for helping the boats through. So they lived and worked in "an environment established over 200 years before" with "the physical isolation" cutting "them off from the present pace of life." There's "no radio, no TV set, no CD player" at Flight House, which are deemed to modern, but the outside world sometimes seeps into this isolated community. And having values, modern or old-fashioned, doesn't automatically mean you always live up to them. Something the Pattons begin to find out before they even arrived at the house.

Richard and Amalia drive to Flight House during snowy weather and come across an abandoned, unlocked car with the engine still warm and the keys hanging from the ignition lock – fuel gauge indicated half a tankful. What happened to the driver? A question that will be answered later that night.

They receive a warm welcome when they arrive, but there are some undercurrents during the birthday/engagement party. Gerald is not exactly charmed by his future son-in-law as "the young foul" thinks it's humorous to take constant digs at Gerald with his "really very immature authority." Ray comes to the party in his uniform and a joke ready ("is this bar licensed, may I ask?"), but Richard notices he has been "drinking as one who sought oblivion." And he refused to show Mellie the ring. So the stage is set.

Later that evening, while taking a stroll around the promise to smoke his pipe, Richard sees a human hand sticking out of the water of the pound. However, I can't reveal anything about the victim, because the victim's identity is a genuine "Ooh, the plot thickens" moment. A very well done effect considering the victim is somewhat of an outsider who has not been mentioned, or named, until the body was discovered. Ormerod tried to repeat this trick when Richard finds someone in very poor condition on one of the houseboats along the canal, but not quite to the same effect as the murder. Although it definitely thickened the plot even further and it made me look in a completely different direction for an answer.

So, while the case appears to be relatively simple and straightforward on the surface, the local policeman in charge, Inspector Ted Slater, had "nothing of a routine nature that he could pursue" with means and opportunity being the same very everyone involved – numerous motives were "jealously guarded." Richard Patton is more than a little guilty of guarding all the motives and keeping evidence from the local authorities. This is both a strength and a weakness of the plot. As noted above, Stone Cold Dead has a very simple, uncomplicated crime without the problems of broken windows, smashed clocks, faked alibis, impossible crimes and toying around with firearms. So there's less physical evidence and clues to betray the murderer or obscure the trail, which is probably why Ormerod didn't dare to go all-in with the puzzle surrounding the missing murder weapon. A very clever idea that could have been on par with the brilliant, double-edged central clue from The Key to the Case (1992) had been properly clued. Now you can only make an educated guess, if you can spot the murderer, that is.

Technically, the plot is sound enough and Ormerod told a fascinating story with a very well realized setting, memorable set-pieces and some good pieces of reasoning, but, purely as fair play mystery, Stone Cold Dead lagged behind his other novels from the same period. The Key to the Case, A Shot at Nothing (1993) and even And Hope to Die (1995) are shimmering examples of what could have been had the Golden Age never ended in the 1960s and continued to develop. Stone Cold Dead started out as something resembling a throwback to the old-fashioned, traditional detective story, but rapidly began to change into a more character-driven, modern crime novel. And not a bad crime novel at all. But hoped to find another one of his sublimely plotted, neo-Golden Age mysteries in Stone Cold Dead. So only recommended to readers who are already a fan of Ormerod and the series. 

A note for the curious: there's a very small, unsolved slice-of-life mystery in Stone Cold Dead. During the second-half of the story, the police begin to drag the locks in the hope of finding the elusive murder weapon. The locks had not been pumped dry in one, or two, centuries and the police collected "piles of sundry junk," which included everything from pram wheels to "a complete chandelier." There were also two shopping trolleys. Patton wonders how they got there, because "no canal user would load a trolley on to his boat" as it would be a devil of a nuisance and no shopper too idle to return the trolley to the store "would have walked it at least two miles to reach these locks." I know this is not as big of a mystery as who killed the chauffeur in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), but I'm Dutch. And this little waterway mystery fascinates me. My solution is that some holidaymakers or canal boat residents went to the village to stock up on supplies, but their car broke down on the way back. So they fetched two trolleys to get their supplies to the boat and then dumped the trolleys into the lock.

When the Old Man Died (1991) by Roger Ormerod

Previously, I reviewed Roger Ormerod's last novel in the David Mallin and George Coe series, One Deathless Hour (1981), which ended his run as an author of British private eye novels and ushered in a more traditional period – during which he refined and polished his plots to almost perfection. More importantly, Ormerod succeeded in updating the traditional, plot-oriented detective novel and finding a balance between the classic and modern style. The Key to the Case (1992) is a great example of combining a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery with the grit of today's crime novels. 

So thought it would be a nice idea to skip a decade ahead and read one of his novels from the early nineties, which gave me about five titles to pick from. I randomly settled on When the Old Man Died (1991) and couldn't have picked a better title. John Dickson Carr would have found much to enjoy about this curious, almost out-of-time detective story! It has everything from antique clocks and quasi-impossible situations to a traveling fair. Step right up, step right up! 

When the Old Man Died is listed online as the eighth title in the Richard and Amelia Patton series, but several of Ormerod's series novels, like the previously mentioned The Key to the Case, are listed as standalone mysteries. So don't pin me down on the exact chronology of his books. 

When the Old Man Died begins with ex-Detective Inspector Richard Patton getting a visit from a former colleague, Chief Inspector Wainwright, who wants to speak with him about a ten year old murder case – which represented Patton's "first big case as an inspector." A decade ago, Patton was called to the town of Markham Prior where an old, dreary and unkempt farmhouse surrounded untended fences and outbuildings became the scene of a very peculiar murder. The owner of the home is the grouchy, anti-social Eric Prost, "suspected of writing scurrilous letters to all and sundry," but poison pen letters lost their power to "to bring about any shivers of apprehension" in modern times. Nonetheless, this didn't prevent Prost from writing abusive letters and had been writing one at the time of his death.

A milkman on his early morning rounds arrived at Winter Haven, as Prost called his house, to find no empty bottles on the steps. So he walked around the house to peek through to the windows and discovered Prost's body, head down on his desk, in his study, but the doors were locked and the windows, upstairs and downstairs, were latched. Some of the latches were "rusted solid." But was the house really locked up as tightly as it appeared? The "side door was so floppy in its frame" that Patton "could slip the latch easily" and two shots were fired through a small, but "critically important," hole in the corner of the pane of the study window – clearly done years before and never replaced. One bullet struck a small, vulnerable spot in the nape of Prost's neck. The second bullet had struck the face of an old, valuable grandfather clock, or long-case clock, standing by the side of the door. Apparently, the bullet stopped the clock at eight-ten and "the shattered glass from its face had been all over the floor" where the door opened. So "nobody could have entered or left the room" without disturbing the carpet of glass. The door had swept a wide arc in it when Patton entered the room.

Patton was hardly fooled by the smashed clock ("who's going to fall for that, these days?") and suspected a faked alibi, but the shots were precise and exact that required the practiced hand of a marksman. Enter the antique dealer and gun enthusiast, Mr. Julian Caine, who's name was on the license of the murder weapon. He had a motive of sorts and a laughable alibi. So he was arrested and received a life sentence on his day in court.

Chief Inspector Wainwright informs Patton one of his then underlings, Detective Constable Arthur Pierce, died last month following a car accident, but he made a statement before passing away. A statement that opened an old, timeworn can of worms. Arthur Pierce climbed to the rank of Chief Superintendent, but "one tiny error in his whole career" had haunted him. He had mishandled the murder weapon and, as a consequence, "the evidence, as presented to the court, wasn't safe." So the conviction was quashed and Julian Caine was released from prison. Four months later, Caine appears on the Pattons doorstep to ask the man responsible for putting him behind bars to now prove his innocence.

While the courts quashed the conviction, Caine is still guilty in the eyes of the town and he already had threats stuck through his letterbox and a brick through the window. Caine admits he was angry enough with Prost to have shot him, but not that precious, nearly 300-year-old Tompion long-case clock. And he could never have brought himself to harm it.

This is easier said than done, because ten years have passed and, every time Patton searched for a way out for him, Caine became "almost frantic to prove that nobody else but himself could have done it" – covering everything from his alibi and motive to access to his pistols. There are many more curious, almost impossible, aspects of the case revealed during this part of the story. Firstly, the pistols were kept in "a room almost as secure as a bank vault" with a cleverly hidden key, but Patton discovers the hiding place was to deceive burglars and crooks. Not friends or anyone else who came over to his home. Secondly, there was something weird and explainable that Patton didn't put into his report. Every clock in the house, "the whole collection," had stopped at eight-ten! This brings to mind old stories of "clocks stopping at the time of their owner's death," but even stranger is that the clocks were started up again after the house had been locked and sealed by the police. A particular bizarre aspect when you consider the bullet made "no more than a dent" in the brass face of the clock. Just a shame Ormerod didn't delve deeper into the lore surrounding old clocks.

Naturally, there are many more problems and side issues complicating Patton's investigation even further. Eric Prost lost his wife in a terrible car accident and the woman who caused the crash was seen fleeing the scene, but remained elusive unidentified. Arthur Pierce car crash very likely was murder and his deathbed statement resulted in an internal investigation, which is going to leave a reputation in tatters and Wainwright can only imagine what the media is going to do when the story gets out. So this means Patton has to lock horns with another ex-colleague, which is one of Ormerod's personalized tropes. Another one is his interest in cars and how they can be used by criminals and murderers in all kinds of different ways. Yes, there's a third victim of the four-wheeled menace when one of the characters is seriously wounded when he/she is rundown in the street. You can already see his interests and pet ideas being turned into personalized tropes in One Deathless Hour and An Alibi Too Soon (1987). Lastly, Eric Prost was related to the people of a traveling fair and Winter Haven was the nerve center where everything's organized and doubled as their winter quarters. When Patton returned, the fair had returned to their winter quarters to refurbish and repair their attractions and sideshows.

Admittedly, the story sags a little in the second-half, which is why think the clock-lore was underutilized, but the story and plot picked up again during the final quarter. A sudden change of pace that begins with one of the most unusual, but original, "courtroom" scene on the books. Patton has a stubborn, unbending sense of right and wrong, which forces him to interfere in "a kangaroo court" that took place in complete secrecy. Even though the accused was guilty of what he had been accused of (not murder), but without being able to defend himself. Patton elbows his way to the stage to do an improve impression of Perry Mason, but, during his improvised defense, he finally saw the complete truth that had eluded him for so long.

I pieced together most of the pieces except for two, not wholly unimportant, key-pieces of the puzzle. I had a pretty solid idea who had a hand in the (attempted) murders, but not quite as I imagined and therefore technically incorrect. Neither did I appreciate, or understand, how craftily and ingenious Ormerod combined the strands of the locked room mystery with old-fashioned alibi-trickery, which strongly reminded me of the short stories in Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Red Locked Room (2020) – which also used the tricks and techniques of one trope to create the other. Ormerod created a hybrid of the locked room and alibi with the murder in that puzzle box house with clocks that stop and start on their own volition. This is another personalized trope as Ormerod doesn't appear to have been interested in conventional alibis. My impression is that Ormerod was more interested in the difficulties of fabricating alibis and the problems that can arise from them, because they had unforeseen consequences or were misinterpreted.

So, while Ormerod had some favorite tropes and hobbyhorses, he also possessed a creative and imaginative mind capable of producing some original ideas, which prevented him from repeating himself. He simply found new ways to use or look at them. When the Old Man Died is no different with only a slower, less imaginative middle part of the story preventing me from ranking it alongside The Key to the Case and A Shot at Nothing (1993) as one of Ormerod's best retro Golden Age detective novels. But its not all that far behind. Just remember that the strength of the book is in its first-half and an ending as solid as it's satisfying.

A note for the curious: I only noticed this while working on my review and reading back what I wrote about One Deathless Hour, which made me realize how much synergy there really is between One Deathless Hour and When the Old Man Died. While Malling and Coe were on their last recorded case, Patton was solving his first unrecorded case around the same time. Both stories involve murders with a twenty-two target pistol, smashed clocks, apparent impossibilities and a flimsy alibi involving a shooting club. Yet, they're two very different detective stories. Ormerod was criminally forgotten and deserves to be rediscovered as showed what could have been, if the Golden Age never ended.

One Deathless Hour (1981) by Roger Ormerod

During the 1970s, Roger Ormerod crime-and detective fiction featured two different series-characters, David Mallin and George Coe, who had their respective first appearances in Time to Kill (1974) and A Spoonful of Luger (1975), but Ormerod decided to bring them together in Too Late for the Funeral (1977) – which has them "approaching the same case from entirely different directions." A crossover that marked the beginning of their partnership. Over the next five years, Mallin and Coe appeared side-to-side in novels like The Weight of Evidence (1978) and More Dead Than Alive (1980). 

I don't think unifying two series has ever been done before like this in the genre. There were occasionally crossovers (Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice) and sporadic cameos (H.C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune and Joshua Clunk), but never a merger to create a new series. So it's possible Ormerod actually delivered something new under the sun with Mallin and Coe's partnership.

I should have started with the earlier novels and worked my way through the crossover novel, but I'm chronologically challenged and the later titles lured me with their promise of locked room murders, impossible crimes and head scratching alibis – tropes that I find really hard to ignore and resist. And today is no different! 

One Deathless Hour (1981) is the last entry in the series and not merely marked the end of David Mallin and George Coe's recorded career, but the first-period in Ormerod's writing as he completely shed the traditional private eye format. During the next two decades, Ormerod's mystery novels gained an even more traditional slant with sharper writing, better characterization and finely-polished plots. The Hanging Doll Murders (1983), The Key to the Case (1992) and A Shot at Nothing (1993) are retro Golden Age mysteries with a new coat of paint, but the neo-classicist in Ormerod was already present in his private eye fiction. Subject of today's review is a perfect example of Ormerod's increasing devotion to good, old-fashionably plotted detective stories.

Victor Abbott is the personnel manager at one of the new factories on the industrial site of a budding town, Watling, who's a member of the Watling Small Arms Club. Abbott comes to Mallin and Coe to help him "provide an alibi for nine o'clock on Tuesday evening." Story he tells the two private eyes is either the flimsiest tissue of lies ever told or the plain, unbelievable truth.

One Tuesday evening, Abbott went to the clubhouse to try out his new pistol and parked his Triumph Dolomite with all the windows open on account of the hot, stifling weather. When he returned two hours later, Abbott found the body of man sitting in the passenger's seat with his face against the car's fascia clock and "a bullet hole in the back of his neck," which had blown half his face away and soaked everything in blood – preventing immediate identification. Abbott tells Mallin and Coe he suspects the victim could be Charles Colmore. Someone he has "always hated" as Colmore is the reason why his first marriage ended and he remarried his ex-wife, Dulcie. So, understandably, he desperately needs an alibi and hammers on a very specific time. One minute to nine. Mallin suspects the bullet wrecked the fascia clock and Abbott noticed the time, but the police is not showing the two detectives all of their cards. This is where Abbott's story becomes hard to swallow.

During those two hours of solitary target practice, Abbott only needs an alibi for those couple of minutes around nine o'clock evening. Miraculously, he had a very curious visitor shortly after the man outside was shot. A young, incoherent man who was "waving one of those stupid imitation plastic guns" and demanded guns. So he shot off the tip of the youths left earlobe! This happened barely two minutes pass nine and Abbott wants them to find this witness "to be produced... only if the police makes a charge." A very dodgy story, to say the least, but it gets stranger!

Mallin and Coe alternately narrate chapters as each tackle a different end of the case. Mallin begins with "roaming the pubs for a blond youth with one earlobe missing," which quickly brings him into contact with the local police. Meanwhile, Coe travels to Bentley Hall to interview Dulcie to discover whether she had now become a widow, but complicated the case even further when he finds the body of Colmore's mistress, Marilyn Trask – shot and killed with the same high-velocity twenty-two. The police were able to exactly pinpoint the time of the murder: eight minutes to nine on the evening Colmore was shot in the parking lot of the Watling Small Arms Club. This presents the investigators with a tricky problem described in the story as "a rank impossibility."

A problem that can be boiled down to "how two people could be shot by the same person, at roughly the same time, sixty miles apart," but, while it looks like an impossible crime, even I couldn't label it as one. This is an alibi-puzzle in the spirit of early period Christopher Bush with two closely-timed murders complicating the problem, but Ormerod completely inverted the concept of manufacturing alibis. The problem here is not destroying seemingly cast-iron alibis, but trying to figure out why they never materialized. Closing the time-gap between the two murders is the key to the solution. Naturally, the possibility of (ROT13) zhygvcyr zheqreref be na vaperqvoyr pbvapvqrapr have to be taken into consideration. Neither of which are used to explain the murders, but both have a role to play in the solution. Very playful. But there's something else about the solution I admired much more.

Ormerod refused to go with the obvious explanation for the two shootings "one hour's drive apart." The plot synopsis of One Deathless Hour suggested an impossible crime and already had an idea how it could have been done, which was mentioned and apparently confirmed in Chapter 5. Only to be shot to pieces as a false-solution when the police finally began to share information with Mallin and Coe. A piece of information that made Colmore's murder "almost unmovable from one minute to nine" and practically anchored to the crime scene. What worked against the story was the shoddy, sometimes unfair, clueing and that the ending needed a touch of suspense to punch it up a bit. 

That makes One Deathless Hour a typical, early period Ormerod mystery novel. A mystery novel with several solid or even innovative ideas, but very rough around the edged and sorely lacked the polish of his "90s mysteries. However, Ormerod began to drastically improve around the early-to mid 1980s and learned how to utilize his plot ideas to the fullest of their potential. Something he became so good at that it made And Hope to Die (1995) feel like a genuine, modernized GAD-style country house mystery and not a botched, cliche-ridden and unfunny send up. And he did it with a small, almost bone dry pool of suspects and a plot that hinged on a very old dodge. You can see this shift slowly beginning to take shape in his Mallin and Coe series with the previously mentioned More Dead Than Alive reading like precursor to Jonathan Creek.

So One Deathless Hour comes recommend to either fans of Ormerod or mystery readers with a particular interest in picking apart, or putting together, tricky alibis. My next read is going to be another Ormerod from the late eighties or nineties.

The Ebony Stag (1938) by Brian Flynn

Earlier this month, I returned to Brian Flynn with the first novel from the third set of Dean Street Press reprints, Cold Evil (1938), which began promising enough until it all fell apart in the last two chapters – translating into a lukewarm review. Flynn has an excellent win/loss record in my book with only four misses to his name. So the odds were in my favor the next time around, but were they good odds? Time to find out! 

The Ebony Stag (1938) is the twenty-second title in the Anthony Bathurst series and begins three weeks after a gruesome and still unsolved murder in the village of Upchalke. One of those small bungalow retirement communities on the west coast of England.

Robert Forsyth was a 73-year-old rate collector and was brutally attacked on an early October evening in his bungalow, The Antlers, which left quite a mess. A terrific blow to face cut his lip and loosened his front teeth, but the cause of death was "a great gash just above the breast-bone" inflicted by strange, unidentified weapon and every article of furniture near the dead man was spattered with his blood. There are two more peculiar features to the case placing it well above your common, garden-variety murder. A small, carved figure of an imitation ebony stag that used to stand on Forsyth's mantelpiece was "smashed to smithereens" without apparent reason and there's an impossible angle to the murder – which nobody saw fit to mention or point out to me. I would have started this third round of reprints with The Ebony Stag instead of Cold Evil!

The front door of the bungalow was bolted and the backdoor locked and bolted, but the key to that door was missing. However, it hardly explains how the door was bolted. Only possible in the bungalow was a small, partly open scullery-window that big enough for a small child to worm through, which is how they were able to open the front door without breaking it down or smashing a window. Admittedly, the locked room-trick is not all that spectacular, poorly motivated ("...to mystify the police") and only a tiny piece of the puzzle that's not given too much attention. But it counts as an impossible crime. And needs to be included in that inevitable, fourth supplement edition of Locked Room Murders.

So the local police get nowhere Major Marriner, Chief Constable of Remenham, turned to Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police, but New Scotland Yard is overstretched. Sir Austin has to turn to his friend, Anthony Lotherington Bathurst, who has garnered a reputation as a "well-known crime-expert." And he's pretty much given a freehand to investigate the murder on his own. An amateur detective's daydream come to life!

All three agreed he would have a much better chance of picking up valuable information incognito. So he goes to the village as Mr. Lotherington, "an artist hoping to execute two or three picture commissions during his stay by the waters of the Chal," to poke around Forsyth's circle of acquaintances and cronies. Forsyth had three so-called intimates, Randolph Skipwith, Leonard Burns and Andrew McCracken, who used to spend a lot of time together playing cards or sharing a drink or two at the local inn, The Tracy Arms – earning them the nickname of "old chinas." Among his less frequent visitors and acquaintances were such notables as Reverend Charles A. Sellon, the Vicar of St. Veronica's, and the village physician, Dr. Innes. Mrs. Margaret Swan is an old friend who used to visit Forsyth about once a month. Lastly, there's a young journalist, Cyril Mulrenan, who enjoys a private income and shared Forsyth's liking for amateur-dramatic work. Bathurst gets his most valuable leads from several people outside of "Forsyth's chosen friends and his mere acquaintances."

Bathust has a change encounter with Wilfred Hatherley, chief Audit Clerk to the County Borough of Easthampton, who's a former colleague of the victim and what he reveals puts an entirely different complexion on the case. A complexion allowing Flynn to indulge in his pet trope, namely the false-identity, because the Forsyth he knew "had his teeth extracted two or three years before he retired." So who had been murdered in the bungalow and what happened to the real Forsyth? Don't worry. This is all revealed early on in the story. A second outsider is Captain Falk Stromm, late of the Swedish Navy, who came to England aboard a Swedish timber ship, the Vaar, to enjoy a holiday. But he and Captain Vass helped Bathurst out of tight corner or two over the course of the story. I should perhaps also mention the second victim, who counted as an outsider, because that murder proved to be one of the vital puzzle pieces that ultimately betrayed the murderer.

Needless to say, The Ebony Stag is Flynn's return to his pleasantly busy, knotted whodunits and not only concerns an impossible murder with a strange weapon and false-identities, but also has a very well hidden, cast-iron alibi and eight-decades-old coded message – which Bathurst refers to as the "stag" cryptogram. A cryptogram linked to a long-ago, nearly forgotten maritime disaster and a treasure of lost gold. Flynn practically threw every well-known trope at the story with various degrees of success as he eventually had to pick what aspect of the plot to concentrate on. And his attention mostly went to the triple-W: who was the victim, who killed him and what happened to the real retiree? The locked room is merely side dressing and the cryptogram only comes into play during the final stages of the story. Flynn put too much on his plate. But, just as a whodunit, it was very well done and an entertaining detective novel from start to finish.

There is, however, a very small flaw in the plot that needs to be mentioned, because how Flynn handled it was so endearing. ROT13: Sylaa ortna jevgvat zlfgrevrf “cevznevyl ng gur cebzcgvat bs uvf jvsr Rqvgu jub unq tebja gverq bs urnevat uvz fnl ubj ur pbhyq jevgr n orggre zlfgrel abiry guna gur barf ur unq orra ernqvat,” juvpu nyfb znqr uvz n cebsrffvbany Fureybpx Ubyzrf snaobl. Gurer ner znal, fbzrgvzrf irel fylyl cynprq, ersreraprf gb gur Onxre Fgerrg qrgrpgvir. Frireny bs uvf abiryf jrer boivbhfyl zbqryrq nsgre Fureybpx Ubyzrf fgbevrf be unq cybg-ryrzragf nyyhqvat gb fbzr bs uvf snzbhf pnfrf. Gur Robal Fgnt vf bar bs gubfr Fureybpxvna zlfgrevrf nf vg jnf boivbhfyl vafcverq ol “Gur Nqiragher bs gur Zhftenir Evghny” naq (zber vzcbegnagyl) “Gur Nqiragher bs Oynpx Crgre” (1904). Vs lbh abgvpr guvf, lbh pna'g uryc ohg fhfcrpg n pregnva punenpgre. Na bgurejvfr pyrireyl pnzbhsyntrq punenpgre. Fb ur znqr abg fvatyr ersrerapr gb Fureybpx Ubyzrf be Pbana Qblyr va guvf irel Fureybpxvna zlfgrel, juvpu zhfg unir orra gbegher sbe n snaobl yvxr Sylaa. I found it very endearing. Even if it undid the work of some of his carefully placed red herrings.

Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn and wrote the introductions to the reprint editions, reviewed The Ebony Stag in 2020 deeming it to be a "very entertaining and a gripping read" – but "not his strongest work." I agree. But don't let our technical nitpicking get in the way of a good, solid and fascinating read. Highly recommended to everyone who's already familiar with Anthony Bathurst and Brian Flynn! 

A note for the curious: The Ebony Stag has a locked room, false-identities and alibis, but the smashed figure of the titular stag, sort of, works as a dying message. Although done by the murderer and unintentionally provided Bathurst with the first of many clues. So detective story tropes were very much on my mind when another, rarely used trope seemed the materialize. Namely the rival detective. Wilfred Hatherley brings Bathurst into contact with his boss, Frederick Gulliver Sharpe-Lodge, who's the Borough Treasurer of Easthampton. Bathurst "had never met a man like this before," but the most astonishing thing is that he tells Bathurst Hatherley had solved "the mystery of a secret Trust Fund" and cleared up "the St. Angela's kidnapping case in less than a month." This not only smacked of rival detectives, but of a crossover! Flynn wrote a second, short-lived series about a character named Sebastian Stole under a pseudonym, "Charles Wogan." I wondered if he might have written a third series under another name. Maybe even a series of short stories. Curiously, Flynn is one of the few mystery writers (especially from his time) who apparently never wrote any short stories. So I poked around the web to see if I could find any obscure detective novels or short stories with characters named Wilfred Hatherley and Frederick Gulliver Sharpe-Lodge. Nothing so far. I advise to keep those names in mind in case you ever come across a story with an audit clerk and treasurer as the detectives.

Murder of a Negative (1963) by Dick A. van Ruler

Last month, I reviewed In de greep van de kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965) by "B.J. Kleymens," a shared penname of J. Kleijn and B. Mensen, whose only detective novel was their contribution to the "Zodiac Mysteries" – a collaborative project of twelve writers and an editor. Ab Visser gathered twelve writers each tasked with writing a detective novel in which one of the astrological signs plays a central or even decisive role. But the project was abandoned and left unfinished after eight novels. So what happened? 

I used my review of In the Grip of the Lobster to burrow deeper into the mystery of the missing "Zodiac Mysteries." I was unable to discover why the series was abandoned or canceled, but Robert van Gulik's novella "De nacht van de tijger" ("The Night of the Tiger," 1963) from The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) was originally intended to be his contribution to the series. There's a possibility, as noted in my review, Jacques Presser's Moord in de Poort (Murder in the Poort, 1965) is another lost Zodiac mystery that made it to print. Maybe. So this left only two contributors unaccounted for.

One of them, Leon Derksen, has to my knowledge never written or published a single detective story, but the subject of today's review did put one to his name. I was more than a little intrigued by his sole detective novel on record.

Dick A. van Ruler studied theology at the Rijksuniversiteit of Utrecht in the 1950s and began to work as a journalist for the Utrechts Nieuwsblad in 1961, but gained national fame as the presenter of popular NCRV TV programs such as Hoe bestaat het – which translates to How It Exists or How Does It Work. A pop-science show from the 1960s and the second picture in this review comes from a newspaper teaser about that program. Yes, Van Ruler is pulling "the weight of eight train wagons" or "five and a half thousand times the weight of Dick van Ruler." You had to tune in that evening to learn the trick behind his incredible feat of strength. Regrettably, I've been unable to find even a few seconds of footage online.

More importantly, Van Ruler penned a detective novel around the same time, Moord op een negatief (Murder of a Negative, 1963), which the back cover tells showcases his interest in pastoral matters. Van Ruler is not so much interested in the crime solving techniques of the police as he's in those who come into contact with the police. Murder of a Negative is not about the who and/or how, but the why and the far-reaching, sometimes unforeseeable consequences of murder. So the result is a quasi-social crime novel similar to K. Abma's De hond was executeur (The Dog Was Executor, 1973) with the difference being Van Ruler tried to write something resembling a Dutch politieroman.

Before going over the story, I need to briefly return to the "Zodiac Mysteries" and Van Ruler's contribution that never materialized or remained unpublished. I didn't expect Murder of a Negative to be a lost Zodiac title, but postulated in my review of In the Grip of the Lobster it might have caught the eye of Visser and earned him a seat at the table – a guess which could be closer to the truth than I imagined. Murder of a Negative more or less, likely without intending it, low key setup a sequel in the background that could tie-in to and be part of the Zodiac series. The wife and confident of the police detective, Mary, "hung her believes and soul" on astrology (well, sort of) and knew her way around the field. She could advise her husband in a murder case involving one of the Zodiac signs. This raises a question: did Van Ruler penned a sequel that was part of the "Zodiac Mysteries" and, if he did, what happened to the unpublished manuscript? Did it survive or did it get lost or even destroyed as there was little chance of it ever getting published? Questions that will probably never get answered and this elusive, hypothetical second novel is so intangible that it can't even be entered into the Phantom Library of Lost Detective Stories. But let's get to the story. 

Murder of a Negative dogs the footsteps of Chief Inspector Leendert M. van Dop, of the judicial police in Utrecht (cheap pop!), who gets "de Kruit-affaire" dropped on his desk.

Johan Kruit was a valued, highly respected and pious financial manager of an import-and export company in Utrecht, De Giec, who was the first to clock in and the last to leave – never taking any vacations. When he finally took a holiday and boarded a ship with his wife to the United States, he discovered too late that his sleeping powders contained a cyanide. And he died on the floor of his cabin. Suicide is quickly dismissed by both the authorities aboard and the Americans, which made them decide to return the body and accompanying problem back to the Netherlands.

Van Dop can begin his investigation quietly and unhurried, but is getting nowhere as he's confronted with a broken, disunited family. Mrs. Kruit is silent, submissive woman who "intoxicated herself with the past" and refused to acknowledge her husband's flaws "so as not to get from the others." Namely their two children. There's a 13-year-old girl, Bertje, but she barely appears. She has a much older brother, Hans, who Van Dop finds to be an "odd boy" suffering from his "learned indifference." And he was not on the best of terms with his father. There's the problem of the two-sided, negative image of the victim.

Johan Kruit had a squeaky clean, public image of an honest, hardworking man who sat on several church and school boards, but back home he acted like "an Old Testament patriarch" who was quick to judge and hated compromises. An image that is completely shattered in the wake of his death when it's discovered he stole tens of thousands of guldens from his employer. And they're not the only victims of Kruit's financial shenanigans. Van Dop even comes across a secret mistress. So there are more than enough motives to go around.

I already said the who-and how take a backseat to the reasons behind the murder and its consequences. The murderer is not difficult to spot (ur'f ba gur pbire) and there's nothing really clever hiding behind the poisoning, which is limited to going pharmacists to ask if anyone bought some cyanide. Murder of a Negative is almost entirely focused on the why and showing how easily a situation can spin out of control. Even when someone does something horrible with the best of intentions. Some detective stories can best be compared to complicated riddles or intricate, maze-like crossword puzzles while others are character studies, but Murder of a Negative is simply watching dominoes falling down – as one bad deed leads to another ending a second murder. A death as inevitable as it's dark and tragic. So not particular satisfying as a fan of the plot-driven detective story, but readers who prefer the social and realist approach will find something of interest between its pages.

Van Ruler's Murder of a Negative is another demonstration that the Dutch detective story is all over the place, which refuses to be defined by a single school of thought or time-period. This makes finding your way not unlike groping around a pitch-black labyrinth. You take what you can get hold off and what you get is not always what you like or were looking for. Sometimes you get lucky and find a Cor Docter or Ton Vervoort. Other times you get a Bob van Oyen. Van Ruler falls into the category of interesting, but not to my liking. That being said, I did enjoy following a typical Dutch police character down all those familiar streets under the watchful eye of the Dom Tower. I just wish it had been more of a proper detective novel.

Penelope's Web (2001) by Paul Halter

I remember reading Xavier Lechard's review of Paul Halter's La toile de Pénélope (Penelope's Web, 2001) back in the late 2000s, on his old blogspot, describing the story as "one of Halter's most orthodox detective novel" born from a challenge posed by a Belgian scholar, Vincent Bourgeois – challenging him to devise "a strange manner" to seal the scene of a crime. Xavier praised Penelope's Web as an "elegantly and soundly devised" locked room mystery that ended up looking "more like Christie than Carr."

That old review never stopped to intrigue me and cemented Penelope's Web on my impossible crime wishlist. But, at the time, the only English translations of Halter's work consisted of a smattering of short stories with the first novel-length translation finally being published in 2010. Over the next ten years, John Pugmire of Locked Room International would go on to publish sixteen of Halter's novels and compiled two short story collections. Penelope's Web remained untranslated and tantalizingly inaccessible until recently. So let's cut through the tangled web of this long, eagerly anticipated translation.

Professor Frederick Foster was an entomologist who went to South America, "to study some rare species of spider," three years ago, but he went missing in Brazil and his body was eventually found on the bank of a river – murdered by a band of savages. Back home, the Foster household continued and his widow, Ruth Foster, became engaged to the local physician, Dr. Paul Hughes, who has been treating her for an illness of retina that made her practically blind. Ruth and Paul receive a nasty shock when they receive news that the body in Brazil was misidentified and Professor Foster is not only alive, but on his way back home to the village of Royston.

Professor Foster brought back more than just stories and anecdotes about his "incredible tribulations in the Amazonian jungle." What he brought back are some very rare, even hitherto unknown species of spiders and "practically tamed" one of them, which he named after his goddaughter, Penelope Ellis. Penelope is one of those unknown species with very well-developed silk-spinning organs and can spin a web faster than her sisters. Professor Foster placed Penelope in an open window of his study where she spun an fine, intricate silk web stretched across the oak window frame. Something that becomes important later on in the story.

So the situation is an uneasy one and begins to deteriorate when questions arise about his identity. A photograph of the professor turns up, but the name scribbled on the back, Peter Thompson, is that of his traveling partner. The man whose body was found on a Brazilian riverbank. Or was it? There's no denying Thompson is, or was, the spitting image of Professor Foster, but are they dealing with an impostor? A question that's not as easily answered as it should be.

Ruth is half-blind and Dr. Hughes always tried to avoid Professor Foster, because he had eyes only for his wife. Ruth's 12-year-old orphaned nephew, James, remembered him only as the uncle who read him Thousand and One Nights and Gulliver's Travels as an 8-year-old (he recently turned 12), while the professor brother-in-law, Major Edwin Brough, confessed he can't be sure either way – only Penelope believes Professor Foster is her godfather. Even if he aged, lost a lot of weight and grew a beard. So the police has to get involved and they tracked down a set of fingerprints from registry office to settle the matter. Shades of John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938)! But, of course, the fingerprints gets stolen during a frantic search for two escaped spiders.

The situation becomes an impossible one when Professor Foster apparently shot himself in his study with "the only door bolted from the inside" and two, of the three, windows "more or less rusted in place." The third window is open, but covered entirely by Penelope's intricately-woven, unbroken silky web. The dark hole in his temple was still "oozing blood" when they broke down the door and there was "a strong smell of gunpowder in the room." However, the police quickly eliminate the possibility of suicide, but how could it have been murder? Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst happen to be on hand to help out the local policeman in charge, Inspector Mike Waddell. 

Penelope's Web is one of Halter's shortest novels to date with the murder taking place close to halfway mark, which makes it tricky to discuss further details. Suffice to say, Halter delivered on his promise of not only finding a new way to lock and seal a room, but came up with an original, tailor-made solution to fit a very novel impossible crime. Interestingly, the how doesn't immediately reveal the murderer's identity, which was almost ruined by the annoying use of unidentifiable pronouns. Even when they made no sense to use in certain sentences. However, this hardly detracted from an overall enjoyable, clever and original locked room mystery. One that strongly reminded me of Halter's Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996) as it shared some of its strength and weaknesses.

While both Penelope's Web and The Invisible Circle both sport original impossible crimes with equally original solutions, but they're not exactly flawless and you can pick holes in them. For example (no spoilers), Dr. Hughes points out to Dr. Twist that there are "traces of gunpowder on the temple" indicating "the shot was fired from point-blank range," but, according to the solution, the shot was fired "through a piece of cloth." There are some other details about the locked room-trick that can be a little sketchy or make you scratch your head.

Penelope's Web is not merely the sum of its locked room-trick and Xavier said in his old review the story ended up being more Christie than Carr. I sort of agree. Penelope's Web is arguably better as who-and whydunit than as an impossible crime story as Halter expertly dangled the smartly clued solution in front of the reader's eye while simultaneously planting red herrings as a distraction. Judging the story purely as a whodunit, Penelope's Web stands as one of his stronger and more solid efforts. The locked room-trick is merely the cherry on top. You can say the same about the second murder, which gave the story a dark and tragic tinge, but a good use of a second murder that's not merely there as padding. Still a pity, because the second victim would have made an interesting detective character. Even if it was just for a one-shot.

So, yeah, I personally enjoyed and recommend Penelope's Web, but mystery readers who are still struggling with Halter might find themselves in another frustrating catch-as-catch-can wrestling match with his own unique brand of plotting and mystery writing.

Now that Penelope's Web can be crossed off my Halter/LRI wishlist, I hope Le crime de Dédale (The Crime of Daedalus, 1997), Le géant de pierre (The Stone Giant, 1998), Le douze crimes d'Hercule (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules, 2001), Le voyageur du passé (The Traveler from the Past, 2012) and Le tigre borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger, 2004) will follow soon!

Mystery at Friar's Pardon (1931) by Martin Porlock

Philip MacDonald was a British novelist and screen writer who was better known as a writer of thrillers as, even in his more formal detective stories, "thriller elements keep breaking in and taking over from the puzzle plot," but he produced a few genuine mystery novels – like the synthetic The Maze (1932). A detective novel, or "An Exercise in Deduction," calculated and designed to fool the genre-savvy mystery reader. 

There's another obscure, long out-of-print pure mystery novel by MacDonald that has fascinated me for the longest time now. 

Mystery at Friar's Pardon (1931), published as by "Martin Porlock," is not only logged as an impossible crime in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but seen as one of the few genuine John Dickson Carr analogs. A detective novel that apparently can be mentioned in the same breath as Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935), Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) and Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954). John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, noted in his 2011 review that Mystery at Friar's Pardon reads like a homage to Carr and "seems as if it were right out of the Dr. Fell series," but the book predates practically all of Carr's celebrated novels – suggesting that "perhaps this work of MacDonald's inspired Carr." Adey added more intrigue by acknowledging MacDonald "hit upon something new" by staging a drowning in "a locked, waterless room."

The book is regrettably obscure and in desperate need of fresh ink and paper, but imagine my surprise when I discovered Mystery at Friar's Pardon was uploaded to the Internet Archive as part of The Fourth Crime Club Omnibus (1937). Why, yes, I'll take one! So let's see whether or not this elusive locked room mystery lives up to its reputation.

Friar's Pardon dates back to the 17th century with the last stone being laid in 1699, "stern and yet graceful," but the man who had the house built, Sir Roger Westmacott, died two years later "under mysterious circumstances in his bedroom." So the place became the property of his eldest son, Sir Derryck, who was a soldier and didn't return until 1706. But when he returned, history repeated itself and he died in the same room as his father under mysterious, inexplicable circumstances. Understandably, his younger brother and his descendants wanted nothing to do with Friar's Pardon and tried to sell the place for generations, but they were unable to rid themselves of it until 1800.

Bertram Deaves purchased Friar's Pardon and began to renovate and expand the house, while "pooh-poohing all local stories and warnings," but he died six months after moving into the house when he was in the prime of his health and his son suffered the same fate – all in the same room. There was a doctor who swore the body of the last victim showed evidence of drowning, but his room was upstairs and there was no water in the room or any "signs of water upon his clothes or person." This only deepened the mystery. So the family sealed up the wing with the room-that-kills and installed caretakers until Mrs. Enid Lester-Greene finally bought the place.

Mrs. Enid Lester-Greene is a famous novelist and playwright, known for such charming stories as Sir Galahad Comes Home and Oasis Love, who found the house of her dreams in Friar's Pardon. She not only refused to be scared away by "a lot of old wives' tales," but "in no way subscribe to belief in any supernatural influence over the house" and ordered the removal of the wall that sealed the haunted wing. Mrs. Lester-Green even decides to live in the haunted wing herself. She's not the only one who lives or stays there as a guest.

There's Mrs. Lester-Greene's daughter, Gladys, who has less personality or strength of character than her well-known, domineering mother. Major Claude Lester is Mrs. Lester-Greene's obstinate brother who sponges off his sister despite not liking her very much. Lesley Destrier is "sort of half guest and half family" who spends about seven months out of the twelve with the old lioness. Norman Sandys is Mrs. Lester-Green's well-dressed, competent secretary who's ever ready with a notebook to take down any ideas that can occur to his employer at a second's notice. There are also two notable house guests, Lady Maud Vassar and the eighth Baron Pursell of Mitcham. Lastly, there's the amateur detective of the story, Mr. Charles Fox-Browne, who needed work and accepted the post of estate manager of Friar's Pardon. Charles Fox-Browne had a varied army career as an intelligence officer and was for a time Chief Intelligence Officer to Brigadier-General Mallison's Brigade on the Somme. Something he has to rely on as the domestic strain and apparently supernatural phenomena become a prelude to murder.

Mrs. Lester-Greene is not the easiest person to be around, somewhat of a benevolent dictator, who appears to be generous with allowances, but prefers to be considered a Lady Bountiful and "see her see her protégés unhappy" than "finish being Lady Bountiful" – which would make everyone a lot happier. A situation not improved by rampant paranormal activity. Keys "plucked out from the keyhole" by invisible hands and doors locking, or unlocking, as by magic. A pair of pajamas disappear and reappear in a locked bedroom. A vase is smashed to pieces in another locked bedroom and disembodied hand with crooked fingers knocking on a bedroom window. And plenty of poltergeist activity. 

The situation culminates when Mrs. Lester-Greene's calls on the house telephone from her room in the haunted wing, screaming "help... help... for God's sake help," but her bedroom window is locked from the inside. Charles Fox-Browne has to break a window in order to get in and open the door. But they're too late. Mrs. Lester-Greene's body is laid out on a couch, not a mark on her body, but the doctor determines she drowned. There's not a drop of water or damp patch in the room. Surprisingly, the local police is more than a little willing to settle for a supernatural explanation.

So the whole setup, while a little long, is full of promise and there's a worthy payoff in the end, but the scheme as a whole turned out to be the proverbial mixed bag of tricks. I think having just reread Carter Dickson's brilliantly plotted The Reader is Warned (1939) made all the more obvious MacDonald lacked the divine touch of the master. Let's get the bad out of the way first.

Firstly, MacDonald gave away the identity of the murderer during the first-half of the story, but not due to clumsiness, sloppy writing or plotting. Some might even completely miss it, but, to me, it made this person stand out like a wolf among sheep. I can't tell what, exactly, betrayed the murderer to me without giving away the solution, but it's something very specific and not used until decades later in a somewhat contentious detective story – namely (ROT13) Vfnnp Nfvzbi'f fubeg fgbel, "Gur Boivbhf Snpgbe"). Secondly, the locked room-trick at the heart of the crime is routine. Not as bad as a secret passage or a pair of pliers to turn the key, but not good or original enough to warrant a reputation as an elusive impossible crime classic. Thirdly, the ghostly activity never gives you the impression that's anything else but cheap trickery, because the reader is never told what's suppose to be behind all those "queer deaths." MacDonald briefly goes over the history of the house and it's unfortunate occupants, but not why the owners started to drown in a bone-dry room in a new house with no history to speak of. Did they recycle building material from an already haunted house, paved the basement floor with headstones or simply a curse? The reader is never told and so the hauntings come across as nothing more than trickery, which robbed the story of most of its creepy atmosphere. And is not very Carr-like. 

On the other hand, the method of drowning in a locked, bone-dry room and how the murderer left it behind was an inspired piece of plotting. The kind of thing you would expect from a Japanese shin honkaku mystery writer with the clue of the spilled nail police being a clever touch to the drowning and locked room setup. There's another, more technical aspect to the murder, which demonstrated Golden Age mystery writers were very up-to-date on anything that could aid them in a juicy murder. Although it's a little weird to see a modern associated word like (ROT13) rnecubarf used in a 1931 mystery novel. I entirely agree with John Norris' 2011 review that the staged séance counts as "one of the best confession by entrapment scenes in a Golden Age novel." A great and very well handled ending to a regrettably uneven, but overall enjoyable, detective novel.

So all of this makes it troublesome to recommend Mystery at Friar's Pardon as a companion to Carr, Roscoe, Smith and Talbot, which is what most (locked room) readers aware of the book hope to find. I don't expect my review will do anything to fine-tune everyone's expectations, but advise you to expect something more in line with Herbert Brean, George Limnelius or one of Paul Halter's second-tier mysteries. You'll enjoy and appreciate it more that way.

The Reader is Warned (1939) by Carter Dickson

Several months ago, I reread and reviewed John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939), whose reputation received a much deserved boost during the internet age as the story magnificently showcases Carr's ability to construct and navigate intricate, maze-like plots – planting clues along the way that double as red herrings. The Problem of the Green Capsule demonstrated he wasn't depended on murders in hermetically sealed rooms and fields of virgin snow to write a baffling detective story. And it made me want to revisit another one of his 1939 mysteries. 

The Reader is Warned (1939) is the ninth novel in the Sir Henry Merrivale series, published as by "Carter Dickson," which has always been somewhat of a low-key masterpiece of the series. A novel generally admired and highly rated when discussed, but rarely referenced or under exposed when discussing Carr's work or impossible crime fiction in general. You can probably put that down to the whole story trying to be as low-key and inconspicuous as possible in spite of it being constructed around some very ambitious and even sensational ideas.

Carr restricted the story to a few locations, centering on half-a-dozen characters, while the sensational, headline-grabbing implications and potentially "an international situation" is played out in the background – ultimately just played for laughs. It all worked out beautifully in the end. Although it likely made the book a little inconspicuous and easy to overlook. Particularly among Carr's impressive body of work, but not something that can't be fixed. 

The Reader is Warned is narrated by a consultant to the Home Office pathologist, Dr. John Sanders, who's invited by a friend and young barrister-about-town, Lawrence Chase to spend the weekend at Fourways. Fourways is the gloomy, Victorian-Gothic home of two great friends of Chase, the Constables. Mina Constable is better known to the general public as the romantic novelist, Mina Shields, who even tried her hands at "a straight detective story" that was "most unmercifully slated." Sam Constable is a retired textile manufacturer and "the complete British clubman" as well as being a bit of a domestic tyrant ("will you stop twitching and jittering with that glass, like an old hag soaking up gin in a pub"). And they'll be entertaining two more guests beside Chase and Sanders. Miss Hilary Keen is the lovely, keen-witted friend of Chase and Herman Pennik is a self-professed mind-reader. Pennik's presence is the reason why Chase asked Sanders "to bring Sir Henry Merrivale as well," but he's away on official business and can't come until Sunday. Too late to prevent the murder.

Herman Pennik regards Sam Constable as "an ill-mannered imbecile, brutal to his wife, insulting to his guests, an obstruction to all mental or moral progress" and confrontation over cocktail gives him an opportunity to demonstrate the full power of his Teleforce – prophesying he would not be alive by the time dinner is served. Just as the clock struck eight, Sam Constable walked down a hallway to the staircase landing when Mina saw him "dancing or staggering" from her bedroom door before he fell across the handrail. Less than a minute later, Sanders caught "a faint flutter of pulse" which stopped the second he found it. This where things not only get really weird, but outright impossible.

Sam Constable died without a mark, external or internal, on his body and there was not a single trace of any kind of poison. Solid, liquid or gaseous. Neither was he anywhere near of an electric fitting. He simply had a fit in the middle of the landing and died a minute later. Things go from bad to worse when Pennik presents himself to Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters as the murderer who can't be arrested or held as a material witness. Pennik is more than willing to talk with the press about his Teleforce.

So the presence of the old man is more than just a little welcome, but Sir Henry Merrivale arrives not in the best of moods as "there's some low, evil-minded talk" about sticking him in the House of Lords. So he expected a quiet Sunday to end the weekend and now he finds himself in the middle of another impossible murder case, which could spell the kind of trouble that could send him away to the House of Lords. H.M. naturally begins to meddle in the case and comes across a parade of seemingly ordinary clues that always become a little bizarre or even sinister in a John Dickson Carr story. Such as the white chef's cap, the burned candles and blobs of grease to a missing scrapbook labeled "New Ways of Committing Murder," which provides the plot with a missing-object mini-puzzle. More complications arise when a second, equally impossible, death occurs. This time, Pennik not only possesses a unimpeachable alibi, but now he can also do astral projection!?!

Some of my fellow reviewers (linked above) have rightly pointed out that Herman Pennik is one of Carr's best characters and villains, but what really made it work is that he's a character in a detective story. Pennik could not have succeeded in any other genre or format except the extremely fair play detective story. If Pennik had been a cartoon or comic book character, he would have been a badly written character with ill-defined powers that change when it suits the story. Pennik goes from being a humble mind-reader and being able to predict the future "to crack a man's bones and skull with thought" and astral projection. But here it served a purpose. For example, Carr used some uncharacteristically cheap, dime-store trickery usually reserved for second-and third tier mystery writers to explain the mind-reading act, predictions and astral projection – which were handily used to further both the plot and Pennik's characterization. There are the scraps and snippets showing the effect of the two mysterious murders have on the outside world ("TELEFORCE: NEW MENACE TO MANKIND?") and how it influenced the jury at the inquest. Just as pure entertainment, The Reader is Warned is as good as any of the better-known H.M. novels.

All of that's merely dressing and the true strength of the story is found in the answers to those three all important questions in any murder investigation. Who, why and how. Yes, the answer to those three questions were very clever indeed and mostly hidden in plain sight!

I've mentioned in my previous reviews Carr was practically unrivaled when it came to parading the naked truth in front of your eyes while simultaneously distracting your attention. You have to be a quick-witted, sharp-eyed reader to catch all of his sleight-of-hands on a first read, but The Reader is Warned might very well have his most daring and inspired pieces of misdirection. So clever and sneakily done, you can only really appreciate it on a second read, because even with all the fairly distributed clues and hints it's almost impossible to anticipate. Carr was very fair with his clues and hints. So fair, he practically spelled out the truth punctuated with several footnotes assuring there were no accomplices or mechanical devices lurking in dark corners. One of the footnotes reminded the reader that there has to be a motive, "though fully indicated in the text, is not obvious on the surface," advising “anyone interested in solving the problem" to "look carefully below the surface." Every footnote ended with the title of the book, The Reader is Warned. Carr was the embodiment of Cavalier sportsmanship!

The only flaw I was able to find, if you can call it a flaw, is that the story is very much a detective reader's detective story and new readers, to Carr and the genre, might want to start somewhere else first. But that hardly takes anything away from this brilliant, expertly cut gem of a detective story.

So what else can I possibly say? You're simply incomplete as a human being without having read and experienced Carr.