The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) by Anthony Berkeley

Nearly a century ago, the Daily Mirror serialized a detective novel by Anthony Berkeley, The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) as by "A.B. Cox," which was published as a competition that challenged the reader to find an answer to the three basic questions of the detective story – namely who, why and how. The correct solution, "or the entry that is most nearly correct," could earn a first prize of £250. A nice chunk of pocket money in the 1920s! 

A year later, Berkeley revised the original text and The Wintringham Mystery was republished in novel form under the title Cicely Disappears (1927) that was credited to the obviously pseudonymous "A. Monmouth Platts." But, after its publication, the book plunged front cover first into obscurity. Only murmurs that surrounded the story for almost a century is that Archie and Agatha Christie and her husband were runners-up in the competition ("The Crime That Christie Couldn't Crack"). Now, ninety-five years later, HarperCollins has reissued the book as part of their Collins Crime Club series. This new edition restored the original title, but kept the revised text from Cicely Disappears and comes with an insightful introduction by critic, editor and genre historian, Tony Medawar. So let's see how Berkeley's most elusive detective novel measures up to his other mysteries from the period.

Stephen Munro stepped out of the trenches of the First World War decorated with a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross into a nice little inheritance from his late uncle. Figuring he deserved "to have half a dozen years of life and let the future go to pot," Stephen became a carefree, frolicking gentleman of leisure, but now the money has dried up and has been trying to find a job for months – noticing "a distinct slump in the market for promising young men." Fortunately, Lady Susan Carey, at Wintringham Hall, sorely needed a footman now that the old lady has decided to do a bit more entertaining. Stephen is expected to start performing his duties on the day a house party is expected to arrive.

A transition that's awkward enough without some familiar face being part of the house party to make the situation embarrassing. There's an old flame of Stephen, Pauline Mainwaring, who arrives at Wintringham Hall with her fiance, Sir Julian Hammerstein. A well-known stockbroker and one of the wealthiest man in London. Freddie Venables is Lady Susan's nephew and an acquaintance of Stephen who refuses to treat him as a mere servant, which is liable to make "the house feel awkward and the servants' hall resentful." Particularly the butler, Martin, proves to be a thorn in Stephen's side. But they're not the only people present who can make things awkward or difficult.

Lady Susan never forgave her niece, Millicent Carey, for not having being born a boy, because "the glories of Wintringham Hall must be allied to some other name" as there were no male Careys in the direct line. She has a greater affection for Cicely Vernon than "Cicely than for any member of the younger generation" and has "the girl to stay with her on every possible opportunity." The other participants of the house party includes Lady Susan's companion, Miss Rivers. A young and distant cousin of Millicent and Lady Susan, Miss Annette Agnew, who's very direct and modern. Miss Agnew doesn't care very much about another guest, Miss  "Baby" Cullompton, who cultivated a personality matching her nickname. Colonel Uffculme is a long-time friend of Lady Susan and full with stories about his time in India ("when I was in Bengal in '93... or was it '94?"). John Starcross recently garnered fame as an explorer by crossing "some of the hitherto unpenetrated hinterland of South America" and no country house party was no complete without him. Henry Kentisbeare is a gentleman of leisure who lives on the resources of his friends. So a house full with all the potential for trouble.

The trouble begins when Freddie finds a book on witchcraft in the library, describing spells to make people vanish into thin air, suggesting they have "a pop at the disappearing stunt" in preference to playing bridge. Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the idea, but Freddie eventually gets his way and Cicely volunteers to be victim for his vanishing-act which they staged in the drawing room – while Cicely is surrounded with every exit closely guarded. Chapter VI: The Séance has a handy plan of the drawing room marking where everyone sat or stood during the séance. Cicely disappears without a trace from the guarded, pitch-black room amid screams, rapping sounds and the smell of chloroform. Stephen and Pauline turn amateur detective to find Cicely and figuring out how she could have vanished as if by magic.

So, while the detective story that follows is well written and amusing enough, the weight of the plot does not justify the length of the story. The Wintringham Mystery is a short story stretched out to book length. A very well done piece of stretching, but not even Berkeley could disguise that most of the story was padding. Quality padding. But padding nonetheless. Anthony Abbot played a similar game in his short story "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) to much better effect, because it wasn't padded out to a novel-length detective story. That being said, it was interesting to see Berkeley having fun with subverting the reader's expectations and playing around with tropes. Such as (ROT13) vtabevat gur cerfrapr bs n frperg cnffntr nf n fbyhgvba sbe gur ybpxrq ebbz fvghngvba naq gur furanavtnaf jvgu gur qrngu-genc. You can already see the mind at work that would produce The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Jumping Jenny (1933) and his brilliant contribution to The Floating Admiral (1931) a few years later.

But, as it stands, The Wintringham Mystery stands as a fairly entertaining, but thinly-plotted and padded out, curiosity with occasional glimmers, or should that be premonitions, of things to come. However, while not a classic of its kind, I'm still glad I got to read this nearly forgotten, early detective novel by one of the Golden Age greats. I think admirers of Berkeley will be the ones who will appreciate this book the most.

Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene (2021) by P. Dieudonné

Back in 2019, P. Dieudonné followed in the footsteps of the late A.C. Baantjer with his debut novel, Rechercheur De Klerck en het doodvonnis (Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence, 2019), written as a tribute to the master of the Dutch politieroman, but Dieudonné began to differentiate himself from other Baantjer imitators in his subsequent novels – even improving on the old man himself. Rechercheur De Klerck en het duivelse spel (Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game, 2020) added more plot complexity to the true and tried Baantjer formula. Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020) is a full-blown, neo-classical detective novel with no less than three impossible crimes and my personal favorite so far. Rechercheur De Klerck en het lijk in transito (Inspector De Klerck and the Corpse in Transit, 2021) is a traditional detective story masquerading as a contemporary police novel. 

Rechercheur De Klerck en moord in scène (Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene, 2021) plays a similar game as its predecessor, but improved on it as the Inspectors Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver have to digest a heavily leaded slice of Urban Americana in Rotterdam. But, as the detective story has learned its readers over the centuries, nothing can be more deceiving than outward appearances. 

Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene begins with De Klerck putting down the Rotterdams Dagblad and remarks to Klaver that "the youth is unhinged, orphaned" in response to an article about the discovery of drugs, fireworks and weapons in the lockers of a high school – including "a hand grenade and a loaded gun." Klaver puts it down to puberty and hormones, but that doesn't wash with the old detective and De Klerck fears that "today's street urchins are tomorrow's hitmen." And that's when their shift really begins. A skipper and old friend of De Klerck reports someone attempted to throw a gun into the water from a bridge, but the loaded, recently fired gun landed on his boat. Klaver remarks they might have gotten hold of a murder weapon and CCTV footage of the various bridges could catch them a killer before his crime is discovered ("we have never worked so fast"). Just a moment later, they're called to the Parkkade where the Harbor Police pulled a body out of the water.

The victim is very well-known to the police, Robin Breidenbach, who's "an equally popular and notorious Rotterdam rap artist." Breidenbach was known as Da Rotting Thug and his "incendiary raps" earned him admiration as well as a ton of enemies, which include an escalating blood feud with Yunus Özütok's De Leftbank Militia from Rotterdam South. A year ago, Özütok was stabbed and robbed, but he blamed Breidenbach. Two weeks later, Breidenbach's cousin was stabbed and seriously wounded by a member of De Leftbank Militia, which left him with a limb. Justin Breidenbach never mentioned this to De Klerck and Klaver, but directed their attention to his cousin's producer, Daan de Rooij. Apparently, they were having a disagreement over royalties. De Klerck sees a parallel with a "rivalry between rappers from New York and their more successful Californian colleagues" in which the two figureheads of the feud, Tupac Shakur from Los Angeles and Notorious B.I.G. from New York, were shot and killed. Is history repeating itself a quarter of a century later in Rotterdam?

So not really the plot-ingredients you expect to find in a detective story with a more traditional bend and Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene does have all the outward appearances of an uncomplicated, modern-day police novel. Dieudonné gradually and effectively spins a complicated puzzle out of an apparently ordinary and sordid crime with every new piece of information that's unearthed bringing both clarity and posing new questions. Like peeling an onion in reverse! I was reminded of the commentary on Christopher Bush's plotting-technique "of starting with very little information (victim's identity) and working outward, lightening up the darkness." A very fitting description of the plot and how it progressed with (for example) the discovery of the original scene of the crime revealing that the murder was a tricky and complicated affair, which would not have been out of place in a Golden Age mystery novel – except perhaps for the clothing and music. While the clues and red herrings were not thickly spread around the story, the ones that were present were on a whole of a good quality. The central clue is not so much a traditional clue as it's a curious, very subtly planted anomaly (oyhr, havsbezrq nyvovf) doubling as a slippery red herring. Something you either spot and note as a suspicious coincidence or miss entirely, but, if you spot it, you can work out the solution.

When I read the synopsis, I assumed Dieudonné was going to go easy on the plot this time around and dreaded having to bang out a lukewarm review, but Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene exceeded all my expectations and ranks alongside Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death as the best the series (so far) has to offer. A series that's fast becoming a personal favorite as its soothing to my nostalgic cravings and meets my demands for good, quality plots. Dieudonné, De Klerck and Klaver deserve to be introduced to an international, English-speaking audience who will be more appreciative of them. But, in the meanwhile, I'm eagerly looking forward to the next one!

If you haven't had your fill of untranslated, Dutch-language detective fiction, I recently reviewed Vanno's De moord op het sloependek (The Murder on the Boat Deck, 1941) and Anne van Doorn's Meer mysteries voor Robbie Corbijn (More Mysteries for Robbie Corbijn, 2021). And, yes, I crammed this review into a few planned posts, because didn't want to wait with posting the review until January.

Christmas Quarrels: "Murder Under the Christmas Tree" (1980) by W.L. Fieldhouse

W.L. Fieldhouse is billed online as a legendary and prolific author of action, adventure and western novels, but my interest went out to a series of short detective stories he wrote for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine about Major Clifford Lansing – an American military investigator stationed in Europe. Major Lansing appeared in nineteen short stories, published between 1979 and 1982, which have yet to be collected. So you can only read the series with such tantalizingly-titled stories as "The Two-Star Corpse" (1980) and "The Nuremberg Ripper" (1982) in their original magazine publication. This is perhaps something Crippen & Landru can remedy in the future. 

Fortunately, Fieldhouse's "Murder Under the Christmas Tree," published in the December, 1980, issue of MSMM, happened to come my way and this month seemed appropriate to finally review it.

Christmas for USAEUR personnel, stationed in West Germany, "is at best bitter-sweet and at worst painfully lonely," but even the housing districts with the military built, clone-like apartments buildings, where the married officers with their families live, are not entirely free of heartache. One evening, the dinner party of Captain Robertson is rudely interrupted by shouting, "you bastard! I'll kill you," followed by the sound of shattering glass coming from the apartment above. Major Conglose and his wife, Beverley, have another fight, but they never heard either of them threaten to kill the other before. So they pop upstairs to have a look.

What the downstairs neighbors find is a dead man, lying face down under the Christmas tree, surrounded by fragments of a broken bottle and scarlet stain covering the back of his neck caused by a sliver of glass that severed his spinal cord, but it's not Major Conglose – which places Beverley in a precarious position. Beverley confesses to Major Clifford Lansing, "the best homicide investigator in USAEUR," she has been having an affair for the past two months with the dead man, Staff Sergeant Wayne Selby. However, she has no recollection of what, exactly, happened to Selby. Beverley remembers they had been drinking wine and dozing off, but got slapped in the face and woke up to find her lover dead beneath the Christmas tree. There was nobody else in the apartment!

The front door was closed and the bedroom window unlatched, but there was no fire escape or a ladder extending from the roof above and the window looked out over an empty parking lot two stories below. Major Lansing "found no scratches to indicate that a grappling hook had been used" or "any traces of rope strand." The roof is made of slate, sharply slanted and frozen solid, which practically made it inaccessible and impossible to traverse. So that only left the closed, but unlocked, front door were it not that "people were staring into the corridor after they heard the woman shouting and the glass break." So, if Beverley is innocent, the murderer was either invisible or sprouted wings.

Major Lansing's work is not made easier by the discovery the victim was a womanizer who turned his hobby into a lucrative, but criminal, side-occupation bagging him plenty of suspects and motives. But the key to the case is figuring out how a third person could have entered and left that apartment unseen.

I think Fieldhouse actually came up with not only a new and original solution to a murder in a watched room with no apparent escape, but nicely inverted the concept of a locked room mystery by revealing there was a different kind of impossibility at the heart of the plot. The real puzzle is (ROT13) abg ubj gur zheqrere pbhyq unir rkvgrq gur ncnegzrag jvgubhg orvat fcbggrq, ohg ubj vg jnf qbar jvgubhg oernxvat nal obarf orpnhfr gurer jnf na boivbhf, hathneqrq rkvg va gur ncnegzrag. My only complaint is that the short story format smothered the plot. There were a ton of leads, false trails and clues crammed together and they all needed more room to breath and space to move around in.

Nevertheless, if "Murder Under the Christmas Tree" is indicative of the overall quality of Fieldhouse's stories, the Major Lansing series definitely deserves to be collected. This is a series I want to return to in the future and will keep an eye out for the uncollected stories until a collection materializes.

On a final, related note: I've actually come across quite a few army-themed detective novels and short stories over the years. So here's a brief overview of those reviews.

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Murderer Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942).

Laurence Clarke's "Flashlights" (1918).

Paul Doherty's A Murder in Thebes (1998).

Michael Gilbert's The Danger Within (1952).

George Limnelius' The Medbury Fort Murder (1929).

Van Wyck Mason's The Fort Terror Murders (1931) and The Sulu Sea Murders (1933).

Bob van Oyen's Na afloop moord (Afterwards, Murder, 1953).

Franklyn Pell's Hangman's Hill (1946).

Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936).

Edgar D. Smith's "Killer in Khaki" (1941).

Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough (1944).

Mason Wright's The Army Post Murders (1931).

A Time for Murder (2002/13) by John Glasby

John S. Glasby was a British chemist, mathematician and a prolific fiction writer who wrote everything from science-fiction, supernatural stories and westerns to Foreign Legion sagas, hospital romances and hardboiled private eye novels on commission – producing over 300 novels and short stories under countless pennames. Glasby continued "to write with undimmed power" right up until his death, aged 82, in 2011. Over the past twenty years, a number of Glasby's novels have been reprinted in addition to several posthumous short story collections. One novel, in particular, attracted my attention for obvious reasons. 

A Time for Murder (2002/13) is advertised as an impossible murder of a kingpin of organized crime that's dropped in the lap of Glasby's most well-known series-character, Johnny Merak. A private detective from Los Angeles and one-time crook who spent three years in prison on a frameup and turned on his own organization, which (I think) lead him into becoming a private detective. Not sure how that exactly worked out.

So not exactly top-rate pulp and the Johnny Merak page, on The New Thrilling Detective Website, warns the reader to expect "a lot of breathlessly purple prose" set "in a mythical America populated by mostly over-sexed babes and gangsters" driving big, shiny cars. The page also airs the suspicion "that many, if not all, of the later Johnny Merak novels published since 2007 were actually regurgitated and possibly retitled novels dating back to the fifties." There are some hints in A Time for Murder that stuff has been added to an older story, but I'll get to that in a minute. First let's get to the story.

Johnny Merak is hired by Carlos Galecci, "one of the top man in the Organization," who believes somebody is out to kill him and wants Merak, as an ex-criminal, to dig around a little, but "a man like him makes a lot of enemies on the way to the top" – which makes his job a timely process of elimination. Three days later, Merak is summoned by Galecci's righthand man, Sam Rizzio, to the private, well guarded residence of his client. Rizzio wants to know why Galecci hired Merak, because he's currently trying to find out if anything has happened to him.

Galecci has a private, room-sized vault where he keeps his cash money and a collection of antique clocks worth no less than a hundred grand a piece. Every night, at precisely eleven-fifty, he goes in and comes out again a couple of hours later, but this time he hasn't. Only he knows the combination to open the vault door. When Merak arrives, a man is busy cutting the six-inch thick steel around the lock with an oxy-acetylene torch and eventually the door is opened to reveal the crime boss sitting at a table in the middle of the vault. There was a large metal box on the table stuffed with money ("obviously... robbery wasn't the motive") and the walls were hung with clocks of all sizes and shapes, "ticking away the minutes and seconds," but not a trace of the person who plunged a knife in Galecci's back!

Merak is baffled how a murderer could have entered the solid, steel-lined locked vault with only the dead man knowing the combination and a guards stationed outside the door and around the premise, but feels obligated to find his client's murderer. And that's where his real problems begins.

Sam Rizzio tells Merak he has no further need for his services and is rehired on the spot by the freshly-minted widow, Gloria Galecci, who believes she's next in line to be murdered. Galecci left a will that makes Gloria the sole heir of his criminal fiefdom and she intends on running it, but Merak knows Rizzio isn't going to take it lying down. So he begins to go through the motions of a run-of-the-mill gangster thriller with kidnappings at gunpoint, dangerous driving and speeding bullets, but there was actually a good scene when Merak was spirited away to a remote mansion to meet "a man who basked in the shadows," Enrico "The Boss" Manzelli – head of the entire Los Angeles Organization. Other than that, the only thing that makes the story standout is its locked room mystery full with potentially good ideas and the ghosts of clues.

Merak briefly discusses and rejects a surprisingly simplistic, but elegant, solution to the whole locked room setup. Suggesting the murdered had "knifed Galecci just as he'd opened the vault, carried him inside and set him up in that chair, before letting themselves out" and "closing the door behind them." Regrettably, the circumstances and the plot didn't allow the false and real solution to be switched around, because the simple, no-nonsense false-solution would have fitted the hardboiled style better than the more pulpier one. There were also hints that could have become good clues (ROT13): anzryl Tnyrppv'f ivfvgf gb gur inhyg univat n ebhgvar nf ur qvq “rirelguvat cerpvfryl ba gur qbg” in combination with gur qbpgbe fgngvat ur qvrq nebhaq zvqavtug naq gur pbagrag bs gur inhyg, which stood out in an otherwise very thinly plotted story. So it didn't take me very long to piece together the solution to the locked room puzzle. Glasby also picked an interesting murderer and a somewhat fresh motive, but neither were very well clued or given serious attention until near the end. However, the character is present throughout the story.

So, purely as a hardboiled private eye novel, Glasby's A Time for Murder has nothing particularly noteworthy to offer, but, as locked room mystery, it's an interesting curiosity. One that earnestly tried to introduce a cerebral locked room problem into a fast-moving world populated with tough guys, dangerous dames and menacing crime lords who operate from the shadows. A combination that has been attempted before and since with much more success, but a well intended attempt from Glasby that makes the story an interesting curiosity for everyone who's neck deep into impossible crime fiction. 

Notes for the curious: I mentioned there were clues and hints, here and there in the story, suggesting A Time for Murder is an older story that was touched up a little to be published as a modern P.I. Firstly, you have the historical clues. There are several references to the 1920s. One of the gangster makes a reference to a possible "return to the bad old days of the twenties" and the need to maintain order, which is something a gangster from the (more or less) immediate post-prohibition era would say than towards the end of the century. Another reference comes when a block just behind Central Avenue is described as "one of those places that had been up since the beginning of the century" and "had seen everything from before the roaring twenties to prohibition and the gangster era" before settling down as a collection of "dingy bars, night clubs and strip shows" – which is a brief history placing the story in the 1950s or early '60s. So the story definitely had a pre-2002/2013 publication, or version, but there are also some technological clues suggestion stuff had been added later. Cars, guns and landline telephones are the most sophisticated pieces of technology in the story, which also pushes the dating of the book closer to the fifties or sixties. But it made two things particular stick out. When Merak is brought to the mansion of the big crime boss, he "scanned the corners of the wall for any cameras" that might be studying his reaction. I know CCTV is an inheritance from World War II and the possibility was there as early as 1949 to have a live (unrecorded) monitoring television system, but it was pretty obscure until recording the footage was possible. That didn't happen until 1960s and '70s. A second thing that stood out is when Merak burglarized a shop, he cuts a hidden wire that would trigger an alarm at police headquarters, if he tried to force the window. This kind of (wired) burglar alarm seems too modern for the 1950s and too antiquated for the 2000s and 2010s. So here have a story clearly set somewhere around the middle of the previous century, but with two different publication dates from the next century and stylistic touches suggesting the text was slightly modernized. Long story short, Thrilling Detectives is probably right about the 2000s titles being retitled novels.

An addendum: Philip Harbottle emailed an important correction as the later Merak stories are not rewrites of earlier stories. I was given permission to add his correction as an addendum to the review, because I didn't want to remove or smudge over my mistake. So here is Harbottle's email: 

Pretty fair review of my friend and client John Glasby's novel, for which I thank you, but I would be very grateful if you could remove the rather offensive garbage quoted from that website—which you appear to endorse—that all later Merak stories were rewrites of earlier works. THEY ARE NOT. There were only 2 novels published in the late 50s: Blood on My Shadow (1956) and This Time Forever (1957). A third, The Savage City, followed in 1961, when the original publisher reprinted the first of them with a new title, Racket Incorporated, and when it was reprinted in the US in 1973, it was called The Organization. I preferred Racket Incorporated when I had it reprinted. ALL the others, beginning with A Time to Die, were brand new, original novels which John Glasby wrote at my request. He was halfway through a new one when he sadly died, and the fragment remains unfinished and unpublished. These later novels were of course simply SET in the late 1950s, which is the period Merak operated. Similarly, the text was NOT edited and updated by me, or anyone else. The second novel, This Time Forever (1957) has sadly never been reprinted, only because I have never been able to find a copy! The author never possessed one, since Spencer didn’t provide comps. I suspect it may well be one of the best, judging by Adey’s description.

Mom Meets Her Maker (1990) by James Yaffe

James Yaffe was an American professor of English and mystery writer who debuted aged 15 with "D.I.C." in the July, 1943, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that introduced his first series-character and head of the NYPD's Department of Impossible Crime, Paul Dawn, who appeared in half a dozen short stories – published in EQMM between 1943 and 1946. A regrettably uneven, short-lived series that peaked with the brilliant "The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms" (1945) and hit a low with "Cul de Sac" (1945). By the 1950s, the training wheels had come off and Yaffe created two new series-characters more closely aligned with Rex Stout and Ellery Queen than the John Dickson Carr inspired Paul Dawn stories. 

Dave is a detective on the New York Homicide Squad who visits his Jewish Mom every Friday in the Bronx to tell her about his latest unsolved murder case and "between the chopped liver and the strudel she always managed to solve it," which made him an inspector before he was forty. Dave and Mom appeared in eight short stories from 1952 to 1968 and were collected in My Mother, the Detective (1997). A collection Mike Grost highly praised as "one of the most important contemporary collections of mystery short stories" with plots "as good as those in classical writers" like Agatha Christie. My Mother, the Detective received an enlarged edition with an extra story, "Mom Lights a Candle" (2002), but Dave and Mom had a real revival in the late 1980s and early '90s. 

Yaffe revived Dave and Mom in four novel-length mysteries, published between 1988 and 1992, but the series had some notable changes in scenery and format. 

Dave is now a widower and moved from New York to Mesa Grande, Colorado, where he become the chief investigator for the public defender's office, but disliked leaving his 75-year-old mother behind in her New York apartment – who had to find another pastime now that her "homicidal connection was cut." Playing detective was among "the greatest pleasures of her life" and she always looked forward to Friday evenings. So she moved to Mesa Grande as she was pleasantly surprised to discover "people kill each other just as easy in the Southwest as they do in the Northeast." Dave had enough cases with unusual features on his plate to keep his mother from being bored. 

Mom Meets Her Maker (1990) is the second novel in the series and takes place during Christmas week. The story begins with a case grabbed from the headlines, "Minister Shot in Anti-Christmas Assault; Harvard Student Held for Attempted Murder," which played out a little differently than reported in the only newspaper of Mesa Grande.

Abe and Sarah Meyer retired to Mesa Grande, where they bought a one-story house with their savings, living not uncomfortably on Social Security and Abe's pension, but lately, their "paradise turned into hell." Two years ago, the Reverend Chuck Candy moved into the house next door with his family and nothing happened until last November. Candy began to extravagantly decorate his house until it resembled "the Christmas display window of a metropolitan department store" complete with lights, "flickering on and off in five different colors," across the roof, windows and statues of Santa Clauses, the Virgin Mary and Child. All of it "outlined in bright garish orange neon," also flickering on and off, while the lawn Santa Clauses make "appropriate ho-ho noises." There were also loudspeakers blaring thunderous Christmas carols from early morning to late into the night, which attracted a lot of sightseers. That began to take its toll on the Meyers.

So when their son, Roger Meyer, comes home from Yale and saw the nervous, frayed state of his parents, he goes next door to confront Candy, but it becomes an altercation in which a gun is drawn and fired – leading to Roger being arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. The case ends up on the desk of the Public Defender and Dave's boss, Mrs. Ann Swenson, who immediately find themselves caught in a two-way fight. They have to ensure Roger gets the best possible defense guaranteed by the American Constitution, but Arthur T. Hatfield, of the Mesa Grande Republicam-American newspaper, is making a personal crusade out of a Jewish, out-of-town student shooting a local Christian minister over Christmas lights and music. Already accusing the local authorities of being soft on crime and allowing "their hearts bleed for the lawbreaker" at the expense of his victim.

Mom nudged Dave in a direction casting a more sobering light on the Christmas decoration fracas and potentially good news for Roger, but then Candy is shot and killed in his own home. His body was found in the living room practically under the Christmas tree, which is very relevant. A wounded and dying Candy opened a present with crayons and wrote a dying message on the carpet, "GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH."

An incomprehensible dying message that the local police has no use for as they bloody shoeprints in the hallway and fingerprints on the murder weapon incriminating Roger Meyer. There's even a witness who saw Roger entering the home around the time of the murder and came running out five minutes later "looking very agitated." Since he's nowhere to be found, the case against Roger looks very grave. Even worse is that Dave and Swenson have to contend with different parties who, for one reason or another, try to muscle in on the case. The local chapter of the ACLU (The American Civil Liberties Union) wants to take over the defense and they can get a well-known lawyer, Victor Kincaid, who "had defended every radical and war protester and activist in sight" during the 1960s. Swenson knows what he wants to defend is a symbol. Not a person. So he wouldn't shy away from making a media spectacle out of the case with Roger's life hanging in the balance. On the other hand, there's the small town politics with demands Roger pleads guilty to second-degree murder to prevent damaging the reputation of a town currently undergoing considerable growth.

All of this takes place against the preparations and eventual celebration of Christmas with Santa Clauses doubling in the streets every day, the traditional lightening of Christmas Tree and a never-ending stream of Christmas songs and movies on the radio and television – while "Joy to the World" was being caroled all over town. You're advised to pay close attention to these festive scenes or you might miss something very clever and subtle that went unacknowledged in Mom's solution.

So, right up until the ending, my impression is that Mom Meets Her Makes was nothing more than one of those modern, lightweight mysteries (borderline cozy), but with the serious frown of a contemporary crime novel. Well, I lived up to my reputation as a fallible armchair detective. You see, I wrongly assumed I spotted the key to the dying message that identified the murderer with only the motive requiring a bit of educated guesswork, which turned out to be a trap. A very, very deep trap as Yaffe went full-blown Ellery Queen with twists and false-solutions. Every single false-solution could have ended the story without leaving me disappointed at the end. Mom Meets Her Maker gloriously broke with that long-standing tradition of the false-solution(s) outshining the correct one! Yaffe interestingly wrapped up the false-solutions in the title of the book. 

Mom Meets Her Maker opens and closes with Mom praying to God and asking for guidance, because she has not told the whole truth and has a crisis of conscience. What she has withhold from her son and the authorities gives one last and correct interpretation of the dying message, which has the kind of religious imagery that can be found in EQ. It's a shame Frederic Dannay was no longer alive when the book first appeared. He would have loved this seasonal, 1990s take on The Glass Village (1954) stuffed with all his favorite plot ingredients!

Lastly, I have to go back to Mom as an interesting specimen of the armchair detective. Dave regularly reports back to her and, while he eats, she listens and "no detail, no matter how trivial, ever escapes from that rat-trap memory of hers." She does some sleuthing on her own and, while that happens off-page, it makes her a very active armchair who works on her feet. Whether she's feeding her son or talking to people under the guise of being social, Mom is gathering and piling on the details to make up her case. So I can see how the original run of short stories may have influenced Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series. Yaffe's Mom and Asimov's Henry are two characters cut from the same cloth. 

Mom Meets Her Maker is a remarkable addition to the lineup of seasonal-themed detective novels doing the murder around Christmastime the American way. Exuberantly loud! No quiet, snowed-in mansion in the British countryside, but a town decorated from one end to another complete with gunfire, petty, small town politics and a bit of religious strife. What's hiding underneath, like a wrapped present, is a first-rate, EQ-style detective story with multiple false-solutions superbly making use of the dying message trope. There are surprisingly few classic dying message novels, or even short stories, but Yaffe's Mom Meets Her Makes can be counted among those few classics.

Here Be Dragons: "The Donnington Affair" (1914) by G.K. Chesterton and Max Pemberton

I've commented before that the size and scope of the traditional detective story never ceases to amaze me. Every time you think you know the lay of the land, a completely forgotten, long out-of-print writer is rediscovered or the growing popularity of translations breaking open a previously inaccessible part of the genre – like a large and open world that can be perpetually explored. Over the years, I've stumbled down an obscure rabbit hole, or two, but you don't always have to navigate uncharted waters to find dragons. 

I knew G.K. Chesterton wrote two uncollected Father Brown stories, "The Vampire of the Village" (1936) and "The Mask of Midas" (1936), when he was practically on his deathbed, but only recently discovered he co-wrote a proto-Detection Club tale during the early months of the Great War.

Max Pemberton was a British writer of crime-and adventure fiction who's a "somewhat of artistically minor member of the Rogue school" and published an unfinished crime story in the October, 1914, issue of The Premier. The open-ended story, "The Donnington Affair," posed a challenge "to several leading mystery writers of the day" to come up with a solution to the murder Pemberton so carefully described. Chesterton appears to have been the only one who picked up the gauntlet and neatly tidied up the whole problem in "Father Brown and the Donnington Affair," which was published in the November issue of The Premier and then promptly forgotten about until the 1980s – when it was rediscovered and reprinted in The Chesterton Review. The two halves have since been reprinted as a single story and can be found in The Complete Father Brown Stories (2012). But why "The Donnington Affair" remains so little-known today is a mystery as it has the kind of plot complexity you'd expect from the detective story of the 1930s and '40s.

The first half of the story introduces the Priest-in-charge of the Parish of Borrow-in-the-Vale, John Barrington Cope, who's engaged to Harriet Donnington, but her home life is an unhappy one. Harriet and Evelyn live at Borrow Close under the thumb of their domineering, old-world father, Sir Borrow Donnington, who "shut the doors alike upon the old world and the new" when his wife passed away. Ever since Lady Donnington's death, the place "has become mediæval in its isolation" with Cope being the only visitor as a future member of the family. That makes him the lucky one. Sir Borrow rudely showed Evelyn's suitor, Captain Kennington, the door and disowned his only, troublesome son. A "disgraceful affair" ended Southby Donnington's university career and became "a derelict in the dangerous seas of London's underworld," which ended with him being arrested on a charge of forgery and sentenced to three years in prison. So his father "swore that Southby should never enter his house again," but that becomes a sticky situation when he escapes from prison with a cellmate. Before too long, the grounds of Borrow Close are swarming with suspicious-looking characters (policemen in disguise) and culminates with a tragic murder of one of the family members.

Pemberton's portion of the story ends with the line "God send us enlightenment that the guilty may be punished" and Chesterton, acting as deputy deity, dispatched Father Brown to the scene of the crime.

Father Brown is true to form. Appearing unexpectedly as "a stumpy, apologetic person with a big hat and a bad umbrella" who sees meaning in seemingly meaningless statements and unimportant things. Such as pointing out "that in a murder case the guiltiest person is not always the murderer" or that the key to the case might be found in the statement that Southby's cellmate was "the cheeriest person possible." Slowly, but surely, Father Brown bicycles the reader through a surprisingly complex plot towards a solution that felt both logical and enviable to the point where you almost believe Chesterton and Pemberton had the whole thing planned out from the beginning!

There were, however, two aspects that were a little hard to swallow. Such as (ROT13) gung jubyr pbireg cbyvpr bcrengvba bire jung'f ernyyl abguvat zber guna n fvzcyr sbetrel pnfr and I was rather skeptical of gur snzvyvny erfrzoynapr va unaqjevgvat “nyzbfg nzbhagvat gb snpfvzvyr," but the latter seems to have some truth to it. So why has almost never been used in a detective stories? You would expect mystery writers to be all over such a handy piece of misdirection.

Chesterton wrote much better, more memorable Father Brown stories, but his collaboration with Pemberton is still far above the average detective story of the 1910s and historically significant as an ancestor of future round-robin mystery novels – like The Floating Admiral (1931) and The President's Mystery Plot (1936). More than deserving of being re-rediscovered today. And, perhaps, there's more to be uncovered or even added. Who were the other leading mystery writers of the day Pemberton challenged to find a solution? Did anyone beside Chesterton accept the challenge? What happened to their story? There seem to be some clues and hints in Pemberton's half that could potentially have opened the door for other writers. The story mentioned that one of the characters knows “half the crooks in Europe” and one of its most well-known crooks is E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles. Chesterton glossed over "terrible wound in the throat" of the victim, but a murder weapon was never identified and could have attracted the attention R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke or any of the other scientific detectives from that era. A collection with all of their different takes on Pemberton's problem would have been an iconic work of the pre-GAD era. A murder that takes place across the mystery multiverse and solved by the best detectives of that era in their respective universes. Ah, the road not taken!

So why didn't it happen? Probably bad timing. Hornung stopped writing fiction in 1914 and Freeman, like so many at the time, become involved with that little skirmish known as the First World War.

New Murders for Old: Case Closed, vol. 79 by Gosho Aoyama

The 79th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, published outside of the English-speaking world as Detective Conan, has some big shoes to fill coming right after the ambitious, multi-layered and massive "Mystery Train" story from vol. 78 combining a classically-styled, railroad detective story with a character-driven thriller – cleverly putting the series' cast of recurring characters to good use. In the last chapter of that volume the groundwork was laid for another Kaitou KID heist of the impossible variety! 

Jirokichi Sebastian is one of my favorite recurring characters, a wealthy, semi-retired CEO of a financial company and adventurer, who has become embroiled in a very public rivalry with the modern-day Arsène Lupin. So now he uses his personal fortune to purchase rare artifacts, gems and elaborate traps to lure and ultimately capture Kaitou KID, which makes him the perfect antagonist for that playful antihero. It's like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, but the traps are baited with precious gems and KID escaping from them usually present an impossible situation.

As stated in the previous volume, Jirokichi "never misses a chance to exhibit a gem that might attract the Kaitou KID" and his latest acquisition is a pendant with a red diamond, the Blushing Diamond, which is fastened to the shell of a turtle – named Poseidon. Jirokichi went through great lengths to protect both the turtle and the diamond that's attached to its shell. The aquarium at the exhibit is constructed out of shatter-proof glass and impenetrable wire netting on the top and sides, but the Moonlight Magician kept his word and made the diamond disappear as if by magic. Leaving behind a sealed, but empty, aquarium and a note saying, "the shy mermaid has dissolved into foam in my hand."

These Kaitou KID heists tend to be visual spectacles that handily exploit the comic book format to get away with tricks that would be hard to pull off in prose. Such as his miraculous mid-air walk (vol. 44) or his astonishing transportation-trick (vol. 61), which still succeeded in not being wholly implausible. By comparison, the theft of the turtle and diamond felt very contrived and unconvincing. However, the impossible crime turned out to play second fiddle to the solution revealing a cleverly done inversion of the Jirokichi vs. KID story format. So my impression is that the impossible theft was plotted around that inversion, but it undoubtedly improved an otherwise average KID story with his mistake being the proverbial cherry on top. I liked that there was a large crowd of Kaitou KID fans in front of the exhibition erupting in celebration to the news that "THE KID GOT THE GEM!!"

Speaking of playing second fiddle, the third, vampire-themed story is the headline act of this volume, but the second story, "The Unlocked Locked-Room Murder," should be considered a landmark of the contemporary-traditional detective story. A story that broke new ground with a rough, unpolished idea demonstrating the 21st century has fresh opportunities, not obstacles, to offer to every mystery writers who knows how to plot.

This original piece of detective fiction begins conventionally enough with Harley and Kazuha accompanying Inspector Torotaki, of the Osaka Police, to Tokyo to help investigate a suspicious death, but before picking up Conan at Richard Moore's office – because Harley suspects Conan might be interested in the "outta-reach locked-room murder." A schoolteacher, Hidemichi Mizuki, came to the attention of the police and they place his Tokyo condo under observation, but, on the third day, he failed to come outside for his daily walk. So they decided to enter the house and found his body hanging from a rope in the living room, but the gap between the dangling feet and seat of the chair suggests it could have been murder. But "how could the killer get in and out without being spotted by the cops?"

Harley, Kazuha, Torotaki, Richard, Rachel and Conan (yes, the whole group) travel to the condo to hunt for clues, but Harley becomes disappointed when evidence clearly points towards suicide. So a potentially interesting and tough case was cruelly snatched away from under his nose, but then something unexpectedly happens. When the elevator comes up to their floor, a man is standing inside with a gun trained to his temple and he pulls the trigger in front of their eyes. The doors close again and briefly goes up before coming down again. The doors open to reveal the body of the man lying inside and the word "GOODBYE" scrawled on the inside doors. Whatever trick you think was used, you're wrong. This is not the kind of detective story you can solve by relying solely on your knowledge of detective stories. Aoyama came up with something completely new that can only be described as some straight up reality manipulation. More can be done with this idea, but the execution of it needs a little more fine-tuning and polish.

So this brings us to that previously mentioned headline act that covers the last seven chapters and will be concluded in the next volume, but it better be good, because have been impressed with the story thus far. Conan, Rachel, Harley and Torotaki tag along with Inspector Torotaki to an old-fashioned manor house in the manor. Six months ago, the body of the maid was found in the surrounding forest, "strung upside down from a stake," whose only injury was "a pair of small punctures in her neck" and locals suspected the owner of the manor, Hakuya Torakura – who turned out to have a rock-solid alibi. But lately, he also adopted all the characteristics of a vampire. He sleeps during the day in a coffin, threw out the priceless family silver and told the cook never to use garlic ever again. Inspector Torotaki is asked to look into this case again as favor to his chief (Harley's father).

Upon their arrival at the manor, they find a family of rivaling siblings and their partners who all have their eyes on inheriting the family fortune. It doesn't take very long before all hell breaks loose. Hakuya Torakura is found dead in his coffin with a stake driven through his heart, but the body inexplicably vanishes as if he turned into mist and disappeared. Just like a vampire. Torakura's figure reappears, "filmy and pale like a ghost," during a group photograph, but only Rachel and Kazuha spotted him. Until the photograph is developed. This is the last time his ghostly presence is both seen and felt. Not to mention several (impossible) murders and getting cut-off from the outside world.

Regrettably, the solution to the vanishing body and spirit photograph exposed some very cheap, second-rate tricks unworthy of this great series and already have a pretty good idea who's behind the murders. But that will be revealed in the next volume with a very late, as of yet unexplained impossibility might rescue the story from ending up being uncharactertically poor entry in the series. Fingers crossed!

So, on a whole, this volume distinguishes itself by toying with some fun and even groundbreaking ideas with only the execution of those ideas leaving something to be desired. The third story had potential, but has so far only disappointed me. That unfortunately makes for a very uneven volume. Particularly coming right after the volume that contained a series-classic. Still not a bad volume, all things considered, but that vampire murder case really dragged down the overall quality.

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) edited by Martin Edwards

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) is the third, wintry-themed anthology published in the British Library Crime Classics series, edited by Martin Edwards, collecting eleven festive stories about "unexplained disturbances in the fresh snow" and "the darkness that lurks beneath the sparkling decorations" – wrapped and presented to the reader like "a seasonal assortment box." This collection presents a wide variety of merry mayhem from the pens of some very well-known mystery writers to a few names who have only recently been rediscovered. But none of the stories have been, what you could call, anthologized to death. So let's pig on this suspicious looking, crime sprinkled Christmas pudding, shall we? Hmm, smells like bitter almonds! 

The collections opens with Baroness Orczy's "A Christmas Tragedy," originally published in the December, 1909, issue of Cassell's Magazine, which has a Christmas Eve party keeping an ear out for "the sound of a cart being driven at unusual speed." A sound that has lately become associated with a series of "dastardly outrages against innocent animals" in the neighborhood of Clevere Hall. So everyone is very keen to put a stop to these cattle-maiming outrages and the cart is heard that night, but this time it was followed by a terrible cry, "Murder! Help! Help!" Major Ceely, host of the party, is found on the garden steps with a knife wound between his shoulder blades. The local police gladly accepts the assistance of Lady Molly, of Scotland Yard, whose success or failure will decide the fate of an innocent man. Not a bad story for the time, but not one of my personal favorites. 

Selwyn Jepson's "By the Sword" first appeared in the December, 1930, issue of Cassell's Magazine and has claimed a place among my favorite seasonal mysteries. Alfred Caithness is spending Christmas with his cousin, Judge Herbert Caithness, who has an idyllic home life with a wife, Barbara, who's twenty-eight years his junior and a five-year-old son, Robert – who loves playing with his toy soldiers. So the perfect setting for an old-fashioned Christmas party, but Alfred has reasons to be more than a little envious of his cousin. He has loved Barbara ever since attending their wedding and sorely needs the kind of money Herbert has aplenty, which is why he decides his cousin has to go when he denies him another loan. So, inspired by the family legend saying that "a Caithness always dies by the sword," Alfred begins to plot the perfect murder with all the evidence pointing to an outsider. However, the entire universe, or the Ghosts of Christmas, appear to be against him as even the best-laid plans can go awry. A fantastic inverted mystery from the hoist-on-their-petards category.

John Pringle is perhaps best remembered today by his principle pseudonym, "Gerald Verner," who prolifically produced pulp-style detective and thriller novels during his lifetime. "The Christmas Card Crime," published as by “Donald Stuart,” originally appeared in the December, 1934, publication of Detective Weekly (No. 96). Trevor Lowe, a well-known dramatist and amateur detective, who you might remember from my reviews of Terror Tower (1935) and The Clue of the Green Candle (1938) is en route with his secretary Arnold White and Detective Inspector Shadgold to spend Christmas with a friend in a small Cornish village, but their train becomes stranded when the heavy snowfall blocks the line. So they have to walk back to the previous station along with seven other passengers, six men and a woman, but they have to go from the empty station to an old, gloomy inn of ill-repute. During the night, two people are murdered in short succession with the thick, undisturbed carpet of snow indicating "no one came from outside and no one has left from within." The only real clue Lowe has to work with is a torn Christmas card. A good and fun piece of Christmas pulp, but more memorable for its mise-en-scène than its plot. However, I have to give props for turning the last words of the second victim in a kind of dying message sort of pointing to the murderer.

The next two stories have been previously reviewed on this blog, here and here, but, needless to say, Carter Dickson's "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) and Ronald A. Knox's "The Motive" (1937) can be counted among the best stories in the collection. Both come highly recommended! 

Francis Durbridge's "Paul Temple's White Christmas" first appeared in Radio Times on December 20, 1946, but reads more like vignette than a proper short-short story. Paul Temple's dream of a white Christmas in Switzerland is granted when he's asked to go there to identify the main suspect in that Luxembourg counterfeit business he had help to smash. So not much to say about this one with only half a dozen pages and a razor thin plot. 

Cyril Hare's "Sister Bessie or Your Old Leech" was originally published in the Evening Standard on December 23, 1949, which is another one of my personal favorites from this collection. Timothy Trent was brought up by his step family, the Grigsons, but Timothy was the only "one of that clinging, grasping clan" who "got on in the world" and made money – someone from that family has been annually blackmailing him. Every year, around Christmas time, he receives a payment notice signed by "From your old Leech." Timothy was actually surprised by the latest demand, because he assumed he had gotten rid of Leech last February. But here he was again. Or was it a she? Timothy goes to the Grigson family party determined to smoke out the blackmailer, but, once again, even the best-laid plans can go awry and here it comes with a particular dark, poisonous sting in the tail. An excellent crime story demonstrating why Hare was admired by both his contemporary brethren and modern crime writers like P.D. James and Martin Edwards. 

E.C.R. Lorac's "A Bit of Wire-Pulling" originally appeared under the title "Death at the Bridge Table" in the Evening Standard on October 11, 1950, which is another short-short. Inspector Lang, the old C.I.D. man, tells the story of the time he had to protect an important industrialist, Sir Charles Leighton, who received threatening letters promising he will be dead before the old year's out. So he accompanies him, incognito, to a New Year's Eve bridge party where's shot to death in front of Lang's eyes and the murderer apparently managed to escape. However, the sharp-eyed detective quickly begins to pick up the bits and pieces that tell an entirely different story. More importantly, he trusts the men he has personally trained. Lorac was somewhat of a female John Rhode, as she was very keen on technical trickery, but you can't help but feel the murderer was doomed from the start by employing such a ballsy method. A pretty decent short-short. Not especially memorable, but not bad either. 

John Bude's "Pattern of Revenge," another short-short, was first published in The London Mystery Magazine (No. 21) in 1954 and surprisingly turned out to be an impossible crime story set in Norway. The story is a retrospective of a rivalry between two men, Thord Jensen and Olaf Kinck, who vy for the attention of a beautiful woman, Karen Garborg, but one morning she found dead on the doorstep of her cottage – stabbed through the heart. There was "only one set of tracks in the fresh-fallen snow," single footprints alternating with deep pock-marks, "characteristic of the imprint left by a wooden leg." Olaf has a wooden leg and his fingerprints were on the knife. So he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but a deathbed confession shed new light on the murder and attempts to right a wrong. A very well done short-short and a truly pleasant surprise to come across this unusual take on the footprints-in-the-snow impossible crime. 

John Bingham's "Crime at Lark Cottage" was originally published in the 1954 Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News and brings a slice of domestic suspense to the family Christmas table. John Bradley gets lost on a dark, snowy evening while his car is on the verge of breaking down and ends up at a lonely cottage. There he finds a woman with her small daughter and asks to use the phone, but is offered to stay the night as there's not garage around who would come out to the cottage at that time of night in foul weather. But she appears to be frightened. And it looks like someone is prowling around the cottage. A very well done piece of crime fiction that would have served perfectly as a radio-play for Suspense.

The last story to round out this seasonal anthology is Julian Symons' "'Twix the Cup and Lip," but nothing he wrote interests me and skipped it. That brings me to the end of this collection.

So, on a whole, The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories is a splendidly balanced anthology with Dickson, Hare, Jepson, Knox and Stuart delivering the standout stories of the collection with the other entries being a little too short or dated to leave an indelible impression on the reader. But not a single real dud or over anthologized story to be found. Two things that tend to be obligatory for these types of short story collections. Definitely recommended for those cold, shortening days of December.

The Case of Alan Copeland (1937) by Moray Dalton

Looking back over my recent blog-posts, it became very evident I have been overly indulgent of everyone's favorite detective sub-genre, locked room and impossible crime fiction, but, every now and then, you need to dismount from your comfy hobby-horse. So it seemed like a good idea to pick as my next read something that's the complete opposite of a trickily-plotted locked room mystery. 

The Case of Alan Copeland (1937) is the seventeenth mystery novel by "Moray Dalton," penname of Katherine Renoir, who wrote twenty-nine mysteries between 1929 and 1951, but despite her productivity she had been entirely forgotten for the better part of a century – until Dean Street Press started reprinting her novels in 2019. Over those few years, Dalton reemerged from obscurity as a precursor of the modern crime novel with her "criminally scintillating," character-oriented mysteries with attitudes or subject matters that were sometimes a few decades ahead of their time. This could possible have contributed to Dalton's obscurity.

Curt Evans, of The Passing Tramp, who introduced the new DSP edition is Dalton's most well-known champion today, praising her ability to "plot an interesting story and compose an intriguing sentence," but it's her strong, vivid characterization that makes her work standout. Curt commented on my review of The Strange Case of Harriet Hall (1936) is that what makes Dalton unique to him is that she actually makes him worry about her characters, which made her unusual during a period "when so many mysteries are drier academic exercises." The Case of Alan Copeland holds a similar attraction being "an emotionally gripping and credible tale of murder" with "genuine detection" and indications to the murderer's identity laid throughout the book. That's what attracted my attention to the book. 

The Case of Alan Copeland distilled the village mystery to a closed-circle situation with the cast of characters comprising of the only handful of notables populating the tiny hamlet of Teene.

Mabel is the cruel, sharp-tongued and tightfisted older wife of former artist and now struggling poultry farmer, Alan Copeland, who felt obliged to marry her after she nursed him back to health, but has become completely depended on her and made him give up painting – determined "he should not waste her money on paints and canvas." She knows how to wound her husband with mean-spirited, carelessly uttered comments. Miss Emily Gort is "one of these ultra prim and proper old maids" who's Mabel confidante and actually enjoys some of her charity. She also dotes on the vicar, Reverend Henry Perry, who's wholly consumed by his meticulous study of the Byzantine Church in the fourth century. Old Mrs. Simmons is an "ex-barmaid grown monstrously fat" who presides over the village from her a wayside garage and petrol station where she reads people's fortune with a pack of greasy cards. She runs the place with her flapper daughter, Irene, whose supposed to marry her cousin, Ern, but she's in love with Alan. Miss Getrude Platt is the local schoolmistress with an unconventional taste in art and literature, but she used to be a fellow art student of Alan before becoming "an instructress of youth."

This small community receives a delayed shock when the vicar's niece, Lydia Hale, comes to stay with her uncle to recover from the flu. After a fortnight, she leaves again without realizing she's pregnant with Alan's child. Remember this was still a controversial and touchy subject at the time, which usually meant ruin to a woman's character and reputation. But, as Curt noted in the introduction, Lydia doesn't suffer from any "recriminations against her character" except from the people who the reader is supposed to dislike. So I can understand why Dalton has a click with crime-and mystery reader's of today. Not their little moment of weakness is without some terrible consequences.

When they're unexpectedly reunited in London, Alan is wearing a mourning band on his sleeve as he recently became a widow. Mabel had passed away after a very brief, but not unexpected, sickbed and she left him all her money. Alan "arranged for the sale of his stock, shut up the house and left the neighborhood for a while" and agreed to immediately marry Lydia when he learns she's pregnant. Nine months later, they return to the village, but hardly anyone approves of Alan remarrying before the year of mourning was over. It wasn't long before tongues began to wag. The police started receiving anonymous, spitefully worded letters accusing Alan of murder.

A discreet investigation provides the police with ample justification to exhume Mabel's body and Alan is indicted for murder, which is where the story shifts from a character-driven crime story to an investigative legal drama – culminating in the trial of Alan Copeland. Strangely enough, this second-half reminded me of the style of crime novels from the late 1800s, like Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), as there are several investigative characters involved with the case. There's the official police, represented by Detective Ramsden, who unearthed all the incriminating evidence. Alan's country lawyer, John Reid, who engages Hugh Barrymore to defend his client in court and advises Lydia to not talk to the press, because Barrymore isn't cheap. She might need to sell her story later on to cover all the legal costs, which is one of those sobering realistic touches that makes Dalton's work standout. John Reid also hires a private detective, George Hayter, to go over the case again and track down the anonymous letter writer. Hayter began his investigation believing Alan was guilty as hell, but changed his mind in spite of everything.

Needless to say, the second-half is my favorite part of the story, but can't deny the buildup to the murder was not expertly handled and particularly liked Dalton showing the characters saying one thing and thinking another. I actually liked the entire story right up until the murderer's identity is revealed, which failed to impress me. I half-suspected this person, but a small, important piece of information was withheld from the reader (ROT13: gur nhag jub qvrq bs gur fnzr fhccbfrq vyyarff nf Znory) which made the dramatic court room revelation possible. However, I hold a minority opinion on the ending and The Case of Alan Copeland is not about cast-iron alibis, dying messages or impossible crimes. It's a character-driven, legal crime drama focusing on the impact of a murder on a small group of people and it does that very well. Even if the ending didn't live up to my personal standards, but I have little doubt Dalton will come to be known in future years as one of the Crime Queens of the detective story's Renaissance Age.

That being said, Dalton's The Night of Fear (1931) and Death in the Cup (1932) were more to my taste with the former being an excellent, highly recommended Christmas-themed mystery. One of the earliest examples of such holiday mystery. I'm eagerly looking forward to a reprint of her post-Apocalyptic detective novel The Black Death (1934).