Double Detection - Belton Cobb

THE STORY: Noel Ross, ex-police sergeant with Scotland Yard, has just ad an operation to remove shrapnel from his head. He and his wife take a vacation for him to recuperate. Ross is distracted and annoyed by his fellow guests at the White Cliffs Hotel on the South Coast of England. When Mr. Griggs, a supposedly amusing and witty man, is found unresponsive in his room the maid jumps to the conclusion that he is dead. A doctor is called who find that Griggs has suffered some sort of respiratory attack and luckily can revive him. Ross later meets Griggs who at first seems friendly and of a like mind. When the other guests show up in the lounge Griggs' humor surfaces. He turns out to be a British Don Rickles belittling and insulting everyone with his brand of nasty humor. Ross seeing that nearly everyone is appalled or enraged by the insults begins to think that the health issue of the previous evening was really a murder attempt. Then Griggs suffers another respiratory attack and dies. Ross is convinced that the murderer struck again and this time he succeeded.

INNOVATIONS: The most intriguing aspect of Double Detection (1945) is that there are two detectives trying to solve the murder.  But each approached the crime from a different angle. Basically, it is the intuitive detective vs. the evidentiary detective. Noel Ross at first surmises and imagines an attempted murder and insists the accidental death Griggs suffers the second night is an actual murder. Inspector Cheviot Burmann shows up at the hotel and Ross ever eager to show his brilliant police work immediately assumes Burmann is there to investigate the murder. He's not. He is acting in an undercover role to ferret out a cook who is involved in a clothing coupon racket. But with his cover instantly blown by the rash ex-copper Burmann is forced to re-think hi strategy. So he begins to investigate as if Griggs was murdered. Slowly the coupon racket case and Ross imaginings blend and when the post-mortem comes out Burmann learns that Griggs was in fact poisoned. 

Ross approaches the crime focusing on HOW it was accomplished.  There is a complicated business with beer bottles recalling the mix-up of cocktail glasess in The Poisoner's Mistake. I was never really clear what was going on with these beer bottles until a very lengthy description which pointed out that some of the guests, including Griggs, had their own stock of beer. The reson for this also involves a complicated revelation about who o actually owned the hotel.

Burmann derided for ignoring the howdunit of the crime by Ross prefers to seek out the WHY. He spends much of his time finding a legitimate motive other than sheer hatred that Ross harps on about. The coupon racket scheme comes into play for a while and Burmann is keen that Griggs death has something to do with cheating his partners out of profits. much to his surprise this sound motive will fall apart when the real culprit behind the coupon is arrested and clears several of the suspects.  once again, Burmann will have to lean in on Ross' ideas in order to solve Grigg's murder.

SUMMARY: Intricately plotted, mostly fair play, and often very funny this was the second detective novel I've read by Belton Cobb and I thought it almost as ingenious as The Poisoner's Mistake. I say mostly fair play due one deeply hidden clue amounting to a bit of minutiae in one character's past that was mentioned exactly once. I thought that bit almost unfair but it was there in the story. Can't really whine. Also one crucial bit of information that seems practically superfluous shows up late in the novel and proves to have a lot to do with the murderer's motive. Therefore, nearly everything in this story will be relevant if the reader wants to match wits with Cobb and his detective characters. I nailed the murderer early in the story due to a psychological quirk that I have come across in other modern detective novels. This unusual aspect, a bonus of sorts to the murderer's motivation, might have come as a shock to Cobb's audience when the book was first published.

QUOTES:  That, of course, thought Cheviot as he put down the receiver, was the worst of doctors: they could always quote to you the case of someone who died in 1776 in a peculiar way and thus had prevented all people who had since died normally from establishing a firm rule. [...] Damn the doctors, thought Cneviot, they always make things harder instead of easier!

 Ross:  "What you need to do now is trace [the poison] from that bathroom to the kitchen where the beer was kept. When you've done that, you'll know who could have taken it there, and you'll have finished the case."

Burmann: "I suppose that would be one way to do it. But it has never been my way to do Sherlock Holmes stuff with a magnifying glass, crawling about carpets. And I don't believe that in this case it would work, if I did it."

EASY TO FIND? Though no modern reprints of this title exist Double Detection is easy to find in the used book market, especially from online sellers.  It was reprinted by Cherry Tree Books around the late 1940s or early 1950s. But be warned:  sometimes those Cherry Tree Books are abridged. I turned up 16 copies, a mix of hardcover and paperback, in one simple search and many come with the typographic DJ. All but two copies are priced sanely and affordably. Happy hunting! 

FIRST BOOKS: The Swan Island Murders - Victoria Lincoln

There is nothing more upsetting than falling for the hype on a book jacket. The Swan Island Murders (1930) with its striking Art Deco influenced illustration of a silhouetted damsel being threatened by claw-like hands and the promise of "mystery, horror and detection" was enough to lure me in. While there is plenty of mystery and a smattering of rudimentary detection on display there is little horror to thrill a 21st century reader.  This is a book of its age when its intended audience surely would've been thrilled by the exotic and bizarre plot elements but which led me to spend time on outside research as I found fault with the author's supposed arcane knowledge of Indian religion and mythology that dominates the story,

The story mostly involves the guests at an impromptu house party hosted by wealthy eccentric Nahum Gould, a collector of Indian esoterica and a variety of Southeast Asian artifacts. The rear of the book jacket leads one to believe that the poor souls stranded on Swan Island are at the mercy of a mad strangler. This is not the case. Two Portuguese immigrant workers are strangled over the course of the novel (so a partial truth) but none of them are major characters at the house party. Instead, the focused crime is that one of the guests is shot dead, a presumed suicide for much of the book. The editorial staff at Farrar & Rinehart seemed more intent on selling the book under false pretenses and playing up to the contemporary demand for sensational popular fiction.  Had they told the truth about the book they would've been "spoiling" the surprises. Of course, I think nothing of diving right and telling you that this book is really about abnormal psychology and monomania related to arcane Indian mythology and its effect on Indian criminal culture.

Connie Steel is our narrator very much modeled on a Mary Roberts Rinehart amateur female detective easily affected by eerie atmosphere and with a tendency to talk about madness far too often. Swan Island, as you might predict, is a fog enshrouded lonely place and Gould's mansion is an imposing and dreary, shadow-filled haven well suited for a reclusive eccentric obsessed with the Mysterious And Inscrutable East. Victoria Lincoln does an admirable job of laying on thick this atmosphere of dread signalling "horrible things to come" with typical HIBK prose like "...but that boat was to come and go again without carrying any one of us away from Swan Island." More typical are Lincoln's florid stylistic touches like this: "How dreadfully right I had been...when I had thought that all our proportions were chemically incorrect, and that some cataclysmic reaction was bound to take place."  This odd chemistry metaphor pops up two times later in the book. She heightens the mystery and terror when we learn that Nahum Gould is so fearful and paranoid he has turned the house into an impenetrable fortress. All the windows have steel frames, there is only a single key for every door lock in the place with no copies and only the butler Gomez or Gould's secretary Torres are allowed to keep these original keys. Gould himself keeps only the key to his bedroom which has a heavy oak and steel door, steel enmeshed windows and other security overkill enhancements making his bedroom more of a prison cell. He speaks in a hushed voice of keeping "It" out and is constantly on guard, especially at night .

Needless to say someone manages to kill the playwright John Parsons and as Connie and her fiance Edward Benedict soon discover the murderer can only be one of the four remaining guests, Gould, or one of his employees. Gomez has a son Joe with developmental delay who in true period fashion is referred to as "the idiot" throughout the novel. Though he is slow to comprehend anything asked of him Joe's father says the boy can have days when he is perfectly lucid. Joe is the first one suspected of being the mad strangler and also the shooter until the stunningly beautiful (she has to be, right?) Nana Moeller, a German actress about to appear in Parsons' latest play, insists that she knows John committed suicide. There is evidence to disprove this suicide theory and that the death is a cleverly covered up murder. Not the least of these clues is a blood stained book written in Urdu that has vanished from the library when Parsons was shot.

A blood stained book written in Urdu?!

This is the single most interesting facet of the novel. Not to mention Lincoln's most macabre and original touch. It will prove key to the solution of all that is baffling about the strangling murders as well as John Parsons' death. Unfortunately, the revelation in the final chapters is so far removed from a fair play traditional detective novel that it called to mind the most popular American detective of the era -- Philo Vance.  I'm sure Victoria Lincoln read her fair share of both Rinehart and Van Dine prior to writing her first mystery novel because apart from the Rinehart style narration, and the Rinehart-like emphasis on terror and madness infecting everyone, ultimately the book is an esoteric treatise much like a Philo Vance detective novel. Thankfully Lincoln spares us pedantic footnotes, but the final chapter is overloaded with arcane trivia about a criminal subculture that thrived in 19th century India. Sadly, the finale is also littered with misinformation and poorly Anglicized spellings of terms and mythological figures and haphazardly mixes fact and legend. I had to sort it all out in about 90 minutes of internet searches and reading up on the incarnations of Kali until I found Bhawani which is the modern spelling of what Lincoln renders in her novel as B'wannee. She also seems to believe that T'huggee (once again her odd spelling) is an actual religion rather than a criminal class.

Victoria Lincoln, age 26 (circa 1930)

THE AUTHOR: Victoria Lincoln (1904 - 1981) was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and claims (on her author bio on the DJ for this mystery novel) that as a child she managed to make the acquaintance of that town's most famous resident Lizzie Borden. She attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1926. The same year she married her first husband Isaac Watkins who was a graduate student in fine art at Harvard. She had her first child, Penelope, with him. A few years after her first novel was published she divorced Watkins and in 1933 married Victor Lowe, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

Her New York Times obituary mentions only her mainstream novels and her non-fiction but not her debut novel, The Swan Island Murders, her first and only foray into mystery and thriller fiction. Among her other works are February Hill (1934) adapted for the stage by George Abbot under its new title The Primrose Path. In 1940 The Primrose Path was made into a movie starring Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea and Marjorie Rambeau who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as a mother who turns to prostitution to support her family. Lincoln's other fiction includes Grandmother & the Comet (1944), The Wind at My Back: Three Short Novels (1946), Celia Amberley (1949) and Out from Eden (1951). Notable among her non-fiction works are the Edgar Award winning biography/true crime work A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight (1967) and her last book on the life of St. Theresa of Avila. She lived with her husband Victor Lowe and her family in Baltimore until her death in 1981.