Death Greets a Guest - Charles Ashton

THE STORY: At a meeting of an archeological society a sudden torrential downpour sends all of the members, who were outside smoking and chatting, ducking for cover. Most made it back indoors some only to the porch of the Eastwood Hall. One guest -- Chandler, a sketch artist who was outside drawing trees -- heads for the summerhouse directly opposite the main meeting area of Eastwood Hall. Four of the members watch the storm increase in strength from a large window inside the Hall and see the guest wave to them from the only window in the summerhouse which also has only one entrance. When the rain subsides some of the members see Chandler slumped in the window frame. They head to the summerhouse and discover that the man has been shot in the back giving the book its ironic title Death Greets a Guest (1936). Yet no one entered the summerhouse at all during the storm. The man was in there all alone.  Basically, he was murdered in front of witnesses by an invisible assailant. Major Jack Atherley assists Colonel Bretherton (the local Chief Constable) and Inspector Williams to find out who killed the guest, how it was accomplished, and why a relative stranger was murdered at all.

THE CHARACTERS: Because the story deals with a group of men who are members of a private club (the archeological society gathers to discuss old buildings, mostly churches) the cast list is rather large. Many of the society's members appear only in the first scene and after the murder takes place and initial Q&A is over many are never heard from again.  Even with the absence of about five to seven men the cast remains varied and large. Among the notable characters who make up the primary and supporting cast are:

Stamford Eastwood - head of the society and host of this meeting. Quite a stiff upper lip sort of gentlemen who suffers no fools quietly.  He is married to 

Sylvia Eastwood - at first a charming woman who befriends Atherley, but quickly turns sharp-tongued and sarcastic when Atherley and the police begin to focus attention and suspicions on her friend...

Jimmy Bagstaffe - an insufferable artistic aesthete who adopts a theatrical manner, wears ridiculously theatrical wardrobe, hosts hedonistic parties for his artistic friends (mostly performing arts types) and belittles everyone and anything he disagrees with. He comes across as a satiric character meant to be a parody of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s who still cling to the hedonism of a decade ago, and also I got a very strong ridiculing of gay or effeminate artistes. A very popular bigoted stereotype that turn up a lot in vintage popular fiction.

Kesgrave - a new neighbor of Stamford and Sylvia's. Jack and Sylvia are invited in for an impromptu meeting one afternoon and we learn Kesgrave is in the process of renovating his Tudor era home, that he is a writer of fiction who uses a pseudonym that he will not divulge, and that he is married to a vivacious woman ten years younger than him.

Musprat - the bore of the archeological society, another comic character. If given a chance he will lecture on endlessly about building trivia, mostly made up of "fascinating features" of the houses and churches in the area. Jack makes the mistake of indulging Musprat one too many times.  I had a feeling that much of his droning on would contain some vital clue that everyone would overlook.

Joe Dudman - the owner/barkeep of the local pub. He is instrumental in identifying...

Mysterious Bar Patron #1, a bearded man who went off to Eastwood Hall looking for someone there regardless of the fact that he was told a private lecture meeting was taking place. 

Mysterious Bar Patron #2 - Immediately after the bearded man shows up another stranger stops in the bar asking about the bearded gent. He claims they are friends and wants to know where he was headed. Dudman tells him the bearded guy was off to Eastwood Hall and #2 mystery man heads there as well.

 One of the society members has a speech impediment that is played for laughs. I thought it a cheap form of humor (even for 1936), something that seemed utterly out of place for Ashton who likes to sprinkle his books with wit and wise cracks, but tends to avoid low farcical humor. Oh well. Making fun of a speech impediment would never fly these days.

INNOVATIONS: The impossible crime surprisingly is not the focus of the investigation; the motive really is more puzzling. The search for the "why" of the murder sends the plot into some intrigues in the past, many of which are found in an odd scrapbook of newspaper clippings that Chandler created. Also, Chandler's sketchbook and the drawings he made during his tour of the outside grounds at Eastwood Hall will provide a possible motive for one of the main suspects. I enjoyed all of the investigations and digging up of the past which involved a variety of crimes, solved and unsolved. When the solution to Chandler's impossible murder (the "how" aspect) is finally made known it's downplayed and delivered almost matter-of-fact. Early on I had a suspicion that Ashton was inspired by the detective novels of Anthony Wynne who employed a similar gimmick in many of his books.

Ashton adds a few unusual plot twists in a clever way. Normally a tired cliche, anonymous letters turn up in the final third of the letter and that plot feature adds an element of hysterical paranoia and allows Atherley to set up an elaborate final scene in which he is determined to unmask the killer.  It's a highly theatrical sequence and the killer comes as an utter surprise. I laughed and thought, "But of course! How did I fall for such a detective novel trick." It's one of those untwritten rules like "Never believe a character who is a bedridden invalid can't walk." Yet I fell for one of the oldest tricks in mystery writing. Kudos to Ashton!

EASY TO FIND? Death Greets A Guest is a very rare book. After looking for over ten years I finally found a copy of the cheap "Cherry Tree" paperback edition but a copy in any edition is near impossible to find. Miraculously, Neer who blogs at "A cup of hot pleasure" found a copy at a library and did not enjoy the book as much as I did.  I like Atherley's irreverence and his egocentrism. His personality, I think, is lively and lighthearted, never as annoying as similar traits in a vain supericilious character like Philo Vance.  To each his own.

The Bus Ran Late - G. M . Wilson

Several years ago I wrote a piece on the use of supernatural in the early detective novels of G. M. Wilson. I've continued to read her books as I own all but two titles, but have been disappointed with almost all of them written after the publication of Nightmare Cottage (1936).  Not only has the supernatural element disappeared, Inspector John Crawford (the policeman willing to entertain the possibility of occult intervention) has vanished, and Miss Purdy takes over as the pseudo-detective along with Inspector Lovick.  They make for an affable if sometimes contentious detective duo, but are not as endearing as, say, the comic squabbling of Hildegarde Withers and policeman Oscar Piper in the mystery novels of Stuart Palmer. Miss Purdy still retains some ephemeral psychic power -- she has spells where she "feels" events from the past -- and that power, such as it is, makes an appearance in later books (so far it crops up exactly once in Murder on Monday, The Devil's Skull and the book being reviewed here). Any plot that may hinge on supernatural events or other-worldy influences, however, is basically absent, and the stories are less off-beat, grounded in domestic strife and societal woes. I keep hoping for something weird but all I've got so far was a hint of witchcraft and hexing in A Deal of Death Caps (1970). Then I read The Bus Ran Late. Surprise! While it may not have anything supernatural it was complexly plotted, engrossing and highlighted with some clever double twists.

The Bus Ran Late (1971) is a story of a blackmailer and some deep dark secrets in the past rearing their ugly head again.  The plot is unexpectedly complicated and seems to be a real throwback to the kind of exciting  stories I enjoy so much from the Golden Age. As I read I began taking copious notes to keep up with all Wilson's machinations and wrote at one point "The plot thickens...HEAVILY! And it's only at p. 56!" Needless to say this was quite an improvement over the four books I've read in her mid-career and one well worth keeping on any devotee's Wish List.

Miss Purdy has moved out of her old home and is renting the ground floor in a three story home owned by a mystery writer named Ralph Gillespie.  The other occupant living up on the renovated second floor is Julian Baxter, a painter.  Ralph has introduced Julian to young Jenny Ross, also an artist, who hopes to get hired by Julian as a design associate in his bustling commercial art business. This household will soon become embroiled in a mess of blackmail that is strangely associated with one of Gillespie's popular mystery novels called Death of a Blackmailer.

Inspector Lovick appears in the story when a woman's body is found in the river. A blackmail note is found among her possessions but none of her effects help identify her. Miss Purdy informs Lovick that Jenny has been concerned about a maid that fled her father's house and took with her an incriminating letter that will reveal a terrible secret about Jenny’s dead mother. The maid, Hilda, has not contacted Jenny as expected and she and Julian have been visiting several people connected to Jenny's mother's past life in the hopes of discovering where Hilda went. They hope to retrieve the letter before it falls into the hands of Jenny’s ailing father. It's fairly clear before any of the primary characters officially identify the corpse that the woman in the river is Hilda.  But what happened to the letter she stole? And why was she being blackmailed by the person who calls himself X just like the blackmailer in Gillespie's novel? In fact, the blackmail letter found at the drowning site is copied verbatim (with minor changes in place names) from the blackmail note in the novel.

The story also relates a past crime at the local antique store once owned by Matt Downall and now run by Martin Frobisher who Lovick suspects of being Downall's son with a new name. Downall was a blackmailer himself but crossed the line when he tried to extrort money out of Julian Baxter who instead of paying up beat Downall with an inch of his life.  The antique store owner was hospitalized, recovered, then was murdered -- again by being beaten. [With a poker!  I thought this was going to tie in with her first mystery novel Bury that Poker and the haunted weapon would turn up in Frobisher's antique store. But no!  What a lost opportunity.] The blackmail of the past will eventually link up with the blackmail in the present, but not before a couple of unexpected murders occur.

Wilson's plotting skill is on full display here and she does a good job of making it seem like the blackmailer and murderer is trying to frame Ralph Gillespie. Then two new characters are introduced that further complicate the story and that frame-up possibility is turned on its head.  I was certain of the finale, but missed one crucial but rather obvious detail. So points to Wilson for skillfully misdirecting my attention and fooling me. Overall, this is a well done tale that succeeds mostly because of the alternating plotlines with Purdy/Lovick and Jenny/Julian that eventually converge in the violent final chapters. The detective work done by Jenny and Julian was much more interesting that what Lovick does. Miss Purdy offers up only two bits of inductive reasoning and ultimately explains the title of the novel, an incident that involves Jenny and the blackmailer, in the final two pages.

There is hope for Wilson, I'm glad to see, in her later books.  I guess skipping ahead and reading out of chronology has serendipitously allowed me a peak at what she may be capable of in her last four books. I hope that those books from the 1970s live up to the fascinating complexity that she concocted in The Bus Ran Late.