The Sentry-Box Murder - Newton Gayle

My attempt to tackle as many obscure writers as possible this year (I have a reputation to uphold after all) turned up this oddity that I had forgotten I owned. So far it is the only detective novel set in pre-World War Two era Puerto Rico I've ever heard of let alone read. The premise - a treasure hunt in an ancient fort with a haunted tower- was so enticing, so much like something John Dickson Carr might write if he were more a fan of exotic locales, that I had to tear into it.

A group of tourists are engaged in a treasure hunt on the grounds of El Morro, a historic fort in Old Juan (and now the only national park on that island commonwealth). Among the participants we find Senator John Monarch; his wife, movie actress Melita Avery; Monarch's lawyer and Melita's sometime lover, Fergus McKelvie; Monarch's nephew Elmer; Stella Tophet, a strident American housewife; Jim Greer, ex-British Secret Service agent; and Robin Upwood his friend and an agent in the British Foreign Office. The treasure hunt ends abruptly when someone quite literally stumbles upon the corpse of the senator in the location of the title. He has been shot in a room with only one entrance, two windows that are no more than slits in the masonry, and that was being watched by two guards. An impossible murder! More Carr influence at work?  Well, not quite.

The book is narrated by Upwood and while he is involved in the action and we get to follow him along on his creepy adventures in the dungeon during the treasure hunt, the true detective of the piece is Jim Greer. Because Upwood is the first person narrator we only know of Greer's activities if the two of them are together. However, Greer is offstage a lot for much of the first part of the book and we only learn of his findings through dialogue exchanges with Upwood. This was beginning to bother me because I prefer fair play detective novels in which the reader and detective discover clues together. But later Greer will team up with Upwood and we get to follow the detection first hand via Upwood's narration.

The now inaccessible haunted sentry box at El Morro

Greer is one of those know-it-all amateur detectives. He reminded me of a British Philo Vance minus the foppery and quirky exclamations like "Oh my aunt!" He seems to be brilliant and intuitive but has a tendency to jump to conclusions, display his biases and chauvinism and make specious comments that rule out minor characters committing the crime like this: "Oakley [the chief of police] assures me that deliberate murder is totally alien to Puerto Rican character. There's a fair amount of crime of the passionel kind down here, but the local records contain no single case of killing planned in cold blood." I can't believe that the island was that much of an Eden even in 1935.

While the Puerto Rican characters are allowed to speak Spanish with Upwood acting as sometime translator (he is practically fluent in the language), there is the other end of the spectrum embodied in the character of Félise, a maid from the Virgin Islands. She speaks in heavily rendered phonetic dialog and is thrown in as the usual black character intended as an object of ridicule. With her "dems" and "dose" and her talk of spooks and superstition it's the most off putting part in a book which for the most part is very modern and sophisticated. Here's a sampling of Félise's words of wisdom, some keen advice for anyone investigating mysteries (with or without ghosts):

"Dar does be tings dat you believes and tings dat you doesn't believe. Sometime it seem a long way out but den you take a little jump home and it coom."

There is ample amount of detection but most of Greer's energy seems to be focussed on extraneous matters. A packet of shirts found in the bushes with odd scribbling on the cuff on the left sleeves, the search for the owner of a mysterious British accented voice that threatened Monarch with a terrible vengeance, and some strange verse-like scribblings left in a hotel room are only a sampling of the numerous clues that monopolize Greer's investigation. All of these seem to lead to the murderer and I was convinced I had nailed the culprit only to have the rug pulled out from under me in the final paragraphs of the penultimate chapter. While I was disappointed in the identity of the real murderer I must allow a tip of the hat to Gayle in fooling me by leading me down to the garden path to the false culprit. No mean feat for a novice mystery writer. This was, after all, the second book of a total of five.

Aerial view of the entire park enclosing El Morro

The investigation of Senator Monarch's murder is only the second book with Greer and Upwood and yet the story is peppered with allusions to several cases in their past. It happens about five times in the course of the book. The first time is a reference to their first case which was published as Death Follows the Formula (1935). This is understandable and a typical marketing strategy of publishers who want to sell books. Many of the detective novels of the 1930s have these kind of footnotes luring readers to the writer's earlier work. But later Upwood talks about the Stavinsky case "one of those things that cannot yet be told" which also "had been a crime with certain similarities" to the one being investigated in The Sentry-Box Murder. Gayle is trying to make Greer into a sort of Holmes with his own giant rat of Sumatra and other astonishing career adventures. It's irritating, especially since Greer is hardly in the class of Holmes.

More interesting than the book are the biographies of the two people who authored it. "Newton Gayle" is the pseudonym of a writing duo made up of Muna Lee and Maurice Guinness. Lee was a well known poet from Mississippi whose early career included work with the U.S. Secret Service as a confidential translator where she censored mail written Spanish as well as in Portuguese and French. She married another poet from Puerto Rico, Luis Munoz Marin and the two moved to Puerto Rico. While living there she collaborated with Guinness, a Shell Oil executive, on five detective novels most of which feature Jim Greer. Not surprisingly both their backgrounds come into play in their books. Death Follows a Formula deals with a man who discovers an alternative fuel to gasoline and his eventual murder. Their third book, Murder at 28:10 (1936), is also set in Puerto Rico. For more about Lee see this detailed article about mystery writers from Mississippi.

This is my first successfully finished book in the Mount TBR Reading Challenge. Crampons and ice pick were not necessary on this leg, though they may be required later in the year as I scale the hazardous peaks in the mini-mountain range I call my TBR pile.