FFB: The Case of the Gold Coins - Anthony Wynne

THE STORY: It's another detective opera from the pen of prolific impossible crime maven Anthony Wynne. Madness, stabbing, cudgelling, strangling, suicide attempts, and melodrama galore! This time we have a corpse discovered on a sandy beach with not a footprint in sight.  Blood on the sand from the stab wound indicates the man must've died on the spot. The knife that killed the man is still firmly embedded in his back yet no impression in the sand beneath the body would indicate being dropped, thrown or falling from a great height. Airplanes are ruled out immediately. How did he die and who managed such a baffling murder? Dr. Eustace Hailey, expert in maladies of the brain, assists the puzzled and infuriated Captain Ainger to ferret out the killer.

THE CHARACTERS: Dr. Hailey is always in accelerated action mode in Wynne's mid-career novels. He shows off his skill in sailing and piloting boats in The Case of the Gold Coins (1934). In this book Hailey is also at his most compassionate and heroic. As usual we get more than we need about psychological theory of the period which more often than not has more to do with class prejudice than it does with an understanding of human behavior. Hailey is supposedly a psychologist or neurologist or something like that ("I study the human brain") and loves to lecture about who has the capability of being a murderer, what constitutes genuinely insane behavior, and other similar topics, but thankfully we are spared some of the more naive theories we usually get from this pontificating detective. Needless to say his talent for abstract thinking comes in very handy in trying to explain how Lord Wallace's battered and stabbed body ended up where it did. Oh! and adding to the excitement are the two other bodies turning up where they shouldn't.

The is the twelfth Dr. Hailey mystery I've subjected myself too in an effort to read the twenty-two books (out of Wynne's total output of  28) I've acquired over the years. And the good news is that I think I have found the absolute best in the entire series. The plot is non-stop action with very little of the usual Wynne lagging and dullness. The detection is keen and very fairly clued which is not the norm for Wynne. And the impossible crime along with the other two murders and the mystery of the gold coins found at the scene of each death are more than satisfyingly explained. Histrionics and melodrama are still present in ample amounts, but there is a sound resolution to all the problems and a real ending rather than his usual abrupt stop.

More to my liking were the interesting characters, especially the two young women -- Ruth Wallace and Pamela Bolton. Wynne usually throws in a couple of attractive women into his plots for romantic interest but they never really come alive. However, in the person of Pamela Bolton we have one of Wynne's most unusual women, a troubled soul who elicits genuine sympathy. She is conflicted by her filial duty to her irascible father, a prime suspect in the murder of Wallace, and her attraction to her former fiance. Captain Ainger finds himself attracted to Pamela further complicating this woman's fragile emotional state. Hailey at the midpoint in the novel pursues Pamela via boat (like many of the characters she is also an expert sailor) to an island off the shore of the Wallace seafront estate and rescues her from her own rash behavior. Their scene together reveals Hailey's wise old man side as he counsels her and she manages to evade his prying questions with cleverly worded ambiguous statements. Pamela may be troubled, but she's still wily and protective of the men she loves. Though Wynne does tend to play up the hysterical woman stereotype too heavily it nevertheless manages to be one of the best written scenes in any of the Anthony Wynne mysteries I've read.

Bryn Terfel as Falstaff
Just as I picture Maj. Pykewood

I can't leave this section without mentioning the other standout, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Major Pykewood is the requisite kook in the story. Is he mad, is he sane or just very angry? He confesses to the murder of his wife and pleads to be arrested.  He has not one, but two mad scenes that would fit right into any classical opera. His first scene is a hysterical confession which includes this pronouncement: "I am dead. I'm still dead. That is why I want to give myself up to the police. They take charge of corpses." All that's missing from a speech like that is the music. Though it's usually women who have the mad scenes in opera I was envisioning a grandiose aria for Major Pykewood, an intensely guilty man with a masochistic streak for self-punishment. He should get fervent percussion and a keening melody. He literally shakes his fist at the ocean and cries out, "Island, island, island! That's where they used to meet." He goes on to describe his wife's love of the sea, her talent for sailing, and how she loved boats more than men. He believes that Lord Wallace was killed not by a human but by an act of God proclaiming: "Do you know what I had planned to do if God hadn't killed him? I had planned to smash him to pieces." Then he talks about his duck gun and he bangs his hands together to emphasize the deed. A tympani would do just as well. I loved the lunatic Major. He becomes the typical Nemesis in a Wynne novel and provides for a literally explosive finale.

INNOVATIONS: Wynne's impossible problem is one of the best of the books I've read so far. Unlike the contrived deaths in previous books the puzzle comes about as part of an accident when the murderer attempts to cover up his crime.  And the solution is simple and rather brilliant.  It's the manner in which the problem is obfuscated by the characters' poor observations that always tends to baffle the reader. The mystery of the appearance of the gold coins is also cleverly handled and so well clued that I was able to figure almost all of how the hidden treasure was transported from place to place and how poor Henry the footman (the second murder) met his death.

There is more genuine detection in The Case of the Gold Coins than in any other Wynne book I've read to date. Dr. Hailey does a thorough job of ruling out obvious answers to how Lord Wallace's body turned up on the beach making it all the more puzzling to arrive at the real reason. He manages to deduce where the gold coins were hidden on the island by looking at the growth of seaweed and barnacles on the rocks. In investigating an outside entrance to a cellar he pays careful attention to the way a trapdoor is constructed and discovers how someone could have bolted the door without ever being inside the cellar. All sorts of brilliant stuff, all of it providing the reader with fantastic clues.

Bill Pronzini has praised The Case of the Gold Coins in 1001 Midnights as probably the best of the Wynne books. I have to agree with him. Everything any detective fiction purist would want in a book is here to make for an entertaining and satisfying read.