FIRST BOOKS: The Eames-Erskine Case - A. Fielding

THE STORY:  Augustus Beale is relatively calm when he reports that he has found a dead body in his wardrobe in Room 11 of the Enterprise Hotel.  In Chief Inspector Pointer turns up on the scene to rule out what the management believes to be a bizarre suicide. It's a poisoning case but it's most definitely not a suicide.  And this murder is only the start of a intensely complex case with the unraveling of multiple criminal conspiracies, unmasking false identities, explicating confusing wills, uncovering embezzlement and international fraud.

THE CHARACTERS:  The Eames-Erskine Case (1925) is the debut of Chief Inspector Pointer. We learn that he lives in Bayswater in a three room flat with an Irish bookbinder, James O'Connor, who he met in the war (World War 1, that is) when O'Connor was a Secret Service agent.  Pointer comes home to mull over his cases with O'Connor who often has insightful observations about the crimes. He's a sort of armchair Watson and offers up questions and answers that help Pointer move along in the proper direction.

The corpse is initially identified via the hotel registry as Reginald Eames, but that soon proves to be a false name.  In fact, many of the characters use multiple identities throughout the novel. Any reader would be suspicious of the book's title as it has a hyphenated name. Sure enough Eames turns out to be Erskine.  The discovery of this is done through an ingenious bit of detection involving the shape of an object in the pocket of a waistcoat.  Pointer retrieves Eames' pocket watch and finds it is too small for the impression left in the pocket. What happened to the original watch that lived in that pocket?  This leads him to various jewelry and watch repairs shops until he turns up the missing watch. In true mystery novel convenience the watch has an unusual engraving on it - a heraldry symbol indicating the family of Erskine.

Pointer also has a small army of policemen at his beck and call.  Several of these minor characters have nice moments to shine as they contribute to finding evidence, offering up ideas which Pointer considers or dismisses. The novel seems to be making its way to a humdrum police procedural until the entrance of Christine West, the fiancee of the primary suspect of the poisoning murder.  After hearing Christine's story and her adamant refusal to believe her fiance guilty of the murder Pointer enlists her as an undercover agent of sorts.  He sends her to the Erskine home posing as a friend of the family lawyer.  There she is to ferret out as much information as she can from Mrs. Erskine who Pointer believes has several secrets she is holding back.

Christine enlivens the book. Her scenes with Mrs Erksine and the three guests, Mr & Mrs Clark and Major Vaughn, are a lot more invigorating than most of Pointer's police work. And Christine is a dynamic woman who though initially troubled by the ethics of her being inserted into the Erskine household under false pretenses is nevertheless adept at getting Mrs. Erskine to open up and reveal herself.

INNOVATIONS:  The novel is inspired by Sherlockian style detection, both evidentiary and inductive, which is on grand display in the first five or six chapters.  There is a lot of attention paid to tow types of tobacco ash found in the murder room, footprints and fingerprints and --most interestingly-- sounds. A clever "ear-witness" sequence takes place when Pointer is interviewing a hotel maid who was doing sewing work in the room adjacent to the crime scene. Pointer asks her to go into the room, sit where she was sewing, and listen through the wall to the sounds he makes. Basically he then re-enacts her testimony. Through various tricks and tests he discovers her story is 100% true and by process of elimination figures out how the body was put into the wardrobe.

Part of the story involves the unusual architectural feature of the Enterprise hotel sharing balcony space with the Marvel, a hotel next door owned by the same real estate conglomerate. Various characters slip in and out of the Enterprise hotel rooms by traveling out onto the balcony and then retreating into a room in the Marvel. I wish there had been diagrams and floor plans to show this intriguing building feature. Alas, nothing. I had to rely on my not very well-trained spatial imagination to envision how these characters managed to accomplish the "escape trick" without being noticed by anyone in the street.

The twist in the plot when Christine West becomes Pointer's spy is the highlight of the book.  Eventually her placement in the household will endanger her more than Pointer anticipated.  The climax of the book includes a boat pursuit and the rescue of Christine from a coterie of villains. It all ends rather melodramatically back at the Erskine home where one of the villains confesses only so that three other people will be implicated.  It's very high drama, operatic even, and reminded me of the finales of several Anthony Wynne detective novels which I like to call "detective operas."  Many of Wynne's mystery books all seem to end with high-strung murderers confessing to all their evil-doing and then committing suicide.

NEGLECTED DETECTIVES: Amy Brewster, Larger than Life Lawyer/Detective

The first words Amy Brewster utters in her debut mystery novel are: "Of course he didn't you quibbling corporation jackanapes!" All 300 pounds of her barges into the room chomping on a Havana cigar then demands with the cigar's cellophane wrapper still in her hand "Where do I put this?" Here is one of mysterydom's least well known but most fabulous creations. We can thank forgotten writer Sam Merwin, Jr for giving her to us.  She appears in only three full length novels and three novellas, far too few, but all worth tracking down.

In Knife in My Back (1945) Merwin gives us a colorfully detailed outrageous past for Amelia Winslow Brewster. He starts with her physical description: "a woman of indeterminate years, of vast corpulence and even greater ugliness" with an outdated hair style that he describes as "cut in the old Dutch style of the suffragettes of 1916."  We learn that she was educated at Radcliffe, graduated Phi Beta kappa and was "admitted to the Massachusetts bar before she was twenty." Coming from a wealthy family helped her no doubt, but her shrewd financial skill turned her modest bank account into eight figures then she gave most of it away. She also has a talent for "gambling prodigiously" and managed to rake in more millions in casinos all over the country. Merwin ends this financial history with this comment: " A confirmed advocate of the redistribution of wealth, she had done her best to live up to it--but couldn't seem to unload [it] as fast as she made it."

Knife in My Back combines puzzle elements of traditional detective novel with hard-boiled characterization in the person of Brewster.  A woman comes to the Dumonat mansion to deliver a message to 28 year old Chris Horton. She is waiting impatiently for him in the study and when he finally arrives at the house he finds her stabbed. Police immediately suspect Joe Horton, Chris' brother, who apart from the butler Gordon was the only person in the house at the time. Joe calls Amy Brewster to defend him and keep him out of jail.

Though the culprit may be easy to spot in this debut mystery that doesn't diminish the all around fun factor of this yarn. It's fast paced, witty, and filled with the arcane history of glass making artisans, paperweights and the origin of those objects as art collectibles. It's the only mystery I've read to deal with this arcane hobby and the tidbits of history make for were fascinating reading.

Brewster returns in Message from a Corpse (1945),  a more hardboiled mystery dealing with professional criminals, a missing biographical manuscript with secrets about a dead millionaire, and a murdered retired judge. The mysteries all culminate in the uncovering of a cache of hidden jewels. Brewster displays her knack for cryptography and codebreaking in this book.

The final book in the trio of novel length adventures is A Matter of Policy (1946).  Insurance fraud brings two strangers together as they attempt to discover who used their names as claimant and beneficiary on a $500,000 life insurance policy. Jim Leavitt, an inept investment counselor, has no knowledge of the policy in his name or the beneficiary a night club singer names Tosta Kaaren, stage name for Toots Carlisle who is actually from Carnarsie and not Sweden. We got a lot of barroom fights, face bashing and a few scenes of our protagonists being tied up.  When a bodyguard assigned to Jim ends up dead in a trap intended to kill Jim Amy Brewster is called in to ehlp put an end to the fraud and possible future attacks on Jim.

I enjoyed this last book just as much as Knife in My Back for all the sarcastic banter from Amy Brewster, her usual wisecracks and hilarious insults. It's a lot more action oriented betraying Merwin's love of pulpy thrills like the stories he wrote for magazines like Dime Detective, Thrilling Detective and Popular Detective to name just three of the dozens of magazines he was published in over his 30+ year career.

Knife in My Back (the first, but I think the best of the trio) is the most common of these books in the used book market. It was reprinted by Handi-Books and I found over 50 copies of that vintage paperback edition for sale on various bookselling sites. Matter of Policy and Message from a Corpse are also out there but fewer copies of each turned up.

For those of you who prefer digital books you're in luck because the three novellas (for decades only found in the original pulp magazines) are available from Deerstalker Mysteries in a single eBook entitled Meet Amy Brewster. This digital book includes: "The Corpse Comes Ashore," "Amy Stops the Clock" and "The Maestro's Secret." And of course -- I had to force myself to look -- the other novels turn up in digital formats as well.