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.