FIRST BOOKS: Wheels in the Forest - John Newton Chance

"Cars, Siddons, cars! The place bristles with 'em. A Morris Oxford, an M.G., and two Rolls-Royces. The solution to this problem is in those cars."

 Emblazoned across the DJ front panel of the first edition of Wheels in the Forest (1935) is a laudatory quote from the pseudonymous crime fiction reviewer of The Observer, Torquemada, praising the debut of its author John Newton Chance. Torquemada (aka Edward Powys Mathers) was notoriously scathing in his reviews, nothing else would be expected from someone who chose as his pen name the identity of the cruel torturer of the Spanish Inquisition. TO find a positive review from him, let alone a rave, was a rarity and I was tantalized. I came across a copy of Wheels in the Fortune in my book hunting and saw several positive quotes attributed to Torquemada related to Chance's first few mystery novels and I succumbed to the spell of Gollancz's marketing scheme.  Could these books really be so good that the toughest detective novel critic of the Golden Age thought them exceptional?  For once the hype proved correct.  Wheels in the Forest is a corker. It delivers the goods on so many levels. And I'm already eager to try more of Chance's books from the 1930s and 1940s.

I'm especially surprised that this first novel turned out so well because the first Chance mystery novel I read (decades ago) was Death Stalks the Cobbled Square (1944), aka The Screaming Fog, which has the distinction of being one of Chance's few known locked room mysteries.  I remember nothing about the book other than that it was one of the few in which the author himself appears as narrator and acts as a character in the story. Nothing really new there -- Willard Huntington Wright was doing that back in the late 1920s as "S. S. Van Dine" in all of the Philo Vance novels. Then sometime in February of this year I read one of Chance's much later books called The Traditional Murders (1983) which based on the title I thought would be a fun retro-homage to the Golden Age. Frankly it was one of the worst mystery novels I've read in a long time. Utterly forgettable, often stupid, filled with stock characters of the worst stereotype, and peppered with inane gratuitous sex scenes.  I had to find out what happened to this writer who was so lauded when he first appeared to the world of mystery readers. 

He must've just gotten lazy and money-grubbing easily succumbing to all that publishers felt necessary to sell books because his first novel is nothing like that drecky book from 1983 when Chance was 72 years old. Wheels in the Forest is not only better written, it often feels more like a mainstream novel satirizing village life along the lines of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm.  As I got deeper into Chance's first mystery the Golden Age writer I kept thinking of was George Bellairs who at one time I liked but quickly grew tired of when his books all seemed to be so formulaic and repetitive.  Like Bellairs Chance employs an author omniscient point of view and allows the reader to know every single character's thoughts.  Chance does a much better job of this than Bellairs and it is one of the book's best strengths and innovative touches.  Every character introduced gets at least one noteworthy scene that not only fully fleshes out that character but advances the story adding layers of suspicion and motivation to the puzzling murder. A pregnant girl's body is found alongside a road in the village of Isle nestled in the New Forest and surrounded by a circuit of roads that attract motor car enthusiasts eager to test out their driving skills and the speed of their cars.

As the epigraph to this review suggests cars play an important part in the solution of the crime. Similar to Freeman Wills Crofts' fascination with train schedules and timetables Chance is a bit obsessed with speeding cars, their mechanics, and the timing of the many cars that were known to be driving on the roads leading to and from the crime scene. In fact, one character - Dennis Lambert - crashes his car into a streetlamp the very night of the murder. That car wreck adds an intriguing mystery to the puzzling nature of where the murdered girl's body was discovered.

 Our detective team consists of belligerent impatient Superintendent "Smutty" Black, his fathead of a sergeant named Siddons, a crew of lower level coppers, and the delightfully eccentric Evelyn DeHavilland who prefers to go by the simple moniker of D. Black enlists D as his unofficial spy in the village and orders him to get the locals talking and to listen carefully, but to never directly ask any questions about the murder. Black tells D: "You're a stranger, starting at an advantage, because you're not used to them. You might notice something that I wouldn't through being used to it."  But later we learn through Black's personal thoughts that he knows D very well from their years spent in the war together and he thinks D to be a fool:

Fools find out things. You can be off your guard with intel-lectual people because they're so wrapped up in themselves that they don't notice anything outside; but with a fool you risk being off your guard and the fool notices the small faults; proving that a fool is not such a fool as he looks.

That talk of fools is also an indicator that Chance was clearly a fan of slapstick comedy. He shows off his love of farce with several scenes of people falling down or otherwise embarrassing themselves in comic bits and gags. In the person of Evelyn DeHavilland alone, a Wodehouse-like fop who embraces eccentricity for its own sake, the comedy is witty and lighthearted. But when the dramatic moments come they are often as shocking as the intrinsic surprises and twists in any mystery plot.

Because we are privy to everyone's thoughts not just those of Black and D, the primary detectives, there are exceptionally well done dramatic vignettes.  In particular, a scene involving a dim-witted motor car garage worker who through much of the book seems like a stock in trade village idiot is heartbreaking.  Bill Jupe, the teen aged brother of the murder victim, breaks down in grief late in the story. In his emotional pleas stated in simple language he asks someone why was his sister killed so brutally, that it was so unfair and that he misses her terribly. It's simply written, direct and powerfully affecting. What makes the scene even more affecting is also the most innovative moment of the novel. That open display of grief in turn drastically affects another character in the novel and the book transforms from a whodunnit to an inverted detective novel. Shortly after that scene with Bill, Chance turns his attention on the murderer's thoughts and allows the culprit to basically confess to the reader!

Wheels in the Forest has turned out to be one of the richest, most surprising, and unexpectedly moving detective novels I've read this year.  Copies are hard to come by unfortunately, but there are at least three affordable copies offered for sale online as of today's date. If you've been tempted by this review and want your own copy, act now! They may be the only copies for sale for a long while.