Now Seek My Bones - S. H. Courtier

THE STORY:  A monster crocodile. A private zoo of venomous snakes. An 18th century ship that disappeared. A lost treasure. And the return of an ancient cult of Crocodile Men. Sounds less like a mystery novel and more like a lost screenplay for another Indiana Jones sequel (though Indy definitely would not be happy about the snakes). These are the bizarre elements that feature in the plot of Now Seek My Bones (1957) which is more of an adventure thriller than it is a detective novel. This macabre crime novel ventures into horror territory frequently when an Australian obsessed with his ancestors from Revolutionary era France is found dead in his swimming pool that borders a marshland and draws water from its natural source. He was apparently attacked and killed by a giant crocodile that got through a sabotaged mesh fence designed to prevent entry of fish and other aquatic life. The horrible death is called a grisly accident and dismissed. When the novel opens the family is preparing for the man's funeral. "Digger" Haig, one of Courtier's clever often arrogant series policeman characters, suspects murder and makes his way surreptitiously to the McGorrie ranch to get to the bottom of the skulduggery.

THE CHARACTERS: The ostensible protagonist and something of an aide to Haig is Jeff Galloway, affectionately known as Galley by most of the women in the story. A reporter and friend of the slain Rann McGorrie, Galley is disturbed because he learned of Rann McGorrie's death from an obituary. No one from the family informed him of the death and so he heads to Port Crosby to attend the funeral. When he arrives we meet the members of the small funeral party, mostly relatives of McGorrie.

Kit McGorrie - Rann's daughter who at first seems to be a naive and flighty young girl. But no one is truly what they appear to be in this novel.

Aunt Hilary - Rann's sister, the imperious substitute matriarch of the clan. She insists that her brother died in a bizarre accident. That there is no killer at large...until the ranch is invaded by the strange men wearing crocodile masks who have modeled themselves after a cult of dream-timing indigenous people of decades past.

Norman McGorrie - Rann's nephew. From the outset it seems Norman is nothing but bad news and many readers will peg him as the villain. Sullen, quick tempered, resentful and violent. Hardly anything likeable about Norman. Don't be so quick to judge. Courtier does a fine job of misleading everyone in this mystery novel.

Marion Steele - a mystery woman of sorts. Passed off as a close friend of Kit's but Digger Haig knows who she really is. Galley (and the reader) will also learn her true identity and why she showed up at the McGorrie home after Rann's death. Her interest in 18th century France may have a lot to do with her presence at the ranch.

Hooker Trull - business associate of Rann.  Of all the characters Hooker is a kind of cipher for much of the book.  He seems only to be present as an attraction for the women in the story.  His role is made clearer in the in the final chapters.

Gosh Laffey - The most authentically Australian character of the lot. Immensely likeable, teeming wiht eccentricity, and harboring lots of secrets he is eager to share with Galley. Gosh is the owner of the private reptile zoo a self-styled herpetologist though not a professional one by any means. He has over 150 snakes in a zoo he keeps ont he south end of the property. The collection of snakes consists of both venomous and harmless native Australian species. The star serpent, so to speak, being David, a carpet python (a constricting snake and non-venomous) he often wears around his neck.  The snakes are not just unusual decor for the novel. Their presence will be exploited in a terrifying action sequence that is better left as a surprise.

Once Digger Haig reveals himself in an intriguing scene the cast will grow to include some indigenous peoples among them King Jimmy of the Crocodile Tribe, also known by his native name Koolakuk, who provides much of the history of the crocodile men, where they came form, their purpose and what they are up to now. Also we meet a tracker named Sammy who is the only one of a group of local men who takes his role as a policeman aide seriously. His work in determining how many men invaded the ranch after studying footprints in the dirt and examining broken branches is some of the most helpful native detective work to Haig. 

INNOVATIONS: From McGorrie's fascination with his French ancestors to the story of the crocodile men it's difficult to know where to start in pointing out the originality and innovation. Courtier's strength as a mystery novelist will always be his talent for uncovering some of the uncommon, often just plain weird, aspects of Australian culture and history. Whether it's in his love of the native animal life peculiar to the continent or the mysterious ways of indigenous people and their arcane mores each Courtier crime novel will offer up some fascinating tidbit. Now Seek My Bones, only his fourth mystery novel, offers more than a tidbit, it's a veritable cornucopia of trivia, history and secrets of the natural world. The story gives a crash course in native snakes of Australia, instructs on the difference between the harmless snakes and the deadly ones. The most deadly of all is the taipan. One nasty specimen makes its home in Goff's zoo and it will feature in a terrifying scene late in the book.

The climax of the book occurs when a book on Australian 18th century shipwrecks is found and a story of a missing ship and its mysterious cargo (oh yes it's all related to 18th century France) is related to Haig and Galley by the equally mysterious Marion Steele. She also reveals an unusual rhyming code that Rann McGorrie composed that when solved will lead the trio to a highly unusual hidden treasure. From this point on the book kicks into high adventure mode with many cinematic action sequences. Some enterprising filmmaker ought to grab a hold of this book and turn it into a movie. It's ripe for a 21st century movie-going public with an insatiable appetite for action movies. Underwater cavern exploration and shipwrecks and monster crocodiles?  Can't you hear the money rolling in like the crashing surf?

Somehow Courtier manages to weave in the shipwreck to McGorrie's obsession with his French ancestors and also wrapping up the reason that the crocodile cult was revived in the utterly unexpected finale that takes place in a sort of submerged cavern accessible only at low tide. Nothing is predictable in this thoroughly bizarre, often chillingly macabre, adventure-cum-mystery novel.  Yes, there is also an unveiling of the truly surprising murderer, but that comes almost as an anticlimax amid all the rest of the over-the-top adventure sequences consisting of underwater hunts, nighttime seiges, captures, rescues, and mayhem galore.

EASY TO FIND? Not at all. You may have luck if you live in Australia. I'm sure the libraries have loads of Courtier's books. My copy purchased just last year was the first one I'd seen since I started looking for all of his exceptionally good mystery novels -- most of them extremely hard to find -- back in 2014 or so. Good luck in locating another copy!

IN BRIEF: Death at Ash House - Miles Burton

When I started Death at Ash House (1942) I was ready for some kind of riff on haunted houses or shunned houses or abandoned houses with a curse. Take your pick of whatever subgenre you'd like to call this kind of mystery. Considering the original UK title is This Undesirable Residence -- the ironic opposite of the standard euphemism employed in real estate advertisements -- the house should have been more than a gloomy setting. It could have transformed into a foreboding character, but it just sort of sits there in the background. Burton in his John Rhode guise would have no doubt played up the setting a bit more as he did in the neo-Gothic detective novel The Bloody Tower.  I was disappointed. But not as disappointed with how plodding the book moves along in its first half. This humdrum mystery novel definitely earns that epithet coined by Julian Symons to describe routine, often unimaginative, detective fiction that maintains a strict adherence to detection at the expense of nearly everything else that makes a mystery novel a delightful reading experience. The police work in the first half of this book is close to drudgery with multiple solutions proposed, analyzed and re-analyzed to the point of utter aggravation. Strange all these permutations of who did what and why when the story itself seems deceptively simple.

S.H. Apperley and his secretary/companion Walter Bristow. The two men  are in the process of relocating. Bristow has been charged with checking out a few houses for purchase while Apperley sets himself up in a temporary residence. Bristow was to have visited one final house, then meet his employer at the real estate office and then make their final move into the temporary location.  But the car, laden down with five suitcases three of which contain a valuable stamp collection, and Bristow have gone missing. Apperley goes to the police to report the missing man and car. Eventually, the police find the car parked in front of Ash House. Bristow is dead, his head based in, and all of the luggage is gone. Ash House is in a forlorn neighborhood, in the shadow of a heavily forested area, and the locals tend to avoid the place because it's so lonely and abandoned. The immediate thought is that Bristow has fallen victim to a marauding thief who saw an opportunity to steal the luggage and conked Bristow on the head, probably not intending to kill. The discovery of the murder weapon, a strange metal disc that turns out to be a piece of equipment taken from a water boiler, changes that supposition to definitely intended murder. 

Somewhere around the halfway mark when I was truly ready to skip more re-analysis, jump to the end and find out the answers to three of the many unanswered questions that to me seemed utterly baffling there was a surprise second murder of a character who had never appeared in the book until her dead body was found. Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard and local policeman Inspector Prickett do some of the best detective work in the novel in determining the identity of the dead woman. When they learn her name there is an unexpected coincidence that sends the whole plot into a new direction. I began to suspect that there would be an upheaval in the entire story. Then Arnold finds a typewritten letter in the woman's room at a boarding house for elderly people where she lived and worked and I had an "Aha!" moment. I literally gasped aloud and saw exactly what Burton had done.

For the remainder of the novel I waited for the final revelation and I was 100% correct. I was delighted and proud of my detective work. For that upheaval in the plot alone this book deserves attention. Initially the plot unravels ever so methodically (often dully, I will admit) and then suddenly is invigorated, so to speak, by the unfortunate second murder. Once the woman is identified the story picks up and some of the best characters appear. The brief interrogation of the stern woman who runs the old people's home and, immediately following, the questioning of the only friendly employee at the same place, a friend of the murdered woman, are highlights in this second half.  Also worth noting is the section where Arnold and Prickett visit and discuss the Napleys, a gypsy family who are working as migrant farmers in the neighborhood picking fruit and vegetables. The bigotry associated with "travellers" and Romany people crops up leading to the ultimate assessment that Isaac Napley, the eldest son of the family known to police for petty theft and trouble-making, most likely is behind the luggage theft and probably the murder of the two victims. However, nothing so predictably prosaic will solve these complex crimes.

THINGS I LEARNED:  Inspector Prickett tells Arnold that the Napleys are not true Romany.  He says: "They're what folks in this part of the country call diddikys".  I know The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden, a novel about gypsy folk that I read as a teenager. I thought, "Are they the same word?"  Indeed they are!  In fact, here is the full list of variants for the word in addition to the spellings already offered: didicoy, diddicoy, and didikai.  There are probably several other spellings with double Ds or single Ds in the second syllable but I'll stop with those three. However you decide to spell the word the term is used to describe people who are not "full blooded" Romany, a mixed race person of half Romany (or any other fraction) plus any other race or ethnicity.

While not one of the most stellar examples of a Miles Burton mystery novel Death at Ash House or This Undesirable Residence is definitely worth reading should you be lucky enough to come across a copy.  It's a rare one indeed. I've never seen a UK edition though the DJ is thankfully stored among the thousands of pictures at the Facsimile Dust Jackets website. I'm unsure if it was ever published either in the US or UK in a paperback edition. No paperback edition turns up when I looked for copies at bookselling sites.  Certainly, the second half of the novel is much improved over its somewhat drearily constructed first half.  The ultimate reveal is cleverly laid out in fair ply style clues. Not too obvious, but with some out of the box thinking the final surprise can be arrived at well before Inspector Arnold delivers the whopper of a surprise to Prickett

Puzzle for Players - Patrick Quentin

THE STORY: Fresh out of his stay at a mental institution where he recuperated from alcoholism and psychological trauma related to his wife's death in a fire Peter Duluth has managed to score a hit play, an angel for financing that play and several veteran actors for his theatrical comeback as producer-director of the melodrama Troubled Waters.  But trouble starts early when the production is forced to move to an ancient, long dormant, and reputedly haunted theater. None of the cast is very happy about their new home.  Especially Lionel Comstock, playing a minor role in the play, who is paranoid about some horrible event that happened there years ago and fears the production may be headed for disaster. Peter dismisses it all as nonsense. After all, theater people are prone to silly superstitions. But when strange ghostly figures appear in a dressing room mirror, and rats infest the basement, it seems that the production may indeed be cursed. Comstock sees the dreaded figure he was worried about and drops dead. Just a heart attack or something more sinister? Then another actor turns up dead in a prop coffin. Peter believes that someone wants the production ended for good and will stop at nothing -- not even murder.

THE CHARACTERS:  Peter Duluth makes his second appearance in Puzzle for Players (1938) and is not much of a detective in this mystery novel. In fact, it is his "angel" Dr. Lenz who will prove to be quite an excellent sleuth. In addition to having helped Peter recover from his trauma in Puzzle for Fools (the first book) Lenz is now the primary financier for the production. His skills as a psychiatrist come in very handy when faced with a couple of puzzling illusions, a murder and attempted murder. Turns out that the novel is very much a psychological mystery and the behavior of several characters is explained in detail by Dr. Lenz over the course of the book. Strange phobias and an actor with an impressive memory for recalling faces from past encounters and are just two examples of "psychological clues" that will help the reader make sense of a rather complexly plotted story.

Being a theater mystery this story tends to be stuffed with melodramatic soap opera-like subplots. There are typical backstage crushes and quasi romances some of which turn out to be something completely different than Peter and the reader originally thought they were.  But the cast is sadly made up of hoary old theater clichés: an oddball stage door codger with a nostalgia issue grieving over his past life; a stage manager who is the miraculous Jack-of-all-trades with a specialty in trapping rats; a veteran actress with a drinking problem; young handsome Lothario as the drunk's protector; a foreign accented actor with dark and alluring looks, a scarred face from an airplane crash, and a secret; and another veteran diva who falls in love with her co-stars as easily as walking down a street. As much as I thought all of these people were stereotypes Webb and Wilson as "Patrick Quentin" do manage to pull off a couple of surprising twists, invert many of the stereotyped relationships, and come up with two well earned surprises in the finale

The best of the characters turn out to be Mirabelle Rue, the diva leading actress with a predilection for swigging from her brandy bottle during rehearsal breaks; her leading man Conrad Wessler, Austrian stage star with the deep, dark secret; and Wolfgang, Conrad's step-brother under Dr. Lenz' care at the Thespian Hospital. The story mainly revolves around these three and their relationship with each other and the other cast members.

Often Peter and Iris seem to be supporting players in their own story even though Peter narrates the book. He spends many pages mulling over his past and reminding us of the trauma of the fire and his wife's death and threatening to hit the bottle more than he does facing the consequences of two deaths in his cast.  Also, the mantra of "the show must go on" seems to infect everyone to the point that the entire company feels it necessary to withhold info from the police so that the play can open and be the success they know it will be. A bit too much even for a theater mystery. To these people the world of the stage is more important than the real world. It gets to be a bore. I only wanted to know who the villain was and why all the sabotage was inflicted on the production.

INNOVATIONS: While the subplots often are tiresome the oddities of the plot keep me engaged. The mystery of the ghost in the mirror is solved fairly quickly, proving to be both simple and utterly creepy when Dr. Lenz explains how the culprit uses the prank to trigger Conrad's fragile psyche and his continuing PTSD from the plane crash.

I especially enjoyed how Mirabelle's alcoholism turns out to be something utterly different primarily because the enabling of an alcoholic really bothered me even for a 1938 novel.  It's a given that heavy drinking seemed to be used way too often for comic effect in days gone by (I guess in some stupid sit-coms it still is) but I still have problems with that trope, especially people tolerating it and enabling the drinker. Webb & Wilson try to make Mirabelle a sympathetic figure who uses alcohol as a refuge but I was glad when it was all proven a sham, that she was seeking refuge in a bottle of something else for a problem that never occurred to me. Also, her relationship with Gerard has a twist in store as well. The Patrick Quentin mystery novels often has clever twists that come out of nowhere and transform something that seemed trite into a refreshingly original idea.

Another nifty plot element is the bizarre murder method used to dispatch a condescending blackmailer, an absolutely gruesome way to go and surely a contribution of Richard Wilson Webb, the lover of the macabre of this writing duo. Also worth mentioning -- Dr. Lenz prescribes acting as a therapy for his patient Wolfgang von Brandt as an ironic means to cure an identity crisis. While this seems radical or far-fetched when all is revealed in the finale (the supreme surprise of the novel) it turns out to be yet another bit of misdirection that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Ultimately, Dr. Lenz turns out to be the detective of the novel. In solving the mystery of the ghost in the mirror he explains why it was necessary to take place in the specific dressing room. He also spots two blackmailers with varying reasons for threatening cast members and the playwright, and in the final pages reveals the dangerous murderer hiding in the company. Peter does very little detecting and in fact Iris  proves herself better as a detective than Peter in this outing. Yet another surprise in the novel.

THINGS I LEARNED: For much of the book Iris continues to press Peter into marriage.  Whenever there is a break in rehearsal she prods him to run down to City Hall to get the license or to run off for the weekend to get hitched. After Peter is bonked on the head by one of the many villains in the story she finally decides to take matters into her own hands. She basically kidnaps him while he is unconscious and drives to Elkton, Maryland.

 

Why so far from New York?  Because as I learned after some fidgety Googling Elkton was the "Wedding Capital of the East Coast" for decades.  Over 10,000 marriages were performed on average each year during the 1910s and 1920s, less during the 1930s due to a change in state law.  For decades there was no waiting period after a marriage license was issued in Elkton and people would get married within hours.  But in 1938 -- oddly enough the year Puzzle for Players was published -- Maryland enacted a state law that enforced a 48 hour waiting period after a license was issued putting a quick end to the "quickie wedding."  To read about this town, that at one time had 20 wedding chapels on its Main Street, and the many celebrities who took advantage of the quickie wedding see this article in Time magazine from Feb 21, 2021.

EASY TO FIND?  A rare "Yes, indeed!" is the answer for a change, my friends. This book was reprinted multiple times in a variety of paperback editions from the 1940s all the way into the 1980s.  Nearly all those are priced well under $15 each. There are a handful of the US or UK hardcover editions as well. Obviously those will be more expensive.  A few collector's copies are out there as well with DJs and are the most expensive, of course. A digital version probably exists too.  But I never bother looking. Someone will most likely point it out in a comment below. Happy hunting!