FRIGHT FEST #3: House Party Murders - Edgar Allan Poe, Jr.

THE STORY:  Wayne Schofield is planning a house party for his friends at his estate in Wilmington, Delaware. But business takes precedence and he heads to Philadephia leaving his friends to set up and instruct the servants on what to do. Little does Wayne know that two of the servants hired are imposters, thieves looking to rob the guests when time is appropriate. Also, among his closest friends two marriages are on the rocks and philandering lovers are in attendance providing ample opportunity for jealous rages to be unleashed.  When Jack Skinner, Wayne's business partner, gets the feeling that the butler who speaks like an extra from a gangster movie is not the real McCoy he confronts the imposter and violence erupts.  Soon the house party guests are not only dealing with flowing champagne and high spirits but exploding bullets and flying knives.

THE CHARACTERS:  The first few chapters are overloaded with detailed exposition about the bed hopping quintet of main suspects. Hope and Jack Skinner are having marital difficulties. Hope is spending a lot of time with handsome, much younger, Ed Fitzhugh who is dreaming that Hope will divorce her husband and marry him.  Hope previously was with Sam Davis, Ed's best friend, who quickly tired of her and passed her off to Ed. Jack in the meantime has taken up with Rose Whitcombe who previously was with Sam.  Rose bizarrely is jealous of Hope who is now with Ed. Oh! and Ed and Jack look amazingly alike. They could be twin brothers. This of course will come into to play later on.

It was dizzying trying to keep all of this straight in my head. And while all this was being related Poe Junior decided to add another level of libido gone wild in the person of Carmen Yakatchie, a barmaid at The Black Cat Tavern. Carmen is described as the daughter of Romanian immigrants with gypsy blood. This un-PC term should signal to the reader Carmen is saddled with fraught emotions like easily triggered anger and jealousy. She vows to kill Ed and even fires a rifle at his car as he leaves the Black Cat after formally ending his affair with Carmen. If this sounds like a ridiculous soap opera that's because it is!  But have no fear the mystery elements are cleverly inserted into the storyline in several unexpected inverted detective novel styled narrative sections.

For the bulk of the novel the reader is in on lots of shifty goings-on, Poe Junior's way of creating suspense while also adding layers of deception and guilt to the busy storyline. We know about the two thieves who abduct the servants, tie them up, and assume their identities in order to rob the Schofiled home.  We know about Rose breaking into Wayne's study looking for an incriminating and embarrassing letter that she fears he will use to blackmail her. We know about Jack confronting the phony butler called "Bull" Bogart.  And we watch as Jack fires a gun at Bogart who was attacking him while at the same time another gun goes off followed shortly by a knife whizzing through an open second story window barely missing Jack's neck and sticking into the wall behind him.  [Knife throwing! Three characters are found to have this carnival skill.  For more about my favorite crime novel plot motif see this post.]

But wait -- there's more! Bogart is shot dead and Jack hides the body and dreams up an excuse for the missing servant. We watch him do all of this too. But his plan never really is carried out as he imagined. Someone interrupts him and later another character literally stumbles onto Jack's body outside in a remote part of the estate. He's been stabbed with a knife that Rose found in the study but which we know she put back into the top drawer of the desk. And right next to Jack is Bogart's body. What? Inspector Grimes must discover how Bogart was shot then dumped beside Jack. We know (and eventually Grimes will figure it out) that Jack hid Bogart's body in a clothes closet in Wayne's study where he shot the fake butler.  This is also the same study where Rose was looking for the letter and found the weird knife with a handle shaped like a woman's leg that is found in Jack's back. Who got into the study, took the knife and stabbed Jack? And how did Bogart's body get from the closet inside to outside the house next to Jack?

Whew! All this in only 63 pages. It's up to Inspector Grimes and his small cadre of diligrnt policemen to make sense of all the chaos.

INNOVATIONS: What I found most intriguing is how Poe Junior blended together the techniques of an author omniscient, inverted crime novel with the traditional narrative elements of a whodunit.  The first half is teeming with criminal behavior -- characters covering up crime scenes, moving corpses and what have you -- and as soon as Grimes appears on the scene the entire book shifts into a traditional detective novel. It's been several years since I've read such a clever tightly plotted book which at first seems chaotic and convoluted but turns out to be rather straightforward.  Close reading will allow the prominent clues to rise to the surface while the red herrings sink down into the murk. There is a lot of deception as you might imagine and the reader needs to watch for who is lying about their actions and whereabouts.

Artwork by Dean Spencer ©2022

As the author is supposedly related to the Master of the Macabre I expected this story to have some kind of homage to The Real E.A.P.  I guess including a bar called The Black Cat Tavern was a wink-wink kind of allusion.  I was ready to give up hoping for something more suited for a Poe story when around the halfway mark there is indeed a weird vignette. Turns out Wayne has devised a Halloween-like prank and hidden it in an abandoned well.  This is near a gazebo where he plans to escort all the guests for a late night meal and drinks.  I won't go into detail about this as it comes as a real surprise, but rest assured it is utterly bizarre and gruesome. Ultimately it is also utterly superfluous as it has nothing to do with the main story! When the machinery of the prank is engaged the bodies of the murdered characters are discovered and the prank is practically forgotten about. Prior to this happening the party approaches something like the hedonistic revelry in "Hop-Frog" and "The Masque of the Red Death.” But perhaps I was reaching for as many Poe allusions as I could.  Still, the requisite grotesquerie does appear. Poe would, I think, approve.

The House Party Murders (1940) is very much informed of action thrillers and at times has some ingeniously devised cinematic scenes.  I particularly liked a Hitchcockian bit. When Rose is finishing up her rifling of the desk she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She ducks down under the desk. The door we know from a few paragraphs previous has a lock that jams and the person who knocked tries to enter but can't get in due to the door knob malfunctioning. Then Rose look up and sees a face reflected in the glass of a framed photograph. There is someone outside looking into the study. She thinks she recognizes the face, but it quickly fades from view. It was like a screenplay moment.  Brilliant touch! Poe Junior has several other similarly concocted scenes that are almost like tightly framed and edited movie shots.

THE DJ: Took me a while to realize that the details in the DJ illustration are 100% accurate to a scene in the book where one of the woman characters also finds Jack's body. I added a close-up photo to show that the artist actually made the knife have a leg shaped handle.  A shoe is superfluously added, I think, to underscore the leg shape idea. But it is a naked woman's leg as described in the text, with no shoe. Also I'm sure the leg should be the other way around -- with the foot facing outward not meeting the blade.

EASY TO FIND?  A handful of copies turn up for sale on various bookselling sites, many with the intriguing dust jacket. My copy was for sale…sold within a single day after this post appeared. Happy hunting!

FRIGHT FEST #2: Veils of Fear - Vivian Meik

The "Creeps" series of books published by Phillip Allan during the 1930s are legendary books among supernatural fiction collectors, all are highly elusive and consequently exorbitantly priced if one is lucky to come across one in the antiquarian book trade. Comprised of short story anthologies by lesser known pulp magazine writers, sporting one word titles like Nightmares, Shudders and Terrors to name a few, they were compiled mostly by Charles Birkin who included his own work under the pseudonym Charles Lloyd in nearly every volume. A select few supernatural novels published by Philip Allan have also come to be included in the "Creeps" series as they were published contemporaneously with the short story collections.  Three novels by Vivian Meik have been deemed to be part of this series among them Veils of Fear (1934), a sequel of sorts to his first novel (actually a series of linked short stories) Devils' Drums.

Meik's second novel like Devils' Drums features Colonel Geoffrey Aylett and Father Jan Vaneken who have done battle with other worldly forces having teamed together in Africa where they learned the superstitions and primitive rituals of the local people.  In Veils of Fear reporter Neil Martyn is sent to Aylett to capture a story that will increase circulation in his struggling newspaper.  When Martyn reports back to his editor he is told the story cannot be published because it is too fantastic to be believed as fact. Martyn then produces a photograph of the subject of the story, an Indian mystic called Ashraf Daiye, and the sinister visage within the photograph begins to animate. The photograph shivers and shudders and the face seems to bulge out of the film as if the subject was trying to escape from a photographic prison.  Martyn's editor succumbs to a fatal hypnotic force and within minutes is dead.

The reporter feels compelled to return to Aylett and demands an explanation.  Soon he finds himself recruited in a international adventure that will take him from England to India to remote regions of Java and Bali. Accompanying him are a trio of occult detectives of sorts -- Aylett, his wife Joan, and the Dutch priest Vaneken. Together all four try to break through the three veils that separate this world from a demonic world controlled by a superhuman force personified as an evil Portuguese mage.

The novel is an odd mix of macabre incidents incorporating a vividly macabre imagination and intellectual lectures on everything from religion to the history of prehistoric weapons.  The supernatural incidents of course are the highlights of the novel and consist of weird manifestations, inter-dimensional travel, astral projection, and terrifying encounters with powerful mind controlling entities both human and non-human.  All of these adventures culminate in a climax of horribly tortuous murder, dismemberment and cannibalism. Meik uses his knowledge (gathered from his many world travels) of Indian, Tibetan and South Pacific Island cults that practice black magic rites to give the novel a verisimilitude not often found in similar supernatural works of this era.

Detail from a Balinese folk painting
showing mythic figures

I did find some comparisons with the work of Sax Rohmer whose fascination with the sinister Orient of pre- and post-WW1 eras turns up repeatedly in his supernatural fiction. Many of Rohmer's villains are powerful sorcerers whose greatest talent is the ability to control human minds, a recurrent motif in Veils of Fear.

Also worth mentioning are similarities to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos tales populated with fastastical non-human beings from the Elder World and other dimensions that invade our reality with the intent to replace mankind with their own presence.  In one sequence an amorphous non-human thing attacks the quartet of adventurers drawn to some spilled blood but bizarrely ends up caught in mosquito netting and miraculously is trapped within its mesh.  Previous to this scene Father Vaneken had delivered a lecture of the superiority of nets as one of the finest inventions of weaponry and entrapment.  It beggars belief, but is done with such conviction it is almost convincing.

Father Vaneken, the most skilled in doing battle with these forces and creatures, has one final weapon at his disposal which he saves for their ultimate battle with Da Souza, the superhuman demonic force.  Ironically, it is a simple sliver of wood with which he managed to capture the spirit of Khalil Pasha, an evil dwarf who turns out to be one the guardians of the veils.  It is the source of the wood that gives the sliver its power over all the entities they encounter.  For the sliver has come from the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. 

Vivian Meik, circa 1940s

Thus, the novel reminds us of the perennial battle between the forces of good and evil. In fact, at one point Father Vaneken says: "But listen we are not interested in [generic immorality].  That is a symptom -- we seek the cause. Greater than this immorality--mostly drink-sodden animalism grossly misapplied--is the real evil. [...] Intrinsic evil as opposed to inherent good." Also we are reminded that sacrifices must be made in these life or death battles. Someone pays the ultimate price, of course.  Because someone must always pay.

Veils of Fear is a notoriously scarce book though remarkably there are currently three copies for sale from various online bookselling sites. None of them come with the ultra rare dust jacket shown at the top of this post.  I owned a copy of this book (with a fully intact DJ) for over two decades and finally read it three days ago.  Then I sold it over this past weekend and was amazed that the individual paid the full asking price without making an offer for a lower priced deal. I have a feeling it may soon be reprinted based on the information I culled about the purchaser.  There's hope for fans of long lost supernatural fiction. Soon you all may be able to read this unique and thoroughly nightmarish work. 

FRIGHT FEST #1: The Death Fire - Lilian Bennet-Thompson & George Hubbard

This month I'll be reviewing a small batch of supernatural mysteries and thrillers as part of this Halloween season. Usually I do one single post tagged Halloween Special (sometimes two), but I pulled a bunch of books to sell, read them prior to listing them, and coincidentally they all had Halloween themes of sorts. To start this Fright Fest off I've chosen what I think is the epitome of the weird menace mystery novel.

"Was there to be no end to the fantastic horror of this thing? Like those of some giant octopus, the tentacles of mystery kept whipping out first in one direction, then in another, clinging and tightening their hold with every effort that was made to loosen them!" - from Chapter 24,"The Fiend"

The Death Fire (1929) not only is the earliest of this small batch of thrillers it also exemplifies a type of story that became a staple of pulp magazines in the 1930s. In fact, there were a slew of magazines that specialized in the "weird menace" story like Dime Detective, Ten Detective Aces and Strange Detective Stories. Weird menace stories deal with ostensibly supernatural events and bizarre crimes that may or may not also feature supernatural creatures and legends. Excessive violence and scenes of torture often were also conventions of these stories. Almost always the supernatural events and creatures will turn out to be rationalized. Many of these stories can be likened to the ghostbusting tales and novels about occult detectives who do battle with otherworldly phenomena and creatures who often have a knowledge of arcane lore. I guess you might also draw analogies to the popular Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoons of the 1970s in which the ghosts and weird creatures always turn out to be elaborate fakes with mechanical ingenuity accompanying the supposed hauntings. Real estate greed or fraud almost always turned out to be the motive of the haunting in the Scooby-Doo cartoons.

Bennet & Thompson, a writing duo who mostly specialized in westerns and western romances, wrote three weird menace detective serials (The Beak of Death and The Golden Ball are the other two) for Detective Story Magazine in the late 1920s which eventually were all published as books by Chelsea House, the book publishing arm of Street & Smith magazines. The Death Fire, originally serialized in 1927, became a book in 1929. It's the grandest of Grand Guignol novels they wrote and features a house haunted by a ghostly presence known as The Lady of the Mist.  She appears on the grounds of a cliffside home near the eastern coast of New York and her manifestations occur just after the appearance of an eerie blue light emanating from the foggy coastline.  Jimmy Clyde, a detective, and his friend Dr. Meredith travel to Cragwood to investigate. Cragwood is the mansion built by David Courtney, a psychic researcher who spent his lifetime investigating real and fraudulent supernatural events. Though long dead Courtney's influence and fascination with psychic phenomena have infected the household. Even the butler has become a true believer for he has seen things he cannot explain.

At the start of the novel Courtney's son Douglas is bedridden with a strange ulcer on his throat. Dr. Meredith has been consulted as he has an expertise in cancers, though everyone hopes that Douglas' wound is not so serious. Douglas refuses to leave his bedroom or the estate as he is fearful for his life and that of his sister Alice, who he bears a close resemblance to. Alice has also grown fearful of the weird events surrounding their home. Her fiance Tony was distracted by the vision of the Lady of the Mist one evening weeks ago and ended up driving his car off the cliff and died in a fiery crash. So already there is one death ascribed to the haunting.

The book is filled with incidents, they pile up on one another quickly until Clyde and Meredith are practically swimming in strange and eerie events. All of the dogs kept in a kennel for hunting have mysteriously died, a swarm of rats invaded Douglas' bedroom (the possible cause of his throat injury), a pool of blood weirdly manifests itself on the floor at the base of the grand staircase though no one seems to have been anywhere around, a black cat that was harassing Alice is poisoned but suddenly reappears after it was killed and buried, and finally Alice has been attacked in her sleep. Two puncture marks are found on her throat. Uh oh...  Everyone knows what that means.

The sheer number of manifestations and weird phenomena is to be marveled at.  Clyde and Meredith may initially be puzzled, but each of them is determined to discover what human agency is responsible for the haunting of Cragwood.  Meredith with his medical science background learns that Douglas' wound despite routine treatment with antibiotics and careful dressing is getting worse and seems to be a horrible skin cancer not the result of an animal attack.  Clyde refuses to accept ghosts and manifestations and suspects only human hands at work.  That is, until one night when the peculiar secretary Varlam, a Russian immigrant known to wander the grounds at night even during a thunderstorm, is discovered in a tomb with an apparently sleepwalking Douglas.  The two of them are armed with a pickaxe, wooden mallets and a sharpened stake, even a gun with silver tipped bullets. Clyde tells Meredith that the two truly believed that a vampire was after Alice. The word nosferatu is tossed around puzzling everyone but Clyde. He has knowledge of Eastern European legends which I'm sure he learned by going to the silent cinema. Or at least the authors must have been silent movie fans. No coincidence that Murnau's movie with its English translated intertitles was popular in theaters around the time this story was first published. 

Eventually all is explained in a very lengthy revelation scene. It should come as no surprise that Cragwood is riddled with secret passages. After all, the owner and builder David Courtney needed special hidden rooms in which to spy on the mediums he invited to his home in order to unmask them as frauds.  After discovering a secret panel the detective team follow some labyrinthine corridors into the basement of Cragwood where they discover all the machinery and equipment that created each and every manifestation.  At this point I got a major Scooby-Doo vibe. Still, this was the template for weird menace decades before that cartoon was even a figment in the animators' minds. Bennet-Thomspon and Hubbard get gold stars for their elaborately designed ghostly machinery. 

Even now The Death Fire with its abundance of incident dominated by freakishly weird events make for a helluva read. Clearly inspired by 19th century sensation fiction and Gothic masterpieces of the same era Bennet-Thompson and Hubbard have left us with the quintessential weird menace thriller of the 20th century.  It's definitely worth seeking out. For if you read this novel as an example of weird menace, then I guarantee that you've read them all.

Anyone interested in savoring this phantasmagorical pulp novel can buy my copy which is listed here.  Three other copies are for sale at other online bookselling sites and all of them are extremely affordable ranging in price from $15 - $25. 

FIRST BOOKS: Madam Will Not Dine Tonight - Hillary Waugh

THE STORY: Valerie King is having a dinner party. She's invited eight guests, among them Sheridan Keith Wesley, a private detective. Included in Wesley's invitation is a $100 retainer.  He's being hired to attend the party...and do what, he wonders?  When he arrives he discovers a motley group of people none of whom claim to know one another.  But although all the guests showed up, their hostess did not.  Wesley and his wife Diane decide to do a tour of the grounds and they find Valerie's naked body in a remote forested area, her clothing torn and shredded all around her. She has been brutally stabbed and is very dead.

THE CHARACTERS: Madam Will Not Dine Tonight (1947) ultimately is the story of a blackmailer.  This is no real spoiler for it's discovered rather quickly that Valerie King gathered all her guests at the dinner party to reveal all their secrets. Shortly after the discovery of Valerie's body Wesley and the police open up a safe in her study and find all sorts of thing one wouldn't ordinarily stow away in a locked safe. Among the items are a framed photograph of two young men dating back to the late 1920s, a pile of letters, and a marriage license. Wesley figures that he was hired to make sure Valerie was protected from harm at the party. But someone caught onto to her plans much more quickly than she had thought out.

The suspects are quite a bunch of oddballs with some of them rather reprehensible.  The guests at the party eventually become the prime suspects and include: James Godfrey, a criminal lawyer who loves to talk about classic painters and their work; Gloria Van Ryne, a contemptible young woman living in the fast lane with a rap sheet for public drunkenness and illegal gambling who thinks she's above everyone else in the world; Charley Cromwell,  described as a "22 year -old playboy and heir to millions"; Jimmy Burns, a gossip columnist with zero journalistic ethics who stops at nothing to get the story he wants; the Webbs, husband & wife servants, who claim to know nothing of their employer Valerie King; the Webb’s suicidal son in love with Valerie; and a middle-aged couple, the Hammits — the husband in "big steel",  the wife a complacent theater fan recently having seen Harvey — seem to be completely innocuous until Wesley finds an incriminating photo that uncovers deep dark secrets

Wesley and his wife are a likeable duo and it's clear they are yet another married couple in a long line of cocktail loving, smart aleck husband & wife teams all of whom descend from the movie versions of Nick and Nora Charles.  I couldn't get Myrna Loy out of my head every time Diana was in a scene with her husband. Her obsession with mixing drinks and cracking wise only underscored the Nora Charles analogy. Thankfully, by the midpoint all this nonsense disappears. It's fun and light-hearted to be sure, and Waugh's sense of humor is often bitingly witty, but it's hardly original. By the mid-1940s nearly every husband and wife sleuthing team from Pam and Jerry North to Jeff and Haila Troy to the suburban dullards created by Theodora DuBois (can't even remember their names) were all like this. It was only the final chapter during which Sheridan Wesley shows his intensely creative and thoroughly underhanded ingenuity that rescued this novel from being only mildly entertaining with a handful of interesting scenes.

INNOVATIONS: The most exciting part of this mystery novel can't be discussed in a review. Well, not in too much detail. Waugh inserted one of his most obvious clues early in the novel, but never returns to it until the final chapter.  He drops this clue in a casual manner but the action described is so obvious to any diehard mystery fan that it sticks out blatantly. This casual action of Sheridan Wesley's while he is examining the murdered woman's study clearly signifies an oft-used mystery novel plot motif.  I made a note of it immediately and kept waiting for the bomb to drop.  It never does until the final chapter.

The plot motif was already a cliche by the time Waugh's novel was published having turned up multiple times throughout the 1920s and 1930s in now classic mystery novels by such people as Ellery Queen (several times in both novels and stories), John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.  I'm sure there are dozens of books by obscure writers that employed this plot gimmick, too. What makes Waugh's usage of such a cliche so innovative is the sly manner in which he has Wesley broach the topic while he is questioning all the suspects. Without ever once mentioning this aspect (basically a personality trait) he manages to eliminate all but one person as the culprit based on his simple action which telegraphs to any astute reader a tell-tale trait. In the final chapter Wesley explains how he managed to bring up the topic and do it uniquely and subtly in each of his shared interrogations with Captain Slocum.  I was flabbergasted at how this accomplished using the "fair play" technique and yet I was completely unaware that Wesley was very busy rooting out the one person with this trait who had visited Valerie's study. Waugh deserves a standing ovation for this aspect of the novel alone.  For a writer's first detective novel it was truly a stunning example of clever detective work.

THE AUTHOR:  Hillary Waugh (1920-2008) was born in Connecticut where he lived for most of his life. He graduated from Yale with a degree in art and upon graduation served in the Naval Air Corps during the final three years of WW2. While in the Navy he wrote and published Madam Will Not Dine Tonight. He went on to write two more private eye mystery novels featuring Sheridan Wesley then slowly moved away from standard P.I. mystery novels to suspense and police procedurals usually set in the suburbs of Connecticut, New York and other East Coast states. All of his books employ fair play techniques and some are stunningly plotted. His other best known series detective is Fred Fellows, a chief of police in a mythical Connecticut town, who appeared in eleven mystery novels. Waugh’s stand-alone detective novel Last Seen Wearing is considered a cornerstone in 20th century detective fiction.  It has been named as #12 of the best police procedurals ever written by the Crime Writer's Association and #6 in best police procedurals by the Mystery Writers of America (MWA). Last Seen Wearing was recently reprinted in the Library of Congress Crime Classics imprint series. While his fiction was never once nominated for an Edgar nevertheless Waugh received an Edgar nomination for non-fiction writing in 1991 for his textbook Hillary Waugh's Guide to Mysteries and Mystery Writing. He won the Grand Master Award from the MWA in 1989. Waugh was also the President of the MWA during 1969. And from 1971-1973 he served as First Selectman in his chosen hometown of Guilford, CT.  

MOONLIGHTERS - Lesley Frost, the Poet's Daughter

Part of discovering so-called forgotten writers and their books is that the discovery is actually more of a recovery. These books already exist and the people who wrote them may have been forgotten by the mystery reading public but often they are actually renowned. Witness Lesley Frost, whose only foray into adult mystery writing is Murder at Large. At the time of the book's publication she was known as a former employee of the Publisher's Association, an airplane factory worker during the summer and fall of 1918, and spent six months in the Hampshire Bookshop in Northampton, Massachusetts. All this according to an author bio sketch on the rear flap of the DJ for her first novel.  She also mentions that she opened her own bookstore in Pittsfield (also in Massachusetts) in 1924.  Her only book prior to the murder mystery was Come Christmas (1929), "a delightful anthology of Christmas songs, carols, poetry, prose and drama." But I don't think she was ever forgotten to many.  She was, after all, the eldest surviving child of America's renowned Poet Laureate, four time Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, the one and only Robert Frost.

But let's get to this rather remarkable and utterly forgotten detective novel. Murder at Large (1932) is first and foremost noteworthy for it's eerie similarities to a novel that would not appear for another seven years, one that would dominate mysterydom as a rule breaking, seminal work. Often imitated but never surpassed that book is And Then There Were None (1939).  I was astounded by the similarities in Frost's archly satiric and sophisticated murder mystery which in addition to an innovative plot is chockful of literary allusions from Shakespeare to Kipling, from Euripedes to S. S. Van Dine. She seemed to have prophesied Christie's novel in a completely different fashion as the skeletal framework of Bristow & Manning's The Invisible Host (1930) seemed to prophesy Christie's story of ten murderers who escaped justice and are doomed to be executed while they struggle to survive on a remote island.

Though Frost's host is hardly an anonymous voice imparting doom from a record player there is nevertheless a Judge present in the story. He is, in fact, the host of a similar dinner party. Bertrand Whittaker plans to expose a group of murderers by publishing his private diary in which he details the identities of seven different criminals and the murders they got away with. Shortly after reading out a passage in which he embarrasses one guest by pointing out his connections to gangsters the lights go out and the diary is stolen. Only hours later, someone is found stabbed to death. But surprisingly it is not Judge Whittaker. It is one of the guests. That one murder sets in motion a decimation plot as one by one guests begin to vanish or turn up dead, all done in by an efficient and clever murderer who uses a variety of brutal methods.

Though these guests are not housebound they are on an island -- Long Island, NY to be specific. As the bodies are discovered all over the house and grounds the level of fear and paranoia is handled almost as deftly and frighteningly as the Grand Dame did herself in her own version of a now overused plot motif. Two of the women characters have intriguingly presented solo chapters in which we get to see their nervous breakdowns and the aftermath of dealing with the exposure of their crimes. One of the women spends much of the book regretting her crime (she shot her fiancé because he wouldn't marry her even though she was pregnant), reliving her past and dwelling on it all morbidly.  It's all very similar to the way Vera Claythorne is plagued with guilt over the boy she let drown. 

 
One difference in Frost's book is that the police are summoned and descend upon the house. As they sort out who killed three guests in one hour and try to prevent further deaths (they don't -- three more die and one escapes death through sheer luck by the book's finale) the amateur sleuth Ordway Belknap does his best to guide the seemingly inept policemen headed by Lt. Det. Silas Berry and Sgt. Stebbins to the truth. Belknap is another Philo Vance clone, one of many who pop up in mystery fiction throughout the 1930s when Vance was the dominating amateur sleuth in popular culture. Erudite, condescending and inappropriately flippant in the face of violent death we are told in the very first sentence that Belknap is himself a former judge. Well, actually an ex-magistrate. He and Whitakker have not only a history in and out of the courtrooms they have a couple of secrets that several of the accused murderers are trying to uncover.

Though it may come across as a nightmarish thriller Murder at Large really does turn out to be a detective novel. Some fair play clueing turns up in some cleverly done passages and the book ends with a requisite twist in the finale, one perhaps that may not be too difficult to figure out by diehard detective novel fans.  Still, Frost manages to pull off the finale with panache and sardonic wit. The ultimate similarity to And Then There Were None will be found in the final pages which just like Christie's book comes from the writing of the judge character.  It is uncanny how much this book has in common with Agatha Christie's masterpiece. While not exactly on the same par for there are a couple of histrionic scenes, some stilted dialogue, and hand-wringing melodrama from the more hysterical characters, Murder at Large ought to be read by anyone who considers oneself a devotee of the Golden Age. I think it ought to be recognized for being more of a forerunner to Christie's seminal mystery than all the attention lavished on The Invisible Host which only has the anonymous host's voice on the record and several bizarre murders in common.  It's possible that Agatha read both books and took bits and pieces from both to come up with her own inimitable version.

Lesley Frost Francis Ballantine (1899-1983) was the oldest daughter of Robert Frost. Of his five children Lesley lived the longest. After the publication of her Christmas anthology and this murder mystery she turned to writing children's books and often lectured on English literature. Among her children's books are Digging Down to China, Not Really, and Going on Two. In 1969 she also published a memoir entitled New Hampshire's Child: The Derry Journals of Lesley Frost.  During WW2 she was named head of the U.S. Information Library in Madrid and 20 years later founded a Spanish language and culture school in La Granja where she had a home.  Most interestingly, in 1952 she co-founded a third national political party, the American Women's Party, meant to get women elected into policy-making positions in federal government. That same year she married her second husband Joseph Ballantine who was involved in foreign affairs in Asia. With her first husband she had two daughters: Elinor Wilber, a Connecticut state representative, and Dr. Lesley Francis. Lesley Frost died in Fairfield, CT at the age of 82.

EASY TO FIND?  There are several POD editions of Murder at Large offered for sale online.  I cannot vouch for any of these copies, most seem to be from Create Space, Amazon's POD service. One has an anime style illustration on the cover (rolling my eyes).  Three US 1st editions are offered online and priced a bit high despite the book's scarcity.

Listen, Please Listen - Naomi A. Hintze

Single mom Jo St. John is hiding from her past. Her real name is Darlene Heckart. Back in Missouri something happened when she was a teenager. Something bizarre and newsworthy. Books were written about her.  And her past pursued her to Chicago where she and her daughter were harassed. Nasty phone calls cam e almost nightly. Someone nailed a dead cat to their door. But now in Camelot, Connecticut with a new name and a second chance it seems she and Becca can start again. Will Jo's past catch up with her?

Listen, Please Listen (1973) begins as a domestic suspense novel with a heavy emphasis on the domestic side with detailed descriptions of daily routines, chit chat at the breakfast table, gossip about the daughter's friends, etc. etc. This is a typical novel of the 1970s overloaded with mundane minutiae and sprinkled with "hot topics" mentioned in passing to keep the book relevant, as they like to say these days. Among these side commentaries are passages about women's lib, male chauvinism, Native American abuses and retaliatory politics. The only really interesting aspect of the dull and plodding first half of the book is learning all about Jo's life as teenage Darlene and the dread secret she carries.

I have to mention this secret even though it came as something of a surprise despite the DJ blurb ineptly giving it all away in the first sentence. It has to be mentioned in order to discuss the book at all. And anyway that secret is revealed early on in a flashback. So here goes...

Darlene had telekinetic powers as a teen.

She was such a raging child that she consistently destroyed her home, both inside and out, with flying dishes and glasses, pelting stones, cracking windows and mirrors. Her religious zealot of a grandmother and her leering creepy uncle who were keeping her at home, basically imprisoned, because they would not have her attending a school that showed explicit sex education films, complained about the odd child and gossiped in town. Subsequently, the newspapers got a hold of the story and Darlene became headline news in her small Missouri town.

If this book actually had been about Darlene as a teen rather than Jo remembering her past via a flashback I think it would have been a lot more interesting. Certainly this entire flashback sequence which explains her powers, what happened to her house and her relatives, her meeting a 19 year-old newspaper reporter, her fleeing the house and subsequent shacking up with the reporter and eventual pregnancy are well written and often suspensefully told. But this amounts to a mere ten or so pages in a single chapter. 

I should have figured out that what Hintze was really after was a story of sins of the mother revisited on her child. Because --that's right -- the telekinetic disasters recur in her new Connecticut home.  At first Jo thinks this is her doing, but her landlady thinks that it's all Becca. She persuades Jo that her daughter has somehow inherited the mother's curse.

Simultaneously, Becca is going through a phase of teenage jealousy. Her friend Candy from her girl scout troop seems to be in competition with everyone. More disturbingly Candy flirts with Mr. Kenyon, the landlord of the boarding house where the St Johns live. Becca loves Mr K and sees him as a kindly grandfather figure. She can't stand Candy becoming overly familiar with the man. She sees Candy sitting in his lap and kissing him whenever he compliments or praises her. Is it possible that Becca is channeling her anger into telekinetic explosions with flying plates and glasses smashing against the walls?

The novel has one strength in that is is actually a cleverly disguised detective novel.  Jo cannot accept that Becca has inherited her curse.  She begins poking around and finds evidence that all of the phenomena were faked. Just as this plot point is beginning to resolve and Jo is planning to confront the culprit a shocking and violent death occurs.  I was totally unprepared for this in the final third of the book.  But I guess if I had been paying attention to subtle clues I would've been able to predict exactly who died so violently. And the entire book shifts focus, mood and intent. The two plot lines conveniently overlap and all is explained if a tad too contrived.

In the end the book is a mix of real and faked psychic phenomena and a unpalatable subplot (which I did manage to predict) that leads to the shocking death. The story resolves itself in a Grand Guignol fashion so common in books of this type published in the 1970s.  For all its piled on melodrama and shocks Listen, Please Listen fails to really carry off most of its intended thrills in our modern cynical times where such scandals and shameful secrets are commonplace.

Naomi A. Hintze (1909-1997) is best known for her debut suspense thriller which she does not seem ever to have topped. That book, You'll Like My Mother (1969), was nominated for an Edgar for Best Mystery.  It was also adapted into a claustrophobic and chilling movie starring Patty Duke, Richard Thomas and Rosemary Murphy. Another of her suspense novels Aloha Means Good-bye (1973) was also adapted into a TV movie in 1970s and starred Sally Struthers as a young woman pursued by a killer hired by an evil doctor who wants her heart for an organ transplant. Hintze's other four novels are a mix of occult, supernatural and suspense novels. After reading this book it was not surprising to learn that she was also a member of the American Society of Psychical Research and wrote a couple of non-fiction books on ESP and psychic phenomena. 

Of note, fans of Stephen King may be thinking this novel sounds like a rip-off of Carrie. A telekinetic teen living in a oppressive home with a religious zealot parental figure is too coincidental, right? However, Listen, Please Listen was published a full year before King's cult classic. Hintze ought to be congratulated for beating the soon-to-be multi-million bestselling author at his own game. 

Murder Mansion - Herman Landon

THE STORY: Donald Chadmore, newly released from prison for an assault charge has come to his uncle Theodore's home in order to protect him from a possible attack. He takes his uncle to the library at the ancient gloomy Chadmore home known to locals as "Mystery Mansion" and locks both of them inside.  The heavy door is bolted twice and locked from the inside. All windows are barred. There is no way anyone can get inside. And yet spectral music plays from the piano in the corner of the library and a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. Uncle Theodore cries out to Donald. Donald fires his revolver at the shadowy figure. He goes to the divan where his uncle was sitting but it's empty.  Uncle Theodore is found behind the furniture piece on the floor. He's been shot. Not only shot but stabbed with an antique dirk that Donald had handled only a few hours ago and which was left in the hands of someone now locked upstairs in the attic. Who was the shadowy figure and how did it get in to kill Theodore Chadmore?

HIGHLIGHTS: Murder Mansion (1928) is another Herman Landon pulp extravaganza.  Think of any pulp magazine story trope and its bound to be in this novel.  Several beatings and fistfights, abduction, two locked rooms, a haunted house, a family curse, hidden jewels, strange legacies, disguise and masquerade, ventriloquism, a dying message, and a handful of gangsters all make their appearances in this story. The entire book is surprisingly well written (at times rather literary), cleverly plotted, and often laugh out loud funny.  Landon can't help but pile on the Gothic excesses and melodrama which tend to turn up the moody atmosphere to 11, 12 or even 13 too often. Still it's a helluva story, well told and teeming with fun characters, innovation, exciting incidents, and enough puzzling elements to keep any hardcore GAD fan glued to the pages.

THE CHARACTERS:  This book has a huge cast of characters but even some of the most minor characters have memorable moments. There are too many to list, including six mystery guests who turn up for a secret meeting with Theodore on the night of his murder. Below are the best of the cast.

Donald Chadmore - Our ostensible protagonist and an amateur sleuth of sorts. As the book continues he is more of a victim of circumstance, chosen by the villains of the piece to take the fall for his uncle's death as well as being blamed for several other bizarre activities. His  dancing partner, both literal and figurative is...

Gloria Westcott - The Bright Young Thing of the book. A real Jazz Age girl complete with 1920s lingo she shows off to her "big boy."  One wonders why she  turns up so often too coincidentally in the most unusual locations. All will be explained later in the book. She's an utter delight providing much of the lightheartedness to offset the heavy-handed strum and drang whenever Donald and Gloria exploring dark passages or dealing with yet another thunderstorm. I loved the Jazz era slang she slings around as easily as she does the foxtrot.

Samuel Peterkin - Valet who works at a luxury hotel, on loan to Donald for his stay and travels to Mystery Mansion to help him as not only valet, but personal assistant.  Peterkin can't help but offer up his talents as a detective and comes up with an ingenious idea to solve the locked room murder. He turns out to be the real sleuth of the book despite the presence of police, a D.A. and a private detective working for the prosecutor's office.

Milliken - Investigator for D.A. Mott. Won't have anything to do with ghosts or locked rooms. The whole crime gets his goat.  "It ain't natural!" he continually pronounces. He can't stand anyone who "blows froth" at him.  Some kind of 1920s slang, I gathered, for telling lies or making up stories (a running gag in the last third of the book). He has a few excellent scenes showing off his detective skills. Notably, he proves that the odd placement of Donald's fingerprints found on the dirk show that Donald could not have stabbed his uncle. Almost everything and everyone he encounters in this case is classified as "unnatural." Nevertheless, he's determined to find the real reasons for the murder and dismiss all the claptrap.

Mr. Amicus - A very dead character whose presence is always felt at Mystery Mansion.  Real name Jacob Hamilton Chadmore, he is Donald's great grandfather.  The story behind his self chosen moniker is too involved to explain here. But it is a bronze bust of the dead man and his promise to return from the grave on the anniversary of his death that keeps Theodore and his wife on their toes and often up late at night unable to sleep. They’re especially troubled every October 7, the night he died back in 1800 and something. The novel of course opens on October 7 and Theodore is killed on the anniversary night. Could it be a ghost that did him in?

Groody - A butler with a suitably weird name this servant to the Chadmore household is privy to several secrets that he won't reveal until the final chapter. He's a bit shifty but always answers Donald's questions honestly.  Trouble is Donald never asks the right questions.

"Doc Locks" - For a while I thought this exceptionally astute expert would turn out to be the detective. But he has only one scene and then he's gone. Neither a physician nor a PhD scholar "Doc Locks" is a nickname given to him by the police and the prosecutor's office. We never know his real name, still Doc is clearly the Gideon Fell of this novel. No locked rook can stump him. Through careful examination of any murder scene deemed a locked room and using his knowledge of criminal tricks and clever illusions he finds any secret passages and all possible means of exit and always proves a locked room is never hermetically sealed. Until this one, that is. Before he tells everyone that it seems impossible for anyone to have entered the locked room tells a few interesting true crime anecdotes like the one about the 19th c. French murderer who managed to infiltrate a locked room with a blazing fire in the hearth by coming down the wide mouthed chimney wearing an asbestos suit and a helmet with built-in oxygen tank!

John Pagan - One of six guests who were to visit Theodore Chadmore on the night of his death. He arrives t dressed in white tie and tails, the only person in such formal attire. He has an unusually deep and theatrical voice that Donald recognizes as belonging to someone he heard plotting his uncle's death. That person calls himself Staglawn.  Much of the book involves characters trying to uncover the true identity of Staglawn. Pagan denies being the murder plot mastermind. He also has a hilarious running gag of sorts that takes the form of an aversion to certain vocabulary and vernacular.  When anyone uses these words he responds with outrage and satirical wit: "Candid? Abominable word! Just as if anyone could be candid in this world of sham and pretense and stupid amenities!" See the quotes section for a couple more of these amusing outbursts.

QUOTES: Gloria: "Secrets should only be told in the moonlight."

Donald: "What do you think, Milliken? Do I look like a murderer?"
Milliken: "You do.  All the murderers I've seen looked innocent."

Pagan: "Hunch? I detest that word. It's a lazy man's designation of an idea he is too indolent to think out clearly."

Pagan: "Kindness? That's another word I detest. What we call kindness is only inverted selfishness." 

"This will be a lesson to me," Don added. "I'll never again trust strange women."
"Poor Don!" Gloria gave a mock sigh. "Everything is a lesson to you, isn't it, Don? But you always forget."

Peterkin: "[Valeting is] the best education in the world. Keep a man waiting two minutes for his trousers before he's had his morning coffee, and you learn as much about human nature as it would take you two years to learn in any other way. To know human nature, you've got to study it in the raw, with the frills off. Sometimes I've found it awfully raw, sir." 

THINGS I LEARNED:  Mr. Amicus is a great devotee of Haydn and remarkably has learned several haunting themes from his opera The Devil on Two Sticks.  Prior to any Mr Amicus manifestation in the library the weird dissonant music from this opera plays on the piano.  I was intrigued by "dissonant" music from Haydn most of whose music I think of as bright and melodious.  Lo and behold!  It is true that he wrote the music for an opera titled Der Krumme Teufel (his first full opera written at the age of 19) based on the 17th century French satirical novel by Alain-René Lesage translated as The Devil on Two Sticks. But how Mr. Amicus can play the music is the ultimate unsolved mystery of Murder Mansion.  According to all accounts I found online Haydn's opera is a lost work and though there are archival copies of the libretto no sheet music nor any recordings are known to exist. The only anecdote I could find connected to the actual composition was told in an 19th century collection of composer biographies. Here it is related that Hadyn and Josef von Kurz, his librettist collaborator, had a discussion on how to capture in music the sound of a thunderstorm.  Haydn could not come up with a suitable musical motif.  In frustration he slammed his hands on the keyboard and his companion exclaimed, "That's it!" Probably someone's vivid imagination at work. Landon certainly makes the music seem creepy in his lush descriptions. Don't know why he didn't use something more immediately recognizable like "Danse Macabre". I guess music that doesn't exist is easier to work with for a novelist; he can make it sound any way he wants it to sound. 

THE AUTHOR:  Herman Landon (1882-1960) was born in Stockholm and came to the United States with his family in 1895. At one time he worked as a journalist for the Washington Herald where he was feature writer and a managing editor. His primary fame, however, is as a pulp magazine short story writer and crime fiction novelist.  Throughout his fiction writing career lasting from 1907 to 1942 he wrote close to 200 short stories and 20 novels. He created several popular series characters for the pulp magazines among them The Gray Phantom (who may have been the inspiration for Batman), The Picaroon, Godfrey Usher, and Kingdon Cole. Some of his Picaroon stories were collected into book format and published in the UK only. Most of his stories were published in Street & Smith magazines with the majority of them (more than two thirds of his total output) appearing in Detective Story Magazine and Detective Fiction Weekly. His stories also appeared in 10 Story Book, The Blue Book, The Smart Set, The Corner Magazine. and The Popular Complete Stories. Some of his stories were adapted into silent movies.

EASY TO FIND?  Nearly impossible these days I'm sorry to report.  I found one copy available for an cheap price due to its poor condition. Looks beat to hell, but if you don't mind reading copies (I certainly don't when the book is extremely hard to find) then it's waiting for you. Two copies (maybe only one listed at two different sites) translated into French also turned up for sale. My copy in VG condition, pictured at top of this post, was sold within 12 hours of the post appearing. Sorry to anyone who was looking for it earlier. 

UPDATE:  Remarkably, three days after this review was posted I checked for copies of Murder Mansion and discovered all were sold. Even the French translated copies! Also sold were two copies of The Forbidden Door (before I even mentioned it in the comment below). Oddly, another copy of Murder Mansion has turned up. That one final copy is the Liveright 1st edition and is priced exorbitantly. It will cost you well over $300 including shipping and taxes if you live in the US. Even more if you live outside of the US. But the copy has four torn pages. In pieces! Still, I am sure that someone will buy that book soon. That and a roll of Scotch tape. 

The Case of the Missing Sandals - Nancy Barr Mavity

THE STORY:  James "Peter" Piper, bespectacled, lanky reporter "with an ugly face" working for the Herald somewhere in northern California, is allowed access to the murder scene at a religious cult's colony. The victim, the domineering cult leader who calls herself Luna, claimed to be a witch in league with Satan. She is found both stabbed and shot, her hands bound in a strange fashion with the cord taken from a green and red bathrobe. Even more peculiar is she is found barefoot.  Earlier the same day she was killed Piper had a brief interview with Luna related to an accusation of the theft of $10,000 from one of her followers, He had seen her striking black satin sandals and knows she would never be caught dead without them. And yet she was. What happened to the shoes?  And why was she both shot and stabbed?

THE CHARACTERS:  The first half of The Case of the Missing Sandals (1930) deals too heavily with Earl Vincent who wrote some love letters found on Luna's body. He is the prime suspect for the police and the fact that he fled California on a freighter further underscores his probable guilt.  Several chapters are devoted to finding Vincent. Piper and police pursue the freighter and try to intercept it with a tug boat but Captain Marquand refuses to stop for the tug radioing the police that they will have to wait for the freighter to pull into port in Los Angeles.  When the ship arrives and the crew depart they discover that Vincent has vanished from the ship.  After another protracted pursuit Piper tracks down the young man and forces him to tell an elaborate story that convinces Piper that the lovelorn boy, supposedly in love with the murdered cult leader, is innocent of the crime. The police, however, refuse to look further than Vincent.

Once Piper turns his attention on the Luna Colony, the book becomes interesting, less laden down with monologues and overwriting, and focuses on detective work. Piper uncovers multiple suspects each with their own peculiar motives. Among the more fascinating characters are:

Ruth Morgan - Earl Vincent's girlfriend who serves as a foil for Piper.  She is determined to clear her beau's name announcing she is willing to do anything to find the real murderer.  In a chapter well past the midpoint she and Piper engage in the requisite tabulation scene in which Piper reviews all suspects, their motives and opportunities while Ruth listens patiently sorting out the probable from the preposterous and often ending each summation with her verdict of "not proven."

Frances "Frank" Hodgson - of all the suspects Frank is the most unique.  She dresses in men's clothes, professes an obsessive love for Luna and is caught by Piper at the murder scene long after police have left searching for what she claims is a special perfume Luna used to make for her. Based on her frantic behavior and twitchy nerves Piper sees through her lies, immediately coaxes a confession from her. She is a drug addict looking for her fix. Turns out Luna was not only a cult leader but a drug dealer. The more we learn about Frank the more we discover that she is a lesbian. Mavity is never daring enough to come right out and use that term however, but couches it all in euphemism and baroque phrases: "But this woman was patently one of Nature's tragic misfits, a victim of the warping fate that had veered her life away from its normal channels." Mavity goes on to describe Piper's assessment of Frank's personality (who he insists on calling Frances though she prefers Frank) with great empathy and feeling. When he sees that Frank is using her left hand due to an injured right hand he starts to formulate a theory that she could have killed Luna. The murderer stabbed Luna in such a manner that reveals a left handed assailant. And still listening to her story and seeing how she left behind a vase of cut flowers for her crush Piper confesses he is "somewhat more sympathetic to the murderer than to the victim." It is a poignant sequence in the book -- one of many such sympathetic musings for a misfit suspect. Still as is often the case in early 20th century fiction Frank is yet another gay character painted as disturbed and doomed: "Just how far toward madness her jealous obsession might have carried her he could not guess."

Albert Jackson - the blind caretaker and gatekeeper at Luna Colony.  Jackson, a Black man, is no stereotype or comic figure, thankfully.  He has two dignified scenes of gravitas with Piper towards the end of the book during which he likens himself to Piper. Both manage to see the truth, he tells Piper, while others live in darkness. There are interesting contrasts between real faith and spirituality and the pursuit of false idols also mentioned in these scenes. Mavity manages to pull off these scenes with a sophisticated touch using simple language and metaphor, never resorting to heavy handed preaching. Albert is a finely drawn character, perhaps the wisest of all people Piper meets and interviews.

Charlie Russell - A young cult member sent to the Luna Colony by his mother to be cured of a so-called bewitchment she feels has cursed her boy. Piper knows this is all superstition for it is obvious that Charlie, in both physiognomy and behavior is mentally deficient. His facial feature are described in such a manner as to match those of children born with what was once called Down's syndrome, now known as trisomy 21. When some new details about the case are revealed Charlie becomes the new lead suspect in the eyes of the police.  Charlie's presence, yet another outlier in this myriad cast, allows for Piper once again to show his emotional side.

Carey - Apart from Mrs. Russell Carey is Charlie's only ally and protector.  Described by Piper as a colorless, bland man not much older than Charlie he is something of an enigma. He appears to be one of the "true believers" of the Luna Colony. Later he refers to himself as an occult researcher.

Oscar Miller - One of Luna's many lovers and the object of envy and jealousy among many of the male members of the Colony.  He is seen hiding something of great importance in the hole of a tree trunk.  Piper later retrieves this object and confronts Miller.  He also owns a rifle that matches the caliber of the bullet used.  In fact, many of the characters own rifles that could be the murder weapon.

Amos Perkins - a mystery man who hires Harrison, a hire-powered lawyer to represent Earl Vincent. A handwritten note is sent to Harrison asking that he prove Vincent is not guilty of the murder.  Enclosed with the note is $1000 in cash.

INNOVATIONS: When Mavity finally gets down to brass tacks after the Earl Vincent section is disposed of The Case of the Missing Sandals is truly an intriguing, complex and engrossing mystery novel.  Piper is very much in line with the many reporter sleuths of early 20th century detective fiction. Ostensibly passing himself off as a cynic he is, in fact, a humanitarian with an open mind and a skill at abstract, often wildly imaginative, thinking.  In the tabulation sequence Piper finally reveals to Ruth Morgan that he is convinced that the solution of the case lies not in factual analysis but to put oneself into the mindset of someone wholly devoted to the world of superstition. The murder is almost ritualistic what with the strangely colored cord used to bind the victim and the outrageous use of two murder methods to kill Luna. The placement of love letters on her breast after she was dead and -- most importantly -- the removal of her shoes both seem to underscore a kind of supernatural ritual, or a curse placed upon her. Ruth Morgan tries to accept  Piper's theory as a possibility but it all sounds too outlandish to her practical mind.

Of course, Piper is on the right track. For in the end it all really comes back to the title of the novel.  While perusing a non-fiction work called Witches Still Live -- an actual book by Theda Kenyon published in 1926 by Ives Washburn (see photo) -- Piper stumbles across the reason Luna's shoes were stolen. Armed with this arcane trivia and with the help of Andrews, his photographer colleague at the Herald, he sets a trap for the murderer in a well done, somewhat stunning, finale.

QUOTES: Piper: "The story isn't dead, even temporarily. [...] There are angles to it -- angles and angles. And while the other reporters are all enjoying the lull and concentrating on Vincent, I'll be out angling the angles -- a regular complete angler I'll be."

Piper: "When you try to figure [all these motives] together, its enough to make you dizzy. And as for proof-- say, if I saw one single little sold fact that didn't change its shape while I was looking at it, I'd faint from sheer amazement!" 

Jackson: "There's two kinds of darkness. There's them that walks in darkness because they can't see their way ahead, and there's them that have eyes and see not. It ain't your fault if it's still dark. You used your eyes as good as you could. That's how I know you're him that was sent. The spirit of darkness is on this place. The spirit of fear is on it. You can't see it, and you can't touch it, but you can feel it. Because you can feel the thing that can't be seen, you'll use your eyes to see when the light comes. That's why you were sent."

 Jackson: "Facts are dangerous things to throw around when you don't know the meaning of 'em."

THE AUTHOR:  Much to my surprise Nancy Barr Mavity (1890-1959) has an entire Wikipedia page devoted to her life and work as a journalist, novelist and author of non-fiction works.  I won't bother to repeat any of it here.  But I will draw your attention to her book Sister Aimee (1931) published one year after this novel was released by Doubleday Doran's Crime Club.  Sister Aimee was the first full biography on Aimee Semple McPherson and it's not too coincidental to draw comparison between that charismatic evangelist (possibly a criminal and fraud) to the power mad, exploitative and cruelly Satanic Luna who dies so horribly in this detective novel. Apparently many of Mavity's crime novels are based on true crime cases.  Further details on which cases inspired her novels can be found in an introduction written by Randal Brandt, research librarian and curator of a crime fiction library at UC/Berkeley, that appears in the Penzler American Mystery Classics reprint of The Tule Marsh Mystery, Mavity's debut novel as a detective fiction writer.

EASY TO FIND? Several copies of the US edition are  available for sale from a variety of online bookseller with prices ranging from  $14 for a reading copy to $48 for a VG copy.  There is one copy with a VG+ dust jacket priced at $425.  I found no UK editions for sale.  I did not look for copies in internet archives but there may be one out there. I have a copy of this book myself, but will not sell it as it is signed by the author and inscribed to her fellow California journalist Alma Whitaker. Took me a while to decipher the addressee’s last name, but that’s definitely the name. In the brief inscription Mavity calls Alma "Best of the Good Scouts", a term Piper also uses to describe his co-worker Andrews, the photographer. A photo of the smeared inscription is included in this post.

Pretty Sinister in Translation

Just a quick note for any of the Spanish language readers out there.  There is a new translation of Wild Justice by George A Birmingham.  Espuela de Plata based in Seville has been translating into Spanish then reprinting many English language Golden Age detective novels and thrillers since around 2017.  Some of the books have been reviewed here including The Medbury Fort Murder,  The Colfax Book-plate and Wild Justice. I've been in correspondence with the translator Antonio Gonzalez Lejarraga several times over the past four years helping him locate copies of books and providing information on authors. Most recently he asked permission to translate and include my blog review of Wild Justice in his newly translated reprint released as Justicia Salvaje (Espuela de Plata, 2026). The entire blog post was translated into Spanish and appears as an afterword in the new edition.

For those of you who read Spanish I highly recommend checking out their translated mystery novels. Among them are two classics with Inspector Hanaud by A.E.W. Mason,  The Hymn Tune Mystery (La partituta misterioso) also by Birmingham,  Fast Company (Libros peligrosos) by Marco Page, The Colfax Book-plate (El Exlibris de Colfax) by Agnes Miller --a very scarce book in its original English version, BTW-- and all three detective novels by George Limnelius, all of which are also extremely scarce in the original English editions. You can find all eleven detective novels and thrillers released by this publisher at their website: Editorial Renacimiento.

The link above will take you to what I thought was all the mysteries in translation but I couldn't make the search button pull those up on one page because some of the mystery novels are not tagged as "policiaca" but rather "narrativa".  You'll have to enter those author names individually in the search bar to pull up the other books. The remaining authors are:  R.T.M. Scott, A.E.W. Mason, Agnes Miller, Miles Burton, and Marco Page. Birmingham's other book is tagged as "narrativa" also.

I received two copies of the book and I'm willing to send out one of those copies to anyone who asks for it. No contest this time.  UPDATE: The copy was claimed very quickly! Mailing it today (Aug. 28). Please do not email or ask for it in the comments. 

Murder at the World's Fair - Mary Plum

THE STORY:  Charles Graham makes a visit to Chicago's Century of Progress exposition and while passing through the Belgravian Pavilion he sees a man open a doorway. The man's hand is covered with blood and he immediately closes the door.  Charles follows him into the room and sees another man stabbed lying on the floor.  He is clearly dead. A shattered vase is nearby. Charles says they must call the police. The bloody-handed man, Paul Melitti, refuses and instead calls the expo's security chief, Gordon Taylor. While Melitti leaves the room for a brief time Charles calls his friend John Smith, a private detective. And the chase is on to solve the crime!

THE CHARACTERS:  John Smith appears in four of Mary Plum's detective novels; this was his last appearance. Within a few sentences it's clear he is yet another in a long line of Philo Vance imitations -- flippant, arrogant, insensitive, dispassionate and ridiculously knowledgeable about all sorts of minutiae.  Around the midpoint his snooty persona is toned down a bit, he seems more tolerant and slightly likeable, but he still seems to know way too much about what's going on and does much of his detective work offstage similar to all those know-it-all Vance wannabes back in the late 1920s.  The final chapters are overloaded with character monologues revealing some of the work and research Smith did far away from Graham who acts as the primary protagaonist and amateur detective.

Initially, the case is about the stabbed man, Stepan Trino, and the search for a killer and motive.  The shattered vase is involved in his death and there is a twin vase that also figures in the story.  Two women, Jenny Dale and Rita Hathaway were invited by Trino to visit him in his office. Jenny is supposedly a dead ringer for Trino's dead daughter Madelon and while I thought this intriguing detail would be instrumental in the plot it's merely a red herring. However, Trino presents Jenny with the twin vase, some kind of Asian artifact with dragons painted in yellow on blue porcelain and this gift will be very important. She leaves his office the day he is murdered with the vase hastily wrapped in a wad of newspaper. Her pal Rita ridicules her for carrying the sloppily wrapped package and kids that they won't be admitted to their swank hotel by the officious and snobby doorman Dmitry. Charles is distracted by all these details. Smith takes this all in stride and focuses instead on the two men with Jenny and Rita who were seen by Graham at a dance hall. Smith is sure he knows one of them -- Dan Harlow, the man who seemed to be Jenny's date for the late afternoon.

Shortly after the murder investigation begins Jenny is abducted from her hotel room and the story suddenly shifts into a pursuit thriller. The mystery of who killed Trino all but vanishes. All energy is devoted to finding out who took Jenny, where she is being held, and why the second vase ended up shattered in her hotel bathroom.

Plum has a deft hand at creating unusual characters. Her woman characters tend to be more interesting.  Rita Hathaway, an utter smart aleck, proves to be a handful for both Graham and Smith. She is an expert at sarcasm and ridicule and it takes some effort to break through her coolly aloof facade. Slowly, Graham realizes that she may have orchestrated the abduction.  He begins to follow her doggedly using taxis, cars and several times pursuing her on foot. A key sequence takes place in a seedy part of Chicago's south side near 23rd Street.  The novel reaches its climax at this location.

I liked the chapter where Smith visits Trino's apartment and questions the no-nonsense landlady, Mrs. Bord. Smith notices a kind of fortress built in her outdoor garden filled with booby-traps. She explains she devised them to keep vandalizing teens and marauding dogs out of her vegetables. She's a great character. She also refuses to allow anyone into Trino's room. In fact she can't let anyone in because she gave him the only key. We learn all about Trino's highly secret life and that Mrs. Bord asked no questions as long as he paid his bill on time which he did well in advance. She Aldi liked that Trini was neat and private, never had any guests. In her opinion he was the best kind of tenant.

Another intriguing scene with an unusual period historical detail takes place at the hotel after the abduction. Most of the guests are anxious about letting police into their rooms, several of the guests protesting heatedly. The cops expect these protests, they're used to them. Those guests, they tell Smith, need time to get rid of their bootleg booze. Happens all the time in hotel searches.

THE SETTING: Much of the Chicago settings are accurately described even to the old time reference of Michigan Boulevard instead of Michigan Avenue which though renamed in 1910 didn't come into regular usage until after WW2. A reference to the "near north" surprised me. One of the standard terms for the neighborhood north of the Loop and south of North Avenue I thought this was a fairly recent label, but clearly was in use back in Prohibition era. I get the feeling Mary Plum was a real Chicagoan although on occasion some odd British syntax and phrases slip into the writing like the use of "stopping in" a hotel instead of "staying in" which is the usual American phrase.

Seems the south side was already becoming rundown in the early 1930s. Plum enjoys writing about dilapidated buildings like a boarding house where Dan Harlow and his friend Pete Johnson are staying which is contrasted with the luxury hotel where Smith and Graham have rooms. There's another scene in a depressing, sparsely frequented, restaurant with a sad clientele that is particularly well done too. Finally, Johnson is followed to a ramshackle converted farmhouse that seems to date to the 19th century.  Charles spies on Johnson and Rita from an ancient barn on this property and hides out in what he thinks is the former hayloft.  He is startled by a gun toting visitor and the story takes a huge twist during this sequence.

As for the Century of Progress only a few pages are devoted to the exposition. We get some nice detail about where the fair takes place, the architecture and how its bright colors and varied buildings are contrasted to the huge Columbian Exposition and its "White Palaces" of the previous century.  Later in the book Plum adds some more details about the attractions, mentioning the famous Skyride, the lagoon and some other buildings. But that's it for the Century of Progress. The fair itself serves only as a setting and nothing in the action really relates back to anything about the actual Century of Progress. Instead, the fictitious Belgravian Pavilion will feature in the plot and the entirely fictional political intrigue  of Belgravia will reveal the motive for all the various crimes including the murder of Stepan Trino.

THINGS I LEARNED: The Century of Progress actually had two seasons. The first big exposition ran from May 27 - November 1, 1933.  The second season began on June 1, 1934 and ran through Halloween of that year.  I was confused when Plum writes that the fair will end on October 1, assuming 1933 since that's the date of publication of the book. Maybe some editor failed to catch the error. 

A strange neologism occurs twice in the story:  one-idead.  This is an adjective that Charles uses to describe Pete Johnson's obsession with Rita. The word looks very weird to me. Plum means "one idea-ed" or more accurately monomania.  Either monomaniacal or obsessive would have been a better choice, I think. I've never seen that word spelled that way nor have I heard it used in everyday speech.

EASY TO FIND?  Not at all.  I found my copy several years ago on eBay and it's an ugly, beat up reading copy. There is only one other copy for sale from a reputable antiquarian dealer who specializes in vintage books in period dust jackets. He has a much better copy of the book with the attractive DJ as seen at the top of this post. My poor copy is up on my eBay listings for an affordable price if you are interested in reading the book. The UK edition was published as The Broken Vase Mystery (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933) but I found no copies under that title on any online bookselling sites. Neither did any free copies at internet archives, but I don't really look too hard for them. There may be one somewhere out there.

John Smith Detective Novels
The Killing of Judge McFarlane (1930)
Dead Man's Secret (1931)
Murder at the Hunting Club (1932)
Murder at the World's Fair (1933)