Death Greets a Guest - Charles Ashton

THE STORY: At a meeting of an archeological society a sudden torrential downpour sends all of the members, who were outside smoking and chatting, ducking for cover. Most made it back indoors some only to the porch of the Eastwood Hall. One guest -- Chandler, a sketch artist who was outside drawing trees -- heads for the summerhouse directly opposite the main meeting area of Eastwood Hall. Four of the members watch the storm increase in strength from a large window inside the Hall and see the guest wave to them from the only window in the summerhouse which also has only one entrance. When the rain subsides some of the members see Chandler slumped in the window frame. They head to the summerhouse and discover that the man has been shot in the back giving the book its ironic title Death Greets a Guest (1936). Yet no one entered the summerhouse at all during the storm. The man was in there all alone.  Basically, he was murdered in front of witnesses by an invisible assailant. Major Jack Atherley assists Colonel Bretherton (the local Chief Constable) and Inspector Williams to find out who killed the guest, how it was accomplished, and why a relative stranger was murdered at all.

THE CHARACTERS: Because the story deals with a group of men who are members of a private club (the archeological society gathers to discuss old buildings, mostly churches) the cast list is rather large. Many of the society's members appear only in the first scene and after the murder takes place and initial Q&A is over many are never heard from again.  Even with the absence of about five to seven men the cast remains varied and large. Among the notable characters who make up the primary and supporting cast are:

Stamford Eastwood - head of the society and host of this meeting. Quite a stiff upper lip sort of gentlemen who suffers no fools quietly.  He is married to 

Sylvia Eastwood - at first a charming woman who befriends Atherley, but quickly turns sharp-tongued and sarcastic when Atherley and the police begin to focus attention and suspicions on her friend...

Jimmy Bagstaffe - an insufferable artistic aesthete who adopts a theatrical manner, wears ridiculously theatrical wardrobe, hosts hedonistic parties for his artistic friends (mostly performing arts types) and belittles everyone and anything he disagrees with. He comes across as a satiric character meant to be a parody of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s who still cling to the hedonism of a decade ago, and also I got a very strong ridiculing of gay or effeminate artistes. A very popular bigoted stereotype that turn up a lot in vintage popular fiction.

Kesgrave - a new neighbor of Stamford and Sylvia's. Jack and Sylvia are invited in for an impromptu meeting one afternoon and we learn Kesgrave is in the process of renovating his Tudor era home, that he is a writer of fiction who uses a pseudonym that he will not divulge, and that he is married to a vivacious woman ten years younger than him.

Musprat - the bore of the archeological society, another comic character. If given a chance he will lecture on endlessly about building trivia, mostly made up of "fascinating features" of the houses and churches in the area. Jack makes the mistake of indulging Musprat one too many times.  I had a feeling that much of his droning on would contain some vital clue that everyone would overlook.

Joe Dudman - the owner/barkeep of the local pub. He is instrumental in identifying...

Mysterious Bar Patron #1, a bearded man who went off to Eastwood Hall looking for someone there regardless of the fact that he was told a private lecture meeting was taking place. 

Mysterious Bar Patron #2 - Immediately after the bearded man shows up another stranger stops in the bar asking about the bearded gent. He claims they are friends and wants to know where he was headed. Dudman tells him the bearded guy was off to Eastwood Hall and #2 mystery man heads there as well.

 One of the society members has a speech impediment that is played for laughs. I thought it a cheap form of humor (even for 1936), something that seemed utterly out of place for Ashton who likes to sprinkle his books with wit and wise cracks, but tends to avoid low farcical humor. Oh well. Making fun of a speech impediment would never fly these days.

INNOVATIONS: The impossible crime surprisingly is not the focus of the investigation; the motive really is more puzzling. The search for the "why" of the murder sends the plot into some intrigues in the past, many of which are found in an odd scrapbook of newspaper clippings that Chandler created. Also, Chandler's sketchbook and the drawings he made during his tour of the outside grounds at Eastwood Hall will provide a possible motive for one of the main suspects. I enjoyed all of the investigations and digging up of the past which involved a variety of crimes, solved and unsolved. When the solution to Chandler's impossible murder (the "how" aspect) is finally made known it's downplayed and delivered almost matter-of-fact. Early on I had a suspicion that Ashton was inspired by the detective novels of Anthony Wynne who employed a similar gimmick in many of his books.

Ashton adds a few unusual plot twists in a clever way. Normally a tired cliche, anonymous letters turn up in the final third adding an element of hysterical paranoia. The letters inspire Atherley to set up an elaborate final scene in which he is determined to unmask the killer.  It's a highly theatrical sequence and the killer comes as an utter surprise. I laughed and thought, "But of course! How did I fall for such a detective novel trick? It's one of those unwritten rules like "Never believe a character who is a bedridden invalid can't walk." Yet I fell for one of the oldest tricks in mystery writing. Kudos to Ashton!

EASY TO FIND? Death Greets A Guest is a very rare book. After looking for over ten years I finally found a copy of the cheap "Cherry Tree" paperback edition but a copy in any edition is near impossible to find. Miraculously, Neer who blogs at "A cup of hot pleasure" found a copy at a library and did not enjoy the book as much as I did.  I like Atherley's irreverence and his egocentrism. His personality, I think, is lively and lighthearted, never as annoying as similar traits in a vain supericilious character like Philo Vance.  To each his own.

FFB: The Case of the Gold Coins - Anthony Wynne

THE STORY: It's another detective opera from the pen of prolific impossible crime maven Anthony Wynne. Madness, stabbing, cudgelling, strangling, suicide attempts, and melodrama galore! This time we have a corpse discovered on a sandy beach with not a footprint in sight.  Blood on the sand from the stab wound indicates the man must've died on the spot. The knife that killed the man is still firmly embedded in his back yet no impression in the sand beneath the body would indicate being dropped, thrown or falling from a great height. Airplanes are ruled out immediately. How did he die and who managed such a baffling murder? Dr. Eustace Hailey, expert in maladies of the brain, assists the puzzled and infuriated Captain Ainger to ferret out the killer.

THE CHARACTERS: Dr. Hailey is always in accelerated action mode in Wynne's mid-career novels. He shows off his skill in sailing and piloting boats in The Case of the Gold Coins (1934). In this book Hailey is also at his most compassionate and heroic. As usual we get more than we need about psychological theory of the period which more often than not has more to do with class prejudice than it does with an understanding of human behavior. Hailey is supposedly a psychologist or neurologist or something like that ("I study the human brain") and loves to lecture about who has the capability of being a murderer, what constitutes genuinely insane behavior, and other similar topics, but thankfully we are spared some of the more naive theories we usually get from this pontificating detective. Needless to say his talent for abstract thinking comes in very handy in trying to explain how Lord Wallace's battered and stabbed body ended up where it did. Oh! and adding to the excitement are the two other bodies turning up where they shouldn't.

The is the twelfth Dr. Hailey mystery I've subjected myself too in an effort to read the twenty-two books (out of Wynne's total output of  28) I've acquired over the years. And the good news is that I think I have found the absolute best in the entire series. The plot is non-stop action with very little of the usual Wynne lagging and dullness. The detection is keen and very fairly clued which is not the norm for Wynne. And the impossible crime along with the other two murders and the mystery of the gold coins found at the scene of each death are more than satisfyingly explained. Histrionics and melodrama are still present in ample amounts, but there is a sound resolution to all the problems and a real ending rather than his usual abrupt stop.

More to my liking were the interesting characters, especially the two young women -- Ruth Wallace and Pamela Bolton. Wynne usually throws in a couple of attractive women into his plots for romantic interest but they never really come alive. However, in the person of Pamela Bolton we have one of Wynne's most unusual women, a troubled soul who elicits genuine sympathy. She is conflicted by her filial duty to her irascible father, a prime suspect in the murder of Wallace, and her attraction to her former fiance. Captain Ainger finds himself attracted to Pamela further complicating this woman's fragile emotional state. Hailey at the midpoint in the novel pursues Pamela via boat (like many of the characters she is also an expert sailor) to an island off the shore of the Wallace seafront estate and rescues her from her own rash behavior. Their scene together reveals Hailey's wise old man side as he counsels her and she manages to evade his prying questions with cleverly worded ambiguous statements. Pamela may be troubled, but she's still wily and protective of the men she loves. Though Wynne does tend to play up the hysterical woman stereotype too heavily it nevertheless manages to be one of the best written scenes in any of the Anthony Wynne mysteries I've read.

Bryn Terfel as Falstaff
Just as I picture Maj. Pykewood

I can't leave this section without mentioning the other standout, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Major Pykewood is the requisite kook in the story. Is he mad, is he sane or just very angry? He confesses to the murder of his wife and pleads to be arrested.  He has not one, but two mad scenes that would fit right into any classical opera. His first scene is a hysterical confession which includes this pronouncement: "I am dead. I'm still dead. That is why I want to give myself up to the police. They take charge of corpses." All that's missing from a speech like that is the music. Though it's usually women who have the mad scenes in opera I was envisioning a grandiose aria for Major Pykewood, an intensely guilty man with a masochistic streak for self-punishment. He should get fervent percussion and a keening melody. He literally shakes his fist at the ocean and cries out, "Island, island, island! That's where they used to meet." He goes on to describe his wife's love of the sea, her talent for sailing, and how she loved boats more than men. He believes that Lord Wallace was killed not by a human but by an act of God proclaiming: "Do you know what I had planned to do if God hadn't killed him? I had planned to smash him to pieces." Then he talks about his duck gun and he bangs his hands together to emphasize the deed. A tympani would do just as well. I loved the lunatic Major. He becomes the typical Nemesis in a Wynne novel and provides for a literally explosive finale.

INNOVATIONS: Wynne's impossible problem is one of the best of the books I've read so far. Unlike the contrived deaths in previous books the puzzle comes about as part of an accident when the murderer attempts to cover up his crime.  And the solution is simple and rather brilliant.  It's the manner in which the problem is obfuscated by the characters' poor observations that always tends to baffle the reader. The mystery of the appearance of the gold coins is also cleverly handled and so well clued that I was able to figure almost all of how the hidden treasure was transported from place to place and how poor Henry the footman (the second murder) met his death.

There is more genuine detection in The Case of the Gold Coins than in any other Wynne book I've read to date. Dr. Hailey does a thorough job of ruling out obvious answers to how Lord Wallace's body turned up on the beach making it all the more puzzling to arrive at the real reason. He manages to deduce where the gold coins were hidden on the island by looking at the growth of seaweed and barnacles on the rocks. In investigating an outside entrance to a cellar he pays careful attention to the way a trapdoor is constructed and discovers how someone could have bolted the door without ever being inside the cellar. All sorts of brilliant stuff, all of it providing the reader with fantastic clues.

Bill Pronzini has praised The Case of the Gold Coins in 1001 Midnights as probably the best of the Wynne books. I have to agree with him. Everything any detective fiction purist would want in a book is here to make for an entertaining and satisfying read.

Department of Queer Complaints - Carter Dickson

This is the only short story collection featuring "Carter Dickson's" (aka John Dickson Carr) lesser known detective Colonel March. I read the revised and updated version of this book which includes two stories previously unpublished in book form that were not in the original 1940 book. According to Douglas Greene's introduction to this updated book Colonel March was modeled after Carr's good friend and fellow mystery writer Cecil Street, aka "John Rhode" and "Miles Burton." If so, then Street must have had a great sense of humor in real life. Something that astonishes me because most of his books are rather lacking in a rollicking sense of humor. The stories in this volume were originally written in 1937 and published between 1938 and 1940 in The Strand Magazine. The final one appeared in February 1941. Two of the stories "The Empty Flat" and "William Wilson's Racket" did not appear in book form until 1963 in The Men Who Explained Miracles.

There are nine stories total and all of them deal with an impossible crime or an impossible problem. Not all the stories are about locked room murders though. There are stories about a room that disappears, footprints on a snow covered hedge that couldn't support the weight of any human, an invisible piece of "furniture," as well as the usual baffling murders with weapons that disappear or methods that seem impossible. In one case, there is even a story that was pilfered from and recycled in two well known Carr novels.

March who heads up the D-3, a special branch of the Metropolitan Police that only investigates unusual cases hence the slang name given the branch that give s the book its title. He is described by Carr as an amiable and large man (his weight of 17 stone is constantly mentioned), "with a speckled face, an interested blue eye and … a cropped mustache that might be sandy or grey." He also displays a jovial sense of humor. His gift is for noting the obvious in what appear to be puzzling problems and "he hits it right every time."

Of the original seven stories I particular liked these:

"The New Invisible Man" – This called to mind of The Curse of the Bronze Lamp in that the crime turns out not to be a crime at all. Also another instance of theatrical shenanigans as in The Problem of the Green Capsule.

"Error at Daybreak" - a man is stabbed while standing on a remote rocky area of beach with no one anywhere near him and the disappearance of his body thereafter. It may not have been brilliant in its solution, but the telling had excellent use of misdirection and so the ending came as a surprise to me.

"Death in the Dressing Room" – another case of misdirection well done. So much time is spent on a pickpocketing ring that the murder victim found in a locked room seems almost forgotten. When the murderer is literally unmasked I was impressed.

"The Silver Curtain" has an Anthony Wynne-like stabbing in a dead end alleyway. The method and means are also reminiscent of several of Wynne's books. I almost figured this one out.

The other four were only so-so in my estimation. "Hot Money" is the one about an invisible piece of furniture used a hiding place for stolen money. But I have never considered the hiding place to be a piece of furniture in any room I've ever been in – even the many vintage apartments I've lived in. I'd call it a part of the room's construction but not a piece of furniture. That different use of the word was unintentionally unfair, but that's what comes of reading a story 70 plus years after it was written. Terminology and home construction have changed drastically. There is a silly story called "Footprint in the Sky" that takes place in the winter and has a lot to do with prints in the snow. It begins like something written by Mary Roberts Rinehart with a very "Had I But Known" air about it. The problem seems entirely contrived for the sake of creating an impossibility. It reminded me of the murderer's trick in Christianna Brand's Suddenly at His Residence (aka The Crooked Wreath) and is practically a cliché in this subgenre. "The Crime in Nobody's Room" is the story of a disappearing room and a body that seems to move after death. This includes a trick employed by Ellery Queen more effectively in a book I dare not mention. Here the culprit has a similar affliction and his behavior gives him away, but the two things he does seem once again contrived, not to mention stupid.

Then there is "The Empty House." The story opens with Douglas Chase, a history professor, bothered by a noisy radio blasting irritatingly loud music while he is trying complete his thesis that if accepted will provide him with a professorship at an American university. He is in competition with another history professor named K. G. Mills whom he has never met. He heads off to find the source of the bothersome radio and discovers that it seems to be coming from behind the door of an apartment with the name plate that says "K. G. Mills." He knocks on the door, a woman opens the door and he asks for Mr. Mills. She replies: "I am Mr. Mills. That is to speak with academic accuracy…my name is Kathleen Gerrard Mills, and I am the only Mills at the present moment." She, of course, is the very same K. G. Mills who is his competitor for the professorship. They exchange a few insults about each others' work before they get down to hunting for the irksome radio. Does this sound familiar? An initialed history professor who turns out to be a woman and the rival for another history professor? It should. A similar scene between two Dr. Campbells, both professors, takes place in the opening pages of The Case of the Constant Suicides a novel written in 1941 about four years after this story was written. And the woman professor in that novel was named Kathryn. Not much different from Kathleen.

And that's not all! When the source of the radio is discovered a dead body is also found. The story reveals that the corpse is a lawyer who was investigating a haunted room (The Red Widow Murders, Night of the Mocking Widow, ) and apparently died of fright (He Who Whispers). But when the solution is revealed it turns out the murderer employed a method exactly the same as one of the deaths in The Reader Is Warned (1939). So we have a story that was cannibalized to make up at least two other books and shares plot elements with at least three other books. All of them coming after the time when the story was originally written, around 1937 as Greene tells us. This is assuredly the reason why the story was excluded from the original Department of Queer Complaints. The Reader is Warned was published only the year before and Carr probably didn’t want to be seen as a lazy writer who borrowed from himself.

For locked room and impossible crime fans this collection contains a few stories well worth investigating. Your tastes may differ from mine, but there is enough of the odd and bizarre to interest a variety of readers. It's not exactly a winner of a book all around. But I enjoyed it and especially was taken aback by the similarities in "The Empty House" with so many other Carr/Dickson works.

FFB: The Room with the Iron Shutters - Anthony Wynne

"Behind the mystery of the room, believe me, lies the deeper mystery of the man."

When it comes to dreaming up preposterous variations on the locked room and devilish murder methods in the detective novels of days gone by one of the most imaginative writers was Anthony Wynne. In his fairly steady output of nearly 30 novels from 1925 to the late 1940s more than three quarters of them contain some type of locked room, impossible crime or miracle problem. Very often the books had combinations of all three in the often convoluted and excessively melodramatic plots he concocted. So why is he forgotten these days? Well, to be perfectly honest he was not a very good writer. The books are somber, humorless and contain dull passages of didactic dialog in which his detective, Dr Eustace Hailey, pontificates on "modern" psychology and "newly discovered" scientific methods. Reading them seventy years after they were originally published can provoke reactions ranging from the disconcerting to the risible. On occasion Wynne does a good job of combining his outlandish methods of doing in fictional characters, his love of melodrama and scientific lecturing with sound story telling and a unique atmosphere and theme. One of those instances of where he gets it right is in The Room with the Iron Shutters.

I'm willing to forgive Wynne for the drawbacks in his books. I'm in them for his frightening ideas about committing murder and disposing of corpses. Often there are fantastic elements that seem to border on science fiction horror worthy of an episode from Fringe or The X-Files. Wynne was one of the first crime writers to use the following unusual murder methods: poison cat claws, anaphylactic shock through insect bite, blood poisoning, and miniature surgical blades hidden in everyday objects. He also managed to find numerous ways in which to have the corpse reanimate for its last dying breath. Many of his victims suffer cruel deaths traveling from one place to another while dying agonizingly from their wounds. In some cases the victims are completely unaware that they've been mortally wounded. The reader should expect a wild ride when he picks up a book by Anthony Wynne.

The basic set-up for this one: Lord Gerald Glen is discovered dead in his locked and shuttered study. He has been stabbed through the heart. No weapon is found in the room. The room was watched from both inside near the locked door and outside where the iron shutters of the title were bolted shut. The majority of the detection is devoted to close scrutiny of the room itself and its architecture. It is gone over umpteen times throughout the course of the story in an attempt to discover how the murderer managed to escape. The rest of the time is spent in trying to figure out who is telling the truth. There are plenty of liars in this book and many lies of omission that impede the investigation for both Dr. Hailey and the clever policeman Inspector Verrey. Verrey even manages to come up with the first viable and logical solution to the murder. But he forgets one piece of evidence that plays a crucial part in the actual solution. Hailey, of course, gleefully points this out to the inspector.

Hanging over the story is the presence of alcohol. I can't recall encountering a detective novel where the victim is an avowed teetotaler and a crazed proselytizing teetotaler at that. For Lord Glen his abstention from alcohol has become a dangerous monomania. Two of the suspects will be revealed to be alcoholics. Glen's vehement feelings towards those characters and his slighted relationship with them both affect the events that follow his death. Wynne gets a lot of mileage out of this. I thought it well done and an intriguing period style temperament in a murder victim. It also allows for logical reasons for characters to lie, then recant, then lie again. And in the instance of the second murder the alcoholic's secret hiding place for his stash of brandy nearly saves him from his own death. How's that for originality in a detective novel? For once Dr. Hailey's discussions of abnormal psychology (the behavior of alcoholics, in this case) makes sense and have a firmly accepted resonance to them. Usually his psychological observations are weak and flimsy seen through a modern reader's eyes. At one point, Hailey makes mention of "the deeper mystery of the man" in discussing the personality of the murderer. When that deeper mystery is ultimately revealed the reader is faced with an intriguing personality type with an unusual motive for murder, one that may even strike a resonant modern chord.

There have been issues taken with the fair play aspect of this particular title. Without a deeper knowledge of 1920s experimental radiology and hematology (both are discussed cursorily in the context of the story) you may never completely solve the murder of Lord Glen. For this reason there is a surprise in the final chapters that is indeed unfair, but I never care about this when reading the detective novels featuring Dr. Hailey. It's like playing cards with a really good bluffer. You know you're going to have to accept that most of the time he's lying about what's in his hand but you accept it and go ahead and make a bet because that's part of the excitement of the game. You raise the stakes yourself. When you're proven wrong anyway you can't be angry because you made the decision to be fooled from the start. That's how I feel about reading these books by Anthony Wynne.  I want to be completely taken in by a great bluffer and, flaws and all, I admire that talent.

IN BRIEF: The Red Lady (1935) - Anthony Wynne

Sir Mark Fleet is stabbed in full view of an audience while delivering a speech in front of a painting called "The Red Lady." Although it was possible for someone to hide behind the painting it is determined that no one was in the crammed space even though it was cleaned as if to obliterate footprints in the dust. It appears that it was impossible for anyone to have stabbed Sir Mark and yet he was killed. Later the body is taken from the bedroom prior to it being delivered to the coroner for an autopsy. It is found on a burning haystack. Why would someone steal the body and set it on fire?

Dr. Hailey starts to uncover a strange financial scheme that led to Sir Mark leaving a sizable legacy to a young woman who he barely knew. In trying to get to the bottom of this mess Hailey discovers that Sir Mark had recently consulted with a spiritualist. So Hailey himself visits the spiritualist under the pretense of contacting the spirit of Sir Mark to find out why he left the money to the girl. Through the medium he learns of yet another young woman who knew Sir Mark. No sooner has the information been divulged the medium is stabbed amid some typical contrived Wynne business and in chasing the intruder out of the séance room Hailey discovers the body of the butler also stabbed.

Before the novel is through two more people are killed -- one in a similar apparently impossible stabbing death. Faster moving than most earlier Wynne books, heavy on dialogue, but plods down a bit with all the rigmarole about the financial chicanery and the writing of the wills that were behind the motive for the deaths of Sir Mark and all the other victims. Still out of Wynne's high output of sometimes dreary, often humorless mystery novels this is definitely one of his best.