The Snare of Circumstance - Edith E. Buckley

THE STORY  Elmer Bliss, reporter, is hired by a mysterious gentleman called Philander Summerfield to look into a recent Peter Somhers murder case that he believes was never solved. Bliss has been fascinated by the case because Somhers' nephew, Harrison Milbrath, was tried twice for the murder. In the first trial he was found guilty then he and his lawyer appealed due to an abundance of circumstantial evidence that should not have led to a guilty verdict. In Milbrath's second trial he is acquitted. Summerfield offers Bliss $20,000 to find the actual murderer. With such a sizeable reward Bliss is keen to turn detective and discover the real murderer of Peter Somhers.

THE CHARACTERS  In the second chapter Buckley introduces Murray Kilbourne, "by predilection a sleuth of no mean ability."  We learn he turned to criminal detection after leaving college. He inherited a fortune from an uncle and in order to claim that money the will had a proviso that Kilbourne was instructed to give up detective work and "devote his energies to the cultivation of his literary talents."  Kilbourne pops up at various points in the early portion of the novel,  but then leaves the country. To me his inclusion is utterly superfluous. Buckley makes it seem that Bliss and Kilbourne will be a team similar to Holmes and Watson, but Kilbourne is actually the worst kind of bogey character.  He serves absolutely no purpose. It was the only irritating part of the book.

Elmer Bliss is, in fact, the real sleuth and he proves to be far superior to Kilbourne who allows his libido to intrude and cloud his judgment in the detective work.  The real sleuthing team tuns out to be Bliss and Harrison Milbrath. The two join forces at the midpoint when Bliss uncovers a secret that Milbrath was hoping no one would learn. The revelation of this secret binds them in a friendship and strengthens Bliss's resolve to repair Harrison's reputation damaged after being found both guilty and not guilty of a single crime.  Together they are sure that once the "snare of circumstance" is finally lifted the young man will be able to carry on with his life both professionally and personally without shame or ignominy.

Philander Summerfield is indeed a mystery man making his first appearance in the first chapter and then vanishing for the remainder of the book. Or has he?  An elderly bearded man matching Summerfield's description and behavior is frequently seen around the Somhers estate by several witnesses that Bliss questions during his investigation.  Is Summerfield spying on Bliss?  Or is this a Summerfield look-alike?

Dolores "Dolly" McClure is the mystery "woman in white" (an obvious nod to Wilkie Collins) that BLiss follows for several days before he discovers who she really is. This young beauty stirs the hearts of all young men who meet her and is rather obviously involved with Harrison though it takes both Bliss and Kilbourne several days to figure this out. Her scenes are some of the strongest in the first half of the book when Buckley is setting up her intricate plot and layering multiple secrets and ambiguities into the story. She is willful, forthright, witty, a bit of a tease, and on the verge of heartbreak. When she learns that Bliss is intent on clearing Harrison's name she becomes one of his closest allies.

Chauncey McClure, Dolores' grandfather, lives nearby the Somhers estate and swears he has seen the ghost of Somhers wandering the grounds late at night. There are some very eerie sequences related to this eyewitness account.  Chauncey also provides a bit of gentle humor prior to his confession of ghost sighting.

Hutton, the station master for the local train depot, is one of Elmer's best sources. Hutton is a born gossip and a fine raconteur.  Elmer Bliss learns more than he ever hoped for from the many stories Hutton cannot help but share.  The most intriguing of his tales is the past history of Somhers building a wing onto his library, a retreat from noise, servant gossip and other intrusions and distractions.  Bliss believes there is also a hidden room (possible influence of Carolyn Wells?) somewhere within this building addition. Hutton also reveals he has seen an old man with a gray beard frequently visiting in town and that he arrives and departs on the train headed fro Boston. Bliss is sure this proves that Summerfield is indeed following him and keeping tabs on his investigation.

Jim Arms and Horsford seem to be the two primary antagonists. Each man lives on the Somhers estate and while Horsford, a caretaker of sorts, has a wife and daughter, Arms is a single man. Arms is the more villainous of the two men holding a grudge against Harrison for years and responsible for testimony that led to the first trial finding Harrison guilty. Bliss suspects that Horsford has secrets and knows more than he is willing to tell. Certainly Horsford's daughter has a piece of information that she is holding close and Bliss suspects she is protecting her father. Ultimately, Bliss will gain one of these men as an ally in an unexpected turn of events around the novel's midpoint. 

INFLUENCES  The Snare of Circumstance (1910) was published at a time when Conan Doyle and all his Holmesian tricks were still the primary influence of neophyte detective novelists. Buckley's novel is one of the finest examples from this nascent period of detective fiction in America. It's all the more remarkable for being her only detective novel and having received numerous rave reviews ranging from H. L. Mencken in the May 1910 issue of The Smart Set ("...well worth the money asked for it.") to the unsigned review in The New York Times March 19, 1910 ("...one of the few [detective novels] which...carries the reader without a hitch. The plot is...most ingeniously carried out. At no point can the reader guess the surprise finally sprung upon him.")  She has clearly drawn from several of the Holmes stories (alluded to by both reviewers, BTW) and in particular borrowed one iconic scene from The Hound of the Baskervilles where Holmes tries to prove a person's identity using a portrait painting. In Buckley's case it is not a painting but a photograph that proves the identification. Bliss does exactly what Holmes did:  he covers up a beard to leave only the eyes and face.

There is another novel that has major influence on the plot, too. Buckley mentions the book outright in the final chapter, but neither the title nor the author can be named, lest I giveaway the crème de la crème surprise.  Let me only remark that this influential novel held sway over several detective fiction and thriller writers from the 1930s through the 1960s who were keen on introducing psychological terror into their plots. Prior to this novel I had thought the earliest use of this familiar motif was in a book published in 1933. Always eyebrow raising to find yet another example and one so early in the 20th century. Buckley's may be, if not the first, one of the first American detective novels to employ this particular psychological plot motif.  For contemporary audiences in Buckley's day it must certainly have been a shocking finale.

THINGS I LEARNED  I was certain that the book took place around 1908 but automobiles are rarely encountered.  Instead there is a type of vehicle I'd never heard of. Bliss employs an early form of taxi called the herdic. As more and more herdics pop up in the story, I was starting to reassess the time as the late 1890s.  At one point there is a herdic chase and Bliss actually says, "Follow that cab!"  In any case, a herdic is a horse drawn taxi with side seats and a rear entrance. The vehicle is named for its inventor Peter Herdic who designed the carriage in 1881.  I found several photographs and drawings of them and chose the best example to include in this post.  There is an excellent history of the herdic and its Pennsylvanian inventor with several illustrations and photos here.

QUOTES Bliss:  "[Horsford] implied that there is a 'real ghost,' but it was to the atmosphere of mystery and danger that he referred. I dare say this man of yours has seen the ghost!"

McClure: "It is only recently that I have indulged in speculation of [unpopular thoughts], but I have had an experience that sent my thoughts in channels quite out of their usual run. Wild as the statement may sound to you, it is a fact that I, too, this summer, nearly two years after his death, have seen the spirit of my old friend, Peter Somhers!"

McClure: "But Mr. Bliss, the figure was not an illusion. Phantom or man it was real, and individual, and if it was not a 'materialization' some one on earth has a wish to give color to the sentiment against the place." 

Dolly: "You know what Tennyson says...? 'But a lie that is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.' That was the case with the testimony of Jim Arms; only the truthful part was so exceedingly small. Now that he has convicted Harry to a living death he is not content. He dares to sneer at him..."

EASY TO FIND?  Having been out of copyright for the past 16 years The Snare of Circumstance has been snatched up by the POD People. Several affordable paperback copies are available from a couple of print-on-demand outfits like Forgotten Books. I'm sure a copy has been uploaded to one of the many internet archives as well. Those seeking out the handsomely designed hardcover from Little, Brown & Company (shown throughout this post) with four original illustrations by Arthur E. Becher can pick from six different copies offered from online sellers. Prices range from $17 - $75 in various states of condition from reading copy to very good. I also found one Canadian edition, one of the better copies, priced at only $20. Happy hunting!

FIRST BOOKS: The Dead Take No Bows - Richard Burke

The Dead Takes No Bows (1941) gives us the origin of Quinny Hite, a former cop turned opportunistic private eye, two splendid plans – one of the scene of the crimes, the other of a gizmo used to carry out the quasi-impossible crime – and a preposterous story of revenge among theater people who seem to have lost their grip on reality.

In his former life as a cop Hite was honest and decent. One day he raids an illegal dice game, arrests all present ignorant of the fact that one of the gamblers is the District Attorney’s brother-in-law. Newspapers sensationalize the arrest making sure to note the arrest of the D.A.’s relative and as a result the lawyer loses his bid for re-election. In retaliation the D.A. has the Police Commissioner fire Hite. This kind of topical political pettiness gave me the impression that I was in for an intriguing satirical mystery novel. Unfortunately, Richard Burke seems to have been more fascinated with the novelty and fantasy of detective fiction because the plot resembles something that Harry Stephen Keeler might have dreamed up. It's a weird story of oddball performers lost in a limbo of nostalgia, obsessing on their faded glory and past achievements, and dominated by the stereotypical high voltage emotions and passions that are supposedly inherent in theater people.

The book opens with Joan, Quinny Hite’s fiancée, waiting patiently for her man to show up for their wedding to be held downtown at City Hall. She is dressed to go and he is late as usual. Just as Quinny shows up offering apologies murder intrudes. A hotel maid screams from the apartment above them and Hite rushes to the scene.

He discovers two veteran vaudeville actors shot in the head -- Louis Lothrop, comedian and theatrical producer, and Desiree La Fond, his one-time lover. Both murder victims are dressed in 18th century costumes from The Girl from Dieppe, an 30 year old musical revue set in the French Revolution era. An unusual reunion of the 1908 show’s cast had recently taken place, one at which every wore their costumes that was apparently held every year on the anniversary of the show’s opening night. There are odd clues throughout the hotel suite that serves as Lothrop’s extravagant home. Bullet wounds suggest two separate guns – a pistol and a rifle. A walking stick or wand of some type wrapped in a silk cloth is found on a mantelpiece near the dead bodies. A dog costume is found in a clothes closet. After the police arrive and Lothrop’s much younger wife Phyllis shows up unexpectedly with Lothrop’s former partner, David Earle, Hite is taken aside and secretly hired by Phyllis to find the murderer. She doesn’t like the way she and Earle were being questioned by police and she promises Hite that both she and Earle are innocent and have alibis. Hite jumps at the easy $500 retainer and the promise of more to follow when he solves the case.

Of course by this time he has completely forgotten about poor Joan and the wedding is indefinitely postponed. Joan is miffed but not very angry. It’s typical of Quinny apparently. Nice guy, huh?

The plot involves digging into the history of The Girl from Dieppe, the performers’ past lives, and the messy relationships that grew out of their involvement in the production. Forget about typical lover’s triangles and hotheaded romantic tiffs and spats. This company was infected by a lover’s tetrahedron. Nearly everyone was jealous of each other and romantic desires overlapped in quadruplets. Some turned to drink, some turned to drugs to comfort them when they were rejected and couldn’t get their object of desire.

Hite focusses on the raging jealousy between Carlo Ralph and Lothrop. Carlo Ralph was a stage magician and Desiree was his assistant and partner in the act. Lothrop stole Desiree away from Ralph. When Ralph’s magician career started to fail without his attractive female partner Lothrop cast him in The Girl from Dieppe giving him the thankless role of a pantomime dog. The costume found in the closet was the one Ralph wore in the show. Hite is certain Ralph is the killer. But when he learns that Ralph was presumed dead during WW1, that he never returned home and was listed as MIA Quinny is forced to look elsewhere for the murderer. Further investigation turns up more dirty secrets and forlorn love.

When Emily the maid is found dead in her apartment surrounded by candles in a what appears to be a mockery of a shrine Hite is baffled. A letter suggests she confessed to the murders and committed suicide. But why all the candles? Is the suicide faked? Maybe Emily saw something she shouldn’t have the night she found the two bodies in Lothrop’s suite.

The fantastical elements of The Dead Take No Bows threaten to turn the book into a self-parody. Burke seems to have modeled his first detective novel on a mixture of private eye action of pulp magazines and the nonsense found in Philo Vance mystery novels. The gimmick here is a murderer who tried to baffle police by using two weapons. And Hite obsesses on the theory that the guns were fired simultaneously. Why would that matter at all? It turns out that the killer created an elaborate bit of machinery using a strange contraption found in the Lothrop home in order to do just that. But I wondered why anyone would bother with it. It seemed an utter waste of time, something dreamed up for sheer theatricality and to puzzle the police, something that would only happen in a detective novel. If the killer was present in the room with the two people and he had a gun he could simply shoot both with one gun and leave.

Dare I mention that the hotel suite has special entrances that allow for anyone to enter the theater next door unseen? Lothrop owned the theater and had a bridge built at the uppermost floor connecting to his hotel suite so he didn’t have to leave his hotel and take the extra five minutes to enter the theater through its front door. Another piece of odd business that exists only to make the story strange and weird. And, of course, allow the killer to gain entrance to the crime scenes repeatedly without being seen.  If that wasn't enough two other secret doors and entrances are discovered that connect the Lothrop suite to other places within the hotel and the theater. It’s like Burke took the worst gimmicks from Carolyn Wells and the absurd “impossibilities” in the poorer S.S. Van Dine novels (remember the pencil under the massively heavy sarcophagus in The Scarab Mystery Case?) and threw them all into his story with no regard for common sense. In the end Hite solves he case, gets his money from Phyllis, and marries Joan. But the finale is as ludicrous as the manner in which the murders were committed.

Burke can prove to be engaging and insightful as in the scene between Quinny Hite and Dorothy Earle, David Earle’s actress daughter who shares with the detective her observations about the sad lives of her father’s friends. She comments on the tragedy of turning your back on the present and disappearing into the past. Her frequent startlingly poetic statements (“Poor Uncle Lou… he was just sifting ashes.”) are so poignant they seem to belong to another book altogether and not this off-the-wall, Keeleresque murder mystery. For that reason I’m interested in reading the other few Quinny Hite novels I’ve acquired over the years.

Inspector Pierson (William Demarest, left) and Mike Shayne
(Lloyd Nolan) confer over the dead body of Desiree La Fond
(played by a mannequin)

Intriguingly, The Dead Take No Bows was sold to the Hollywood and turned into a vehicle for Lloyd Nolan in the Mike Shayne private eye series. That’s rather remarkable for a first time novelist, I think. Even moreso for having been turned into a movie so quickly after the book was published. Most of the Mike Shayne movies, oddly, used different books other than the original Brett Halliday stories and substituted Shayne in the role of private eye. So in Dressed to Kill (1941), the renamed movie version of Burke’s book, Quinny Hite is gone, but Joan is still there trying marry Nolan as Shayne.

I found the movie uploaded to YouTube and watched it a few nights ago. I was flabbergasted to learn that the plot was almost 100% true to Burke’s kooky novel. The only noticeable changes were that Phyllis, Lothrop’s second wife, was transformed into a society matron; Dorothy was relegated to one dumb scene in a taxi and robbed of her poignant monologue; one minor character became a potential second murderer in the slightly rewritten finale; and the original method for killing the two actors was dispensed with and a similar idea was substituted, one more plausible and possible but still rather ludicrous when you examine it closely.

There are a handful of fairly affordable copies of The Dead Take No Bows out thee for sale, including some with the rare DJ. But instead I recommend you look up the movie and watch it. It’s so faithful to the story it’s almost like reading the book. One warning in advance: Be prepared for Manton Moreland and Ben Carter doing some awful scaredy-cat Black man "humor" in one of the few wholly original, but insulting, scenes in the movie.

FRIDAY FRIGHT NIGHT: The Come Back- Carolyn Wells

Boo!

It's October, the season of of black cat and witch inflatables on front lawns, jack-o'-lanterns on front porches and pumpkin spice in everything. October and especially Halloween will be different in this age of the COVID pandemic. Maybe there will be fewer jack-o'-lanterns on front porches and definitely fewer children trick-or-treating door-to-door but that doesn't mean we can't still keep the Halloween spirit alive on our vintage mystery blogs. Curtis Evans of “The Passing Tramp” proposed a "Friday Fright Night" meme for the entire month in which we will celebrate all things spooky, eerie and perhaps even terrifying. Right up my alley, friends! I jumped on board in an instant. Without further ado here is this week's contribution...one day late.

The Come Back (1921) is one of the books in my favorite short series from the indefatigable Carolyn Wells. Her most interesting books are those that feature her detective Pennington Wise and his enigmatic, quasi-psychic assistant Zizi. In each of the Penny Wise books this detective duo faces apparently supernatural happenings while Wells presents her murder mystery plot. Often the ghosts, haunted rooms and apparitions turn out to be rationalized.  I have previously reviewed two books in the series: The Room with the Tassels and The Man Who Fell through the Earth.  The Come Back is the fourth book in the eight book series and deals with spiritualism (a favorite topic of early 20th century mystery writers and a blog topic worthy of a post all its own) and the ghost of a dearly departed relative.

Like many of Well's better written books the plot is intricately complex. The story begins with the tale of three friends who go to Labrador in Canada on a hiking and camping trip and fall victim to severe snowstorm. One of the three, Peter Crane, is separated from the group and cannot be found afterward. When months pass and no word is heard from Peter his family and friends give him up as lost and presumed dead. An attempt to find his body when the snow melts in spring turns up nothing. Essentially Peter Crane has vanished.

Peter's mother Helen is a devout believer in spiritism. Peter's fiancée has an affinity with the Ouija board and the two women begin experiments in contacting Peter. When they start receiving messages from Peter via Ouija communication Helen Crane aches to find out exactly what happened to her son on that trip.

Of course there are skeptics and doubters. Christopher "Kit" Shelby, one of Peter's friends who survived the disastrous camping trip, loathes "spook idiots" and tries his best to warns the Crane family and Carly, Peter's fiancee, against accepting the messages from Peter as genuine "words from the beyond world." Julia Crane is Peter's sister and she resents Carly's introduction of the Ouija board into her house, dredging up supernatural nonsense, and making her parents into superstitious obsessives. Gilbert Blair, the third member of the camping trip and other survivor, is also suspicious of the spirit messages. Still, he makes his move on Carly now that she is apparently available for other men.  We know that he expressed an interest in her during an intimate conversation he had with Peter back in the camping trip section of the book.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Crane at the suggestion of a friend involved in the Society of Psychic Research visits the renowned medium Madame Parlato. He wants the help of an expert to prove that Peter's messages are real. She impresses him immediately when she contacts Peter and reveals his nickname "Peter Boots" known only to immediate family members, and details of how he died freezing to death in the snowstorm. How could she know any of this with no time to do any research other than hearing the stories from Peter's own ghostly lips?  Crane continues to visit the medium and becomes as devout in spiritism as his wife. He writes a book about his experiences, it becomes a huge bestseller and revives a nationwide interest in spiritism.

The plot thickens when Gilbert Blair is poisoned in an impossible crime situation. This may or not be related to an architectural prize that Blair was competing for with his jealous architect/illustrator roommate McClellan Thorpe. Blair had recently accused his roommate of stealing ideas. Perhaps someone in Madame Parlato's close circle of friends killed Gilbert because he was close to exposing her as a fraud.  Or... Is Peter's ghost seeking revenge?  Or --even more miraculous -- is Peter still alive and out for retribution for those he feels abandoned him months ago in Labrador?

The book is filled with all sorts of seance sequences, and the kind of spook busting detective work that is the hallmark of early 20th century mystery novels involving mediums and contact with the dead. The characters who disbelieve the supernatural elements, Kit and Julia are intent on exposing Madame Parlato as a fraud.  At one of the seances a tobacco pouch with Peter's initials materializes. Mr Crane begins to suspect that Peter is alive and hires a private detective. This is where Penny Wise and Zizi enter the book (very late in the story as per usual with Wells). Oddly, Wise himself does very little in this story.  It is Zizi and Julia who are the detectives and they do some admirable sleuthing.

The overall mystery is not difficult to figure out and all supernatural elements, of course, are in the end rationalized and the mediums exposed as frauds. But that doesn't take away from its genuinely entertaining story. Many unusual twists and complications enliven the story and make for some page turning excitement. There is a mysterious man named John Harrison, a reporter named Douglas who shows up at the Crane house asking prying questions, a movie called Labrador Luck that becomes all the rage and, in a reverse of most spook-buster mysteries, a blackmail scheme that involves enlisting the help of Madame Parlato to entrap the murderer.

Zizi is fast becoming one of my favorite female sleuths in early American 20th century mystery fiction.  She has intelligence, sarcastic humor, spunk and a fertile imagination. She often resorts to chicanery and con artistry with her boss in order to unmask the villains and miscreants in the books in which she appears. I highly recommend investigating these little known books. There are the best of Wells' early mystery writing career and do not infuriate the reader with the kinds of fantastical and improbable murders that arise from ludicrous motives in her later books of the 1930s and '40s.

Like many of Carolyn Wells' early novels The Come Back is in the public domain. It appeared at the Project Gutenberg over a decade ago and as a result has been pirated by profiteering "reprint publishers" who download the entire novel and repackage it under their "publishing name." So you have myriad editions to choose from. You can buy a pirated copy from about ten different repackagers of free content or download the book for free from Project Gutenberg.  Local libraries may have a copy on their shelves. A few actual used copies of the 1921 editions are out there for sale as well, including an A.L. Burt reprint in a beautifully intact and colorful DJ.

For more ghosts, monsters and things that go bump in the night visit Cross Examining Crime, My Reader's Block, The Passing Tramp and Clothes in Books.  And tune in next week for more Vintage Horrors!

A Wealth of Wells - Pulp Covers of Carolyn Wells' Stories & Serials

After finding a five page long list (!) of Carolyn Well's work published in magazines from 1897 - 1940 I was curious to see the covers that promoted her stories in the numerous pulp magazines over her long career.  Some of them were so striking and evocative had I been alive decades ago I would've easily been tempted to spend my last dime or quarter on one of these magazines.

I picked out a selection of the finest examples, mostly those that advertise a serial that was beginning in the given issue, some are promoting a short story like "Common Sense Cutler." Nearly all of these are Fleming Stone detective novels that were later published by either George H. Doran (until about 1922) and then Lippincott, her book publisher for most of her career. The final one pictured (Skeleton at the Feast) is a Kenneth Carlisle mystery and he was the detective character who was published by Doubleday Doran's "Crime Club."

Scroll away, gang!

One of Well's serials that appeared in a "slick" magazine rather than a pulp. Her work also regularly appeared in the dream publication of her era -- The Saturday Evening Post. Usually it was her poetry and humor they bought. OH! The title of the book the boy is reading is How to Develop a Pleasing Personality. Took me a while to discern that!

FFB: Boo Hoo: Not So Scary Houses of Horror - Carolyn Wells & Michael Crombie

Today's Friday's Forgotten Book post is on two books that belong more to Alternative Mystery category and are forgotten with good reason. Both published in the early 1930s each book shares some conventions already becoming mystery novel cliches in this early period. Horror House is an example of Carolyn Wells at her most turgid and unimaginative self pulling out every hoary cliche -- or as she would put it "hackneyed device" -- and then some. Michael Crombie (aka James Ronald, one of my favorite unsung and under-appreciated writers of the Golden Age) does the same in The House of Horror but at least he does it with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Both writers are known for their offbeat sense of humor: Wells was a punster and wordplay enthusiast, while Ronald was a master of witty banter and bitchy comebacks. But while both writers show their skill at comic scenes and dialogue neither book is a very good detective novel.

Let's dispense with Well's horror first. Horror House (1931) is her 51st mystery novel! It comes in her mid career, with 50 detective novels and close to that in juvenile books already under her belt. She was a veteran by 1931 and would write another 31 books before she called it quits in 1942. One would expect some snappy modernity to her writing by this point. But no, like so many of her 30s and 40s novels this one is still redolent of that bygone era when she was only a fledgling mystery writer. Her indefatigable detective Fleming Stone was growing ever grayer -- meaning colorless rather than aging -- and tiresome displaying his "transcendental" gifts at amateur sleuthing. The convoluted and utterly preposterous story is one of Wells' many attempts to emulate her more successful contemporaries. On the surface Horror House most resembles The Greene Murder Case(1928) in that it is yet another of those family decimation plots. A diabolical murderer is knocking off the members of a single household, one by one, using as many methods as he can get his hands on. Not satisfied with bullets (Wells has never used a gun in her books because she said she knew nothing about them and couldn't be bothered to learn) Wells' killer in Horror House dispatches his victims by stabbing, poisoning, automobile sabotage, and strangling.

15 century gauntlet
(courtesy: Metropolitan Museum of Art website)

The strangulation is particularly baroque as it is carried out with gauntlets taken from a suit of armor, affectionately dubbed Max by the Bailey family. But the victim had also partaken of alcoholic punch spiked with knockout drops in order that the strangling could be efficiently carried out. Clue #1 - murderer is not too strong and therefore either a woman or a feeble old person theorizes our genius Fleming Stone. If you know Wells then of those choices there is only one possibility and the murderer's identity is a dead giveaway. Nevertheless, I pressed on hoping that the book would elicit some cheap thrills, some more weird murders or an odd example of her histrionic melodrama. Instead I got cheap laughs, often at Carolyn Wells' expense.

Luckily not a secret passage in sight in this one, but the absence of that frequently used hackneyed device is made up for in annoyance factor by her choice of vocabulary and her treatment of one of the female characters. Poor Agnes, a housemaid of "exquisite beauty" prone to sneaking into Mrs. Bailey's boudoir to "loll in the luxurious furnishings" and dip into her mistress' cosmetics, is dismissed as an airhead. Referred to as "dumbbell" and having "an unattractive personality" she is relegated to the dumpster of red herrings, yet another example of Wells' overt class prejudice and snobbishness. The servants in Wells' books are never given any signs of cleverness, intellect or vivaciousness. Agnes may be beautiful but her beauty is of the Old Testament 'sinful' type -- to tempt men and be symbolic of the foolishness of vanity.

If you aren't irritated by this supercilious worldview then the strange word choices ought to set your eyes a-rolling. Some examples? Wells prefers inutile to 'useless', persiflage rather than 'mocking banter' pops up twice, a hostile witness at an inquest is heard "murmuring anathema all around". Instead of simply saying that Owen Bailey snorted she writes "well mannered though he was, [Owen] gave utterance to a sound that is colloquially known as a snort." All of those examples occur on a single page! I grew impatient with her florid syntax and antiquated vocabulary. Clearly this is her equally antiquated sense of humor giving rise as we approach the climax of the book, but I just wanted her to get the point as I reached a body count of four victims and occurrence of a second inquest in a nearly 300 page novel.

Her final affront is the constant drawing parallels between detective fiction and "real life." As if the book we are reading is supposed to be some kind of extremely hip and modern 1930s crime novel reflective of the violent world of gangster ridden America. The plot and crimes are as ludicrously fantastic as the fiction she is constantly alluding to.

It was a relief that Wells had not resorted to filling her Horror House with secret passages as she usually does. But the same cannot be said of Michael Crombie. The House of Horror (1935) is a veritable labyrinth of secret passages, underground tunnels, priest holes and hidden rooms. There are so many passageways in Hunter's Keep, Wilmer Basingstoke's house, I was half expecting someone to press on a wooden panel and, rather than sending a gigantic portrait swinging open on its well oiled, hidden hinge and stepping into a shadowy corridor between the walls, to be spontaneously disintegrated and sent into another dimension. For not only are there people creeping about in these hidden corridors there are multiple disappearances of four separate characters, including the bloody corpse of Wilmer Basingstoke himself.

Coincidentally, this book also talks about about detective fiction, but there is an express purpose for it. Basingstoke is a crime writer. He began with true crime, Capote style true crime that uses the conventions of fictional narrative rather than reportage. He then branched out into murder mysteries. We get to read two full chapters of one of his novels over the course of The House of Horror. Peter Wootton, our lead detective -- in an effort to explain the relationship of the victim to the prime suspect, an escaped criminal known as "the Basher" -- pulls down a book from the Basingstoke's crammed library shelves and reads aloud from it to his Watson. Here was a chance for James Ronald (aka "Crombie") to show off his gift for narrative shifting but the tone and style of Basingstoke's book within the book is no different than the book we are reading about the characters at Hunter's Keep. Written with more blood and thunder and colloquial language the book-within-the-book serves no purpose at all. Those two chapters could easily have been replaced with a short dialogue scene. Wooton could have explained in a few sentences how Basingstoke wrote of his adventures in amateur sleuthing by turning them into novels and changing the names of those involved.

The whole of The House of Horror is lacking in any genuine thrills or scares. The title is hyberbolic and obviously meant to attract people like me with a taste for cheap lurid entertainment. The ploy of the title worked, but I can't say I'm at all satisfied with what I got. I'm sure some will find what occurs in its pages to be wildly entertaining. I only kept on reading for a few of the characters.

Philip Lavery and Irma Dering are two perfect embodiments of wealthy layabouts posing as sufferers of ersatz weltschmerz, bored with everyone except each other. Irma is a delight of brusque opinions and catty dismissals, a welcome contrast to the virginal goodness of Lucy Halperin. We're probably meant to hate Irma as much as Lucy does for her superior posturing and cruel barbs, but I thought Irma Dering was one of the best characters in the book. She crumbles under pressure when the body count gets too high and she has a wonderfully frank scene with Lucy where she admits to her fraudulent persona and wishes she could be more real like Lucy. These were the moments that made the book worth sticking with. However, The House of Horror overall is presented like a genuine parody of the country house murder mystery. In terms of plot it is the most stereotypical story I've read from Ronald who usually displays a more original and ingenious imagination in his crime fiction.

Despite the caustic humor and witty banter as a mystery novel this House of Horror is more House of Ho-hum. Ultimately, the various mysteries are self-defeating, the book one long shaggy dog story. Those of you who have read The Curse of the Bronze Lamp by Carter Dickson may know what I mean by that. Its abundance of cliches and "hackneyed devices", the ridiculous amount of secret passages and all the rest of its pseudo-Gothic trappings tip off the reader to the anticlimactic revelation in the final chapter. The House of Horrors collapses like a house of cards and the time spent reading of its many "baffling" disappearances and gruesomely bloody deaths proves to have been a waste, the story as flimsy as the pasteboard playing cards metaphorically lying at our feet.

FFB: The Man Who Fell through the Earth - Carolyn Wells

THE STORY: There's a load of mystery going on at Puritan Trust Company. First, lawyer Tom Brice witnesses what appears to be two men in a violent argument in the office opposite him shortly followed by a gunshot. Then a dead body is found in a secret private elevator. Then a young man disappears without a trace. Olive Raynor, the young ward of Amos Gately, the murder victim, is Suspect #1 in the eyes of lazy Chief of Police. But she'll have none of that. She may not have liked her "uncle" who acted as an ever watchful guardian but she would never have killed him. She hires Tom Brice as her lawyer and then suggests he hire a private investigator to look into the murder and find evidence to clear her name. Tom seeks out Pennington Wise and his spooky assistant Zizi and together they unravel the various mysteries including that of the amnesiac title character.

THE CHARACTERS: In a scene late in the book when Tom and his resourceful and witty secretary are discussing the mystery of Case Rivers (the title character), Norah comes up with an outlandish idea of what might have happened and why Rivers has also seemingly disappeared. Tom says to her "Oh Norah! come off! desist! let up! Next thing you know you'll be having him in the pictures, for you never thought up all that stuff without getting hints for it from some slapstick melodrama." Norah replies, "Oh, well, people who are absolutely without imagination can't expect to see into a mystery!" That's exactly the kind of person Carolyn Wells would not want for her target audience. Imagination in abundance is on display in The Man Who Fell through the Earth (1919) perhaps one of her best detective novels. For all her talk of the differences between fiction and "real life" over the course of the novel the "real life" of her story is more colorful and bizarre than any real gritty urban crime that plagued early 20th century Manhattan where this story is situated.

Tom and Norah make a fine duo of sparring amateur detectives. Their scenes are sparkling with humor, affability and gentle jibing. Norah is the abstract thinker while Tom is the logical minded man, of course, and together they offer up some interesting ideas about who and how Amos Gately was killed in his private offices. But more interesting among the various mysteries is the discovery of some financial chicanery, possible blackmail and the unexpected revelation of a spy working for Germany. Then there is the title character and his own strange story.

1st US edition, front cover
(George H Doran, 1919)
Note the snowflakes!

Case Rivers is the name an amnesiac man gives himself as an alter ego while he tries to sort out who he is and what happened to him. All he remembers prior to his being pulled out of the East River nearly naked, wearing only ragged and torn underwear, is a terrifying fall. He is certain he literally fell through a hole in the ground in Canada and ended up in the frigid waters of the East River. Everyone who is treating him for his loss of memory and helping him to recover his identity knows this is absurd, that he must be speaking figuratively. Tom at first thinks Rivers might be the missing Amory Manning, Olive's supposed fiancé, but when he meets the amnesiac he knows they cannot be the same person for they look nothing alike. When it is discovered that Manning is working for the US government the idea of kidnapping suddenly enters the picture.

Norah is sure Rivers has something to do with Manning's disappearance. Zizi is certain Rivers is Gately's killer. Tom and Pennington Wise disagree with the women and have their own ideas about who did what to whom. The reader is left to sort through the various theories, discard the red herrings, and pick one of the many detectives in this case with whom to side.

Among the handful of suspects one of my favorites in the first half of the book was Jenny Boyd, a floozy office worker --  a ubiquitous stock character in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Jenny is first described by Tom, our first person narrator, as "the yellow ear-muffed stenographer" alluding to her Princess Leia-style hairdo and goes on to detail her "cheaply fashionable" clothes and her irritating habit of chewing gum. She shows up to the police interrogation wearing a risque V-neck dress with a short skirt. Then he concludes his paragraph on Jenny with this hilarious sentence: "Her air of importance was such that I thought I had never seen such an enormous amount ego contained in such a small cosmos." Keep in mind that this cliched portrait of a not-so-bright secretary who thinks she's sexy was written in 1919! It always gives me a mild shock to encounter such early examples of character types we think were created much later in popular fiction and entertainment. Jenny, however, is not just present as a figure of ridicule, another Wells trademark. She is crucial in protecting someone hiding behind the scenes -- a surprise villain who opens up a whole new plot thread that only complicates discovering who killed Amos Gately and why.

1st UK Edition (Harrap, 1924)

INNOVATIONS: Well's typical formula is followed here with the amateur detective collaborating with the police in the first half, her series character (the supposed "star" of the book, but not so in this case) showing up just after the halfway mark, and the pros and amateurs teaming up to solve the mystery in the second half. Remarkably, this is the first Wells mystery novel I have read in which there are literally four different theories being played out between the pros and the amateurs. It's a daring way to deal with a detective novel plot and she artfully manages to juggle all the balls in mid-air dazzling the reader with a variety of solutions to the multiple baffling mysteries. There are plenty of unusual clues and more crimes than one ever expects.

A quasi-impossible murder, a mysterious disappearance, a possible kidnapping, an abduction, espionage, featuring a coded message with an odd method of decoding the cryptogram, and the mystery of identity related to Case Rivers are all met with intelligence and sometimes indulgent fantasy, which would later be the downfall of Wells as a mystery novel plotter and writer. Despite the tendency for characters like Norah and Zizi to dream up ludicrous theories this is one detective novel that Wells managed to concoct in its purest form.

Imagine reading this book when it first appeared 100 years ago and one can see why Wells was seen as a forerunner to what we now consider quintessential Golden Age detective fiction. She first employed all the conventions and motifs we now see as old hat long before the truly great writers re-engineered them in engaging and baffling mystery novels that soon overshadowed her work. Wells draws on previous writers for sure, notably Conan Doyle, and her frequent references to Holmes, detective story writers, and well known plot motifs show not only her vast knowledge of the genre but an obvious love and respect for the form.

One of the more interesting clues that help the team of detectives help learn more about Rivers is his habit of drawing intricately beautiful snowflake patterns. Zizi makes the observation that people tend to doodle while using the telephone and she discovers a doodle of a snowflake in a prominent place that reveals Rivers had to have been there. Finding the snowflake doodle in that spot leads Zizi to form a theory about Rivers possibly having murdered Gately. There is one brilliantly placed clue I completely overlooked that provides the solution to Case Rivers' true identity yet the reader is not even reminded of it until the penultimate page. Wells makes great use of seemingly mundane human behavior taken for granted in real life and then applying observations like Zizi's to her detective novel plot. It's both a refreshing and ironically eye-opening plotting technique that would become the standard of the incipient Golden Age.

THINGS I LEARNED:  Another intriguing clue is a carriage check, a small card issued to hotel guests or theater goers that allowed them to get a taxi or carriage (back in the horse drawn days) and wait in a queue as they pulled up to collect their passengers. I only learned about these by intensive internet searching and picking up this stray sentence in an encyclopedia about vaudeville. The article addresses the short-lived Folies Bergere in Manhattan whose owners Harris & Lasky thought up "other little innovations for theatergoers, such as a call boy inquiring of patrons shortly before the ending of the evening whether they wish a taxi giving a numbered card to those who do, the card becoming the person's carriage call." An illustration of one appears in my copy of The Man Who Fell through the Earth (at right) which I guess must be a good facsimile of what one looked like. A big deal is made about the holes in the card, what purpose they actually serve I have no idea, but in the course of the story they have an alternate more sinister use.

"Papier Poudré" brand powder-papers (click to enlarge)

In their first search of the murder scene Norah and Tom find things the police have overlooked. Norah, truly one of the ablest of the amateurs in this novel, spots a slip of pink paper in the trash can and pockets it. Tom asks her what it is and she tells him to be careful as it might still have fingerprints. "It's a powder-paper. Women carry them -- they come in little books. That's one of the leaves. They're to rub on your face, and the powder comes off on your nose and cheeks."  The conversation then turns to a mystery woman who must have been in the room visiting Gately. Tom remarks in passing: "A bit intimate, isn't it, for a woman to powder her nose in a man's office." Norah jibes back, "Not at all, Mr. Old Fogey! Why, you can see the girls doing that everywhere, nowadays. In the street cars, in the theatre -- anywhere!"

THE AUTHOR: Among Carolyn Wells (1870-1942) first professions were librarian in her hometown of Rahway, New Jersey and a prolific poet and humorist. Her first published work -- "The Poster Girl" -- appeared in 1897. Her first novels starting in 1902 were aimed for children, specifically the popular girls' book market. she came to write detective fiction a bit late only after attending a reading of Anna Katharine Green's That Affair Next Door. Wells' first detective novel, The Clue (1909), featured her long running series detective Fleming Stone. In addition to Stone and Pennington Wise she created Kenneth Carlisle and Lorimer Lane who each appeared in two mystery novels. Writing in multiple genres, both non-fiction and fiction, her work appeared in both the slicks and pulps of her time. Many of her novels were first serialized in popular story magazines like Detective Story (published by Street & Smith) and Munsey's All-Story Weekly.

Wells was one of the most amazingly prolific writers of the early 20th century consistently publishing at least three or four books annually from 1902 to her death. She claimed in an autobiographical work, The Rest of My Life (1937) to have written 170 books, including 70 detective stories—"so far."

Pennington Wise & Zizi Mystery Novels
The Room With the Tassels (1918)
The Man Who Fell Through the Earth (1919)
In the Onyx Lobby (1920)
The Come Back (1921)
The Luminous Face (1921)
The Vanishing of Betty Varian (1922)
The Affair at Flower Acres (1923)
Wheels Within Wheels (1923)

The Carolyn Wells Technique, or: How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love the Mess

It is always unpleasant to contemplate the hanging or the electrocuting of the fiction criminal. For this reason he not infrequently takes poison (which he has ready in his pocket), as soon as he is discovered, and dies peacefully, close upon the last words of his confession. This is one of the conventions adopted to spare the reader's feelings. For a criminal that can hold the reader's interest throughout the story is often too attractive a character to be permitted a horrible taking off.

from The Technique of the Mystery Novel by Carolyn Wells

One of the most prolific American writers of the early 20th century Carolyn Wells did it all – childrens' series, poetry, light verse, humorous fiction, a parody of Sinclair Lewis' best selling Main Street called Ptomaine Street, non-fiction essays, and of course her numerous detective novels. With only four published detective novels to her name she felt to be such an authority on the genre that she was the first to write a manual on writing detective fiction called The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913). That it was published by a firm calling itself The Home Correspondence School may tell you something about the intended target audience. It must have been popular, though in reading select chapters I really can't see why, for it remained in print through 1928.

For anyone acquainted with Wells' own oddball brand of detective novel reading her handbook for writers can be as unintentionally funny as reading her mystery novels. She repeatedly advises writers to avoid cliched mystery novel conventions that she herself used ad nauseam. An example is this paragraph taken from the chapter called "Devious Devices"

Another hackneyed device is the secret panel in the wall, which slides open by pressing a hidden spring. This was overdone in sensational fiction, before Detective Stories began, but was seized upon as a valuable device for Mystery tales. But it is easily suspected, and is unsatisfactory in modern settings.

Wells was IN LOVE with secret passages, hidden entryways, and secret panels. It is laughable that she would call them "unsatisfactory in modern settings" when her books are littered with them. One particularly egregious example occurs in Spooky Hollow - the worst of the books I read - in which the solution of a missing jewel relies on not one, not two, but three secret panels hidden in a wall safe -- itself a hidden panel operated by a hidden spring! Perhaps she thought this some kind of neat twist but to me it was self-parody.

Wells also calls to tasks her fellow mystery writers of the period for relying too heavily on tiresome plot devices like birds that steal jewels, clothing threads as clues, initialed guns, calling cards and handkerchiefs left at the scene of a crime, and crimes committed during snowy, foggy or rainy weather. In giving examples of some of the better conventions to emulate Wells also reveals the identity of the murderers in five classic mysteries. Nice! Luckily I had read most of them. Finally, she also has the nerve to describe other writers' work as "bordering on self-parody." In response to that I think of a wisecrack one of my theater friends often used for people suffering from lack of self-awareness: "Alice, there's the looking glass!"

I recently went through a sampling of the Wells books I own. I selected three for their locked room and impossible crime elements, a subgenre Wells was drawn to, hoping that at least one of them would show her to be the kind of imaginative teacher she presents herself as in her handbook, one who at least avoids cliches and "hackneyed devices." I was miserably disappointed. Even as "alternative classic" reading it was a torturous couple of days. Only one of the three proved to have any lasting entertainment value. Below are my discussions of the books starting with the worst of the lot and ending with the one that I found most worthwhile.

Spooky Hollow (1923) Fleming Stone, the Wells detective who appears most often in her abundant output, is the sleuth here. Like many of Wells books he shows up only in the final third of the story. I can't say what he is like in her other work but here he is dull, dull, dull. In this book he has a teenage boy sidekick named Terence "Fibsy" McGuire who actually does most of the detecting even if ALL of it is done offstage. Stone does little but ask a few pointed questions and dismisses nearly everything that the reader would think is important. The most mysterious parts of this book are actually proven to be superfluous in the end. What a cheat! There is the usual Wellsian haunted mansion with a legend attached to it. A murder was committed in the past and the sound of a harp emanates from a mausoleum situated near a bog on the rear of the estate. If anyone hears the harp playing it is supposed to be an omen of violent death to come. The harps plays, of course, and Anne Vincent, sister of Homer Vincent a reclusive eccentric inventor, is found stabbed in her locked bedroom. A visiting stranger also mysteriously disappears that very night and the bulk of the book is spent trying to discover where he went and who he is. But we already know who he is because Wells told us in the very first chapter. Ugh. Stone's supposed detection is nothing more than manipulative grilling of the suspects and melodramatic pronouncements punctuated with an ample supply of exclamation marks. The locked room solution relies on a "hackneyed device" I'm sorry to say, and is the lazy's writer's way out. Anytime I encounter it I groan in disgust. It comes up way too often in the Golden Age and rarely does anyone put enough of a spin on this method to really make it seem clever. The explanation of the ghost-like harp, of course, is not supernatural but it made no sense to me whatsoever. Still, it finally gave a reason for Homer Vincent calling himself an inventor. The fact that it took years to be discovered is absurd when you pause to think about it.

Deep Lake Mystery (1928) The premise of this book seemed very promising. Sampson Tracy, a typical millionaire Wellsian victim, is found in his locked bedroom dressed up like something out of an ancient burial ritual. There is a garland of flowers draped around his neck, a women's scarf on his head, an inverted feather duster propped up behind his head giving him the appearance of an Indian chief. Also, an orange and some crackers are set beside him and a crucifix is placed in his hand. But does any of this come into play in the solution of the crime? No. Once again the most interesting bizarre elements are extraneous. Speaking of bizarre: the murder method is one that is lifted from a real story called "The Nail," by Pedro de Alarçon. At one point a character (who apparently has the same arcane knowledge of crime fiction as Wells does) purports that someone must have read the story and if they can find a copy of it which happens to be in volume eight of Mystery Tales of All Nations then they may get closer to finding the killer. Believe it or not, it will turn out that the book is in the library of someone's home and the killer did in fact read the story!

The majority of the story is annoying and repetitive - a recurring trait of Wells. The Watson character Gray Norris has fallen head over heals in love with the prime suspect Alma Remsen, Tracy's niece. Even though all the evidence points to Alma, even though three separate eyewitnesses claim to have seen her at the scene of the crime (including Norris who watched her paddle a canoe away from the house), no one believes her guilty. Why? Because she is so darling and sweet that she could not possibly have murdered anyone, let alone her own uncle. Nice people never commit murders in a Wells book. Here's some more of Wells' writer's philosophy:

The next character to be chosen must be our criminal. Here again is one, who, if he is to be convicted, must not be too deeply in the reader's sympathy. [...] The drawing of the criminal calls for fine shading and strong effects. He must be both intelligent and ingenious, in order to give the Transcendent Detective a foeman worthy of his steel. The reader must have no liking or pity for him.

Finally, in Deep Lake Mystery we get another Wells staple and another "hackneyed device" for the murderer turns out to be a mad killer of the Mrs. Rochester variety. That's right -- someone who was thought to be dead was locked away in a room, managed to escape one night, and committed the dirty deed. But what of the locked room where the murder was committed? Well, there was that large window and it did happen to be directly above a lake - three stories above, that is. Look for the character who knows how to swim and dive, of course. And make sure that swimmer is the one who could dive perfectly into the safest spot in a rock-filled cove in the middle of the night with only the full moon as illumination. Oh. Are you sorry that I spoiled that for you? Didn't think so.

The Room with the Tassels (1918) marks the first appearance of Wells' series occult detective Pennington "Penny" Wise and his female sidekick Zizi. According to Wells' bibliography this is her twelfth book and if it is any sign of her early work then this is where I suggest people start if they are compelled to sample Carolyn Wells' mystery writing. This book had a lively and witty beginning and had more genuine humor in it than the other two I read. Wise and Zizi are all the more interesting because they are not really detectives - they are con artists. Zizi, when not teamed up with Wise on their "sleuthing" adventures is a silent movie star and she uses her talents as an actress and stuntwoman to her advantage as a sleuth. Wise tends to be drawn to cases that involve apparent supernatural events and he fancies himself a ghost buster. Zizi plays the part of his mysterious assistant and pretends to be psychic. She dresses all in black, floats in and out of rooms as quietly as the specters they are exposing, and frightens the heck out of the suspects with her freakish behavior and insinuating accusations. They're a great duo and it is largely due to their presence that I liked this book the best.

The story opens with a group of bored New Yorkers looking to enliven their dull summer by spending a weekend in a haunted house. They find the perfect place in Black Aspens, a mansion in a remote portion of Green Mountains of Vermont. Years ago a woman killed her husband with cyanide at 4:00 am. She ran out into the street in hysterics proclaiming the deed. A doctor chased her down, brought her back to the house and found what she said was true. He locked her in the room with the dead body and called the police. When they arrived and the room was opened the body was gone and the woman was raving mad. Now the "room with the tassels" where the two were temporarily imprisoned is said to be haunted by the ghost of the murderess who shows up looking for her dead husband. When the New Yorkers decide to take turns sleeping in the haunted room strange events take place. During the weekend two people are poisoned in the room while four others are present and the intended summertime lark of a weekend turns into a month long murder investigation. And later when one of the bodies disappears from the locked room with the tassels the suspects are convinced that a supernatural force is at work. Will it come as a surprise if I tell you there is no ghost? And that the massive pillars in front of Black Aspens have secret all their own? Yes, that's right -- more secret entrances. Double ugh.

For me the major flaw with Wells is her insistence on the inclusion of protracted "confab" scenes. Confab is a favorite Wells term. She uses these scenes repeatedly as "tabulation devices" in which the preceding events are discussed at length and mulled over by the numerous characters. She also has a habit of creating other private detectives as minor characters who come into the story to try their hand when the police (always inept) have failed. So when the series detective finally appears we have usually read about the events of the crime two or three times and must endure yet another confab by the REAL detective of the piece. It's her biggest failure as a mystery writer and yet it is something that she strongly believes is essential to the construction of a suspenseful mystery story. For me this endless reiteration and repetition is a suspense killer. An interest deadener. A brain numbing snoozefest.

In The Technique of the Mystery Story it is clear Wells has a wide reading knowledge of the writers of her period and those who came before her. Doyle, Gaboriau, Zangwill and Green are the most often mentioned in her discussion of what to strive for and what to avoid in writing a mystery story. Other minor writers like Burton Stevenson and Arthur Train are also cited in her numerous examples.  Clearly she knew her stuff from the late Victorian and early Edwardian era. Yet with all this knowledge she still has no real understanding of how to construct and write a detective novel. She is quick to condemn the "hackneyed devices" but will use them herself. She discards useful conventions that move a story forward and invents some of her own that bog down the flow of the action. When it comes to putting it all together Carolyn Wells is more like the wannabe painter who throws buckets of paint on a canvas and sloshes around in it and then expects it to be accepted as art. Anyone else will look at it and call it a mess. But a loveable mess if you have an appreciation for her mastery of the early American alternative classic mystery.