FFB: Flying Clues - Charles J. Dutton

UK 1st edition (Bodley Head, 1927)
Provocative illustration of a character
who appears nowhere in the book

There are a handful of Charles J. Dutton's books that I have recommended repeatedly and I’ll do that again right now before I launch into this review. Dutton had a fascination with criminal psychopathology but is never mentioned in the development of the American mystery novel for being perhaps the first writer of detective fiction to delve into criminal profiling before that methodology actually had a name. The three books I always recommend for this facet alone are Streaked with Crimson (1929), The Crooked Cross (1922) and Out of the Darkness (1922). Unfortunately, Flying Clues (1927) has nothing to do with criminal pathology, serial killer behavior, mental illness as related to homicide, or any genuinely clever plotting.

In the New York Times Book Review of Feb 13, 1927 the anonymous reporter said this about Flying Clues: "With a sextet of mystery stories to his credit it is scarcely surprising that Charles J. Dutton's latest work should show the signs of a practiced hand. Indeed, the presence of those signs stands out in the book as almost a defect." The review goes on to call his book "too accustomed, too usual and much in its matter that is too routine."  Someone one once accused me of writing a review of a book I thoroughly enjoyed as "damning with [it] faint praise."  The accuser was wrong and I defended my stance. However, the NY Times reviewer gives us the epitome of that phrase. I will not be so kind nor ambiguous at all in my feelings here.

Flying Clues, though intermittently entertaining and eyebrow raising in its 1920s social commentary, has its share of storytelling flaws and the most egregious is its title. The very last lines in the book consist of the detective telling his Watson (the ultra dull Pelt who has no first name) that the best title for his write up of this case should be Flying Clues. But I tell you it’s not. Why? Because it is a giveaway to one of the “mysteries” that befuddle Professor Hartley and the police. Well, the title tells you everything, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out exactly what kind of flying clues are responsible, especially when Dutton spends two paragraphs describing a flock of what looks like falcons in the sky and another time when some ignoramus sees some birds in a cage on board a ship, birds that look like chickens. They turn out to be pigeons.

Chickens Pigeons roosting in a rooftop coop

Now I know you are asking yourself exactly the same thing I did: “When have pigeons ever looked like chickens?” Is this some odd evolutionary quirk of the 1920s? Doubtful. I’ll tell you when pigeons look like chickens. When a mystery writer is trying his hardest to plant a red herring in his mystery novel by creating some dumb yokel who has never seen a damn pigeon in his life but has seen more than his share of chickens. You’re welcome to blow a raspberry at Dutton as I did. The louder the better. He’s dead, he’ll never hear you, but it’ll feel really good.

So onto the rest of Flying Clues. We have an impossible crime! A murder that takes place in a physician’s private exam room located in his own home. A woman has been stabbed in a chair in his “waiting room” and then moved to the “operating table.” I’m not going to address the operating table in the private exam room. You can do all that research on your own. And good luck.

The murder was committed in a room where the door was open and yet no one managed to see anyone go in or out of the room. A window leads to the outside but after a heavy rain that very night there are no footprints anywhere near the window and no signs of mud or anyone having entered or exited via the window. How was the woman killed without being seen? Trust me. It’s extremely obvious. There is hardly anything that will puzzle even the most neophyte of mystery readers.

A much better detective novel is
Streaked with Crimson (1929)

Still Dutton insists on trying to make it all seem baffling. The police are convinced that the butler did it! He, after all, was the one who was supposedly watching the room and the only person to leave the dining hall adjacent to the exam/waiting/operating room. During the only span of time that the woman could have been killed a dinner party is going. There are twelve possible suspects besides the butler and the physician who hosted the party and yet all of them were in the dining room at the time of the murder. The bulk of the book is spent discovering who the woman is and her connections to the people at the dinner party. None of it really matters. The killer is as obvious as the title.

What is interesting are two other aspects of the book. One is a subplot dealing with a cult religion called the Home of Universal Truth run by scarlet silk robe clad, turban wearing prophet named Savitr. The other is the apparent motive for the killing which involves cocaine smuggling, illegal drug use and widespread drug dealing. Dutton who was a Unitarian minister gives us a theology lesson in comparative religions, focusing on Hindu spirituality, and exposes the false gods that Savitr claims to represent. As bonus lecture we get the fundamentals of Vedic mythology which helps to explain the self-proclaimed guru's odd name.

Prof. Bartley, Dutton's criminologist sleuth, is just as informed on drug dealing as he is on ancient Indian mythology. In a page long lecture he offers up current cocaine pricing:  $14/ounce purchase price for dealers; $300 to $400/ounce for the users. I have to tell you I gasped when I read this. The handy internet US inflation calculator tells me that $400 in 1927 is equal to $4,437 in 2019. In an eerily prescient passage all too resonant for our troubled times Dutton accuses pharmacists all over the USA of being collaborators, whether unintentional or not, in the cocaine problems that plague 1920s America. One can only draw parallel to the opioid crisis we're dealing with now, more than 80 years later.

So if social history is your thing by all means pick up a copy of Flying Clues (if you can find one!).  Otherwise, here is a yet another early American murder mystery that is deserving of its forgotten fate.

The Shadow on the Glass - Charles J Dutton

This is the third book featuring John Bartley as detective and narrated by a Watson character named Pelt (no first name) who makes Captain Arthur Hastings look like a candidate for Mensa. The story is slight and seems to have been written with Carolyn Wells' The Technique of the Mystery Story within easy reach. Filled with reiterative "tabulation scenes" the book could easily have been of novella length had all those portions been omitted making the story streamlined and the action unimpeded.

On the eve of his daughter's wedding Frank Rich, a millionaire book collector is found battered to death in his locked library, accessible only by private elevator and that elevator is guarded by two private detectives hired to watch over the wedding gifts. In addition to the murder it is discovered that a valuable rare book of Italian sonnets worth $30,000 and a box containing $5000 in gold coins (one of the many wedding gifts) are both missing. Donald Maxon, a spiteful cousin, who disapproved of the wedding goes missing the next day and is thought to have drowned in the ocean. For some reason the bulk of the novel is spent looking for this supposedly drowned character rather than trying to find out who killed Rich. Numerous "tabulation scenes," (a Dutton staple) an unnecessary inquest scene, and other extraneous action set pieces were surely inserted for the pulp magazine audience but serve only as padding and do not propel the story forward.

To be honest nothing much really happens in this very slight story except the endless repetition of the events of the crimes and the continual pronouncements of how puzzling it all is. The detection is negligible. Every three chapters something missing will be found in an obvious place. The "drowned" man turns out to be very much alive though this too is hardly surprising. Even with its tantalizing locked room problem the mystery is sadly routine with familiar tropes and more than a handful of "hackneyed devices." The only interesting piece comes at the end when the locked room is finally explained. But it turns out to be a faked locked room -- a definite anticlimax.

The book is chock full of lectures that are bound to annoy a 21st century reader. You will learn all about the inferiority complex and why at least two characters are thought to be suffering from this condition and will have to trudge through long paragraphs of psychological behavior. There are, however, some interesting passages on collecting medieval books as well as the art of the erotic engraving and how scandalous it was thought to own such a "dirty book" in the 1920s.

I have read several of Dutton's books but mostly those with his second detective, Harley Manners, in the lead. Manners is younger and more of an action hero than John Bartley who belongs to the old scientific detection school. This is pretty thin stuff even for Dutton whose early work first appeared in serial format in the pages of pulp magazines like Detective Story Magazine and Star Novels Magazine. Elsewhere on the internet I have written up plot summaries of some much better books by Dutton and talked about why I think he is worth reading for his insights into the early form of criminal profiling used in hunting down a multiple murderer. But I have yet to read one of his books that does not suffer from the reiteration scenes so necessary to the serial format with all those variations on how to convey "our story thus far." Sad to say that this is perhaps Dutton's poorest effort.