Dragon's Cave - Clyde B Clason

THE STORY:  Jonas Wright, owner of an engraving business in Chicago, is found stabbed in a locked room where he housed his collection of medieval and historical weaponry. One of those weapons in his collection -- a halberd -- is apparently what did him in.  He is found with his neck severed and the halberd in a pool of blood nearby.  A dribble on a table in the middle of the room and one single droplet on the opposite side of the room are the only other traces of blood.  Shouldn't the room have been drenched in blood if Wright's neck had been severed?  Prof. Westborough is tagged by Lt. Mack to be a stenographer during the interrogations and to ask any questions he wishes., no matter two seemingly irrelevant. He is sure that the halberd is not the weapon. Before the detective team discover the correct murder means there will be more impossible events including the disappearance of a man from a second story locked room with no footprints in the snow outside his window.

THE CHARACTERS: The primary suspects are mostly confined to the Wright household with a few others associated with the family. They are:

Julian Carr- Sales Director at Wright Engraving who had returned from an amateur production of Romeo & Juliet. (BTW, the book's title is taken from a quote in the play which uses a cavern as a metaphor for a deceitful heart.) He was acting in it and played Mercutio. We find out he is adept at fencing and happened to be returning a rapier borrowed from Wright's collection used as a prop in the production. That's right, these Chicago yokels actually used a real sword in an amateur theater production.  (Ai yi yi!  What was Clason thinking?)

Madeleine Wright - she was with Julian when they entered the house and found her murdered father.  She was also in the play in the lead role of Juliet. Madeleine is one of these icy young socialites who turn up frequently in Golden Age detective fiction. Acting skill -- take note! She has murder suspect written all over her though with her dialogue and actions Clason tries to dissuade the reader against suspecting her. She's is not to be trusted, my friends.

Martin Wright - a pretentiously intellectual college student, the older of the two Wright sons. If it weren't enough that Prof. Westborough lectures us on the minutiae of medieval weaponry and how they were used we must endure Martin's mini lectures and allusions to great philosophers of the world. That's what he’s studying at Northwestern University. Schopenhauer is his current hero.  I was sure his ego and supercilious personality were going to implicate him in some fashion. At one point Martin pontificates on the uselessness of prisons and the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate. He believes there are only two solutions to crime: societal remedies that will prevent crime in the first place and psychological treatment. For, as he tells Hilda and Ronald (see below), there are only two real causes of crime: environment and mental illness.

Wellington (Wel) Wright - the handsome hunk of a son, youngest in the family. Embittered because he is not rewarded with a high paying job in his father's firm. Impetuous, temperamental, brash and a bit naive. Drinks a lot. Was drunk the night of the murder -- or was it play acting? Had been at the home of his Gold Coast friend...

Tony Corveau - commercial artist and Lothario. Puts the make on Madeleine.  Oh wait! they were once an item. She despises him now. Tony likes to draw naked women and his lush apartment is decorated with his many pen & ink sketches of many women he's met. Recently fired from Wright Engraving over some hazy abuse of company supplies. Wellington might also be involved. The haziness of that abuse will eventually come into focus and lead to an important discovery.

Hilda - the Wrights' servant. She flees the house employing a clever ruse after it is learned that her son Ronald has recently been released from prison. Her escape is a desperate attempt to keep her son away and prevent him from being questioned by the police. She fails miserably.

Alan Boyle - Chicago newspaper reporter.  Intrusive, too wise, and very interested in Madeliene (aren't all these men?). Always seems to be at the Wright home at the right time (ha!). He is eventually enlisted as an aide by both Madeleine and later Westborough.

Hans Gross (1847-1915)

THINGS I LEARNED:  This is the earliest murder mystery I have ever encountered in which blood spatter, bloodspill and blood patterns found in a crime scene are featured prominently. Or actually in this case -- the lack of blood evidence.  Two experts' names in the field of blood evidence are invoked in Westborough's mini lecture: Jeserich and Gross.  Both were Germans.  Dr. Paul Jeserich according to his New York Times obituary published on Dec 10, 1927 was dubbed the "German Sherlock Holmes" and was known internationally for his work in "legal chemistry".  Hans Gross was a 19th century criminologist who authored a seminal book entitled Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (1893), literally Handbook for Investigating Judges as a System of Criminology, described in a professional journal article (“Literature of Bloodstain Pattern Interpretation” - MacDonell, 1992) as "an excellent reference for not only bloodstain patterns but almost everything else that may be considered within the field of criminalistics." Proving once again that Westborough (and of course Clason) really knows his stuff.

Westborough and later Boyle, the reporter, both make an allusion to Mary Blandy when the police start to seriously suspect Madeleine as the killer.  Blandy I had never heard of.  Wikipedia tells us: "In 1751, she poisoned her father, Francis Blandy, with arsenic. She claimed that she thought the arsenic was a love potion that would make her father approve of her relationship with William Henry Cranstoun, an army officer and son of a Scottish nobleman."  Was she that well known that two characters would make allusions to her case?  Madeline Smith was more well known as a notorious poisoner. But why even mention poison since the victim was stabbed? I guess Clason wanted someone accused and tried for patricide to make his point. Still seems extremely arcane even for the 1930s.

Madeleine & Julian spy blood
leaking under the doorway. Note
that Julian has the rapier in hand.
UK edition (Heinemann, 1940)

INNOVATIONS: Despite some of my snide commentary above in describing the characters I rather enjoyed this one.  The impossible problems are cleverly carried out and the detection involved to explain those impossibilities is both sound and sensible.  The characters are forced into resorting to bizarre means to accomplish desperate acts because they are trapped in a house under constant guard by the police.  It's not a murder mystery where someone intentionally dreams up the crimes and miracle problems just to baffle police.  In this regard Clason was trying to make the locked room mystery more grounded in reality rather than making it a puzzle for its own sake.  So points to him!

While there is a somewhat sappy subplot of a love triangle (Julian-Madeleine-Alan) and Professor Westborough indulges a bit too often in esoteric tangents the plot is always engaging, the banter between Lt. Mack and the professor is always fun and amusing, and the imaginative "miracle problems" keep the reader on his toes trying to outguess the detectives and come up with the solution before the final chapter. Dragon's Cave (1939) has now displaced The Man from Tibet (1938) as my favorite in a rather uneven series of detective novels. I still have four more to read before I say whether this is the quintessential Clason mystery.

EASY TO FIND?  Wonderful news! Not at all scarce. Plenty of Rue Morgue Press reprint paperback copies out there. Amazingly, most of them are very cheap, well under $10 a copy. And, of course, there are several of the US first edition for those interested in owning the original Crime Club hardcover. Many of those are actually under $50 a copy. That's refreshing, ain't it?

The Search for My Great-Uncle's Head - Peter Coffin

Peter Coffin is both the narrator and author of The Search for My Great Uncle's Head (1937). There was a time when there were loads of books "written" by the narrator. I wonder why writers thought this was clever. They weren't fooling anyone. The books were always found in the fiction section of bookstores so why bother with the gimmick at all? In this case Peter Coffin turned out to be a pseudonym for Jonathan Latimer, creator of the Bill Crane private eye novels. The Crane books are completely different in tone and style from this book. From the title you think you'll be getting a very black comedy and there is a smidgen of that here. I'd say it's more of a blend of the fair play detective novel and a surreal nightmare thriller with a trace of the Gothic shocker thrown in for good measure. The wise cracking dialogue of Bill Crane is fairly absent here.

Coffin is summoned to the home of his great-uncle Tobias Coffin where his relatives have gathered for an announcement about Tobias' will. While walking through the woods in the most Gothic scene in the book Coffin encounters a barefoot man skipping along merrily and singing the old nursery rhyme "A tisket, a tasket." Later we discover that he met up with an escaped lunatic who previously had decapitated his wife and children. The police are trying to capture the nut case but are doing a pretty poor job of things. At the home of his great-uncle Coffin is met by his hostile relatives who mistake him for the lunatic due to his rain drenched clothes and his mud stained hands and face. After a brief clean-up and several protestations they allow him to see Great-Uncle Tobias who proceeds to castigate him in a kind of character test. Coffin, disgusted by the poor treatment, tells off his great-uncle and tries to leave the house. Tobias is pleased that Coffin shows a little backbone and convinces him to stay. He also confides in him that there will be a surprise in store for all the relatives the next day alluding to his plans to disperse his fortune in a new will.

But of course, Tobias is done in rather brutally as the title suggests. His headless corpse is discovered in his study and the new will is missing from his papers. Coffin attempts to do some detective work on his own but he proves to be rather dim witted even if he is a college professor of Renaissance English history. He's also ridiculed by nearly all the other characters in the book. Oddly enough, in a scene very reminiscent of ol' Aggy Plum, Coffin proves himself quite an athletic swimmer in the lake. When he practically drowns someone he believes to have taunted him one of the woman changes her initial opinion of him as a wimpy coward.

Our hero dwells too much, however, on what others think of him. He spends much of his time interpreting, often mistakenly, the opinions and actions of others. For a while it seems as if the book has forgotten it is a detective novel as it veers off into an exploration of a comedy of manners.

Coffin is trapped by his intellectual persona. The obvious eludes him. He is taken into confidence by some of his wily relatives who toy with him and yet he is never aware of their manipulations. He is something of an accidental detective like David Frome's Mr. Pinkerton who almost always stumbled into a crime and got entangled in the investigation like a cat playing with a ball of yarn. Still, Coffin is so oblivious he doesn't even realize that he had in his possession from very early in the book the missing will that all the characters are so desperate to locate.

Only late in the book when an insurance investigator, Colonel Black, shows up does the book really start shaping up into a detective novel. Black is the quintessential detective of the Golden Age. He has arcane hobbies (the authenticity of Shakespeare's work), speaks enigmatically, and displays quirky methods of detection. In one scene he's sitting on the floor of his bedroom in lotus position apparently meditating. Later he is seen crawling on all fours at the scene of the crime and looking up at impossible angles. He also suffers from the "Van Dine syndrome" of extemporaneously lecturing on any esoteric topic that captures his fancy whether it relates to the case or not (see my review of The Fifth Tumbler for another of these detectives). But he's far more interesting than Coffin. He's the much needed breath of fresh air in a book that otherwise might have succumbed to a suffocating claustrophobia.

The Problem of the Green Capsule - John Dickson Carr

The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) is subtitled "Being the Psychologist's Murder Case." If the reader should miss this on the title page the final chapter is also conveniently titled the same thing. In England the book was published as The Black Spectacles which, in addition to being part of the murderer's elaborate disguise, is an interesting metaphor which will be explained later. Under his Carter Dickson pseudonym Carr wrote a book called Seeing Is Believing (1941). This book might just as easily be called Seeing Is NOT Believing for the powers of observation – or more accurately the lack thereof – is at the heart of this devilish detective novel.

Here is an example of the type of John Dickson Carr book so lovingly parodied by Anthony Shaffer in Sleuth. It is pure artifice, something that could never happen in real life. The whole thing is really nothing more than a piece of theater. Illusion and misdirection were the key components in Carr's fantastical detective novels. It's surprising he didn't employ more theatrical plot devices like this one in his books. Puzzle lovers are sure to get caught up in the multiple layers that make up the criminal activity in this book. At work are mind-bending psychological game playing, intentional trickery and bamboozlement galore.

Marcus Chesney claims no one truly observes. He pronounces that eyewitnesses are worthless. He is determined to prove to his niece Marjorie, her fiancé George, and Professor Ingram, a psychologist; that they are not as observant as they think they are. In a letter to Dr. Fell he outlines his ideas:

All witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles. They can neither see clearly, nor interpret what goes on on the stage, still less what goes on in the audience. Show them a black-and-white record of it afterwards, and they will believe you; but even then they will be unable to interpret what they see.

Chesney arranges a theatrical experiment, enlisting the aid of a household servant, which they are all to witness and be quizzed on what they think they saw immediately afterwards. To help prove his point he asks one of the participants to film the proceedings. What is meant to be a piece of melodramatic theater – the servant dressed in an outlandish disguise enters from outside and feigns murdering Chesney – goes horribly wrong. Chesney dies as the result of prussic acid poisoning apparently at the hands of his confederate. Yet later the confederate is discovered wounded and dazed in the yard outside. The pieces of the disguise strewn about the yard. Questioning of the three witnesses proves that none of them could have left their places. It's another impossible situation.  This all seems to be related to a series of poisonings that took place weeks ago. Poisonings in which Marjorie was a primary suspect and the target of malicious gossip.

Dr. Gideon Fell is consulted when one of the three policemen Inspector Elliott is stymied. It doesn’t help matters that Elliott has previously met Marjorie coincidentally while traveling in Italy and has fallen in love with her. Dr. Fell recognizes this emotional flaw and helps guide Elliott out of his self-imposed trap towards the proper solution. The film of the playlet proves of great importance in unmasking the killer as does one character's knack for lip reading.

Two interesting parallels: One the book deals with prussic acid poisoning the murder method used in The Fifth Tumbler by Clyde Clason, a book I wrote about last month. There is a remarkable section in Carr's book almost identical to a passage in Clason's book in which the chemical properties and composition of prussic acid are discussed. Not only that –- the commercial, agricultural and industrial uses of potassium cyanide, the main ingredient in prussic acid, are also mentioned in almost exactly in the same order as in The Fifth Tumbler. Clason's book was published in 1936 three years earlier than Carr's. Had Carr read it and used it as a reference in writing about prussic acid and potassium cyanide? Or is it one of those outrageous coincidences of life? Definitely something to mull over.

Secondly: Dr. Fell gives one of his famous lectures in this book. This time it is a poison lecture. I wonder why critics never talk about this one. His locked room lecture (found in The Three Coffins, also published as The Hollow Man) is very well known having been cited many times in numerous articles, critical works. And rightly so. It's a brilliant crystallization of the various ways in which a murder can be committed and made to appear impossible. But this poison lecture is one that is based on true crime cases not a fantastical detective novel trope. Carr outlines a type of poisoning persona and uses the case histories of convicted poisoners to support his theories. It's an overlooked portion of the book and deserves some mention.

* * *

This is my first completed read in Bev's Color Coded Reading Challenge at My Reader's Block.  If you like reading contests jump on the bandwagon, friend!  Click here to get the scoop and the rules.

Friday's Forgotten Books: The Fifth Tumbler

In the detective fiction collecting world The Fifth Tumbler has a reputation for being one of those highly sought after books. It tops many collectors' want lists and they wait agonizingly for a scarce copy to come up for sale anywhere. When it does there is often a flurry of traffic (on-line at least) to purchase the copy no matter what it's condition. While the book may be prized by a collector lucky enough to have captured an elusive title like The Fifth Tumbler, it is all too rare that the contents of the book live up to its prize status. Clyde Clason's first mystery novel is, sadly, not one of those double rarities.

This is the first appearance of Clason's mild mannered, absurdly erudite professor of ancient history and sometime archaeologist Professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough (why is it professors of archaeology must have such goofy names?). As with many of his cases he just happens to be on the premises when a baffling murder occurs, usually one of the impossible crime nature or a locked room murder. The title of his first sleuthing adventure hints at the recurring motif of locks and keys and does not refer to a drinking glass nor an acrobat.

The story is almost exclusively set in the Hotel Equable on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Elmo Swink, a dislikable man with a habit of womanizing and drinking heavily is found dead in his locked room. He has been poisoned by an ingeniously contrived booby trap - when he opened his door he caused a test tube containing a solution of potassium chloride and sulfuric acid to fall to the hard floor. When the two liquids mixed upon impact it released the poison hydrocyanic gas so popular with mystery fiction murderers. Lt. Mack is stumped as to how anyone could have procured the ingredients and fashioned the booby trap, then locked the door without anyone seeing all the activity that must have been involved in staging the crime. Westborough asks meekly and politely if he may sit in on the interviews of the hotel residents and begins taking notes.

Anyone who has read Clason's books (many have been re-issued by the wonderful couple at Rue Morgue Press) will know that these mysteries can get very eggheady as the investigation proceeds. Clason likes to populate his books with characters who have technical and scientific knowledge, characters who are well read and have a habit of alluding to their favorite works and writers, and characters who have other arcane bits of info that will somehow find itself into the dialog. Westborough, of course, is the main lecturer and allusion dropper - much of his prattle is just that and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story. This kind of pretentious malarkey is also found in the works of Ellery Queen and S.S. Van Dine. Some may find this quaint, some may find it eye-opening, with me it gets old very fast.

We have mini lectures on organic chemistry, the various methods of creating prussic acid, and the numerous uses of potassium cyanide (one of its ingredients) in business and industry. The night clerk Chris Larson just happens to be taking a course in chemical engineering and willingly shows off what he knows to help the police. But whereas a few sentences might suffice to relay this information to the reader Clason goes on for pages. There is also a lecture on how locks work, emphasizing the difference between a cylinder lock and a "paracentric" lock which is apparently the lock of choice at the Hotel Equable. While I was finally satisfied that a mystery writer had the smarts to explain it's not easy to pick many types of locks, I did think that Clason was indulging himself with the lock business as well. But then locks and keys have an awful lot to do with this book. The preponderance of locked doors, locked rooms mysteriously accessed, lock picks and hotel passkeys in the book makes The Fifth Tumbler a fitting title. Especially so when Westborough uses the inner workings of a lock as a metaphor for his approach in solving the crime:

"Let me elucidate by means of an analogy. The situation is not unlike the mechanism of a pin-tumbler lock."

"I'll be taking locks to pieces in my sleep," Mack declared with emphasis. "There's five pin tumblers, and the wedges on the key have to raise 'em all in a line before the plug can turn. That what you mean?"

"Exactly. To carry the parable a step further, I might add that four of my tumblers have reached the proper height, but an obstinate fifth prevents the lock from opening."

When the time comes for Westborough to reveal the identity of the murderer we get yet another long lecture and a killer who, when faced with his mistakes, crumbles under pressure and confesses. But his motive is kept secret for yet another chapter when the requisite surprise is delivered with a resounding thud. This is the only part of the book that fails to honor the fair play tenets of the detective novel. Although some background is given earlier in the book only the most imaginative reader could have made the outrageous leap required to connect the murderer and his motive. For me this was not so much a surprise as it was one of those eleventh hour tricks found in many of Carolyn Wells' mysteries. You expect a rabbit to be pulled out of the hat, but instead a kangaroo jumps out, hops all over the page, and practically thumbs its nose at you. You feel kind of stunned and cheated, no smile on your face and no desire to applaud.

UPDATE:  The Clyde B. Clason bibliography.  All books feature Prof. Westborough as the detective.

The Fifth Tumbler (1936)
The Death Angel (1936)*
Blind Drifts (1937)*
The Purple Parrot (1937)*
The Man From Tibet (1938)*
The Whispering Ear (1938)
Murder Gone Minoan (1939)*
Dragon's Cave (1939)*
Poison Jasmine (1940)*
Green Shiver (1941)*

*These titles are available in trade paperback reissues from Rue Morgue Press.  Tell them I sent you.