FFB: They Walk in Darkness - Gerald Verner

They Walk in Darkness (1947) opens with a dinner party held on Halloween night. The main topic of conversation is hardly palatable for any dinner party no matter what the date. In the village on Fendyke St. Mary children have been disappearing, five over an eighteen month period. Only one has been found so far. The Robson’s infant was taken from its pram but three days later was found horribly butchered, its throat cut and the body dumped in “a clump of reeds at the edge of Hinton Broad.”

You can imagine all the characters reaching for the whiskey, gritting their teeth, clutching the arms of their chairs. You imagine they would want to change the subject as soon as possible. But no one does. Can there be more? Oh, yes there is--

The prelude to this ghastly murder and subsequent disappearances of other children was the slaughter of lambs killed in a similar fashion and just as ignominiously disposed of. Verner's narrative style is so detached, so British, presenting such monstrous acts in as tasteful a manner as possible.  The guests feel more challenged by how to conduct themselves with decorum rather than show their true feelings. The men shake their heads and dismiss it as the actions of a lunatic, the woman utter euphemistic platitudes. Collectively the dinner party basically shakes their head mumbling about “nasty work”. We expect outrage but get lackadaisical resignation.

If that weren’t enough their hostess Helen Wymondham is more concerned about how the evening was ruined, "all gaiety vanished" no matter how many “valiant efforts” she made to restore it to a pleasant evening for all. She babbles on interminably as she tries to say her good nights to her nephew Peter Chard and his wife Ann: “Such a dismal atmosphere, I’m really quite relieved that the evening is over. I do wish it hadn’t happened today of all days. It would have been so nice if we could have had a really jolly evening…”

Of course this is just a precursor to more unspeakable acts.

The next day four people, two men and two women, are discovered dead at another party held in a reputedly haunted house known as Witch House. It had snowed on Halloween and footprint trails travel towards the house showing all four entered, but none travel away showing anyone left. The door was locked from the inside and had to be broken down. All four people are found seated at a dinner table, some meats are still on a sideboard, a wine bottle is empty,  and all four have eaten and drunk wine. There is a fifth place setting at the table but the plate and glass are untouched, empty of food or drink. Examination of the bodies indicates cyanide poisoning, later corroborated by autopsy, administered via the wine. When mass suicide is ruled out the police are faced with what appears to be a locked room and four impossible murders. Who poisoned the wine, locked the room, and escaped without leaving footprints in the snow?

Peter Chard, a thriller writer, and his wife assist the police in the murder investigation. Eventually, the lamb slaughter, the vanished children, and the poisonings are all tied together when Peter’s wife Ann suggests that everything smacks of ritual and superstition. Peter’s Aunt Helen who hosted the dinner party tells them stories about the house where the murders took place, and of the ugly history of witchcraft and executions that took place in the village centuries ago. Ann dares to suggest that a coven of witches may be active in the village and Peter begins to seriously contemplate that possibility. The truth, however, is far worse -- more outre, more bone-chilling.

The detection and clues are here, but Verner is sloppy in his handling of his sinister plot. While we watch Peter discover things like an ornate jeweled brooch in the shape of capital L in the home of victim Laura Courtland, and read up on witchcraft and horrid occult rituals in the library of Anthony Sherwood other pieces of detective work are shaded in ambiguity or just plain unfair. There are two blatant references to an aspect of one character’s unusual past that stick out like a sore thumb indicating a major clue as to how the the impossibility was pulled off, but on the other hand we never learn (until the last chapter) what Peter found when he investigated the front porch of the Witch House. All the reader knows is that he sees it, smiles and walks away.

Verner seems to lack the confidence to play fair with his readers. He’ll hide a couple of aces up his sleeve but then let one drop out onto the table ineptly. Too much detection happens offstage or is described so obliquely that the reader is unclear what has been discovered. The clues are a mix of the utterly absent or completely obvious. When the solution to the impossible crime comes many readers may be disappointed by its familiarity in the impossible crime subgenre, a gimmick used almost as frequently as knife throwing.

In the end They Walk in Darkness comes off as an inferior homage to a Dennis Wheatley occult thriller moreso than a traditional detective novel. Verner has been described as being inspired by Edgar Wallace in that even when he sits down to write a detective novel he ends up with action oriented thrillers, often with gangsters and career criminals as the antagonists. However, the more I read of Gerald Verner the more I'm reminded of a similarly prolific crime writer who wrote under multiple pseudonyms. Edwy Searles Brooks whose "Ironsides" Cromwell books written in his “Victor Gunn” guise are very much in line with what Verner wrote. Both include impossible crimes, haunted houses, Gothic atmosphere galore, elements of weird and supernatural fiction always rationalized, and the standard heightened melodrama exemplified by this Lovecraftian passage:

Something had come into that quiet, warm, cosy room -- a disturbing, unpleasant something, as though a door had partially opened and through the crack had come writhing abominable and hideous things from an unspeakable hell.…

Luridly cliche? Yes, but a perfect evocation for what's to come. And it would have been fine if Verner ended the chapter there. Instead he undermines the terror with the prosaic by tacking on this absurd coda:

Peter slid the brooch into his pocket."Let’s go to bed, shall we?" he said soberly. "I think I’ve had enough horrors for one day.…"

Despite all the flaws in construction and fair play technique Verner is a born story teller and the book does not fail to grip hold of the reader.  Of all the books I've read this one seems his most mature, he is trying to do something than merely entertain.  There is social criticism and satire of British stoicism in the face of "nasty business." Amid the lathered on histrionics and the intentionally melodramatic prose there is a subversive thread being played out. They Walk in Darkness slowly transforms from occult thriller with detective fiction elements into a contemporary morality play with a motive for murder steeped in vigilantism presented as the only true course for justice and retribution. We watch the disintegration of a community and witness them suffer in helplessness, rise up in anger and violence in order to stop the unseen malevolent force terrorizing their village. Who among them will be brave enough to dispel the superstition and at long last see the truth no matter how improbable?  The novel begins in tragedy and ends in tragedy when at last two characters step out of the shadows take the law into their own hands and fight evil the only way they can. Even Peter Chard recognizes this as the only solution possible in the final pages.

FFB: Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell, another Neglected Detective

When last I looked at the work of prolific crime and adventure writer Edwy Searles Brooks I sampled the Norman Conquest thrillers he wrote under his "Berkeley Gray" pseudonym. As many crime fiction enthusiasts know Brooks used several pseudonyms and created multiple series characters as well as contributing to the Sexton Blake books. Writing as "Victor Gunn" he invented probably his most appealing detective character in a series almost as long running as the Norman Conquest books. Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell makes his debut in Footsteps of Death (1939) and appears in a total of 43 books over the next 27 years. In nearly all (or a least those four I've sampled so far) he is aided by his faithful Sgt. Johnny Lister, a sharp young man with an roving eye for the ladies. Cromwell keeps his police partner in line and does his best to tutor him in his keen eyed police ways, but Lister usually falls short of the mark. The books are as varied as the Sexton Blake series ranging from detective novels to pursuit and espionage to inverted crime and suspense thrillers. Unfortunately, because Brooks started his career as a short story writer for boys' magazines and never really seemed to mature in his narrative style the books often are plagued with predictable eleventh hour death traps, villains who all but twirl their mustache ends, and cringeworthy romantic developments. But he wrote fast and furious and there's no denying as Blake or Gray or Victor Gunn that Brooks was inventive and imaginative in his plotting and was an ace storyteller. If the characters suffer from stock-in-trade personalities, speak tritely and too often in the exclamatory mood, that's only to be expected from a man who churned out so many books over his lifetime.

Here's a sampling of the adventures of Ironsides and Lister. They run the gamut in subgenres, show some ingenuity, and reveal a pattern of favorite plot devices as well as a few trips into well worn territory of crime fiction. Chronological order is the easiest way to tackle this kind of post. And away we go--

The Dead Man Laughs (1944) is the first book I read in the Ironsides series. I was surprised that it is not a genuine detective novel at all. It's an inverted detective novel with not one, but two villains behind all the criminal activity. Nearly every inverted crime novel that reveals to us the murderer from the start also tells the story from his viewpoint exploring all the motivations and going into great detail about the methodology of his crimes. Not so here. The intriguing part of this novel is that the motive and methods are never really known until the final chapters. In this case the mysteries involve the identity of the victim of a fatal car accident that occurred during a winter snowstorm. The body is thought to be Sir Kenneth Parsloe who had the insane habit of enjoying driving around within his luxury convertible with the top down even in freezing wintry weather. He is discovered with a head injury but also completely frozen. Cromwell is sure that the body could not have become completely frozen even overnight with all the snow. Was it indeed a car accident or was there foul play?

About one third of the way into the story we discover that Parsloe's brother Phillip and Dr. Thumper have something to do with either causing or staging the accident, something that is not too surprising at all given the way the two men are so evasive and insistent on burying the body. But the discovery of a cold storage plant where a taxidermist keeps his animals prior to stuffing them will provide clues to wrap up the mystery. Cromwell and Lister nearly lose their lives when they are trapped in the storage plant in one of the novel's most macabrely described and best action sequences. The solution is sadly all too easy to arrive out though Brooks does his best to throw out a few red herrings like an escaped convict. But grave robbery and some nonsensical business about bearded men pretty much give away what he thought were his most clever tricks.

A more satisfying book is The Laughing Grave (1955). Here we have a genuine detective novel that features weird legends and apparent supernatural events, two favorite motifs in the Ironsides series. The title refers to a weird legend about cruel Judge Forbes known to laugh at each prisoner before he pronounced their death sentence. Anytime the judge's ghost is heard laughing from the local graveyard it is an omen that someone in the Haverford/Forbes clan will soon die. One night Lord Haverford, a superstitious man despite his own cruelty, hears the laugh and flees from the estate. He runs out into a road and apparently drops dead of fright after avoiding being hit by truck. But examination of the corpse reveals neither a natural death nor even an accident. A bruise on his chest indicates that he was struck by a heavy blow. The examining physician theorizes that someone stomped on him. A mud stain on the front of Haverford's mackintosh over the exact spot further supports that theory. Typical Golden Age detective novel evidence includes footprints of someone wearing socks, stolen boots and a balled up newspaper.

Action is a plenty, the characters are varied and many giving us a fairly wide pool of suspects even if most of them are all too simplistically rendered. The stuff of the legend heightens the atmosphere of The Laughing Grave which has a decidedly eerie mood. Brooks works well when he lathers on the Gothic excesses. However, the killer's exploitation of the legend of the laughing judge's ghost veers into embarrassing land of Scooby-Doo style hauntings. Still it doesn't diminish the entertainment value of this book. As my second tasting in this long series I was pretty well satisfied. IT told a good tale, the detection was there albeit very rudimentary and I have to say I was surprised by the identity of the murderer. I was determined to read more to see if these books get better the more Brooks wrote.

It looked like my theory was right because The Golden Monkey (1957) was my third reading and it proved to be the most satisfying of the lot. The plot is ridiculously complex compared to the other two mysteries. The cast of characters was equally complex and utterly eccentric. That this book was also set in the music hall and circus worlds made it all the more appealing to me. And to top it off the first murder involved one of my favorite bizarre Golden Age detective novel gimmicks -- knife throwing. (See reviews here, here and here.) Crime writers would have us believe that the entertainment world is nothing but amorality run rampant (these days it certainly seems so) with world class criminals of all sorts making up any cast on a music hall bill or employed by a travelling carnival. In The Golden Monkey we have murder by knife throwing, kidnapping of a prized animal, theft, burglary and blackmail. Blackmail galore in this one as a matter of fact.

The title character is in fact not a monkey but an ape. He's Vick, a unique chimp who serves as a ventriloquist's partner. Instead of using a dummy Valentine the voice thrower makes it appear that the chimp is talking. And it seems ownership of Vick is the most important part in solving the crime. I dare not attempt to summarize the complicated tale in the past lives of Kit Barlowe, an opera singer; Rex Dillon, the knife thrower; and Valentine. But it does involve an Australian animal trainer nearly killed by a tiger that escaped from its cage and an unusual legal document drawn up to protect Vick and leave him in trustworthy hands.

Brooks keeps the story of The Golden Monkey moving at a rapid pace, tirelessly piling on complications so that interest never falters. So what if everyone is blackmailing one another. There are more than enough secrets in this one to satisfy the gossip pages for decades. Isn't that the kind of detective novel you want? Sure you do, especially if you picked up a Victor Gunn book. The ending of this one has one of the most preposterous pieces of information based on fact that left me laughing the way that the grotesque stories in "Ripley's Believe it or Not!" comic strip used to affect me.

But then we come to number four and disappointment begins to settle in. Just when you think that Brooks would never fully succumb to stale genre conventions or resort to lazy storytelling we get Devil in the Maze (1961). Such an ominous title. I'm sure you're all thinking as I did that here is his tribute to John Dickson Carr. For in fact it starts off just like something Carr would have written. A group of heirs are summoned to the home of an imperious aging matriarch who conducts a contest in order to determine her most worthy legatee. She will have each person travel through the baffling yew tree maze in the garden of her estate, timing each person. The one who makes it to the center, retrieves a card with his or her name on it, and makes it out in the shortest time will receive half of her fortune. The remaining heirs will receive equal portions of the remaining half. And --have you already guessed?-- someone doesn't make it out. At all. Voila! An impossible crime. Major Claude Pilbeam, the eldest who enters the maze last, never exits. The others wait for hours and set up a vigil overnight. He simply vanishes. Around three in the morning someone finds him hanging lifeless from a hook in a disused room of the huge Scott mansion. Who killed him? And more importantly how on earth did the body get out of the maze without being seen?

Who's behind that mask?

It's not very well handled, frankly. The story is made even more ridiculous by the appearance of a scarred stranger with an eerie yellow tinge to his wrinkled face. This weird looking stranger who is always dressed in a belted blue raincoat pops up frequently over the course of the novel. In fact Yellow Face, as he is so unimaginatively dubbed by everyone, confesses to the murder to Cromwell and Lister just before he tries to kill both of them. This happens at the halfway mark lessening the surprise of a final chapter reveal. So my hope for a Carr homage vanished as quickly as Major Pilbeam and was replaced by reminders of the weakest and most formulaic of Edgar Wallace thrillers. Even the dullest minded reader will catch onto this cliché of a weird looking villain in a never changing get-up. It's an obvious disguise and with disguise usually comes a mask or make-up.

And by the way -- all of this was written and published in 1961. [pause for guffaws] Seriously? I kept thinking this must've been one of those manuscripts written in the author's callow youth that he pulled out of trunk, dusted off, and sent off to his publisher laughing all the while.

The solution of the Major's vanishing and his transport into the house is saved for the final two pages yet is almost casually dismissed. Even the killer says to one of the final surviving heirs, "Oh what does it matter how I got the major out of the maze?" I beg to differ. It matters a hell of a lot. It's the only reason I kept reading this ruddy book, Mr. Gunn! We do get an explanation and it involves the killer's enlisting a confederate (he had several, all of whom he later kills) who it turns out was an acrobat. Shades of The Problem of the Wire Cage? Not at all. I leave the rest to your vivid imaginations. The solution was a huge let down. Not to mention preposterous when taking into account physics and timing and the presence of six witnesses.

As I said a big disappointment after three books that had truly entertaining and often ingenious plotting. As for Cromwell himself he's one of the better policeman characters out there. He enlivens the proceedings with his astute observations, his caustic humor, and his endearing irascibility. I like these cop characters who suffer no fools and give their colleagues a verbal slap upside the head every now and then. Johnny Lister is no dullard but he rarely sees the forest for the trees in these few investigations I've sampled.

This is real pop fiction, gang -- mystery novels meant purely for entertainment, to while away an afternoon or two. All of the books are very short, well under 200 pages no matter where they fall in the series chronology. I have five more I've managed to accumulate and will be reporting back if I encounter one close to the genuine fun of The Golden Monkey which so far has proven to be the best of the lot.

EASY TO FIND? Not really. And if they do turn up they're usually damned expensive. I've spent a pretty penny on most of the books I've managed to find. None of these books was published in the US making copies that more difficult to locate. Though many of the Victor Gunn books were reprinted in paperback editions in the UK and Canada those too are becoming increasingly scarce. It may be that he's a cult collector's phenomenon. Many of these titles are next to impossible to find like The Devil in the Maze though in that case lack of copies is no real loss to mystery fans. Those who live in the UK, Canada or Australia will probably fare much better, especially if you look in libraries where he proved to be a popular author. Most of my Victor Gunn books are ex-library copies that came from Canada and there are a lot of stamps in the back of those books.

"Ironsides" Cromwell Detective Novels & Thrillers
Footsteps of Death (1939)
Ironsides of the Yard (1940)

Death on Shivering Sand (1947)
Ironsides Smashes Through (1940)
Death's Doorway (1941)
Ironsides' Lone Hand (1941)
Mad Hatter's Rock (1942)
Ironsides Sees Red (1943)
The Dead Man Laughs (1944)
Nice Day for a Murder (1945)
Ironsides Smells Blood (1946)
Three Dates with Death (1947)
Ironsides on the Spot (1948)
Dead Man's Warning (1949)
Road to Murder (1949)
Alias the Hangman (1950)
The Borgia Head Mystery (1951)
Murder on Ice (1951)
The Body Vanishes (1952)
Death Comes Laughing (1952)
The Whistling Key (1953)
The Crippled Canary (1954)
The Crooked Staircase (1954)
The Laughing Grave (1955)
The Painted Dog (1955)
Dead Men's Bells (1956)
Castle Dangerous (1957)
The Golden Monkey (1957)
The 64 Thousand Murder (1958)
The Treble Chance Murder (1958)
Dead in a Ditch (1959)
The Next One to Die (1959)
Death at Traitors' Gate (1960)
Death on Bodmin Moor (1960)
Devil in the Maze (1961)
Sweet Smelling Death (1961)
All Change for Murder (1962)
The Body in the Boot (1963)
Murder with a Kiss (1963)
Murder at the Motel (1964)
The Black Cap Murder (1965)
Murder on Whispering Sands (1965)
The Petticoat Lane Murders (1966)

1957 BOOK: Conquest after Midnight - Berkeley Gray

For years I kept coming across the Norman Conquest books being offered up for sale on various bookselling websites. “Hmm,” I often mumbled to myself. “I wonder if those are any good.” But I never gave in to temptation. Maybe in the back of my mind knowing that “Berkeley Gray” was one of the many pseudonyms of the prolific thriller and crime fiction writer Edwy Searles Brooks kept me away for decades. The bulk of Brooks’ career was spent writing juvenile adventure stories for the British boys’ magazines and then spending a lot of time writing for Amalgamated Press and helping to further the exploits of Sexton Blake. I’ve never been interested in that kind of thriller so I avoided all of his books under his various guises.

Then one day earlier this year I stumbled across a mini library of Norman Conquest books at a Half Price Books location near me. All of them were $8 or less and so I bought them all. When I learned that Norman Conquest is a sort of clone of Simon Templar and that one of the books I now owned was published in 1957 fitting into this month’s Crime of the Century reading challenge, I decided to finally sample one of the adventures of the man known as the “Gay Desperado”. My fears all proved well founded. Even though this book was written in the 1950s it was like travelling back to the early twentieth century and read very much like a boy’s adventure story.

Like much of this pulp fiction the story is fast paced and often quite fun. And yet it is plagued with hoary plot devices, shallow observations about human nature, naïve or stupid characters who fail to see the obvious, and cringe worthy dialogue. Witness, for example, what Fiona says after a gasoline tanker crashes through her living room wall and explodes in a fiery inferno. Does she break down in tears, scream, rant, or rave now that her home and all her belongings have literally gone up in smoke? No, she wimpily exclaims, “Oh dear! What a muddle!”

There is nothing remotely modern about Conquest after Midnight (1957) which is a very old-fashioned potboiler. There is a rich master criminal (a prominent member of Parliament who owns an independent political newspaper) who devises a preposterous plot in order to remove a former business partner he cheated and who is now planning to expose him. Does he threaten him with violence or shoot him dead? Does he hire a thug to beat the guy up or otherwise scare him into silence? No, the M.P. pretends to be interested in starting a private zoo, buys a lion, and hires a couple of men to let the lion loose on his enemy who he knows takes an evening stroll. Let the lion be blamed for having escaped and mauling the man in a surprise but bizarre encounter at night. And everyone chalks it up to an accident. You have to give Rupert Hargrove credit for over-the-top imagination. Other bad guys might just try to run down the guy with a car. I think Hargrove watched too many old movies.

Though filled with cinematic escapades and melodramatic incidents the story is very thin. It easily could be told in less than 100 pages but Brooks’ long career in writing serials for magazines reveals the curse of this kind of penny-a-word writing: constant and needless reiteration. If the story was read from week to week the recounting of previous events would be somewhat necessary. To have Conquest tell characters things we’ve already been told three pages prior is more than annoying. A simple sentence like “He told Fiona what he told the police.” would serve perfectly fine. Not for Brooks. He must tell us two, three, sometimes as many as four times things that need only be explained once.

I’ll admit that it was fun to see how many quirks Norman Conquest has in common with Simon Templar and similar “gentleman adventurers” found in thriller fiction. He is independently wealthy having amassed a fortune from somewhat crooked dealings, helping himself to portions of the wealth of the rich villains he does battle with. Like Templar he leaves behind a calling card. Conquest’s has the significant date 1066 printed in red. Cute.

Towards the end of the book there are absurd surprises:

• A coil of rope Conquest “invariably” wore “as an additional article of attire.” Added as an afterthought: “Easily carried between his undershirt and shirt and quite comfortable.” Batman’s utility belt would be a lot more comfortable.
• Wry commentary meant to be witty but falling short of the mark: “This was no occasion for applying the Queensberry rules” when Conquest starts throwing punches in a fistfight.
• The insults and epithets are pretty tame, too: “You’re a fast worker, slug.” “Careless of you, poison, to come alone...” “Don’t be such a rabbit...” (This last one spoken by a murderer to his cohort)
• An Italian villain actually exclaims “Maledizione!” when foiled as if he were Snidely Whiplash in a literally translated Dudley Do-Right cartoon.
• Conquest boards his private airplane (a Mills Conister Fury) with his wife and pilots his way to Italy to rescue the requisite damsel in distress who of course is being used as a bargaining chip. Hand over the incriminating documents or the girl gets it--- all the way over in Italy, no less.

This is the type of book where the rich and powerful villain can’t be bothered to save his own skin. He hides behind his façade of respectability and hires goons and lummoxes, and in one case a femme fatale who owes him a favor, to do all his ludicrous dirty work. There would be no story if these crooks behaved like real violent criminals who want to protect themselves and just shot everyone dead. Instead we get all this globetrotting silliness, murder by a “monstrous device” that resembles lion claws, kidnapping on board a cable car in the Italian mountains, and stowing the abducted damsel in a refugio hidden in the forest.

I expect more from a writer with a long career in concocting this kind of formulaic crime novel. Most crime writers who have successfully had long careers spanning multiple decades found it necessary to evolve and adapt to reflect how the plots, characters and formulae of crime fiction change with the times. Brooks seemed to find it very easy to cling to his origins and remain firmly rooted in the past. After reviewing the various bibliographies at the Edwy Searles Brooks tribute website I learned that Brooks recycled many of his stories. This tends to be the curse of the writer who feels compelled to produce numerous books at a logic defying rate. John Creasey did the same thing in order to deliver his hundreds of books in his various writing personas. Though many of the Norman Conquest books are noted as being rewrites of plots Brooks used in boys' papers or other pulp magazines Conquest after Midnight apparently was an original story for this series. Could have fooled me.

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This is my second contribution for the Crime of the Century vintage mystery blog meme sponsored by Past Offences. During May we read books published in 1957. My other, much more enjoyable read, was Three for the Chair by Rex Stout.