FIRST BOOKS: The Swan Island Murders - Victoria Lincoln

There is nothing more upsetting than falling for the hype on a book jacket. The Swan Island Murders (1930) with its striking Art Deco influenced illustration of a silhouetted damsel being threatened by claw-like hands and the promise of "mystery, horror and detection" was enough to lure me in. While there is plenty of mystery and a smattering of rudimentary detection on display there is little horror to thrill a 21st century reader.  This is a book of its age when its intended audience surely would've been thrilled by the exotic and bizarre plot elements but which led me to spend time on outside research as I found fault with the author's supposed arcane knowledge of Indian religion and mythology that dominates the story,

The story mostly involves the guests at an impromptu house party hosted by wealthy eccentric Nahum Gould, a collector of Indian esoterica and a variety of Southeast Asian artifacts. The rear of the book jacket leads one to believe that the poor souls stranded on Swan Island are at the mercy of a mad strangler. This is not the case. Two Portuguese immigrant workers are strangled over the course of the novel (so a partial truth) but none of them are major characters at the house party. Instead, the focused crime is that one of the guests is shot dead, a presumed suicide for much of the book. The editorial staff at Farrar & Rinehart seemed more intent on selling the book under false pretenses and playing up to the contemporary demand for sensational popular fiction.  Had they told the truth about the book they would've been "spoiling" the surprises. Of course, I think nothing of diving right and telling you that this book is really about abnormal psychology and monomania related to arcane Indian mythology and its effect on Indian criminal culture.

Connie Steel is our narrator very much modeled on a Mary Roberts Rinehart amateur female detective easily affected by eerie atmosphere and with a tendency to talk about madness far too often. Swan Island, as you might predict, is a fog enshrouded lonely place and Gould's mansion is an imposing and dreary, shadow-filled haven well suited for a reclusive eccentric obsessed with the Mysterious And Inscrutable East. Victoria Lincoln does an admirable job of laying on thick this atmosphere of dread signalling "horrible things to come" with typical HIBK prose like "...but that boat was to come and go again without carrying any one of us away from Swan Island." More typical are Lincoln's florid stylistic touches like this: "How dreadfully right I had been...when I had thought that all our proportions were chemically incorrect, and that some cataclysmic reaction was bound to take place."  This odd chemistry metaphor pops up two times later in the book. She heightens the mystery and terror when we learn that Nahum Gould is so fearful and paranoid he has turned the house into an impenetrable fortress. All the windows have steel frames, there is only a single key for every door lock in the place with no copies and only the butler Gomez or Gould's secretary Torres are allowed to keep these original keys. Gould himself keeps only the key to his bedroom which has a heavy oak and steel door, steel enmeshed windows and other security overkill enhancements making his bedroom more of a prison cell. He speaks in a hushed voice of keeping "It" out and is constantly on guard, especially at night .

Needless to say someone manages to kill the playwright John Parsons and as Connie and her fiance Edward Benedict soon discover the murderer can only be one of the four remaining guests, Gould, or one of his employees. Gomez has a son Joe with developmental delay who in true period fashion is referred to as "the idiot" throughout the novel. Though he is slow to comprehend anything asked of him Joe's father says the boy can have days when he is perfectly lucid. Joe is the first one suspected of being the mad strangler and also the shooter until the stunningly beautiful (she has to be, right?) Nana Moeller, a German actress about to appear in Parsons' latest play, insists that she knows John committed suicide. There is evidence to disprove this suicide theory and that the death is a cleverly covered up murder. Not the least of these clues is a blood stained book written in Urdu that has vanished from the library when Parsons was shot.

A blood stained book written in Urdu?!

This is the single most interesting facet of the novel. Not to mention Lincoln's most macabre and original touch. It will prove key to the solution of all that is baffling about the strangling murders as well as John Parsons' death. Unfortunately, the revelation in the final chapters is so far removed from a fair play traditional detective novel that it called to mind the most popular American detective of the era -- Philo Vance.  I'm sure Victoria Lincoln read her fair share of both Rinehart and Van Dine prior to writing her first mystery novel because apart from the Rinehart style narration, and the Rinehart-like emphasis on terror and madness infecting everyone, ultimately the book is an esoteric treatise much like a Philo Vance detective novel. Thankfully Lincoln spares us pedantic footnotes, but the final chapter is overloaded with arcane trivia about a criminal subculture that thrived in 19th century India. Sadly, the finale is also littered with misinformation and poorly Anglicized spellings of terms and mythological figures and haphazardly mixes fact and legend. I had to sort it all out in about 90 minutes of internet searches and reading up on the incarnations of Kali until I found Bhawani which is the modern spelling of what Lincoln renders in her novel as B'wannee. She also seems to believe that T'huggee (once again her odd spelling) is an actual religion rather than a criminal class.

Victoria Lincoln, age 26 (circa 1930)

THE AUTHOR: Victoria Lincoln (1904 - 1981) was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and claims (on her author bio on the DJ for this mystery novel) that as a child she managed to make the acquaintance of that town's most famous resident Lizzie Borden. She attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1926. The same year she married her first husband Isaac Watkins who was a graduate student in fine art at Harvard. She had her first child, Penelope, with him. A few years after her first novel was published she divorced Watkins and in 1933 married Victor Lowe, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

Her New York Times obituary mentions only her mainstream novels and her non-fiction but not her debut novel, The Swan Island Murders, her first and only foray into mystery and thriller fiction. Among her other works are February Hill (1934) adapted for the stage by George Abbot under its new title The Primrose Path. In 1940 The Primrose Path was made into a movie starring Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea and Marjorie Rambeau who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as a mother who turns to prostitution to support her family. Lincoln's other fiction includes Grandmother & the Comet (1944), The Wind at My Back: Three Short Novels (1946), Celia Amberley (1949) and Out from Eden (1951). Notable among her non-fiction works are the Edgar Award winning biography/true crime work A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight (1967) and her last book on the life of St. Theresa of Avila. She lived with her husband Victor Lowe and her family in Baltimore until her death in 1981. 

FIRST BOOKS: A Man Died Here - Gina Dessart

THE STORY:  Liz & Bob Macklin purchase an old home in Marshall, Massachusetts and begin an extensive rehab project transforming the gloomy, dark paneled, house into a bright, livable home. Liz is curious about the former owner, Seton Williams, who died in the house several years ago. Cancer she's told was the cause. A lonely old man dying alone, she thinks. But who was he? One day at the post office the gossipy Postmistress Mrs. Moore asks Liz, "Why did you buy the Williams house?  A house where that man killed himself?" Liz is shocked by this news. Why did the estate agent lie to her about Mr. Williams' death? She begins a subverted investigation making her way through the neighborhood ostensibly getting to know her neighbors when in fact she is slyly inserting questions about the house and the man who died there. Some townspeople offer up tidbits but clam up when Liz presses on with specific questions. Why is it no one wants to talk about Seton Williams, his death, or his family? Fighting common sense Liz and Bob keep digging and soon learn that perhaps the past is better left untouched.

THE CHARACTERS: A Man Died Here (1947) has an abundant cast of characters apart from the husband and wife amateur sleuths.  The novel is also written in the author omniscient voice allowing the reader to know the private thoughts of every character including the most minor characters like Jacob Kingman whose wife Harriet died by suicide years ago. As the novel progresses Dessart focuses on the Williams family and a handful of Marshall's residents including:

Miss Greeley - The high school principal who is beginning to lose her grip on reality as she spends much time dwelling on the lives of two of her favorite pupils, now grown adults. Her daydreaming and nostalgia lead her to spend too much time thinking about Seton Williams' death when Liz keeps asking prying questions.

Mrs. Moore - an inveterate gossip the local postmistress is responsible for re-opening the past with her casual but intrusive question to Liz about why she moved into the Williams house. Each time Liz runs into Mrs. Moore she gets more unusual info about the Williams family.

Prentiss Williams - the only member of the Williams family who left town for a successful life. Now a general practitioner with several patients in neighboring Colby, Prentiss is still troubled by what happened to his father. He and his brother seem to have a secret between them. When Liz uncovers a trove of letters hidden away in books left in the Williams’ library we learn that Prentiss had a violent argument with his father a few months before he died.

Henry Williams - youngest member of the Williams family and a rather sad man. He took over the family hardware store begrudgingly and never really seemed to get along with anyone let alone his father.  Luckily, he and his brother are close, but Henry can't understand why Prentiss was so antagonistic to the old man. He is sure Prentiss had something to do with their father's death.

Dr. Kilander - was at the Williams house to pronounce the old man dead.  One of the few witnesses to see exactly how the body was found he relates some crucial info to Bob & Liz when they hound him for details about the night Seton died. 

Mrs. Chmielewski, the Williams housekeeper; her daughter Agnes; and Blanche Milliman, a girl who died in a drowning accident also feature prominently in the plot.  Liz and Bob begin to wonder why so many young women who crossed paths with Seton Williams die violently. The more they uncover about this supposedly lonely old man they more they learn he was malevolent, licentious, cruel and cared little for anyone but himself.

INNOVATIONS: Dessart starts off her novel in a dreary outline of Liz and Bob house hunting, some pedestrian small town interactions almost as if the book will be a soap opera-like litany of mundane observations.  But it's a sly move because this seemingly prosaic beginning slowly gives way to the timeworn exploration of a town's populace haunted by violent death. The narrative voice Dessart adopts allows her to leak into the story, in a mixture of subtle and overt clues from a variety of character viewpoints, just exactly what took place the night Seton Williams died. Though the detective work is minimal and largely relegated to Q&A and the discovery of letters which are rendered in full into the narrative, there are a couple a notable scenes.

Liz decides to visit the local cemetery and almost by accident finds the gravestone of Blanche Milliman whose drowning death also seems to hold some of the townspeople under a spell. She spends much of this scene wondering if Seton Williams' grave is also in the cemetery. Eventually she finds it in a far corner of the yard in the dark shade of a hemlock tree. It's an eerily conceived scene and adds some much needed atmosphere to a novel that tends to skirt around the edges of mystery and violence.

Perhaps the highlight of the book (maybe the purpose that Dessart wrote the book) comes when Bob and Liz have a debate about whether they should continue with uncovering the truth about Williams' death which by this point they realize is a cleverly covered up murder. They have a dilemma: do they report what they've discovered? Do they leave it alone? Liz argues for a murder committed by a vigilante Good Samaritan and that perhaps the murder of Williams brought more good than bad. Let that person get away with it.  Bob tells her murder is murder no matter the motive. He cannot justify letting the culprit escape no matter if the end result was beneficial for many people.

By this penultimate chapter it becomes clear that Dessart has been exploring something resonant with our time of podcasts obsessed with true crime, the resurrection of cold cases and the desire to seek justice for unsolved crimes. Should a criminal be sought out after decades have passed? Is vengeance a moral solution? Where does forgiveness enter the picture? If a murder occurred that brought about good and happiness was the crime a just murder and was the killer a hero? All these idea float around the periphery of the story until Liz and Bob finally voice them in their at times heavy-handed conversation.

QUOTES:  Bob: "So--having detected to the extent of discovering the murder, I guess it's up to us to go on detecting until we find the murderer. Only God knows where we begin."

Liz: "But if Mr. X is a truly fine person, would you agree that it might be a special case, sort of?"

Bob: "...I thought it was all nicely set up with black is black and white is white. Damn it all, how can I tell at this stage of the game?"

THE AUTHOR: Georgine Belle Dessart (1912-1979) was born in Chicago but spent her youth in and around Long Island, Brooklyn, and Syracuse, NY as well as a brief stay in Germany. She attended Smith College but was compelled to end her studies after her second year.  She and Phillip Hildreth (soon to be her husband) borrowed $50 and went into business doing silkscreen printing and display advertising. They quit the business after about five years and moved to the Berkshires in Massachusetts. In the mid-1940s she began writing as a "retirement venture."

She credits becoming a mystery writer with the bizarre educational experience of learning French while in a German school while she was still mastering the German language. "Any child lost in three languages simultaneously is apt to be marked for life and end up as a mystery story writer," she wrote on her biographical sketch on the rear DJ panel of A Man Died Here.  

Dessart had a story published in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine ("Counterpoint" in the Nov. 1965 issue) as well as other stories published in several noteworthy literary journals like The Virginia Quarterly and The Literary Review. Her three crime novels were written and published between 1947 and 1959. While her first, A Man Died Here, is heavily inspired by detective fiction the later works are more geared toward domestic suspense. Her third novel, Cry for the Lost (1959), takes place in a desert town called San Paulus no doubt based on Tucson, Arizona where she and her husband settled and where she was lecturer in English and a creative writing teacher at the University of Arizona in the mid-1970s.

FIRST BOOKS: The Corpse in the Corner Saloon - Hampton Stone

Jeremiah X. Gibson, Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, is accompanied by his colleague from the D.A.'s office known only as "Mac" who also serves as the narrator in their debut which deals with the murder of a promiscuous barfly and sometime entertainer as well as the apparent suicide by poisoning of the man who supposedly killed her. But it's a lot more complicated than a tawdry sex crime --she was strangled, her clothing was carefully cut from her back and the word "Bitch" was written in lipstick on her bare skin-- and suicide. The first complication is that there are multiple witnesses who saw the man, night club dancer Hubert von Mund, in the woman's apartment. He has a very distinctive garish plaid coat he wears everywhere. And a man wearing that coat was seen in the window of Fleurette Val's home. It wasn't just his coat that make the witnesses remember him --  he was doing something rather lewd with his pants down. Gibby doesn't buy that someone would go to the trouble of such an elaborate crime, perform a sex act, and then come to a bar wearing the same coat and knock back a beer with a cyanide chaser. He starts an intensive investigation that takes him from tenement apartments to bars to small businesses meeting up with a collector of erotic photographs and dirty books, an odd husband and wife who seem to spend a lot of time playing voyeur on their neighbors, Hubert's ex-dancing partner who was abandoned when he broke his contract leaving her without a job, and a coiuple of hunky tattooed bartenders who have attracted quite a following from the regular female bar patrons.

The Corpse in the Corner Saloon (1948) is a forerunner to the sex-and-crime murder mysteries that would flood the popular fiction marketplace in the 1950s.  For the year of publication this book is incredibly racy, just shy of salacious. You get a veritable cornucopia of transgressive topics and incidents: exhibitionism, , erotic drawings, pornographic books, and sex in bedooms with draperies open. Naked people and voyeurs are everywhere. The reviewer for The Saturday Review in November 1948 said "Well enough done, but definitely not for queasy palates." Understatement! Stone manages to raise several sexual topics with wiseacre dialogue and well placed innuendo avoiding vulgarity with ironic humor.  The characters themselves are mostly a sleazy bunch (I counted only two suspects who weren't sex obsessed or window lurkers), no need to make it raunchier by going into great detail. Besides, I think the editors must've thought they were risking too much by including the murderer fondling himself in a window. They had to tone down all the rest of it somehow.

As for the mystery elements Gibby (as he is referred to by our narrator) is keen on the "Clue of the Coat", as it were. In fact, clothing and the world of tailoring play an extremely important part in the solution to the two crimes. A tailoring business owned by Marlowe Trutt features prominently in the story. Arnold Carroll is Trutt's longtime associate and friend.  For a long time the story seems to be implicating Carroll as the murderer with a motive of over-protectiveness of Trutt and revenge. Trutt has a surprise connection to Fleurette Val that turns the case on its head. And when an unusual order for a fabric that matches the strange yellow and blue plaid of Hubert's distinctive coat is trace back to Trutt's business Mac becomes highly suspicious of Carroll.

One of the more interesting clues is the word neatly written on Fleurette's back. Of great interest to Gibby is the "t" which is not fully crossed. This turns out to be the trademark of someone's signature and is well known to anyone who uses Trutt as their tailor.  His signature with partially crossed T's (see the illustration on the Dell paperback) is well known because his name is the company logo. His flourishing signature appears on labels in clothes as well as the ornate business cards he hands out to clients. Someone is trying to frame Marlowe Trutt. Gibby sees through this transparent ploy immediately.

Despite the tawdry nature of the crimes and the prurient interests of the window spies in the various apartments that face the murder scene this is a well plotted mystery with deft twists and several excellent red herrings that fooled me and led me away from the real unexpected villain of the book. I'd classify it as a fair play detective novel that mixes up noirish subject matter found in typical private eye novels of this era with traditional mystery novel plotting. One particular clothing related clue mentioned exactly once in the early part of the book is a clincher to the identity of the killer. I completely missed that clothing remark. It was placed nonchalantly with the expertise of Carr or Christie. Kudos to the writer for that one. 

THE AUTHOR:  "Hampton Stone" is one of the many pseudonyms used by Aaron Marc Stein (1902-1985) who began his mystery writing career as early as 1935 when as "George Bagby" he wrote a long series of detective novels inspired by the growing popularity of police procedurals. They all feature Inspector Schmidt and the narrator George Bagby who, like S. S. Van Dine, "authors" the books as if the cases were real. Under his own name Stein created the archaeologist sleuthing team of Timm Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, and the engineer Matt Herridge. The "Hampton Stone" detective novels all feature Gibby and Mac and lasted into the early 1970s with a total of 18 books.

THINGS I LEARNED: The art of tailoring and the business of being a tailor is a highlight of the novel.  Even supporting characters turn out to have tailoring and sewing skills. Clothing aficionados take note!  You will learn all about the snobbery of high end tailors and their tastes in fabric, the commercial aspect of clothing industry disdained by true tailors, the "ghetto" of Manhattan's garment district, and even the intricacies of inserting a zipper into a pair of pants. It was all sort of fascinating. The many crime movies I've seen featuring tailors as protagonists from The Tailor in Panama to The Outfit don't offer anywhere near the depth of understanding nor give as much insight into tailoring as in this book.

EASY TO FIND? Dozens of copies of the two vintage paperback editions are out there for sale. Pries for the vintag e paperbacks range from $3 - $15. You can choose from the nifty Dell Mapback shown above, or a Paperback Library edition from 1971 with cover art that makes Gibby look like long gone, action movie star Steve McQueen. Hilarious! A few copies of the US 1st edition shown at the top of this post are also available for sale ranging from $15 to $54, with and without DJs. I read my copy from the Chicago Public Library. Don't have one to sell you. Sorry.

FIRST BOOKS: Wheels in the Forest - John Newton Chance

"Cars, Siddons, cars! The place bristles with 'em. A Morris Oxford, an M.G., and two Rolls-Royces. The solution to this problem is in those cars."

 Emblazoned across the DJ front panel of the first edition of Wheels in the Forest (1935) is a laudatory quote from the pseudonymous crime fiction reviewer of The Observer, Torquemada, praising the debut of its author John Newton Chance. Torquemada (aka Edward Powys Mathers) was notoriously scathing in his reviews, nothing else would be expected from someone who chose as his pen name the identity of the cruel torturer of the Spanish Inquisition. To find a positive review from him, let alone a rave, was a rarity and I was tantalized. I came across a copy of Wheels in the Fortune in my book hunting and saw several positive quotes attributed to Torquemada related to Chance's first few mystery novels and I succumbed to the spell of Gollancz's marketing scheme. Could these books really be so good that the toughest detective novel critic of the Golden Age thought them exceptional?  For once the hype proved correct.  Wheels in the Forest is a corker. It delivers the goods on so many levels. And I'm already eager to try more of Chance's books from the 1930s and 1940s.

I'm especially surprised that this first novel turned out so well because the first Chance mystery novel I read (decades ago) was Death Stalks the Cobbled Square (1944), aka The Screaming Fog, which has the distinction of being one of Chance's few known locked room mysteries.  I remember nothing about the book other than that it was one of the few in which the author himself appears as narrator and acts as a character in the story. Nothing really new there -- Willard Huntington Wright was doing that back in the late 1920s as "S. S. Van Dine" in all of the Philo Vance novels. Then sometime in February of this year I read one of Chance's much later books called The Traditional Murders (1983) which based on the title I thought would be a fun retro-homage to the Golden Age. Frankly, it was one of the worst mystery novels I've read in a long time. Utterly forgettable, often stupid, filled with stock characters of the worst stereotypes, and peppered with inane gratuitous sex scenes.  I had to find out what happened to this writer who was so lauded when he first appeared to the world of mystery readers. 

He must've just gotten lazy and money-grubbing easily succumbing to all that publishers felt necessary to sell books because his first novel is nothing like that drecky book from 1983 when Chance was 72 years old. Wheels in the Forest is not only better written, it often feels more like a mainstream novel satirizing village life along the lines of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm.  As I got deeper into Chance's first mystery the Golden Age writer I kept thinking of was George Bellairs who at one time I liked, but quickly grew tired of when his books all seemed to be utterly formulaic and repetitive.  Like Bellairs Chance employs an author omniscient point of view and allows the reader to know every single character's thoughts.  Chance does a much better job at this than Bellairs and it is one of the book's best strengths and innovative touches.  Every character introduced gets at least one noteworthy scene that not only fully fleshes out that character but advances the story adding layers of suspicion and motivation to the puzzling murder. A pregnant girl's body is found alongside a road in the village of Isle nestled in the New Forest and surrounded by a circuit of roads that attract motor car enthusiasts eager to test out their driving skills and the speed of their cars.

As the epigraph to this review suggests cars play an important part in the solution of the crime. Similar to Freeman Wills Crofts' fascination with train schedules and timetables Chance is a bit obsessed with speeding cars, their mechanics, and the timing of the many cars that were known to be driving on the roads leading to and from the crime scene. In fact, one character - Dennis Lambert - crashes his car into a streetlamp the very night of the murder. That car wreck adds an intriguing mystery to the puzzling nature of where the murdered girl's body was discovered.

 Our detective team consists of belligerent impatient Superintendent "Smutty" Black, his fathead of a sergeant named Siddons, a crew of lower level coppers, and the delightfully eccentric Evelyn DeHavilland who prefers to go by the simple moniker of D. Black enlists D as his unofficial spy in the village and orders him to get the locals talking and to listen carefully, but to never directly ask any questions about the murder. Black tells D: "You're a stranger, starting at an advantage, because you're not used to them. You might notice something that I wouldn't through being used to it."  But later we learn through Black's personal thoughts that he knows D very well from their years spent in the war together and he thinks D to be a fool:

Fools find out things. You can be off your guard with intel-lectual people because they're so wrapped up in themselves that they don't notice anything outside; but with a fool you risk being off your guard and the fool notices the small faults; proving that a fool is not such a fool as he looks.

That talk of fools is also an indicator that Chance was clearly a fan of slapstick comedy. He shows off his love of farce with several scenes of people falling down or otherwise embarrassing themselves in comic bits and gags. In the person of Evelyn DeHavilland alone, a Wodehouse-like fop who embraces eccentricity for its own sake, the comedy is witty and lighthearted. But when the dramatic moments come they are often as shocking as the intrinsic surprises and twists in any mystery plot.

Because we are privy to everyone's thoughts not just those of Black and D, the primary detectives, there are exceptionally well done dramatic vignettes.  In particular, a scene involving a dim-witted motor car garage worker (who through much of the book seems like a stock in trade village idiot) is heartbreaking.  Bill Jupe, the teen aged brother of the murder victim, breaks down in grief late in the story. In his emotional pleas stated in simple language he asks someone why was his sister killed so brutally, that it was so unfair and that he misses her terribly. It's simply written, direct and powerfully affecting. What makes the scene even more affecting is also the most innovative moment of the novel. That open display of grief in turn drastically affects another character in the novel and the book transforms from a whodunnit to an inverted detective novel. Shortly after that scene with Bill, Chance turns his attention on the murderer's thoughts and allows the culprit to basically confess to the reader!

Wheels in the Forest has turned out to be one of the richest, most surprising, and unexpectedly moving detective novels I've read this year. Copies are hard to come by unfortunately. There were three affordable copies for sale (a mix of first editions and later reprints) a few days ago, but after this post was published they all sold within a few days! There’s one left but it’s priced at an exorbitant amount. Good luck finding any other copies!

FIRST BOOKS: Two Lovers Too Many - Joan Fleming

Don't be fooled by the title or the odd illustrations on the DJs of Two Lovers Too Many (1949). It may seem like a melodramatic hospital romance novel based on the title and illustrations, but this debut crime novel from Joan Fleming is an innovative work incorporating aspects of the detective, suspense and horror novels. In fact, Fleming is prophetic in predicting how scientific discoveries and advances can be perverted in the hands of a criminally minded individuals bent of exacting revenge. Her insight into the possible exploitation of science is nightmarishly resonant for our violently troubled 21st century.

As the title implies, the story is about a lover's triangle -- or rather quadrangle as we will learn by the midpoint. Despite what the title says there are actually three men vying for a woman’s attention.  Daisy Walkern, a vapid femme fatale concerned with only herself and sexual conquests, is rescued from her life as single mother by Alan Walkern, the gallant but very homely and disabled (he has a club foot) physician. He marries Daisy and becomes stepfather to her unruly child Barney. While married to Alan, Daisy becomes pregnant and they eventually have a second son, Peter. But while married to Walkern Daisy continues her life of teasing and taunting any man who will pay attention to her.

When the book opens Alan Walkern is dead. And one of Daisy's "lovers" is dead, apparently a suicide by gun.  Paul Lathbury is found in the hayloft of a barn shot dead.  But the gun is nowhere to be found. How then can the death be a suicide?  Did someone remove the gun to prevent anyone thinking the handsome, well-liked, highly successful man killed himself? Another young doctor, Alastair Southery, is assigned as a locum tenens to fill in for Dr. Walkern until a new physician can be hired. Alastair begins an innocuous investigation with only a few questions concerning Paul's death. But the most senior physician in town, Dr.  Forty, an associate of Dr. Lathbury and Dr. Walkern is not satisfied with the police work. He is also concerned about an odd coincidence.  Dr. Walkern supposedly died from aplastic anemia and Dr. Lathbury whom Alastair is working for, is currently being treated for the same condition.  How is it that both of the town's doctor's contracted anemia within months of each other when prior to that both men had no signs of any chronic illness? Dr. Forty is relentless in pursuing this medical coincidence.  He even suggests that Walkern's death and Paul Lathbury's death are related because they were linked to Daisy Walkern.

Though he at first dismisses Dr Forty's wild speculation that someone is killing men who cross Daisy -- could it be Daisy herself? -- Alastair finds himself cast into the role of a medical detective.  He begins subtly questioning everyone in the village, eventually spying on them and doing a little snooping into their homes and personal belongings. When a medicine bottle turns up missing he begins to think that Dr. Forty's theories may have some truth in them. Alastair discovers that what can cure illness can also induce illness and he is determined to expose the murderer and prevent more deaths.

Some of the supporting characters provide welcome relief in a story fraught with tension and danger.  Alastair befriends a seven year boy, the son of a talented portrait painter Calliope Eldernell who earns her primary income as a servant in the Lathbury home. Both Calliope and her son Tim serve as the common sense characters who seem to be Alastair's only friends and provide the groundwork for what ultimately is a happy ending for this trio. Tim is a delight and Calliope, a troubled woman who doubts her own artistic talent, provides hope in a book that is largely doom-laden and focused on the darkness within everyone else in the village.

Fleming's first crime novel is utterly fascinating. She has created both a medical detective novel and a horror novel simultaneously. The murder method turns out to be diabolical.  It's a modus operandi first introduced as a fictional murder method back in the late 19th century by a handful of astute short story writers like L. T. Meade, but not truly explored by 20th century crime writers until the WW2 era. A master of innovation in the crime novel Fleming has never been noted to follow genre formula. She often employs imaginative twists and trenchant satiric touches both of which are on display in this first novel that promised so much. Many of her later novels are superior and this first effort definitely predicted great things for her. It’s a shame so few people know of her work and that 95% of her crime novels are out of print. 

FIRST BOOKS: Murder in Make-Up - Charles Ashton

THE STORY:  During the filming of Tempest, a crime movie about a gentleman thief, the actor playing the thief is found stabbed behind a bit of scenery. The movie crew insists that the police remove the actor's make-up prior to carting away the corpse to spare him the indignity of the false beard and greasepaint.  The police remove the make-up and reveal the man is a completely different actor -- Lancelot Weston, the young romantic lead in the movie. Why did Weston pretend to be William Harvey for that one scene? Was Harvey actually the intended victim? Inspector Bob Saunders investigates assisted by his police consultant Major Jack Atherley.

THE CHARACTERS: Murder in Make-Up (1934) is the first detective novel by former silent film actor Charles Ashton.  The novel introduces his series characters Jack Atherley and Inspector Saunders.  Atherley is the true sleuth in Ashton's series of detective novels and he's a breath of fresh air. Saunders is a by-the-book copper while Atherley is his witty, carefree aide with a talent for seeing things "out of the box".  He reminds me of Philip "Spike" Tracy, the playboy amateur detective created by Harriette Ashbrook. Saunders and Atherley are perfect foils for one another and I enjoyed how Atherley routinely exasperated Saunders, often for the sheer joy of annoying his policeman colleague.

The rest of the cast is made up of Saunders' homicide squad headed by Sgt. Davis, another serious policeman who is more tolerant of Atherley's lightheartedness and often anticipates when the Major is about to pull one over on Saunders.  And of course because the murder takes place in the world of cinema we have a  supporting cast of suspects in the movie biz.  They are:

William Harvey - the character actor who plays the gentleman thief and was supposed to be in the scene being filmed when Weston was killed.  As the story progresses several more attempts are made on Harvey's life.  The police do their best to protect him, but the killer always manages to penetrate the police protecting Harvey

Lettise Moore - the ingenue lead in Tempest. She has a secret related to Harvey that the police soon uncover. This makes her a prime suspect but she is protected by...

Mrs. Moxon - a dresser on the set for Miss Moore, and a servant/confidante in Moore's private life.  Maternal, overprotective and somewhat of a termagant. Moxon is a thorn in Saunders' side.  Atherley is the only who can tame this shrew. She is actually on his list of suspects because after stabbing Weston the killer needed to be able to silently lower his athletic body behind the flats while the scene was being filmed. Atherley is certain the killer is one of a similar build and with enough upper body strength to carry out the silent disposal of the corpse. Besides three of the male suspects, Mrs. Moxon is the only woman who could also to do everything as he thought it out.

Ralph Lastor - the producer (in the US we'd call him the director) of the movie. His mind is only on the movie, its delays and the possible scrapping of the production due to the criminal investigation and the loss of his leading man. Why would he kill one of his actors and sabotage his own production?  Does he have a secret too?

Dick Howard - assistant director, man of all work. Suspicious, shifty, mistrustful. He draws the attention of Saunders when his police team while following Howard as directed see him sneaking around off the set making visits to Miss Moore's home and conversing confidentially with... 

Miss Laurie - the script girl (continuity in modern movie talk) who is always on set. We learn fairly quickly that she talks in a fake American accent, flirts with nearly all the men, and had the hots for handsome Weston. But she was rejected by him. If Weston was the true intended target then Miss Laurie is definitely suspect #1 thinks Atherley. But was she strong enough to commit the murder as he envisioned it. Or was Weston somehow stabbed in some other manner?

INNOVATIONS: For a novice effort at detective novel Ashton does some admirable work here.  It is almost a purely fair play novel. Unfortunately, he does hold back a bit and does more suggesting what happened which forces the reader to fill in some unexplained events.  For instance, late in the book Atherley finds some supplies left behind by workmen who were doing plumbing repairs in his flat.  Atherley is described as picking up a bucket of paint and stepping onto the fire escape.  He then exclaims with a smile, "What a fine night!" and the chapter ends.  But why was he out there with a bucket of paint?  It's all explained in the final chapter. The reader has to figure it out on his own prior to being told what Atherley did.  This kind of "sneaky" clueing is perhaps forgivable in a novice mystery writer.  But! I know that Ashton continued to do this sort of thing in his later books. Here Comes Murder was written nearly ten years later and includes similar scenes only partially explained when first presented to the reader.

Really the best part of the book is the insider information on how an early “talkie” is produced.  Ashton, a former silent film actor, offers up not only the glamorous part of movie making but the complicated work of the non-actors consisting of the lighting crew, cameramen, make-up and wardrobe staff, as well as the hassles of keeping track of all the changes from shot to shot carried out by the continuity person -- in the early days of moviemaking usually called "the script girl" and almost always (as in the novel) a woman. The script girl is really nothing more than a secretary who spends all day taking copious notes, later typing them up in a daily report, on what everyone is wearing, which props are held in which hand, and all the rest of the minutiae of a movie scene.

Charles Ashton as Dick Alward
in Pillars of Society (1920)

THINGS I LEARNED:  One of the first scenes explains exactly why a clapper board was necessary in making early sound movies.  The sound of the clap was used to synchronize all sound in the scene that followed.  A clapper was used to end the scene as well.  I'm unsure if this is why they still use a clapper.  Maybe with all the digital technology used in moviemaking it's used more to label all the scenes for the editing team.

Atherley uses an odd abbreviation in a single line of dialogue: "And it's got the archives of the famous Yard l.b.w." He says this after looking up one of the suspects in Who's Who on the Screen. I spent nearly an hour using various search terms in trying to find what those three letters meant. Turns out it's the cricket term "Leg Before Wicket" which I think means a foul that can get a batter dismissed. If it had been made clear early in the novel that Atherley was also a cricket player and often uses cricket terms I'd been able to figure this out faster. By the midpoint long after the use of that abbreviation we learn that Atherley is an avid cricket player and has played in tournaments. Apparently on a professional team because a taxi driver recognizes him from a past game. Why he uses "l.b.w." in reference to the Who's Who listing still eludes me.  

EASY TO FIND?  You can have my copy (it's the "Cherry Tree Book" copy pictured at the top) if you're lucky enough to place the highest bid. (SOLD!) Good luck finding a copy anywhere else. Like all of Ashton's detective novels it's as rare as finding a silver nitrate copy of one of Charles Ashton's movies from the silent era.

Murder without Clues - Joseph L Bonney

A dead body in a locked room, a house surrounded by undisturbed snow, all suspects have an alibi but one and yet it seems that one person could not have committed the crime.  Another ingenious John Dickson Carr rip-off?  Well, not quite.  Murder without Clues (1940) is a the ultimate Golden Age homage that does a very good job of honoring the work of not only Carr but Queen and Van Dine.  Joseph L. Bonney, in his debut work as a mystery writer, has also thrown in a couple of wink-wink allusions to Conan Doyle to make this a quadruple homage. Does this mystery succeed as yet another in the impossible crime/locked room subgenre. Hmm...You decide.

Henry Watson, a wannabe novelist, is in search of a new apartment and a roommate and his friend suggests he visit Simon Rolfe who is also in search of new digs. The two meet and Watson can't help but be disturbed by Rolfe's emulation of a certain fictional detective. Rolfe has a mysterious origin that is never fully explained, seems to be independently wealthy, plays the violin, smokes a pipe, lounges around in a smoking jacket, and sees clients with puzzling problems which he solves for a modest fee and does so in a single afternoon.  Bonney has a bit too cutely paid homage to Conan Doyle while at the same time allowing his Sherlock dopplegänger to disparage the entire canon in a four page diatribe in which he deconstructs several of the stories as pathetically obvious. Once this tirade is out of the way the story can take place front and center and we have a classic Golden Age locked room populated by ex-vaudeville performers who are stranded in a snowbound house somewhere in upstate New York.

Wicked philandering dancer Lucille Divine is found stabbed in the back in her locked bedroom at the home of Champ Lister. All of Lister's guests and servants were downstairs at the time she screamed, they rush upstairs, find Lister in the hallway at the wrong door, then break down Lucille's door and find her in her last gasps. One man goes to her tries to help her and hears her say "It was the Champ..."  Then she expires. Has she verbally fingered her killer?  Lister denies he had anything to do with her death.  He didn't even know she was in this other bedroom.  He went to the bedroom across the hallway where she usually stayed.

Young Joseph L Bonney
looking suitably nerdy
on the DJ rear cover

As the title implies - there are no clues, at least as far as physical evidence goes. Plus -- no weapon can be found anywhere, even after all the rooms are thoroughly searched. The only window in the murder room is open a crack (Lucille liked fresh air to sleep at night despite the wintry temps) and can't be opened any further.  How did anyone get in, kill Lucille, and escape entirely unnoticed.  The timing of the guests rushing upstairs seems to eliminate Lister who was seen at the other doorway as they came up the stairs. Also, Lister a former vaudeville performer who stunned people with feats of memory and instant recall, listened to a radio program at the time of the murder. To prove it he writes down all the dialogue from memory.  When the police compare it to the actual broadcast it's nearly verbatim. It's all utterly baffling -- until Rolfe starts questioning the suspects of course.

Rolfe fancies himself a detective of psychology who finds this case with no physical evidence right up his alley. He approaches detective work from a different angle paying attention subtleties in language and behavior.  Though he claims to use deduction most of his conclusions are the result of induction. Still Bonney is clever in how he allows Rolfe to expose lies and get the suspects to reveal things they'd rather keep hidden. I was impressed with the dying clue bit which is very reminiscent of several Queen books.  However, in the end Bonney's explanation is a bit of a stretch.  No matter how many people I polled I couldn't get one person to duplicate what he says happened.

Rolfe is also irritatingly an obsessive student of the French philosopher Montaigne who he quotes repeatedly through the book. Only one quote seems to have anything to do with his work as a detective:  "I do not understand; I pause, I examine."  This might serve as Rolfe's (or any worthwhile detective's) mantra.

In the end it's a intricately detailed investigation, perhaps overly so in the manner of Queen and Van Dine,  with Rolfe sharing the stage with Inspector Charles King and a slew of policemen put on guard throughout the household. In a neat touch Henry Watson (Rolfe actually addresses him as "My dear Watson" too many times) provides quite by accident one of the key observations.  The manner in which the crime is committed is perhaps one of the wickedest I've encountered in a American mystery novel of this era.  there is, of course, another bizarre murder means, not quite as original as Bonney may think it is.  This method belongs to a subset of murder means that I can group into Death by... OH!  Better not mention that.  But it has been used in the work of Carr as Carter Dickson, Burton Stevenson, the Coles, and two obscure books by William Morton, and George R. Fox, all of those books and stories pre-dating Bonney's novel. Was the murder means yet another, albeit obscure, homage?

Some good news:  copies of Murder without Clues are out there for sale! About eight or nine copies by my count. One 1st edition with DJ is absurdly priced at $495. Be aware that the paperback digest edition (pictured at right) is abridged. But in this case that 's a good thing. I can imagine that all the nonsense about Montaigne and Socrates was eliminated to shorten the book. Also I'm sure that the editors cut to pieces the Sherlock Holmes diatribe that tends to spoil some of the content of the stories.

This is an interesting and engaging read in the locked room subgenre.  I thought for sure that I had pegged the killer and figured out how Lucille was done in. I also thought I had figured out the dying clue. But I was wrong on all counts.  It all turned out to be quite a surprise, though I think a bit flawed.

Having many of the suspects come from the world of vaudeville allows for a slew of red herrings, two of which I fell for and one which did not turn up at all. I was disappointed Bonney didn't include the missing aspect. It would have fit in perfectly with the dying clue.  Missed opportunity!  You can expect at least one knife thrower to show up in the cast. After all, knife throwing and vaudeville go hand in hand in the mystery novel. If you aren't acquainted with this hoary cliche of detective novels read my post on the ultimate knife throwing murder mystery here.

Nice People Don’t Kill – F. W. Bronson

First mystery novels can be fascinating. What does the writer want to try out as an entry point into the world of the whodunit? Will it be a locked room murder? A noirish private eye novel? An inverted crime novel where we follow the murderer through the planning stages to the finally flawed crime? F. W. Bronson was not a neophyte writer when he tackled his first murder mystery. He already had three mainstream novels under his belt, published between 1926 and 1933. I thought this debut as a mystery writer might be an academic mystery judging from his biography that has Yale all over it.  Or maybe an ex-pat novel due to his having lived in Italy and elsewhere abroad in his post-college days. Never would I have thought he would choose to emulate Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart, slightly satirizing the conventions of those Had I But Known mystery writers in his ironically titled Nice People Don’t Kill (1940).

The novel is narrated by Coraly Ames, widow living in an unnamed Connecticut town located on the shores of Long Island Sound. Greenacres is the name of the estate left to her by her husband and it's here she adds to her modest inheritance by renting out the separate beach house to summer tourists. In the opening chapter her husband’s best friend “Mac” suggests she rent to Schuyler Adams, a prominent Wall Street executive. We are quickly introduced to a variety of the locals in town and Coraly’s neighbors who will turn out not too coincidentally to be acquainted with Adams. But of course they are! And those relationships are tainted with secrets and criminal activity. All of which leads to the grotesque murder of Adams while he is sunbathing in what initially appears to be an impossible crime. Sadly that angle is quickly dispensed with as a mysterious man in a white bathing suit was seen by several people. A couple of nervous witnesses also lose their lives, one in a bloody hatchet murder (shades of Rinehart!), when they attempt blackmail or foolishly speak of what they know in cryptic brisk phone conversations and – of course – are overheard.

A plethora of Golden Age-style clues offer up mini-puzzles in addition the overarching mystery of the murderer’s identity. A volume of Keats’ poetry, a book Adams always carried on him, vanishes and reappears several times. Greenacres’ telephones operate on a party line offering several opportunities for eavesdropping when someone picks up an extension – even in the beach house, a ten minute walk away, or in the guest house to the south of the main house. Someone has been staying in the boat house as suggested by sandwiches remnants, paper bags and a makeshift bed found there the day after the murder. Is the person who was surreptitiously using that shed as their private motel also the killer? Could that be the man seen in the white bathing suit digging around in the sand a few feet from the murder scene?

 

Beautifully detailed map endpapers of the various scenes of the crimes
Nice People Don't Kill (Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)

 

Bronson's characters are all familiar types to anyone who has read a mystery novel by Rinehart or Eberhart or any GAD mystery novel for that matter.  In addition to Coraly and her dead husband's pal "Mac" the cast consists of a momma's boy with a respiratory condition and his overprotective jealous mother, a mystery woman with a secret past, gossipy nervous servants, the middle aged military man and his much younger wife, the skipper of Adams' yacht "Blackbird" and the yacht's steward who acts as Adams' valet and cook on land. No one really has any depth and because they are representative of mystery archetypes they are fairly predictable in their thoughts and behavior. Thankfully, Sheriff Davey Jones is an intelligent policeman and provides well needed gravitas, common sense and shrewd detective skills throughout the book. Though Coraly fancies herself an amatuer sleuth she's a bit inept and severely impaired by her obvious biases and favoritism. Only Susan Carlisle, a young woman who appears quite unexpectedly on the scene and ends up staying in the guest house on Greenacres' porperty, comes across as slightly complicated or at least ambiguous in her motivations. She definitely has a past and I was bothered that Coraly seemed to believe Susan’s every word and action. Unlike the easily duped heroine/narrator I suspected Susan was definitely up to no good. Similarly, a gaggle of servants at Greenacres may appear to be just inconsequential supporting characters but the reader should pay close attention to them for they will play major roles later in the novel as their own secrets are also revealed.

With our heroine constantly hinting at future events that the reader has yet to encounter it’s an obvious but often heavy-handed homage to that “feminine” subgenre that detective fiction maven Jacques Barzun enjoyed disparaging. The novel is littered with spins on typical HIBK writing style. I was getting a bit irritated with her too. Here’s a sampling of what occurs in every chapter until the middle of the book:

It's odd to realize now that instead of welcoming Schuyler Adams with practically open arms I should have thrown the money in his face and ordered him off the property.

It didn't seem terribly important at the time--but that bit of carelessness almost cost me my life.

He might have added that my [inquest] testimony -- though of course he didn't know at the time -- contained the most important clue in the whole baffling, nerve-racking case.

Francis Woolsey Bronson
(1901-1966)

More annoying is her firm belief that “nice people don’t kill” echoing a sentiment that Carolyn Wells highlighted in The Technique of the Mystery Story and often mentioned in her detective novels written 20 years before this book was published. Coraly further elaborates on her sadly stereotypical views of humanity by surmising that the culprit responsible for the savage murders can only be Captain Lipari, the evil looking, mustachioed, limping skipper of Blackbird moored in the nearby harbor. It took me awhile to realize that Bronson was sending up the narrow-minded, overly optimistic women who populate the typical HIBK novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Ultimately, the reveal of the crazed murderer in the final chapters is pleasantly surprising even if Bronson (in the voice of Coraly) decides to present us with a silly melodramatic fake climax fulfilling some of Coraly’s predictions that didn’t quite fool me. Even a HIBK narrator has a few tricks up her sleeve to keep her readers baffled.

F. W. Bronson Detective Novels
Nice People Don’t Kill (1940)
The Uncas Island Murders (1942)
The Bulldog Has The Key (1949)

FIRST BOOKS: The Templeton Case - Victor L. Whitechurch

Victor Whitechurch is best known for his short story collection Thrilling Stories of the Railway with his vegetarian detective Thorpe Hazell and for being one of the founding members of the Detection Club.  He wrote a mere five detective novels and one comic crime novel (which is not very funny at all) as well as penning the first chapter of the seminal round robin detective novel The Floating Admiral.  I was thinking a lot about that round robin novel while reading The Templeton Case (1924), his first foray into detective fiction. Reginald Templeton is found stabbed in his yacht while moored off the coast of Marsh Quay, a tiny village situated near an estuary. Sailing and boating feature prominently in the story and there are myriad suspects who were in and around the yacht before and after the murder.  Several intriguing puzzles surrounding the murder crop up leading to some excellent examples of early 20th century detection in a murder mystery.

Our persistent and clever detective is Det-Sgt. Colson ably assisted by a lawyer and inadvertent detective of sorts in the person of Canon Fittleworth.  To be truthful the Canon is an accidental obstructor of justice because he finds and pockets a distinctive cigar label rather than handing it over to the police.  For a while I thought perhaps Whitechurch meant us to think this absentminded member of the clergy was involved in a cover-up. Whitechurch, being a canon himself, would never stoop to such a sacrilege. Eventually the Canon hands over the cigar label at the inquest which leads to an intriguing sort of shell game that I immediately picked up on though I was incorrect in my assuming who did the switcheroo.

Victor L. Whitechurch in his youth

I also liked many of the supporting characters including Mrs Yayes, the owner of the local pub; a young mystery man who claims to be a painter and seems very suspicious; a handful of hired boating men; and Colson's very perceptive and imaginative wife with whom he discusses the case. She gives her husband several ideas about the murder mystery. Unfortunately towards the end of the book we meet an ugly portrayal of a Jewish man and the book descends into the typical kind of "Jew talk" that pollutes so much of early 20th century British fiction. It didn't ruin the book for me but I can imagine it would make for a "skipping it" deal-breaker for lots of readers these days.

In addition to the puzzle of the cigar label there is a clever bit of code breaking of sorts when Colson and his crew discover a blotting pad with a string of words missing some letters. We are courteously given that string of letterless words in the text and can return to it repeatedly as the story unfolds.  Colson's lawyer friend keen on puzzle solving mulls it over and using a combination of intuition, logic, and a lot of luck remarkably comes up with the actual sentence and identifies the name of a key player in the mystery.

The Crown & Anchor and Harbor View house in Dell Quay

 Templeton was an explorer and his past life in South Africa coupled with the discovery of a single raw diamond on the yacht will lead Colson to a dark motive and a web of past criminal activity.  I thought the reveal of the murderer was a delightful surprise.  Never saw it coming and it seems to be something of an original rule breaking coup. I've never encountered this twist in any detective novel I've read to date.  So hats off to Canon Whitechurch for this clever and engaging debut.

THINGS I LEARNED:  The geography was so specific in describing an estuary that Templeton's man navigated that I thought perhaps all the towns mentioned were real.  They weren't.  But I looked up those I knew were real and followed the course of the yacht as described by Whitechurch.  It lead me to the small town of Dell Quay not far form Chichester which just happens to have a famous cathedral.  I think that this is exactly the area that Whitechurch set his story. It certainly fits in with all the descriptions and definitely follows the sailing route of Templeton's hired yacht, Firefly.

As this is out of copyright I was planning to reprint The Templeton Case but someone beat me to it earlier this year.  I guess that's from whom I bought my truly cheap copy of the US first edition a few months ago.  The Templeton Case is now available in paperback and digital format from an outfit called Spitfire Publishing.  They sell their books on that giant internet source of nearly everything under the sun.  If intrigued by this review you can get a cheap eBook or modestly priced paperback.  Despite the depiction of the Jewish man at the end I thought this was rather good.  Even Jacques Barzun in his Catalog of Crime thought it was a notable effort for a first try at writing a detective novel.

She Never Reached the Top - Elma K. Lobaugh

Elma K. Lobaugh's first mystery She Never Reached the Top (1945) was lauded by the editorial team at Doubleday Doran's "Crime Club" as "unusually competent."  But that, my friends, is an understatement like all true raves.  Very few first time popular fiction writers bother with thematic elements in that much maligned genre known as the whodunnit. A murder mystery is often dismissed as a trifle of a book, a mere entertainment as Graham Greene used to categorize his action-filled yet wholly intellectual espionage thrillers. Lobaugh's story is imbued with an soupçon of superstition and other-worldly events that not only add a frisson of terror to the house party haunted by past violent deaths and literally haunted by a ghost but enhance her theme of random violence as an act of chance and fate.  This is a thought-provoking murder mystery, and ultimately a bit of a transgressive novel in how Lobaugh treats her subject matter and how her "detectives" deal with the murder that only they have uncovered -- and then covered up.

Like many of Lobaugh's books this one is set in Indiana and like her later I Am Afraid (reviewed here) the story takes place in a house on the dune-lined shores of Lake Michigan.  The house itself features prominently and its bizarre unfinished state pays homage to the many weird architectural features of houses in books by John Dickson Carr, Carolyn Wells and Hake Talbot. The house in She Never Reached the Top, as the title may imply, has some missing staircases and incomplete steps leading to the second floor. Years ago a woman fell to her death from one of these unfinished staircases while using the DIY solution, a ladder that had no guardrails on the unexposed side.

Much of She Never Reached the Top seems mired in the past and the death of that unfortunate woman who fell from the ladder infects the house with doom.  Especially as the legend of the ghost has attached to it the prophecy that only those "who have been disappointed in love" will be cursed to hear and see the specter. Jennie Simpson, our Eberhart inspired narrator, is such a disappointed lover.  She reluctantly accepts an invitation to join the house party after a recent break-up with her boyfriend Peter.  Actually not much is know about why she and Peter are no longer together.  Did he die?  Was he killed in the war?  Did her just dump her for another woman?  We never really find out.  But thoughts of Peter and "what might have been" are never far from Jennie's mind.  And Jennie does hear the sounds of the ghost running to the ladder and the eerie brief silence just before the inevitable thud.  The reader just knows those noises are not a ghost at all but someone who has met the same fate as the woman from the past. But who could it have been?

Trendy floating staircases pose
similar possible fatal mishaps

When in the morning screams are heard and Pam, the youngest member of the house party, comes running into the breakfast room out of breath, in shock, and muttering, "I stepped on her! Oh my God, I stepped on her!" we have the proof of no ghost and a real corpse. It comes as no surprise that the troublesome wild woman, Margot Spendler, a free spirited, brazenly sexual woman who flirted with everyone including young Pam, was the victim.  But was it only an accident?  Bit by bit Jennie, Skip and Jim find evidence that Margot's death was a cleverly carried out murder. And each time they find evidence one of three either says nothing to the others or destroyys what they find. Will Margot's death be avenged?  Some of the "detectives" think it better to keep it all quiet.  The final chapter is satisfyingly thorough in explaining how the murder was accomplished. And there is a minor surprise in the identity of that killer. The final solution, however,  is entirely unconventional in how Lobaugh metes out her version of Justice.

I particularly enjoyed some of the occult sequences like when Jennie is goaded into reading palms.  Lobaugh treats the scene at first like a parlor game, but lets us know that Jennie takes palmistry very seriously, almost as if she is a psychic.  When Margot insists that Jennie look at her palm Jennie is terrified to discover that the flirtatious sexpot has no heart line. Furthermore, that her life line vanishes when it should extend to the wrist.  Could there be any more doom-laden foreshadowing than that?  There are other scenes tainted by superstition and many tales told about the ghost who first fell to her death that add to the fated atmosphere. Additionally, Lobaugh employs macabre folk songs (Jim is a professional piano player obsessed with melancholy tunes) and frequent recitations of lugubrious poetry to further play up her theme of lives pre-destined to violence.

She Never Reached the Top is (of course) rather hard to find anywhere. Currently, there are only four copies for sale from online sellers.  I never find Lobaugh's books in stores when I go book hunting.  Adding to the difficulty of locating copies is that it was published only in the US and only in hardcover.  Why it never received a paperback reprint (or even a cheap hardcover reprint from Triangle Books or Grosset & Dunlap) during Lobaugh's lifetime is another mystery that perhaps may never be solved.  It definitely deserved another life outside of the Crime Club edition. I'd say that Elma K. Lobaugh's work is due for a revival.  This is not only "unusually competent," it's rather a brilliant example of the mystery novel that defies categorization and one that dares to break several hallowed rules for a still young genre that too often was entirely formulaic.

FIRST BOOKS: Author in Distress - Cecil M. Wills

THE STORY: Novelist Gervoise Trevellyan is an Author in Distress (1934). And first time mystery writer Cecil Wills wastes no time in getting immediately to the story.  On page one Trevellyan calls the police to report that he's shot a man who he believes is a burglar.  The first problem Sgt. Geoffrey Boscobell --and the bigger problem for the novelist-- is that there are two bullets in the body. Trevelyan swears he fired only once.  Trevellyan claims the man broke in and fired at him.  The writer then shot the burglar who was apparently breaking into the safe in the library.  Doubly puzzling is that only one bullet casing is found in the library. And where is the bullet mark from the victim's gun? Things only get more complicated as Sgt. Boscobell and the other policemen further investigate this supposed act of self-defense.

THE CHARACTERS: Geoffrey Boscobell makes for a whip smart and attentive detective.  He rides a motorcycle to get around the various villages in his investigation.  Neat touch for 1935. When the novel is focussed on detection this policeman is one of the best of the Golden Age. And when the novel turns into a thriller he's as heroic and full of derring-do as any dashing matinee idol found in the cinematic cliffhangers of 1930s movie palaces.

 Among the suspects are Myra, Trevellyan's considerably younger wife.  She has a fascinating interrogation scene where she tells the story of her past life in Monaco which reads like an E. Phillips Oppenheim novel in miniature.  Gambling, con artists, the decadent life of the rich and indulgent...and an accidental shooting that ends to death and a cover-up.  It's all there.  I'm guessing Wills read his fair share of Oppenheim.  This section is a neat homage and not altogether gratuitous.  Myra's past and the characters mentioned in her story play a large part in the later unfolding of the intricate plot. Myra has a huge secret that leads to a blackmail scheme Boscobell uncovers.  Did her husband get involved and try to protect her?

Another suspect is the antique glass collector Lawton Holmes, a shady and cruel man with secrets in his past and a roving eye for the ladies. Mrs. Thomas, the requisite gossip, offers up the dirt on Holmes and his theft of a rare glass curio -- The Ravenscroft Goblet.  And here I thought was another detective novel homage. This time to the prolific J. S. Fletcher whose books of the 1920s and early 1930s were filled with jewel and antique thieves sporting titles just like the object Holmes stole.  In fact two of  Fletcher's books are titled Ravensdene Court and The Ravenswood Mystery, not to mention all his detective novels about objets d'art like The Kang-He Vase, The Borgia Cabinet, The Malachite Jar, and The Carrismore Ruby. Definitely another tribute, in my opinion.  I thought the theft of the Ravenscroft Goblet would be the crux of the mystery, but was way off the mark.

One of the best of the supporting characters is Boscobell's girlfriend Audrey, his most trusted confidante.  She becomes his Watson and is present at the scene when they visit Mrs. Thomas.  Boscobell and Audrey spend many a chapter trading theories and bouncing ideas off each other. They discuss a variety of possible situations to explain the evidence as in the case of the missing bullet and where it might be found.  Audrey goes looking for it, in fact, with out telling her policeman paramour.  Also they talk about the footprint in tar found a outside the scene of the crime which Boscobell realizes almost immediately is utterly faked.

INNOVATIONS:  For a first time detective novel Wills shows a deft hand at incredibly intricate plotting and clever clueing making use of familiar detective novel tropes like the burned bits of paper, secret messages, missing bullets, and footprints at the scene of the crime, and even an initialed handkerchief - perhaps the hoariest of all hackneyed devices, as Carolyn Wells might put it.  I also liked the more subtle homages to detective novel conventions like Oglethorpe, Trevellyan's valet and butler, a kind of Bunter character who back in WWI was Trevellyan's batman when both were sappers, soldiers who dug and fought in the trenches.  There is a surprise witness at the very long inquest section which makes for some fairly exciting reading and allows Wills to add yet one more intriguing development in an ever increasingly complex murder case that at times seems too baffling for its own good.  Can a detective novel be complex for complexity's sake?  Author in Distress may be the template for such a mystery novel. As complicated as the story becomes I didn't care.  I was marveling, not complaining, at the labyrinthine story telling, the layering of past and present, the double identities and masquerades the deeper I got into the story.

Nifty map of crime scene combined with floor plan of house.  Click to enlarge!

Unfortunately, in the final third Wills abandons his finely engineered detective novel and transforms the book in a cliche-ridden adventure thriller. Audrey is kidnapped and imprisoned in a tower accessible only by two ladders, a daring rescue involving near fatal perils, the garrulous villain confesses everything on his deathbed. My notes include this brief rant: "Loads of Edgar Wallace claptrap. Ugh!"  Blackmail and an old bank robbery turn up in the eleventh hour and serve as the motive for the various crimes and murders.  It all seemed so manufactured and random in the summing up and made for an anticlimactic finale.

Prior to the high speed action-filled, but utterly familiar, final chapters the book is fascinating and engaging for fans of the traditional puzzle-filled detective novel.

QUOTES: I only wrote down one, but it's rather resonant for these days:

"The American, like most of his countryman, carried a gun." 

THE AUTHOR: Cecil M. Wills (1891-1966) had a fairly lengthy career as a detective novel and thriller writer from 1935 to 1961. Can't find much about his life online, but his bibliography is well documented on various crime fiction sites. This is my first reading of his books having only discovered him after seeing his name mentioned in a passing remark in the excellent mystery novel At the Sign of the Clove and Hoof.  Wills' early books of the 1930s featuring Geoffrey Boscobell and Audrey are rather scarce, sorry to report.  There are a handful copies out and (not too surprisingly) several very cheap editions of a French translated edition of The Chamois Murder.  The easier to find Wills mystery novels are his titles from the 1950s.  For several reviews of these later books featuring a completely different series detective see the Puzzle Doctor's posts at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.

Despite its flawed finale chapters I enjoyed Author in Distress.  It's a book I think ought to be reprinted.  In fact, the entire Boscobell series holds promise based on this sole reading experience.  Enterprising and daring publishers take note.  Cecil M Wills deserves a second life, I'd say.

Sgt. Geoffrey Boscobell Detective Novels

Author in Distress (1934)
Death at the Pelican (1934)
Death Treads (1935)
Then Came the Police (1935)
The Chamois Murder (1935)
Fatal Accident (1936)
Defeat of a Detective (1936)
On the Night in Question (1937)
A Body in the Dawn (1938)
The Case of the Calabar Bean (1939)
*The Case of the R.E. Pipe (1940)
*The Clue of the Lost Hour (1949)
*The Clue of the Golden Ear-Ring (1950)

 

*also with Roger Ellerdine who becomes the leading detective in the remaining Wills detective novels