FFB: The Hidden Light - Max Dalman

THE STORY: Loathsome portrait painter James Garrow is shot in his locked, bolted and barred studio. There are only two entrances and Garrow has the only two set of keys. One set of those keys is kept locked in a safe and only the painter has the combination. His death appears to be a suicide but we know better because in the opening chapter we know that someone entered the studio while Garrow was drawing a pastel portrait of a woman who was haunting his thoughts. And our detective hero David Marchant knows better when he breaks into the room and sees chalk dust on Garrow’s fingers but a visibly clean weapon. Who got into the room and shot Garrow and managed to leave it locked if the only keys were still in the room?

The Hidden Light (1937) of the title refers to a second mystery related to the murder. Just after Garrow was found dead a light went on in the room indicating that perhaps the murderer was still inside looking for something. The sun was beginning to go down and interior light from lamps was needed to see anything in the room. It was not a flashlight as the witnesses who reported seeing the light go on were servants well acquainted with the lamps in the room. A few minutes later it went out again and of course no one was in the room when Marchant and two others entered to find Garrow’s body. So we have a genuine locked room murder and an impossible problem of the “hidden light”.

THE CHARACTERS: David Marchant was hired by Garrow for an unknown reason but his summons was urgent and so he headed out to the Garrow home as quickly as he could. We, however, know that Garrow hired Marchant to investigate death threats sent to him in a series of anonymous letters. We see Garrow poring over these letters in the very first scene of Chapter One prior to his murder. Some letters were left out on his desk when he died, but when Marchant breaks into the studio the letters are gone. This is an interesting use of dramatic irony, a convention not often employed in traditional detective novels. Dalman allows the reader to know things ahead of the detective and we keep waiting for Marchant to stumble onto existence of the letters so he can make progress quicker than the police.

Kay Garrow, the painter’s much younger wife, was trapped in a loveless marriage suffering almost daily emotional abuse from her cruel husband, She becomes suspect number one in the eyes of the police. But Marchant is reluctant to accept this premise. In an another ironic moment Mrs. Garrow offers up the local gossip that she is having an affair with Richard Garstane, another artist Garrow hired to restore some frescoes in a chapel on the grounds. Garstane is emotionally unbalanced and perhaps more in love with Mrs. Garrow than she is aware of. Mrs. Garrow gives Marchant this information in an attempt to appear frank and honest. She swears she is innocent and asks Marchant if he will work for her in order to clear her name. He accepts on one condition – if he she discovers all evidence leads to her guilt then she must relent and allow him to turn her in to the police. Mrs. Garrow accepts his challenge.

But there are others in the house who have motive and opportunity. Jessica Garrow, the painter’s daughter from his first marriage, spent some time in a hidden alcove nearby the entrance to the studio supposedly reading a book. Peter Amberwood, Garrow’s secretary, was in a nearby room and was quick to come running when Marchant demanded to be let into Garrow’s studio. It is not hard to see that Jessica and Peter are trying to hide an intimate relationship; Marchant sees their sly glances at each other and is positive they are in love. They are caught in several lies and cover-ups before Marchant gets them to tell the truth of what they were doing the night of the murder.

In true Golden Age tradition the servants are far from minor characters in this story. Each one. from butler Keyne to maid Alice maid and even the cook. will all have important information to divulge to Marchant and the police before the culprit is uncovered. Alice, the maid, in fact has one of the most surprising secrets to reveal in the entirety of the book.

INNOVATIONS: And who is the woman in the pastel portrait that has been hidden under Garrow’s body? When Marchant finally turns over what he thought was a blank piece of paper and sees the face drawn in pastels he lets out a gasp. He recognizes the features of the woman and is truly taken aback. Dalman sends Marchant on a strange detour into the past lives of some of the suspects, uncovers false identities and a secret in Garrow’s past that will turn the case upside down.

The discovery of the anonymous letters coupled with the face in the pastel portrait lead to some marvelous detective work on Marchant’s part. He studies the postmarks on the envelopes, compares the towns to train schedules and pinpoints Bristol as a hub from where the letter writer must have been based. Once in Bristol he sets to work in libraries digging into Garrow’s past looking for a link to Bristol. This section is one of the cleverest and most exciting parts of the novel.

SUMMATION: The Hidden Light was my third Max Dalman mystery and, coincidentally, Dalman’s third mystery in his chronological output. The story is highly entertaining, the action never flags and all of the characters are fascinating to read about. Not a dullard in the bunch. Dalman almost succeeded in being as clever as he was in Poison Unknown which was my first and still my favorite of the Dalman detective novels. But I will have to admit that when it came to the denouement in The Hidden Light much of what was so intriguing and puzzling was revealed to be distressingly prosaic. The solution to the locked room is hardly brilliant, the mystery of the hidden light is rather obvious, and the identity of the villain relies on one of the hoariest clichés. I literally groaned. It’s so laughably bad that I’ve only encountered it three times in the hundreds of books I’ve read. Most mystery writers dare not ever employ it for fear of being ridiculed. Ah well…

Moving onto mystery number four in my small pile of Max Dalman books. He can write well and he is often genuinely imaginative with ingenious methods of detection. Hoping I find one as dazzling as Poison Unknown in the next three books I’ve lined up.

Herald of Death - Max Dalman

THE STORY: Sound the bugle! Mount your horses! The fox hunt has begun. But this fox hunt ends with a decidedly different killing. Richard Marney is found stabbed with an ornate stiletto just short of an infamous hazard requiring skillful horse jumping maneuvers known as The Cliff. Suspicion falls first on Hugh Egmont, rival for the affection of Joan Marney, Richard’s cousin. Police investigation uncovers a history of other Marney family members having recently died in violent accidents. When Joan is attacked late one night the police begin to think that a killer is intent on murdering the entire Marney family.

THE CHARACTERS: Anonymous letters with cryptic statements using heraldry terms turn up a few days before Marney is murdered giving the book its title Herald of Death (1943). A letter sent to PC Retters seems to predict the death at the fox hunt though the message is worded nebulously, almost in riddle format. Luckily, there is an expert in heraldry in town who helps Retters make sense of the message which seems to hint at future deaths.

Egmont also receives a message telling him the hunt was cancelled the day of the murder, a tactic of reverse psychology that guarantees Egmont, known to be an avid hunter, would be sure to investigate. And so instead of not attending, Egmont makes sure he gets on his horse and rides the usual course. His timing couldn’t be worse, however. As soon as he shows up at the scene of the crime -- the perilous area known as The Cliff -- the police are there investigating what they think is a horse riding accident. Close inspection of Marney’s body reveals the oddly placed stab wound,

Charles Marney, Joan’s father who is in financial difficulty; Mrs. Handley, a mystery novelist; and Retters are the most interesting characters in the book. I vaguely remember an eccentric vicar in the mix, he appeared in only a few incidents at the start of the book, but since his name doesn’t appear in my notes I don’t think he had much to do with the story at all. Everyone else is a stock character of no real dimension – officious policemen, indignant heirs, several garrulous villagers, a pair of gossipy servants, and Joan as the requisite damsel in distress who anyone knows is completely innocent of anything and exists only for love interest and to have her life threatened once or twice.

Overall, the novel is intermittently engaging especially when PC Retters is on the scene. Rarely do we find police constables proving to be the smartest and most abstract thinker among the detectives in novels of the Golden Age. There are perhaps too many detectives in this book and I didn’t care much for the main sleuth Inspector Lyly. I wasn’t sure who I should be paying attention to – Lyly, Supt. Leyland or Retters who Dalman makes not only clever but slightly sinister. For a while I thought Retters had sent all the heraldry letters as an obfuscating distraction.

INNOVATIONS: Some well done scenes feature an eerie presence only heard and never seen. A horrid mournful screeching is heard in the night and at one point Joan is menaced and followed by this apparently invisible thing in the night. Cats are featured in the story and might appear as red herrings to all but the most astute reader. Dalman can be effective in creating atmosphere and chilling the bone in these quasi-supernatural sequences. He almost succeeds in making the reader believe some fantastical creature might be involved in the various deaths that occur. When the true explanation for the mysterious screeching comes in the final pages it fails to achieve the desired effect and comes almost as an anticlimax. Certainly nothing as chilling as what John Dickson Carr might have come up with.

This novel reminded so much of The List of Adrian Messenger by Philip Macdonald. Both feature a fox hunt and a family decimation plot similar to The Greene Murder Case, Israel Rank and other crime novels with rich families being murdered one by one. The difference with Dalman’s book is that the motive for murdering the Marneys is not made known in full until the final pages. There is an incident in the past mentioned two or three times over the course of the story that stuck out like a bloody thumbmark and made me think I knew exactly who the killer was and the motive for all the deaths. However, the actual “how” as applied to that character in relation to Richard Marney’s murder made no sense. As it turns out I was correct in my tagging the killer. Dalman is mostly good at misdirecting the reader over the course of the book until he overplays his hand with a monologue from the culprit that is intended to be a solution of the crime pointing the finger at another, but in effect turns out to be a confession. As such this is a clever way to attempt to trick the reader, but as it comes towards the end of the book it was too late for me. I had already seen through his flimsily veiled illusion several chapters before.

The overall narrative is also disjointed with no real flow of action. I found it to be repetitive and cyclical. The police revisit the scene of the crimes multiple times, suspects are re-interviewed, and the story is rehashed and repeated. Actual progress only comes in a rushing deluge in the final pages.

The unsurprising reveal of the murderer and a weak explanation of the eerie screech made this just a middling story. It falls well below the promise of what I discovered in Poison Unknown (1939), Dalman’s fifth mystery novel. Herald of Death is from the tail end of his writing career, the twelfth of a total of fifteen books. Maybe his first books are the ones to read. Are the later books lesser works? Had he lost his touch towards the end of his career? Three more Max Dalman mystery novels await me – one before this one in his chronological bibliography, and two right after. I’ll soon see if he’s a true discovery among the many neglected writers I write about here or if he is one of the many hit-or-miss writers who belong in the Hall of Ignominy in that ever growing annex of Forgotten Writers in the Golden Age of Detection.

Poison Unknown - Max Dalman

The Juliot Research Institute in Poison Unknown (1939) is a small facility entirely funded by a philanthropic grant.  The grant allows for paying the salaries of one professor, one teaching assistant (called a demonstrator in the context of the story) and to help finance the housing for four students who can live on the premises while furthering their unique studies.  Many of the students are involved in poison research and because this is a detective novel you can be sure that one of those students has an interest in the obscure often undetectable poisons of South America. Take a wild guess if a poison dart will be among the clues. Of course! and not one but two.

Professor Roseland is found murdered in the laboratory. At first it seems an accident occurred, that an experiment went wrong. Inspector Macleod and Supt. Carbis are suspicious and suspect a possible murder staged to look like an accident. There are indications that various hands have altered the scene where the body was discovered.

Sylvia Roseland, the professor's daughter, and Paul Danton, one of the students, turn amateur detectives competing with the police professionals in an underhanded investigation of their own. As their prime suspect the police have targeted Francis Seymour, Sylvia's boyfriend, and the "demonstrator" for the students. Sylvia is determined to clear Seymour's name.

Classics professor Dr. Boynley, interestingly, is a detective fiction fan. He happens to be in the study in an armchair unseen by Sylvia and Paul and thus has overheard their plan to clear Seymour's name. He then says to them:

"I'd be interested to know what models you propose to follow--Lecoq, Sherlock Holmes, the more recent, but infalliable, Dr. Thorndyke... That perhaps would suit you best, Mr. Danton?  the scientific method..."

Together the three devise an elaborate plan in order to prove that Seymour caught a 6:30 train, traveled to London, and attended a conference.  If their plan succeeds, then as Boynley concludes "his innocence is proven."

Meanwhile the police uncover another murder of a woman they believe to be a prostitute who has dallied with several of the men at the Juliot Institute.  When her true identity is discovered and the reason for her secret meeting that led to her death is finally disclosed the murder of the professor takes on a wholly new shape. Further evidence is gathered (in one case, literally extricated) proving that the professor's death was a cleverly executed murder. 

Poison darts, talk of rare and undetectable poisons and the involved study of toxic chemistry may take up much of the investigation, but the ultimate murder means and motive come as a surprise in the end. The plotting was reminiscent of the kind of favorite trick of our mutual friend Dame Agatha often employed in his devilish murder mysteries. And I fell for it. Bravo Mr. Dalman!

Max Dalman (1905-1951) is not much read these days and I found almost nothing about him online.  He was born Max Dalman Binns in Scarborough and is the son of the equally forgotten British mystery writer Ottwell Binns. Both men are sadly lost to the vaults of myriad obscure crime fiction writers.  Based on this single novel which was engaging from page one, filled with unusual ideas, some clever plotting and exciting set pieces of detection I'd say Max Dalman is worth further investigation. Thanks to some luck with Illinois lottery tickets I netted $145 and used those winnings to splurge on buying some more Dalman books. Expect more reviews on his other novels later this year.

Max Dalman Detective Novels
Three Strangers (1937)
The Hidden Light (1937)
Vampire Abroad (1938)
Death on May Morning (1938)
Poison Unknown (1939)
The Missing Grave (1939)
The Burnt Bones Mystery (1940)
Mask for Murder (1940)
Doctor Disappears (1941)
Third Alibi (1942)
Death Before Day (1942)
Herald of Death (1943)
Death Disposes (1945)
Buried Once (1946)
The Elusive Nephew (1947)