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.

FIRST BOOKS: The Dead Take No Bows - Richard Burke

The Dead Takes No Bows (1941) gives us the origin of Quinny Hite, a former cop turned opportunistic private eye, two splendid plans – one of the scene of the crimes, the other of a gizmo used to carry out the quasi-impossible crime – and a preposterous story of revenge among theater people who seem to have lost their grip on reality.

In his former life as a cop Hite was honest and decent. One day he raids an illegal dice game, arrests all present ignorant of the fact that one of the gamblers is the District Attorney’s brother-in-law. Newspapers sensationalize the arrest making sure to note the arrest of the D.A.’s relative and as a result the lawyer loses his bid for re-election. In retaliation the D.A. has the Police Commissioner fire Hite. This kind of topical political pettiness gave me the impression that I was in for an intriguing satirical mystery novel. Unfortunately, Richard Burke seems to have been more fascinated with the novelty and fantasy of detective fiction because the plot resembles something that Harry Stephen Keeler might have dreamed up. It's a weird story of oddball performers lost in a limbo of nostalgia, obsessing on their faded glory and past achievements, and dominated by the stereotypical high voltage emotions and passions that are supposedly inherent in theater people.

The book opens with Joan, Quinny Hite’s fiancée, waiting patiently for her man to show up for their wedding to be held downtown at City Hall. She is dressed to go and he is late as usual. Just as Quinny shows up offering apologies murder intrudes. A hotel maid screams from the apartment above them and Hite rushes to the scene.

He discovers two veteran vaudeville actors shot in the head -- Louis Lothrop, comedian and theatrical producer, and Desiree La Fond, his one-time lover. Both murder victims are dressed in 18th century costumes from The Girl from Dieppe, an 30 year old musical revue set in the French Revolution era. An unusual reunion of the 1908 show’s cast had recently taken place, one at which every wore their costumes that was apparently held every year on the anniversary of the show’s opening night. There are odd clues throughout the hotel suite that serves as Lothrop’s extravagant home. Bullet wounds suggest two separate guns – a pistol and a rifle. A walking stick or wand of some type wrapped in a silk cloth is found on a mantelpiece near the dead bodies. A dog costume is found in a clothes closet. After the police arrive and Lothrop’s much younger wife Phyllis shows up unexpectedly with Lothrop’s former partner, David Earle, Hite is taken aside and secretly hired by Phyllis to find the murderer. She doesn’t like the way she and Earle were being questioned by police and she promises Hite that both she and Earle are innocent and have alibis. Hite jumps at the easy $500 retainer and the promise of more to follow when he solves the case.

Of course by this time he has completely forgotten about poor Joan and the wedding is indefinitely postponed. Joan is miffed but not very angry. It’s typical of Quinny apparently. Nice guy, huh?

The plot involves digging into the history of The Girl from Dieppe, the performers’ past lives, and the messy relationships that grew out of their involvement in the production. Forget about typical lover’s triangles and hotheaded romantic tiffs and spats. This company was infected by a lover’s tetrahedron. Nearly everyone was jealous of each other and romantic desires overlapped in quadruplets. Some turned to drink, some turned to drugs to comfort them when they were rejected and couldn’t get their object of desire.

Hite focusses on the raging jealousy between Carlo Ralph and Lothrop. Carlo Ralph was a stage magician and Desiree was his assistant and partner in the act. Lothrop stole Desiree away from Ralph. When Ralph’s magician career started to fail without his attractive female partner Lothrop cast him in The Girl from Dieppe giving him the thankless role of a pantomime dog. The costume found in the closet was the one Ralph wore in the show. Hite is certain Ralph is the killer. But when he learns that Ralph was presumed dead during WW1, that he never returned home and was listed as MIA Quinny is forced to look elsewhere for the murderer. Further investigation turns up more dirty secrets and forlorn love.

When Emily the maid is found dead in her apartment surrounded by candles in a what appears to be a mockery of a shrine Hite is baffled. A letter suggests she confessed to the murders and committed suicide. But why all the candles? Is the suicide faked? Maybe Emily saw something she shouldn’t have the night she found the two bodies in Lothrop’s suite.

The fantastical elements of The Dead Take No Bows threaten to turn the book into a self-parody. Burke seems to have modeled his first detective novel on a mixture of private eye action of pulp magazines and the nonsense found in Philo Vance mystery novels. The gimmick here is a murderer who tried to baffle police by using two weapons. And Hite obsesses on the theory that the guns were fired simultaneously. Why would that matter at all? It turns out that the killer created an elaborate bit of machinery using a strange contraption found in the Lothrop home in order to do just that. But I wondered why anyone would bother with it. It seemed an utter waste of time, something dreamed up for sheer theatricality and to puzzle the police, something that would only happen in a detective novel. If the killer was present in the room with the two people and he had a gun he could simply shoot both with one gun and leave.

Dare I mention that the hotel suite has special entrances that allow for anyone to enter the theater next door unseen? Lothrop owned the theater and had a bridge built at the uppermost floor connecting to his hotel suite so he didn’t have to leave his hotel and take the extra five minutes to enter the theater through its front door. Another piece of odd business that exists only to make the story strange and weird. And, of course, allow the killer to gain entrance to the crime scenes repeatedly without being seen.  If that wasn't enough two other secret doors and entrances are discovered that connect the Lothrop suite to other places within the hotel and the theater. It’s like Burke took the worst gimmicks from Carolyn Wells and the absurd “impossibilities” in the poorer S.S. Van Dine novels (remember the pencil under the massively heavy sarcophagus in The Scarab Mystery Case?) and threw them all into his story with no regard for common sense. In the end Hite solves he case, gets his money from Phyllis, and marries Joan. But the finale is as ludicrous as the manner in which the murders were committed.

Burke can prove to be engaging and insightful as in the scene between Quinny Hite and Dorothy Earle, David Earle’s actress daughter who shares with the detective her observations about the sad lives of her father’s friends. She comments on the tragedy of turning your back on the present and disappearing into the past. Her frequent startlingly poetic statements (“Poor Uncle Lou… he was just sifting ashes.”) are so poignant they seem to belong to another book altogether and not this off-the-wall, Keeleresque murder mystery. For that reason I’m interested in reading the other few Quinny Hite novels I’ve acquired over the years.

Inspector Pierson (William Demarest, left) and Mike Shayne
(Lloyd Nolan) confer over the dead body of Desiree La Fond
(played by a mannequin)

Intriguingly, The Dead Take No Bows was sold to the Hollywood and turned into a vehicle for Lloyd Nolan in the Mike Shayne private eye series. That’s rather remarkable for a first time novelist, I think. Even moreso for having been turned into a movie so quickly after the book was published. Most of the Mike Shayne movies, oddly, used different books other than the original Brett Halliday stories and substituted Shayne in the role of private eye. So in Dressed to Kill (1941), the renamed movie version of Burke’s book, Quinny Hite is gone, but Joan is still there trying marry Nolan as Shayne.

I found the movie uploaded to YouTube and watched it a few nights ago. I was flabbergasted to learn that the plot was almost 100% true to Burke’s kooky novel. The only noticeable changes were that Phyllis, Lothrop’s second wife, was transformed into a society matron; Dorothy was relegated to one dumb scene in a taxi and robbed of her poignant monologue; one minor character became a potential second murderer in the slightly rewritten finale; and the original method for killing the two actors was dispensed with and a similar idea was substituted, one more plausible and possible but still rather ludicrous when you examine it closely.

There are a handful of fairly affordable copies of The Dead Take No Bows out thee for sale, including some with the rare DJ. But instead I recommend you look up the movie and watch it. It’s so faithful to the story it’s almost like reading the book. One warning in advance: Be prepared for Manton Moreland and Ben Carter doing some awful scaredy-cat Black man "humor" in one of the few wholly original, but insulting, scenes in the movie.

FFB: Death in the Dark - Stacey Bishop

THE STORY: Three murders, all committed under seemingly impossible conditions, have decimated the Denny family in Death in the Dark (1930). A locked apartment building and a death by gunshot in a darkened bedroom, another death by gunshot done in full view of five witnesses, and a shooting in a jail cell with no one near the victim nor any gun in the cell. How has the murderer achieved these miracle crimes? Intellectual criminologist Stephan Bayard with the help of police Detective Jules and Bayard's close friend George Stacey Bishop manages to weed through the chaff and get to the heart of all the mysteries. Along the way the reader is treated to various lengthy and esoteric discussions of fine art, the state of modern music in 1930, and the criminality of thymocentric personalities. Once again, the influence of Dr. Louis Berman rears its ugly head in yet another early American detective story plagued with talk of eugenics and the bogus science of determining personality based on endocrinology.

THE CHARACTERS: Stephan Bayard is another of the many American detectives descended from C. Auguste Dupin and Philo Vance. He is as cold and rational as Dupin and enjoys his esoteric monologues like Vance. Within minutes of learning of the death of Dave Denny, a music concert promoter, Bayard is sure that the man has committed suicide. But a key left in a door when it should be hanging on a hook, one of Denny's diehard habits, will bother the criminologist until the final pages. Bayard much like Vance is also a cultural connoisseur and we get several didactic lectures on art, music, and literature with loads of name dropping of both familiar and obscure painters, sculptors, musicians and writers. Bishop is the S. S. Van Dine stand-in of the book and is both mythical author and narrator when in fact "Stacey Bishop" is the pseudonym of modern musician George Antheil.

Dr. Stein, a radical endocrinologist, is one of the many fictional doctors inspired by Louis Berman's work on controlling personality and behavior through use of hormones and surgery of the pituitary and thymus glands. Berman's radical theories and practices which flirt with controversial eugenics theory caught the imagination of many genre fiction writers at the time. Donald Clough Cameron's criminologist, Abelard Voss, for example is another fictional detective who likes to espouse Berman's theories. Antheil takes this specious science to the extremes making Stein something of a mad doctor tinkering with experiments more suited to a science fiction shocker. There is a scene where Bayard and Bishop visit Stein's lab and we see his experiments have led to the development of a bizarre machine that in its description sounds like something out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It seems to involve the extraction of personality via electricity and the wearing of a metal mask. I read these sections several times and still can't make sense of them. The finale of the novel is straight out of a shudder pulp magazine and is completely out of place for a story that was up till then purely cerebral and focussed on logic and ratiocination.

Floor plan of Dave Denny's murder (click to enlarge)

The suspects are mostly made up of stock characters with paper thin personas like Mrs Denny, a bed ridden wealthy matriarch; John and Frieda Alvinson, composer and his "boyishly handsome" wife who serves as the 1920s exotic female figure; a profligate brother in Aaron Denny who is financially irresponsible and hated by his stepmother; and a handful of servants who are nothing more than symbols. Bayard and Stein are the only characters in the book that approach anything remotely resembling human dimension, even if it is mostly intellectual. Even the murderer comes across as lacking in any real depth until the last couple of chapters when motivation is revealed and we get more nonsense about the thymocentric personality.

INNOVATION: Death in the Dark is overloaded with intriguing new ways to tell a detective novel. If they all tend to obfuscate the story that's no real failure. They often made me laugh in astonishment rather than in ridicule. Bayard draws up numerous fact sheets that serve as tabulation scenes highlighting the oddities that make each crime impossible. He also informs Bishop that Sir Richard Muir, the lawyer involved in the trial of Crippen, liked to compose "poems" during his case summations which he would read to the jury at the close of a trial. Bayard then composes his own series of blank verse tributes to each of the three impossible crimes pointing out each puzzling incident that is nagging his overstimulated brain. In effect we get two separate and protracted tabulation scenes: one in a bulleted list format, the other in a pseudo-poetic format.

Over the course of the book the impossibilities are each dealt with individually with each solution presented as it is discovered rather than revealed in the concluding chapter as with most detective novels. The problem of a key left in the locked door of the Denny apartment is oddly the one problem that is not explained until the novel's end. The jail cell murder -- the most ingenious of the three crimes -- is surprisingly solved almost immediately but having its roots in more pulp fiction gimmickry the bizarre method adds another incongruous element of the absurd to the overarching somber tone.

THINGS I LEARNED: I absorbed a lot about early American and European modern music and contemporary modern art of the late 1920s. Among the artists mentioned is sculptor Constantin Brancusi and his abstract series known as Bird in Flight. Bayard talks about this shape and the fascination with all things streamlined and draws analogies to the evolving trend of women's physiques becoming more boyish, less shapely. He compares the differences between curvaceous American Gertrude Denny and Russian emigre Frieda Alvinson repeatedly throughout the story. At one point Frieda is compared to a "transvestant" which Bishop points out is a type that is appearing with increasing frequency in New York. (In a brief note after Bishop's preface reprint publisher John Pugmire points out that Antheil's eccentric punctuation and spelling has been preserved so the reader may "experience the full flavor of the original." )

THE AUTHOR: George Antheil was an aspiring modern music composer during the 1920s who is now best remembered, not for his concert work, but for his music scores of movies like Repeat Performance, Knock on Any Door and House by the River. Death in the Dark is supposedly a cathartic revenge book which Antheil wrote in reaction to his disastrous Carnegie Hall debut in 1927 of Ballet Mécanique. Each of the victims in the murder mystery is a thinly disguised version of the people Antheil held responsible for his public humiliation. The story of the novel's creation, the concert and the people who served as the inspiration for the characters is told in an Afterword by Mauro Piccinini. In passing Piccinini also touches on Antheil's other claim to fame -- his physics work and the development of the "frequency hopping spread spectrum" invented in tandem with actress Hedy Lamarr.

EASY TO FIND? John Pugmire has reprinted this extremely rare detective novel as part of his Locked Room International imprint. It's available only as a paperback via amazon.com and nowhere else. LRI does not distribute to bookstores as it is a print-on-demand operation utilizing Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing platform. Don't hold your breath trying to find an original 1930 edition published only in the UK by Faber and Faber in a very small print run. The only copy I've ever seen offered for sale was back in 2010 and was priced at $1500. Currently, the only copies are in a much more affordable $25 paperback edition just released a few weeks ago. Click here to go the book's sale page on amazon.

FFB: The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook

If it hadn't been for an unmentionable book by a writer known only by his initials Harriette Ashbrook might never have become a mystery writer. Just as Agatha Christie was inspired to pen her first novel by reading a poorly written detective novel Ashbrook in a newspaper interview done in 1933 confessed, "I owe it all to T.S. Fine literary style is discouraging to the beginner. It's better to read a terrible piece of tripe and get encouraged." Whatever that book and whoever T.S. might be we have to thank him for the creation of Ashbrook's ne'er-do-well amateur detective Philip "Spike" Tracy.

We first meet Spike Tracy in The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) and he's a near twin of Philo Vance, who at the time had only appeared in five books. Tracy has got a playboy's philosophy of life, appears to be utterly hedonistic, has no job, and thinks becoming an amateur sleuth might be rather fun. The main difference between Ashbrook's detective and her obvious inspiration is while Vance loves to lecture ostentatiously on esoteric topics like Chinese pottery and ancient Egyptian burial rites Tracy is more down to earth, keenly observant but also a smart aleck. Tracy notices things the police overlook and enjoys pointing out their faults without ever appearing snobbish or patronizing as Vance often is.

Tracy has a brother who is the Manhattan District Attorney. R. Montgomery Tracy is his professional name as it is painted on his New York office door. The R stands for Richard and thankfully he doesn't go by Dick. As Vance has Markham and Sgt. Healy and Ellery Queen deals with a D.A. and his policeman father Tracy is paired with his brother and Inspector Henschmann.  For good measure Ashbrook supplies a medical examiner bored with his job who displays the requisite black humor when examining the many corpses that turn up in the series.

...Cecily Thane is fairly traditional compared to Ashbrooks' later novels featuring Spike Tracy. The victim is the unliked young wife of an older man who allowed her to go out regularly with a "dancer" named Tommy Spencer. Mrs. Thane is found shot in her bedroom with a safe open and robbed of jewels. Turns out another woman was robbed and killed earlier and she too was seen in the company of a dancing gigolo named William Preston. Is there a criminal gang of male escorts turned thieves and murderers?

There are some unusual aspects to the criminal investigation like the search for the murder weapon which was disposed of in an odd manner and turns up in a most unlikely place. Also, a blotting paper clue is reproduced in the book and allows the reader to hold it up to a mirror in order to read the message thus getting a feeling of joining Tracy in his sleuthing. But the cleverest part is that the entire crime hinges on an altered timepiece. Ashbrook's insightful observations about the difference between actual time and perceived time make for one of the more modern features of the story.

The Murder of Steven Kester, UK edition (1933)

She followed her debut with The Murder of Steven Kester (1931) which fans of obscure B movies may know in its cinematic adaptation known as Green Eyes. The movie turns up all over the internet these days as it was released by one of the bargain basement video outfits that churned out hundreds of DVD cheapies of movies now in the public domain. A murder takes place during a masquerade party held at the Long Island mansion of the title character. Kester is dressed as Bottom (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) complete with donkey's head. Tracy comes as a gladiator in an abbreviated costume consisting only of a tiger skin loincloth. When he goes in search of a safety pin in order to prevent an accidental charge of public indecency he stumbles upon the corpse. Ashbrook's offbeat sense of humor and her tendency to be a bit risqué is on flamboyant display in this book. Like many scenes added for comic effect in her books seemingly insignificant minutiae will take on greater importance when the crime is fully explained.

Her plotting is original but her execution is sometimes faulty. There are some great clues like the evidence of something having been destroyed in the furnace of the Kester home, a suspect's past life as an actress, and a pair of dice that turn up during a scene involving an ostensibly extraneous crap game -- yet another "big clue" disguised in a scene of minutiae that helps Tracy solve the murder. But while the reader is presented with all of this Tracy still withholds some important data. Too much offstage action in this story for my tastes, too many scenes when Tracy goes away and we have no idea what he does until pages later in the denouement.

Ashbrook starts to experiment with unusual themes in her next two books. In one book she touches on abnormal psychology and uses some groundbreaking research in a rather daring surprise reveal while the other gives her a chance to discuss the lonely life of World War 1 veterans, their often tortured lives, and the private demons they must learn to deal with back home far from the brutality of the front.

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) shows considerable improvement from her first two detective novels. Tracy is on his own in this outing which takes him to the backcountry of Vermont. Ashbrook does an excellent job with misdirection and even manages to include an impossible disappearance. For the 1930s this was probably an astonishing mystery with a gasp inducing, surprise ending. It deals with twin sisters -- Mary, a bedridden invalid, and Jill, an extroverted, highly sexual young woman. Jill believes there is a plot to kill her. She enlists Tracy's aid to prevent her impending murder at the hands of her oppressive and odious guardian and his nurse, but the old man turns up dead first. And Jill is discovered standing over his body with the bloody weapon in her hand.

Though it may all become rather obvious to the 21st century reader Ashbrook must be commended for handling a topic rarely used in detective fiction of the 1930s. A rural Vermont sheriff mentions a well known Victorian novel in the final pages, perhaps the only familiar reference on the topic to a reader of Ashbrook's time. She handles the topic fairly well for a device that is now an overused trick in thriller and mystery fiction. I like ...Sigurd Sharon for its daring invention and its subversive depiction of a sexually free female character.

The theft of a valuable stamp collection, several murders and a handful of attempted murders are at the core of the elaborately constructed A Most Immoral Murder (1935). Tracy is back in Manhattan with the usual supporting characters from the police and D.A.'s office. He also makes frequent trips to New Jersey, notably the fictitious town of West Albion where a secret in the past is revealed to have a connection to the murders and the stamp collection theft. Ashbrook uses a murder investigation to draw comparison between wartime killing and murder in civilian life and has some very strong opinions about each and the effect killing has on soldiers. I found it to be her most mature work even if the plot gets a bit creaky with some old fashioned tropes involving adopted children that seem borrowed from Victorian sensation novels. The unfolding of events, however, is impressively done. The large cast of well drawn characters holds the reader's interest with the stamp expert being the most memorable of the lot.

Harriette Ashbrook wrote only seven novels using her real name then handful more under the pseudonym "Susannah Shane." The Shane novels are a blend of Mignon Eberhart style "women in peril" thrillers and all-out farcical comic crime novels like the work of Phoebe Atwood Taylor and Craig Rice. I prefer her work under her own name.

These days Spike Tracy is utterly forgotten. Sadly, so too is Harriette Ashbrook. I'd recommend tracking down any of her books -- they're entertaining, sometimes devious, and often very original for the time they were written. Spike Tracy was one of the better Vance impersonators but a lot more likable. As Ashbrook says of her own creation, "He's the kind of man I wish I could meet in real life."

Philip "Spike" Tracy Detective Novels
The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930)
The Murder of Stephen Kester (1931)
The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933)
A Most Immoral Murder (1935)
Murder Makes Murder (1937)
Murder Comes Back (1940)
The Purple Onion Mystery (1941) (AKA Murder on Friday)

FFB: The Deadly Truth - Helen McCloy

The ultra urbane New Yorkers of Helen McCloy's detective novels are beginning to remind me of  similar sophisticated Manhattanites of the 1920s in the S.S. Van Dine series about Philo Vance. But whereas Vance is the only one who seems to be extremely well read and eager to make literary allusions as often as the wind changes direction in McCloy's world everyone acts like Vance. Was there ever really a New York like the one we find in The Deadly Truth (1941)? Did people really spice up their language with frequent quotes from historical figures and obscure authors? Did mini lectures about chemistry and literature and the science of audiology take the place of regular conversation? I doubt it. Unlike Willard Huntington Wright who to me always seemed to be showing off in the guise of Philo Vance, Helen McCloy makes her erudite characters fit naturally into her mysteries. Her lectures are intrinsic not intrusive to the story.

Claudia Bethune, with her multiple marriages and multiple wardrobe changes, tart tongue and wicked ways, is very much like a 1940s version of Alexis Carrington. Life has become a great amusement to her and people are her toys. She is planning a cocktail party to which she has invited several friends and business acquaintances and sent individual invitations stating that each person should try to come as "you are the only one I really want to see." Little do they know that these cocktails will be laced with a new drug she stole from her biochemist pal Dr. Roger Slater. The drug is a derivative of scopolamine with "truth serum" properties enhanced and its dangerous side effects removed. Claudia is eager to find out all the secrets her friends have been keeping from her.

The cocktail party is a highlight of the book and gives McCloy a chance to show off her talent for wicked dialogue. The entire sequence might have been lifted from an episode of that hyper-melodramatic nighttime soap Revenge. During the party Claudia manages to goad her guests into revealing a myriad of deep dark secrets. Chief among those secrets are her husband's long time adulterous affair with Phyllis (who also happens to be his first wife) and the plummeting price of the stock in a clothing mill Claudia inherited from her father that has virtually left her penniless. There are other secrets, too, but McCloy cuts the scene short choosing instead to reveal those in the surprise-filled denouement.

The theme of truth and lies runs throughout the novel with the characters indulging in McCloy's love of allusion. Prior to their ever being aware of the truth drug they will ingest at the party we get quips and quotes like these:

Truth is always unpleasant and usually intolerable.

If I may be permitted to paraphrase Aaron Burr: Truth is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

Yet even the speakers of those quotes are vulnerable to the effects of the super dose of the drug Claudia tosses into the bottle of vermouth used to make the night's martinis. She, of course, does not partake of the drinks nor does Roger who spotted a missing tube of the test drug only minutes after Claudia left his lab. He warns everyone to stop drinking while everyone else warns Claudia that she'll pay for her cruel game. But by then it's too late. And it's too late for Claudia as well. Later that night she is found brutally strangled with her prized emerald and platinum necklace.

Dr. Basil Willing, psychologist and consultant to the NYPD, is on hand and in fact discovers Claudia in her death throes, nearly catching the murderer in the act of strangling. Claudia is still alive when he breaks into the dining room, but the intricately designed catch on her necklace leaves Basil helpless to free her from the jeweled death trap. Basil is also an "ear-witness" of sorts to the crime. He will remember that prior to the discovery of Claudia he had heard an unusual sound of footsteps and does his best to apply his listening skills throughout the book to match that aural memory to the gait and footsteps of the suspects. Sound and the absence of sound feature prominently in the book as major clues even to the inclusion of a deaf character.

The Deadly Truth is not only a high spirited melodrama of modern mind game playing it is one of the best examples of a fair play detective novel I've ever read. The clues are right there in front of you. Many of them stood out to me flagrantly and yet I was unable to put the pieces together. Why? Because McCloy has ingeniously led the reader down the garden path with a plethora of red herrings that seem to lead to one person when in fact all the flagrant clues most assuredly point to another. It was one of those rare instances of an ending that left me gasping and saying, "That's why that happened!" I'd love to point out some specific examples but that would ruin the enjoyment of joining me as yet another reader fooled by a master deceiver.  With each new book I read by Helen McCloy I discover that she is indeed an artist of the detective novel.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary - Anthony Boucher

Boucher's first mystery The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) is a daring piece of crime fiction in this heyday of the Golden Age when everyone seemed to be breaking the rules. He joins other detective fiction iconoclasts who did things like have a first person narrator turn out to be the murderer, or have the detective turn out to be the killer, or have an ambiguously supernatural solution to a murder. What he does exactly is something I will not reveal, of course, but it seems to me to be one of the first rule breaking books of its kind for this period.

We have here yet another academic mystery in which John Ashwin, Ph.D. acts as the armchair sleuth who works out the puzzling aspects of three strange murders without ever leaving his book lined home. Ashwin is a professor of Sanskrit at a California university (modeled after Berkeley). Like another well known detective who never leaves his Manhattan apartment Ashwin has his own Goodwin-like footman in the person of Martin Lamb, a researcher in German at the university, who delivers first hand accounts of his investigations to Ashwin. Lamb says something self-deprecating of himself in relation to the murders (something I guess another person might call "un-PC" ) that I marked and have to include here:

"You may have gathered that I've been taking a lot of interest in these deaths.  Well, I am that worst abortion of nature, an amateur detective..."

Wonder what the Right to Lifers would say about that?

The book seems to be influenced by the Van Dine school both structurally with the "author" acting as narrator and in its content with an arch tone, a sophisticated and cosmopolitan cast of characters, literate and intellectual dialogue plus -- most Van Dine-ish of all -- a story overloaded with all sorts of arcane knowledge like Spanish plays in translation, Gnosticism and other Catholic heretical sects, and even Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. Ashwin also discusses Sanskrit literature tangentially in a way that reminded of Philo Vance's habit throwing around esoteric trivia that usually has nothing to do with the murders in the Van dine books. In this case most of the esoterica will be pertinent to the crimes and reading about it is much more fun that Vance's usual pedantry that tends to annoy. It does with me, at least.

A professor is found dead on the campus only a few feet from the home of a young student he apparently was visiting. He's been struck with a blunt instrument and the weapon cannot be found. By his body is found a scrap of paper with a diagram that looks like "a curious sort of italic F, mounted upon three rectangles shaped like steps." The reader should not be fooled for an instant by that description. This is, of course, the Seven of Calvary of the title (see the DJ of the 1st edition above). But just what that symbol signifies will remain a mystery until about the book's halfway mark.

And speaking of not being fooled -- this first murder had a couple of puzzles attached to it that I figured out easily and was rather disappointed. I wondered why Boucher made it all so transparent. But then that smart man Professor Ashwin reveals that the first victim was mistaken for someone else and the whole story turns upside down. By the end of the book two more deaths occur and I was completely taken in by all the later misdirection. I doubt anyone will discover the truth behind all the deaths. It's a devious piece of work that is definitely a real rule breaker for the 1930s.

For fans of devilish puzzles and intellectual academic mysteries this is a book I highly recommend checking out. Though you'll be hard pressed to find a hardcover copy of the first edition at an affordable price, there are cheap hardcover reprints in Macmillan's "Murder Revisited" series and the Collier paperback, a copy of which I managed to obtain for under $5.