TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: Fatal Flourishes - S. S. Rafferty

Another re-post from the archives.  This week I'm re-running a review of a unique historical mystery book, actually a collection of detective stories set in Revolutionary War era America, as part of the continuing month-long salute to history and mystery for the Tuesday Night Bloggers.

Captain Jeremy Cork first appeared in "The Margrave of Virginia" in the August 1975 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Further exploits of this 18th century inventor, speculator and amateur sleuth of "social puzzles" would appear over the next year and half. Eventually author S.S. Rafferty penned one adventure with Cork and his yeoman financier Wellman Oaks for each of the original thirteen colonies. All thirteen stories were collected in a rather scarce, but nonetheless noteworthy, book called Fatal Flourishes (1979).  It was later reissued as part of the "Library of Crime Classics" imprint by International Polygonics under the title Cork of the Colonies (1984).

Like Lillian de la Torre's detective stories about Samuel Johnson and Boswell Rafferty's tales are loaded with 18th century history and lore. But unlike the Johnson stories Captain Cork is an entirely fictional creation. Described by his sidekick as "six foot six inches of insouciance" Cork is similar to many of the Holmesian inductive detectives in that he almost immediately knows the solution, alternately challenges and rebuffs Oaks, his long suffering Watson, and indulges a bit too much in his own vanity. The cases he stumbles across which he prefers to call social puzzles involve a variety of crimes from theft to murder and include a handful of puzzling elements ranging from mildly diverting to devilishly ingenious.

Each story has the additional feature of focusing on some little known aspect of pre- and post- Revolutionary War era America. You'll learn of South Carolina's Charles Town as a sort of 18th century Las Vegas with parties, drinking and hedonism on display 24/7. The highlight of the story is that state's strange ritual of the cicisbeo lottery, an 18th century game of gender role reversal borrowed from the Italian aristocrats, in which married women draw names of single men to be their Cavalier Servente for one week. "The Georgia Resurrection" deals with vodo (Rafferty's spelling), African superstitions, and tribal herbal medicine. You'll also learn about the execution practices of that colony and the differences between the duties of hangman and coffin maker. He even gives us the origin of the now too familiar horror icon -- the zombie, or zombi as Rafferty spells it. No eating of brains in sight which may come as a huge disappointment to some 21st century zombie fans.

For me there was also an abundance of new learning related to life in the original colonies. I always thought that the big cash crops of the South were cotton and tobacco. Rafferty tells me, however, that it was rice and indigo that were making the colonists all their money. There was frequent talk of slavery and the treatment of slaves (Cork is an abolitionist) and in one story, "The Witch of New Hampshire," slavery is at the heart of the disappearance of several young women in a town still clinging to century old superstitions.

As for those "social puzzles" we get the usual tricks of the mystery writer's trade: twins, locked rooms, switched weapons, and some valiant attempts at misdirection. However, there is little fair play technique to be found here. The reader is left feeling as astounded as Oaks when Cork pronounces his solutions in his usual matter-of-fact style when not one clue was ever presented. It is more Cork's behavior and personality that dazzles and entertains rather than the construction of the puzzles and mysteries.

One of the most involved stories is "The Curse of the Connecticut Clock" which features an overly complex cipher based on the musical scale and the Roman numerals on a clock face. The explanation of the code takes up four pages! You have to admire the ingenuity behind the devilry but it seemed more like an ostentatious display by a 20th century writer rather than the revelation of the 18th century imagination of the character who created it.

Historical fiction fans will revel in the detailed portraits of colonial life, the colorful characters, and Captain Cork himself – a combination rogue and savvy businessman who finds much to fascinate him among the criminal element as he travels from North to South.

TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: The Longbow Murder (a rerun)

The Tuesday Night Bloggers are saluting historical mysteries this month. I don't often read these anymore, but when I come across exceptional examples I tend to write about them here at Pretty Sinister Books. Below is a rerun (originally posted here in 2014) of a highly unusual historical murder mystery which very well may be the very first one to use a historical figure from medieval times as a fictional detective. Enjoy this Autumn rerun.

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Howard Haycraft, noted detective fiction historian and critic, called Victor Luhrs' debut mystery novel The Longbow Murder (1941) a curiosity. At the time of its original publication the subgenre of the historical mystery was relatively new. Agatha Christie's famous contribution set in ancient Egypt, Death Comes as the End (1944), had yet to see the light of day. The use of a genuine historical figure such as Richard the Lionhearted as the detective protagonist was so unique in detective fiction and perhaps a bit too strange that no other writers followed suit. Now we are fairly inundated with real historical people solving fictional murders. Kings, queens, U. S. presidents and senators, even detective novelists all show up as amateur sleuths in historical mysteries these days. Victor Luhrs, if not the first to do so, was certainly one of the first and sadly completely forgotten as well. Turns out that Coeur de Lion makes quite the clever detective in this novel.

Richard faces a series of murders by poison arrow while at the same time trying to fend off assassination attempts on his own life. With the aid of a simple-minded scribe named Peter of Caen who serves as the Watson of the piece, he ferrets out two separate conspiracies all with traditional detective novel puzzle elements. Two murders are committed in locked and guarded rooms but only incidentally appear to be locked room murders. Some of the evidence and the eventual revelation of collusion by a guard reduce the cleverness of the impossibility Luhrs presents and I have to disqualify it from being considered a genuine "locked room" or impossible crime. Nonetheless, Luhrs is rather ingenious in coming up with a murder method and assassination plot that Richard also uncovers and prevents that rivals the main plot of the actual murder victims.

Richard I, ace detective

Luhrs is noted as being an avid medievalist. According to the informative bio sketch on the rear DJ panel he was obsessed with all things of the middle ages from his boyhood and has read extensively about the period in both fiction and non-fiction. That he is a devotee of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is never in doubt. The plot of The Longbow Murders is heavily influenced by Scott's classic novel of Richard I. Robin of Locksley (aka Dickon Bendbow, aka Robin Hood) even makes a cameo appearance. A custom made arrow stolen from his quiver turns out to be one of the murder weapons. Luhrs' love for the period is also quaintly depicted in his frequent use of archaic language. Some may find it quaint. For me the mix of modern day language and speech peppered with a plethora of methinks, yclept, mayhap, and prithee elicited more frowns than smiles.

There are other touches of quaintness as well as some troublesome anachronisms. One of Luhr's more notable atmospheric period touches is the character of John Star, a wizard who acts as coroner in the investigation. He determines time of death and then retreats to his alchemical lab where he distills the poison from the arrows and identifies it by name. Star often falls into a spell Richard calls "being in the mist", meaning Star can go into a trance-like state. While in this state the wizard seemingly confused confesses to the murders. His "in the mist" state leads to much confusion and Star's inability to distinguish reality from fancy. This "misty" trance seems to be a form of fugue state and he suffers from temporary bouts of amnesia. Star is one of the most original characters in the supporting cast. I only wish he had a larger onstage role. Most of his activity is reported second and third hand. It would have been a lot more interesting to see him interacting with others while in this state rather than hearing of it afterwards.

The solution of the murder, however, while surprising in revealing the murderer's identity is too dependent on a couple of vainglorious notes left by the murderer. The main question is whether they are meant as taunts or intended to frame another person. Both notes teasingly refer to the six letters in the murderer's first and family names. This is the kind of plot gimmick you find in novels by Edgar Wallace or Johnston McCulley who both created a slew of egomaniacal master criminals prone to leaving signature cards, with or without riddles, at the scene of the crime. It seems like a far too contemporary idea for a medieval criminal to contemplate; it bothered me. There are other subtle signs of modern crime solving leaking into this middle age world like trying to determine the exact time of death, alibi breaking, and intermittent use of contemporary phrases and idioms. But I have to say I liked the way Richard swore in medieval style. One of his commonly used oaths is "Holy Virgin!" There are a fair share of "Zounds! and "Gramercy!" exclamations as well and you learn the origin of the word "Good-bye" to boot. Some lapses in medieval verisimilitude were easier to excuse than others. Originality in plotting notwithstanding, the murderer's notes and the evidence of how the medieval alphabet is used in spelling was a bit too much for me to swallow.

Victor Luhrs, from the 1st edition DJ
 (photo uncredited)

Luhrs is also noted in his bio as being a detective novel aficionado. The numerous puzzles he incorporates into the plot make that quite clear. And I can only guess that he read a lot of stories in the pulp magazines. Richard at times adopts the brash and brutal manner of a tough guy private eye beating his witnesses (some of whom are also loyal knights in service to him) by boxing their ears, slapping their faces repeatedly, and once literally kicking ass. He's kind of a Carroll John Daly character of the Middle Ages but also shares qualities of the logical and rational crime solving methods of Ellery Queen and Philo Vance.

The bio hints that Luhrs hoped to write more adventures using Richard I as a detective, but unfortunately this is the only one. My guess is that despite the book's cleverness, its colorful medieval setting, and a larger than life Richard I as the lead, the book probably did not sell well. Luhrs never wrote another novel that I know of, certainly not another detective novel set in the Middle Ages. The only other book I find listed with Victor Luhrs as author is a history of the "Black Sox" scandal during the 1919 World Series.

Copies of The Longbow Murder are out there -- nearly all of them have the attractive DJ with medieval inspired artwork -- but most of them are priced too high for the average reader. Check your local library though. Anyone who enjoys historical mysteries, and those set in the Middle Ages especially, will discover a wealth of entertainment in this well written and cleverly constructed mystery.

TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: "Murder à la Carte" by Jean Toussaint-Samat

Sheer serendipity today!

In researching the life and works of Jean Toussaint-Samat, a new to me author whose book The Dead Man at the Window I will soon be reviewing, I came across this nugget of Gallic Golden Age Fiction. As luck would have it's all about poison. Didn't think I'd have anything more to continue the conversation about toxicity in detective fiction, but here you go.

This scarce English translation was published in The Living Age which billed itself as "an eclectic literary magazine" that lasted from 1844 to 1941. Toussaint-Samat's story appeared in the June 1, 1931 issue. It was translated by an uncredited person from the French and originally appeared in Revue Bleue, a "Paris Literary and Political Semimonthly".

All four pages of this short short appear below. Enjoy!

TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: The Poisoner's Mistake - Belton Cobb

Here's a rerun for the Tuesday Night Blogger's continuation of our month long exploration of poison in Golden Age detective novels. It's slightly edited from the original December 30, 2011 post and includes a new leading paragraph written especially for this month's meme.

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Agatha Christie may be the most celebrated expert of the use of poisons in the detective novel but who then gets that title among her contemporary male writers? I nominate Belton Cobb who you've probably never heard of. Cobb's preferred means to knock off his victims has been poison; more than half of his first ten books alone feature that murder means. And look at the titles published between 1940 and 1965, his most prolific writing period: The Fatal Holiday, Death in the 13th Dose, Early Morning Poison, Stolen Strychnine, No Charge for Poison, Drink Alone and Die, Poisoner's Base... You get the idea. He may not be as innovative as Christie or others in the myriad types of poison made available to his devious killers since he tends to stick to the "Big Three" (arsenic, cyanide, strychnine), but he certainly was varied in the ways the poison is administered. In some books the way the poison got in the victim's glass was entirely baffling as in his second novel The Poisoner's Mistake (1936).

With this one book, a startling shake-up of the old English manor murder mystery, Belton Cobb won me over. So impressive is his sophomore effort I broke my rule of splurging on new books by obscure writers and purchased three more Cobb mysteries from UK online dealers.

The Poisoner's Mistake features wily police detective Inspector Cheviot Burmann in the lead role. He is called to the home of Rupert Bole on New Year's Day following the sudden death of one of Bole's party guests who was hospitalized for stomach pains. Turns out he was poisoned but just how that poison was administered is only the first of several puzzling incidents in this twisting and deviously told story.

The New Year's Eve dinner is followed by an elaborate game of anagrams and was to end with a traditional midnight toast with "Auld Lang Syne" playing on the gramophone while all guests joined hands around a table singing along. But a sudden fire in the garage adjoining the mansion interrupts the festivities. All the men run out to extinguish the blaze while the women stay indoors and call for the firemen. No one drank any of the cocktails intended for the midnight toast and Mary asks for them all to be cleared away when the fire puts a damper on the party atmosphere.

Young Bobby Letchworth complains of stomach pains and a doctor is called to care for him. It appears Bobby is suffering from food poisoning. The doctor orders Bobby to be taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. But all efforts are futile. In the morning Letchworth is discovered dead in his hospital bed. The diagnosis is now changed to arsenic poisoning.

The intricately told murder investigation is fascinating but perhaps a tad overly methodical. The events of the party are dissected and examined minutely. Every detail is paid close attention -- from where the cocktail glasses were placed before the fire occurred to who picked them up and where the glasses were later found. The roles of the servants and their activity, usually a routine entry in similar stories of this period, are just as crucial as the main suspects' behavior during the party. For instance, we learn that one cocktail glass was broken from the set of ten that was intended for use at the midnight toast. One of the maids secretly substituted another glass from a cheaper set and did her best to make sure her finicky and temperamental boss Mr. Bole did not receive the odd glass. But of course things do not work out as she planned. That odd glass also was placed in a ring of books arranged to hide the anagram answers and supposedly was not touched for the entire evening. But somehow it ended up across the room hidden in a recess by the fireplace. Who moved it? Was that the glass that contained the poison? If so, it must have been Rupert Bole who was the intended victim posits Inspector Burmann. And so an elaborate plan is laid out that will both protect Rupert from a poisoner who is most likely hiding among the members of his household and flush out Bobby's murderer.

The book is not only dazzling in its presentation of the minutiae of the night of the poisoning but lays out several clues cleverly hidden in seemingly mundane snippets of dialog. The motive for the crime is mentioned in an odd exchange between two characters, for example, that is so jarring I knew it had to have something to do with the crime. In the final chapter in which Burmann explains all there are footnotes with page numbers directing the reader back to these cleverly planted hints recalling Mrs. Bradley's Notebook Pages in the addenda of Gladys Mitchell's early novels as well as C. Daly King's "Clue Finder" at the end of his Obelist books.

I find it very difficult to come up with "Best of the Year" lists. Were I to make up my own list of exciting discoveries and the best books among my vintage crime reading during 2011 I think that I would place The Poisoners' Mistake at the top of the list. The structure of the story is an enviable display of misdirection. There is a sardonic humor on display and the plot is constantly shifting with neat twists and surprises. When the culprit's titular fatal error was pointed out and the villain was unmasked I was more than satisfied and should have seen it all along.

This is an impressive work by a little known writer who somehow fell though the cracks. Of his more than forty detective novels and thrillers published in England only two were published in the US during his lifetime and few received paperback reprints in his own country. But copies of his books are out there in the used book market and most of them priced affordably. Though Cobb had a long career in crime fiction lasting from 1936 to 1971 it is his early work from the 1930s through the mid 1940s that is worth your attention. The Poisoner's Mistake certainly serves as solid proof of his well plotted, literate, and entertaining mystery fiction.

TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: What's Your Poison?

There is poison in the fang of the serpent, in the mouth of the fly, and in the sting of a scorpion; but the wicked man is saturated with it. -- Chanakya (Vishnu Gupta)

Poisoning is one of the most varied of the murder methods -- at least when it comes to fictional murder. With a killer at the end of a gun or knife or bludgeon the victim often knows who did them in. With poison, however, the victim may never know his or her assailant. A poisonous death often comes slowly over time, with a cruelty that surpasses even the most wicked of torture methods. And poisons come in myriad forms not just the top three (arsenic, strychnine, cyanide) that mystery novel addicts would call familiar. Often the most benign substances can turn deadly in the hands of a knowledgeable poisoner who is acquainted with simple biochemistry or botany or the horrors of anaphylactic shock. This month the Tuesday Night Bloggers discuss poison -- that most passive aggressive, and IMO opinion the most evil, of murder means.

Here's a sampling of some of the more nightmarish methods of poisoning I've encountered in detective fiction. In some cases I'll mention specific titles and authors, but where the murder method is intended as a surprise I'll not mention the title.

X-rays The discovery of x-rays took place in the late nineteenth century with the development of the x-ray machines led by Thomas Edison shortly following in 1895. The most innovative and diabolical of writers seized upon this new scientific discovery and recognized the dangers of radioactivity and its possible fatal consequences. The earliest known use of x-rays and x-ray machines as a fictional murder method come in not only early British scientific romances of the 19th century but genuine detective fiction. L.T. Meade & Clifford Halifax made use of an x-ray machine as a means to kill in "The Sleeping Sickness" published in October 1896 and later appearing in the extremely rare story collection A Race with the Sun (1901). Alfred Dorrington in The Radium Terrors (1922) holds back no surprise in the title while the exact plot device used in Dorrington's novel shows up a few years later in The Haunting Hand (1926) by G. Adolphe Roberts. Other examples include The X-Ray Murders (1942) by M. Michel Scott and a 1934 book by an American writer reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

Bacilli - Various uses of bacteria have been used in lieu of chemical poisons. A shaving brush infected with anthrax, one of Christie's better known uses of exotic poisoning, occurs in Cards on the Table (1937). Bacteria are the choice of the mad killers, potential murderers, or revolutionary anarchists in "The Stolen Bacillus" (1898) by H. G. Wells, The Microbe Murders (1933) by Frederick G. Eberhard, and "The Flock of Geryon" found in Christie's Labors of Hercules (1947). Perhaps the most disgusting bacteriological murder method once again comes from the pen of Dame Agatha. The infecting of a supposedly clean dressing with pus from a cat's wound which eventually led to the victim succumbing to septicemia can be found in a book I refuse to name, but many of you I am sure know well. I know of one novel in which the rabies virus is used to kill but the discovery of that means is used to shock the reader in the final pages and so I'll not name it. Cans of green beans are tampered with so as to allow botulism to occur and kill several people in Alisa Craig's A Pint of Murder (1980). Which I think will provide a nice segue to the very rich vein of...

Botanical Toxins In my reading I've learned all sorts of horrifying things related to the deadly properties of plants. Digitalis, used to treat heart conditions, has toxic properties when extracted directly from its plant source foxglove. Its use as a poison is found in many mystery novels of the Golden Age. Other popular botanical poisons employed by writers include aconite derived from wolf's bane, gelsemine found in yellow jasmine and not only are the flowers and leaves of oleander crammed full of deadly toxins so is the wood. Some barbecue skewers made from oleander branches are substituted for the harmless wooden skewers in Please Omit Funeral (1975) by Hildegard Dolson (Richard Lockridge's second wife) resulting in the death of an author of "dirty books" after he eats his shish kabob cooked on the oleander sticks. Yew berries may be harmless to birds but can be fatal to humans as Rex Fortescue learns in Christie's A Pocketful of Rye (1953) as well as the victim in Rest You Merry (1978) by Charlotte MacLeod.

Sinners Go Secretly (1927), the only short story
collection with Dr. Eustace Hailey. Includes
"The Cyprian Bees" and "The Black Kitten"

Venom To be accurate the poison found in animals, insects and arachnids is called venom and often it's not intended to kill but to anesthetize the prey while the predator enjoys its lunch or dinner. Mystery fiction has made use of all sorts of venom as an exotic murder method whether it be employing the animal itself or extracting that venom and injecting it into the victim or adding it to the victim's food. Sax Rohmer was a fan of spiders and venomous insects in many of his books. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is perhaps the first time a snake is used to kill someone in detective fiction. A boomslang's venom is found on the dart that kills in Death in the Clouds (1935) by poison expert Dame Agatha. The use of spider venom occurs The Washington Square Enigma (1933) by Harry Stephen Keeler. Bee venom turns up in Anthony Wynne's "The Cyprian Bees" (1926) in which the murderer takes advantage of the victim's allergic reaction to bee stings. In another apiarian murder tale a mad scientist finds a way to control the pheromones of bees in order to swarm on command in A Taste for Honey (1941) by H. F. Heard. The deadly venom of the fugu, the Japanese blowfish, kills a woman in Sayonara, Sweet Amaryllis (1983), one of the fine detective novels from James Melville featuring his Japanese detective Tetsua Otani.

If that isn't enough for you, let's wind up this macabre discussion with a simple yet enticing list:

Poison Introduced by Bizarre Means
Cat Claws - "The Black Kitten" (1927) by Anthony Wynne
Furniture - The Fangs of the Serpent (1924) by George R. Fox
                 The Human Bookcase Mystery (1931) by William Morton
Automobile Steering Wheel - The Shadow of Evil (1930) by Charles J Dutton
Surgery - The Nursing Home Murder (1935) by Ngaio Marsh
Cigarette Lighter - Facing East (1936) by Andrew Soutar
Jewelry - "The Toys of Death" (1938) by G. D. H. & M. Cole
Bird Beaks - "A Great Whirring of Wings" (1943) by Day Keene
Fishing Lure - Bleeding Hooks (1940) by Harriet Rutland
Musical Instrument - Death, My Darling Daughters (1945) by Jonathan Stagge

TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: Death and the Professors - Kathleen Sproul

Two rival physics professors die within hours of one another after attending a faculty function at the home of the Dunster College's president in Death and the Professors (1933). Though one death appears to be from natural causes and the other a suicide, the circumstances surrounding each are bizarre and in the case of the suicide so violent that foul play is suspected. Visiting lecturer Richard Van Ryn Wilson, a criminologist and psychologist, is bothered by the uncharacteristic behavior of each professor prior to their deaths and he turns detective to ferret out the truth and expose a ghastly revenge plot.

Once again we find a college campus rife with overflowing passions, unhappy marriages and unrestrained sexuality. Unlike the last book I profiled (The May Day Mystery) for the Tuesday Night Bloggers' discussion of murder in academia this month, the bedhopping is not in the dormitories but in the faculty bedrooms. This is one more addition to the fictional proliferation of unhealthy marriages, jealous husbands, philandering wives and spurned lovers as played out in a university setting. Coincidentally, this is practically the mirror image of Octavus Roy Cohen's book, a sort of Through the Looking Glass tale in which the student and faculty roles are reversed while exactly the same plot devices are used including another secret marriage, another hateful cad and another murder by throat cutting.

The most innovative part of the book is the method by which Jeff Storm is done in. Sproul is one of the first of the American mystery writers of the Golden Age to employ this method, but not the first ever. The earliest instance I know of this particularly diabolical means to kill someone dates back to 1901 in a short story by L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax that appears in the extremely rare collection Race with the Sun. By the late 1940s, however, it becomes a gimmicky murder method, especially in novels dealing with scientists, experimental labs, and hospitals.

Richard Wilson is not exactly the most competent of detectives nor is the story very well constructed. The clues are discovered by other characters and brought to Wilson's attention whether actually hand delivered to him as in the case of a bloody monogrammed handkerchief found several blocks from the home of Professor Shearer who was thought to have killed himself by slitting his own throat, or through the various gossip mongers who eavesdrop and spy on their neighbors. Gossip plays a large part in the story and is Sproul's attempt to satirize the small-mindedness of a New England town. The portraits of the two old biddies who periodically come to Wilson's door with tales of what they saw and heard are done amusingly and show Sproul's flair for character dialogue. The abundance of  evidence gathered through eavesdropping, however, gets to be irritating by the last third of the book.

That Wilson does not actually discover much of the physical evidence himself is no real concern to Sproul. She has given him an innate talent as a truth seeker: "One of the qualities that had made him so successful as a detective was his remarkable ability to feel psychological subtleties--to feel a personal conviction, not often needing to be altered later, the truth of what he was hearing at any time." She seems to be reflecting a quality of early 20th century fictional detectives that shows the influence of Anthony Berkeley's ideas of what detective fiction ought to be about. The talent for observing human nature and seeing through deception and lies, and for "feeling" or sensing criminal behavior are traits more often found in women detectives like Mrs. Warrender created by the Coles, Maud Silver, and Solange Fontaine whose talent for sensing evil stems more from an undefined supernatural origin than a highly developed psychological insight. Wilson belongs more to the intuitive school of detectives and is more self-doubting than his male counterparts. His reliance on others to provide him with the results he ought to be finding on his own makes him less of a detective hero than his male counterparts in the genre.

The New England setting has its touches of archetypal characters and a bit of a Hawthorne touch in the person of the "village idiot" Gracien Lowell. Here is a woman who lost her son in a horrific accident that ended in a fatal explosion in the physics lab. She descends into a severe depression, leading eventually to madness and becomes a recluse, almost mute, hiding away and allowing her house to fall into disrepair serving as a metaphor for her ever disintegrating mental and emotional state. There was an opportunity here for some eerie touches of Gothic sensibility but Sproul instead chooses to have other characters talk about Gracien Lowell and we get third hand assessments of who she is. Wilson meets Gracien only once and the scene instead of being poignant is almost comic. She has some privileged information that she is reluctant to talk about for she can speak but chooses not to. But by the time she decides to speak up and seek out Wilson it is too late.

My experience with reading academic mystery novels has been almost exclusively with the type of detective novel that uses the milieu of an insular intellectual world to reflect selfishness, opportunism in one's career and the typical rivalries and jealousies that arise out of competing for tenure and positions of influence and power. Sproul explores all of these but with less grace or insight than most writers who choose to satirize ivory tower thinking. The faculty here are petty, spiteful and extremely juvenile. There are two characters who have an assured manner, speak in voices that reflect the kind of arrogance you would expect from academics who think police and outsiders have no understanding of the importance of their work. And it is those characters the reader is most likely to finger as the murderer. The rest of the cast exist as stereotypes of jealous lovers behaving more like horny teenagers as in the case of the woman cheating on her husband who meets her lover in the physics lab for a nightly sexual rendezvous.

Kathleen Sproul had an interesting career as a writer. She wrote five detective novels in between 1932 and 1946 and then became a staff writer for The Saturday Review. Her book reviews  and nonfiction articles appeared regularly throughout the 1950s, many of her essays were cover stories. But her love for the detective novel never left her. For a brief time in 1951 she took over the duties of reviewing mystery and detective fiction for The Saturday Review's "The Criminal Record" monthly column. Most of her books are rather scarce and with the exception of this title were published only in the US. I know of no contemporary reprints or paperback editions of any of her books which makes the likelihood of finding any of them even more remote. Based on this one offering I doubt that I will be investigating any more of her mystery novels. Her insights as a mystery reviewer, however, are right on target. At least they match my tastes and I have found her snippet reviews in "The Criminal Record" columns to be an excellent guide in finding new writers and books for my own neverending hunger for the genre.

Kathleen Sproul's Detective Novels
The Birthday Murder (1932)
Death and the Professors (1933)
Murder Off Key (1934)
The Mystery of the Closed Car (1935)
Death Listened In (1946)

TUESDAY NIGHT BLOGGERS: The May Day Mystery - Octavus Roy Cohen

Throughout the 1920s there was a subgenre of popular fiction that I've never bothered reading. It also made its way into films and radio. I'm talking about collegiate fiction -- stories of wealthy frat boys with slang filled vocabulary only their peers would understand, flapper coeds with bobbed hair and scandalously short skirts, and stodgy "ivy-covered professors in ivy covered halls" as Tom Lehrer once put it. The students fell madly in love, went to parties where they got drunk on bootleg whiskey and maybe did a little cocaine or smoked marijuana. There were pranks and scandals, lots of bed hopping, and sometimes a murder or two.

Universities were the perfect microcosm for the detective novel. A closed community of suspects in which passionate love affairs, envy among academics play a crucial part in the story. Petty jealousies played out in the dormitory hallways as well as the the lecture halls can often lead to violent and murderous reactions. The May Day Mystery (1929) is a prime example of the blending of the collegiate novel and the detective novel that was just catching on in the United States. It's also the first novel length adventure in crime solving for one of the more unusual detectives in the genre - bank insurance investigator Jim Hanvey.

Set in Alabama on the campus of a college not far from Birmingham The May Day Mystery starts off with an involved tale of a campus hotbed of unhealthy love affairs among a group of college friends and the cad named Paterson Thayer at the center of all the jealous rivalry. The first third of the book details a series of intersecting relationships, some of them very sexual, that have made Thayer the scorn of both men and women on the campus of Marland University. We learn that one woman was duped into marrying Thayer while at a football game in one of those silly bets that crazy, drunken college kids are known to indulge in. If the one team that appears to be losing wins, she must marry him. She foolishly agrees thanks to the giddiness of the day and the alcohol-befogged mind.  Now she's under his power for he has turned the marriage into a tool of extortion.  And because reputation is everything in novels of this type she also agrees to pay him hush money to spare herself further humiliation.

That's not all Thayer has done. He's seduced several women and promised marriage to at least one naive freshman woman. Yes, that makes him a potential bigamist. He's angered that young woman's current boyfriend and caught the ire of her brother, a teaching assistant in a graduate program who is secretly in love with Thayer's pseudo-wife Antoinette "Tony" Peyton. It's a mess of hormones gone haywire and hearts in torment -- exactly the kind of thing that still goes on in colleges these days. Thayer has it coming to him, don't you think? And someone gives it to him but good. One night he's found dead from a stab wound in his jugular but the weapon has gone missing.

Jim Hanvey enters the picture when he's called on to investigate a bank robbery in Marland. A masked burglar robbed the bank of a $100,000 payroll and escaped after being shot by one of the bank employees. Hanvey is employed by the Banker's Protective Associaton, a financial insurer and it's his job to track down the missing money and turn in the culprit to the police. The primary suspect is Max Vernon whose car happened to be the getaway vehicle.

Vernon is a well known college kid in Marland and also the wealthiest. He opened a very rich bank account when he started school two years ago and due to his frequent visits has become familiar to the bank staff. He is also the boyfriend of Ivy Welch, the girl Thayer seduced into a marriage proposal and was the last person to see Thayer alive. He's not only the prime suspect for the bank robbery but for Thayer's murder. Hanvey is asked to clear Vernon's name of the murder and prove he is the thief. The banker has a soft spot for Vernon and would rather see him on trial for theft rather than murder. In fact, he's well loved by all the students and faculty. He's the rich boy with the heart of gold. Not so much a smart rich boy though, as he's been going through his money like mad. Why? Because he's also something of a gambling addict. Guess who he owed loads of dough after a series of two handed poker games? That's right -- Paterson Thayer. "What a skunk!" as one of the characters says of Thayer.

Jim Hanvey (right) as drawn by George Brehm
"The Frame-Up" (The American, June 1928)

What makes Hanvey unique in early American detectives is that's he's far from sophisticated. Described as a overweight giant with an ugly countenance but a friendly manner Jim Hanvey prides himself in his country bumpkin ways. He's fond of saying "Durned if I know" when asked of his opinion of his own perspicacious findings. He relies on common sense and honesty, and like Columbo is apt to lead the suspects into thinking he's addle brained. Despite his self-effacing remarks about his lack of intelligence Hanvey is anything but stupid.

He's also got a real heart and is one of the more affable of the humanistic fictional detectives. When the harsh and narrow-minded John Reagan belittles Ivy Welch for falling in love with Thayer he calls it "kid stuff".  Hanvey counters this prejudicial remark: "Only remember this, John -- when a girl of seventeen falls in love, it ain't kid stuff to her, no matter what it seems like to other folks. I think maybe everybody would have done better to realize that Ivy Welch was a woman grown."

Moody portrait of Octavus Roy Cohen (circa 1930s)

Prior to this novel length case Hanvey appeared in a series of short stories originally published in the "slicks", magazines like The American, Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. Most of those stories were about his financial investigations and his clever trickery in revealing the crooked ways of the crooks he set out to capture. The May Day Mystery is his first attempt at solving a murder and he makes a neat job of it even to the finale with a traditional lecture in the roomful of suspects. The clues are for the most part right there for the reader to discover when Hanvey finds them and the unmasking of the villain turned out to be quite a surprise.

The particular college crime story is more concerned with student life than the lives of the teaching staff, though Hanvey does interview a few of the professors. Cohen was for a brief time on the English faculty of an Alabama university before he hit it big in radio and movie script writing. The student scenes, though they tend to be heavy on the melodrama, do ring very true. Their speech is youthful and bitingly funny. Very different from the older adults in the book. I liked the 1920s slang that the students threw around with ease. Some of it I'd never encountered before.

It's remarkable to me how college really hasn't changed in over 80 years. Students of the 1920s seemed to be more interested in sex and drinking, frat life and parties than their studies just as today. Their underhanded methods in obtaining alcohol during Prohibition actually seem more wily than the ways modern underage students go about getting booze with fake IDs and other methods. Because the novel was written in 1929 I expected a subplot involving hooch and bootleg alcohol. It shows up late in the story and is introduced almost matter-of-factly for something so illegal. Yet it turns out to be fairly important in the solution of the crime.

Towards the end of the book Cohen writes of the effects of crime of the student body. It's the one real eye-opening paragraph that delivers a blow with subtle impact, one that resonates with the kind of random, mad violence that shows up on our college campuses today:

The tragedy had cast a pall over the campus; yet it had brought a new and strange excitement. Even Commencement, which at this season of the year usually loomed up as being all-important seemed a matter of little moment. Examinations held terrors for very few students. It was as though they had been confronted by some of the starkness of life a month ahead of time. Human life, human love... examinations and Bachelor's degrees seemed of small moment by comparison.

Jim Hanvey Series
Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923) - collection of six novellas
The May Day Mystery (1929)
The Backstage Mystery (1930)
Star of Earth (1932)

There are a few other Jim Hanvey stories found in two other Octavus Roy Cohen collections. Detours (1927) and Scrambled Yeggs (1934) each contain one story with the bank investigator.
*   *   * This post serves a dual purpose for two blog memes: The Tuesday Night Bloggers who, during the month of June, are exploring the academic mystery and crime novels with an educational bent as well as "The Crime of The Century" challenge at Past Offenses where we are reading books published in 1929.

TUESDAY CLUB: Death under Sail - C. P. Snow

The shipboard mystery or nautical mystery novel is just as prevalent in the Golden Age as those set on a train. Death on the Nile may very well be the quintessential detective novel set on board a ship. Freeman Wills Crofts is better known for his train mysteries but he wrote quite a few with ships and yachts including The Sea Mystery, Mystery in the Channel, The Loss of the 'Jane Vosper', and Mystery on Southampton Water (Crime on the Solent in the US). A small sampling of other titles: Hate Ship by Bruce Graeme, Singing in the Shrouds and A Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh, and Too Much of Water by Bruce Hamilton.

The American writers were just as good at setting murders on board luxury yachts, cruise ships, military craft, submarines and rowboats just as well as their British counterparts. S.S. Murder by Q. Patrick tells of a bridge party on board a yacht and one of the card players being done in. Obelists at Sea by C. Daly King is the debut detective novel featuring the erudite and long winded Dr. L. Rees Pons. John Dickson Carr's shipboard mystery The Blind Barber is more farce than detective novel, but as Carter Dickson Nine-And Death Makes Ten (aka Murder in the Submarine Zone) is rather unique in that the ship featured is a military cargo carrier that is been temporarily assigned as a passenger ship and the plot brings up all sorts of maritime laws during WW2 including how the blackout rules in England extended to ships and cruise lines. Rufus King made an entire career of writing about killers dispatching their victims at sea in titles such as Murder on the Yacht, Murder by Latitude, The Lesser Antilles Case, Murder Masks Miami and many, many more.

This may lead you to believe that I'll be writing about one of these American shipboard mysteries and I thought I was going to do so, too. That is until I uncovered my very old copy of Death under Sail (1932) and decided to finally give it its long overdue examination.

A wherry yacht and all its parts

Roger Mills, physician and yachting enthusiast, invites six friends on an excursion through the Broads, the system of rivers and lakes in Norfolk. The morning after picking up Ian Capel, the oldest guest and narrator of Death Under Sail, Roger is found shot dead still holding on to the tiller in the stern well (see plan of The Siren below). Though the murder in C. P. Snow's very first work of fiction (and first of only two detective novels) does indeed take place on a ship -- specifically a wherry yacht -- the majority of the book actually takes place on land. The yachting party is confined to a bungalow several miles down the River Bure and a short jaunt up the River Thurne in the Norfolk village of Potter Heigham. There they stew, fester and fret doing their best to endure the Puritan tirades of shrewish housekeeper Mrs. Tufts and undergoing absurd interrogations from Det.-Sgt. Aloysius Birrell who seems to have learned most of his techniques from one volume of criminology and about a dozen detective novels.

The novel at first appears to be a parody of the detective novel. Birrell comes off as a comic character from the moment of his entrance where his apparent reckless driving of a police motorboat causes a violent wake to capsize the dinghy sending three men into the river. Contrasted with Birrell, is the omniscient amateur sleuth Finbow who is a friend of Ian Capel's and who Capel calls in to help investigate the puzzling death of Roger Mills. Finbow spends much of his time observing, flattering the suspects into revealing themselves, and eavesdropping on people's private conversations like any good amateur detective of the Golden Age would do. Ethics have nothing to do with crime solving where Finbow is concerned. He also spends a lot of time expounding some of Snow's own personal beliefs which interestingly will serve as the foundation for his later mission in life as spokesman for the scientific mind. All these mini-lectures seem to be thrown in to distract the reader. But Snow has plotted the book in a devious fashion and despite the lectures that appear to be filler the book is actually very much in the fair play tradition.

There is a lot of talk about the routine that develops on a ship when people travel in such a confined space like the Siren. The murderer must have been aware of who did what and where they went every morning, Finbow surmises. Ian is therefore eliminated from the start as he has only been on board the Siren for a single day and night. Not long enough for anyone else to know where he might be when Roger was shot. The rest of the detective work is done along these lines. Snow might have been influenced by the detective novels of Anthony Berkeley who was a pioneer in stressing the importance of psychological motive and human behavior in crime fiction. There is not much physical evidence to review. Rather, Finbow is more interested in why Avice is so frightened and why her crying seems to be more acting than genuine, why William remained shirtless on the morning of the murder and the importance of how he undresses, why Tonia appears to be in love with Phillip but may be masking a hidden love affair, and why Christopher needed to get out of his wet clothes so quickly after the capsizing of the dinghy. These "psychological insights" are what lead Finbow to eliminate most of the suspects eventually leading him to the identity and motive of the killer. He develops a list of five important questions that include all the suspects and each question is answered in grand detail in the final chapter. It is only then that the reader learns that everything mattered, each incident and discussion was essential to the story. It's all brilliantly done with some bravura misdirection that even the most seasoned detective fiction aficionados will not spot.

THINGS I LEARNED: Though not much is discussed about the wherry itself or the Broads I needed to satisfy my curiosity and so I looked up all sorts of photos of Norfolk locales mentioned along the rivers shown on Finbow's map. Then I visited a fascinating website with photos of families and friends on their wherry yachts and got to see just how the Norfolk towns looked at the time when Snow's novel was set and even earlier. In fact, the bulk of the photos are from the post World War I era. You can look at the same photos if you so desire by going to Broadland Memories.

MCC is mentioned in passing but I had no idea what the characters were talking about. The passage is here: "Tradition, my boy," William broke in sharply. "Like the M.C.C. and Public Schools. Doing a thing twice is good enough reason for doing it forever." Based on the linking of tradition with MCC and public schools I'm guessing William means the Marylebone Cricket Club which controlled the way both amateur and professional cricket was played for over three centuries. From the info I looked up the MCC still owns the copyright on cricket rules that were created back in the late 18th century. Apparently another group known as the ICC (International Cricket Club) is trying to wrest control from them and make a more harmonious, less rigid rule governing board for international cricket playing.

One of the many Penguin reprints

EASY TO FIND? Yes, indeed. Luckily, Death Under Sail was chosen as one of the "Top 50 Detective Novels from 1900-1950" by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor. That selection allowed the book to be reprinted multiple times since its original 1932 publication. Several paperback reprints are available in the used book market in both US and UK editions. And you can still find a few copies of either the Doubleday Crime Club 1st edition (US) or the Collins Crime Club 1st edition (UK) if you're willing to shell out $75 or more. The prices for the paperback reprints, of course, are much more reasonable and there are literally hundreds of copies out there. Happy hunting!

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This is my second post on travel in detective fiction which is the theme for May for the group of vintage mystery fiction fans who call themselves "The Tuesday Bloggers." Other links are here:

Throw Mama (or Anyone Else) from the Train! - Bev at My Reader's Block
Christie on Holiday - Moira at Clothes in Books
Why Set a Murder Mystery on Holiday or a Mode of Transportation? - Kate at Cross-Examining Crime
This Train Is Bound for Gory - Brad at Ah! Sweet Mystery
 Coach Tours to Crime - Helen at Your Freedom and Ours

Deliver Us from Wolves - Leonard Holton

US 1st edition (Dodd Mead, 1963)

Part of the mystique of foreign travel is the total immersion in a different culture. A true traveler does not want to be cocooned in the familiarity of fast food restaurants or signs pointing out everything in English or anything that reminds one of home. Rather he wants to experience the wealth of difference in food, language, and habits of the new country he's visiting. In Deliver Us from Wolves (1963) Father Bredder, the series detective in Leonard Holton's mystery novels, is lucky to have at least the language skills in hand when he is accepts a free round trip ticket to Portugal won by his housekeeper who cannot go. He plans on visiting the holy shrine of the Virgin at Fatima and also is told by his own bishop in California to pay a call on the Bishop of Leiria. When he arrives he discovers the timing of his visit could not have been more fortuitous. His education in a very different part of Portuguese culture will take him into the realm of superstition and the paranormal.

The title Deliver Us from Wolves is the English translation of the Latin phrase "Libera nos a lupis" which keeps cropping up in the oddest places during Father Bredder's brief but very strange stay in Portugal. He first encounters it on a strange claw shaped stone sold to him in a tourist shop filled with tacky souvenirs depicting the image of the Virgin of Fatima on everything from handkerchiefs to kaleidoscopes. The stone turns out to be a talisman and the shopkeeper tells him of the legend of the werewolf that hangs over their town. When Father Bredder visits the Bishop of Leiria he learns even more about the legend of Pedro da Malveira who seems to have once again risen from his grave.

US paperback (Dell 1887, 1966)

Several dead lambs were found on the surrounding farms and at each site a series of bloody wolf footprints that suddenly turn into human footprints have been discovered. A local man has also disappeared and the fear is that he has also been attacked by the ghost of Pedro da Malveira, a 17th century thief executed for witchcraft. The townspeople have succumbed to the legend again and the talk of wolves and lobishomen, the Portuguese word for werewolf, will not stop. Fear and suspicion are controlling the daily habits population. The Bishop would like Father Bredder to discover who is up to mischief and put an end to the werewolf superstitions so the town can return to normal life.

Our priest detective undergoes a crash course in the Portuguese culture and the reader learns with him a lot about Portuguese history and the odd variations of how the werewolf legend is incorporated into their culture. Father Bredder meets Father Painter, a British priest sent to the local parish, who has not been living up to his calling. Church attendance is down and the English priest is apparently is not well liked by the townspeople. In a series of didactic scenes he lectures Father Bredder on the architecture of Portuguese castles, the history of the trial of Pedro Da Malveira, and the local werewolf superstitions. The most interesting aspect of Portuguese lobishomen is the melding of vampire and zombie lore into the werewolf myth. Some of more bizarre features include: the lobishomen has an enlarged big toe, he must return to his grave by daybreak, and he must seek out a new human form by killing a living human in order to make his transformation complete.

Father Bredder is convinced that someone is taking advantage of the lobishomen legend and the story of Pedro da Malveira to cover up some other type of criminal activity. His personal knowledge of his life as a former Marine and the training of attack dogs in his service come into play and help him as a detective in this "busman's holiday" type of book. The detection, however, is limited as the book takes on more of a supernatural/adventure thriller with lots of action sequences replacing the usual scenes of detection.

Iberian Wolf (photo: Terry Whittaker)

Like many of the other books in the Father Bredder series Holton uses a crime plot to discuss aspects of Catholic religion. Here the story of superstitious minded people makes it all the more easy to bring up discussions about the secular minded person contrasted to the man of faith. In addition to the fearful townspeople the priest encounters an atheistic schoolteacher who will not allow even a simple cross in her schoolroom. She shuns all talk of God and will not teach religion to her students. Her brother is the man who has disappeared and Father Bredder suspects he has been killed and the body disposed of or hidden someone in order that the werewolf legend can flourish. He also suspects that her brother was involved in some sort of criminal scheme that leads him to the castle high above the village of Sao Joaquin da Serra where he meets the imperious Countess of Castelbranco.

Deliver Us from Wolves is the fourth book in a series of eleven adventures with Father Bredder. Most of the books are set in Los Angeles where the priest is the parish leader at a convent school. In some of them he travels outside of California, but I believe it is only in this book where he leaves the United States. I learned an awful lot about werewolves, Portuguese culture and religion, Portuguese fortress building (to build on what I already knew from reading Shelley Smith's This Is the House) and the existence of the Iberian wolf, a species of wolf smaller than the North American gray wolf and geographically confined to Portugal and southern Spain. Reading this very unusual and highly entertaining mystery -- oh yes, there's a murder and several other crimes to solve within its pages -- has been the most immersive learning experience in a foreign culture that I've had this year without ever stepping out of my comfortable couch at home.

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This essay is my contribution for "The Tuesday Night Bloggers," a group of vintage mystery book bloggers who write on a specific theme each Tuesday. Throughout the month of May the members of this neo-Tuesday Club will write on various aspects of travel as featured in vintage detective and mystery fiction. Other posts can be found at Curt Evan's highly informative blog The Passing Tramp.  Why not check 'em out?