FFB: The Hidden Light - Max Dalman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herald of Death - Max Dalman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOONLIGHTERS: Will Oursler, Son of a Mystery Writer

The first novel Will Oursler wrote was also his first detective novel. The Trial of Vincent Doon (1941) is presented as if it were an actual murder case and consists entirely of a facsimile of the court transcript accompanied by drawings, house plans, photographs and a full set of People’s Exhibits. No doubt this was inspired by the latest fad -- solve-them-yourself murder puzzles like those in the Baffle Books published by Doubleday Crime Club and the crime dossiers created by Dennis Wheatley and J. G. Links with titles like Murder Off Miami and Who Killed Robert Prentice? These dossiers included not just photographs of the evidence as in Oursler’s novel, but the actual evidence: pieces of threads, real fingerprint sheets, and in one case a cellophane envelope containing real hair. The Trial of Vincent Doon is unique as a first novel in its structure and gimmickry, but as a novel it is not very original nor even thrilling.

Philip Strong, is the criminal defense lawyer for Doon and is clearly modeled on Perry Mason. His partner James Matthew acts as the narrator/compiler and periodically makes commentary on Strong and the case in footnotes a la the Van Dine detective novels. The story involves a lover’s triangle that leads to a stabbing murder of strait-laced Edwin Hallet. The accused is a jealous painter, Vincent Doon, who was working on a portrait of Betty Van Eyck. Hallet was to marry Betty but Doon claims she never loved her fiancée, that she was really in love with him.

Though Oursler may think he was being clever and original l this book is heavily reminiscent of Gardner’s Perry Mason series, especially the later books which contain lengthy courtroom scenes designed mostly to live up to the formulaic TV series. Like the Perry Mason TV series and most of the books the most interesting parts of Oursler’s story are not the complicated plot, unusual motivations and surprise confessions on the stand, but the quirky trivia-laden testimony of expert witnesses. In The Trial of Vincent Doon the most fascinating part of the book, the most interesting to read, is the testimony of a telephone repairman!

He answers a series of seemingly irrelevant questions which are objected to by the prosecution but are allowed by the judge. Strong insists that the phone repair and the ringing of a phone at a certain time on the night of the murder is crucial to understanding the apparent alibis of people other than Doon. And so the reader is treated to some intriguing and true telephone repair tricks like a special code that repairmen can dial into any phone that will make the phone ring after hanging up. This is definitely true. As a teen back in the 1970s I was given that special code (which changed over the years and was different depending on where you lived in the US) by some savvy friend of mine whose father was in telecommunications. I would play tricks on my brothers and my mother all the time by dialing the three digit code, hanging up and leaving the house.

Apart from the telephone repairman’s testimony and frequent displays of Strong’s devious methods in getting witnesses to reveal their true character on the stand the book consists entirely of a run-of-the mill courtroom drama. Oursler even manages to manipulate circumstances so that the killer confesses on the stand. Perhaps one of the few innovations prior to it becoming cliché. And thanks for that can go entirely to the Perry Mason TV series.

Much better is Oursler’s sequel Folio on Florence White (1942) once again with Matthews, this time as full-fledged first person narrator, and Strong as defense attorney cum detective. The gimmick of the casebook forgoes the courtroom transcript and People’s exhibits but as the title tells us it is indeed a folio. Interspersed between narrative chapters we get letters, memos, phone messages, transcripts of depositions all designed with different fonts and illustrated elements to give the illusion that they are actual documents.

The cast of characters is relatively familiar in this story of wealthy businessmen, adultery, corporate malfeasance and the theft of company assets. Florence has been wrongly convicted of theft of securities two years ago and has recently been released from prison. Her rival who testified against her, Evelyn Emory, is killed by cyanide poisoning. Flo is arrested. Later, another witness from the old security theft crime is also killed. His wife thinks it is a heart attack. But autopsy proves poisoning by cyanide. Is someone getting even for Flo’s wrongful imprisonment?

In one of the novel’s most memorable sequences Strong does some actual sleuthing at a potter’s field, based on an actual cemetery with a gruesome history (see THINGS I LEARNED section). A visit to Harlem gives us a scene relatively free of prejudice in which Strong and Matthews feel out of their element when they realize they are treated as outsiders and intruders. While there is an open hostility expressed Oursler does not go the 1940s PC route by making the white people seem like they know everything. Nor are the Blacks turned into ludicrous cartoons for comic effect. Strong and Matthews learn a lot about themselves in this scene and the Black characters are depicted with sympathy and wisdom.

Complicating the story of Flo’s supposed guilt in the murder of Evelyn is the disappearance of Harvey Mason, owner of Mason Aircraft where she and Evelyn worked. A tramp dies with no form of identity found on his body and the after the legal limit of waiting for a relative to claim the body it is sent to a potter’s field. Strong orders an exhumation of the corpse thinking they can prove that the trap is actually Harvey Mason who was put into tramp’s clothing. When the coffin is opened, the body is gone. Shades of John Dickson Carr!

The Potter's Field on Hart Island, 1898
(courtesy of Bowery Boys website)

THINGS I LEARNED: The history of the island is described in detail which led me to check up on the story. Turns out Oursler merely changed the name to Planker’s Island and described it as having once been owned by a rich Dutchman named E. Van Dyrk Planker who after his death bequeathed the island to New York City for use as dumping ground for 'refuse and trashe.'  He based the setting on a cemetery located on Hart Island, written up lately in various online articles as “a place of strangeness and sorrow” and “New York City’s potter’s field.” The New York City Corrections Department maintained and supervised burials for in its earliest life the island was home to a Confederate soldiers’ prison. For decades after the Civil War prisoners were tasked with burying bodies of unclaimed corpses that had been consigned to New York City’s morgue. To this day prisoners still tend to the grounds and bury the dead on Hart Island, but the prisoners come from Riker’s Island as the prison on Hart Island is long since abandoned and fallen into ruins. Hart Island has also been used to bury HIV victims during the AIDS crisis and victims of Hurricane Sandy. Most recently hundreds of people killed by COVID-19 have been buried here. Oddly, these days Hart’s Island is under the direction of the New York Department of Parks and Recreation but the public has never been able to visit. This may be changing soon in light of the consequences of the pandemic.

THE AUTHOR: Will Oursler (1914-1985) whose work was previously featured and discussed here back in 2015 was the son of mystery writer, journalist and Catholic spokesperson Charles Fulton Oursler, better known to vintage mystery fans as “Anthony Abbot.”  Oursler, the son, also made his living in journalism as a war correspondent, appeared on talk radio as a panelist and wrote several books, like his father, on religion or with theological themes. I call him a moonlighter because out of a total of 45 books (fiction and non-fiction) only eight of his novels qualify as detective fiction. Remarkably, I recently discovered he served as Vice President of Mystery Writers of America. So I guess he was very much involved in the crime fiction world and not really a dabbling moonlighter at all. In addition to the two books featuring Strong and Matthews as protagonists Oursler wrote two other novels modeled on these folios without the lawyer duo, two Gale Gallagher books in collaboration with Margaret Scott using the main character, a female skip tracer/private eye, as their pseudonym and as "Nick Marino" an additional two crime novels.

Poison Unknown - Max Dalman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FFB: The Deadly Climate - Ursula Curtiss

"How very losable your identity was, Caroline thought, lulled and drowsy. Stripped of your social security card, your charge plates, that old, old reminder from your dentist, you became nobody, or anyone at all."

Caroline Emmett has been sent to a rest home in Wicklow, Massachusetts upon orders from her doctor. There she will recuperate from pneumonia and mental duress following her discovery of her husband's dallying with a woman half his age. Walking in the countryside she finds to be more therapeutic than any treatment from her nurses and doctors at the rest home. One evening she takes a detour from her regular path and climbs up a hill. She witnesses the brutal beating of a woman at the hands of a bulky figure wearing a man's raincoat. Or so she thinks. He shines his flashlight on her leaving it there for several minutes and Caroline flees. Bad weather -- rain and wind -- force her to seek shelter before she can return to her room. She manages to gain entry to the home of the Olivers where she tells her story while they listen with a mixture of disbelief and curiosity. She'll remain here for the next twelve hours while the killer in the raincoat tracks her down.

This is familiar territory to be sure -- the eyewitness to a crime who seems to have imagined everything. Of course no body is found where Caroline said she saw the attack. But don't expect the story to fall into the trap of a well-worn formula and an obvious unfolding of events. Enter Carmichael, the editor and owner of the local newspaper, with a nose for news and a healthy dose of common sense. He is the only one who believes Caroline. With the permission of a lackadaisical and skeptical policeman named Trunz the newsman heads out to the crime site to do some real work. He quickly finds two sets of footprints in the mud and a woman's patent leather shoe. Size 9. Something bad has happened he is sure. And he begins his dogged search for the woman with one shoe. Or her dead body.

Ursula Curtiss was the daughter of Golden Age mystery writer and police procedural pioneer Helen Reilly. She came to writing fiction late in her life unlike her prolific mother, but seemed to have inherited her mother's talent for tight plotting, lively and original characters, and well rendered settings. She surpassed her mother with an enviable talent not too easily mastered in crime fiction.  Curtiss' mastery in nearly all her books is her skill in creating mounting dread and terror. In The Deadly Climate (1954) she creates a household of suspicion and paranoia. Caroline seems to have found a haven from the mysterious attacker but no one, not even the practical minded and forthright teenage daughter Lydia Oliver, is really on her side. Over the course of a single night the killer stalks Caroline, makes two attempts on her life, disables the only car available to the Olivers and turns their would-be refuge into one of peril. "It was infinitely worse...with the shades drawn," Curtiss writes of Caroline's racing thoughts. "Like breaking uncontrollably into a run, or giving way to tears, this hiding from the night let down the frail barrier of pretense."  Dread builds to the point where even a rambler rose scratching up against a makeshift cardboard window pane gives rise to fearful glances from the characters and a chill or two from the reader.

The world Curtiss creates is also one of arbitrary happenings, oddities and the just plain weird. While Caroline is attempting to gain allies in the Oliver family two strangers interrupt the night's already chaotic events. A young man appears selling storm windows and a middle-aged woman comes collecting donations for the Red Cross. Coincidence or devilish design? Everyone who makes an entrance in the story is questionable in their apparent innocent motives. Who sells storm windows during a storm? Only the most opportunistic of salesman, right? Is he even a salesman? Why does a woman go ringing doorbells in the rain asking for charitable donations? And why does Lydia insist that the woman is not Mrs. Vermilya as she claims she is?

Carmichael's investigation of the victim is the highlight of the story. Here Curtiss shows she knows how to spin a good detective novel. We watch him turn to the newspaper clippings in the morgue and ask for help from his reporter colleagues as far away as Pennsylvania. He begins to put together a jigsaw puzzle of the past that sheds light on a crime involving an illegal abortion operation and a suspicious suicide. Not that it's all fun and games for Carmichael. One of the more interesting moments is the unease and discomfort he experiences while rummaging through the victim's belongings in her hotel room. His discovery that she mended all her clothes including a wispy and intimately sheer nightgown allows him a moment of sadness mixed with shame. He sees her as a lonely woman who cared too much for her clothes but clearly had no money to spend on herself.

This book so skillful in its building of suspense and tension not surprisingly proved tempting for scriptwriters. It was adapted and filmed for television twice in Curtiss' lifetime. Once for the 1950s anthology program Climax! with what sounds like a great cast -- Nina Foch as Caroline, Kevin McCarthy as Carmichael and Estelle Winwood as Mrs. Oliver.  It was done again in 1968 for the British anthology series Detective about which I know nothing.

The Deadly Climate in the words of Anthony Boucher is "a throat-clutcher in the absolute, tightly and economically written." A better summation I could not devise myself. Copies of the book are readily available in both hardcover and paperback (four reprint paperback editions at my count) in the used book market. I'm sure her books will be found in your local library. Curtiss was quite popular in her day and was the kind of writer that librarians loved to keep on their shelves. None of her books, to my knowledge, are currently in print. More's the pity for lovers of excellent crime fiction.

Murder in Shinbone Alley - Helen Reilly

Barbara Baron, a student in fashion design at the International School of Design, is found in Shinbone Alley a forgotten byway in lower Manhattan. She plummeted to her death from the rooftop smoking terrace after modeling her winning design in the school's annual competitive fashion show. The sight of her body clad in her handmade bridal gown provides an ironic comment on her planned marriage to the school's president Jorden Fairchild. Suicide and accident are soon ruled out when McKee discovers evidence on the smoking terrace that Barbara had a visitor who gave her a fatal shove.  And it turns out that lots of people might have wanted to send her flying as Babs was a supercilious and loathesome woman.

For the first few chapters this is a fairly routine detective novel that I expected to have more insight into 1940s era police work. But truly it's more of a traditional fair play detective novel than it is police procedural. I was worried when the first few clues turn out to be tired cliches of the genre (a initialed handkerchief, used match sticks, for example) that it would continue down the pathway of the hackneyed. Then the theft of an Indian dagger used by one of the life models is stolen. McKee fears that the dagger will be used on one of the suspects who he is sure saw something on the terrace, but is unwilling to reveal his secret to the police. At this point the story picks up in pace and interest and all my fears of a lackluster story filled with familiar elements were assuaged.

The art school and the various characters who make up the teaching and business staff make for an atypical background and liven the proceedings. Suspicion falls on Nairn English, one of the students, and Philip Mountain, an art instructor. McKeee knows that each is withholding information and in the manner of Trent's Last Case seem to be protecting each other thinking the other is the killer. When the mentally challenged errand boy of the school, Willie Cleet, is found stabbed and Philip is seen fleeing the crime scene and climbing a wall with bloody hands McKee focuses his investigation on finding the art teacher and has his men follow Nairn hoping she will lead him to their suspect.

Highlights of the book include the scenes devoted to the minor police characters' contributions to the murder investigation. Todhunter, a mousey nearly invisible cop, has an uncanny ability to transform himself into other personae. He does a mean drunk impersonation and uses that skill to gain access to Nairn English and gets her to confide in him without letting on he is actually a policeman. Another officer, Captain Pierson, has a great scene where her pursues Nairn though the cemetery at Barbara Baron's funeral. He falls in a shallow grave muddying himself, loses his subject, picks up her trail again and finally tails her to Mountain's hiding place. It was one of the most cinematic set pieces in the book reminding me of a similar graveyard chase on foot in Hitchcock's Family Plot.

Helen Reilly was a pioneer in the police procedural novel. She was one of the first women writers tackling this subgenre as early as the late 1920s. Howard Haycraft said in Murder for Pleasure (1941) that her novels about McKee "are among the most convincing that have been composed on the premise of actual police procedure." Perhaps her other books show off her knowledge to better effect. Surprisingly, the books ends with one of those "gather the suspects in one room" scenes and McKee's seems like something out of an old Agatha Christie novel than the kind of book contemporary police procedurals are these days. Still, Murder in Shinbone Alley (1940) is an enjoyable detective novel with a truly surprising least likely person revealed as the murderer.

AVAILABILITY:  Luckily, this is a book that was reprinted in paperback edition by Macfadden and it went into two printings.  Multiple copies of one or the other are available online ranging from $2 to $15.  Not bad when I usually recommend books that 1. you can't find or 2. will cost you the equivalent of a winter month's heating bill.

This marks seventh book in the first part of my three part 2012 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge sponsored by Bev at My Reader's Block. Links to the previously reviewed books are listed below.

Part I. Perilous Policemen
The Case of the Beautiful Body - Jonathan Craig
Murder by the Clock - Rufus King
The Death of Laurence Vining - Alan Thomas
The Moon Murders - Nigel Morland
Killer's Wedge - Ed McBain
Exit Charlie - Alex Atkinson