Death of an Editor - Vernon Loder

The newspaper crowd has descended upon Marsh House but not without an invitation. The impromptu house party consists of a gossip columnist, an advertising man, two reporters from France, and a serial fiction writer. All of them are waiting to speak with Hay Smith, editor of The Daily Record, one of the papers owned by publisher Sir James Sitheby. The guests are kept busy at recreations devised by Miss Roe Gay, a professional hostess tending to the various guests while Sir James is up in London. But no one has a chance to see Hay Smith. Right after a game of miniature golf the group disperses and someone finds Smith dead in the study. He’s been shot in the head and facing a window left open that looks out on the nearby seashore. Inspector Brews investigates this Death of an Editor (1931) and soon the murder reveals a complex web of questionable journalistic ethics and possible espionage. 

 Though I was disappointed that this mystery novel lacked the surreal qualities and outrageous touches that I thought were Loder's hallmarks this was a competently constructed and engaging police procedural.  Loder probably belongs in the camp of the "humdrum" detective novelists because his detective novels are very much about puzzling out the how and the why of the murder moreso than about exploring character or creating atmosphere.  The characters here are a bit flat and tend to fall into familiar stock roles of popular fiction.

Interestingly, Brews is the first of only two police detectives Loder created who appeared in more than one novel.  This is his second outing after his debut in The Essex Murders (1930), reviewed here under the US title The Death Pool.  While there may not be any blow guns and poison darts or murder victims who fall into their own death trap I found the complexity in this one above par for the usual Loder mystery novel.

First off, it's a quasi impossible crime.  All evidence seems to make it appear that Smith was the victim of a sniper's rifle fired from Sir James' yacht that was moored a few hundred yards form the open window of the study.  Brews finds signs that a rifle was fired from an open porthole and a strange wire mesh target was still in the porthole leading one to believe that the shooter used the intersecting wires as a sight.  when Smith's head appeared in the center intersection the shooter fired at his victim. But then why leave the wire mesh behind?  It seems not only sloppy on the murderer's part but might be manufactured evidence.  Are the police supposed to believe someone outside the house is the killer?

There is a lot made of everyone's alibis.  Some of the guests were together seemingly ruling them out while others were engaged in solitary habits.  The shooting took place almost directly after a malfunctioning car backfired several times.  No one could tell which were the gunshots and which sounds same from the ailing car. One of the most intriguing bits of evidence is the corners of several pieces of paper found still clutched in Smith's right hand.  Was something torn from his hand just before he died?  And if so, was it the killer who took the papers?  Or was someone in the study after the murder and took the papers from Smith when he was already dead?  

These several mysteries will all be explained with one of the most surprising elements being the actual method and manner of Smith's murder.  The documents in question are a sort of Hitchcockian McGuffin.  Loder never really needed to explain what they were (though he does vaguely allude to state secrets and British occupation in India);  they are merely an object "of great importance" to most of the characters in order to further the plot.  When the Home Office gets involved and wants to retrieve those missing documents an element of espionage enters the story.  Impostors, multiple chase sequences, and even Brews taking on the disguise of a gamekeeper further complicate the story as he tries to suss out the killer, find the missing weapon and attempt to recover those vitally important missing documents.  Death of an Editor morphs from a rather cut-and-dried quasi-impossible crime mystery to an engaging adventure thriller with Brews hot on the trail of a ruthless and devious French woman who holds the key to all the various mysteries.

THINGS I LEARNED: The world of bore guns or what Loder calls collector’s guns was revealed to me in the pages of Death of an Editor. Eventually the murder weapon is discovered to be a .410 bore rifle. He describes a weapon that was marketed to young men and teens in the advertising pages of boy’s magazines. I did some a-Googling and found several photos of these guns along with a couple of pages from period weapon catalogs. In the March 2022 issue of The Vintage Gun Journal I found an article titled “The Poacher’s Companion” all about these unique folding rifles. The article said this was the rifle of choice for poachers because they could easily fold up the gun and shove it out of sight into the deep pockets of their ulster or hunting jacket. Loder mentions that they were often called collector’s guns because there were used by people who collected bird specimens. Apparently the shot fired would kill the bird without obliterating the delicate body the collector would then take to a taxidermist.

QUOTES: “Look at the fever for all kinds of quack psychology in America. Every detective novel is full of it, and, what is worse for the police there, the country is infested with alienists, and experts full of mouth-filling words, who can prove that any criminal is not a criminal, but only ten years old.”

“There is a tendency...among newspapers to forget the purveying of news, and attempt the purveying of politics.”

Psychoanalysts to the contrary, [Brews] did not believe that egotists killed people. Narcissism is a full-time job.

“I have the advantage and the disadvantage of being a provincial, even a country detective -- that is to say, I am expected to do the work of a wise man while being regarded as an inevitable fool.”
“Which is the most advantageous, Mr. Brews?” she asked laughing.
“Being regarded as an ass,” he replied promptly.

Hard work and team work form the basis of police investigations; with a superstructure of observation and inquiry rather than lucky intuition. But, when the ends of the threads do begin to show, there is no one better at synthesis than your experienced detective. He knots up much faster than he unravels....

Three Detective Novels by Brian Flynn

The more I read of Brian Flynn the more I realize why he was never recognized or remembered for his work. He just isn’t consistently good. First off, he is a terrible prose stylist in his early books with some awful sentence structures that were screaming out to an editor for a full-on assault of the blue pencil.  His page length paragraphs are syntactically irksome, the narrative gets repetitive with redundant “our story thus far” recaps, he uses eccentric vocabulary when plain language will serve better  (vaticinate is a favorite bizarre word choice instead of foretell or prognosticate) All of these sins pile up sometimes on the same page and are detrimental to his engaging plots and lively incidents. I’m trying to forgive him for all of this but it’s hard to ignore when an avalanche of verbosity occurs in the most inconvenient places impeding the enjoyment of the story and interrupting the flow of action.

The biggest of his sins, however, is his failure to honor the fair play tradition. The adventures of Anthony Bathurst are overloaded with last minute reveals with nary a clue offered up that relates to that reveal. He indulges in the unfavorable practice of having a character lowering a speaking voice and not recording what is said. In essence they whisper to each other without the benefit of the reader knowing what was said. Similarly, characters write things on pieces of paper rather than openly speaking their ideas once again leaving the reader left out of the action. Makes me boil.  Grrr...

One thing I particularly dislike – an indulgence I think Flynn must have thought was uproariously funny – is his habit of taking cliches and aphorisms and rewriting them to make them sound like jokes. I found examples of this annoying gimmick in each one of the books I recently read. To do this in one or two books as an homage to the renowned Mrs. Malaprop, say, would be acceptable. But it happens all the time, in all of his books. Flynn never seems to grow tired of his dubious wordplay. Everyone engages in this paraphrasing of proverbs (a preposterous idea for any fiction writer), including Bathurst himself. I’ve cited several of them in the capsule reviews below.

And yet...  somehow I can't get enough of these books!  What keeps me reading are Flynn’s inventive plots, his unceasing imagination and his absolute love for the genre. He really does love a mystery. In The Ebony Stag, for example, Bathurst makes an allusion to Monsieur Hanaud, the French detective created by A.E. W. Mason, best known for his star turn in The House of the Arrow. Detective short stories and novels are repeatedly mentioned as often as Flynn’s habit of having Bathurst cite obscure poems and arcane works of literature. Additionally, Flynn was willing to experiment with the form in his later years deviating from the formulae of the traditional Q&A investigation, evidence gathering and clue hunting to try his hand at pulpish thrillers, Grand Guignol horror, inverted detective novels and in one specific book a rather mature handling of the psychological crime novel specifically dealing with a theme later explored by dozens of crime fiction writers– the infection of a crime on an individual's moral character and conscience. Flynn gets better at plotting once he reached the third decade of his career in the 1940s. I only wish he abandoned some of his irksome writing habits as he seemed to mature in other areas like concocting deviously engineered murders, devising unusual motivations and plumbing the depths of murderous minds with trenchant insight.

The Padded Door (1932),  11th book in the series Dislike the heavy-handed metaphor of the title taken from a line that appears in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde. The line is used an epigraph to the novel. It refers to a prisoner awaiting the "hangman with his gardener’s gloves/Slip[ping] through the padded door."  The novel begins with a well-used plot motif – a man wrongfully accused of murder and the desperate fight to get him acquitted at trial. First half of the novel tells the story of the trial and how the defense manages to pull off a miracle. Second half is a murder mystery when a shocking reveal of a second murder victim upends the plot's main thrust.

I pride myself on seeing through the biggest piece of misdirection in this cleverly told story. Flynn breaks a few rules here, almost pulling off a trick worthy of one Agatha Christie’s best mystery novels. But he let his cards show before the final reveal. Fair play clueing is present for some bits, otherwise I’d not have been tipped off.  In other areas, however Bathurst delivers some info in the final pages without ever letting the reader know what he was doing. The Stilton cheese business, for example, was utterly unfair but easily could have been dealt with in a subtle and fair manner. There is also some unfair business when the doctor who examines the murder victim gives us details about the time of death. Huge cheat on Flynn’s part that may mislead most readers. This is later explained, but the reason is lazy and lame.

REWRITTTEN APHORISM (spoken by Sir Robert Frant, father of the accused on trial) "There are two ends of the candle, you know, and combustion should only be at work at one of them."

The Ebony Stag (1938), #22 in series  This is a splendidly told, exciting mystery. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. Quite the ripping yarn.  The story is teeming with Golden Age conventions: a rhyming riddle, lost treasure, secret identities, impostors, a bizarre murder method, a nearly impossible crime in an almost locked room.  It’s a real page turner and Flynn’s writing is pretty good in this one. Unfortunately, it gets bogged down towards the end when he resorts to his old bad habits of suspense-killing rambling monologues, ill-timed recapping and a completely pointless tabulation scene the likes of which even Carolyn Wells would shake her head while reading.

But still the good far outweighs the bad here. An elderly retired gentleman is gruesomely murdered by an unknown weapon in his locked cottage. Only a small window was open but the opening was barely big enough to allow entry for a boy who manages to get in and unbolt the door for the gent’s niece. She comes by to check up on her uncle and then must enlist the help of the boy. The figure of the title is found broken by the body. The missing weapon and the reason for the broken stag are pale in comparison to a larger mystery when it is soon discovered that the murdered man is not who everyone thought he was. The story grows ever more intriguing as it progresses. Very much recommended if you’re looking for one of the truly entertaining Anthony Bathurst detective novels.

REWRITTTEN APHORISM (spoken by Bathurst) “But Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, if you remember, once warned a certain Horatio concerning the possibilities continued in heaven and earth that were omitted from their philosophy.” [So clunky. Not funny at all. Why not just quote the line verbatim? Every other mystery writer quoted that line ad nauseam throughout the Golden Age.]

There is also a character named Frederick Gulliver Sparke-Lodge in The Ebony Stag who mixes metaphors and speaks in dozens of these mangled proverbs. I’ll spare you any sampling of that nonsense.

Such Bright Disguises (1941), #27 in the series. Bathurst does not appear until the final third of this truly remarkable crime novel. It’s not really a detective novel until the final third when all that preceded is turned on its head with a final double twist that I thought rather brilliant. The bulk of the novel is, in fact, an inverted crime novel and tells the story of two adulterous lovers who plot the murder of the wife’s husband. There are some mysterious elements introduced in the story that make you doubt what you think was almost a certainty. This is part of Flynn’s clever melding of pure detective novel and inverted detective novel. It’s his attempt to write a mystery novel in the style of Francis Iles, I’d say. Crime fiction fans will draw comparisons to Malice Aforethought, Payment Deferred by C. S. Forrester, This Way Out by James Ronald and the works of James M. Cain. They all came to mind as I read Flynn’s book, but one classic work stood out more.

The deeper I plunged into this dark novel the more I was reminded of Thérèse Raquin, one of Emile Zola’s superior crime novels to explore the guilt of adulterous lovers and how after committing and covering up a murder they are doomed to never forget what they’ve done. In Flynn’s novel Lawrence and Dorothy are the duplicitous lovers. As a consequence of their criminal act their desire and lust wither away under the weight of guilt and remorse. Dorothy has nightmares and is literally haunted by the ghost of her husband. Ultimately, they begin to distrust one another and madness and paranoia begin to set in. There is no happy ending here with Flynn delivering a whopper of a surprise in the final pages. Of the handful of Flynn’s novels I’ve read this is his most mature, almost a melodramatic mainstream novel of psychology with crime as a side dish, rather than a crime novel as the main course.

Psychological crime fans, inverted detective novel lovers and anyone looking for a dark and noirish crime story will be thoroughly satisfied with Such Bright Disguises. I’m convinced it is one of Flynn’s finest novels and I’ve only read seven so far.

Upstairs and Downstairs - Carol Carnac

Though written in an era well past the heyday of the Golden Age of detective fiction Upstairs and Downstairs (1950) is redolent of books that flourished two decades earlier. So far I’ve only read this one mystery novel by Edith Rivett in her “Carol Carnac” guise, but it is definitely a candidate for the Humdrum school of detective fiction. Carnac creates a baffling crime dependent on gadgetry and a web of questionable alibis that rival anything found in the pages of John Rhode or Freeman Wills Crofts, two of the masters of that subgenre in which the plot and puzzle take precedence. The story is almost exclusively devoted to painstakingly reconstructing how the murder was committed and who was where when the victim was killed. Almost entirely absent is any delving into character, relationships and motives. In fact, I found only two of the characters compelling enough to talk about in this review.

Upstairs and Downstairs despite a title that seems to allude to servants and their masters is not set in a manor house or country estate. Rather the setting is a research hospital where the upstairs crew is made up of doctors and executives running the facility while the downstairs staff consists of the varied men and women who deal with the massive amounts of paperwork stored in a complex filing system that takes up two entire floors.

The murder victim is head file clerk, Mr. Chindle, an odious man hardly well liked and little respected. His daily battle with the majority of women who make up the filing team is aggravated by his misogyny, foul breath and rank body odor. He had habit of undermining everyone, eavesdropping on conversations and committing petty thefts in order to cover his debts incurred as the result of addictive gambling and extravagant bets on long shots at the horse races. The day of the murder a pearl necklace belonging to June Banbrugh, the most recently hired file clerk, goes missing. It’s no surprise when he is found with his head bashed in from a fire escape ladder that apparently became accidentally dislodged from its hinged mount.  The pearl necklace turns up in Chindle's pocket.

Inspector Julian Rivers investigates the apparent accident and immediately suspects that the ladder was tampered with. An elevator near the fire escape ladder has proven to have an eccentric mechanical flaw. Passengers can hit the “Stop” button and cause the car to change direction from up to down, and vice versa. Rivers begins to imagine that the elevator may have been employed to create a death trap. As the case progresses he will find numerous bits of evidence to support his theory and the case begins to look more and more like deliberate murder.

Mechanics and gadgetry are the fascination of this plot. In addition to the fire escape ladder used as a murder weapon and the odd elevator that can change direction in mid-journey there is a telephone system with poorly installed wiring that allows people to pick up extensions and listen in on conversations. Entire chapters are devoted to Rivers and his police crew monkeying with the ladder in a variety of experiments to see how it falls, investigating the elevator shafts and making various phone calls to find out which lines are affected by the wiring and acoustical anomalies. I enjoyed Julian Rivers a lot more than Rivet’s other policemen Inspector Macdonald who appears in her detective novels written as “E. C. R. Lorac”. Rivers has a slightly more lively personality, exhibits a sense of humor ("Aren't you [fond of bed]?  I am. I was born lazy") and often is smiling at various stages in the story. In contrast I’ve always remembered Macdonald as dour and uninteresting, a personality-less cipher.

Among the supporting characters the best scenes feature Wilson, the head of security, or chief porter as Carnac calls him in the novel. He is an intelligent man with a lot of opinions but who is unwilling to augment those opinions with gossip. He is the most helpful of anyone in the research facility. The doctors on the other hand are a secretive bunch, duplicitous and deceitful giving contradictory statements frustrating Rivers at every opportunity. Highly protective of the work they are doing on viruses and the common cold they are stubborn in revealing what they were doing when Chindle was killed.

Another memorable sequence has Rivers visiting a boarding house where Chindle lived.  Mrs Mason, the landlady, gives some info that further proves Chindle was a thief then with some prodding allows Rivers to see his room.  Because she is tired of policeman entering the house and mucking about which has led to her boarders gossiping about the murder victim's life she insists that Rivers pretend to be a prospective boarder. They role play as if she is allowing him to view the apartment as a possible renter.  In this little bit of improvised theater Mrs. Mason reveals more about her character as a landlady and how she views her lodgers. Carnac does a neat job here once again resorting to wry humor and allowing us to see Rivers as a man of humor and unusual bent of will who will indulge in others' whims to get what he needs.

Overall, I enjoyed this mystery novel.  It's rather complex and sometimes a bit convoluted, but it was never really dull.  Wilson, Mrs. Mason, Rivers and some of the doctor characters held my interest, though admittedly the doctors at the facility seemed entirely interchangeable and not too well delineated.  The murder method turns out to be overly elaborate and rather ingenious.  I couldn't help but think of books like The Death of Laurence Vining, Fatal Descent (aka Drop to his Death) and Elevator to the Gallows (aka Frantic) when the focus turned to the elevator rather than the ladder than crushed Mr. Chindle. Carnac's subtle sense of humor was a welcome addition to the book and made me want to read more of the books featuring Julian Rivers and avoid the Lorac books which for the most part I have found rather dry and dull. And so there will be more Carnac reviews coming in the next month.  Stay tuned.

Death Awaits Thee - Maria Lang

A warning before you proceed: If you've read the work of Maria Lang, recently made available to mystery fans one more time in the trio of English translations, and enjoyed her work prepare for a minor diatribe. Lang has been touted as the "Agatha Christie of Sweden" among other laudatory and hyperbolic sobriquets. I always take those marketing and critical assessments with a grain of salt if I don't entirely disregard them while rolling my eyes. But it usually indicates to me a slight understanding that the writer being compared to the Grand Master herself has a grasp on the traditions of the pure detective novel. My first sampling of Lang's work showed me she loves a mystery and aspires to greatness but falls short by a long shot. She understands narrative formula, detective novel conventions and motifs, and the quirkiness of bizarre puzzling murders and we get a lot of that in Death Awaits Thee (1955), originally published in Swedish as Se döden på dig väntar. Yet it all leads to a muddle and ends with a whimper, not the bang of surprise we all want from a detective novel.

First off, and granted this spoiled my enjoyment of the book as a whole, was the choice of translator Joan Tate to Anglicize the entire book.  Death Awaits Thee takes place in a thoroughly Swedish locale -- the very real Drottningholm Theater built in 1766, a marvel of Swedish architecture and European history and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  It's one of the only theaters in all of Europe that still retains original 18th century scenery pieces and restored hand-operated theatrical machinery of that era.  Photographs of the theater flood the internet, stories of visits to this historic place also appear by the hundreds in all languages.  It's worth trawling the internet and reading some of the better posts and articles if you have time.  With a murder mystery redolent of Swedish history and atmosphere one would hope that the book would stay thoroughly Swedish. But it hasn't.

1.  All references to Swedish currency have been changed to pounds. What a hassle it must have been to convert the money amounts. Or did she even bother with that?  An amount of 800 pounds is missing during the story and is somewhat crucial to the plot. But is it actually 800 pounds?  Or was it 800 krona and the translator simply substituted pounds without bothering to calculate the British equivalent?

2.  The character names -- with the exception of Puck Bure, Lang's female protagonist and not-so-good amateur sleuth, and an opera singer named Jill Hassel -- have all been changed to easily comprehended British names.  This infuriated me.  For those interested the English names are Teresa, Diana, Stephen, George Geraldson (whose surname is also changed), Richard, Matthew and Edwin.  See the photo below for the real names Maria Lang gave her cast of characters. I found an online version of the original text from which I took several illustrations for this post. You can match the names to see how Tate robbed them of their real identity. I've typed the British substitutes above in the order they appear in the list below.

3. And this is the most upsetting part -- the translation itself is a pretentious Anglicization of awkward syntax, heavy use of British idioms and vernacular in the dialogue, and other elements that take you out of the Land of Lingonberries and Pancakes and transport you to the Land of Bangers and Mash.

In the long run Joan Tate and the editorial staff of Hodder & Stoughton have fairly ruined the book by wringing nearly all that is Swedish from its admittedly thin pages.

The thunder machine as depicted
on rear cover of Swedish edition

As for Lang's story it starts off rather intriguingly with a prologue resembling a mantra-like monologue in Puck's voice in which she looks back on the violence and mystery in a rather heavy-handed poetic style.  Then we are introduced to the characters who seem a lively bunch and reminded me of the kind of quirky types you'd encounter in a Ngaio Marsh theater mystery or the witty detective novels of Christianna Brand.  Christie didn't come to mind at all at actually.  The characters, however, become increasingly one note relying on a lone personality trait  to distinguish them from each other (raging jealous lover, foppish gay boy, tart tongued bitch, etc.). Most were entirely lacking in complexity or depth. Only a handful ever felt like real people rather than puppets being manipulated for the sake of the plot alone.

The plot concerning a production of Cosi Fan Tutte and a murdered opera singer, her body found crushed and disfigured in special effects device known as the "thunder machine," offers the reader a smattering of mysteries not the least of which is how was she actually killed and why was she carried up to the machinery-laden attic and shoved through the small opening of the effects device.  Motives are aplenty and tend to revolve around the impassioned and egocentric actors we find in theater mysteries. Jealousy, envy, hatred -- you name it, it's here.

But as for clues? Or the fair play aspect that one would think would be present given Lang's comparison's to her heroine and the writer she attempts to imitate?  Few and far between.  I can only recall two real clues!

 

Too much of the story comes far too late in the book.  Prior to the arrival of Christer Wijk (surname altered to Wick in this "translation"), who appears only in the final two chapters, we are treated to intensive back story among the theater troupe and the rambling fantasies of Puck who is tempted to have an affair with Matthias Lemming, the opera conductor. The murder investigation is conducted by a non-series detective and his team. Then when Wijk finally appears he interrogates the characters for a third time (!) recalling the work of Carolyn Wells.  I wonder if Lang read any of her books.  In the end this felt more like a Wells novel than any other woman mystery writer Lang has been compared to. The suspects lie and withhold information just like Wells' characters and are coerced or manipulated into finally telling the truth when Wijk shows up.  He does no real detective work at all.  He relies on what his predecessor and police team have already done, notices discrepancies in stories, then simply gets people to tell the truth.  And like Wells' "transcendental detective" Fleming Stone, Wijk subsequently intuits and guesses using "psychology" to ferret out the murderer.  In the end the killer delivers a long confessional monologue, once again just like the majority of Wells' mystery novels. It's all disappointing, a real let down with all this questioning and re-questioning.

To be fair there are elements that I admired like when conductor and production director Matthias Lemming tells the full story about his volatile relationship with his ex-wife Tova, the murder victim.  I also liked the characters of Ulrik and Jill who were the most lively out of the bunch of opera singers.  Ulrik is Lang's token gayboy character and Jill is the mean-spirited bitch of the opera company.  I guess it's always fun for writers to indulge themselves and let go of their reins when writing these types of characters.  Lang certainly enjoyed those two for their scenes always enliven the tone of the book.

Maria Lang, circa 1950s

One of Lang's very modern touches is her inclusion of sexuality in her stories. Death Awaits Thee is the story of a woman who loved life and sex and apparently indulged herself with anyone -- male or female, young or old -- who struck her fancy.  Gay and lesbian characters appear in many of Lang's books (a lesbian couple feature prominently in her first mystery published in 1949) and sexual relationships are key to an understanding of the motives behind many of the murders in her novels. In this regard she is one of the pioneers in bringing murder mysteries into modern times. Had she really had skill as a novelist she might have become the Swedish forerunner of Ruth Rendell or Minette Walters. At times I thought of both of them while reading this novel, especially when Lang's mystery got down and dirty in revealing Tova's rampant sexuality and her disturbing secret that led to her divorce from Lemming.

Death Awaits Thee is the seventh Christer Wijk murder mystery, so it comes fairly early in Lang's career which spanned from 1949 to 1990.  If Death Awaits Thee is any indication of Lang's work as a whole then I'm afraid I'm not interested in reading any more as much  as she has been recommended to me by a couple of people I've met at mystery conferences and in emails I've received.  Those of you who read Swedish, of course, have all 43 novels to choose from. Those of us who only read English, however, have just three translations.  The others are Wreath for a Bride, aka Kung Liljekonvalje av dungen (1957) and No More Murders, aka Inte flera mord (1951). The most recent editions of these three English translations released in 2014 are available only as digital books from Mulholland Books. Alternatively, you can spend half a lifetime as I did trying to track down older editions in paperback and hardcover. They seem to be disappearing as the years fly by. But if those too are the translated and Anglicized work of Joan Tate then it's further justification for avoiding the books.

FFB: Pray for the Dawn - Eric Harding

THE STORY:  The relatives of explorer and trader in African artifacts Nathan Claymole are summoned by invitation to visit him at his remote home isolated on a island surrounded by a torrential stream called the Boa. Some will be meeting him for the first time in their lives. In the letters of invitation Nathan has promised that each person will "learn something to your advantage." Little do they know what the night has in store for them.  A weird ritual is about to take place on this night of the full moon, the dead will rise, and the family will fear for their lives as they Pray for the Dawn (1946).

THE CHARACTERS: The novel is narrated by ballet dancer, and sometime actor Barry Vane, nephew to Nathan Claymole. Barry is down on his luck due to a disabling injury that has ended his career as a dancer and performer.  Lack of work has resulted in dire financial straits for Barry.  He is hoping that this "something to his advantage" promised in the invitation will be a boost to his impoverished bank account. There are seven other relatives who are also eager to find out why they were invited and what news Nathan has for them.

Caroline Claymole - Nathan's sister. A religious zealot and termagant extraordinaire who spends much of her time harassing and belittling her daughter...

Betsy - mousy bespectacled teenager browbeaten into submission by her tyrant of a mother. She seems to have no personality at all, or has had it eradicated by her overprotective mother's domination.  But Betsy has a shocking secret that will change how she is viewed by everyone later in the novel.

Uncle Oscar - Caroline's wimpy cousin who spends much of the book silent and hiding in the shadows.  But he also has a secret and a hidden aspect to his seemingly Casper Milquetoast persona

Jonah Clay - the oldest of the guests, Nathan's uncle and Barry's great uncle. Ancient and barely able to walk he is described by Barry as "Death outliving the grave." Nearly forgotten by the group he snoozes and mumbles in a corner until it's time to escort him upstairs to his room

Sylvia Claymole - the ingenue of the piece is lovely to look at, generous and kind to Betsy. Drawn to Barry's gentleman’s nature she will soon fall to pieces and become the most paranoid and fearful of the group.

Bret Janson - the American cousin and requisite dashing yet arrogant man that always shows up in these stories of gathered relatives. He spends a good portion of the book drinking heavily to fend off his fears  

Tobias Judd - husband to one of Nathan's nieces who has apparently died unknown to the host. Judd has come in her place eager to learn what was promised to his wife.  He is the most suspicious of the group and Nathan is wary of ulterior motives.  Judd will turn out to be the most human, the one with the most common sense and, as the most level headed and courageous, ultimately he is the detective hero.

Nathan is assisted in his large lonely house by an African servant named Kish.  This is perhaps the one aspect of the book that will prevent it from ever being reprinted. Kish's presence allows Harding to go to unnecessary lengths in talking about "jungle primitives" and the ominous nature of exotic foreigners. The book is littered with paragraphs contrasting civilized British life with the dark impulses of the jungle, the savage nature of Africans. What little interior decoration can be found in Nathan's home consists of African and South African artifacts. Strange masks and weapons decorate the walls and --most bizarrely -- shrunken heads also pop up in the decor scheme. Kish is not just a servant but also the personification of the Voice of Doom constantly uttering ominous statements in his pidgin English like "Dead sometimes come to life" and "Have care Boss. Strange ground."

And of course there is N'olah, the dwarf witch doctor whose corpse has been kept in an alcove room underneath a staircase.  Nathan and Kish have kept a vigil all night, the 10th anniversary of the death of the South American shaman of the lost tribe of the Javiros who live in the Amazon jungles. [Yes, there was a corpse kept in the house for an entire decade.]  Nathan expects that the witch doctor will be resurrected after some odd ritual magic and African mumbo jumbo. His guests are quite rightly disturbed and frightened.

When the body vanishes due to a mix-up in the changing of the guard, so to speak, between Nathan and Kish the guests’ reactions range from unsettled to outright terror.  Many of them actually believe that the corpse has come to life. After hearing the strange story Nathan has told about why he and Kish brought the body back from South America the relatives are convinced the zombie is out for revenge.  A search is arranged with Toby leading one group and Nathan leading another. They two groups head off to find out if the corpse has come to life or if it was ever a corpse to begin with.  Eerie events, fights, scuffles, and attacks occur for the next several hours. Nathan orders that the bridge crossing the violently coursing stream be destroyed which will prevent N'olah from leaving but also prevents all the guests from escaping the island.  When Jonah is found strangled in his bedroom the novel begins to seem more and more like And Then There Were None redux with a zombie on the loose as the killer. At this point horror and hysteria are unleashed at full throttle.

ATMOSPHERE:  Speaking of hysteria unleashed...  Most striking to me is the manner in which Harding sustains the dread, fear and paranoia. It infects the entire group like a horrible virus. Oscar, the wimp, is seen growling and snarling at Barry. Sylvia loses control and keeps ranting about their collective demise: "Eight nooses!  Eight guests!  We're all going to be murdered!"  But it is Caroline's transformation from spinsterish finger-wagging Bible thumper to full-blown religious maniac that serves as the climax of the book.  

In one of the longest and creepiest sections of the novel Barry, Sylvia and Toby pursue Caroline into the labyrinthine cellars of Nathan's ancient home.  There Caroline finds Kish in front of a firelit altar performing an outlandish ritual complete with African chanting, and ecstatic dancing.  She and Kish have a battle and she ends up destroying a wooden idol he was directing his chanting toward.  Caroline has made both a literal and figurative descent into madness all because her daughter has gone missing.  She fears the worst and no one can find Betsy.  In the midst of her insane fight and destruction of the idol she reveals the deep dark secret that is at the core of Betsy's lack of personality.  It's a shocker of a confession and gave me a thought. I suddenly realized that there was a parallel to this book and Stephen King!

Caroline --who is called Carrie by her relatives -- is a religious zealot overly protective of her mousy personality-less daughter who everyone else sees as a freak. Ring any bells? This coincidence just blew my mind. Caroline, her relationship with Betsy, the heavy-handed quoting of Biblical passages and general over-the-top religious kookiness uncannily foreshadow Margaret White and her relationship with her own freak daughter in King's debut novel Carrie written three decades later. Both Carrie White and Betsy Claymole have a secret connected to violence. While Betsy is not a telekinetic monster when enraged she is just as murderously dangerous.  Perhaps it's a wildly imaginative stretch to think that King might have come across Pray for the Dawn in his youth, but he has been known to borrow from everywhere, horror comic books to old TV movies, for his plots.  Of course it might all be coincidence but it's a mighty crazy coincidence, if you ask me.

INNOVATIONS:  Harding includes an "Author's Note" (see the photo at right) at the start of the book stating that Pray for the Dawn is not a detective novel. He goes into detail to justify why the book is structured the way it is and why it shouldn't be considered a "fair play" detective novel, but rather an adventurous thriller. But that disclaimer, of sorts, is a huge red herring. The book is indeed a detective novel, albeit a very unconventional one. Scattered throughout the story are multidinous red herrings all of which I fell for alongside several cleverly planted clues that can lead you to figuring out exactly what is going on, who the murderer is, and why Jonah and one other person were strangled.

It is not unfair of me to reveal that all of the supernatural events will turn out to be rationalized. For all the hysteria and horror encountered within the pages of this genuinely terrifying and thrilling book there is no black magic at work, no ghosts, no zombies.  But it is rather obvious at the midpoint of the book as Toby Judd reminds Barry and Sylvia that the spooky events are all being engineered by some madman. But exactly who is it?  What happened to the dwarf witch doctor's corpse? Why are the nooses being used to strangle the victims? And what is the purpose of the secret dossier on all the guests which reveals the details of their lives including all their secrets?

THE AUTHOR:  Eric Harding is perhaps a pseudonym for a writer that no one knows very much about. He is the author of only two crime novels Pray for the Dawn (1946) and Behold! the Executioner! (1939), both titles so scarce that they are nearly impossible to find anywhere. I found only one person of note who used Eric Harding as a pseudonym but he turned out to be Eric Harding Thiman (1900 - 1975) organist, composer of songs and church music and Professor of Harmony at Royal Academy of Music.  Thiman's biographical information is rich with his accomplishments as a musician, composer and academic and I learned that he wrote a few songs early in his career using the name Eric Harding.  Is he also responsible for these two bizarre crime novels in that guise?  Anyone who knows anything about either man, please feel free to enlighten us all in the comments.

FFB: The Crime in the Crystal - Robert Hare

THE STORY: Portrait painter Elton Cleeves sees a vision of his nephew he before the man is found dead. Cleeve’s vision showed his nephew grasping one wrist then holding the other arm outstretched before collapsing. Minutes later Cleeves receives a telephone call informing that his nephew’s body has been found in a wood not far from the uncle’s home, he has been clubbed to death, a wound to the left temple and a bruise on his right wrist – exactly as in the painter’s vision. Believing he is clairvoyant Elton begins to investigate the crime by psychic means. He consults a crystal ball and believes he has seen The Crime in the Crystal (1933)

THE  CHARACTERS: His physician Dr. Adrian Berwick is concerned for Elton’s mental health. He thinks the elderly man is crumbling under stress and suffering from hallucinations. Adrian confiscates the crystal ball and keeps a watch on his patient. A physical examination raises concerns about the possibility of poison. Berwick does some sleuthing by analyzing chemical properties of Elton’s art supplies and uncovers a shocking plot.

Meanwhile Inspector Gearing is beginning his investigation of Dr. Michael Cleeves’ murder. Though the many routine interrogations we learn that Cleeves, the nephew, was an intolerable hedonist, nearly always drunk, gambling, and leading a libertine’s life. Uncle Elton lost all respect for his nephew, had turned his back on him and instead focused his attention and affection on his grandniece, Helena, the physician’s daughter. There are two guests of the physician who have moved into a small cottage on the Cleeve’s estate and they have had an insidious influence on Helena, normally a simple conservative young woman, almost a relic of the Edwardian era like her great uncle, she is surrendering to her father and his guests’ wild pursuit of cafes, bars and urban nightlife. Uncle Elton convinces Insp. Gearing that these guests, a brother and sister named Vincent and Irene Youles, have had a hand in his nephew’s death. Vincent has been paying extra attention to Helena with the intent of proposing marriage. Irene had been flirting with Dr. Cleeves and seemed to be thinking the same. The Youles, Elton tells the police, are nothing but “avaricious adventurers” and he is certain they plotted to do in the doctor hoping that Helena would inherit his money.

The joke’s on them, however, for Elton had several weeks ago disinherited Michael and made Helena his primary beneficiary. This makes the possible poisoning of Elton Cleeves all the more sinister. It is entirely possible that the Youles are so eager to marry rich that they will murder anyone who stands in the way of their plot to gain control of Helena’s money.

INNOVATIONS: Gearing and Dr. Berwick make an interesting detective team. Berwick with his scientific mind and a clearheaded common sense outlook contrasts with the near inhuman determination and obsessive mind of Gearing. Amusingly, Berwick tutors himself on “Investigation, Criminal” by reading a lengthy entry in an encyclopedia in the Cleeves library. He looks to this anonymous article as his inspiration to find the killer of Dr. Cleeves’ and the poisoner trying to murder Elton Cleeves.

All the while the idea of clairvoyance, omens, messages from beyond and the ability to have visions about the past and future haunt both Dr. Berwick and Elton Cleeves. A watercolor portrait of what appears to be Helena as a child turns up, but the date of 1885 proves it cannot be the grandniece because she was not born until 1911. Is it possible that this painting is also proof that Elton has some psychic gift? Could he have foretold the birth of his nephew’s daughter decades before she was even alive?

QUOTES:   All things are born and make their first growth in the dark, and premature exposure may kill them. So it is with ideas.

Was not the whole world made up of strange and extraordinary things which only the dullness of our senses had reduced to the level of the drab and commonplace?

The reawakening of memory! he pondered upon that, and with the thought there came -- as though it had sprang from the crystal itself -- an idea as startling in its inception as it was terrible in its implications, a supposition not quickly to be set aside. The shadows which darken the corners of a room...have a disturbing quality in their shapelessness which induces the beholder to clothe them with images of his own creation; because there is nothing we fear so much as a thing without form. ...[A]re they real, or must we account them the unnatural vapors of a disturbed imagination? For it is to be remembered, Adrian realized, that there are shadows in the corners of the mind as well as in the rooms of an old country house.

SUMMATION: The Crime in the Crystal is the first of three works of ingenious crime fiction by American writer Robert Hare. It’s a remarkable debut, such that in marketing the book Longman’s managed to get bestselling detective novelist J. S. Fletcher to write a laudatory foreword in which he succinctly describes why the book is a noteworthy contribution to the genre. Fletcher summed up Hare's work: "The highest praise that can be given to this first effort is to say that here is a story not only worth telling but told in really distinguished fashion." This is no hype, circa 1933, it's 100% accurate.

Hare’s second novel was an equally praiseworthy amalgam of inverted crime novel and detective novel The Doctor’s First Murder (1933) He rounded out his trio of works with The Hand of the Chimpanzee (1934), an over-the-top homage to weird menace stories of the 1930s pulp magazines like Dime Detective that nevertheless is an ingeniously plotted, albeit lurid and outlandish, traditional detective novel. I have recently discussed ad nauseum all three of these books in the "In GAD We Trust" podcast about rare and hard to find books that deserve reprinting. Having finally read the first of this trio of highly inventive and imaginative detective novels I will just reiterate what we’ve all said many at time: Will some enterprising publisher please reprint these books? Thank you.

Behind the Bolted Door? - Arthur E. McFarlane

 Browsing through the pages of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders I came across an obscure book from the early 20th century by an utterly forgotten writer with the impossible situation described as a "death... in a locked room with a swimming pool."  I immediately went looking for Behind the Bolted Door? by Arthur E. McFarlane and found a handful of copies. One was being sold by someone on eBay who happened to live in Illinois so I know I would get the book quickly. Was it worth the $30 I shelled out?  Well, certainly not for its shoddy condition. (I'll spare you my rant and email exchanges with the seller) But as an example of early 20th century detective fiction it was worth obtaining (perhaps at not such an inflated price) and reading for it serves as a template for other writers who improved on the many conventions and motifs employed in the book. At times it was a puzzling story, frequently it was entertaining, but in the end it proved to be an infuriating read.

Unfortunately, Adey uses a word in his entry for Behind the Bolted Door? (1916) that somewhat ruins the entire book because the apparent cause of the murder -- a blow to the head -- is not the actual method at all. The method and cause of the murder are not revealed until the final five paragraphs of the last chapter! I don't think he should have employed that word in his entry for Behind the Bolted Door? Luckily, I had completely forgotten that word while reading McFarlane's book. It was the swimming pool in the apartment building that utterly fascinated me -- especially for a book written in 1916.  The murder is committed in a puzzling fashion, but then the story is overloaded with too much silliness that distracts and frustrates the reader. It was easy to overlook the obvious. This novel is unnecessarily convoluted, slipshod in its storytelling, and crammed full of melodramatic incidents, cliffhanger chapter endings and an attempt to add some supernatural elements that were frankly laughable and not in the least bit eerie as presented.  I could see this as one of the many books John Dickson Carr might have read as a teenager and had in the back of his mind when he became the master of apparently supernatural events leading to an impossible crime.  

Mrs. Fisher, the philanthropic wife of a science professor, is found with her head bashed in the locked hall that contains a swimming pool in her luxury duplex apartment in midtown Manhattan. A strange circular indentation is found in the head wound and her body has been moved from its original position. All rooms leading to the swimming pool hall have been locked on the inside, the only entrance to the corridor is from a staircase and no one was seen leaving that way.  (see the plan below)  By all accounts it seems to have been an impossible crime. If it was an accident then who moved the body and why? And if it was murder how did the killer escape undetected?

 

Judge Bishop listens
to the werid voice

The crime is investigated by a trio of detectives none of whom are policemen. Dr. Laneham, a neuropath "who possessed a name fast becoming international," is assisted by two young people who are considered suspects -- Walter "Owly" Willings, who runs a settlement house and is involved in charitable work on the Lower East Side, and Daphne Hope, secretary to Judge Fulton Bishop, the newly elected District Attorney. The kindly Chief of Police McGloyne allows Laneham and the two young people a few days to gather evidence and thereby clear their names and deputizes them giving them some authority to question suspects. Willings claims to have a better understanding of the mindset of poor people and Laneham as a psychologist is intrigued by alternate forms of police investigation when dealing with unruly suspects, and in one case a different cultures. One of the suspects is the immigrant Italian maid who fled the Fisher household the day that Mrs. Fisher was killed.  Compounding her possible guilt is the fact that she was recently released from prison and was given her job as part of a mission to reform prisoners and give them a second chance at "going straight."

In addition to these social justice aspects that make the novel somewhat revelatory for its era McFarlane brings up an odd psychological technique that becomes the main theme of the novel. He has Dr. Laneham mention Emile Zancray, a supposedly pioneering French psychologist, and his ideas about the behavior of criminal suspects. It is referred to as "Zancray's postulate" which states "that practically never does any friend of the victim tell everything. Either for his own good, or for the good name of the gentleman murdered, the helpful friend will always hold out something." Over the course of the novel this will hold true. Willings, Daphne, Jimmy the butler and others will all withhold vital information, sometimes seemingly trivial bits, but all of which impedes the investigation and leads to further consequences.  In fact, in one case withheld information leads to the death of a policemen.

Obviously McFarlane is trying to make a point. But that he needed to justify his thesis by couching it in  psychology theory is troubling. For a thorough search of early 20th century psychology texts turn ups no one named Emile Zancray.  I entered multiple phonetic French spellings as search terms in my many internet searches in case McFarlane had never seen the name in print (Sancré, Cincré, Zancré, etc.) and came up with no one at all resembling this Zancray and his postulate. LeRoy Lad Panek in The Origins of the American Detective Story (2006) has a section in which he discusses the novelist's desire to make crime fiction seem authentic by name dropping both real and imaginary experts of criminological breakthroughs. Bertillon, the famed French criminologist, turns up in dozens of early 20th century detective novels and short stories, and Panek cites many of them, so too do myriad psychologists and other men of science. Most of them are real, some of them never existed. Zancray is mentioned in Panek's study as is McFarlane's book but Panek does not tell us if he found that either Zancray or his postulate were factual.

I mention all this because McFarlane gives away that he is a naive and lazy writer. At two points in the book when Dr. Laneham is supposedly trying to sound an expert or prove that he is a talented "neuropath" McFarlane reveals his ignorance. Reading this book was mind-boggling in the amount of misinformation, lazy writing and just plain wrong “facts”. I was reminded of a book which on the first page purported that a character had been hunting tigers in South Africa. An utter impossibility because tigers are indigenous only to India and a few other Asian countries. Here are the two most egregious examples of McFarlane's lack of expertise:

1. The German for “world” is die Welt, and not der Mund.

McFarlane must be confusing Romance languages which are all similar in spelling and phonetics — mondo (Italian), mundo (Spanish) and monde (French) — with his understanding of the various translations of word “world.” German, however, is not a Romance language. Mund means mouth! Always has and always will. He had his detective make the very false statement that “mund is German for world” not once in the book, but twice. The second time to a native German speaker! I was prepared for an outburst from Professor Fisher (whose name should be spelled Fischer if he’s a real German). But no, the professor given to many an outburst throughout the story says nothing and never bothers to correct Dr. Laneham.

2. Hypnosis is achieved almost exclusively using verbal cues. Rarely is any touching involved. And most importantly the subject must be willing to undergo hypnosis.

Dr. Laneham manages to hypnotize the fiery tempered and foul mouthed Italian maid Maddalina by massaging her temples and “smoothing the skin” on her arms and face. She never consents to being hypnotized either. After wildly resisting arrest and clawing at the faces and arms of her captors she is subdued. Laneham somehow manages to stand behind her and without her consent he hypnotizes her by touch. Then with an assembly of props in front of her -- and without any verbal instruction whatsoever! -- she replicates a series of activities using those props thus incriminating herself in the theft of Mrs. Fisher’s money. According to McFarlane hypnosis is some sort of magic act that can be achieved through a combination of simple massage and telepathy. In order to get Maddalina out of her tactilely created trance he merely has to slap a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. She not only snapped out of the trance instantaneously she once again became a “female hellion” slapping at anyone near her and swearing up a storm in two languages.

So is Zancray a real person? I sincerely doubt it.

 Behind The Bolted Door? seems more inspired by silent movie adventure serials and the nascent pulp fiction of the era than it is any genuine psychology theories and practices. The characters are stock and lacking in any real dimension. Only in the action sequences does McFarlane reveal character. Daphne -- or D. Hope as she is referred to throughout the entire book -- is the typical New Woman: willful, independent, and possessing an athleticism that would rival any superhero. She manages to save "Owly" Willings (so called for the round Harold Lloyd style glasses he wears) from drowning in the frigid and icy East River when Willings jumps in to rescue Jimmy the butler from a rash suicide attempt.  But when she's not in Wonder Woman mode D. Hope is just a starry-eyed female waiting for acknowledgment of love from her reticent do-gooder.  Maddalina, the Italian maid, is an insulting stereotype of the "hellcat", lacking in all self-control, easily riled and quick to claw at eyes and pull hair when she loses her temper which is almost on every page. Two elevator operators are West Indian immigrants and speak in the usual phonetic dialect reserved for Black characters in this era, constantly referring to all the White men as "boss", ever fearful when being questioned. Ghosts, eerie voices and supposedly spectral knocking feature in the plot. When the interrogation turns to these apparent supernatural events the two men are reduced to quivering spooked cartoons.

The farfetched rescue sequence in the East River is only topped by the bizarre near murder of Dr. Laneham late in the novel.  In trying to figure out how the elevator might have been stalled while traveling to the Fisher home Laneham manages to open the door grate and expose the elevator shaft. A mysterious hand appears from nowhere and gives him a shove. Because the story is inspired by cliffhanger silent movies Laneham expertly grabs hold of the grating and saves himself from a fatal fall. No mention is made of the possible dislocated shoulder or torn and bloody fingers he must have suffered in saving himself. He merely gets a bandage placed on his shoulder.

Oh! Did I mention the knife throwing gangsters that nearly do in one of the policemen guarding the scene of the crime? There. I just did.

Behind the Bolted Door? is a cornucopia of crime fiction conventions and motifs. The novel even has a superfluous seance to round out the "eerieness" just in case the talk of ghosts, spectral knocking and weird voices crying out "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" weren't enough. Strange objects are manifested in the seance that allude to the murder method the revelation of which causes the murderer to flee the room and plunge to his death in a convenient suicide.

The denouement takes place over three chapters. Three characters must explain the various mysteries that complicated the plot. In addition to the murder, you see, there was the donation of $500 to the settlement project that went missing, a message in strangely ornate copperplate handwriting that appeared to imply Mrs Fisher was being coerced into committing a crime, a burned magazine with a back cover that had only the letters "mund" legible, and a manuscript of a play that enters the story in the penultimate chapter that comes out of nowhere. That the novel was first serialized in a magazine (Maclean's, May through November 1916) easily explains the melodramatic, incident filled story, but cannot excuse the sloppiness in which it is told nor the misinformation that was never corrected by an astute and careful editor.

You can read Behind the Bolted Door? for yourself at Maclean's website of archived issues where all but the last installment have been uploaded.  Inexplicably, the November 1916 issue is missing though Maclean's claim that their archive is complete. You'll get to see all the original illustrations by Henry Raleigh there too.  The original Dodd Mead edition, should you be lucky to find a copy, has only four of the over one dozen pictures Raleigh created for the serial version of McFarlane's novel. I've included several of them in this post. Alternately you can read a PDF of the entire book at Hathi Digital Trust courtesy of The Ohio State University. However you choose to read it, be prepared to be infuriated.

FFB: The Dead Have No Friends - John Donavan

THE STORY:  Intensely disliked, but extremely popular and financially profitable, novelist Emmanuel Cortal is murdered in his unique glass enclosed writing studio.  There is only one entrance and it was locked from the inside. His death may at first seem to have been natural, but police find he has been poisoned with a highly unusual toxin. How was the administered when apparently no one went into the studio the night he died?

THE CHARACTERS: Although The Dead Have No Friends (1952) is by John Donavan Sergeant Johnny Lamb, Donavan's usual series detective is nowhere in sight.  Instead we have Chief Inspector Roger Newlyn, the son of a Marquis who is affectionately referred to as "the Dook" by the policeman on his team or as Mrs. Coker, the cook in the Cortal household, describes him " a reel haristocrat." Despite the deferential attitude of servants who address him as "my lord" and the perks he gets that come with his family name Newlyn would much prefer to be done with his inherited title and just be known as a policeman.  He's efficient,  likeable and very good at his job as are the men who serve under him. Though as prominent as his role is Newlyn surprisingly is not the one who solves the case. Figuring out the strange murder weapon, the way it was administered and the unveiling of the identity of the killer falls to someone else entirely.

That man is Benjamin Scarle, who we first get to know in a scene of outrageous bluster and pompous anger in the office of literary agent T. F. Rodder.  Scarle is a former police commissioner, now retired, and is a bit behind in turning in the manuscript of his memoir he was coaxed into writing. Contentious, opinionated, and formidable Scarle will remind detective fiction fans of similar larger the life sleuths as Sir Henry Merrivale, Professor Stubbs, and Simon Gale.

Cortal, of course, is also one of Rodder's clients and this is how Scarle becomes involved in the case.  Though he claims to be retired Benjamin Scarle is one of those policeman who will never give up his work. Often Scarle serves as a consultant in some of the more complex cases involving Scotland Yard.  Newlyn is quick to enlist his aid when he is told the coincidence of Cortal and Scarle being clients at the same literary agency.

I made a long list of characters because the first section of this novel, a scathing satire of literary workplaces, was overflowing with names and personalities.  None of the people at the Rodder agency is pertinent to the murder case other than T. F. Rodder himself.  I wasted an entire piece of paper making notes on the staff and their delightful eccentricities only to never read of many of them after the first three chapters. Nigel Morland, the writer behind the "John Donavan" pen name, clearly was having a lot of fun in poking fun at the world of agents, publishers and writers. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these characters were based on people he knew. Instead of eagerly scribbling down notes on the staff of the agency I should have just waited until the police started their murder investigation. For it is the Cortal household with its myriad servants, Cortal's soon-to-be ex-wife Vivien, his 12 year old son Tony, and actress paramour Gerda Heywood who are the real characters to pay attention to.

INNOVATIONS:  The murder scene, of course, is perhaps the most original element.  Cortal has built for himself a private sanctuary where he can be in isolation while he writes. Within the cavernous ballroom converted into a library of his Georgian mansion he has placed his transparent studio, an entirely glass-enclosed private domain where he can see anyone coming toward him on all sides. Thankfully we are given a beautifully drawn and labeled plan of Cortal's glass room-within-a-room that definitely helps the reader understand how impenetrable it appears to be.

 

But in addition to the odd murder setting Morland adds clueing about the door of the ballroom's main entry which leads to the glass encased writing studio.  One of the maids has a great scene where she mentions the clicking of the door handle. She has exceptionally acute hearing and has always been aware of the odd noise which reverberates through the nearly deserted floor where the ballroom and studio are located.  Much is made of this and Newlyn sensing the young woman's sincere attitude and resolute testimony has his team investigate the door. They determine that the clicking sound only occurs when someone leaves the room. One brilliantly observant cop even shows Newlyn exactly how it makes the noise. This bit of info is crucial to eliminating possible suspects among the list of those who visited the ballroom just prior to Cortal's death.  The whole book is filled with excellent details like the "mystery of the clicking door" in helping the police determine who could have killed Cortal.

Also notable is Cortal's weird museum of African artifacts and medieval weaponry, a hodgepodge of dangerous objects that were left in an unlocked room. I was reminded of the many similar scenes from the crime museum in Isabel Ostrander's The Twenty-Six Clues to the collection of skulls in Freeman's The Uttermost Farthing all the way up to the prominently displayed weapon collection that features in the climax of the recent movie Knives Out.

Much of The Dead Have No Friends reminded me of a classic Agatha Christie novel. The multiple Golden Age motifs and conventions continued to pile up and delighted me the deeper I got into the book. A convoluted will with a cruel legacy, an actress who does more acting in real life than on stage, a murder mystery novel ghost written by one of the suspects, minor characters who seem to be thrown in only to  entertain the reader but who prove to be most important of all -- all of these elements make The Dead Have No Friends a corker of a murder mystery. Morland was always a thriller writer first and foremost, and he cannot resist adding a hair-rising climax worthy of the cinema. It's so well done that I found myself gasping in awe but moreso for it being highly reminiscent of the finale of one of Christie's best mysteries.

QUOTES:  Wessex Street on a Sunday forenoon has a peculiar air, like an old lady in a tube subway waiting for somebody to tell her where to go.

A typical outburst from Benjamin Scarle: "Hell's bell, Malcolm, you're a nasty-minded chap! Don't stare at me like a recalcitrant bacteria, startin' revolutions on a culture plate."

"Your mental dexterity is only equaled by your appalling audacity."

The English worship old customs, colourful anachronisms, and self-opinionated old men with original ways.

Scarle was not a psychic man: he had that quality of all real thinkers, in that he could parade invisible people before him and survey them from a godlike peak, guided by understanding and insight blessed with the incisive, merciless qualities of a scalpel. As the actors in the tragedy...passed before him each was dissected neatly, as if the heart was cut open and its secrets betrayed.

"'Turns out well'?" Scarle waved. "My dear chap, I'm takin' over, aren't I? That's an assurance of success."

EDGAR WALLACE ALLUSIONS:  Morland was Edgar Wallace's protege and friend. His early books were dedicated to Wallace and are modeled on his style of thriller with policemen as protagonists and not an amateur sleuth in sight.  Morland also claimed to be his secretary. Wallace is mentioned two separate times in this book. First, in a faint allusion that only a few might catch. Cortal is described as posing with a cigarette in an extremely long holder "copied from a long dead and still unforgotten writer of detective stories who had been loved as Cortal never would be."  The second time Wallace is directly mentioned when the investigation uncovers the ghost written novel The Pliny Problem. Rodder, the literary agent says: "Don't you recall how people used to say that Edgar Wallace had hacks to write his books? I knew E.W. well and I can assure you it was fatuous nonsense."  A clear case of Morland inserting himself into the narrative.

THINGS I LEARNED:  The Yost Typewriter is mentioned in a throwaway line and of course I needed to look it up.  Named after its inventor George Washington Yost it is one of the earliest typewriters, created in the last decade of the 19th century. An early ad proclaimed its original features: "No ribbon, direct printing, permanent alignment." As for the remarkable lack of ribbon here is how that worked according to an article at Antiquetypewriters.com: "Inking is done by a felt pad positioned in a full circle around the top of the tower where the type-bars rest. The type-bars travel an intricate half-flip upwards to reach the platen and then are channeled, by an inverse pyramid shaped guide hole, to strike the platen in exactly the same spot every time, giving the accurate alignment that Yost demanded."

I learned all about Acokanthera schimperi a plant indigenous to eastern Africa. Its bark wood and roots are used to make an arrow poison as well as being used in tribal medicines.

SUMMARY:  Written in 1952 and seemingly very modern The Dead Have No Friends simultaneously seems like a retro Golden Age book.  It may have been written years before and sat around waiting for the right time for Morland to submit it. The only sign that it is a later work is his more mature approach to characterization, the moral nature of the resolution, and the focus on psychology which was one of his main interests in the last half of his writing career.  I found little in his writing to arouse my irritation like xenophobic or ethnic slurs, misogyny or any of his other sins for which he has been derided.  The locked room puzzle, the clever murder method, the clues that lead to the solution, the abundance of suspects and motives -- all of this is redolent of the good ol' days of pure detection.  In fact, of all the Morland books I've read, whether under his real name or a pseudonym, I will concede that this is perhaps the best of the lot. As seen on the final page to the left (no spoilers at all in the bittersweet final paragraphs, BTW) the publisher promised more adventures from the thoroughly enjoyable Benjamin Scarle. Sadly, nothing ever came of that. The Dead Have No Friends is his first and only appearance.

It's a shame that this fine book is so ridiculously scarce. Purchased a few months ago my copy is the first I have seen in over 45 years of collecting and reading vintage crime fiction. This is one to add to the list of Must Be Reprinted titles. Here's hope that some enterprising publisher stumbles across this post and takes up the challenge.