Murder Mansion - Herman Landon

THE STORY: Donald Chadmore, newly released from prison for an assault charge has come to his uncle Theodore's home in order to protect him from a possible attack. He takes his uncle to the library at the ancient gloomy Chadmore home known to locals as "Mystery Mansion" and locks both of them inside.  The heavy door is bolted twice and locked from the inside. All windows are barred. There is no way anyone can get inside. And yet spectral music plays from the piano in the corner of the library and a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. Uncle Theodore cries out to Donald. Donald fires his revolver at the shadowy figure. He goes to the divan where his uncle was sitting but it's empty.  Uncle Theodore is found behind the furniture piece on the floor. He's been shot. Not only shot but stabbed with an antique dirk that Donald had handled only a few hours ago and which was left in the hands of someone now locked upstairs in the attic. Who was the shadowy figure and how did it get in to kill Theodore Chadmore?

HIGHLIGHTS: Murder Mansion (1928) is another Herman Landon pulp extravaganza.  Think of any pulp magazine story trope and its bound to be in this novel.  Several beatings and fistfights, abduction, two locked rooms, a haunted house, a family curse, hidden jewels, strange legacies, disguise and masquerade, ventriloquism, a dying message, and a handful of gangsters all make their appearances in this story. The entire book is surprisingly well written (at times rather literary), cleverly plotted, and often laugh out loud funny.  Landon can't help but pile on the Gothic excesses and melodrama which tend to turn up the moody atmosphere to 11, 12 or even 13 too often. Still it's a helluva story, well told and teeming with fun characters, innovation, exciting incidents, and enough puzzling elements to keep any hardcore GAD fan glued to the pages.

THE CHARACTERS:  This book has a huge cast of characters but even some of the most minor characters have memorable moments. There are too many to list, including six mystery guests who turn up for a secret meeting with Theodore on the night of his murder. Below are the best of the cast.

Donald Chadmore - Our ostensible protagonist and an amateur sleuth of sorts. As the book continues he is more of a victim of circumstance, chosen by the villains of the piece to take the fall for his uncle's death as well as being blamed for several other bizarre activities. His  dancing partner, both literal and figurative is...

Gloria Westcott - The Bright Young Thing of the book. A real Jazz Age girl complete with 1920s lingo she shows off to her "big boy."  One wonders why she  turns up so often too coincidentally in the most unusual locations. All will be explained later in the book. She's an utter delight providing much of the lightheartedness to offset the heavy-handed strum and drang whenever Donald and Gloria exploring dark passages or dealing with yet another thunderstorm. I loved the Jazz era slang she slings around as easily as she does the foxtrot.

Samuel Peterkin - Valet who works at a luxury hotel, on loan to Donald for his stay and travels to Mystery Mansion to help him as not only valet, but personal assistant.  Peterkin can't help but offer up his talents as a detective and comes up with an ingenious idea to solve the locked room murder. He turns out to be the real sleuth of the book despite the presence of police, a D.A. and a private detective working for the prosecutor's office.

Milliken - Investigator for D.A. Mott. Won't have anything to do with ghosts or locked rooms. The whole crime gets his goat.  "It ain't natural!" he continually pronounces. He can't stand anyone who "blows froth" at him.  Some kind of 1920s slang, I gathered, for telling lies or making up stories (a running gag in the last third of the book). He has a few excellent scenes showing off his detective skills. Notably, he proves that the odd placement of Donald's fingerprints found on the dirk show that Donald could not have stabbed his uncle. Almost everything and everyone he encounters in this case is classified as "unnatural." Nevertheless, he's determined to find the real reasons for the murder and dismiss all the claptrap.

Mr. Amicus - A very dead character whose presence is always felt at Mystery Mansion.  Real name Jacob Hamilton Chadmore, he is Donald's great grandfather.  The story behind his self chosen moniker is too involved to explain here. But it is a bronze bust of the dead man and his promise to return from the grave on the anniversary of his death that keeps Theodore and his wife on their toes and often up late at night unable to sleep. They’re especially troubled every October 7, the night he died back in 1800 and something. The novel of course opens on October 7 and Theodore is killed on the anniversary night. Could it be a ghost that did him in?

Groody - A butler with a suitably weird name this servant to the Chadmore household is privy to several secrets that he won't reveal until the final chapter. He's a bit shifty but always answers Donald's questions honestly.  Trouble is Donald never asks the right questions.

"Doc Locks" - For a while I thought this exceptionally astute expert would turn out to be the detective. But he has only one scene and then he's gone. Neither a physician nor a PhD scholar "Doc Locks" is a nickname given to him by the police and the prosecutor's office. We never know his real name, still Doc is clearly the Gideon Fell of this novel. No locked rook can stump him. Through careful examination of any murder scene deemed a locked room and using his knowledge of criminal tricks and clever illusions he finds any secret passages and all possible means of exit and always proves a locked room is never hermetically sealed. Until this one, that is. Before he tells everyone that it seems impossible for anyone to have entered the locked room tells a few interesting true crime anecdotes like the one about the 19th c. French murderer who managed to infiltrate a locked room with a blazing fire in the hearth by coming down the wide mouthed chimney wearing an asbestos suit and a helmet with built-in oxygen tank!

John Pagan - One of six guests who were to visit Theodore Chadmore on the night of his death. He arrives t dressed in white tie and tails, the only person in such formal attire. He has an unusually deep and theatrical voice that Donald recognizes as belonging to someone he heard plotting his uncle's death. That person calls himself Staglawn.  Much of the book involves characters trying to uncover the true identity of Staglawn. Pagan denies being the murder plot mastermind. He also has a hilarious running gag of sorts that takes the form of an aversion to certain vocabulary and vernacular.  When anyone uses these words he responds with outrage and satirical wit: "Candid? Abominable word! Just as if anyone could be candid in this world of sham and pretense and stupid amenities!" See the quotes section for a couple more of these amusing outbursts.

QUOTES: Gloria: "Secrets should only be told in the moonlight."

Donald: "What do you think, Milliken? Do I look like a murderer?"
Milliken: "You do.  All the murderers I've seen looked innocent."

Pagan: "Hunch? I detest that word. It's a lazy man's designation of an idea he is too indolent to think out clearly."

Pagan: "Kindness? That's another word I detest. What we call kindness is only inverted selfishness." 

"This will be a lesson to me," Don added. "I'll never again trust strange women."
"Poor Don!" Gloria gave a mock sigh. "Everything is a lesson to you, isn't it, Don? But you always forget."

Peterkin: "[Valeting is] the best education in the world. Keep a man waiting two minutes for his trousers before he's had his morning coffee, and you learn as much about human nature as it would take you two years to learn in any other way. To know human nature, you've got to study it in the raw, with the frills off. Sometimes I've found it awfully raw, sir." 

THINGS I LEARNED:  Mr. Amicus is a great devotee of Haydn and remarkably has learned several haunting themes from his opera The Devil on Two Sticks.  Prior to any Mr Amicus manifestation in the library the weird dissonant music from this opera plays on the piano.  I was intrigued by "dissonant" music from Haydn most of whose music I think of as bright and melodious.  Lo and behold!  It is true that he wrote the music for an opera titled Der Krumme Teufel (his first full opera written at the age of 19) based on the 17th century French satirical novel by Alain-René Lesage translated as The Devil on Two Sticks. But how Mr. Amicus can play the music is the ultimate unsolved mystery of Murder Mansion.  According to all accounts I found online Haydn's opera is a lost work and though there are archival copies of the libretto no sheet music nor any recordings are known to exist. The only anecdote I could find connected to the actual composition was told in an 19th century collection of composer biographies. Here it is related that Hadyn and Josef von Kurz, his librettist collaborator, had a discussion on how to capture in music the sound of a thunderstorm.  Haydn could not come up with a suitable musical motif.  In frustration he slammed his hands on the keyboard and his companion exclaimed, "That's it!" Probably someone's vivid imagination at work. Landon certainly makes the music seem creepy in his lush descriptions. Don't know why he didn't use something more immediately recognizable like "Danse Macabre". I guess music that doesn't exist is easier to work with for a novelist; he can make it sound any way he wants it to sound. 

THE AUTHOR:  Herman Landon (1882-1960) was born in Stockholm and came to the United States with his family in 1895. At one time he worked as a journalist for the Washington Herald where he was feature writer and a managing editor. His primary fame, however, is as a pulp magazine short story writer and crime fiction novelist.  Throughout his fiction writing career lasting from 1907 to 1942 he wrote close to 200 short stories and 20 novels. He created several popular series characters for the pulp magazines among them The Gray Phantom (who may have been the inspiration for Batman), The Picaroon, Godfrey Usher, and Kingdon Cole. Some of his Picaroon stories were collected into book format and published in the UK only. Most of his stories were published in Street & Smith magazines with the majority of them (more than two thirds of his total output) appearing in Detective Story Magazine and Detective Fiction Weekly. His stories also appeared in 10 Story Book, The Blue Book, The Smart Set, The Corner Magazine. and The Popular Complete Stories. Some of his stories were adapted into silent movies.

EASY TO FIND?  Nearly impossible these days I'm sorry to report.  I found one copy available for an cheap price due to its poor condition. Looks beat to hell, but if you don't mind reading copies (I certainly don't when the book is extremely hard to find) then it's waiting for you. Two copies (maybe only one listed at two different sites) translated into French also turned up for sale. My copy in VG condition, pictured at top of this post, was sold within 12 hours of the post appearing. Sorry to anyone who was looking for it earlier. 

UPDATE:  Remarkably, three days after this review was posted I checked for copies of Murder Mansion and discovered all were sold. Even the French translated copies! Also sold were two copies of The Forbidden Door (before I even mentioned it in the comment below). Oddly, another copy of Murder Mansion has turned up. That one final copy is the Liveright 1st edition and is priced exorbitantly. It will cost you well over $300 including shipping and taxes if you live in the US. Even more if you live outside of the US. But the copy has four torn pages. In pieces! Still, I am sure that someone will buy that book soon. That and a roll of Scotch tape. 

NEW STUFF: Strange Houses - Uketsu

Here we go again. Another puzzle laden "mystery" novel has arrived fresh from the pen of Uketsu and the English language translator Jim Rion.  It's Strange Houses (2025, original Japanese edition 2021) and this time instead of a variety of unusual picture puzzles that are supposed to reveal the hidden motives of the criminally minded characters in its pages (Strange Pictures) we have an assortment of floor plans of deviously designed homes.  But it's more of the same -- contrived story meant to nest inside some silly puzzles that are not too puzzling.  The preposterous story, once again devoid of any fundamental understanding of humanity, reminded me of a 1974 TV movie called Bad Ronald I saw when I was a teen that has stayed with me for decades. Quite a campy bit of psychological horror, wild and preposterous, but in the end utterly human. It was based on a cult crime novel by John Holbrook Vance, about a boy who commits a murder and is secreted away in a hidden room. Then his mother dies, the house is sold and.... well, you probably can guess at the rest.  Bad Ronald is way more thrilling and creepy than Strange Houses which has a similar conceit at its perverse center.

Uketsu's excessively Gothic story is informed of macabre murder novels, a family curse, revenge noir and --of course-- cruelty. An attempt to redeem the plot with a character who tries to invert the curse by not committing murder is weakly handled and seems more like a 21st century fairy tale than non-violent behavior resembling something a real human would do.  But of course these are only characters in a book, right?  It's OK to shun any guise of reality because of that. I guess.

With lines like this:  "..would anyone really sacrifice their whole future for a school sweetheart?"  I came to resent the author and the book.  That line contains the basis for hundreds of well known novels, stories, plays and movie scripts. It is a sentiment that is the foundation of timeworn storytelling where something real and human and relatable is at stake. That the author ridicules such a notion speaks volumes about who he or she is and why Uketsu writes soulless nonsense like Strange Houses. Rather than embrace humanity, a more challenging pathway, Uketsu reduces the risk and adventure by piling on excesses reminiscent of 18th century Gothic horror novel conventions: deformity, obsessive love, paranoid fear, and "brainwashed" people compelled to commit murder because they have been cursed.

I'm done with Uketsu. These are not novels. They are naive puzzle books drawing on video game notion that violent revenge is the only recourse. The narrative is skeletal, the dialogue is rendered in script format adding an off-putting dispassionate layer to the entire framework. Strange Houses seems more like an instruction manual with all the real tools of fiction writing -- human characters, metaphor, descriptive and rich language -- completely stripped away to make way for a bare bones structure of logic puzzles onto which a flimsy and outlandish plot is attached. There's pulp fiction and there's trash fiction. A third English translated book from Uketsu came out this year -- Strange Buildings.  I won't be going to the open house.

NEW STUFF: The Final Problem - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

There will always be Sherlock Holmes pastiches.  It is the one type of mystery novel homage that seems to be pouring out of an eternal fountain.  I tend to avoid them these days but The Final Problem (2026),  from the pen of inventive Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, has an intriguing originality in that this is not only a Holmes homage but also an intricately devised meta-fictional tribute to the history and development of detective fiction and also a true love letter to the Golden Age of Cinema, specifically Hollywood studio produced movies of the 1930s -1950s.

The stand-in for Holmes in this well thought out and trickily plotted detective novel is an actor who clearly is meant to be Basil Rathbone. No attempt to hide his true identity is made even if Pérez-Reverte saddles him with the awful stage name of Hopalong Basil, a name Basil despises. His real first name is no better.  It's Ormond and only one person ever calls him that.  I think it happens twice. He's referred to by his last name hammering home the source of the character each time someone addresses him as Basil. Anyone who knows old movies and the life of Basil Rathbone will see through the disguise immediately regardless of the similarity in names.  Ormond Basil's biographical information as it slowly seeps into the storyline parallels Rathbone's life matching everything from his close friendships with David Niven and Errol Flynn to his failed marriages.

And so we have a meta-fictional mystery with Holmes being played by the actor most well known at the time of the book's setting (it's 1960, BTW) who reluctantly accepts the role of detective. Basil is among a group of international tourists marooned on a Greek island when a violent death occurs. They are waiting for a severe storm to subside so that the Corfu police can arrive by boat and take over the police investigation. Edith Mander, a British tourist, is found dead from an apparent suicide in a locked room.  But of course it's not. This is a detective novel. There is a murderer among the tourists and violent deaths will occur twice more (one in another locked and bolted room) before the police arrive. Basil takes on the Holmes mantle one more time with the aid of Paco Foxá, Spanish thriller writer -- another attempt at a disguise that is easily seen through as it is obvious this is meant to be Pérez-Reverte.

This book is overloaded with Holmes allusions and quotes.  Hardcore devotees and all the Baker Street Irregulars out there may find this a real romp, but the incessant quoting of lines from the Canon and allusions to the many movie adaptations Ormond Basil has appeared in were a distraction for me. An equal amount of references to Hollywood movies, both real and imagined, dozens of real Golden Age of Cinema actors and actresses as well as insights into the life of Basil Rathbone are strewn throughout the text.  The abundance of references seemed like padding by the midpoint of the book. After each lengthy interruption I was eager for a return to the unravelling of the many mysteries surrounding the death by hanging and the two bludgeoning murders that occur later.

Basil and Foxá are a good duo and enjoy the role playing so much that there begin to refer to each other as Holmes and Watson. However, the role playing gets to be as transparent as Ormond's true life inspiration when the talk turns to plot tricks and misdirection. An exchange between Basil and Foxá hints at the rule breaking trend in GAD mystery fiction of both the detective and the Watson turning out to be the murderer.  This was, I think,a huge mistake on Pérez-Reverte's part because it led me to scrutinize one of the two detectives' actions and I easily figured out the solution to one of the locked rooms. Without that mention I don't think I would have seen through it so easily. Astute readers may see that sequence of discovering the second locked room is an allusion to a well-known detective novel, oft imitated in the genre. Even the title of that work is mentioned off-hand at least once that I noted.

What is most unique about the narrative is Pérez-Reverte's devotion to the actual construction of a mystery novel. Not only is this a meta-fictional treatment of a detective story it is the only one I can recall in which the crimes are viewed as incidents in a novel. The solution itself is arrived at only by looking at the murders as if they were created by a writer of mystery fiction. This conceit makes the reader look rather closely at the actions of Foxá, a writer himself.  But don't expect an obvious twist there.  The real motive behind the murders is hidden very cleverly and while the focus seems to be on a cat-and-mouse game between Basil and Foxá, Pérez-Reverte has several tricks up his sleeve delivered in the finale that elicited a few gasps of surprise from this veteran reader of detective fiction. Timeworn motifs and plot gimmicks show up and I was too busy out-thinking Pérez-Reverte to see the obvious.  And, of course, the ultimate Holmes allusion arrives in the finale, one that should have been obvious from the start. I overlooked that one because of the constant references to Moriarty. I should have paid closer attention to Basil and his frequently quoted line "You see, Watson, but you do not observe."

Some of the best parts of the book are in the talks of writing and concocting mystery plots, comparing "real" crime with fictional crime and the role of the detective. Here are some of my favorite exchanges:

Foxá on the art of misdirection: "You have to cover the reader's ears when you show them something and then cover their eyes when you tell them something. Also, play with their capacity for misjudgement and forgetfulness. You have to plant an idea, hide it, and confuse the reader with things that lead them to a different idea..."

"Sherlock Holmes wouldn't be on television today for being famous; he would be famous for being on television." 

 Foxá persuading Basil to be their detective: "Look at it another way. Lacking a real detective and with all those films under your belt, you have more experience than any of us. It's less about a criminal investigation that simply acting as an authority figure. Something symbolic." 

Foxá: "...[the murderer is] working like a good novelist."
Basil: "That's exactly what he does: incite ideas, but arranges everything to as to impede us from thinking things though. That's why we cannot trust the visible clues. And he could be offering up real ones as well to make it seem less suspicious."

Basil: "One of the downsides of imagination is that is suggests too many alternatives and can cause one to follow false leads."

Basil: "Remember that we're inside a novel. [...] Who said that audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world?"
Foxá: "You said it. Well, Sherlock Holmes said it. The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge?"
Basil: "Well, Sherlock Holmes, or Conan Doyle was mistaken. There are still some romantic killers left."  

The Final Problem is a meta-fictional tour de force. Whatever your obsession -- Sherlock Holmes, old Hollywood movies, actors and actresses, or the traditional detective novel formula with all its trickery and plot motifs -- this new treasure trove of a novel will not disappoint.  Just be prepared for an overload of allusions.  Is there a preventive drug like Dramamine for allusion overkill?  Pop one of those in mouth (figuratively, of course) before diving headlong into this richly detailed and truly fun book. 

NEW STUFF: The Murder at World's End - Ross Montgomery

For the past two years I've seen an intriguing spike in modern writers trying their hand at a retro GAD-style locked room or impossible crime mystery novel.  I've read quite a few of them and mostly they tend to be less than gripping in plot, populated with tiresome formulaic characters, and prosaic in their solutions. Tom Mead, of course, seems to be the heir to John Dickson Carr's fame in mysterydom as master of the locked room mystery. Mead's novels are the exception and never cease to entertain and boggle my mind. Though I have to say I solved most of his last book The House at Devil's Neck, primarily because I read two books back to back that employed a similar masquerade plot device found in Mead's latest book. Now I discover a children's book author who has done his best to outdo the Great Carr and others like him in an often witty and baffling mystery called The Murder at World's End.

Even without the locked room plot element this mystery novel grabbed my attention for the setting and time period alone.  It is May 1910 and Viscount Conrad Stockingham-Welt, an eccentric aristocrat who fancies himself an amateur astronomer (though most of what he claims as his own work he stole from his aunt), has summoned his family to Tithe Hall on the eve of the reappearance of Halley's comet. He is certain that the comet will bring about devastation to Earth. He has ordered everyone to go to their rooms where they will all be sealed in as the comet passes overhead. The entire house is boarded up, all windows and doors are locked and sealed, and all rooms of course are likewise locked and sealed with cotton batting at all doorway bases. Even keyholes are sealed with wax. A perfect set-up for a classic lock room mystery recalling the room locked and sealed with gummed tape in He Wouldn't Kill Patience by John Dickson Carr.

Of course someone is discovered dead in the morning. It will come as no surprise that the murder victim is Lord Stockingham-Welt. The murder weapon seems to be a crossbow bolt. But how was it fired through a locked and sealed door?  (Shades of The Judas Window.) The crossbow usually is held in the gauntleted arms of a suit of armor that stands outside the Viscount's study but now the crossbow is missing.

 

Inspector Jarvis is soon called upon to interrogate the entire household. He sets his sights first on Stephen Pike, the newest addition to Tithe Hall's flock of servants. Stephen reluctantly admits to receiving this job straight out of Borstal where he was sent for committing murder. And so we have the perfect patsy for what appears to be a perfect crime.

Stephen is determined to clear his name.  Luckily, Decima Stockingham, the viscount's aunt, an 80ish invalid who cannot go anywhere without her wheelchair, is eager to clear Stephen's name as well. Together the two, along with the housemaid Temperance, team up to solve the mystery of who killed Lord Conrad.

Montgomery does a rather admirable job of concocting a baffling mystery and even comes up with multiple solutions. He throws in several red herrings, does a good job of leading us down the garden path thinking that one of the servants is very guilty of something if not the murder itself, and then delivers three or four well placed surprises. The biggest shock to me was the second murder victim. Rather a rule breaking bit of business for a traditional mystery novel, though I have encountered it a few time in genuine Golden Age mysteries. Still when this kind of rule breaking event happens it's always a shock.

I was most proud of Montgomery's not resorting to secret passages as an explanation for how the locked And sealed room was accessed. The characters do at one point make a thorough search of the house for such a hoary cliche. but when no such passage is found I was very happy. The final solution though not startlingly original was satisfying and -- most importantly -- fairly clued.  All the hints and references are presented early enough in the story to point the reader to the answer of who killed the viscount and how it was carried out.  If not gasp inducing at least the solution is presented in an entertaining, almost elegant fashion. It is a bit overdone in how Stephen and Decima split the reveal between themselves. Decima, an arrogant egotist, demands that she deliver the solution all on her own, but Stephen interrupts to get his portion of the detective work properly ascribed to himself.

Overall, I was impressed and entertained with this book. The background of Halley's comet and the doomsday mania that affected most of the world is inserted into the story with actual newspaper articles giving the story a valuable sense of verisimilitude. Montgomery plots well, has a savage sense of humor related to the dying British aristocracy, and the contrast between a very youthful servant and the aged woman he cares for is a welcome show of generational mixing that reveals both mutual respect and mutual loathing. Very real and often very funny. Should there be a sequel in the adventures of Decima Stockingham and Stephen Pike I would definitely read that book.

Death Took a Publisher - Norman Forrest (Nigel Morland)

THE STORY:  Inspector Jack Grief and John Finnegan, a forensic chemist, join forces to solve two baffling poisoning murders that seem impossible. In the first case the detectives cannot figure out how the poison was administered in a time span of less than five minutes when no food or drink were in the room and the victim showed no signs of a hypodermic needle being used. In the second the victim is found in a locked room with a fireplace blazing and a unlatched window leading to a precarious ledge that no one would dare use as an escape.

THE CHARACTERS:  Death Took a Publisher (1936) is the first of two books Nigel Morland wrote using his Norman Forrest pseudonym.  In it we meet Grief, a typical British policeman of the Golden Age, who is grounded in reality and will have nothing to do with so-called impossible murders.  "I hate mysteries!" he exclaims in exasperation at the midpoint of the book. He prefers solid police work though he delegates much of it to his platoon of constables and sergeants. Grief is not above some unorthodox breaking and entering to follow-up on leads.  Twice he basically commits burglary in order to go through the apartments of two suspects and faces grave consequences when he realizes he will somehow have to justify his breaking the law. 

John Finnegan is the super-genius of the novel. Formerly employed in the United States by the Justice Department he is handpicked by the Home Office in England to head up the newly created Department of Forensic Chemistry in London. Here he spends much of his time poring over fingerprints both legitimate and forged (more on that later) via his high powered microscopes and conducts experiments using other other technical wizardry. He also performs some elaborate detective work in discovering the bizarre murder means that killed Willoughby Royle, an ostensibly well liked publisher at Royle & Gray, Ltd. The method of killing is the book's most ingenious and -- to borrow Grief's adjective-- diabolical aspect of the story.

The suspects, especially the women, are an eccentric group.  There is Rebecca Finck, Royle's secretary who seems to spend much of her time covering up and inventing stories about what happened in the office when Royle was killed.  Also among the publishing employees is the elderly spinster Miss Thyme who is primarily a reader and copy editor of sorts. She determines whether or not most manuscripts are worthy of the publishing house or if they contain problems that need to be addressed prior to being sent to the printer. Grief discovers she is a secret devourer of erotica and risque literature and belittles her in his mind.  He treats her less than kindly and as a consequence seriously underestimates her. Miss Thyme will prove to be the only person to solve the crime because of her job as the firm's reader.

Sybelline Higgins is a caricature of a romance novelist who reminded me of Salome Otterbourne, the vociferous and opinionated novelist in Death on the Nile.  Miss Higgins first draws Grief's attention when she is astonished not that Royle was murdered but that he was poisoned with hydrocyanic acid. Each time the poison is mentioned Miss Higgins has an overly theatrical reaction. Grief mulls this over and comes up with a surprising theory that ultimately leads him to rummaging around in the novelist's home while she is conveniently not at home.

There are a handful of other employees at the firm but apart from the second victim and Mr. Brew, a satirical character who exists only for Morland to ridicule "anarchists" and "budding Communists", they all seem to be cut from the same drab cloth. I was proven right when they all, for the most part, turned out to be bogey characters.

INNOVATIONS:  The real interest of the novel is in the police work and the technical aspects of Finnegan's crime solving. Morland was a proponent of realism in crime fiction. When he tackles the science of criminology (a great interest of his) the book rises above its pulpy origins. Much of the crime solving is focused on fingerprints allowing Finnegan to lecture frequently about his mentors and textbooks he has read on the topic.

Death Took a Publisher is often poking fun at professional writers and the entire business of publishing.  It's as much a story of those two worlds as it is a near send-up of detective fiction. Ultimately, all the allusions to detective fiction and specific writers (there are many) lead to the novel being a rather involved meta-fictional mystery novel. A minor character, Sheraton Andrews, is a reclusive mystery writer and he seems to have gone missing. Also missing is the manuscript of his latest book A Half Bucket of Blood. This all seems almost thrown in as an afterthought until Grief, during one of his burglaries, locates the manuscript and hands it over to Gavin Gray, co-owner of the publishing house. Gray then gives the manuscript to Miss Thyme to review for any issues prior to sending it to the printer. Suddenly, Andrews and his book become the focus of the novel. The denouement is as meta-fictional as any similar mystery novel I've ever read.  It may not be the first time this gimmick was employed, but Morland certainly gets his money's worth in the final chapter. 

THINGS I LEARNED: When Grief enters the home of the second victim he is impressed with the tasteful furnishings and the decor focused on racehorse art. He notices a print of "The Worst View in Europe" and a portrait of a horse called Plenipotentiary. Of course I had to have my curiosity satisfied so off I went a-Googling.  The painting is by Charles Johnson Payne (aka "Snaffles") and depicts a rider falling disastrously in a steeplechase or in a failed attempt to jump a stonewall while fox hunting. Payne also did a painting called "The Finest View in Europe" as a companion piece which is a POV painting of a rider on horseback.

The horse is also real and during its time was better know as "Plenipo". The Thoroughbred won six out of seven races during its year-long career from April 1834-April 1835.

"Fingerprints Can Be Forged" (1924) is a monograph by Albert Wehde and John Nicholas Beffel.  Their work is cited by John Finnegan when he encounters an elaborate frame-up involving obviously faked prints that are meant to implicate an author in the murders. I found more on Beffel, a leftist journalist who specialized in writing about radical political ideas, especially promoting labor organizations and criticism of lynchings, than I did on Wehde. This 134 page treatise was reviewed in 1927 by Edmond Locard, Director of the Laboratory of Police Technique in Lyons. Locard, like Finnegan, also mentions in passing the work of Minovici of Bucharest who wrote about the possibility of forging fingerprints in his Manual of Forensic Medicine (1904). 

QUOTES:  Miss Higgins; "Mr. Royle was not a gentleman -- he was publisher. Therefore we cannot attribute to him the qualities reserved for ordinary mortals."

Finnegan: "...I'm not a Sherlock Holmes, and I can't tell if the man wore a pink hat and had an epileptic sister in Tooting!"

He picked up the latest Sayers, then put it down with a sour look on his face when he felt the weight of it. Van Dine came in for a minute's consideration, and Gardner was equally treated. Finally he picked up the new Freeman and paid...his seven-and-sixpence.

Finnegan: "I like a detective story to be a detective story. When they try to write novels at the same time I've no patience for 'em."

Dan Lewis, Grief's superior: "I don't think I've ever come across a case like this. It's a detective novel, down to the ground--all the trimmings: red herrings, the senseless and complicated method of killing you would expect to find in a seven-and sixpence thriller..."

EASY TO FIND?  Rather scarce as usual, my friends. Both US and UK editions come in at least two types -- hardcover and paperback. However, both the US and UK paperback editions may be abridged. If you speak and read French, the cheapest copies out there are int hat language. All copies I turned up seem fairly priced.  Happy hunting!

Dragon's Cave - Clyde B Clason

THE STORY:  Jonas Wright, owner of an engraving business in Chicago, is found stabbed in a locked room where he housed his collection of medieval and historical weaponry. One of those weapons in his collection -- a halberd -- is apparently what did him in.  He is found with his neck severed and the halberd in a pool of blood nearby.  A dribble on a table in the middle of the room and one single droplet on the opposite side of the room are the only other traces of blood.  Shouldn't the room have been drenched in blood if Wright's neck had been severed?  Prof. Westborough is tagged by Lt. Mack to be a stenographer during the interrogations and to ask any questions he wishes., no matter two seemingly irrelevant. He is sure that the halberd is not the weapon. Before the detective team discover the correct murder means there will be more impossible events including the disappearance of a man from a second story locked room with no footprints in the snow outside his window.

THE CHARACTERS: The primary suspects are mostly confined to the Wright household with a few others associated with the family. They are:

Julian Carr- Sales Director at Wright Engraving who had returned from an amateur production of Romeo & Juliet. (BTW, the book's title is taken from a quote in the play which uses a cavern as a metaphor for a deceitful heart.) He was acting in it and played Mercutio. We find out he is adept at fencing and happened to be returning a rapier borrowed from Wright's collection used as a prop in the production. That's right, these Chicago yokels actually used a real sword in an amateur theater production.  (Ai yi yi!  What was Clason thinking?)

Madeleine Wright - she was with Julian when they entered the house and found her murdered father.  She was also in the play in the lead role of Juliet. Madeleine is one of these icy young socialites who turn up frequently in Golden Age detective fiction. Acting skill -- take note! She has murder suspect written all over her though with her dialogue and actions Clason tries to dissuade the reader against suspecting her. She's is not to be trusted, my friends.

Martin Wright - a pretentiously intellectual college student, the older of the two Wright sons. If it weren't enough that Prof. Westborough lectures us on the minutiae of medieval weaponry and how they were used we must endure Martin's mini lectures and allusions to great philosophers of the world. That's what he’s studying at Northwestern University. Schopenhauer is his current hero.  I was sure his ego and supercilious personality were going to implicate him in some fashion. At one point Martin pontificates on the uselessness of prisons and the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate. He believes there are only two solutions to crime: societal remedies that will prevent crime in the first place and psychological treatment. For, as he tells Hilda and Ronald (see below), there are only two real causes of crime: environment and mental illness.

Wellington (Wel) Wright - the handsome hunk of a son, youngest in the family. Embittered because he is not rewarded with a high paying job in his father's firm. Impetuous, temperamental, brash and a bit naive. Drinks a lot. Was drunk the night of the murder -- or was it play acting? Had been at the home of his Gold Coast friend...

Tony Corveau - commercial artist and Lothario. Puts the make on Madeleine.  Oh wait! they were once an item. She despises him now. Tony likes to draw naked women and his lush apartment is decorated with his many pen & ink sketches of many women he's met. Recently fired from Wright Engraving over some hazy abuse of company supplies. Wellington might also be involved. The haziness of that abuse will eventually come into focus and lead to an important discovery.

Hilda - the Wrights' servant. She flees the house employing a clever ruse after it is learned that her son Ronald has recently been released from prison. Her escape is a desperate attempt to keep her son away and prevent him from being questioned by the police. She fails miserably.

Alan Boyle - Chicago newspaper reporter.  Intrusive, too wise, and very interested in Madeliene (aren't all these men?). Always seems to be at the Wright home at the right time (ha!). He is eventually enlisted as an aide by both Madeleine and later Westborough.

Hans Gross (1847-1915)

THINGS I LEARNED:  This is the earliest murder mystery I have ever encountered in which blood spatter, bloodspill and blood patterns found in a crime scene are featured prominently. Or actually in this case -- the lack of blood evidence.  Two experts' names in the field of blood evidence are invoked in Westborough's mini lecture: Jeserich and Gross.  Both were Germans.  Dr. Paul Jeserich according to his New York Times obituary published on Dec 10, 1927 was dubbed the "German Sherlock Holmes" and was known internationally for his work in "legal chemistry".  Hans Gross was a 19th century criminologist who authored a seminal book entitled Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (1893), literally Handbook for Investigating Judges as a System of Criminology, described in a professional journal article (“Literature of Bloodstain Pattern Interpretation” - MacDonell, 1992) as "an excellent reference for not only bloodstain patterns but almost everything else that may be considered within the field of criminalistics." Proving once again that Westborough (and of course Clason) really knows his stuff.

Westborough and later Boyle, the reporter, both make an allusion to Mary Blandy when the police start to seriously suspect Madeleine as the killer.  Blandy I had never heard of.  Wikipedia tells us: "In 1751, she poisoned her father, Francis Blandy, with arsenic. She claimed that she thought the arsenic was a love potion that would make her father approve of her relationship with William Henry Cranstoun, an army officer and son of a Scottish nobleman."  Was she that well known that two characters would make allusions to her case?  Madeline Smith was more well known as a notorious poisoner. But why even mention poison since the victim was stabbed? I guess Clason wanted someone accused and tried for patricide to make his point. Still seems extremely arcane even for the 1930s.

Madeleine & Julian spy blood
leaking under the doorway. Note
that Julian has the rapier in hand.
UK edition (Heinemann, 1940)

INNOVATIONS: Despite some of my snide commentary above in describing the characters I rather enjoyed this one.  The impossible problems are cleverly carried out and the detection involved to explain those impossibilities is both sound and sensible.  The characters are forced into resorting to bizarre means to accomplish desperate acts because they are trapped in a house under constant guard by the police.  It's not a murder mystery where someone intentionally dreams up the crimes and miracle problems just to baffle police.  In this regard Clason was trying to make the locked room mystery more grounded in reality rather than making it a puzzle for its own sake.  So points to him!

While there is a somewhat sappy subplot of a love triangle (Julian-Madeleine-Alan) and Professor Westborough indulges a bit too often in esoteric tangents the plot is always engaging, the banter between Lt. Mack and the professor is always fun and amusing, and the imaginative "miracle problems" keep the reader on his toes trying to outguess the detectives and come up with the solution before the final chapter. Dragon's Cave (1939) has now displaced The Man from Tibet (1938) as my favorite in a rather uneven series of detective novels. I still have four more to read before I say whether this is the quintessential Clason mystery.

EASY TO FIND?  Wonderful news! Not at all scarce. Plenty of Rue Morgue Press reprint paperback copies out there. Amazingly, most of them are very cheap, well under $10 a copy. And, of course, there are several of the US first edition for those interested in owning the original Crime Club hardcover. Many of those are actually under $50 a copy. That's refreshing, ain't it?

A Year in Review (part 2)

Here is the continuation of my 2024 reading summation.  In looking over my reading log I see a predominance of newly translated Japanese detective novels, a small pile of contemporary ghost and horror novels, and sadly very few vintage mysteries. And away we go!

JULY:  I read nothing but new books this month or books that were translated into English for the first time.  The highlight this month that can be deemed vintage was surely the tour de force The Noh Mask Murder - Akimtsu Takagi (1951, new English translation 2024).  Initially I thought this tricky, rule breaking detective novel to be only run-of-the-mill. The murders were bizarre as expected but like many Japanese mystery novels is was another in a long line of decimated family murder plots.  The meta-fiction aspect (narrator is a writer and manuscripts make up much of the story) was intriguing at times, but I was underwhelmed for most of the book. Then, around the final third of the book I was literally gasping. I was utterly unprepared for the finale. Interested if anyone else has read this one.

AUGUST:  More Japanese novels!  I read two Seishi Yokomizo books featuring his eccentric detective Kosuke Kindaichi.  The Village of Eight Graves (orig 1950s, transl 2021) was less a mystery than it was a family saga novel and protracted thriller that barely passes my satisfaction rating. That it was first serialized is very apparent and I disliked that the translator hadn't the courage to remove lengthy recap passages. Overloaded with incident and extraneous characters and nothing really special.  The Little Sparrow Murders (orig 1971, transl 2024) was only slightly more of an improvement. Still another decimated family mystery plot but we get three families being attacked this time. I got a bit frustrated trying to keep them all separated in my head. Applause for Vertigo for continuing to include the vital (at least for me) cast of character list at the front of  the book.

SEPTEMBER:  Derry Down Death - Avon Curry (1960) Years ago I read and reviewed on this blog a serial killer thriller by Avon Curry (aka Jean Bowden) that while entertaining and well plotted contained an embarrassment of 1970s gay stereotypes and lots of misinformation or --more than likely-- plain ignorance. I was determined to give Bowden another chance in her "Avon  Curry" guise. If you want to try her out as a mystery writer, then Derry Down Death is definitely the book to read.  It was superior on all levels.  The plot involves the death of a musicologist who collects song lyrics and melodies of folk songs. His questions about one tune, and its lyrics in particular, seem to have led to his death. Was it murder or an accident?  And if murder, why would anyone be killed over a song? Utterly fascinating Derry Down Death is engagingly written with colorful, intelligent characters and a corker of a plot. It made my Top 10 for books I read in 2024.

OCTOBER:  The Gauntlet of Alceste - Hopkins Moorhouse (1921)  While this was the only vintage mystery I read this month it is far from the best book read in October.  But it's worth mentioning for the very forgotten detective who belongs to the Inductive Detectives of the early 20th century and for the Canadian writer also most likely forgotten. However, the book takes place in New York City rather than Canada which was a bit disappointing. The detection is minimal as our hero tries to locate a stolen antique jeweled gauntlet.  By the midpoint it devolves into a Master Criminal plot that seems inspired by French detective and sensation fiction of the late 19th/early 20th century.  The detective, Addison Kent, appears in only two books. I bought the sequel The Golden Scarab (1926) and will review that one later this year. No doubt an antique jewel theft is involved.

NOVEMBER:  Zero vintage novels read!  I was addicted to watching movies online this month and read very little. Of the three contemporary novels I read in November -- The Hitchcock Hotel, The Silver Bone (both 2024) and Rouge  (2023)  -- it was most assuredly The Silver Bone by Andrei Kurkov that stood out.  In 1919 during one of the many Ukrainian revolutions the protagonist Samson Kolechko, an engineering student, is unexpectedly recruited to the police force and finds himself engrossed in multiple mysteries involving the skeletal remains of the title and a strangely tailored suit with inhuman proportions. He solves all mysteries while doing his best to fend off corrupt soldiers who have commandeered his home. If you like offbeat detective novels with a bit of fascinating history thrown in the mix look no further.  It's a quick read and well translated by Boris Dralyuk, who makes mention of his close friendship with the writer in an afterword.

DECEMBER:  I read only one vintage mystery, The Night of Fear - Moray Dalton (1931).  Selected only because it takes place at Christmas it was a lightweight mystery of the wrongfully-accused-man-on-trial school. Didn't know the bulk of the book would be a courtroom thriller. Story concerns a stabbing during a game of hide & seek at a Christmas house party.  Loathsome mystery writer, the victim, is also a blackmailer. Meh. To be honest I remember nothing of the story and took no notes. I had to read the blurb on the back and flip through the final pages to recall anything about the story. I know Curt Evans was responsible for getting all her books reprinted, but most of these merely pass the time and don't linger in the imagination. I did, however, truly enjoy the weirdness in Death in the Forest which I read in 2023. I'd recommend that Moray Dalton novel for its creepy plot with supernatural overtones and the extremely bizarre ending.

Murder without Clues - Joseph L Bonney

A dead body in a locked room, a house surrounded by undisturbed snow, all suspects have an alibi but one and yet it seems that one person could not have committed the crime.  Another ingenious John Dickson Carr rip-off?  Well, not quite.  Murder without Clues (1940) is a the ultimate Golden Age homage that does a very good job of honoring the work of not only Carr but Queen and Van Dine.  Joseph L. Bonney, in his debut work as a mystery writer, has also thrown in a couple of wink-wink allusions to Conan Doyle to make this a quadruple homage. Does this mystery succeed as yet another in the impossible crime/locked room subgenre. Hmm...You decide.

Henry Watson, a wannabe novelist, is in search of a new apartment and a roommate and his friend suggests he visit Simon Rolfe who is also in search of new digs. The two meet and Watson can't help but be disturbed by Rolfe's emulation of a certain fictional detective. Rolfe has a mysterious origin that is never fully explained, seems to be independently wealthy, plays the violin, smokes a pipe, lounges around in a smoking jacket, and sees clients with puzzling problems which he solves for a modest fee and does so in a single afternoon.  Bonney has a bit too cutely paid homage to Conan Doyle while at the same time allowing his Sherlock dopplegänger to disparage the entire canon in a four page diatribe in which he deconstructs several of the stories as pathetically obvious. Once this tirade is out of the way the story can take place front and center and we have a classic Golden Age locked room populated by ex-vaudeville performers who are stranded in a snowbound house somewhere in upstate New York.

Wicked philandering dancer Lucille Divine is found stabbed in the back in her locked bedroom at the home of Champ Lister. All of Lister's guests and servants were downstairs at the time she screamed, they rush upstairs, find Lister in the hallway at the wrong door, then break down Lucille's door and find her in her last gasps. One man goes to her tries to help her and hears her say "It was the Champ..."  Then she expires. Has she verbally fingered her killer?  Lister denies he had anything to do with her death.  He didn't even know she was in this other bedroom.  He went to the bedroom across the hallway where she usually stayed.

Young Joseph L Bonney
looking suitably nerdy
on the DJ rear cover

As the title implies - there are no clues, at least as far as physical evidence goes. Plus -- no weapon can be found anywhere, even after all the rooms are thoroughly searched. The only window in the murder room is open a crack (Lucille liked fresh air to sleep at night despite the wintry temps) and can't be opened any further.  How did anyone get in, kill Lucille, and escape entirely unnoticed.  The timing of the guests rushing upstairs seems to eliminate Lister who was seen at the other doorway as they came up the stairs. Also, Lister a former vaudeville performer who stunned people with feats of memory and instant recall, listened to a radio program at the time of the murder. To prove it he writes down all the dialogue from memory.  When the police compare it to the actual broadcast it's nearly verbatim. It's all utterly baffling -- until Rolfe starts questioning the suspects of course.

Rolfe fancies himself a detective of psychology who finds this case with no physical evidence right up his alley. He approaches detective work from a different angle paying attention subtleties in language and behavior.  Though he claims to use deduction most of his conclusions are the result of induction. Still Bonney is clever in how he allows Rolfe to expose lies and get the suspects to reveal things they'd rather keep hidden. I was impressed with the dying clue bit which is very reminiscent of several Queen books.  However, in the end Bonney's explanation is a bit of a stretch.  No matter how many people I polled I couldn't get one person to duplicate what he says happened.

Rolfe is also irritatingly an obsessive student of the French philosopher Montaigne who he quotes repeatedly through the book. Only one quote seems to have anything to do with his work as a detective:  "I do not understand; I pause, I examine."  This might serve as Rolfe's (or any worthwhile detective's) mantra.

In the end it's a intricately detailed investigation, perhaps overly so in the manner of Queen and Van Dine,  with Rolfe sharing the stage with Inspector Charles King and a slew of policemen put on guard throughout the household. In a neat touch Henry Watson (Rolfe actually addresses him as "My dear Watson" too many times) provides quite by accident one of the key observations.  The manner in which the crime is committed is perhaps one of the wickedest I've encountered in a American mystery novel of this era.  there is, of course, another bizarre murder means, not quite as original as Bonney may think it is.  This method belongs to a subset of murder means that I can group into Death by... OH!  Better not mention that.  But it has been used in the work of Carr as Carter Dickson, Burton Stevenson, the Coles, and two obscure books by William Morton, and George R. Fox, all of those books and stories pre-dating Bonney's novel. Was the murder means yet another, albeit obscure, homage?

Some good news:  copies of Murder without Clues are out there for sale! About eight or nine copies by my count. One 1st edition with DJ is absurdly priced at $495. Be aware that the paperback digest edition (pictured at right) is abridged. But in this case that 's a good thing. I can imagine that all the nonsense about Montaigne and Socrates was eliminated to shorten the book. Also I'm sure that the editors cut to pieces the Sherlock Holmes diatribe that tends to spoil some of the content of the stories.

This is an interesting and engaging read in the locked room subgenre.  I thought for sure that I had pegged the killer and figured out how Lucille was done in. I also thought I had figured out the dying clue. But I was wrong on all counts.  It all turned out to be quite a surprise, though I think a bit flawed.

Having many of the suspects come from the world of vaudeville allows for a slew of red herrings, two of which I fell for and one which did not turn up at all. I was disappointed Bonney didn't include the missing aspect. It would have fit in perfectly with the dying clue.  Missed opportunity!  You can expect at least one knife thrower to show up in the cast. After all, knife throwing and vaudeville go hand in hand in the mystery novel. If you aren't acquainted with this hoary cliche of detective novels read my post on the ultimate knife throwing murder mystery here.

IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS: Still Life with Pistol – Roger Ormerod

In Still Life with Pistol (1986), the second outing featuring ex-police detective Richard Patton and his paramour Amelia, we find the two taking part in a private art teaching seminar sponsored by Bruno Fillingley, reformed art forger turned teacher and mentor of the arts. Lucky participants rich enough to spend the high admission price get to spend a fortnight (that’s two weeks to us North Americans) at Bruno’s art-filled mansion painting, sculpting, drawing and indulging in whatever other medium tickles one’s fancy. Bruno provides not only lodging, meals and studio space in the price tag but tips and guidance to bring out the artist’s best work. Amelia is the artist of the two while Richard is merely along as an observer. He had formerly consulted with Bruno on an elaborate electronic security system to help protect the valuable collection of impressionist paintings and Chinese pottery Bruno has amassed over the years. The alarms are turned off during the day and go back on at 11 PM sharp each night. Only Bruno knows the secret code words that set the alarms.

So we have the setting for a possible art heist, don’t we? And it all sounds very much like Ormerod’s sophomore mystery novel, The Silence of the Night, previously reviewed here at PSB. The security system, Chinese vases, fake art work, a burglary and a violent death that might be accident or might be murder are all features of that other novel. But there the similarity ends. There is no theft – fake or otherwise – in this novel. It’s an unequivocal murder that takes place.

Like most of Ormerod’s books we also are dealing with a crime in the past in the intricate plot. The victim is former police detective Roy Towers, currently Bruno’s newest security man and a painter in his own right. And he was the lead detective responsible for arresting a murderer in a crime of passion that involved Roy's former mistress. That murderer, now behind bars, has a wife who is hounding Roy for sending her husband to prison. The oddity is that woman was Roy’s mistress and the reason for the murder her husband was convicted for. That old murder case seems to be at the core of the motive for the killing that takes place at Bruno’s estate.

Roy’s odd hobby is taking part in the bi-weekly art seminars and working on an acrylic still life that gives the book its title. He has painted the same still life made up of a Chinese vase with yellow flowers, a hunter’s trumpet and a pistol (see the illustrations on the dust jackets) for several months. The full set is handled by a gallery owner in London and bizarrely the paintings are extremely popular and sell quite regularly. [Still lifes popular in the 80s? And selling repeatedly? Hard to believe.] Roy’s latest painting and the still life props are crucial to the plot of this mystery. Most interesting is that the novel involves not one, but two impossible problems! Nowhere is this indicated on the book jacket of my copy or anywhere else. You won’t know this until you actually read the book...or this review.

Roy is found shot and through ballistics tests the gun from the still life is proved as the murder weapon. But Richard who found the body had noted that the gun had been sitting on the table unmoved and matching exactly the position as depicted on Roy’s canvas. Further complicating the impossibility of the gun being used to kill Roy is the fact that there were four flower petals on the gun itself, also seen on the exact spots on the gun in the painting. Richard who just happened to have his trusty Konica with him immediately takes several photographs of the crime scene in case the police disturb the still life while conducting their investigation. The problem of how the petals were on the real gun and the one in the painting will be a cause of much debate and obsession for Richard, Amelia and the police inspector in charge of the case.

This impossible problem reminded me of the clever ideas Edward D. Hoch dreamt up in the hundreds of stories he wrote for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It would be a fantastic idea for a short story. But it wears out its welcome in this novel. The two possible solutions can be thought out rather quickly by any reader with a modicum of common sense. Richard and Amelia come up with the more improbable of the two solutions. But it takes Inspector Poynton to point out to Richard the real explanation of how the gun was used to kill Roy and still end up on the table in the exact spot with the flower petals undisturbed.

What does keep the book interesting as a murder mystery is trying to figure out which one of the guests at the art seminar killed Roy. There are multiple suspects and multiple motives, some of which are trickily exposed in the usual surprise-filled chapters Ormerod so often delivers in his crime fiction. The second impossible problem, one of lesser intricacy but still quite baffling, is the puzzle of the Chinese vase and the nine fakes up on display in a corridor upstairs. How did the genuine vase used in the still life get switched with a fake one after the murder when the studio was locked and sealed? And why is one of the artists who is interested in recreating that Chinese vase so intent on getting into the studio to use the kiln to fire his vase?

Still Life with Pistol seems to be thought out too intricately and I confess that its complexity left my mind reeling a couple of times. I found myself re-reading passages trying to keep straight which vase was where and who was trying to get into the studio. The plot smacks of the kind of overly fanciful plots that hearken back to the Golden Age. Of course Ormerod is a huge fan of these types of mystery novels, but there is a kind of overkill in Still Life with a Pistol that defies logic. The methods employed in the murder scheme are baroque and time consuming and in the end senseless. Even the motive seems unreal. And then Ormerod delivers one more unexpected touch in the melodramatically macabre final pages. It all ends with a kind of a fizzle despite the sound of the final bang from a pistol in the last scene.

But... even lesser Ormerod is good Ormerod. Unlike Reginald Hill who criticized his mystery writer colleague for being overly complicated in devising his crime plots and accusing him of being a failure I disagree. I’ll keep coming back for more. Roger Ormerod has a fascinating and teeming imagination. There was enough here to tantalize me and keep me reading to the end.

I have more Roger Ormerod books to read and more reviews planned throughout the summer. Stay tuned!

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.

The Hanging Doll Murder - Roger Ormerod

Can a murder mystery about a locked room with a broken window still be considered as an impossible crime?

The bloody shotgun murder in The Hanging Doll Murder (1983) sure seems like one. A man has been found with his face blown off and his hands mangled from the being shot at by both barrels of a shotgun. The entire house was locked from the inside and the front door has swelled from cold weather and cannot be opened. But one window in the kitchen has a hole in it, presumably from a shotgun blast and yet it’s too small and almost too perfectly made. And why is there no glass on the inside of the house if someone shot the victim through the window from the outside. Why is the glass only found outside in the snow covered ground that reveals hardly any footprints?

Is a puzzlement, as the King of Siam used to say.

Ultimately it isn’t the puzzle of the broken window that makes the book such an engaging and devilish bit of detective fiction. With a deviously layered plot, one brilliant piece of misdirection, and a gasp inducing surprise in the final pages here is a throwback to the heyday of detective fiction when story and plotting superseded character study and grim psychological probing. TomCat who blogs at Beneath the Stains of Time has reviewed several Roger Ormerod mystery novels and I finally succumbed to temptation after his most recent review mentioned other Ormerod titles with possible locked room elements that he wanted to investigate. The Hanging Doll Murder was on that list of books.

If the locked room really isn’t completely sealed and the problem of the broken window is only a minor impossible problem that doesn’t discount The Hanging Doll Murder as a fine piece of mystery fiction. But I prefer the original UK title Face Value. It’s much more fitting both for the pun about the identity of the murder victim as well as the colloquial meaning of the phrase. A clever police constable introduces the idea of the title when he says “on the face of it” the crime appears to have be committed one way, but what if the exact opposite were true? I can’t reveal either side of his argument without spoiling one of the many clever ideas Ormerod presents in this story of a violent crime.

A burned out car, a missing husband and the release from prison of a murderer/rapist all culminate in the shotgun murder. Prior to the discovery of the murder a weird plastic doll with a beard glued to its chin was found hanging from a noose in a tree on property belonging to the former prisoner. Later some taunting drawings are found painted on the house itself. Was someone out to kill the prisoner? Who is the victim? The husband? The ex-con? Or someone entirely different? Amelia Trowbridge reported her husband missing and becomes a key suspect when police learn she was instrumental in getting the rapist released from his life sentence.

This is the first of ten novels featuring Richard Patton. It is also the book in which he meets his future wife. Like Lord Peter meeting Harriet Vane during a murder trial in Strong Poison and The Man in the Moonlight in which Dr. Basil Willing first meets his future wife who is a prime suspect in a murder investigation, Patton meets Amelia Trowbridge who the police are highly suspicious of having done something to her missing husband. But unlike those very innocent other future wives of fictional detectives don’t be too quick to cross Amelia off the list of suspects in this instance. Things look very bleak for her indeed and her behavior does not improve matters. Patton is certain she is guilty of something if not murder then some terrible secret.

I really enjoyed this mystery novel. Rarely am I as thoroughly surprised by everything in a story as I was by this book. That it’s fairly contemporary is all the more wonderful. This is an excellent example of a modern mystery that honors the traditions of the Golden Age and still incorporates modern police technique, modern behavior and a motive that will never go out of style. I kept trying to outguess Ormerod at his own game and failed miserably. Patton makes a stunning pronouncement in the final chapter that explains a very minor mystery that I basically dismissed the moment it was introduced. Foolish mistake for that minor mystery is key to understanding the entire solution. It all reminded me of a particular trick repeatedly employed by Agatha Christie with great finesse. There are several amazing twists in the plot not the least of which is what happened to Amelia’s husband which is truly the most brilliant part of the story. Highly recommended. I’m off to find more Roger Ormerod books!