IN BRIEF: The Queen's Gate Mystery - Herbert Adams

Jimmie Haswell receives a note from his friend Capt. Gregory Bruden inquiring about the legality of finding something of value in a home in which the owner died.  Is it a case of finders keepers?  Or does the cache of treasure still belong to the estate, the heirs of the dead former owner of the house. What if the finder then buys the house?  Is it legally his property because it was found in the house?  Jimmie is mulling over these various legal riddles when he learns of a murder in a house that was for sale.  And the corpse turns out to to be Capt. Bruden.  Could Bruden have been killed because of the letter?  Was there some hidden cache of something valuable in that supposedly empty house now for sale where Burden  was found bludgeoned?  Well, of course the two are tied together!  That's the core of The Queen's Gate Mystery, a quasi detective novel of murder, hidden treasure and a gang of ruthless criminals.

The Queen's Gate Mystery (1927) is Jimmie Haswell’s third outing as an amateur detective.  He  is a lawyer --a solicitor, not a barrister -- recently married to Nonna, a French woman he met and fell in love with in his previous adventure The Crooked Lip.  Nonna convinces Jimmie to investigate the various legal questions posed in Bruden's letter and to prod the police into tying the letter to the murder.  The two of them get in over their heads and soon what began as a detective novel transforms into a full blown action thriller rife with the kind of 1920s set pieces that would make this novel suitable for the afternoon serials of Adams' contemporary cinema. 

Nonna is abducted, Jimmie must rescue her.  Jimmie is attacked, bound and gagged and must escape. The search for the treasure intersects with a subplot of a ring of criminals some of whom are looking for the treasure, others who have their own reasons for using the house.  Secret passageways which featured prominently in Haswell's debut (The Secret of Bogey House, 1924) are key to solving the mystery of how the crimes are committed but this is no surprise at all and rather obvious early in the book.

Jimmie says late in the book, "What an ideal place golf links must be for conspirators to meet and plan their crimes."  Golf courses recur as settings for murders and the game crops up in a variety of ways throughout Adams' novels. Here it isn't so much the game itself as it as an aspect of golf.  One of the clues Haswell stumbles across while searching the rooms of the murder site -- actually it's Nonna who finds it -- is a golf scorecard that includes a hole-in-one. The scorecard is prominently stamped with the name of the golf course and club. Knowing that this high achievement in golf is almost always celebrated at the course and talked about in the clubhouse Haswell heads to the course and with clever questioning discovers the person who made the shot. He then sets out to prove that person was present in the house around the time of the murder.  Eventually, that ace golfer is implicated in several other crimes as well as the murder.

As always romance plays an important role in the story. Haswell often riffs on the life of a newlywed with some amusing remarks. His devotion and love for his wife spur him on giving him a sort of superhuman talent in rescue and survival. Nonna is interested in getting the other couple to repair their relationship after a damaging quarrel seems to turn them against one another. Never fear. They all make up and both Jimmie and Nonna and Philip and Enid foil the villains and live happily ever after.

The action sequences leave a lot to be desired, however. While I found it hard to believe that he could actually untie knots by simply manipulating the tight cords on his wrist on a hook embedded in a brick wall and do this all with his back against the wall in pitch darkness it still made me smile.  Oh the days of derring-do in 1920s action adventures.  The story is pure cliffhanger movie fodder.  But Jimmie and Nonna are just plain likeable so it's hard to make fun of such familiar stock in trade action and hackneyed devices, as Carolyn Wells liked to call them.

I have a few other Haswell books to get to and then I'll be sampling several of Herbert Adams' non-series detective novels.  But nothing has yet to outshine his remarkable achievement in the baffling and exciting detective novel The Crime in the Dutch Garden.

Jimmie Haswell Crime Novels
(reviews on this blog have hyperlinks)

The Secret of Bogey House (1924)
The Crooked Lip (1926)
The Queen's Gate Mystery (1927)
The Empty Bed (1928)
Rogues Fall Out (1928)
The Golden Ape (1930)
The Crime in the Dutch Garden (1931)
The Paulton Plot (1932)
The Woman in Black (1933)

LEFT INSIDE: Promotional Post Card from 1938

Today for a change we have a legitimate "Left Inside" find.  I was sort of cheating for the past couple of months using inscriptions and bookplates (and there are more of those to come in case you were suffering from withdrawal) due to a lack of ephemera left inside my books. A plethora of bookplates and POIs  began turning up as well as autographs so I started taking photos and have quite a file to choose from now.  This post card, on the other hand, was a delightful and long overdue find.

And the book itself is an even better find!  One of the best purchases I've made in years. It's an incredibly rare copy of Death Walks Softly (1938) --a Nigel Morland book, one of the Inspector Tandy detective novels he wrote using his "Neal Shepherd " pseudonym. At a mere $35 it was a steal. The description promised the exceptionally scarce dust jacket though based on the price clearly the seller had no idea about that. Overall, the description noted minimal damage and a book in good condition. A bare bones description to be sure and leaving a lot of room for my usually cynical imagination to fill in with all sorts of expected flaws. It could mean anything from genuinely good to battered and worn because "good" in the book trade does not mean good at all. Usually "good" translates to barely good. In truth the rating can be used to cover a condition that ranges from usual wear to beaten to hell.  This counterintuitive grading system that's been in place for centuries frankly still baffles me. 

Imagine my surprise when I opened the package to discover a review copy in Very Good condition!  Minor wear, faint foxing to the foredges, some tanning to the edges of the dust jacket, but absolutely much better than a mere "good."

Laid inside I found a bonus not mentioned in the seller's description. A promotional post card from Constable & Co., the publisher, intended to be sent to professionals in the chemistry world. This makes me think that the book was a review copy and that the recipient was to send the card out to help promote sales. It also alludes to the fact that the book is the first in a new series although that fact is never mentioned outright. The front of the card has a miniature of the dust jacket illustration, but in black and white. The actual dust jacket is in three colors (blue, green and black). Click to enlarge for full enjoyment. You'll most likely have to enlarge the second one in order to read the message.

I own three of the four Neal Shepard books and have been promising to write about them for years now.  I think I've mentioned in passing the plot of Death Flies Low in a couple of comments over the past ten years, but still have not written up reviews of any of the books. They are all scientific detective novels with bizarre murder methods and unusual motives. Along with another brief series featuring Sgt Johnny Lamb that Morland wrote as "John Donavan" they are the best of his detective novels. Expect reviews of all the Neal Shepherd books starting in March and continuing through April. You'll have to wait for the photos of the beautiful copy of Death Walks Softly in the first review in the coming weeks.