FFB: The Man with My Face - Samuel W Taylor

Imagine coming home to find a stranger in your home who looks just like you. Imagine, too, that your spouse and your friends insist that the stranger is you and you are a fraud.  How do you prove them wrong?  This is the nightmare problem that faces the protagonist of Samuel Taylor's debut mystery novel. It's a whirlwind of an action thriller and has elements of the traditional detective novel as well.

The Man with My Face foreshadows the post-World War 2 paranoia that would show up in so many private eye novels and other suspense thrillers throughout the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. In addition to the theme of loss of identity the book is very much about trust. Finding the right person or people to believe Charles "Chick" Graham's story provides the main thrust of the plot. The only way to escape the trap of his stolen identity and avoid further victimization of the grandiose plot hatched to frame him for a $2 million bank robbery Graham decides to turn the scheme around. Rather than fruitlessly trying to prove that he is the real Graham he decides to prove that Rand (the bank robbing double) is not Graham. A subtle difference to be sure, and yet a brilliant strategy.

The story is replete with crazy coincidences. Graham finds a business card from a salesman who visited him at his office. To escape the police he pretends to be James Pease, the salesman who lives only a couple blocks away. He convinces the cop to take him home - Pease's home - and through sheer luck gets into the unlocked house. Then he has to talk his way out of that predicament when Pease walks in and asks Graham who he is and why he just walked into his home. Later, Pease will run into Graham and Rand on a commuter train and discover Graham's secret. Or what he thinks is Graham's secret.


Barry Nelson (right) insists he is the real Charles Graham in the 1951 film


Added to the high level of coincidence are B movie tricks and gimmicks. Much needed information is received through incredibly detailed newspaper articles and emergency radio announcements. These are easy ways out for any thriller writer and are terrible clichés to us these days. Taylor's other novice writer annoyance is what I call the Soap Opera Dialog Syndrome. Everyone addresses each other repeatedly for no reason. "Chick, how did your face end up like that?" "Well, Mary, it's a long story." "Oh Chick, I have all the time you have." "OK, Mary grab a chair" "Ready when you are, Chick." Chick, Mary, Chick, Mary! Blah, blah, blah! On a radio or TV show this is sometimes necessary. In a book where the scene is between two characters it's completely unnecessary. A minor complaint but one that just grates on my nerves when the dialog is made up of 90% of these type of exchanges.


Then there is the strange man in the black leather "zip jacket" with the Doberman. He seems to show up everywhere Graham goes. Not only are the police after Graham this guy with a vicious dog is after him as well. It's a series of pursuits followed by narrow escapes throughout the entire book. Graham needs an ally and the only person he can think of turning to is his former girlfriend, Mary.

Once again through a series of coincidences Graham runs into people who provide him with information about Mary. He is lucky enough to track her down and she and her brother, Walt, after listening to Graham's outrageous story finally believe him and decide to offer their help. Without them Graham would've been sunk.

Slowly Rand sees that his scheme is falling apart and he does his best to enlist some other villains to prevent Graham from succeeding in ruining the plan. There are several brutal murders, two abductions, a handful of dog attacks, and a fortuitous run-in with a poison oak bush that temporarily gives Graham an unwanted disguise. Amid all this action there is also some legitimate and very clever detection on the part of Graham, Mary, Walt and even James Pease –- the salesman who will make one final appearance in a scene involving a walk-in meat freezer.

As if all that preceded wasn't enough Taylor adds a final surprising twist and eleventh hour salvation from the least likeliest character to have uncovered the plot. All in all, a remarkable debut from a crime writer who contributed only two books to the genre. Taylor's second book, with the unfortunate title of The Grinning Gismo, will be reviewed here in the future. I highly recommend The Man with My Face as a perfect example of an imaginative cat-and-mouse thriller with the added bonus of some well thought out detective story elements.

Department of Queer Complaints - Carter Dickson

This is the only short story collection featuring "Carter Dickson's" (aka John Dickson Carr) lesser known detective Colonel March. I read the revised and updated version of this book which includes two stories previously unpublished in book form that were not in the original 1940 book. According to Douglas Greene's introduction to this updated book Colonel March was modeled after Carr's good friend and fellow mystery writer Cecil Street, aka "John Rhode" and "Miles Burton." If so, then Street must have had a great sense of humor in real life. Something that astonishes me because most of his books are rather lacking in a rollicking sense of humor. The stories in this volume were originally written in 1937 and published between 1938 and 1940 in The Strand Magazine. The final one appeared in February 1941. Two of the stories "The Empty Flat" and "William Wilson's Racket" did not appear in book form until 1963 in The Men Who Explained Miracles.

There are nine stories total and all of them deal with an impossible crime or an impossible problem. Not all the stories are about locked room murders though. There are stories about a room that disappears, footprints on a snow covered hedge that couldn't support the weight of any human, an invisible piece of "furniture," as well as the usual baffling murders with weapons that disappear or methods that seem impossible. In one case, there is even a story that was pilfered from and recycled in two well known Carr novels.

March who heads up the D-3, a special branch of the Metropolitan Police that only investigates unusual cases hence the slang name given the branch that give s the book its title. He is described by Carr as an amiable and large man (his weight of 17 stone is constantly mentioned), "with a speckled face, an interested blue eye and … a cropped mustache that might be sandy or grey." He also displays a jovial sense of humor. His gift is for noting the obvious in what appear to be puzzling problems and "he hits it right every time."

Of the original seven stories I particular liked these:

"The New Invisible Man" – This called to mind of The Curse of the Bronze Lamp in that the crime turns out not to be a crime at all. Also another instance of theatrical shenanigans as in The Problem of the Green Capsule.

"Error at Daybreak" - a man is stabbed while standing on a remote rocky area of beach with no one anywhere near him and the disappearance of his body thereafter. It may not have been brilliant in its solution, but the telling had excellent use of misdirection and so the ending came as a surprise to me.

"Death in the Dressing Room" – another case of misdirection well done. So much time is spent on a pickpocketing ring that the murder victim found in a locked room seems almost forgotten. When the murderer is literally unmasked I was impressed.

"The Silver Curtain" has an Anthony Wynne-like stabbing in a dead end alleyway. The method and means are also reminiscent of several of Wynne's books. I almost figured this one out.

The other four were only so-so in my estimation. "Hot Money" is the one about an invisible piece of furniture used a hiding place for stolen money. But I have never considered the hiding place to be a piece of furniture in any room I've ever been in – even the many vintage apartments I've lived in. I'd call it a part of the room's construction but not a piece of furniture. That different use of the word was unintentionally unfair, but that's what comes of reading a story 70 plus years after it was written. Terminology and home construction have changed drastically. There is a silly story called "Footprint in the Sky" that takes place in the winter and has a lot to do with prints in the snow. It begins like something written by Mary Roberts Rinehart with a very "Had I But Known" air about it. The problem seems entirely contrived for the sake of creating an impossibility. It reminded me of the murderer's trick in Christianna Brand's Suddenly at His Residence (aka The Crooked Wreath) and is practically a cliché in this subgenre. "The Crime in Nobody's Room" is the story of a disappearing room and a body that seems to move after death. This includes a trick employed by Ellery Queen more effectively in a book I dare not mention. Here the culprit has a similar affliction and his behavior gives him away, but the two things he does seem once again contrived, not to mention stupid.

Then there is "The Empty House." The story opens with Douglas Chase, a history professor, bothered by a noisy radio blasting irritatingly loud music while he is trying complete his thesis that if accepted will provide him with a professorship at an American university. He is in competition with another history professor named K. G. Mills whom he has never met. He heads off to find the source of the bothersome radio and discovers that it seems to be coming from behind the door of an apartment with the name plate that says "K. G. Mills." He knocks on the door, a woman opens the door and he asks for Mr. Mills. She replies: "I am Mr. Mills. That is to speak with academic accuracy…my name is Kathleen Gerrard Mills, and I am the only Mills at the present moment." She, of course, is the very same K. G. Mills who is his competitor for the professorship. They exchange a few insults about each others' work before they get down to hunting for the irksome radio. Does this sound familiar? An initialed history professor who turns out to be a woman and the rival for another history professor? It should. A similar scene between two Dr. Campbells, both professors, takes place in the opening pages of The Case of the Constant Suicides a novel written in 1941 about four years after this story was written. And the woman professor in that novel was named Kathryn. Not much different from Kathleen.

And that's not all! When the source of the radio is discovered a dead body is also found. The story reveals that the corpse is a lawyer who was investigating a haunted room (The Red Widow Murders, Night of the Mocking Widow, ) and apparently died of fright (He Who Whispers). But when the solution is revealed it turns out the murderer employed a method exactly the same as one of the deaths in The Reader Is Warned (1939). So we have a story that was cannibalized to make up at least two other books and shares plot elements with at least three other books. All of them coming after the time when the story was originally written, around 1937 as Greene tells us. This is assuredly the reason why the story was excluded from the original Department of Queer Complaints. The Reader is Warned was published only the year before and Carr probably didn’t want to be seen as a lazy writer who borrowed from himself.

For locked room and impossible crime fans this collection contains a few stories well worth investigating. Your tastes may differ from mine, but there is enough of the odd and bizarre to interest a variety of readers. It's not exactly a winner of a book all around. But I enjoyed it and especially was taken aback by the similarities in "The Empty House" with so many other Carr/Dickson works.