Riddle of a Lady (1956) by Anthony Gilbert

Last month, I reviewed the recently reprinted The Tragedy at Freyne (1927) by "Anthony Gilbert," a pseudonym of Lucy Malleson, which was the first novel to appear under that name and introduced her first, short-lived series detective, Scott Egerton – a rising politician who appeared in ten mysteries. Gilbert replaced Scott Egerton with a shady, scheming and relentlessly amusing London lawyer named Arthur Crook. A delightful character often likened to Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale or his American counterparts like John J. Malone or Perry Mason. Gilbert also knew her way around a plot with her best novels (e.g. The Clock in the Hat Box, 1939) coming close to rivaling those of Agatha Christie. Gilbert stuck with Crook from his first appearance in Murder by Experts (1936) to the posthumously published A Nice Little Killing (1974).

The Tragedy at Freyne was a better than average 1920s mystery novel, but it reminded me that a return to Arthur Crook series was long overdue. So picked one that sounded promising and it didn't let me down!

Riddle of a Lady (1956) is the 31st novel in the Arthur Crook series and starts out as an inverted detective story. Henry Greatorex hails from a family of London lawyers, but his casual, frivolous attitude to life and his work was "an intolerable thorn in the side of his sober half-brothers," Richard and Charles Greatorex – who opened the the Beckfield branch in "to provide a niche" for their younger brother. Not expecting too much, Henry had nonetheless flourished with his light attitude to life proving to be "the equivalent of what, in doctors, is known as a bedside manner" ("Henry had it to perfection"). That was twenty years ago. Riddle of a Lady begins with Henry and his staff treating themselves to an anniversary luncheon. Henry is a little grayer, but no less vital as he intends to marry the much younger Beverley Carr. Just one problem. Henry, "wicked old Henry, the bachelor but surely not the celibate," has a mistress setup in a little house, in Hallett Street, where he has been visiting her regularly for the past five years.

Stella Foster, "the deserted married woman who has never sued for divorce and is no longer in a position to do so," refuses to let Henry go without a fight. Even waving a revolver in his face and promising that, as long as she lives, he won't take anyone else to church. If he does, she'll be waiting outside to shoot her.

So the idea of murder entered Henry's mind, "it wouldn't be murder, he reflected, but suicide by proxy." And, before too long, the reader finds Henry standing over the body of Stella Foster and beating a hasty retreat through the backdoor with the intention in keeping very quiet. Stella knew him as Henry Browne and there were no letters, or anything else to connect the two, but the methodical police eventually gather enough evidence and witnesses to identify him – getting detained and arranged for trial. Arthur Crook is called on the defend him or prevent the case from going to trail at all, which is easier said than done. But not for a lack of potential suspects. Riddle of a Lady is not the classic story of the eternal triangle, but an infernal revolving door as Stella had a string of lovers and visitors on the night of her murder ("really, she might as well hang a red light over the door").

Arthur Crook appeared briefly in the opening stages and mentioned several times, but shines as a lawyer-detective, "my clients are always innocent or they wouldn't be my clients," in the second-half. The all-important question is, of course, whether Crook's client really is innocent or the author is playing a game of bluff poker with the genre savvy reader. A very well-played game, either way, especially considering Riddle of a Lady is ultimately a sordid crime story. Crook called it "a not particularly edifying common-or-garden story" and the murderer's identity is a bit of a letdown, but the fireworks preceding it was superb! Crook gathered together all the suspects to mercilessly break down their alibis in order to erect cases against them in dazzling succession. And continues to break down, and build up, until the murderer tripped up.

So, yes, a sordid story as old as time, but not one without substance. Everything from the ambiguous, inverted nature of the plot and the various characters to Crook being Crook helped to polish a sordid crime story into an excellent, late-period Golden Age mystery. One of those all together too rare glimpses of what the plot-driven detective story could have been in the age of the character-driven crime and thriller novels.

Note for the Curious: for those who enjoy my completely wrong armchair solutions, I seriously considered (ROT13) Tvyoreg jnf oyhssvat naq Urael npghnyyl qvq xvyy Fgryyn. Rirelbar nterrq “Urael jnf n tragyrzna, ur unq ybiryl znaaref, ur jbhyq abg fgenatyr gur zbfg gverfbzr bs zvfgerffrf,” ohg jung vs ur unq orra unaqrq n unys-svavfurq wbo? Fbzrbar unq nggnpxrq Fgryyn naq, oryvrivat ure gb or qrnq, syrq gur fprar evtug orsber Urael ragrerq gur ubhfr. Fb ur svavfurq gur wbo gur bgure thl yrsg hasvavfurq juvpu jbhyq rkcynva jul fcraq rkgen gvzr va gur ubhfr bgure guna gvzr fgnaqvat fgvyy. Well, I was only mostly wrong.

The Tragedy at Freyne (1927) by Anthony Gilbert

"Anthony Gilbert" was the penname of Lucy Malleson, an inventive, productive and a shade unconventional mystery writer, who wrote over sixty novels, dozens of short stories and a number of radio-plays – mostly starring her series-detective, Arthur Crook. A London-based lawyer of ill-repute and dubious ethics who lived up to his name. So a tremendously fun character deliberately made vulgar to counter the popular image of the debonair, sophisticated and meddlesome sleuth a la Philo Vance. However, the first novel published under the "Anthony Gilbert" name introduced her first, short-lived detective-character, Scott Egerton.

Scott Egerton is "a member of the least democratic body on this earth, the British House of Commons," who's predicted to have a bright future in politics ("he's the type that's cut out for leadership"). Beside being a rising young politician, Egerton got to play detective in ten novel before getting replaced by Crook. That's one of the reasons why Crook eclipsed his predecessor, but not the only one as nearly the entire series had been out-of-print for decades. Even today, the likes of The Mystery of the Open Window (1929) and The Night of the Fog (1930) remain out-of-print and somewhat elusive. Nor does it help that the easiest accessible, most well-known title in the series, The Body on the Beam (1932), reputedly is a dud ("do people really enjoy this sort of the book?"). So never paid much attention to the Scott Egerton series except for the first novel.

The Tragedy at Freyne (1927) introduced both the "Anthony Gilbert" penname and the Scott Egerton character mystery readers, which has an entry in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). So, on the special impossible crime wish list it went, but The Tragedy at Freyne was one of those annoyingly obscure, long out-of-print and scarce titles – hard to come by until recently. The Tragedy at Freyne was reprinted twice in the past two years. First by a small, independent outfit named Spitfire Publishers, but their editions aren't available in my country. If you ask me, that reeks suspiciously of Dutchphobia! Fortunately, Dover Publications added their own edition of The Tragedy at Freyne to the Dover Mystery Classics last April.

Alan Ravenswood, narrator of the story, is one of the people who make up the house party at Freyne Abbey. The home of his cousin, Lady Catherine Chandos, and her husband, Sir Simon Chandos, who are entertaining a small crowd. There's Sir Simon's ward, Rosemary St. Claire, who's about to be engaged to the rising young politician, Scott Egerton. Guy Bannister is a well-known war correspondent, scientific journalist and generally considered to be a charming party guess. Captain Rupert Dacre is the Chandos' reclusive, shell shocked neighbor who lives at Dacre Court "like a monk, with three ex-servicemen." Lastly, Sir Chandos' odd secretary, Miss Althea Dennis. Ravenswood finds everyone at Freyne Abbey on edge. Not without reason or consequences.

After the house party, Sir Simon Chandon apparently retreated to his study to commit suicide by taking an overdose of morphine. The door was locked from the inside with the key found inside his pocket and the windows were securely shuttered. A rambling suicide note is found on the desk with Sir Simon still tightly holding a pen in his right hand, which Egerton knows is the wrong hand. Sir Simon was left handed. So murder cleverly disguised as suicide and the police pounce on Dacre, because he was having an affair with Lady Chandos.

The Tragedy at Freyne has all the hallmarks of a fairly standard, 1920s mystery novel, but even this early in her career, Gilbert tried to mix different styles and upturning certain conventions – which resulted in a very different type of twenties locked room mystery. First of all, the victim is not a tyrannical patriarch who commonly end up murdered in these type of mysteries, but a tragic figure and truly blameless victim. Sir Simon is an immense ugly man, "a shambling, inhuman figure," who moved with "a leaning-forward pose of body that suggested the ape" and features that were "a throw-back to monkey ancestors." Before he was murdered, Sir Simon was already “dying by inches of cancer.” However, the story is still streaked with "inexcusable melodrama" from the Victorian-era, but Gilbert already showed a talent for handling dramatics and employed the dramatics to weave some pleasing patterns into the plot. It's almost a shame the arrest of Dacre didn't explode into a full-blown courtroom dramatics. Another notable difference is how the introduction of the detective is handled.

After pointing out the murderer's mistake, Egerton is largely absent and only spoken about until reappearing during the final leg of the story. Egerton is given something of a backstory during his absence concerning a sordid episode from his youth that could cast a dark cloud over both his career opportunities and engagement. So, if you read The Tragedy at Freyne in 1927, you can't be blamed for thinking Egerton is just one of the more suspicious characters in the cast of suspects. When the police arrested Dacre, the defense hires a private detective, "Stuart will get the truth if any man can," to ferret out information. The detective work through out the story is mix of humdrum detection and Sherlock Holmes (donning disguises) with the highlight being Gilbert's brilliant take on the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.

The Tragedy at Freyne presents Gilbert as a mystery writer full of promise and potential, but how she handled the ending shows she still had some work and fine-tuning to do. Egerton returns to the story with an admittedly pretty good and satisfying solution in hand, which then turns into "a race against time" to gather evidence before the murderer boards a ship. It deflated and undermined the clever, twisty solution when it follows by evidence collecting. Regrettably, the locked room-trick is simple and routine, but enjoyed the police being convinced the murderer exited the locked room through a secret passage they were unable to find. So don't get it solely for its impossible crime element.

So while the ending could have been handled better, The Tragedy at Freyne is still a cut, or two, above the average, 1920s mystery novel and stands as a promising debut from a diamond-in-the-rough full with potential – only needing further cutting and polishing. Which is fortunately exactly what happened as Gilbert would go on the pen the Agatha Christie-worthy The Clock in the Hat Box (1939) and the late, but excellent, She Shall Die (1961). The Tragedy at Freyne comes recommended as a herald of the 1930s Golden Age detective novel.

Note for the curious: Amazingly, The Tragedy at Freyne was published in the same year as Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger (1927). One of the worst Golden Age detective novels ever written and likely the book that drove Ronald A. Knox to write down "The Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929).

Portrait of a Murderer (1933) by Anne Meredith

Lucy Malleson was a fertile mystery novelist best remembered today as the author of the long-running series about a morally flexible defense attorney, Arthur Crook, published under her most well-known pseudonym, "Anthony Gilbert," but there were two other pennames that have fallen into obscurity – namely "J. Kilmeny Keith" and "Anne Meredith." Between 1927 and 1935, Malleson produced ten novels, as Keith, featuring a Liberal MP, Scott Egerton, as the series-detective. Egerton was abandoned as soon as that rogue elephant among lawyers appeared on the scene.

The name Anne Meredith mainly appeared on the covers of Malleson's straight novels, twenty in total, but there was a dark, highly-praised seasonal crime novel published under the Meredith byline.

Portrait of a Murderer (1933) was praised by Dorothy L. Sayers as a "powerful and impressive" story with a "tragic quality," while Carolyn Wells called the book "a Human Document" crammed with "interest and personality." Regardless of their praise, the book was soon forgotten and remained in complete obscurity until it was republished in 2018 by British Library/Poisoned Pen Press.

Portrait of a Murderer is with its emphasis on psychology, instead of detection, not your typical 1930s Golden Age detective novel and the story can best be described as the mirror opposite of Philip MacDonald's experimental detective novel, The Maze (1932) – in which any hint of characterization was barred from its pages. The characters only appeared as names in a court transcript. But, from the very first page, Portrait of a Murderer sets off in the opposite direction with character exploration supplanting the detective work.

The story begins with a brief announcement that the life of an elderly curmudgeon, Adrian Gray, ended violently at "the hands of one of his own children" at Christmas, 1931. An "instantaneous and unpremeditated" crime that left the murderer as "incredulous and dumb" as the victim.

After this primer, the story goes back a day to introduce the various relatives of Adrian Gray arriving at their ancestral seat, King's Poplars, which painted a picture of a family that "had come down in the world" as the cost of the modern world had rapidly evaporated their old money – forcing them to part with much of their property. Once life in the village had centered round the stately manor house and now it "swept past its doors." Even the family had broken up with many of them migrating to the towns or going abroad. The "generations of Grays" littering the churchyard would have scarcely recognized their descendants and would have been "reluctant to acknowledge their kinship," because they're either broken husks of human beings or up to their eyeballs in trouble. And three of them have come to ask Adrian for money.

Richard is Adrian's eldest son and an ambitious politician, who has invested a lot of time and money in obtaining a peerage, but now he's being blackmailed by his mistress for "an absurd sum." Hildebrand is one of Adrian's more troublesome sons, a passionate artist, who wants to money to escape from his harridan of a wife and scraggy-looking children. Some of whom aren't even his own. Eustace Moore is Adrian's son-in-law and a well-known financier, but his financial schemes is about to place him in the docks and desperately needs ten-thousand pounds to straighten things out. Only problem is that he also lost a lot of Adrian's money!

German edition

However, with exception of the murderer, these character portraits are, for someone who prefers plot over characterization, quite unnecessary. The only characterization that has any relevance to the story is that of the victim and his killer.

All of that being said, I thought the two-tier aftermath of the murder was very well done and fascinating to read. Firstly, you have the murderer's journal, whose name will not be revealed in this review, in which he detailed what happened directly after he struck down his father and his reluctance to forfeit his life on account of his father – whose life he considered to be "quite worthless." And the steps he took to lead the trail away from himself. Secondly, there's the discovery of the body on Christmas morning and how the family responded to the news.

Unfortunately, there was very little in the remainder of the story that held my interest with exception of the snippets of social commentary and the unsettling portrayal of the murderer's squalid home life, which included child neglect and outright physical abuse. Something you rarely find in a Golden Age mystery. Towards the end, there was a spot of detective work, in order to wrap up the story, but reader already possessed all of the answers. So there was nothing to sink my teeth in and all the characterization, of even minor characters like Sergeant Ross Murray, just felt like padding to me.

I've to be honest here and acknowledge Portrait of a Murderer is not my kind of crime fiction, which negatively tainted this review, but I couldn't help but think how much better this psychology-driven, character-oriented crime novel could have been had there been an element of mystery about the motive – a mystery along the lines of "Rosebud" from Citizen Kane (1941). During their stormy argument, Adrian Gray could have uttered a cryptic remark or word that made his son pick up a paperweight and swing at him in blinding anger. This would place the reader in a position to piece together the significance behind that cryptic and deadly remark. I think this could have made it one of the few truly classic whydunits.

So, on a whole, I can't say I particularly enjoyed my time with Portrait of a Murderer, but keep in mind that my personal presence strongly lies with the labyrinthine-like detective story and my personal dislike for character-heavy crime novels takes nothing away from Malleson as a talented writer. I just prefer her Arthur Crook mysteries. However, if you want a second-opinion, Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, positively reviewed the book some years ago.

A note for the curious: coincidentally, my previous read, Gerald Verner's Noose for a Lady (1952), contained a line that aptly described the story of Portrait of a Murderer: "A portrait of the murderer... not the portrait of a face, but the portrait of a mind — a mind that thinks and acts in a certain definite way." If I were still using opening-quotes, I would have definitely used it for this review.

The Clock in the Hatbox (1939) by Anthony Gilbert

The Clock in the Hatbox (1939) is an early title in the Arthur Crook series, only the sixth of fifty-some novels, written by "Anthony Gilbert," a pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, who distinguished herself from her contemporaries by blending (domestic) suspense with a formal detective plot – resulting in some unusually-structured mystery novels (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942). As unconventional as Gilbert's approach to plotting is her morally ambiguous lawyer-detective, Crook, who was accurately described by Nick Fuller as having something of "the gusto and cynicism of Sir Henry Merrivale himself."

The Clock in the Hatbox appeared on my radar after coming across it on a list, "Recommendations by Nick Fuller," originally posted on the GAD group, which listed this book as the only recommendation under Gilbert's name. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, published a laudatory review of the book last year. Concluding that Gilbert's "unusual treatment" of the detective story, courtroom drama and Hitchcockian suspense culminated in a "mindblowing crime novel." A "landmark mystery novel" that "for some reason is never mentioned in the many studies of the detective novel." There were a number of other reviews that really enticed me.

My reason for referring back to their opinion on The Clock in the Hatbox is that, halfway through the story, I began to suspect my own opinion was going to be a contrarian one. And then that ending happened!

The story opens with the trail of Viola Ross, who stands accused of having murdered her husband, Teddy Ross, a schoolteacher who was smothered to death and the clue that landed her in the docks was the bedside alarm clock – which was found inside a hatbox in the closet. Whoever put the clock in the hatbox was likely the same person who placed a pillow over the victim's face. And had forgotten to replace it.

Viola was only twenty-three when she married Ross, a man twice her age, but the marriage provided Viola with security and Teddy with wife. However, as the years passed, Ross become "the complete domestic tyrant" and alienated his son from a previous marriage, Harry Ross, who refused to become a teacher like his father. Ross resented that Viola sided with his son and even began to harbor suspicions that they were having an affair. Predictably, he died the night before he was going to change his will.

So the police had a motive and all of the evidence argued against Viola, as well as public opinion, but a death sentence is delayed when the jury was unable to come to an unanimous decision – deadlocked by a single juror. The result is a hung jury and a new trial date is set.

The lone holdout in the jury is an aspiring novelist, Richard Arnold, absolutely convinced of Viola's innocence and is determined to rescue her from the gallows.

A mission supported by Arnold's fiance, Bunty, but her support begins to slowly wane when a threatening letter arrives demanding that she tells her boyfriend "he has twenty-four hours left in which the change his mind." However, this threat only works only worked as an incentive to carry on the investigation, because Arnold is clearly making someone nervous. Someone who doesn't want anyone looking closer at the murder, which is where the Hitchcockian suspense and thriller-ish elements of the plot come into play.

There are several attempts to kill Arnold, one of them employing the gun-with-a-string trick, but a second tragedy happens when the fumes of a tampered bathroom heater killed a completely innocent man. A man who died in Arnold's place!

During his investigation, Arnold engages Arthur Crook, a shrewd lawyer of "the most enviable repute," but Crook is only peripherally involved in the case until he pulls the rug from underneath the reader at the end. Until then, Crook makes a couple of appearances to warn Arnold not to meddle and give their prey the time to gather "sufficient rope" to hang himself. A warning that was duly ignored.

A note for the curious: Crook quotes Gilbert's original series-detective, Scott Egerton, a rising politician, who appeared in only ten novels until Crook replaced him in the mid-1930s. Towards the end, Crook tells Arnold how Egerton always used to say "the last trump always lies with fate and she bein' female, there's no telln' how she'll play it." I always like it when mystery writers acknowledge, one way or another, that their various series-detectives live in the same fictional universe.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the story, I began to slowly doubt the judgment of my fellow mystery enthusiasts. After all, the murderer's identity looked to be rather obvious, especially to seasoned mystery readers, which would have hardly justified the lavish praise. Don't get me wrong, it would still have been a well-written, cleverly put together detective novel with a good play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but I began to think that the book had been overpraised – which is when I arrived at the twist in the story's tail. A triumphant ending that can be likened to Anthony Berkeley's Jumping Jenny (1933).

I also understand now why Norris liked the book so much, because The Clock in the Hatbox reminded me of Joan Fleming's Polly Put the Kettle On (1952), which Norris glowingly reviewed. The books are as similar as they differ, mainly in the approach they take to the plot, but, in the end, the similarities really are striking. If you like the one, you'll probably like the other.

All in all, The Clock in the Hatbox is a classic textbook example of what it is that attracts me to these cunningly cut gems from the genre's Golden Era. I went in with expectations that were, perhaps too high, but began to get slightly disappointed as the explanation appeared to be obvious in spite of the author's to cover it up as inconspicuously as possible – only to learn at the end that I was supposed to think that all along! The Clock in the Hatbox is without question one of Gilbert's best detective novels and deserves to better known.

And speaking of detective stories that (probably) deserve to be better known, I recently got my hands on a genuinely unknown collection of short detective stories. They look very promising and, if they're any good, I might have actually unearthed something interesting. I think there are even some impossible crime stories in this collection! So that surprise collection will be next.

Under a Cloud of Suspicion

"A little malice adds a certain savor to life."

- Mr. Treves (Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, 1944)

Over a period of half a century, Lucy Beatrice Malleson wrote nearly seventy detective-and suspense novels and employed a handful of pennames, but the one that garnered her the most success was that of "Anthony Gilbert" and she used the name for the fifty-some books about her series-character – a morally ambiguous lawyer named Arthur Crook. A likable antihero cut from the same cloth as Craig Rice's John J. Malone and Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. 

 

I've only read six of her novels, a mere fraction of her complete output, but my sampling showed how she danced between domestic suspense (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942) and the formal detective story format (e.g. Death Knocks Three Times, 1949). My impression is that she was more gifted when writing tales of suspense, but was not entirely inept when handling a puzzle-oriented plot. And that brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.

She Shall Die (1961) came late in Malleson's career and as a rule I tend to be little hesitant when it comes to detective novels published after 1959, but this particular title has been on my wishlist ever since I came across a short review by Nick Fuller on the GADWiki – who described it as a "really good" mystery with a "well-clued Agatha Christie-type solution." He also accurately described Crook as having "something of the gusto of H.M." So it was about time I finally knocked this title of my list.

Hattie Savage is the attractive "daughter of a rich tycoon" and she has a knack for attracting both men and trouble, which eventually lands her in a police cell on suspicion of murder.

The trouble began for Hettie when a young man, Richard Sheridan, proposed to her, but she rejected him and Sheridan did not take that very well. Sheridan told Hattie he would not be able to live if she did not accept him and threatened to put "a bullet through his brain," but instead of walking away from the situation Hattie did the unthinkable – she handed him sleeping tablets and told how many it would take to kill himself. So the next morning there's a policeman on her parents doorstep with the news that Sheridan had been found dead in his bed. The doctor had no doubt that he died from taking an overdose of barbiturates.

As to be expected, Hattie receives very little public sympathy and at the inquest "the coroner barely concealed his sense of outrage," but the jury returned an open verdict and she's free to go. She was not cleared from any wrong doings in the court of public opinion and within twenty-four hours of the verdict the anonymous letters-and telephone calls began, which made her decide to escape the limelight and "flee to Paris." However, the real trouble began to manifest itself during her absence.

During the inquest, Marguerite Grey, "a saleswoman in the glove department of Booties," came forward and claimed to have been engaged to Sheridan, which would throw serious doubt on Hattie's story, but Marguerite is unable to produce any proof and nothing was done with statement. But the small cast-of-characters who surrounded Hattie and Sheridan had not seen the last of her.

Marguerite is determined to wriggle her way into the community and begins with Sheridan's aunt, Miss Alison Sheridan, who runs a popular restaurant and she is the first to discover that the girl is a regular snake in the grass – one with a penchant for blackmail. Marguerite knows something about her dead nephew that has to be kept a secret. Miss Sheridan has to allow Marguerite into her home, but her blackmailing antics doesn't stop there and even tries to sink her claws into Hattie when she returns with a husband in tow.

However, Marguerite had "the natural vanity of the blackmailer" and it never occurred to her "she might be in danger herself." Unsurprisingly, someone ends up planting a knife between her shoulder blades.

U.S. edition

Hattie is placed under arrest and her new husband, Philip Cobb, rushes off to get the help of Arthur Crook, "that rogue elephant among lawyers," who only appears in the last five chapters, but that's all he needs to clear up this mess and even provides a false solution based on A.E.W. Mason's At the Villa Rose (1910) – which succeeded in completely throwing me off my game for a moment. The false solution was presented very convincingly and briefly assumed I had been foolishly trailing a well-placed red herring. Luckily, I was not entirely wrong about the explanation.

I correctly figured out what was at the heart of both deaths (spotted all the clues!) and this allowed me to identity the murderer, but got a thing or two wrong about how this information fitted the overall picture. Still, I was more right than wrong and loved the level of fairness that allowed me to play along on an equal footing with Crook.

She Shall Die may be a relatively short domestic tale with a small, intimate cast-of-characters, but the structure of the plot and placing of the clues is what one would expect from the Grandest of the Golden Age. On top of that, there are certain components of the plot that show some strokes of originality. So to know that such a classically-styled, fairplay mystery novel was published during that dark decade for our genre, the sixties, was very heartwarming, because there are not that many examples from the same period.

The only other (classical) examples I can think of are Robert van Gulik's The Red Pavilion (1961) and Helen McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968). I'm sure there are a few more, but this was literary all I could think of at the moment.

However, while the plot burned and shimmered with all the brilliance of the 1930s, the cultural references clearly showed that the story was set in a completely different time. One of the characters mentioned they were living in "the shadow of the atom-bomb." Khrushchev gets a throw-away reference. A refugee committee hovers in the background and suspect they dealt with people who fled Eastern Europeans. A police sergeant is mourning the fact that "even the television had lined itself up with the wrong side," because they were giving away all the secrets of police work. I've always found these cultural and (now) historical references to be interesting ornaments on my detective stories.

Anyhow, She Shall Die is a well-written, fairly clued and soundly plotted detective novel that gives the reader all the room needed to arrive at the same conclusion as Crook, which should please every self-proclaimed armchair detective. I can therefore recommend the book to everyone who loves a fair shot at beating the detective to the solution. And you should be able to do it, if you're observant enough.

Well, let me cut-off this overlong review here and tell you that the next review will fall into the locked room-and impossible crime category, because I received some interesting titles in the mail this week. I just have to make a decision which one of those titles will be devoured first.

The Devil in the Summer-House

"Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder."

- Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (Agatha Christie's Spider's Web, 1954)

The collaboration between Dean Street Press, an independent publisher "devoted to revitalizing good books," and Curt Evans, genre historian and author of Masters of the "Hundrum" Mystery (2012), is arguably the best thing that happened to the forgotten detective story since the Rue Morgue Press and Crippen & Landru opened for business.

It's a collaborative effort that's slowly bringing E.R. Punshon's work back into circulation and republished, after close to a century of neglect, two mystery novels by Ianthe Jerrold – of which one, Dead Man's Quarry (1930), is a textbook example of a forgotten classic. And that's not just me saying that.

Annie Haynes is a mystery writer Evans first wrote about in 2013 and at the time he "knew of only two living persons," besides himself, "who had read any of her books." Thankfully, Dean Street Press will be adding her work to their expanding catalogue and Rupert Heath was kind enough to supply me with a review copy of The Crystal Beads Murder (1930), which was probably completed by "Anthony Gilbert" after Haynes untimely passing.

There are other persons of interest who could've completed the manuscript, but Evans made a compelling case as to why it might have been Gilbert.

I'll refrain from retracing parts of the introduction Evans wrote, but, if you want an idea of what kind of person Haynes was, there's a short, interesting foreword by one of her close friends, Ada Heather-Biggs – who mentioned Haynes once cycled "miles to visit the scene of the Luard Murder" and pushed "her way into the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where the remains of Belle Elmore were discovered."

Unfortunately, "the last fifteen years of her life" Haynes "was in constant pain and writing itself was a considerable effort" with "her only journeys being from her bedroom to her study," but "this struggle with cruel circumstances" was "lightened by the warmth of friendship existing between Miss Haynes and her fellow authors."

Well, that dark cloud has long since passed and I'll be doing my part now in lifting Haynes from the memory hole of history by taking a look at her last novel.

The Crystal Beads Murder is the last recorded case in the Inspector Stoddard series and has a plot clustering around the murder of the odious William Saunderson, a professional moneylender and part-time blackmailer, who's shot to death in the summer-house of Lord and Lady Medchester – during an evening of drawing-and billiard room activities characteristic of the early 20th century.

A full house of potential suspects moved about the premise and garden, which isn't exactly helpful to the police, even though "an alibi is the easiest thing in the world to fake" and "the least satisfactory of defenses."

There is, however, one tangible clue, "three crystal beads finked together by a thin, gold chain," which was found upon a second examination of the body, but a superintendent swears it wasn't there during the initial inspection of the victim. So did the murderer, or someone else, returned to the scene of the crime and left a "clue," of sorts?

In this respect, the first half of the book often reminded me of the typical, 1920s mystery novel, but without excessive littering of monogrammed handkerchief and train tickets – which is a huge plus for a mystery writer who wrote and published practically her entire body of work during that decade. It's only to be expected that, stylistically, Haynes' work reflected the genre, as it was in the 1920s, which made the change of author especially noticeable in the second-half.

A policeman is mortally wounded by a bullet in the second leg of the story and his dying process, and aftermath, isn't the emotionless affair that the murder of Saunderson was.

Saunderson had a wife turning up out of nowhere. A wife who admitted her husband "had his faults" and didn't "see why he should be done in and nobody punished," but her main interest is the possible inheritance that could come her way in lieu of an official will. The portrayal of the emotionally devastated widow of the poor policeman is the complete opposite.

There's a genuine sense of lost and even their home reflects this sudden, painful lost: the home looked "so familiar, and yet with life turned gray and the pivot of her very existence removed, it all looked flat and unresponsive," followed by, "the clock on the mantelpiece that she and Bill had bought when he got promoted to sergeant still ticked on with the same monotonous perseverance as ever, but it seemed somehow to be telling quite a different story." These brief snippets of grief really made me sympathize with the hangman.

If you link that with another plot-thread, involving a domestic intruder attempting to force a marriage, and you've got another indication that the mystery author might have been Anthony Gilbert – because it reflects the kind of domestic strains she specialized in when her own career took off (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942).

I've got one, minor complaint, before I cut this overlong, rambling review short, which is the clue Stoddard uses to solve the case. It's a piece of evidence that’s sloppily overlooked by the police during their first investigation of the crime-scene and thrown in the inspectors lap by a passing tramp (Curt?!) and the policeman's widow, which prevents Stoddard from leaving an ever-lasting impression on the readers – and that's a shame since this was his last recorded case.

But, aside from that, Connoisseurs of Murder will find another interesting and exciting rediscovery from the Golden Age of Mysteries in Haynes and The Crystal Beads Murder. The book is slated for release in early October of this year.

Say It With Blood

"So many murders! Rather hard to do a lot of murders and get away with it, eh?" 

- Luke Fitzwilliam (Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy, 1939)

Lucy Beatrice Malleson left behind a literary portfolio, mainly under the penname "Anthony Gilbert," stuffed with crime novels often floating in the gray, misty borderland between suspense and mystery. I find them fascinating to read, even if they sometimes lacked that final, illuminating touch of a truly brilliant detective story, but Death Knocks Three Times (1949) goes a long way in that direction.

The starting point of Death Knocks Three Times is ornamented with the original set pieces, painted in shades of black and white, of the cliched image of the detective story, in which the sleuth of the piece arrives soaked from a cloudburst at a decaying mansion – where the specter of death stalks the musty corridors. Enter Arthur Crook, a notable criminal-lawyer and the British answer to Perry Mason, who seeks refuge at the home of the eccentric Colonel Sherren before the weather strands him in the countryside. The residence of the Colonel is indeed a mansion with hallways stretching into the dark unknown, but the place only gives a home to two people and the conveniences the house offers them are the same as when it was built. It still beats being stuck in a flooding and Crook goes on his way the next morning, however, this divergence from the norm doesn't mean the end of his involvement with the Colonel and his relatives.

After his return to London, Crook is summoned back to attend an inquest and hears the Colonel has broken his neck after the lid of the ancient bathtub came crashing down. The Colonel had received a visit from his nephew, John Sherren, a novelist of meager fame, but a motive seems to be lacking as the money passes to Colonel's servant, Bligh, and a slightly divided jury settles on a verdict of death by misadventure. Interestingly, one of John's two remaining relatives, aunt Isabel Bond, falls from a balcony one night after visiting her! And there was only one.

Aunt Clara is a stronger and far more independent minded woman than her late sister, Isabel, but the influx of threatening, hand-delivered letters and the arrival of her nephew, John, has her reaching for the help of a friend with an amateur-expertise in crime, Miss Frances Pettigrew. Connoisseurs in Crime, who, without saying, know their classics, will be tempted to draw a comparison with the name Francis Pettigrew, the lawyer-detective introduced in Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law (1942), but her physical description is a grotesque parody of Mrs. Bradley with the behavior of a haggard Miss Marple. John first catches a glimpse of Miss Pettigrew in a bookstore where she's giving a standing lecture on murder, "naturally murder is simple, with weapons on all sides," and plotting detective stories, "why writers of detective stories have to employ mysterious poisons or sealed rooms or blowpipes... when bricks, bread-knives, coal-hammers and pairs of scissors are to be had for the asking and are at least as efficacious." And I gravely suspect Gilbert of sniping at Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) when John found himself locked up with Miss Pettigrew in a non-smoking compartment for the duration of the journey, which was similar to how Luke Fitzwilliam was (socially) chained on his train ride to Miss Fullerton, who suspected a mass-murderer was active in her home village of Wychwood.

Even the scarlet beetle, Mr. Crook, crawling back into the picture can't prevent the case from becoming increasingly complicated with the arrival of a blackmailer into the picture and more letters – climaxing with a death by poisoning at a very curious hotel resort. I think, once again, Gilbert was subtly poking fun at one of her fellow mystery writers. The death takes place in a locked hotel room and the maid said that she raised enough noise "to wake the dead." You do the math. By the way, this is not a locked room mystery in any shape or form. It would not have mattered to the outcome whether the doors were locked or not. This one should not have been in Adey's bibliography of the locked room mystery.

On the other hand, the identity of the murderer is inventive, even if the seasoned mystery reader won't have too much problem foreseeing the twist, but the way I stumbled to it is something (read: bizarre coincidence) I'm going to blame on the bogeyman of the mystery-sphere and that's all I can say without spoiling the solution. The solution, and ideas surrounding it, anticipate and foreshadow a rather interesting Agatha Christie novel, but, again, I can't go into details without spoiling even more detective stories.

Lets end with saying that Death Knocks Three Times, alongside Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1942), is the best and most rewarding Arthur Crook mystery I have read to date.