Murder in the Air (1931) by Darwin L. Teilhet

Darwin L. Teilhet was an American journalist, advertising executive, screenwriter and novelist who started out as a mystery writer, authoring seven detective novels from 1931 to 1940, four of which forming a short-lived series – featuring the irrepressible, slightly unhinged Baron von Kaz. Hildegarde Teilhet co-wrote three of the brave Von Kaz novels, but her husband began his literary career with three standalone mysteries.

The most notable, best remembered of Teilhet's trio of non-series mysteries is the prescient The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), which takes place in Germany when the Nazis rose to power. It has the distinction of arguably being the first ever World War II detective novel beating Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) by two years. A big reason why it was reprinted in 1985 by Polygonics. Death Flies High (1931) and Murder in the Air (1931), a pair of aviation-themed mysteries, aren't as well remembered today, but that can be put down to neither having ever received a reprint. So, you can say they flew under our collective radars. Murder in the Air is an interesting case as it's not only an impossible crime novel listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but the central impossibility is based on a famous, real-life disappearance from the late 1920s. More on that aspect in a moment.

Murder in the Air opens with Peter Blue, a reporter for the Paris Journal, getting fired by editor, Henry Jackson, because he has "muffed every good story" given to him. Just when is ready to leave, the telephone rings with bombshell news. Dr. von Dolbenstein, "biggest financier in Europe," vanished from his tri-motored, Rhorbach monoplane while it was flying five thousand feet above the English Channel. There were five other passengers, not including the pilot and navigator, who saw Von Dolbenstein go into the lavatory alone and not coming back – no answers to their calls or knocks. So they broke down the door only to discover Dr. von Dolbenstein has vanished into thin air! What followed was a search of the small plane from cockpit to tail-end without finding a trace. They even tried to open the cabin door, to see if he might have accidentally fallen out, but "the blast of wind from the propellers was too strong" ("we couldn't budge it"). Only thing they can do is radio the police that a well-known, influential financier known on two continents has inexplicably gone missing from a sealed airplane in mid flight.

So, if this situation sounds vaguely familiar, the "fantastic disappearance" of Von Dolbenstein was based on a notorious, real-life disappearance under very similar circumstances. On July 4, 1928, the Belgian financier Alfred Loewenstein, third richest man in the world at the time, flew from Croydon to Brussels on his private air plane with a group of six people. They reported seeing Loewenstein going to the lavatory and not returning. Only difference is that when they checked the lavatory, they found the entrance door open and it was assumed Loewenstein had accidentally plunged to his death. However, the official reading didn't stop the speculations and conspiracy theories. Teilhet's Murder in the Air probably was the first fictionalized take on the case, but not the last as you might also be reminded of Franco Vailati's Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) and Helen McCloy's short story "The Case of the Duplicate Door" (1949) collected in The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003).

Back to Peter Blue and Henry Jackson. When news arrives, Jackson has no reporters on hand and dispatches Blue to the airport to report on, what could be, the biggest breaking story of the decade. Blue, as the on-the-ground reporter, learns the other passengers consisted of Von Dolbenstein's two secretaries, Frederick von Stallf and Miss Geraldine "Jerry" Howard, two other well-known financiers, Harvey Gerbé and Sir William Wallace, and a former secretary, John Carson – who forced his way onto the plane before it took off. Lastly, the pilot and navigator, Clarence Pierce and Erich Rask. Blue also learns there's another layer to the seemingly impossible disappearance as "a cordon of men surged around the monoplane even before its wheels had bounced on the ground" ensuring Von Dolbenstein couldn't have been hiding on the outside, dropped off and escaped. Shortly following the disappearance, the man who called in the tip to Jackson is murdered in one of the hangars. And the victim left behind a dying message suggesting a link with the disappearance mystery.

However, this murder is of peripheral importance to the story and plot as it's barely mentioned again until towards the end. The story that follows is more of a medium boiled, almost pulp-style mystery with the plucky, elusive Miss Howard and the hardboiled John Carston giving him the most trouble, which comes with plenty of physical altercations. For example, the fifth chapter opens with a bandaged Blue waking up in a hospital bed.

Beside a couple of unruly suspects, Blue also has to deal with George St. Armand, the newly appointed Chef de la Sûreté, who's convinced Carson and Miss Howard are behind the disappearance ("they are two of the most infamous criminals"). Much to Blue's dismay who has become very interested in Miss Howard and somewhat confused why she's protecting Carson. There is, of course, the inexplicable mystery of Von Dolbenstein's disappearance from an airplane and the trouble his disappearance is causing. Before he disappeared, Von Dolbenstein was ready to market a new technical marvel, "a new, secret Diesel airplane," but the plans vanished alongside the financier. So the investors are ruined and a newspaper report how "the crash of the von Dolbenstein bubble" has already resulted in two suicides.

I have mentioned on this blog before how the "financial wizards" of the early 20th century took over the role of popular villains and ready-made, murderable victims from blackmailers in detective fiction following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 – e.g. The Mystery on the Channel (1931) by Freeman Wills Crofts. Murder in the Air is another example, but with a slight twist bringing me to the solution.

Murder in the Air is Teilhet's first stab at the detective story, a stab full of energy and enthusiasm, but a still inexperience hand at plotting reveals itself in the solution. First of all, Teilhet made a capital mistake confirming my initial suspicion was spot on. What was that mistake (HUGE SPOILER/ROT13): gur bcravat abgrq gur qbbe bs gur yningbel jnf ybpxrq naq unq gb or oebxra qbja, ohg gung ybpxrq qbbe jnf arire zragvbarq be pbafvqrerq ntnva nf n cneg bs guvf zhygvynlrerq ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel. Jul? Orpnhfr gur ybpxrq qbbe cynlrq ab cneg va gur fbyhgvba. Fb gur svanapvre unq gb unir unq n unaq va uvf bja qvfnccrnenapr. So that brought me halfway towards the correct solution, but muddled the method a little as I considered something a little different. Something silly that was rightfully mocked in the story itself. Teilhet deserves credit, given the limited scope the situation allows for locked room trickery, for not going full pulp and trying to deliver a somewhat detective-worthy solution to the impossible disappearance. The trick is a rather involved one, but not overly convoluted, but undeniably marred by (SPOILER/ROT13) qrcraqvat ba zhygvcyr pb-pbafcvengbef naq nppbzcyvprf. Jung vf guvf... na rcvfbqr bs Wbanguna Perrx? On the upside, while the dying message is only a small part of the plot, its solution shines with brilliant simplicity. It simply stands out against the involved vanishing-trick.

So, all in all, Murder in the Air is a diamond-in-the-rough written and plotted around the central idea of how a man can disappear from an airplane, but how that idea was executed caused the plot to experience some turbulence. Other than the rough patches on the plot, Murder in the Air is highly readable, fast-paced medium boiled mystery-thriller with pulp leanings and full of promise Teilhet would deliver on in future novels. It made me curious about Teilhet's second novel and aviation mystery, Death Flies High, which looks to be a classic, closed circle whodunit aboard a transatlantic flying boat. On the wishlist it goes!

The One-Man Book-Club

"To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy."

- Rex Stout.

Until a few years ago, the message board of the John Dickson Carr collector website was not entirely unlike a disreputable alleyway, tugged away in an obscure gas-lit street of Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London, where the fugitive shadows of the city gathered to tell and boost of tales of haunting crimes and murder most foul. However, crime has the tendency to spread and soon we were absorbed by the blogosphere, which provided us with the tools necessary to brainwash the masses indoctrinate your children promote classically-styled mysteries, but it turned the JDC forum into a ghost town – and one thing I do miss, from time to time, are the one-man book-clubs.

A One-Man Book-Club is exactly what its name implies: you read a book and post your thoughts and theories as you go through the story. This resulted in some interesting "reviews," at least I think so, and because I have nothing else at the moment I decided to revisit a few of them.

One month before I began blogging, I read Lenore Glen Offord's The Glass Mask (1944) for one of these One-Man Book-Club threads and the first thing I noted that it was the kind of detective story that American mystery writers reputedly never wrote – set in a remote small-town unaffected by the passage of time and echoes the sleepy, country-side village of Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead. The problem is also one that could have been torn from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel: was an ailing and inoffensive matriarch murdered by her grandson to inherit her property and an opportunity to get married? According to the local gossip machine, he did, but it's impossible to proof as the remains were cremated and there are many other unanswered questions.

Offord's main characters, however, are not stock-in-trade and even ahead of their time. Georgina Wyeth is a single mother of an eight-year-old girl and has relation with her semi-official fiancé, pulp writer Todd McKinnon, but she's not your quintessential dunderheaded heroine entering dark cellars or abandoned houses on her own – and the book has its "Had-I-But-Known" moments. But the biggest triumph of this book is how the solution to the "perfect murder" is handled.

S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case (1934) was a disaster of a story that I had to abandon midway through, but not before taking a peek at Vance's explanation and discovered not only that I was partially correct but also that I was being to logical. If you’re curious, you have to read the original post where my observations are hidden behind proper spoiler-tags.

Darwin Teilhet was one of the first writers to address the atrocities committed by the nazi's, when Hitler rose to power, and used the detective story as his vehicle. The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), set against the rise of the Third Reich, opens with the unlikely sight of a talking sparrow, imploring an elderly man to help him, moments before the man himself is shot. A cover-blurb pointed out that the book, atmosphere-wise, suggests the work of another American mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, and I agree. The story has a few nice touches of the macabre, the sparrow that spoke like a human and nazi officials going out of their way to bow to a lone pine-tree, but also a young American hero who's caught between a blitzkrieg of crime and the efficient Schutzmännen of the German police force.

Unfortunately, The Talking Sparrow Murders merges the spy-thriller with elements of the detective story, which left me in two minds, where I wanted more from the plot, but was nonetheless intrigued that it was published years before Hitler began WWII. This makes me want to give less weight to its shortcomings as a mystery. I mean, it's not an historical novel – it was written in 1934, and it turned out to be a glimpse of things yet to come!

My fall as a snobbish, cynical purist began to pick up momentum after reading William DeAndrea’s The HOG Murders (1979), which has a wonderfully conceived plot that connected the past with the present. A serial killer is bumping people off at random in a small town and sends taunting messages to the police, who turn to the famous criminologist Nicolo Benedetti, who I described at the time as a cross between Hercule Poirot and a hand tame Hannibal Lecter, and Ronald Gentry – a private-eye Benedetti personally trained. The plot has an original take on the serial killer story and I was on the right track, before DeAndrea effectively pulled the wool over my eyes.

It's follow-up, The Werewolf Murders (1992), was also subject of discussion in a One-Man Book-Club thread. The book was written and set during the waning years of the Twentieth Century and a French baron has organized the first Olympique Scientifique Internationale, a year-long gathering of the world's most prominent scientists, in preparation of the new and hopefully more enlightened millennium at the ski resort of Mont-st.-Denis. But then an astronomer is murdered and his body is draped across the eternal flame, situated in the town square, another scientist is brutally attacked, and before long, logic and reason begins to dissipate among the scientific community as the rumors of the Werewolf of Mont-st.-Denis begins to leave footprints on their nerves.

When the local authority with the assistance of a detective from the famous Sûreté fails to turn up any leads or even a viable suspect, everyone, once again, turns to that philosopher of crime and human evil, Professor Niccolo Benedetti, who also shows Nero Wolfe how to collect an enormous fee and still come across as the embodiment of generosity and patriotism. 

I was able to grasp the most significant parts of the solution, only missing out on some of the finer details and motive, and missed one very obvious clue.

Well, that’s it for this week’s filler and hope to back soon with a regular review. And beware, I have stocked up on locked room mysteries... again. 

Treasure Island

"When the mainsail's set and the anchor's weighed

There's no turning back from any course that's laid

And when greed and villainy sail the sea,

You can bet your boots there'll be treachery."

- Shiver My Timbers (Muppet Treasure Island, 1996).

Well, this pass week, which was, to say the least, draining, did not left me with a lot of moments needed to read through Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet's The Feather Cloak Murders (1936) at my usual pace, but I persevered and managed to squeeze this review out before the official kick-off of the weekend!

After his first adventure in the "barbaric Northern states" of America, recorded in The Ticking Terror Murders (1935), the brave Baron von Kaz embarks on an impetuous detour to his native Vienna – where he's expected to realign himself with the once trampled monarchists. But the Baron is drenched in thoughts of Caryl Miquet, a mere plebeian who played on the heartstrings of the exiled aristocrat, and when a certain Mr. Hiroshita offers him a $1000 fee to accompany him on his voyage aboard on ocean liner bound for Honolulu, Hawaii, which also has Caryl Miquet's name on its passenger list, the plan to help an emperor climb back on the throne of Austria is bumped down a few places on his lists of priorities.

At first, Von Kaz assumes that he's simply escorting a wealthy importer in possession of an expensive piece of merchandise, a jade coin emblazoned with the image of a lion, but ends up spending the crossing confined to their cabins – drinking and playing cards. The reason for their seclusion is Carl Kohler, a Hawaiian from Germanic extraction, who's eager to speak with the importer privately. However, when the Baron stumbles across Kohler's body on a deserted section of the deck, a tufted and feathered steel dart, quietly discharged from the barrel of an air pistol, stuck in his chest, it becomes apparent that there's more at stake than just a decorated gobbet of jade – which his client confirms after docking in Honolulu.

However, the first hurdle presents itself when the Baron simply wants to report his discovery of the body to the proper authority, the ships captain, but finds a skeptic who knows that he spend a considerable stretch of the voyage intoxicated – and presumes that he stumbled out of his cabin in an alcohol fuelled trance and now imagines tripping over corpses, killers and air guns at every turn. It doesn't help, either, that the body has disappeared, probably chucked overboard, when they finally decide to take a peek and only two facts speak in favor of the Baron's story: the presence of blood on the scene and the fact that Mr. Hiroshita is also silenced with a dart from an air gun shortly after their arrival in Hawaii.

But before he was shot, Mr. Hiroshita told the Baron a fabulous tale of a map that marked the location of a lost Inca city in Mexico, buried with its treasures, and later he hears of a rare red diamond that any collector would empty his bank account for as well as stories of the titular feather cloak of Prince Puakini – one of the ancient chieftains of the island. The feathers for those cloaks were plucked from birds that are now extinct and assembling them took up to two generations, which resulted in only one set of cloaks every one hundred years and an original one would fetch a small fortune on the private market.

These stories give the place a touch of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), but, unfortunately, most of these treasured artifacts turn out to be McGuffin's that are disregarded and forgotten about when the final chapters come into view – and this gives the conclusion an incomplete feeling. Notwithstanding this deficiency, The Feather Cloak Murders does not end on an entirely unsatisfactory note, since most of the important plot threads are neatly tied up in the final chapters, but the solution wasn't as impressive as the setting that the Teilhet's so evocatively brought to life.

The Hawaiian islands, on which the Baron tramps about over the course of his investigation, almost became a character in themselves and function splendidly as a backdrop for this story – providing even an ancient and concealed lava tunnel for an exciting dénouement. I feel that the book, as a whole, and then in particular its somewhat fragmented plot, benefited from this evocative surrounding and the history that came with it. It's what made the story, for the most part anyway, stick together.

I also enjoyed the character of the brave Baron Franz Maximilian Karakôz von Kaz a lot more than I did in his previous outing, The Ticking Terror Murders, in which he struck me as a capricious assortment of oddities – even though he was at his best there when he was at his worst. But here he felt a lot more approachable and human, as he was not just occupied with breaking and entering or braining an innocent shopkeeper with his loaded green umbrella/sword stick, and showed more than one side of his personality – like his genuine infatuation with Caryl Miquet or how disturbed he was when her nephew was savaged with a spade by the murderer. What emerges is a far more believable character than merely a figure of fun that's only there for laughs and to provide a solution when the time has come to wrap things up.

While this was not one of the best detective stories I have read, The Feather Cloak Murders was still a very likable and pleasant companion that could not be accused of that one unpardonable sin: namely that of being dull. It's a story that's simply in motion and this makes it disappointing that the plot wasn't any better or that it didn't follow up on all of its tall tales of treasures and lost cities. There was something worthwhile buried in this narrative, but its authors failed to bring it completely to the surface of its pages.

The Case Book of the Brave Baron von Kaz: 

The Ticking Terror Murders (1935)

The Feather Cloak Murders (1936)

The Crimson Hair Murders (1936)

The Broken Face Murders (1940)

As If By Magic

"...that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and bolt."

- Captain Hook (Peter Pan, 1911).

In my previous review, I briefly touched upon the fact that neo-orthodox detective stories, all of a sudden, started to hog all of the limelight in this place for themselves – which can be simply put down as a pattern that emerges in ones reading habits without malice aforethought. It's like natural selection, but driven by an ego's futile attempts to steer and control its evolvement. This is why, for the time being, the current domineering species, such as Herbert Resnicow and Paul Doherty, will continue to detract from their forbearers. But rest assured, I will never list their predecessors as extinct and for today's review I will even highlight one of them.

Darwin Teilhet's The Ticking Terror Murders (1935) added with Baron Franz Maximilian Karagôz von Kaz, an Austrian aristocrat in exile, another accumulation of oddities to a swelling crowd of eccentric detectives, but whereas Hercule Poirot and Henri Bencolin have a dash of continental quaintness the Baron is merely capricious – which sometimes borders on sheer malevolence. Admittedly, the Baron is at his best when he's at his worst behavior, like breaking and entering a premise for a private investigation or braining a shopkeeper with his trusty green umbrella in order to make a free phone call, but for the most time he's just an anomaly.

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, Baron von Kaz is a member of the Austrian nobility who was forced to escape his native stomping ground after a botched political plot to restore the monarch and fled to the land of opportunities to set-up as a consulting detective – and his first client is brought to him to by an American woman he met and helped before back in Vienna.

Lucille Tarn made a name as an actress before wedding herself to a rising political star, but recently she found herself having an extramarital affair with a famous screenwriter, Henry Kerby, who's being haunted after dark by inexplicable and indeterminable ticking noises. Kerby suspects that Lucille's husband, Charles Tarn, became wise of their affair and is extracting revenge with these subtle, but disturbing, night-time noises. However, the Baron believes there's something more to these tickings than reaches the ears and convinces the Hollywood scenarist to retain him to identify its source. But before he can unsnarl this problem another one presents itself: Lucille Tarn is murdered as if by magic! 

While attending a performance of Dacrokoff, a celebrated magician, Lucille Tarn is asked to take place in a cabinet to make her disappear, which is exactly what happens, but when her form reappears she's sprawled on the bottom of the contraption with a poisoned hatpin protruding from her chest. The arrangement and execution of the locked cabinet trick turned out to be as clever as it's simple, but I think Teilhet's sleigh of hand made a slip when he divulged the solution at 1/3 of the book.

Technically, it's understandably why the solution had to be thrown out at that point in the book, but it would've benefited the overarching story if more had been done with it or at least procured a better spot between its covers – such as the middle portion of the book. But I have to praise the inclusion of three, highly detailed diagrams depicting every step necessary to conjure up a deceptive image that instilled the audience with the false notion of having just witnessed a murder that should not have been possible – even though it's not a complex trick that can only be comprehended with visual aids.

Plot-wise, there's a drop-off in quality after Baron von Kaz solves the mystery encompassing the magician's cabinet and unmasks an accomplice – who's promptly disposed off under circumstances that simply begged for another locked room mystery. The rest of book seems, for the most part, dedicated to filling up time with mad cows, nocturnal adventures and a kidnapping of sorts, before reaching the simple and inevitable conclusion – in spite of the fact that there were still clues to be picked up along the way.

I'm afraid that the negative underpinning of this review hasn't given a too favorable impression of this book, but let me assure you that overall I found it a very enjoyable read. As a detective story, it's just very uneven in quality which failed to deliver the goods in the end. Nonetheless, despite a faulty structure it's still worth a read – especially if you're an enthusiast of impossible crime stories.

And thus ends this slovenly scribbled critique of The Ticking Terror Murders and was planning to announce here that, whenever time would permit me, I would take another look at Herbert Resnicow. But I came across something interesting and obscure that will require my attention first. It involves a dead mystery writer and a locked room. 

The Baron von Kaz series: 

The Ticking Terror Murders (1935)

The Crimson Hair Murders (1936)

The Feather Cloak Murders (1937)

The Broken Face Murders (1940)