Murder is No Laughing Matter

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King's horses and all the King's men

couldn't put Humpty together again.

One of my favorite things about this place are the comments that follow in the wake of a newly posted review or a vaguely constructed ramble, especially when they form an appendix of additional information – as was the case with my post critiquing David Alexander's Murder Points a Finger (1953).

Xavier confessed that it was favorite of him and "one whose lack of reputation" always surprised him as well as noting that "its author was not usually associated with the traditional mystery genre," while Richard Moore revealed David Alexander as "one of the leading journalists covering thoroughbred racing as a racing editor for the New York Herald Tribune and columnist for important racing publications" – and his tenure as the managing editor for the New York Morning Telegraph was "clearly the basis" for the Bart Hardin stories.

All this did was whet my appetite for a Bart Hardin mystery and this time I had the foresight to order a copy of another book before having made my full acquaintance with its author, which is why I am now writing a review of The Death of Humpty Dumpty (1957) instead of impatiently marching back and forth in front of the letter box.

Bart Hardin is the hard drinking, two-fisted editor of a sporting and showbiz rag named The Broadway Times and has a penchant for flowered vests and lives above a flea circus in a Times Square tenement, which is perhaps a combination that gives off some sort of pheromone that attracts trouble to his doorstep.

The Death of Humpty Dumpty opens with a stone-cold sober Bart Hardin starring glazy-eyed at his television screen, broadcasting the New Years celebrations, but as a professional in such indoor sports as Irish drinking he considers New Year's Eve as Amateur Night and refuses to touch a single drop of liquor. The plans for the night is to retire early, but then he receives an invitation from a friend and part-time lover, Zita Janos – a Hungarian nightclub dancer who twisted her ankle and now has the night off.

Zita Janos invites him to come watch the famous New Year's Eve Ball descend from her apartment, but as all but one pair of eyes fixed themselves on the ball there's one pair, Bart Hardin's, distracted by a disturbing and surrealistic scene: Humpty Dumpty Hughes, a nightclub comedian, falls from a ninth-floor window of a hotel across the street and vanishes in mid-air! At least, he assumes that's what must have happened. The nightclub comedian could not have left a mess on the sidewalk (the people celebrating the new year beneath the window would definitely have responded to a falling man) and the police he called to investigate found no traces of a body on a balcony that was also located beneath the window.

The following morning, Bart Hardin finds a cab driver with the pallid countenance of a skeleton and his ancient hansom cab on his doorstep. Someone stuffed a c-note in the cabby's hand to deliver a drunk friend to Hardin, but the drunkard in the back turns out to be Humpty Dumpty Hughes – fully dressed (except for his shoes) and a bullet wound in his chest inflicted after death.

These opening chapters are evocatively written, wonderfully phantasmagorical in tone and simply dripping with imagination, but Alexander inexplicably began ditching these fantastic elements, one after another, before he took a turn into those mean streets – turning a detective story full of promise into an unexceptional hardboiled yawn yarn.

You can discern this plunge into mediocrity yourself when you have reached the page on which Hardin learns of Zita Janos' kidnapping and has to confront one of the most dangerous loan sharks in town, Moe Selig, who's complacent enough when he's fed but has no problem chewing your head off when he has to wait or finds you a bit annoying.

Hardin tries to both appease and vex the money-lending mob-boss, but everything he does simply cried incompetence, from setting up a false alibi for a bunch of murderers to verbally abusing an unwilling accomplish in such a way that the poor guy blows his brains out, but the worst thing of all is that the explanation to those imaginative events in the opening chapters shares the same lack of inspiration with the second half of the book. It was really, really disappointing to learn that there was nothing clever lurking behind its Alice-in-Wonderland façade.

And that leaves me in two minds: I loved the front décor of this story, but the illusion was ruined when David Alexander showed the plain woodwork behind it and this left me dissatisfied after turning over the final page. Well, I guess this one of those books you can only fully appreciate if you’re devoted fan of the series.

Hopefully, the next obscure mystery that has reached the top of the snow-capped peaks of Mt. To-Be-Read is a bit better as this is the second review in row that ended on a disappointed note. 

Dead Man's Clue

"Philip Linton, whose testimony had helped convict nineteen murderers, died in the belief that the mute testimony on the floor beside him would help convict a twentieth. He was a good cop to the very end."

- David Alexander's Murder Points a Finger, 1953.

The name Ellery Queen has always been synonymous with The Dying Message, permanent associates like John Dickson Carr and The Locked Room Mystery and Agatha Christie and The Closed Circle of Suspects, but this liaison never produced a work that became the flagship for that particular brand of detective fiction – unlike The Hollow Man (1935) and The Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

You could argue on behalf of The Tragedy of X (1932), introducing the Queenian motif of the dying message, but the moribund clue didn't turn up until the final quarter of the book and it's not one that has aged well. Its interpretation relies on a nugget of trivial, everyday knowledge that the passage of time relegated to the dustbin of history and not something contemporary readers should be expected to know. So Ellery Queen's close association with The Dying Message seems to have more to do with their prolific output than that one of their stories became a textbook example of the form.

This is not a putdown of Ellery Queen, but after I had finished reading David Alexander's Murder Points a Finger (1953) I was seized by the realization that it was, perhaps, the first detective novel I read that was as exemplary for The Dying Message as Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930) was for The Private Eye and Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) for The Hybrid Mystery.

Murder Points a Finger sets about when the hour-glass of a former police lieutenant, Philip Linton, only has a few grains of sand left in it and murder is accompanying him on the way home. Linton was a much-lauded expert on fingerprints and had spend the bulk of his years on the force in the identification department, where his expertise on the esoteric patterns of whorls, arches and loops helped secure convictions for nineteen murderers – and his cryptic dying message may put away another one. 

Not long after returning home, the murderer forces an entrance and fires a bullet from a forty-five in Linton's belly before taking off again. The dying detective is painfully aware that he has precious few minutes left and takes what is closes at hand, a set of fingerprint cards, to spell out the name of his assailant and dies assured that his friend, Dabney Ashton, will figure it out. Of course, you have to accept the premise that the murderer is satisfied with the belly shot and immediately leaves without making sure that Linton is dead and unable to call for help – or leave an incriminating message. Anyway...

The Clue of the Dying Detective

Philip Linton's friend, Dabney Ashton, is a distinguished theatrical performer with one or two television parts to his credit, an accomplished chess player and a ex-special agent who decoded enemy messages during The Great War, but this does not make him the perceptive debonair amateur sleuth – who picks up on all the subtle hints that the police missed. On the contrary, he's quite inept when it comes to police work, despite his knack for puzzles, and a burden on the investigating officers. Ashton is unable to correctly translate his friends dying clue, which, almost immediately, results in the police going for the simplest answer and swear out an arrest warrant against Linton's foster son, Abner Ellison. Meanwhile, everyone is on the lookout for Linton's granddaughter, Pat, who was kidnapped after she went out to dinner with her fiancé, policeman Allan Walters, on the night of her grandfathers murder and Ashton's meddling could very well have been the driving motive behind a second murder.

Needless to say, as the investigation drags on without the desired results, Ashton begins to feel that he has let everyone around him down and this provides the story with a realistic view on the infallible storybook detective, but, at the same time, it also fully embraces some of the more bizarre features that can be found in the works of members from the Van Dine-Queen School. In the background of the story, the sentry towers and battlements of Mad Hatters Castle, erected by an Albanian who amassed a fortune with cheap, knock-off hats that were copied from more expensive models, casts dark shadows over the events and inspiration for the solution is found in an old speakeasy, "Gypsy's Cosmic Tea Room," that went on after the prohibition era ended – and provides a dwelling for some of the cities most eccentric drinkers. This makes the story read, at times, like one of those half-conscious, lucid dreams in which imagination and reality merge together effortlessly and this partly prompted me into placing an order for another one of his books. But more on that when it arrives here in a few weeks time.

The solution is not a disappointing one, however, it won't kick you in the teeth and leave you stupefied, either, as any seasoned reader of detective stories will probably catch up with the murderer before arriving at the halfway mark of the book – even if you fail, like yours truly, to decipher the clever, but ultimately, simple dying message. But the predictability of the murderers identity does very little damage to the overall quality of the story, at least, there were not any serious scratches on the reading pleasure that I derived from this book.

On a whole, a very satisfying, if a somewhat unusual, detective story that ranks alongside Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935) and Pat McGerr's The Seven Deadly Sisters (1948) as the best mysteries I have read this month – and with that we've come full-circle! The three best detectives I devoured in the first month of this year are all exemplary stories for The Locked Room Mystery, Closed Circle of Suspects and The Dying Message as well as representing three succeeding decades.