The Whistling Hangman (1937) by Baynard Kendrick

This year, Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics is reprinting one of my two favorite Baynard Kendrick detective novels, Blind Man's Bluff (1943), which I read a few years ago and called it a pulpier version of John Dickson Carr's The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) – nearly as good as the other favorite, The Whistling Hangman (1937). The book that introduced me to Kendrick and his blind private eye, Captain Duncan Maclain, who appeared in twelve novels and several short stories. I found The Whistling Hangman impressive enough at the time to seek out more and did not forget about it when compiling "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." And while having enjoyed Kendrick's detective fiction, only Blind Man's Bluff came close to matching The Whistling Hangman.

So with the news of more Kendrick reprints in the works, I wanted to revisit The Whistling Hangman to see if my favorable first impression can stand a second look.

Baynard Kendrick's The Whistling Hangman is the second novel featuring his former Intelligence officer and sightless detective, Captain Duncan Maclain, who had been "blinded in the war more than 20 years before," but, through "indomitable persistency and unrelenting work," he had beaten the darkness – becoming New York City's greatest detective. Three times a week, Captain Maclain practices blind target shooting in a bat-cave-like subbasement followed by "long hours spent improving hearing, touch, and the closely allied senses of taste and smell" in addition to exercising and disciplining his "memory until it seldom failed." However, he does not stand alone. Samuel "Spud" Savage is Captain Maclain's partner and close friend "who had piloted the captain through dark years after the war" and married his secretary, Rena Savage. They guarded him with "a loyal, fierce intensity which was almost fanatic." And then there are the two German shepherds ("one named Schnucke, to guide him from the left; and the other, a trained police dog named Dreist, to protect him, from the right"). On top of that, the office is crammed with early 20th century recording and even photographic equipment ("everything said in his office is recorded on an Ediphone record").

I mentioned in previous reviews Captain Maclain occupies a rather unique spot in the genre as links the traditional detective story to the pulp magazines and comic books. The link to the comic books was not done intentionally, but came after the facts when Stan Lee used Captain Maclain as the model for Daredevil ("if a man without sight could be a successful detective, think what a triumph it would be to make a blind man a comic book superhero"). But due to the darker, pulp-style trappings of the series, you can easily imagine the stories taking place in an alternate Gotham without costumed vigilantes or villains running amok. Regardless of all of that, the series never comes across as a gimmicked one. On the contrary. 

The Whistling Hangman is not a pulp-style thriller (The Last Express, 1937) or a WWII spy thriller (The Odor of Violets, 1941), but, more or less, a regular who-and howdunit. The setting of the story is Doncaster House Hotel, a luxurious apartment hotel made up of "is a collection of beautiful homes housed in a single building" with a reputation as spotless as their linen. When the story begins, the staff is awaiting the arrival of a most desirable guest, Dryden Winslow. A once bankrupt stockbroker who left the United States and carved out a second fortune in Australia, but left behind his two children, Baxter and Gertrude. They have not seen their father since they were small children and Winslow has arranged a family reunion, of sorts, at the Doncaster House Hotel and rented six furnished apartments. These are for his son and daughter. A niece and a nephew, Rose and Emmet Black, and two maiden aunts, Marcia and Purcella Forrest, who raised Baxter and Gertrude. So a desirable guest list, but there's a reason to be anxious as the hotel receives notice that Dryden Winslow is "incurably ill" and has come home to die.

This is very much a so-called hotel mystery as a large part of the story concentrates on the hotel, its staff and how the murder affects the well-oiled routine of such an establishment ("it seemed incredible that the standards of years could disintegrate completely under the touch of murder..."). So you get some keyhole snapshots of how the hotel is run and some humorous observations ("guests so inconsiderate as to die were smuggled downstairs via a service elevator, and always late at night"), but it's really the characters of the hotel staff who stand out here. There's the hotel manager, Rudolph Bleucher, who's a friend of Captain Maclain and his assistant manager, Thomas Fralinger, but the most important character here, storywise, is the head housekeeper, Mrs. Colling-Sands – who has "20 years of hotel experience and wore it proudly as a badge of merit." You get to see a lot of the characters and incidents in the story from her point-of-view as well as trying her hands a bit of sleuthing herself. But not before witnessing the seemingly impossible death of Dryden Winslow. Mrs. Colling-Sands was in apartment 608 she heard "a soft call of two notes rising and falling" followed by a crack ("which might have been a small-sized gun") merged with a strangled scream. Next thing she sees is Winslow's battered, broken body landing on the balcony of 608. Winslow had fallen from one of the apartments he had rented on the top floor of Doncaster House, but was it an accident or suicide?

Captain Maclain was playing chess with Bleucher when it happened and is immediately guided to 608 to make a primarily investigation and comes to a startling conclusion. Dryden Winslow was hanged! But how could have possibly have been hanged ("...his neck was broken too") without a rope or when taking Gertrude's statement into consideration. She was talking to her father when he suddenly stopped, went out on the terrace and disappeared over the railing before her eyes. A few seconds later, Mrs. Colling-Sands saw him land on the balcony of 608 ten floors below.

I believe this to be a legitimate impossible crime, or an open-air locked room mystery, as there appears to have been no possible way someone could have either pushed or hanged Winslow from the terrace of his apartment. Somehow, The Whistling Hangman is omitted from both Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and have only seen it referred to as "a borderline impossible crime." I suppose the trick has some hints of Kendrick's pulp-roots to perhaps place it closer to the weird menace stories, but John Dickson Carr used two variations of this trick in a short story and radio-play. While the trick might feel a touch out of place in an otherwise straitlaced, 1930s detective story, Kendrick uses the bizarre circumstances surrounding the murder and method to great effect. I liked there was room for Inspector Larry Davis and Sergeant Aloysius Archer, of the New York Homicide Squad, to give their take on the problem and provide the story with a false-solution – one that got demolished in a practical demonstration. There are more aspects for Captain Maclain to consider.

Why did Winslow request a Gideon Bible to be brought to his apartment? Who or what frightened the maid, Carrie Ritter? What role does Gertrude's fiance, the Hon. Paul Holden, O.B.E., who also book an apartment at Dorcaster House play in the case? Or how does another guest, Dr. Lorenzo Ynez, figure in it or at all? Despite all these complications and two impossible murders, The Whistling Hangman is a pleasantly clear, uncomplicated, but solidly plotted, detective story with the strange clueing standing out on my second read. Firstly, there are the sound-based clues that accompany the partially witnessed murders and recall the impossible crime from Kendrick's Death Knell (1945). This again may sound like a gimmick in a series about a blind detective, but it never feels forced and naturally something a detective who largely relies on hearing to focus on. Secondly, the clues to the murderer's identity and motive come not the form of a trail of breadcrumbs with one, or two red herrings along the way, but a growing list of requirements that can only fit the whistling hangman ("Spud and I have spent a frantic day trying to fit all those requirements onto the same person"). It works as far as fair play goes and a tell-tale clue is never even acknowledged (SPOILER/ROT13: xrrc lbhe rlrf bhg sbe vavgvnyf), but it feels like there's something slightly off about the detective story element. Not broken. Just slightly askew like a painting hanging crooked on the wall. But it really fitted the tone of the story. You can even say it complimented the rest of the story.

I can see why The Whistling Hangman impressed me so favorably on my first read. It feels like a fresh and original treatment of the traditional, fair play detective story without breaking or deconstructing it. The Whistling Hangman holds up as an excellent and fine example of the American Golden Age detective novel, but it pulp roots and well realized main character gives the series an atmosphere all of its own that makes it stand out. And inspiring the creation of a beloved comic book hero only adds historical interest to the series. Highly recommended! You can expect some of the lesser-known titles from this series, like You Die(t) Today (1952), The Aluminum Turtle (1960) and Frankincense and Murder (1961), to be moved up the big pile.

Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) by Brett Halliday

Last time, I reviewed a juvenile detective novel by Enid Blyton, The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944), that confronted the Find-Outers with the apparently impossible theft of the titular, prize-winning Siamese cat and gave me the idea to pick the subject of today's review as my next read – as it's an interesting contrast to Blyton's children's detective fiction. A hardboiled, tough-guy 1944 locked room mystery obviously not intended to be read by 8-12 year old's. 

"Brett Halliday" was the pseudonym of an American writer, Davis Dresser, who was married to the well-known mystery novelist Helen McCloy and together they ran a literary agency called Halliday and McCloy. They also founded the Torquil Publishing Company, but Halliday is best-known as the creator and first writer of the Michael "Mike" Shayne series. A hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen complete with different series-periods (Miami and New Orleans), ghost writers and a short fiction magazine (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine).

Mike Shayne is seen by knowledgeable, better informed readers as "one of the most popular private detectives ever," whose cases are "generally very well plotted and pleasantly complex," but the earlier books have been called "surprisingly traditional" in nature – something that doesn't really surprise me anymore. The tough-guy private eye school is supposed to be the antithesis to my beloved, plot-driven detective stories of ratiocination, which is not entirely untrue. But my experience is that a lot of them were excellent plotters and either tried their hands at the locked room mystery or even made it a specialty. Just look under the "Private Eyes" tag. 

Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) is the tenth novel in the Mike Shayne and Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, picked it as one of her recommendations to locked room enthusiasts based on the reviews in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47 (2001-09). Anthony Boucher praised the "clever locked-room murder method" and "typical Halliday hard-paced action." So let's see what this series is all about. 

Murder and the Married Virgin takes place shortly after Shayne moved from Miami to New Orleans and setup shop in two-room suite, on the fourth floor of the International Building, with a brand new secretary, Lucy Hamilton – who apparently played a role in a previous novel. From what I gathered, Lucy is the Nikki Porter of the series, but with more character consistency. Anyway, Shayne gets two different cases on his desk that conveniently took place under the roof of the same household.

Firstly, a Mr. Teton, of Mutual Indemnity, hires Shayne to recover an emerald necklace that had been insured for $125000, but, in the present gem-market, "the necklace would easily bring two hundred thousand." The necklace, belonging to a Mrs. Lomax, was presumed stolen during a burglary and was supposed to be in the bedroom safe, which the burglar didn't touch. That's why nobody missed the necklace until the day their maid committed suicide in her locked, third-floor bedroom. Katrin Moe was a Norwegian immigrant engaged to be married to a young army lieutenant, Ted Drinkley, who, dazed and broken down, turns to Shayne. He wants to know why she committed suicide the day before their marriage. Or was she perhaps murdered? And how?

Shayne remarks that "Philo Vance might be able to sort out the truth from the lies, but I'll be damned if I can." However, he does a decent job in tangling with the locked room problem with no less than two false-solutions. Shayne spots the possibility of an old-dodge and pieces together a technical, but not uninspired, false-solution which accounts for both the locked door and why Katrin appeared to welcome death with "outflung arms and a smile." The actual locked room-trick achieves the same effect, but is a bit cruder in execution and not as fairly clued. Regardless, these locked room bits and pieces were, too me, the highlight of the story.

But in every other regard, Murder and the Married Virgin is a seedy, hardboiled private-eye novel and Shayne has to through the whole shebang to tie the stolen necklace to an impossible murder. There's the dysfunctional Lomax family made up of "an old man married to a wife with young ideas" with a stone-cold, perpetual bored daughter, a wannabee playboy son and a chauffeur with movie-star looks – not to mention a dead maid. He also has to tangle with a troublesome dame, a shady club owner and armed torpedoes, which comes with the customary whack to the back of the head and "a murder frame" around his neck.

Shayne has to do a lot of talking, thinking and downright dirty work to get himself out of a very tight spot. Such paying for "witnesses" to place a certain someone at the scene of a murder, which disgusts Lucy to the point where she's ready to walk out on Shayne ("...I thought you were decent"). Funnily enough, I picked Murder and the Married Virgin as a simple contrast to a children's (locked room) mystery novel from the same year, but both stories have their detectives seriously tampering with evidence. One of them was done out of mischievous, child-like innocence, while the other was the result of adult cynicism in a dog-eat-dog world ("scruples are something the boys write about in detective novels"). So incredibly different, and yet, I can't help but see a family resemblance.

My sole complaint is that the ending felt a little like fiddling with a combination lock, trying different combinations with the known numbers, but other than that, it's a solid, fast-paced private eye novel and a notable example of the hardboiled locked room mystery. So the other three Halliday novels on my big pile will be moved up a few places.

Squaring the Circle

"The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892)

Dr. Gerhardus Hellinga was a Dutch internist, endocrinologist and the founder of andrological fertility science in the Low Countries and a founding member of De Vereniging voor Fertiliteitsstudie (Society for Fertility Study), which lead to him becoming a Principal Assistant in the Department of Internal Medicine of the Free University of Amsterdam. He worked there until his retirement.

After retiring from a professional life dedicated to medical research, Hellinga began to work on fulfilling a life-long cherished ambition: writing and crafting a misdaadroman (detective novel). I did not make that up in order to fluff this piece up. It was mentioned in his "In Memoriam," which noted "he had once said he would like to write a detective novel," but he put four of them to his name – before passing away in 1991 at the respectable age of 84. So, now that we got that shakily and clumsily written introduction out of the way, we can take a look at his debut novel.

Under the penname of "Hellinga Sr," he wrote not one, but four, mystery novels and three of them had a small village physician, Dr. Joris Joris, as the detective. Moord in het vierkant (Murder in the Square, 1981) was the first one in this short series. 

Dr. Joris suffers from "ziekelijke vetzucht" (morbid obesity) and as a result he's colossally fat with enormous shoulders and arms. Fat bulged around his neck and on his back. He barely had any hair on the top of his head, but it grew wildly above his ears and on the sides of his cheeks, which made his face look extra wide – giving it the appearance of "the head of a lion." His impossible fatness made him depended for personal care on his assistant, Hannes. Otherwise, he would have been regarded as an invalid, but the personal care he received from his assistant allowed him to continue to work as a doctor and make his patient rounds in the village.

The village of Bikhoven is a fictional place, nestled in a quiet polder landscape of the Province of North-Holland, which has a square grassy area that's completely surrounded by a complex of houses and streets – known in the village simply as Het Vierkant (The Square). Life in the village has remained relatively simple and there are still living remnants of the past, but, above all, it's a peaceful and quiet place. But that all changes when one of the prominent locals is murdered.

Scene of the Crime: Bikhoven, N.H.

Paul van Dam was a Public Notary, or simply notaris in Dutch, whose lifeless body is found inside his office: a revolver was clasped in his hand, blood stain on his coat and the door of a wall safe was swung wide open. After the discovery, the rumor mill of the village assumed Van Dam had shot himself, but Dr. Joris immediately determines the blood seeped from a stab wound. It's murder!

You could easily describe the subsequent investigation as a "Case for Three Detectives," because there are three of them. Firstly, there's Dr. Joris and he tows around a young man, Alexander Arnolds, who's dating one of the doctor's daughters, Dolly, but he may have been in the village at the time of murder on a work related assignment – as he's attached to one of the government ministries and usually does investigative work for this ministry. It may have been related to another village prominent. The last one is a rechercheur (detective) from Amsterdam, Mr. Verlinde, but he's a fairly minor character in the story.

Well, they encounter a surprising amount of suspects and motives in the small village, which cuts through all of the social strata of the village life: the Belgian wife of the mayor, who had an extramarital affair with Van Dam, and her husband may have wanted him out of the way because he was against the purchase of a plot of land by the village counsel. Klaas ten Cate is a chemist and claims to have made an important invention, which he wanted to sell to the Ministry of Defense, but he's not very popular with his fellow villagers on account of his loose morals and cruelty to animals. A Japanese man was beaten up by a German guest in the local lodging house, called "De Kat," after which he vanished from the stage and Japanese man was brought to the local hospital. There's woman suffering from insomnia, known to everyone as Aunt Alie, who keeps an eagle eye on her fellow villages with a pair of spyglasses and Dr. Joris calls her "the best spy he has." There's an old-fashioned barber, who saves his customers "like his father did fifty years ago," but he's also one of the prime movers of the local rumor mill.

This all makes for a very readable and enjoyable story, but, as the cogs of a plot, they were rendered useless when both the false and correct explanation fingered two persons outside of this closed community of suspects who only played a small part on the sidelines of the story – which also tied in with the obvious motive and made the murders incidental. Oh yeah, there's a second, completely unnecessary, murder and the culprit conveniently commits suicide. So I was left profoundly disappointed after that rather under whelming ending. It's why this review is so poorly written without much of substance, because, plot-wise, most of interesting stuff was thrown out of the window by the end.

I wish I could end my return to the homegrown detective stories of my country on a more positive note, but the ending was really disappointing.

Well, I did like the Dell Mapback-like map of Bikhoven and enjoyed the character of Dr. Joris Joris. Several times, Dr. Joris took a break from the story itself to sit down on his soapbox and lecture about his unorthodox opinions on doctor-patient confidentially, village life, the future of medicine and the effects the sound of a name has on shaping a child's personality. It gave him that aura of the Great Detective and he deserved a better case to help solve, but I've read De breinaaldmoorden (The Knitting-Needle Murders, 1983) is supposedly to be his best effort. So I'll probably give that one a shot somewhere down the line.

Well, I hope I'll be returning soon with something better. In the meantime, you might want to read my previous review, in which I took a closer look at some of the locked room mysteries penned by Jacques Futrelle during the early 1900s.

Snapping Up the Evidence

"Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1903).  

There was a gap in between starting and finishing George Harmon Coxe's The Camera Clue (1937), which is why the details from the first half have fuzzed a bit, but that's a minor obstacle for a hack reviewer like yours truly.

The Camera Clue is the third in a row of twenty-two novels starring Kent Murdock, "the best news cameraman in Boston," who made his first appearance in Murder With Pictures (1935) and in substance a cleaned-up, more likable incarnation of the Black Mask version of "Flashgun" Casey – a crime photographer debuting in 1934.

Interestingly, there are some similarities between the problems faced by Murdock in The Camera Clue and Casey in Murder for Two (1943), which I recently reviewed here. The victims in both stories are (gossip) columnists, but here the successful writer has a lucrative side business in blackmail, while the murdered journalist from Murder for Two was crusading against those kinds of abuses. It's basically a reverse take on the plot of the story I have just read. However, there are far more differences than similarities, which makes it stand on its own and Coxe answered a great question with this book: what if Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" had been written as a proper detective story...

"Planning one," is what Murdock asked Nora Pendleton when she inquired, "what constitutes a justifiable homicide," but her answer is surprising, "I just finished one," and the victim is Jerry Carter – the well-known columnist and blackmailer. Carter has a few indiscrete letters, which could threaten her current engagement with Roger Spalding and a confrontation over them ended with Nora shooting Carter. Twice! Carter crumpled in front of her, but Murdock finds it hard to believe and goes a-snooping. Murdock has his first pick at Carter's private office (the scene of the crime), snaps a few pictures and that's when the trouble begins. There are some familiar faces in a photograph taken of the street, in front of the block of offices, a third bullet fired may exonerate Nora and Murdock's meddling attracts some unwanted attention. All in a days work for a pulp-journalist from the 1930s.

Crime Map on the Back Cover

My impression, after merely two books, is that the photographic evidence in Coxe's novels function mainly as a safety deposit box for clues rather than for scientific analysis. You can take something away from the crime-scene, but erasing them from a photograph is a lot harder to accomplish – especially back then. You have to destroy them. In the mean time, that's as good as an excuse as any to sick some shady figures on whomever possesses the photographic plates and ground the stories in the hardboiled tradition of the pulp magazines. So not exactly a branch-off of the scientific-and realist school of detective fiction.

The ending is actually quite good, in which Murdock devices a Wolfean scheme in order to trap a multiple-murderer and even pulls a frame on another suspect to ensure cooperation, however, the best part was the least-likely-suspect card that was drawn – which probably would've worked better had I read one of the previous books in the series. All in all, a fun, fast-paced mystery of the pulpy, semi-hardboiled kind.

Finally, there's a seemingly insignificant part of the solution I need to point out, in which Murdock explains how he basically played a mind trick to prevent the armed murderer from shooting anyone during the confrontation. You can call me crazy, but I think that small bit may have given John Dickson Carr the idea for one of the impossible problems in one of the stage plays collected in 13 to the Gallows (2008). If you reverse what Murdock did there, you have the basics for a trick/solution to build a locked room story around. 

Mapping Out a Plan

"It does help the reader relate events to setting, and does so accurately and with a sense of atmosphere. As a combination of decoration and usefulness, it's probably the best of the lot."

- Jack Iams (on the "mapback" edition of his Girl Meets Body, 1947)

I unearthed a spiral-bound book during a minor restructuring of my shelves and it's one of those books I intended to read, but lingered on the pile before being shelved. Well, Piet Schreuders' The Dell Mapbacks (1997) is actually more of a diary posing as a booklet than an actual book. It goes in a few short chapters, fourteen pages in total, over the history of the immense popular and highly collectible Dell Mapbacks – distinguished by their airbrushed cover art and crime maps on the back covers.

Schreuders is a graphic designer by trade and admirably adopted the Dell Mapback style-and trademarks for the compilation of The Dell Mapbacks, which is plainly a labor of love of a collector/fan. The book even opens with What This Book is About ("a series of highly collectible BOOKS published between 1943 and 1953"), Wouldn't You Like to Know ("who murdered the DELL historian, William H. Lyles?") and Persons this Book is about – followed by a dramatis personae and a List of Exciting Illustrations.

Dell Books was brought into being in the middle of World War II when Dell founder, George T. Delacorte, Jr., needed paper to print books and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing & Lithographing wanted printing work, but the most eye-brow raising from this chapter was how these beloved collectibles were abridged or even censored! "Some books were abridged drastically so as to fit Dell's page requirements" and "although the front cover blurb... suggested that the books were complete, they rarely were." And worse: "one compositor, Ralph MacNichol, spiced the house style with his editorial judgment by removing words like Christ, Jesus, and Goddamn." It's good to see one moral arbiter had to foresight to see the possibility of the nazi's eventually opening a North-American branch of the Kultuurkamer and brushed up on his résumé just in case. Hey, I had to raise that petty censorship with a Godwin.

The following chapter concerns the art-department of Dell Books and in particular the work of Gerald B. Gregg, who painted the covers of 212 novels and drew a couple of back covers, and praised for "extraordinary skill with the airbrush which made the Dell covers of the 1940s unique in appearance." True to the nature of a detective story, Gregg was "resorting to the tricks of the time to get the effects" such as pasting a paper doily onto the bottom of a painting (i.e. cover of Fanny Heaslip Lea’s Half Angel, 1946; a romance novel). The Dell Mapbacks reproduces fourteen of Gregg's covers in this book. Another artist mentioned in this chapter is Robert Stanley, who used himself as a model for characters such as Sam Spade, Mike Shayne, Hercule Poirot and Zorro! 

However, it's the crime map on the back covers that stands out as the standard feature among these Dell Book trademarks, and the feature that keeps drawing-in readers, but they probably cost them the most work – from editors and volunteers to map specialists. Something worth mentioning is that Schreuders included two of his own (fake) mapbacks, but they are truly astonishing pieces of art! I especially liked the map showing the location, Haags Gemeentemuseum, of the first international paperback art exhibition in The Hague, in February, 1981. The chapter also notes Dell historian, Lyles, discovered the identity of a prolific crime back artist, Ruth Belew, who drew 150 (or so) in the series.

The historic overview of Dell Books ends on a sad note with the story of William H. Lyles, writer and researcher, who wrote a biography of the Dell Books entitled Putting Dell on the Map (1983) and it's reputedly a meticulous analysis of the stories in comparison with the artwork/crime maps. Unfortunately, there were personal and financial problems for Lyles (resulting in selling-off his entire and complete collection of mapbacks), which ended with him snapping and committing suicide after shooting (and wounding) his then girlfriend in July of 1996. The remainder of The Dell Mapbacks consists of a diary for 1998 and interspersed with replications of front-and back covers of various Dell publications – from mystery and romance to western and science fiction. Flipped through the book again, but it's hard to pick a favorite. Even the simple map of the European Theater of Operation, from the back cover of Eisenhower Was My Boss (1948; Kay Summersby), makes me want to seek out that book.   

Long story short, The Dell Mapbacks is an interesting curio and as collectible for Mapback collectors as the original books. And Schreuders included a list of essential reading, if your interest has been piqued on this niche subject.

Yes, I just rambled for more than a full page on what basically amounts to a calendar/diary from 16 years ago, because it had some background info in it about a defunct publisher of detective stories from the 40s. Again: welcome to the niche corner.

The Art of Deception

"For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..." 

- Agatha Christie's After the Funeral (1953)

After a brief, unannounced leave-of-absence from this blog, I've been slowly picking up my normal reading pace and managed to finish My True Love Lies (1947) by Lenore Glen Offord in just a few days. And no, contrary to the title, it's not a sugary, one-note romance novel, in which true love stands as the sole survivor, but a bone-fide detective story by a writer who served as the mystery critic for the San Francisco Globe for three decades – and stood-in for Anthony Boucher whenever he was unavailable during World War II.

My True Love Lies is set in the year following Allied victories over the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific, but civilian and military life is still entwined in the San Francisco of 1946. The streets are filled with navy uniforms and the story's protagonist, Noel Bruce, has a job as a government job as a paid driver while she studies (line-) drawing at the Sherwin Art School. Noel is also friends with a charming and good humored Navy commander, named Miles Coree, who came back to San Francisco to find his fiancée married to another man.

A great detective once observed artistic blood is liable to take the strangest forms and the body found inside an unfinished war sculpture, a clay model called "Woman at the Grave," can attest to that statement!

Offord is represented on my best-of list with The Glass Mask (1944), because it’s an excellent treatment of the "perfect murder" ploy without a cop-out ending and an example of the kind of detective stories American's weren't suppose to be writing at the time: the kind set in a small and sleepy country-side town in which time has crept forward instead of marched. My True Love Lies doesn't bat in the same league as The Glass Mask, but the writing plainly shows Offord knew her way around a plot.

The reader is constantly kept busy with mysterious developments and analysis's of the crime. There are crimes from the past lingering in the present and unknown pursuers are harassing Noel and the relationship between the different characters become more, and more, entangled. There are the "Five Scared Artists:" Noel, Anna Tannehill (it was her sculpture in which the body was discovered), Will Rome, Rita Steffany and Paul Watkins – who's inseparable from his cousin, Daisy. This lot is rounded out by the head of the art school, Eugene "Papa Gene" Fenmer, a brash reporter from the Eagle, Red Hobart, a derelict known as "Old Dad" and the ex-wife of the murdered man. And they all gravitate towards the scene of the crime.

Offord actually came up with a clever solution as to why the corpse was hidden in the clay model (other than dramatic effect) and there was a nifty double-twist at the end, which made My True Love Lies an above average mystery novel. It missed that special spark to make it really great, but it's definitely better than similar artsy-themed detective stories such as Dorothy L. Sayers' Five Red Herrings (1931) and Ngiao Marsh's Artists in Crime (1938).

In parting, here's a nugget of wisdom tugged away in the opening of the second chapter of My True Love Lies and reflects on the news playing up the Bohemian angle of the murder case: "Like many journalistic implications, these were partly true and mostly a long way from accuracy." We're almost a century removed from the publication of this book, but I'm afraid this little quote still holds some truth today considering you could make a special-edition DVD box-set for 3D home entertainment systems of the recent news coverage of the missing Flight 370 with downloadable content of Jesse Ventura taking the viewer through all the conspiracy theories.  

Well, enough filler writing for one review and I'll probably grab a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery from the shelves for my next read.

 

Cream of the Crop

"I hope the bastard appreciates this, yanking out my twat hairs by the root so I look good in a sundress."

- Otto & George 

Painted for the Kill (1943) was the first of only three (comedic) mystery novels by Russian born Lucy Cores, whose family packed up and left their home country behind after the Communist Revolution – hiding out in Poland and France before arriving in the United States in 1921. There they made themselves a new home and, twenty odd years later, Cores achieved the American dream by adding her name to one of the grandest pillars of human civilization with the publication of her first detective novel.

The center of commotion and many shenanigans in Painted for the Kill is The House of Lais, a beauty salon patronized by the upper crust of New York's socialite, which is ruled over by Lais Karaides and her reign resembles that of a small-country dictator. Every morning, at 8:30 sharp, there's a mandatory pep talk before the store opens and the store-manager, Mlle. Illona, drills home the pointers on how to behave towards customers and the importance of brand loyalty. If this book would not pre-date George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), I would've suspected Cores of spoofing the Stalinist shadow of Big Brother. That very same, dark shadow that caused her family to fled her home... Just a coincidence or the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler. Moving on.

Cores satirizes everyone and everything, however, it’s not a mere comedy of manners and more closely related to the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection. The story is set in New York among the upper denizens of the city and the scene of the crime is a building, The House of Lais, consisting of multiple floors, through which characters move around – movements which are analyzed and scrutinized. There's a tour of the inner workings of the company. And the detectives are essentially amateurs who quickly develop a friendly relationship with the official police force, in this case Police Captain Andrew Torrent, but the exception here is that they aren't dilettante amateurs killing time by snooping around a fresh crime scene for clues.

Tony Ney is the dark-haired exercise director at Lais and Eric Skeets writes copy for the advertisement department, normally two completely segregated floors, and as to be expected, there's a mutual interest in one another. There developing relationship gives the story ties to the mystery solving couples. As a matter of fact, I was reminded at times of Kelley Roos' debut novel, Made Up to Kill (1940), in which Jeff and Haila Troy were engaged and secured a supporting role in a Broadway play – where murder quickly ensued. Except here the glitter and glamour of the theatre are replaced with the luxurious surrounding of an expensive beauty salon, where the daily routine is disturbed when Lili Michaud, a famous French movie star/refugee, drops in for a special treatment with the Winogradow mudpack.

Before Painted for the Kill morphs into mystery, the hustle and bustle at the beauty salon reminded me of British comedy series like Are You Being Served? So imagine my surprise when Eric Skeets channels Mrs. Slocombe when visiting Tony's apartment and meets Tony's gray Persian, Tom Jones, and remarks "nice pussy," adding, "you and I are going to be great friends, ha, ha." The humor is otherwise more sophisticated than that and Tom shows his disapproval of Eric by favoring Captain Torrent.

BAD PUN ALERT!: Beauty Sleeps & Dirt Maps

Anyhow, Lili Michaud has been left alone in a private-room with a mudpack on her face and quickly fell asleep, but after a while they found out that she's dead and a police investigation reveals that the cause of death was a jujitsu-like blow to the throat. 

A murder is feared to be disastrous for business, considering they could only just prevent the press hounds, who followed Lili around, from having an exclusive photo-op with the corpse, but they're booked full the next day – some of them even insisting on being massaged and mudded up in the "Murder Room." Satirizing continues when the detectives, official and non-official, are making up the balance and conclude that, while people had opportunities, they lacked a good motive for the murder of someone who was practically a stranger to them. Their problem is apparently solved when someone else dies under circumstances that appear so identical that it must be another murder, however, the throat of this body is not crushed. Did the murderer's heart succumb under the strain of a guilty conscience? Suicide? Or was it murder after all? And did murder become a little bit more careful?

When the cause of death is revealed I immediately recognized it as a red herring, if Cores hadn't been too careless in revealing the solution and had withheld vital information, because it suggests a solution that genre savvy readers will be more than familiar with. Edmund Crispin and Nicholas Blake wrote two of the better-known examples and if you know your classics, you'll know what I mean when you read the book. I had to reject it because it didn't tally with the information from the story and the actual solution was therefore much better in that it was more original and the arrival came through some well-clued detective work. The solution (and the story as a whole) makes Painted for the Kill also literary ancestor of Herbert Resnicow's Alexander and Norma Gold mysteries. So the only complaint I could possibly have is that Lucy Cores did not went all the way and found a way to this closed-circle of suspects into a bone-fide locked room mystery. Lets call it a cosmetic imperfection in an otherwise excellent mystery.

That leaves us with one unanswered question though: did the Cores family smuggle a time-viewing crystal out of Russia to keep themselves entertained with futuristic pop-culture and prepare for their new lives in America? 

A Town in Tumult

"A picture paints a thousand words."

- Proverb 

A few years ago, I picked up Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Death Lights a Candle (1932) and The Criminal C.O.D. (1940), after listening to some favorable reviews on Les Blatt's weekly audio pod cast, but they just didn't do it for me and forgot all about Mrs. Taylor – until I rediscovered Octagon House (1937) in the cavernous belly of Mt. To-be-Read. Hey, after Zelda Popkin and Kay Cleaver Strahan delivered the second time around, I judged correctly to give Taylor and her "Codfish Sherlock," Asey Mayo, another shot.

The town of Quanoment, Cape Cod's forgotten hamlet with a population of eight hundred, has been granted a new postal office with a mural from a local artist, Jack Lorne, but the town isn't thrilled. They recognize images of themselves in the mural and the depiction of the townspeople isn't exactly flattering. Plainly, it was Jack's wife, Marina, who put him up to it, and from the evidence, she was very adept at playing the role of killable murder victim – even though she never appears on stage herself. They room with Marina's father, Aaron Frye, whose spirit she broke, and her sister, Pam, at the titular house and it is Pam's precarious situation that brings her to the doorstep of Asey Mayo.

Pam found the body of her sister in the garage, stabbed with a pocketknife that belonged to her and Jack screaming at her that she has killed Marina and that he has called the police, but there are also the incriminating and fabricated statements spouted by Nettie Hobbs – a town gossip who soured when Pam protected her father from Hobbs' advances. There's also the problem of the hundred-pound lump of ambergris that Pam chanced upon the beach, and fought over with her sister, but has now gone missing and appears to be lugged around all over the place. These elements combined with the setting almost gave you the idea of tramping around in one of Dorothy Cameron Disney's mystery novels and Pam's plight gave it shades of John Dickson Carr's He Who Whispers (1946)

Speaking of Disney and Carr, my edition of Octagon House is a Dell Mapback and includes a "What this Mystery is about" and "Wouldn't You Like to Know" section and the latter one asked a question that I have to address: why and how Pam disappeared from the locked bedroom?

Octagon House is listed nowhere as an impossible crime story, however, chapters five and six include a disappearance from said bedroom, which was locked from the outside and the key in possession of Asey Mayo, and the window screens firmly hooked in place from within. I should also mention that Pam disappeared from the bedroom when Mayo had one of the Frye's lodgers as a visitor named Timothy Carr! It's more of an Easter egg than an actual challenge, but it was treated exactly the way it should've been for something as simple (and short) as that and the explanation was more than acceptable. I was also intrigued to find another one of these miraculous side distractions, which also occurred when Jeff Troy vanished from a dumb-waiter in mid-air in Kelley Roos' Ghost of a Chance (1947) and Madeleine Magellan evaporated from a watched room in the Jonathan Creek episode, Ghosts' Forge (1999).

I know, I keep coming back to locked rooms, but I keep running into them, even when I assume I'm reading a straight laced whodunit (see: Dead Man's Gift, 1936). It's a gift... and a curse.

To round this review up, I enjoyed Octagon House and the "Codfish" Sherlock a lot more a second time around, because this one wasn't written around a joke (and punch line) that I saw coming a quarter into the book (i.e. The Criminal C.O.D.) There was plotting and mystification woven around such imagery as people running around with a lump of ambergris, an eight-sided house with clock strewn walls, brewing town riot and even an airplane crash in town square. I have to admit, it's not perfect (figured out whodunit) and the ending chapters tended to drag a bit in parts, but otherwise, I was entertained.

The theme of 2013 definitely is redemption and perhaps I should consider taking another crack at Sjöwall and Wahlöö. 

What's becoming of me?! :/

Cartoonist in a Tailspin

"Something didn't seem right. There was something about the whole set-up that smelled like someone else's hydrant."

- Ace Hart (Dog City, 1992-94) 

When the founder of Whitcomb Feature Syndicate, Big Bill Whitcomb, passed away the general-manager, Mark Wallis, inherited the responsibility to keep the business afloat that, in turn, keeps the vultures that were circling his sickbed in luxury and comfort. The only honor they give to their late benefactor is an annual diner to commemorate his birthday, which went well for nearly ten years, until their star cartoonist, Zeke Brock, made a drunken scene and the family has summoned Wallis before the next diner – and thus begins Jack Iams' Death Draws the Line (1949).

Zeke Brock is the creator of the Little Polly Pitcher comic strip and alcohol was his poison of choice, which seems to have done him, after Wallis planned to let him sleep for a couple of hours before towing him to the party. However, Wallis' becomes suspicious when Brock's will, leaving the copyright to his assistant, Mary Bradley, appears to be missing and ask a befriended D.A. for an autopsy – much to the chagrin of the acid-tongued and scandalized Widow Whitcomb. Of course, the fact that the autopsy showed that Brock was drowned (!) was not enough for Wallis to hold on to his job, because he neglected to put the interest of the company and the family on the first place.

Unfortunately, the snobbish, childish and decadent manners of the Whitcomb family pretty much sets the tone for the book and Iams appears to have been determined to drive home the fact that they're wicked people. Instead of following up on an interesting premise, Wallis has to endure the wrath of the Widow Whitcomb, tangle with her nymphomaniac of a daughter, Pamela, who's seen by Wallis approaching men in a dim-lit street, wrestle a gun from her brother Fenwick and knocks out with his former simpering assistant, Henry Parfield, who perhaps hopes to marry into the family. There are also sappy love feelings boiling between Wallis and Mary Bradley and a second murder, in which Wallis briefly becomes a suspect, to distract from the story. 

Crime Map on the backcover

It’s not like the murder of Zeke Brock is completely delegated to the background, but a lot of details were lost that could've made for a better story and not only in regards to the plot. Through out the story there are mentions of Avenge Polly Pitcher Clubs and movements popping up all over the country and you could have peppered the story with newspaper snippets (perhaps from one or two Rocky Rockwell's The Record?) of their activities. Yes. It would have still been padding, but it would've been more fun than what we actually got. There was also no background on the comic book industry of the 1940s. The murder of Brock also had some confusing points. None of the police involved seemed to give much thought on how the murderer entered the premise. Was I reading a locked room mystery or not? It was mentioned that Brock gave keys to practically every woman he ever slept with, but that was never looked into. Even after a suicide attempt takes that may be a botched attempt at murder takes place there. Somehow, someone got in... yes... that's a remarkable feat of deductive reasoning, detective. Why don't you go to a Coffee-and-Donut store and sit this one out.

The only point of genuine interest was the batch of missing Little Polly Pitcher comic strips and they were actually included in this book, drawn by Roy Crane, and they tell you what you probably suspected all along, but it’s a nifty gimmick nonetheless. I can only see this book of being of interest to scholars looking into the visual elements in detective stories. In short, Death Draws the Line was not just a step down from previous books I have read by Jack Iams, like The Body Missed the Boat (1947) and What Rhymes With Murder? (1950), but a suicide dive off a cliff and I think that is a wish we should respect and leave it at that.

Oh, and I know it's folly to post two reviews on the same day, so if this is the first time today that you decide to take a peek at this blog, you might also want to take a look at my rundown of the new Jonathan Creek special, The Clue of theSavant's Thumb (2013), which aired last night. The tone of that review is also a bit more on the positive and upbeat side. I hate