The Girl with the Hole in Her Head (1949) by Hampton Stone

Last month, I reviewed The Real Gone Goose (1959) by Aaron Marc Stein, a prolific American crime-and detective writer, who produced over a hundred novels under his own name as well as two pseudonyms, "George Bagby" and "Hampton Stone" – all published between 1935 to 1984. I concluded the review with the observation that Stein consistently churned out entertainingly written, serviceable plotted detective stories possessing an ever-present glimmer of greater things. Judging from what I gleaned of Stein's writing and career, he rarely, if ever, delivered greater things. You can likely put that down on his productivity and having to meet deadlines, but The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) and The Real Gone Goose were enough to push him back into my peripheral. However, I'm always open to suggestions that could prove me wrong (e.g. The Kindaichi Case Files), but the subject of today's review kind of lucked its way into my hands. 

The Girl with the Hole in Her Head (1949), published as by "Hampton Stone," is the second entry in the series about New York's Assistant District Attorney, Jeremiah X. "Gibby" Gibson. This is only title in the series that had been jotted down on my wishlist, because Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Murders (1991). So can a full-blown locked room puzzle deliver greater things and turn The Girl with the Hole in Her Head into something more than an entertainingly written, serviceable plotted detective story? Yeah, kind of, but not on account of "bolted rooms and gimmicks like that."

Ellen Bannock is the titular girl with the hole in her head, "a sweet child but quite mad," who nearly died in car crash and would have died had it not been for the miracle of modern surgery – patching the hole in her head with a metal plate. She lives under somewhat curious circumstances with her dysfunctional siblings and assorted live-in friends in a slick, modern three-story house on East End Avenue. Ellen Bannock has a half-brother and step-brother, David and Gordon Cameron ("Gordon was his. I was hers. David was theirs"). David Cameron is an alcoholic wreck and a friend from Alcoholic Anonymous, "some character name of Edwards," is living in their guestroom. Gordon Cameron is the head of the rich, successful head of the family, but without any real friends beside a special secretary and companion. Paul Morrison, "man-of-all-work," is there to take care of all the little, day-to-day annoyances and playing sports with Gordon ("...Gordon is a special person and Paul's job is made to order to fit Gordon"). Austin is another resident guest and somewhat successful sculptor who crafted the wire and glass rod arrangements on the hall walls. But he also made a sculpture of Ellen's head with a great jagged hole, which stands on a pedestal in a most prominent position ("...another touch of madness in a completely mad household").

So while the household can be described as unusual, even slightly dysfunctional, it's not a completely loveless household. When anonymous threats begin to arrive at the house, Ellen tries to intervene.

All the threats were addressed to Gordon, but he refuses to take them seriously and can't even be bothered to open them anymore. So now he tears them to pieces unopened, and unread, but, when he found out Ellen was putting them back together, he simply burned them. Ellen turned to the District Attorney, The Old Man, who in turn puts his two assistants on the case. But can she be trusted? Jeremiah X. Gibson and Malcolm T. Macauley, simply Gibby and Mac, receive instructions to humor her, but not to believe a word she says. Gibby and Mac begin a discreet investigation behind Gordon's back as they try to get their hands on the ashes of a burned letter. And then there's the curious incident of the birdcage. But things had gone "too far for them to have boiled out to anything but murder." More on that locked room murder in a minute.

Mike Grost notes on his website, A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, that Stein's detective novels "are vaguely Van Dine-ish in approach" and that's certainly true for The Girl with the Hole in Her Head. Firstly, the series and this book is narrated by Mac, but he merely records what happens and is barely acknowledged. Mac is only mentioned by name a handful of times through out the story. So very much a Van Dinean narrator. Secondly, there's the slightly cracked family living together and Gordon's private, soundproof study doubling as a private museum so often found in Van Dine and his followers. Gordon's study houses a very peculiar and personal collection, but it takes a while before Gibby and the reader get to meet Gordon. And experience the bizarre collection ("one was assaulted by their total effect"), which is the most striking scene in the whole book. A mad touch of Ellery-in-Wonderland! There is also an unmistakable influence of the hardboiled detective story mixed into the narrative. Grost points out that "their District Attorney boss is called the Old Man like the boss of the detective agency in Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op tales," but I only noticed lines like "he [Gibby] just can't get it through his head that they [influential people] aren't people like anyone else, subject to the same laws." Gibby has a tendency to forget about "the limitations the law puts upon the powers of the public prosecutor's office" and can be "dynamite with influential people," which includes bending the rules a little as shown in The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends – making him the legal counterpart to Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. Mac's primary job in the series is curbing Gibby's unfortunate tendencies and stop him from stepping on too many toes. It feels like a very pulpy setup.

Gordon Cameron is eventually found dead, shot in the chest, in his study, but the door is bolted from the inside and all the windows latched. There were two hired guards posted at the front and rear doors. However, there's not much more to say about the locked room problem, because a solution is immediately proposed and accepted. Fortunately, the locked room-trick has a small twist in its tail and Gibby amusingly tries to find out who in the house has read the detective novel entitled Murder Behind the Bolted Door ("complete explanation of the... trick in the last chapter"). A copy of which was found somewhere in the house. So more interesting in how the murderer employs the concept of a locked room mystery than any kind of ingenious trickery or sleight-of-hand as the trick is fairly routine. Not something you can say of either the who-and why. 

The Girl with the Hole in Her Head is a second-string (or mid-list) detective tale, but the identity of the murderer is not half as obvious as it would have been in the hands of a less talented second-stringer. The murderer's identity is strengthened with a good and convincing motive, which is not a run-of-the-mill reason and one that arose from a very specific set of circumstances. All of it's relatively fairly clued. My only (very minor) misgivings is that a Dying Message puzzle would probably have served the plot better than a locked room and fitted the Van Dine-Queen furnishings of the plot and characters. Other than that, The Girl with the Hole in Her Head proved to be a better, more consistently plotted, detective story than either The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends or The Real Gone Goose. So glad my initial impressions from them do not entirely hold up and rekindled my intention to track down his archaeological mystery series or continue poking around this series. The Murder That Wouldn't Stay Solved (1951), The Corpse That Refused to Stay Dead (1951) and The Strangler Who Couldn't Let Go (1957) all sound promising enough.

The Real Gone Goose (1959) by George Bagby

Aaron Marc Stein was a prolific American writer of some 100 detective novels, mysteries and the occasional crime-thriller, published over a period of half a century, beginning with Murder at the Piano (1935) and ending with The Garbage Collector (1984) – half of which appeared under two different pseudonyms. I reviewed the sixth novel in his Jeremiah X. Gibbon series, The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953; as by "Hampton Stone"), back in 2020. Hardly a groundbreaking detective novel, but a good, second-stringer from one of those human fiction factories who "once were the backbone of publishing and public libraries." So decided to go over Stein's large bibliography to see if there's anything worth cherry picking.

There are three locked room mysteries, Ring Around a Murder (1936), The Girl with the Hole in Her Head (1949) and Lock and Key (1973), which have been jotted down for future reference. Stein also penned a series featuring two archaeologists, Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, who stumble across murder and mystery in faraway locations or dig sites. I like a good archaeological mystery, but they tend to be damnable rare. So knowing there's an entire series out there sounds like a treat. And then there's the long-running "Schmitty" series.

Inspector Schmidt, New York's Chief of Homicide on Manhattan Island, debuted along with his creator in the previously-mentioned 1935 novel, Murder at the Piano, whose casebook comprises the lion's share of Stein's output – over fifty novels in nearly as many years. The series appeared under the first of Stein's two pennames, "George Bagby," doubling as "the homicide-books man" who "writes up those Inspector Schmidt cases." A common trope among New York-based mystery writers at the time and imagine Stein modeled the series after Anthony Abbot's Thatcher Colt mysteries. However, it does not appear as if Schmitty and Bagby were frozen in the 1930s and '40s with later novels carrying such titles as The Tough Get Going (1977), Mugger's Day (1979) and The Most Wanted (1983). So poked around the early, pre-1950s novels, but, of course, a copy of Ring Around a Murder has yet to come my way. I ended up picking a more accessible title from the middle-period of the series that turned out to be a procedural parody of the conventional "closed circle" whodunit teeming with beatniks who care very little about conventions. 

The Real Gone Goose (1959), alternatively published as A Real Gone Goose, is the twentieth entry in the Inspector Schmidt series, but it's George Bagby who takes center stage.

George Bagby lives in an apartment house in Greenwich Village and has seen many neighbors come and go over the years. And hardly ever got to know any of them. That changes when "this new breed" moved into the apartment building. A group of young beatniks who "seemed to have no sense of privacy" like "locking your door is a crime or something" and never closed or locked their front doors. And when one of them walked into a closed and locked door, they resorted to "the celluloid strip or hairpin routine" to unlock it. It makes you "somebody who thinks property is important" and "there's nothing worse than that." These are the so-called exiles who only use given or assumed names like Sabra, Blair, Sam, Carrie and Dudley, because "surnames suggested parents and they had no need of parents" ("they had already been born"). What they did was one of three things: noise-making, drinking and sponging off Sabra. Bothering other people in the building came as natural to them as breathing.

So kind of the neighbors from hell, if you value privacy, but surprisingly, Bagby finds himself courting their approval. Even was shamed into not double-locking his door ("like a frightened old maid"), because the celluloid strips and hairpins proved no match to the special lock. And being laughed at by Sabra made Bagby feel "stodgy and middle-aged." This situation persisted an entire week, until it came to abrupt end when Sabra was shot and killed in her apartment. Fortunately, Inspector Schmidt is placed in charge of the investigation, but even then Bagby's problems have only just begun.

Admittedly, the story is drained of its loud, colorful and exuberant atmosphere after the third chapter as the investigation begins and becomes more routine, but the ever worsening position Bagby finds himself in added interest to the middle portion – as he's no longer the impartial observer he had always been in these things. There are all those little things that would have looked merely embarrassing or silly, if there hadn't been a murder. 

Such as Bagby removing Sabra from his apartment after their first meeting, which immediately fueled talks "Battling Bagby, the Babe Beater" and rumors he has "been sleeping with the babe." Bagby knew the story of him supposedly beating "dames into submission" would be all over headquarters as "cops are heavy-handed and persistent humorists." So his involvement with the exiles has caused him nothing but trouble and it gets worse when it turns out his missing gun could have been the murder weapon. That makes the episode of the glazier and the gun look a whole lot less innocent than it really was.

I don't know if it was a good decision to let the reader know how innocent these damning scenes really were, but Bagby's precarious position as an innocent man who looks damn suspicious at times helped to enliven an otherwise dull, routine middle portion. Things pick up again towards the end when a second murder is committed behind the double-locked door of Bagby's apartment. Not exactly a locked room mystery, relaying on a duplicate key and celluloid strip, but could have been retooled into a legitimate impossible crime. But the problem instead becomes one of alibis ("alibis all around and I'm left without a suspect"). This final-act has a good use for the normally cliched stopped clock and how Inspector Schmidt used it demonstrate only one of the alibis had been manufactured. I think it would have been an overall improvement had this part occurred earlier in the story with the middle-portion cut down and threaded into the second murder. The remarkable transformation of Blair Nolan would have made a perfectly serviceable Strange Person subplot. However, I don't think anything could have been done to make the murderer less obvious. Not even withholding the finer details regarding the practical side of the motive

So, in the end, The Real Gone Goose came up a little short as a pure, plot-driven and fair play detective story, but tremendously fun as a parody that placed the conventionally-minded, 1930s detective stories among a younger generation contemptuous of conventions. Add the unfortunate situation of the narrator, you can see why Stein was one of those reliable, mid-list writers who were so popular with public libraries and paperback publishers. It should be noted that The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends and The Real Gone Goose both had all the ingredients to be better detective stories than they ended up being, which probably was due to time constraints and looming deadlines. More time to work out his plots would like have reduced his bibliography, but they would have been better detective novels that would have stood the test of time a lot better. My impression now is that he wrote entertainingly written, serviceable plotted detective fiction that always had a potential glimmer of something greater and never being able to deliver on them. I'm gladly proven wrong and welcome any recommendation.

The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953) by Hampton Stone

Aaron Marc Stein was an American journalist with a degree in archaeology from Princeton University, New Jersey, who became "a full-time fiction writer" with the publication of the first Inspector Schmidt mystery, Murder at the Piano (1935), which was followed by over a hundred detective novels – receiving the Grand Master Edgar in 1979 for his contributions "to the craft of mystery writing." These contributions consist of four, long-running series published under three different (pen) names. And the one with the most name recognition is probably "George Bagby."

I've been aware of Stein for years as one of those reliable, mid-list writers who once were "the backbone of publishing and public libraries." A writer who appeared to have been a cross between Anthony Abbot and Erle Stanley Gardner, but never came across one of his novels until recently. Honestly, Stein was much better than most mystery writers who have been branded second-stringers on this blog!

The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends (1953), published as by "Hampton Stone," is the sixth, of eighteen, titles about the New York Assistant District Attorneys, Jeremiah X. Gibbon and Malcolm T. Macauley – usually their names are shortened to Gibby and Mac. Mac is the S.S. van Dine-style narrator of the series and is often assigned to Gibby to hold him "somewhere within the limits of legality and prudence" or "a cautious approach" is warranted in regard to some of "the town's more gilt-edged reputations." The murder of one of the vice-presidents of Fiveborough National Bank requires Mac's "special talent" in spades!

Fiveborough National Bank is a big, solid and respectable New York institution, firmly rooted in "the financial tradition of Alexander Hamilton," with branch banks all over New York City that all look like "a little neighborhood Sub-treasury."

Every year, the Bank Club throws an exclusive dinner party at the Butterfield Hotel. Only this time, the "three-star binge" spilled all over the fifth floor where the body of Homer G. Coleman is found in one of the rooms. Coleman had "died horribly" with a black canvas strap pulled tightly around his throat, but Gibby and Mac immediately smack headfirst into an enormous contradiction. The victim was universally loved. Everyone liked and respected the guy, which actually made for a nice change. Stein put it to good use in the last chapter.

There are, however, many more complications surrounding the murders including two burglaries with stolen keys, two (attempted) murders, three assaults with a candlestick and traces of blood of third, unknown victim. But the bulk of the story concerns the plot-threads centering on two of the suspects, Art Fuller and Miss Ross Salvaggi.

Art Fuller has served time in Sing Sing and is now out on parole, but tried to split when the police recognized him at the hotel and the story he gave them is shakey, to say the least, which is why they "fix him up with a tail" – who'll keep a close eye on him over the next twenty-four hours. Surprisingly, this plot-thread turned into a minor locked room mystery when Fuller left and returned to his home without being observed by his unshakable tail. The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends is not listed in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and had no idea the plot contained a small locked room puzzle. I honestly tried to take a break from the impossible crime tale, but they won't leave me alone! Miss Salvaggi, on the other hands, acts as a human roadblock and evidently knows more than she's willing to tell, but she eventually finds her match in the stubborn, outspoken Gibby. She didn't went down in the first couple of rounds and Gibby had to take a dirty, roundabout way to get his hands on the full story.

So these (side) problems cover a large swath of the story and this comes at the expense of, what should have been, the central plot-thread that was already scantily clued. That's a pity because the identity of the murderer, along with the motive, were interesting and made the murder of Coleman a genuine tragedy. More importantly, it gave the story an ending you don't often see in these classic detective stories as everyone turned on the murderer the moment this person was revealed. Gibby has to tell the victim's friends they have to save the murderer for a jury followed by some banter ("Where do you go to find the peers of a thing like that? What are you going to use for a jury, bedbugs?").

The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends is an engagingly written, busily plotted detective story with a fun detective who's not above a little housebreaking or playing dirty, but Stein lacked the coincidence in the main plot-thread, covered it up with extraneous story-lines and went light on clueing – dragging down an otherwise excellent detective novel to the second ranks. Still a good, entertaining read with some good ideas and I'll definitely return to Stein in the future. I want to try one of his detective novels about his archaeologist sleuths, Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt.

A note for the curious: Mercury Publications edition had a $1000 cash prize for "the best new title submitted for this novel by September 28, 1954," but The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends has never appeared under any other title. So, whoever won the contest, the winning title was not used.