Job Hunting: "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" (1943) by Herbert Brean

Last month, I reread Herbert Brean's Wilders Walk Away (1948), which disappointed the first time round, but turned out to be quite good when read on its terms without the unreasonable, highly stacked expectations build up over the decades – demanding a John Dickson Carr-like masterpiece. So wanted to return to Brean's work by sampling one of his obscure, rarely reprinted short stories.

Brean's "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" originally appeared in the September, 1943, issue of Thrilling Detective and reprinted, only once, in the July, 1954, issue of Thrilling Detective (UK).

The story opens with "Tick" Johnson and his partner/narrator, Fred Murphy, wake up in their one-room hotel apartment by "the devil's own door-pounding" coming from the hall outside their door. There they find a patrol man, a plainclothes detective and the hotel manager trying to break down the door to another apartment. When the door is broken down, they see the body of a man spread crosswise on the bed with a bullet wound in his heart and a .32 revolver lying on his chest. Sergeant McClelland is ready to call it a suicide, "door was locked and there's no other entrance," when Tick buds into the investigation and begins pointing out all the inconsistencies – which all tell him "that lad didn't kill himself." Tick introduces himself and his partner as a pair of private detectives, but Murphy confides to the reader they're not private detectives. They're disgraced newspaper reporters "hunting jobs on a new paper in a new town." Tick's decision to insert themselves into the investigation, to get an inside scoop, has consequences.

Not only was the hotel room locked from the inside, but the only other tenants on that floor when the murder was committed. The elevator boy swore nobody had come on or departed from that floor and "no killer escaped down those stairs," because they were being painted at the time. So now they have to find a solution in order to preserve their own necks.

That brings us to Mr. Sanda, murder victim and spiritualist, who on the previous night had conducted a séance on the floor above. Sanda had not been since he retreated to his room, until the door was broken down. So the potential suspects include Madam Vera Pool, consulting medium, who wanders around the hotel in a white garb and claims Sanda's ghost told her who killed him. But promised she would never tell. Ivan Karanovich, the Wire-Walker, who has a long-dragging feud with Sanda dating back to their days at the circus. William Holbrook, a young playboy and son of the late Senator Holbrook, had his own reasons to dislike Sanda. Who did it and how? Tick reveals all when he and Murphy crash a séance to hand the murderer over to Sergeant McClelland neatly wrapped in evidence. But how good is it?

First of all, the locked room-trick itself to get away from the crime scene is nothing special, or groundbreaking, but how it was employed under the given circumstances and allowed for a cleverly-hidden murderer was not half bad. I also liked how the locked room-trick ultimately proved to be the murderer's undoing. So, plot-wise, a decent enough short detective story, but it's the characters of "Tick" Johnson and Fred Murphy who steal the show. They recall Craig Rice's screwball mysteries about Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, traveling photographers/conmen, who first appeared in The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942). So if you like those American screwball mysteries of the murder-can-be-fun school, Brean's "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" is definitely worth a read.

Wilders Walk Away (1948) by Herbert Brean

Herbert Brean's debuted as a mystery writer with Wilders Walk Away (1948) and, according to Curt Evans, the praise it received from Anthony Boucher, critic and mystery writer, Brean "almost walked away with an Edgar" for best first novel – alongside with a cult status that lasted for decades. Wilders Walk Away was considered to be one of the great impossible crime novels not penned by John Dickson Carr. A reputation that wasn't tested too severely during the post-WWII decades as the traditional, Golden Age-style detective novels entered its dark age. That changed during the 2000s.

Wilders Walk Away remains out-of-print today, but used copies are neither ridiculously rare nor eye-watering expensive. When the internet began to offer a new, open market place copies of Wilders Walk Away began to circulate again and it's cult status began to unravel. Barry Ergang summed it up perfectly in his 2003 review posted on the GADWiki, "for a little while I thought I'd found in Wilders Walk Away a companion to The Three Coffins and Rim of the Pit for ultimate greatness." Somewhat of a shared experience as most of us were promised something like a Wrightsville mystery by Ellery Queen as perceived by Carr, centered on a series of miraculous vanishings across several centuries, but the explanations are disappointingly prosaic and mundane. Nor did the rediscovery of Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950), Brean's true masterpiece, do its reputation any favors.

So read it at the time anticipating an all-time great, unjustly out-of-print impossible crime classic and soured on the book when the impossible vanishings, generations and centuries apart, were explained away with plain, unimaginative solutions – which probably was too hasty a dismissal. Jim, of The Invisible Event, suggests in his 2017 review Wilders Walk Away is better read "as a prototype for the small town thriller" because it's "much more successful as that kind of book." I wanted to revisit Wilders Walks Away for some time now to see how the story lands without the high, somewhat unreasonable expectations of finding an impossible crime novel equal to the best from Carr and Hake Talbot.

The backdrop of Wilders Walk Away is the historical town of Wilders Lane, Vermont, whose history dates back to the mid-eighteenth century and named after the lane leading to old Ethan Wilder's log cabin. By 1775, a fairly sized village had grown around it that developed into the current town with the Wilders as its richest, leading family. There is, however, something curious about the Wilder family. Some of its members, through out the generations, have to habit of simply vanishing without a trace. Or, as it's locally known, they "walked away" never to be seen again.

Jonathan Wilder was the first to walk away, in '75, when going down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine, but his wife swears he never came back up again. There was no other way out of the cellar except going back up the stairs to the kitchen. Forty years later, Langdon Wilder disappeared from his bed and Walter Wilder was on the ill-fated Mary Celeste ("...people hereabouts think that whatever happened on the Celeste happened because Walter Wilder was aboard"). Wilders continued to walk away into the twentieth century. In 1917, John Michael Wilder was seen walking down a wet beach, before inexplicably vanishing from sight leaving nothing more than a trail of footprints, "plain as paint," stopping in the middle of the beach – "no concealment for yards around." Only the previous year, Fred Wilder disappeared from the supply room of his office under impossible circumstances on Columbus Day. These never-ceasing, strange and sometimes miraculously disappearances gave rise to a catchy jingle that became part of the folk lore of Wilders Lane:

 

"Other people die of mumps
Or general decay,
Of fever, chills or other ills,
But Wilders walk away."

 

In recent years, Wilders Lane has done a lot of work to restore the town to its colonial charm to attract tourists with families owning a Colonial house opening their homes to the public between two and five each afternoon. So visiting Wilders Lane was like a trip back in time to the days of the American Revolution. That brings Reynold Frame, a freelance writer and photographer, to Wilders Lane to do several picture pieces on the town, but soon finds consumed by everything Wilder. Particularly with the daughter of Fred Wilder, Constance, who, very much to Frame's horror, has a fiance. But there are other puzzling mysteries surrounding the Wilders and Wilders Lane. Such as a minor historical mystery, a hidden code, indicating where an old diary had been secreted away.

More importantly, Constance's sister, Ellen, disappeared shortly after Frame arrived in town and its him who eventually finds her, but that discovery turns a local legend into a full-blown murder investigation – first in the career of police chief Miles Maloney. Ellen is not the last of the Wilders to walk away and turn up dead, before the story draws to a close. Frame, "a faithful reader, and disciple, of Sherlock Holmes" is prompted to start playing detective to impress Constance, because she believes "someone else could do better than the police." The mysteries of the Wilder family not only involves strange disappearances and murder, but hidden treasure, skeletons and grave digging.

So, as you probably gathered, I enjoyed Wilders Walk Away a lot more the second time around and even got more out of the miraculous vanishings, especially the historical ones, out of this second read – even though they remain largely second-rate. A good example of the strength and weaknesses of these impossible disappearances is the 1775 vanishing of Jonathan Wilder from the windowless cellar with the exit under constant observation. The trick is old hat (n frperg cnffntrjnl), but why he never returned after disappearing has a great answer. So why they all vanished and who's responsible is more important here than how they disappeared, which always has a simple, unimpressive answer. I think Wilders Walk Away would have benefited from ditching the impossible nature of some of the disappearances in favor of their strangeness and habit of repeating themselves across generations. Frame even discusses the work of Charles Fort to explain to Constance that her family don't hold the patent on anomalous phenomena.

After all, "the idea that anyone can vanish off the face of the earth without leaving a trace is uncomfortable." Like the series of very odd, non-impossible disappearances from Freeman Wills Crofts' The Hog's Back Mystery (1933). The impossible disappearances in Wilders Walk Away were less of disappointment knowing before hand that the importance is on why they disappeared, and by whom, rather than how. So, understandably, its reputation cratered when locked room fanatics started getting their hands on it in 2000s.

Wilders Walk Away has more to offer than a string of very odd, inexplicable disappearances. Beside being a fun, old-fashioned whodunit presented as a small town thriller, something is to be said about its style and structure. Something I completely missed on my first read. In 1948, Wilders Walk Away represented a perfect blend of the genre's past and present with glimpses of the future (see Jim's prototype comment). Some all-important elements of the plot would have been very much at home in a Victorian melodrama or Conan Doyle story, but hardly a throwback considering how Brean handled the plot and the answers waiting at the end. Speaking of Doyle, Brean was a Sherlockian and every chapter is headed with a quote from the Sherlock Holmes canon and the story is littered with Van Dinean footnotes – ranging from historical information to a recipe for "easy to make" Jokers. It never tips over to being too much and is surprisingly subtle in how it balances it various plot-threads and characters. Far too subtle for what I demanded from my first read. But it earned a place among my favorite, non-impossible Golden Age detective novels.

So, yeah, Wilders Walk Away proved to be far better than I remembered from my first read and even better than I hoped it would be on rereading it. It's undeserved reputation as an impossible crime classic has done it no favors, but if you don't expect any "Carter Dickson-effects" from the vanishing-tricks, it's going to be difficult for Wilders Walk Away to disappoint. A tremendously fun and enjoyable romp that comes with a heartily recommendations. Just don't expect a fusion between Queen and Carr, but more something along the lines of Theodore Roscoe's Four Corners series and Jack Vance's two Sheriff Joe Bain novels.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) by Herbert Brean

Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) is the fourth and final novel starring Reynold Frame, a freelance writer, photographer and amateur detective, which began life as a short story in the June, 1952, issue Cosmopolitan – expanded two years later as a suspenseful mystery. A thriller with a detective plot that has one of the best and most memorable take on Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). 

I've wanted to take a second look at The Clock Strikes Thirteen ever since rereading Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950), but then 2020 happened and decided to put it aside. You see, the story takes place on a desolate, rocky island where germs and viruses are being weaponized.

So it's not merely the presence of a murderer that puts the small, isolated group on edge, but also a splash of weaponized bacteria and viruses let loose on the island. Not exactly a comfort read. Rupert Penny's Policeman's Evidence (1938) convinced me it would be a waste not to use a quarantine-style detective novel to close out 2020. Go hoard some rolls of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, because we're about to enter a viral hotspot. 

The Clock Strikes Thirteen begins with a midnight phone call to freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who's to take the place of a Russian-born photographer on a secret assignment to Kilgore Island, Maine – twenty-four miles out in the Atlantic. North Wayland is the current owner of the island who used to be the "most skilled brain surgeon in the world," but became a changed man when he lost his wife and children in the war. Wayland became a bacteriologist and dedicated his life to researching the kind of science "doing its darnedest to kill off man in wholesale lots," namely biological warfare, which is why he located to the remote island and erected a private laboratory. Wayland apparently has developed a biological weapon capable of "wipe out an entire country" and "conquer the rest of the world." So, naturally, the U.S. military is deeply involved in the project and the reason why the original photographer failed to get security clearance.

Reynold Frame and Leon Exeter, a writer for Picture magazine, voyage to Kilgore Island with Major Harry Geddes and Captain Jonas Kilgore, who was born and raised on the island, but now refuses to stay there. Not without reason. Kilgore Island resembles "the other side of the moon." A bleak, rocky protrusion in the sea crowned with a clump of dead, prickly trees. Wayland lives and works there with his assistants, Val Chesnikoff, Susy Smith, Clare Quarles and Dr. Mike Inglehart – who's the chief assistant in charge. Finally, there's an overworked cook and her slow-witted son, Tom. And it doesn't take very long before things go south.

Wayland shows Frame around the laboratory and he wants to take a photograph of the bacteriologist holding a test tube, but Wayland corrects him that they chiefly use Petri dishes. So he goes to get some samples, but when doesn't return, Frame begins to look for him and discovers his body on the floor of the barn. Slashed to death with a scalpel and covered with fragments of broken glass with "a gelatinous substance" stuck to the shards. What has been spilled in there is agar, which is used for growing cultures. If there were bacteria cultures in it, they're now all over the place. That's very bad news, if they contained Wayland's secret weapon. But it gets worse!

Since they've no idea what the incubation periods is, they have everything from twelve hours to two, or three, days before they know what they're up against. But it gets even worse. North's taste for fresh food means that there's no canned food on the island and they can't eat any uncovered food, due to contamination, which means they now have to survive on water and some eggs until Old Jonas returns – ensuring a few days of extreme dieting. On top of that, Tom disappeared around the time of murder and Frame's lack of motive finds him a captive of Major Geddes. Oh, and there's no radio to contact the mainland. Can any more go wrong for Frame? The answer is yes. Yes, it can.

As noted above, The Clock Strikes Thirteen is an expanded short story and the core of the plot, who, why and how, is relatively simple and straightforward. Something you would expect from a short, 10-page story with the highlight being a brief lecture on "the essence of a perfect alibi." During this short lecture, Frame mentions the main principles of the alibi-trick (booby traps, concealed weapons, manipulated clocks and the unconsciously coached witness) and demolishes everyone's alibi by demonstrating that "the really perfect alibi" is "the one that is so natural and ordinary that it is never even suspected." Sadly, this lecture covers only the last two, or three, pages of Chapter 9, but should still delight fans of Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts.

So, as far as the plot is concerned, The Clock Strikes Thirteen is decent enough, but compared to Wilders Walk Away (1948), Hardly A Man is Now Alive and The Traces of Brillhart (1960), is Brean's thinnest detective novel. The Clock Strikes Thirteen is mainly carried by its storytelling, setting and a truly original premise, which has to my knowledge never been done before or since.

When I read it for the first time, the story struck me as a good, old-fashioned piece of detective fiction spiced with some cold war paranoia, but, having lived through 2020, their situation became much more relatable – although nobody ever mentioned toilet paper. Neither is there the same level of mental breakdown among the characters as in Berkeley's Panic Party, Christie's And Then There Were None or Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937), which is replaced with the gloom of a possible death sentence hanging over their heads and a growing, gnawling hunger. This situation makes one scene, in particular, very effective when Frame finds himself in the role of "someone in a story from the Arabian Nights" and had "rubbed a magic lamp." Only for the mention of germs for reality to come crashing down all around him. An absurd, but good, intermezzo reminiscent of those Baghdad-on-the-Thames scenes in John Dickson Carr. 

The Clock Strikes Thirteen is, plot-wise, not quite as good as Brean's other detective novels, but the writing and its suspenseful take on the closed-circle of suspects/isolated island situation helped elevate the story to something very much worth your time. Even more so if you like these type of mysteries centering on a small, isolated cast of characters. Brean was great even when playing with a weak hand.

So, in closing, I want to wish everyone of you a happy new year and hope 2021 will treat us all better than 2020 has, but if 2021 decides to outdo its older brother, I'll be seeing some of you in the trenches. We will identify to each other with the phrase, "you have been to Afghanistan, I perceive."

Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950) by Herbert Brean

Herbert Brean was an American journalist, editor and writer, who wrote the widely acclaimed How to Stop Smoking (1951) and edited The Mystery Writer's Handbook (1956), but the bulk of his work comprises of seven detective novels and ten short stories – published in such magazines as Thrilling Detective and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. These short stories include the elusive impossible crime tales "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" (1951) and "Nine Hours Late On the Opening Run" (1954).

So, while Brean hardly was one of the most prolific mystery writers, he produced one detective novel that garnered somewhat of a reputation among locked room readers.

Wilders Walks Away (1948) was described by Curt Evans as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr" in his 2014 review and you could described the plot as Queen-style Wrightsville story with a Carr-like plot. A plot concerning a series of seemingly impossible disappearances, stretching across many generations, in a historical, beautifully preserved New England town. Wilders Walks Away is a very well written, ambitious and imaginative debut with all the hallmarks of a classic, but ended in disappointment with an underwhelming solution.

Barry Ergang's wrote in his 2003 review, which alerted me to Brean, he thought he had found in Wilders Walks Away a companion to Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) and Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) for "ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" – which didn't stop him from "enthusiastically" recommending it. My fellow Carr Cultist, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, had a similar response and even awarded the book four-stars in his 2017 review.

So, in spite of its weak, underwhelming conclusion, Wilders Walks Away remains Brean's most well-known mystery novel, which I find depressing. There are three mysteries from his hands that are superior to Wilders Walks Away.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) is an excellent detective-cum-thriller set on an isolated island during a potential outbreak of a deadly, weaponized bacteria. The Traces of Brillhart (1960) is an amusing romp about a sleazy musician who appears to be impervious to death, but his true masterpiece is Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950). A truly Carr-like detective story about a quasi-impossible disappearance, ghostly manifestations and a historical mystery as a sub-plot, but, more importantly, has a solution that delivered on its premise – which is why it deserves the reputation Wilders Walks Away still enjoys. So, I decided to reread the book to see if my high opinion on it has changed. Nope. :)

Hardly a Man is Now Alive is the third novel about Brean's series-detective and freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, which has been published in the UK as Murder Now and Then in 1952. Somehow, that year is listed on some places as the original year of publication, but it's 1950.

The story begins with Reynold Frame and Constance Wilder, who met in the now too often mentioned Wilders Walks Away, driving a battered convertible to the historical town of Concord, Massachusetts, where they plan to get married by Dr. John Annandale – a one-hundred and four years old man who "knew Ralph Waldo Emerson personally." When he was a boy of twelve, he heard from "the lips of a man who was in it," a 98-year-old Ben Tick, the story of the Concord fight in 1775. But their path to the altar is littered with obstacles.

Firstly, when they arrive at the home of Constance's Aunt Kate and Uncle Bowler, circumstances left them with only a single spare bedroom. So they booked him a room with Tom Satterthwaite down the street.

Frame learns that a previous roomers, J.J. Walmsley, who had his room disappeared six weeks ago under peculiar circumstances and left behind a baffling question: how could Walmsley "walk down an uncarpeted stair," carrying a number of traveling bags, and go past "a room in which other people are sitting" without being heard or seen? And then there's the haunting history of the bedroom itself with its ghostly manifestations.

During the Concord fight, a British soldier was mortally wounded and had died in the bedroom of the Satterthwaite house with "a betty lamp" besides him. The lamp mysteriously disappeared as the soldier took his last breath.

On his first night, Frame wakes up to find a small, sardine can-sized metal box on his bureau with a chain, hook and "a sort of sprout from which the wick protruded" – burning wick gave off a fishy smell. Next morning, the whale-oil lamp has disappeared from the room. More than once, the ghostly, disembodied sounds of "an army marching to a fife and drum" can be heard in the room. Brean's handling of these quasi-impossible situations shows he had learned from the mistakes he made in Wilders Walks Away.

The disappearance of Walmsley and the ghosts of the Revolutionary War are simply another layer of an incredibly stacked plot, instead of the focal point, which were properly clued and explained well before the final chapter rolled around. This really helped. I also think it helped that they were presented, not as impossible crimes, but simply as tricky problems and were put to good use. Even when they were already explained and dismissed. For example, in the final lines of chapter 13, Brean briefly rose to the height of Carr when he superbly used "the sound of the British detachment marching." A cliffhanger that would made any writer of magazine and newspaper serials see green with envy. However, this is still only about half of the plot.

Dr. John Annandale tells the first-hand account he heard as a boy of the battle of Concord, which is a "factual account" except for "the incident of the fleeing officer" and "the presence of Job Wilder," presenting the story with a historical mystery from nearly two-hundred years ago – why did the British officer broke and ran? The fleeing officer, Lt. Percy Nightingale, was the same officer who died and haunts the bedroom at the Satterthwaite house. This is another well-done, properly clued plot-thread with a delightfully simplistic solution that has been "staring everyone in the face for almost two centuries." Only reason why nobody noticed it until now is because "the individual bits of knowledge" were divided between several people. And it took an outsider, like Frame, to put them together. I liked it. And there's a second historical plot-thread, tied to one of the present-day mysteries, involving a long-lost secret from two of the luminaries of Concord's rich past. Still, there's more. So much more.

A badly decomposed body of a man is found in an old, disused well behind the Satterthwaite house. Dr. Annandale disappears before the wedding without a trace. A ghost is seen peeking from behind a tree. A spiritualist is very anxious to switch rooms. A séance is held and the missing ghost lamp turns up again.

On the surface, Hardly a Man is Now Alive appears to be an incomprehensibly complex, maze-like detective novel with numerous, interconnecting plot-threads stretching across two centuries, but Brean untangled them with ease and the result is very satisfying – showing how childishly simple everything looked beneath all those layers of obfuscation. Nearly every plot-thread, except for the second historical mystery, were adequately clued or hinted at and the chapters are littered with opening quotes and informative footnotes. Really, the only things missing were one or two floor plans and a challenge to the reader.

Admittedly, all of the individual plot-threads are pretty average by themselves, particular the problem of the murdered man in the well, but, when pulled together, they form a pleasantly busy and satisfying detective story. A detective story you can breeze through in one sitting and not feel like you wasted even a single second. This makes Hardly a Man is Now Alive the mystery novel Brean should be remembered for.

Fatal Flaws: A Short Overview of Ruined Detective Stories

"These little things a very significant."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, 1976)

Earlier this month, I reviewed Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls, which took an unconventional approach to telling an inverted detective story and the narrative had all the elements of a genre-classic, but was unable to sustain itself and ended with a whimper – an open-ending that managed to be simultaneously lazy and pretentious. So hardly a satisfying and rewarding read. However, the book made me reflect back on similar detective novels that were on their way of becoming (minor) classics, but slipped with the finish-line in sight.

It has been a while since I slapped together a filler-post and thought doing a quick rundown of a handful of them would make for a nice fluff piece. You may abandon this post, if you want, and come back for one of my regular review, which should be up within the next day or so. Or stick around. It's entirely up to you.

I'll be running through this short list in non-specific order and will begin with Agatha Christie. Or rather with an observation about one of her series-characters, Miss Jane Marple, who's one of Christie's two iconic detective figures, but there's remarkable difference between the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series – namely a severe lack of classic titles in the former. Miss Marple never handled a case of the same caliber as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A.B.C. Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). However, there's one Miss Marple novel that came close to matching the brilliance of her Belgian counterpart.

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) has an American starlet of the silver screen, Marina Gregg, descending upon the sleepy village of St. Mary Mead, but soon learns that an English village can be as dangerous as a dark, grimy back alley in the States. One of her house-guests dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail and the explanation for this specific murder was one of Christie's last triumphs.

The relationship between the victim and murderer, combined with the powerful and well-hidden motive, stuck together with simplistic brilliance, but the equally powerful effect the explanation could've achieved was ruined when Christie allowed the murderer to become completely unhinged – committing several additional murders along the way. It cheapened and lessened the impact of the reason behind the first murder, which robbed the series of a book that could've stood toe-to-toe with such Poirot titles as Peril at End House (1932), Sad Cypress (1940) and Five Little Pigs (1943).

Logically, the murderer should've been stone cold sane, completely unrepentant and never went pass that first murder, which had a solid, original and very human reason behind it. I've always wondered if a much younger Christie would've made the same mistake. A textbook example that sometimes less can be more.

You can also ruin a potential series-classic by punctuating the plot of the story with sheer stupidity. Case in point: The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen.

The American Gun Mystery had all the potential to be one of the best entries from Ellery Queen's plot-orientated nationality series, which has a great premise and a memorable backdrop: a sports arena, the Colosseum, where a horseback rider is gunned down during a rodeo show with twenty thousand potential suspects and eyewitnesses in attendance – topped off with the impossible disappearance of the murder weapon. I distinctly remember how much I had been enjoying this slice of old-fashioned Americana, presented as an original puzzle detective, but all of that enthusiasm dissipated upon learning how the gun was made to vanish. It was one of those rare instances I actually wanted to fling a book across the room in frustration and the hiding place of the gun seems to be a stumbling block for most readers.

And that's why The American Gun Mystery is never mentioned in the same breath as The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) and The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932).

Sometimes you can be on the right track, but simply bite off more than you could chew and a good example of this is Herbert Brean's still beloved Wilders Walk Away (1948).

Curt Evans described the plot of the book as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr," which is an apt description, because the story is basically one of Queen's Wrightsville novels as perceived by Carr. The protagonist is a freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who travels to Wilders Lane, Vermon, which is named after the founding family of the place. A family with a peculiar tradition dating back to eighteenth century: members of the Wilders clan have the tendency to escape the yawning grave by simply vanishing into thin air.

So what's not to like, you might ask? Well, the solutions to all of the impossibilities have some of the most routine, common-place explanations you could imagine. It stands in stark contrast with everything that came previous in the book. Barry Ergang hit the nail on the head, in his review, when observing that Wilders Walk Away appeared as "a companion to The Three Coffins (1935) and Rim of the Pit (1944) for ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" and that's how I felt when reading the book. A very likable and readable detective story, but the wasted potential is painful to behold. Everything about the book screamed classic... until you reached the ending.

Brean would go on to redeem himself with the superb Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1952), the equally good The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) and the very amusing The Traces of Brillhart (1961), but they (sadly) never garnered the same attention as Wilders Walks Away.

Finally, I have a prize-winning book, Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929), which could have become a personal favorite of mine, but shot itself in the foot in a way that's very similar to Rolls' Family Matters.

Footprints garnered some attention upon its publication for toying with conventions and plot-devices that were not very well established or popular at the time. One of them is that the book qualifies as a semi-historical mystery novel and this past story is entirely told through a series of old, crumbling letters. A story that took place on an Oregon farm in the early 1900s, which has, rather originally, a murder that could one of two types of impossible crimes: either the murderer escaped from a locked room to get to the victim or passed over a field of snow without leaving any footprints.

So you can imagine I was completely hooked by the halfway mark. I loved the depiction of family life on an American farm in the early twentieth century with an apparently innovative impossible crime plot at its core, but the vaguely written ending only hinted at the murderer's identity. And not a single letter was wasted on attempting to explain the impossible situation. A postmodernist would no doubt love such an ending in a structured genre like us, but I wanted, as Carr would say, strangle the author and lynch the publisher. They were really lucky they had already kicked the bucket when I finished the book.

Cleaver did redeem herself with her second locked room novel, Death Traps (1930), which was a competent, if rather conversational, piece of work with an actual ending!

So far my lamentations on several detective novels I really wanted to like, but proved to be a let down, in one way or another, when the final chapter rolled around. I hope this will be, for now, the last blog-post with my whining about bad or disappointing detective stories. My next review looks to be that of a good mystery novel and have something interesting (and untranslated) for the one after that. And both of them fall in the locked room category. Please try to act a little bit surprise about that!

Trouble at Sea

"There should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation."

- Sherlock Holmes (Valley of Fear, 1915)

Herbert Brean was an American journalist and a "Perennial Sherlockian," who switched from reading detective stories to writing them and Wilders Walks Away (1948) is his most cited and popular work to date. Personally, I prefer Hardly a Man Is Now Alive (1952), mandatory reading for John Dickson Carr enthusiasts, and The Traces of Brillhart (1961), in which a magazine writer, William Deacon, investigates the alleged immortality of a New York music composer.  

The Traces of Merrilee (1966) marked the second, and final, appearance of Bill Deacon and meddling in police business paid off at the start of this book – as a banking friend hires him to take passage aboard the Montmartre to protect a multimillion dollar investment. Loans were given to fund a big-budget movie, based on Helen of Troy, but a successful return on their investment depends on Merrilee Moore and she disappeared for the time being. There was a solemn promise from the actress to be aboard, but gave an impression of being scared and fearful of the crossing.

Interestingly, there are snippets of impossible crime material present here! Merrilee believes she inherited the gift of Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP) from her mother, who developed the power touring dingy theatres and joints with a mind reading act. The solution to the trick was revealed in a throwaway line, inside a brief back-story, but it's actually pretty clever and could generate year's worth of discussions on its fairness – if properly and prominently used in a detective story. Merrilee's mother predicted she would die at sea (how lovely) and has a recurring nightmare herself about man with a green face hanging by the throat in a closet.

This makes The Traces of Merrilee a borderline impossible crime novel, but the elements are too weak and superficial to, officially, qualify the book as such. This is, however, not to the detriment of Brean as a mystery writer, because they weren't the main focus of the plot and Brean learned from Wilders Walks Away a full-blown locked room mystery wasn't one of his strong suits – hence why I prefer the titles mentioned in the opening of the post.

The Best of the Brean Novels

Back to the story. The recurring nightmare about the green-faced man, hanging from a hook inside a closet, becomes prophetic, however, Deacon simply disposes of the body by dumping it one of the lifeboats. A popular spot for a body dump on an Atlantic cruise, because the murderer picked another lifeboat to discard of the second victim. Unfortunately, the dying words of the victim never translated into Ellerian dying message. The detections of Deacon further consists of tailing a notorious industrial spy, which becomes complicated when there are two men sharing the same name on the ship, slipping in and out of cabins (or being locked up in them) and avoiding being maimed – before confronting the killer during a staged visitation from beyond the grave.

Not very original as far dénouements go, but that's emblematic for The Traces of Merrilee. Brean penned a breezy, fast-paced and fairly clued detective that was fun to read, but, except for the mind-reading act, nothing stood out as particular clever or inspired. Merrilee and Deacon were pretty much the only characters in the book and everyone else simply played their part. I'd place the book closer to (TV lightweights) Murder, She Wrote and Midsomer Murders (fun but unchallenging) than to the Golden Age ancestors Brean penned earlier in his career.

Recommend to fans of Brean and shipboard-set mysteries, but, if you're new to this author, I recommend you begin with Hardly a Man Is Now Alive, The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) and The Traces of Brillhart.