Read All About It: "The Late Edition" (1928) by Kelman Frost

Kelman Dalgety Frost was a prolific British writer of fiction who wrote his first published story in the trenches during the First World War, aged sixteen, which started a fifty-year career as a professional storyteller – estimated to have "written almost 70 million words of fiction." Frost contributed prolifically to the popular boys' papers and pulp magazines of the day in addition to penning numerous westerns for children like Terror at Nameless Creek (1965) and Hoofbeats on the Prairie (1966).

Despite his prolific output and reaching five million readers, when D.C. Thomson's boys' story papers were at their peak, Frost is barely remembered today. And most of his output is, sort of, lost. A lot of Frost's work was published anonymously and largely disappeared, uncredited, in the murky maze of early twentieth century magazine publications. And his novels didn't fare much better. Frost reportedly wrote over forty children's adventure books, but less than twenty have been identified. Nor has his brief dalliance with the detective genre weathered the passage of time gracefully.

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947), a charming, uncomplicated mystery, is practically forgotten with copies having become scarce and ridiculous expensive, but Frost's second mystery novel, Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage, apparently never made it to print – only announced by the Oberon Press as "in preparation." Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists one of Frost's many obscure short stories, however, the locked room-angle of Death Registers at the Eagle left me unimpressed. So the short story dropped on the locked room priority list, until recently. More on that in a moment.

Kelman Frost's "The Late Edition" was originally published in the March, 1928, issue of Clues, reprinted in Hutchinson's Adventure & Mystery Story Magazine and finally collected in The Best English Detective Stories of 1928 (1929).

"The Late Editions" begins with Sergeant Gosling, of the Swinwood Police, out on patrol when sees young Malcolm Lovibond coming down from London in his two-seater to see his father ("...the old skinflint"). Several minutes later, Lovibond is back to ask the Gosling to come back to the home, because something appears to have happened to his father. Lovibond arrived at the house to find no trace of his father, until he noticed a very strong smell of gas coming from under the kitched door. However, the door was locked from the inside.

So they go to the house together to break down the door and find the body of James Lovibond lying on the kitchen floor with his head stuck inside the oven. The kitchen door was locked from the inside and a thick mat was pushed up against the wide crack at the bottom of the door, while the backdoor is locked and bolted and the windows securely shuttered. Every other crack or opening of the backdoor and shuttered windows had been "crammed tightly with rolled newspapers in order to make it air-tight" and "a big ball of rolled up newspapers had been thrust into the chimney opening." A clear case of suicide until Dr. Francis Farrar, "a middle-aged practitioner who was comparatively new to Swinwood," arrived on the scene.

Dr. Farrar must have been aware he's playing the role of detective in a short story, because he makes a mad dash towards the ending the moment he arrived. From his preliminary investigation to apprehending the murderer, which is the most amusing part of the story. And finally explain the whole thing to the baffled Sergeant Gosling ("but it was a plain case of suicide, doctor"). So not much detection or fair play in this crime story with a locked room hook. However, "The Late Edition" has an admirably layered plot for a 1920s short story. The murderer and motive are obvious, of course, but the how also concerned a cleverly arranged alibi reinforced by locked room setup suggesting suicide. And pointing out the fatal mistakes the murderer made along the way (ROT13: "...gung cncre unf n ybg gb nafjre sbe... gung cncre'f tbvat gb unat lbh").

So about that locked room setup and trick. This short story came back to my attention following a comment on my review of Ooyama Seiichiro's short story "Kanojo ga Patience wo korosu hazu ga nai" ("She Wouldn't Kill Patience," 2002). Stephen M. Pierce commented that he was working on a "Top 5 Taped Room Mysteries." Being the incorrigible impossible crime fanboy that I'm, the list doubled in size in mere minutes and promised to keep an eye out for other “tape tomb” short stories and novels. I remembered "The Late Edition" centered on a gassing inside a locked room and decided to track it down to see if it qualifies, because it would have been the earliest known "taped tomb" on record, but doubt Stephen will accept a room only partially "sealed" with newspapers – nor would he rank it very highly. The locked room-trick is minor and routine. Something that gets rejected as soon as it's suggested in today's locked room mysteries. But, on a whole, not a bad crime story for 1928. Still perfectly readable today.

The Spy Who Played Clue

"I mean, it does say 'hotel' outside. Maybe I should be more precise, 'Hotel for people who have more than 50% chance of making it through the night'!"

- Basil (Fawlty Towers)

Christopher Kelman Dalgety Frost (1899-1972) has proved to be somewhat of an elusive figure in the realm of mystery fiction, but on the printed pages of children and juvenile stories, he left us enough clues to reconstruct a picture of the man. On the report of Jane Badger Books, Frost began writing at the age of sixteen in the trenches of France, however, Book Palace Books notes that his earliest known work were the adventures of 'Don Conquest' for Mickey Mouse Weekly – which ran from 1954 to 1957.

His entire bibliography seems to be a bit of a mess, consisting of a lot of unconfirmed and unaccredited stories, which is mainly due to being a freelance writer who anonymously churned out stories to fill the pages of D.C. Thomson's boys paper, but Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage (19??) was supposed to be published under the name of Kelman Frost and I have only found a mention of the book in Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947) as "in preparation." Was the Oberon Press dissatisfied with the end result/sales of the previous novel and cancelled its publication? Or was it simply retitled before publication?

I'm intrigued whether it suffered the same, horrifying fate as Hake Talbot's third Rogan Kincaid novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness, or collecting dust somewhere as an unpublished manuscript, like Christianna Brand's The Chinese Puzzle and Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, or just insists on being one of those ridiculously rare mystery novels. Any info would be appreciated! 'Cause curiosity can be an agonizing thing. 

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms is a Kelman Frost novel that did wound up in my covetous hands and it's set in a dreary, depleted hotel on the Scottish coast during the blackouts of WWII and the grounds of the Eagle Arms teems with stationed military men, fascists and secret agents from both sides of the enemy line – all that without degenerating into a run-of-the-mill spy thriller. Frost kept it a plain and simple mystery, which commences when Malcolm Woodley, a prolific mystery novelist without literary pretensions, and his wife Isobel notice that the bathroom opposite of their room has been occupied for quite some time. A second key from the upstairs bathroom, which is almost identical to the one they're unable to locate, is fetched and upon opening the door, they find that the tub is filled with what remains of Mr. John Hood.

Enter Inspector Hynd, who's one of those bland policemen whose character is only defined by his job and a rather unimpressive figure to tangle with spies, but he has to think in that direction when Mr. Hood turns out to have been a Security agent. What's more, one of the maids, Poppy, who saw light signals when rendezvousing with her lover, is found decapitated near the train tracks. But Hynd has more threads to pick from: Dr. Inglis is relieved from a bottle of strychnine and subsequently an attempt is made on his life with that same poison. Another maid disappeared without a trace. And Colonel Wylie-Smith appears to have a much more personal motive for wanting to see Hood dead.

Admittedly, Death Registers at the Eagle Arms is not an overlooked treasure from the shelves of biblioblivion, but it's a charming enough and uncomplicated mystery whose strength lies in an idea rather than the execution of it. I anticipated the solution in spite of the sparse clueing (some of them even being withheld from the reader), which can be done by every observant and seasoned mystery reader, and enjoyed the idea. The ending also upheld a fine old tradition without being trite. Great image to end a novel on, and to be honest, the only proper way to have done it. But it also showed that Frost was more a writer of adventure stories as opposed to mysteries (i.e. interviewing suspects can indeed be a dull routine) and I think an amateur detective would have been a better option for him as a writer – like A.A. Milne did in The Red House Mystery (1922). Granted, it's eventually one of the guests that turns up with the corrects solution, but the investigation was done by Hynd and he could've easily been reduced to a background character doing the tedious police work while one or two amateurs are enthusiastically running around the place. I really think it would've made for a better story.

Two things: 1) Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) dated this book at c. 1948, but the online sources I found all give 1947 as the original publication date – so I went with that. 2) Death Registers at the Eagle Arms is not really a locked room mystery. The original key of the door is found inside the bathroom and they immediately deduce that the murderer threw the key under crack of the door back into the room that could be opened with different key anyway. An impossible crime in name only.  

Kelman D. Frost's mystery fiction:

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947)
Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage (19??)
The Riddle of the Caid Jewels (1969; a juvenile mystery?) 

Short fiction (published in Clues during the late 1920s):

"By Special Delivery"
"A Blot on the Landscape"
"The Clue of the Busy Bees"
"The Death Dog" a.k.a. "The Dog of Doom"
"The Late Edition" (mentioned in Adey)
"The Man with a Load of Chaff"
"Sonata in Flat B"