The Curmudgeon Got Cut

"The situation is serious, far more serious than you seem able to realise."

- Dr. Constantine (Molly Thynne's Death in the Dentist's Chair, 1932)

Last year, all of the obscure, long-forgotten detective novels by Molly Thynne were reissued by the Dean Street Press, comprising of six titles, which can be divided into two groups of three books each – starting with a trio of standalones and ending with three mysteries about her only series-character, Dr. Constantine.

I reviewed all three of her series titles, shortly upon their re-release, but decided to temporarily store the remaining ones on the big pile. It was a decision I now slightly regret, because the subject of today's blog-post is easily the best detective story I have read by Thynne so far.

The Case of Sir Adam Braid (1930) is the last of the three standalone novels and opens in the London flat of a distinguished, but cantankerous, artist with a penchant for malice and hoarding money, which may be at the root of his untimely demise. On the evening of his death, Sir Adam was pouring all of his venom into a response to his granddaughter, Jill, in order to put an end "to the hopes of the one relative he possessed who did not actively dislike him."

Jill had made the foolish mistake of asking her ill-tempered grandfather for an advance on her inheritance, as she really needed the money, but a murderer's hand prevented the completion of the letter and this secured her position as his heir – as well as giving her a cast-iron motive when Sir Adam's body is found with "a cut at the back of the neck."

There are, however, more potential suspects for the police to consider who live in, or were around, the flat where the murder took place.

Sir Adam's long-suffering manservant, Johnson, was drinking a pint of a beer and discussing horse-racing at "The Nag's Head," which is an alibi, but subsequent investigations exposed he still had a thing or two to hide. Someone who also has something to hide are the occupants of the top-floor flat, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who are not entirely unfamiliar with the police. A brother and sister, Everard and Bella Webb, occupy the ground-floor flat and they're "born gossips," but do these two splendid characters know more than they shared with the police?

Luckily, Chief Inspector Abel Finn finds an ally in an old friend and neighbor of the victim, Dr. Gilroy, who's normally too busy peering at bacteria through a microscope, but catching a glimpse of Jill is all the motivation he needs to get himself involved – which provides the plot with a pinch of romance. And they have some serious clearing up to do before they can get to the heart of the case.

Several of the previously mentioned characters have something of an unlawful nature to hide, which are not always (directly) tied to the slaying of Sir Adam, but require clarification for the plot to advance. The plot-strands that are directly tied to the murder consists of a missing hat-box (stuffed with banknotes), stolen jewelry and the quarreling voices heard coming from Sir Adam's flat around the time of his death. All of these problems, unanswered questions and developments are keeping Finn and Gilroy on their toes, which makes for a pleasantly busy and complex detective story. A detective story that could've easily become a tangled mess of plot-threads, but they were all firmly within Thynne's grasp and were only let go off once she was done with a specific thread.

However, Thynne's greatest accomplishment here is how she actually managed to prevent the solution from becoming an anti-climatic disappointment.

The identity of the murderer and the motive is not what you would expect to arise from the premise of the plot, or any kind of classical whodunit for that matter, but all of the evidence was there. And it was used to play on the least-likely-suspect motif. I liked it.

So, to sum up this review, The Case of Sir Adam Braid is a well written, competently plotted Golden Age mystery with a purity of at least 22k. I genuinely hope the other two standalone titles, The Draycott Murder Mystery (1928) and The Murder on the Enriqueta (1929), will be able to match, or even surpass, this one.

P.S. I was constraint for time when I began to write, which is why this hastily slapped together review is shorter than usual, but I'll back to my rambling old self for the next one. 

Snow Bound

"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The wrong shall fail,

The right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Christmas Bells, 1863) 

Molly Thynne was one of the long-lost, forgotten mystery novelist from that luminous era, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but her neglected body of work has recently been exhumed by the Dean Street Press and this consisted of half a dozen mystery novels – three of them standalones and the remaining ones are part of a short series. All three of those concern the exploits of an elderly Greek chess maven named Dr. Constantine.

I previously reviewed the excellent Death in the Dentist's Chair (1932) and He Dies and Makes No Sign (1933), but the series commenced with The Crime at the Noah's Ark (1931), which is subtitled "A Christmas Mystery." They were released in the twilight of this year’s summer and late August was a bit too early for a Yuletide mystery, but the holiday season is now steadily approaching. Well, that and I already reviewed three Christmas mysteries last month: J. Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White (1937), Winifred Peck's Arrest the Bishop? (1949) and a short story, entitled "The Christmas Bear," by Herbert Resnicow.

So I wanted to resume my reading of these wintry tales in an attempt to eliminate as many of these seasonal-themed mystery novels and anthologies from my TBR-pile as possible, because we're only six weeks removed from Christmas Day. Let's get this snowball rolling!

The Crime at the Noah's Ark is Thynne's fourth mystery novels, but the first one to feature her series-characters, Dr. Constantine and Detective-Inspector Arkwright, who crossed paths in a spacious, rambling and old-fashioned establishment – a remote inn called the "Noah's Ark." However, the inspector appeared fairly late in the story. So this is the only reference to Arkwright in this review.

A far more important character is Angus Stuart, a rising author with a bestseller to his name, who decided to enjoy the spoils of his success by spending the Christmas holiday at an expensive, seaside resort. Unfortunately, the never-ending snowfall threw a spanner in the works. The snow was so persistent that even "the children grew tired of snowballing" and "the most confirmed among the sentimentalists began to grumble," but, day after day, "the drifts rose higher and higher in the country lanes" – a week before Christmas the roads showed signs of becoming so blocked that it threatened the plans of holiday-makers. And this was certainly the case for Stuart.

Stuart is one of those holiday-makers who failed to reach his intended destination and ended up in a remote, snowed-in inn, the "Noah's Ark," which is well known to hunters and, if it weren't for the heavy snowfall, would've been filled to capacity. So there's enough room to provide a warm shelter for stranded travelers and there’s an interesting collection of characters housed underneath its roof.

First of all, there are two sisters, Amy and Connie Adderley, who were stranded in the snow, but Stuart saved them from their difficult position and drove the sisters (alongside their chauffeur) to the inn. Other guests already there include the Romsey clan, which are represented by Lord Romsey and his three adult children: Victoria, Angela and Geoffrey. Another guest from the upper crust of society is the widow of a rich American banker, Mrs. Van Dolen, who is known for the number of husbands she tried and as the owner of an emerald girdle. She is accompanied by her secretary, Miss Hamilton. Mrs. Orkney Cloude is an attractive and "an exceptionally charming lady," but turns white as a sheet when she sees Lord Romsey. Major Carew is "a proper bounder" and a drunk who will be at the root of some of the problems at the inn. Trevor is an accountant's clerk and very, very shy. Felix Melnotte is a gigolo (i.e. dancer) who was suppose to ply his trade at the resort, Redsands, where Stuart was planning to spend the holiday. Finally, there's Soames, a commercial traveler, and Dr. Constantine, who are both enthusiastic chess players. So they spend some of the dark, cold evenings hunched over a chessboard and locked into a battle of wits.  

The Dr. Constantine from the movie adaption of The Murder on the Orient Express

Well, the severe winter weather has condemned these people to spend Christmas together and Dr. Constantine observes that they're "as completely isolated from the outside world as the inhabitants of the original Noah's Ark," but I found the snowy encirclement of the inn to be reminiscent of a large snow-globe – which is regularly shaken and rocked by strange, nighttime disturbances. A masked figure has been seen in one of the long, dark passages on the first night and this caused some commotion, but this incident proved only to be a prelude.  

Major Carew's drunkenness culminates in an altercation with Miss Hamilton and Trevor, who jumps to her defense, is given "a crimson nose." So they decide, for everyone safety, to lock Major Carew up until he's sober again, but that same night a rope is seen dangling from his bedroom window and everyone assumes he escaped to the balcony below – resulting in a midnight search of the premise. During this search, they discover that someone ransacked Mrs. Van Dolen's room, while she was sleeping, and took her emeralds. They also find the body of the major tucked underneath a blanket in his bed: his fractured head resting a blood-soaked pillow. The hostelry was abound with bloody murder and thievery!

Thynne's best?

However, as contradictory as it may sound (especially coming from an unapologetic classicist), but the violent death of Major Carew is a cosmetic imperfection of the plot. He should've had a bad heart, due to his bad lifestyle, which then gave out during the confrontation with the murderer. If you've read the book, you know it would fit the situation (and the simple plot) a whole lot better, because now the culprit seems stupid for leaving a battered corpse behind. Particularly when you learn the fate of this person in the last chapter.

Otherwise, the plot is pleasantly busy and has a plethora of plot-threads, which the largely sedentary Dr. Constantine calmly untangles and these include hidden relationships, background stories and several secret identities – which go hand-in-hand with the nightly prowls. And while I would not rank The Crime at the Noah's Ark alongside the excellent Death in the Dentist's Chair, it's miles ahead of He Dies and Makes No Sign. A worthy addition to the stack of Christmas-themed mystery novels so many of us loves to read (and re-read) around this time of year.

So if you're sick and tired of endlessly re-reading Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas (1938) and Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972), you might want to consider adding The Crime at the Noah's Ark to your yearly reading list for November/December. Or check this list that I need to update one of these years.

Well, the next blog-post will probably be of a collection of short stories that may or may not be related to the theme of this review. So stay tuned!  

Swan Song

"This... is more wildly improbable than any roman policier I have ever read."

- Dr. Constantine (Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express, 1934)

Last month, I took a look at Molly Thynne's Death in the Dentist's Chair (1932), the second of a trio of mystery novels, starring Dr. Constantine and Detective-Inspector Arkwright, which were recently brought back into circulation by the Dean Street Press – prefaced with an introduction by Curt Evans. The book warranted further investigation into this short-lived series, but was conflicted as to which of the two remaining titles to pick up next.

I wanted to go with The Crime at the Noah's Ark: A Christmas Mystery (1931), but, after carefully scrutinizing the calendar, I came to the conclusion that the dusk of summer was still too early for a yuletide yarn. So I settled for the other one.

He Dies and Makes No Sign (1933) marked the final appearances of Dr. Constantine, Arkwright and Manners, which makes this book their last hurrah. However, the book also served as a punctuation mark that ended the literary career of its author. After its publication, Thynne retired from writing fiction and began her rapid decent into obscurity, which is where she languished for eight decades – until she was finally found by DSP and Evans. Let's get this review off the ground.

The book begins with Dr. Constantine coming home from a trip to continental Europe, where he suffered an annoying defeat in a chess tournament, which made his disposition as moody as the rainy weather of England. Opportunely, there seems to be a potential case, to relieve his mind, impatiently waiting for him at home: his valet, Manners, tells him the Duchess of Steynes tried to reach him. She was greatly annoyed by his absence and wished to be immediately informed when he returned from the continent. The problem she has for him has the appearance of a domestic triviality, one of the old-fashioned kind, but, before long, this problem turned into a murder case.

Marlowe is the only son of the Duchess and "the despair of half the mothers in the country," not excluding his own, but he finally met a girl, "an actress of sorts," with whom he wants to settle down – which did not fail to horrify and worry his mother. So Dr. Constantine finds himself poking around to see how matters stand, but soon the first of many complications arise. The grandfather of the girl, an obscure musician, goes missing and someone, posing as a piano-tuner, ransacked their rooms. Money and trinkets were left untouched, but a number of pages were torn from Julius Anthony's diary.

Soon thereafter, the body of the musician is discovered, under very peculiar circumstances, at the Parthenon Picture Theatre.

The body of Julius Anthony was crammed inside a small cavity, "a little over a foot in height,' that can be found underneath the stage for the orchestra, which is used "as a kind of storeroom," but circumstances makes it impossible he crawled in there himself – as the body was stuffed behind a broken chair and several music stands. There is also the matter of a strange, but superficial, wound at the back of his neck and an unhealthy amount of morphine in his system. So they're very definitely dealing with a murder case.

Just as in Death in the Dentist's Chair, the investigative characters suggest Thynne was influenced by Dorothy L. Sayers, because the dynamic between Dr. Constantine, Arkwright and Manners is very reminiscent of that between Lord Peter Wimsey, Chief Inspector Parker and Bunter. For example. Dr. Constantine uses Manners for the occasional stretch of legwork, which, if I recall correctly, is similar to the way Lord Peter uses his manservant, Bunter. However, it has been eons since I read a mystery novel by Sayers and Bunter may not have had as big a role as I remember, but do I recall him playing a part in some of Lord Peter's investigation.

In any case, one of Thynne's own trademarks appears to be plots with a strong international flavor. The plot-threads from the previous book were all over the map and this one is not all that different in that regard: one of the main characters, Mr. Civita, is an Italian restaurant owner and one of his former associates is a Belgian sommelier, Mr. Meger, who's murdered halfway through the story. Dr. Constantine solved the how-part of this second murder with the assistance of a pair of Japanese martial artists. All of this gives her books somewhat of a cosmopolitan feel.

However, where He Dies and Makes No Sign differs from Death in the Dentist's Chair is a waver thin plot, lacking any real complexity or cleverness, which made the book somewhat of a chore to review. Oh, it was very well written and nicely characterized, but the plot is overly simplistic and never really delivered on its premise. Admittedly, as a whydunit, the murder of the violinist was well conceived, but I wish the who-and how received equal attention. The second, borderline impossible murder, involving a deadly fall from a window, was cleverly done, but Dr. Constantine solved that one off-page. After which he gives a demonstration of how it was done to Arkwright and the reader. So it really added not all that much to the overall plot.

Well, as you probably gathered from this piss poor written review, I had soured on the book by the time the final chapter finally rolled around. I simply expected so much more after the excellent Death in the Dentist's Chair, which was both original and clever with an effective ending. None of those qualities made an appearance in this one.

So, yeah, I'll end this excruciating blog-post by saying that this one simply did not do it for me, but take notice, the next one will take a look at a Carrian-type locked room mystery (of course!) from the early 1930s. Hopefully, that one will live up to its reputation. 

The Standalones: 

The Draycott Murder Mystery (1928)

The Murder on the Enriqueta (1929)

The Case of Sir Adam Braid (1930)

The Dr. Constantine series: 

The Crime at the Noah's Ark (1931)

Death in the Dentist's Chair (1932)

He Dies and Makes No Sign (1933)

In the Teeth of the Evidence

"It is really a most extraordinary case."

- Dr. Constantine (Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express, 1934)

Molly Thynne was born into nobility, a member of the English aristocracy, who was related, on her mother's side, to the painter James McNeil Whistler and as a young, impressionable girl met such literary luminaries as Rudyard Kipling and Henry James – which may have influenced her own literary endeavors later on in life. But, as Sherlock Holmes once famously observed, "art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."

In the case of Thynne, this meant that she turned her back on the lofty heights of literature and descended into the dark bowels of popular-fiction. Over a period of six years, she penned half a dozen detective stories, of which three were standalone novels, but the remainder were part of a short-lived series about Dr. Constantine – a Greek "chess playing amateur detective" who was placed by the critics among "the Frenches and Fortunes" of the genre.

Lamentably, the relentless march of time was not very kind to Thynne and she eventually fell prey to obscurity. Even the fairly comprehensive Golden Age of Detection Wiki, a veritable who's who of who the hell are these folks, does not have single page on Thynne or any of her books. Now that's genuine obscurity! However, Thynne and Dr. Constantine are about to be rescued from the purgatory of biblioblivion.

Dean Street Press is going to reissue all six of her detective stories and our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, furnished these new editions with an introduction, which touched upon her family background and brief career as a mystery novelist. It adds some interesting background details to these long-forgotten mysteries and the person who wrote them.

So let's take a look at one of them: Death in the Dentist's Chair (1932) is the second book about Dr. Constantine and Detective-Inspector Arkwright, who made their first appearance in The Crime at Noah Ark: A Christmas Mystery (1931) and bowed out in He Dies and Makes No Sign (1933), which also happened to be Thynne's swan song – after which she vanished from the scene. She retired from authorship without a discernable reason. The critics were very positive about her books and she was "independently wealthy," which would have allowed her to continue to dabble in the genre, but, perhaps, she got bored in the end. Anyway...

The opening of Death in the Dentist's Chair takes place in the dental practice of Mr. Humphrey Davenport, society dentist, where several patients are congregating in the waiting room: Mr. Cattistock is taking a breather after having several of his front teeth removed, which he experiences as a terrible blow to his self-confidence. Mrs. Vallon, widow of a theatrical manager, had a bad toothache, but she found that the pain had subsided after a pleasant conversation with Dr. Constantine. Sir Richard Pomfrey was introduced as "a prey of unease" who, sincerely and devoutly, wished the morning was over. Finally, there's Lottie Miller, wife of a London jeweler, but she's described as an unpleasant, garish-looking woman with a bad-tempered mouth.

The most famous dentist mystery

Mrs. Miller is the first one to be ushered into Davenport's consulting room, but her appointment seems to drag on and on. Dr. Constantine decided to poke around and finds what, initially, appears to be an embarrassment: Davenport left Mrs. Miller behind in the consulting room to adjust her dentures, but, upon his return, he found the door to be locked from the inside. Mrs. Miller seems to be completely unresponsive.

So the dentist's mechanic is summoned from his workshop to remove the screws from the lock on the door and what they find is horrifying: Mrs. Miller is seated in the dentist's chair and underneath her chin was now "a larger and more gaping travesty of the toothless mouth above," which is an ugly, dark gash – in which "the blood that had now ceased to spurt still frothed and bubbled." On the floor, to the left of the chair, was a bloodstained knife. Someone had slipped in, cut her throat and escaped through the open window, which had traces of blood and soot on it. The key to the door was found outside.

I guess this premise proved I suffer from, what Edmund Crispin described as, "locked rooms on the brain," because I was convinced this was an impossible crime in disguise and Davenport was the murderer. After all, why slash someone's throat when she was having a dentist’s appointment? I reasoned this was the only opportunity Davenport had to get to the victim, but this, potentially, also made him a prime-suspect. So he needed to distract the attention away from himself by making it appear someone else entered the room and left through the window. This could simply be accomplished by cutting her throat, opening the window, creating the blood-and soot traces on the window sill and locking the door behind him. He could simply fling the key out of the window of another, nearby room in the building.

However, the whole affair revealed itself to be far more complicated and original than my own locked room fancies!

Dr. Constantine and D.I. Arkwright are immediately confronted with a whole slew of complications: Mr. Cattistock has vanished and Sir Richard briefly left the waiting room at the time of the murder, which looks very suspicious when the police suspects him of having a past with the victim. Mrs. Vallon seems above reproach: no apparent motive and her alibi is Dr. Constantine, but, of course, that means nothing in a detective story. Then there's the widowed husband, Mr. Charles Miller, who has a dark, murky past and did not get on well with his wife, but now he appears to be "badly frightened."

Murder in the Torture-Chair

The case truly becomes complicated when the body of a second woman is discovered on a doorstep of Eccleston Square, throat cut with a similar looking knife as was used on Mrs. Miller, which is entangled in a crisscross of international connections. The second victim is found to have Russian antecedents. Both of the murder weapons are of Chinese origin and Cattistock worked in that country as a missionary. Mr. Miller's shady past is rooted in South Africa and they extend all the way to Switzerland and eventually England.

Arkwright finds the whole case "too damned geographical" for his taste, but he forms an engaging duo with Dr. Constantine and they do an excellent job at following all of these globally scattered plot-threads back to the killer. One of Dr. Constantine's approach to uncover information clearly showed the influence Dorothy L. Sayers had on Thynne's detective fiction: Dr. Constantine used his valet, Manners, to do a spot of legwork – which I found to be very reminiscent of Mervyn Bunter's role in the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

However, as was pointed out in this review, the reader was sometimes kept in the dark about the finer details of Dr. Constantine's investigation, but that turned out to be a minor complaint when the explanation was unveiled – an explanation that was build around parts of what was then still fairly recent history. And those parts were used better than I expected. The plot could’ve easily dissolved into a third-rate thriller in the final leg of the book, but Thynne kept the story firmly grounded in the detective story territory and this made the ending all the more effective. So I definitely want to read the other two Dr. Constantine mysteries.

On a final, hastily scribbled note, I’ve to point something out: one of the first things that came to mind when I read about this series was Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934), because one of the characters is a Greek physician, named Dr. Constantine, which could've been just a coincidence. 

However, I've a good reason to believe this may not be the case. Death in the Dentist’s Chair and The Murder on the Orient Express also have an interesting plot-thread in common: they both share an almost identical language-clue, but it gets better. These clues are not only based on the Russian language, but they also concern the except same letter in both novels! It's not exactly a stock-in-trade clue you'll find any other mystery novel from this era. So maybe the inclusion of a Dr. Constantine was a nod and wink at the book that helped Christie plot The Murder on the Orient Express. It’s possible, right?