The Scarlet Circle (1943) by Jonathan Stagge

Hugh Wheeler, Richard Webb, Martha Kelly and Mary Aswell formed a team of writers who collaborated on a number of detectives series, standalone mysteries, crime novels and short fiction – published under the names "Patrick Quentin," "Q. Patrick" or "Jonathan Stagge." Over the years, I've sampled about ten of their novels covering everything from their Peter Duluth and Lt. Timothy Trant series-characters to their phenomenal crossover in Black Widow (1952) as well as a few standalone novels. 

I also read a Jonathan Stagge novel, Death's Old Sweet Song (1946), which once upon a time used to be easiest Dr. Hugh Westlake mystery to get your hands on. The book has a good reputation and expected much at the time from a story in which a serial killer goes ham on a small town with murders patterned after a nursery rhyme. So comparisons to S.S. van Dine's The Bishop Murder Case (1928), Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and later Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949) and Double, Double (1950) were inevitable. Sounds enticing, I know, but I'm still of the opinion Death's Old Sweet Song is the weakest of all nursery rhyme-themed mysteries. The use of the nursery rhyme motif is likely the sole reason why the book is remembered at all, because as a detective story it was weakly-plotted, obvious and disappointing.

So with secondhand copies and reprints in short supply back then, I quietly exited the Dr. Westlake series, but there's one title that kept cropping up. A novel that has been personally recommended to me over years several times. Now that the Mysterious Press has reissued the entire series, I decided to finally give Stagge and Dr. Westlake a second shot. 

The Scarlet Circle (1943), published in the UK as Light from a Lantern, is the sixth entry in the series and I can see why people thought I might like it. As Curt Evans wrote in his 2012 review, Stagge's The Scarlet Circle "should be guaranteed to please devotees of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Hake Talbot," but not for the reasons some of you might assume, because this is not a locked room mystery or impossible crime novel – a bizarre, outre whodunit with a small, tightly-knit circle of suspects. The story has Dr. Westlake taking his 10-year-old daughter, Dawn, on a September holiday to Cape Talisman. One of those "spots against which the elements seem to have a perpetual grudge" as, inch by inch, "the waves were encroaching upon the crumbling dunes" and "the older section of the town, which was once a flourishing community, was now almost deserted." The old church has already been abandoned, a hurricane had "carried away all the tombstones on the seaward side of the churchyard" and the Talisman Inn "now had the beach for a front garden." Call me a Dutchman, if you want, but that had me hooked from page 1 and the story hadn't even touched upon the bizarre string of murders yet! On their way back to the Talisman Inn, Dawn notices a pink light moving around the old churchyard. Dr. Westlake goes out to investigate and comes across "a strange, shapeless figure" who scurried away at the sound of his voice and left behind a paper Chinese lantern next to an opened grave.

What a fantastic opening to a good, old-fashioned detective story, but someone creeping around the churchyard with a Chinese lantern to dig up graves is only the beginning. That becomes all too apparent once Dr. Westlake and Dawn return to the inn.

There were only a about a dozen people at the inn. Firstly, there's Mr. Mitchell, the owner-manager, whose "impeccable New York clothes and his impeccable New York manners" can't hide his desolate resort is slowly disintegrating around him. Mr. Mitchell takes pride in still employing a lifeguard, Buck Valentine, who's "a red-blooded young he-man with a very roving eye," but the only women he could turn an eye to were the two waitress-housemaids or Nellie Wood. The nursemaid of 5-year-old Bobby Fanshawe who's staying at the inn with his parents, Virgil and Marion Fanshawe. Virgil Fanshawe is a successful commercial-artist and with Dawn taking Bobby under her wing, Nellie Wood has her hands free to pose for her employer and that's usually more than enough to get rumors started in small places. Marion Fanshawe is a complete mystery to Dr. Westlake as she appears to exist in "a strange vacuum of personal silence." Benjamin G. Usher is an undertaker who's always carrying or reading the Bible, but "the sight of him leafing through Deuteronomy conjured up obscene images of sacrilege and Black Masses." Lastly, there's the tall, willowy painter, Miss Haywood, who kept herself to her ladylike self.

Dr. Westlake is not blind that "there's enough tension accumulating" around him to "blow up the inn." And only a few hours later, Dr. Gilchrist calls Dr. Westlake out of his bed to inform a body had been discovered down by the rock known locally as the Monk's Head ("some eerie piece of devil's sculpture"). The body of Nellie Wood was lying in a "grotesquely pious" pose, hands folded and eyes closed, lighted by the pink glow of a cheap, decorated Chinese lantern – a scarlet circle had been scrawled around a mole on her left cheek. Inspector Sweeney is very aware of Dr. Westlake's status as a successful amateur detective and is not only willing to accept his help, but offers to swear him in as a deputy sheriff as he knows an amateur like him is simply "itching to get in on this thing." And he's not wrong! But is the murder a result of the emotional powder keg back at the inn or the work of a serial killer stalking the beaches of Cape Talisman? And has it anything to do with what goes on in the churchyard? All the while, the bodies begin to pile up as sightings of "that strawberry-ice-cream pink" glow from the Chinese lanterns become a harbinger of death. 

The Scarlet Circle perfectly utilizes its setting to not only give the story a distinct flavor of its own, but also to give it a feeling of genuine isolation. Cape Talisman is not cut-off from the outside world, but the Talisman Inn feels like its located at the end of the world as the sea slowly encroaches on the place. Add the small cast of characters who are quickly being thinned out by "a murderer insanely obsessed with moles," you have a very intimate and suspenseful whodunit. The murders and mysterious situations Dr. Westlake has untangle also feel somewhat native to the Cape Talisman, which gives The Scarlet Circle a link to the works of regionalist writers like Todd Downing (e.g. Murder on the Tropic, 1935) and Arthur W. Upfield (e.g. Bony and the Mouse, 1959). Particularly towards the end when the ocean comes back to pick a fight with the Cape Talisman and gives the book another link to that rare subgenre known as the disaster detective (e.g. Tyline Perry's The Owner Lies Dead, 1930). But the plot is top-notch as well.

Dr. Westlake has his work cut out for him and a treat for everyone who dislikes inactive detectives who sit on their hands. Dr. Westlake has to pry away the long, closely-guarded secrets from all the suspects as well as clearing up certain misunderstandings and digging around in the distant past to get some answers. You have to take that digging both figuratively and literally, but, when the story has run its course, "there's only one person" who could have done it. That comes not as the result of a last-man-standing situation, but the evidence pointed to that person as the only one who ticked all the necessary boxes. An immaculate piece of fair play that completely eliminated my spare suspect who I actually favored as the murderer, but, by the end, Dr. Westlake was right. Only that person could have done it. There are, however, two very small smudges on the plot. I can see now why so many readers hate Dawn as a character. She's not an endearing character and creating child characters obviously was not the forte of the Quentin Collective. The second, very minor, smudge is a familiar element to the solution, but it was put to such good use in a busy, richly detailed and well characterized detective story, it borders on nitpicking to complain about it.

So, yeah, the people who recommended The Scarlet Circle figured correctly it would go a long way in redeeming the Dr. Westlake series after the underwhelming Death's Old Sweet Song. A truly rock solid, engagingly written and suspenseful detective novel that earned other Stagge titles like The Dogs Do Bark (1936), The Stars Spell Death (1939), Turn of the Table (1940) and The Yellow Taxi (1942) a top spot on my wishlist.

The Stars Grow Dimmer

"I look at tomorrow with one eye,

while keeping my other eye on yesterday."

- The Real Folks Blues (OST Cowboy Bebop)

The last time I perused the pages of a Patrick Quentin novel, a solo effort from Richard Webb entitled Murder at Cambridge (1933), I was confronted with a fiasco and began to wonder if this tangle of pennames had another detective novel to their credit that reflected the same ingenuity showcased in Death and the Maiden (1939) and Black Widow (1952) – with the former being one of my dozen favorite mysteries. 

I sort of ended up abandoning Patrick Quentin for a while until reading a review of Cottage Sinister (1931), a combined project from the tandem of Richard Webb and Martha Kelley, published under the byline "Q. Patrick," on MysteryFile.Com and immediately spotted a recommendation in the comment section from John Norris for two of Hugh Wheeler's unaccompanied outings under their shared penname. One of the titles was Black Widow, praised on here for flaunting a plot that moves with the same meticulous precession as the innards of a Swiss watch, while the other, Suspicious Circumstances (1957), was an unfamiliar title for me, however, there was a copy buried somewhere in the caverns of my to-be-read pile – so guess what I dug out for today's review?

Suspicious Circumstances opens with our narrator, Nicholas "Nickie" Rood, teenage son of the world famous actress Anny Rood and aspiring novelist living in Paris, receiving a telegram from his mother with an urgent plea to return home post-haste. Nickie feels very little for a trip back home, but does manage to struggle himself free from the loving embrace of his Monique and flies home for what turns out to be a funeral – and it appears as if his mother had more of a hand in it than just lending one to help with the preparations of the service. The legend that is Anny Rood, "of the Great Swooping Eyes and the Bone Structure," is a strong and well characterized woman, whose almost revoltingly nice and would go to the limit to help others, but the subtle imperfections that stud her personality humanizes her and successfully prevented the birth of another Mary Sue.

One of her schemes that could be filed away under "Acts of Neighborly Love," are her indefatigable attempts to mend the broken marriage between two of her friends, famous independent producer-director and her not-so-secretly admirer Ronald Light and his washed-up actress-wife Norma Delanay, even using her charms to maneuver Ronald into giving Norma the leading role in a sex-million-dollar Cinematic-scope spectacle based on the life of Ninon de Lenclos. It's one of those roles women would kill for and Anny's convinced that the newfound success that will stalk Norma upon the release of this new picture will get her off the booze and back with Ronald, but her friendly intrusions are resented and everything explodes in her face – especially when Norma's fading star turns into a falling one as she plummets down a flight of stairs. Oh, and Anny had just agreed to take over the role of Ninon.

Serial Mom: the skeleton in her own closet

It's impossible to describe any further events in the book without revealing too much because the plots is an accumulation of problems for Anny Rood and her entourage, which is the story's biggest selling point for the simple reason that you are never quite sure what kind of detective story you are reading until you have reached the solution. Is it an inverted-mystery, of sorts, in which sweet, innocent Anny Rood is a predecessor of Serial Mom (1994) or a diabolical parody revealing the unfortunate deaths to be nothing more than mere accidents and the suspicion of murder nothing more than the product over an overactive imagination of a teenage boy – encouraged by rivalries one should expect in a industry like Hollywood films. By the way, I thought Nickie was a very likeable narrator and used a line from Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven” and a scene from James' Lost Horizon (1933) to describe two of the characters after certain events. Never thought I would come across a reference to that novel in a mystery. Loved it!

Anyway, eventually, I did stumble to the correct solution, although it was more instinctively rather than deductively, but it was good one even if it was not in the same league as Death and the Maiden or Black Widow. The revelation of the murderers identity comes through a signed confession, which is never a satisfying device, but somewhat acceptable here because the story lacked a detective figure. All in all, not bad, not bad at all. But not as a good as some of their other work.

Something ironic occurred to me while reading this book. It dawned on me that this is the kind of story that Ellery Queen tried to write during their Wrightsville/Hollywood period, when they were aiming for more realism in their novels, but even a greater emphasis on character could, IMHO, not reveal that they were as detach from reality as their first period books – and ditching reversed rooms, cut-off mountain top mansions and decapitated corpses nailed to road signs does not necessarily make a story any more realistic. However, for all the claims made against Ellery Queen for their lack of realism it's their name that's still (somewhat) being remembered and their books are still being read while only a few of us possess eyes that won't glaze over when they check the pennames Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge at us.

It really makes you wonder how aware some of the genre's detractors are of its history as it's really easy to point to a few of Christie's village mysteries/closed-circle of suspects novels and some of her fellow Crime Queens to conjure up a stereotypical image of a 1930s whodunit. Why always point to the usual suspects when there are so many wonderful examples of good detective fiction that should get a stamp of approval from modern critics if characterization and innovation actually means as much as they say it does. 

GAD never explored sexual relationships in-depth? What about Peter and Iris Duluth? Their relation is very explicitly depicted over a number of books and they even met at a sanatorium when they were complete wrecks. For Carr's sake, how modern do you want it to get? GAD emphasizes plot over characters? Pick up a Pat McGerr novel and marvel at how the characters dictate every twist and turn the plot takes. GAD had no eye for the lower/working classes? Go talk with Curt Evans and he will tell you about a man who penned a staggering amount of detective novels named John Rhode. You probably never heard of him let alone read one of his books, which is why we take you as serious as an Alzheimer patient lecturing on the nonverbal communication in silent films. Or better yet, read "The Adventure of the Lost Men," a radio play penned during the 1940s for The Adventures of Ellery Queen, in which the setting is a community of homeless people.

Well, that’s enough ranting and raving against windmills for one day. Thanks for suffering, once again, through one of my vague rambles. :)

An "F" for Felony

"It was as fantastic as Alice's sojourn in Wonderland – as improbable as her tea party with the Mad Hatter!"

- Hilary Fenton (Murder at Cambridge, 1933)

The collaborative, literary venture, operating during one of the most prosperous eras of the detective story under a number of different pennames, such as Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge, accumulated a considerable hoard of praise on here – and each and every laudatory syllable was well deserved. Unfortunately, they didn't permit me to compose another meritorious song of praise, in which I would've lyrically waxed about their skillful handiwork at knitting an intricately patterned wire mesh from a ball of plot threads and their knack for gauging the intelligence of their readers and act on it to cleverly lead them up the garden path. But none of these talents were on display in Murder at Cambridge (1933).

When I invaded the opening chapters of Murder at Cambridge, published under the Q. Patrick byline, I was astonished to find myself at the heart of what appeared to be John Dickson Carr territory. Naturally, the style of story telling diverged from that of the maestro himself, but the characters and events suggested a conscience pastiche – which I would've assumed to be the case were it not for the fact that John Dickson Carr was still an up-and-coming writer himself at the time of publication.

This felonious yarn of double murder, sudden romance and buried family skeletons, clawing away a ton of dirt to their freedom, set at a quiet, British college is narrated by Hilary Fenton, son of a well-to-do, notable jurist from the States, who studies abroad and leads the habitué lifestyle of an undergraduate – which is turned on its head when he catches a glimpse of a woman in the lecture hall and promptly falls in love. The name of the woman, referred to by the love struck chronicler as The Profile, turns out to be Camilla Lathrop, a daughter from a wealthy family, who trots the campus grounds with her fair share of secrets – one of them being the true nature of her relationship with Julius Baumann, a South African of Dutch extraction, who coincidently turns up at Fenton's doorstep with a rummy request.

Baumann wants Fenton to countersign a document as a validation of his signature and entrusts him with an envelope, which he has to drop off in a mailbox, in case anything happens to him – dire words pregnant with prophesizing qualities. Because one night, during a roaring thunderstorm, doubling as an atmospheric backdrop for a group of students telling horror stories and as a cover to drown out the noise of a gunshot, someone surreptitiously slipped into Baumann's room and shot him in the face.

Well, there you have it: nearly all the ingredients required to formulate a John Dickson Carr novel. The male lead of the story is a youthful, American hero who is swooned off his feet by an attractive, British girl and they're subsequently plunged heads first in a shady, dangerous affair – cumulating in a murder committed while everyone was breathlessly listening to ghost stories with occasional interuptions by the crackling thunder. The only components needed to have completed this concoction was a killer striking in a hermitically sealed environment and the hidden presence of ingenious, double-edged clues.

The lack of a proper, meticulously conceived locked room trick is a grave offence, but one that would've received some leniency if there had been even a single, semi-clever clue to look at – instead of randomly selecting a culprit who snugly fitted the role of least likely suspect and even that bolt from the blue was deflected by the front cover of my edition! Yes, the second-rate, poor excuse for a hack illustrated the front cover of the Popular Library edition with a depiction of the murderer in the act of poisoning the cup of the third, intended victim – hence the reason for picking a different cover to embellish this post with. 

Thankfully, this artistic debauchery didn't spoil a better detective story, but I'd still like to show this paint-waster, and others of his kind, the error of his ways in an interactive college course I entitled, The Experiments of Dr. Mengele: An Reenactment. Guess who will be wielding a set of syringes filled with a brightly, multi-colored liquids? Oh, c'mon, don't pretend you failed to notice the tell-tale signs of my crumbling sanity and ever weakening grip on every-day reality.  

Anyway, the only redeeming qualities this book possesses is the Carrian flavor that lingers through-out the book, the protagonist who tells an excellent story and the delineation of college life in the early 1930s – but as a clever, fair-play detective story this one just might constitute as the biggest misfire of the year.

This is not at all what I expected from the same, straight "A"-minds who crafted the deviously, twisted and multi-layered plots that adorn the pages of Death and the Maiden (1939) and Black Widow (1952) – and I have no other choice than to mark this one down with a big red "F". I hope you do better next time, guys!

On a final note, I once again have to apologize for the fact that a bad read translated itself into another shoddily written review. When a book turns out to be as disappointing as this one, it's an exhausting wrestling match to gather the right words, string them together to form coherent sentences and hoping that it miraculously resembles a half decent review. Hopefully, I will do better in my next blog entry, which, by the way, will focus on one of John Rhode's most praised books. Stay tuned! 

All the books I reviewed by these writers:

Murder at Cambridge (1933)

Puzzle for Players (1938)

Puzzle for Puppets (1944)

Death and the Maiden (1939)

Black Widow (1952)

Suitable for Framing

Willie Wang: "I don't get it, Pop- was there a murder or wasn't there?"

Sydney Wang: "Yes, killed good weekend! Drive, please."

- Murder by Death (1976)

Over the past week, this blog took a cosmopolitan perspective to the detective story with an excess of alien trimmings that would've driven Inspector Cramer up the wall. But today, we're back on familiar turf with a book that has, as he would've said, a good old "American murder with an American motive and an American weapon."

Nope. Contrary to what the opening of this blog entry suggests, this is not a book review that casts a critical glance at one of Rex Stout's novels or bundle of novelettes, but another assessment of Patrick Quentin – a collaborative posse of writers who've gone up and up and up in my estimation! However, the novel that is today's subject of discussion, Puzzle for Puppets (1944), is merely an excellent attempt in lieu of the absolutely brilliant stuff I was exposed to in their last few novels – but it's one of those fun stories in which they took a sadistic pleasure in placing their protagonists in severe peril. I once read someone comparing the Peter Duluth tales to intelligently written soap operas, and I couldn't think of a more fitting label to attach to this series.

The backdrop of the story is nighttime San Francisco, during those dark days when a raging war torn the continent of Europe asunder, where Peter Duluth, now and up-and-coming naval officer, plans to spend his weekend leave with his wife, but an acute rooming shortage threatens to wreck all of their romantic plans – when a kindred spirit, named Mrs. Rose, who's on the threshold of her second marriage, comes along and promptly relinquishes her hotel room to the youthful couple. Problems solved? Nah. Their troubles have only began piling up in front of them. At first glance, Iris is commonly mistaken for her cousin, Eulalia Crawford, a renowned puppeteer, which in itself is innocently enough, but when Peter visits a sauna, to stop a developing cold dead in its tracks, his uniform is stolen – and the clues all point to a lisping man and the scent eventually leads to a drunken man with a beard who spouts riddles ("the red rose and the white rose mean blood. I warned you on page eighty-four. The elephant hasn’t forgotten. Life or death").  

This exhilarating madcappery, inconvenient though it may be, appears to be harmless on the surface, until the trail stops at the front door of the puppet-strewn apartment of Eulalia Crawford – and Peter and Iris discover her blood-spattered body, scattered with roses, slumped on the floor behind a desk with a knife handle projecting from her chest and the last person to be seen entering her abode was a uniformed naval officer. The thief from the sauna has assumed Peter Duluth's appearance in order to commit a murder!

Plans for an amorous weekend? Thoroughly wrecked! It's very hard, if not impossible, to romantically canoodle in your room when the police are in the progress of organizing a massive, state-wide manhunt and allowing a second murder to be committed, on your watch, doesn't exactly help, either. Fortuitously, for them, they have the backing of two local private detectives, who assist them in tailing suspicious persons and tucking them away from the police, which allowed them the freedom needed to backtrack the blood-dripped, rose-scattered chain of murders to a huge circus – where a frantic dénouement causes a near stampede and would've not disgraced the pages of a Sir Henry Merrivale novel. 

In spite of the admirably executed climax at the circus, it's paradoxically also the part that keeps the book from joining Death and the Maiden (1939) and Black Widow (1952) at their top-spot in the first ranks. The solution feels too slight for such a baffling problem and the grand revelation comes at 2/3 of the book, which was far too early, even if it was filled up with an interesting and extensive account of past events leading up the double murder case, but it just doesn't measure up to first part of the book – and even the final, "Ha! Gotcha!," twist didn't elevate the story to its original heights.

Still, this is a fine and solid effort from a vintage brand name in the genre and falls only just short of being a great mystery novel, but it's unfair to expect that every book that bears their nom-de-plume on the cover is a towering achievement in the field. Yes, this a book has its fair share of problems, but there's more than enough to look pass those blotches and enjoy another trying tribulation in the turbulent marriage of Peter and Iris Duluth. Their agony, is our joy!

All the books I reviewed by these writers:

Puzzle for Players (1938)

Puzzle for Puppets (1944)

Death and the Maiden (1939)

Black Widow (1952)

Puzzle for Plotters

It's funny how neatly the previous two blog entries tie-in with this review, which discusses not only another book from the collective hands of that shamefully neglected writing team, operating this time under the nom de guerre of Patrick Quentin, but one that also happens to star two of their series detectives: the troubled Peter Duluth and the methodical Lieutenant Trant. But don't think that the maddening, and hauntingly ingenious, problem put forward in Black Widow (1952) is solved by this dream-team of super-sleuths, because crossing paths means in this case crossing swords – as Lt. Trant doggedly pursues Duluth as he tries to tag him for the death of a young woman.

The Plot Against Peter Duluth

The menacing plot, contrived against the ever-troubled Peter Duluth, ticks and moves with the same meticulous precision as the cogs and wheels that make the hands of a Swiss pocket watch move – and once again showcase their talent for combining a knotty, twisted and complex plot with an exploration of the darker depths of the human soul.

Black Widow was put down on paper more than a decade after Death and the Maiden (1939), but I'm also glad to report that the intermediating years didn't deteriorate their talent for gauging the intelligence and experience of their readers – and mercilessly use it as a tool to lead them by the noose.

This diabolical scheme starts when a depressed and lonely Peter Duluth is persuaded by a friend to stop moping around the house and join a dull party, where he meets and befriends a young woman – who's also an aspiring writer. He sort of looks out for her, in a purely platonically and fatherly manner, and even offers the use of his house for her to work quietly on her writing. But no good deed goes unpunished, and one day, when Duluth returns from fetching his wife, who just came back from a trip, they find the girl in their home with a scarf tightly knotted around her neck – dangling from a chandelier.

Enter the ever-persistent and efficient Lieutenant Trant, whose careful examination and questioning of witnesses turn up a pile of damning evidence against Peter Duluth – that brands him, not only as an unfaithful husband and a seducer of young women, but also marks him as potential and particular ruthless murderer. I was getting a real kick out at seeing these detectives interact as antagonists, instead of sitting down and discussing the case over a drink, however, the methods employed by Lieutenant Trant seemed a bit crude at times, and one of his remarks was loaded with so much venom that it would've rendered even Archie Goodwin speechless.

This is a frighteningly good constructed persecution story, that does such a fine job of stacking up the odds against Peter Duluth that you tend to forget that you're reading a fair play detective story – and the possibility you have as reader to skewer through the many layers of plot and figure out for yourself what the heck is really going on.

Not to brag, or anything, but I managed to do exactly that! Early on, I stumbled across part of the truth and slowly developed it into a workable theory, but for the most part of the story, it was mere conjecture, until certain clues started showing up that snugly fitted my solution. At that moment, everything clicked into place and suddenly everything made sense. However, they anticipated upon an observant reader coming that far and nearly swiped that smug grin off my face with a completely fair twist, but I was able to work that one out as well – just in the nick of time.

To sum the book up: Black Widow is a very dark story, in which an innocent person is trapped in a poisonous and tightly woven web of lies and deceit – designed to slowly kill its prey, but the complexity of its plots makes the book so much more than merely a story of suspense and peril. And the fact that the book is a crossover is the icing on the cake.

This is another five star detectives from the geniuses whom we collectively call Patrick Quentin. 

Final note: I will update this post if anything like this happens tonight. Stay tuned. ;)

The Student Body

I alluded in an earlier review to the intricate relationships and ever changing combinations of the participating members of a collaborative writing team, primarily known under the shared penname of Patrick Quentin, and the near impossibility to shortly summarize the inner workings of the group for a simple review as this one. Therefore, I will confine myself to the rudimentary facts, and tell you that Death and the Maiden (1939) was written by Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb, one of the regular tandems of the group, and was signed as by Q. Patrick (as "inconspicious" as an anonym as "Carter Dickson").

Ruckus on the Campus

Death and the Maiden is easily one of the best detective stories I read this year, and has all the ear-marks of a first-rate whodunit: an elaborate, multi-layered woven plot, well-rounded, believable characters and a fairly good setting, however, the best part of the story is that the Webb and Wheeler have taken the intelligence and experience of their readers into the equation. The observant and experienced mystery reader will probably spot the murderer, either deductively or instinctively, before the final chapter, but the story is so diabolically clever and trickily plotted that you're in for a surprise no matter how solid your deductions were or how sensitive your intuition is.

Being able to gauge your readers' intelligence and knowledge of the genre, and acting on them to cleverly mislead them, is one of the greatest gifts a mystery writer can possess – and makes for a satisfying read. It's like both men crossed time and space to point and snicker at me, while saying, "Ha! You thought we came at you from this angle, but then we turned around come at you from that spot." Well played, guys. Well played.

This fiendishly cunning story revolves around Grace Hough, not one of the most popular woman on campus, who's been receiving a string of special delivery letters – which everyone presumes to be love notes from a mysterious admirer or even a secret lover. But the letters become sinister tell-tale clues, when, after a short disappearance, her body is dragged from the river of a small town – twenty miles removed from the campus grounds.

The efficient Lieutenant Trant is put on the case and skillfully unsnarls a tangled and complicated web of lies, motives and clues to discover who from the small pool of suspects, consisting of fellow students and faculty members, murdered the unpopular and dangerous Grace Hough – who's final actions resembled that of a kamikaze pilot. It's really no wonder she ended up with a dent in the back of her skull.

Lieutenant Trant is a memorable detective without being an overbearing, eccentric snob who spouts Latin phrases and quotes obscure passages from Shakespeare every five minutes. He's a shrewd, scheming homicide detective who's cut from the same mold as his colleague Lieutenant Columbo. Just like him, Lt. Trant has a knack for wreaking havoc on the nerves of suspects and knows how to give them more than enough rope to hang themselves with. In a way, his personality and police methods makes it almost disappointing that the plot wasn't constructed as an inverted detective story.

On a final note, I have to say that Patrick Quentin has impressed me as a mature equivalent of Ellery Queen. Quentin's detective stories boost the same complex, multi-layered plots and clueing as Ellery Queen, but their tone was more serious, their themes darker and they were simply better at creating characters.

Concisely, this is a five-star detective story – worthy of being labeled a classic.

Actors and their Demons

Back in December, I asked a mixed group of clued-up enthusiasts, well-read scholars and zealous collectors to recommend me a few good American detective writers, and they were unanimous in their nomination of Patrick Quentin – one of the collective pennames of a collaborative writing team whose output was of prodigious value to the genre. My enquiry also spawned quite a tail of comments discussing the participating members and showed how intricate the inner workings of the team was. I shall therefore not attempt to shoehorn all that information into a short biography, but refer you to their page on the GADwiki.

As a ferocious reader of detective stories, I wasn't completely unaware of their existence – having already read S.S. Murder (1933), The Grindle Nightmare (1935) and Death's Old Sweet Song (1946), but was only impressed by one of them (their take on the shipboard setting was marvelous). Nonetheless, this false start did not deter me in my newly made resolution to start reacquainting myself with their work, especially now that I was equipped with a better understanding of their work. You see, I put a lot of stock in the opinions expressed by the group I consulted and their exuberance was highly contagious. This resulted in a feverish itch to start ordering their suggestions left and right, but managed to restrain myself by showing firmness of mind and fortitude!

Well, OK... that's not exactly true. There were just too many outstanding orders at the time, but hey, it's a convenient excuse to delude one self into believing one possesses traces of self-restraint and must be properly rewarded for cultivating such a virtues characteristic. One of the rewards came a few days ago, when I finally had an opportunity to dig into the second book from the Peter Duluth series. 

Yeah, it's a never-ending cycle from which no escape is possible.

Puzzle for Players (1938) appears to be an immediate sequel to its predecessor, Puzzle for Fools (1936), in which Peter Duluth was recovering from a bout of alcoholism in a disquieted sanatorium, where he assisted Dr. Lenz in apprehending a devious killer who left his victims tied-up in straightjackets. Having survived that dark abyss, his next step in his rehabilitation process is staging a big comeback as a theatrical producer. Lady Fortune seems to be casting an auspicious smile at him in this endeavour, as he was successful in assembling a talented cast of actors and acquired an excellent play to produce, but his luck is stopped dead in its track when he learns that the stage for his return is at the old Dagonet.

The Dagonet is a decrepit, old theatre with a dismaying reputation of being jinxed and where the disembodied reflection of a young woman, who hanged herself there a few decades earlier, haunts the dressing rooms, but credulous superstition and ghostly backstage visitations are only an ill omen of things to come. Nearly everyone is struggling with his own demons, but when a couple of unlikable characters turn up, who try to worm their way into the production, and the first body drops in on the rehearsals, it's clear that someone is giving them another demon to fight against – and this one's a lot more tangible!

This is an excellent mystery that does a first class job at balancing a superb plot with an exploration of well-drawn characters, without falling into the modernist hack-trap of wallowing in angst and misery, and the issues they have to face are actually tightly woven into the plot – and the final scene provides a powerful dénouement.

Puzzle for Players is a novel that reminded me why I love reading these old-fashioned detective stories.