Dr. Morelle Investigates (2009) by Ernest Dudley

Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen, known better under his adopted stage-and penname of "Ernest Dudley," was an English actor, dramatist and mystery writer who created the popular BBC weekly radio series The Armchair Detective – reviewing "the best of the current releases of detective novels, dramatising a chapter from each." The program reviewed John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and that attracted the attention of Fearn's agent-biographer-champion Philip Harbottle some fifty years later. Harbottle became Dudley's friend and agent, which is why Dudley's otherwise obscure detective fiction is still in print today. Harbottle has worked decades to ensure the writers under his care, like John Russell Fearn, Gerald Verner and Ernest Dudley, remain in print.

Dr. Morelle Investigates (2009) collects two long-ish short story adaptations of a radio and stage play, "Locked Room Murder" (1954) and "Act of Violence" (1959), solved by the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Morelle ("he is also an expert on crime"). Dudley created Dr. Morelle for the BBC radio anthology series Monday Night at Eight and was a hit with the audience leading to a movie, TV series, stage play and a series of short stories and novels. So this two-story collection of a radio-and stage adaptation sounded like a potentially fun and interesting follow up to John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud's 13 to the Gallows (2008).

“Locked Room Murder” is an adaptation of a stage play, Doctor Morelle, Dudley co-wrote with the then Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, Arthur Watkyn.

The story begins one late Saturday evening when Brian Cartwright is visited by four friends, Philip, Nigel, June and Evelyn, who were involved in a drunken, fatal hit-and-run accident – learning from a radio broadcast the victim had died. So they turn to their friend in something of a jam, but Cartwright happen to be in desperate need of money and turns his hand to a spot of good, old-fashioned blackmail. Cartwright promises to keep his mouth shut in exchange for two-thousand pounds ("between the four of you that shouldn't be embarrassing"). A demand that doesn't go unchallenged as one of them sends Cartwright a death threat, but Cartwright turns the table on them by inviting them to dinner with three additional guests. The first is a journalist, Bill Guthrie, who was already interested to write about the history of the house for his "Criminal Corners of London" column ("some female was battered to death a hundred years ago where your pantry is now"). The last two are Dr. Morelle and his secretary, Miss Frayle.

Cartwright shows them the death threat ("We have till nine o'clock. So have you. R.I.P.") and calls their bluff in front of three witnesses. Either they agree to a simple transaction or he's going to police. Cartwright is going to wait until then in his study with the doors locked from the inside and the windows to the balcony securely bolted, but, when the clock strikes nine, they hear a gunshot from the locked study. Who killed Cartwright and how, when he was all alone with every entrance locked and bolted from the inside? Dr. Morelle takes charge of the case and solves the murder in exactly an hour, but is it any good? That's a bit of a mixed bag.

"Locked Room Murder" is not a very challenging, or fairly played, detective story with, what some would consider to be, a second-rate locked room-trick. There is, however, a pleasing cat-and-mouse atmosphere permeating throughout the story. You have a brazen blackmailer trying to get back at his victims when one of them threatens him anonymously, but the story also appeared to toy with its audience. The locked room-trick might not be the stuff of legends, neither was it overtly apparent from the start with the crime scene littered with "clues" all suggesting different possibilities. From the planned, short blackout as the electricity company changes over to a new grid system and Cartwright smoking a cigar in a pitch-black room to the old-fashioned telephone with separate mouthpiece and receiver bolted to his desk all suggested different possibilities. Even the money troubles and the victim's brazen behavior implied the dreaded suicide-disguised-as-murder was not off the table. Dr. Morelle struggled with spotting the locked room-trick as well and has to accept the murderer's challenge to find it before the hour is out or become the next victim of the devilish murder method.

So, while not one of the most ingenious detective stories ever conceived, "Locked Room Murder" nonetheless turned out to be a fun read with a minor, but pleasing, element of the unexpected.

The second short story, "Act of Violence," is an adaptation of a Dr. Morelle episode from Monday Night at Eight. Dr. Morelle and Miss Frayle are invited over to dinner by Professor Owen a day before he's going to marry his secretary, Mary Lloyd, who secretly loves his laboratory assistant, Glyn Evans. Along the way, Dr. Morelle and Miss Frayle pass a gas station run by a Robert Griffiths. Dr. Morelle recognizes him as the young man who was on trial and sentenced to hang for murder, but had been reprieved to begin life anew. There's a manuscript of a dramatic sketch, sent in anonymously to the local dramatic society, which reenacts the murder that almost hanged Griffiths ("...only a short sketch but it certainly packs a punch"). Griffiths is going to play his own part!

This sounds a little disjointed and Dudley takes his time to set everything up, while leaving the reader in the dark about the direction the story is eventually going to take, but the potential for a good detective story was there – depending on how the ending is going to pull everything together. And that's the problem. Dr. Morelle ties everything together, but the solution is not all that impressive and made the long preamble feel like stalling and padding out the story. Dudley should have focused either on the domestic story of the eternal triangle or gone with the theatrical storyline and the anonymous manuscript, because this didn't work.

So, thematically, Dr. Morelle Investigates makes for interesting comparison material to the stage plays by Carr and Gielgud, but should have read these two adaptations before, not after, 13 to the Gallows as Carr is a hard act to follow. At least "Locked Room Murder" was fun and entertaining.

13 to the Gallows (2008) by John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Douglas G. Green's founding of Crippen & Landru, a small publishing firm specialized in short story collections, whose first publication was John Dickson Carr's Speak of the Devil (1994) – a BBC radio serial originally written and broadcast in 1941. C&L was decades ahead of the curb and gave mystery fans a taste of the coming reprint renaissance with their "Lost Classic" series. A series of short story collections comprising of such early gems as Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), Craig Rice's Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002), Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin (2003), Joseph Commings' Banner Deadlines (2004) and Ellery Queen's The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005). Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999).

There are fortunately no signs C&L is slowing down or stopping anytime soon as Jeffrey Marks, "the award-winning author of biographies of Craig Rice and Anthony Boucher," took over from Douglas Greene as publisher in 2018.

In March, I reviewed one of their latest publications, Pierre Véry's Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937). A collection of imaginative short mystery stories, translated from French by Tom Mead, published in 2023, but was unaware of the C&L's 30th anniversary and neglected to mention it when I wrote the review. It was not until a review of Edward D. Hoch's The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) appeared on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel that I was reminded of C&L's 30th anniversary. So a good excuse to finally move those Anthony Berkeley, William Brittain and Hoch collections to the top of the pile, but not before revisiting one of my favorite C&L collections from my all-time favorite mystery writer.

13 to the Gallows (2008) is a collection of four, never before published manuscripts of stage plays John Dickson Carr wrote during the early 1940s and collaborated on two of the plays with his friend and then Director of Drama at the BBC, Val Gielgud – who had a "shared interest in detective stories and fencing." Gielgud wrote detective novels himself and you would think the name of a British broadcast legend on the covers of Death at Broadcasting House (1934), Death as an Extra (1935) and The First Television Murder (1940) is a guarantee to keep them in circulation, but they have all been out-of-print for ages. This collection of stage plays is the first time his name appeared on a piece of detective fiction in over thirty years. What a way to make a comeback!

Just one more thing before delving into these plays. 13 to the Gallows is edited and introduced by Tony Medawar, a researcher and genre archaeologist, who also littered it with Van Dinean footnotes and even included "Notes for the Curious." Medawar's detailed introduction should give you an appreciation of the time and work that went into the making of this volume of "Lost Classics." One of the many fascinating background details is that it was "the late Derek Smith who first conceived of this collection." So with that out of the way, let's raise the curtain on this collection of stage plays from a once forgotten period of Carr's writing career.

The three-act play "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (1942) is the first of two collaborations between Carr and Gielgud, which is also the first of two plays that take place in a BBC radio studio. In this case, it's the cellar below a country house on the outskirts of a provincial town that was taken over by the BBC as an emergency security set of studios. When the story begins, they're rehearing the first episode of a true crime program called Murderer's Row starring ex-Chief Inspector Silence to talk about the Kovar case. It was his first big case ("I hanged the criminal") in which Thomas Kovar shot his wife's lover. A part of the program is a dramatic reenactment of the shooting, but the producer, Anthony Barran, made the unfortunate call to cast Elliott Vandeleur and Lanyon Kelsey as the murderer and victim – because Kelsey is rumored to be involved with Vandeleur's wife, Jennifer Sloane. So all the ingredients for murder all there, cooped in a small radio studio, while an air-raid goes on over their heads outside.

One of them gets fatally shot during the on-air performance, but who pulled the trigger and perhaps more importantly how was it done? Silence is on hand to handle the case, until the police arrives, collects two .22s from the studio, but one "has never been fired" ("...barrel's unfouled") and "the other was full of blanks." So what happened to the murder gun? Silence turns the studio inside out and has everybody searched without finding as much as a shell casing. Nobody could have drawn or ditched a gun without being seen, but somebody, somehow, managed to pull it off. The impossibility of a shooting in a closed spaced by an apparently invisible killer and the puzzle of the vanishing gun are perfectly played out, which both have simple, elegant and yet satisfying solutions that simply works on stage. These impossibilities are dressed with the personal and backstage drama of the characters mirroring the old murder case and the running joke of Silence being frightened of microphones. Simply the kind of story fans of Carr and impossible crimes in general. However, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" is not even the best play in this volume.

A note for the curious: Medawar noted in the afterword to the play that the impossible murder recalls one of Carr's short stories, "although the details of the mystery are entirely different," but I think Max Afford's The Dead Are Blind (1937) warrants a mention here. A locked room mystery staged inside a radio studio. You can also find similar impossible shootings with vastly different solutions in Stacey Bishop's Death in the Dark (1930) and Christopher Bush's The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935).

The second, three-act Carr-Gielgud collaboration, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944), is set this time in a Midlands school converted into a wartime emergency studio for the BBC. The program being produced is a spin-off episode, of sorts, of In Town Tonight entitled Out of Town – a series of special items split up between three towns in Britain. Barran from "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" returns to produce Barchester part of the program, but, during the rehearsals, slowly sees the whole thing disintegrating in front of his eyes. Even having to entertain the idea of interviewing a man who trains and imitates sea lions. Fortunately, the town has something of a notorious local celebrity, Wallace Hatfield.

Hatfield is a builder who had converted the school into a radio studio and, several years before, was tried for the murder of his wife, Lucy. Not only was he acquitted, but the death dismissed as a tragic accident as the prosecution couldn't even prove it was murder. Lucy had fallen from the belfry, "seventy or eighty feet," scattered round the body were flowers with Hatfield being the only person near the tower. What saved his neck is that the police found only Lucy's footprints in the dust up in the belfry. So nobody could have pushed her. Hatfield still believes she murdered and agrees to be interviewed, which initially was supposed to be conducted by an ex-Scotland Yard inspector. Program director, Sir John Burnside, insists on his old OC, Colonel Sir Henry Bryce, former head of the Indian Police. Sir John gushing over his old OC is another strain for the harassed producer culminating with Barran calling the old OC "son of a cock-eyed half-caste Indian constable" right when Colonel Sir Henry Bryce his entree. Just in time for history to repeat itself as an invisible killer throws another person from the belfry.

Medawar notes in the introduction "Carr clearly contributed to the mystery and Gielgud the authentic details of broadcasting" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" very clearly has Carr's fingerprints all over the plot and storytelling. From the comedy and clueing to the impossible crime reworked from his Suspense radio-play "The Man Without a Body" (1943). Only smudge is that the murderer is an absolute idiot, but other than that, as good and solid a mystery as its predecessor. A vintage Carr. A pity he never considered reworking "The Man Without a Body" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" into a Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. I gladly would have traded one of the final three Merrivale novels for The New Invisible Man.

The last two plays were solo projects, "a version for the stage of his famous BBC series Appointment with Death," beginning with the short play "Intruding Shadow" (1945), which is tightly-plotted little story of domestic murder – staged at the home of a well-known mystery writer. Richard Marlowe is the author of such celebrated detective novels as Death in the Summer-House, Murder at Whispering Lodge and The Nine Black Clues, but the story finds him dabbling in true crime of the fictitious kind. Marlowe wants to scare the pants of Bruce Renfield, a West End blackmailer, to make him back off from one of his victims and hand over the blackmail material. In order to achieve his goal, Marlowe is going to make both of them believe he's about to murder Renfield. After all, this is Golden Age mysteries in which a blackmailer is the type of person "who deserves to die" or "to be scared within an inch of his life." A plan that spectacularly backfires when Marlowe finds a dying Renfield on his doorstep shortly followed by Inspector Sowerby.

Apparently, "Intruding Shadow" was met with some reserved praise from the critics, but on paper, it's easily the best of the four plays Carr wrote during the war years. A short, pure undiluted detective story recalling that small gem "Who Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939/40). Both stories are essentially Carr successfully pulling an Agatha Christie-style whodunit without any locked rooms or other impossible crimes. There is, however, a typical, Carrian Grand Guignol scene involving the corpse. So a great detective tale all around!

The fourth and last (short) play, "She Slept Lightly" (1945), belongs together with The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) and the previously mentioned radio-play, Speak of the Devil, to Carr's earliest experiments in mixing the detective story with historical fiction, which he kind of pioneered starting with plays and short stories – e.g. "The Other Hangman" (1935) and "Blind Man's Hood" (1937). After the 1940s, Carr began to write fully fledged historical mystery novels decades before the historical mystery became a subgenre of its own. Regrettably, Carr's historical (locked room) mysteries and thrillers either criminally underrated or outright ignored. A real shame as some of the Carr's best work from the 1950s and '60s can be found among his historical novels. Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is one of the best historical mystery-thrillers ever written and one of Carr's finest novels from the post-war period.

Just like Captain Cut-Throat, "She Slept Lightly" is a mystery-thriller set in Napoleonic France and brings several characters together in the home of Belgian miller while the Battle of Waterloo rages on in the background. Firstly, there's the elderly Lady Stanhope, "her enemies might call her a little mad," whose carriage overturned and needs the miller to guide her through the French lines. The second arrival is a wounded British soldier, Captain Thomas Thorpe, who's looking for the young girl in Lady Stanhope's company. She, however, denies the existence of the girl. Major von Steinau, a Prussian Hussar, is another one who's interested in this apparently non-existent woman and not without reason. He hanged her only a year ago for spying ("I saw the rope choke out your life"). So how could she be alive and walking around?

Like I said, this is more of a historical mystery-thriller than detective story with the apparent impossibility of a woman who was hanged and lived to tell about it as a small side-puzzle, but I can see why this historical melodrama is not going to excite everyone. I enjoyed it. However, I'm also very, very partial to the type of historical mystery as envisioned by Carr, Robert van Gulik and Paul Doherty. So feel free to disagree on this one.

So the quality of the plays, purely as detective and thriller stories, is uniformly excellent, but, more importantly, 13 to the Gallows plugged another fascinating, once completely forgotten gap in Carr's body of work – similar to the obscure radio-plays collected in The Island of Coffins (2021). That's the greatest contribution C&L had made in helping to restore Carr back to print. A highly recommendable, must-have volume for the true JDC aficionado and might pick up The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and Adventure (2022) before tackling the Brittain and Hoch collections.

Dark Are the Days of Winter

"There is, at Christmas, a spirit of goodwill. It is, as you say, "the thing to do." Old quarrels are patched up, those who have disagreed consent to agree once more, even if it is only temporarily."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas, 1938)

Back in May, I reviewed Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015), edited by Martin Edwards, who is known as an award-winning crime novelist, genre-historian and the author of The Golden Age of Murder (2015), but now Edwards is building a reputation as the resident anthologist of the British Library Crime Classics – compiling a rapidly growing number of themed mystery anthologies for them.

Thus far, the stack includes Capital Crimes: London Mysteries (2015), Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (2016) and Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes (2016), but potentially the best collection of short stories is still in the pipeline: Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). But that anthology won't be released for another six or seven months. So, for the moment, I will have to make do with what has already been published, which brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.

Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries (2016) is an offering of "vintage crime stories set in winter" and a sequel, of sorts, to Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries (2015), which became "one of the UK's fastest-selling crime anthologies" and this lead to the commission of a second compendium of wintry tales – as there's "no denying that the supposed season of goodwill" is "a time of year that lends itself to detective fiction." Edwards succeeded in cobbling together a collection of rare, interesting and often excellent detective stories breathing the spirit of Yuletide. Let's take these stories down from the top.

Fergus Hume's "The Ghost’s Touch," culled from the pages of The Dancer in Red (1906), acts as this collection's curtain-raiser and some aspects of the plot anticipates John Dickson Carr's other famous radio-play, "The Devil’s Saint," which has several versions – two of them I discussed here and here. Hume's story is narrated by Dr. Lascelles, who relates the terrible Christmas of 1893, when he accompanied a friend, Percy Ringan, to his ancestral home. Percy's father accumulated wealth as a gold prospector in Australia, but his poorer cousin, Frank, inherited the family title and estate. So their relationship is both familial and mutually beneficial.

Frank invited both of them to spend Christmas at the Ringan estate, Ringshaw Grange, which resembles "the labyrinth of Daedalus" and has a cursed chamber, the Blue Room, haunted by the ghost of Lady Joan – who reputedly touches occupants of the room "who were foredoomed to death." As to be expected, one of the cousins decide to sleep in the Blue Room, but Dr. Lascelles intervenes in their plans and effectively demonstrates the mortality of the accursed ghost of the room. Not really a rug puller of a detective story, but a good, solid example from "The Room That Kills" category (i.e. a ghost story with a logical explanation).

The second story comes from "The King Kong of the Thriller," Edgar Wallace, whose predilection for lurid sensationalism and hoary dramatics has a repellent effect on me, but the few short stories I read seem to contradict his reputation as a writer of dated melodrama – which is certainly true for "The Chopham Affair." 

Originally, the story was published in one of Wallace's own collections, The Woman from the East (1934), and can be described as a crime story with a twist: one of the main characters of the tale is an old-fashioned rogue, "Alphonse or Alphonso Riebiera," who passes himself off as a Spaniard, but has a passport from one of those shady South American republics. Riebiera eked out a living as a blackmailer of women of rich husbands and turned this in "a well-organized business," but one day, the husband of one of his victims accidentally receives a blackmail note. As a result, the husband decides (as Sherlock Holmes would call it) to extract some private revenge. However, this result in an unusual and hard to explain situation: the blackmailer is found in the snow, shot through the head, alongside the body of a car thief. How this situation came about is the twist in the tail of the story. I liked it and should try one of his full-length novels in the not so distant future.

Margery Allingham's "The Man with the Sack" was first published as "The Case of the Man with the Sack" in a 1936 issue of the illustrious Strand Magazine, which plays a familiar tune on the theme of stolen jewels during a Christmas house party. Reluctantly, Mr. Albert Campion accepts Lady Turrett's invitation to come to Pharaoh's Court on Christmas Eve, because she fears one of her guests, Ada Welkin, is in danger of being relieved from her valuables. Campion is, however, unable to prevent the place from being burglarized, but promptly identifies the guilty person and finds the place where this person stowed away the loot. It's not one of the most original short stories in this anthology, but good and competent enough for what it is.

S.C. Roberts was a renowned publisher and a distinguished Sherlockian, who once played a round of golf with Conan Doyle, which was enough to brag about as a fanboy, but Roberts also wrote and published several pastiches – one of those stories, "The Case of the Megatherium Thefts," is apparently very good. However, the Sherlockian pastiche that's collected here is a short stage-play, "Christmas Eve," in which a problem is brought to Holmes and Watson by Miss Violet de Vinne. She acted as a secretary to Lady Barton, "the owner of a very wonderful pearl necklace," but the pearls have gone missing. Holmes immediately sees there’s a second story hidden beneath her account and cleverly ferrets the truth out of her.

The resolution of the case tore a page from "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), which also happened to be a Christmas-time story about a lost gemstone. As a matter of fact, I think that story may very well be the arch-type of these festive tales about stolen and/or lost stones.

One of the main reasons for jumping on this anthology is the next novella-length story: Victor Gunn's "Death in December," originally published in Ironsides Sees Red (1948), which is an impossible crime tale set in a snowbound castle during Christmas – solved by a wonderful character in the mold of Sir Henry Merrivale, Andy Dalziel and Arthur Bryant.

Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell, or simply "Old Iron," is a grumpy character who is dragged by his highborn subordinate, Johnny Lister, to the ancestral seat of his family. A place as dark and gloomy as the past, named Cloon Castle, perched on the top of desolate mountain in the Peak District. So "Old Iron" had enough material to grumble for the entire length of the journey, but, upon their arrival, the holiday is slowly turning into a busman's holiday for the two. On the driveway of the castle, they saw "an extraordinary figure," garbed in a dark cloak, stumbling across a snowy field and vanish, but the figure failed to leave any footprints in his wake. And this would not be the only apparently supernatural event at the castle.

Cloon Castle has one of those haunted rooms, known as the Death Room, but the head of family, General Lister, refuses to tell the back-story of the room to his guests. However, this fails to dampen the enthusiasm of the house party and one of them ends up sleeping in the haunted room. As is pointed out in the story, these experiments usually end with the house party finding "the occupant of the haunted room stretched out cold and stark on the floor," but this time around the events take a different turn: a blood-spattered corpse appears inside the room in the middle of the night. But when everyone goes back to check, the body has vanished and not a trace of blood is found on the floor! This cannot be tagged as a locked room, but how the bloodstains vanished can be marked as an impossible situation.

The subsequent investigation by "Old Iron" was quite fun, which lead from the Death Room to "a cold, gloomy, family crypt" and back to his bedroom where a nasty surprise was waiting, but I have a bone to pick about the impossible situation regarding the footprints. I do not believe the trick would leave behind a spotless field of unbroken snow and it would be very easy to make a slipup in its execution, which would ruin the whole effect. All in all, I liked this novella and have written Victor Gunn down as a person of interest for the near future.

Christopher Bush's "Murder at Christmas" was first published in 1951, in The Illustrated London News, under the title "The Holly Bears a Berry," which features his series-character, Ludovic Travers, who is spending Christmas-weekend as the house guest of the Chief Constable of Worbury – which is usually a quiet, peaceful place. However, one of the neighboring inhabitants is a rather notorious characters and an ex-convict, named John Block Brewse, who was "the last of the line of financial swindlers." So hardly surprising when someone strangles him to death in the nearby woods and Travers solves the case by smashing the murderer's alibi to pieces, but I always wonder if these alibi-tricks work when you have to manually strangle the victim. Otherwise, a fairly good short-short detective story.

The next entry in this anthology is also a fairly short-short story, but one that quickly became a favorite of mine, "Off the Tiles" by Ianthe Jerrold, who also authored the magnificent Dead Man's Quarry (1930) and the splendid There May Be Danger (1948). Jerrold has undergone a personal renaissance, after all four of her mystery novels were reissued by the Dean Street Press, which were supplemented during the 1950s with a handful of short detective stories in The London Mystery Magazine.

This one is a great showcase of her talent as a writer, as well as a demonstration of her cleverness, as Inspector James Quy investigates the deadly fall of a woman from a roof onto the street below. Was it an accident or a cleverly contrived murder? The plot that Quy uncovers is fairly original and one that could be considered both a success as well as an abject failure. So I really hope all of Jerrold's short stories gets gathered in a single volume. I would love to read more from her.  

Macdonald Hastings' "Mr. Cork's Secret" was printed in the December, 1952 issue of the monthly magazine of Lilliput magazine, which was offered as a Christmas competition and promised a reward of 150 pounds to everyone who could deduce the titular secret. The solution and winners were announced several months later. Interestingly, Edwards posted the answer to the secret at the end of the book. So you can try and challenge yourself. Plot-wise, this twist in the tail turned this fairly ordinary crime story into one of the best and most original Christmas stories about stolen jewelry. A genuinely clever piece that involves bloodied corpse in a hotel room, several famous thespians, a newspaper reporter and a well-mannered burglar. A very fun and eventually clever story.

Unfortunately, I did not care all that much for the next pair of stories, Julian Symons' "The Santa Claus Club" and Michael Gilbert "Deep and Crisp and Even," which is convenient excuse to skip them and not further bloat this blog-post.

Finally, the last entry, Josephine Bell's "The Carol Singers," was first published in Murder Under the Mistletoe (1992) and the story ends this collection on a fairly dark, grim and sad note – even for a collection of detective stories about bloody murder and thievery. Old Mrs. Fairlands occupies the ground floor flat of a converted Victorian family home, which once housed her entirely family and a domestic staff, but this became untenable by the late 1940s. So the house was converted and the floors rented out as apartments. The reader is also told how old age is catching up with the poor woman, who needs a solid hour to get dressed and sometimes too tired to make supper, which leaves her faint and thirsty, but the worst is yet to come.

Circumstances lead her to be all alone in the large house on Christmas, which provided an opportunity to a small group of home-invaders, pretending to be carol singers, to overtake Mrs. Fairlands. She was tied to a chair and gagged. And there she was left and eventually take her last, labored breathe after being completely "exhausted by pain, hunger and cold." It's even sadder when you realize the carol singers who did this were children! However, the ending showed Bell was not willing to plunge the reader in an all-encompassing darkness and provided a cop-out ending, but it remains a well-written, powerful and chilling story. In particular the part up until her death.

So, all in all, Crimson Snow is a nicely balanced collection of holiday-themed detective-and thriller stories, which managed to avoid all of the usual suspects and consists almost entirely of rarely anthologized short stories – even a couple of genuine rarities. And that's always a plus for these kind of short story collections. I really enjoyed breezing through all of these stories and will have to take a look at some of these other collections. I just hope I haven't breezed through this review too fast. By the end, it was basically just banging on the keyboard. 

Well, that's it for this blog-post and I'll try to lay-off the Christmas/wintry mysteries for now, because last year it actually burned me out. 

Come Into My Parlor

"Well, one of us must have killed him!"

- Mrs. White (Clue, 1985)

Last year, the first officially sanctioned Agatha Christie pastiche, The Monogram Murders (2014) by Sophie Hannah, was released and garnered criticism for its implausible, convoluted plotting and inaccurate portrayal of Hercule Poirot.

The estate has always been protective of Agatha Christie's intellectual property and never allowed an author to pen a continuation or a previously unrecorded case in one of her series before, which is probably why this one fell short of the mark.

For over ninety years, the only standard for an Agatha Christie novel was set by the Queen of (Golden Age) Mysteries herself, which is a tough bill to fill for any contemporary crime novelist. It would be like asking Napoleon III to equal Napoleon I on the battlefield. Sure, you could expect the same results, but disappointment probably won't be trotting far behind those expectations.

How different was the situation at the beginning of this millennium: there was still entire stack of Hercule Poirot mysteries to be filmed, Miss Marple eagerly awaited a return to the small screen and a handful of stage plays were being novelized by Charles Osborne – a journalist and author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982).  

During the late 1990s, early 2000s, HarperCollins were reissuing all of Christie's book in hardback in the order they were originally published, which included new material such as Black Coffee (1998), The Unexpected Guest (1999) and Spider's Web (2000) – novelisations of stage plays that didn't endure the same, long-running success of The Mousetrap (1952-present). Well, in my time away from this blog, I serendipitously came across a beautiful, hardcover edition of Spider's Web and finally got around to reading it. You know you're reading a previously unexplored minefield by Christie, when you find out you have been eyeing the wrong suspect the entire time.

Christie wrote Spider's Web in 1954 for "the British film star, Margeret Lockwood, who wanted a role that would exploit her talent for comedy" and "stayed for 774 performances" at the Savoy Theatre in London.  

The story opens at Copplestone Court, eighteenth-century country home of Henry Hailsham-Brown, Foreign Office diplomat, and his wife, Clarissa, who's entertaining friends and waiting for her husband to return home from work. It's a warm, homely picture that's disturbed when a man named Oliver Costello is announced by the butler. Costello was the man who probably introduced Henry's first wife, Miranda, to the drugs that destroyed their marriage, but Costello has married Miranda and now she wants their daughter, "Pippa," back from Henry – who's scared to death of her mother and Costello.

Agatha Christie: The Last True Queen of Great Britain

There's one particular aspect of that plot strand that's rather dark and atypical for Christie (Costello sexually abused Pippa), which could be something Osborne added to make the story more appealing to readers of modern, psychological-and character driven novels of crime. After all, the dark cover of Spider's Web is stamped with "A Novel" instead of such vulgar terms as "A Mystery" or "A Thriller," but at least it's less pretentious than "A Literary Thriller." Anyway, moving on.

Clarissa doesn't breath a word of the visit to her husband, because he has returned with the rather important tasking of hosting a (secret) meeting at their home between the premier of the Soviet Union and the British Prime-Minister. The only thing Clarissa has to do is leave ham sandwiches and hot coffee in the library, while he's going to fetch the "guests," but in that very same library she stumbles over the lifeless body of Costello – clobbered over the head with something sharp. Luckily, Clarissa has the clarity of mind to do what everyone would do in such a situation: call a couple of friends to hide the body.

The three friends are her godfather, Sir Rowland Delaheye, Hugo Birch and a young man, named Jeremy Warrander, who's in love with Clarissa and after some convincing (including setting up a bridge-alibi), they decide to help. To quote Warrander, "what's a dead body or two among friends?" Unfortunately, an anonymous phone call was made to the police telling them there has been a murder at Copplestone Court and they send Constable Jones and Inspector Lord, who doesn't believe there hasn't been a murder and makes things very difficult for them – especially after he's been proven to be correct.

Clarissa has to draw from her rich well of imagination, which often wondered what she would do if she ever found a dead body in the library, to find explanations for the ever-expanding web of lies she's weaving to keep everyone out of trouble. Even going as far as drawing up a dummy case against herself, claiming self-defense, to protect Pippa. The living quarters setting and group of friends, having each others back, recalled London Particular (1952) by Christianna Brand, but done in the light-hearted, good natured humor reminiscent of Kelley Roos and the Tommy and Tuppence stories in Partners in Crime (1929).

Throw-in a dead antique dealer, a hidden drawer containing an envelope and autograph of Queen Victoria and a good use for that hoary, 19th century plot-device known as the secret passage and you have a fun, fast-paced comedy thriller in which the reader is in the pleasant position of knowing more than Inspector Lord, but not enough to know who's hand is actually behind it all. Not in my case, anyway.

I'll return presently with a new review/blog-post.