Nick Quarry's The Girl With No Place To Hide

Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) was an American writer of pulp crime and adventure novels, some written under his own name and others under a host of pseudonyms. The Girl With No Place To Hide, published in 1959, was the second of his six Jake Barrow private eye thrillers written under the name Nick Quarry.

Hardbitten PI Jake Barrow sees a girl being beaten up and rescues her. She wants somewhere to hide out and thinks that Jake’s apartment would be a good place. The girl is Angela and she tells Jake that a couple of guys are trying to kill her and that they’ve already killed some guy named Ernie. Jake gets a call and he has to go out to attend to a case. He tells Angela to stay put.

Jake discovers he’s been decoyed out of the apartment. By the time he gets back Angela has gone. Maybe she just took a powder and maybe somebody snatched her.

Jake has no idea who this Ernie character is but the next day he finds out that a guy named Ernie really did turn up dead in an alleyway. Jake figures the matter is worth looking into. He did after all promise to protect Angela.

The trail leads Jake into the worlds of high fashion and photography and the murky world of high-stakes gambling. He also uncovers some juicy domestic dramas that might be motives for murder. And there might be a connection to another much earlier murder.

There are quite a few dames mixed up in this case. One of the dames, Lavinia, is a knife-thrower. That’s her profession. She worked a knife-throwing act in a carny. Another woman who seems to be mixed up in the case is Nel. She had been Ernie’s secretary and now someone is trying to kill her but she claims to know nothing that would cause someone to want to bump her off.

Of more immediate concern to Jake is the fact that someone is trying to bump him off.

There’s a decent well worked-out plot here with plenty of suspects and plenty of possible motives.

There’s also plenty of action with some moderately graphic (by 1959 standards) violence. And there’s as much sleazy paranoid noir atmosphere as anyone could reasonably demand. And you get quite a bit of hardboiled dialogue.

In this type of fiction the key was to get a good balance between plot and atmosphere and the author manages that very effectively in this instance.

Jake is definitely a tough guy PI. He most definitely does not like to be pushed around. He’s a pretty good guy overall and he doesn’t have much liking for people who go around terrorising, and murdering, women. In fact he doesn’t have much time for murderers. He’s not a Boy Scout. He’s not an outrageous womaniser but if a woman is willing then he won’t say no.

He likes money, he likes it a lot, but he likes to earn it honestly. He’s not self-righteous about it but he does have ethics. He does the right thing but he doesn’t make a song and dance about it.

Jake is a likeable enough and reasonably colourful hero.

Most of the women have the potential to turn out to be either innocent victims, innocent bystanders or scheming femmes fatales and Quarry keeps us guessing about every one of them.

It’s not exactly ground-breaking but overall this is a well-crafted noirish private eye thriller which provides very solid entertainment. Highly recommended. It's been reprinted by Black Gat Books.

I’ve reviewed another of the Jake Barrow PI novels, No Chance in Hell (which is also very good), and also one of the thrillers he wrote as Ian McAlister, Driscoll’s Diamonds (a terrific book).

Nick Quarry's No Chance in Hell

Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) was an American who wrote in a number of different genres using quite a few different pseudonyms. He wrote westerns. He wrote adventure thrillers under the name Ian McAlister (including the excellent Driscoll’s Diamonds) and he wrote lots of crime thrillers. Under the name Nick Quarry he wrote the half-dozen Jake Barrow private eye thrillers. No Chance in Hell, published in 1960, was the fifth book in this series.

Jake Barrow wants to show off his luxurious new apartment to his girlfriend Sandy (a lady cop), but when they get to the apartment there’s a girl there. Her name is Nina Cloud, she’s a sixteen-year-old Navajo girl and she’s the daughter of Johnny Cloud, an old army buddy of Jake’s. Johnny has told Nina that she’s in danger and that she’s to trust Jake.

Johnny Cloud seems to have landed himself in trouble of some sort. Whatever that trouble is it’s led to the murder of Johnny Cloud’s girlfriend Margo, an attempt to kidnap Nina and the shooting of Sandy. It’s the shooting of Sandy that has Jake really riled up. She’s in hospital and the surgeons don’t know if she will live.

All Jake knows about the man who shot Sandy is that he’s tall and redheaded, but Jake intends to find him and kill him.

Revenge for the shooting of Sandy is Jake’s main motivation but in order to find the man who shot her he’s going to have to unravel the mysteries surrounding Johnny Cloud and his daughter. Jake is going to have to figure out just exactly what kind of a jam Johnny is in, and he’s going to try to get Johnny out of that jam. They’re buddies. And since Johnny is a buddy Jake is obviously also determined to keep Nina Cloud safe.

The first step is to find the red-headed man. Jake thinks the red-headed man was working for Harvey Kew. Kew has a lot of business interests, some of them legal, and he’s a powerful influential man. Getting to see Harvey Kew isn’t easy but Jake does get to see Harvey’s wife. That makes a few things clearer.

There are quite a few women mixed up in this case. I wouldn’t describe any of them as classic femmes fatales although some of them could certainly be dangerous. If Jake can find out exactly where each of the women fits in the puzzle he should be able to solve the case.

If he lives long enough. Jake has picked some powerful people to upset. And some very nasty people. Jake gets beaten up so many times that you wonder what keeps him going. In fact it’s the power of hate that drives him.

There’s a rather epic chase sequence through the storm sewers after Jake is framed for a murder.

This is a fine hardboiled mystery thriller with a nice little final twist. There’s a great deal of violence and it’s moderately graphic. There’s no sex at all. I’m not sure I’d describe this novel as noir. It’s more an action-packed roller coaster ride of a crime suspense thriller.

While noir protagonists tend to be swept along by events Jake Barron is a guy who makes things happen. They don’t always turn out as well as he’d hoped but at least he keeps things moving. He’s not a guy who waits passively for trouble to come to him - he’ll go looking for it and he usually finds it.

He’s pretty much your basic tough guy private eye hero.

There’s nothing really dazzlingly original here. This is just a very well-told very satisfying tough private eye yarn. That’s good enough for me. Highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Nick Quarry's The Girl With No Place To Hide.

Seabury Quinn’s The Dark Angel

The Dark Angel is a collection of tales by Seabury Quinn that were published in Weird Tales in the early 1930s. It includes his short novel The Devil’s Bride.

Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) was an American pulp writer who enjoyed considerable success. In fact in the 1920s and 30s he was the most popular of all the Weird Tales writers. His reputation did not last. While his fellow Weird Tales writers like H.P. Lovecraft Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith have gained at least a limited degree of literary respectability Quinn is still (for the most part) reviled as one of the kinds of hack writer who gave the pulps a bad name.

That’s a bit unfair. Quinn had no literary pretensions whatsoever. He wrote to earn money. To achieve the success that he did achieve he needed to have a very sound instinct for what would work in commercial terms and he most certainly did have that instinct. He wrote commercially oriented pulp fiction and he wrote it very well.

His tales of occult detective Jules de Grandin (with an American doctor named Trowbridge acting as his Watson) are immense fun but they’re also very clever.

Jules de Grandin is a bit like Hercule Poirot if you can imagine Poirot on crystal meth. He’s a wildly over-the-top character, insanely self-confident and utterly unstoppable and remorseless in his pursuit of those who use occult powers for evil.

The Lost Lady is a tale of the East. More specifically it has its origins in French Indo-China. It involves a woman from the East, but not of the East. In involves evil and it involves power but it is the belief in evil and in power that matters. Actually it involves several women, one of whom is (or was) a Khmer temple-slave but she is European, not Khmer.

White slavery was an immensely popular subject at the time (with plenty of salacious potential) but this is not an ordinary story of white slavery. It does however have lots of salacious content.

The Ghost Helper is obviously a ghost story and it’s quite a good one. We start with a married couple and there is obviously some tension between them. Jules de Grandin and his friend Dr Trowbridge are then called in to treat the wife who seems to have been terrified by something. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to reveal that there really is a ghost but it’s the motives of the ghost that are important. A good story.

In Satan’s Stepson an old foe of de Grandin’s returns and he faces a new and even more terrifying foe. It is a tale of a man and a woman who both cheat death, but in very different ways. And it is a tale of a monster, partly human and partly diabolical, not a vampire but just as monstrous. It is a tale of an evil that can only be destroyed in a very specific way. And it is a tale of espionage as well. This is Quinn at his best, superbly inventive and energetic. A very good story.

The Dark Angel involves a series of murders, apparently carried out by an angel of Satan. Jules de Grandin finds that are all kinds of evil in the world and evil is not always where you expect it to be. This one is a bit too obvious but it’s OK.

There’s murder at the ballet in The Heart of Siva. Someone is trying to prevent the Issatakko Ballet Russe from presenting their latest somewhat outrageous production and the motivations could be religious. There’s some decent suspense in this one, some gruesomeness and some sleaze and of course hints of sinister eastern conspiracies and secret societies. And some real creepiness. These are the kinds of things Quinn did well and it’s a very good story.

In The Bleeding Mummy de Grandin and Trowbridge are called to the home of archaeologist Professor Larson, to find that Larson has suffered a grisly and terrifying death. He had been in the process of unwrapping a mummy he had brought back from Egypt. His is just the latest in a series of deaths associated wth his most recent expedition. The first mystery that Jules de Grandin must solve is the manner of the professor’s death but there is another much more ancient mystery to be solved as well. This is a rather scary story and a clever one as well.

The Door to Yesterday deals with a series of mysterious deaths, horrors from the past, a giant snake, voodoo and an interesting take on haunted houses. You can’t go wrong with those ingredients and I’m especially find of voodoo tales so for me this story was definitely a winner.

A Gamble in Souls is one of the cleverer stories in the collection. For some reason de Grandin and Trowbridge pay a visit to the penitentiary, or more specifically to Death Row, and witness a heart-breaking scene. A woman named Beth is saying farewell to the man she loves, a man named Lonny who is to be executed next day. A few hours later de Grandin and Trowbridge encounter the woman again. She is about to commit suicide by throwing herself off a bridge. While they try to dissuade her from suicide she pours out her tragic story. Lonny is innocent. The murder of which he was convicted was carried out by his brother Larry. But Beth is married to Larry and cannot testify against him, and therefore there is no way to save Lonny from the executioner.

The case is so hopeless that even Jules de Grandin is powerless - unless perhaps his old friend Hussein Obeyid can do something to save Lonny. De Grandin has seen Obeyid do many seemingly impossible things. Obeyid thinks that he may be able to help although he can make no guarantees that such a fantastic scheme will work. And it is a fantastic scheme. A very good story.

In The Thing in the Fog two young men are attacked in the city by a huge dog. One is killed, the other seriously hurt and would have been slain had Jules de Grandin not happened to be on the scene. The attack happened at night, in thick fog. The injured young man’s fiancée Sallie is of course dreadfully upset and tells de Grandin a strange story that confirms the Frenchman’s suspicion that they are not dealing with a dog but a werewolf. And this young lady may well be tainted by lycanthropy as well.

Quinn gives his own rather interesting spins to werewolf lore - you don’t need silver bullets to kill a werewolf and the curse of lycanthropy can be transmitted in many ways. These variations on standard werewolf lore are the highlight of the story.

De Grandin has an added incentive in this adventure - Sallie and her young man wish to worry and being a Frenchman de Grandin is determined to see young love triumph. But can the taint of lycanthropy be removed from Sallie? This is a fairly entertaining werewolf tale.

The Hand of Glory is the final story in the collection. The hand of glory itself (the hand of a condemned murderer which was supposed to have magical powers) plays only a minor part in the story. It’s a tale of the old gods (or in this case the old goddesses) exercising their evil powers. Not a bad story but nothing special.

This collection also includes the short novel The Devil’s Bride which I’d already read and which I reviewed here a few years back.

Summing Up

There’s no sense in trying to claim that Seabury Quinn was the equal of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard. He clearly wasn’t. But he knew how to assemble the right ingredients for a pulp story and he knew how to cook up those ingredients into a good entertaining tale. This collection is on the whole pretty enjoyable. Recommended.

The Horror on the Links, Seabury Quinn

The Horror on the Links is the first volume issued by Night Shade Books in their complete collection of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories. The stories in this first volume were all published in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1928. Seabury Quinn was an incredibly prolific contributor to Weird Tales. While his Weird Tales contemporaries like H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard continue to have strong followings Quinn’s reputation has not lasted anywhere near as well. In his day he was however the most popular of all the Weird Tales writers.

Some of de Grandin’s cases have supernatural explanations. Those that have rational explanations are possibly even more bizarre.

The Horror on the Links introduces the two main characters who appear in all the stories. Dr Samuel Trowbridge is the portly and rather staid American doctor who acts as narrator and generally plays the Dr Watson role. He meets colourful French doctor/scientist/occult detective Jules de Grandin when mysterious murders take place in Trowbridge’s home town of Harrisonville. A young man has survived a savage attack with serious injuries which provide a vital clue. Several young women were not so lucky. Trowbridge is the sceptic who cannot believe de Grandin’s crazy theories about the crime.

The Tenants of Broussac moves the action to an ancient chateau in France. The tenants of this crumbling pile all seem to come to extraordinarily grisly ends. It’s a haunted house story but with some fairly effective and atmospheric moments.

In The Isle of Missing Ships de Grandin has been employed by Lloyds of London to investigate the loss of a disturbing number of ships. This story features a memorable villain  and an extremely clever setting beneath the sea (with perhaps just a hint of Captain Nemo). The political incorrectness level of this story is absolutely off the scale.

I can’t say very much at all about The Vengeance of India without risking spoilers. It’s a tale of sudden, very sudden, death and vengeance long delayed.

The Dead Hand employs the fairly well-worn device of a disembodied hand. It’s made more interesting by the fact that in Quinn’s de Grandin stories you never know if the solution is going to involve the supernatural or not and the explanation is quite clever.

Quinn could be quite grisly at times and The House of Horror is very grisly indeed. Lost at night in driving rain de Grandin and Trowbridge take refuge in an old mansion and what they find there shocks even de Grandin. This one is perhaps just a bit too reliant on sheer gruesomeness and really that’s about all this story has going for it.

In Ancient Fires we discover that love can survive even the greatest sacrifice. It’s a kind of ghostly romance story.

The Great God Pan deals with what today would be called a cult.

The Grinning Mummy deals, obviously, with a mummy and naturally enough there’s a curse.

The Man Who Cast No Shadow is a very old central European nobleman. Very old indeed. But perhaps not always quite so old.

The Blood-Flower is pretty obviously a werewolf story but it demonstrates Quinn’s ability to come up with intriguing twists on old ideas. In this case a knowledge of botany is required to combat the lycanthropic menace. We also discover that modern technology can be just as effective as older methods of disposing of werewolves.

A woman who fears she is losing her husband to another woman might not seem like the sort of case that would interest Jules de Grandin but this other female is no ordinary woman, if she is a woman at all. The tale of The Veiled Prophetess all started with a visit to a fortune-teller, and with an Egyptian statue.

The Curse of Everard Maundy is a story of a voodoo curse, but a curse with an unusual twist. It’s almost as if those afflicted curse themselves.

Creeping Shadows begins with a man who has been dead for several days, except that he can’t have been since he was seen alive by three reliable witnesses just a few hours earlier. And it’s a story of death stalking men whose greed tempted them into a very unwise theft indeed.

The White Lady of the Orphanage is a rather grisly story of children who mysteriously vanish from an orphanage. It relies a bit too much on shock value for my tastes.

The Poltergeist tells of a young woman afflicted by strange and frightening manifestations which threaten her sanity and her very life. A poltergeist certainly, but what is more interesting is the origin and nature of this ghostly menace. Jules de Grandin comes to suspect that the answer lies in the past, but whose past?

The Gods of East and West is a duel for the possession of a woman’s soul, fought out between the monstrous Indian goddess Kali and the spirits of the Dakota people of North America.

Mephistopheles and Company, Ltd offers a particular challenge, de Grandin’s adversary being the Devil himself. Or at least a representative of that gentleman. A young Austrian woman is the victim of demonic possession although de Grandin suspects it’s not quite so simple as that.

It was inevitable that sooner or later de Grandin would come up against a case involving ancient Egypt and mummies. The Jewel of Seven Stones is almost a stock-standard mummy story but with a few crucial differences. For one thing the mummy is a Christian mummy. The stones themselves are a nice touch. This is one of Quinn’s more ambitious and complex stories and it’s one of his best, combining horror, suspense and romance.

In The Serpent Woman de Grandin takes on the case of a woman suspected of murdering her child. Is it murder, kidnapping or could it really be a giant snake?

Body and Soul is a tale of Egyptology and an attempt to provide evidence of life after death which unleashes  killer from beyond the grave. Quite a creepy story.

Restless Souls is a story of love and vampires, and love after death. One of the best of the de Grandin stories, and one of the few that adds just a little depth to the hero.

The Chapel of Mystic Horror is an ancient villa that had been dismantled, transported from Cypus to America and reassembled. The evil that was in the villa was brought to America along with the stones.

These stories are fairly consistent in quality. None are truly great stories but they’re all clever and entertaining. There are only a couple that are a little weak and there's a handful (such as The Jewel of Seven Stones and Restless Souls) that are particularly good.

They are also pure pulp. In fact they’re remarkably trashy, although they’re trashy in a good way. Jules de Grandin is a character entirely lacking in subtlety or depth. He’s like a hyperactive Hercule Poirot with none of the qualities that make Poirot interesting. None of this really matters. It’s the plots that matter and they’re gloriously ingenious. Quinn takes just about every horror cliché you can possibly think of - vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, voodoo, witchcraft, ancient curses, mad scientists - but he always seems to manage to give these old ideas fresh new twists. And for all their trashiness these tales are fast-moving and entertaining and they have the vitality and manic energy of pulp fiction at its best. Quinn is certain not the equal of a Lovecraft or a Robert E. Howard but his stories are inventive and they’re great fun. Recommended.

Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery

The American Gun Mystery appeared in 1933 and was the sixth of the Ellery Queen mysteries. And it’s a rather controversial one among fans of golden age detective fiction.

This is a story about cowboys and cowgirls and six-shooters and horses and roping steers and all that sort of stuff, but it’s set in New York City. Wild Bill Grant’s rodeo and wild west show has come to town. The venue is the Colosseum, a gigantic sports arena operated by promotor Tony Mars. As a special extra added attraction the show will feature former cowboy movie star Buck Horne doing an exhibition of trick riding and sharpshooting.

On the opening night Inspector Richard Queen of the NYPD and his son Ellery just happen to be in the audience. The show takes an unexpected turn. Murder was not part of the program but murder does take place, in full view of 20,000 witnesses. And in spite of all those witnesses, and in spite of Inspector Queen’s decision to seal off the Colosseum so that not a single soul is able to leave until the mystery is cleared up, the mystery is not cleared up. The identity of the killer remains unknown, the details of the murder remain obscure and most exasperatingly the murder weapon cannot be found.

The victim was shot. Lots and lots of guns are found. But not one of these guns is the murder weapon. The various participants in the show were all carrying guns and during the course of the show they all fired their guns but since this is a Wild West Show their guns are all large-calibre revolvers. The fatal shot came from a .25 automatic.

This is not quite an impossible crime story but it does have tendencies in that direction.

The controversial element I alluded to earlier is the puzzle of the missing gun. When Ellery finally reveals the solution to that part of the puzzle many readers find themselves disappointed or even enraged. The objections to the solution are that it’s silly, it’s implausible or that it’s a cheat. It is certainly silly. It does stretch plausibility to the limit. As to its being a cheat, that’s a matter of opinion. There is a very definite clue that points to the solution but the solution itself is so outrageous that very few readers are going to grasp the significance of the clue. I’m personally inclined to feel that the solution to the missing gun puzzle is not very satisfying and is even just a tad irritating.

It must however be pointed out that the missing gun puzzle is only one minor part of the story. In fact it’s not important at all as far as the solution of the murder mystery is concerned. The finding of the gun only matters insofar as it will be difficult to get a conviction in a murder case without a murder weapon.

Another possible weakness is the motive which is not revealed until the final page, although admittedly there are clues that make the motive (mostly) plausible.

Then there’s Ellery himself. Many readers seem to dislike him intensely. He does have certain affectations, he does love showing off his erudition, he can be high-handed and he does have the habit of not letting people know how much of the puzzle he has already figured out. He’s like a younger and more callow version of Philo Vance. On the other hand he is a young man and it’s hard to dislike a young man for having the faults of youth. I like him but your mileage may vary.

So this book does have its flaws. It also has considerable strengths. Circuses and theatres provide wonderful settings for murder mysteries and a Wild West show works every bit as well. These are strange self-contained worlds filled with colourful eccentrics who have their own distinctive codes of behaviour and even honour. In this case the authors have enormous fun with the whole Wild West thing and they throw in elements of other equally bizarre sub-cultures. Among the assorted possible suspects are gambling joint owner Julian Hunter, prize-fighter Tommy Black and movie star Mara Gay while both Buck Horne and his daughter Kit are or were stars of Hollywood cowboy movies. There’s also a glimpse into the fascinating world of newsreels (which provides a valuable clue). And the fact that the Wild West world has been transported to the middle of New York City adds to the fun.

The plotting is typical early Queen, extremely complex but with plentiful clues and apart from the disappearing gun it holds together well enough. This is a flawed Ellery Queen but while the flaws in The Spanish Cape Mystery proved fatal The American Gun Mystery is mostly successful if you overlook that pesky and annoying little .25 automatic. Generally enjoyable, although not as good as The French Powder Mystery, The Siamese Twin Mystery or The Greek Coffin Mystery. Recommended.

Ellery Queen's The Chinese Orange Mystery

The Chinese Orange Mystery appeared in 1934. It was the eighth of the Ellery Queen mysteries written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee (not counting the Drury Lane books published under the Barnaby Ross pseudonym). And it has a wonderful setup.

A fat little man is murdered on the twenty-second floor of the Hotel Chancellor in New York. Everything about the murder is backwards. The victim’s clothes are on back-to-front. Every item in the room has been turned back-to-front as well. As the case progresses more backwards items emerge. Even Ellery Queen has to confess to being puzzled.

The twenty-second floor is occupied by the wealthy Kirk family - the elderly curmudgeonly scholar Dr Kirk, his son Donald and daughter Marcella. The body was found in Donald Kirk’s office. In partnership with the rather snobbish Felix Berne Donald runs an up-market arty publishing business known as the Mandarin Press (one of the many links to China in this story).

Also present at the time of the murder were Donald’s friend Glenn MacGowan (engaged to Marcella), a young would-be writer named Jo Temple who was brought up in China, the glamorous and slightly mysterious beauty Irene Llewes, Dr Kirk’s nurse Miss Diversey and Donald Kirk’s private secretary Jimmy Osborne.

As well as everything about the murder being backwards there are also various connections to both China and stamp collecting. One particular stamp plays a vital role in the story and that stamp happens to be a great rarity - because it was printed backwards!

There’s another puzzle that has to be unravelled - the identity of the murder victim.

The setup is so clever and the idea of the backwards crime is so original that you can’t help worrying that the solution, when it’s finally revealed, will be a letdown. Fortunately though it doesn’t disappoint. It’s far-fetched certainly but it’s conceived with such skill that we have to admit that it really is plausible. The motive and identity aspects are also tied in with the murder method in an intricate and entirely satisfying way. There’s also some fine misdirection. I have to confess that I didn’t have the remotest idea of the identity of the murderer until Ellery revealed it. As a pure puzzle plot this is one of the very best of the Queens.

There’s also some fun stuff about stamp collecting, such as the fact that some collectors specialise entirely in “locals” - semi-official stamps issued before proper government-controlled postal systems were established. The rather curious obsession that stamp collectors have for flawed or misprinted stamps adds an amusing touch and becomes a plot point as well.

This is also very much a New York novel. By the mid-30s Dannay and Lee were starting to send Ellery off into the countryside but personally I think he’s most at home in New York.

The S.S. Van Dine influence is still evident in this tale and Ellery has his Philo Vance-ish moments. Personally that doesn’t bother me. I like Philo Vance, and I like the early incarnation of Ellery Queen. The affectionate antagonism between Ellery and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, adds more fun.

The Chinese Orange Mystery is for my money one of the most completely successful of the early Ellery Queen mysteries. Very highly recommended.

The book was filmed in 1936 as The Mandarin Mystery.

Ellery Queen's Calamity Town

Calamity Town marked a major change in direction for the Ellery Queen mysteries. Published in 1942 this was the first of the so-called Wrightsville mysteries which saw the authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) moving away from the puzzle-plot mysteries that had brought them so much success and towards a more character-driven and self-consciously realist style. Unfortunately the result is a book that fails on every level.

New York detective story writer Ellery Queen decides to move to a small town in New England. Presumably he is looking for inspiration for his next novel. He rents a house that has such a bad reputation that it has become known as Calamity House. The house had been built by the town’s most prominent citizen, John F. Wright, for his daughter and her new husband to live in. Just before the wedding the prospective bridegroom disappears. The house is left empty - the one person who rents it dies mysteriously as soon as he moves in.

Calamity House happens to be the only house in the town available for rent and Ellery is happy to sign a six-month lease. 

John F. Wright runs the local bank and the Wright family more or less runs the town. Ellery is drawn into the family’s dramas when he takes a shine to Wright’s daughter Pat. Pat has two sisters. Nora, the one whose intended husband Jim ran out on her, has clearly had some kind of breakdown and rarely leaves her room. No-one wants to talk about the third sister, Lola. She is not Respectable.

Three years after running out on her Jim returns and now the wedding between Nola and Jim can finally take place.

Everything now seems to be hunky dory, until Pat and Ellery make a discovery that suggests that murder may be afoot. Ellery, rather recklessly, adopts a wait-and-see approach confident that he can prevent any such crime from being committed. This turns out to be the first of his many mistakes in this case.

When the murder does take place it appears to be an open-and-shut case but Ellery has his doubts. What follows is a long drawn-out saga to establish the truth and it has to be said that Ellery does not distinguish himself, missing painfully obvious clues.

It’s quite common for writers of detective fiction (and genre fiction in general) to decide quite suddenly that they really don’t want to be mere writers of detective fiction. They want to be Serious Writers. This almost invariably turns out to be an error of judgment. Such is the case with the Ellery Queen authors. Wanting to write more character-driven books is all well and good but they don’t display much flair for it. The characterisation is not very convincing. 

They also decided they wanted to add some social commentary (almost always a bad idea) and the results are heavy-handed in the extreme. The idea seems to have been to make the town itself a character in its own right. This is Calamity Town and it’s the real villain.  Dannay and Lee were New Yorkers and like so may urban intellectuals they clearly did not like or approve of small town America. Their hostility is unfortunately all too obvious. The people of Wrightsville are portrayed as narrow-minded gossip-ridden hypocritical bigots. In fact it’s the authors who come across as the real bigots. Their snarkiness is rather off-putting.

Then there’s the plot. A child of five could have solved this one but unfortunately Ellery can’t find a child of five to help him out so he spends months(!) bumbling about missing every vital clue. Being charitable I assume the idea was to make Ellery more human by making him fallible. That’s fair enough but sadly he comes across as a complete buffoon.

And then there’s the courtroom scenes. If your name isn’t Erle Stanley Gardner you’re well advised to avoid lengthy courtroom scenes. They can be dull, and in this case they are. The two Surprise Moves in the legal case are illogical, silly, gimmicky, pointless and embarrassing. 

The plot limps along until finally Ellery sees the light, and then for no logical reason decides not to reveal the truth until even more months have passed, thus adding more unnecessary padding to a book that already has major pacing problems.

I love the very early Ellery Queens (I love them very much indeed) but to be honest even as early as The Spanish Cape Mystery in 1935 there were signs that the authors’ powers of invention were flagging in regard to plotting. That book has a serious structural flaw that makes the identity of the killer just a little too obvious. 

Calamity Town should have been called Calamity Novel because that’s what it is - a misguided poorly conceived disaster. Very very disappointing.

If you’ve never read Ellery Queen then seek out their novels from the early 1930s. Books like The Greek Coffin Mystery and The French Powder Mystery are among the finest of all golden age mysteries. But give Calamity Town a miss.

Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery

The Spanish Cape Mystery, which was published in 1935,  was the ninth and last of the Ellery Queen “nationality” mysteries. It was also the last to feature the famous Challenge to the Reader. After this the two cousins (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee ) who comprised the Ellery Queen writing team would begin to change the style of the novels.

Like the other “nationality” mysteries The Spanish Cape Mystery can be considered to be a fairly pure example of the puzzle-plot murder mystery. 

The setting of the story is Spanish Cape, a rocky peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. It is connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of land. Since the whole of Spanish Cape is private property, belonging to millionaire Walter Godfrey, the setting has the effect of confining the possible suspects to the Godfrey family and their motley collection of house guests.

The story opens with a bungled kidnapping (by a giant one-eyed hoodlum known as Captain Kidd!) and soon thereafter the body of John Marco is found.

Ellery Queen and his old friend Judge Macklin have taken a cottage for the summer. The cottage just happens to be right next door to the Godfrey estate. When they discover one of the kidnap victims in their cottage it’s inevitable that Ellery and the judge will become intimately involved in the case. In fact they are soon invited to take up residence in the Godfrey mansion on Spanish Cape.

There is one curious thing about the corpse. It is stark naked. There is no possible reason why John Marco would have been sitting on the terrace overlooking the small beach at the far end of the cape stark naked. Therefore the killer must have removed his clothes. But why would a murderer waste time doing something so eccentric. Inspector Moley of the local police insists it’s just a smokescreen but Ellery is convinced that the corpse’s nakedness is the key to the mystery.

John Marco was a man of very evil reputation. When Walter Godfrey opines that his murderer has done the world a great service no-one is inclined to disagree. Murder however is still murder and Ellery is determined to solve the mystery.

The identity of the killer is in fact fairly obvious. Unravelling the means by which the murder was accomplished is the real challenge. It’s not exactly an impossible crime but there are some very strange circumstances which are likely to baffle even the most astute reader. Ellery himself is baffled and remains so until almost the end of the book.

Ellery likes to think of himself as as detective who regards crime-solving as a fascinating intellectual exercise into which human feelings do not enter but in this case he finds it increasingly difficult to ignore the human dimension.

The novel takes its title from the setting but there is also another cape, a rather theatrical item of clothing belonging to John Marco, which plays a crucial role in the story.

This is almost a maritime mystery - the sea and the peculiar local tides will play important parts in the solving of the mystery.

The early Ellery Queen mysteries are usually regarded as being somewhat in the S.S. Van Dine style so it’s amusing to find Ellery making reference to Philo Vance at one point. There are those who find the Ellery Queen of these early books to be a slightly irritating character. I’m a bit mystified by his. I find him to be quite likeable. But then I find Philo Vance to be likeable as well, so what do I know? In this book Ellery does reveal a more compassionate side to his nature and admits that he is even tempted to let the murderer go free.

The Spanish Cape Mystery has an amazingly complex plot but it is resolved in an eminently satisfactory fashion. The process by which Ellery eliminates all possible suspects except the actual murderer, and eliminates all possible explanations for the murder method except the correct one, provide exactly the kind of enjoyment that fans of golden age detective fiction crave. 

Highly recommended.

Ellery Queen and Lord Peter Wimsey on TV

There have been some pretty good television series based on the detective novels of the golden age. Recent attempts have generally been conspicuously unsuccessful or even outright disasters but back in the 1970s these things were often done surprisingly well.  

Two of my favourites were the Ellery Queen series starring Jim Hutton which aired on NBC in 1975 and 1976 and the 1970s BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries with Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter. 

For anyone who’s interested I’ve reviewed both the Ellery Queen and the Murder Must Advertise episode of the BBC Lord Peter Wimsey series on my Cult TV blog.

Q. Patrick's S.S. Murder

S.S. Murder is a 1933 mystery novel by Q. Patrick, an author with a complex and confusing series of identities. Q. Patrick was in fact a writing team, usually comprising Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912-1987) and Richard Wilson Webb (1901-1966) but at times also including Mary Louise White Aswell (1902-1984) and Martha Mott Kelley (1906-2005). Some of the books were written by Wheeler alone, other by varying combinations of the other writers. And just to ensure the maximum of confusion the books were published under the names Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, Jonathan Stagge and even Quentin Patrick.

S.S. Murder was one of their early efforts, written by Webb and Aswell.

The entire novel consists of a series of journal entries by newspaper reporter Mary Llewellyn, intended for her husband-to-be Davy (also a reporter). Mary has taken passage on the liner S. S. Moderna, bound for Rio de Janeiro. Mary is recovering after surgery and has been ordered to take things easy. Since she cannot participate in many of the shipboard activities due to her convalescence she eases the boredom by keeping a journal for the benefit of Davy, left behind in New York.

The epistolary novel was immensely popular in Victorian times but by 1933 was somewhat out of fashion. Its chief advantage was that it allowed the author to tell a story from several different points of view using multiple narrators. In the case of S.S. Murder there is only one point of view and one narrator. The technique was presumably chosen to give a sense of immediacy and to heighten the suspense (after all if the novel consists entirely of journal entries we cannot be absolutely certain that the narrator is not going to end up being the murderer’s final victim). There was most likely another reason for using the technique. It allows the authors to mimic, in a rather witty way, the celebrated “challenge to the reader” feature of the early Ellery Queen mysteries. In this case Mary Llewellyn informs Davy, in one of her later journal entries, that she has supplied him with all the information necessary to solve the crime and that she hopes he has been successful in doing so.

The epistolary nature of the novel is yet another example of the willingness of golden age detective fiction writers to experiment with structure and technique.

Shipboard settings could be, and were, used very successfully by a number of golden age writers, most notably Rufus King who set no less than three of his mysteries on board ships. A ship offers all the advantages of an isolated country house - the murderer has to be one of the passengers or crew and having committed the murder or murders he cannot physically escape but can only hope to avoid detection.

S.S. Murder doesn’t take long to get to the murderous action. One day out from port a man keels over dead during a game of bridge. The ship’s doctor immediately suspects poison, a suspicion confirmed by an autopsy. The circumstances make it clear that the killer had to be one of a fairly small number of people although the question of alibis will later become rather complicated.

Being a reporter Mary Llewellyn naturally senses the possibility of a scoop. She and Davy had covered murder cases in the past so she fancies her chances as an amateur detective. She does not however carry out the investigation single-handed. To complicate matters the two people with whom she collaborates in her investigation are both suspects, and as far as they are concerned she might well be a suspect also.

This will not be the last murder that enlivens the voyage of the S.S. Moderna, murder being more popular than deck tennis on this particular ship.

The plotting is reasonably solid and the unbreakable alibi angle is handled well. There is a certain weakness in the plot but  I won’t risk a spoiler by hinting at what it might be.

I would not place it in the top rank of golden age mysteries but S.S. Murder is a brisk and entertaining mystery of the second rank. Recommended.

Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery

The Siamese Twin Mystery was the seventh of the Ellery Queen novels and was published in 1933. Like The Egyptian Cross Mystery (the fifth in the series) a year earlier it shows signs of moving not only into more fantastic territory but even into the realms of the grotesque.

It certainly features one of the most extreme examples of the popular mystery novel mechanism of having a group of suspects isolated geographically and cut off from contact with the outside world. In this case the suspects, along with Ellery Queen and his father Inspector Richard Queen, are trapped in a mountain-top house by a raging forest fire. Needless to say the fire cuts the telephone lines. The fire not only isolates this small group of people, it threatens to annihilate them! There are occasions when a fictional detective finds himself in a race against time, with some disastrous consequence likely to follow if he does not solve the mystery within a specified time frame. This novel takes that a step further - Ellery has to solve the mystery before he and everybody else in the house become nothing but charred cinders! 

Of course we don’t really expect this fate to eventuate (given that we know that Ellery went on to be the hero of several dozen further novels) but Ellery certainly believes that death is imminent. Dr Johnson once remarked, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” In this instance knowing he is likely to be burnt to a crisp in the next day or so doesn’t initially seem to have had the desired effect on Ellery’s mind. He makes several serious errors during the course of his investigation. On the other hand as death seems to be becoming more and more imminent  he does seem to be finally inspired to find the correct solution.

Ellery’s mistakes may indicate that the authors were becoming bored with the notion of infallible amateur detectives, although Inspector Queen makes some even more serious errors (one of them very unfortunate indeed).

The murder victim in The Siamese Twin Mystery is brilliant surgeon Dr John Xavier who is engaged in some medical research of a rather grotesque nature. In fact from the moment that he and his father are forced to take shelter from the fire in Dr Xavier’s house Ellery has an uneasy feeling about the strange household dwelling on the mountain-top.

You may be wondering if the title is to be taken literally. This story does in fact involve actual siamese twins. While siamese twins have featured as characters in various horror stories this is to my knowledge the only occasion on which they feature in a detective story. 

The Siamese Twin Mystery is plotted with the skill one expects from the authors and it includes one particularly clever twist that serves to lead us astray, as it leads Ellery astray. It also features a very elaborate variation on the theme of dying messages left by murder victims. 

Oddly enough this novel apparently originally included the famous Challenge to the Reader that was such a feature of the early Ellery Queen mysteries but for some reason it appears that it was deleted from most of the paperback editions.

The Siamese Twin Mystery has everything that a fan of the golden age puzzle-plot detective story could possibly ask for. Highly recommended.

The Egyptian Cross Mystery

Ellery Queen’s 1932 novel The Egyptian Cross Mystery is something of an oddity as far as golden age detective stories go, by virtue of its sheer gruesomeness if nothing else. Both the gore and the plot make it in some ways an early predecessor of the awful serial killer novels that have been infesting the shelves of bookstores for the past few decades.

To me it doesn’t quite feel like an Ellery Queen novel. It’s almost as if the authors were experimenting with a change of style. It also has a lot of the elements one normally associates with the thrillers of its era. The story culminates in an extended cross-country chase by both car and aircraft!

The novel opens with a grisly murder in West Virginia. A local schoolteacher has been beheaded and crucified. The whole crime scene seems to indicate some kind of obsession with the letter T, or more likely with T as a symbol of a cross of some kind. Perhaps an Egyptian cross of some variety?

This bizarre crime remains unsolved for many months and Ellery has almost forgotten it when another equally gory murder is committed. The method seems to indicate plainly enough that the two murders are connected but there seems no possible connection between the two victims.

As if all this isn’t strange enough, a nudist colony also plays a key role in the plot. Not just nudists, but Egyptian god-worshipping nudists. And the Egyptian god they worship is right among them, in the flesh so to speak.

Ellery’s father Inspector Richard Queen plays a very minor role in this story, and the hunt for the murderer takes Ellery a long way from his more familiar New York haunts.

Despite the thriller elements there’s a puzzle here as well, of course. Personally I don’t think it’s one of the better Ellery Queen puzzles. When I can guess the identity of the murderer something has gone very wrong somewhere, because I’m generally hopeless at that sort of thing.

I’ve been reading the early Ellery Queens in sequence, and enjoying them very much, but this is the first one that has disappointed me just a little. I’m hoping that this book was just an aberration and that the next one will return to the much more successful formula of the earlier books.

Sant of the Secret Service

William Le Queux (1864-1927) was a prolific Anglo-French writer of mysteries and espionage thrillers. Along with E. Phillip Oppenheim he more or less invented the spy thriller genre. Sant of the Secret Service, published in 1918, is one of his later works in the genre.

The book is a king of episodic novel, chronicling the adventures of spy hunter Gerry Hunt. Along with his colleague, the beautiful and multi-talented Gabrielle Soyez, he is kept busy dealing with the hordes of German spies who infested Britain and France during the First World War. While there were undoubtedly real German spies operating during this period it is highly unlikely that they existed in anything like the numbers conjured up by Le Queux’s vivid imagination.

Le Queux’s style was lurid and sensationalistic to an extreme degree. The modern view is that his stories are dated and slow-moving. Perhaps, but they have charms of their own, conjuring up a vanished world. There’s less action than a modern reader would expect in a spy thriller but Le Queux does his best to create an atmosphere of breathless excitement.

Le Queux’s approach is very much of the Edwardian period and he never bothered to alter it. To him espionage was a game for gentlemen. Even in 1918 he would have appeared to possess the prejudices of an earlier era. In keeping with his Edwardian approach he relies a good deal on having his characters, especially Gabrielle Soyez, adopt disguises. This was a standard feature of thrillers and mysteries of the Victorian and Edwardian periods an by the time this book appeared it was already an old-fashioned technique. I don’t think being considered old-fashioned would ever have bothered Le Queux.

This is the spy thriller as melodrama and the plotting is somewhat clunky. There’s not much to the characterisations. Le Queux’s heroes were heroic and his villains villainous and it goes without saying that the heroes are French and English and the villains are German. The idea that German espionage agents might have seen themselves as loyal and patriotic servants of their country is not one that you will this author exploring.

Gabrielle Soyez must qualify as one of the earliest female master spies in literature and she’s portrayed as being more than just an attractive assistant to the hero. She is a heroic and capable figure in her own right.

Whatever his faults Le Queux was a major figure in the development of the spy thriller and if you claim to be a fan of that genre you need to read at least one of his books (and at least one of Oppenheim’s). Their works would by the 1920s be displaced by the far superior and more realistic and sophisticated espionage tales of John Buchan and Somerset Maugham but they had served their purpose, creating a readership for the genre that has not yet shown any signs of disappearing.

Sant of the Secret Service is fun in its own way and can be recommended to readers who are prepared to judge it by the standards of its own time.

The Devil’s Bride

Seabury Quinn wrote quite a few short stories featuring the occult detective Jules de Grandin. The Devil’s Bride, published in 1932, was the only de Grandin novel.

Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) was an American writer who was a prolific contributor to the pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Devil’s Bride is a tale of devil-worshippers in the United States. When a young woman, Alice Hume, disappears in mysterious (in fact seemingly impossible) circumstances Jules de Grandin soon finds himself on the trail of Satanists.

Alice Hume’s ancestor, David Hume, was himself of mysterious origins. It’s not until de Grandin discovers a manuscript hidden in an old Bible that the truth about Hume’s origins comes out. As de Grandin suspected, there was a connection between David Hume and a sect of devil-worshippers that flourished centuries ago in the Near East. The remnants of that sect survive and they are now operating in New Jersey.

Alice Hume is a descendant of the priests of that cult, and now the survivors of that sect want her back to serve as their high priestess.

What is at stake though is more than just an obscure Near Eastern cult. It is nothing less than an atheist conspiracy, financed by the Russian communists, to undermine western civilisation. This is a conspiracy theory worthy of Dennis Wheatley.

Jules de Grandin and his associates, a doctor named Troubridge (the narrator of the tale) and a detective from the Sûreté in Paris named Renouard, are up against fiends who practise human sacrifice. The conspiracy is also linked to the infamous Leopard Men of West Africa, practitioners of cannibalism.

This is a particularly lurid tale. Quinn never misses an opportunity to have one of his female characters naked. There’s more than a hint of perversity here. There are drugs and there is the dreaded bulala-gwai which is dispersed in a fine mist and comes in two forms - one form renders anyone who comes into contact with it

There’s also plenty of action as de Grandin and his colleagues pursue the Satanists both in the US and in Africa. There are Black Masses and there are primitive jungle rites. As you may have guessed this is a very politically incorrect novel. Delightfully so in fact.

Jules de Grandin is an entertaining hero, a bit like a low-rent (and much more violent) version of Hercule Poirot with his outrageous French accent. He differs from other occult detectives of this period in several ways. Apart from the much pulpier style of this story it’s also doubtful if the occult elements actually count as occult. There are no actual supernatural happenings. It’s more like a sleazy crime story with occult trappings. The criminals are all too human, with the occult essentially serving the interests of fiendish criminal activity. The Devil’s Bride is really a thriller which happens to involve devil-worshippers rather than straightforward criminals.

While the conspiracy theory elements are very reminiscent of Dennis Wheatley, in Wheatley’s books the occult was always a real presence. Quinn simply uses the occult to make an outrageous pulp thriller more outrageous and even sleazier.

The Devil’s Bride is, despite these reservations, a great deal of fun. It belongs at the more disreputable end of the pulp fiction spectrum, but it’s still worth making the acquaintance of Jules de Grandin. Recommended.

The Creation Oneiros paperback edition of The Devil’s Bride also includes a Jules de Grandin short story, The House of Golden Masks, an even more lurid tale of white slavery.

The French Powder Mystery

The French Powder Mystery was the second of the Ellery Queen mysteries by Manfred Bennington Lee (Manford Lepofsky) and Frederic Dannay (Daniel Nathan). It appeared in 1930.

The book certainly gets off to a stylish start. French’s Department Store in New York has a window exhibition of modernist furniture. Every day at the same time an employee of the store stages a demonstration of the features of this furniture, including in this case a foldaway bed. On this particular day when the employee presses the button to unfold the bed a corpse is revealed. It belongs to the wife of the owner of the store.

As you expect in an Ellery Queen novel there are plenty of suspects and plenty of clues. But which clues are the ones that matter? The murder could have been committed by almost any member of the French household as Mr French has private apartments on the top floor. There are seven keys to this private apartment, and those keys will assume considerable importance. The murder could also have been committed by any one of several employees of the store, including all the members of the board of directors (a meeting of the board took place in Mr French’s private rooms on the morning of the murder).

The murder might also be linked to a drug ring - the murdered woman’s daughter is a drug addict.

Inspector Richard Queen is frankly baffled, but his son Ellery (an enthusiastic amateur sleuth) is not dismayed by this puzzling case.

As with most of the early Ellery Queens this book contains their famous challenge to the reader - towards the end of the book the reader is informed that he now has possession of all the facts necessary to solve the case for himself, and (as was usual in the Ellery Queen mysteries) the plot is so ingenious that the murderer turns out to be the only person who could possibly have committed the crime.

There’s certainly no disputing the authors’ ability to construct a plot that is like a piece of precision machinery, with each part fitting together so as to produce one and only one solution.

Ellery Queen himself is not the most colourful of fictional detectives but he’s likeable enough. The father-and-son crime-solving team, with the father a professional detective who employs all the conventional methods of a good police officer while the son is a gifted amateur who relies more on pure reasoning, is an effective combination.

The French Powder Mystery is unlikely to disappoint fans of the golden age detective story.

Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery

The Greek Coffin Mystery marks my long overdue introduction to Ellery Queen. Published in 1932, this really is the apotheosis of the golden age detective story. The starting point for the story is the death of a New York art dealer of Greek ancestry. After the funeral it is discovered that his will has disappeared. This sets off a chain of events involving murder and art, a chain of events that almost manages to baffle the great detective himself.

Ingenious is an inadequate word to describe the immense complexity of the plot. And it has to be admitted that when the author issues his “Challenge to the Reader” (which was apparently a feature of all the early Ellery Queen novels) claiming that the reader now possesses all the clues needed to solve the mystery, and that there is only one possible solution that fits exactly, he really isn’t kidding. All the clues really are there, and it really is impossible for anyone else to have committed the crime. The skill with which the trail of clues is laid is breath-taking.

It’s not just the twists and turns of the plot that makes this such a marvellously pure embodiment of golden age crime fiction. It takes the lack of interest in psychology and characterisation that distinguishes this form to an extreme that I don’t think has ever been surpassed. The characters exist, and act, solely to serve the demands of the plot. This can be seen as a flaw, but in reality it’s part of the charm of this type of detective tale. It takes the reader into a world governed entirely by the rule of reason, a world in which any puzzle can be solved by the exercise of logic and the rules of deduction.

If you accept it on its own terms it works brilliantly. And it’s great fun

The Dutch Shoe Mystery, by Ellery Queen

The Dutch Shoe Mystery is one of the very early Ellery Queen mysteries, dating from 1931.

Ellery Queen has gone to the Dutch Memorial Hospital in New York to consult the medical director, an old pal of his, about a murder investigation he’s working on and he soon find himself slap bang in the middle of one of the biggest cases of his career. The founder and patron of the hospital, Abigail Doorn, is wheeled into the operating theatre for urgent surgery and is discovered to be dead. But not of natural causes. She has been strangled.

She is one of America’s wealthiest and most powerful women and her murder sends shock waves through the financial markets as well as the highest strata of society. There are quite a few potential suspects but the only worthwhile clue is a pair of white oxford shoes. Elleey and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, confess themselves to be completely baffled unto, a second murder unexpectedly presents the key to solving the puzzle.

The plot has all the intricacies you expect in a golden age detective tale, and then some. These early books included the famous “challenge to the reader” towards the end, where the reader is informed that all the clues necessary to the solving of the case have now been presented, and there is only one possible solution. It has to be admitted that (once the murderer is revealed) there really could only be one possible culprit. In fact the solution turns out to be annoyingly simple but it’s a measure of the skill of the two authors (Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee co-authored the books) that they are able to keep us guessing.

A highly enjoyable read for those who like the elaborate puzzle variety of mystery novel.

The Mystery Of The Green Ray

The Mystery Of The Green Ray is a 1915 espionage thriller that could also be considered as borderline science fiction.

William Le Queux (1864-1927) was an amazingly prolific author (with something like 150 novels to his credit) who specialised in thrillers and espionage novels. These often involved hypothetical accounts of German invasions of Britain or other deadly threats to the Empire.

He seems to have been a little on the eccentric side, but eccentric in an interesting way. He had a great enthusiasm for new technologies such as aircraft and radio, the latter playing an important role in The Mystery Of The Green Ray. Le Queux apparently had some slight problems distinguishing fact from fiction and ended up believing that the German intelligence services were out to get him. He convinced himself that he really had unearthed dastardly plots that threatened Germany’s war aims.

As the novel opens four young Englishmen are enjoying a peaceful days’ relaxation punting on the river but they are all too keenly aware of the storm clouds that are gathering. It is late July 1914 and the assassination of a certain Austrian archduke has Europe poised on the brink of war. Being patriotic manly Englishmen all four friends intend to do their bit by enlisting. Before doing so young Ronald Ewart must pay a visit to Scotland to see his fiancée Myra and her father, a retired general.

Ewart hopes to get in a bit of salmon fishing as well but this brief getaway proves to be anything but relaxing. Myra is also keen on fishing but disaster strikes unexpectedly - she is mysteriously struck blind! She sees a green flash and then nothing. Her father has an odd experience as well, reporting that a large rock overhanging the river seemed to be moving towards him. And then Myra’s faithful dog goes blind and as was the case with Myra it happens just as suddenly.

Ewart calls in a leading eye specialist who turns out to be a bit of an amateur detective and has connections with the military and naval authorities. He starts to suspect the possibility of some diabolical plot involving radio waves. There certainly is a conspiracy, but it’s much more bizarre than that. I won’t spoil it by revealing the exact nature of the plot but given that it takes place in 1914 and was written in 1915 you won’t get any prizes for guessing that the Germans are mixed up in it somewhere.

It’s all delightfully outlandish and a great deal of fun. The emphasis on gadgetry and diabolical inventions gives it a pleasingly pulpy feel. Le Queux was one of the major pioneers of spy fiction and fans of that genre should find plenty to enjoy.