The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971) by Edward D. Hoch

Decades before Crippen & Landru, Edward D. Hoch had about half a dozen collections of his voluminous detective fiction published, throughout the 1970s and '80s, covering only three of Hoch's lead detectives – namely Simon Ark, Jeffery Rand and Nick Velvet. Simon Ark was the first to get a solo collection with City of Brass (1971), while Rand and Velvet had to share the spotlight in The Spy and the Thief (1971). Velvet would get his own collection years later (The Thefts of Nick Velvet, 1978), but Rand had to wait nearly two decades for The Spy Who Read Latin (1990). Who didn't have to wait years, or decades, to get an additional collection was Ark.

The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971) was published practically alongside City of Brass. A short, snappish collection of five Simon Ark short stories from the 1950s and comes with an introduction from the editor of The Locked Room Reader (1968), Hans Stefan Santesson. So these aren't only Hoch's earliest short stories, but also among the earliest stories from his first detective series. Some of these early stories provide a better, more interesting perspective on Ark's character than the later stories that I'm familiar with.

Simon Ark, an elderly, normal looking man, claims to be over a thousand years old Coptic priest ("would you believe it if I told you I walked the sands of Africa with Augustine...") condemned to wander the Earth seeking out and exorcising evil. And, one day, do battle with the Prince of Darkness himself. One of the stories from this collection gives a possible origin, "a strange Coptic priest in the first century after Christ," who wrote "a gospel glorifying the Lord" that was denounced a fraud and turned him into a man who could be sent neither to Heaven nor Hell – doomed to wander forever ("...until such time as God would decide his fate"). So, unless Ark is supposed to be stark raving mad, this series can filed under hybrid mysteries as having an immortal detective certainly makes it qualify as one. Anyway, this series takes place during the second-half of the previous century and combating evil in this world means taking on the role of unofficial investigator. However, Ark is an investigator with a classical bend and the evils he exorcises are the type of bizarre murders and impossible crimes that would have been more at home during the first-half of that century.

"Village of the Dead," originally appeared in the December, 1955, publication of Famous Detective Stories, introduces Simon Ark and his nameless narrator, but the ending suggests Hoch probably didn't intend it to be the first in a series. Nor it to be proper detective story. This first brings the narrator, a magazine writer, to the tiny, isolated mining village of Gidaz where the population was reduced from seventy-three to zero overnight in a mass suicide when every men, women and child flung themselves off a hundred foot cliff. Simon Ark meets the narrator at the edge of the cliff as they look down at the bodies on the rocks below. What attracted Ark to the scene is a strange man, Axidus, who appeared as a religious figure in Gidaz two years previously ("I knew him long ago, in North Africa, as St. Augustine did..."). Axidus wielded a great influence over the isolated people of the village, but how could he have had a hand in the mass suicide? And why? Is this Axidus the same person Axidus from history or perhaps an even greater evil? It's not a spoiler to say the answers to all these questions reveal a far lesser evil than the devil's devilry. More like a dark, grim version of Scooby Doo leaving some lingering questions unanswered (like how the culprit "had ever heard the odd story of Axidus in the first place"). The narrator's final lines about Ark, "never saw him again after that night, but I have the feeling that he’s still around somewhere," shows this was probably meant to be a one-off. Just note that the last Simon Ark story was published in 2008.

So, on a whole, a somewhat unusual story, but an interesting start and introduction to Hoch's first series. Yes, it's one of those weird coincidences I read "Village of the Dead" right after Motohiro Katou's "In the Year of Quantum Mechanics" from Q.E.D. iff vol. 1.

"The Hour of None," originally published in Fall 1957 issue of Double-Action Detective & Mystery Stories, brings Ark and his narrator to the monastery of Saint John of the Cross in West Virginia. Ark received a letter from an old acquaintance, Brother Ling, who wrote to him "that your old enemy Satan is walking among us, in the mind of one of my friends" and that he's "possibly in danger" – a fear not unjustified. Brother Ling is pushed from a church tower before Ark got to speak to him. So now they have to find his killer with three principle suspects, Father Michael, Father Joseph and Father Mark, who were brought back to the United States by Brother Ling after being held prisoners in China for years. So an intriguing premise and, when it comes to form, it feels more like a Simon Ark story than the previous one. A great backdrop and cast of characters, but found the plot and especially the solution lacking. Things gets better in the last three stories!

"The Witch is Dead," first published in the April, 1956, issue of Famous Detective Stories, takes place at Hudsonville College for Women in Westchester County during the second decade of the Atomic Age. Not a place for old world witchcraft and magic, but Mother Fortune was still "peering into a mammoth crystal ball and telling you just what you wanted to hear about yourself." Recently, Mother Fortune went medieval by placing a curse on the students ("...your school will be a campus of the dead") over an old injustice from decades ago. And not without effect. A mysterious, unidentifiable illness is hospitalizing one student, after another, which naturally lured Ark to the campus. This case is complicated when Mother Fortune "died as all good witches must" in a burst of flames while alone inside her locked trailer.

Now this is far from Hoch's best detective story or locked room mystery, however, it's the first genuine detective story from this collection with a glimpse of the emerging short story giant. Hoch casually dropped one of those brazen, tell-tale clues identifying both murderer and method.

"Sword for a Sinner," originally published in the October, 1959, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, is unquestionably the best story from this collection. This time, Ark travels to the tiny village of Santa Marta, somewhere on the state line between Colorado and New Mexico, where Father Hadden asked him for help on a personal matter – believing he can communicate with the dead. Before they can even get down to talk, Father Hadden is informed a murder has been committed at the morada of Sangre de Cristo in the mountains. The village has seen the revival of the Penitentes, or Brotherhood of Penitentes, who perform self-torture as an act of devotion ("...rites of self-scourging and crucifixion..."). A practice that was banned by the church, but the society with its various chapters continued to exist and practice. So when they go to the morada, they find one of the most bizarre murder scenes Hoch has ever created. A dark, dimly cellar room full of life-size crucifixes with living figures tied to them, "horribly fantastically alive," wearing nothing more than a white loin cloth and a black hood. One of these crucified, hooded men was run through with a Spanish sword! The victim, Glen Summer, runs the local bar, Oasis, which Father Hadden described as "a den of sin." So plenty of potential suspects and motives to go around, but the key to solving the case is figuring out how the murderer was able to stab the correct victim under those circumstances. Ark's answer to this question is beautifully simplistic and logically. Something that makes you want to kick yourself, if you missed it. Those few years of experience were already paying off by '59.

Finally, "The Judges of Hades," originally appearing in the February, 1957, issue of Crack Detective & Mystery Stories, which brings this collection full circle. Sort of. The nameless narrator receives a devastating telegram, "YOUR SISTER AND FATHER KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT," which brings him back home to Maple Shades, Indiana. A town sometimes known through a never-ending prank as Hades (“...since the boys are always painting over the sign”). Things get worse when he arrives as the police believes it was a murder-suicide by head-on collision, but who killed whom? The motive appears to stem from a family row when the narrator's father, a judge, ruled against his own son-in-law in a zoning battle. So he asks Ark to look into the case as a personal favor, but Ark becomes interested when learning the victim was known as one of the Judges of Hades. While not terribly complicated or especially challenging, "The Judges of Hades" is a decent enough detective story with perhaps the best part being how it succeeded in revealing absolutely nothing about the narrator himself. Well done, Hoch!

So how to rate The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories? There are only a handful of short stories here and only "Sword for a Sinner" cut it as a classic Hoch performance, which is normally a poor score for a short story collection – even for a short collection of five stories. However, I appreciated how Santesson decided to arrange and present the stories. Santesson didn't arrange the stories in order of publication, but placed them in such a way there's a pleasing uptick in quality with each passing story from the first to fourth story. And the last story simply compliments the first. That makes The Judges of Hades a great introduction to the character of Simon Ark. It also gives a fascinating glimpse of how Hoch developed as a plotter during his first years as a professional writer. A strong recommendation for long-time fans of Hoch and Ark, but, if you're new to Hoch or Ark, I recommend trying one of the recent Crippen & Landru collections. I recommend Funeral in the Fog (2020) or The Killer Everyone Knew (2023).

Reunion with Murder (1941) by Timothy Fuller

Reunion with Murder (1941) is Timothy Fuller's third novel about Harvard man and amateur sleuth, Edmund "Jupiter" Jones, who appeared in a handful of mysteries starting with Harvard Has a Homicide (1936) – ending with the previously discussed Keep Cool, Mr. Jones (1950). A tightly-packed crime yarn clearly intended to modernize and reboot the series, but Fuller abandoned the series after its publication. Nonetheless, it rekindled my interest in the series and tracked down a copy of This is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943). A mystery from the American murder-can-be-fun school that would have been right at home in the catalog of the Rue Morgue Press. I fortunately had the foresight to also get a copy of Reunion with Murder. Three times must be the charm as it's Fuller's most accomplished, fully rounded detective novel.

The titular event of Fuller's Reunion with Murder is the first reunion of the Class of '31, Harvard College, that brought over a hundred alumni to the Syonsett Beach Hotel.

On the second day of the reunion, two alumni out on an early morning round of golf find the body of Sherman North near the eleventh tee of the Syonsett Golf Club. North's body was still dressed in dinner jacket, color rumpled and black tie twisted, but more concerting is the gaping bullet hole in his chest. North was rooming at the hotel with fellow attendee Edmund Rice, a humorist, who wakes up that morning with a hangover and scraped, bloodied hands. No memory of what happened when he was blackout drunk. What's more, Rice has to be the best man next day at a wedding of his college chum, Jupiter Jones, currently teaching at Harvard's Fine Arts Department. That's when he remembers, "Sleuth Jones."

So the best man getting involved in a murder at his tenth college reunion a day is "damned inconvenient," but Betty Mahan joins her soon-to-be husband for a day of prenuptial sleuthing.

There's much more to the murder than an apparent drunken, motiveless shooting on the golf course under cover of night. Firstly, North was knocked unconscious, driven in his own car to the scene of the crime and shot, which is a reasonable precaution, but why attract attention by firing half a dozen of extra shots – which were noticed. Secondly, there's a trail of high heeled woman's footprints "coming across from the clubhouse and ending at the top of the tee" where they stop and vanish ("...must be some explanation for their disappearance"). Yeah, I didn't expect a (minor) impossible situation of no-footprints variety not mentioned in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). But there are also slightly more traditional clues strewn around the crime scene. Like a broken watch and watch charm in the form of a miniature sword. So both police and amateur detective have their work cut out. Really enjoyed how Jupiter buttered himself up in order to slip himself into the investigation.

Reunion with Murder is as humorous and satirical in tone as This is Murder, Mr. Jones. Fuller lightheartedly poked fun at Harvard culture, detective fiction and reunions ("probably some Stone Age massacre had gone off rather well and the participants vowed to meet again in a year and talk things over"), but Reunion with Murder has a serious pall hanging over it in the shape of the war raging on in Europe and the feeling they'll be soon dragged into it. This comes especially to the front during the second-half of the story fueling discussions, but just as serious is Jupiter transforming into a White Knight for North's widow, Ann North. At one point, Jupiter even comes to see her as the "symbol of the Perfect Girl, the Dream Girl who didn't exist," while Betty is standing right next to her. Over the course of his private investigation, Jupiter breaks enough laws to potentially get him thirty years in prison simply to protect Ann. And he's very serious about it.

So not everything is played for laughs and the armchair detectives out there better keep that in mind when trying to piece together this "macabre puzzle." I think the conclusion, and the twisted path it takes towards that conclusion, is what makes Reunion with Murder Fuller's best contribution to the American detective novel.

First of all, there's the unusual and unforgettable circumstances of the denouement taking place right after the wedding and during the costumed parade closing out the reunion. Jupiter, dressed as Superman, gathers the principle players to explain what happened. Or, at least, the parts he knows about. Jupiter's ingenious, fractured solution is a Golden Age delight of plotting succeeding in having its cake and eat it too. You know what I mean when you read it. The core idea is admittedly not original with Fuller, but he sure did something different and original with it to make it his own. Something that pleasantly took me by surprise, but a lot made sense the moment the truth dawned on me. Of, course, how the murder is resolved among the Harvard boys is something most readers today will find hard to swallow and perhaps is easy to point to the looming war as a motive. However, I think Fuller simply had been reading a lot of John Dickson Carr at the time and got inspired. Everything from the murderer inexplicably attracting attention post-murder and the vanishing footprints to letting a cleverly hidden, but exposed, killer get away for morally dubious reasons just smacks of Carr – not to mention old-world chivalry streaking the characters and plot. No wonder I enjoyed it so much!

Fuller's Reunion with Murder is a first-class Golden Age mystery, one of the better American collegian detective novels, which deserves to be reprinted. It would be a great fit for Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics line of reprints. I suppose I'll finish the series, backwards, by rereading Three Thirds of a Ghost (1941) next and closing out with Harvard Has a Homicide. Stay tuned!

Note for the curious: while churning out this review, I stumbled across the fact Fuller wrote short stories and one of his stories, "The Second Visitor," features Jupiter Jones. “The Second Visitor” made its first and only appearance in the September, 1937, issue of The American Magazine. So it has slipped through the cracks and forgotten about, but perhaps a short story worth reviving for a future American Mystery Classics anthology. Fuller wrote a few more short stories that appear to be (possibly) criminal in nature: "An Acquaintance with Thieves" (Britannia and Eve, Jun. 1948), "The Husband Who Disappeared" (Cosmopolitan, Jan. 1950), "His Wife Cried Wolf" (This Week, Jul. 10, 1955) and "A Shot in the Dark" (Bluebook, Apr. 1956).

Hold on a second! Just one more thing: Just discovered "The Second Visitor”" was reprinted, only once, in the Spring, 1953, issue of Triple Detective. Strange that the only Jupiter Jones short story was never reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or any of the Ellery Queen anthologies. So it either was really overlooked and forgotten about or it's just shit.

The Will o' the Wisp Mystery (2024) by Edward D. Hoch

The Will o' the Wisp Mystery (2024), introduced by Tom Mead, is the latest collection of Edward D. Hoch short stories from Crippen & Landru and covers two short, but complete, series with the first being "an incredibly audacious experiment in storytelling" – a short novel made up of short stories. Six short stories, "The Pawn," "The Rook," "The Knight," "The Bishop," "The Queen" and "The King," originally serialized in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from April to September 1971 under the name "Mr. X." The Will o' the Wisp Mystery was reprinted in complete form a decade later in the anthology Ellery Queen's Maze of Mysteries (1982), before descending into obscurity. A shame as it's one of Hoch's more inventive pieces of detective fiction. Not only for its storytelling structure!

The one-shot detective of this unusual mystery is David Piper, the Manhunter, who works for the fictitious, ambiguously-named and underfunded Department of Apprehension. Piper's department assists other law enforcement agencies in "the capture of escaped convicts, the location of parole violators" and "even on occasion the return of runaway teenagers to their parents."

So when a prison bus transferring six criminals to jail gets hijacked, the Manhunter has to track down and apprehend the escaped prisoners. Busting a prison bus that leaves two guards dead, one injured and half a dozen criminals being pursued by man nicknamed "The Manhunter" sounds hardboiled, but there's a traditionally, fairly-clued puzzle plot – cleverly hidden underneath its timely trappings. Over the course of half a dozen stories, Piper attempts to find a connection between Nick Bruno ("underworld king"), Hugh Courtney ("impostor and murderer"), Kate Gallery ("murderess"), Charlie Hall ("swindler and card cheat"), Jack Larner ("bank robber and car thief") and Joe Reilly ("forger"). And, again, why they were busted out considering the people who organized the prison van ambush paid big money ("...my theory that they're together on some sort of big caper"). Each of the six stories has a self-contained piece of the bigger picture, tied to each of the six escapees, but every story ends on a cliffhanger. And, of course, they start bleeding into each other.

For example, the second story, "The Rook," one of the escapees turns up dead and murdered in a hotel room, which is solved, but Piper has some lingering questions regarding the circumstances of the murder ("...we're being maneuvered into making exactly the moves that someone wants us to make"). So even with the killer in custody, the murder continues to cause trouble later on in the story. That makes for a very short, very compact novel of no more than six "chapters," but, as previously mentioned, The Will o' the Wisp Mystery is not merely a mystery novelty item. Solution to what lies behind the prison bust and trail of bodies, or what the hypothesized big caper could, is original, imaginative and fairly clued. Piper even tries to buy time in the last chapter by going over all six clues. I found one clue particularly ingenious and think many of today's detective fans would agree.

Let me tell you, I did some self-congratulatory back-patting when the solution I pieced together turned out to be correct. I half expected I got hold of a juicy red herring, but the modern-day Mycroft Holmes right on the money. When a detective story is actually good, like The Will o' the Wisp Mystery, the readers always wins whether you solve it or get properly hoodwinked – because both are satisfying for different reasons. For me, anyway. Just for its titular story, The Will o' the Wisp Mystery comes highly recommended.

This collection has more to offer as it includes all seven short stories in the short, but long-lived, series about an inner city priest, Father David Noone. Mead described Father Noone as "a decidedly off-beat creation," compared to other clerical sleuths, who deals with the grittier, urban crimes of modern America. Simply put, they tend to be more character focused stories than most of Hoch's mysteries. Well, they aim for that early post-WWII realism. Hoch himself has said in an interview Father Noone is a character he kept "around for just the right type of story" appearing only sporadically in his short stories. Father Noone's first three appearances were spread out over a twenty-some year period from 1963 to 1985, while the final four were published between 2002 and 2004.

"Game of Skill," originally published in the December, 1963, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, introduces Father Noone as he takes over the duties of the absent Monsignor at St. Monica's. On a Monday evening, Father Noone gets a threatening phone call from a man, "I'm going to blow up your church on Sunday morning." The man calls back everyday with the same threat, but everyday with a bit more venom. Father Noone is, of course, much more interested in reaching out to this troubled soul and tries to engage with him every time the phone rings. This builds up towards the Sunday mass with, story-and character-wise, an effective ending, but otherwise not much of a detective story. Hoch's early work, especially from the 1960s, is a bit spotty as some stories were just typical, gloomy 1960s crime stories (e.g. "The Oblong Room," 1967).

The next story, "The Thing in Lovers' Lane," first appeared in the July, 1971, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and is a slight improvement on the first story published eight years previously. Father Noone's parish is rocked to its foundation when a young priest, Father Kling, is killed, under compromising circumstances, in a lovers' lane – dying in the arms of a woman named Stella. Both were "shot to death in the front seat of her car." Understanding the true relationship between the two victims is the key to solving the case. A marginal improvement over the first story with a little bit more meat to the plot, but the "clueing" here shows Hoch was more interested in the characters than the plot (ROT13: jul qebc gur X jura Y jbhyq unir orra fb zhpu orggre, orpnhfr Fgryyn Xvat fbhaqf orggre naq n yvggyr rnfvre gb zvff guna Fgryyn Yvat, juvpu whfg fgnaqf bhg).

I reviewed the third story in the series last year, but "The Sweating Statue" (1985) is the best of the three Father Noone stories published before the 2000s. Yes, it helped that has a solid and somewhat unique impossible situation to center the story and characters around.

"One More Circus," originally published in the May, 2002, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is the first Father Noone short story from the second, short-lived period in the series from the early 2000s. So you get a far more polished story from an older, experienced Hoch than the first two stories from the '60s and early '70s. And it shows! Father Noone is asked to take on the duties as temporary chaplain for the performers of the Breen Brothers circus out in Montana, because "the Catholic Church in America was besieged by an acute shortage of priests." Father Noone agrees as it's only a three-day job, "you wouldn't miss any Sunday Masses," but his stay at the circus ends with a terrible, tragic accident revealed to be a cleverly-disguised murder – before reverting back to being a tragedy. In some ways, “One More Circus” is a similar to "Game of Skill," but the ending is better handled and thus far more effective. Even though it's not much of a detective story.

"The Arrow of Ice," original to the anthology Murder Most Catholic: Divine Tales of Profane Crimes (2002), finds Father Noone's parish during a tumultuous period. A part of his parish, "clinging to the past," are in a uproar over the plans to renovate and modernized the church. They're demonstrating the plans and the architect, Porter Macklin, who's going to redesign the church. Meanwhile, the other parishioners are preparing for an upcoming festival featuring ice sculptures. Between all of this, the visiting architect is found murdered in the kitchen of the rectory with a sliver of ice sticking out of his bloodied throat. This is one of Hoch's lesser-known, rarely discussed stories and so hoped, based on the title, it would be some clever take on the impossible crimes with the normally trite icicle weapons, but no such thing. Just a competently put together, but unremarkable, whodunit. Same can be more or less said about the next story.

"The Hand of God," first published in the January, 2003, issue of EQMM, brings Father Noone to St. Joan of Arc college to attend a conference, but it gets cancelled when a sophomore student, Darcy Clemence, is shot and killed. A second body is soon found suggesting suicide with the victim having left behind a suicide note and confession on his computer ("I didn't mean to kill her"). So was it a murder/suicide or a double murder? I think the best aspects of "The Hand of God" is its college setting and Father Noone hitting upon the solution during a performance by college drama club of Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story. Both helped to prop up the plot and solution.

"Searching for Sammy Sand," originally published in the August, 2004, issue of EQMM, is the seventh and final story in the Father Noone series. There's still a shortage of priests and Father Noone is asked to act as chaplain at the county jail, until they have a permanent replacement. One of the prisoners, Roger Colone, claims to be innocent and asks Father Noone to help him find a man by the name of Sammy Sand. Colone is a landlord who rented one of his houses, off the book, to this Sammy Sand, but turned the place into a drug house. What's more, the refrigerator, "often contains chemicals used to manufacture synthetic drugs," was booby trapped with a grenade. However, it was a police officer who opened the fridge and died in the explosion. And, of course, Sammy Sand is nowhere to be found. So it was Colone who was left holding the bag. Father Noone can never ignore a plea for help and begins to snoop around. The plot behind the elusive Sammy Sand and the booby trapped fridge is not terribly complex, but Hoch created some pleasing plot-patterns out of this atypical situation for a detective story. I suppose its fitting this series ends with Noone telling the culprit, "I can hear your confession."

So how to rate The Will o' the Wisp Mystery as a whole? The titular story, or short novel, is the main attraction of the collection and worth the price of admission alone, but the Father Noone stories are the customary mixed bag. "The Sweating Statue" is the standout of the series and “Searching for Sammy Sand” is probably the only other story that'll stick in my mind, which probably not going to be true for the other stories – especially the first two. But then again, I'm probably not the right person to appreciate this series. So get the collection for The Will o' the Wisp Mystery and take the Father Noone stories as an extra.

Deathwatch: "The Oblong Room" (1967) by Edward D. Hoch

Earlier this month, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's short story collection The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023), gathering fifteen stories in the Captain Leopold series from the 1981-2000 period, which comes with a detailed introduction and series retrospective – written by the celebrated French anthologist, Roland Lacourbe. The introduction directed my attention to a particular short story in the series.

"The Oblong Room," originally published in the July, 1967, issue of The Saint Magazine, is together with "The Leopold Locked Room" (1971) the "most frequently republished Hoch stories," but, somehow, always confused "The Oblong Room" with "The Problem of the Octagon Room" (1981). So was a little surprise to read Lacourbe describing "The Oblong Room" focusing "less on who killed the victim than why" and "the motive, once discovered, will be one of the strangest in detective fiction." That doesn't sound like a locked room mystery at all! Sure enough, it turns out to be the exact opposite of a locked room mystery.

Captain Leopold and Sergeant Fletcher have an apparently open-and-shut case on their hands when they're called to the scene of a murder at the men's dorm of the local university. Ralph Rollings, a sophomore, is found stabbed to death in his dorm room and the obvious suspect is his roommate, Tom McBern, who refuses to talk and demands a lawyer – while an obvious motive begins to emerge ("they probably had the same girl or something"). There are, however, some baffling details complicating, what should have been, an open-and-shut case. When the bloody scene was discovered, Ralph had been dead for the better part of a day and the only thing Tom is prepared to admit is staying with the body in the locked dorm room for the past twenty-two hours. Captain Leopold and Sergeant Fletcher also have to take the drugs found in their room into consideration and the testimonies from other students about their strange relationship and the sway Ralph held over people ("...a power you wouldn’t believe any twenty-year-old capable of").

So the murder is not about whodunit and how the murder was pulled off, but what happened in that dorm room and why. A what-and-why-dun-it. Hoch obviously used the Captain Leopold series to experiment as "The Oblong Room" would not have worked as well in the Simon Ark or Dr. Sam Hawthorne series. Hoch's experiment here was not without consequences.

"The Oblong Room" was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine before The Saint Magazine bought and published it. Apparently, the solution has certain elements that "scared off some editors" at the time, but "The Oblong Room" in the end won Hoch an Edgar Award. Deservedly so? Yes... and no.

I think "The Oblong Room" is a good crime story, certainly for the time, but not one of Hoch's best short stories for two reasons. Firstly, the story and those controversial elements feel like a product of its time and, as far as sordid crimes go, relatively tame by today's standards – both real and fictitious. Secondly, the story needed to be longer for the ending to be truly effective. Captain Leopold noted himself that the problem with this case is that didn't get to meet the two principle players until the damage was already done. Well, that can in this case just as well be applied to the story and reader. If you're going to write a what-and-why-dun-it, you need to do more character work than was done here. Other than that another competent piece of work from Hoch.

After this short story and the previous short story collection, it's time for something slightly more traditionally plotted. Stay tuned!

Mr. Diabolo (1960) by Anthony Lejeune

Edward Anthony Thompson, better known during his lifetime as "Anthony Lejeune," was a British political writer, syndicated columnist, editor, reporter, reviewer and radio broadcaster – whose weekly show, London Letter, ran for thirty years in South Africa. Lejeune also had some interesting connections, real and fictitious, to the world of crime.

Lejeune was a close friend of the bestselling thriller writer Dennis Wheatley and, reportedly, through Ian Fleming got the job as the crime correspondent for The Sunday Times. In 1953, Lejeune began reviewing detective novels in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet and began to dabble in crime-and detective fiction before the end of that decade. Between 1959 and 1988, he wrote nine detective novels of various stripes beginning with a spy-thriller, Crowded and Dangerous (1959). So, going on those scant few pieces of background information, you wouldn't expect Lejeune to turn up on this blog, but he wrote more than just thrillers or spy-fiction. Lejeune actually had a traditional bend with two of his novels, Mr. Diabolo (1960) and Key Without a Door (1988), being included in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). The former elicited some interesting and contrasting comments and opinions.

Adey briefly mentioned Mr. Diabolo in his introduction ("imaginative") and added the following comment under the solution at the back of the book, "almost a classic and would have been had the detective been a little more interesting and the book rather longer." John, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Mr. Diabolo back in 2012 and concluded it “aspires to true greatness and promises to dazzle the reader,” but “only manages to raise a faint glow of surprise” of what "might have been a real classic in locked room mysteries." Jim, of The Invisible Event, thought it was "written like it's five times as clever as it actually turns out to be" and struggled to find something to say, while admittedly being "amazed that this sort of book was published in the 1960s" – even though the whole thing ultimately left him cold. Adey's problem appears to have been the colorless detective and short length of the story rather than the plot. John thought the ending did not measure up to the premise of the strange legend and the vanishing, ghost-like killer. Jim couldn't possible care less about either. That only inflamed my curiosity even more. So it got tossed on the special locked room wishlist.

Having now read it, I can say Lejeune's Mr. Diabolo, purely as a locked room mystery, can be filed under the "Curiosities & Oddities" of the genre. However, it's also an earnest, well intended homage to John Dickson Carr and has neatly posed, multiple miraculous disappearances and a locked room murder. You can hardly miss which novel in particular inspired him (The Arabian Nights Murder, 1936), which comes with a light sprinkling of Clayton Rawson (Death from a Top Hat, 1938), but largely failed to deliver on its promising and fantastic premise. I think the book is best compared in that regard to Hugh Holman's Up This Crooked Way (1946) and Herbert Brean's Wilders Walk Away (1948), but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Mr. Diabolo takes place during the Annual Conference of the Anglo-American Literary and Political Society, "known to its friends as The Alps," at the College of Western Studies. Alistair Burke, of the Foreign Office, narrates the story and represented his office at this transatlantic gathering, but, when he meet the academic Barbara Tracey at the meeting, he began to devote himself "to the task with a zeal far beyond and above the line of duty" – providing the story with the obligatory romantic subplot. During dinner in the Senior Common Room, the old college legend of the alleyway running behind the college called Devil's Lane.

College of Western Studies was founded in the early 1600s by the disciples of John Dee, "an Elizabethan occultist," which was "to promote all forms of good learning" like "alchemy, astrology and the use of crystals." But by the end the 18th century, the college had gone to seed and catered to the bullheaded sons of the local squirearchy. One particularly “wild creature” was young Lord Farrant who "raised what hell he could." There were secret, midnight parties in his rooms and whispers of him indulging in the black arts. It all ended when Lord Farrant was found dead, behind the locked door of his room, lying in the middle of a pentacle that had been drawn on the floor. This discovery was preceded by a sighting of a figure wearing a tall hat and cloak with a pointed board and no eyes ("just blackness, like the eye-sockets of a skull") on the track running along the edge of the meadows behind the college. A spot currently known as Devil's Lane. That figure is the same whispered to have been present at the midnight parties and listens to the name Mr Diabolo.

So a thoroughly pleasant dinner conversation followed by a brief discussion on traditional ("nowadays it's all psychology and sordidness. Social realism is the curse of our age") and modern ("I like the new-style mysteries. Philo Vance used to bore me stiff") detective fiction. But when the meeting breaks up, the members and assorted guests get hurled into a detective story of their own.

When the party steps out into the Great Quad, they spot a bizarrely dressed, devilish-looking man wearing a tall, stovepipe hat and a cloak thrown back from his shoulders to reveal "a bottle-green cut-away coat, a red waistcoat and tightly fitting trousers of some cream-coloured material" – nothing where his eyes should have been. An illusion quickly dispelled when they notice the empty eye-sockets is caused by a pair of dark glasses. So they're determined to catch whoever is playing Mr. Diabolo and chase him down Devil's Lane. A police constable and a young man, Bill Frazer, saw the rush past him down the lane, but the watchman at the Warden's Garden on the other swears nobody came out of Devil's Lane. Mr. Diabolo had  "simply appeared and disappeared" like a puff of smoke.

Alistair Burke calls on an old friend from the War Office, Arthur Blaise, who's suitably intrigued by the seemingly impossible disappearance in Devil's Lane to start poking around the college grounds. Blaise particularly wants to talk to Frazer and the watchman ("I suspect you may not have asked them the right questions though"), but Frazer is murdered before he gets a chance. Strangled to death in his room with the door locked on the inside and one of two keys in his pocket. The second key is a duplicate used by the porter to unlock the door, but the key is "so rusty they don't think it can have been touched for quite a while." Not before it opened the door. I thought that was an interesting touch. So while the police carry out the official investigation in the background, Blaise and Burke play amateur detective with the womanizing, blackmailing providing enough motives to go around. But the only thing that really matters is the impossible disappearance and locked room murder.

Firstly, I agree with Jim that the book is presented to the reader five times as clever as actually turns out to be. The opening chapters gives the impression you have something akin to Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954) in your hands, but everything turned out to be as childishly simplistic as it appeared. I think most seasoned mystery readers will be immediately suspicious about something in the setup to the disappearance in Devil's Lane and should, in turn, reveal the right question they didn't ask the watchman. What somewhat saved it from being completely disappointing and unimpressive is that it turned out to be a two-part trick with the answer to the first part uncovering a second impossibility (SPOILER/ROT13: “fb jung lbh'er fnlvat vf gung gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Ze. Qvnobyb'f pybgurf vf nf vzcbffvoyr—be, ng yrnfg, nf zhpu bs n ceboyrz—nf gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Ze. Qvnobyb?”). While the second part of the trick put some much needed shine on the plot, even the story itself admitted it hardly broke any new ground. John Dickson Carr used the trick as an anecdote in one of his celebrated novels, which is probably where Lejeune first heard of it. Regrettably, the locked room murder manages to be even more obvious with one of the oldest, lackluster and routine locked room-tricks on the book. And, in both cases, the obvious or suspicious aspects of the presented impossibilities pointed straight to the culprit. You have to go out of your way to miss it.

A truly great locked room mystery, aspiring to be a classic, would have used the two-part vanishing-act to greater effect nor have dared to present the locked room-trick as anything other than a false-solution. But what the reader got is the equivalent of "Kiddies First Locked Room Mystery." If only Lejeune had penned Mr. Diabolo as a juvenile mystery, it would have actually been a classic of its sort alongside Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950), Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) and Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990). But as a mystery written for grown up kids, like myself, who love detective story this one is all bark and no bite. I can only really recommended it to fanatical locked room fans and completists. 

Addendum: I proofread casually skimmed over the review and noticed I became a little more negative towards the end than originally intended. Even with my expectations dialed back to expect something a whole lot less ambitious than a genre classic, I still ended up disappointed and letdown. But the book was not a struggle to get through nor did it overstay its welcome. And not anywhere near as bad as some of the worst locked room mysteries encountered over the years. Such as the recently reviewed Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger (1927) or Joseph Bowen's bungling in The Man Without a Head (1933). Not to the mention the underside of the bottom of the barrel represented by David L. Marsh's Dead Box (2004). So, if you come across a copy, you don't have to avoid like the plague, but neither do you have to lose any sleep over never coming across a copy.

The Student Body (1958) by Nigel FitzGerald

In the previous blog-post, I looked at Nigel FitzGerald's second of only two impossible crime and locked room mystery novels, Suffer a Witch (1958), which confirmed my suspicion that his last novel, Affairs of Death (1967), constitutes the scraps left at the bottom of the barrel – ending his run as a mystery writer on a whimper. However, in spite of the book's shortcomings, it couldn't disguise FitzGerald was a polished writer with a verve for characterization and local color. Not to mention trace evidence suggesting FitzGerald might have been a pretty decent plotter during the earlier stages of his career. While the plot would have worked better as a short story or novella, Suffer a Witch confirmed all my suspicions. 

So wanted to take a closer look at FitzGerald's second locked room mystery, The Student Body (1958). The description of the impossibility in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) sounded absolutely intriguing and comments promising "an extremely lively" tale of murder and intrigue. Sure enough, The Student Body is an explosive mixture of the Cold War spy-thriller, college-set detective story and a quasi-inverted mystery with hints of the police procedural and comedy of errors. A very weird, but very well-done and strangely effective concoction. 

The Student Body largely takes place at Christchurch College, Dublin, which was founded in 1557 and "there is no record of murder having been committed within its precincts until the fourth centenary year of its existence." There are two students, Jer Milne and Don Carton, who had a hand in bringing murder to the respectable college.

Jer and Don go to a local restaurant to celebrate passing an exam with a few drinks and two young repertory actresses, Rona and Peggy. Some ten days previously, Rona and Peggy had been in London where they visited a famous church, but they arrived at the moment a Hungarian Baroness, "a political exile in Britain," was murdered right as the service was beginning – a knife-handle protruding from her back. Rona and Peggy witnessed a small, swarthy blue-eyed man hurrying from the church as he stripped dark gloves from his hands as he went. They now spotted that very same man sitting at the corner of the bar "placidly completing the crossword puzzle in the Irish Times and taking occasional sips from a glass of dry sherry." Don proposes to ask advice from Aidan "Radish" Roberts, literary editor of the Dublin Observer, who also happens to be at the bar. The long and short of the opening chapters is that they take the only logical and rational course of action anyone would take in their situation. They kidnap the man and take them to their college rooms to be questioned. 

The Student Body is a mystery-thriller of hot, young and alcohol fueled Irish blood operating under Murphy's Law. So everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Firstly, their room is entered by a small group of party crashers lead by the lecturer in English language and literature, Dermot Gray, who's accompanied by his sister, Mrs. Nuala Norden. George Kerry, inter-varsity heavyweight champion, who brought a keg of beer. Secondly, this distraction caused a cat-and-mouse game between the mysterious, possibly red assassin and the heroes in which they constantly turn the tables on each other. Thirdly, the scrap ends with the man being tied and is locked behind two doors with a bicycle padlock on it for good measure. As an extra precaution talcum powder is scattered thickly over the approaches to the door on the landing. When returning from having a good meal and drinks, they find the locks and talcum powder undisturbed, but their captive has the handle of knife sticking out of his back. So what to do, except cover everything up and dump the body. Something that proves easier said than done.

The trickiness with some locked room murders and impossible crimes is that the method can expose a murderer too soon, which is kind of the case here. The locked room-trick itself is sound enough, but everyone who has read a decent amount of detective fiction will figure it out in no time. Even if you happen to suck at figuring out these locked room puzzles, FitzGerald hammers down all the clues and hints to ensure the solution is impossible to miss. I suspect FitzGerald intended to have the locked room puzzle crystal clear and practically all tidied up when he returned to it in the last chapters, because the second-act shifts gears as it becomes somewhat of an inverted mystery. Nevertheless, easy to solve as the trick may be, the locked room functions as a fun little side distraction to the overall plot and interesting FitzGerald developed a sudden, short-lived fascination for impossible crime fiction in 1958. Going by these lines, "the impossible situation: murder in a locked room which no one could have entered or left" and "a weapon which for obvious reasons could neither have been fired through the keyhole nor thrown through a window," he probably read some locked room mysteries at the time – which found expression in Suffer a Witch and The Student Body. And looking at the first-act of The Student Body, I wouldn't be surprised if Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) were on his big book pile.

The second and final-act is a different story as Superintendent Patrick Duffy, of the Detective Branch of the Garda Siochana, enters the picture and the story becomes an undeclared inverted police procedural. The body had been dumped and fished out of a bay, which is why Superintendent Duffy is unaware he has an impossible murder on his hands and simply hopes to find the murderer by identifying and retracing the victim's steps. How very Freeman Wills Crofts of him! So, of course, Duffy pretty quickly uncovers a trail leading straight to Christchurch College and discovering the victim crossed paths with Radish and the college party numerous times. All the while, the reader is in the fortunate and rare position of knowing more than the detective and thus the second, last-minute murder is not very effective as a red herring. So, knowing more than Duffy, regrettably reinforces a dry, anti-climatic ending ("I can say now that there will almost certainly be further charges") to what's otherwise a lively and entertaining story. You have to tolerate the poor decisions making skills of the characters in order to enjoy it. 

The Student Body and Suffer a Witch show FitzGerald was a writer stuck between two distinctly different periods of the genre, a transitional period from the cerebral Golden Age detective stories to the darker, character-driven crime novels that came to dominate post-1950s, which tried to merge by picking and merging the best of both. So the murders, motives and subject material tend to be a little darker, grittier and uneasier than your average, 1930s detective novel, but there's always one or more puzzling components to the case. Such as the second murder from Affairs of Death, the impossible disappearance in Suffer a Witch and the locked room mystery here. FitzGerald can be clumsy, plot-wise, when it comes to ending a story, but he deserves to be acknowledged for an early writer who tried to adept the traditional detective story to the changing times. Not a perfect mystery writer or mystery series, but a valiant and much appreciated attempt to keep the detective story alive and relevant.

Murder in the Zoo (1932) by Babette Hughes

Babette Hughes was an American playwright and writer who published more than twenty one-act plays, semi-autobiographical novels, non-fiction books about her work in public relations and two largely forgotten detective novels, Murder in the Zoo (1932) and Murder in Church (1934) – out-of-print since their initial publication in the 1930s. That was until last March, when Coachwhip Publications reissued them together in a twofer volume. So let's find out if Murder in the Zoo has been criminally overlooked or justifiably forgotten for the past nine decades. 

Murder in the Zoo and Murder in Church form a short-lived, two-book series featuring Ian Craig, a professor of Oriental philosophy at Earl College, who's introduced in the prologue. A friend of him, Scott, wonders why Craig buried himself in Oriental philosophy without making a contribution to the field and putting up with a college professor wages, because he was neither lazy or someone who used the college as a refuge. Craig's personality is somewhat of an unacknowledged character-arc running through the story, but he soon diverts the attention to the time he solved the murder of a cynical colleague. Courtney Brown was a psychologist and behaviorist whose "enthusiasm for art, philosophy, literature and science" was "eaten away by sheer cynicism." The kind of cynicism that "aims at your appetites and capacities." Craig believes in the Confucian theory "that life can be reduced to a series of patterns" and incorporated this philosophy in a process of deductions that eventually exposed the murderer. Craig gives Scott a journal in which he wrote down his involvement in the Courtney Brown case.

The journal opens with the discovery of Brown's body in the animal laboratory maintained by the psychology department on the third-floor of Science Hall at Earl College. Yes, the title of the book is a little misleading. The animal room, or "zoo," is stacked with cages filled rats, guinea pigs and pigeons, wooden packing cases containing ants and devices all over the floor for testing animal intelligence – like mazes, problem boxes and ladders. Brown's body was found sprawled beside the largest animal maze with a bloody hammer next to him. At the time of the murder, there a little more than half a dozen in Science Hall or visited it.

There are two students, Grace Mullin and Jack Tobey, who were carrying out an experiment in another laboratory. Craig was working in the philosophy library and the animal-loving janitor, Axel Hulse, who found the body was cleaning the various rooms and mopping the stairway. But there were also a few visitors. Such as the victim's widow, Jennifer Brown, which is always a suspicious role to play in a murder mystery. Particularly when she doesn't appear to be grieve stricken and takes delight in shocking people. She accuses a colleague of her husband of murder. Professor Charles Frampton was seen at Science Hall around the time of the murder as was a newspaper reporter, Dick Sterling. Finally, the janitor saw an unindentified man who they simply refer to as "the unknown dago." So the two interchangeable homicide detectives, Thompson and Andrews, have more than enough suspects to pick on.

So a fairly standard premise premise in which a body, a weapon and a small, closed-circle of suspects with possible motives, but Murder in the Zoo has a few creative touches to the storytelling, characterization and detection.

Firstly, Craig is not welcomes with open arms by Thompson and Andrews as the brilliant amateur detective who's going to crack a tough nut for them. On the contrary, he has to con his way into the position claiming he has been asked by the Sun to be their on the scene special reporter. Even then they insist on his credentials. So he has to strike a deal with Sterling to get a press card and hold on to his front row seat to the investigation. Funnily enough, Thompson and Andrew's insisting on credentials contrasts nicely with then sharing a drink with Craig a year before Prohibition was repealed. Craig has bottles of liquor (like Spanish brandy) all over his room and bootlegging actually plays a minor part in the story, which was alluded to in the prologue. Secondly, while the story contains a timetable and the solution partially hinges on demolishing a Christopher Bush-style alibi, Hughes largely eschews physical evidence in favor of psychological detection. Murder in the Zoo leans towards the detective fiction of Helen McCloy. Only difference is that the psychological detection here is soaked in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. However, Craig dabbles a little in Freudian psychology as one of the suspects has a mother complex.

That really helped to cover up the fact that neither the bare-bones plot nor the solution can be called ingenious or inspired, as a puzzle-driven detective story, which could have been fixed had a little more attention been directed towards (ROT13) gur zheqrere'f zbgvir naq nyvov – both were underplayed or ignored to be carted out as a last-minute surprise. A pity as they represented the most interesting aspects of the solution. Sure, there were some psychological hints, here and there, but hardly anything that can be called rigorous fair play. And that's hard to miss once you reached the ending.

So were Babette Hughes and Murder in the Zoo criminally overlooked or justifiably forgotten? Neither. Murder in the Zoo is serviceable enough, second-string mystery novel and have come across much worse of such obscurities (e.g. Ian Greig's The King's Club Murder, 1930), but there's an enormous gap between Hughes' Murder in the Zoo and the works of the more well-known American mystery writers of the early 1930s. Yeah, another example of a detective story that was better written than plotted.

I've not been lucky lately when it comes to picking titles from Coachwhip, but I keep hoping to find another Kirke Mechem, Clifford Orr, Roger Scarlett and Tyline Perry somewhere in their catalog.

The Mummy Case Mystery (1933) by Dermot Morrah

Dermot Morrah was a British journalist for The Times, chiefly as an editorial writer, but was best-known during his lifetime as an expert on heraldry, genealogy and the Royal family who acted as an assistant on royal ceremonial occasions – notably being an aide at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Morrah reportedly had a friendly relationship with the Queen Mother, wrote speeches for George VI during World War II and a book on the early life of Prince Charles. There is, however, a biographical detail curiously absent from a lot of online sources like his obituary and wikipedia page. 

Morrah authored a donnish detective novel in the humorous, high spirited tradition of Edmund Crispin and Michael Innes, but The Mummy Case Mystery (1933) predated Innes' Death at the President's Lodging (1936). A book that has been credited with being the cradle of the donnish detective story. And preceded Crispin's The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) by more than a decade. More importantly, Morrah was as good as his more illustrious literary descendants. So let's unpack and unwrap this mummy case!

Dr. Peter Benchley, Professor of Egyptology at Beaufort College, Oxford, is a research chemist turned Egyptologist and made his name with his "remarkable theory that the Greek wine god, Dionysos, could be identified with a spirit of vegetation worshipped in Lower Egypt at the time of Twelfth Dynasty" – a thesis fully set forth in his lifework, Dionysos at Memphis (1910). But the theory had a well-known, imminent detractor. A Russian-born Egyptologist, Feodor Bonoff, aggressively challenged Benchley's theory and resulted in "a warfare of print that raged for twelve years in learned periodicals." So it was unexpected when Benchley admitted defeat, buried the hatchet with Bonoff and even bought one of his valuable, very special mummies. The mummy of King Pepi I. Reputedly, the oldest Royal mummy in existence. And the long-dead king gets one last hurrah during the Beaufort College Commemoration Ball at the end of the term.

During the festivities, two young men in evening dress and top hats wheeled in a bier with a bulky coffin on it ("...old Benchley's mummy") while chanting phrases from "the funeral and penitential liturgies of several religions." A mock funeral procession was "the obvious thing to do with a mummy," but the rituals of Oxford doesn't allow for ragging at the commem ball. So the two were given a tour of the River Cherwell for their trouble and the mummy returned to Benchley's private rooms. Only to discover the following morning they gave false names to the Dean and likely not members of the Corpus Christi College. But has that anything to do with the tragedy that occurred on the same night?

While everyone was dancing, the fire alarm sprang to life ("save the hall, save the hall") and the fire is raging in Benchley's locked bedroom, which gutted the whole room and it took twenty minutes to find "a charred and shapeless mass" among the debris – identifiable as the late Benchley by a wristwatch and a bunch of keys. Beaufort College maintained its medieval right to form its own jury from the Provost and Fellows of the college to hold an inquest and they return a verdict of accidental death. Not everyone's satisfied with the verdict.

Professors Denys Sargent and Humphrey Considine, a law expert and Assyriologist, decide on a spot of "amateur dabbling in detective work" and use their position as Benchley's executors as a front. They go to work with all the enthusiasm, humor and high spirits expected from the best amateur detectives, but Chapter 4 ("The Scout") stands out as it can be directly linked to the early forensic detective fiction of R. Austin Freeman, Eric Wood and the Radfords. Considine, "trained in more than expedition to the ruins of Babylon," subjects the fire ravaged rooms to an archaeological excavation with "systematic thoroughness." The place is divided in trenches and they systematically sieve through the ashes in the hope of finding some clues. But most of their work comprises of gathering information and theory as they consider various suspects and potential motives.

Firstly, there's the American millionaire and collector, Luther Y. van Ditten, who wanted to buy the mummy from Benchley and why he was there on the night of the ball. Every seasoned mystery readers knows collectors can be classed as "a special sort of lunatic" who would gloat in private over a unique item nobody else got. Miss Daphne Carrothers is the niece of the late Egyptologist, but her uncle objected strongly to her engagement to a perfectly respectable young man, Mark Devereux, who's a commoner of New College. Benchley even added a codicil to his will placing his niece under guardianship of a court and wishes it would not grant permission for their marriage. And finally there's the long-time, hermit-like rival, Professor Bonoff, in addition to several dons who wander the hallowed halls of the college. Just as important as the question of who-and whydunit, is whose charred remains were actually found in Benchley's bedroom. Was it Benchley? But then what happened to the mummy? Or vice versa! And who were those two jokers?

Morrah laid out a pretty puzzle in The Mummy Case Mystery and the almost immaculate clueing practically spelled out the solution to the observant reader, which (admittedly) became next to impossible to miss as the story progressed – something you might suspect from the outset. A solution dulled by the passage of time. However, it turned out only to be only thrust of the overall plot with the ending having considerably more weight to it than initially suspected. This can be entirely put down to the highly unusual motivation of the murderer to put the whole, intricate and risky plan into motion. One that was almost ruined by the cussedness of all things general, but provided the story with another strong hint of what, sort of, was going on. Something you can hardly take serious had it not been for Morrah's tongue being firmly planted in his cheek when he wrote the book. What did caught me by complete surprise is how the case was resolved. Well, I honestly didn't see that turn of events coming! I think even today that ending would be considered original. 

The Mummy Case Mystery can now be counted among my favorite academic mysteries. A mystery as eccentric as it's intelligent, driven by "pure academic curiosity," but possessing enough humor to escape the dangers of taking itself too seriously. Morrah penned such a fun, enjoyable little detective story, you almost forget he glossed over one, or two, details in the summation of the case. Such as clearing up whether or not it was a locked room murder (a routine solution was provided in case it's one) or explaining how, exactly, the room was torched. I don't think (ROT13) evttvat hc “n pbagencgvba jvgu na nynez pybpx naq n pnaqyr” fully answers that question. But, when you remember those minor smudges, you're likely to either continue to overlook them or forgive them altogether. Smudges that can simply be written off against everything else that makes The Mummy Case Mystery one of the thoroughly enjoyable, delightfully British and ambitiously plotted academic mysteries from the 1930s.

Golden Rain (1980) by Douglas Clark

In my previous two blog-posts, I reviewed Douglas Clark's The Libertines (1978) and Roger Ormerod's An Alibi Too Soon (1987), two British genre conservationists, who attempted to modernize the great detective stories of yore during the post-WWII decades and why I grouped them together as modern, neo-traditionalists – which may need a small correction or footnote. Having read two of their novels back-to-back, I noticed a subtle difference in the way they tried to mix the traditional with the modern. 

Ormerod evidently was closer aligned to the modern, psychological and character-driven crime novels (e.g. The Key to the Case, 1992) than Clark, but with unmistakably traditionalists bend. And reveled in the use of double-edged clues, red herrings, twisted alibis and locked room mysteries (e.g. A Shot at Nothing, 1993). Clark was much more covert in his approach and his novels not only masquerade as modern police procedurals, but apparently tend to underplay the traditional elements of the plot a little. Or, to be more accurately, disguising his plots as pharmaceutical mysteries and poison-puzzles. You can do and get away with a lot of trickery that involves poisons, medicine or the victim's medical condition. An approach that allowed so much room that Clark was even able to wrote something as incomparable as The Longest Pleasure (1981).

However, I've only read a handful of Clark's novels and my observation could be completely wrong. So why not read another one to see if the pattern repeats and what better to use than one of his reputed, uncatalogued locked room mystery novels? 

Golden Rain (1980) is the thirteenth title in Clark's Master and Green series and takes place at Bramthorpe College for Girls, "always referred to simply as Bramthorpe," where Miss Mabel Holland reigns in her double role as beloved headmistress and benevolent dictator – as "discipline was strict and punishments were few." She reformed the school most diplomatically, economized without austerity and was very cross when learning one house had saved money on catering one term. Because "the school was not in business to make a profit out of the girls' food fees." Everything was done under her watch to ensure the girls could realize their full potential that, in turn, raised the academic standard of the school. So nobody could have possibly have had a reason to kill her, but Miss Holland becomes the subject of a precarious murder inquiry. An inquiry in which even Scotland Yard has to tread carefully.

Miss Holland lives in the School House and shares the place with a housekeeper, Mrs. Gibson, who has Tuesday as her day off, but, upon her return, she smelled vomit. A trail lead to the bedroom where she discovered the body of Miss Holland. An autopsy revealed she had been poisoned with laburnum seeds, which grow from a poisonous plant with pea-like, yellow flowers commonly called Golden Rain. Miss Holland was "chock full of the seeds," but the local police is more than willing to settle on an accidental poisoning or suicide. She was alone the house, locked up tight, with "no signs of forcible entry," but some people close to her have good reasons to believe she neither committed suicide or accidentally poisoned herself.

Miss Holland was a level-headed, cheerful and happy woman who looked forward to her holiday in Malta and had written her mother to tell she had "a lovely surprise" that would overjoy her, which hardly suggests a suicidal frame of mind. Secondly, Miss Holland was a biologist and botanist who would be able to identify laburnum seeds and know of their toxic qualities. But how do you force a spoonful of crushed laburnum down someone's throat in a locked house without a struggle or a trace of poison anywhere? So what they needed was a big bug from Scotland Yard to clear up this messy case.

Funnily enough, I've read some recent reviews criticizing Clark's overstaffed cast of police characters as a massive waste of resources and manpower, which made me wonder if he faced similar criticism during his lifetime – because it becomes kind of plot-thread in the first-half of the story. The local police is divided with Detective Inspector Lovegrove intending to squash the case at the inquest to get a verdict of suicide or accidental death. Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Green with Detective Sergeants Reed and Berger arrived less than a day before the inquest, which gives them precious little time to come up with evidence to the contrary. And the prickly, autocratic coroner wants plain facts to bring in any other verdict. The presence of a specialized Scotland Yard team "cost money and time," which makes an exhaustive investigation hard to justify without a shred of evidence in "the face of a coroner's unfavourable verdict."

Unfortunately, this angle is only used to pad out the first-half with Clark holding back all the good and clever bits for the second-half.

First of all, the locked room situation is, as expected, completely underplayed and barely acknowledged, but the locked doors and windows were, sort of, incidental. Some of you likely would not even label it as a locked room mystery or impossible crime. Miss Holland was poisoned in a locked house, but the deviously clever piece of plotting is in the poisoning-trick that's almost as good as the one from Detective Conan's "The Loan Shark Murder Case." But it's not merely a trick. Clark skillfully dovetailed the poisoning-trick with all the other facets of the story and employed something common in schools as an original piece of camouflage. Something that threw me off the scent and was initially a little disappointed as it introduced an until then unknown character into the solution. There was no reason to be disappointed. Clark used it to give the murder something "strange for a major crime" like murder, which revealed the camouflage the murderer draped across the poisoning-trick.

I was equally impressed with the late problem of three sets of fingerprints discovered at School House and particular the third set poses a tricky problem, but the explanation either makes you want to slap Clark's shoulder like a good sport or strangle him with his own necktie – nicely fitted the setting and period. Only problem is that it didn't give enough room to be used to its full potential and give the solution more of a punch. But, other than that, the ending and solution placed Clark back on the same footing with Ormerod as a top-tier, neo-traditionalist mystery writer.

Where they differ is Clark's clandestine alliance to the classics as he tries to sneak all the good stuff pass the reader (or critics?) without trying to draw attention to them like a closeted alcoholic lacing his coffee with booze. Almost like he felt it was necessary to lure the reader in with the premise of a contemporary police procedural before hitting them with the more traditional stuff disguised, or presented, as a pharmaceutical or poisoning mystery. Death After Evensong (1969) appears to be an exception to the rule, but than again, there's nothing subtle about shooting someone point blank with a magic-bullet. However, it showed that his work could have been even better had he continued to embrace and indulge in the traditional, plot-driven side of his detective novels.

So, all things considered, Golden Rain begins slowly and delays the most important plot developments and clues until the second-half, but the end result is an excellent, first-class take on the classic, college-set mystery novel and an admirable dovetailing act. Recommended to everyone who appreciate a good, old-fashioned puzzle plot or detective stories that take place in the world of academia.

Just a heads up, I might bookend these two Douglas Clark posts with reviews of Ormerod. So the next one might be one of Ormerod's 1990s mysteries, but haven't made up my mind yet. However, I'll will return to the Golden Age in one of the next two posts. So don't touch that dial!