The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) edited by Martin Edwards

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) is the third, wintry-themed anthology published in the British Library Crime Classics series, edited by Martin Edwards, collecting eleven festive stories about "unexplained disturbances in the fresh snow" and "the darkness that lurks beneath the sparkling decorations" – wrapped and presented to the reader like "a seasonal assortment box." This collection presents a wide variety of merry mayhem from the pens of some very well-known mystery writers to a few names who have only recently been rediscovered. But none of the stories have been, what you could call, anthologized to death. So let's pig on this suspicious looking, crime sprinkled Christmas pudding, shall we? Hmm, smells like bitter almonds! 

The collections opens with Baroness Orczy's "A Christmas Tragedy," originally published in the December, 1909, issue of Cassell's Magazine, which has a Christmas Eve party keeping an ear out for "the sound of a cart being driven at unusual speed." A sound that has lately become associated with a series of "dastardly outrages against innocent animals" in the neighborhood of Clevere Hall. So everyone is very keen to put a stop to these cattle-maiming outrages and the cart is heard that night, but this time it was followed by a terrible cry, "Murder! Help! Help!" Major Ceely, host of the party, is found on the garden steps with a knife wound between his shoulder blades. The local police gladly accepts the assistance of Lady Molly, of Scotland Yard, whose success or failure will decide the fate of an innocent man. Not a bad story for the time, but not one of my personal favorites. 

Selwyn Jepson's "By the Sword" first appeared in the December, 1930, issue of Cassell's Magazine and has claimed a place among my favorite seasonal mysteries. Alfred Caithness is spending Christmas with his cousin, Judge Herbert Caithness, who has an idyllic home life with a wife, Barbara, who's twenty-eight years his junior and a five-year-old son, Robert – who loves playing with his toy soldiers. So the perfect setting for an old-fashioned Christmas party, but Alfred has reasons to be more than a little envious of his cousin. He has loved Barbara ever since attending their wedding and sorely needs the kind of money Herbert has aplenty, which is why he decides his cousin has to go when he denies him another loan. So, inspired by the family legend saying that "a Caithness always dies by the sword," Alfred begins to plot the perfect murder with all the evidence pointing to an outsider. However, the entire universe, or the Ghosts of Christmas, appear to be against him as even the best-laid plans can go awry. A fantastic inverted mystery from the hoist-on-their-petards category.

John Pringle is perhaps best remembered today by his principle pseudonym, "Gerald Verner," who prolifically produced pulp-style detective and thriller novels during his lifetime. "The Christmas Card Crime," published as by “Donald Stuart,” originally appeared in the December, 1934, publication of Detective Weekly (No. 96). Trevor Lowe, a well-known dramatist and amateur detective, who you might remember from my reviews of Terror Tower (1935) and The Clue of the Green Candle (1938) is en route with his secretary Arnold White and Detective Inspector Shadgold to spend Christmas with a friend in a small Cornish village, but their train becomes stranded when the heavy snowfall blocks the line. So they have to walk back to the previous station along with seven other passengers, six men and a woman, but they have to go from the empty station to an old, gloomy inn of ill-repute. During the night, two people are murdered in short succession with the thick, undisturbed carpet of snow indicating "no one came from outside and no one has left from within." The only real clue Lowe has to work with is a torn Christmas card. A good and fun piece of Christmas pulp, but more memorable for its mise-en-scène than its plot. However, I have to give props for turning the last words of the second victim in a kind of dying message sort of pointing to the murderer.

The next two stories have been previously reviewed on this blog, here and here, but, needless to say, Carter Dickson's "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) and Ronald A. Knox's "The Motive" (1937) can be counted among the best stories in the collection. Both come highly recommended! 

Francis Durbridge's "Paul Temple's White Christmas" first appeared in Radio Times on December 20, 1946, but reads more like vignette than a proper short-short story. Paul Temple's dream of a white Christmas in Switzerland is granted when he's asked to go there to identify the main suspect in that Luxembourg counterfeit business he had help to smash. So not much to say about this one with only half a dozen pages and a razor thin plot. 

Cyril Hare's "Sister Bessie or Your Old Leech" was originally published in the Evening Standard on December 23, 1949, which is another one of my personal favorites from this collection. Timothy Trent was brought up by his step family, the Grigsons, but Timothy was the only "one of that clinging, grasping clan" who "got on in the world" and made money – someone from that family has been annually blackmailing him. Every year, around Christmas time, he receives a payment notice signed by "From your old Leech." Timothy was actually surprised by the latest demand, because he assumed he had gotten rid of Leech last February. But here he was again. Or was it a she? Timothy goes to the Grigson family party determined to smoke out the blackmailer, but, once again, even the best-laid plans can go awry and here it comes with a particular dark, poisonous sting in the tail. An excellent crime story demonstrating why Hare was admired by both his contemporary brethren and modern crime writers like P.D. James and Martin Edwards. 

E.C.R. Lorac's "A Bit of Wire-Pulling" originally appeared under the title "Death at the Bridge Table" in the Evening Standard on October 11, 1950, which is another short-short. Inspector Lang, the old C.I.D. man, tells the story of the time he had to protect an important industrialist, Sir Charles Leighton, who received threatening letters promising he will be dead before the old year's out. So he accompanies him, incognito, to a New Year's Eve bridge party where's shot to death in front of Lang's eyes and the murderer apparently managed to escape. However, the sharp-eyed detective quickly begins to pick up the bits and pieces that tell an entirely different story. More importantly, he trusts the men he has personally trained. Lorac was somewhat of a female John Rhode, as she was very keen on technical trickery, but you can't help but feel the murderer was doomed from the start by employing such a ballsy method. A pretty decent short-short. Not especially memorable, but not bad either. 

John Bude's "Pattern of Revenge," another short-short, was first published in The London Mystery Magazine (No. 21) in 1954 and surprisingly turned out to be an impossible crime story set in Norway. The story is a retrospective of a rivalry between two men, Thord Jensen and Olaf Kinck, who vy for the attention of a beautiful woman, Karen Garborg, but one morning she found dead on the doorstep of her cottage – stabbed through the heart. There was "only one set of tracks in the fresh-fallen snow," single footprints alternating with deep pock-marks, "characteristic of the imprint left by a wooden leg." Olaf has a wooden leg and his fingerprints were on the knife. So he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but a deathbed confession shed new light on the murder and attempts to right a wrong. A very well done short-short and a truly pleasant surprise to come across this unusual take on the footprints-in-the-snow impossible crime. 

John Bingham's "Crime at Lark Cottage" was originally published in the 1954 Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News and brings a slice of domestic suspense to the family Christmas table. John Bradley gets lost on a dark, snowy evening while his car is on the verge of breaking down and ends up at a lonely cottage. There he finds a woman with her small daughter and asks to use the phone, but is offered to stay the night as there's not garage around who would come out to the cottage at that time of night in foul weather. But she appears to be frightened. And it looks like someone is prowling around the cottage. A very well done piece of crime fiction that would have served perfectly as a radio-play for Suspense.

The last story to round out this seasonal anthology is Julian Symons' "'Twix the Cup and Lip," but nothing he wrote interests me and skipped it. That brings me to the end of this collection.

So, on a whole, The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories is a splendidly balanced anthology with Dickson, Hare, Jepson, Knox and Stuart delivering the standout stories of the collection with the other entries being a little too short or dated to leave an indelible impression on the reader. But not a single real dud or over anthologized story to be found. Two things that tend to be obligatory for these types of short story collections. Definitely recommended for those cold, shortening days of December.

The Clue of the Green Candle (1938) by Gerald Verner

The Clue of the Green Candle (1938) is Gerald Verner's ninth pulp-style detective novel starring his dramatist and amateur criminologist, Trevor Lowe, who's asked to discreetly investigate the strange disappearance of a celebrated mystery novelist, Roger Tempest – considered to be "one of the most ingenious of our detective writers." A mystery writer with "a most amazing capacity for evolving ingenious swindles" and "methods of robbery," but the opening lines of the story has him dictating a locked room mystery for Fiction Weekly to his secretary, Isabel Warren. So we already know he must have been a good guy! :) 

Several social obligations puts their work on hold until the next morning. Firstly, Roger expects a visit from his much younger, easy-going brother, Richard, who's "an inveterate gambler" and "a well-known figure on the racecourse." Roger quickly found out that "supplying his brother with money was rather like pouring water into a drain," which is why he tells Richard that he's not getting another penny until he turns his life around. This time, he means it!

After his brotherly sermon, Roger is driven to the home of his friends, the Sheldons, to have dinner, but, on his return home, he simply vanishes without a trace and nobody hears anything from him for over a week. Naturally, the publishers are getting a little restive with the non-delivery of his manuscripts and new contracts not getting signed.

So they bring in Trevor Lowe to start looking for him and, before too long, the bestselling author is found in a ditch with a stubby, unshaven face and dirty, bloodstained evening clothes with an ominous, narrow slit surrounded by a reddish brown stain in the shirtfront – ankles and wrists shows signs he had been tied up for some time. Suggesting he had been kept a prisoner somewhere until he no longer was of any use to his murderer. Just like "a bit out of one of his own books."

The Clue of the Green Candle is a pure, pulp-style detective novel, but you wouldn't be able to tell from its opening chapters and showed there was a proper, Golden Age-style mystery writer was hidden inside Verner. I guess the biggest stumbling block were his deadlines, because as the story progresses, you can actually feel his deadline coming closer as Verner's writing and plotting becomes more slipshod and pulpy. A change that becomes quickly apparent after an early, relevant inquest that adds new information instead of chewing cud (rejoice, JJ!) and ends with an arrest.

Regrettably, Verner immediately disposes of this new development and doesn't really come into play until the last chapters. This is also the point where the plot becomes a little more disjointed.

After the inquest, Lowe is asked to investigate the death of an old acquaintance, Sir Horace Gladwin, who was in "the best of health" when he went to bed and apparently died during the night of acute pneumonia, which is strange without any previous symptoms – reason why his doctor refuses to sign a death certificate. Lowe finds two important clues, "three dead flies and a green candle that has a queer smell," which convinces him "a very cunning crime" has been committed. But even he's surprised when he finds a tangible connection between the murders of Roger Tempest and Sir Horace.

On a sidenote, the murder of Sir Horace earned The Clue of the Green Candle a place in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but it's not a locked room or impossible crime in any shape or form. The bedroom door wasn't even locked! You have been warned.

So, as the story moves towards the halfway mark, it begins to enter pulp territory with its disjointed storytelling and the scheming presence of "a man with a dark overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat" who does everything in his power to get his hands on a sheaf of papers. Nothing is off the table. Arson, intimidation, violence, kidnapping and even murder comes the way of everyone who crosses path with this shadowy individual. There's a good, spirited attempt to misdirect the reader, but spotting the murderer is not too difficult a task and the only remarkable feature of the solution is the motive for murdering Roger Tempest, which is an uncut, diamond-in-the-rough of an idea – which deserved a better detective novel. Yeah, that's pretty much all that can be said about The Clue of the Green Candle. 

The Clue of the Green Candle is a short, fast and readable pulp novel with a few good ideas and a strong opening, full of promise, but the convoluted, sometimes confusing, second half killed any interest that the opening chapters had setup. For example, what exactly was the point of the intermezzo in which Lowe drives a swindler (unconnected to the story) to suicide? So, no, The Clue of the Green Candle is not in the same league as Verner's more accomplished novels, like They Walk in Darkness (1947), Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956), but still makes for fun, uncomplicated hour or two of reading.

The Last Warning (1962) by Gerald Verner

Gerald Verner's The Last Warning (1962) is the fourteenth title in the Detective-Superintendent Robert Budd series and is, particular compared to They Walk in Darkness (1947), the shortest novel I've read by Verner to date – practically a novella. I begin to believe that the Superintendent Budd novels were written according to a formula.

I've previously read the novella "The Beard of the Prophet" (1937) and The Royal Flush Murders (1948), which have very similar premises with men under a deadly threat in their own home and a police presence unable to prevent murder from happening. One of the murders is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances in a locked room closely guarded by policemen. The plot of The Last Warning follows the same pattern.

The Last Warning opens on a Friday evening, the 13th of November, when the assiduous, ill-tempered and unlikable Mr. Criller returns home to find the capital 'S' scrawled in red chalk on his gate. A greatly annoyed Criller assumes it was done by some of the unruly village boys, because he's not exactly popular in Thatchford. But this incident comes back to haunt him the next day.

Criller lives with his servants and an adopted niece, Grace Hatton, who acts as "a kind of unofficial secretary" to her uncle and, in return, she receives food, shelter and "a microscopic dress allowance" – making some people wonder why she put up with her "impossible life." A sub-plot that deserved better treatment. One of those people is her neighbor, Jim Langdon, who lives with his mother at Yule Lodge and wants to marry Grace. Naturally, Criller wants to hear nothing about it ("I'll not have any philandering, understand that").

Twenty years ago, Criller made "a nice packet" of money in a mysterious, underhanded scheme with two confederates, Franklin Brinn and Sir Benjamin Gottleib. A scheme not so subtly alluded to during a business meeting between Criller and Brinn, but details are kept as sketchy as possible at this early juncture in the story. When the meeting ends, Brinn strolls into the garden to smoke a cigar, but never returns. Grace is ordered to go look for him and finds his body in the summer-house. A rough letter 'S' was drawn in blood on the garden table!

The stout, deceptively sleepy-eyed Detective-Superintendent Robert Budd happened to be in the neighborhood on an unrelated case and had been talking with an old friend, Superintendent Hawkins, when he got news of the murder – coming on the tail of telling Budd that they "don't get much excitement" in Thatchford. So he tags along and they soon discover that the two remaining men are in mortal danger.

A threatening letter tells Criller that he'll be next and Gottleib receives a similar worded death threat announcing "tomorrow night at twelve you will die too."

They decide to spend the night at Criller's house. Gottleib is placed in a room with two police constables patrolling the ground beneath the window, which are securely fastened and bolted on the inside. Budd and Hawkins will be in sight of the locked door the entire time. Only thing Gottleib has to do is call out "all right" at regular intervals, but, when the clock had chimed twelve, everything remained silent behind the locked door and there's no response to their knocking – which made them decide to break down the door. What they find is Gottleib, slumped in a desk-chair, with "a small round hole in the center of his forehead" and "the hot-iron smell of burnt cordite" still lingering in the air.

A pretty solid premise for an impossible crime, but the locked room-trick employed here has been done before. A trick not as well known to mystery readers who aren't also wholesale consumers of impossible crime fiction, but I've come across numerous examples and variations on this idea, which was kind of old hat by the time The Last Warning was published. That being said, this trick is still better and less disappointing than secret passages, keys being turned with pliers or pieces of string, duplicate keys or keys being reintroduced to the room after the door was broken down.

My real problem with the impossible shooting is how it destroyed any shred of doubt I had about the murderer's identity. I already had this person tagged as my number one suspect, but there was another character, suspiciously hidden the background, who presented a possibility. Unfortunately, this was not the case and story became blatantly obvious and, as short as it was, a tedious right after the murder in the locked room. There's was an interesting little game of musical chairs with false identities and wills towards the end of the story, but this came too late to help prop up the weak solution.

So, while The Last Warning had a good premise and some interesting ideas, the plot failed to deliver the goods in the end and has convinced me Verner is not a writer you need to look to for good locked room mysteries. Luckily, Verner's Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956) demonstrated he could be an excellent, second-string mystery writer without having too lean on an impossible crime. I found a promising, non-impossible crime, title that looks promising with a plot and setting reminiscent of John Russell Fearn. But that's a detective story for 2020.

They Walk in Darkness (1947) by Gerald Verner

Gerald Verner's They Walk in Darkness (1947) is the second novel in a very short-lived series about a thriller writer and his wife, Peter and Anne Chard, who debuted in Thirsty Evil (1945) and rapidly descended into the catacombs of obscurity after their second outing – which was only dimly remembered as a locked room mystery. Astonishingly, this obscure, barely remembered detective novels reprinted three times in the past ten years!

Ulverscroft published a large print edition in 2011 as part of their Linford Mystery Library and Ramble House reissued the book in hard-and paperback in 2016, which was followed this year with an ebook version from Endeavour Media.

Regrettably, these various reissues seem to have done precious little to bolster the profile of the book and that's a shame, because honestly, it's one of Verner's best detective/thriller stories – certainly of the handful of titles I've read to date. I believe this has to do with the fact that Verner gave himself the space to tell the story. They Walk in Darkness is twice as long as, for example, The Royal Flush Murders (1948), Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956), which showed Verner was closer aligned with the pulp-style thrillers than with the pure Golden Age detective stories. Verner evidently attempted here to write something more in line with the traditional mystery novel. Something that's more evident in the first than the second half of the book.

They Walk in Darkness opens on a cold, snowy evening, in late October, when the Chards are traveling to a small, East Anglia village to visit a close relative of Peter, Aunt Helen.

Fendyke St. Mary used to be "a hot-bed of witchcraft in the Middle Ages" and "the abominable orgies of the Witches' Sabbath," attended by Satan himself, were regularly practiced at a place known as Lucifer's Stone. There's also an old, derelict cottage, Witch's House, which used to belong to leading light of "a particularly virulent coven" and was burned to death in 1644. So with such a long, ancient history and tradition in devil worship, it's hardly surprising many villagers are only too ready to explain anything "strange and inexplicable" as witchcraft. A belief they apply to the terrors that has plagued the village for the better part of two years.

During a dinner party, Peter and Ann learn that a child murderer is roaming the village, but "the prelude to the baby murders" was the theft of several lambs, at various intervals, which were found back as cadavers – all of them had their throat savagely cut. And then the children began to disappear. One of them was taken from his pram in the garden and another never returned home for tea, but their bodies were eventually found in clumps of reeds somewhere on the edge of Hinton Broad. Only suspect the police has seriously considered is a mentally undeveloped man, Tom Twist.

However, the dinner party's response to the wanton child killings going on in the village is extremely cool, level-headed and very British. They shake their heads in disapproval, mutter something about a maniac and chide the local police for their lack of progress.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed They Walk in Darkness back in March and commented on the British stoicism of the characters "this wholesale murder of helpless children." I left a comment suggesting he read Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996) and compare it with Verner's They Walk in Darkness, but had no idea at the time how apt my comparison really was.

The Vampire Tree is also set in a small village with a dark, bloody history and has become the playground of serial killer targeting children. This killer has pretty much the same modus operandi as the child murderer from Fendyke St. Mary and the characters have the same cool, detached response to the murders as they do here. I remember the children in Halter's story were allowed to continue to roam the woods, where the bodies were found, but Verner was even colder and had one of his characters suggest they use one of the village children as living bait ("like the old hunter's trick, eh?") by leaving the child in a lonely spot under discreet observation – a "tethered kid to attract the lion." One of those subtle hints that the English are, in fact, completely insane. The only reason they have been able to hide it so well is that they happen to share this continent with the French and Germans.

There's also the curious coincidence that both They Walk in Darkness and The Vampire Tree have characters named Twist and an impossible crime of the no-footprint-in-the-snow variety.

After the Eve of All-Hallows, a group of four people from Fendyke St. Mary briefly go missing from their home and their bodies are found, seated around "a very old worm-eaten table" laid for five people, in the dirty Witch's House. They sat "strangely contorted" with their eyes turned towards the empty chair at the head of the table with an "expression of horror." A considerable quantity of cyanide was found in the wine glasses and one of the bottles, but the cottage had been locked and there were four tracks in the snow outside. However, the tracks only went in the direction of Witch's House, but there was none coming back!

So, this situation presents the Peter and Ann with two possibilities, which are both utterly impossible: the four people either committed suicide and the door magically locked itself, before the key miraculously vanished, or there was a fifth person present in the cottage – who somehow managed to lock the door and disappeared with the key from "a house surrounded by snow without leaving any tracks." An intriguing premise and the solution was only slightly soiled by the clumsily handling of an important clue, which has always been weakness of Verner. Yes, "the snow trick" is not terribly original and have come across a very similar solution recently, but, somehow, I didn't mind that here. That has very much to do with the identity of the murderer and strong motive.

I thought I would never come across characters more deserving of murder than the "victims" from Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933) and Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934), but Verner served his reader four of such human abominations. This aspect reinforced many of the weak points of the overall plot and held the story together in the end.

The no-footprint-in-the-snow is, as mentioned above, hardly a classic of its kind and the second half of the book is written in the lurid style of the sensational, pulpy occult thrillers littered with adjectives (beastly, blasphemous, diabolically, horrible, etc), but the murderer and motive made up for a lot. I thought the vigilante mob scenes and the Biblical event that ravaged the region towards the end was a nice touches to the story.

They Walk in Darkness stands as one of the darkest, highly unconventional and spellbinding village mysteries, written by a professional story-teller, but not everyone is going to appreciate what Verner tried to accomplish here – either because the plot has its weaknesses or the unpleasant subject matter. This makes hard to unhesitatingly recommend the book to everyone. That being sad, if you liked Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) and Ellery Queen's The Glass Village (1954), both equally unconventional, you'll probably find They Walk in Darkness a fascinating and rewarding read.

And on a final, related note: when reading the book, I came up with an alternative solution to the impossible murders in Witch's House. An alternative solution that in no way resembles the actual explanation and wanted to share it with you. My solution placed two people inside the cottage, before the snow began to fall, which are the murderer and one of the four victims. They are preparing the cottage for their devil's banquet. When the snow stops falling, the other three arrive and, when they're dead, the murderer leaves the cottage by walking backwards – creating a fourth track of prints in the snow. Yes, I know walking backwards in the snow is an old, tired and hacky trick, but, usually, this trick is done by retracing a previously created trail of footprints. In this case, the murderer leaves an untempered track that's simply misinterpreted.

Noose for a Lady (1952) by Gerald Verner

Back in June, I looked at the second detective novel from the short-lived Simon Gale series, entitled Sorcerer's House (1956), which Gerald Verner unmistakably intended as an homage to one of John Dickson Carr's most celebrated mystery novels, He Who Whispers (1946) – without becoming too derivative or having to lean on a locked room gimmick. Surprisingly, the book actually succeeded in being an obvious tribute that told its own story and that piqued my curiosity about the first title in the series. A mystery novel that has consistently been compared to the work of Agatha Christie.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, left a comment on my review of Sorcerer's House saying Noose for a Lady (1952) is "very much like a Christie novel" just as Sorcerer's House is "like Carr." I agree. Personally, the book reminded me of Christie's Sad Cypress (1940) and Ordeal by Innocence (1958) with a hint of Cards on the Table (1936).

Noose for a Lady opens with the conclusion of the trial of Margaret Hallam, who has been found guilty of the murder, by poison, of her husband, John Hallam.

John Hallam died at his home, Easton Knoll, from "an overdose of barbitone" administered in a glass of hot whiskey and milk. A mixture prepared by Mrs. Hallam. There were only two set of fingerprints found on the glass, which belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, but, even more damning, is that she had been taking a preparation of barbitone for insomnia and kept her supply in a locked drawer in her bedroom – she kept the key in her purse. Two days before the murder, Mrs. Hallam had bought a new bottle containing "containing twenty-five five-grain tablets," but the police only found three tablets in the bottle. Mrs. Hallam was unable to account for the missing tablets.

So the jury returns with a unanimous guilty verdict and the judge, who gets the square of black silk draped over his wig, announces that Mrs. Hallam will be "taken from this place to a lawful prison" and "thence to a place of execution" where she'll be "hanged by the neck until you are dead." Mrs. Hallam continues to proclaim her innocence, but the only person who believes her is her stepdaughter, Jill Hallam.

Jill Hallam last hope is enlisting a childhood friend of her stepmother, Simon Gale, who recently returned from Italy and has read "one of the scurrilous rags" for the past eight months. So, when he learns her execution is scheduled to place within a week, Gale thunders "do you mean these blundering, incompetent numskulls are going to hang her?" and is determined to reverse the verdict before that seven day time-limit. But his approach and even personality noticeably differed from his second appearance.

Sorcerer's House was written as a homage to Carr and called Gale in my review a store-brand Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale, because he constantly smoked vile, acrid smelling cigarettes rolled from black tobacco and booms odd, classically inspired phrases – such as "by the golden apples of Hesperides" and "by the cloven hoofs of Pan." These Carr-like personality traits were entirely absent here. Gale still has a loud, boorish personality, but now he stands much closer to either Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple than to Dr. Fell or H.M. A detective who hunts for psychological clues in the personalities of the suspects.

Gale is a professional portrait painter and admitted he knew nothing about "as cigar ash, fingerprints, alibis, and tangible clues of that kind," but knew Mrs. Hallam didn't poison her husband because it was "psychologically wrong." Mrs. Hallam has an infernal temper and she would have used a poker or bread-knife, but not poisoning his nightcap with a dose of sleeping pills. So he descends on the village of Wickham Green to find out who, of its inhabitants, fits the psychological profile of "one of the most dangerous types of murderer," the sly poisoner.

This proves to be somewhat of a Herculean task. Not only have they less than a week to find this unknown murderer, but the victim, John Hallam, is revealed as "a mental sadist." Someone who liked to find out people's dirty secrets and torture them, privately, with the threat of exposure and there were quite a few people in the village who were caught in his torturous web. There's a malicious village gossip, Mrs. Ginch, who poses as a pious church lady. A collector of some exquisite pieces of china, Robert Upcott, whose spirit was broken when his wife ran away with another man. An ex-military man, Major Fergusson, who has seen things in the war that keeps him awake at night. A tartar of a woman, Mrs. Langdon-Humphreys, who's always accompanied by her niece, Vanessa Lane. Lastly, there the typical country physician, Doctor Evershed, who's the only one in the village that has threatened Mrs. Ginch with lawsuit for the lies she told behind his back.

Noose for a Lady largely comprises of ferreting the long-held secrets from this closed-circle of suspects, but they're incredibly reticent and Gale compared his task to turning on "a bright light in an old, damp cellar" as "all kinds of nasty, crawling things go scuttling away to their holes" – in order "to get out of the glare." All the while, the clock is rapidly ticking away the days that Mrs. Hallam has left to live.

So I can understand why the story has been described as an Agatha Christie-style novel and Verner took many of his cues directly from some of her detective stories. I already mentioned Sad Cypress and Cards of the Table, but one piece of psychological clueing tore a page directly from Christie's widely praised masterpiece, Death on the Nile (1937). However, the ending betrayed the fact that Verner was not quite in the same league as Christie.

John Norris wrote in his blog-post, entitled "Neglected Detectives – Simon Gale," that "the ending is histrionic in the extreme" with too much "explained away as madness" and made "the entire story seem prosperous." Santosh Iyer was a lot nicer, but his one complaint was "the unnecessary melodrama at the end." I mostly agree with them, but the reason why melodramatic ending didn't work, in my opinion anyway, is the vulgar motive to get rid of John and Margeret Hallam. A more personal and emotional motivation would have made the ending more acceptable. An incident was mentioned that could have been turned into a motive that, psychologically, fitted the murderer.

So, in spite of the slightly botched ending, Noose for a Lady is a well-done, much appreciated attempt at a classic, cleverly-done whodunit, a la Christie, which made for an exciting and intriguing detective story, but Christie would have handled the surprise ending so much better. Just compare Noose for a Lady to Peril at End House (1932) and Lord Edgware Dies (1933), you can't help but to appreciate her lesser-celebrated novels all over again. However, it isn't really fair to compare Verner to Christie and, by his own standards, Noose for a Lady is as good a second-string mystery as Sorcerer's House. Purely recommended for readers who either want to read something like Christie or readers who love obscure detective stories.

A note for the curious: Noose for a Lady began as a radio-play and was adapted in 1953 for the movies. You can watch the trailer here.

Terror Tower (1935) by Gerald Verner

Several months ago, I read two detective novels by the prolific "Gerald Verner," a penname of John R.S. Pringle, of which the Paul Halter-like homage to John Dickson Carr, Sorcerer's House (1956), encouraged me to delve deeper into his work – which brought me to Terror Tower (1935). A pulp-style take on the quintessential English village mystery.

Terror Tower is set in a little place named Stonehurst, an old-world village on the Kentish coast, where the building plans for a factory in the middle of the village has split the community in two groups. On the one hand, you have the villagers who believe a factory will turn Stonehurst from "a village to a prosperous town." On the other hand, you have "the more conservative members of the community" who wish to preserve the village for themselves. And they have a majority vote.

John Tarley is the leading voice of this conservative faction and proposes to raise the money to pay for the several acres of land that was mortgaged by the now late owner, Owen Winslow, but five thousand pounds is more than "the village could rake up in a century." So they decide to make an appeal to the new owner of the village and the ancient Greytower, Jim Winslow, Old Winslow's nephew.

Greytower was "an ancient creeper-covered building," originally an old fort, "standing in its own well-wooded grounds in the centre of the village" and was expanded with a left-hand wing in 1890s – where Owen Winslow lived as a recluse. Jim Winslow inherited the place from his uncle and arrived in the village with a friend in tow, Ian McWraith, but almost immediately they got a taste of the "atmosphere of terror" which brooded over the whole place. Greytower is run by a butler and housekeeper, a Mr. and Mrs. North, who act very suspiciously. There's a mysterious, solidly locked door underneath the spiral staircase that can't be opened, because they have no idea what happened to the key. McWraith's nightcap is doctored with a sleeping drought. Winslow witnesses from his bedroom window how a shadowy figure pushes around a wheeled-ambulance with the body of a man on it!

On the following morning, the body of a stranger is found at the cross-roads just outside the village a bullet in his head. And this is not the only problem that has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard.

Over a two year period, a number of police-detectives have disappeared within the vicinity of Stonehurst and the last disappearance occurred only three weeks ago. So the Yard puts one of their best man on the case, Inspector Shadgold, who immediately turned to his talented friend, Trevor Lowe – a dramatist and amateur criminologist. Lowe opened strongly, in the third chapter, as he critiqued and sniffed savagely at the "so-called psychological novels."

His secretary, Arnold White, asks Lowe about the book he has been reading and answers that there isn't "a solitary character in it who isn't cross and nasty." They all have "kinks of some sort or another." These characters spend pages analyzing themselves "to find out what they are" and "pages more to find out why they've got them!" 

A pernicious type of literature that only "portrays a crumb" of the world as a whole, because the world is made up of mostly of decent, hardworking people who are too busy earning a living to inhibitions. Lowe shudders to think the effect such dreary books have on people who are just reaching adolescence. Young men and women who dig down into their subconscious to try discovering "things that don't exist" and have their minds poisoned by "a long dose of this 'nothing-is-worth-while' creed." It teaches self-analysis in the wrong way. Hear, hear! Go to Hell with your drab, mundane realism! I want ingeniously constructed, labyrinthine plots full of danger, romance and murder! I want hansom cabs rattling through the London fog and a track of footprints in the snow that impossibly end in the middle of an open clearing! Give me the Great Detectives of yore!

Yeah, in spite of some of his shortcomings as a plotter and storyteller, I'm beginning to warm to Verner.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the story, Terror Tower slowly changes from a, more or less, conventional village mystery into an old-timely, dime thriller complete with gangsters, but first, the reader is treated to a classic cliché and trope of the traditional detective story – courtesy of a murderer with a good sense for dramatic timing. One of the suspects is about to sing like a canary, but is shot in front of the detectives by a murderer who makes a successful escape. A second suspect is poisoned in a locked and bolted bedroom, but the impossible crime was only a very minor aspect of the plot. However, the solution made me wonder what Agatha Christie could have done with this idea for a locked room poisoning. There was something about the trick that fitted her work like a glove.

Sherlock Holmes stated in A Study in Scarlet (1887) that, criminally, "there's nothing new under the sun" and that "it has all been done before," but the central plot-idea that emerged when Terror Tower turned into a thriller struck me as completely original. I'm not as familiar with these dime thrillers as with the classic detective story, but the overarching scheme of the villains seemed pretty original to me. There was even a touch, or suggestion, of the horror story when that evil scheme began to emerge and take shape. A slightly better writer might have gotten more out of the idea, but Terror Tower was an entertaining, old-timely gangster thriller, fraught with danger, presented as a village mystery. And I appreciated the bits of foreshadowing.

So, all things considered, Terror Tower can hardly be labeled as one of the greatest pieces of crime fiction from the genre's Golden Age, but still made for a good read with an exciting ending and perhaps a truly original idea at the heart of the plot – neatly tied to the missing policemen and (locked room) murders. Yeah, I'm now convinced I have found my next John Russell Fearn.

Sorcerer's House (1956) by Gerald Verner

In my previous post, I reviewed John R.S. Pringle's The Royal Flush Murders (1948), published as by "Gerald Verner," which ended with the promise to immediately return to the work of this obscure, pulp-like mystery writer with, reputedly, one of his best detective novels – namely the intriguing-sounding Sorcerer's House (1956). A detective story clearly intended as a homage to the great maestro, John Dickson Carr, but without leaning on an impossible crime. Nearly everything else is pure Carr!

One of the primary characters of Sorcerer's House is a young American, Alan Boyce, who's on holiday in England and is staying with a long-standing friend of his father, Henry Onslow-White, in the charming village of Ferncross. On the day of his arrival, Boyce learns of the abandoned, decaying and haunted Threshold House. A house long forgotten by the world, but the villagers remember the time when it was used as "a kind of wizard's den" by one of history's most peculiar characters, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.

Cagliostro was a self-professed magician, occultist, alchemist and very likely a died-in-the-wool conman.

During his second and last time in England, Cagliostro had rented Threshold House where, if local legends are to believed, he attempted to replicate his famous Banquet of the Dead in the Long Room – which has been haunted every since by "a dim, bluish glow." A mysterious light that is seen as "a sign that somebody is going to die." Violently! In recent years, the bluish light in the window preceded a deadly motor cycle accident in the village and the discovery of dead, unidentified tramp underneath the window of the Long Room.

Boyce learns of this local legend in the garden of Bryony Cottage, home of Mr. and Mrs. Onslow-White, where a group of people are sitting around in deck-chairs on a hot, airless summer evening. These people are Avril Farrell and her brother, Dr. Farrell, who's accompanied by his daughter, Flake. She naturally becomes somewhat of a love-interest to Boyce. Paul Meriton rounds out the party. The plot begins to roll when Avril Farrell makes the disturbing remarks, "there was a light in the window last night" and "I wonder who is going to die this time?"

That night, Boyce looks out of his bedroom window, overlooking the old, ruined and ivy smothered house, and sees a light in the window of the Long Room. So he decides to investigate and makes a terrible discovery. The body of Meriton lies underneath the window of the Long Room, exactly like the dead tramp, with the back of his head caved in and turns out he had been killed with "a loose banister torn from the staircase" – after which he had been pitched out of the window. So this is murder. And this brings one of Verner's short-lived series-detective onto the scene.

Simon Gale is a flamboyant, beer guzzling artist-of-leisure and an incorrigible contrarian with an unruly shock of hair, aggressive beard and the dress sense of a Dutch flower field. He smokes vile, acrid smelling cigarettes rolled from black tobacco and booms such phrases as "by the orgies of Bacchus" or "by the cloven hoofs of Pan." Gale is unmistakable meant to be a Great Detective in the tradition of Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, but many readers will probably find his mannerisms tiresome. And this probably makes him more of brand-store version of Dr. Fell and H.M. Still, I didn't entirely dislike him, but he can be tedious at times. Lee Sheldon created a very similar, but more convincing, JDC-inspired detective in Impossible Bliss (2001). Anyway, the most obvious nod to Carr had yet to come.

A key-part of the overarching plot is finding out what exactly happened to Meriton's wife, Fay Meriton, who apparently absconded with a secretive lover, but nobody has ever been able to find a trace of her. Gale is convinced there's more to her sudden disappearance and believes he'll find the answer in the decaying house. This is the point where the story becomes tricky to discuss, but Fay's back-story is directly tied to the dark and hidden tragedies of the house. However, it's not exactly what you think it is. Gale was even surprised by two of their discoveries, but, slowly, Fay emerges as a tragic and wronged woman. You can say what you want, but this largely mirrors the story of Fay Seton from Carr's classic He Who Whispers (1946).

As I mentioned above, Sorcerer's House becomes tricky, if not impossible, to discuss once they begin to explore the house in earnest, because the story is almost structured like a magazine serial and the discoveries are excellently used here as cliffhangers – baffling everyone from reader to the detective. These are some of the best set-pieces of the story and the closes Verner came to matching Carr when it came to story-telling. Verner also deserves praise for showing the excitement and gossip in Ferncross when the police and press descended on the small village. A particular highlight was the character of the village gossip, Miss Flappit, who was in "a seventh heaven of excitement" and shot all over the village like "a noisy and virulent wasp."

Plot-wise, Sorcerer's House only suffers from ramshackle clueing and an otherwise excellent, well-hidden murderer who falls for an obvious trap set by Gale, but most readers will probably forgive that last point. Because you'll get one of those great, Carr-like scenes in return. A genuine surprise played to great effect, but again, the murderer was acting as an idiot here and should not have fallen for it.

Leaving aside these imperfections, Sorcerer's House is a superior and more original detective story than either The Beard of the Prophet (1937) or The Royal Flush Murders. The former borrowed a little too freely from Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), while the plot of the latter was pretty much a pastiche of S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928). Yes, Sorcerer's House evidently drew inspiration from He Who Whispers, but most of the plot is entirely original. In some ways, you can even say the plot of Sorcerer's House anticipates Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990). So maybe Brad and JJ want to take note of this one.

Long story short, Sorcerer's House is a good, second-string mystery comparable to the more Carr-like mystery novels by John Russell Fearn (e.g. The Five Matchboxes, 1948), but, above all, it's a much appreciated homage to the master with patches of truly great story-telling. So this one has definitely given me a reason to return to Verner in the future.