The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012) by E.X. Ferrars

"Elizabeth Ferrars" ("E.X. Ferrars") is the pseudonym of prolific, long-lived British mystery writer, Morna Brown, who wrote seventy-one detective novels and filled two short story collections over a period of half a century – between 1940 and 1995. I thought the last holdouts of the British Golden Age were Gladys Mitchell (The Crozier Pharaohs, 1984) and Michael Innes (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986), but Ferrars still had enough gas in the tank to go another decade. In his blog-post “The Country Cottage Murders of Elizabeth Ferrars,” Curt Evans wrote that "had Ferrars not suddenly expired in 1995 at the age of 87, there's every reason to believe that she would have keep going with her writing, perhaps even into the 21st century" as "there's no sense of the steep mental slippage" marring the later works of so many of her contemporaries.

I only sampled a few of Ferrars' detective novels over the years, while Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Death in Botanist's Bay (1941) and The March Hare Murders (1949) have not moved an inch towards the top of the big pile in years. Recently, the name Ferrars came back to my attention and decided to move her up the pile starting with her second short story collection.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012), published by Crippen & Landru and introduced by John Cooper, collects seventeen short-shorts and short stories. The first six short-shorts feature a retired private investigator, Jonas P. Jonas, who badgered the wife of his nephew, a professional writer, to put his past triumphs to paper – fitting considering their publication date. Cooper writes in his introduction the stories were published "during one week in 1958 from December 8 until December 13 in the London Evening Standard" ("...a pre-Christmas treat for the readers of this newspaper"). So a retired detective trying to get his memoirs written at the very tail-end of the late, late Golden Age is a great premise, but only the first two stories are noteworthy with the remaining four being little more than amusing anecdotes.

In "The Case of the Two Questions," Jonas tells the story of the time a woman came to him with two strange questions. Can a middle aged woman go out of room, grab a rifle, run a hundred yards to shoot a man and come back within five minutes "without puffing for breath or having a hair of her head disarranged"? And is it possible for "a car to be driven through a watersplash and back again, without its tires getting wet"? Ferrars spins a clever detective story out of these question covering less than a handful of pages and its short length is its only drawback. A slightly longer treatment of the plot-idea would have made for a first-rate howdunit bordering on an impossible crime.

The second story, "The Case of the Blue Bowl," is the short-short done to near perfection. Jonas recalls the first time he heard about how birds learned to poke through the tops of milk bottles left on doorsteps to get to the milky cream. This fact came to his attention while investigating the disappearance and subsequent murder of a village miser, Old Mrs. Toombs, who was supposed to have a small fortune sewn up in her mattress. Jonas shrewdly uses this knowledge in combination with the titular blue bowl left on the victim's doorstep to deliver her murderer to the hangman. A fine example of the detective short-short and even better as a miniature replication of the British village mysteries of the 1930s.

Not much can be said about the other four short-shorts as they're little more than thinly-plotted, mostly forgettable anecdotes. "The Case of the Auction Catalogue" finds Jonas aboard a train when a woman is found strangled in the end compartment and the first suspect is the passenger who hurriedly left the train at the previous stop, but Jonas demonstrates his innocence based on an auction catalogue the suspect left behind. "The Case of the Left Hand" has Jonas recall the time he had to go to a pub to identify a wanted criminal in disguise and only knows the suspect has a partially paralyzed left hand. Jonas helps an old woman in "Invitation to Murder – One the Party Line" who believes "she'd been listening to a murder being plotted on the telephone." The last story of this short-lived series, "A Lipstick Smear Points to the Killer," comes the closest to matching the first two stories and concerns an elderly man found dead sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee on the arm of the chair – an inexplicable half-moon of lipstick on the rim. But in the end, too slight to match the first two stories.

So an enjoyable enough series of short-shorts and loved the premise of a retired detective trying to get his memoirs ("nostalgic memories of crime and criminals") committed to paper in 1958. I just wish all the stories were either as good as "The Case of the Blue Bowl" or came with a somewhat substantial plot like "The Case of the Two Questions" to make this series a little more than an amusing genre curio/footnote.

The other eleven mysteries in The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries are not classically-plotted detective stories, but darker, character-driven crime fiction of the modern school. So not every single story in this section is going to be to my taste, which you should keep in mind when I'm giving some of the stories a short shrift. I do like a good inverted mystery with a biting twist and this collection has a few of them.

The first of these stories is "Custody," originally published in A Suit of Diamonds (1990), which follows Ray Bagstock in tracking down his ex-wife and children to the small town of Dillingford. Ray is determined to take the children away from Lucille and move abroad, because she's a bad mother and a violent fight over this ended in a divorce with Lucille getting custody of their two children – which proves to be easier planned than executed. Particularly when becoming the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his landlady. And the care he took in covering his tracks in finding his ex-wife only makes him look even more suspicious. Surprisingly, the depressingly dark conclusion is more opportunistic than the carefully laid trap I expected, but somehow it worked. Even though it required the shocking incompetence of the police to get to there.

"The Trap" was published in the May, 1961, issue of My Home and is a throwback to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches." Miss Isobel Allen takes the position of an elderly, invalided woman, Mrs. Buckle, who lives remote cottage. Isobel was hired by Mrs. Buckle's sister, Jean Chantry, but she notices something is off as soon as she arrives and even gets an ominous warning, "if unkindness is all you encounter in this house, Miss Allen, you'll be lucky" ("you should prepare yourself for far worse things"). Things move on from there. All I can say about this story is that the ending doesn't feel like the cop-out it is and that's something of an accomplishment.

The next story, "Stop Thief," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 24 (1992) and concerns a married couple, Peter and Coralie Gates, who recently suffered a miscarriage and their lost has affected Coralie's mental health. She has begun to shoplift from the village stores and to Peter's absolute horror word is getting around the much more modern minded, sympathetic village community ("I don't want sympathy!"). I struggled to care about the story, characters or what appeared to pass for a plot, but, fair's fair, the ending pulled it together and delivered with a cruel twist.

"The Long Way Round," first published in Winter's Crimes 4 (1974), is exactly the type of inverted mystery I enjoy the most. A type of inverted mystery sometimes referred to as "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories in which a carefully laid crime or scheme falls apart based on a small, devilish detail – which the oblivious culprit overlooked. One of the best-known examples around these parts is William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965) and John Sladek's "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) deserves a nod. This story is an excellent take on the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Leo and Melanie are married antique dealers traveling to Cyprus to visit a troublesome relative, Uncle Ben, who undeservedly inherited a big sum from his sister without sharing a penny ("...he had merely said that at least he could now afford to take himself off their hands..."). Leo has a foolproof plan to rectify that mistake and inherit the money from his soon to be late uncle. Only for a very tiny, but very important, detail to upset his whole plan ("Oh, God, God!") with the setting being more than just story dressing. Maybe my favorite short story from this collection as a whole.

The next story, "Fly, Said the Spy," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 15 (1983) and is an odd, but compelling, mixture of espionage with domestic intrigue. A nuclear physicist working at a secret research institute has been spilling secret for the past ten years and getting paid for it, but now he has received a warning that the gig is up. So now he either has to bite down on a cyanide capsule or leave everything, including his wife, behind to start a new life under a new name provided by the people who paid him. Not exactly my thing, but not a bad story.

"Instrument of Justice," published in Winter's Crime 13 (1981), reads like a modern crime story, dark, grim and populated with flawed or unpleasant characters, but the story is cleverly-plotted full with unexpected twists and turns. The story begins with Frances Liley reading the obituary of Oliver Darnell, "a painter of very abstract pictures," who had been blackmailing Frances ("two thousand a year...") with salacious photographs, but relieve makes place for horror. She has to find the photographs before someone finds them and sets out to ensure an opportunity to search his studio. What should have been a relatively save, risk free undertaking becomes a complicated situation when a murder is put in her way. Cold, calculated manner ("she was not a nice person, she thought") in which she takes care of both the blackmail material and the murderer makes "Instrument of Justice" the standout story of this collection. A plot, no matter in what shape it's bend or twisted, can do wonder even for the darkest, grittiest of crime material.

The next two stories are not particularly interesting, nor memorable, short-shorts originally published in the Evening Standard. "Suicide" (1963) revolves around two questions: did the dead woman found in an old quarry take her own life or was she murdered and why would she or her killer leave on the car's headlights? "Look for Trouble" (1964) brings the police to a hair salon following a string of burglaries and a murder. Short, not bad and completely forgettable.

"Justice in My Own Hand," originally published in Winter's Crimes 20 (1988), reads like a patchwork of ideas and plot points from other stories in this collection without improving on any of them. So not much to say about this story, except that I didn't care about it. Fortunately, the last two stories end this collection on a high note.

"The Handbag," originally serialized in two-parts in July 2 and July 9, 1960, publication of The Star Weekly Magazine, is the exact opposite of the previous story. It reads like the Golden Age has recently passed away, but its presence (or spirit) is still lingering around the place. Dorothy Clare's father recently passed away when an old friend, Vivian Alford, appeared out of nowhere to take her away for a much deserved break from grieving, but their holiday destination turns out to be a small, grayish inn – somewhere in the bleak, rainy border country. Dorothy slowly begins to believe Vivian has an ulterior motive to drag her along to that place. A suspicion that becomes stronger when Vivian strong arms her into coming along on a sightseeing expedition of Harestone House ("it's hundreds of years old..."). A strange house tour conducted by the blind owner of the house, Mrs. Hunter, during which both Vivian and a priceless cup go missing. So what happened? A modern crime story with all the trappings of a classic country house mystery complete with slippery red herrings.

The collection closes out with a story that could have easily been rewritten as a slightly lengthier Jonas P. Jonas short story. "Sequence of Events," originally published in Winter's Crimes 9 (1977), brings the celebrated Evening Standard reporter Peter Hassall to the village of Newton St. Denis. Hassall is writing a series of articles on forgotten murders, but always ends up solving "the problems which, over the years, had baffled the police." This story reads like the first in a series tells of the first forgotten murder Bassall investigated. The murder of Dr. Joseph Armiger, a retired researcher, who several years ago was found beaten to death next to a letter box in the village and the main suspects were a gang of boys on motor-cycles ("...seen that evening driving wildly through the village"). But no case against them could be made. So, five years later, Bassall travels to the village to make inquiries, but found nothing new until speaking with a local mystery writer, Everard Crabbe. And he has a story to tell. Or, to use his own words, "all I'm telling you about is a sequence of events." A sequence of events centering on a neighborly feud Armiger and Albert Riddle over stolen coronations, vandalized gardens and threats. The ending presents the reader with two possible solution: a simple, sordid and uncomplicated explanation and a more complicated one echoing a very famous detective story. Needless to say, I prefer Crabbe's sequence-of-events interpretation of events, but, either way, a solid story to close out this collection.

So, all in all, The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries is a surprisingly good, nicely balanced selection of short stories considering how far most of the stories are outside of my wheelhouse, but, looking back over the review, I liked more of them than expected. Most of the short-shorts are flimsy and forgettable, except the first two featuring the titular detective, but only "Justice in My Own Hands" truly disappointed. And while I didn't care for the majority of the story, most of the time, I admired how Ferrars manage to turn me around right at the end ("Custody," "The Trap" and "Stop Thief"). More importantly, "The Long Way Round," "Instrument of Justice" and the last two stories are first-rate short crime-and detective stories which gave me something different to chew. A little different than what usually gets reviewed on this blog, but variation is the spice of life and this collection shows our genre has plenty of variety to offer.

I suppose the biggest takeaway from The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas is that Ferrars, who debuted in 1940, could just as easily turn her hands at modern crime fiction in all its gory, depressing grittiness as a good, old-fashioned whodunit. So I'll also bump Give a Corpse a Bad Name up a few places on the big pile.

Grim Memories

"It's a dangerous piece of knowledge to possess, and it's well known that one murder leads to another."

- Mr. Winkley (Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks, 1940) 

Morna Doris MacTaggert was the birth-name of "Elizabeth Ferrars," or "E.X. Ferrars," whose career as a mystery novelist spanned five decades, from 1940 to the mid-1990s, during which she wrote over seventy crime novels and numerous short stories – some of them were posthumously collected (e.g. The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries, 2012).

Ferrars has been called the closet of all mystery novelists to Agatha Christie in "style, plotting and general milieu," but I suspect this to be an arbitrary, superficial comparison similar to how the late P.D. James was once heralded as her "Crown Princess." They were female mystery writers who were, at one point in time, contemporaries of one another, which is where the similarities come to a halt. I've read only two of Ferrars' detective stories, but I think the subject of this blog-post showed a writer who fundamentally differed from Christie. As well as poking the popular notion that detective stories from the Golden Era only dwelled in the stuffy, hearth-warmed drawing rooms of ancestral mansions in the eye.

I, Said the Fly (1945) was published in the final year of World War II, but opens in 1941 in a bombed-out street in London and proceeds to tell the story of what happened there in the year preceding the war.

Before the bombs, Little Carberry Street had already lost a lot of its eighteenth century respectability and became dominated by the squalor of the poor. The windows were hung with "curtains of soiled yellow lace," bug-infested rooms and the street "filled by the shrill voices of swarms of illdressed, underfed children" and the disturbing "singing of homegoing drunks" – interspersed with "screams and shouts" and "fighting in the street." Kay Bryant found herself occupying a cheap bed-sitting-room on the top floor of No. 10 Little Carberry Street after she drifted away from her husband and had an "extreme shortage of money."

She returned to the place "to see what the blitz had done to it" and began to remember the grim, horrifying events that took place there. It began when Kay's neighbor, Pamela Fuller, convinced their landlady, Miss Lingard, to install a gas-fire in her room, but the gas-fitters found something beneath the floorboards that delayed the job: a revolver swaddled in a dust cloth!

The firearm is linked by the police to a murder that occurred a fortnight before the floorboards were lifted: a naked, mutilated body of a woman, shot through the heart, was discovered on Hampstead Heath and the victim is identified as a former tenant – which makes it very likely that the murderer is an occupant of No. 10. There are more than enough potential suspects for Inspector Corey to review.

Tovey is the caretaker of the place who shuffles around the place to make "symbolic gestures of cleaning" and can usually be "found outside a door or round a bend in the staircase," which does not make him a very popular figure. He often verbally abuses Miss Lingard, but excuses him as being "quite a character" and "had trouble with his poor old head" after being wounded in World War I. Ted Hay and Melissa Ivory share a room and live a "dark life of sin." Hay makes his loving "in a hand-to-mouth fashion on the edge of the world of journalism" and "knew who was going to marry whose wife" or "who was homosexual." Ivory was simply "a very odd person" and attempting to figure her out got nobody anywhere. Charlie Boyce is a tenant on the first-floor and loves to wake everyone up whenever he has forgotten his latch-key and Kay would not be surprised that his whole existence was made up of "one unmentionable crime after another." Mrs. Flower lives on the ground floor and "loans her front room to a lot of her girlfriends and their gentlemen acquaintances," which presumably comes with "a commission on the transaction" that helps her pay the rent.

Well, I said Ferrars did not struck me as an Agatha Christie-type mystery writer and the backdrop, characters and even the plot of I, Said the Fly can testify to that. However, Ferrars was still a product of the Golden Age and that becomes very evident towards the end of the book when some of the characters begin to draw-up dummy cases against each other, which was (plot-wise) my favorite part of the book – because I liked them better than the eventual explanation. Not that the solution was thoroughly bad, or anything, but I simply enjoyed how the characters were airing their suspicions and attempted to make the evidence fit their pet-theories. I was pleasantly reminded of Anthony Berkeley! But it also made the real explanation somewhat underwhelming.

So don't expect an Agatha Christie-tier rug puller that'll leave you dumbstruck with surprise, but I would still warmly recommend the book to the loyal readers of the Crime Queens who have nearly depleted their pile of Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngiao Marsh, Christianna Brand, Margery Allingham, Gladys Mitchell and the others. I'd wager the backdrop op the story will be interesting to genre historians and scholars of popular culture, because it goes contrary to the image a lot of people have of a British whodunit from the 1940s. 

Fade to Black

"Trouble shared is trouble halved."

- Lord Peter Wimsey (Five Red Herrings, 1931)

The Golden Age of Detection Wiki has a summery biography for Morna Doris MacTaggart, whose penname, “Elizabeth X. Ferrars,” was plastered on the covers of more than sixty mystery novels – appearing for the first time in print at the dawn of WWII and the last one rolled off the presses in 1997!

That's a prolific writing career covering a significant chunk of the previous century, during which she garnered praise for her novels and was compared with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but the absence of a solid lead character in her detective stories may have contributed to her descend into literary obscurity. I know she had two, albeit minor, series characters in Toby Dyke and Jonas P. Jonas, but from what I gathered, the majority of her work consists of stand-alone novels and the rule of thumb with Golden Age mysteries is that the lack of an iconic detective figure rarely bodes well for a writers longevity. Who remembers now Pat McGerr, a true post-WWII era innovator, or the man who penned the delightful The Neat Little Corpse (1951), Max Murray, but a handful of fervent "Connoisseurs in Murder."

Murder Among Friends (1946) is one of those stand-alone mysteries that was selected by the late H.R.F. Keating as one of his "one hundred best crime and mystery books" and Ferrar's regular publisher apparently rejected the manuscript, because the content was too steamy for a proper detective story, however, you shouldn't rush off to order a copy on account of its explicit content – which is adorably tame by today's standard that probably would even consider P.D. James as one of the "cozies."

(added per request by E.F.'s original publisher)

Ferrar's coated the plot of Murder Among Friends in the style of the classic, British drawing room mysteries, in which the roar of the war is reduced to a murmur from the outside world penetrating the blacked out windows of the home of Cecily Lightfood – who's throwing a party for a closed circle of artistic friends. The main objective of the party is to lift the spirit of a lauded playwright, Aubrey Ritter, after his wife, Rosamund, killed herself the month before. However, the guest of honor no-shows, and before long, they find out why: someone busted open his head in his upstairs apartment with a fire iron. The American soldier who discovered the dying Ritter heard him mutter the name Janet. One of the titular friends is a Janet Markland, who even makes an admission, which is immediately detracted, but the damage has been done and she's convicted for the murder of Aubrey Ritter – and sentenced to be hanged by the neck.

Everyone seems to accept the official reading of the murder and the sentencing, except for Alice Church, who feels not so sure if the evidence is complete or even if they're aware of the full truth. Alice begins to talk with the people who knew Janet personally and creates a picture of a woman of whom she's convinced could not have committed the murder. These four conversations and combined with the fact everyone accepts the murder as a closed and shut case, gives the plot a murder-in-retrospect structure and may have been influenced by Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs (1943) and (maybe) Sparkling Cyanide (1945). The downside is that story has the pace and urgency of a dying mountain stream. The ending is mixed bag of treats and there were some clever edges to the solution, but found the explanation for fingerprints on the murder weapon to be very convenient for the purpose of the plot.

In summation: Murder Among Friends is a very chatty, British-styled drawing room mystery that openly flirts with certain elements of the psychological crime novel and still has some clever, sharp edges that mystery fans can enjoy. Not great, but not all that shabby either.