The Locked Room Reader VIII: The Case of the Copy-Cat "Writer"

A year ago, Coachwhip republished the entire Inspector Norton Kane series by "Roger Scarlett," a shared penname of Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page, who had the misfortune of being the victim of "the most glaring piece of plagiarism ever to exist" when the pseudonymous "Don Basil" copied The Back Bay Murders (1930) almost word for word – shamelessly published it as his own under the title Cat and Feather (1931). Our resident genre historian, Curt Evans, wrote a great piece on this remarkable case of plagiarism.

Evans opened his blog-post with the statement that "plagiarism can be subtle or it can be blatant." Sometimes it can be "jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly blatant." Well, I came across a recent example that's almost as brazen and shameless as Basil's Cat and Feather.

In my never-ending quest to satisfy my crippling impossible crime addiction, I stumbled across the promisingly titled The Locked Study Murder (2017), a self-published novel, written (or so I thought) by Stephen M. Arleaux – which immediately had my interest. My fellow locked room fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, has showed us in his ongoing series "Adventures in Self-Publishing" that this corner of the publishing industry has some hidden gems. So I began looking into this particular title and writer when a feeling of deja-vu came over me.

The plot-description of The Locked Study Murder sounded awfully familiar and it took me a couple of minutes to realize the premise of the book was very similar to the setup of A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922).

However, this similarity could have just been a coincidence or Arleaux had read The Red House Mystery and thought he could wring a better detective story from Milne's premise. I didn't immediately assume the worst, but the feeling of deju-vu didn't subside when I started reading an excerpt of the first chapter. So I opened a second tab and went to Project Gutenberg to compare the two chapters, which showed that this was not merely a coincidence or an homage to Milne – because the chapters were nearly identical! Only some of the names were changed!

Here's a brief sample from the first chapter of The Locked Study Murder:

"In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Townsend House was taking its siesta. There was a lazy murmur of bees in the flowerborders, a gentle cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms. From distant lawns came the whir of a mowingmachine, that most restful of all country sounds; making ease the sweeter in that it is taken while others are working."

Now compare that excerpt with the opening lines from The Red House Mystery:

"In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Red House was taking its siesta. There was a lazy murmur of bees in the flower-borders, a gentle cooing of pigeons in the tops of the elms. From distant lawns came the whir of a mowing-machine, that most restful of all country sounds; making ease the sweeter in that it is taken while others are working."

The Red House Mystery is in the public domain and this is not, strictly speaking, illegal, but it isn't fair nor is it very honest and just a cheap way to make a buck under false pretenses. Even more annoyingly, Arleaux wrote on the copy-right page that the story is "As Suggested by A.A. Milne," which really rubbed me the wrong way. This is nothing more than copy-paste job with a name change. A story suggested by Milne would have been an originally written detective novel based on the unrecorded case he had hinted at at the end of The Red House Mystery.

This is not the only time Arleaux has passed off a book in the public domain as his own work. The Locked Room Murders (2017) is a word for word copy of Wadsworth Camp's The Abandoned Room (1917) and he didn't even change the names of the characters in that one! Obviously, he does this to make a quick, easy buck, because Arleaux's copies are only available as paperback editions that are sold for close to sixteen bucks a copy when you can read the originals for free. So let the reader be warned!

I hastily slapped together this unplanned blog-post on the spot, because I simply had to share this with all of you, but normal programming will resume tomorrow with a regular review of a short story collection by Edward D. Hoch. So stay tuned!

The Back Bay Murders (1930) by Roger Scarlett

The Back Bay Murders (1930) is the second detective novel Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page co-wrote under their shared pseudonym, "Roger Scarlett," which cemented Inspector Kane of the Boston Police as their series-character and had the dubious honor of falling prey to "the most glaring piece of plagiarism ever to exist" – a "word for word copy" surreptitiously published in England. Curt Evans has an interesting piece on his blog about the cover-to-cover plagiarism of The Back Bay Murders in Don Basil's Cat and Feather (1931) with comparable samples. And the plagiarized passages have to be read to be believed. Don had cheek, that's for sure.

The Back Bay Murders opens with Inspector Norton Kane taking his friend and loyal chronicler, Mr. Underwood, to Mrs. Quincy's reputable brownstone boardinghouse in "the formerly sedate neighborhood of Boston's Back Bay."

Mrs. Quincy caters to solitary individuals, "entrenched in respectability," without immediate relatives and offers them comfort, luxury and human society. Only exception to this rule is Arthur Pendergast, a neurotic young man, who lives there with his mother and he has reported unusual case of housebreaking to the police. Pendergast's room had been ransacked and the floor was stained with thick, reddish brown substance, as if "blood had rained down from the ceiling," but even more curious was the white Persian cat playing in the room with a white feather – tossing it around and pouncing on it. A bizarre scene and Kane promises to let him know if anything turns up.

However, Kane and Underwood return to the brownstone the next day when Pendergast has been found murdered in his room. Someone had slit his throat and a white feather was left on the scene.

Inspector Kane is in fine form as he solves Pendergast's murder in short time and identifies a visitor to the brownstone, Alvin Hyde, as the murderer. Hyde came to the brownstone to deliver a record of Saint-Saëne's Danse Macabre to Mr. Weed and they listened to it together, which is when Hyde got out of the room and murdered Pendergast. But this explanation immediately poses another question: who's Alvin Hyde?

Kane reasons that Pendergast was a neurotic man without friends or acquaintances outside of the house, which means that without "a ready-made, practically self-confessed murderer" the police would looking for his killer among his fellow lodgers. So the murderer blazed a path of evidence leading straight out of the front door of the brownstone. And, had the police fallen for this scheme, they would forever be chasing a man who doesn't exist. A scheme as cunning as it's daring and especially liked the red herring of the faked fingerprints. Just one of the many clever little aspects that make up the plot of The Back Bay Murders.

During the second half of the story, Mrs. Quincy is scratched with a deadly dose of hydrocyanic acid in her bedroom and the circumstances of her death makes it a (borderline) impossible crime.

Hydrocyanic acid causes instantaneous death and her husband, who was in the sitting room next door, heard her fall. The bedroom had second, unlocked door that opened into the hallway (see floorplan), but her husband heard no commotion or anything that indicated that a second person had been present in the bedroom – which is by itself not enough to tag this as an impossible crime. However, the murderer turns out to have a perfect alibi and, as Kane observed, it appeared to be "physically impossible" for this person to have killed Mrs. Quincy. And the explanation is a play on a well-known locked room technique.

So I decided to tag this review as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime." Even if it is, technically, only a borderline impossibility. Still, a very nicely done and cleverly conceived murder.

Honestly, I did not expect The Back Bay Murders to upstage its predecessor, because the series would not really find its own voice, namely that of a dark, gloomy yakata-mono (mansion stories), until the next novel, but here the authors were already getting comfortable with themselves – slowly emerging from the shadow of S.S. van Dine. This second mystery has a really knotty, complex plot littered with physical and psychological clues and hints, which range from a leaky roof, broken pieces of (crystal) glass and the psychological makeup of the murderer. There's always a hint of Freud in the Scarlett novels.

The personality of the murderer obviously took its cue from R.L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) and the only drawback is that this made the murderer's identity increasingly obvious as the story progresses.

Nevertheless, everything else was very well handled and showed two mystery writers who were growing and quickly finding their own stride. They would come into full bloom with their next three mystery novels and the result is a lamentably short-lived, but high quality, series of detective stories that simply cannot be recommended enough. Coachwhip and Curt Evans deserve a heap of praise for bringing this series back into print. Because these books belong on the shelves of every enthusiast of the Golden Age of detective fiction.

The Roger Scarlett Mysteries:

The Beacon Hill Murders (1930)

The Back Bay Murders (1930)

Cat's Paw (1931)

Murder Among the Angells (1932)

In the First Degree (1933)

In the First Degree (1933) by Roger Scarlett

In the First Degree (1933) is the fifth and final detective novel by "Roger Scarlett," a shared pseudonym of Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page, which distinguished itself by disregarding the formula of the previous novels and blotting out all of the secondary characters – like Sergeant Moran and Underwood. Inspector Norton Kane, of the Boston Police, is still present, but has to act in an unofficial capacity and has to conduct his investigation from the shadows. Sometimes quite literally.

But the one thing that has remained the same, as in the previous novels, is that book is, what they call in Japan, a yakata-mono (a mansion story).

This time the dark, gloomy mansion is Boston's historic Loring house, a rare survival of Federal period architecture on Cambridge Street in Bowdoin Square, where a murder is brewing. Inspector Kane ends up there, as a paying lodger, in a rather roundabout way.

Kane is recovering from a "siege of influenza" and has been granted a four week leave of absence to regain his strength, but the opening chapter finds him a state of "infinite boredom" in a Boston hotel room and therefore welcomes the announcement of an unexpected visitor. The name of the visitor is James Faraday, a friend of Aaron Loring, whom he believes is in mortal danger. However, Kane dismisses his visitor as a neurotic man until he opens a package that had arrived before Farraday.

A package that contained a book, Petronius' The Satyricon, which has been bookmarked at "The Tale of the Widow of Ephesus" and in a blank space, in the middle of the page, he read two words, "Help me," written in pencil – inside the front cover was a bookplate bearing the name Aaron Loring. So that piqued the interest of the bored policeman and Kane decides to take a look at the Loring house himself, which is when an unlikely occurrence brings him within the walls of the Loring mansion.

As Kane slinks around the dark house, he sees how, all of a sudden, a sheet of cardboard was put in one of the top-floor windows with the word "Rooms" crudely printed on it.

So the inspector has an excuse to make an inquiry, however, the woman he gets to speak to, Miss Julia Vincent, who's Loring's sister-in-law, knows nothing about them renting rooms and the cardboard is nowhere to be found – which does not prevent him from actually getting the room. Kane, as he surreptitiously listens to conversations in the shadowy nooks, discovers that the people who live there are not very happy. And very lonely. Kane overhears Sara Loring telling her sister, Julia, how they must breakthrough "this dreadful isolation."

Ho-Ling Wong mentioned in his review of the book how the opening chapters have "a unique atmosphere" and are reminiscent "a Gothic thriller novel," which is a good description of how this story begins. You can almost read like a nostalgic homage to the Victorian-era thriller with dark secrets and shifty characters slinking around in the rooms and hallways of a gloomy, moldering mansion. And that all pervading fear that something dreadful is about to happen. This large, sprawling mansion proved to be a perfect backdrop for such a story as the place has an abundance of empty rooms, only occupied by the memories of the past, which has this sense of "beautiful neglect" about it. So the backdrop of the plot is, alongside the L-shaped mansion from Murder Among the Angells (1932), the best in this series of mansion-themed detective novels.

Despite his presence, Kane was unable to prevent the death of Aaron Loring, who died in his bed, which his personal physician, Dr. Greenevb Hewling, determined to have been due to heart failure, but Kane smuggled another doctor into the home – who said Loring had died from an overdose of morphine. A dose that had been administrated with hypodermic syringe. So why did Dr. Hewling claim Loring had simply died of heart failure?

Kane uncovers that Dr. Hewling was having a secret affair with Sara, but also has to figure out who defaced a portrait of Loring, and why, as well as dealing with his servant, Lander, who surprisingly turned out to be main beneficiary of the will. Loring gave his wife nothing more than he was legally obliged to give her!

Honestly, at this point of the story, I began to lose a little bit of hope, because I could not see how the solution could be anything but anti-climatic. Luckily, I turned out to be wrong. Very, very wrong. As the ending was quite surprising!

First of all, the ideas on which the solution stands are not new. I've come across countless variations on this trick over the years, but Scarlett crafted a daring variant on this trick that was fraught with risk and pitfalls for the murderer – eventually resulting in a second attempt at murder. A spur of the moment attempt that surprisingly failed. Usually, such characters don't pull through. And this attempted murder is closely connected to the clue of the mop that was hanging out of a third-story window to dry! Sure, you can argue that the murderer's scheme is completely bunkers and not at all plausible, but I believe Scarlett skillfully handled this tricky, twisted plot and the attempted murder demonstrated the plan had its weak spots. Besides, realism be damned!

As to the clueing, the hints are primarily hidden in the situation within that home, the characters themselves and the actions they take. All of these clues could put the reader on the right track to the murderer. However, I should mention that Kane kept, what he saw in the darkened bedroom, to himself, which should have been shared with the reader. This is not exactly a stumbling block to the solution, but it would have been nice had we gotten the entire picture. And it would have worked perfectly as a red herring.

So, on a whole, In the First Degree is a well-written, excellently plotted detective novel with a classic solution that I would place, along with Cat's Paw (1931), slightly below Murder Among the Angells, but above The Beacon Hill Murders (1930). Only real downside of the book is that it was the last in an altogether too short-lived series, but I suppose the authors had said everything they wanted in this genre. Something that may explain why this last one was a departure from the earlier ones. Thankfully, I still have The Back Bay Murders (1930) on the pile and I'll be saving that one for next month.

Humble Beginnings

"There are depths beneath depths in what happened last night—obscure fetid chambers of the human soul. Black hatreds, unnatural desires, hideous impulses, obscene ambitions are at the bottom of it..."

- Philo Vance (S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case, 1927)

The Beacon Hill Murders (1930) is the first of five detective novels by "Roger Scarlett," a shared pseudonym of Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page, who were part of the flock of American mystery writers that followed in the footsteps of S.S. van Dine during the 1930s – a following that included such luminaries as Clyde B. Clason, Stuart Palmer, Rufus King and Ellery Queen. You can hardly miss the influence Van Dine had on their maiden novel.

Blair and Page had not yet found their own voice and the result is an emulation of Van Dine, which was not badly done, but lacked the originality of the later titles I read.

The Beacon Hill Murders takes place on Boston's Beacon Hill, an affluent neighborhood where the houses are as old as the money of its dignified residents, but the newest denizens of the neighborhood were definitely not a part of the old Bostonian aristocracy.

Frederick Sutton had started life at one of the bottom-rungs of society and accumulated a large fortune as "a stock exchange gambler." So now that he has money he wants to climb to the social ladder, which is why he moved his family to an old mansion in a respectable neighborhood and threw a dinner party for a small, but not unimportant, group of people – one of them being his prim lawyer, Mr. Underwood. Underwood is aware of the fact that Sutton is preparing to "break his way into society" and wanted to use him as "a rung in the social ladder," but he was not in a position to refuse the invitation from his client. And he's quite surprise to find a well-known socialite as one of his fellow guests.

Mrs. Anceney is "a woman of great charm," whose name frequently appeared in the social columns of the newspapers, which makes Underwood wonder why, of all people, she would accept to be a dinner guest of the Suttons. A surprise that becomes a shock when, at the end of the evening, Mrs. Anceney is found standing over the dead body of her host in his private sitting room. She appears to have been the only person who could have pulled the trigger of the gun that was found in the very same room.

So the police is immediately notified and Underwood calls his policeman friend, Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston Police, but, shortly after his arrival, this straightforward murder case morphs into a genuine conundrum when their primarily suspect is brutally murdered – while alone in room with a policeman at the door. I have to pause here to point out that nobody, who commented on this book, accurately described the locked room components of the plot.

Robert Adey listed The Beacon Hill Murders in Locked Room Murders (1991) and described only the second murder as a slaying in a room under police guard. Curt Evans wrote in his introduction that "both killings are essentially clever locked room problems" that should "severely test the acuity of the reader," while Ho-Ling Wong didn't even touch upon the impossible-element of the story in his double review of the first two Scarlet novels. So allow me to clarify: only the shooting of Sutton qualifies as a proper impossible crime.

Sutton was shot when he was alone in a room with Mrs. Anceney. The four windows in the room were locked tight, which means that a third person could have only entered, or left, the crime-scene through the door into the hallway – in which case this person would have been caught in the act. The answer as to how a third person could have a fired the fatal bullet into this room is a variation on a legitimate locked room trick I have seen before (several times, in fact). On the other hand, the room in which the second murder was committed was not constantly guarded and the murderer simply slipped in-and out of the room.

However, the murder of Mrs. Anceney does turn out to play a key role in the murderer's alibi, which was nicely done, if risky.

Japanese edition

So figuring out the murderer's movement, as well as the baiting of a failed trap, takes up the first half of the book. During the second half of the story, the reader is let in on all the potential motives of the family members and dinner guests, even Underwood is furnished with a motive, which is another aspect where this inaugural novel differed from the later ones – because the familial intricacies are far less pronounced here. And that's reflected in the relatively weak motive of the murderer.

The third and fourth title in this series, Cat's Paw (1931) and Murder Among the Angells (1932), had both very strong and even original motives, which were adequately clued and sprang from the (hidden) relationships between various characters that had been described in great detail.

The Beacon Hill Murders is slightly more muddled in that regard and the motive was obviously inspired by one of Van Dine's well-known detective novels. Evans called it "a surprisingly dark thread of Freudian psychology" that ran through the motive and explanation of the crimes. The thread in question is, without question, a dark one, but one that dented the fair play aspect of the story, because the murderer was not entirely sane. And a mentally unstable killer always makes it harder for the armchair detective to gauge the truth. I did had an inkling that the murderer may not have been entirely rational, but zeroed in on the wrong person based on something that happened very early on in the book and the circumstances of the second murder.

All of that being said, The Beacon Hill Murders is an imperfect, but promising, debut and could have been better had the authors not so closely imitated the plotting-style of Van Dine. Nevertheless, Blair and Page deserve credit for breaking out of that mold and finding a voice of their own, which resulted in the gem known as Murder Among the Angells. Not to mention that they would go on to exert influence of their own over the development of the Japanese detective story! So that alone makes their maiden voyage an interesting read, but, by itself, it's not that bad of a detective story. Undistinguished, perhaps, but definitely not a bad for a first try!

By the way, Ho-Ling ranks the second entry in this series, The Back Bay Murders (1930), right alongside the first one, on account of them being "quite similar in design," but everything I read about the plot reminds me of the work of Anita Blackmon. So that alone is tempting me to pick it up before In the First Degree (1933). But whichever one I'll pick next, it will not be the subject of my next blog-post. I've now reviewed three of them, back to back, which means there are only two of them left on the big pile and want to save them for the coming months. 

So I have to rummage through that big pile to find something good for my next review, but I can already tell you that, whatever I may find, I'll  be changing my blog-format beginning with that next review. No more cutesy blog-titles or opening quotes. Just the title of the book, name of the author and the usual rambling review, because finding quotes and coming up with blog-titles has become a real chore over the past year or so. Hey, it only took me about seven years to finally start blogging and reviewing like a normal person! :)

A Family Affair

"In tackling a criminal case... you look for motive and opportunity."

- Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen's The Player on the Other Side, 1963)

Previously, I reviewed Murder Among the Angells (1932) by Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page, who wrote under the shared penname of "Roger Scarlett," which used to be an overpriced rarity on the secondhand book market, but recently, it was reissued by Coachwhip Publications – together with the rest of the series. Murder Among the Angells proved itself to be an excellent detective novel and decided to follow it up with the second title contained within in that very same twofer volume.

Apparently, Cat's Paw (1931) is very different in structure and approach from the preceding two books, The Beacon Hill Murders (1930) and The Back Bay Murders (1930), which reportedly were entirely written in the spirit of S.S. van Dine. Obviously, Blair and Page took their cue from Ellery Queen here, but the structure of the book also differs from your standard, Van Dinean-era whodunit.

Cat's Paw is divided into four parts and begins with a short prologue, titled "The Question," in which Underwood receives a wireless message from Inspector Kane, who's vacationing abroad, asking to "get in touch with police on Greenough case" and "find out everything." The second part, "The Evidence," tells what happened leading up to the murder and "The Case" is a preliminary investigation by Kane's subordinate, Sergeant Moran. The fourth and last part, "The Solution," gives an explanation drawn from the preceding two parts and "the clues rejected by Sergeant Moran."

So the Boston inspector functions here purely as an armchair detective and reasons the truth from the information that has been brought to him by Underwood and Moran. It's only towards the end that he actually crosses the threshold of the huge, Gothic-style mansion where the murder took place.

The mansion in question was erected by a wealthy recluse, Martin Greenough, whose talebearers whisper that he made his money as a bootlegger or found "bushels of diamonds" in South Africa, but in reality he earned his money in the textile business and invested his earnings in sound stocks – which soared beyond "the wildest of wildcat ventures." So he could afford to buy a large piece of undeveloped land, within the city limits of Boston, where he erected an enormous gray-stone mansion with battlements, towers and ivy. And to complete the doom and gloom of the place, the estate was surrounded by a high wall topped with threatening "spikes of broken glass."

Greenough would have lived a withdrawn and unassuming life there, but his four, older siblings made him the legal guardian and custodian to their children. No doubt hoping that it would give them an opportunity to secure a fat inheritance and financially secure their future. However, Greenough is a capricious devil with three distinct personalities and "tyrannized over them all." He could be very kind, lavishing his relatives with expensive gifts, but often cut them a check in order to get them out of the house for an extended period of time and his word was always final – even on a very personal level. Such as his unwavering opposition to his nephews and niece making an independent living. Cousin Mart, as they called him, wanted to have control over them and the way to do that was money.

So when the family is brought together, to celebrate Greenough's birthday, things come to a head and not least of all by the bombshell he himself drops on his relatives.

However, his nephews also drag a pile of trouble into the mansion. Hutchinson has married a kleptomaniac, Amelia, who usually takes inexpensive scarves and powder-boxes from various department stores. The stores, who know of her character flaw, simply bill her husband for the things she take, but this time she has lifted a necklace worth thousands of dollars. Another nephew, Blackstone, brought a woman, Stella Irwin, who was engaged to his cousin, Francis, but Greenough had forbidden the marriage. So that made him very unhappy to have her under his roof.

Greenough has the last laugh as he drops the biggest bombshell by announcing his imminent marriage to his long-time companion and mistress, Mrs. Warden. A widow who has been with him since her husband was alive and this situation turned out to be deadly cocktail for the old miser. I know not everyone likes a long, drawn-out buildup to the murder, but the slow escalation to murder is very well done here and all of the events in this portion of the story play an important part in the plot – whether they turn out to be red herrings or actual clues. Blair and Page evidently knew how to plot a detective story!

Japanese edition

Anyway, to show their goodwill towards their guardian, the nephews put on a firework display on the lawn, while he watches from a second-floor window, but during this spectacle one of them show him through the head.

A note for the curious: during the firework-scene, Francis tells Hutchinson to be careful, because a spark from his match will put him "among the angels." So I wonder if this little scene gave Blair and Page the title for their next book.

Anyway, Sergeant Moran takes charge of the investigation, because Kane was still abroad at the time of the murder, but fails in separating the real clues from the red herrings. So this task comes down to Kane and his solution does, indeed, recall Ellery Queen's best work. Kane expertly maps out the movement of the various suspects and how they're involved, sometimes involuntarily, in the murder and explains the true meaning behind such clues as marked playing cards, a love-lorn note and the stolen necklace. And these clues work beautifully, because they play on assumptions.

There is, however, a smudge on the fair play element that should be mentioned. Ho-Ling already noted this in his review and concerns a clue that was unfairly withheld from the reader, which knocks this otherwise excellent detective story down a place or two. I really wanted to place Cat's Paw alongside Murder Among the Angells, because in every other aspect it was great.

Cat's Paw has a pleasing, labyrinthine plot with a policeman sleuth, who acts as an intuitive armchair detective, while sifting through a pile of physical clues, but the story cheated itself of a place in the first-ranks by pawning one of the vital clues and hiding up its sleeve. A real shame. However, the book is still a good read with enough twists, turns and clues to satisfy the pure, plot-driven readers, who love Van Dine and Queen, but will probably also be slightly annoyed that it (unnecessarily) withheld an important piece of information from them. So make of that what you will.

A House Divided

"Adding the element of impossibility only invites suspicion."

- Ruoping Lin (Szu-Yen Lin's Death in the House of Rain, 2006)

Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page were two American writers who met during their tenure, as editors, on the staff of a prominent publishing house and this meeting initiated a long, productive friendship which would bear the golden fruits of civilization – namely five detective novels written over "a short span of five years" during the Great Depression. All five novels appeared under a shared pseudonym, "Roger Scarlett," and are helmed by their series-characters, Inspector Kane of the Boston Police.

Until recently, the series was languishing in literary obscurity and secondhand copies tended to be as scarce as they were expensive. Some even came with triple digit price-tags! 

Coachwhip put an end to this intolerable, long-standing situation by republishing all five novels and our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, wrote a lengthy introduction touching on the authors, their background and work – including how they became a victim of "the most glaring piece of plagiarism ever to exist." However, the most relevant part of Curt's introduction (for this blog-post) is the influence of Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932) on the development of the Japanese detective story.

In the West, Scarlett had been completely expunged from popular memory, but in Japan their work made an ever-lasting impression and influenced their yakata-mono (mansion story). An influence that can still be seen today.

Edogawa Rampo, father of the Japanese mystery story, once recommended the Japanese edition of Murder Among the Angells to then very young Seishi Yokomizo, who wrote the superb Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951), which inspired him to write (along side the writing of John Dickson Carr) to write Honjin satsujin jiken (The Murder in the Honjin, 1946). A locked room tale set in a mansion in rural Okayama and the narrator mentioned Murder Among the Angells in "his list of foreign locked room mysteries that might possibly have inspired the murderer." Rampo also recognized it as "the first novel of reasoning in the Anglo-American style in the world of Japanese detective fiction."

So while practically forgotten in the West, Scarlett continued to have a measure of name recognition in Japan and a good example of this can be found in Ho-Ling Wong's 2011 review of Murder Among the Angells, which he read in Japanese. A translation that, at the time, could be "purchased at any store for 900 yen + tax." At the same time, the book over here was only available on the secondhand market and copies were prized between 100-300 dollars!

Needless to say, that made me marginally envious of Ho-Ling, but all of that's in the past now as I was given four of the five Scarlett novels over Christmas. 

 

Coachwhip published those four books, The Beacon Hill Murders (1930), The Back Bay Murders (1930), Cat's Paw (1931) and Murder Among the Angell, as twofer volumes and reissued the last one, In the First Degree (1933), as a single volume – which will be absorbed into my TBR-pile at a later date. So I had to pick my first read from those four titles and, predictably, I went for the last one. What can I say? I'm an unoriginal hack.

Murder Among the Angells takes place within the curious walls of an L-shaped mansion, located on Boston's Beacon Street, which has been divided in two idenitical halves and the two sections are only connected by an elevator. The two halves are occupied by two elderly brothers, Carolus and Darius, who live their with their children, in-laws and servants, but a pale hangs over the household. Their father was obsessed with good health and his eccentric will placed an ever-widening wedge between his sons. He wanted his encourage his sons to live a clean, healthy life by leaving his entire estate to the son who outlives the other. A survival of the fittest where the winner takes all!

Unfortunately, Darius' health is declining and he has been tempting his brother to sign a "deed of gift," in which they agree to divide the estate equally among their four children. Darius contacted a Mr. Underwood, an attorney and close friend of Inspector Kane, to draw up the deed, but his reticent brother is not the only problem that's bothering him. Someone has been dipping his pilfering fingers into his money strong box and asks his son-in-law, Whitney Adams, how to catch this thief.

On the same day Darius decides to tackle these problems, the butler announces a visitor for Adams, but when he goes to the drawing room to see who wanted him there was nobody there – shortly followed by the first of two murders in this book. Carolus is shot to death in the dining room and the butler witnessed the shooting, but he's also the only person who has actually seen this homicidal visitor. And this would be repeated later on in the story.

Inspector Norton Kane observes that there's "a distinct element of time in this case" as if "something necessitated Mr. Angell's immediate death." He has to unsnarl such tangled clues as a fabricated track of (timed) footprints in the snow, outside of the mansion, as well as the theft of the deed of gift, but he also has to prevent Darius from signing over half of the estate to his cousins. Darius is determined, now that he has outlived his brother, to keep true to his original intentions and make sure they did not lost out on an inheritance now that their father was murdered. I think he was perhaps the only genuinely good, if flawed, soul residing in that austere mansion. And that makes his murder somewhat tragic.

Darius rolled his wheelchair into the elevator on the third floor and pushed the button, but when arrived at the bottom, where people were waiting for him, the doors remained closed and they had to pried open – which when they found him with a stab wound in the neck. The elevator cannot descend, or rise, when any of the doors of the three floors are open and the trapdoor in the ceiling opens on a thick carpet of unbroken dust. The elevator went straight down from the third floor without stopping and there wasn't even room in the elevator, entirely filled by the wheelchair, for a second person, but, somehow, someone still managed to murder the old man. Kane and Underwood do some pleasant theorizing as they eliminate the possibilities, one by one, before Kane eventually hits upon the solution. 

A solution that's pretty original and makes good use of the crime-scene, but it should be mentioned that this trick probably only works with a victim who has a very frail constitution. After all, the medical examiner mentioned that the blow was a weak one. So this particularly method would probably have only wounded Carolus.

Funnily enough, there were certain elements of this impossible murder that recalled a locked room trick from a novel that me and "JJ," of The Invisible Event, have a fondness for. The locked room situations and solutions are very different, but they share certain, uhm, principles that helped create the illusion of an impossible murder.

However, the most impressive aspect of Murder Among the Angells is not the identity of the murderer or the impossible stabbing inside a moving elevator, but the clever treatment of the ingenious, double-edged motive.

You would think this was merely a homage to the S.S. van Dine-style detective novel from the 1920s, in which murders are committed in gloomy mansions in order to secure a large sum of money, but you'll be sorely mistaken. The motive here cuts on two sides and provided a shrewd answer explaining why the brothers had to die in that specific order. An explanation that is far more satisfying than if the murders had been committed merely to secure the estate. The motive is the linchpin beautifully linking the who-and how together, which helped lift Murder Among the Angells above an average mansion murder story.

Long story short, I really liked my first encounter with Scarlett, Kane and Underwood. I tell you, it's long-lost gems like this one that remind me why I love detective stories. So you can look forward to reviews of the remaining titles in the not so distant future, because these former rarities aren't going to be permanent residents of my TBR-pile.

So only seven days into the New Year and already have an entry for my 2018 best-of list!