She Had to Have Gas (1939) by Rupert Penny

Rupert Penny's She Had to Have Gas (1939) is the sixth novel in the Chief Inspector Edward Beale series and has a premise as enticing and provocatively bizarre as its title, which kind of delivered on its promise, but Martin Edwards warned that its elaborate plot came "close to sinking under the weight of its own cleverness” – even JJ's four-star review came with a few caveats. Admitting that She Had to Have Gas presented Penny as a first-rate second-stringer and placed it last on his Chief Inspector Beale best-of list. So imagine my surprise when I turned over the last page and concluded I had read the most enjoyable Penny to date. 

I wouldn't rank She Had to Have Gas quite as highly as Policeman in Armour (1937) or Policeman's Evidence (1938), but found it to be much better than The Lucky Policeman (1938) and played in a completely different league than Sealed Room Murder (1941). Sorry, Jim. But you can take solace in knowing you helped rehabilitate Penny's reputation as a purveyor of puzzles in my eyes. I was wrong to write him off so quickly. 

She Had to Have Gas tells the story of two women, Alice Carter and Philippa Saunderson, whose stories become intertwined and provide the story with one of the most baffling and grisly crime scenes of the 1930s detective stories. This is likely the reason why Edwards picked it to tell The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017).

Alice Carter is fair-haired, blue-eyed girl of about twenty-four, but her landlady, Mrs. Agatha Topley, had summed her up almost immediately "as no lady" and had "never seen cause to take back her judgement," but money was tight – as dreary Craybourne was not a popular seaside tourist attraction. Mrs. Topley accepted the silent, secretive girl and the first two weeks passed satisfactory until her cousin, Ellis, turned up. A gruff, suspicious-looking character habitually dressed in a long, tightly buttoned trench coat, check cap and spectacles with colored glasses. Alice and Ellis bottled themselves up in her room for hours on end, but where the situation becomes truly bothersome is that she owes more than three pounds in rent money.

One evening, Mrs. Topley returns from a family visiting to discover Alice had taken her late husband's battery wireless set and loudly blaring music in her room, but there's no response to the hammering on her locked door. So she takes a chair to peek through a glass partition covered with decaying, half peeled away frosted paper and sees the blanketed body of Alice in front of the gas fire. An "evil-looking curve of red rubber tubing" disappeared into the blanket by the head, which all pointed towards suicide. But when the police breaks down the door, nine minutes later, the body has "impossibly vanished." Sadly, no, it's not a locked room mystery. There are two situation in this story that were presented as impossible crimes, but you have to read the book to learn why they really aren't.

The second plot-strand concerns the niece of Charles Harrington, "a writer of murder mysteries," whose "productively imaginative pen" has produced more than twenty intricately-plotted detective novels, but now he finds himself in the middle of homegrown mystery problem – one that concerns his niece, Philippa Saunderson. Philippa had been deeply involved with the dandy, but disreputable, actor Robert Oakes, who now demands £5000 in return for a stack of embarrassing letters, compromising photographs and a nude painting. An astronomical sum that even her generous uncle can't or wants to cough up. So she has to bargain to get everything back or her new, much more respectable boyfriend, Colin Dennison, will find everything. But why did she disappear?

What gets the ball rolling, following fifty pages of setup, is the grisly discovery of a mutilated body in Oakes' bungalow. The body of a young woman, clad only in underclothes, whose head, hands and feet were cut off. Perplexingly, the stumps of the neck and wrists were "encased grotesquely in yellow oilskin tennis-racket covers." A situation you would expect to find in a Japanese (shin) honkaku mystery, but Penny gave the corpse-puzzle the good old college try in 1939! Obviously inspired by early period Ellery Queen.

At first glance, Penny's acrostic, diagram-and timetable riddled detective novels with their occasional excursions into locked room territory and policeman protagonist invites comparison with Freeman Wills Crofts and Christopher Bush. Penny has always openly aligned himself with the American writers of the Van Dine-Queen School and included an EQ-style "Challenge to the Reader" in each of his Chief Inspector Beale novels. Nowhere else is the influence of early period Queen as noticeable as in She Had to Have Gas, which really tried to imitate the elaborate, surrealistic flair of such EQ novels as The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) and The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). Just like those novels, the bizarre circumstances in which the body was found and what happened at the crime scene being the key to the plot. Also note that one of the missing woman, fueling the plot, is named Alice. There's no way that's a coincidence with a mystery writer whose literary role model was Ellery Queen.

Penny managed to lit a fire and set my mind ablaze with all the questions and possibilities that arose from Chief Inspector Beale's investigation. Whose body was found in the bungalow, Alice or Philippa? What happened to Alice's body at the lodging house and, if the body belongs to her, how and why did she end in the bungalow? What happened to Philippa and, if it's her body, where was she originally murdered since the bungalow is not connected to gas, which comes with a mini-lecture on cheaply produced, household gas – why it's attractive to people considering suicide. Why did the murderer put tennis-racket covers on the neck and arms, but not the legs? What's the link between the two women and who really is Ellis? Where's he now? What part did the stolen delivery van and blackmail plot play a part in the murder and disappearances? This is just a small sampling of what to expect from this richly flavored, maze-like detective story that even slightly disoriented the author a few times.

Even though the story and plot tick and move with slow, mechanical precision, everything becomes somewhat mired and muddled at times, which required flipping back a few times to keep track of all the intricate details and moving parts. So it's not as smoothly written, or clearly plotted, as some of the others I've read. I suspect there will be many reader who'll find it all a little too mighty, too rich and too artificial for their taste, which here is underscored by the presence of a challenge to the reader and a clue-finder. There is, however, no denying it required some genuine craftsmanship and ingenuity to erect such a staggering, breathtaking edifice to the simon-pure jigsaw detective story. It's just that it did so very ungracefully.

For example, Beale points out in his explanation that they had "a strong lead to the solution" under their noses and they "did everything but recognize it." Due to a specialty of mine, I actually spotted the lead very early on, but what Penny did with it turned out to be much more contrived than I imagined. You see (ROT13), gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Nyvpr jnf cerfragrq nf n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel naq gung znqr zr fhfcrpg jung gur ynaqynql fnj jnf n cubgbtencu (bs Cuvyvccn?), juvpu vf jul Zef. Gbcyrl abgrq “gur pbzcyrgr nofrapr bs nal zbgvba fhpu n oernguvat.” N cubgbtencu, be crrc-obk, vf rnfvre gb erzbir va avar zvahgrf guna n obql. However, Penny had a much more contrived explanation as to what happened there.

So, yeah, I really appreciated what She Had to Have Gas tried to do and not entirely unsuccessfully, but it also represents the traditional, plot-oriented detective story at its most artificial with a cluttered plot, muddled direction and a sometime unsteady grip on the various plot-strands – preventing it from fully delivering on its promise. But, what it tried to do, made it Penny's most enjoyable endeavor to date. Not even the few loose nuts and bolts rattling around inside could spoil my enjoyment. One of the most delightfully bizarre, ambitiously plotted and convoluted curiosities of the genre's Golden Age. I think fans of early period Ellery Queen will probably get the most out of it.

Having now read four of Penny's Chief Inspector Beale novels since that first, disastrous encounter with Sealed Room Murders, I'm now ready to take on his Croftian dreadnought, The Talkative Policeman (1936).

The Lucky Policeman (1938) by Rupert Penny

Rupert Penny's The Lucky Policeman (1938) is the fourth, of eight, detective novels in the Chief Inspector Beale series and Penny's present-day champion, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, named it his best novel in his blog-post "Policeman's Lot – Ranking the Edward Beale Novels" – praising it as Penny at his "most potent." A recommendation from Jim always need to be approached with some caution and his praise for Sealed Room Murder (1941) is dodgy as hell. But fair's fair, he was kind of right about Policeman in Armour (1937) and Policeman's Evidence (1938). 

So I decided not to cynically go with the bottom-ranked title, She Had to Have Gas (1939), as my next Penny, but blindly trust Jim's judgment on this one. What could possibly go wrong?

First of all, The Lucky Policeman turned out to be a little different from what I expected. I thought it was going to be Penny's take on the Golden Age-style serial killer story, in which the detective has to find the common-link in a series of apparently random murders, but The Lucky Policeman is played like a straight detective story with the serial killings taking place in the background. Well, more or less.

Professor Hilary Peake is an American psychiatrist and "the gold-star alienist" who came to England, in 1931, where he bought a large, old mansion in New Forest and converted it into a private asylum – only has two patients on his hands when the story begins. A religious maniac and a man, Simon Selby, who's quite normal most of the time, but, every five or six weeks, "he breaks out into mental eruptions." Strangely enough, the only thing to lessen the periodic attacks is to let his hair grow unrestricted and denied him the attentions of a barber for the past three years. Nothing else was achieved and Selby became Peake's most puzzling patient. And then he unexpectedly escaped under very peculiar circumstances!

The nurse discovered a dummy in Selby's bed, two of the outside windows bars were ripped away and missing. Selby was gone and nowhere to be found. A week after his escape, people began to disappear from the area of New Forest: a servant girl, a girl hitchhiker and a reporter, which called for a wide and intensive search. But during the search, Sergeant Lee goes missing and his body is later found lying near a tree with a stabbed with something that left a hole "as big as a two-shilling piece" behind his right ear. Even weirder is that the murderer had taken the sergeant's left boot. Over the next few days, more bodies turned up with identical wounds and their left shoe missing.

Chief-Inspector Edward Beale, accompanied by Anthony Purdon, takes on the case and the multi-faceted problem gives them much food for thought. So they're not just preoccupied with chasing an escaped, homicidal maniac.

One of the central puzzles is how Selby managed to wrench two bars from stonework, scaled a brick, twelve feet high wall in his pajamas and evaded capture without supplies – making it a borderline impossible crime. Just a shame he didn't went all out with it as the explanation for the removal of the bars could have been used in two different ways to create a tight locked room scenario. However, the story was already quite packed and another plot-thread that has to be examined is Peake's backstory and why he left America, which happened when he got caught in the meshes of a New York matriarch who led "a home-made army against half the world" in 1929. She has her own reasons to suddenly reappear. There are the finer details of the case, like the shoes, weapon and a burglarized cottage, but Penny overlooked the body the reporter. I don't recall it was mentioned anywhere that his body was found, which made me very suspicious (in combination with something else) and distracted me from the real solution.

Having now read four of his novels, it becomes noticeable how much Penny liked his backstories and background details. Penny wrote and plotted like a historian, which is a double-edged sword as it could easily kill a story. This approach did murder the pace of Sealed Room Murder to the point where even the admittedly original locked room-trick couldn't save the whole mess, but it certainly benefited Policeman's Evidence with its historical subplot and treasure hunt. Penny's fondness for locked rooms, timetables and intricate, maze-like plots probably kept him in check, but shudder to think what the result would have been had he been more interested in characterization than plotting. Thankfully, we got the Rupert Penny puzzle edition.

Penny knows how to occupy his reader's attention with the various plot-threads and then abuse it to distract them, although not always fairly, but the equal amount of attention given to the clues makes it a pardonable offense. 

The Lucky Policeman is, technically speaking, a sound piece of work with the who, why and how neatly coming together in the last chapter, preceded by a false-solution with an excellently handled twist, but I couldn't help feel a little let down – as some things turned out to be less inspired than anticipated. For example, I thought the clue of the stockings was much better than the shoe business.

So, all in all, The Lucky Policeman is a technically-sound, fair play detective novel with enough clues and red herrings to keep you busy for three or four hours, but, somehow, it wasn't quite as convincing or satisfying as it could have been. And while its light years ahead of Sealed Room Murder, I wouldn't place it above either Policeman in Armour or Policeman's Evidence. That being said, The Lucky Policeman still offers a highly unusual take on the GAD-type serial killer and it definitely helped that the murderer's identity was somewhat off the beaten path, which makes it well worth the attention of every fan of puzzle-oriented mysteries. Beale is starting to grow on me as a character ("Damn! I never thought of that"). You can expect more Penny in the future.

Policeman's Evidence (1938) by Rupert Penny

Back in January, I took a second look at "Rupert Penny," penname of E.B.C. Thornett, whose promising-sounding Sealed Room Murder (1941) was such an ordeal to read that it put me off his work for nearly a decade, but "JJ," of The Invisible Event, kept singing his praises – culminating with "Policeman's Lot – Ranking the Edward Beale Novels of Rupert Penny." Policeman in Armour (1937) came in third on that list as Penny at his "most presentable" with a plot that unrolls with "seamless efficiency." Shockingly, Jim was right and Penny redeemed. 

So, hoping lightening will strike twice, I consulted the list to help pick my third Chief Inspector Beale novel, but decided not to go with his #1, The Lucky Policeman (1938), because that would be too much like playing Russian roulette. It's Jim we're talking about. I played it save and picked one of Penny's two (not three) locked room mysteries, Policeman's Evidence (1938), which is #5 on the list, but Jim named it his personal favorite. Let's see how this penny stacks up. 

Policeman's Evidence marks fifth appearance of Chief Inspector Edward Beale, who narrates the second-half of the book, but the first portion of the story is told by his friend, Tony Purdon.

Purdon is staying at the Gloucestershire country home of an acquaintance, Major Francis Adair, who's a "crack experts on codes and ciphers" and "a civilized bully," which are two qualities that are relevant to what's to come. Eighteen months ago, Adair bought an old leather-bound volume written in a kind of shorthand he hadn't seen before and was determined to decode, and translate, the private shorthand as a personal challenge, but the text revealed the history of the Mauberley family – particular of its last surviving member, Jasper Mauberley. A "cantankerous cripple" who lived as a recluse until he died in 1706 without leaving a trace behind of his purported wealth. So everyone assumed at the time Jasper had been poor instead of mean-spirited, but the shorthand diary proposes that "the clue to the whole matter should be found in the panelled room" near the end of the Long Gallery. Adair has plenty of money, a strain of avarice and enough mule's logic to purchase Mauberley Grange. Setting the stage for an all out treasure hunt!

When he arrives at Mauberley Grange, Purdon finds a curiously and mixed household of family members, guests and employees. Adair is a widower with a daughter, Tilly, who's "ugly as Anubis" and is treated abysmally by everyone. He also has an adopted daughter, Lina Hipple, who he treats as if she was his real daughter and the apple of his eye. Hinkson is Adair's personal secretary and had been engaged on account of his own knowledge of ciphers, but only after his predecessor, Warner, got sacked for theft. Apparently, Warner now bears a grudge, which is why Adair also hired a gangland-type bodyguard, Buck. Roger Montague is another "queer bird" and an old friend of Adair who has various ailments and bored, cynical demeanor. Finally, there a various servants such as the cook, chauffeur-gardener and the butler.

So there's enough animosity and greed bubbling underneath the surface of Adair's household without a treasure hunt among people who either hate his guts or need money. Something that becomes only too apparent when the long hidden clue is found with "a token of the real treasure," an unset, pea-sized ruby, and another homemade shorthand cipher. The ruby disappears, perhaps stolen, while an intruder attacks the butler. Purdon asks his hosts to extend an invitation to his friend.

Chief Inspector Edward Beale barely crossed the threshold of Mauberley Grange or the butler announces he was bringing Adair his customary evening sandwiches and hot milk, but he doesn't answer his knocking and it becomes clear they have to break open the door, which had been locked on the inside and double bolted – top and bottom. And when the door crashed open, Beale found Adair's body slumped in a chair with an automatic pistol lying on the floor. The window was covered with a makeshift, two-part wooden partition locked on the inside with a padlock, which can be fastened only with a key that was found inside Adair's pocket. One of the clearest cases of suicide, but Beale wants to be sure and this poses a problem. Penny came up with an original solution to Beale's quandary.

Since the case looks undeniably like a suicide, Beale needs to find authoritative grounds to stick around and not give people a reason to ask why he's still hanging around. So he makes a few phone calls and several hours later a telegram arrives to inform them that the place is placed in a two week quarantine, because a suspect Beale had interviewed was diagnosed with hospital smallpox. The gates into the road were padlocked and supplies were tossed over it. But, hey, who knew that rambling, badly kept 300-year-old place so closely resembled a house of the future ready for that 2020 lifestyle.

Anyway, the quarantine gives Beale all the room and time to carefully examine the supposed suicide, which comes with some quasi-self awareness as locked room mystery. There's the obligatory reference to John Dickson Carr's Locked Room Lecture from The Hollow Man (1935) with a promising line that "nowadays nobody dares write a sealed-room mystery" unless he's found, or thinks he has, "a new method for eventually unsealing his room" – tailed by a tabulation of all the facts and a challenge to the reader. So, far, so good, but it's the solution that left me in two minds about Policeman's Evidence. If you strip the story down to its bare essence, you're left with the pulpy, second-string mystery I associate with John Russell Fearn and Gerald Verner. Something that's particular true for who's behind the murder, but the locked room-trick itself is also nothing more than a redressing of an age-old trick. What prevented me from either hating it or having to write a lukewarm review?

Penny did nothing noteworthy with the treasure hunt, subsequent murder or the locked room puzzle, but what he did with it, he did very well with some solid detective work and good piece of misdirection that briefly fooled me. Even the locked room-trick, while done before, was played perfectly. Penny made lemonade out of lemons with Policeman's Evidence and the end product, somehow, managed to be better than ingredients used to make it. I don't know how he did it, but he did and that says something about his talents as a plotter and writer. So, yeah, I kind of misjudged him based on a single bad penny. And, perhaps, it's time to excavate The Talkative Policeman (1936) from the subterranean caverns of Mt. To-be-Read.

Yes, Jim was right again, but, in order to keep up appearances, I've to vehemently disagree with his five-star rating of the book. Five stars is preposterous! A solid, three-star rating is much fairer reflection of a well-handled plot that, perhaps, promised more than it eventually delivered without losing the reader at the finish line.

Policeman in Armour (1937) by Rupert Penny

E.B.C. Thornett was an English crossword expert and the author of nine densely plotted, jigsaw-like detective novels, published under the pennames of "Rupert Penny" and "Martin Tanner," which were almost completely forgotten in modern times – until they were brought back in print by Ramble House. Back in 2010, I decided to give Penny a try and, obviously, settled on Sealed Room Murder (1941). Unfortunately, the torturous, snail-like pace of the story wasn't exactly an open invitation to continue my exploration of Penny's Chief Inspector Beale series.

Sealed Room Murder has an audacious and original locked room-trick, but it was tucked away in the last quarter of the story and it was preceded by seemingly never-ending domestic quarrels between the characters. Something that became tedious and boring very quickly. I do believe Sealed Room Murder could have been pruned and whittled down to a classic short story or novella, comprising mostly of the last quarter, but, as it stood, it completely killed any desire to read the rest of the series.

Cue "JJ," of The Invisible Event, who has been raving about Penny since 2015. The cretin even had the gall to say (I quote) "the emergence of an unpublished penny novel" would be more exciting to him than "an unpublished work of John Dickson Carr." He actually said that... on a public forum!

You can say what you want about Mary Tudor, but she knew how to treat apostates and heretics, like JJ, which makes it fortunate for him that I'll be the one who'll be passing judgment on this occasion and always give someone a second hearing – such as Yazoburo Kanari and Clifford Knight. So I went over JJ's blog-post, "Policeman's Lot – Ranking the Edward Beale Novels of Rupert Penny," and decided on the novel he called "Penny at his most presentable." Was he right? Let's find out!

Policeman in Armour (1937) is the third novel in the Chief Inspector Edward Beale series and embarks a month after Albert Carew is sentenced to five years of penal servitude for forgery.

Carew "kicked up no end of a fuss when the verdict was brought in" and wrote a threatening letter to the judge who presided over the case, Sir Raymond Everett, stating that "Hell is the only place for people who take five years off a man's life for what he didn't do." Closing the letter with the promise that the judge certainly hasn't more than five years left to live. Sixteen months later, a deathbed confession released Carew from prison with "a lot of apologies" and a financial compensation, but he had not forgotten about the man who put him behind bars.

Justice Everett, of the King's Bench Division, suffered a severe heart attack after the sentence and was forced to retire to his mansion, Heath Approach, where lived with his relatives and has filled a private room with a collection of knives – resembling "a war museum." An aspect that remained underdeveloped in the story, but something I thought was worth mentioning since Penny so closely aligned himself with writers of the Van Dine-Queen School like Anthony Abbot, Clyde B. Clason and Roger Scarlett.

Chief Inspector Beale is consulted by Justice Everett, now "a plain private citizen" with "a very weak heart," on a very peculiar threat he received from Carew. A letter arrived advising the ex-judge to start doing "a few good actions," because Carew was going to make up a balance of his life and pass judgment. And the letter is filled with details only known to his household. Several months later, Chief Inspector is called back to Heath Approach to investigate the murder of the retired judge.

Before he was murdered, Sir Raymond Everett has suffered a second heart attack and was put to bed, sedated with morphia, but was found later in the evening with the bone-handle of a nine-inch knife sticking from his back.

Some of my fellow mystery bloggers, like JJ and SaHR, have labeled this murder as a locked room mystery, which is not only incorrect, but it sells short what Penny tried to do here. Beale observed that "nobody could have done the murder," but, as the explanation shows, the crime-scene was hardly a locked room under close, unwavering observation. There were several ways in, and out, of the bedroom. However, these entrances and exits resembled an obstacle course, or maze, comprising of latched windows, a door with a noisy lock, an occupied dressing-room and ticking clocks – through which the murderer had plotted a route. Beale had to find this way to get in, and out, of the room without being seen or heard. Something very different, but just as intriguing, as a good, old-fashioned locked room puzzle.

Penny wisely decided to keep the pool of potential murderer's as small as possible and placed only a handful of people inside the house at the time of the murder. There's the victim's greedy, unlikable daughter and son-in-law, Mildred and Richard Dyson. A spinster daughter and qualified nurse, Sybil Everett, who has been taking care of her father since his first heart attack. The victim's niece and someone Beale believes to be entirely innocent, Evelyn Stoddert, and his physician, Dr. Malcolm Rider. And then there's always the outside possibility, Carew.

Beale methodically tries to find a way out of this maze-like problem, littered with such clues as "a squashed snail," a packet of taunting letters and a fatal assumption on the murderer's part, which even the most observant reader is likely to miss or overlook – until its spelled out during the denouement. This is indeed makes for a very densely, sometimes slowly moving, but a solid, plot-driven, detective novel. Penny shared most of clues fairly with the reader, because, as the Challenge to the Reader states, there's "not much point in setting a problem that nobody can solve except the setter and his puppets." My only complaint is that the motive of the murderer is only foreshadowed. This prevents the reader from comfortably settling on the murderer, because you're never quite sure about the motivation of this person. I also thought the nature of the motive was a little out of place in, what had been up to that point, a purely an intellectual game between author and reader.

Nevertheless, the plot is undeniable a piece of old-world craftsmanship and it didn't bother me there were conveniently converging plot-threads that complicated the overall scheme, because Penny handled them with care and skill. A plot that could have easily become a mess. You can easily envision the solution and follow along with Beale's explanation, but, more importantly, the murderer's pathway into the bedroom and another, well-hidden alibi-trick were (for me) the absolute highlights of a clever, complicated, but satisfying, detective story. Recommended to everyone who prefers a big hunk of meat on their plots!

So, all in all, I think it's safe to say Penny has redeemed himself with Policeman in Armour and will resume my exploration of Chief Inspector Beale's casebook later this year, but, while JJ was right on this occasion, he's not off the hook yet. He still has a strike against for him that last manuscript comment.