Z is for Zombie (1937) by Theodore Roscoe

Theodore Roscoe was an American biographer, naval historian, novelist and penned a ton of short stories and serials for periodicals such as Argosy, Action Stories, Far East Adventure Stories, Flynn's Detective Fiction and Wings – fabricating quality pulp fiction with his lush tales of exotic adventure, far-away wars and bizarre murder. Roscoe is best known to detective fans as the author of two imaginative, highly regarded locked room mysteries. Murder on the Way! (1935) is an otherworldly flight-of-fancy set in a decayed, moldering chateau on Haiti during a zombie scare and I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) is a speculative, pulp-style thriller that takes a peek at the coming World War.

Until a few years ago, Roscoe's contributions to the magazine publications of his day had been mostly out-of-print and uncollected for decades. Something that changed all of the sudden around 2017 when a number of his short stories were collected and serials republished as full-fledged novels. And those reprints revealed Roscoe's contribution to the detective story had extended beyond two locked room serials.

I reviewed Roscoe's Four Corners, vol. 1 (2015), a collection of longish short stories, in which the citizens of Four Corners grapple with invading gangs of criminals, bank robbers, small-town intrigue and the occasional impossible crime – e.g. "I Was the Kid with the Drum" (1937). The Green Capsule confirmed there's more in Four Corners, vol. 2 (2020) with his review of "Ghoul's Paradise" (1938) and that story has "impossibilities abound." Jim, of The Invisible Event, discussed another one of Roscoe's long-forgotten detective serials in 2018, entitled Z is for Zombie (1937), which returned to the "whisper of Haitian drums and a wizardish hint of resurrection" of Murder on the Way! But, as Jim noted, it's not merely "a simple, lazy retread" of his most-well known novel. Roscoe spun an entirely different story out of the premise of a zombie scare on Haiti and demonstrated why he was the John Dickson Carr of the pulps. 

Z is for Zombie was originally serialized from February 6 to March 13, 1937, in Argosy and reprinted in 2019 by Steeger Books (formerly Altus Press) as part of their Argosy Library reprint series. So let's dig up some zombies and murderers!

Dr. John Ranier is a man who did the rags to riches story in reverse. Before the Great Depression, Ranier had his own medical practice on Park Avenue where he performed "wonderful operations on wonderful millionaires." That all came to an end when the stock market crashed. So now he's a humble ship's doctor on the S.S. Cacique, Atlantic-Caribbean Line, dispensing seasick pills and "tomato juice to soused tourists who wanted to see the world through the bottom of a gin glass." Z is for Zombie opens with Ranier sitting in a Haitian waterfront dive when a taffy-haired Dutchman, or German, tosses him outside without an apparent reason.

As an aside, Jim commented in his review how Roscoe couldn't make up his mind whether Leo Haarman is Dutch or German, but, as a Dutchman, I began to sweat nervously. Roscoe evidently knew we're Germanic and, if this ever leaks out, it potentially could undo centuries of hard work in convincing the English we're not like the rest of mainland Europe – like physically distancing ourselves from the rest of the continent with our Water Line defenses. That was a lot of work. So don't tell them.

Anyway, Ranier stumbles back into the bar to give Haarman a piece of his mind and fists, but decides against it, gets a drink and observes the German (or Dutchman) as a group of cruise passengers poured into the bar. A party comprising of "an Irish sugar merchant, a Brooklyn mug, an authority on insects, a peroxide blonde, a swart Italian," who drink and discuss voodoo and "the un-dead dead who walk the jungles on silent feet" with their Haitian tour guide. Haarman was sitting at the far end of the table by himself, "pretty fogged," but nobody had come near him before they discovered he had been wounded and dying from a knife-wound to the back. So body could have stabbed him, but there's another impossibility to the stabbing. What happened to the knife? Whoever stabbed Haarman unnoticed and then made blade vanish into thin air "was not only a magician but a chap who meant business." This is impossible stabbing in a Haitian waterfront hole is as normal as the story gets. And what follows is best describes as Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand (1945) done right or Fredric Brown's Night of the Jabberwock (1950), but darker and pulpier.

They transport the dying Haarman to the only hospital nearby run by a Dr. Eberhardt, a German, who has been there many years taking care of the natives and conducting his private experiments – believing "he could revive dead cells with adrenaline." But, when they arrive, they find that Dr. Eberhardt has gone missing, his laboratory wrecked and his adopted niece, Laïs Engles, recognizes the dying Haarman as someone she knew. Someone who had died and been buried on Haiti over fourteen years ago. This comes with a fantastical story of a secretive, long-forgotten World War I mission up the Amazon River in South America, which got lost and (somehow) ended up in Haiti carrying "the mauve death from Brazil." A disease that wiped out every member of the mission except the then child, Laïs. She can prove Haarman is the German sailor who died there in the hospital over a decade ago.

Something is rotten on the island of Haiti and what ensues is a typically, pulp-style merry-go-round the misty, overgrown cemeteries as the dead apparently abandoned their graves and members of cruise party begin to drop like flies. That takes its toll on members of the group. Meanwhile, the natives are getting angry over the rumor "a zombie is loose" and a mob is gathering in the background to storm the hospital. So most of this macabre night full of corpses and rumors of the undead to the "low, sullen throbbing of wooden drums." Roscoe really knew how to set the scene! 

Z is for Zombie is inevitable going to be compared to its illustrious predecessor, but it's hardly a fair one as Murder on the Way! is undoubtedly the better and more memorable of the two. However, the reason is not because the former is actually of lesser quality, but that Murder on the Way! is a loopy roller coaster of insanity while Z is for Zombie is a haunted house ride. One is more exciting and memorable than the other, but therefore not necessarily bad. Surprisingly, I agree with Jim that only serious flaw of the story is its repetitiveness that can, very likely, be blamed on it originally been published as a serial and the characters needed to retrace their steps to help refresh the reader's memory – which a good editor could easily fix. It would improve the pace of the story and move it closer, in terms of overall quality, to Murder on the Way! But disagree with Jim about the impossible stabbing. Sure, the trick was not terribly complicated or even all that original, but it was a lot more practical than the theory is was trying to work out. I worked on the assumption the vanishing knife was a byproduct of the trick the murderer used to cloak the knife thrust. So I figured the murderer found a way to drive, or shoot, a blade without a handle deep into the victim's back, which would have rendered the blade completely invisible. You can turn the bar inside out without finding it. When the body apparently walked out of the hospital, I thought I was on the right track, because a medical examination would have revealed the blade. Roscoe came up with trick that was a little more workable.

So, to keep a long story short, Z is for Zombie is a glorious piece of pulp with an ending that lives up to its premise and the best those much maligned pulp magazines had to offer. Roscoe's was an unapologetic, entertaining fiction writer whose intricately-plotted, darkly written (locked room) mysteries can only be likened to John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot. Z is for Zombie is a fine example of the best the pulps had to offer. Recommended without reservations!

The Argosy Library: Four Corners, vol. 1 (2015) by Theodore Roscoe

Last year, Bold Venture Press reissued a pair of obscure, long-forgotten and out-of-print locked room mysteries by Theodore Roscoe, Murder on the Way! (1935) and I'll Grind Their Bones (1936), which were specifically mentioned and praised by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991) – who lauded the books for their pace, plots and "diabolically clever" impossible crimes. Originally, these locked room novels were published as serials in a now long-defunct pulp magazine, Argosy, who regularly printed short stories, novelettes and serials by Roscoe. Some of those stories and series are now being reprinted by Altus Press in their Argosy Library series.

One of the series Roscoe penned for Argosy was about Four Corners, a small town about a 100 miles from New York, which may have inspired Ellery Queen's Wrightsville (Calamity Town, 1942) and Shinn Corners (The Glass Village, 1954). There's one story in particular that reminded me of The Glass Village, but more on that later.

Altus Press collected the first five novelettes in this series as Four Corners, vol. 1 (2015), originally published between June 5, 1937 and January 8, 1938, including a very alluring story, titled "I Was the Kid With the Drum," which Adey listed in Locked Room Murders and described the story as having two impossibilities – a drum beating on its own accord and a disappearance from a watched house.

Yes, it was this story that lured me to this volume, but all of the stories turned out to be really good. Roscoe was an excellent story-teller and here he spun a couple of fascinating yarns about small-town life in America spliced with crime material.

This makes Four Corners difficult to pigeon-hole, because it has everything, hardboiled gangsters, small-town intrigue and even impossible crimes, which also makes them a little hard to review. Regardless of the genre they belong to, they're fantastic reads and I'll definitely pick up the second volume when it gets published. But let's take a look at these five stories first.

The first story is "He Took Richmond" and the protagonist is a ninety-year-old man, Anecdote Jones, who prattles endlessly about a particular incident during the American Civil War when General Grant had personally commanded to take piney hilltop and "hang onter it like a bulldog to a rott" – boasting how he single handedly held the piney knoll when encircled by a platoon of Johnny Rebs. Whenever he's asked how he was able to hold the piney knoll in the face of overwhelming odds, Old Anecdote can only answer with a puzzled expression on his face as he mutters to himself, "how did I hold the hill?"

A question Old Anecdote is finally able to answer when Joe Gravatti, a notorious and wanted kidnapper, comes to Four Corner when most of the town is in Brockton for the Armistice Day celebration. Gravatti has brought his gang along. They capture Old Anecdote and a garage mechanic, but the old man escapes and reappears as "the ghost of a Civil War veteran in tarnished brass buttons and moth-eaten blue." A portrait of one of the Boys in Blue "painted in moonbeams and cobweb" or "a mirage from the dust blown off a history book." There's definitely a touch of John Dickson Carr in Roscoe's writing. 

Theodore Roscoe

Anyway, Old Anecdote takes on the gangsters, single handedly, which shows how he could have held the piney knoll and the explanation turned out to have been lovely foreshadowed in the early part of the story – giving this pulp story a fun little historical sub-plot. An excellent, well-written story with a satisfying conclusion.

The second story, "Frivolous Sal," is the story that reminded of The Glass Village and concerns the spotted history of "a woman hermit," Clariselle "Sal" Alders, who had come to age in the Gay Nineties (i.e. 1890s) "when people were humming waltzes, looking at Gibson Girls and whispering of suffragettes." So she become an modern, independent-minded woman, but this came with a price and she was held (morally) responsible for the suicide of her father when she refused to marry. This was followed by a string of scandals and even deaths. One of these deaths was that of her business partner in a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Sal is now an elderly woman who has withdrawn from the world in a shanty, rundown shack in the woods, but certain members of the community are anguish to get hold of her diary and they're prepared to pay good money for it – only to be turned down. However, a little girl dies of scarlet fever and people begin to talk about witchcraft.

So the sheriff has to face down his own neighbors to prevent a lynching in Four Corners, but the whole situation is turned on its head when they break down the door. They find something behind the locked door they did not expect. I genuinely want to know if Dannay and Lee were aware of this story when they wrote The Glass Village.

The next story, "Barber, Barber, Shave a Pig," takes place in the barbershop of a Dutch immigrant, Anton Grunner, which he had took over from a failing and ever-frightened local, Willie Updyke, but kept him around as a barber. A day before the story opened, Updyke witnessed the murder of a personal friend, Henry Applegate, at the hands of a bank robber, but lacked the courage to intervene and the murderer got away – much to the disapproval of the community. They even refuse his services as a barber. So the story really is about Updyke rehabilitating himself by ousting the (obvious) murderer and this results in a bloodbath in the barbershop.

This was not a bad story at all, but was slightly annoyed by Grunner's thick, German accent. Why can't Americans differentiate between Dutch and German? We were there when the United States was being settled and your first American-born president, Martin van Buren, was a Dutchman whose first language was Dutch! The difference should have been obvious by 1937. I did smile, though, when Grunner purred "like a tomcat." 

The penultimate novelette, "I Was the Kid With the Drum," is the gem of this collection and the story is narrated by the twelve-year-old son of the sheriff, Bud Whittier, which is why I tagged this blog-post with the "juvenile mysteries" label.

The house of Joe Sleeper is a dark, rambling place with weed-grown side yards where a spiritualist circle held seances in the parlor and listened to the voices of the departed, which is irresistible to a boy, but Sheriff Whittier had received complaints from Mrs. Sleeper about certain boys climbing on the woodshed at the back of the house to get a better look at what's happening inside – instructing his son to stop it. An order that was destined to be ignored. 

One dark, clammy evening in August, Bud climbs the woodshed to peer into a window of an upstairs bedroom and sees Joe Sleeper's bass drum standing in the corner. The drum, unattended, was booming in its corner and there was no sign in the room of Joe or his "masterful drumstick." The bass drum was beating by itself! On the following morning, Mrs. Sleeper disappears from the house. Not once. But twice. The second time a ghostly face is seen behind one of the windows of the somber mansion, but when people go inside to investigate nobody is found.

Back in May, I reviewed a multi-part episode from the Detective Conan animated series, entitled The Case of the Seance's Double Locked Room, which has a beautiful synergy between the two impossibilities of the plot and you can say the same, although to a lesser extent, of "I Was the Kid With the Drum." The ghostly drummer and the disappearance of Mrs. Sleeper are tightly intertwined. You can't have one without the other, but also appreciated how the actions of the culprit are dictated by circumstances. Or how Bud essentially acts as the unknown quantity in the plans of this person.

The result is a beautiful, logical and coherent plot that combines elements of the inverted detective story, juvenile fiction and the locked room mystery. And it worked! I think this story should be included in one of the future impossible crime anthologies.

On a semi-related side note, another detective story with great synergy between two impossible situations is Agatha Christie's 1937 short story "The Dream" (collected in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, 1960).

Finally, we arrive at the fifth and final story of this collection, "Daisies Won't Tell," which is a hoist-on-their-own petard yarn and it brings a wolf to Four Corners in black sheep's clothing. The story largely takes place in the past, 1903, which makes this somewhat of a historical mystery and concerns a black sheep of the community, Andy Curlew, who was disowned by his grandfather after robbing the village tavern and fled to Australia, but his grandmother grew lonely after her husband passed away and notices began to appear in newspapers asking him to return to Four Corners – only someone else turned up. The result is thievery, murder and a thirty year stretch in prison. However, the murderer gets a nasty surprise when he returns to Four Corners with the intention to retrieve his long-buried nest egg. A very proper punishment for this individual and perfect closer to great collection of stories.

So, on a whole, Four Corners is as close as you can possibly get to a perfectly balanced selection of short stories and I'm very tempted to say that there isn't a dud among them, but that's a personal value judgment that may vary from reader to reader. I only picked this volume on the strength of one specific story and did not really know what to expect from the rest of the collection, but this made it a pleasant and welcome surprise to discover that they all had something to offer. And I have always loved these slices of small-town Americana. Highly recommended!

The Stumble to War

"Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum

I Smell the Blood of a War to Come

Legions Alive Will Soon be Dead

I'll Grind Their Bones to Make My Bread"

- Mother Goose (Song of the Armament Maker, 1936)

Theodore Roscoe wrote short stories and serials for the pulp magazines and periodicals of his day, such as Argosy, Wings and Far East Adventure Stories, who also signed his name to a brace of highly regarded, but rare, detective novels in the locked room sub-genre – both of them have garnered praise from the likes of Robert Adey and John Norris.

Several years ago, I favorably reviewed the most well-known of the two titles, Murder on the Way (1935), which is best described as Agatha Christie's And There Were None (1939) as perceived by Hake Talbot. The plot threw a grotesque cast of gargoyles into a decaying chateau on Haiti, a place rife with superstition and voodoo practices, where a fatal shooting occurred inside a locked room and a man vanishing, impossibly, from an underground passage. Murder on the Way is a marvelous flight of fancy and a first-grade pulp detective that secured a permanent spot on my list of all-time favorite (locked room) mysteries. And this made it all the more depressing that Roscoe's second impossible crime novel proved to be even more elusive. That is, until recently.

Back in March, "JJ," who blogs over at The Invisible Event, announced he had been collaborating behind the scenes with Bold Venture Press and Audrey Parente, author of Pulpmaster: The Theodore Roscoe Story (1992), in order to bring Roscoe's impossible crime novels back in print – having prepared the text for publication and written an introduction for both editions. So nothing but praise for everyone who worked on getting these once rare, long-neglected titles back on our shelves!

I really can't recommend Murder on the Way enough, but what about that second, elusive locked room novel? Well, let say this, the book is practically incomparable to anything else that has been written in the detective genre. But let's start at the beginning.

I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) was originally published in Argosy as a seven-part serial, titled War Declared, which is set in an alternative universe where names, borders and historical events (slightly) differed from our time-line. The end result is best described as speculative war-fiction that uses a pulp-style detective-and thriller story as a vehicle and even flirted with the Ruritanian Romance towards the end. What impressed me the most is that the book, in some ways, can be read as a nightmarish premonition of the war to come, because some of Roscoe's depiction of the next war proved to be eerily close to what happened when the world stumbled into another global conflict at the end of the decade – making the book only comparable to Darwin L. Teilhet's The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934). One of the first works of fiction that addressed the political, and social, upheaval in Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

As prophetic as the book is in some regards, Roscoe also drew heavily on the Great War of 1914-18 for the aesthetics of the story and the political powder keg at the heart of the plot. One of these nods to the First World War can be found in the opening chapter.

The lead character of I'll Grind Their Bones is a "correspondent-at-large" for the Universe News Agency, John Keats, who visits a dark, gloomy castle in Transylvania, Rumania, which is the home of a reclusive munitions magnate, Count Vasil Garganoff – who's a poorly disguised version of the real-life merchant of death, Sir Basil Zarahoff. A man who, like his fictional portrayal, was known as "the so-styled Mystery Man of Europe." Some have even called him the living, flesh-and-blood embodiment of Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty. A salient detail of history that was surprisingly overlooked by a certain someone when writing the introduction.

Keats was on his way to report on the conference taking place between the Iron Premier of Teutony (Germany) and the Foreign Minister of Esperance (France), but Count Garganoff granted a rare interview to the American reporter.

Only news Count Garganoff has to tell Keats' readers is that he turned down the invitation to attend the closed door conference and asks to put in print that he would appreciate it if these "blundering statesmen" would omit him from their "proceedings in the future," but the munitions magnate also has a lucrative, off-the-record offer for the reporter – one that would allow him to walk out of their meeting with a hundred grand in cash. Count Garganoff wants Keats to cease his "literary attacks" on the Hertha Gun Works and accept the money to take "a two-year leave of absence" from his "strenuous literary activities." Keats is even promised to be the next recipient of the "the Godell Peace Prize," but turns down both and that's when the problems begin to pile up all around him.

A stray bullet penetrates the rear window of his car, as he and his cameraman, Crazy Hooper drove away from the castle, while, at the Hotel Metropole in the Teutonic capitol, someone threw a Russian knife at him. Someone was obviously out to get him, but then everything around him began to accelerate when shots were fired inside the sealed conference room at the hotel.

Apparently, Baron Sigismund von Speer (Iron Premier) and Victor Gatreau (Foreign Minister) had "shot each other to death" during a heated debate inside a locked, guarded and soundproof conference room at the hotel.

Gatreau was a well-known duelist in his country and had emptied his pistol on the Teutonic premier, who only needed two bullets from his Luger, which proved to be convenient excuse to start beating the drums of war. This is another aspect borrowed from the First World War when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countless Sophie acted as a prelude to, what is arguably, the stupidest thing we've ever done on the European continent.

Meanwhile, in the middle of people yelling "Heil Schnitzler" and "Gott strafe Esperance," Keats acts as a true pulp-protagonist by stumbling from one complicated situation into another: a young cub-reporter from the London Observer, Philip Shepler, was murdered in his hotel room and the hotel is subsequently torched to the ground. A beautiful press representative of the Soviet Tass, named Alexandra Frantsovna, tells Keats she witnessed the double shooting through the windows and swears shots had been fired by a third person she was unable to observe. But that would make the shooting a double murder of the impossible variety!

All of this, and more, is what Keats finds on his path when he travels from the Teutonic capital to the European headquarters of Universe News in Esperance, but then a war exploded "in the heart of the puzzle" and blew "the fragments a thousand ways." And, as a consequence, the detective-and thriller elements of the book (briefly) take a backseat to the war, which consist of several well-written, fascinating and even prophetic chapters.

Der Meister of Teutony, August Schnitzler, had declared there was a "danger-of-war" followed by an apocalyptic attack on Esperance's capital city from the air with "aerial torpedoes" (rockets) and marked the "first time in history they've been used to reduce a city" - providing the book with prophetic image of the German V-1 and V-2 rockets that would rain down in London in World War II. Roscoe was reportedly a naval historian, who had been commissioned by the US Naval Institute to write several books about Navy operations, which likely gave him some insight in the military capabilities of future wars.

Keats stumbling through the smoking, corpse-littered rubble of the city makes for a haunting and powerful scene. One that sadly would become a stark reality only a few short years later.

A second prophetic, but very brief, scene is when the Teutonic army occupies the fictitious Kingdom of Helvania and mentions squadrons of parachutes that made it look as if "the sky was raining men." Paratroopers were first used, on a massive scale, during the World War II. There were, however, other things that were less prophetic or grounded in reality. One of them was the ridiculous easy invasion of Switzerland and the other was the premature end of the three-way war between Teutony, Espererance and Helvania, which bordered on the ludicrous and hopelessly naive to boot. You would not have beaten the real Nazis as easily as that.

So the rapid deterioration of the political ties between two countries and the subsequent war makes for fascinating reading, especially when you realize it was written several years before the actual war took place, but what about that double murder in Hotel Metropole, you ask – which appeared to have all the earmarks of an impossible crime. Well, the explanation as to who engineered the murders, and how, was both foreshadowed and sometimes bluntly clued. But the hints and clues were all there.

What might prove be a problem for some readers is that the who and how, completely depended upon one another here, strongly reminds one of the pulpier miracle crimes imagined by the likes of Fredric Brown and Clayton Rawson. I found this to be slightly disappointing, because I had hoped that the plot, or detective-elements, would emerge from the turmoil of the war story-line as something along the lines of the bloody tour-de-force that was Murder on the Way. I wanted this book to be an all-round masterpiece, but lacked that spark of innovation in the solution to launch the book to the godly heights of the Mount Olympus of Detective-Fiction.

Nevertheless, I don't want to sell I'll Grind Their Bones short and end this blog-post on sour note, because, as a whole, this really is an excellent, but pulpy, detective novel with a prophetic eye on the then coming war. Only problem is that its predecessor cast a shadow of expectation over the plot. So maybe I only have myself to blame for that slight twinge of disappointment, because both books are incomparable.

In closing, Murder on the Way remains my favorite of Roscoe's two locked room novels, but I'll Grind Their Bones has conquered a spot on my list of favorite war-time mysteries, which includes Christianna Brand's Green for Danger (1944), Carter Dickson's Nine-and Death Makes Ten (1940), Michael Gilbert's The Danger Within (1952) and Franklyn Pell's Hangman's Hill (1946; better setting than plot).

So, that's another review I botched in the end. Anway, I'll probably have a lesser-known, but equally, obscure locked room mystery for the next blog-post.

Culte des Mortes

"I met murder on the way -

He had a mask like Castlereagh -

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him—"

- Masque of Anarchy

In the introductory chapters of Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), Robert Adey compiled a comprehensive summary of this particular sub-genre and underlines notable works from established novelists and writers whose names have dimmed in our collective recollection. One of these unnoticed, fleeting shadows from the past, whose career lays in the same negligent state as that of the crumbled remnants of a headstone, is a "seasoned wanderer" named Theodore Roscoe – who wrote part of his masterpiece, Murder on the Way! (1935), on a candle-lit cemetery near Leogane! If that doesn't set the mood, nothing does.

This barbarous and grotesque narrative embarks on its grim journey when the two main protagonists, artist Edwin Cartershall, who also narrates the story, and his fiancé-to-be, Patricia "Pete" Dale, receive a late-night visitant, a character plucked from the fantasies of Lewis Carroll, named Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines – who contented himself with the title of Comte de Limonade. Tousellines introduces himself as the solicitor of Pete's uncle, Eli Proudfoot, recently departed from this world, and invites them to tail him back to the decaying chateau of his late employer, situated in Morne Noir, Haiti, for the final rites and the reading of his will.

Uncle Eli shuffled off his mortal coil in the confines of his moldering library, where his remains were found slumped in an armchair with a bullet hole defacing his visage, and the local authority, represented here in the presence of Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse, of the Garde d'Haiti, presumes that the man robbed himself of his own life. However, the absence of a gun also leaves him with the option of murder, but only seems to have considered this possibility with the scourge of the local inhabitants firmly set in his mind – the voodoo-driven zombies of Haitian legend! 

You have to keep in mind that this book predates most, if not all, of those bad, cheesy low-budget horror flicks and the zombies that reputedly stumble around in this book are lifted from folklore instead of Hollywood. Tousellines provides Cartershall and Pete with the following description of Narcisse's first suspect: 

"A zombie, m'sieu, a zombie is one who has died but is not yet dead. A corpse resurrected by witch’s doctors magic from the grave. A living dead man who returns as the slave of some master, who may labor in the field or walk with silent steps on errands of revenge."

But the scenes awaiting them at the dilapidated, colonial chateau, where the rhythmic rumbling of ceremonial drumming, emanating from the wilds encompassing the estate, never ceases, can be best described as the drug-fuelled phantasmagorias of an opium addict. There's the unconventional funeral of Uncle Edi, prepared for burial according to Haitian voodoo rituals, and the reading of a will – which turns all of his prospective heirs into pawns in a game with a one hundred thousand dollar inheritance as the big prize.

The assortment of potential heirs, aside from Dale and her artistically inclined friend, could've been escapees of a freak show, especially when hurdled together in one room, and between them there are enough murders to furnish a new wing for the black museum. These seven blood hounds that follow murder in his footsteps are a British peer who has done a twenty-year stretch for murder, a tattooed deserter from the United States Navy, a Dominican with bloody hands and no tongue, an Albino youth with an attitude, a one-armed Jamaican witch and her half-wit son named Toadstool and an exiled German bluebeard who was an embarrassment to the home front. The only thing they have to do in order to procure the inheritance is simply staying at the chateau for twenty-four hours after the funeral and they can ascent the list if the person ahead of them in the line of successors leaves or croaks! Murders, resurrections, impossible disappearances, rebel uprisings and hair-raising situations tag each other in and out at a frightening and dazzling pace. 

Murder on the Way! clues us in on what And Then There Were None (1939) would've been like if the names of John Dickson Carr or Hake Talbot were plastered across its front cover. Theodore Roscoe does not only share their taste for Grand Guignol, but also their gift for conjuring up an apparently demon haunted world where everything is possible – even the impossible!

At one point in the story, the second heir in line, the tongue-less Ti Pedro, is locked into the room where Uncle Eli used to store his rosewood coffin and that storage room pretty much amounts to a plastered and sealed room – without any easy entrances or escape routes. The door was locked from the outside, with the solitary key in constant possession of a police officer, while an interconnecting door was nailed shut and the only window was covered with undisturbed cobwebs, but despite these obstacles someone managed to shoot him through the top of his head. Later on, the shadowy murderer vanishes from a dead-end point in a subterranean tunnel and Roscoe explains these miracles of black magic away with the same ease as the sun shoos away the stars at dawn. The only thing that marred the pleasure for this reader was my own cleverness at picking up on nearly all the clues that helped me identify the murderer earlier on in the story, but what an enterprising and spirited murderer with a truly original scheme that anticipates a rather famous cartoon series.

This is nothing short of a bloody tour-de-force and an unapologetic flight of fancy, which does a breath taking job at merging the plot of a fair play mystery with components of thrilling tales of adventure and making it feel like a horror story. Readers who prefer their detective stories with an air of literacy are best advice to stay out of its way. This is genre fiction in its purest, undistilled form and only recommended to habitual users.

On a final note, according to short autobiography in this book, Roscoe was also the author of a detective story that just might be the scarcest title in all of mystery fiction:

"At the age of eight, he was the author of a thrilling mystery, 'The Sheriff of Red Roach Ranch,' published in a hand-bound edition limited to one copy."

I can only imagine the number on the price tag of that book, if it ever appeared on the second-hand book market.