Three Detective Novels by Brian Flynn

The more I read of Brian Flynn the more I realize why he was never recognized or remembered for his work. He just isn’t consistently good. First off, he is a terrible prose stylist in his early books with some awful sentence structures that were screaming out to an editor for a full-on assault of the blue pencil.  His page length paragraphs are syntactically irksome, the narrative gets repetitive with redundant “our story thus far” recaps, he uses eccentric vocabulary when plain language will serve better  (vaticinate is a favorite bizarre word choice instead of foretell or prognosticate) All of these sins pile up sometimes on the same page and are detrimental to his engaging plots and lively incidents. I’m trying to forgive him for all of this but it’s hard to ignore when an avalanche of verbosity occurs in the most inconvenient places impeding the enjoyment of the story and interrupting the flow of action.

The biggest of his sins, however, is his failure to honor the fair play tradition. The adventures of Anthony Bathurst are overloaded with last minute reveals with nary a clue offered up that relates to that reveal. He indulges in the unfavorable practice of having a character lowering a speaking voice and not recording what is said. In essence they whisper to each other without the benefit of the reader knowing what was said. Similarly, characters write things on pieces of paper rather than openly speaking their ideas once again leaving the reader left out of the action. Makes me boil.  Grrr...

One thing I particularly dislike – an indulgence I think Flynn must have thought was uproariously funny – is his habit of taking cliches and aphorisms and rewriting them to make them sound like jokes. I found examples of this annoying gimmick in each one of the books I recently read. To do this in one or two books as an homage to the renowned Mrs. Malaprop, say, would be acceptable. But it happens all the time, in all of his books. Flynn never seems to grow tired of his dubious wordplay. Everyone engages in this paraphrasing of proverbs (a preposterous idea for any fiction writer), including Bathurst himself. I’ve cited several of them in the capsule reviews below.

And yet...  somehow I can't get enough of these books!  What keeps me reading are Flynn’s inventive plots, his unceasing imagination and his absolute love for the genre. He really does love a mystery. In The Ebony Stag, for example, Bathurst makes an allusion to Monsieur Hanaud, the French detective created by A.E. W. Mason, best known for his star turn in The House of the Arrow. Detective short stories and novels are repeatedly mentioned as often as Flynn’s habit of having Bathurst cite obscure poems and arcane works of literature. Additionally, Flynn was willing to experiment with the form in his later years deviating from the formulae of the traditional Q&A investigation, evidence gathering and clue hunting to try his hand at pulpish thrillers, Grand Guignol horror, inverted detective novels and in one specific book a rather mature handling of the psychological crime novel specifically dealing with a theme later explored by dozens of crime fiction writers– the infection of a crime on an individual's moral character and conscience. Flynn gets better at plotting once he reached the third decade of his career in the 1940s. I only wish he abandoned some of his irksome writing habits as he seemed to mature in other areas like concocting deviously engineered murders, devising unusual motivations and plumbing the depths of murderous minds with trenchant insight.

The Padded Door (1932),  11th book in the series Dislike the heavy-handed metaphor of the title taken from a line that appears in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde. The line is used an epigraph to the novel. It refers to a prisoner awaiting the "hangman with his gardener’s gloves/Slip[ping] through the padded door."  The novel begins with a well-used plot motif – a man wrongfully accused of murder and the desperate fight to get him acquitted at trial. First half of the novel tells the story of the trial and how the defense manages to pull off a miracle. Second half is a murder mystery when a shocking reveal of a second murder victim upends the plot's main thrust.

I pride myself on seeing through the biggest piece of misdirection in this cleverly told story. Flynn breaks a few rules here, almost pulling off a trick worthy of one Agatha Christie’s best mystery novels. But he let his cards show before the final reveal. Fair play clueing is present for some bits, otherwise I’d not have been tipped off.  In other areas, however Bathurst delivers some info in the final pages without ever letting the reader know what he was doing. The Stilton cheese business, for example, was utterly unfair but easily could have been dealt with in a subtle and fair manner. There is also some unfair business when the doctor who examines the murder victim gives us details about the time of death. Huge cheat on Flynn’s part that may mislead most readers. This is later explained, but the reason is lazy and lame.

REWRITTTEN APHORISM (spoken by Sir Robert Frant, father of the accused on trial) "There are two ends of the candle, you know, and combustion should only be at work at one of them."

The Ebony Stag (1938), #22 in series  This is a splendidly told, exciting mystery. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. Quite the ripping yarn.  The story is teeming with Golden Age conventions: a rhyming riddle, lost treasure, secret identities, impostors, a bizarre murder method, a nearly impossible crime in an almost locked room.  It’s a real page turner and Flynn’s writing is pretty good in this one. Unfortunately, it gets bogged down towards the end when he resorts to his old bad habits of suspense-killing rambling monologues, ill-timed recapping and a completely pointless tabulation scene the likes of which even Carolyn Wells would shake her head while reading.

But still the good far outweighs the bad here. An elderly retired gentleman is gruesomely murdered by an unknown weapon in his locked cottage. Only a small window was open but the opening was barely big enough to allow entry for a boy who manages to get in and unbolt the door for the gent’s niece. She comes by to check up on her uncle and then must enlist the help of the boy. The figure of the title is found broken by the body. The missing weapon and the reason for the broken stag are pale in comparison to a larger mystery when it is soon discovered that the murdered man is not who everyone thought he was. The story grows ever more intriguing as it progresses. Very much recommended if you’re looking for one of the truly entertaining Anthony Bathurst detective novels.

REWRITTTEN APHORISM (spoken by Bathurst) “But Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, if you remember, once warned a certain Horatio concerning the possibilities continued in heaven and earth that were omitted from their philosophy.” [So clunky. Not funny at all. Why not just quote the line verbatim? Every other mystery writer quoted that line ad nauseam throughout the Golden Age.]

There is also a character named Frederick Gulliver Sparke-Lodge in The Ebony Stag who mixes metaphors and speaks in dozens of these mangled proverbs. I’ll spare you any sampling of that nonsense.

Such Bright Disguises (1941), #27 in the series. Bathurst does not appear until the final third of this truly remarkable crime novel. It’s not really a detective novel until the final third when all that preceded is turned on its head with a final double twist that I thought rather brilliant. The bulk of the novel is, in fact, an inverted crime novel and tells the story of two adulterous lovers who plot the murder of the wife’s husband. There are some mysterious elements introduced in the story that make you doubt what you think was almost a certainty. This is part of Flynn’s clever melding of pure detective novel and inverted detective novel. It’s his attempt to write a mystery novel in the style of Francis Iles, I’d say. Crime fiction fans will draw comparisons to Malice Aforethought, Payment Deferred by C. S. Forrester, This Way Out by James Ronald and the works of James M. Cain. They all came to mind as I read Flynn’s book, but one classic work stood out more.

The deeper I plunged into this dark novel the more I was reminded of Thérèse Raquin, one of Emile Zola’s superior crime novels to explore the guilt of adulterous lovers and how after committing and covering up a murder they are doomed to never forget what they’ve done. In Flynn’s novel Lawrence and Dorothy are the duplicitous lovers. As a consequence of their criminal act their desire and lust wither away under the weight of guilt and remorse. Dorothy has nightmares and is literally haunted by the ghost of her husband. Ultimately, they begin to distrust one another and madness and paranoia begin to set in. There is no happy ending here with Flynn delivering a whopper of a surprise in the final pages. Of the handful of Flynn’s novels I’ve read this is his most mature, almost a melodramatic mainstream novel of psychology with crime as a side dish, rather than a crime novel as the main course.

Psychological crime fans, inverted detective novel lovers and anyone looking for a dark and noirish crime story will be thoroughly satisfied with Such Bright Disguises. I’m convinced it is one of Flynn’s finest novels and I’ve only read seven so far.

FFB: The Triple Bite - Brian Flynn

THE STORY: A riddle in rhyme and a complicated alpha-numeric code are the key to a hidden treasure that lifelong criminal Sam Trout has left to two lucky people. One of them is Nigel Strachan, a lawyer who defended Trout in his last criminal trial, and whose kindness and decency is being rewarded by Trout with the chance of finding the treasure. Trout is leaving it up to “the best brain” among the two lucky recipients to solve the riddle and code and find the hidden riches. Nigel brings the code to the Cameron household and hopes his friends will be able to help him find the mystery location by breaking the code. Murder and mayhem follow when a group of crooks learn of the hidden treasure and stop at nothing to get to the treasure first.

THE CHARACTERS: The Triple Bite (1931) is another of Brian Flynn’s experiments in narrative structure. Once again we have a first person narrator – this time a woman in the person of Cecilia Cameron – who finds it necessary to step into the shoes of other people in order to tell portions of the story. Cecilia like Rector Parry-Probyn in Murder En Route (and apparently other Flynn mystery novels according to Steve Barge’s introductory material in the Dean Street Press reprint edition) will often write entire chapters in the third person to tell us of portions of the story when she was not present herself. She later explains that these were told to her afterwards by the people who actually experienced those parts of the action. Usually these scenes feature Bathurst alone muddling over some odd piece of the puzzle or the police interviewing suspects. I wonder what the point of this is. When it would be just as easy to write the whole book in third person. I thought that this was a peculiarity of Brian Flynn, but recently quite by accident while I was reviewing a few of my old posts I discovered that this very mixing of first and third person occurs in Catt Out of Bag (1939) by Clifford Witting. Was it a trend in popular fiction then? Was everyone mimicking one another?

The novel starts out like a dime novel thriller with good guys and bad guys clearly delineated and no real mystery as to who might be the villain of the piece. “Flame” Lampard and his gang of thugs infiltrate the Cameron household, intimidate and threaten, abduct and even bind and gag the housekeeper. A shootout occurs one night as the crooks do their best to get the heroes and heroines to give in to their demands. When Cecilia’s uncle is found dead outside a nearby home, seemingly from natural causes, she finds it necessary to call in Anthony Bathurst. Only then does the plot morph into a genuine detective novel.

Flynn does a good job of sprinkling the gruesome and bizarre events with a healthy dose of lively humor. Cecilia’s Aunt Elspeth is on hand for some moments of comic relief with her supercilious comments and derisive put-downs and Bathurst is always willing to lighten the impending darkness with a quip or two.

INNOVATIONS: In addition to being a nifty genre blending mystery incorporating aspects of a crime thriller and a detective novel with a soupcon of Gothic chills The Triple Bite is a homage to Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction, the kind of stories that seem to have greatly influenced Brian Flynn in his mystery writing. The first and most obvious homage is to Sherlock Holmes. In the brief introductory note that precedes the novel Flynn tells us himself that he was inspired to write his book based on “one line of a [Holmes] short story” by Arthur Conan Doyle. We are not told from which story this one line comes until the final chapter. The line refers to one of the many unchronicled cases of Holmes and Watson, some of them too gruesome or sensational to be told to the general public. The one line appears in an entire paragraph of case references – six in total – found in the short story “The Adventure of The Golden Pince-Nez.” I see no need to hold back that piece of info since Flynn and Bathurst hold back too much already, not only in this novel but in almost every one of his adventures. Even if you look up the paragraph (or know it by heart) it is doubtful you will be able to tell exactly which case inspired the writing of this book.

Original illustration from "The Adventure of
the Flitterbat Lancers" (Windsor Magazine, 1896)

In his introduction Steve Barge, our resident Flynn maven, makes some conjectures about this particular Holmes case and its use in The Triple Bite, but I’m surprised he completely overlooked the other detective fiction allusion in the novel. In attempting to solve the riddle/code in Sam Trout’s note Bathurst is reminded of a similar use of jargon in a case solved by Martin Hewitt, Arthur Morrison’s consulting detective whose adventures were published in The Strand and Windsor Magazine the same years as the Holmes stories. There is an unfortunate typo when the case is mentioned in this reprint edition. Whether the error was in the original text used to create this edition I do not know, but someone ought to have corrected it. The case is “The Adventure of the Flitterbat Lancers”-- rendered as Dancers in this edition. Anyone acquainted with that tale will know that it features a discussion of criminal underworld argot. You learn the meaning of slang terms like horney which means a street musician who plays the cornet, and an unusual use of the word dancer. This truly arcane term is wholly unfair to the reader unless he happens to be a veteran of Victorian era crime or a diehard fan of Martin Hewitt’s exploits. Luckily, Flynn explains the peculiar meaning both in Morrison’s story and as it applies to the case Bathurst is trying to solve.

My only complaint was the endless talk in monologue form. Bathurst does go on at length too often. Conversations are dominated by one character who drones on and on, rather than making the scenes more dynamic with input from all the characters. And Flynn has a regrettable habit of letting his paragraphs run on interminably for entire page lengths when in fact they are made up of multiple paragraphs. He needed a real editor back in the day. With this new edition there was an opportunity to improve ease of reading by breaking up those long paragraphs into smaller ones. A minor quibble and a personal taste of mine when it comes to reprinting older works.

Though this novel may owe too much to century old detective stories it was overall one of the better Brian Flynn mystery novels I’ve read. The bizarre murder means, the inclusion of a code and riddle (one easy to solve, one overly complicated) and the general good humor expressed throughout the novel all made it well worth reading. Still it’s no Murder En Route. I’m hoping that soon I’ll read one of Flynn’s mystery novels that lives up to the ingenuity and high entertainment quality of that book.

FFB: Murder En Route - Brian Flynn

THE STORY: It's a foggy and wet night on the bus route from Esting to Raybourne and one passenger insists on sitting on the upper deck even though the bonnet was not installed that night. A little drizzle is nothing to him. No other passengers went up to join him for the remainder of the trip. But when the conductor goes up to check that all passengers have left the bus he finds the lone man still in his seat. Closer examination proves he is dead -- strangled. How was it possible to strangle the man when no one went near him since his ticket was purchased and the only way up and down is by the stairwell that passes right by the conductor's platform?

THE CHARACTERS: Anthony Bathurst is called upon to assist in solving the murder of the man on the bus in Murder En Route (1930), the eighth book in a long series featuring this consulting detective. I've not been too impressed with Bathurst in the two other books I read. One I finished (The Billiard Room Mystery) and found to be run-of-the-mill and the other (The Ladder of Death) was so dull and stagnant that I closed the book and never finished. Clearly I picked two of his lesser efforts. Murder En Route opens with a baffling murder in the very first chapter. As the crime is investigated the story gets more and more puzzling and will intersect with a secondary story about a missing heir to a vast fortune.

This time Bathurst is not the vain fop I so disliked in the other books. He is engaging and likeable, with a keen eye for minutiae and a skill in getting to people to open up. Granted he still exhibits an egocentric manner in his omniscient detective ways but the usual accompanying arrogance seen in so many similar fictional detectives is absent here. Rather Bathurst is eager to enlist as many people as he can to help him. He has a regular battalion of aides in this outing including our sometime narrator Rector Parry-Probyn, the rector's son Michael often found behind the wheel of Bathurst's Crossley as they travel to and from the multiple locations, and a father and son lawyer team. Of course the police are on the case as well but oddly Bathurst manages to make it seem as if they are working for him rather than vice versa.

We learn early on that Bathurst, in addition to his renown as a police consultant, is quite a Renaissance man with an encyclopedic knowledge on various arcane topics. He tells Rector Parry-Probyn that he is a musician (we never learn what instrument he plays, however) and proceeds to compliment him on the service he attended and in the process showing off his knowledge of church music. The conversation quickly moves from topic to topic. I'll let the rector explain how Bathurst astonished him:

We began to talk and we went on talking. In the space of an all-too-short hour we touched on football (both codes), rowing, church architecture, ancient monoliths, the susceptibility of the turquoise to polish, sclerosis of the posterior columns and degenerative arterial change, the Black Mass and the Medea of Euripedes.

Anthony Bathurst could give Philo Vance a run for his money in a contest of esoterica and arcane erudition! We also later discover that Bathurst has a wide knowledge of the life of bivalves and the laws pertaining to their collection which proves to be very helpful in connecting the dots to the very involved and baroquely performed murder scheme.

Flynn has a keen ear for local patois and likes to recreate dialects and regionalisms among the minor characters. One of the more memorable scenes takes place in the Quarryman Inn where Bathurst tracks down a codger named Old Orlando who has quite a few stories to tell about the murder victim while a couple of other bar patrons volunteer information about one of Bathurst's cohorts in crime solving.

Really there's never a dull moment in this story with its large cast of well defined characters, some of whom sadly run to stereotypes or are barely fleshed out like Eileen Trevor, one of only two women characters in the novel. Yet none of the story ever feels stale or old hat thanks largely to the lively portrayal of Bathurst in the lead role and the deftly plotted, well thought out, but entirely far-fetched mystery that leads to a melodramatic, thrillingly cinematic climax near an abandoned coal mine.

INNOVATIONS: Flynn does a very odd thing in this book. He starts off in third person and then introduces a first person narration in a fragmented manuscript written by the Rector. And yet in much of the first person narration the clergyman was never present for what is described. We get typically lame sentences like "Of course Michael later informed me of what happened and I have done my best to recreate the conversations to the best of my ability." But three entire chapters revert to the third person when the plot veers into the story of Eileen Trevor, her missing father, and the inheritance he is due. Why not just tell those portions of the story where the Rector is absent in the third person as well? It's just strange to me and mildly annoying as a sign of sloppy method of mixing points of view. My guess is that Flynn so enjoyed the bizarre Edwardian style syntax that comes out of the pen of Rector Parry-Probyn that he could not help himself but give over to that eccentric voice as often as he could get away with it.

The most creative aspects of this detective novel are in its construction of the impossible crime, the dizzying number of impersonations, and the amazing abundance of well placed "fair play" clues. Among the tantalizing evidence Bathurst and the police discover are a mysterious white-gray streak on the back of victim's coat and the powerfully fishy smell that permeates all his clothing; a racing program with some odd numbers in columns marked S, T, D, M; a photograph of two men one of whom is holding a sign that reads "Lifting of the Ban;" the strange reference to a street by its decade's old defunct name rather than its current name; and a pair of glasses with a prescription stronger in the left lens than the right. That's just a brief sample of the avalanche of clues and baffling aspects associated with the murder. There's enough here to keep even the most demanding detective novel reader very much on his toes.

If there is anything to gripe about it is Bathurst's unfortunate predilection in not being forthright with all he is thinking or all he has uncovered. He plays guessing games with the Rector at one point and praises him when he's right, but never fills in the missing pieces when the rector is stumped. This is because Flynn is one of those mystery writers who likes to deliver the full solution all at once in a grandiose unveiling in the final chapter. Some of the info would've been better revealed earlier to make the ending less drawn out and cumbersome.

THINGS I LEARNED: Whether it is Flynn himself or the character of the Rector who allowed Flynn to indulge in numerous allusions, Murder En Route is rife with obscure historical and literary references. Some of these allusions were linked by a single person who I think is a primary influence on Flynn's writing.

When someone remarks that no man can be in two places at once the Rector counters with: "Barring, of course, that he's a bird. I hope that in the circumstance Sir Boyle Roche will pardon the flagrant plagiarism." Roche was an 18th century Irish politician known for his absurd mixed metaphors and poor use of figurative language in his speeches and letters. The Rector's comment directly references Roche's most oft quoted quip: "Mr. Speaker, it is impossible I could have been in two places at once, unless I were a bird." Click here for a selection of Roche's other ill phrased metaphors.

Eileen Trevor is a schoolteacher and plays on the field hockey team at Freyne House where she teaches. Her masterful athletic skill is commented on by a sports writer: "That girl...was more like S. H. Shoveller than any woman centre I have ever seen." Shoveller was the star player on England's Gold medal winning field hockey team in the 1908 Olympics. [Men's field hockey was an Olympic event one hundred ten years ago? Waddyah know.]

On page 125 Flynn goes into rapturous detail about his setting of Glebeshire, "universally acknowledged to be the most beautiful county in England." The entire page is filled with the gorgeous weather, the climate that allows tropical plants and fruits to flourish, and the languorous life of a person blessed enough to have settled there. Except that it doesn't exist. It is the creation of novelist Hugh Walpole who set most of his books in that fictional county. Pretty damn ballsy to steal someone else's fictional setting and plop down your own characters there.

Flynn's Great Influence?

About ten pages further into the mystery story (page 138 to be precise) Rector Parry-Probyn makes a passing reference to Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill and what happened at a breakfast they shared. They don't exist either. They are the protagonists in a novel called Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1911) by... wait for it... Hugh Walpole.

Finally on page 158 Bathurst quotes another English writer when he says "When you want a good wife, M. De Marsac." referring to the title character in A Gentleman of France (1895) by Stanley Weyman. Weyman has been described as a writer of "the finest English historical romances since Scott." Guess who said that about Weyman? Hugh Walpole! Is that too much of a coincidence? I think not. Flynn is mad about Walpole. I'm sure his other books are loaded with Walpole references. His elliptical syntax and repetitive prose is very much reminiscent of some of Walpole's own ornate style of writing.

EASY TO FIND? This one is a strike out, gang. I seem to have bought the only copy available in years. Currently there are no copies available from any online bookselling sites. You may find one at Biblio.com offered by Arroyo Seco but it's gone from their stock. That's the one I bought using their listings on abebooks.com. Now watch one pop up on eBay in a couple of weeks. It's been known to happen after I post about a scarce book. Being one of Flynn's earliest mystery novels Murder En Route was published in both UK and US editions. But obviously both are as rare as a wooden nickel these days. However, if you are lucky enough to stumble across a copy I'd snap it up in an instant. I enjoyed it immensely and it proves that the obscure writers can dish up an engrossing, ingenious and thrilling detective story to match any of the greats of the Golden Age.