FFB: Murder Goes to the Dogs - Timothy Brace

THE STORY: Inexplicably, prize-winning greyhound Sweetheart turns and runs in the wrong direction just as she is about to win the final race at the Everglades Kennel Club racetrack. Moments later Vincent Wells, Associate Judge, is stabbed in the presence of the large crowd. No murder weapon is found and no one seems to have been near the victim prior to his death. Anthony Adams assists the sheriff in figuring out who killed the judge, what happened to the knife, and why the dog ran the wrong way.

THE CHARACTERS: Murder Goes to the Dogs (1938) is the third outing for gentleman criminologist and sometime private investigator Anthony Adams and his faithful manservant Thurber. In this short series Adams and Thurber are often called upon by Sheriff Ernest Chase to help solve baffling crimes that sometimes, as in this case, include impossible crime and locked room elements. In this case Chase and Adams need to figure out how the victim was stabbed in full view of a crowd without anyone seeing anything and find out how the weapon was disposed of since everyone was searched and nothing was found.

Adams belongs to the intuitive school of detectives and will most likely remind readers of Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. He has a vast knowledge of arcane subject matter and likes to speak in a highfalutin manner that is completely out of place in this largely colloquial styled entertainment. His loyal manservant Thurber is one of those wannabe Watsons who begs to be included in the sleuthing. Thurber's previous assists (alluded to throughout this novel) resulted in a second victim and he is reluctant to mention his ideas and theories to Adams lest his suspect also turn up dead. Seems that Thurber has more of a role as legman in this book than in the first two of the series and I thought he did a nifty job in digging up some dirt on some of the suspects. Adams likes to toy with Thurber and has a unlikable way of belittling his employee who risks his life at least twice. There wasn't much to like about Adams in this book. I wonder if he's as patronizing in the other books.

The suspects are a motley group with most of them involved in the world of dog racing. Several dog owners, breeders and trainers make up the rather large cast of suspects. One of the dog breeders is a woman and it's hinted through supercilious description and gossipy dialogue that she is most likely a lesbian. All of the other dog racing characters are men and every one is belligerent, loud mouthed, brash and a heavy drinker. There aren't many nice people in this crowd. The two youngsters -- Peter Lane and his fiancee Frances Warr -- are the only two who resemble real people even if they, too, have shallow personalities.

The most interesting duo consists of Leo Sunday, an actor who is "resting" in Florida (translation: currently unemployed) and his partner Patsy Grant, an aspiring showgirl and actress who works at the local drive-in as a "curbgirl". They are working on an unusual act together and hope to hit the vaudeville circuit soon. Leo despite his charm and easy going nature has a slightly sinister side. He seems to be hiding something. And his extreme good looks disturb Sheriff Chase who distrusts "pretty boys." Thurber is sure that Sunday's act has something to do with the missing murder weapon. Sunday, of course (you've probably guessed), is a knife thrower.

INNOVATIONS: You may not believe this but this is the 17th murder mystery wherein I have encountered knife throwing in the plot. And it was entirely unexpected for a book that deals primarily with greyhound racing, dog breeders and the world of gambling in 1930s Florida. Knife throwing was first discussed on this blog in one of the most popular posts of 2012. In that book there were four knife throwing characters. Still haven't topped that one. In this book there are merely two, but at times it seems there could be more characters with this hidden talent of tossing around cutlery. There are two different scenes in which Leo Sunday shows off his skill and the climax of the book uses knife throwing to entrap the culprit.

THINGS I LEARNED: Dogtrack racing, a form of gambling that is almost completely gone from American culture, was hugely popular in Florida for close to a century. The oldest was in St. Petersburg which began operations in 1925. The only other greyhound dogtrack racing mystery I know of features Mike Shayne, one of the Golden Age's early Floridian private eyes who was based in Miami. In Tickets for Death (1941) he uncovers a counterfeiting ring at the dogtrack with phoney tickets being cashed in for prize money. Murder soon follows. I think there may be a few other mystery novels featuring dog racing but I was unable to confirm the titles after extensive a-Googling.

Adams lectures on the origin of the greyhound telling Thurber the dog shows up in ancient Assyrian artwork, medieval European tapestries, and is mentioned in the Song of Solomon in the Bible. He goes on to discuss a treatise on the dog breed written by Xenophon as well as a similar essay by Herodotus. Even Shakespeare, Adams says, "often uses [the dog] as an example of keenness and alertness." I detect an overwhelming whiff of Philo Vance, don't you? There are footnotes all over the novel about dog racing lingo, too.

As of this date dog racing is illegal in 41 states and only four states legally allow greyhound racing: West Virginia, Texas, Iowa and Arkansas. On January 1, 2021 Florida —currently with three operating racetracks —has a new law going into effect banning greyhound dog racing and all tracks will be forced to shut down. The one racetrack in West Memphis, AR will shut down in December 2022. I imagine none of them -- or any gambling establishment, for that matter -- are doing well in this age of COVID-19.

QUOTES: I enjoyed the plot and the unusual relationship between Adams and Thurber. But Adams has a grating pretentious style of speaking no doubt influenced by watching too many Philo Vance movies. Here's a collection of Adams droning on in ersatz sophisticate mode alternating with with clever wise guy mode that not once sounds authentic:

"...surely you have the first crawlings of suspicion. Certainly within your breast there stirs some little worm that bores so irritatingly that it creates a bothersome repression."

"Encroach as much as you want. And bring your encroaching to the car later."

"I feel the need for an excursion. It may clear the functioning of the thing I believed to be my brain."

THE AUTHOR:  "Timothy Brace" is the pseudonym used by Floridian novelist Theodore Pratt (1901-1969), a popular writer of every type of fiction imaginable. He is best remembered for his lighthearted novel The Barefoot Mailman (1943) and the comic fantasy Mr Limpet (1942) turned into a movie in 1964 starring Don Knotts as the title character who transforms into a fish. Those like me who haunt the listings of eBay may recognize his name from the numerous lurid potboilers and paperback originals that crop up for sale. He wrote a slew of them with titles like Handsome (1951), Escape to Eden (1953), Smash-Up (1954), and The Tormented (1950) about a nymphomaniac which unsurprisingly was a huge bestseller.




I uncovered several photographs of Pratt and his wife posing in front of the trailer he built and customized himself. For several years this was their home as they traveled all over Florida while Pratt researched the state's past for what would result in a trilogy of novels about Florida's native people. That unusual habitation surely fueled his imagination for one of the Anthony Adams mystery novels he called Murder Goes in a Trailer. I managed to find copies of all four of his mystery novels and I'll finish up with one more post on Pratt and Anthony Adams in a "Neglected Detectives" post later this year.

Oh, one bit of odd trivia. Apparently Pratt chose "Timothy Brace" for his alter ego to amuse his friends and wife. It turns out to be the name of his pet cat.

FFB: The Cast to Death - Nigel Orde-Powlett

THE STORY: Murder interrupts an annual fishing trip for a group of four friends. Dissatisfied with the police the victim's brother calls on his friend Tony Rillington, a criminologist for hire (sometimes), to do a more thorough job of finding out how and why the murder occurred.

THE CHARACTERS: Benjamin Blaggs, a fussy banker, is the most uptight and upright of the four men on their fishing holiday. We think at first the story is going to be told exclusively through his point of view since we meet him on page one and follow him for several chapters. Once the others are introduced Orde-Powlett unleashes one of my pet peeves in Golden Age mystery fiction -- the narrative voice as a separate character. In The Cast to Death (1932) this narrative voice acts as a sort of tour guide telling us things like: "Before proceeding any further with this narrative it will be as well to describe briefly (as the examiners used to say) the general daily programme adopted by the four anglers..."

Blaggs introduces us to Reggie Lenton, a business associate certainly not friend.  Loud, brash, and rambunctious Lenton has the irritating habit of slapping Blaggs on the back, laughing uproariously at the most inappropriate times and -- the worst insult of all -- calling him Ben. The others are Lenton's business partner Alfred Gascall and the oldest member of the group Henry Skane in his mid-fifties while the others range between early thirties to mid-forties. Once Reggie's body is found -- soaking wet, dragged across the ground from a fishing platform, stabbed twice on either side of his upper chest and a scraping wound on his neck -- the story veers away from Blaggs' point of view and we get a wide variety of characters to follow.

The author, age 55
(courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)

Supt. Farnis is the policemen who zeroes in on Gascall as his prime suspect. While we follow Farnis in his thoughts and methods in a few chapters, a later chapter has us tracing the actions of Gascall and his subversive attempt to lead the investigation away from himself with a few neatly placed letters in Lenton's office. The room is locked and sealed by the police forcing Gascall to resort to underhanded methods in order to plant the letters. It's a rather cleverly done scene and made me think that the book was going to transform into an inverted mystery with each of the three suspects doing something to alter the facts of the case. Rest assured it remains a traditional detective novel.

Skane also gets some good scenes when he teams up with Tony Rillington and offers some inside information about Lenton's fishing habits and routine. Each of the three surviving anglers gets to shine in one way or another as the murder investigation takes two routes. Farnis and his narrow minded approach is contrasted with Rillington's more wide ranging style highlighted by several ingenious re-enactments of events on the night of the murder and some subtle questioning and keen observations.

Rillington belongs to that select group of eccentric amateur detectives who have a talent for abstract thinking and get by on gregarious charm. James Lenton, the victim's brother, describes Tony as "a friend of mine, who has made the science of crime detection both his business and his hobby. He is not a private detective in the ordinary sense; in fact, he refuses more cases than he accepts..." Tony is "young, virile and good looking." Of course! He has a quiet sense of humor and is very affable. Blaggs, the fussbudget who dislikes nearly everyone, takes an immediate shine to the young man. He is later belittled for this "man crush" by Gascall. I liked the way Rillington went about questioning the suspects allowing them to feel comfortable with him, letting them to talk too much thus revealing info they might otherwise never have offered up. The only drawback to Tony's investigation is one scene where he goes off to interview a publicist for a travelling circus that take place offstage. The novel would have been improved had that scene been presented to the reader.

Map of the crime scene in The Cast to Death, as drawn by Tony Rillington
(click to enlarge)

That travelling circus tripped me up. I thought for sure that this murder mystery would employ one of my favorite oddball detective novel motifs -- a character who is a knife thrower. I was wrong on that account, but the circus still plays an important part in the finale. It's just that Orde-Powlett has Rillington announce its significance in an eleventh hour moment that made me cry out "So unfair!"

The rest of the primary cast includes Mrs. Helton, landlady of "The Crystal Ball", the inn where the anglers are staying; Mother Dawn, a gypsy woman who lives in a nearby caravan; her daughter Mollie, a ravishingly beautiful but feeble-minded servant at the inn; and Jack, Mrs. Helton's teenage  son who serves as the anglers' guide and ghillie. Minor characters include various unnamed witnesses called in at the inquest by the equally anonymous coroner.

Speaking of the coroner... Infuriatingly, all of Chapter 19 is a rehash of the inquest when it is re-adjourned and we go through the entire first half of the book again. Plus, we must endure the coroner summarizing the entire testimony of the witnesses to the inquest's jury. In total we get three iterations of one inquest, two of those versions appear in the same chapter!

INNOVATIONS: The murder method is perhaps the only reason to read this book should you ever be lucky enough to find a copy. The plot is something of an impossible crime as Tony Rillington learns that no one was seen going anywhere near Reggie Lenton from the several witnesses who happened to be within viewing distances of the anglers alongside the river. How then was Lenton stabbed in three places by a long cylindrical blade resembling a lead pencil? Tony also determines that none of the three other vacationers were likely to have committed the crime no matter how much the evidence and uncovered motives seem to implicate two of the men. The clueing related to the murder method is somewhat fair, but there are only two bits of information given to the reader in the narrative prior to the solution and one is rather blatant. Exactly how that one blatant clue relates to the way the murder is carried out is left to the reader's imagination. Rillington reveals all in the final chapter and when he tells Supt. Farnis how the wounds were administered to Reggie Lenton the reader is apt to squirm. It's a grisly way to meet one's demise.

THINGS I LEARNED: The Cast to Death takes its place alongside the handful of other vintage detective novels and mysteries using the sport of fly fishing as its background. Other notable angling mysteries include Bleeding Hooks by Harriet Rutland, Death Is No Sportsman by Cyril Hare, Five Red Herrings by Sayers and Scales of Justice by Marsh. When I went trolling the internet for other fly fishing mysteries I found a cascade of modern mysteries, close to 80, including an entire series about a washed-up private eye and fly fisherman who lives in a ramshackle home in Montana decorated with fishing flies. That series by Keith McCafferty totals seven books and sports such evocative titles as The Royal Wulff Murders, The Gray Ghost Murders and Cold Hearted River.

"The Strike" - watercolor painting by T. Victor Hall (circa late 1930s)

The fly fishing lore and background is even more detailed in The Cast to Death than in the only other fly fishing mystery I've written about here (Bleeding Hooks).  Orde-Powlett uses terminology I was unaware of. Perhaps it's outdated now, that I can't tell you. For instance, I always thought a rod and reel used fishing line.  The characters refer to this as the cast. Not just using the word as a verb but as a noun to describe the line that the flies are tied to.

The men spend much of their time fishing at night, between nine and ten o'clock. I've never heard of this. They are obsessed with "the rise" -- the time when fish rise to the river’s surface to feed on insects. Specific flies are used to mimic the look of these nighttime insects. A sedge fly (see photo at left) features prominently in the story. The four men all quit well before ten when the moon becomes full and the sky is free from clouds. In dialogue it is implied that they think the fish can see their movements in the bright moonlight. I thought this was fascinating. No idea if this actually still goes on today. Anglers out there, please clue me in.

Also, 1930s fishing line was obviously not made of plastic filament as it is today but instead made of woven or braided textiles like silk and linen. When the line got saturated it would sink rather than float and so anglers would have to grease the cast. A tin of fisherman's grease and where it is found at the crime scene is one piece of puzzling evidence that seems to incriminate one of the anglers, but Rillington proves its location clears the man of all suspicion.

QUOTES: "We found the clue all right. Rillington found it; but I saw it afterwards, quite plainly."
"What was it?"
"Two holes in the end of the plank [where Lenton was fishing]. It solves the whole case."
"How on earth does it do that?" Gascall asked.
"I haven't the least idea," Blagss admitted, "but Rillington said so, and I feel confident that he is right."
"Your trust in that fellow is positively childish," Gascall exclaimed impatiently. "If he told you the moon was inhabited by giraffes I believe you would believe him.

Nigel Orde-Powlett, age 28
(courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)

THE AUTHOR: To my great surprise I found a wealth of information on this author who I thought was utterly obscure. In the world of mysterydom that may be true. But Nigel Amyas Orde-Powlett (1900-1963) comes with an aristocratic pedigree, a title, and family of some renown. He is the 6th Baron Bolton, descended from Thomas Orde-Powlett (1740-1807), the first Baron. You can read all about the various Barons, how the title came into being, where Thomas Orde got his hyphenated surname and other fascinating bits of baronial trivia at the page for Baron Bolton on Wikipedia.

Nigel like many of his family was military man, served in two wars, and later became Justice of Peace for the magistrates' courts. He was Deputy Lieutenant of County of North Yorkshire and a member of the Royal Agricultural Society. For the Society he wrote several monographs on horticulture and forestry. In 1956 he authored Profitable Forestry (Faber & Faber, 1956). In addition to his two detective novels my bibliographic research turned up a volume of poetry Vale, and Other Poems (Ballantine & Co, 1918) apparently published privately while he was in Eton College.

EASY TO FIND? Although this was the only book of the two mysteries from Orde-Powlett that was published in both the US (Houghton Mifflin, 1932) and the UK (Ernest Benn, 1932) it is still absurdly scarce. In my search today I found absolutely no copies for sale online. That is not to say that some seller who eschews online catalogs may have it...somewhere. Academic and public library listings reveal eight copies in US libraries, three in UK libraries and one at the University of Sydney, Australia.

His other detective novel Driven Death (1933) was released only in the UK also by Ernest Benn. Not a single copy of the second book is offered for sale. And according to Worldcat.org only one copy is extant and held by the British Library, St. Pancras. Now that's a rare book!

FFB: Three Men Out - Rex Stout

We're saluting Rex Stout today in a web-wide reading of his books for the Friday's Forgotten Book meme hosted by Patti Abbott though most of his books, I think, are hardly forgotten. I chose to continue my reading of the Nero Wolfe canon with Three Men Out (1954). This volume includes three novellas all of which were published under different titles in The American Magazine between September 1952 and December 1953. All of them were subsequently reprinted one or more times in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. As with most of the Nero Wolfe books the US paperbacks were first printed by Bantam and remained in print from the 1950s throughout the 1980s. I liked all of these long short stories for various reasons, but the first one seemed the weakest of the lot.

"Invitation to Murder" was originally published as "Will to Murder". The first title is uttered by Herman Lewent as part of his introductory dialogue. Lewent is both client and victim in the story. As the second (original) title may suggest to a wily Wolfe reader the novella is about a large inheritance, the money and estate that Lewent feels he's been cheated out of. He seeks out Archie and Wolfe to help him find out what happened to his share of his father's estate which was inherited by his sister. She died suspiciously of ptomaine poisoning after eating a plateful of artichoke appetizers at a party and Lewent thinks that someone in her husband's household killed her. Reluctantly, Wolfe takes on the case and Archie is sent to the home of Theodore Huck, the wheelchair bound husband, in a somewhat undercover capacity to smoke out the killer...if in fact there is one. When Lewent dies Archie is tasked with finding a real murderer. He and Wolfe try to prove that Lewent was murdered because of his knowledge of Mrs. Huck's suspicious and conveniently timed death.

The suspect list is small in this story and therefore the sniffing out of the culprit is not at all difficult. Besides the invalid husband who is the most fleshed out of the characters, there is his nephew Paul Thayre, an aspiring composer of "modern music" and Huck's three female employees: a housekeeper, a secretary, and a nurse. None of these women is really s given any full treatment as a character. They're sort of ciphers. Archie of course is attracted to a few of them, notably Mrs. O'Shea, the buxom, hip swinging, widowed housekeeper who he thinks is Huck's secret paramour. But when Lewent's murder by bludgeoning is examined closely there really can be only one possible killer. The only surprise here is how the body was moved from the actual murder site to where Archie literally stumbled over it. Not much of a mystery tale and though Wolfe solves it with his usually aplomb anyone could figure out this one.

A better mystery and better tale is "The Zero Clue" which resembles the work of Ellery Queen. It's no wonder that the story was reprinted four times in EQMM between 1963 and 1976. The Wolfe novella includes a rather puzzling dying clue, a plot device practically invented by the Queen writing team.

This is also one of the few times we learn that Wolfe had a rival in the private detective business, though this detective is of a most unusual sort. Leo Heller is what one might call a probability detective. As an ex-professor of mathematics Heller made a name for himself by using the laws of probability in determining the outcomes of anything from a horse race to a political election. He then turned to becoming a private detective of sorts using his various calculations and formulae in helping people with everything from completing business deals to locating missing persons. Archie says the rumor has it Heller was so successful that he was pulling a six figure income. Heller crossed paths with Wolfe in one case where they had the same client but Wolfe was fired when the client thought he was moving too slowly. Heller then delivered for the client but he used much of the data and info gathered by Wolfe's operatives which led to Wolfe's negative opinion of Heller as a man of ethics in the private detective world.

The dying clue in "The Zero Clue"

Now Heller wants to hire Wolfe to verify his suspicions of a client who may be a criminal. Wolfe is still steamed about the past and his anger is only intensified when Archie tries to get permission to take the case because Wolfe and Theodore are in the midst of dealing with a thrip invasion in the orchid greenhouse. Archie goes to Heller's office anyway and finds him dead with Cramer and other police already investigating. On the desk in Heller's office the police find eight pencils and one eraser arranged to form what appears to be the initials NW. Cramer is convinced that the rivalry between the two got the better of Nero Wolfe and he had Archie take out Heller like a hitman. Wolfe, however, sees through the meaning of the dying clue almost immediately and asks the police to pay close attention to anything involving the number six.

The suspects include all of the prospective clients who were in the waiting room or who had recently paid a visit to Heller's office. Among them are a nurse who wanted Heller to help her uncover the identity of the person who firebombed her hospital; a society dame with a cache of anonymous letters that hint at blackmail; an egotistical inventor with a temper who sought out Heller to provide him with the missing formula to make his latest invention workable; and Karl Busch noted as a man of "NVMS" (no visible means of support) on the police notes Archie spies. Busch seems to be the criminal of the bunch for he wanted Heller's help in winning a horse race. Heller provides him with the name of the horse to bet on but with a name like Zero Busch was too superstitious to accept it as the real winner.

Wolfe listens to all their stories and sees that not only was his first thought about the dying clue wrong, but that Heller's mathematics background is actually the key to the entire case. And armed with some arcane knowledge he gathers from a textbook about the history of mathematics he not only solves Heller's murder but discovers the person who blew up the hospital where Susan Maturo, the nurse, worked. The story is not exactly fair play since it requires that the reader also have that arcane knowledge, but it's nevertheless a superior mystery story with some of the best plotting for a story set in a single room I've read in a long time. This could easily be adapted for the stage and it should be!

The last story of the bunch "This Won't Kill You" is equally good, but because it deals with baseball I tended to waver in and out of it. In fact, I skipped entire pages at the start of the story that described the baseball game that Archie, Wolfe and a visiting chef from Paris are attending. There are some funny moments with Wolfe indignant about the chairs in the stands that obviously will not accommodate his mammoth size. (Wolfe's need to find suitably large furniture to sit in is a running joke in all three stories.) There is all sorts of 1950s name dropping of baseball players that went right over my head, too.

The story is about the drugging of four baseball players on the New York Giants and the murder of a fifth player suspected of drugging them. The large cast of characters includes a showgirl wife who is the object of many a player's roving eyes and who supplies the story with a subplot that goes on a bit too long. The real mystery is so tied up with the game of baseball that for me it didn't mean much. The mystery was well told but sports fans would appreciate it a lot more than someone like me who doesn't give a damn about professional athletics. For me the biggest mystery was the decision of the Viking editors to change the verb in the original title "This Will Kill You" to a negative.

Overall, a good collection with the second and third novellas the best of the trio. But for me "The Zero Clue" is absolutely top notch. It also appears to be the unanimous appraisal for that novella. "The Zero Clue" turns up in the top five (some rank it as #2) of all 39 novellas in numerous "Best of Nero Wolfe" lists all over the internet and in several reference books.

FFB: Three for the Chair - Rex Stout

It's not really right to ever include any of Rex Stout's crime fiction in the Friday's Forgotten Book posts, but here I go anyway. How can anyone call Nero Wolfe forgotten?  I needed to find some books published in 1957 and all I could find were British writers among my shelves. I wanted to devote more time to US writers this year, especially when it came to contributing to Rich Westwood's "Crime of the Century" monthly posts where we write about books published in a specific year. By chance I stumbled across my beat up book club edition of Three for the Chair and was glad to see a copyrighted date of 1957. I'll just gloss over the fact that all three novellas in the book were originally published in magazines in 1955 and 1956 if that's all right with everyone. And now that's all out of the way -- let's move on, class.

I was excited to return to Nero Wolfe after having completely given up on him for over forty years. As luck would have it Three for the Chair seems to be very atypical for Stout, at least from my foggy memories of the novels I've already read. Among the three novellas in this book there are two very well plotted mysteries, one of them including a borderline impossible crime.  I was very surprised and delighted with those stories. As for the third...

My least favorite of the trio was "Immune to Murder".  Because I work in a hospital when I see the word immune I immediately think of viruses, infectious diseases and vaccines. I thought this was going to be a medical mystery of sorts. Here the word immune had nothing to do with medicine or biology. It exemplifies why I wasn't thrilled with Nero Wolfe as a kid since the story is not so much a mystery as it is a tale of the legal issues of diplomatic immunity. It's also about fly fishing and cooking trout.

It's one of two stories in the book where Wolfe and Archie leave Manhattan and his brownstone haven where Wolfe would prefer to be.  The private eye has been invited to a mountain lodge in the Adirondacks to prepare a special gourmet trout dish for a group of visiting diplomats. But just before the dinner is to be served one of the guests is found with his head bashed in and floating face down in the river.  There's not much of a mystery here and the identity of the killer got a sort of "So what?" reaction from me. The real interest in the story is Wolfe's attempt to work around New York laws dealing with the treatment of diplomats and the surprising news that anyone who dares to arrest a diplomat can be charged with a crime himself. There is a very minor mystery of why he chose not to cook any of the fish caught by the man who invited him to prepare the trout in the first place.

Much better is the first story called "Nero Wolfe and the Vanishing Clue" when it was originally published in The American Magazine and given a much simpler title of "A Window for Death" in this triple play book. Bertram Fyfe dies unexpectedly of pneumonia after telling his relatives that he was looking into his father's death. Bert was tried and acquitted for murder several years ago when his father died from negligence. Someone left a bedroom window open during a snowstorm which was a direct cause of his father's death. That the son has now died from pneumonia just as his father did is more than just coincidence. David Fyfe hires Wolfe to look into his brother's suspicious death.  He thinks murder has been done, especially since there's a lot of money that will be inherited and shares in a uranium mining operation in dispute.

The story has a kind of Agatha Christie feel to it with the crime in the past and the family members fighting for their share of the money left to them in the dead man's will.  Similar to "Immune to Murder" there is a recurring theme of a negative clue, so to speak.  Much is made of the two hot water bottles that were found empty in Fyfe's bed the morning he died.  The nurse insists she left them full, but when the body was discovered one of the brothers found that they were both empty and dry. This is the vanishing clue of the magazine published title. This puzzle of the empty hot water bottles is tied to the purchase of some mango flavored ice cream, if you can believe that, making it even more like a Christie story.

Continuing another coincidental pattern in my reading this year the murder method is yet another instance of a bizarre way to kill someone. It tends to crop up in Golden Age novels more often than I would've expected. This instance makes the fifth use of this particular substance as a means to do in someone. Stout's variation is utterly fantastic, hugely risky and probably not very fatal.  But that doesn't detract from an entertainingly told and cleverly thought out criminal problem for Nero Wolfe.

The best of the lot is the final story in the book "Too Many Detectives". It's the second story in which Wolfe is out of his element and the safety of his brownstone on 35th Street. This time he and Archie have traveled to Albany where they and several other private detectives are required to give testimony in a hearing on illegal wiretapping practices among licensed private detective agencies in New York state.  We learn that in 1956 there were 590 licensed PIs in New York, and 423 of them were in New York City.  That's not counting the employees who at the time required no license.

Among the PIs being questioned is Dol Bonner who appeared way back in 1937 in her own novel Hand in Glove and also teamed up with Tecumseh Fox in Bad for Business (1940).  She and her employee Sally Colt keep Archie's wavering eye very busy as he sums them up both as professional colleagues and potential dating material. When Sally shows a taste for alcohol she loses points with him.  I didn't remember that he never drank booze in the novels unless this is something that develops in the later books.

This story is funnier, more involved, has a lively cast of unusual characters, and has the most genuine detective work out of all three stories.  The mystery of a murdered con man who under a variety of aliases hired each of the five detectives to perform some spying and eavesdropping on phone calls is not just confined to who and why he was killed. They must discover his real identity and his motivation for the elaborate trickery employed in the wiretapping jobs. Each of the other detectives seems to have some secret reason for not admitting to being taken in by the con artist. And when the Albany D.A. serves a warrant for Wolfe's arrest the story kicks into high gear.

When I went to The Wolfe Pack website to hunt for illustrations for this post I found a rating sheet for all 39 novellas created by Rex Stout fan Robert Schneider. Interestingly, my assessment of these three stories matched exactly his ratings.  Schneider ranked "Too Many Detectives" the highest with an A-. It comes in at #5 out of all 39 novellas -- in the Top Ten, no less.  "A Window for Death" which he compared to a Ross Macdonald novel (I can see that) earns a B+  and ranks 16/39 while the trout cooking story was ignominiously ranked at #32 getting slapped with a D for "dearth of detection". I'd say D for dull. Unless you like reading about fishing, descriptions of Archie's salivating over the two attractive women, and some arcane tidbits about New York State law the story is pretty lousy as a mystery.

Should you come across a copy -- and there hundreds of copies out there --of this book I'd very much recommend the other two novellas. I had such a fun time with Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin and the rest of the gang this time around that I'll be digging up some more Rex Stout in this book museum of a home.  I'm very much interested in these novellas now as they seem to be quite varied and show Stout's unusual experimenting with plotting and detective fiction gimmickry.

FFB: Bleeding Hooks - Harriet Rutland

Time for a rerun.  When I first posted this review back in 2011 on The Poison Fly Murders I received no comments. That's probably because there were absolutely zero copies to be found in the used book market.  Now that all of Harriet Rutland's books have been reissued, and this particular title is not receiving the amount of attention I feel it is due, I'm re-posting my original review.  I highly recommend everyone get their hands on a copy of this book (so far my favorite of the three Rutland mystery novels) as well as the other two.  All are available from Dean Street Press via all of the amazon.com sites throughout the world.  Both paperback and digital versions are for sale.  Enjoy!

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"Butcher" - a trout fly

The original title of this book is the far more evocative Bleeding Hooks. It also happens to be an exclamation uttered frequently by Major Jeans, one of the most colorful characters in the story. An intriguing and devilish puzzler Harriet Rutland's second mystery novel is set in a Welsh sporting lodge that is host to a group of fly fishing Britishers on holiday. One day during the lunch break, on a small island several miles from the lodge, the body of Mrs. Mumsby, a middle-aged woman more interested in the men at the lodge than the fish in the lake, is discovered on the beach. Her face is blue, her body contorted, and in her palm a fishing fly has become deeply embedded. It is thought she died of a stroke or heart attack. Among the group is Mr. Winkley, Rutland's series Scotland Yard detective, serving as yet another policeman on a "busman's holiday," who almost immediately suspects foul play.

"Munro's Killer" - a salmon fly

There is lots of talk about fly fishing, the role of the ghillie (a fisherman's guide and oarsman, I gathered from the reading), the art of fly tying, the difference between fly fishing and regular angling, and the difference between trout and salmon fishing. I thought this would get dull, but none of it was. On the contrary, Rutland manages to make fly fishing rather fascinating. As an example, when talking of fly tying Major Jeans refers to his flies by the macabre names he gave them: "Avenging Murderer," "Blinkin' Bastard," and "The Bloody Butcher."

These mini lectures on fly fishing, and all its arcane skill and art, are interspersed throughout the narrative with much of it being vital to the story of the unraveling of Mrs. Mumsby's strange murder. Mr. Winkley conducts his own legitimate investigation gathering evidence to prove the death is, in fact, a nasty murder. He is convinced that the fishing fly was poisoned then somehow dragged into Mrs. Mumsby's palm perhaps by a skilled fisherman with a rod. While this is going on, two young people step up and try their hand at amateur sleuthing and do their best to discover the killer on their own. In the process, one of the amateurs' life is endangered and another attempt at murder is made. Adding to the oddness is a young man aspiring to be a stage magician who owns a pet monkey that mysteriously disappears shortly after Mrs. Mumsby's death.

"Reid's Assassin"
- another trout fly

There are a couple of neat twists in this clever plot, many secrets revealed and a finale that gives three surprises one right after the other. Most surprising -- to both Mr. Winkley and the reader -- is the final chapter in which it is revealed that the murderer has perhaps pulled off a perfect crime. The last bit makes this book something of a little masterpiece in my opinion.

My only criticism is the author's penchant for cutesy character names. The young couple, a 21 year old woman and man of the same age, acting as amateur detectives are named Pansy Partridge and Vyvyan Gunn, but the reader gets to know them by their nicknames:  Pussy and Piggy.

Harriet Rutland's Detective Novels
Knock Murderer, Knock (1938)
Bleeding Hooks (1940) - US title: The Poison Fly Murders
Blue Murder (1942)

FFB: Body Charge - Hunter Davies

Franko Baxter is sort of lost in life. Drifting in and out of a humdrum life as a cab driver with no real friends, living with his Gran with whom he ends each night with a ritual cup of cocoa, he finds no real joy in life except when work is done and he can head off to play football with young men and sometimes teenagers.  Body Charge (1972) is the story of his aimless life, his search for love and friendship and in the end a story of reconciliation of the self.

Franko is hopelessly naive about himself, especially as far as sex goes. We learn prior to his current job in an unlicensed car-for-hire service he was working in a hair salon and lived with an openly gay and sexually ravenous man named Jonathan. Franko hints at a few male on male encounters with Jonathan but we don't learn the real truth of that relationship until the penultimate chapter.  As the story progresses it is clear that though Franko is attracted to women and attempts a few straight relationships what he really craves is male companionship. Sex with anyone doesn't really excite him he confesses, yet he finds himself increasingly fascinated with men, the male physique and what he feels is an astonishing energy required to maintain a life of non-stop hedonism. The novel focuses on four men and the strange friendships they develop with Franko.  There is Zak, a young married man living on the dole whose son says "my Dad's job is looking for a job";  Shug, a rising star athlete in professional football (that's soccer to all you Yanks);  Joff, an arrogant highly sexed BBC TV presenter; and Ginger, a teenage hooligan and would-be skinhead.

1st UK paperback (Sphere, 1974)

When one of these men is found beaten to death in a park known for gay cruising and sexcapades in the bushes Franko becomes one of the prime suspects.  The mystery aspect of the novel is not all that mysterious. It's rather obvious what happened to the poor guy and who is responsible.  But the point of the story is not really about the crime and its solution.  Rather that Franko must have his eyes opened to the truth about the men he thinks are his friends while simultaneously undergoing an epiphany about himself.  The murder investigation forces him to admit to a few secrets in his past as well as mustering up the courage to stand up for the gay men even if he must suffer physical violence in the process.

This is a book with an identity problem of its own. It starts off as a character study, then tries on social satire, then metaphysical navel gazing, then trips into the land of murder mysteries.  The murder mystery is the least successful of the genres Davies attempts but somehow it was difficult to put down. Eventually this quick change storytelling settles down in the last half when Body Charge becomes an intriguing novel of social criticism and Franko finds himself speaking out against cruelty, oppression and violent bigotry.

As an examination of self and sexual identity the novel is a little ahead of its time for the early 1970s and has lot that still resonates for contemporary 21st century life. Long before gender identity and sexual politics became topics of study in college and graduate school Davies was unwittingly writing a sort of primer for gay identity. The novel is also an encapsulation of 1970s life in London in its depictions of football hooligans, skinheads, sex parties, swingers, and gay activism. One of the most unusual and prescient vignettes is found towards the end of the book when a guerrilla theater group protests intolerance for gays and lesbians by staging a mock gay wedding that ends in cheerleading and in-your-face same sex kissing. Most of the observers are appalled and disgusted, but a group of senior citizen ladies give the demonstrators a rousing ovation.

Hunter Davies

Despite his blase naivete Franko is the kind of loser character you want to root for.  You want him to commit to anything and stop dabbling, you want more from him than his slow realizations that seem startling to him but to anyone tuned into real living would find obvious. You want him to find a foothold in Life instead of standing half in his long gone adolescent past and half in the world of grown-ups. He reminds me of characters like Nick Carraway who stand outside of life always observing, rarely participating. These are the kind of characters always in awe of people who grab life by the balls and sink their teeth into experience often devouring people in their hunger for exuberant living. But these observers never have the courage to try to emulate those they admire. Franko has to be forced into his decisions and though he pays dearly at the violent hands of one of his false friends in the final paragraphs there is encouragement and hope for him.

Body Charge has been reprinted by Valancourt Books and their fine reprint edition includes a foreword by Hunter Davies disclosing how the book came to be written and how surprised he was that it still seems timely to him more than 40 years after its original publication. You can read more about Davies and Body Charge at their website here.

FFB: Duck Season Death - June Wright

Sometimes when someone unearths a forgotten writer and attracts the attention of eager publishers looking for unique material to reprint we as readers not only get new easy to obtain editions of out of print books we get new books never before published.  Such is the case with Duck Season Death, originally written in the mid-1950s by Australian mystery writer June Wright but foolishly rejected by her publisher Hutchinson for being too old-fashioned and formulaic. Odd thing is the publisher's reading committee members' harsh comments praised the writing and humor in the book while summarily condemning Wright for writing what amounts to a rather clever murder mystery. One wonders what they expected a mystery writer to write. In any case, Duck Season Death is now published for the first time in this handsome trade paperback edition with an introduction by Derham Groves, Australian architect professor and crime fiction devotee. Groves re-discovered Wright's mystery novels several years ago and helped bring her back out of obscurity into the light for an exhibit called "Murderous Melbourne." S. H. Courtier about whom I have written enthusiastically was also featured in the exhibit.

Duck Season Death is, as its title suggests, a mystery with a hunting background. It might also be thought of as both a homage and send-up of the standard country house whodunnit. On the surface it does seem to be formulaic with its detestable murder victim, Athol Sefton, publisher of a highbrow literary magazine and an assortment of suspects all of whom hate him for one reason or another providing us with a variety of motives for the murder. The local authorities seem to want to dismiss his death as a hunting accident until Sefton's nephew Charles Carmichael points out that his uncle was shot with a rifle and all the hunters shooting ducks were armed with shotguns. It doesn't help that there are multiple rifles matching the caliber bullet found in Uncle Athol's body and that everyone at the Duck and Dog Inn is a crackshot with firearms.

But Wright does something clever and a bit irritating at the same time.  She makes Charles a book reviewer who has spent his entire journalistic career writing about detective novels for a special column in his uncle's magazine.  His fanciful ideas are scoffed at by the local doctor, the lazy policeman and later a visiting investigator looking into another suspicious death.  He is constantly being told by the law that he has read too much fiction and that a real murder is nothing like those he finds on the printed page. Charles becomes increasingly exasperated with these dismissals and demands that everyone look at the evidence. Murder is obvious, he practically screams at them. Actually he does scream a couple of times. All the talk about book murders versus real life killing gets to be a little too much even though it is clear that Wright intends it for comic effect. By the time we get to page 156 there is this exchange between the two detectives:

"And you're hoping to trace the call?" asked McGrath sadly. "I wish you luck my boy. I've only known that stunt to come off in books."
"Oh shut up about books!" snapped Charles.

Please do! I said smiling to myself. But I kept reading all the way to the somewhat surprising finale.

There is some darn good detection in this novel encompassing old standbys like muddy boots and  ballistics wizardry to highly technical forensic evidence, at least for the 1950s. Mixed into the puzzling murder on the lake is a questionable natural death of Athol's wife, a plethora of family secrets, and some wild accusations that reminded me of the novels of Christianna Brand. Wright manages to pull off some fine character work, especially in the sardonic owner of the hunting lodge Ellis Bryce. She shows a healthy sense of humor sprinkled throughout the mayhem and throws in a nod or two to Great Detectives of mysterydom. In fact, the solution is predicated on one of the most well known rules in detective fiction. The third section is entitled "The Impossible Remainder" and it is only when Charles is reminded of the famous Holmesian maxim "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable must be the truth." that he finally can assemble the clues and come up his nearly flawless solution.  But Wright has one last trick up her sleeve. One twist too many perhaps and not as much of a surprise to this reader, but an admirable job all the same.

Soon all seven of June Wright's mystery novels will be reprinted by Dark Passage Books, an imprint of Verse Chorus Press. Currently three of her books are available in smart looking trade paperback editions. In addition to Duck Season Death, there is Murder at the Telephone Exchange (1948), Wright's debut mystery novel, also with an introduction by Groves and So Bad a Death (1950) with an introduction by Lucy Sussex. All three are available through the usual online booksellers or can be ordered from your own local bookstore. Why not introduce yourself to yet another impressive Australian writer of the late Golden Age of Detective Fiction?

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Reading Challenge update: Golden Age card, space O3 - "Animal in title"

The Body in the Beck - Joanna Cannan

There are some detectives in the history of crime fiction who were created for the express purpose of infuriating the reader, I think.  Roger Sheringham was probably one of the first smug detectives who was far from likeable in his first few outings.  There's Philo Vance with his prissy urbanity and show-off erudition.  I recall a police inspector character created by American mystery writer Hugh Austin named Peter Quint who was one rude sonofabitch when dealing with his suspects. And if you flash forward a couple of decades out of the Golden Age it's hard to avoid Joyce Porter's insufferably lazy, rude and sloppy Wilfrid Dover. Some of these detectives are created as comic figures of  ridicule, others seem to have earned their irritating and annoying traits unintentionally. In the school of the detective as object of ridicule we can place Inspector Ronald Price who makes his debut in The Body in the Beck, (1952) one of Joanna Cannan's few forays into legitimate detective fiction.

Price is tasked with investigating the murder of a man found dead in the mountains of the Lake District.  He immediately suspects Francis Worthington, an academic and mountaineer, who discovered the body found beaten and possibly drowned in a small stream (the "beck" of the title).  Cannan sets up Price as a fool of a policeman and proceeds to discredit him both in his professional capacity and in his narrow minded view of humanity.  He is painted as a xenophobic prig uptight about sex.  She reveals him to be pretentious in manner and speech, moralistic about crime, and supercilious in his treatment of suspects he feels are his superiors. Everyone he interrogates is appalled by his lack of respect at an Oxford college where he tries to learn what he can about Worthington.  Old Man Meade, a veteran don, is particularly disturbed by Price's lack of grammatical skill during their interview. This is a remarkable kind of protagonist for any mystery writer to introduce.  Shockingly, Price goes onto appear in four more books.  Cannan must have been amusing herself a great deal.

The detective plot is scant. It is clear that Worthington is innocent and he sets out to try to clear his name as Price continues to move adamantly forward in an attempt to prove him guilty.  Price lucks out when he runs fingerprints on the victim and learns he has a police record primarily for extortion and crimes related to an intimidation racket. But his obsession with Worthington soon leads the reader to give up all hope on Inspector Price solving the crime.  More and more one looks forward to Worthington's few scenes of detective work. When he sees someone making frequent trips to an abandoned well he begins to piece together the mystery of who, how, and why the victim was killed and dumped in the mountain stream. The identity of the murder therefore does not come as too much of a surprise in the end, though the motive and other aspects leading up the murder do supply a mild eyebrow raising moment.

If the book fails to excite as a mystery novel it cannot be said that it is altogether uninteresting. What distinguishes this book is Cannan's skillful characterizations, especially when the story focuses on the academics and the mountaineering tourists. Her other asset is an often indulgent and wry British humor notably when dealing with Price and his backward social skills. There was one physical description of Price's smile ("revealing pearly dentures, which was meant to be reassuring, but brought crocodiles to mind") that summoned an image of the wickedly acerbic Beatrice Bradley, often called Mrs. Croc in the mystery novels of Gladys Mitchell.

Another remarkable feature of the book is Cannan's obsession with mountaineering poetry.  Apparently there is a very scarce volume of such poems -- The Englishman in the Alps edited by Sir Arnold Lunn (1913) -- she dipped into for repeated obscure literary allusions.  And I of course had to look up every last one of them!  Francis Worthington, his climbing partner Sebastian, as well as a woman psychologist and one of the elderly dons all spout forth passages from arcane poems and long forgotten works of England's literary past, most of which turn up in Lunn's anthology. One poem "Separation" by Walter Savage Landor is often quoted (" Between us now the mountains and the wood/Seem standing darker than last year stood").  Other poets quoted include A. D. Godley, Thomas Macaulay's "The Lays of Ancient Rome" and the initialed near anonymous author known only as B. K. whose "Levavi Oculos" serves as the source for another oft repeated phrase ("Grant I may pass with strength undimmed and find/The sleep that is more ancient than the hills.")

Speaking of hills, the phrase "the hills sleep on in their eternity" crops up a couple of times. Not only is it an allusion to the poem "Friendship" by Hartley Coleridge, but those familiar with Cannan's bibliography may catch that it is a reference to one of her earliest works The Hills Sleep On (1937), a borderline crime novel.

And if her love of undistinguished mountain poetry was not enough allusion play Cannan also has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of scene in which she makes fun of herself.  Price visits Worthington's sometime mistress Lady Nollis and while waiting for the woman to be summoned by her servants he peruses the titles of her bookshelf. There he finds a miniature library of children's books with the titles like I Wanted a Pony, They Bought Her a Pony, and Plenty of Ponies.  In addition to her mainstream novels and crime fiction Joanna Cannan is probably best known for her pony books written for young girls (and perhaps a few boys). Those titles Price discovered on Lady's Nollis' bookshelves are genuine books written by Cannan and her two daughters, Christine & Diane Pullein-Thompson, who also became writers of horse and pony books.

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Reading Challenge update:  E6 on the Golden Age Bingo Card - "A Book You Have to Borrow."  I took this one out of the Chicago Public Library.

Moment of Untruth - Ed Lacy

Touie Moore returns in a sequel of sorts to Room to Swing. Seven years have passed since his debut and he is now married to Fran who he met at the boarding house in Bingsten, Ohio. As the story opens Touie learns his wife is pregnant, but he's not as excited as she is. In fact he's not at all happy about it though he doesn't reveal this to Fran. Shortly after getting the news of his impending fatherhood he calls Ted Bailey, his former private detective partner, to plead for a side job. He's already thinking he'll need additional income when Fran has to quit her job to take care of the baby.

Hoping for nothing more complicated than a guard job on the weekend he soon learns that Ted 's private detective agency is now an "industrial investigating" firm and that Kay Robbens, the PR TV executive from Room to Swing, is Ted's partner in the firm. As it happens they need an agent to take on a job in Mexico. The primary stockholder in a chemical company that Kay is wooing for her PR firm demands Ted's agency send down a private eye immediately. After some cajoling Kay and Ted get Touie to agree to take on the job. Touie sees it as an opportunity to escape his responsibility to his pregnant wife and a chance to distract himself from the major life changing event that he faces.

When Touie arrives in Mexico he learns that the "old bag" Kay was telling him about, Grace Lupe-Varon, is actually a very young and outspoken university professor. She wants Touie to prove that he husband was murdered. She is sure that a prominent matador is behind the death. Her investigative journalist husband had uncovered something about the bullfighter's career and was threatening to expose him. When the husband died of a snake bite she was convinced it had to be a murder. Snake bite? Where did the snake come from, Touie asks? From my collection she tells him. Mrs. Lupe-Varon it turns out is a herpetologist and she has a veritable menagerie of reptiles in her home for her extensive research on snake venom and their medicinal properties.


UK edition: T.V. Boardman (1965)

Complicating matters is the presence of Frank Smith, a mysterious American tourist who befriends Touie based solely on the fact that they are two black men in a foreign country. Smith claims to be a writer, Touie is suspicious. Nevertheless, the two strike up a friendship as often is the case when people of similar background met up by chance in a foreign country. Smith introduces Touie to the world of bullfighting allowing him to see firsthand the artistry of matador superstar "El Indio." But when Smith seems to be following Touie in his investigation of the Lupe-Varon murder the plot takes a sinister turn. Is Smith also a private detective interested in the death of the professor's husband? There is more to Smith than meets the eye as Touie will soon learn from the Mexican police.

Moment of Untruth (1964) as the title may suggest is a mystery about bullfighting. The moment of truth as bullfighting aficionados may know is the point at which the matador makes his kill. The title is one of the biggest clues to the ultimate mystery surrounding the murder of Grace's husband. There are plenty of scenes in the bullfighting arena, lots of background on the art of being a matador and specifically the unusual habits and rituals of "El Indio."

The mystery is much better constructed than Room to Swing and the exotic background makes for a gripping, fascinating read. Though Lacy apparently disliked the idea of a series character he does a fine job of incorporating Touie's life as husband and father-to-be into the detective story plot. And there is plenty of detection and action in this private eye novel. His final adventure in Mexico will force him to make decisions about what he really wants out of his life. That decision will fully explain why he never appeared in another book or story.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Ed Lacy's death. Coincidentally, there happens to be a rise in interest about him just as I have been posting reviews on his work. You can read a tribute to Lacy in Tablet, a Jewish online magazine. Click here for the article.

IN BRIEF: The Youth Hostel Murders - Glyn Carr

Abercrombie Lewker, a garrulous, somewhat pompous Shakespearean actor and avid mountain climber is one of the more unusual amateur sleuths in detective fiction. In his travels and rock climbing adventures he inadvertently stumbles across violent deaths that invariably turn out to be nasty murders.

Here, in the third book in the series Lewker's annoying, very artificial speech is considerably diluted from his debut in Death on Milehigh Buttress which I never finished because of the arch dialogue. Lewker has an irritating habit of peppering his speech with quotes from Shakespeare, Webster, Wilde, Shaw and other classic writers of the British stage. But I muddled through the first three chapters of this one and the engrossing story overshadowed all the dialogue eccentricities.

The story includes witchcraft, Welsh legends and lore, and hidden cache of paintings. I figured this one out very early on, but the rock climbing and the character contrast between the youthful suspects and the middle-aged Lewker made for a good read nonetheless.

Most of the good books in this series, including this title, have been reissued by Rue Morgue Press. One of their reissues - Death under Snowdon - is a book that is practically impossible to find in its original edition. A handful of the other Lewker books (not reissued by RMP) are also very scarce and fetch exorbitant prices in the used book trade.

Last year I reviewed Lewker in Tirol, one of the later books in the series. The post can be found here along with the full bibliography of the Abercrombie Lewker series.

Crime in the Dutch Garden - Herbert Adams

I lied. I said I was going to write up a Neglected Detectives entry on Jimmie Haswell, but this book is so rich and different that I had to give it special attention. Also, the three books I ordered by Herbert Adams turned out to be books without Haswell which threw a wrench into my plan to write up about three or four books with Haswell as the protagonist. What surprised me most about Crime in the Dutch Garden (1930) is that it is one of the few examples where the addition of multiple love stories works because love and the refusal of love are at the very core of the many mysteries of the plot.

Haswell visits newlywed cousin Donald and his wife Nancy (they both appeared in The Golden Ape, the book the immediately precedes this one in Adam's bibliography) and is asked to help solve the violent murder of Annabelle Querdling. She was found crushed to death by the statue of a satyr, something that will prove to be an ironic death when Haswell learns more about her personality.

Previously, Miss Querdling's niece Evelyn and her fiance Lionel Duckworth, visited Haswell to discuss the receipt of anonymous letters threatening Miss Querdling's life. Haswell wonders if her death a culmination of those threats. A chauffeur with a volatile temper is suspected. He had recently been sacked for showing an romantic interest in Miss Querdling's maid. Haswell soon learns that not only did Miss Querdling disapprove of the romance, but she has a neurotic antipathy for all romantic attachments and especially to the idea of marriage. Her revulsion of marriage is so far gone that she wants to prevent even her two nieces ever being happy with a husband and had plans to rewrite her will so that none of her money would go to the women if they were to marry. But the will has gone missing and thorough searches have turned up nothing.

Haswell is first and foremost a lawyer by profession. Similar to the stories by Melville Davisson Post featuring his devious lawyer Randolph Mason strange quirks in the law come into play in several of Herbert Adams' detective novels. The legal issues surrounding the withdrawal of an inheritance if a legatee were to marry are discussed at length and were a very interesting insight into British law.

Italian edition, 1932. Even Adams' name is translated!

The usual action thriller elements of Adams' early work give way to stronger character studies and a thematic exploration of love and marriage in the context of a criminal investigation. We learn that Evelyn is determined to marry Lionel despite her aunt's protestations. Her sister, Marjorie, on the other hand honors the aunt's wishes by remaining unattached. But who is Marjorie sneaking off to meet in the garden? It seems she has more to hide than Evelyn. Even the lives of the servants are affected by Annabelle Querdling's strange anti-romance obsession. Haswell's scenes with Janet, the maid who was engaged to marry the chauffeur, are some of the most poignant in the book. He has quite a humane and compassionate touch in dealing with the sensitive aspects in this investigation as opposed to the colder police methods of Supt. Richmond.

Detection, too, is on ample display in this book. Haswell and Supt. Richmond spend plenty of time going over the crime scenes discovering that a bench had been moved to better allow for an accurate hit when the statue was toppled. The statue itself is thoroughly examined and it is determined it was so finely constructed and keenly balanced that it could not have accidentally toppled from its mount. There is also some business with alibi checking with only Evelyn and Lionel seemingly out of the picture as they had retired to the parlor for piano playing and singing and were heard there fro the entire evening the night of the murder.

Miss Querdling's estate is bordered by a golf course and country club (see that excellent map endpapers below). Like many of Adams' books golf plays its part, but here it serves as more of a social background. A game of golf becomes the perfect excuse for several characters to have private conversations without the eavesdropping ears of other suspects or servants around.

Adams has all sorts of excellent touches in this book that may be overlooked by someone who approaches the book as a mere puzzle mystery. The victim abhors love and seems to shut out beauty, but lives in one of the most beautiful and romantic homes surrounded by artfully designed and lovingly cared for gardens. She is murdered with a statue of a mythological figure that symbolizes lust, a brilliant ironic touch. The site of her murder is one of the many picturesque, serene gardens that also happens to be a place where two characters have been having nighttime trysts.

Map of the gardens at Anabelle Querdling's estate
(click to enlarge)

The gardens themselves play an important role in the book not just serving as an unusual setting. I know this is going to sound pretentious but couldn't help but think of Shakepeare's plays and his forest and garden worlds where lovers are misunderstood or misaligned, where disguise and false identities impede and hinder the course of true love, but where in the end all is put right when foolishness is set aside, magic and illusion are dispelled, and common sense helps let true love prevail. All of this can be found in Adam's detective novel. While there's no fairy magic we can think of Haswell's deductions and brilliant insights as a sort of magic that allows the lovers to achieve their rightful union and deserved happiness.