Classic Mysteries

From the Vault: "Before Midnight"

Just a few weeks ago, almost everyone was talking about the 2016 election the enormous jackpots awaiting lucky winners in two big national lotteries. The odds against any individual winning one of those prizes were astronomical, but when enough people play, somebody was going to win one eventually. (Just not you or me...sigh.) In any case it all reminded me of another competition for what were, in their day, astronomical winnings - enough (at least in fiction) to make it worth while for somebody to commit murder. This one was a million-dollar contest made up of riddles. It happens in one of Rex Stout's mysteries featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, and it's called Before Midnight. I reviewed it on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago, and I wanted to share that review with you as you wait for Lady Luck to recognize your sterling qualities. Oh - and this weekend (November 30 - December 2) is Black Orchid weekend with the Wolfe Pack in New York City. Hope to see some of you there. Now, on to the review from the vault. As always, some minor editing has been done.

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The rules of the contest were clear: correctly answer a series of increasingly difficult riddles and win a huge cash prize. But when somebody apparently decided to cheat a bit – by murdering the contest’s creator and stealing the answers – it became a case for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, a case that needed to be solved Before Midnight – which is the name of the book by Rex Stout that we are discussing today.

As most mystery readers know, Nero Wolfe really doesn’t like to work. He would prefer to spend his time concentrating on growing his orchids, or on discussing his next gourmet meal with his chef, Fritz Brenner. But having a personal chef…and all those orchids…and all of Wolfe’s other habits and indulgences…cost a great deal of money. And so, from time to time, he must take on a variety of  criminal cases in order to finance his lifestyle.

That’s what happens in Rex Stout’s Before Midnight, as Wolfe accepts what seems, on the surface, to be a most unusual case for a detective who spends so much of his working time solving murders. There are murders in Before Midnight, to be sure. But Wolfe is hired for a more urgent job – at least it’s more urgent in the eyes of the advertising agency which hires him. The agency has created and publicized a contest for a company that makes “Pour L’Amour” perfume. The contest consists of a series of verses, each of which is meant to identify a famous woman. Of course, the riddles in the verses become more difficult with each new riddle, and the contest has come down to just five finalists. The contest’s creator has written five final verses as tie-breakers – but he has been found shot to death, and the puzzles along with their answers appear to be missing.

And so the representatives of the ad agency come to Wolfe. Frankly, they don’t really care who murdered the agency executive in charge of the contest. They want to know who stole the answers and how they can preserve their wildly popular contest. That’s why they hire Wolfe. If he identifies the murderer (who, logically, is probably the thief as well), that’s fine – but that is not a requirement; they are only interested in preserving the national contest and their reputation for honesty.

So Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin find themselves following up on the mysterious theft and murder – even trying to convince the ever-skeptical Inspector Cramer that they are not trying to solve the murder but only learn the truth about the theft of the contest answers. Before they do so, there will be another murder – and the circumstances of that crime will completely outrage Wolfe.

Rex Stout has a great deal of fun with this one, and his insights into the advertising world are wickedly funny. He also allows Wolfe to make a serious error – but the great man comes up with a truly ingenious solution that not only catches the killer but also ensures that his own not inconsiderable bill will be paid.

As always, there is Archie Goodwin, with his wisecracking and gift for understatement, to remind us in his role as narrator of how well Rex Stout could write. Here’s one example: Archie describes Saul Panzer, one of the detectives whom Wolfe hires from time to time to carry out some facet of the investigation if Archie himself is not available for the job. Archie tells us:

Saul is not a natural for Mr. America. His nose is twice as big as he needs, he never looks as if he had just shaved, one shoulder is half an inch higher than the other and they both slope, and his coat sleeves are too short. But if and when I find myself up a tree with a circle of man-eating tigers crouching on the ground below, and a squad of beavers starting to gnaw at the trunk of the tree, the sight of Saul approaching would be absolutely beautiful. I have never seen him fazed.

That really does tell the reader a great deal about Saul Panzer – and about Archie, for that matter. What delightful writing!

It’s interesting to note that the story revolves around what was – at the time – an incredibly rich prize for a publicity contest: a total of one million dollars at stake, with a first prize of half a million. State and national lotteries have made that kind of a win appear to be small potatoes – but this was 1955, and half a million at the time was worth a great deal more than it is today.

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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.

Next: Artists in Crime, by Ngaio Marsh.

"The Arsenal Stadium Mystery"

I guess I'd better begin with a confession: I am not much of a sports fan. I also, as an American, use the name "soccer" when referring to the game played and followed by much of the world's population as "football." I am happy to report, however, that my own lack of the "sports fan" gene most certainly did not keep me from enjoying - and, herein, writing about - Leonard Gribble's excellent book, The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, in which the entirely real Arsenal football (see above) team finds itself confronted with a murder which takes place during a tense and exciting exhibition match against the (entirely fictional) Trojans. The book is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to that review in its entirety by clicking here.

Now, answers to a few of the important questions which you may have.

Who was Leonard Gribble? I didn't know the name at all until I read the book, but he apparently was a prolific British author of popular mysteries during the Golden Age. 

Who is Arsenal? They are a very real and very popular football team from London, also known as the Gunners. It is worth noting that the 1939 team and its manager, George Allison, not only appear in major roles in the book, many also appeared as themselves in the 1939 film version of The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a movie which apparently is still available in DVD format for home viewing.

Who are the Trojans? As noted above, they are an entirely fictional team of amateurs, playing against Arsenal in this exhibition pro/am game.

The British Library has brought The Arsenal Stadium Mystery back into print as part of its Crime Classics series. It features an introduction by Martin Edwards expanding on the virtues of football (or soccer) and providing more background about the author, Leonard Gribble. It is being published in the U.S. during December by Poisoned Pen Press, and the publisher provided me with a copy for this review.

A crowd of about 70 thousand football fans are gathered at Arsenal Stadium in London to watch a long-and-eagerly awaited match between the Gunners of Arsenal and the Trojans. During the game, one of the Trojans suddenly collapses on the field. He is carried off, but he dies soon afterwards. The sudden and completely unexpected death has enough peculiar points to make Arsenal’s manager, George Allison, phone Scotland Yard. Inspector Slade – who was Leonard Gribble’s series detective in many books – is quick to suspect murder, a suspicion confirmed by an autopsy. His suspects are going to come from a limited selection of people, almost all of them connected with the Trojans, the fictitious amateur team, for the circumstances of the death seem to make it clear that the Arsenal players – or any other random characters – could not have been involved. Inspector Slade will find the investigation reveals a great deal about the day-to-day life of a major professional sports team; along the way, he will also find the real motive and the real killer behind an often-surprising mystery.

The bottom line for a non-sports fan like me, I suppose, is that this sports mystery has a heavy emphasis on the “mystery” part of its name. It is a well-written book with a likeable pair of detectives, some even more likeable football players, and more than enough action and plot twists to keep readers entertained and guessing down to the last page. 

From the Vault: "Partners in Crime"

Last week, I promised that the next mystery to be pried up out of the Classic Mysteries vault would be another Agatha Christie book - one without either Miss Marple or Monsieur Poirot. Instead, I offer you a pair of very likeable and adventuresome detectives, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. In this outing from the 1920s, the Beresfords were quite young indeed, which is part of their charm today, and the couple, being unsure exactly how detectives were supposed to act, chose to look back at other contemporary fictional Great Detectives for guidelines on how to behave. The book, a series of short stories linked within a larger frame, is called Partners in Crime, and here, suitably edited, is what I had to say about it on the Classic Mysteries podcast, nearly a decade ago:

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In the London of the late 1920s, a young couple takes over the running of a down-at-the-heels private detective agency. It’s not the kind of job where you can simply walk in and go right to work. It requires some ideas about procedure, about how to begin solving mysteries. Perhaps that’s why the couple decides to go with what they know – and put the techniques of famous fictional criminal detectives to work for them. You’ll know the couple – Agatha Christie’s adventuring young partners, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. And the other fictional detectives? They are the supporting staff of Partners in Crime, by Agatha Christie.

Partners in Crime is a collection of fifteen short stories given a framework and tidied up a bit to look more like a novel. The stories originally appeared between 1923 and 1928, and the book itself appeared in 1930. It was the second book to feature Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the bright young couple who appeared earlier in the thriller, The Secret Adversary. In Partners in Crime, the Beresfords – with Tommy now a comfortable 32 years old – find themselves somewhat bored with life. They are contacted by Tommy’s old secret service boss, who invites them to help hunt for an elusive master spy by taking over a somewhat shady private detective agency. Tommy and Tuppence agree, of course, and we get into the heart of the stories, as different clients bring them a variety of puzzling cases.

Tommy and Tuppence having little formal detective training between them, decide to turn to popular fiction and model themselves on a variety of different detectives. This is the concept which animates Partners in Crime, and makes it a real joy to read, for all the short stories really are loving parodies of some of the great detectives of the era. And they can be quite funny.

In the story called “The Affair of the Pink Pearl,” for example, Tommy tries his best Sherlock Holmes imitation on a new client, a young woman who has just come into the office. Having observed a Holmesian clue, he says to the young woman – quoting now:

[H]e lay back for a minute, half closed his eyes and remarked in a tired tone: “You must find traveling in a bus very crowded at this time of day.”

“I came in a taxi,” said the girl.

“Oh!” said Tommy aggrieved. His eyes rested reproachfully on a blue bus ticket protruding from her glove. The girl’s eyes followed his glance, and she smiled and drew it out.

“You mean this? I picked it up on the pavement. A little neighbor of ours collects them.”

Tuppence coughed, and Tommy threw a baleful glare at her.

That’s a pretty good example of the kind of humor you can expect to find in these parodies – can you imagine what Sherlock Holmes’s reaction might have been if his observations had led him to make a similar error?

Holmes, of course, is far from the only detective parodied. Each short story features a parody of at least one famous detective and the author who created him. You’ll find some familiar names, particularly if you follow some of the authors we’ve discussed in these reviews. Tommy or Tuppence (or both) will take on the mannerisms, detecting style and personalities of such luminaries as R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Freeman Wills Croft’s Inspector French and H. C. Bailey’s Reggie Fortune. There are also references to authors almost completely forgotten today – Isabel Ostrander and her detectives Tommy McCarty and Dennis Riordan, for example, and Valentine Williams’ detective brothers, Francis and Desmond Okewood. 

In addition to the parodies, of course, the stories themselves are mostly worthwhile. Some of them are fairly simple and straightforward, but – this being a book by Agatha Christie – you can always count on things not being quite what they may seem. As for the spy story which forms an outline for the novel, it too will be resolved quite neatly at the end of the book. I suspect you’ll be intrigued and certainly amused by this fine collection of stories.

Oh – I should mention one other detective whose character and style are parodied in Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime. The very last one – satirized in the wrapup to the spy story - is a short little man with a magnificent moustache, a detective who prides himself on using his little grey cells to solve the most mysterious crimes – a Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot. Thank you, Mrs. Christie. Readers, you have been warned.

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You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.

Next: Before Midnight, by Rex Stout.

"Murder Down Under"

Australian farmer George Loftus disappeared without a trace on the stormy night of November 2. His car was discovered to have crashed into Australia's enormous rabbit fence, only a couple of miles from Loftus's house. Did the farmer leave his car and set off to walk the few miles between the rabbit fence and his home? If so, his wife said, he never arrived there. There was absolutely no evidence. The rain destroyed any traces that might have given experienced trackers some clue. Police were stymied. And so, nearly two weeks after Loftus's disappearance, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland, Australia, police decided to forego his usual vacation and traveled to the farm town of Burracoppin to help a colleague discover what had become of George Loftus. Along the way, Bony would become fascinated by another mystery - the mystery of Loftus's neighbor, Mr. Jelly, who was given to frequent disappearances himself, and Bony would find it necessary to solve that second mystery before he could discover the truth. The story may be found in Murder Down Under, a 1937 Napoleon Bonaparte mystery by Arthur W. Upfield. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

What is the secret of D-I Napoleon Bonaparte’s success? Bony himself will sum it up for you repeatedly over the course of the more than two dozen books in which he is featured. Bony says:

          “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And yet – as Bony will also tell you – it requires nearly superhuman will power to simply sit back for days, weeks, even months, and wait for time to uncover a pertinent clue that can give the patient Inspector Bonaparte the opening he needs to begin unraveling a vexing case of murder. In the case of George Loftus, the best Bony can do at first is wait, while he searches for other ways to open a crack in the case. One comes along, he thinks, in the person of Loftus’s neighbor, Mr. Jelly – a man who leaves home without warning from time to time, after being summoned to a nearby city by a cryptic telegram. He usually returns home some days later, somewhat the worse for wear. Many in Burracoppin think he has merely gone off on a prolonged bout of drinking – but he shows no sign of it, although he returns quite clearly very upset with whatever has been happening to him during his absences. Bony will make it his business to discover what Mr. Jelly's business really is...

There is a lot of Australia on display in Murder Down Under – at least a rough version of Australia as it was during the nineteen thirties, with its rugged outback and enormous wheat fields, its rough farmers and hired hands. And it doesn’t shy away from the controversial image of Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose skin color and half-Caucasian, half Aborigine parentage makes him a figure of controversy to some, and whose skills make him an invaluable and greatly skilled detective. And, yes, he is a good friend to all who call him Bony. You’ll see that on display in Murder Down Under. I recommend it – and I recommend just about all of Arthur Upfield’s books about Bony – unreservedly.

 

 

From the Vault: "Holy Disorders"

Working on the theory that one good impossible crime deserves another, it occurred to me that it would be fun to pair last week's "From the Vault" mystery, Catherine Aird's His Burial Too, with another clever one, Edmund Crispin's Holy Disorders. I find, on looking back several years, that this is precisely what I did when I first reviewed both books within two consecutive weeks on the Classic Mysteries podcast 8 years ago. Then too, there's another incentive in that Crispin's The Long Divorce is the current book being discussed on the podcast this week. I do hope my reasoning becomes clear as you read this week's "From the Vault" feature - slightly edited, as always:

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The organist at the cathedral in Tolnbridge is dead. The man was first driven to madness, apparently by something that he saw in the cathedral – and then he was murdered. And his music wasn’t all that bad, either. It’s up to Oxford University professor Gervase Fen to figure out the why, the how and the who – and it nearly costs him his own life. It happens in Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin.

On last week’s podcast, I recommended His Burial Too, by Catherine Aird, a book which features an impossible murder in which a man is killed inside a locked room in a church, crushed to death by heavy statuary. Something very similar happens in Holy Disorders, when a man is found dead inside a locked cathedral, crushed by a heavy tombstone. In both books, there appears to be no clue as to how the murder could have been committed – and yet the mystery is explained at the end. In Holy Disorders, though, the impossible crime is really not as central to the mystery as it is in His Burial Too.

Let me give you some idea of the story. It begins in London, as we follow an organist and composer named Geoffrey Vintner. He has received a summons from his old friend, Professor Gervase Fen, to come to the town of Tolnbridge to play the cathedral organ there. The organist at the Cathedral was the victim of a mysterious attack which apparently cost him his mind. Vintner accepts the invitation – but he immediately becomes the victim of several attacks on his way to Tolnbridge by people who seem intent on keeping him from playing at the cathedral.

The first organist will soon be murdered in his hospital room. And there will be a second murder – that’s the one where the victim is crushed by the heavy tombstone. Add to that some witchcraft, and the apparent presence of Nazi spies – this book appeared in 1945 – and you have quite a mixture of impossible crime, murder mystery and spy thriller.

You also have humor. Crispin’s books are all filled with a great deal of humor – funny characters, odd situations, even direct appeals to the audience. But in Holy Disorders, more so, I think, than in any of Crispin’s other books, the humor is very dark indeed, and it often veers off into nightmare, with laughter suddenly giving way to horror.

I think the overall mood of the book is described very well in this passage from the book. Sitting in a pub, Geoffrey Vintner has been joking with a young woman, and he makes a comment – and here’s how Crispin describes what happens:

The girl got up suddenly. In a moment, as it seemed, the laughter was gone. Just so might a child intent on play run out of her own front door into a garden never seen before, and better not seen. Just so might a man turn a casual remark to a friend in a darkened train, and see a dead mask.

And just that quickly does the mood change in this book, often from paragraph to paragraph, going from slapstick to horror. There is a fair amount of violence here and some really nasty evil. There’s a marvelous ghost story (one which fits right in with the overall tone) which might have come from the nightmarish stories of M. R. James. It is a very dark humor, a gallows humor, at work here – but it works extremely well, and you definitely should not be put off by it. But do expect that you will find yourself laughing heartily at some turn of events…and suddenly find yourself in a terrifying situation.

Edmund Crispin was the pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery, whose primary work was as the composer of a number of classic British movie scores. He uses his own musical knowledge in setting up the events at Tolnbridge Cathedral, which makes the whole rather fantastic chain of events more believable. As I noted earlier, he doesn’t mind playing with the reader either; at one point, Fen is talking to the police inspector about whether there might have been a way for the killer to use a rope in the cathedral to reach his victim. Fen is speaking:

“You make a special sort of knot,” he said vaguely, “and you climb down one strand, and then when you reach the bottom you pull the other and it all comes undone.” He sat back in a pleased manner.

“Oh.” Said the Inspector suspiciously, “and what is this knot, may I ask?”

“It’s called the Hook, Line and Sinker.”

“Why is it called that?”

“Because,” said Fen placidly, “the reader has to swallow it.”

At this point Crispin puts in a footnote expressing his outrage at this accusation against him. It’s typical of Crispin’s break-the-fourth-wall humor. The same is true of his oft-repeated anxiety that Scotland Yard will send down Appleby to take over the case – Appleby being the name of the popular fictional detective created by Michael Innes.

But in and around all the humor, there is a good deal of mystery, fairly clued for the reader. There are a number of significant – and even shocking – plot twists. Edmund Crispin’s Holy Disorders is an outstanding novel, and I’m delighted to find it back in print and also in e-book editions.

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You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here. 

Next: Partners in Crime, by Agatha Christie.

"The Long Divorce"

"Anonymous letters?" said Mr. Datchery. "What anonymous letters?"

His tone betrayed no more than a civil interest such as any strangers, encountering a case of this sporadic affliction, might be expected to show; but if Penelope had been less preoccupied...she might have seen that his pale blue eyes narrowed at the words, and that he began to follow what she said with a new alertness...and Penelope said:

"Oh, didn't you know about them? They've been going on for two or three weeks now."

That little exchange of pleasantries between the rather mysterious Mr. Datchery and a young woman named Penelope Rolt, helps set the scene for a mystery which begins with anonymous letters and moves quickly to murder. It is another outing for the incomparable Gervase Fen, who remains one of my favorite amateur detectives. The book is called The Long Divorce, by Edmund Crispin, originally published in 1951. It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The little English town of Cotten Abbas is being plagued by someone who is sending anonymous poisoned pen letters to people in the town. Letters of this type usually accuse the recipient either of some crime or of some major breach of morality. If there is any degree of truth in the letters, they can be deadly, and they would appear to be the reason behind at least one death in Cotten Abbas. The mysterious Mr. Datchery, newly arrived in Cotten Abbas, rather clearly knows more than he is saying about the letters and their source. But it will become a case of murder that will puzzle Crispin’s detective, Oxford Professor Gervase Fen, though he’s not even mentioned to us by name until more than two thirds of the way into the novel. It's a good thing that he’s on hand too, as the evidence looks remarkably black against one of the town's two doctors, Dr. Helen Downing, the sympathetic heroine of the book. It would appear that someone is trying to frame her for a murder that is most likely connected to the poisoned pen letters. And that someone is doing so quite effectively until Fen comes along.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot – it’s quite typical of Crispin, enormously complicated, between the poisoned pen letters, the suicide by a recipient of those letters, and the murder of a young teacher which – according to the evidence – could only have been committed by Helen Downing. And the facts seem to be so damning that even the investigating police officer – who has fallen in love with Helen Downing – finds himself suspecting her of murder.

But all of this – and a great deal more – is contained in a book written, as all of Crispin’s were written, with wit and humor – and horror, often within the same chapter, or even the same page. Crispin’s characters – as suspects or investigators or simply as extras or walk-ons in a given scene – are largely unforgettable, both good and bad. And that certainly goes for Gervase Fen as well. The Long Divorce is available both in print and as an e-book, and it’s certainly worth your time and energy to get a copy.

 

UPDATED to fix link to the audio review. Hat tip to Christophe Van den Bulte for catching my error.

"The Conqueror Inn"

The Conqueror Inn is ancient, possibly dating back to the eleventh century, but it is a very new crime which brings Inspector Bobby Owen to the inn's door. The inn's owner had phoned the police to say that he had found a box full of money lying in the road, and would the police kindly come and take it away? Well, it was the middle of World War Two and England had other worries on its hands, so Bobby Owen sighed and headed out to the inn. By the time he arrived there, he was greeted with the news that there seemed to be something else left lying about - a body in an unmarked grave. And that turned out to be a gruesome sight indeed, for somebody had battered the body so badly after death that it was going to be close to impossible to identify it.

That's the situation you will find in The Conqueror Inn, by the British Golden Age author, E. R. Punshon. The book is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.

In 1943, when The Conqueror Inn was first published, Britain was at a low point in its struggle for survival during World War II. A lot of the puzzles in the book, and its description of the routine of everyday life in wartime, make it clear how disruptive and demoralizing the effects of the war, and the need for eternal vigilance against aerial bombing, infiltration by possible spies, rationing and an active and pernicious black market, could be for the average person – not to mention the daily tragedies of family and friends killed in battle. When you read The Conqueror Inn, you’ll learn a great deal about what life was like under those conditions.

The war is one of the primary reasons that Inspector Bobby Owen first gets involved in the strange goings-on at the Conqueror Inn – there really isn’t anyone else left to do the job. He sees a chance to get out of his office on a simple errand – picking up that box of money. He doesn’t expect to be led to the shallow grave containing that horrifyingly mutilated body, a development which puts him squarely into the middle of a murder investigation. 

With little to go on in the way of clues – and NOTHING to go on to help him in terms of identifying the dead man – Bobby Owen begins hunting for young men of roughly the same age as the victim who might have gone missing. As he investigates, he will find that many of the local residents have secrets to hide, and Bobby will have to sort out their stories and find himself searching desperately, trying to find evidence that will stand up in court. And somehow, the Conqueror Inn itself is at the heart of both the mystery – and its solution.

The Conqueror Inn, by E.R. Punshon is a tightly written book with a complex plot and some sharply defined characters – including, I might add, the “character” of that gloomy and unwelcoming inn. It is a grim crime indeed, and a dark solution, too. You will enjoy it. As a bonus for today’s readers, mystery historian Curtis Evans has provided an introduction to this new edition from Dean Street Press.

From the Vault: "His Burial Too"

Let's take a look back today at a really clever "impossible crime" story: someone is killed in a church tower when a giant statue is tipped over and smashed into small pieces. Unfortunately, rubble from the smashup blocks all the entrances and exits - yet, while the victim most definitely could NOT have committed suicide by toppling the statue on himself single-handedly, there is no sign of anyone else in that tower. What caused that enormous statue to fall on its victim? The answer may be found in His Burial Too, written in 1973 by Catherine Aird, one of her "Calleshire Chronicles" featuring Inspector C. D. Sloan of the Calleshire police. Here's my original review from the Classic Mysteries podcast, updated somewhat with availability information:

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One thing was very clear to Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan: the man found dead in the church tower could not have committed suicide. He had been killed when a giant memorial statue was toppled over onto him. The statue was smashed into a lot of smaller pieces, most of which quite effectively blocked the doors and made it impossible for anyone to get in or out of the room. Yet the victim was there, under the statue – and there was nobody else in the tower, nor was there any other way in or out. Inspector Sloan was not happy. Neither was his boss, Superintendent Leeyes, who groaned irritably and said, “Not another of those locked room mysteries, Sloan, I hope.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what he gets in His Burial Too by Catherine Aird.

The impossible crime at the heart of Catherine Aird’s His Burial Too is really one of the more ingenious plots I’ve read. Consider the problem: a man is found, quite clearly murdered, crushed by a gigantic statue that has been toppled over on him. The statue is massive; there is no way that anyone could have pushed it over single-handedly. Even more conclusively, though, the destruction of the statue has resulted in huge chunks of marble blocking all the doors so that it is impossible to open them – in fact, when the police need to get into the sealed room, a crew of workers must use welding equipment to remove the door from its hinges. So how did the statue get pushed over onto the victim – and how did the killer escape from the room?

The job of answering those questions falls to Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan. He is assisted – although that may be the wrong word – by Detective Constable Crosby, a young man so dense that he is referred to by other officers as “the defective constable.” In all of Catherine Aird’s books about Sloan, the inspector is invariably weighted down with the dubious assistance of Crosby because there simply is nobody else in the small local police department available to work on the case.

Sloan’s problems also extend to the higher-ups in the local constabulary, for his superior, Superintendent Leeyes, is extremely irascible and not particularly helpful, cherishing his own feuds with other police departments and always taking self-improvement classes, which he does not always understand. Aird describes it this way:

The various instruction courses attended by Police Superintendent Leeyes left their scars in a way which would have astonished the highly skilled instructors who lectured at them had they known. Like a sticky snail the Superintendent strewed a trail of imperfectly assimilated concepts behind him: not only did they show where he had been but they were a nuisance to the unwary.

All the same, Inspector Sloan manages to negotiate his way through something of a minefield when dealing with the superintendent – sometimes by reflecting on his own need to preserve his future police pension!

Catherine Aird juggles these elements quite nicely, with a great deal of quiet humor and writing which brings out the conflicts among the characters. As with most of her stories, there are some elements of a police procedural here: Sloan and the other police do their questioning and collect their evidence, discarding false trails as they are discovered. But this is still primarily a puzzle mystery, with that most peculiar locked room problem at its heart. As Sloan realizes, the problem is not only how the murder was accomplished, the question is why it was necessary to go to such elaborate lengths. As with any good mystery, the reader is presented with clues, although I suspect most may be led astray by the assorted false leads. If you enjoy witty mysteries, with intelligent protagonists and believable characters, you are quite likely to savor this book, His Burial Too, by Catherine Aird.

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Since this review was written several years ago, Open Road Media has brought many of Catherine Aird's titles back in e-book formats. There are also print copies, mostly used, I believe, available through your local mystery bookstore or through Amazon's network of second-hand booksellers. I do recommend the book quite highly, particularly if you haven't yet met Sloan and company.

 You can listen to the complete audio review by clicking here.

Next: Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin.