Classic Mysteries

"Death in Fancy Dress"

Blackmail. An ugly word for an even uglier crime. A crime which is based on fear, on the knowledge that everyone has done things they'd just as soon keep secret from the world - and the blackmailer, having learned those secrets, sets out to force his victim to pay for silence. And pay and pay and pay and pay. It's amazing how many good mysteries include an unpleasant blackmailer. And it's worth noting that blackmail can lead to sudden death...

That's what appeared to be going on at the country home of the Felthams, Feltham Abbey. British authorities are hunting the blackmailer they know only as "The Spider," whose sometimes impossible payment demands have been driving victims to suicide.There is reason to believe that the latest victim may be among the people gathered at the abbey for a fancy-dress ball. Before the night is over, there will be murder done. As for "The Spider"...well, that's the story you'll find in Anthony Gilbert's 1933 Golden Age classic, Death in Fancy Dress. 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. Death in Fancy Dress is being republished in the U. S. this month by Poisoned Pen Press, a Sourcebooks imprint, as the latest entry in the British Library Crime Classics series, and the publisher has sent me an Advance Reader's Copy of this new edition for my use in presenting this review.

When the British Home Office becomes aware of what one official calls “a wave of suicides” taking place among the rich and famous of the upper middle classes – even finding victims among the aristocracy – the government is able to see the ruthless hand of the blackmailer known as “The Spider.” “The Spider’s” identity is not known, but there’s reason to believe the blackmailer’s latest victim may be someone living at the country home known as Feltham Abbey. The home is soon to be the scene of a fancy dress ball, with attendees wearing all sorts of costumes, and the shadow of a notorious blackmailer ever-present.

Still with me? Beyond that point, the plot becomes quite complicated. Rest assured that the rising tensions will most surely end in murder. Anthony Gilbert gives us a large number of possible suspects, along with several motives and potential victims, but the author also provides clever, carefully placed clues that may give readers a fair shot at deducing who is doing what to whom. As usual with traditional Golden Age mysteries, there are some major twists in the plot which are likely take you by surprise.

“Anthony Gilbert” was one of the pen names used by Lucy Beatrice Malleson, who created other pen names and wrote a number of popular mystery series. As a bonus, this new edition of Anthony Gilbert’s Death in Fancy Dress comes with two very short stories by Gilbert that center on blackmailing plots, along with an informative introduction contributed by mystery historian Martin Edwards. It’s a package I think you’ll enjoy.

 

From the Vault: "Gaudy Night"

This week, our selection from the Classic Mysteries Vault is a Golden Age book that seems to attract controversy and strong opinions both for and against it. The book is Gaudy Night, one of Dorothy L. Sayers's stories about Lord Peter Wimsey - and, perhaps more importantly, about Harriet Vane, who does her own share of investigating a rather ugly campaign of harassment aimed at what were, at the time, some of the earliest Oxford's female scholars. Personally, I have always enjoyed the book, and I'm just going to step back here and let you read what I had to say about the book when I did an audio review of Gaudy Night for the Classic Mysteries podcast about a decade ago. I have done some editing, mostly for clarification.

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To put it mildly, the situation was simply intolerable. The respectable scholars of the first women’s college at Oxford University dedicated to – and populated solely by – women were under attack. Someone was sending nasty, belittling letters to the female dons and woman scholars. Someone was playing unpleasant, even dangerous tricks, apparently in the hope of ruining the school’s reputation among the Oxford community. That learned community had no idea how to proceed. So they turned to a distinguished alumna, Harriet Vane for help – and, through her, to Lord Peter Wimsey. It happens in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers.

It is a little hard to believe, given the prominent and distinguished role of women in higher education today, that it has been less than a century since women were first admitted as full members to, and became eligible for degrees from, Oxford University in England, one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished centers of learning. Among the first women to receive degrees from Oxford was Dorothy L. Sayers, who would go on to write her immensely popular and influential mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey – and, in four of them, create and develop another marvelous character, Harriet Vane, an Oxford-educated woman and a successful mystery novelist. Any parallel between Harriet Vane and her creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, of course, must be strictly coincidental.

In the first of those four mysteries, Strong Poison, Lord Peter saves Harriet from the gallows when she is put on trial for having murdered her lover. For the next couple of books he will pursue Harriet Vane, from time to time proposing marriage, only to be rejected.

That is the state of affairs at the opening of the third of those books, Gaudy Night, first published in 1935, a book in which Lord Peter plays a distinctly second fiddle role to Harriet Vane – and in which Dorothy Sayers gets to examine the subject of the proper role of women in higher education, which was still a highly controversial issue in the mid-1930s.

Gaudy Night begins with Harriet Vane being invited to attend a Gaudy Night at her old school, Shrewsbury College, a college exclusively for women and a part of Oxford University. Shrewsbury, by the way, is fictional; most of the other Oxford colleges and landmarks mentioned in this book are real. Anyway, a “Gaudy Night” is a sort of school reunion, with “old students” returning to mingle with the dons and the rest of the college staff. Harriet attends despite having qualms – her notoriety as a criminal defendant acquitted of murder makes her unsure of her welcome among a community of scholars as she returns to her academic roots at Oxford, but she is welcomed by everyone from Shrewsbury’s Warden and the Dean down to the “scouts,” as the servants are called who provide necessary services for the students. Her visit is somewhat marred by a couple of seemingly isolated incidents involving poison-pen letters and a peculiarly offensive drawing found on the college grounds, but Harriet Vane, having suffered through a hostile public reaction to her trial for murder, is used to this sort of thing and assumes it is the work of some malicious outsider aimed personally at her.

A few weeks after the Gaudy, however, Harriet receives a call from the Dean of Shrewsbury College: there have been a number of increasingly disturbing events – more poison-pen letters, increasingly dangerous “pranks” – and the school doesn’t know quite how to respond. They do not want publicity, for that would play into the hands of the not-inconsiderable number of male Oxonians who still resent the presence of a women’s college in what had been until recently their all-male domain. The prankster – if that is what we may call the person responsible – is quite clearly seeking to drag the college down by generating unfavorable publicity, and the pranks are becoming more dangerous and more desperate.

From the evidence, it is clear that the person responsible for these attacks – for they are attacks on the college itself – must be some member of the Shrewsbury community. Is it the work of some frustrated intellectual? Do women who have dedicated themselves to scholarship, as opposed to marrying someone and raising a family (which was by far the prevalent fate for most English women in the early 1930s), wind up with personalities so warped that they must take out their frustrations in these increasingly dangerous pranks?

Harriet hopes for some intervention from Lord Peter Wimsey, who spends the better part of the book away from England, on diplomatic missions to an increasingly tense central Europe. This was the time of growing Nazi power in Germany, and there is considerable debate among the Shrewsbury dons over the subservient role of women according to the Nazi world-view. There will be several crises in and around Oxford before Wimsey returns to help Harriet uncover the truth behind the dangerous attacks – and the reader will undoubtedly be surprised to learn what has really been happening.

Among fans of Dorothy L. Sayers, there is some controversy over Gaudy Night. Some object to its length – it is almost as bulky as many of today’s oversized mysteries – and to the quotations and other nuggets of scholastic humor that are provided; others object to some of the views presented about women and their roles in both scholarship and life in general; still others complain about the time devoted to the growing romance between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. I disagree with all those critics. Sayers has a wonderful writing style that keeps the story moving while providing insightful and witty and, yes, thought-provoking comments that I find extremely entertaining. For example, at one point, Harriet, having composed half of a sonnet, finds that Peter has completed the other portion of the poem to complement what she has written. Sayers observes:

“[Harriet] went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.”

I love that. Here’s another: Harriet is considering some surprising lines in a letter from Wimsey. She muses:

That was an admission of equality, and she had not expected it of him. If he conceived of marriage along those lines, then the whole problem would have to be reviewed in that new light, but that seemed scarcely possible. To take such a line and stick to it, he would have to be not a man but a miracle.

As you may have guessed, much of the tension in the book comes from the continuing and developing relationship between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey, and its ultimate resolution is most satisfying.

As always in Sayers, the settings are beautifully drawn; I have been an admirer of Gaudy Night for many years, and I made it a point, while visiting Oxford some years ago, to walk the lovingly-described and remembered streets to find the landmarks so important to both Harriet Vane and Dorothy L. Sayers. The major characters are believable and memorable. This should not be your only Sayers novel – almost certainly not your first. But it should definitely be on your “To Be Read” list as an example of the kind of elegant writing that made the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in England so memorable.

My thanks to Sally Powers, at the "I Love a Mystery" Newsletter, where my review first appeared, for allowing me to expand it for this podcast. [ED. NOTE: Sadly, "I Love a Mystery" is no longer published. but there are numerous editions of Gaudy Night available.] 

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

Next: The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen.

"Evil Under the Sun"

The beauty of Arlena Stuart Marshall moved nearly everyone she met either to love her or to hate her. Men fell for Arlena because of her beauty. Women hated her because her one real pastime appeared to be stealing men from other women – more often than not, their husbands. That summer at the Jolly Roger resort hotel, the passions of summertime romance exploded into violence and murder. Fortunately, Hercule Poirot was also a guest at the Jolly Roger. And it was Poirot who would uncover the truth behind the events presented to us in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun. It's the book I review today on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete recording by clicking here.

I have a somewhat guilty secret to share with you: there are books by Agatha Christie that I haven’t read yet – and more that I read so long ago, a couple of decades at least, that I have forgotten all the plot twists and turns that make reading a Christie novel such a treat. This week, I decided to tackle a Christie book that I think I last read 20 or more years ago. My choice was Evil Under the Sun, first published in 1941, during the later years of England’s Golden Age of Detection.

 It’s a solid read, one of the author’s best books, the story of Arlena Stuart Marshall and the men and women in her life. I must confess that I was still genuinely surprised by some of the plot twists – and the genius of Christie’s signature misdirection. While Poirot (and Christie) do play fairly with the reader, I think you’ll be very surprised indeed at the resolution of the story when you see how cleverly you have been led astray by a master storyteller. Evil Under the Sun plays with your expectations and delivers interesting characters and a plot that keeps its promise of evil. I think you’ll enjoy it.

 

From the Vault: "No Coffin for the Corpse"

There's an old English music hall song by Will E. Haines, made popular (I think) by the late Gracie Fields, called "He's Dead but He Won't Lie Down!" I came across a YouTube video of her singing the song in a 1932 movie called Looking on the Bright Side. It came to my mind the other day when I was looking for something to bring you all from the Classic Mysteries vault this week. It reminded me, in fact, of a very fine example of an impossible murder story called No Coffin for the Corpse, a 1942 book by stage magician (and co-founder of the Mystery Writers of America) Clayton Rawson. It's about...well, I suppose, someone who's dead but won't lie down. I did an audio review of it several years back on the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here's a transcript of what I had to say about it - as usual, some light editing has been done:

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Regular visitors to this podcast know that I really love a good impossible crime mystery. Give me a locked room, a situation where a murder couldn’t possibly have happened – yet did – and I’m pretty well hooked. So let me present another example of the impossible crime. Here’s a man, a would-be blackmailer, killed before witnesses – but the man who did the killing won’t call police. And because he is very rich and very powerful, the witnesses help the man bury his victim in a nearby cemetery. And that’s when the real fun starts: for it appears that the victim isn’t going to lie peacefully in his grave. Ghosts appear and disappear and even turn up in photographs. Witnesses can swear that they saw a ghost toss valuable vases around when nobody is near enough to touch them. And there is, ultimately, a murder, which – by all appearances – must have been committed by the ghost, who then, again according to witnesses, must have managed to get out of a locked and bolted room, perhaps by walking through walls. It certainly didn’t make the police officer in charge, Lieutenant Flint, very happy. So it was up to a professional magician – the Great Merlini – to figure out the truth about what happened – and, most importantly, how. And there in a nutshell you have No Coffin for the Corpse, by Clayton Rawson.

Rawson was one of the four founding members of the Mystery Writers of America. He was also a professional magician, an illusionist, and he put a lot of his knowledge about the tricks of the magic trade into his four novels about a magician named The Great Merlini. The last of those four – and arguably the best of them– was No Coffin for the Corpse, which was published in 1942. It has a delicious plot, with plenty of apparent impossibilities for the reader to figure out.

The story is told primarily through the eyes of Ross Harte, a young journalist who has written a series of newspaper articles about the apparent wrongdoing of Dudley Wolff, the hot-tempered owner of a munitions factory. This was hardly likely to make Wolff harbor friendly feelings towards the journalist. And when Ross Harte proceeded to fall in love with Wolff’s daughter, predictable fireworks erupted, which ended with Harte being quite firmly made unwelcome at the Wolff estate.

What Harte doesn’t know – and the reader is given an advantage over the narrator here – is that on the same night the journalist was kicked off the estate, someone appeared at Wolff’s mansion and tried to blackmail the industrialist. Quite predictably, Wolff punched the would be blackmailer – who fell to the floor, hitting his head. A doctor on the scene pronounced him dead.

But rather than calling the police – which would have meant publicity that Wolff felt he could ill afford – the magnate insisted on forcing his aides and associates to take the body of the would-be blackmailer to a nearby disused cemetery – and bury it there.

In the meantime, Ross Harte has dropped in on his old friend, the magician known as the Great Merlini, who is putting together a new show. I won’t try to follow all the twists in the plot at this point, but suffice to say that Merlini and Harte wind up out at the Wolff estate – where they find the industrialist clearly upset and frightened. He, and members of his family, have been seeing a ghost – a ghost whom Wolff recognizes as the man he killed – who has apparently been materializing in spite of the sophisticated alarm system in the heavily secured house. Wolff’s daughter, one of the witnesses, remembers it this way:

“It stood there looking down at us, watching very quietly as if it had been there for a long time. I cried out, I think, and Father, who had been examining the torn pages, dropped them. He stood in front of me and I saw his face as he turned. It was as if something had struck him a violent physical blow…

“And then, quickly, the figure moved. The upper hall, even in the daytime, is shadowy and dark. It seemed to melt back into it. And, just as it vanished, the doorbell rang.”

A terrifying image, to be sure. And that ghost appears to have the power to cause unexplainable phenomena – such as a vase tipping and falling and breaking when nobody is near it (and, no, nobody has used a black thread to tip it over). The ghost even shows up in a photo = with the background behind the ghost clearly visible through the image of the ghost itself.

And just when things become extremely complicated…there is a murder. And, for that matter, our narrator Ross Harte is nearly murdered. And the circumstances are such that it certainly appears a ghost must have been responsible, because it somehow managed to shoot its victim in front of witnesses and then disappear out of a locked room.

Still with me? It will get more complicated. As Harte tells us,

“What we all needed at that moment more than anything else was a week or two in bed in a quiet secluded sanitarium with no visitors allowed.”

The police, of course, having finally been called in to deal with the murder, are not at all happy when they learn about that earlier death. Poor Lieutenant Flint winds up suspecting just about everyone in turn. It is only when Merlini is able to explain who the ghost really is…and how it got in and out of those locked rooms…that the nightmare is resolved. And be advised that there are so many twists, plots and counter-plots that the reader is likely to reach the ending feeling somewhat dazed.

A good impossible crime story relies heavily on misdirection, just as the stage act of a great illusionist uses the same techniques. That’s one reason why I enjoy the character of Merlini and the writing of Rawson. Happily, the Mysterious Press is now offering all of Rawson’s books in ebook formats [Ed.Note: Still available as of 3/27/2020], so they are once again available to mystery lovers. I was certainly aware that I was being led down the wrong path several times in this book – but I still wound up being surprised by some of the final twists of the story. Clayton Rawson’s No Coffin for the Corpse is a very good, solid impossible crime mystery which will provide readers with some assurance that, in the end, nothing is impossible.

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

Next: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers.

"Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy"

When a deadly fire swept through Starvel House, in the English village of Thirsby, it burned the entire place to the ground, apparently trapping three of its residents inside the house. The master of Starvel House, an elderly man named Simon Averill, was killed, along with two other people in the house. It was thought to be a terrible accident. But then Inspector French was sent in by Scotland Yard. And French quickly confirmed suspicions that the fire was no accident - but a triple murder. Details will be found in Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy, a 1927 mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts. It's the subject of my audio review this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

Freeman Wills Crofts, widely respected during his lifetime as one of the best and most popular authors of England's Golden Age of Detection,  has been maligned over the years since his death as a “humdrum” writer. I think that’s a most unfair description of a man whose plots – especially some of the ones featuring Inspector French – are well-thought out puzzles. French’s first appearance was in Crofts’s fifth book, Inspector French’s Greatest Case, and he appeared in many of the author’s best books thereafter. Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy was among the earliest of these. It remains a mystery which I think you would enjoy very much.

From the Vault: "Mrs. McGinty's Dead"

I've come away from my regular visit to the Classic Mysteries vault this week with what I'd have to call a perennial favorite of mine: Agatha Christie's Mrs. McGinty's Dead. I like the way a police investigator comes to enlist Poirot on behalf of a convicted killer. I like the re-appearance in a Christie book of Ariadne Oliver, Christie's fictional alter ego. I enjoy the way Mrs. Oliver fights with the young author trying to adapt one of her books to the stage (to Ariadne Oliver's horror). And there's so much more. Here's a transcript of  the audio review I recorded for the Classic Mysteries podcast about seven years ago, somewhat edited for clarity (as always):

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Superintendent Spence remembered it from his school days.

“Just a game. Child’s game. We used to play it when we were kids. A lot of us in a row. Question and answer all down the line. ‘Mrs. McGinty’s dead!’ ‘How did she die?’ ‘Down on one knee just like I.’ And then the next question, ‘Mrs. McGinty’s dead.’ How did she die?’ ‘Holding her hand out just like I.’ And there we’d be, all kneeling and our right arms held out stiff. And then you got it! ‘Mrs. McGinty’s dead.” ‘How did she die?’ ‘Like THIS!’ Smack, the top of the row would fall sideways and down we all went like a pack of ninepins.” Spence laughed uproariously at the remembrance.”

But Superintendent Spence has come to visit his old friend and colleague, Hercule Poirot, on a more serious matter. For, indeed, Mrs. McGinty is dead. Murdered. And a man has been convicted of the murder. Only Superintendent Spence, in charge of the murder investigation, doesn’t think that man did it. And he wants help from Poirot in finding the truth – before the supposed killer is executed. It happens in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie.

The book opens at what, for many other mysteries, might as well be the end: the victim, a cleaning lady named Mrs. McGinty, has been murdered and robbed, an obvious suspect with motive, means and opportunity, a tenant named James Bentley, has been caught, he has been tried and convicted, and – this being Britain in the early 1950s – he is headed for a date with the executioner.

Only something is wrong. The man who headed the investigation into the murder, Superintendent Spence of the Colchester Police, doesn’t really believe that Bentley could be guilty. He doesn’t seem to have the right personality to have committed the crime.

But what can the superintendent do? The case is over. Bentley has been tried and convicted. Superintendent Spence has other cases to pursue.

So he goes to visit an old friend – the now retired detective, Hercule Poirot, a man who has been chafing against the boredom of his retired life. Poirot listens to his friend’s story and agrees to look into it as a private citizen. So he travels to the village of Broadhinny, where the murder took place, hoping to find something, some unexplored angle of the story which might provide an escape for James Bentley – and justice for the real killer.

Naturally, Poirot finds the kind of evidence he has been seeking – evidence that the crime was more than a sordid murder and petty robbery. No, there must have been another motive, and Poirot spends a good deal of time uncovering the truth about what really happened. Naturally, he plays this very close to his vest (though readers are given plenty of clues)…but he is annoying enough in his cryptic conversations with Superintendent Spence to force Spence to declare, “How I managed to keep my hands off you, I don’t know.”

He is helped in this by another of my favorite Christie characters – the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver. So here we are, in the midst of a story featuring an elderly foreign detective written by a middle-aged female author, talking with a character who is a middle-aged female author who writes mysteries about an older foreign detective. Ariadne Oliver exists to give Agatha Christie a chance to neatly skewer some of her own difficulties as a writer, and there is a subplot here involving Mrs. Oliver’s dealing with a young, brash playwright – a man who, in adapting the author’s work for the stage, seems intent on changing absolutely everything about Mrs. Oliver’s characters and plots. It’s really quite funny – and, remember please, that this is an Agatha Christie book, so there’s obviously going to be more going on here than meets the eye.

The plot really is one of Christie’s better ones, I think – well developed, interesting characters, a good use of humor, plus Christie’s trademarked sudden, unexpected plot twists. It really isn’t until the final confrontation, with Poirot explaining the truth to a room-full of suspects, that the reader will learn what really happened in Broadhinny – and why.

Mrs. McGinty’s Dead was originally published in 1952, at a time when Agatha Christie was deeply involved in several projects for the theater, which is another reason why the presence of Ariadne Oliver, supposedly wrestling with a playwright who wants to change just about everything in her work, is such a delight. This was Mrs. Oliver’s first appearance in a Christie novel since 1936, and she would appear several more times in later stories with Poirot. There’s a great deal to savor in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and it really is one of Christie’s best.

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

Next: No Coffin for the Corpse, by Clayton Rawson.

"Maigret and the Saturday Caller"

It was really a new experience for Chief Inspector Maigret of the Parisian police:

"For the first time in his career, a man had come to find him after hesitating for weeks, after following him in the street, after writing to him, or so he claimed, and then tearing up the letters, after sitting for hours in the police waiting room, a man who did not seem in any way exceptional in his looks or his clothes, yet had contrived to introduce himself into his home, humble yet obstinate."

So here was this stranger, coming to Maigret’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon, no less. But the man had something important to say to Maigret – a secret that the visitor felt needed to be shared outside the office – and what that secret turned out to be might lead to murder. It’s the story of Maigret and the Saturday Caller, written by Georges Simenon in 1962. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.

Georges Simenon wrote some 75 novels about Maigret, along with dozens of short stories. For that matter, his total literary output included about 450 novels and short stories. Simenon was born in Belgium, and his books are written in French. Penguin is reprinting all of the Maigret books, in excellent translations into colloquial English. Maigret and the Saturday Caller first appeared in 1962, and it's pretty typical of the series: Maigret winds up investigating a crime, or occasionally preventing a crime, in what frequently turn out to be morally ambiguous circumstances. That's pretty much what happens in Maigret and the Saturday Caller, and the book, as usual, gives us a close-up look at the characters - victims as well as suspects and bystanders. The books are beautifully written; Simenon - and Maigret - care deeply about the people caught up in the events of the book. We readers are along for the ride. It’s a powerful and moving drama, and a good place to see why so many readers – and other authors, too – admire Simenon as they do. I think you’ll enjoy it.

 

From the Vault: "Average Jones"

Here's an average person who is really anything but "Average." Meet Average Jones. He only appeared in fewer than a dozen short stories by Samuel Hopkins Adams, which were gathered into book form entitled simply Average Jones in 1911. They're astonishingly good stories, too. Several years ago, I did an audio review of Average Jones for the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here, mildly edited, is a transcript of that review:

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A century ago…when most advertising took place in newspapers, long before the birth of today’s alphabet-soup mix of federal agencies trying to enforce truth in advertising…classified ads could be found for almost anything, from ads for patent medicines to personal notices. There was little or nothing to help guide a reader through those ads, besides common sense…and little enough of THAT, to be sure. Which is why it’s worth noting a series of detective stories that began, really, with the following ad in a local new York city newspaper. It read this way:

 

 

Have you been stung?

Thousands have.

Thousands will be.

They’re laying for you.

Who?

The advertising crooks.

    A.V.R.E.J. Jones,

Ad-Visor

Can protect you

Against Them.

 

An interesting ad, at a time, a century ago, when the general business philosophy was, let the reader – or buyer – beware. Who, you may ask, was this fictional ad-visor, A. Jones?  His parents had given him the full name Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones, thus giving him the initials A. V. R. E. before the J. of Jones…which explains why he was known to his friends as Average Jones. And what he did, in a series of short stories, was to chase down criminals – rogues, thieves, kidnappers, even murderers – through their newspaper ads. It’s all on display in Average Jones, by Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Samuel Hopkins Adams had an important day job: he was an investigative journalism who made a name for himself as a muckraker, particularly in the field of public health, railing against medical quackery and fraud. According to the Golden Age of Detection wiki and Wikipedia, Adams’ pioneering journalism is generally credited with having pushed Congress into passing the Pure Food and Drugs Act that created the federal bureaucracy that eventually became the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. But Adams also wrote a number of crime novels and stories, including a series that was collected into a book, Average Jones, which was published in 1911.

Average Jones is – as his own ad says – an ad-visor (which proves that puns were just as awful a century ago as they are today). The newspapers of the day had a great many more classified ads than modern papers, and Jones  would scan them every day looking for ones that interested or intrigued him. Often, clients would bring him ads that, in some way, affected their lives, and he would try to make sense out of them – and, frequently, would find himself fighting a criminal conspiracy of some kind.

There are eleven stories in Average Jones – two of those, actually, are halves of the same story, so there really are only ten. They are thoroughly entertaining. Here are a few examples:

"The B-Flat Trombone," the first Average Jones story, tells how and why Jones got into his unusual business of vetting newspaper ads. It also discovers how a trombone almost becomes an instrument of murder…and a crooked politician is uncovered.

"Red Dot" is a bizarre story about attempted murder in a seemingly locked room.

"The Mercy Sign" is a two-part story which involves a disappearance, some very bizarre scientific experiments – and a murder.

"The Man Who Spoke Latin" revolves around a man who claims to speak only classic Latin…and a remarkable scheme to find what could be a unique and priceless document.

And "The Million-Dollar Dog" deals with an unfortunate plot to kidnap and murder a small dog that stands between a man and a fortune – and the unusual way in which that plot was thwarted.

All the stories are like this. In most cases, a seemingly bizarre situation or an unexplained crime turns out to have a rational, scientific explanation. Often, a series of coincidences furnishes Jones with the information he needs to solve a puzzle – but, says Jones, that’s okay. At one point he explains, “Detective work, for all that is said on the other side, is mostly the ability to recognize and connect coincidences".

Another point jumps out from these stories: Average Jones – and his creator, Samuel Hopkins Adams – have a very low opinion of most politicians, and of the police in general, and an even lower one of the big combines and trusts that ran so much of American business in those days. As I’ve said, Adams was a muckraking journalist, and it certainly shows in these stories.

All the same, they are very good early American detective stories, and I think they’re not only worthwhile but highly enjoyable in their own rights. As the stories are more than a century old, they’re available in some inexpensive paperback editions – and some entirely free electronic ones. Samuel Hopkins Adams and Average Jones were quite important and popular in their day. Read these stories to find out why.

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

Next: Mrs. McGinty's Dead, by Agatha Christie.