Classic Mysteries

"Pass the Body" (or "Crime in Kensington")

Like so many other residential hotels in Kensington, the Garden Hotel was an uninspiring arrangement of stucco, tiled doorsteps, aspidistras, revolving doors, verandahs and hall porter.

"It looks neither odd nor comfortable," reflected  Venables, negotiating the steps, the hall porter, the doors and the aspidistra...

Well, Charles Venables is likely to be proven only half correct in his initial assessment of the Garden Hotel. He is correct in assuming that the hotel is unlikely to prove very comfortable. But it most certainly is odd, at the very least, as are many of the rather eccentric residents. And the occurrences of a disappearance from and a murder within a locked room in the hotel surely must be considered as odd. Also, as Charles has discovered, the price paid by its guests was distinctly too low. The details will be found in an English Golden Age mystery that appears to be available, at the moment, under two different titles: as a paperback book, it is called Pass the Body, which was its American title, while as an e-book it is known by the title, Crime in Kensington, by which it was originally published in the U.K. in 1933. It was the first mystery to be written by Christopher St. John Sprigg (who wrote as "Christopher Caudwell"). It is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you may listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Charles Venables, now earning a (somewhat) precarious living as a gossip columnist for the Daily Mercury, finds himself on the scene for the very unfortunate goings-on at the Garden Hotel. His friend, Lady Viola Merritt, daughter of the Earl of Buxley, was already a resident of the Garden Hotel and had suggested that Charles move in to the hotel, because of the low price and the surprisingly high quality of the amenities. Even on the day of his arrival, Charles found the hotel a bit unusual, to say the least. As he reflected:

"This is really too awful...When one hears a bloke threaten to kill his wife and then immediately afterwards meets a sinister and mysterious Oriental, it is time to move somewhere else, for one has obviously walked into the plot of a thriller of the vulgarest and most exciting description."

And that night, Mrs. Budge, who owns the Garden Hotel along with her husband, disappears from her bedroom (and another older resident is attacked in that same room as well) – and yet nobody could have entered or left the room unobserved. It won’t be long before a particularly gruesome discovery brings Scotland Yard – in the person of Detective Inspector Bernard Bray – into the case. Inspector Bray will find an ally in Charles Venables – who has some useful skills in his own background that will be helpful to both of them in solving a shocking murder case – and, with it, uncovering the secrets of the Garden Hotel.

In his brief lifetime, Christopher St. John Sprigg wrote only seven mystery novels – before he went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he died in battle. Pass the Body was the first of his crime books, and it reinforces my enjoyment of, and respect for, Sprigg’s plotting skill and extremely witty writing. It is available as a paperback under the title Pass the Body or as an e-book entitled Crime in Kensington. If you enjoy impossible crimes, interesting characters, and clever writing, you will enjoy this book.

From the Vault: "The Judas Window"

If you are a fan of the impossible crime or locked room story, as I am, then you are probably familiar with the name of John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as "Carter Dickson"). If you are a fan of the impossible crime or locked room story and you are not familiar with the name of John Dickson Carr, then it's time you read at least one of his best books. I'm sure there are good reasons why Carr - so far - has not been widely reprinted by publishers who have been bringing back so many fine Golden Age authors, but I do not know what those reasons are. I do hear, from time to time, rumblings about plans to make some of his books available - and I've found that one of his best is available currently as an e-book. So while we wait for the day when we can again find affordable paper editions of some of Carr's other fine books, here's my review from the Classic Mysteries vault of The Judas Window, originally published in 1938 as being by Carter Dickson and featuring the irascible Sir Henry Merrivale as its detective. As usual, the text of my review has been slightly tweaked:

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How’s this for a nightmare situation: you wake up, aware that you have been drugged, to find yourself alone in a room with a dead man. He appears to have been stabbed with an arrow that had been hanging on the wall. The window is securely shuttered and locked. The door is locked and bolted on the inside. There is no way in or out of the room – and there is nobody else in the room. And someone is knocking on the door. That’s the situation in The Judas Window, by Carter Dickson – the pen name of John Dickson Carr.

John Dickson Carr was, and remains, the acknowledged master of the locked room mystery. As Carter Dickson, he wrote a series of impossible crime novels featuring his detective, Sir Henry Merrivale, H. M. as his friends call him. In The Judas Window, Sir Henry winds up in the role of defense lawyer in court, defending the young man I described a moment ago, who is, of course, accused of the murder.

Let’s recap: James Answell, the young man in question, has been called to the house of his fiancee’s father – a man he has never met. The two enter a room. The father begins – in Answell’s eyes, at least – to act strangely, and appears to be picking a fight. But then Answell passes out. When he wakes, perhaps 20 minutes later, he finds the scene as I described it a moment ago. His future father-in-law has been murdered inside a locked room, with no way in or out. Witnesses, who overheard the start of an argument between the two men, are able to testify that nobody has entered or left the room. The whiskey decanter which Answell says contained the drugged liquor is full (and there are no drugs in it) and the glasses are clean, and a doctor called to the scene says he can see no signs that Answell was drugged.

There is, in short, nothing to believe except that Answell has committed the murder, having quarreled with his fiancee’s father. He is arrested, charged with the murder, and his trial takes place in that great court of London known as the Old Bailey.

But Answell does have one thing going for him: Sir Henry Merrivale agrees to take the case for the defense. Because Sir Henry thinks he knows what really happened. The crime was committed, he says, through use of the Judas Window.

And what, you may ask, is the Judas Window? Obviously it’s going to be a while before Sir Henry reveals that to you. Is it some obscure secret? Hardly. It is, as H.M. says repeatedly, the key to the whole plot (not to mention the title of the book). Some obscure secret passage? No. As H.M. observes pretty early on in the book, you will find a Judas Window in just about every room you enter. The trouble, as he says, is that so few people even notice it.

Does it sound as if Carr is playing with the reader? He is. Most shamelessly. And quite thoroughly. The book is primarily a courtroom drama – something a bit unusual for Carr, but not at all out of place. And the locked room mystery, which is so clearly at the heart of this book, is well and fairly presented to the reader. H. M. even gives the reader a carefully worked-out timetable, with names and events neatly outlined and his own comments penciled carefully into the margin. And yet I’m willing to bet that most readers won’t tumble to the solution before H.M. is ready to deliver it – and that will follow quite a set of courtroom theatrics. As one of the characters says to him, at the very end of the book, “I am inclined to suspect that you are a disgrace to all the splendid traditions of the fairness of English law.”

There are critics who have called The Judas Window the best locked room mystery of all time. I’m not sure I agree with that; as I have said before, I still think Carr’s The Three Coffins (known in England as The Hollow Man), takes that honor. But The Three Coffins is much more complex in its locked rooms and impossible crimes, depending on a series of more-or-less unlikely events and the careful misleading of the reader. The solution to the locked room problem in “The Judas Window,” by contrast, is breathtakingly simple – in fact, as is often the case with such books, there’s a tendency to feel somewhat disappointed, to say, “is that all?” That’s unfair to the genius of the author, who has managed to practically rub our noses in the concept of the Judas Window – and yet conceal his meaning until the end of the novel – and, by doing so, he misdirects us admirably.

As always with Carr, the reader can’t help but be aware that he or she is in the hands of a master manipulator – but one who essentially plays fairly throughout. It is a book that belongs in every mystery lover’s library.

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

Next: If Death Ever Slept, by Rex Stout.

From the Vault: "Rim of the Pit"

I love a really well-done "impossible crime" mystery - the kind that John Dickson Carr in particular wrote over the course of his career. The kind of mystery that doesn't seem to have any possible solution that doesn't involve the supernatural. But in the best of them, the terrifying atmosphere and seemingly impossible mysteries will ultimately be resolved, and you'll find that the author has quite neatly pulled the rug out from under you and your expectations. While Carr was the acknowledged master of the locked room/impossible crime genre, there is one other book by one other author that deserves comparison with Carr at his best. The book is Rim of the Pit, a 1944 classic by Hake Talbot, and it's still available. Here's a text version of the audio review I did of Rim of the Pit on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago - somewhat edited for clarity:

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“I came up here to make a dead man change his mind.”

That’s the first line of a pretty amazing book – an impossible crime story by an author I had never read before. It’s a story that veers right along the edge between the supernatural and the stage illusion, the kind of tension at the heart of some of the very best locked room mysteries. The book is Rim of the Pit, by Hake Talbot.

Hake Talbot was the pen name of a stage magician named Henning Nelms. He only wrote two mysteries, one of which, Rim of the Pit, is absolutely dazzling. Perhaps it was because of Talbot’s background as a magician that he is so well able to force his audience to suspend disbelief. The reader is going to be swamped with impossibilities – with situations which, it would seem, could only have been the result of supernatural forces. But  this is a mystery, not a ghost story.

The central character, and detective figure, is a man named Rogan Kincaid, who has been invited to a lonely lodge somewhere in the wilderness of northern New England, close to the Canadian border. The man who invited him there, Luke Latham, is the man who makes that initial statement which I found so startling: "I came up here to make a dead man change his mind." He means that literally. Latham and his business partner, Frank Ogden, own a logging company. For reasons too complex to explain here, they believe that the only way they will be able to stay in business is by holding a séance to get permission from a long-dead partner to expand their logging interests. Both men, obviously, are believers in spiritualism, and there will be eerie scenes of séances adding to the general atmosphere of brooding and terror.

Because what happens – or appears to happen – at that séance is that they are successful in bringing back their dead partner, only to discover that he has become an evil and utterly malevolent spirit. From that point on, we are treated to apparent cases of possession, the appearance of a flying monster known as a wendego, and a couple of bloody murders. Add in a blinding snowstorm that – naturally – isolates the small group of characters and you have the elements of a fine thriller.

But I assure you that this is not necessarily a ghost story. It is, instead, an ingenious plot in which there are impossibilities galore: there are trails of footprints that appear to start and end in the middle of fields of unbroken snow. There are ancient curses, escapes from locked rooms, that terrifying flying…thing.

But can there be a non-supernatural explanation? The atmosphere of terror, of ghosts and evil spirits, of things that appear to be totally impossible – that atmosphere is created and maintained in this book as well as I have ever seen it done. In atmosphere, it rivals the very best of John Dickson Carr. As a matter of fact, there are enough similarities at some points to make it appear that Talbot must have been paying some homage to Carr. In Carr’s The Three Coffins, for example, a central character is named Professor Grimaud. In Rim of the Pit, the long-dead partner is named Grimaud as well. Coincidence? Possibly. But just as Carr, in his best books, could create that atmosphere of being caught up in the supernatural…while providing the reader with fair clues about what really happened…so we see very much the same kind of thing in Talbot’s book. For there will be clues. Spiritualism, mediums and séances were very popular, both in England and in the United States, for a very long time, and the reader will be shown some of the ways in which those events could be manipulated. One of the characters in Rim of the Pit is a man who has been a stage magician, and – without giving away any real secrets – he is instrumental in helping the reader (and, of course, the other characters) figure out what is really going on, providing some insight into the ways in which stage magicians are able to trick their audiences. For behind all the supernatural trappings, there may be a human hand at work.

I’m trying to avoid giving too much away, for this wonderful book is filled with mystery and surprises, and the atmosphere of horror plays a significant part in misleading the reader and pointing away from the eventual solution.

One other note: according to Wikipedia, a poll of mystery experts taken in 1981 listed John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins – also known as The Hollow Man – as the best locked room mystery ever written. I have frequently said that I agree with that judgment. But the same poll of experts found Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit was number two on their list – and I think that could very well be true. Yes, it’s that good. Ramble House has reissued Rim of the Pit, complete with a back-cover map (taken from the old Dell Mapbook version of the book) that illustrates the scene of the crime and some of the impossible footprint trails and other puzzles. If you enjoy impossible crimes with fascinating characters and terrifying atmospherics, by all means you must read this book. Frankly, I couldn’t put it down.

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To listen to the original version of this review, you can click here.

Next: Three Witnesses, three Nero Wolfe novellas by Rex Stout.

"Murder Fantastical"

The Manciple family, gathered at their family home, Cregwell Grange in the English village of Cregwell, is one of those delightful (if rather surreal) collections of colorful eccentrics who may be found in some traditional, plot-and-puzzle driven English mysteries. There is Major George Manciple, the titular head of the family. There is his brother Edwin, the retired Anglican bishop from the African nation of Bugolaland who loves English-style cryptic crosswords, full of puns and odd wordplay clues. There is another brother, Sir Claude, director of the nearby atomic research station. There is Aunt Dora Manciple, 93 years young and not slowing down at all, thank you, even if her hearing aid only whistles. And several more relatives, each with their own oddities and weaknesses. They are a charming family, even if they have next to no money and the house, Cregwell Grange, appears to be on the verge of collapsing around their ears. But could one of them possibly be guilty of murder? That's what Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard must determine in Murder Fantastical, a 1967 mystery by Patricia Moyes, featuring Inspector Tibbett, along with one of the finest supporting casts of eccentric characters any reader could wish. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The problem certainly began when Raymond Mason bought - and moved into - the lodge, on the Manciples' home property of Cregwell Grange. Mason was a bookmaker - that's a bookie, to you American visitors - and he was, not to mince words, a snob, interested in muscling his way into the upper layers of Cregwell society. He wanted to buy Cregwell Grange; the Manciples refused his offers, both reasonable and unreasonable, and Mason was setting up some truly nasty entanglements to force the issue. And then Mason was shot in the back - in the driveway of the Grange. The Chief Constable - another good friend of the Manciples - called in Scotland Yard to avoid the awkwardness of having to investigate close friends for murder. And so Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy, arrived in Cregwell. That's when Henry first encounters Major George Manciple sitting in a tree, waving a revolver, saying "bang bang" and trying to recreate the murder scene. As another character, the Chief Constable, observes, "conversation with George Manciple had this distressing effect of dispersing logic, as sunshine disperses fog." It leads to a memorable moment:

As Henry climbed into his car again he was aware of the carefully aimed pistol and the faint cry of ‘Bang, bang!’ from among the branches. He drove the few yards up to the front door in a state of pleasant anticipation. He felt reasonably certain that he was going to enjoy himself.

I’ve been trying – without much success – to figure out how to tell you more about the plot, more about the shooting, more about the Manciples, more about the surprising twists and the witty writing, all without spoilers. I have finally given up. Look, my friends, here’s the situation: you have a shooting. You have a likable and intelligent detective. You have a wildly eccentric family for whom misunderstanding the world around them seems to be a part of everyday life. You have some developments that are so funny that you will find yourself laughing very loudly indeed – and some other elements that will chill you.  Saying much beyond that, I’m afraid, would spoil your reading pleasure. Trust me on this one. Murder Fantastical is well plotted and both very funny and touching. Just read it. Thank you.

 

From the Vault: "The Case of the Constant Suicides"

You would think, with all the attention now being paid to classic-but-forgotten mystery writers from the Golden Age in both the U.K. and U.S., that some enterprising publisher would by now have acquired the rights to re-publish all or at least most of the works of John Dickson Carr (who also wrote as "Carter Dickson"). Unfortunately, it hasn't happened yet, at least not that I can tell. If Carr's name is new to you, he was - and remains, I think - the ultimate master of the locked room/"impossible" crime mystery. For that reason, I thought it might be a good time to raid the vault for the text of my audio review of Carr's brilliant The Case of the Constant Suicides, which ran on the Classic Mysteries podcast about eight years ago. The book is out of print (again), but there do seem to be a few dozen copies out there in the wild, in case you'd like to see why I make such a fuss over Carr's books. As always, there has been some editing, mostly to update information about the book's availability:

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When Angus Campbell fell to his death from his room at the top of a high tower, he left several unanswered questions behind. First among them, certainly, was the question of whether Angus had committed suicide – or had been murdered. If suicide, why would he kill himself and so invalidate his fairly new life insurance policies, thus leaving his family as paupers? But if it was murder, how could it have been committed inside a locked and bolted room? Fortunately for the Campbells, Dr. Gideon Fell, that master at solving impossible crimes, was on hand – and he found himself confronted with more than one impossibility in The Case of the Constant Suicides.

John Dickson Carr was the acknowledged master of the locked room or impossible crime story. Almost all of his books feature crimes – usually murder – that apparently never could have happened – but somehow did. And Carr was scrupulously fair with his readers, giving them every clue they needed to solve his impossible crimes before his detective – if the readers were clever enough to pick up those clues and follow them. It was a game to both Carr and to his readers – the grandest game, he often called it, and it is one of the reasons why he remains one of my favorite authors.

Carr has been out of print for far too long, and I am delighted that the Rue Morgue Press has been reissuing some of his best books. [Note that the RMP is no longer in business, so the books are, once again, out of print. -Ed.] The newest addition to their list is The Case of the Constant Suicides, which has to be one of Carr’s finest books. It was first published in 1941, and it is set in a Britain which has begun blacking its lights out at night, in preparation for what would become the devastating Nazi blitz.

The Case of the Constant Suicides revolves around two young people – rival history professors, in fact – somewhat distant relatives and members of the Campbell family, who are summoned to the family’s castle in the Scottish highlands. The family’s patriarch, old Angus Campbell, has died in a fall from his locked bedroom, located in a virtually inaccessible high tower attached to the castle. If he was murdered, or if it was an accident (which seems highly unlikely), then his heirs will receive the payouts on some insurance policies which he took out shortly before his death.

But if it was murder – as the family believes, for suicide would be most unlike Angus, particularly as he would have known that suicide would mean no money for his heirs – if it was murder, how was it done? Angus was sleeping in his bedroom, which was locked and bolted, at the top of the tower, accessible only by an inner stairway – there was no other way to reach the room. But what happened to Angus’s diary, which disappeared from the bedroom after his death? And what of the empty animal carrier, found latched under his bed, empty? Did it contain some nightmarish creature that killed him by forcing him to leap out of that tower window? What of the later appearance of an apparent ghost in the tower – or another person’s fall from the tower room, under the same circumstances?

And just when we think we may know the answer to that question, there is another death – another man, found hanging inside a locked and bolted cottage.

The man who makes sense out of all these peculiar happenings is Carr’s wonderful character, Dr. Gideon Fell. Physically and mentally, Fell is based on the author G. K. Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown. Dr. Fell is an expert at solving impossible crimes, and he finds himself challenged by the events in this book – although he will eventually reach a solution and even bring about what he will consider a fair and just end to a difficult case.

What all this fails to tell you is that The Case of the Constant Suicides is also a wonderfully, laugh-out-loud funny book. Set in Scotland, the characters find themselves drinking a family whiskey known as the Doom of the Campbells – called that for excellent reason. There are drinking scenes perhaps best described as heroic. Here’s young Alan Campbell – one of our history professors – taking his first taste of the whiskey:

He lifted the glass, drained it, and almost literally reeled.

It did not take the top of his head off, but for a second he thought it was going to. The stuff was strong enough to make a battleship alter its course. The veins of his temples felt bursting; his eyesight dimmed; and he decided that he must be strangling to death.

The description goes on at some length. Be forewarned that, just as the drink itself was amazingly powerful, so too will be the hangover when Alan wakes up the next morning.

There are other brilliantly funny passages – particularly the rivalry and eventual romance between Alan and his second cousin twice removed, the other history professor, Kathryn Campbell. But there is also a marvelously frightening atmospheric quality to the nightmarish events in the book. Carr was always masterful at suggesting unseen and supernatural terrors – that would all, of course, be quite rationally explained at the end of the book.

Enough. It is funny. It is mysterious. It is fair to the reader. It is a delight. The Case of the Constant Suicides is one of John Dickson Carr’s best. It should not be missed.

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To hear the complete recording of the original review, click here.

Next: Death in the Stocks, by Georgette Heyer.

The Twelve Reading Days of Christmas

For the Classic Mysteries blog and podcast this week, may I present all my readers here with a gift: a list of twelve mysteries that may help instill a bit of the Christmas spirit into the stoutest Grinch. I would hope that you'd take your list down to your favorite mystery bookstore, whose staff, I'm sure, would be happy to help you fill your shopping basket with these books. Believe me, those bookstores really can use your support. Another reason for me to celebrate: this is podcast # 600 - give or take a couple of the early ones. We're at about 11 1/2 years of doing the podcast; the blog came a year or so later.

That said, and in an effort to keep the size of this post to a level where it really is readable, let me urge you to listen to today's podcast (#600!!), which contains brief descriptions of each of the twelve books, along with other useful information about the Twelve Reading Days of Christmas. Then, as you wish, please look at the links below. For each book, I have provided a link to my original podcast review. For all but one of them, I have also provided a link to each book's original post on this blog. The exception is Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel, which was reviewed on the podcast before the blog began, meaning I have nowhere to link.

This is being posted about two weeks ahead of the holiday, so I'm hoping many of you will take advantage of the opportunities to add to your collections and to enjoy what I suppose is a more murderous way to greet the season. May we all have something to celebrate during this season.

The twelve books:

1. Agatha Christie, Murder for Christmas   click for podcast     click for blog post

 

2. Rex Stout, "Christmas Party." In And Four to Go.     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

3. Georgette Heyer, Envious Casca     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

4. Nicholas Blake, Thou Shell of Death     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

5. T. Jefferson Farjeon, Mystery in White     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

6. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

7. Ngaio Marsh, Tied Up in Tinsel     click for podcast     Blog post unavailable. Sorry!

 

8. Charlotte Macleod, Rest You Merry     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

9. Mavis Doriel Hay, The Santa Klaus Murder     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

10. Francis Duncan, Murder for Christmas     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

11. Martin Edwards (ed.), Crimson Snow     click for podcast     click for blog post

 

12. John Mortimer, A Rumpole Christmas     click for podcast     click for blog post

I do hope you'll get the chance to read and enjoy at least a few of these. I'm off to celebrate with the world's friendliest mouse at Disney World. See you next week!

"The Division Bell Mystery"

A murder in Britain's House of Commons! Well, a fictional one anyway, and the parliament, politics and characters involved are all from the first third of the twentieth century. But given the intense battles over politics in the United States this year - some of which, clearly, continue to be fought - it seems very appropriate, at the end of that American political year, to relax a bit with a classic Golden Age mystery about an English murder that seemed to have the potential to bring down the English government. The story may be found in The Division Bell Mystery, a 1932 mystery by Ellen Wilkinson, one of the first women ever to be elected to Parliament. It is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are invited to listen to the complete review by clicking here.

The Division Bell Mystery is a political mystery from the Golden Age, being re-published as one of the British Library Crime Classics series. Poisoned Pen Press is publishing the book this week in the United States, and the publisher provided me with a copy for review.

The central character of the book, a young member of parliament named Robert West, serves as what is called the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. It is in that capacity that he is present in the House of Commons one evening, when the members await the sounding of the division bell calling them to scheduled parliamentary votes. But as the bell rings, it is almost drowned out by the sound of a shot. Robert is closest to the door of the small private Parliamentary dining room, Room J, where that shot was fired. When he rushes to the locked door, he finds the body of a very rich – and very important - American financier, a dinner guest of the Home Secretary, shot to death. The victim was alone in the locked room. Was it a suicide? The Scotland Yard police officer in charge is not convinced. And so Robert West, the humble P-P-S, as those low-level and overworked functionaries are called, will find himself – with police blessing – acting as an amateur detective, dealing with a politically charged murder that could cause a financial crisis in London and even bring down the government. Robert was quite used to the arcane practices of the House of Commons – and he would soon find himself dealing – very diplomatically, to be sure! – with some extremely important people, all of whom had secrets to hide.

All of this, of course, makes for a good, lively mystery. To me, the book is also made vastly more interesting because its author, Ellen Wilkinson, drew on her experience as an elected member of parliament and put a great deal of insider knowledge into the book both about the scenes inside Parliament and about some of the politics involved. As usual, mystery historian Martin Edwards provides an introduction, focusing his attention this time on politics in Golden Age detective fiction. There is also a preface, written for this new edition by Rachel Reeves, another elected Member of Parliament. I recommend the book to you very highly indeed.

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.

 

From the Vault: "Diagnosis: Impossible"

Back we go into the vault again and come out bearing...impossibilities. My favorite kind of traditional mysteries: crimes which simply couldn't have happened - but did happen. Locked rooms, victims surrounded by unbroken fields of snow - I'm sure my visitors here know many examples of these wonderful mysteries. So today, let's look at some stories by a master of the genre, Edward D. Hoch, and his long string of stories starring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a New England doctor with a real knack for untangling the secrets of impossible-crime stories and revealing those secrets for the illusory magician's tricks that they are. The Dr. Sam stories are gathered now in four good-sized trade paperbacks from Crippen & Landru. The first collection was called Diagnosis: Impossible, the Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, and it was the subject of my audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast all the way back in 2010. Here's what I had to say about it:

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Hi there. Come on in and chat for a while. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Dr. Sam has been practicing medicine in a small town in Connecticut for quite a while now. But – much more than that – he’s also helped solve some pretty amazing mysteries while he was going about his business. Amazing – because the crimes all appeared on the surface to be impossible. So sit down, pour yourself a small libation, as Dr. Sam might say, and get ready for Diagnosis Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, by Edward D. Hoch.

Talk about amazing: Edward D. Hoch was a pretty amazing author. Hoch, who passed away in 2008, only wrote a handful of novels in his career. But I think he was unequalled in short stories, turning out some 950 of them in the course of his writing career. He had a number of different series detectives. But our focus today is on one character, Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Hoch wrote dozens of stories about Dr. Sam, all published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from 1974 until his death in 2008. Every one of them is about an impossible crime – usually murder. In many ways, Hoch was the successor to the 20^th century master of locked room mysteries, John Dickson Carr – in fact, Carr once said of Hoch, "Satan himself would be proud of his ingenuity."

The publishing house of Crippen and Landru has issued a number of anthologies of stories by Hoch. In Diagnosis: Impossible, we are given the first dozen of his stories about Dr. Sam Hawthorne. The stories are all fascinating: in each case, we see a seemingly impossible crime committed. Police are baffled. But Dr. Sam, who is observant and intelligent, is able to figure out what really happened and solve the crime – although he doesn’t always turn the criminal over to the authorities.

What kind of situations are we talking about?

• How about the case of a man driving a horse and carriage into a covered bridge – and never coming out the other side? The driver, horse and carriage all simply disappear.
• How about a politician murdered in full view of witnesses by what appears to be a homicidal ghost who appears, stabs his victim – and vanishes in a puff of smoke.
• Or the kidnapping of a schoolboy who simply disappears from a schoolyard swing.
• Or the captured escape artist who manages to get out of a locked jail cell and out through a locked stairway door without anybody seeing him.
• Or the stunt actor who parachutes into a supposedly haunted oak tree…but is found to have been strangled AFTER he jumped and BEFORE he could get down from the tree.
• Or another politician who is stabbed to death in front of witnesses as he leaves a voting booth – yet there’s no sign of a killer or knife.

Are we having fun yet? I certainly hope so. There are a dozen of these stories, and they all feature some apparently impossible situation. And, yes, there are natural and honest (if sometimes improbable) solutions to all of these problems. As always with such stories, it can be a lot like learning how a magic trick was really done – there’s a tendency on the reader’s part to say, “Is that all there was to it?” That’s an unfair, if quite understandable, reaction, and it should never be strong enough to keep a reader from savoring these remarkable stories.

They’re all set in the Connecticut town of Northmont, where Dr. Sam Hawthorne lives and works. And they are historical mysteries as well as impossible crimes – they’re all set in the 1920s, a time when America was struggling with prohibition, a situation which plays a significant role in several of the stories. Hoch wrote them for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and intended them to be a regular series, as they were. Each story begins with Dr. Sam welcoming his anonymous listener – that would be you – and offering what he calls, in those days of prohibition, "a small libation" of brandy. And each story in this collection ends with a one or two line preview of the next one. It was a good gimmick, which was continued long after the first dozen stories had appeared.

Are the stories fair to the reader? Yes…although we are not always given some of the key clues early enough to draw our own logical conclusions. But we ARE told the facts we need to know. And, frankly, much of the fun in these stories comes from realizing that we are watching a fine magician at work, producing these impossible illusions before our eyes. Diagnosis Impossible is a wonderful introduction to Ed Hoch’s stories about Dr. Sam. I’m looking forward to reading more of them.

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Over the past several years, Crippen & Landru have published three more volumes of Ed Hoch's Dr. Sam stories. You can find links on the Classic Mysteries backlist page (just scroll down to "Hoch" on the list). 

Next: Lady in the Lake, by Raymond Chandler.

"The Case of the Murdered Major"

With the outbreak of World War II, Britain found itself in need of such things as Prisoner of War camps, to house captured enemy fighters, some refugees and interned civilians. So it was that Ludovic Travers, that very successful amateur investigator of major crimes, became Captain Ludovic Travers, the Adjutant Quartermaster (and second in command) of Prisoner of War Camp #54, in the city of Shoreleigh. It wasn't going to be an easy job, and the camp's commandant, Major Percival Stirrop, described as "a bantam of a man, full of quick and self-important nervousness," most certainly wasn't going to make it any easier. A nasty, incompetent officer, a monkey wrench in the efficient mechanism of the camp's operation, the major was a source of immense frustration to Travers and the other officers and men charged with the camp's operation. So perhaps it won't come as much of a surprise to find Major Stirrop dead - murdered, lying in a field of snow unbroken by any other footprints. Fortunately, Scotland Yard sent in a senior officer to help the military with their investigation: Ludovic Travers's old friend, Superintendent George Wharton. He and Captain Travers will have to solve The Case of the Murdered Major, which is the title of the 1941 mystery by Christopher Bush which is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

 The Case of the Murdered Major provides the reader with a powerful and exciting view of an England on the verge of war (for it is set just before the war actually begins). Against that backdrop, an impossible murder and the search for a murderer – and quite possibly for senior enemy agents and high-ranking Nazi officials trying to get into England to be ready for the war – makes a fascinating detective story. I must admit I couldn’t put it down – and I was caught off-guard by several of the story’s twists.

Dean Street Press is continuing its project of re-issuing all of Christopher Bush's 63 mysteries that featured Ludovic Travers, and the publisher sent me an e-book version of The Case of the Murdered Major for this review. According to mystery historian Curtis Evans, who provides a very helpful introduction to this book and to the rest of Bush's work as well, this was the first of a trilogy of wartime books which was based on Bush’s own experiences as an administrator of a real prisoner of war camp in England early in the war. It's quite good, and I recommend it to you.