Classic Mysteries

Looking Back: "The Roman Hat Mystery"

Who poisoned the man in the audience of the Roman Theatre in New York City? How was it done? And what happened to the victim's top hat?

That last, I assure you, is not a frivolous question - for the answer will be critical to the solution of "The Roman Hat Mystery," the first mystery novel written by "Ellery Queen."

As most classic mystery buffs know, Ellery Queen was the pen name used by two cousins, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. It was also the name of their principle detective character; Ellery (the character) was the son of New York City Inspector Richard Queen and - in many of the books - helped his father solve particularly difficult cases.

I reviewed "The Roman Hat Mystery" a few years back. My blog post is here, and my audio review may be heard by clicking here. At the time, it was only available in a three-novel collection, now out of print, then offered by the Mystery Guild. So I am delighted to find The Mysterious Press offering "The Roman Hat Mystery" in a variety of electronic editions. They were kind enough to provide me with a copy for my Amazon Kindle. I was very pleased to find that the e-book editions include some essential diagrams, lists and illustrations from the original "hard-copy" book.

If you have any e-book reader - or if you simply want to read it on your home computer - I would urge you to give "The Roman Hat Mystery" a try. I think it is unconscionable that the Queen books are just about universally out of print. Ellery Queen, particularly in the first phase of his literary and detecting career, was one of the most powerful influences on American detective stories - at least the traditional story, in its "pre-hardboiled" days. The early books, the ones with titles patterned as "The [Nationality] [Noun] Mystery," are puzzles in their purest form. Readers are given all the clues available to the detective, and there is a formal challenge to the reader, before the final sorting-out, inviting him or her to solve the mystery before it is revealed:

"Who killed Monte Field?" "How was the murder accomplished?" ...Mr. Queen agrees with me that the alert student of mystery tales, now being in possession of all the pertinent facts, should at this stage of the story have reached definite conclusions on the questions propounded."

 I never could do it.

"The Roman Hat Mystery" was the first Queen novel; I don't think it's necessarily the best. The character of Ellery Queen was still pretty raw, still based far too much on the amateur dilettante model of S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance. And Ellery is totally missing from the final explanation, which is handled by his father - who does credit his son with making all the deductions for him!

As I say, it's good to have this back in print (all right, in pixels). It's a good example that I wish more publishers would follow - making older authors and the backlists of newer authors available to a new generation of readers at a relatively low cost and with few problems of building up unwanted and expensive inventory.

So take advantage of it. If you have never read the early Ellery Queen, this is the place to start.

White Wine or Red? (Or, Wait in the Carr)

There has been an interesting discussion lately among members of the Golden Age of Detection mail group on Yahoo about two particularly fine books by John Dickson Carr, the master of the locked room/impossible crime genre. The debate is about which is better - "The Three Coffins" (known in the UK as "The Hollow Man) or "The Judas Window."

To me, it's like having an argument over which is better - white wine or red. I would have to agree that both books are among Carr's best plotted and written.

For "red wine" lovers, there's "The Three Coffins," a book whose opening paragraph defines the mysteries within and challenges the reader to solve them. The detective is Carr's main series detective, Dr. Gideon Fell. It's also famous for the chapter called "The Locked Room Lecture," in which Dr. Fell expounds on the various ways in which seemingly impossible crimes can be created - and explained. Unfortunately, it is out of print - and getting harder to find.

For those who prefer "white wine," there's "The Judas Window," written by Carr using the name "Carter Dickson," and featuring his other primary series character, Sir Henry Merrivale. This doesn't pose the same direct challenge to the reader, but it is one of the best-plotted mysteries I have ever read - and the reader's nose will be rubbed quite thoroughly in the concept of a "judas window,"  through which murder can be committed in a locked room, before the solution is explained. This one IS still available, thanks to the Rue Morgue Press.

Which is "better"? Both. As a matter of personal preference, I still like "The Three Coffins," because Carr manages to create such a frightening and uncanny atmosphere around the events of the story. On the other hand, "The Judas Window," with some classic Merrivale humor, can be quite funny even as the central character's life and freedom are threatened. But both books are well plotted - and both give the reader all the necessary clues, marvelously hidden. to solve the puzzle - if you can.

White wine? Red wine? Both can complement a meal very nicely, thank you. No need to choose - enjoy them both!

"Death from a Top Hat"

If you enjoy Golden Age mysteries, impossible crimes, insider information about stage magicians and their tricks and writers who can both amuse and amaze you, then you really ought to be familiar with Clayton Rawson. Rawson, who was one of the original founding members of the Mystery Writers of America, was himself a stage magician, quite familiar with the often-brilliant tricks that illusionists use to fool and misdirect their audiences. His literary creation, The Great Merlini, owns a store that supplies tricks and props to professional magicians, and he is called upon, in Rawson's novels, to help the police solve seemingly impossible crimes.

These qualities are very much in display in Death from a Top Hat: A Great Merlini Mystery," Rawson's first novel, originally published in 1937, the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

Police turn to Merlini for help when another magician - a man who apparently really did believe in his own magical ability to summon evil powers - is murdered inside a tightly locked and sealed room. Then there is a second murder - with the crime scene covered in an unbroken expanse of snow.

Unfortunately for the police, not only are both victims stage magicians - so are the primary suspects. After all, who but a stage magician could so effectively set the scene to give the illusion of a seemingly-impossible crime? Stage magic relies on illusion and misdirection - and the suspects in the case are all experts. Merlini himself is able to come up with half a dozen or so explanations of how the trick could have been accomplished. Can the mystery reader do likewise?

Rawson writes with quiet humor, and Merlini himself is quite likeable (if you are willing to overlook his habit of making coins appear in, or disappear from, his hands while talking). Rawson's books are mostly out of print, but the Mysterious Press has released e-book editions for the Amazon Kindle (which may be reached at the link served by the button, above). There are used hardcover and paperback editions available as well.

Looking Back: More by Clason

If you are intrigued by the kind of locked room/impossible crime mysteries that were specialties of Clyde B. Clason, you might be interested in a couple of other Clason mysteries, written a few years after he wrote "The Purple Parrot."

"Dragon's Cave" is a fairly complex but quite enjoyable mystery, involving the murder of a rich Chicago man, found murdered in a locked room, the apparent victim of an antique halberd, one of the antique weapons he collected. How could the murder have taken place inside that locked room - and why did the killer choose such a large and awkward weapon?

In "Poison Jasmine," Professor Westborough is on the scene in California, when a fellow-guest at the home of a world-famous perfume maker is poisoned at the dinner table - in plain sight of several guests, none of whom saw anyone tampering with the victim's food. It's another impossible-crime thriller, and a very clever one.

The links, by the way, will take you to my earlier blog posts about those books - where you'll find links to my podcast reviews and the book pages on Amazon.

"The Purple Parrot"

Granted that old Hezekiah Morse was unlucky enough to be a murder victim. But one might argue that his granddaughter Sylvia found herself in an equally unlucky position, given that the police were convinced she must have murdered him. After all, the only way into the room where he was stabbed was through the door from her room - where she was sitting alone, summoning the courage to go tell her grandfather that she was defying his wishes to marry someone of whom he didn't approve. And she was being cut out of his will - being left only a small, apparently worthless statuette of a purple parrot. So there you are - motive, means, opportunity - and a situation where apparently nobody else could have done it.

No, Sylvia's position was anything but ideal. And that's the situation we find in "The Purple Parrot," a 1937 "Golden Age" locked-room mystery by Clyde B. Clason, set in Chicago. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

While the police believe that Sylvia committed the murder, it is worth pointing out that she had a fair number of defenders. Her husband-to-be, a lawyer (and our narrator), was also in the house at the time, and he insists that Sylvia could not have done it. Fortunately, he is supported in that belief by Professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, an expert on Roman history - and a man with quite a track record as an amateur sleuth who has provided invaluable assistance in the past to Chicago police detective Johnny Mack. Westborough has a reputation for explaining impossible crimes. He also is intrigued by that strange statue of a purple parrot - which, by the way, seems to have disappeared. And it is only when he uncovers the secret of the bird - and a number of other seemingly incidental details concerning rare wines, malevolent gangsters and rare first editions - that the mystery will be explained.

Other American mystery writers - most notably John Dickson Carr - were more famous for their locked room mysteries, but Clyde B. Clason really deserves a wider readership. He wrote ten mysteries between 1936 and 1941, most of them involving seemingly impossible crimes for Professor Westborough to solve. Those of his books which I have read don't have the kind of atmospherics, the touch of terror that Carr brought to his novels. But they were very good, enjoyable mysteries, with some ingenious solutions to the seemingly impossible problems. The Rue Morgue Press has republished "The Purple Parrot" and a few other Clason novels. If you like locked room puzzle mysteries, you really ought to make his acquaintance.

"The Fourth Door"

So you like puzzles with impossible crimes? Consider this situation:

A man named Patrick Latimer - whose wife is said to be a psychic medium - decides he will confront a malevolent ghost apparently haunting the house where he lives. So he has himself sealed into the haunted room - the only door sealed with wax, which has been stamped with the image of a rare coin, chosen from several hundred different coins just moments before its use, and never out of the possession of a trusted witness.    

When the room is opened, though, with that wax seal still intact, Patrick Latimer has disappeared. Instead, an unknown man is found dead - stabbed in the back inside that locked and sealed room.

My kind of mystery, to be sure - and not a "Golden Age" mystery, but a relatively new one (1985), the first book of a French author who is still turning out first-rate "impossible crime" stories today. It is "The Fourth Door," by Paul Halter, and it is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. You can listen to my full review by clicking here.

Paul Halter is a living rebuke to those of us who read John Dickson Carr and other classic mystery writers and sigh, "They don't write them like that any more." That's not true. Paul Halter is doing very nicely with his new locked room novels. A few of them, in first-rate translations by John Pugmire, are available now, either as "regular" books or as an e-book available for the Amazon Kindle.

"The Fourth Door" has other puzzles besides that main one about the murder in the sealed room. There is a second murder - committed in a house surrounded by freshly-fallen snow, meaning no murderer could have escaped - and yet the victim is alone in the house. There are all kinds of eerie trappings; for example, that medium I mentioned earlier manages to read a message that has been sealed inside a closely-watched envelope. There are seances which may or may not be real. There is an apparent case of "bilocation" - the same individual being seen at precisely the same time in two, widely-separated, locations. And there is a heavy atmosphere of evil and madness - the sort of atmosphere that John Dickson Carr was particularly adept at producing. Halter plays fairly with the reader, too, providing clues which will challenge the reader to find and use them. Carr would most certainly have approved.

Halter is a devotee of Carr, and the book contains some nice homages to him - including a key character who says he is a mystery writer named "John Carter." I came to Halter through mystery-loving friends, who recommended him quite highly. They are right. If you want to read an author who can make the old form of the impossible puzzle mystery appear fresh and new, you will certainly enjoy Paul Halter's "The Fourth Door."

"Murder on Wheels"

So you think you've had bad days?

Consider the plight of New York City police officer Francis X. Doody, directing traffic at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in 1931-era New York City. In rush hour. In a snowstorm. And an open roadster - with no driver - careens down the Avenue and crashes into a taxicab. Well, there was a driver in the roadster - but he apparently did a back flip out of the driver's seat a short way up the street and is now lying - very dead, with a rope tied around his neck - in the middle of the road. Murdered - but how? By whom?

No, not a good day for Officer Doody. Not much better for his boss, Inspector Oscar Piper. Luckily for Piper, his friend, that "meddlesome old battleaxe" Hildegarde Withers, is on hand to help him investigate this apparently impossible crime. And we're off and running, in "Murder on Wheels," by Stuart Palmer, a wonderful mystery (with plenty of comic overtones) from America's Golden Age of Detection. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

Written in 1932, "Murder on Wheels" was Palmer's second book featuring Hildy Withers, a schoolteacher who takes no nonsense from her students or from stubborn police inspectors. In fact, after agreeing to disagree over a number of points, Hildy and Piper agree to each investigate the crime independently to see which of them can solve it first. Any of my readers want to place any bets?

"Murder on Wheels" is a strong entry in the Hildy Withers series. With an impossible murder, interesting characters, a foul-mouthed parrot, and an entire rodeo - yes, a rodeo - there's plenty going on here. Good thing we all have Hildy to sort it out.

Listening in a Locked Room

As an enthusiastic fan of locked room and impossible crime mysteries, I want to pass this along to others who are fascinated by these puzzles: the BBC this week released a half-hour radio program called "Miles Jupp in a Locked Room." It is a half-hour program about locked room mysteries, featuring comedian Miles Jupp interviewing a number of authors and scholars about the genre.

Jupp's guests include author and editor Mike Ashley, whose "The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries" is sitting on top of my TBR pile waiting to be read, and Robert Adey, another expert who has written extensively about locked room mysteries - and whose books, alas, are hard to find. There are also interviews with contemporary authors such as Paul Halter, the French author of first-rate locked room mysteries such as "The Fourth Door: The Houdini Murders," and with John Pugmire, who has translated several of Halter's books into English. There are a lot more - Paul Doherty, Denise Mina, Jasper Fforde, to name a few.

The BBC program is only available for listening through Sunday, May 27, so if you want to hear it, please click through and enjoy it now. It's well worth the half hour of your time.

Hat tip to John Pugmire and Monte Herridge for pointing this out to the Golden Age of Detection mail group on Yahoo.

"The Peacock Feather Murders"

If you were planning to murder someone...would you invite the police to come witness the crime? No, it's not a silly question. It happens - twice - in "The Peacock Feather Murders," by John Dickson Carr (writing as Carter Dickson). This 1937 doubly-impossible but fairly clued mystery is the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here.

Here is the situation: two years before the start of this story, the police receive an odd message reading "There will be ten teacups at number 18, Pendragon Gardens, W. 8, on Monday, April 30 at 9:30 P.M.  The police are warned to keep an eye out." Was it a joke? Apparently not, for when police went to the house after the appointed hour, they found a man dead inside the only room provided with any furniture in the otherwise vacant house - and that furniture includes a big round table, set with ten empty teacups with a design on them like peacocks' feathers. The police investigation after the fact got nowhere and the case remained unsolved.

Now, the police have been sent another message with a very similar invitation. This time, they station police officers in the house across the street. And one officer even conceals himself inside the house mentioned in the peculiar invitation. That officer sees a man walk into a room across the hall from him, closing the only door to that room behind him. A couple of minutes later, the police hear two shots. The policeman inside the house runs into that room and finds the man who had entered it earlier has been shot to death - apparently shot in the back, at very close range. But nobody else is in the room. And there is no way anyone could have entered OR left that room by the only door (under police observation) or the windows (observed by the police across the street). And once again, in an otherwise empty house, there is a large round table in the murder room with ten teacups on it...

Like it so far? Fortunately, Carr's detective in this story is Sir Henry Merrivale, the Old Man, H. M., as he is known - irascible, with a deep appreciation for practical jokes and a well-deserved reputation for solving such "impossible" puzzles. And this one certainly seems impossible...doesn't it?

So there you have it. How was it done? By whom? And why were the police told to be on hand?

H. M. will find out. But you'll have to read "The Peacock Feather Murders" to get the answers. Fortunately, this Golden Age classic locked-room mystery, is back in print, from the Rue Morgue Press. If you enjoy matching wits over a good puzzle, try your hand at this one.

Where to Begin with Appleby

In my review this week of Appleby's Answer, by Michael Innes, I note that it is probably not the best choice for a reader unfamiliar with the series of novels about Sir John Appleby. Between 1936 and 1986, Appleby appeared in 32 novels and more than twice that number of short stories by Innes.

The novels generally share certain qualities. They are traditional mysteries, with clues to be followed and considered, although Innes sometimes conceals them from the reader until nearly the end of the book. They are all written with a good deal of sophisticated humor. Perhaps reflecting Innes's real life as a professor of English literature, the books do have (and occasionally suffer from) a surfeit of literary quotations - some of which even I, as an old English major, find hopelessly obscure. But I find that this adds to the overall atmosphere of the books, rather than detracting from them.

Innes's plots can also be fairly bizarre. Some of the stories really border on surrealism, though Innes does manage to make them intriguing, if the reader is willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good mystery.

The question, then, is where to begin with Appleby and Innes - where to find a book with as little distraction and as much pleasure as possible.

I invariably recommend my own personal favorite, Lament for a Maker. It was the third outing for Appleby, written near the end of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, in 1938. It is written after the fashion of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone - the story is told by a series of narrators, each of whom picks up the plot and unravels some of the tangled mystery. Set in the Scottish Highlands, it features a mad and malevolent Scottish laird, a miser, who wanders through the halls of his decrepit and unheated castle with a candle, reciting the eerie words of the medieval poet William Dunbar's "Lament for the Makers." The story features an apparently impossible murder, a memorable setting, and marvelous characters and, I think, it contains some of Innes's finest writing.

If you would rather read some of the Appleby short stories, there is a fine collection published by Crippen & Landru called Appleby Talks About Crime with 18 previously uncollected (in book form) Innes short stories. You will get a good taste for Appleby and Innes in these stories.

Beyond that, check the backlist page of this blog for earlier reviews of Innes books - including some which do not feature Appleby at all. There are many more waiting on my to-be-read (or really to-be-reread) shelf, so I'd better get to work.