Key Without a Door (1988) by Anthony Lejeune

Last February, I reviewed Mr. Diabolo (1960) by "Anthony Lejeune," a pseudonym of Edward Anthony Thompson, who aspired to write a genuine, Golden Age-style locked room mystery – paying homage to John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. There is, however, a considerable gap between Lejeune's aspirations and his delivery. The opening chapters of Mr. Diabolo reads like the genuine article, but the plot never went beyond the basics and utterly failed to deliver on its promise. I noted in the review, the plot would have been somewhat impressive had it been written for a younger audience. Mr. Diabolo fits in better with Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) and Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) than The Three Coffins (1935) or Death from a Top Hat (1938). The plot is that basic.

Nevertheless, Mr. Diabolo is not a trudge to read and actually made curious about the second, intriguing-sounding impossible crime novel listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) written nearly thirty years later.

During the late 1980s, Lejeune started a short-lived series starring an Oxford professor, James Glowrey, whose tranquil life in academia gets uprooted in two genteel thrillers, Professor in Peril (1987) and Key Without a Door (1988). The latter is listed in Locked Room Murders as a "disappearance of a man in pajamas from outside his front door," but is it better than the impossible vanishing from his 1960 locked room mystery? Let's find out!

The first chapter recounts how James and Cressida Glowrey met and befriended their neighbors, Norman and Eve Prestwick, while walking their dogs and getting the dog leads entangled and struck up a friendship – it helped that both Cressida and Eve are Americans ("...strangers in a strange land"). Norman Prestwick is the director of Compuparts, a manufacturer of "miniaturised computers," who has political aspirations "nursing what was considered a safe seat." One early morning, the Glowreys find Eve on their doorstep with a startling news that Norman is gone ("I mean he's gone. Disappeared. Vanished"). The circumstances under which he disappeared are downright mysterious. While Eve was preparing breakfast, Norman fetched the milk and newspapers from the doorstep, but never came back inside. A minute, or two, pass before Eve goes outside to have a look and only finds Norman's bedroom slippers ("one was just outside the door, the other was halfway up the steps") and his dressing gown draped across a trashcan. So how could Norman have possibly vanished from his own doorstep as "he could hardly have walked through the streets barefoot and in pyjamas, unnoticed, even at that time in the morning." Nor had he enough time to reach the end of the street, before Eve poked her head out of the front door.

Yes, the disappearance of Norman Prestwick is not exactly, technically-speaking anyway, an impossible disappearance, but more a mysterious vanishing without an apparent reason. It reminded me of the disappearance of Dr. James Earle from The Hog's Back Mystery (1933) by Freeman Wills Crofts. One moment he was sitting by the fire in his bedroom slippers reading a newspaper and the next moment he was gone. So only a quasi-impossible vanishing, but those first couple of chapters really do capture the spirit of John Dickson Carr and reads like a impossible crime story.

James and Cressida go out to investigate, but the pleasant, sunny weather and the London sounds of mid-morning bustle makes "Eve's tale of a man vanished in the shadowy quiet of that day's dawn" seem "more incongruous than ever" – like "being rapt away by the fairies." That's not the only mystery that has James enthralled. Eve discovered an extra key, a front door key, on Norman's key ring that does not fit their own front door. Doors without keys are ten a penny, but a key without a door is something very different, "there is something inherently mysterious about an unknown key," but regrettably does not heed his own warning that "one should never gratuitously open doors without knowing what's behind them." James finds the door fitting the key, opens it and discovers a body. And, from there on out, the whole story simply collapses into itself.

Key Without a Door goes in a handful of chapters from a fascinatingly-posed and presented mystery of a man in pajamas being spirited away from his doorstep to a boring, uninspired thriller. The underhanded business dealings, government contracts, emerging technologies, kidnappings, attempted murders, successful assassinations and even a Great Villain (known only as Shaman) are enough to distract the book away from the tantalizing disappearance of Norman. Only thing really worth mentioning from the second-half is the open ending ("I have a fancy, a fantasy, that one day I shall meet him again myself") suggesting a continuation of the series, but, for whatever reason, it never materialized.

So the puzzling vanishing is not brought up, until James has an inspirational moment showing how it could have been done and it certainly is an interesting take on this type of solution. Very different from how I imagined it was done (more on that in a minute). But nothing more than that. And nothing special or good enough to save the book as a whole. On the contrary, it made the second-half even worse as you feel the first three chapters lured you into an old, dirty van with the words "FREE CANDY" crudely scrawled on the side under false pretenses. I had hoped the twenty-eight year gap between Lejeune's impossible crime novels would have given his second stab at the form some weight and more substance, but Mr. Diabolo is definitely the better of the two. Mr. Diabolo might have unwarranted bluffed and bragged its way through the story without anything to show for it at the end, but at least remained consistent throughout. More importantly, it tried to do something with its alluring premise for longer than three chapters.

I can't recommend Key Without a Door. Not even to locked room and impossible crime fanatics.

A note for the curious: the last time I tacked one of my alternative, armchair solutions to a review was back in June when reviewing Norman Berrow's The Spaniard's Thumb (1949). What put this idea into my head is the suspicious description of the front door setting of the Prestwick home, which is not at street level, but half-basement height forming a small area with trashcans and several steps up to street level – surrounded by iron railings. A nice little place, obscured from view, to pull some shenanigans. In roughly two out of three of these vanishing mysteries, the victim, one way or another, had a hand in their own disappearance. I reasoned Norman could have left a parcel of clothes and shoes in one of the trashcans. So when Norman goes outside to get the milk and papers, he puts the clothes over his pajamas, puts on the shoes and maybe a hat or cap with a wig attached to it and walks away. One minute to throw on the clothes and one minute to get as far away from the front door as possible. Eve looked down the street looking for a barefoot Norman in pajamas. Not a normally dressed stranger. There was no danger in Eve calling to him to ask if he had seen a man in pajamas going down the street, because the milkman was doing his morning round. Who would you ask if they had seen Norman in that situation... a complete stranger of the milkman? Makes sense, right? But, of course, nothing at all was done with it and gave too much importance to the setting. So another marvelous misfire of a false-solution from the Roger Sheringham of the Netherlands!

Mr. Diabolo (1960) by Anthony Lejeune

Edward Anthony Thompson, better known during his lifetime as "Anthony Lejeune," was a British political writer, syndicated columnist, editor, reporter, reviewer and radio broadcaster – whose weekly show, London Letter, ran for thirty years in South Africa. Lejeune also had some interesting connections, real and fictitious, to the world of crime.

Lejeune was a close friend of the bestselling thriller writer Dennis Wheatley and, reportedly, through Ian Fleming got the job as the crime correspondent for The Sunday Times. In 1953, Lejeune began reviewing detective novels in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet and began to dabble in crime-and detective fiction before the end of that decade. Between 1959 and 1988, he wrote nine detective novels of various stripes beginning with a spy-thriller, Crowded and Dangerous (1959). So, going on those scant few pieces of background information, you wouldn't expect Lejeune to turn up on this blog, but he wrote more than just thrillers or spy-fiction. Lejeune actually had a traditional bend with two of his novels, Mr. Diabolo (1960) and Key Without a Door (1988), being included in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). The former elicited some interesting and contrasting comments and opinions.

Adey briefly mentioned Mr. Diabolo in his introduction ("imaginative") and added the following comment under the solution at the back of the book, "almost a classic and would have been had the detective been a little more interesting and the book rather longer." John, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Mr. Diabolo back in 2012 and concluded it “aspires to true greatness and promises to dazzle the reader,” but “only manages to raise a faint glow of surprise” of what "might have been a real classic in locked room mysteries." Jim, of The Invisible Event, thought it was "written like it's five times as clever as it actually turns out to be" and struggled to find something to say, while admittedly being "amazed that this sort of book was published in the 1960s" – even though the whole thing ultimately left him cold. Adey's problem appears to have been the colorless detective and short length of the story rather than the plot. John thought the ending did not measure up to the premise of the strange legend and the vanishing, ghost-like killer. Jim couldn't possible care less about either. That only inflamed my curiosity even more. So it got tossed on the special locked room wishlist.

Having now read it, I can say Lejeune's Mr. Diabolo, purely as a locked room mystery, can be filed under the "Curiosities & Oddities" of the genre. However, it's also an earnest, well intended homage to John Dickson Carr and has neatly posed, multiple miraculous disappearances and a locked room murder. You can hardly miss which novel in particular inspired him (The Arabian Nights Murder, 1936), which comes with a light sprinkling of Clayton Rawson (Death from a Top Hat, 1938), but largely failed to deliver on its promising and fantastic premise. I think the book is best compared in that regard to Hugh Holman's Up This Crooked Way (1946) and Herbert Brean's Wilders Walk Away (1948), but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Mr. Diabolo takes place during the Annual Conference of the Anglo-American Literary and Political Society, "known to its friends as The Alps," at the College of Western Studies. Alistair Burke, of the Foreign Office, narrates the story and represented his office at this transatlantic gathering, but, when he meet the academic Barbara Tracey at the meeting, he began to devote himself "to the task with a zeal far beyond and above the line of duty" – providing the story with the obligatory romantic subplot. During dinner in the Senior Common Room, the old college legend of the alleyway running behind the college called Devil's Lane.

College of Western Studies was founded in the early 1600s by the disciples of John Dee, "an Elizabethan occultist," which was "to promote all forms of good learning" like "alchemy, astrology and the use of crystals." But by the end the 18th century, the college had gone to seed and catered to the bullheaded sons of the local squirearchy. One particularly “wild creature” was young Lord Farrant who "raised what hell he could." There were secret, midnight parties in his rooms and whispers of him indulging in the black arts. It all ended when Lord Farrant was found dead, behind the locked door of his room, lying in the middle of a pentacle that had been drawn on the floor. This discovery was preceded by a sighting of a figure wearing a tall hat and cloak with a pointed board and no eyes ("just blackness, like the eye-sockets of a skull") on the track running along the edge of the meadows behind the college. A spot currently known as Devil's Lane. That figure is the same whispered to have been present at the midnight parties and listens to the name Mr Diabolo.

So a thoroughly pleasant dinner conversation followed by a brief discussion on traditional ("nowadays it's all psychology and sordidness. Social realism is the curse of our age") and modern ("I like the new-style mysteries. Philo Vance used to bore me stiff") detective fiction. But when the meeting breaks up, the members and assorted guests get hurled into a detective story of their own.

When the party steps out into the Great Quad, they spot a bizarrely dressed, devilish-looking man wearing a tall, stovepipe hat and a cloak thrown back from his shoulders to reveal "a bottle-green cut-away coat, a red waistcoat and tightly fitting trousers of some cream-coloured material" – nothing where his eyes should have been. An illusion quickly dispelled when they notice the empty eye-sockets is caused by a pair of dark glasses. So they're determined to catch whoever is playing Mr. Diabolo and chase him down Devil's Lane. A police constable and a young man, Bill Frazer, saw the rush past him down the lane, but the watchman at the Warden's Garden on the other swears nobody came out of Devil's Lane. Mr. Diabolo had  "simply appeared and disappeared" like a puff of smoke.

Alistair Burke calls on an old friend from the War Office, Arthur Blaise, who's suitably intrigued by the seemingly impossible disappearance in Devil's Lane to start poking around the college grounds. Blaise particularly wants to talk to Frazer and the watchman ("I suspect you may not have asked them the right questions though"), but Frazer is murdered before he gets a chance. Strangled to death in his room with the door locked on the inside and one of two keys in his pocket. The second key is a duplicate used by the porter to unlock the door, but the key is "so rusty they don't think it can have been touched for quite a while." Not before it opened the door. I thought that was an interesting touch. So while the police carry out the official investigation in the background, Blaise and Burke play amateur detective with the womanizing, blackmailing providing enough motives to go around. But the only thing that really matters is the impossible disappearance and locked room murder.

Firstly, I agree with Jim that the book is presented to the reader five times as clever as actually turns out to be. The opening chapters gives the impression you have something akin to Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954) in your hands, but everything turned out to be as childishly simplistic as it appeared. I think most seasoned mystery readers will be immediately suspicious about something in the setup to the disappearance in Devil's Lane and should, in turn, reveal the right question they didn't ask the watchman. What somewhat saved it from being completely disappointing and unimpressive is that it turned out to be a two-part trick with the answer to the first part uncovering a second impossibility (SPOILER/ROT13: “fb jung lbh'er fnlvat vf gung gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Ze. Qvnobyb'f pybgurf vf nf vzcbffvoyr—be, ng yrnfg, nf zhpu bs n ceboyrz—nf gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Ze. Qvnobyb?”). While the second part of the trick put some much needed shine on the plot, even the story itself admitted it hardly broke any new ground. John Dickson Carr used the trick as an anecdote in one of his celebrated novels, which is probably where Lejeune first heard of it. Regrettably, the locked room murder manages to be even more obvious with one of the oldest, lackluster and routine locked room-tricks on the book. And, in both cases, the obvious or suspicious aspects of the presented impossibilities pointed straight to the culprit. You have to go out of your way to miss it.

A truly great locked room mystery, aspiring to be a classic, would have used the two-part vanishing-act to greater effect nor have dared to present the locked room-trick as anything other than a false-solution. But what the reader got is the equivalent of "Kiddies First Locked Room Mystery." If only Lejeune had penned Mr. Diabolo as a juvenile mystery, it would have actually been a classic of its sort alongside Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950), Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) and Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990). But as a mystery written for grown up kids, like myself, who love detective story this one is all bark and no bite. I can only really recommended it to fanatical locked room fans and completists. 

Addendum: I proofread casually skimmed over the review and noticed I became a little more negative towards the end than originally intended. Even with my expectations dialed back to expect something a whole lot less ambitious than a genre classic, I still ended up disappointed and letdown. But the book was not a struggle to get through nor did it overstay its welcome. And not anywhere near as bad as some of the worst locked room mysteries encountered over the years. Such as the recently reviewed Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger (1927) or Joseph Bowen's bungling in The Man Without a Head (1933). Not to the mention the underside of the bottom of the barrel represented by David L. Marsh's Dead Box (2004). So, if you come across a copy, you don't have to avoid like the plague, but neither do you have to lose any sleep over never coming across a copy.