Death of an Author (1935) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Caroline Rivett was a British mystery novelist who, over a thirty year period, penned over seventy detective novels and a smattering of short stories – published under her two pennames, "E.C.R. Lorac" and "Carol Carnac." Lorac's work was highly regarded during her lifetime, but, as so often is the case, they went out-of-print and mostly out of circulation upon her death in 1958. If your reputation hinges on easily available, secondhand copies of a book like Murder by Matchlight (1945), you can almost under why she had been dismissed for decades as "pedestrian and forgettable." Fortunately, Martin Edwards and the British Library Crime Classics series have gone a long way in restoring Lorac's reputation with reprints of some her better work such as These Names Make Clues (1937), Bats in the Belfry (1937) and Checkmate to Murder (1944). The subject of today's review is arguably the finest Lorac reprint to date.

Last year, British Library reissued Lorac's Death of an Author (1935) and marked this forgotten, out-of-print gem's return to print for the first time in close to a century. A very fitting title to reprint today considering the premise and characters populating the story aged like a vintage bottle of wine.

Death of an Author begins with a successful publisher, Andrew Marriott of Langston's, giving some attention to one of their prize authors, Michael Ashe, whose novels are "regarded as the best things of their type since Conrad" ("...and they sold"). Ashe terrifies Marriott by threatening to turn to crime fiction to fight the early onset of fossilization ("I'm getting stylised"), which is countered by the shocked publisher that "crime stories are a legitimate branch of fiction, but they're mere ephemerals" selling like hot cakes today – gone tomorrow. This was not an uncommon opinion among Golden Age mystery writers. Agatha Christie believed her detective stories had a sell-by date, but history, especially the past two decades, proved them wrong. If only John Dickson Carr knew one of the monstrosities of the modern age (the internet) would end up giving his beloved impossible crime story the room (of course, locked from the inside) it needed to thrive like never before. Anyway, Ashe points to another one of Marriott's prized authors, Vivian Lestrange, whose bestseller, The Charterhouse Case, is "a crime story that is in the rank of first rate novels." Ashe asks his publisher to arrange a dinner party and introduce him to his fellow writer, but Marriott tries to explain Lestrange is a notorious recluse.

That and there's another problem. Ashe believes Lestrange is a man and an ex-convict, but Marriott has actually met Lestrange in person and was astonished to discover his top-selling "thriller merchant" proved to be a tall, slim and capable young woman. Surprisingly, Miss Lestrange accepts the invitation under the condition that Ashe respects her privacy and not leak her secret to the public. The meeting between Miss Lestrange and the bewildered Ashe is very amusing, which Lorac evidently had fun writing down. And not without reason.

Martin Edwards writes in the introduction that "she adopted the ambiguous writing name of E.C.R. Lorac because of a suspicion of prejudice against female authors." Lorac was so good at hiding her identity that she was often referred to by reviewers ("Mr. Lorac can write") and fellow authors ("his Inspector Macdonald is one of the most sympathetic professional detectives that I have had the luck to encounter," Nicholas Blake) as a man. I think the assumption a man was behind the Lorac pseudonym had more to do with the technical side and murder methods featuring in her plots that recall the work of the so-called "humdrum" mystery writers, which is commonly associated with male writers. If you read a mystery in the "Had-I-But-Known" vein with an ambiguous name on the cover, the first assumption most readers would make is that it was probably written by a woman. But there have been male writers who dabbled in the feminine HIBK school (e.g. Baynard Kendrick's Blood on Lake Louisa, 1934). Back to the story.

Three months later, the same woman goes to the police who announces herself Vivian Lestrange's secretary, Eleanor Clarke. She's worried sick about her eccentric and reclusive employer, because he appears to have simply disappeared.

I should note here that this case is not in the hands of Lorac's celebrated policeman, Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald of Scotland Yard, but handled by the local policeman Inspector Bond and Chief Inspector Warner of the C.I.D. – who enters the picture after the former has "done a steady week's work investigating the disappearance." Bond and Warner are an engaging pair of characters and investigators, but, sadly, Death of an Author is their only recorded case. The introduction suggests the characters were probably abandoned, prematurely, when Lorac jumped ship from Sampson Low "to the more prestigious Collins Crime Club imprint." Death of an Author was incidentally her last published by Sampson Low. Whatever the reason might have been, Lorac presented Bond, Warner and the reader with a pretty problem to pick apart.

Eleanor Clarke explains Vivian Lestrange is an eccentric recluse, practically cripped with rheumatism, who dislikes visitors and publicity. And lived pretty much in complete anonymity. So, when people began to pester him, Eleanor Clarke took on the role of Vivian Lestrange. Just one tiny problem: Lestrange always wore gloves and nobody outside the small household has ever laid eyes on the celebrated mystery novelist. Only person who could have corroborated her story is Lestrange's housekeeper, Mrs. Fife, but she has also disappeared without a trace. What, exactly, is going on?

Bond and Warner have opposing views of the case, or rather about Clarke's absurd story in addition to a noticeable lack of background, which arouses the suspicion of the former. Bond sees her as "one of those queer secretive women" who appeared to have been very much at home with her equally secretive employer. Could they have been one and the same person after all. Warner gives her cool, collected account of the strange situation a bit more credit, but wonders whether they're "handling a case for a psycho-analyst, a case of perjury or a murder case." Everything they uncover along the way proves to be "susceptible to various interpretations" to an almost maddening degree. Even the eventual discovery of a body only ends up deepening the problem instead of giving some much needed clarity to the two detectives.

Death of an Author is an exemplary detective novel in how it takes an ultimately simple situation and turned into a maze-like structure merely by playing a game of Guess Who? with the cast of characters. A very intense, hard fought game of Guess Who? that chipped away at Warner's sanity and remarked towards the end, "if I petitioned Parliament do you think I could get an enactment that no man writes under any name but his own” and “his finger-prints be registered on the title page?" ("it oughtn't to be allowed... hardened offenders... recidivists..."). It goes without saying Death of an Author emerged as splendid detective novel comparable to the best from Christopher Bush, Freeman Wills Crofts and especially Brian Flynn. My favorite Lorac reprint to date. Highly recommended!

Bats in the Belfry (1937) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Rivett was a prolific mystery novelist who penned seventy-some detective novels and a handful of short stories, published under the pseudonyms "E.C.R. Lorac" and "Carol Carnac," which the British Library Crime Classics expanded with a long-lost novel, Two-Way Murder (2021) – originally intended to be published as by "Mary Le Bourne." Martin Edwards and the British Library have not only did a bang-up job in resurrecting Lorac from near-total obscurity, but they also helped rehabilitate her once tarnished reputation. Lorac used to be considered a dull, clunky and largely forgettable humdrum writer like a cross between the worst of John Rhode and Ngaio Marsh. She has a number of novels to her names, such as Death Came Softly (1943) and Murder by Matchlight (1945), which do nothing to dispel that notion. But the recent run of reprints revealed Lorac was an uneven mystery writer. Not a bad one. 

These Names Make Clues (1937) and Checkmate to Murder (1944) changed my views on Lorac as they turned out to be intelligently written, smartly plotted and well-characterized mysteries. And everything but dull or humdrum. Both novels are good examples of Lorac's tendency to plot her own route through a conventional detective story. I think Jim nailed it in his 2018 review of today's subject when he said Lorac didn't reinvent the wheel, but put "a different tread on the tyres." Since it was Jim who was ahead of the current Lorac Revival, why not take a gamble on one of his recommendations. So let's examine, what Martin Edwards called, "a hidden gem from the Golden Age of Murder."

The British Library edition of Lorac's Bats in the Belfry (1937) is subtitled "A London Mystery" and the theme of the story is "odd things do happen in London." A story that begins with a gathering at the home of "that distinguished ornament of the Authors' Club," Bruce Attleton, following the funeral of Anthony Fell – a "cousin of sorts" of Bruce who died in a car wreck. This gathering comprises of Bruce's glamorous wife and well-known actress, Sybilla. Bruce's 19-year-old ward, Elizabeth Leigh. A young, brash journalist, Robert Grenville, who wishes to marry Elizabeth, but Bruce refuses to give his guardian's consent as he believes it would be "a mistake for her to get tied up before she's seen enough of the world." A heavily-built, well-tailored and wealthy stockbroker, Thomas Burroughs. And another close friend of the Attletons, Neil Rockingham. So the conversation turns to murder or rather that age-old problem of how to get rid of a pesky corpse or "what method could you dispose of it so as to avoid any future liabilities." Once phrase from this discussion lingers throughout a large part of the story, "concrete him up into the permanent fabric of the establishment." But then another problem presents itself.

Bruce Attleton is informed by his butler that a gentleman named Debrette phoned while he was out and snaps to the butler, "if he rings up again, tell him I'll bash his bloody head in." Rockingham has noticed Attleton has something on his mind and suspects his friend might be blackmailed or even threatened by this mysterious Debrette. So he decides to form an alliance with Robert Grenville to draw on his journalistic expertise to get a line on Debrette, which leads him to a dark, rundown belfry studio known around the neighborhood by its cheery nickname, the Morgue – scheduled to be demolished. I suspect the scenes with Grenville trying to play the amateur sleuth was Lorac gently poking fun at the mystery thrillers of the 1920s with their young, smart alecky and love-struck heroes. What happens to him throughout the story and how the incidents began to escalate bordered sometimes on darkly comedic slapstick. And that tended to strike a false-note with the serious, even gruesome nature of the case. Bats in the Belfry is not a black, comedic spoof of the detective story, but one of the scenes with Grenville forced me to tag this review with the "locked room mysteries" toe-tag. That requires a brief explanation before getting to the meat of the story.

While on the hunt, Grenville rented the belfry studio and rigged the place with booby traps to give the alarm if anybody gets in, but Grenville is attacked by an intruder "who got in and got out through locked and bolted doors" without disturbing "Grenville's strategic arrangement of pails and tin trays." A very minor, utterly simplistic locked room mystery, which is not given much attention and easily explained away on the last page, but still qualifies as a locked room mystery. I didn't intend to add yet another locked room review to the blog, but those damned, infernal things haunt me like an Edgar Allan Poe creation.

Rockingham turns to Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald, of Scotland Yard, when Bruce Attleton and Debrette simultaneously go missing. It doesn't take very long for Macdonald to uncover an otherwise craftily hidden, headless and handless corpse posing a tricky conundrum to the Scotsman. Whose body? Did the author dispose of a blackmailer or did Debrette have a motive to get rid of Attleton? Or is there another possibility? After all, Attleton apparently gave a sign of life and Debrette was spotted in Trafalgar Square. A case as murky as it's muddled and demonstrates Lorac's tendency to approach a fairly standard, straight forward problem in a roundabout way. So the plot can feel a little muddled in places and the ending revealed certain elements that were alluded to held less weight in the end and were kind of glossed over (HUGE SPOILER/ROT13: "abguvat zber pna or cebirq nobhg gur qrnguf bs Nggyrgba'f oebgure naq Nagubal Sryy" or gur ohgyre'f nppvqrag). Nonetheless, the story and plot is not without merit or some truly inspired touches.

Firstly, I thought the method Macdonald employed to identify the headless, handless corpse was quite clever. Back in those days, the police needed a head with an undamaged face and teeth, hands to take fingerprints or some distinctive mark on the body – like a scar or birthmark. And without any of those identifying factors, it would be next to impossible to identify a headless, handless body without any scars or birthmarks in the 1930s. So it was an inspired piece of thinking on Macdonald's part and very fortunate the victim used such a service. Secondly, while the murderer's "whole plan shows an effrontery which simply passes belief," the complicated scheme has an element I've never seen before. The murderer's (SPOILERS/ROT13) bevtvany cyna jnf gb yrnir qbhog nf gb jub xvyyrq jub (nf gur obql jbhyq unir orra orlbaq vqragvsvpngvba) naq hfr gur ynj gung “n zheqrere pnaabg cebsvg ol uvf pevzr” ntnvafg gur ivpgvzf gb frpher gur sbeghar, but the premature discovery of the body demolished that plan. To quote Jim again, Lorac is "not as rigorous as Christie, not as refined as Sayers, not as dull as Marsh," but she had undoubtedly something different to contribute to the British detective. Just like her ambiguously, pen-named contemporary, “Anthony Gilbert,” she did it in her own, slightly unusual way. What's not to be overlooked is Lorac's keen awareness and observations of the world around her, which gives a work today an odd historical flavor. For example, Lorac briefly described the loungers who were always to be found in Trafalgar Square, "wrecks of men, unemployed and unemployables, who spent wretched days and nights in streets and doss-houses, scavenging in the very gutters, living on the uncertain charity of passers-by." Not a passage you're likely to come across in most British mysteries of the 1930s.

Add to this the fact that Bats in the Belfry is Lorac's best clued mystery I've read to date, you can easily overlooked some of the muddling and smudges on this otherwise excellent and most of all fascinating Golden Age mystery. A much merited reprint!

I'll try to return to Lorac before too and think of doing three back-to-back. It would be a good way to get Carol Carnac's Crossed Skis (1952), the posthumous Two-Way Murder and another Chief Inspector Macdonald reprint off the pile.

These Names Make Clues (1937) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Rivett was a British mystery writer who prolifically produced detective novels and short stories under two different pseudonyms, "E.C.R. Lorac" and "Carol Carnac," but she was a second-stringer with her seventy some novels being very uneven in quality – contributing to their decent into obscurity following her death in 1958. If you asked about Lorac, you usually got a mixed response.

A few years ago, I reviewed Death Came Softly (1943) and Nick Fuller commented Lorac is like "a cross between John Rhode and Ngiao Marsh" with "the worst aspects of both," while JJ countered that he remained "curious about Lorac purely on account of the uncommon ways she approaches what should be fairly standard problems." Lately, I have noticed a shift and you can likely put it down to the recent run of British Library Crime Classic reprints. Martin Edwards and the British Library have slowly been rehabilitating Lorac's reputation by cherry picking her best detective novels to reprint. Checkmate to Murder (1944) was good enough, in spite of some of its obvious flaws, to reintroduce Lorac to my to-be-read pile. Bats in the Bellfry (1937), Murder in the Mill-Race (1952) and the once lost, now posthumously published, Two-Way Murder (2021) currently reside on the big pile, but one of the more recent reprints sounded too intriguing to ignore or put off for too long.

Martin Edwards described These Names Make Clues (1937) in his introduction as "an intriguing detective novel" closely "in tune with the mood of traditional detective fiction of the kind we associate with 'the Golden Age of Murder’ between the two world wars," but had been practically forgotten until British Library reprinted it. There were no secondhand copies for sale on the internet nor any critical commentary in the reference books. Only a very short review from 2008 on the GADetection Wiki. Going into the book, I half-expected something along the lines of Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table (1936), but These Names Make Clues struck me as a conscious imitation of Christopher Bush's detective novels from the same period – like Dead Man's Twice (1930), The Case of the April Fools (1933) and The Case of the Bonfire Body (1936). It's not just because of how the plot was structured with two closely-timed murders, but there were several references to the characters having "the cross-word mind." A variation on a phrase I have only come across in Bush's novels to describe his series-detective, Ludovic Travers. But let's get to the story! 

These Names Make Clues begins with Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald going through his correspondence and finding an invitation from Graham Coombe and his sister, Miss Susan Coombe, to a Treasure Hunt at Caroline House on April's Fools Day.

Graham Coombe is a celebrated publisher whose firm had produced the bestseller Murder by Mesmerism, which Macdonald had sharply criticized during a diner with Coombe without being aware he had published the book. So the invitation challenges Macdonald to pit his "wits against those of the thriller writers, and others, who are competing" in a Treasure Hunt with "clues of a Literary, Historical and Practical nature" provided to the contestants. Coombe gathered eight writers to participate in the game. Nadia Delareign, Andrew Gardien, Ronile Rees and Denzil Strafford represent the so-called "thriller merchants" and Valerie Woodstock (history), Louise Etherton (romance), Digby Bourne (travel) and Ashton Vale (economics) the straight writers. All of the contestants, who have never met before, is given a pseudonym and "a clue to unravel," which has to be deciphered to get to the next stage in the game. The library and telephone-room with guides and timetables is at their disposal. The hunt ends with a final test during which each guest will be allowed to ask six questions in an attempt to deduce, or guess, the identities of their fellow guests.

Macdonald finds himself in the hospitality of a publisher "who turned the other cheek to the smiter" and "who at the same time challenged the critic to use his wits in practical combat against those whom he had derided," which makes him feel like he was hoist with his own petard, but set to work – working his way through a variety of clues and running ahead in the Treasure Hunt. The whole evening begins to acquire "a Mad Hatter quality" when the main fuse blows and the house is plunged into darkness. When the lights are finally restored, the body of Andrew Gardien is discovered in the telephone-room. Apparently, Gardien died of heart failure following a shock, but marks on his hands and a minute fraying of copper wire makes Macdonald suspect the thriller writer had been cleverly electrocuted. And the murderer had removed the gadget that did the trick. Interestingly, Gardien earned the nickname "Master Mechanic" due "to his ingenuity in inventing methods of killing based on simple mechanical contraptions" involving "bits of cord and wire and counterpoises."

Now the "Lights Out, Murder!" trope tends to be one of the genuine hacky and trite cliches of the genre, which actually would be more of obstacle to the murderer than a cover, but These Names Make Clues is an exception to the rule. Lorac had a very simple, but good, explanation why the house went dark. Particularly liked how the blown fuse ended up affecting the murderer's plan. One of Lorac's more ingenious and inspired pieces of plotting. So with a good reason for the blackout in place, the movement of everyone involved becomes much more interesting with several of the guests swearing they saw an uninvited person in the house leading up to the murder. A gray-haired, flat-footed gentleman who's nowhere to be found when the lights come back on, but this mysterious interloper is not the only complication Macdonald has to contend with.

Macdonald has a potential murder on his hands with a victim who had completely obscures his identity and past life, which becomes even more mysterious when Gardien's literary agent is shot in his private office. Gardien's name was accusingly written on the blotting paper and a gun is discovered entangled in the mechanisms of a grandfather clock, but the timing between the two deaths simply don't add up for them to have killed one another. So what really happened to those two mysterious men that lead to their equally mysterious deaths? 

These Names Make Clues is a tremendously enjoyable mystery novel in which Lorac tried to rise above her status as a second-stringer with a tricky plot attuned "attuned to the cross-word method, anagrams and reversals" with several cleverly contrived death traps. There are, however, some of Lorac's usual flaws show up like her roundabout way (like JJ said) in which she approached what should have been a fairly straightforward problem. I think the second death needlessly complicated the case and it would perhaps have better if that death had been immediately explained, which would have then added another layer of mystification to Gardien's murder. Like a lot of second-stringers, Lorac's strength was not in creating misleading, double-edged clues or even more treacherous red herrings and reasoning your way to the solution requires a bit of inspired guesswork – which is normally a serious flaw in any detective story. But the story and characters were so enjoyable, I found myself in an extremely forgiving mood. Martin Edwards noted in his introduction Lorac was elected to membership to "the world's first social network for detective novelists," the Detection Club, in 1937 (same year as Bush) and she likely "drew inspiration from her experiences and encounters on becoming a member of the Detection Club" for These Names Make Clues. For example, Miss Romile Rees, who writes as R. Rees, is "accepted by the critics as a man" on account of her dry, mordant style. Something that has happened to Lorac herself as there were not many female mystery writers who toyed around with mechanical death traps. A toy commonly associated with the technical-minded writers of the humdrum school. Speaking of the humdrums, I think Lorac subtly namedropped a few of John Rhode's pavement-themed names (like "Major Road ahead" and "just off John Street").

Something else I always admired about Lorac's novels, which is very much present in These Names Make Clues, is her awareness of what was happening in Britain and Europe before, during and after the Second World War. Checkmate to Murder and Murder by Matchlight (1945) depicted the squalor of blackouted London during the Blitz, while Fire in the Thatch (1946) takes place among the bombed-out houses of a scarred, post-war London. These Names Make Clues was written several years before the outbreak of the war, but the possibility of war is already present here with several characters being convinced pacifists and members of the Peace in our Time campaign. You can fill entire bookshelves with detective novels and short story taking place during or after the Second World War, but very few mystery writers were prescient enough to tackle a potential war during the 1930s. Only names that come to mind are E.R. Punshon (Crossword Mystery, 1934) and Darwin L. Teilhet (The Talking Sparrow Murders, 1934). This gives Lorac's novels a kind of unintended historical flavor that I can always appreciate. 

These Names Make Clues has some of the flaws you come to expect from Lorac, but the overall package of characters, plot and storytelling made it something very much worth resurrecting from the depths of biblioblivion. And, if these British Library reprints are representative of her best novels, Lorac could very well secure a place among my favorite second-stringers of the genre.

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) edited by Martin Edwards

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) is the third, wintry-themed anthology published in the British Library Crime Classics series, edited by Martin Edwards, collecting eleven festive stories about "unexplained disturbances in the fresh snow" and "the darkness that lurks beneath the sparkling decorations" – wrapped and presented to the reader like "a seasonal assortment box." This collection presents a wide variety of merry mayhem from the pens of some very well-known mystery writers to a few names who have only recently been rediscovered. But none of the stories have been, what you could call, anthologized to death. So let's pig on this suspicious looking, crime sprinkled Christmas pudding, shall we? Hmm, smells like bitter almonds! 

The collections opens with Baroness Orczy's "A Christmas Tragedy," originally published in the December, 1909, issue of Cassell's Magazine, which has a Christmas Eve party keeping an ear out for "the sound of a cart being driven at unusual speed." A sound that has lately become associated with a series of "dastardly outrages against innocent animals" in the neighborhood of Clevere Hall. So everyone is very keen to put a stop to these cattle-maiming outrages and the cart is heard that night, but this time it was followed by a terrible cry, "Murder! Help! Help!" Major Ceely, host of the party, is found on the garden steps with a knife wound between his shoulder blades. The local police gladly accepts the assistance of Lady Molly, of Scotland Yard, whose success or failure will decide the fate of an innocent man. Not a bad story for the time, but not one of my personal favorites. 

Selwyn Jepson's "By the Sword" first appeared in the December, 1930, issue of Cassell's Magazine and has claimed a place among my favorite seasonal mysteries. Alfred Caithness is spending Christmas with his cousin, Judge Herbert Caithness, who has an idyllic home life with a wife, Barbara, who's twenty-eight years his junior and a five-year-old son, Robert – who loves playing with his toy soldiers. So the perfect setting for an old-fashioned Christmas party, but Alfred has reasons to be more than a little envious of his cousin. He has loved Barbara ever since attending their wedding and sorely needs the kind of money Herbert has aplenty, which is why he decides his cousin has to go when he denies him another loan. So, inspired by the family legend saying that "a Caithness always dies by the sword," Alfred begins to plot the perfect murder with all the evidence pointing to an outsider. However, the entire universe, or the Ghosts of Christmas, appear to be against him as even the best-laid plans can go awry. A fantastic inverted mystery from the hoist-on-their-petards category.

John Pringle is perhaps best remembered today by his principle pseudonym, "Gerald Verner," who prolifically produced pulp-style detective and thriller novels during his lifetime. "The Christmas Card Crime," published as by “Donald Stuart,” originally appeared in the December, 1934, publication of Detective Weekly (No. 96). Trevor Lowe, a well-known dramatist and amateur detective, who you might remember from my reviews of Terror Tower (1935) and The Clue of the Green Candle (1938) is en route with his secretary Arnold White and Detective Inspector Shadgold to spend Christmas with a friend in a small Cornish village, but their train becomes stranded when the heavy snowfall blocks the line. So they have to walk back to the previous station along with seven other passengers, six men and a woman, but they have to go from the empty station to an old, gloomy inn of ill-repute. During the night, two people are murdered in short succession with the thick, undisturbed carpet of snow indicating "no one came from outside and no one has left from within." The only real clue Lowe has to work with is a torn Christmas card. A good and fun piece of Christmas pulp, but more memorable for its mise-en-scène than its plot. However, I have to give props for turning the last words of the second victim in a kind of dying message sort of pointing to the murderer.

The next two stories have been previously reviewed on this blog, here and here, but, needless to say, Carter Dickson's "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) and Ronald A. Knox's "The Motive" (1937) can be counted among the best stories in the collection. Both come highly recommended! 

Francis Durbridge's "Paul Temple's White Christmas" first appeared in Radio Times on December 20, 1946, but reads more like vignette than a proper short-short story. Paul Temple's dream of a white Christmas in Switzerland is granted when he's asked to go there to identify the main suspect in that Luxembourg counterfeit business he had help to smash. So not much to say about this one with only half a dozen pages and a razor thin plot. 

Cyril Hare's "Sister Bessie or Your Old Leech" was originally published in the Evening Standard on December 23, 1949, which is another one of my personal favorites from this collection. Timothy Trent was brought up by his step family, the Grigsons, but Timothy was the only "one of that clinging, grasping clan" who "got on in the world" and made money – someone from that family has been annually blackmailing him. Every year, around Christmas time, he receives a payment notice signed by "From your old Leech." Timothy was actually surprised by the latest demand, because he assumed he had gotten rid of Leech last February. But here he was again. Or was it a she? Timothy goes to the Grigson family party determined to smoke out the blackmailer, but, once again, even the best-laid plans can go awry and here it comes with a particular dark, poisonous sting in the tail. An excellent crime story demonstrating why Hare was admired by both his contemporary brethren and modern crime writers like P.D. James and Martin Edwards. 

E.C.R. Lorac's "A Bit of Wire-Pulling" originally appeared under the title "Death at the Bridge Table" in the Evening Standard on October 11, 1950, which is another short-short. Inspector Lang, the old C.I.D. man, tells the story of the time he had to protect an important industrialist, Sir Charles Leighton, who received threatening letters promising he will be dead before the old year's out. So he accompanies him, incognito, to a New Year's Eve bridge party where's shot to death in front of Lang's eyes and the murderer apparently managed to escape. However, the sharp-eyed detective quickly begins to pick up the bits and pieces that tell an entirely different story. More importantly, he trusts the men he has personally trained. Lorac was somewhat of a female John Rhode, as she was very keen on technical trickery, but you can't help but feel the murderer was doomed from the start by employing such a ballsy method. A pretty decent short-short. Not especially memorable, but not bad either. 

John Bude's "Pattern of Revenge," another short-short, was first published in The London Mystery Magazine (No. 21) in 1954 and surprisingly turned out to be an impossible crime story set in Norway. The story is a retrospective of a rivalry between two men, Thord Jensen and Olaf Kinck, who vy for the attention of a beautiful woman, Karen Garborg, but one morning she found dead on the doorstep of her cottage – stabbed through the heart. There was "only one set of tracks in the fresh-fallen snow," single footprints alternating with deep pock-marks, "characteristic of the imprint left by a wooden leg." Olaf has a wooden leg and his fingerprints were on the knife. So he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but a deathbed confession shed new light on the murder and attempts to right a wrong. A very well done short-short and a truly pleasant surprise to come across this unusual take on the footprints-in-the-snow impossible crime. 

John Bingham's "Crime at Lark Cottage" was originally published in the 1954 Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News and brings a slice of domestic suspense to the family Christmas table. John Bradley gets lost on a dark, snowy evening while his car is on the verge of breaking down and ends up at a lonely cottage. There he finds a woman with her small daughter and asks to use the phone, but is offered to stay the night as there's not garage around who would come out to the cottage at that time of night in foul weather. But she appears to be frightened. And it looks like someone is prowling around the cottage. A very well done piece of crime fiction that would have served perfectly as a radio-play for Suspense.

The last story to round out this seasonal anthology is Julian Symons' "'Twix the Cup and Lip," but nothing he wrote interests me and skipped it. That brings me to the end of this collection.

So, on a whole, The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories is a splendidly balanced anthology with Dickson, Hare, Jepson, Knox and Stuart delivering the standout stories of the collection with the other entries being a little too short or dated to leave an indelible impression on the reader. But not a single real dud or over anthologized story to be found. Two things that tend to be obligatory for these types of short story collections. Definitely recommended for those cold, shortening days of December.

Checkmate to Murder (1944) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Rivett was a British detective novelist who wrote more than 70 mysteries under two different pseudonyms, "Carol Carnac" and "E.C.R. Lorac," which can best be categorized as John Rhode-like "humdrum" novels reminiscent of Ngaio Marsh, but my limited experience with Lorac has been spotty – mostly pedestrian and forgettable. So why pick such an uneven, second-string writer on the heels of several underwhelming detective novels?

British Library Crime Classics has reissued seven of her novels over the past two, or three, years and their latest reprint, Checkmate to Murder (1944), sounded too good to ignore. I'm glad to report it's the best Lorac I've read so far.

This brand new edition is subtitled "A Second World War Mystery" and Martin Edwards wrote in his introduction that the book is a fascinating account of "a domestic crime committed at a time of national crisis." Lorac certainly exploited the blacked-out London setting backdrop better here than in Murder by Matchlight (1945) and more memorable than the depiction of post-war Britain in Fire in the Thatch (1946), which are two of her best known mysteries. But barely remember either. Something that's less likely to happen with Checkmate to Murder.

Checkmate to Murder largely takes place in, and around, the large, grimy and beetle-infested Hampstead studio of a little-known painter, Bruce Manaton, who shares the place with his fastidious and artistic sister, Rosanne – who had been badly hit by the war. And now they were constantly swinging back and forth between being broke and absolutely broke. Story opens on a cold, foggy winter evening in January and five people were gathered in that grimy, dimly lit studio. An obscure actor, André Delaunier, who sits on a model's platform garbed in a scarlet robe and a broad-rimmed Cardinal's hat. Opposite the sitter, Manaton is furiously attacking a canvas with a piece of charcoal and occasionally utterers orders at Delaunier ("Chin up, chin up—to the right a little"). On the other end of the studio, two men were playing an absorbing game of chess under a single light bulb. Robert Cavenish is an elderly, highly respected Civil Servant and the younger Ian Mackellon is "a first-class chemist" in government employ. Rosanne is preparing supper in the kitchen and occasionally pops her head around the door.

A quiet, peaceful evening in Bohemian squalor rudely disturbed when a Special Constable bursts into the studio with a limping Canadian soldier in tow. Neil Folliner is the grand-nephew of the Manaton's misery landlord, Albert Folliner, who's "a nasty old skinflint" and was either as poor as a church mouse or hoarded money.

Albert Folliner lived alone in a largely empty house, using his bedroom as a living room, which is where his grand-nephew found his body with a bullet in his head. An empty cash-box and pistol lay on the floor. Only a few seconds after discovering the body, a Special Constable enters the bedroom and chases the soldier who he saw making a bee-line to the studio "as though for a deliberate reason." So the situation looks very dire for the young soldier, but Detective Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald takes nothing for granted.

Macdonald is not the most distinguished, or colorful, of the Golden Age inspectors, but always thought their quietly competent, purely professional and dogged police work should be seen as a payoff for the lack of a personality, eccentricities or (God forbid) a private life – ensuring there are no outside distractions. Macdonald focus here is entirely on the case as he reduces the number of suspects to half-a-dozen, inquires into the previous tenants of the studio and asks what role the Special Constable had to play in the murder or why he looked so frightened. All the while, the grimness of the war hangs heavily over the story like a dark black-out curtain!

The introduction notes Checkmate to Murder takes place during "a period of British history when blackouts, fire-watching, and air raid precautions were an everyday fact of life" and "black-out regulations were a nightmare" to Rosanne, but her brother was always forgetting them and "the probability of being fined always hung over their heads." She unwittingly robbed herself of an alibi when she went outside to inspect the black-out curtains, but the whole district is dotted with derelict, or bombed-out, buildings awaiting demolition and it's mentioned that a lot of capital is tied-up in it now that the war has brought everything to a grinding halt. So this gives everyone a one-size fits-all motive to shoot the old man, because they all could use a bit of money. Lorac also showed how the war impacted people in much smaller ways. Such as how Rosanne had treasured, "like fine gold," some China tea against an emergency for months and a colleague of Macdonald had to feed a hungry witness.

There are, however, some smudges on the plot that held it back a little. Firstly, it's not difficult to figure out who did it and how. Secondly, the problem of the cast-iron alibis is acknowledged, but never explored, or discussed, as usually the case with alibi-breakers (see Christopher Bush) and can understand why Lorac danced around this issue – because a discussion would have lead to an obvious question. A question that would have given the whole game away. So if you can figure what question to ask and answer it, you'll have no problem identifying the murderer. Lastly, Lorac demonstrated her status as a second-stringer by giving the motive a personal dimension. An unnecessary, last-minute addition that actually cheapened the solution. Checkmate to Murder had worked towards the solution by showing how hard life had become during the war, "what with taxation and cost of living," which made the cash-box a perfectly acceptable motive. And fitted the overall theme of the story. So no idea why Lorac decided to add an ulterior layer to the motive.

Nevertheless, Checkmate to Murder is mostly a solid, well written and competently plotted detective novel with some finely drawn characters, an excellently realized backdrop and some good ideas (like the alibi-trick). Not everything is perfectly executed, but it's her best novel to date and comparable to some of Marsh's better efforts, e.g. Death in a White Tie (1938) and Overture to Death (1939). So recommended to readers who previously didn't have much luck with Lorac or with a special interest World War II period British mystery novels.

A Melee of Miraculous Mysteries

Years ago, I compiled a list, entitled "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries II: Short Stories and Novellas," which covered, as one of the comments pointed out, impossible crime tales from the well-known locked room anthologies amalgamated with a handful of more obscure stories – such as Robert Arthur's unsung classic "The Glass Bridge" (collected in Mystery and More Mystery, 1966). I wanted to update this list for years, but simply had not enough material at my disposal to expend on it.

So I have been discussing more short story collections and single short stories on this blog, which has brought some gems or interesting curiosities to light. I'll be drawing on these reviews when I have read enough to finally update the list. This blog-post is meant to reduce the glut of single short stories clogging my pile of unread detective stories. I'll be going through them in the order I have read them.

Craig Rice's "...And Be Merry" is a short-short story of three pages, originally published in the January, 1954, issue of Manhunt and confronts John J. Malone with the impossible poisoning of Alma Madison. She was found dead in a locked dinette, but Captain von Flanagan, of Homicide, told Malone they had been unable to find even "a trace of cyanide in that whole apartment." The victim was under treatment of a psychiatrist and the explanation hinges on her eccentric behavior. An unusual short-short impossible crime story, but, sadly, also a very forgettable one.

Charles Larson's "Mail Me My Tombstone" appears to have been only published in the April, 1943, issue of Ten Detective Aces and is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

Jim is a happily married writer of detective stories, but "the mad jangling" of the telephone briefly turns his life upside down. An old flame, named Rita Manning, has been arrested for the murder of her husband, Steven Loring, who was "a big-time gambler," but Rita tells him she was with her mother when three witnesses heard gun shots from inside the house – she wants Jim to solve the murder by posing as her lawyer. A complicating factor is that the house was securely locked and bolted from the inside with the sooth in chimney undisturbed. A minor, but pleasant, story with a solution obviously derived from a famous short story and the locked room-trick is a slight modification of an age-old trick.

Ed Bryant's "The Lurker in the Locked Bedroom" was originally published in the June, 1971, issue of Fantastic and blends fantasy, horror and contemporary crime fiction with a psychic detective and a classic locked room scenario – which was somewhat reminiscent of Edogawa Rampo (e.g. "The Human Chair" and "The Stalker in the Attic"). Aleister Houghman is called to the Swithit Hotel for Young Ladies where three young women have been assaulted and raped in Room 491, but the door of the room has "a latch, a safety chain and two bolt-type locks." So how did the perpetrator managed to get to the women? The solution is a pure, undiluted fantasy with a great and darkly humorous take on a classic trope of the horror genre, which kind of disqualifies it as a locked room mystery. However, it certainly is a memorable treatment of the impossible crime story.

E.C.R. Lorac's "Remember to Ring Twice" is one of the few short stories she produced, originally published in 1950 in the Evening Standard, which was finally reprinted in the anthology The Long Arm of the Law (2017).

Police Constable Tom Brandon overhears a conversation in the bar of The Jolly Sailor about five hundred pounds, an elderly aunt and being "fed up lookin' after the old lady." A week later, P.C. Brandon is walking his beat when this conversation comes floating back to him when, behind the locked front door of a house, he hears "a faint scream and a series of heavy thuds." The front door is unlocked and they find the elderly aunt at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. Unfortunately, the story was way too short to play and the solution too technical to be completely fair with the reader, but it certainly was a good police story. I liked it.

The next story I read was Harry Kemelman's "The Man on the Ladder," collected The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories (1968), which everyone appears to like, but I didn't care for it at all. The quasi-impossible situation is a man falling to his death from a roof and the murderer has an iron-clad alibi, but the solution was infuriatingly obvious. And this made the second half a drag to read.

Finally, Eric Ambler's "The Case of the Overheated Service Flat," originally published in the July 24, 1940, issue of The Sketch and is one of only half-a-dozen short stories about the refugee Czech detective, Dr. Jan Czissar – who's a thorn in the side of Assistant-Commissioner Mercer. In this story, the police is trying to hook a notorious wife-killer, Thomas Jones, who prematurely buried three wives after they tragically died from carbon-monoxide poisoning. These deaths have left him a man of independent means, but the first two deaths have been shelved as unfortunate accidents. And the police really want to nail him for the murder of his third wife. Only problem is how to proof it.

The premise of the story is very similar to Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Wife Killer," collected The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), which even has a clever, science-based solution that you would expect from Porges! I really liked this tale and you can expect me to return to this series at some point in the future.

So, all in all, this medley of impossible crime stories was the expected mixed bag of tricks, but I'm glad I can now cross them off my locked room column of my to-be-read list. I'll try to pick a non-impossible crime novel for my next read.

Death Came Softly (1943) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edit Rivett was an astonishingly productive writer of detective fiction and churned out more than seventy novels under two different pennames, "Carol Carnac" and "E.C.R. Lorac," but regardless of productivity, she had been largely forgotten even by readers of the traditional detective story – until the British Library began to reprint her work. Just last year, they reissued Bats in the Belfry (1937), Murder by Matchlight (1945) and Fire in the Thatch (1946). Murder in the Mill Race (1952) will be released in May of this year.

So I decided to reacquaint myself with Lorac and her Chief Inspector Robert MacDonald, because my last read was Rope's End, Rogue's End (1942) and dates back to 2014. I first wanted to go with Bats in the Belfry, but went with Death Came Softly (1943) instead. A decision I have come to regret.

Death Came Softly opened strongly when a recently widowed and comparatively wealthy woman, Mrs. Eve Merrion, rents a empty, lavish mansion in Devonshire in order to get away from wartime London. Valehead House lays "miles away from anywhere," in a remote, wooded valley, with a large, colorful garden full of beauty and neglect. The forty-some room mansion was erected in Georgian times, but this secluded back wood is smudged with the fingerprints of "men of the stone age, Romans, early Britons and medieval charcoal burners" – all of whom have inhabited the valley in previous times. A notable landmark is "an airy, commodious and generally desirable" cavern known locally as the Hermit's Cave.

Mrs. Merrion manages to pack this large mansion with family, staff and guests. There's her elderly father, Professor Crewdon, who's an anthropologist interested in archaeology and had been "simply aching" to find a quiet spot to write his magnum opus. He would bring along his studious, owl-faced secretary, Roland Keston, and his two servants, Mr. and Mrs. Brady. Emmeline "Emma" Stamford is Mrs. Merrion envious sister, who had married an officer in the Indian Army, but barely has any money and has to count her threepence's for a taxi ride. Something that's bound to cause resentment ("it's simply not fair").

The household is rounded out by two live-in servants, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, but Mrs. Merrion is also entertaining two house-guests. A world traveler, Bruce Rhodian, who wrote a book about his "journey over the Andes" and a modern poet, David Lockersley.

These opening chapters are easily the best, most vividly written parts of the story and the secluded valley with its wild, natural splendor and lonely mansion becomes a place you would like to take peaceful stroll, but slowly grinds to a halt when a murder occurs – a rather ingeniously imagined murder. Professor Crewdon has developed the habit of sleeping on the stone bed in the Hermit's Cave, but is found dead one morning without a mark on his body. A medical examination revealed that the professor had died of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by glowing charcoal.

A brazier was found in the cave and there was plenty of charcoal, but Chief Inspector MacDonald is faced two problems: the cave was naturally ventilated and, if it was accident, how was the charcoal ignited when the professor only had a matchbox on him. This makes him think the professor was murdered.

Admittedly, the gimmick used to commit the murder was clever and something you would expect to find in a Detective Conan story or perhaps even in a John Rhode novel. Although Rhode would probably have improved and elaborated on the gimmick tremendously. The identity of the murderer and motive were competently handled, but everything between the vivid opening chapters and solution became increasingly dull, lacked inspiration and even the setting had lost their shine – making it a trudge to read. Hell, even the characterization became as thin as paper in the second half.

This stark difference between the opening chapters and the bogged down, post-murder section reminded me of Ngaio Marsh. Something referred to in these parts as "Dragging-the-Marsh." A good portion of Marsh's detective novels consists of two sections: a lively written, properly characterized novel of manners often with sophisticated, cultural backgrounds and flat, humdrum second half. This part usually consists of a series of unexciting interviews and lumbering around the scene. So I have not much else to say about Death Came Softly, because the book is guilty as hell of dragging-the-marsh.

So, in summation, Death Came Softly opened promising with a solid premise set against a beautifully painted background, but the plot was unable to sustain itself in the second half and the characters, as well as the setting, lost all its color. Chief Inspector MacDonald was even more colorless than I remembered! The plot was decent and the murder-gimmick was clever, but hardly enough to recommend the book as a whole. 

Well, this was turned out to be rather disappointing, but don't despair, I'll give Lorac another shot one of these days with Bats in the Belfry or Murder in the Mill Race. However, my next read is going to be a long overdue return to the detective fiction of Helen McCloy.