The Washington Motive

"It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risk."

- Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United Sates (1901-1909)   

Last year, I reviewed Washington Deceased (1990) by a lawyer-turned-author, Michael Bowen, whose predilection for "locked rooms, subtle clues, offbeat suspects and colorful characters" earned him comparisons to the likes of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Herbert Resnicow – placing him in the ranks of the genre's traditionalists. Or, as I call it, the top of the heap.

Washington Deceased was the first of five politically tinged mystery novels, published between 1990 and 1999, which introduced Richard Michaelson: a sixty-some year old warhorse who served three decades in the Foreign Service of the State Department. In those five novels, Michaelson had to draw on all his knowledge and experience to plot a safe course through the darkest, murkiest and rat-infested waters of Washington politics. A watery sludge with more than one body floating around in it!

Bowen can tell an intriguing story and has a pleasant style that combines a light, humorous touch with shreds of cynical realism, which evidently lent itself well for a series of political mystery novels and the minor flaws in its debut were largely related to the plot – such as an overly complex impossible crime and a dismissive explanation as to how a firearm was smuggled into a tightly secured prison complex. However, I'm glad to report that such flaws have dissipated by the time the fourth book in the series was published.

Worst Case Scenario (1996) has Michaelson attending the Contemporary Policy Dynamics Conference, which is described as a "compressed microcosm of Washington," where he does a favor for a man, named Alex Moodie, who wants to know his wife, Deborah, suddenly stopped getting promotions – effectively freezing her career. Michaelson has dug-up a source of information, Scott Pilkington, who informs Alex that his wife made too much noise when "she thought she'd sniffed out a scandal." Deborah is a deputy director of Planning and Research Priority Assessment with the National Health Research Agency and she discovered that a retired army general, with "a charity star," received a bump on the way up on a priority list for a rare-match liver transplant. She became a nuisance on this issue and was put on a dead-end track. This is just one of the examples of people at the conference who are on the lookout for information, contacts or merely funds.

There is, however, one attendee who has a rather simple wish: Sharon Bedford wants to have a job. She circulates her résumé and attached to it is information "that'll get the attention of the right people at the right time," which is a tantalizing and tempting offer for any political climber in attendance – but she's keeping a tight lid on that information.

Michaelson warned Bedford to be careful, because "there are two ways you can get in trouble in Washington." One of them is "by promising what you can't deliver" and "the other is by delivering the kind if thing you just promised." These words prove to be prophetic when the door of her hotel room has to be pried open. Bedford is found submerged in a bathtub and death is later determined to have been caused by deadly dose of bufotenine, but this does not diminish the seemingly impossible nature of the murder. It is know how the poison was ingested, but the way in which the murderer gained access and exited a locked hotel room unseen remains an apparent miraculous feat and the explanation is simple, clever and sneaky. Bowen used simple misdirection and architectural nature of hotel rooms to create a satisfying locked room situation. So that's one aspect of this series that places its author in the class of traditional, puzzle-oriented mystery writers.

There was another aspect of the plot that reminded me of the traditional detective story, classic or modern, which came when Michaelson examined the victim's bookshelves: shelves hosting an eclectic collection consisting of White House memoirs, Tom Clancy, Erle Stanley Gardner and Danielle Steel. However, Bowen went one step further and planted a nice little clue among those volumes. A clue pertaining to the red-hot information that cost Bedford her life and harked back to the days of Ronald Reagan's presidency, his foreign policy, the previously mentioned general and the rumored government take-over of health care services – which all shapes the murder in "a Washington crime." A crime with a motive "that only makes sense in Washington terms."

Part of the motive nudges the story into the territory of alternative and speculative history, but the incriminating document, which gave the book its title, suffered a similar fate as so many of the lost manuscripts by famous writers and playwrights in similar type of the detective stories – e.g. John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933) and Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding (1948).

So, all in all, this made Worst Case Scenario an engagingly written, well plotted and classically-styled mystery novel with an original divergence from "regular" detective stories, from past or present, by simply placing the intrigue of the plots in some of in the inner-circles of Washington politics. It's why I'm really warming up to Bowen and this series, because it takes everything I love about Golden Age mysteries and resettles them in a completely new and interesting environment: Washington D.C. of the 1990s.

You can expect to read more about this series in the not so distant future. Stay tuned!

Death Behind Bars

"You've got the murderer locked in there like a cockroach under a drinking glass. How does he get out?"

- Inspector Poland (Joseph Commings' "Murder Under Glass," from Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner, 2004) 

In a recent cumulative blog-post, titled "The Locked Room Reader II: An Overview," which commemorated the two hundredth post tagged as a "locked room mystery," I mentioned several modern practitioners of impossible crime stories – such as Herbert Resnicow and Bill Pronzini.

Michael Bowen is trial lawyer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States and an author of about a dozen mystery novels, who I have seen mentioned in the same breath as the previously mentioned locked room artisans. But his detective stories had eluded me until now.

It's not for a lack of interest. In an edition of "The Jury Box," from an issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from the early 1990s, Jon L. Breen opined that Bowen was "one of the most promising detective-story classicist to debut in the last couple of years" and his stories appears to be crammed with the kind of impossible problems haunting up the works of John Dickson Carr and Edward D. Hoch.

So, I'm not entirely sure why a self-described, unapologetic classicist, like yours truly, who can't go for more than two or three blog-posts without bringing up a locked room mystery took so long to get around this author. But that's one of those unanswerable, ponderous questions of life for you.

Washington Deceased (1990) introduces Richard Michaelson, who's a thirty-five year veteran of the Foreign Service of the State Department, all-round Washington insider and author of a slim, hardcover volume by the title of Bright Lines and Slippery Slopes: Nine Fallacies in Current Foreign Policy Discourse – which he sees being clutched at a meeting by 19-year-old Wendy Gardner.

Wendy Gardner is the daughter of an ex-senator, named Desmond Gardner, currently serving time in a Federal Minimum Security Correctional Facility in Maryland on a bribery conviction, but a chance at parole is looming on the horizon. However, a sugar-related investigation might block Gardner from tasting his freedom again. Which is why Gardner contacted Michaelson through his daughter and asked him for chat at the prison face to face.

The first half of Washington Deceased mainly consists of establishing Michaelson as a character of this series, which shows him as "brave, cool and arrogant" with a "definite idea where he wants to be when the next President comes in," but would "lie, cheat or steal to get on the right guy's short list for one of the jobs he has in mind." So, not exactly a hand-wringing bureaucrat, but a politician nonetheless.

There are, of course, some things to be said about Washington itself, or rather, the political-machine it hosts, which has (for example) the State Department spying on the CIA, because the latter was "not good at telling the State Department and Congress everything it found out" – which gave the place an Alice-in-Wonderlandesque spot of madness. Like the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. There were also some conversational snippets predicting a collapse of Apartheid in South Africa and a crumbling influence of the Soviet Union.

I found these parts quite enjoyable, because it placed the detective story in a different territory, but only part of the story that of interest, plot-wise, was the seemingly inexplicable locked room shooting in prison.

"Sweet" Tony Martinelli was "a thumb breaker" specialized in "labor racketeering," which exists of coaxing "union members not to be overly inquisitive about what's happening to their pension funds" and shake down employers by convincing people "not to interfere with illegal work stoppages." A charming personality who was quite out of place in the minimum secured facility housing non-violent offenders.

So it's not a surprise someone wanted an end to Martinelli's existence, but the real problem arises in answering how this unknown person managed to do it!

Tony Martinelli is shot in a locked basement supply room, numbered "B-4," with a Colt .22, which was left inside the room and the shooting was on a surveillance camera – and that's where the problems begin to arise. The only room in the window was barred, locked and framed with a metal detector-alarm and the same goes for pretty much the entire premise. There are three floor plans showing how many cameras and metal detectors are strewed around the complex, which makes it "totally impossible for any inmate" to have "left the Supply Room by any means."

The explanation for this seemingly impossible murder has flashes of originality and imagination, which possibly betrayed a love for stage-illusions on the authors part, but the complexity of the trick came at the expense of believability – evidenced by the amount of ground Michaelson had to cover to explain each step of the murder.

The murderer had to do "a whole series of things that incredibly increased the chance" of being spotted "doing something that would get him convicted of murder," which is hard to explain in a convincing manner without Murphy's Law rearing its ugly head.

You really need to calculate one or two (minor) screw-ups in order to give this kind of real-time, murderous illusions a shred of credibility, but I can easily forgive this – 'cause I love originally thought-out impossible problems. I had a much bigger problem how some of the details were half-assed such as how the murder weapon got into the facility as a whole. The answer supplied: "how does cocaine get in... how does contraband of any kind get in," followed by "no prison on Earth is airtight." Well, the solution how the pistol got into locked and metal-detector protected supply room was definitely a lot better. And puzzling along and making up false solutions was fun as well. 

Overall, Washington Deceased was an interesting, if imperfect, introduction to Michael Bowen's locked room novels, which requires further investigation before giving my final judgment. I remember reading some positive things about Worst Case Scenario (1996) and Collateral Damage (1999). So one of those two will probably be the next Bowen I'll be reading.