Golden Age Whodunits (2024), edited by Otto Penzler, is the fourth anthology in the American Mystery Classics series and previously reviewed Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), which unfortunately consisted mostly of short stories already collected in other locked room-themed anthologies – several having appeared together in Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982). So the selection of stories left me a little salty and you can taste it in the review. A review that wasn't appreciated by everyone at the time.
The first short story is Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Amateur of Crime," originally published in the April, 1927, issue of The American Magazine, which begins during Mrs. Culverin's house party at her Long Island home and she has gathered a who's who of guests – everyone from a cinema star and Olympic athlete to Ruritanian dignitaries. Peter Scarlet is a pink-cheeked youth whose enormous, horn-rimmed spectacles "gave him much of the innocent downiness of a very young owl” and his hobby enlivened the sagging house party. Scarlet is the amateur of crime privately studying "the queer kinds of people who are murderers" or "the even queerer kinds who are murderees" ("the people who seem just born and bound to be murdered"). Mrs. Culverin's house party is going to give him an opportunity to put his theory into practice when Prince Mirko, of Ruritania, is stabbed to death in his locked suite under impossible circumstances.
G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown series clearly modeled for "The Amateur of Crime" and Peter Scarlet. Benét wrote a short story that often feels like a Chestertonian detective story, particularly the opening stages and the character of Scarlet, but the disappointing solution is exactly the kind of second-and third-rate tripe Chesterton shepherded the genre. Baffingly, Benét did nothing with Scarlet's study of murderers and their murderees. So not a very promising beginning to this anthology.
Anthony Boucher comes to the rescue with "Black Murder," originally published in the September, 1943, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and collected in Exeunt Murderers (1983), which is where I first read it. However, I didn't remember having read this before until Nick Noble came into the story. A once promising, young homicide devoted to both his job and wife, but "when both were gone, there was nothing left" except "cheap sherry that dulled the sharpness of reality enough to make it bearable" – while his mind and reasoning skills remained razor sharp. A mind that can trace patterns in chaos. So helps out his former colleagues on occasion, like a barroom detective, for booze money ("Screwball Division... they called him"). This time, Detective Lieutenant Donald MacDonald is investigating the attempted poisoning of a naval inventor, Harrison Shaw, who was working a sub detector. Only person who could have administrated the poison is his own mother and MacDonald doesn't buy it. So goes to the Chula Negra Café, headquarters of the Screwball Division, where Noble makes short work of the case, but they get surprise when the inventor is still gruesomely murdered. And, whoever slit his throat, drew a bloody swastika on the wall. Noble simply solves this second part of the case by pointing out that swastika drawing points to only one of the suspects. I liked how the solution delivered on the promise of the story's opening line, "in peacetime the whole Shaw case could never have happened." A solid short story from an even better, regrettably short-lived series.
The next short story comes from a "Literary Visitor" to the crime-and detective genre, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose short story "The Dance" first appeared in the June, 1926, issue of The Red Book Magazine. The story has the narrator recalling a trip to the southern cotton mill town of Davis where she "saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny, and frightening rear its head" – before "the surface closed again." It boils down to flirtatious love affairs boiling over into murder during a dance party and the narrator solves the fatal shooting in the women's dressing room, but "The Dance" is closer to a social crime story than a detective story proper with the local's searching for the shooter among the black population of the town ("...instant and unquestioned assumption"). So not a bad short story, but neither is it a Golden Age detective story.
Penzler wrote in the introduction that a 13-year-old Fitzgerald wrote a short detective story, "The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage," which actually got published in the September, 1909, issue of Now and Then. So poked around a bit and found something interesting: "The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage" would "likely have remained a mysterious footnote in Fitzgerald's bibliography, were it not for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine." EQMM saved it from obscurity by reprinting it in their March, 1960, issue. A shame its early, pre-GAD publication date precluded inclusion here as it sounds like a fun, Doylean-style mystery, but perhaps something for a future anthology entitled Gaslit Whodunits.
C. Daly King's "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion," originally published in the February, 1935, issue of Mystery under the title "Invisible Terror,' is a gem of an impossible crime story! Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries has King's most well-known short story in the Mr. Tarrant series, "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem" (1935), but it's overrated and suggested "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" would have been a better pick. And here we are!
The impossibility of phantom footfalls is a neat variation on the no-footprints scenario, which has been sporadically explored in such stories as Anthony Wynne's "Footsteps" (1926) to Edward D. Hoch's "The Stalker of Souls" (1989), but never as good as "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" – on a whole a very original take on the haunted house detective story. I'm thinking it's time to place The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) on the reread pile.
Ring Lardner's "Haircut," originally published in the March 28, 1925, issue of Liberty Magazine, is, as the introduction points out, "not a typical mystery story." Lardner was famous as a sports writer and humorist who penned a darkly humorous story presented as a string of anecdotes told by a barber cutting a new customer. The anecdotes revolves around the exploits of the small town's cruel jester, Jim Kendall, who would have made a fascinating study subject for Peter Scarlet from Benét's "The Amateur of Crime." So, of course, Kendall gets hoisted on his own petard. A bleak, darkly humorous criminal anecdote and a welcome surprise to find in this anthology.
Stuart Palmer's "Fingerprints Don't Lie" was first published in the November, 1947, issue of EQMM and one of the Miss Hildegarde Withers short stories I hadn't read yet. Miss Withers was on her way to California for a holiday when her friends of the New York police at Centre Street asks her to look into a missing person, Eileen Travis. She's supposed to be living there to establish residence for a Nevada divorce. And her husband, recently indicted for black market shenanigans, has uttered some treats. Miss Withers arrives on the scene of a gruesome shotgun killing and, before too long, another murder discovered. This time, the victim has an icepick planted between his shoulders. Fortunately, the murderer left fingerprints on the murder weapons ("...the prints on the icepick matched the prints on the shotgun..."), but they "can't find any suspect whose prints fit those on the murder weapons." Palmer is a personal favorite and think Miss Withers is the best spinster sleuth the Golden Age has produced, but this short story is definitely a low-point in the series. The solution to the fingerprints is carny, not the good kind, which is trotted out in the last line as a "tadaah, surprise!" However, it outright ignores the incredible difficulty to use that trick to shoot someone in the face with a shotgun or the outright impossibility to stab someone in the back with it. Unworthy of Palmer and Miss Withers!
Post's "The Witness in the Metal Box," originally published in the November, 1929, issue of The American Magazine, concerns a contested will. Alexander Harrington was supposed to have died intestate, "leaving his great properties to pass by operation of law to his daughter," but a holograph will was found leaving everything to his younger brother ("...some minor provisions for the daughter"). What gave the testament the stamp of authenticity is the signature ("that big arabesque of a scrawl could not be imitated"). Colonel Braxton, "no knight-errant for romance," is the eccentric lawyer representing the daughter. But he brought no witnesses or experts to testify. Only a small, circular metal box and curious questions about farming to win the case ("this Colonel Braxton was the magician out of a storybook"). I never thought I would say this about a short story penned by Melville Davisson Post, but "The Witness in the Metal Box" is not bad at all.
Ellery Queen's "Man Bites Dog" first appeared in the June, 1939, issue of Blue Book and collected in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940), which is where I first read it, but remembered next to nothing about the story or plot. The story finds Queen working in Hollywood and itching the return to New York where "the New York Giants and the New York Yankees are waging mortal combat to determine the baseball championship of the world" ("ever missed a New York series before"). Miss Paula Paris, celebrated gossip columnist, ensures he gets to see the championship match together Inspector Richard Queen and Sgt. Velie. During the game, the ex-baseball pitcher Big Bill Tree is poisoned while watching the game. While not the most challenging of short stories this series has produced, the solution to the poisoning has a satisfying little twist. However, the most interesting part of the story is the character of Ellery Queen himself.
It has been pointed out before that the Ellery Queen in this short story is nothing like the book collecting, pince-nez-wearing Philo Vance clone who was introduced in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) a decade earlier. You can't imagine the Queen from the international series getting annoyed at a murder interrupting his baseball game and only given the case half his attention, while keeping another eye on the game. That being said, I think "Man Bites Dog" could have been adapted into a tremendous episode for the 1975 Ellery Queen TV series. I couldn't help but imagine Jim Hutton, David Wayne and Tom Reese playing the parts of EQ, Inspector Queen and Sgt. Velie here.
Mary Roberts Rinehart's "The Lipstick," originally published in the July, 1942, issue of Cosmopolitan, brings some mild suspense to this anthology. Elinor Hammond had fallen from the tenth-floor window of her psychiatrist's waiting room, but did she take her own life or was she pushed? Her younger cousin, Miss Louise Baring, believes she was murdered and takes it upon herself to find the murderer. Not merely because her mother threatens to stop her allowance for trying to stir up scandal. Not bad, on a whole, but not really my thing either.
Vincent Starrett's "Too Many Sleuths," originally published in the October, 1927, issue of Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, is the longest story in this anthology and loosely based on the real-life Oscar Slater case – similar to D. Erskine Muir's Five to Five (1934). This time, the victim is the elderly, jumpy Miss Harriet Lambert "who is constantly afraid that something is going to happen to her." So she locked herself away in her apartment with her collection of brooches, rings, and pendants against "the bloody terrors that filled the outside world." Unfortunately, for Miss Lambert, one of those bloody horrors got pass the patent spring lock on the door and bludgeoned her to death. Frederick Dellabough, roving crime reporter of the Morning Telegram, is on the case and he has access to his own armchair detective, G. Washington Troxell. A bibliophile, bookseller and amateur detective who work together like Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe ("I'm Dellabough's brain. Dellabough, to put it in another way, is my legs"). The first lead is the man who was seen casually leaving the scene of the crime after saying goodbye to the corpse. A man who may be named Otto Sandow or Oscar Slaney and they may, or not may, be one and the same person. Just one of the many complications that include other people who think they got hold of the answer.
A very well written, Wolfean-style detective story predating Stout's Nero Wolfe series by a good eight years! Regrettably, the solution is plain and unremarkable next to the elaborate misdirection and dead ends involving mixed identifies, a pawn ticket and too many sleuths. A stronger, more inspired solution could have turned this into a small gem.
T.S. Stribling's "A Passage to Benares," first published in the February 20, 1926, issue of Adventure, closes out this anthology, but have nothing much to say about it. Dr. Henry Poggioli, the American psychologist and consulting detective, is in the Port of Spain, Trinidad, when he asked to investigate a murder at a Hindu temple. A young bride had been found decapitated and a group of beggars were found sleeping nearby carrying items of the murdered bride, but the widowed groom is also under suspicion. However, this story is an exercise in style over substance. From the local color and dream analyzes to the final line. A travelogue trying to be a regional mystery, which only succeeded in making me appreciate S.H. Courtier and Arthur W. Upfield all the more.
So not a great closer to Golden Age Whodunits, but, on a whole, I thought the selection an improvement over Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries. Not every pick is a classic of the short story form, some were just bad or disappointing, but greatly enjoyed the stories from Boucher, Eberhart, King and Queen with the stories by Lardner and Post being welcome surprises. So the usual mixed bag of tricks, but a mixed bag with something for everyone.
