Murder on the Tropic (1935) by Todd Downing

Earlier this month, I reviewed Todd Downing's The Last Trumpet (1937), a minor gem of the North American regional mystery novel, which Coachwhip reprinted as a paperback in 2012 and discovered at the time a handful of Downing's Hugh Rennert novels were reissued in March as ebooks – courtesy of MysteriousPress/Open Road. Since we're about a month into the summer, I decided to delve into the sultry-sounding Murder on the Tropic (1935). I was not disappointed!

Murder on the Tropic is the fourth title in the Hugh Rennert series, an agent of the Customs Bureau of the United States Treasury Department, who discovered he's getting older and started looking towards retirement with purchase of a citrus farm. An early spring freeze ruined a lot of citrus fruit down in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and this cold wave had hit Rennert's hundred and twenty acres hard, but a proposal to go on "a little mission" comes with a paycheck that will replenish his coffers.

Edward Solier is a Texas businessman with an interest in a remote, isolated hacienda down in Mexico, named Flores, which had been bought based on certain information that the new Pan-American Highway, to Mexico City, would cut through the track of land and wanted to erect a luxurious hotel on the spot – a plan that was spoiled when the route of the highway was changed. So now he was left with an isolated and practically useless property on his hands.

A company had been formed to buy the property and build the hotel, which sold shares, but now they want to get rid of it. Only problem is that one person refuses to sell back her block of shares.

Miss Bertha Fahn is a botanist who invested a small sum of money and has been staying at the hacienda to do "some kind of a study of plants and flowers," but they have no idea why she flatly refuses to sell. Or why she requested 126 postcards. Solier wants Rennert to persuade Miss Fahn to sell back her shares and find out who has been emptying bottles of water during the night, which is becoming a problem now that springs are drying up and the place is becoming dependent on bottled water. Rennert accepts an easy paycheck, but discovers that the quiet, isolated hacienda has a palpable "undercurrent of repressed emotions" and compared his task with "sitting on top of a volcano."

When he arrived at the hacienda, there are eight people: Solier's two business partners in the failed project, Tilghman Falter and George Stahl, but Stahl unexpectedly died of sunstroke and his interest went to his stepson, Mark Arnhardt – who's also present at the hacienda. Stephen Holman is the architect who designed to the hotel, but came down with tuberculosis and stayed there with his wife, Ann, in the hope that the climate would help him. Esteban Flores is a young Mexican whose airplane crashed there and is trying to get new parts to repair the plane, but the place used to belong to his family. And he spends his time searching for the long-lost body of his grandfather. Miguel and Maria Montemayor have been caretakers of the hacienda since the days of Flores' grandfather. Lastly, there's the stubborn Miss Fahn and the Chinese cook, Lee, who returns from a family trip after Rennert's arrival. 

 

All of these characters come with a little side-mystery that has to be solved or else carry a piece of the puzzle, which means Rennert has to clear a lot of debris before he can reveal who has been behind a series of very subtly executed murders. A series poisonings with all the unnerving and fantastic eeriness of John Dickson Carr!

George Stahl had supposedly died of sunstroke before two weeks before Rennert arrived at the hacienda, but "he kept talking about the air being yellow" and "the strange illusion" that everything appears yellow is recurring symptom of the people who fall ill and die at the hacienda – three of them in total. These mysterious illnesses and deaths add substantially to, what's arguably, the strongest aspect of the story, the isolated setting.

Hacienda Flores is situated in "a hidden pocket of the mountains," on the Tropic of Cancer, where "a precipitous valley debouched onto the desert." Downing doesn't relay on cheap or crude plot-devices to completely seal the characters away from the outside world. There's a short-wave radio set that allows constant communication with the outside world, but it gets through the story undamaged and the tropical hurricane lurking in the background only temporarily hinders their movement towards the end. Regardless of these exists, or air holes, Murder on the Tropic is one of the best and most convincing isolation-mysteries on the book. You really get the idea that the characters are tucked away in a lonely, nearly unreachable pocket of the world. Even though that's not entirely the case (they get bottled water trucked to them everyday), but the illusion of isolation is very convincingly and effectively done.

There are, however, two weak spots in an otherwise solid and cleverly constructed plot: the clueing is a little iffy in certain places (such as the nature of poison) and even with the clues that were given, the twist ending is easily anticipated – because the murderer (sort of) stands out. A kind of cliche that will make any seasoned mystery reader suspicious. But these minor drawbacks were hardly enough to ruin an engagingly written and leisurely plotted detective novel. A detective novel full of dreamlike, but often unsettling, mysteries and wonder of the desert.

Honestly, if Murder on the Tropic had been published 5-10 years later, I would have assumed Downing had been trying to emulate some of Agatha Christie most well-known mysteries, but she had not yet written Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1937), And Then There Were None (1939) and Evil Under the Sun (1941) at the time. So, if you liked any of those titles, you'll likely find a lot to enjoy in Murder on the Tropic.

I'll end this review with a warning to everyone who's new to Todd Downing: don't begin with The Cat Screams (1934), because its an inferior work compared to Murder on the Tropic and The Last Trumpet that has kept me away from Downing for nearly a decade. But now that I have rediscovered him, I'll try to read and review The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (1936) and Death Under the Moonflower (1939) before the summer draws to a close.

The Last Trumpet (1937) by Todd Downing

Todd Downing was an American advertising copy writer, novelist and reviewer who was born in Atoka, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), who began his stop-and-go academic career as an instructor in Spanish at the University of Oklahoma and ended it as a teacher at Atoka High School – capped with his appointment to Emeritus Professor of Choctaw Language and Choctaw Heritage. But his academic achievements pale in comparison to the body of work that made him, to quote Curt Evans, "one of the most important regionalist mystery writers of the Golden Age."

When he was teenager, Downing began devouring the detective-and thriller stories by Arthur B. Reeve and Edgar Wallace at "a prodigious rate" and graduated to the Golden Age detective fiction of Anthony Berkeley, S.S. van Dine and Rufus King in the 1920s. These years formed the foundation for his career as a mystery reviewer and writer in the 1930s. Downing reviewed John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen in the literary pages of Oklahoma City's Daily Oklahoman and published his first mystery novel, Murder on Tour (1933). A novel that introduced United States Customs Service Agent, Hugh Rennert, who made seven appearances between 1933 and 1937, which are mostly set in Mexico.

So a writer who should have had more of my attention, especially since all of his novels were reprinted by Coachwhip, but mistakenly decided, years ago, to begin with his most well-known detective novel, The Cat Screams (1934) – a detective story undeserving of its reputation. Downing redeemed himself with Vultures in the Sky (1935), but, sort of, forgot about him until I recently came across my copy of The Last Trumpet (1937).

Now that I've read it, I finally understand why Curt has been gushing over Downing and devoted an entire book to him, Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing (2013).

The Last Trumpet takes place around the sun-soaked border towns of Mexico and the United States, during the Christmas season, where Hugh Rennert has retired to grow citrus fruit. When the story opened, Rennert had been on an errand to Matamoros when a friend, Kent Distant, drags him to the debut of a young matador, Carlos Campos. Everything appeared to go well, until Campos was about to deliver the golpe de gracia with his sword when "a spasm of pain contorted the man's face." And he got fatally wounded by the horn of the bull.

An unfortunate tragedy that becomes highly suspicious when it turned out that Campos was one of the witnesses in a lawsuit between Dr. Paul Torday and the Mexican National Railways, which stemmed from a horrific collision when a passenger train crashed into a sidetracked Pullman sleeper – killing four people and left the doctor crippled. Dr. Torday was not expected to survive his injuries and the railway company offered him a thousand dollars a week indemnity, but he didn't die and held them to their bargain. So now they're trying to break their indemnity by going to court. And it turns out that the witnesses in this ongoing case have been plagued by fatal, or near fatal, accidents around the same time of the year.

Over the past two years, around Christmas time, death stalked the group of witnesses with various degrees of success. One of the witnesses was killed in a hunting accident and Dr. Torday's car had been nearly forced of the road. Now the young matador had been killed in a suspicious-looking mishap and someone else was shot and wounded while on an evening walk, but, more interestingly, another man is shot and killed while crossing the crowded International Bridge, over the Rio Grande, connecting Mexico with the United States – offering a potentially diplomatic nightmare scenario. What if "the gun had been fired a foot or so inside Mexico," but "the man died in the United States?" or "if the murderer had stood on the United States side, shot across the line, and then stepped over into Mexico?"

A great idea that should have been used as the premise of a separate detective novel instead of being merely a puzzle piece.

Dr. Torday tries to hire Rennert to find out, whether or not, there's a plot against him and his witnesses, but he turns him down and accepts the position of deputy sheriff (without a pay) to find a solution to these nebulous deaths. And why they had to die. Since it's highly unlikely that the Mexican National Railways is committing mass murder to get out of an ordinary lawsuit.

So the plot of The Last Trumpet very much reminded me of the Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and John H. Vance's The Fox Valley Murders (1966) with its series of suspicious, homicidal-looking accidents and the explanation Rennert's uncovered was immensely satisfying and pure Golden Age. One part of the solution is a variation on a trick used by two of the previously mentioned mystery writers, but Downing found an original use for it and strengthened the solution by giving the murderer a ruthless motive, which made for a memorable ending to a classic American detective novel. Only (minor) blemish on the plot is that it needed the presence of a lot of left-handed, or ambidextrous, characters in order to make it work, but a flaw I can easily forgive when learning why they were needed – showing you can stretch things a little if you have something to show for it in the end. Downing definitely delivered here in the end!

The Last Trumpet is a small gem of the American detective story with a plot that appeared to be as loose as sand when you're reading it, but the solution revealed everything stuck together like conjoined twins. So, plot-wise, The Last Trump is an excellent detective novel, but the writing and setting demonstrated why Curt considers Downing as one of the best regional mystery writers of his day. Obviously, Downing loved Mexico and that love is reflected in his writing. Most heartily recommended!

A note for the curious: one of the characters predicts that "solar heat would eventually be converted into cheap energy" and "take the place of mineral fuel," which felt a little out-of-time and wondered if the text had been "updated." But a quick search showed that people have been experimenting with solar energy since the late 1800s. Still, it was unexpected to come across a reference to solar energy in a regional mystery novel from the 1930s.

"Who is in charge of the clattering train..."

"...Death is in charge of the clattering train!"

- Edwin J. Milliken (Death and his Brother Sleep) 

C. Daly King opened one of his lauded mystery novels, Obelists Fly High (1935), with the epilogue of the story and thought it would be a nice touch to begin this post on Todd Downing's Vultures in the Sky (1935) in a similar vein: it's as if we have entered a period of redemption!

As the post-title and opening quote suggests, Vultures in the Sky takes place aboard a passenger train bound for Mexico City, but sundry shadows are cast over the journey and not all of them are from the zopilotes (vultures) dotting the desert sky. Rumor filled compartments of an impending railway strike and saboteurs of the Cristeros (a religious splinter faction) become the prowling ground of a murderer who snuffed out a passenger before he even boarded the train! There's even talk that there may be people aboard who are connected to an infamous kidnapping case, which is not entirely coincidental, as Curt mentioned in his review that Downing had "read Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) the year he began writing Vultures and he immediately praised the Crime Queen's novel unreservedly" – giving perhaps the first of many nods to one of the most famous whodunits ever written.

Downing's regular detective, Hugh Rennert of the United States Treasury Department, Custom Services, tries to take charge when he suspects foul play after one of the passengers, an American of Mexican extraction named Torner, dies while they passed through a darkened railway tunnel and Rennert does not entertain the theory that it was the bad air in the tunnel that got to him. He receives official clearance to take charge of the case, until they reach their destination and the proper authorities can take it from his hands, but this murderer is not deterred by red tape and continues to plough through the list of passengers.

I wonder if Vultures inspired the opening sequence of Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937), in which Inspector Oscar Piper is on a train heading for Mexico City when a customs inspector takes a sniff from a bottle of cheap perfume and falls to the floor in a dead faint.

The plot rattles along at a nice, but brisk, pace and Hugh Rennert functioned as both a knowledgeable guide, who speaks his languages and appreciates the culture and history of the land, and as a proper detective – trying to make sense of hatboxes and the movement of suspects. In many ways, this was the kind of detective story that I was hoping to find when I picked up Downing's The Cat Screams (1934), actually two years ago this week, and I think my poorly written, two-year-old review still conveys my lack of enthusiasm for the book. I actually referred to Clyde B. Clason in that review and I think Vultures compares best to his work except that we move from the remnants of an erstwhile civilization, piled up in a private museum or library, to a railway track carving through the deserts of Mexico – where everything is very much alive as opposed to dusty museum pieces in the possession of a soon to be murdered private collector (c.f. about half of Clason's output).

Downing redeemed himself with Vultures, after my initial disappointment over Cat, and second chances appears as of late to be a trend on this blog. Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1942) was a marked improvement over her slapdash performance in Murder in the Mist (1940) and Kay Cleaver Strahan's Death Traps (1930) made the award-wining Footprints (1929) look even worse in retrospect: it's as if we have entered a period of redemption! 

Lets hope this trend continues and I will definitely check back on Downing. All of his books have been reprinted by Coachwhip and have an introduction by Curt Evans (a.k.a. The Passing Tramp).

This also reminds me how horrible behind I am on my reading and working off my wish list.