UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: McAllister and His Double, by Arthur Train (1905)

           Arthur Train’s McAllister and His Double (New York: Scribners, 1905), is seven stories about the man his fellow clubmen call “Chubby McAllister” and his quondam valet turned notorious second-story man, Wilkins, known as “Fatty Welch,” to whom McAllister bears an unfortunate resemblance. The McAllister stories were published in Scribner’s, Metropolitan Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post from December, 1904 until October, 1905. Scribners published the collection in 1905 as McAllister and His Double.

            From the comfort of the Colophon Club on Christmas Eve, McAllister scoffs at the idea of prison conditions being deplorable . He thinks briefly of Wilkins, his valet who stole a pearl scarf-pin and whom his master turned in. But he soon finds himself taken for a criminal when he throws himself into what he thinks is a cab but turns out to be a getaway carriage for a thief. And the police are convinced he is “Fatty Welch,” which is the nickname of Wilkins. He is subjected to an “anthropometric” system developed by Bertillon, and two mugshots, front and profile, are taken of him, but there is no mention of fingerprinting. He is taken to the Tombs and put in with “Davidson,” which is the name Wilkins gave when he was first arrested. McAllister’s lawyer writes back to him indignantly that McAllister is out of town and he must therefore be an imposter, but he has second thoughts and shows up to get McAllister off. The next night, when someone at the club scoffs at prison reform, repeating McAllister’s own words about prison being no worse than a second-class hotel in Europe, McAllister shouts him down with “What do you know about it?” Such is “McAllister’s Christmas.”

            These are tales about a fat, complacent rich man who, through his uncanny resemblance to his former valet-turned-burglar, learns about how the other half lives, and something about himself as well. After spending a few days in jail, McAllister tries to keep his friends from learning about what he considers shameful, for the sake of his dignity, because “Nothing so effectually, as McAllister well knew, conceals the absence of brains.” But McAllister either acquires brains or begins to use the ones he has in the course of the stories. He assists a detective, who becomes his friend, in a number of cases, several of which he figures out on his own, and he begins to think about his life and what he owes to his fellow mortals. All of this is handled with a light comic touch.

            McAllister is grabbed by Inspector Barney Conville just as he is about to board the subway for a house party in Scarsdale. Conville agrees to go part of the way to see if McAllister can convince him he’s not Fatty Welch. The unlikely premise is that he goes all the way and is introduced at the house party as the Baron de Ville, but Chubby locks him in the bathroom because the inspector has no evening clothes. At dinner, McAllister sees that Wilkins is serving, just as a guest loudly proclaims her pearl necklace is gone. McAllister tells Wilkins to slip him the pearls and scram because there are cops in the house. Conville jumps to the ground from the bathroom window just as Wilkins drives off in the dog cart. Conville, now acknowledging that he was fooled, pursues. McAllister returns the necklace to everyone’s astonished admiration.

            “The Escape of Wilkins” takes him to the Colophon Club, where he begs McAllister to help him. McAllister fends off the police and sends Wilkins on a train to Boston, where he himself shows up from a party, in costume as Henry VIII. After various comic adventures, Wilkins gets away and McAllister is arrested by a Boston cop and then sprung and returned to New York by Conville, who asks him why he doesn’t help them catch Wilkins. “Perhaps I will,” says McAllister.

            Wilkins reappears as one of a gang attempting to steal the jewels in “The Governor-General’s Trunk.” Barney Conville is a step ahead of them: he has secured the jewels in the safe at the Waldorf, where McAllister’s aunt Sophia and uncle Basil are staying. Basil is Governor-General of “a small group of islands somewhere near the equator.” Wilkins managed to get hired as his valet and believes the jewels are still in the trunk where he put them before sending the trunk to Grand Central Station, where Conville and McAllister spend some time in the trunk working the capture of Wilkins co-conspirators, but Wilkins himself gets away.

            In “The Golden Touch,” after hearing about a fellow clubman being cheated in a bunco scheme involving fake gold mine stock, McAllister finds himself investigating such a scheme, that seems to involve the same cast of characters as the clubman described. He brings Barney Conville and the clubman in and gets the gang together, but then he discovers Wilkins among them. He surreptitiously asks for Wilkins’s help when he finds himself in a tight spot, and when Wilkins gives it, McAllister allows him to escape. When we hear about Wilkins again, he has reformed and is once again McAllister’s valet. Moreover, McAllister himself has changed in the remaining stories.

            In London ordering several suits to be made before his departure for New York in two days, McAllister inadvertently becomes the cause of two poor tailor’s assistants, one with a nasty cough, having to work all Saturday night and through Sunday to finish his clothes in time. McAllister stews over this Saturday evening and then goes back to the tailor shop at midnight to try to persuade the workers to stop their labor. Comic difficulties ensue. The workers won’t stop without the shop owner’s orders, so McAllister goes all the way to Kew in the wee hours and manages to convince him—he thinks McAllister is some sort of religious fanatic and agrees to let his people off work. McAllister returns to the shop and sends the workmen home in his own cab. “McAllister’s Data of Ethics” is not systematic like the Herbert Spencer work the title refers to, but McAllister is at least beginning not only to think about what is right and fair but to act on it as well.

            The last McAllister story is a sentimental one, “McAllister’s Marriage.” He unwillingly tends a little girl in her train trip from Bar Harbor to Bangor when her uncle enlists him. Then he finds himself at the farm of an aunt who is her guardian, who will soon have to sell her land because she can’t make a go of it, and this will mean the child goes to her uncle, whose wife does not like her. McAllister buys the farm, and because the little girl has said she would be willing to marry a man who “never hurt anyone,” he slips a cigar band on her finger and symbolically marries her, sending her back to her guardian with a signed paper giving the farm to the child. He’s already promised her guardian that they can live on the land without rent.

Tutt and Mr. Tutt, by Arthur Train (1919)

             The younger member of the law firm of Tutt and Tutt, Samuel Tutt, and the old legal warhorse, Ephraim Tutt, are not related; Tutt applied to the older man for a job because, he says, “with you I should be associated with a good name.” Their first case, “The Human Element,” is an impossible one to defend: their client clearly killed the man who was demeaning his wife, and she bought him the pistol. The deciding factor is a scene recalling, with differences, Hamlet coming upon Claudius praying. These were the first of eventually eighty stories appearing in The Saturday Evening Post about the duo, always written tongue-in-cheek, and culminating with Mr. Tutt writing his own autobiography, Yankee Lawyer, in 1943, and Arthur Train reviewing it!

            “Mock Hen and Mock Turtle” is a farce that plays on stereotypes of the Chinese (the non-Chinese characters call them “Chinks,” and there are more racist slurs, including the N word) and evokes the tong wars of the first decades of the century. Since he’s committed a brutal murder, the man Ephraim Tutt gets off can’t be allowed to get away with it; he is shot to death by a rival tong in the last lines of the story. The outrageous acquittals of people who shot or bludgeoned their victims are feebly justified by having the prosecutors and judges who oppose Mr. Tutt in cahoots, rigging the voir dire system to seat jurors they want, sustaining all the prosecutor’s objections and overruling all of Tutt’s.

            Arthur Train had a career in law for twenty years, as an assistant in the New York County District Attorney’s office and in private practice, before he spent his last decades concentrating on writing. One of his early, non-Tutt books is McAllister’s Double (1905), in which a fat clubman discovers how the other half lives, develops a conscience, and helps a New York police detective in a number of cases.

            In “Samuel and Delilah,” the younger Tutt is encouraged by a knowing blonde to play out his midlife crisis, and it costs him five thousand bucks. And it is the younger Tutt rather than Ephraim who defends the owner of “The Dog Andrew,” who resolves a feud between two neighboring fishermen on Long Island by biting one of them.

            “The Hepplewhite Tramp” may have merely wandered into Hepplewhite’s house and slept in his guestroom bed, but the police reaction prompts some very populist, if not outright Bolshevist, philosophizing by the Tutts. The jury turns out to know better than Mr. Tutt here.

            When a crooked trader cons one of Ephraim’s poor clients, a widow, into giving him her life savings, Tutt comes up with an ingenious plan to use worthless stock certificates, given him by an unsuccessful conman who is also a client, to fool the trader into paying the widow back, in “Wile Versus Guile.” The last story, “Lallapaloosa Limited,” brings back Doc Barrows, the unlucky conman who gave Ephraim Tutt all his worthless stock certificates in the previous story. Tutt takes a group of unscrupulous traders to court for trying to secretly revive a gold mine and defraud those who hold stock in it, thinking the stock worthless. Barrows had a hundred thousand shares of the gold mine stock. Though Tutt does not get the traders to pay Barrow for his stock, they will be prosecuted. With stories of the Tutts, “Chubby” McAllister, and others, Train entertained the readers of his books and of The Saturday Evening Post for forty years.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Corpus Christmas, by Margaret Maron (1989)

             Just before Christmas, an art historian is murdered while working in the Breul House, the mansion of a rich Victorian art collector which has been turned into a small but tony art museum. The murder occurs after a party at the museum, which just happened to be attended by Margaret Maron’s New York Police detective Lieutenant Sigrid Harald. She is there because she is romantically involved with a famous painter whom the museum is courting. If a retrospective of his work is shown there, the financially-strapped museum will get a big boost in attendance and donations.

            This plot setup takes Margaret Maron a while to develop; in fact the murder doesn’t happen until page 100, more than a third of the way through the book. But it’s a rich setup in Maron’s hands because she has three different stories going at once. Almost century-old details about the Breul household, the art collecting of Erich Breul, and the wanderjahre of Sophie and Erich Breul’s son in Europe are told through letters and snippets of books about the house and its owners. Maron begins each chapter with one of these. The murder itself is tied up with the present life of the house as museum: its director, secretary, trustees, docents, and even the live-in janitor. And this story, because it involves the larger art world of collectors and galleries, connects with detective Harald’s lover, the abstractionist painter Oscar Nauman, as Harald gradually learns as she investigates. Maybe that’s four different stories. At any rate, the author has used the tried-and-true device of making the victim utterly despicable, so that not only are we happy to see him go, but he is so roundly hated that everyone has a motive. Among the suspects are the vain, incompetent director of Breul House, another curator who thinks the art in the place is all Victorian kitsch, an aging gallery owner and his attractive young partner, and a rich ship owner with plenty of his own secrets.

             Corpus Christmas is the sixth in Margaret Maron’s books about Sigrid Harald. She has another mystery series featuring a judge named Deborah Knott, and these books are favorites of my wife. She suspects, and I do too, that Maron probably has more female than male readers. Her detective gets the mystery solved in time for Christmas, and the solution surprised me, anyway. A late Merry Christmas, mystery lovers.

The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers, by Stuart Palmer (1947)

            Palmer introduced the spinster third-grade teacher Hildegarde Withers in The Penguin Pool Murders in 1931. This book collects eight short stories in which she solves crimes with her friend/antagonist police inspector Oscar Piper.

            The plastic surgeon John Severance looks like the lady-killer who might indeed have killed the infatuated girl whose face he had fixed, but Miss Withers, pretending to be an aunt in the family, “The Lady from Dubuque,” begs to differ. “The Yellow Canary” sings the song that helps Hildegarde crack the Tin Pan Alley case. “The Blue Fingerprint” is Hans Holbein’s, and the murder victim was trying to match it to one on a painting that might sell for as little as a hundred dollars.

            Miss Withers is often described by Palmer as “angular,” suggesting height and thinness. She is not attractive, but “equine” in face shape. Her methods combine very acute observation with a touch of intuition; she is also capable of picking a lock when necessary. She has a forceful personality, and often convinces Piper to go along with her in order to test theories about a crime that she only strongly suspects without having any real proofs.

            “The Doctor’s Double” is a complicated tale involving a Montague/Capulet romance consummated by means of a tunnel between houses, as well as a man disguising himself as himself. “In “The Twelve Amethysts,” a woman uses her ex-fiancé to ease her way into getting rid of her husband and blaming it all on a former servant. “The Black Museum” is the scene of a strangling, and the two men who were touring the museum with the victim accuse each other of the crime.

            “The Green Ice” is an emerald ring that a smash and grab man goes back to the same jewelry store to steal after overlooking it, taking diamonds instead, during his first theft. Miss Withers pierces the disguises of him and his getaway driver, a blonde with sunglasses. The last case, “The Snafu Murders,” deals with a woman marrying servicemen about to be shipped overseas and collecting allotments as their wives. Each case is ingenious—perhaps a little too much so to be plausible—and moves along at a pace that keeps our interest.

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Laura Lippman, The Girl in the Green Raincoat (serialized in The New York Times, 2008; book form 2011)

            Many mysteries have made use of the “armchair detective,” the investigator who solves a crime without leaving his house, merely by deducing the answer from facts brought to him by newspapers or informants. Edgar Allan Poe invented the armchair detective. His Auguste Dupin solves “The Mystery of Marie Roget” by reading newspaper accounts of a young woman’s murder. Other sleuths solve crimes while they are involuntarily immobilized by injury or illness. A broken leg keeps the protagonist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window –based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich—from investigating the murder he sees taking place through a nearby apartment window. In Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, a bedridden detective inspector solves England’s greatest historical crime, the murder of the princes in the Tower.

            Laura Lippman refers to Rear Window and to The Daughter of Time in the opening pages of The Girl in the Green Raincoat, her eleventh book about her reporter turned private investigator, Tess Monaghan. Tess is about to give birth to her first child and because of preeclampsia has been ordered to stay in bed. She chafes at this restriction, but from her new sun porch she can at least watch people walking their dogs in the park. One woman interests her because she and her dog wear outfits of the same celery green. Tess watches the girl in the green raincoat and her dog every afternoon for a week; then one day the dog shows up, running, trailing its green leash, but the woman does not reappear.

            Tess sets her staff to the task of finding the dog’s owner. They find the dog first and then the man who claims that it is his wife’s dog, that he doesn’t want the dog, and that his wife is out of town on business. A little digging shows that this man’s two previous wives and a girl friend all died under mysterious circumstances. When she makes a couple of blunders that let those she is checking on know she is curious about them, things get dangerous for Tess, who is already in a vulnerable position.

            Despite the novella-like brevity of The Girl in the Green Raincoat, we learn more about those around Tess in this than in some of the longer books. The reason is that the book was first serialized in The New York Times in 2008 before book publication in 2011, and Lippman has tried to give some self-sufficiency to each installment by having someone tell a story about themselves to Tess in the course of the plot.

            Tess’s associates include the inimitable Mrs. Blossom, who gives an extraordinary, tautological reason for the serenity of her marriage to Mr. Blossom: “I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did.” Another person who assists Tess’s investigations is her friend since college, Whitney Talbot, who is also a kind of rival of Tess’s. From her parents Tess learns that they were not the political activists she has always assumed they were.

            The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a quick and entertaining read. I think you’ll like it.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Stephen Leather, The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

The eight stories here are the only ones Leather has written about his Singapore Police Inspector Zhang, who is not eager for publicity about his detective skills, but like Sherlock Holmes, does his work for the sake of the problems he can solve, as long as his faithful attendant, Sergeant Lee, knows his worth, and his other fellow workers. In the first of the stories, “Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish” for a locked-room murder, which allows him to give John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell lecture on the subject with similar prolixity. And he allows us to guess the solution by showing us the evidence twice.

Cecilia Wang appears to have shouted “I’m going to jump!” from the ninth story of an apartment building, also shouting her name in response to a question of Inspector Zhang, standing below with his wife. She falls a few seconds later, but the autopsy finds her lungs full of water. “An impossible crime,” says the inspector, gleefully, in “The Falling Woman.”

“The Dead Thai Gangster” was shot, but it couldn’t have happened on the plane Zhang and Sgt. Lee were taking to Bangkok. But he was dead, and had been alive a few minutes before; Zhang solves another impossible crime.

The burglar whose fingerprints are found on the murder weapon as well as his toothmarks on the arm of the murdered woman really does have “The Perfect Alibi”: he was in jail at the time of the murder.           Zhang is a very methodical investigator, and the step-by-step approach he follows allows the reader to see the evidence that Zhang himself sees. The result is that, for the most part, these are fair play mysteries in which the reader has a chance of anticipating the detective’s solution. The pace, as a result, tends to be slow. Often Zhang arrives at his solutions before his Forensics Department has had a chance to process the crime scene. He would rather, as he says often, use “zee little grey cells,” because Zhang is a fan of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as well as Sherlock Holmes. He is, in fact, a devotee of mystery fiction in general, contemporary as well as going back to the nineteenth century

            “The Hotel Guest” claims to have lost his memory when he was mugged, but Zhang makes a series of deductions from observations of him, supplemented by what he sees in CCTV footage from the hotel elevator, and he solves the “case.” The story is reminiscent of Rodrigues Ottolengui’s “The Nameless Man,” where the detective’s friend Mitchel attempts to fool the detective, Barnes, with a fake amnesiac.

 “The Disappearing Drugs” were supposedly dollied into an empty apartment but then managed to disappear without anyone entering or leaving. The CCTV footage gives Zhang a clue.

“Inspector Zhang goes to Harrogate” is another locked room mystery that Zhang solves by realizing the murder could be committed from outside the room. The occasion for Zhang’s being in England was a surprise birthday trip to a mystery writers’ convention, arranged by his wife, and Zhang revels in every minute of it. The victim, a mystery writer who made himself the best-selling author of eBooks by pricing the electronic versions of his mysteries low, is killed by a jealous rival author. Leather, in fact, was the second-best-selling Kindle author in 2011, and was involved in public disputes with other authors about his methods.

Zhang investigates, in “The Island of the Dead,” the murder of a rich cosmetic surgeon whose specialty is restoring virginity to the deflowered. Like his patients, the case is not what it appears to be. These stories, though a little repetitive and not fast-paced like the thrillers Leather usually writes, are each entertaining; they appeared first as Kindle editions and were collected in 2014.