UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: George Limnelius [Lewis George Robinson], The Medbury Fort Murder (1929)

             The repulsive Lieutenant Lepean is killed in his locked room at the Fort, with his spinal cord severed at the back of his neck. Five men are suspected. His batman, Corporal Mason, has been humiliated by Lepean for having been a butcher in civilian life, and Lepean has been “walking out” with Mason’s girl in the town. Private Swansdick has been hazed and disciplined by Lepean over minor matters such as not saluting the lieutenant when in mufti. Lepean has cheated Lieutenant Harris at cards, and if Harris doesn’t come up with the hundred pounds he owes him, Lepean will go to his C. O. Captain Wape. The C. O., believes that Lepean has made unwanted advances to his sister and possibly raped her. The Medical Officer, Major Preece, is being blackmailed by Lepean for an infidelity several years before.

            Limnelius, writing in 1929, invokes at least four different solutions to the locked room puzzle. One is Israel Zangwill’s solution in The Big Bow Mystery (1892). The murderer is the first man to break into the locked room and he commits the murder before others can see what he’s doing; then he announces that he’s “found” the murdered man. The investigators in this case, Scotland Yard Inspector Paton and his superior, Chief Inspector McMaster, consider this possibility, naming Zangwill as its origin.  A second method is to use a mechanical device to grasp and turn the key that’s inside the locked door, unlock it, do the murder and then relock the door using the same device. Another possibility is the murderer is already in the room before it is locked. He commits the murder and then either uses the mechanical method above to relock the door from outside, or he pretends it is locked, beats on it, and then forces it before others can see it is not actually locked. Yet another possibility, that several of the people who “find” the body are in collusion and kill the victim together, is briefly under consideration by the detectives before being dismissed. Agatha Christie famously used this method five years later in Murder on the Orient Express.

            Paton and McMaster solve the crime together, though they have to eliminate many false leads and they are fooled in at least one important detail by one of the witnesses. But McMaster is guilty of uttering this one preposterously snobbish remark: “In the history of crime there is no single case of a murder of violence having been committed by an educated man.”

            Limnelius/Robinson was an army man, and this is the first of several novels he wrote with a military setting. It seems to have been nearly forgotten before some discussions of it on the web and in Martin Edwards’s The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books in 2017 brought it some deserved new attention.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice (1992)

            Death at La Fenice is the first mystery in Donna Leon's series about Guido Brunetti, a police commissario in Venice. Brunetti investigates the death of a famous conductor, poisoned during a performance of La Traviata at the Venice opera house La Fenice.

            Before we're even a quarter of the way through the book, Leon has woven a blanket of suspicion large enough to cover most of the people we've met and some we haven't yet. The soprano and her lesbian lover have lied about their last contact with the maestro, whose homophobia may also implicate the director and his lover as well. The dead man's second wife was a suicide, and the children of that marriage are now grown. The present wife, much younger than the conductor, is a natural suspect, and several burglaries at one of the maestro's apartments, resulting in large insurance settlements, hint that a lot of inheritance money is at stake. By the time he has learned this much, Brunetti isn't even halfway through the first full day of the case.

            Brunetti concentrates on the personality of the dead man: “the answer always lay there,” he thinks. He mistrusts intuition and hunches about a suspect. Unlike so many detective characters, Brunetti's home life is happy and provides a center for him. He struggles with an arrogant superior and some incompetent subordinates, but on the whole moves fairly smoothly through his world, where he can shift easily from the Venice dialect called Veneziano to a more widely-used standard Italian and even to competent English.

            Donna Leon is a transplant to Venice—she's a New Yorker who taught in various schools abroad before settling in Venice for thirty years; she still spends many weeks there each year. The mystery story is used to this sort of cultural appropriation: the first detective stories, about a French detective in Paris, were written by an American who had never been there. Since Poe, we've had white Australians writing about aborigine detectives, Anglos writing about southwestern American Indian detectives, Belgians writing about French detectives, Englishwomen writing about Belgian detectives, and so on and so on.

            Leon does very well at lightly sketching the beauty and interest of Venice, especially its foggy mysteriousness in November, when the story takes place. And she deals well with Italian daily life, the Italians' love of titles (Brunetti's father-in-law is a count), the swarm of daily newspapers representing each demographic group and every shade of political opinion, the corruption that pervades Italy's bureaucracy, and the way the pace of Italian life is measured by meals in restaurants and homes, coffee breaks in cafes, and drinks taken at various hours at parties, bars, apartments, and even the dressing rooms at the opera house, Teatro La Fenice. Brunetti is a likable character in a picturesque setting; if you like him, there are thirty-one more books in the series.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: C[harles]. Daly King, The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935)

            Eight stories narrated by the athletic Jerry Phelan, who meets Trevis Tarrant in the first story, “The Codex Curse,” when they are both locked into a room in the Metropolitan Museum trying to keep an Aztec Codex from being stolen. They fail, but not to worry, because Tarrant knows who took it and how to recover it.

            Tarrant prefers to call these “episodes,” the word “case” being “too formal an expression for his activities. He is not a detective, but looks for “apparently inexplicable problems” which he solves by a rigorous adherence to the doctrine of causation. Jerry remembers his experience with Tarrant and reaches out to him in the second episode. “The Tangible Illusion” is one oppressing Valerie Mopish, soon to be Mrs. Phelan. Tarrant and Katoh move in to Valerie’s “modernistic” house, built for her by her brother. Katoh is Tarrant’s Japanese butler/valet, who is a doctor at home in Japan and a spy in the States. It turns out the brother may have been less than all right that Valerie got all the money when the parents died.

            “The Nail and the Requiem” is a locked room murder mystery, and Tarrant solves it by the process of elimination: if the murderer couldn’t have gotten out…. “Torment IV” is a boat, and it may or may not have other characteristics in common with the infamous Mary Celeste.

            The only stories that can be recommended are in this first half of the book; skip the first one and read the next three.

            “The Headless Horrors” is a silly story about voodoo ritual beheading. “The Vanishing Harp” is a slow-moving story, another locked-room puzzle, but not a murder, though an attempted one, and at the end Tarrant gives the miscreant the “honorable” way out. “The Man with Three Eyes” does a classic sleight-of-hand move in diverting attention from the obvious answer to a murder committed in plain sight—almost—with several witnesses. This story is also probably worth reading. But the final episode, “The Final Bargain,” goes off into la-la land with twisted auras causing paralysis and Tarrant pledging to go away for seven years as some kind of bargain to save Jerry’s sister Mary, who loves Tarrant and vice-versa.

            This collection made it into Ellery Queen’s list of the most important detective and crime fiction short stories.