The Inventor of the Country House Mystery?

 

            Lord Gorell was one of the lesser-known members of the famous Detection Club, even though he served as its co-president. The fact that he did the work while Agatha Christie, his co-president, got the glory helps explain his lesser fame, but so does the fact that he only wrote half a dozen mysteries, and none seems to be still in print, while he is not even mentioned in Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler’s Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). And yet, he certainly anticipated the genre of the country-house mystery; his In the Night (1917) begins with a map of Salting Towers, and Ronald Gorell Barnes (who was already the third Baron Gorell when this book was published, though the title page has his common name only) tells us in a preface that he intends to play fair with the reader, who will be given all the clues necessary to solve the mystery, or at least all those his detective has in hand at the solution. For me, the book is most notable for its young woman character, Evelyn Temple, who out-detects the detective, though she misses the solution. But so does he.

At Salting Towers Sir Roger Penterton has been murdered. Inspector Emmanuel Humblethorne is on holiday in the “picturesque and unexciting” village of Salting, at the Rose and Crown, where he tries to speak to a fellow guest and is rebuffed. He joins the investigation; Sergeant Birts is happy to have someone take the responsibility. Humblethorne soon realizes from the family faces at Salting Towers that the rude guest at the Rose and Crown is the son of the family, John Penterton, whom his father sent packing ten years previously for having married against Sir Roger’s wishes. John Penterton left the inn immediately after his rebuff of Humblethorne, who begins to theorize, with John as the villain, when he discovers that someone has let an outsider into the house, through the drawing room doors, the night before.

            Actually it is not he that makes that discovery, but Evelyn Temple, close friend of the Penterton daughter Celia. Evelyn also discovers that the silver cigarette case lying near the body is not the murder weapon, but was thrown, missing Sir Roger and hitting the wainscoting on the stairs and leaving a mark. It was only later placed in the position she finds it, close enough to the body to have a bloodstain on its underside. Evelyn believes that Celia or Sir Roger’s secretary, Philip Castle, must have let John in, and either Philip or John committed the murder. She does not wish to believe any of this, but it is clearly the theory that Humblethorne is working on.

            Evelyn also discovers the murder weapon, a statuette in a niche on the stair landing, ready at hand to drop on the head of Sir Roger. There is blood on it, and fingerprints that Evelyn matches to the butler’s after a little unwitting instruction about revealing latent prints by Humblethorne and a clever ruse to get the butler to handle a glass.

            Of course the butler didn’t do it and Evelyn was mistaken in thinking so, but Humblethorne was even farther out in his ideas about how the murder was done and who did it. Neither can take credit for discovering the murderer, but Evelyn clearly did more of the detective work than Humblethorne. Yet it is the inspector who condescendingly mansplains to Evelyn at the end, indicting himself without knowing it:

            “If you don’t mind taking a tip from me, Miss Temple,” she heard Humblethorne saying in her ear as they went along the passage, “you have a real gift, but you make one mistake.”

            “What is that?” she asked without the least interest.

            “In thinking that there can be only one explanation of any set of facts,” he replied. “Now I have had years of experience and I know that the same facts can often be explained in several different ways. And you see now that I’m right.”

            “Yes,” she answered slowly, “I see now: it is wonderful to see at last, isn’t it?”

An Oxford Tragedy

 

 

            For almost a hundred years now, according to Martin Edwards in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, there’s been a “seemingly never-ending fictional crime wave among the dreaming spires” of Oxford. According to Edwards, the mayhem began with Adam Broome’s The Oxford Murders in 1929. But many agree that the best of the early academic mysteries is J. C. Masterman’s An Oxford Tragedy (1933).

            Here the fictional Oxford college is St. Thomas’s, thirteen of whose fellows, attending dinner in the Hall on the evening of the murder, constitute the closed suspect pool. The story is told to us by Francis Winn, Senior Tutor in history, who has the narrative advantage of having been around long enough (as he often reminds us) to know all the fellows as well as the physical setup of the Dean’s rooms on the Quad where the murder takes place. The geography of Quad and Common Room, Hall and High Table, is the book’s territory and seldom strayed from. The lingo takes some getting used to if you’re not a product of Oxford. “I have sported the oak in my rooms,” says the Dean, meaning “I’ve closed the outer door.” Bumpers and toggers and Bump Suppers to celebrate victory in the former (boat races) are topics of conversation at the High Table, when they condescend to talk about the undergraduates. Another is a revolver the Dean has confiscated from an undergraduate and left lying, loaded, in his rooms. As Chekhov said of the shotgun on the wall in the first act, we know that revolver’s going to be used before long. When it is, one of the thirteen is dead, and then comes an interesting twist. Neither the ineffectual Winn nor the thorough, methodical Inspector Cotter of the local force will solve this one. The detective is a visiting lecturer in law from Vienna, Ernst Brendel, who has something of a reputation as a crime-solving amateur in his native city. Winn begs Brendel to investigate, and he does.

            Masterman gives us the solution to the puzzle three quarters of the way through, so that this quiet book has only a brief climax, and then a dying fall. Winn himself is a weak character, too prone to introspection, too hesitant and self-critical to act. But all this makes the book just the sort of mystery we might like to read when the world is too much with us and the times too interesting.

A Clinic on the Locked Room Mystery

 

             When the repulsive Lieutenant Lepean is killed in his locked room at Medbury 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. This is the setup in The Medbury Fort Murder, by George Limnelius, a pseudonym for Lewis George Robinson.

            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.

The Split Personality of Francis Beeding

  

Francis Beeding is the pseudonym adopted by two men, John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders, who met while they were both working at the Geneva Secretariat of the League of Nations, where part of their first book, The Seven Sleepers (1925) is set. Palmer was a drama critic and a biographer of theatre people. Saunders was a decorated war hero and a war historian. The two had different backgrounds, but some of their interests, in writing mystery and spy thrillers, overlapped. 

The Seven Sleepers was their first collaborative effort. Tom Preston sells hardware to buyers in other countries—an itinerant tinker, as he calls himself. In Geneva he is mistaken for a German member of a secret society working to rearm Germany to avenge the Versailles Treaty. The Seven Sleepers are financiers bankrolling this effort—they fear the huge reparations Germany still owes will result in the confiscation of their fortunes. 

            Tom visits the Secretariat to hand over to Henri Lavelle, an old wartime friend, a coded document he’s been handed by mistake. Also, an old flame, Beatrice Harvel, works there, and the fire starts up again on both sides. Then Lavelle is murdered and Beatrice kidnaped by the gang, and Tom must rescue her while getting the goods not only on the sleepers, but on the man for whom the coded document is intended, the man the sleepers want to lead Germany’s armies to new hegemony in Europe. 

            The book is the tradition of Buchan thrillers but displays an insider’s view of the secretariat as well as facility with the German language and familiarity with the capitals of Europe. It’s a page-turner, but with some of the sentimentality that Ambler and Greene’s grittier novels would eliminate. That casual Brit anti-Semitism is here, too; it strikes me as ironic in books that cast the pre-Third Reich Germans as villains.

            The main villain here is Professor Anselm Kreutzemark of the hypnotic eyes, and he survives the book to tangle with Tom again in The Hidden Kingdom (1927).

            Palmer and Saunders found a more enduring series character in Colonel Granby, who featured in eighteen novels written over as many years. When they turned their attention to mystery novels, the Francis Beeding duo did even better than their spy series. The House of Dr. Edwardes (1928), a psychological thriller, was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1945 as Spellbound. And their next mystery became a classic. 

            Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) was written when few detective stories concerned serial killers. It is set in the fictional East Anglian seaside village of Eastrepps, where the resort visitors clear out pretty fast once the “Eastrepps Evil”—as a London newspaperman dubs him—murders his second victim.  

            The plot is fairly complex. A rich broker visits his married mistress in Eastrepps once a week, setting up a complicated scheme so that it seems he spends two nights in a London hotel each week while working in the city, but in fact he travels back to Eastrepps on the second day to spend a night with her, pretending the next morning to arrive from London. Her ne’er-do-well cousin discovers this affair and attempts to blackmail them. Then several young women are murdered, and each of them, or their families, lost money in a stock scheme run by the broker years ago under a different name. A local fisherman who claims to have seen the murderer is killed next. The Scotland Yard man, Inspector Wilkins, investigates Alistair Rockingham, a mentally disturbed young nobleman living in Eastrepps with Higgins, his minder. Rockingham has been institutionalized for his behavior toward young women, and he has blackouts. Discovering that Rockingham gets out of the house where he is supposedly confined at night, Wilkins arrests him. But then the murders continue, and we see Rockingham for the red herring he is. 

            The police go for another suspect, and much of the book’s last third is taken up with his trial, but where we expect dramatic developments in the courtroom, we get instead a shocking conclusion to the trial. The solution only comes in the last chapter, when Wilkins, who’s been oddly out in solving the case, finally is shown the truth and manages in the nick of time to prevent two more murders.

            A few blog writers on mystery have said smugly that they had guessed the culprit, but found the book entertaining anyway.                   They fail to see that their guessing the solution forms part of the authors’ clever plan. The reader is meant to guess the solution during the trial, then doubt her guess when the trial does not turn out as expected, and then find vindication in the last chapter when the book’s characters catch up with her astuteness.

            I think this mystery has retained its popularity for almost a hundred years because of its deft use of red herrings, its plot complications, and its employment of what I would call the Watson/Hastings ploy (the reader is smarter than the detective’s assistants) and an extra turn on this ploy where for a few pages the reader is smarter than the detective. Vincent Starrett, the critic and Sherlock Holmes scholar, called this one of the ten best mysteries ever written, Martin Edwards includes it as one of his hundred in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017), and it is in “The Definitive Library of Mystery Fiction” compiled by Howard Haycraft and updated by Ellery Queen.

Diane and Her Friends

In reading books of mystery and detective fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian age for a possible book project, I find many that would be of interest only to the specialist. They all have novel features, but some are not as well-written as the ones that have achieved deserved fame: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, G. K. Chesterton’s tales about Father Brown, and a few others. But in a fair number of cases I’ve come across a book that is well-written and interesting, but for some reason has failed to keep public attention over the last century. One of these is a book that Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote together as Ellery Queen, listed among the most important books in detective fiction, but which I’d never heard of before my research, Arthur Sherburne Hardy’s Diane and Her Friends, whose eleven connected stories first appeared in Harper’s Monthly in the years 1908-1912; the book was published in 1914. The detective here is Inspector Joly, but he makes up only one part of the book.

In fact the book has three moving parts. The circle of Diane Wimpffen’s immediate friends is small, and includes her husband Raoul, General Texier, an old family friend who becomes Raoul’s boss at the war ministry, and Monsieur de Sade, who begins as an acquaintance—interesting, provocative, and so irritating that Diane, insulted by him, fights a sword duel with him and prevails. Yet he is also one whose manners abruptly return after this breach, and in the course of time his wisdom and capacity for empathy make him Diane and Raoul’s most trusted friend.

Diane meets by chance Countess Anne, who owns a chateau in the village of Freyr and holds there an unofficial position somewhere between that of a magistrate and a parish priest. The countess takes Diane and her young daughter in, inspiring Diane’s friendship and the daughter’s hero-worship; the girl demands, after getting to know and love the countess, to be called not Diane, her given name, but Anne. Having her mother’s strength of will, she prevails in this. But the whole village becomes Diane’s friend, and the village is depicted with Chaucerian sympathy and Flaubertian precision. The hotel upon whose terrace Diane and the countess meet is thus introduced:

It was called the “Hotel d’Italie et d’Angleterre.” Why? Neither Italians nor Englishmen frequented it. Nor had M. Achille, its proprietor, ever visited these countries except in imagination. Why not “Peking and Timbuctoo?”

With such brushstrokes Hardy creates a believable village he calls Freyr. Its police commissaire, its reverend abbot—secretly in love with its chateau owner, Countess Anne, its fiercely rationalist doctor, its mysterious recluse, and the countess’s donkey Balafre, all inhabit a village on the Meuse, with a steep path up to the chateau, the river with its long-abandoned ferry replaced by a bridge, its hotel with a terrace overlooking the river, its Café de la Regence, its bakery, and its fountain by Girardon. The mysterious figure in the village, known only as Le Vieux, turns out to be an escaped murderer, and to Freyr an inspector of the Paris prefecture to apprehend him. This is Inspector Joly, the third moving part, whose immediate purpose is defeated because the countess has used her influence with General Texier (yes, he is also the countess’s friend, because a tissue of acquaintance and coincidence also links Diane’s friends), who persuades the Minister of Justice to grant Le Vieux a pardon. The countess makes him her gardener.

Before he leaves Freyr, M. Joly picks up a clue to a Paris mystery that allows him to capture a bomb-throwing Russian revolutionary. Joly becomes an admirer of the countess and a friend of Diane. Joly is an unassuming but effective police detective who also finds the diamonds of the Vicomtesse Celimène de Caraman (another of Diane’s friends), and recovers the stolen plans for France’s defenses stolen from the War Ministry, where now Colonel Raoul Wimpffen works with General Texier. Inspector Joly is  “clean-shaven, with round, rosy cheeks,” has a cardinal principle not to form an opinion prematurely” and a belief “that his best thoughts came, not logically from established facts, but from God knows where—motherless and fatherless offspring.”

The fortunes of Diane and Raoul and those of Madame and Inspector Joly are paralleled in the last couple of stories, where the two sets of parents deal, in very different ways, with the romances of their young daughters.

A soupçon of sentimentalism seasons the pages of Diane and Her Friends, probably more than is fashionable these days. But if you can stomach Dickens you won’t find it difficult to take here.