RONALD KNOX – The Three Taps.   Penguin 1451, UK, paperback, 1960. Hardcover editions: Methuen, UK, 1927; Simon & Schuster, US, 1927.

    Born in Knibworth, Leicestershire, Ronald Knox was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1918, and with The Belief of Catholics in 1927 he became one of the UK’s foremost spokespersons for the religion. As most fans of early detective fiction know, he also dabbled in more mundane matters of more interest to us here. In fact was a prominent member of the exclusive Detection Club for many years, until he was requested by his bishop to cease and desist writing mere mysteries.

    He is known perhaps in our circles more for his Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction than for his novels, here they are in short form, as stated in his introduction to The Best English Detective Stories of 1928:

    The longer version with commentaries and suggested exclusions, et cetera, can be found here.

    Ronald Knox produced only six detective novels of his own, all but the first solved by one Miles Bredon, an insurance investigator for the Indescribable Company. This makes him a sleuth very much like a private eye in nature, but he’s no mean streets kind of guy. Small village life is the setting of The Three Taps, and along with him is his wife Angela, and I have to admit, she’s no slouch as a detective either.

    Slowing the book down in the beginning is a long rambling preamble that assumes, first of all, that the reader knows what an Euthanasia policy is. I couldn’t find a single reference to such an agreement on the Internet, but I probably ran out of patience before I should have. From the context, though, I finally gathered that it was an insurance contract that before the policy holder reached the age of 65 paid off on the his or her death in the usual fashion, but then turned into an annuity making regular payment to the survivor, if he did.

    Of course if the policyholder commits suicide before the age of 65, the heirs get nothing. This is the crux of the story. A man named Mottram, the holder of such a policy, is found dead of gas poisoning in the room in the inn which he was staying while on a vacation fishing trip. He’s under 65, but recently he’d tried to buy out his policy from Bredon’s insurance company, telling them that a doctor had given him only a few months to live.

    Bredon makes a bet with his friend Inspector Leyland. Breton says his death was suicide (so his company doesn’t have to pay off), and Leyland says it was murder. And with the wager in mind, each looks for clues to back his version of what really happened.

    It’s a complicated matter, and a beautifully constructed one, with lots of clues mixed in with the red herrings, double bluffs, hidden motives and of course no one tells (all) the truth. The denouement is even more complicated, so far as to be unreal, but truth (and fate) certainly does fall in strange and unexpected ways, so who am I to argue?

    Besides the Euthanasia policy to confound the present-day reader, the matter also depends greatly (and quite naturally) on the gas taps in the dead man’s room: which of the three were on, and which were off, and when and why. For all except the last, or “why,” it would take a mathematician to follow the logic, but I plead guilty and admit that I fell asleep at the switch.

    Overall then: this tale is definitely dated — much of the current crowd of mystery readers isn’t going get very far into this one — but it’s their loss. This is a beautifully and wonderfully constructed detective story.

      Bibliographic data:

  [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

KNOX, [Monsignor] RONALD A(rbuthnott). 1888-1957. Series character: Miles Bredon, in all but the first.

      The Viaduct Murder (n.) Methuen 1925.
      The Three Taps (n.) Methuen 1927.
      The Footsteps at the Lock (n.) Methuen 1928.
      The Body in the Silo (n.) Hodder 1933.
      Still Dead (n.) Hodder 1934.

      Double Cross Purposes (n.) Hodder 1937.

   
VICARS BELL – Death and the Night Watches. Douglas Baynes #5. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1955. British Book Centre, US, hardcover, 1962

    Death and the Night Watches by Vicars Bell is another of that enjoyable sub-genre, the English village murder, chock-a-block with well-distinguished local characters, much like The Nine Tailors without Wimsey.

    Here the detective is Douglas Baynes, an entomologist who lost a leg in World War II, assisting a couple of interesting members of the official staff, and the problem: who shot a local farmer and bully, beat his head to a pulp, and left his body in the churchyard? His death is the greatest relief to his sister, a member of the walking dead, and her daughter, still hopeful and in love.

    The vicar, a believer in the militant church, thinks her boyfriend did it and tries to cook the evidence. Baynes sees through this and puts the romance back on the tracks, but he and the author can’t figure out who did do the crime.

    At last, a portion of the cast reveal themselves as villains and, against their best interests, kidnap Baynes, so there can be a smash ending, complete with a boat race and a helicopter.

   
[Editorial PostScript.] This a scarce book. After reading Bill’s review, I went hunting for a copy, and I found one, the cover of which you see above. At the moment I am typing this, there are now none.

    I’m sure I was the lucky recipient of a bookseller’s error. I paid less than $10. Of Vicars Bell’s six mysteries (see below), only two of them are available online, and one is offered in the $200 range. And not only does mine have the dust jacket, it turns out that it is inscribed by the author to his father in 1955.

   For more about Vicars Bell, Contemporary Authors describes his career thusly: “Spaldwick Council School, Huntingdon, England, headmaster, 1927-29; Little Gaddesden Church of England School, Little Gaddesden, Berkhamsted, England, headmaster, 1929-62. Lecturer at University of London, University of Birmingham, Oxford University, and Cambridge University; also lecturer in Isreal and public lecturer in England. Founder of Little Gaddesden Parish Council, lay reader for Diocese of St. Albans.”

   Fifteen books are listed in CA as having been written by Vicars Bell, which sounds like a pseudonym but is not, including the six detective novels previously mentioned. Other work includes such titles as Little Gaddesden: The Story of an English Parish, 1949, and On Learning the English Tongue, 1953.

    Bibliographic Data —   

         [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]

BELL, VICARS (Walker). 1904-1988. Series character, in all titles: Douglas Baynes.
      Death Under the Stars (n.) Faber 1949.
      Death Has Two Doors (n.) Faber 1950.
      Two by Day and One by Night (n.) Faber 1950.
      Death Darkens Council (n.) Faber 1952.
      Death and the Night Watches (n.) Faber 1955.
      Death Walks by the River (n.) Faber 1959.

Hi Steve,

   I wonder if you can help me. I need to get hold of an obituary for novelist and screenwriter Roy Chanslor who died in September 1964. It seems the only one appeared in an issue of Variety sometime that fall. I don’t know if you know anyone who might be able to help, or if you could ‘advertise’ on your blog. I would be most grateful if you could. Variety does have a sort of archive, but it’s only for old film reviews,

       Bibliographic data [crime fiction only]:

CHANSLOR, ROY. 1899-1964.
       Lowdown. Farrar & Rinehart, hc, 1931.
       Hazard. Simon & Schuster, hc, 1947; Bantam #474, pb, 1949. Film: Paramount, 1948 (scw: Arthur Sheekman, Roy Chanslor; dir: George Marshall).

[Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

   Chanslor also has a long list of writing credits on IMDB, including Tarzan Triumphs, The House of Fear, Black Angel and Cat Ballou.

   Bill Crider had an interesting post about him last year on his blog. Follow the link.

   More? His wife, Torrey Chanslor, was both a well-known illustrator of children’s books and a two-time mystery writer. Where or when she died is apparently unknown, but her two detective novels have recently been reprinted by Rue Morgue Press. Follow this second link for a long biographical essay about her.

CHANSLOR, (Marjorie) TORREY (Hood). 1899-?
      Our First Murder (Stokes, 1940, hc) [Lutie and Amanda Beagle; New York City, NY]
      Our Second Murder (Stokes, 1941, hc) [Lutie and Amanda Beagle; New York City, NY]

AMBER DEAN – Snipe Hunt .

Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1949. Reprinted in The Standard as the “Book of the Week” feature, September 30, 1950.

   This one surprised me a bit. It starts out with a couple of G-men who are stuck in the basement of a New York City tenement on a stake-out, trying to stay alert in order to spot any of the members of a notorious gang of counterfeiters they’ve been tipped off about.

   Just another dull procedural, I thought. The only noticeable complications concern the unlucky love life of one of the agents, undone by some typical Woolrichian vicissitudes of fate.

   Then suddenly the scene shifts. To upstate New York, the Finger Lakes region, where a commandeered customs agent named Max, his wife whom he calls Mommie, and a pretty girl named Danny combine forces to show the federal men the local lay of the land.

   What a snipe hunt is is a wild goose chase; there is also a humorously nosy neighbor who thinks that Max is just pulling her leg. But comedy, even such an incongruous concoction such as this, does not mix well with sudden spurts of nearly devastating disaster.

   Maybe I’m just chagrined at being caught off stride like this.

[UPDATE] 01-29-09. I messed up big time when I wrote this review. It turns out that one of Amber Dean’s standard series characters is in the book, and she didn’t make enough impression on me even to note her name: Abbie Harris. Checking the blurb for the book from Ellen Nehr’s Doubleday Crime Club Compendium, Abbie almost assuredly is Max Johnson’s nosy neighbor.

   Most of Amber Dean’s 17 mystery novels take place in upstate New York, not too surprisingly, since she herself lived in the Rochester area for most of her life, 1902-1985.

   Abbie Harris was in eight of those books. From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a complete list:

         HARRIS, ABBIE    [Amber Dean]

      Dead Man’s Float (n.) Doubleday 1944.
      Chanticleer’s Muffled Crow (n.) Doubleday 1945.
      Call Me Pandora (n.) Doubleday 1946.
      Wrap It Up (n.) Doubleday 1946.
      No Traveller Returns (n.) Doubleday 1948.
      Snipe Hunt (n.) Doubleday 1949.
      August Incident (n.) Doubleday 1951.

      The Devil Threw Dice (n.) Doubleday 1954.

SIMON HAWKE – Much Ado About Murder.

Forge, hardcover; First Edition, December 2002; reprint paperback: January 2004.

   There’s a period (1585-1592) in the life of William Shakespeare that’s called the Lost Years, in which nothing is known — where he was, what he was doing, and who he was hanging out with.

    Filling in the gap — pure speculation on Hawke’s part, not to mention audacity — here’s the third in a series of detective adventures of the most famous poet and playwright the world has ever known. Assisting him is his good friend and hanger-on with the Queen’s Men, Symington “Tuck” Smythe.

   Hard times have hit the traveling group of players. Plague has struck London, and all of the city’s playhouses have been closed down. (Not so incidentally, Hawke describes the horrible condition of the unsanitary streets in more than adequate detail. Ghastly.) Will has sold some sonnets, though, so he and Tuck are not starving, yet.

   They also run athwart the Steady Boys, a gang of young ruffians who feel that the country is being done under by too many immigrants: England for Englishmen in Shakespeare’s day!

   But while the events in Will and Tuck’s day-to-day life are interesting, after 130 pages, they’re no longer entirely riveting, so for the mystery fans perched in the front row, when the murder of Master Leonardo occurs, it’s with (dare I say) a certain amount of relief and “at last.” It’s a relatively minor case to be solved, but it’s Will’s sense of what makes people do what they do that saves the day.

   Bawdy at times, extremely funny at others, this is an entirely enjoyable lark, a remarkable flight of fancy, and I think you’ll like it, too.

[UPDATE] 01-26-09. It turns out that Simon Hawke is (or was) an SF writer named Nicholas Yermakov, before he changed his named legally to Hawke.

   He’s most noted, perhaps, for a long series of books in his “TimeWars” series, the first of which you see here to the left. He’s also written Battlestar Galactica, Batman, and Star Trek novels, as well as novelizations of “Friday the Thirteenth” movies.

   There were only four books in his series of Shakespeare movies, I’m sorry to say. Perhaps the funny bones of a wider audience weren’t tickled as much as mine was. The fourth one was never even released in paperback:

     The Shakespeare & Smythe mysteries —

[LATER THE SAME DAY.] I was looking at the two cover images I included in this post, and I think I can see one reason why there were 12 books in the TimeWars series, and only four in Hawke’s Shakespeare series, even though they were desgned for two entirely different audiences.

   You probably can, too. Look at the cover of Much Ado. It’s perfectly designed to show that it has something to do with a mystery (from the title) and something to do with Shakespeare (also from the title). Other than that? Dullsville.

JOHN BUXTON HILTON – Holiday for Murder. Diamond, reprint paperback; 1st printing, July 1991. Originally published as Passion in the Peak. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Originally published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, hc, 1985.

   This is another in the author’s Inspector Kenworthy series, the fifth in the series published by Diamond. There have been seventeen in all, and they have all been published in the US, surprisingly enough. (For most British mystery writers, there’s always at least one book that doesn’t make the cut with publishers over here — or so it seems.)

   Of the ones they’re doing, Diamond is not publishing them in order. One that I read not too long ago was Hangman’s Tide, which originally came out in 1975. In Holiday for Murder, which was written ten years later, Inspector Kenworthy has already retired, but his ability as a detective has spread throughout England so greatly that he’s regarded as very nearly omniscient.

   In this book he investigates a strange sort of murder, a hillside automobile accident in the driver disappears, only to show up later, very much dead, some distance away. The dead man is a notorious womanizing rock musician (all of which are (to some degree) very much synonymous) who has the leading role (that of Christ) in a non-denominational/ecumenical Passion play now in the stages of rehearsal in the small village of Peak Low.

   Practical jokes at the expense of two different Mary Magdalene’s have preceded the accident, but the murder was apparently committed for other reasons. The villagers, various policemen, and the many actors, singers, electricians and so on involved in putting on the extravaganza are all precisely and individually depicted — Hilton’ s primary strength as a writer.

   The solution to the murder is presented in very anti-climactic fashion, strangely enough, as if Hilton felt that the mystery itself wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own.

   There is also a red herring — the matter of the match from Doncaster — that is poorly done. Kenworthy seems to know all about before he’s informed, and its significance in the story is none at all. It’s never mentioned again.

   But if you enjoy mysteries with small English village settings, read this one anyway. You’ll like it.

[UPDATE] 01-25-09. Strangely enough, while I don’t remember any of the details of this book’s plot, much less whatever flaws I may have found in it, I do remember enjoying reading it, which makes that last sentence pretty much of a guarantee.

   One thing that I didn’t change in the review is Kenworthy’s rank. I called him an Inspector, but in Al Hubin refers to him as a Superintendent. (See below.) The easiest explanation is, of course, that he was promoted sometime during his career.

   When Hilton wasn’t writing about Kenworthy, he used Inspector Thomas Brunt as his detective on the case. What really distinguished them from the Kenworthy mysteries, though, is that the six Brunt books took place in England in the late 1800s through the year 1911 or so.

   And, for the sake of completeness, Hilton also wrote another six mysteries as by John Greenwood. Inspector Jack Mosley was in all of these. I remember the Mosley books as being somewhat lighter in tone, though I may be in error about that.

   Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all the Kenworthy books —

         KENWORTHY, SUPT. SIMON     [John Buxton Hilton, 1921-1986.]

       Death of an Alderman (n.) Cassell, UK, 1968. Walker, US, 1968. Also published as: Dead Man’s Path, Diamond, pb, 1992.
       Death in Midwinter (n.) Cassell, UK, 1969. Walker, US, 1969. (Diamond, pb, 1994.)
       Hangman’s Tide (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1975. St. Martin’s, US, 1975. (Diamond/Charter, pb, 1990.)
       No Birds Sang (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1975. St. Martin’s, US, 1978. Also published as: Target of Suspicion, Diamond, pb, 1994.
       Some Run Crooked (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1978. St. Martin’s, US, 1978.
       The Anathema Stone (n.) Collins, UK, 1980. St. Martin’s, US, 1980. Also published as: Fatal Curtain, Diamond, pb, 1990.

       Playground of Death (n.) Collins, UK, 1981. St. Martin’s, US, 1981. (Diamond/Charter, pb, 1991.)
       Surrender Value (n.) Collins, UK, 1981. St. Martin’s, US, 1981. Also published as: Twice Dead, Diamond, pb, 1992.

       The Green Frontier (n.) Collins, UK. 1982. St. Martin’s, US, 1982. Also published as: Focus on Crime , Diamond, pb, 1993.
       The Sunset Law (n.) Collins, UK, 1982. St. Martin’s, US, 1982.

       The Asking Price (n.) Collins, UK, 1983. St. Martin’s, US, 1983. Also published as: Ransom Game, Diamond, pb, 1992.
       Corridors of Guilt (n.) Collins, UK, 1984. St. Martin’s, US, 1984. (Diamond, pb, 1993.)

       The Hobbema Prospect (n.) Collins, UK, 1984. St. Martin’s, US, 1984. Also published as: Cradle of Crime, Diamond, 1991.
       Passion in the Peak (n.) Collins, UK, 1985. St. Martin’s, US, 1985. Also published as: Holiday for Murder, Diamond, 1991.
       The Innocents at Home (n.) Collins, UK, 1986. St. Martin’s, US, 1987. Also published as: Lesson in Murder, Diamond, 1991.
       Moondrop to Murder (n.) Collins, UK, 1986. St. Martin’s, US, 1986.
       Displaced Person (n.) Collins, UK, 1987. St. Martin’s, US, 1988.

MABEL SEELEY – The Listening House.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1938; reprinted, 1953 [25th Anniversary of the Crime Club]. Paperback reprints include: Popular Library #69, 1944; Mercury Mystery 45, digest-sized, n.d.; Pyramid R-1009, 1964, plus several later printings.

   It’s hard to believe that The Listening House, one of the cornerstones in the Haycraft-Queen collection, has been out of print for so long and that it isn’t a book everyone knows.

   Perhaps the problem is that Seeley wrote only a handful of books (nine, not all of them mysteries) and stopped writing when she was still fairly young — she lived until 1991 but her last mystery book appeared in 1954. It might be a regional thing too, for she was resolutely set in her native Minnesota.

   And then again it might be that, for all her other charms, Seeley never again wrote a book as fine as her first, though she copied the title again and again so that she had during her lifetime the sort of brand name loyalty Travis McGee novels had, or in our own day Sue Grafton. Seeley’s other books include The Chuckling Fingers, The Beckoning Door, The Crying Sisters, and The Whistling Shadow.

   In The Listening House a young woman, fired from her job and down at her luck, rents a cheap room from a huge old creepy rooming house that is set on the very edge of a steep overlook, and tenants throw their garbage off the back side of the building.

   Gwynne Dacres is not your ordinary ingenue heroine. She has been married, she’s capable of taking care of herself, for the most part, she has managed to surmount the Depression. The Great Depression is a tactile, living thing in this novel, a character as important as any of the crime victims or killers.

   Gwynne’s new landlady, old Mrs. Garr, is a terrible old tarantula of a woman, out of a Balzac novel, sitting on her cellar steps half the day and night, waiting, waiting, waiting, but for what? In the meantime a man’s body is found (by Gwynne) dumped, like an old load of dry goods, into the trash area at the bottom of that long cliff-like drop.

   Mrs. Garr’s terror is unfeigned, and we are not surprised, but horrified, and maybe even moved to pity, when the ghastly old lady is the second corpse whose body Gwynne discovers.

   There is plenty of horror or terror or what have you in this book, but it is also a fairly clued mystery with roots in a socio-sexual crime that occurred some twenty years back, during the days when police corruption in “Gilling City” allowed vice to run rampant.

   Seeley’s no-nonsense honesty about the harsh realities of what today we call “sex work” distinguishes her book from any other that I know of published in the late 1930s. It has a harsh, biting, Faulknerian edge to it.

   (I was thinking one of the reasons Seeley has faded from view is that none of her books was ever made for the movies — Irving Wallace made The Chuckling Fingers into a 1958 episode of the TV anthology series Climax! — and I can see that The Listening House is far too sexually frank for Hollywood of the late 1930s.)

   In addition to the sex-crime horror, which remains pretty disgusting even in today’s considerably degenerated world of “torture-porn” writing, Gwynne herself is torn, though in an amusing and sophisticated way, between the love of two very different men, a newspaper publisher, and the cop investigating the murders.

   (She accidentally meets the first one while he’s wearing only his boxer shorts, doing chin-ups in his apartment, so she gets a long view of his bare torso and hairy forearms and legs — sort of the “meet cute while naked” introduction Ellery Queen used to give his cute male characters.)

   Some have called Seeley’s plot marred by “coincidence,” but I don’t read it that way. Certainly many of the tenants had reason to kill their evil landlady — but it’s because they followed her there, to track her down, it’s not as if it were all some accident that so many of the characters had some ties to the 1921 disappearance and suicide of the unfortunate Rose Liberry.

   I think Seeley is painting a picture pf a complex society in which crimes against women are endemic because they’re built into the system, they’re the mortar which holds the bricks together in an edifice larger than a listening house.

   Too bad her other books aren’t as good, but she did make up for a disappointing run by a sharp and exciting finale: The Whistling Shadow, which is like the William Irish/George Hopley book that Woolrich never wrote.

      ___

         Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin; various paperback editions are shown.]

SEELEY, MABEL (Hodnesfield). 1903-1991.

      The Listening House (n.) Doubleday 1938.
      The Crying Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1939.

      The Whispering Cup (n.) Doubleday 1940.

      The Chuckling Fingers (n.) Doubleday 1941.
      Eleven Came Back (n.) Doubleday 1943.

      The Beckoning Door (n.) Doubleday 1950.

      The Whistling Shadow (n.) Doubleday 1954.

LILLIAN O’DONNELL – The Goddess Affair.

Fawcett Crest, paperback reprint; 1st printing, January 1998. Hardcover edition: Putnam, December 1996.

   Born in 1926, Lillian O’Donnell wrote 34 mystery novels between 1960 and 1998. Three different series detectives appeared in these books, all female: Norah Mulcahaney, a detective for the NYPD, beginning as a rookie cop (15 books); Gwenn Ramadge, a Manhattan-based PI (4 books, of which this is one); and Mici Anhalt, who works as an investigator for the New York City Crime Victim’s Compensation Board (3 books). The other 12 books all appear to be stand-alones.

   In The Goddess Affair Ms. Ramadge is hired by the owner of a cruise liner to find who’s been stealing jewelry from the passengers as the ship makes its way through the Caribbean, the Panama Canal and up the Central American coast.

   What she doesn’t count on is being asked to solve a murder mystery too, that of Minerva Aldrich, the only one of three half-sisters who has any wealth remaining several years after the unfortunate death of their mother, who was the head of Goddess Designs, and the creative force behind it.

   Are the two cases connected? It’s up to the intrepid heroine to find out – although as she admits on page 185, “She didn’t consider getting beat up or shot at as part of the job. She wasn’t that kind of private eye.”

   What she does do is ask a lot of questions, most of them quite personal, but being on ship is like being trapped in a mansion surrounded by banks of snow. There is no place the possible killers and/or thieves to go. The telling is readable enough but rather flat in tone, without a lot of excitement – even though exciting things are going on.

   If being realistic can be considered a fault in a detective story, that’s the underlying problem here. Gwenn Ramadge is no superheroine. It takes several calls to her backup assistant in New York City to come up with the facts that clinch the case, all offstage – that plus luck, and the timely intervention of Ray Dixon, her close friend on the NYPD, who flies down and helps wrap things up in the last three or four pages.

   Some personal matters between Ray and Gwenn are also quickly settled, and on the last page they exit stage left — and off into the sunset — this being their last recorded case together.

       ___

   From the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all four:

               RAMADGE, GWEN     [Lillian O’Donnell]

       A Wreath for the Bride (n.) Putnam 1990

       Used to Kill (n.) Putnam 1993
       The Raggedy Man (n.) Putnam 1995

       The Goddess Affair (n.) Putnam 1997

   The opening of Isabel Ostrander’s The Clue in the Air (1917) is a full intuitionist detective novel. There is a Dying Message. There is a description of a whole apartment building, and the suspects living on various floors and corners — a description that could have served as a blueprint for the many Golden Age novels which have elaborate floor plans in their stories.

   The detectives also investigate alibis and time tables. Unfortunately, this does not lead to a classic puzzle plot. Ostrander unravels all the threads of her story, but does not show any great ingenuity in the Christie tradition.

   Still, the whole tone of the novel anticipates the storytelling of Christie, Queen and other intuitionists of the Golden Age. Ostrander, like other American women writers such as Lee Thayer and Carolyn Wells, was writing intuitionist detective novels at an early date: in the 1910’s, and long before the famous British writers like Christie and Crofts, who allegedly started the Golden Age in 1920.

   Thayer and Wells dealt with the domestic realm in their tales: a house full of suspects, whose motives sprung from their personal relationships with each other and the deceased. This was in marked contrast to the public realm writers of the American Scientific school, where motives spring from business relationships, theft, politics and civic corruption.

   Ostrander has plenty of domestic motives. But she also has a young inventor and his plane. A typical scientific school, business type issue. Similarly, in At One-Thirty (1915) we have domestic motives for some characters (a tangle of jealousy and adulterous relationships) and business issues motivatingothers (a detailed look at a Wall Street swindle).

   Business issues in Christie et al tend to be somewhat perfunctory. Someone will threaten to kill someone because they are double crossing them in a business deal. The motive is not developed into a major story, the way the American Scientific School would do it.

   For example, everything about the missing cashier and the embezzlement in The Circular Staircase is elaborately plotted. Ostrander straddles both traditions in her books.

   Another difference between the two schools. The intuitionists play attention to the crime scene, and the movements of the suspects around it during the crime. This is not generally true of the American Scientific School. A possible exception: Cohen’s Six Seconds of Darkness.

   This motion around the crime scene probably is a consequence of impossible crimes: one cannot have a Zangwill-Chesterton rearrangement in space and time, without tracking the characters’ movements.

   But it spreads to writers that are not always impossible crime oriented, such as SS Van Dine, Anthony Abbot, and Ellery Queen. It was also found in Doyle, in stories like “The Naval Treaty.” This was before the main impossible crime movement.

   The central mystery plot of Ostrander’s At One-Thirty (1915) is a straightforward imitation of Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913). This shows that Ostrander was reading British mystery novels.

   Ostrander’s book is very similar to Golden Age mystery fiction to come, with murder among a closed circle of suspects in a wealthy home. Here as elsewhere, Ostrander introduces a whole slew of suspects, each with a different subplot.

   Servants tend to be prominent characters in Ostrander, just as they are in Bentley. They do not tend to be the anonymous functionaries of Christie, who fade into the background. Instead they play major roles in the stories.

   Ostrander’s The Tattooed Arm (1921) has her police detective hero Sergeant Miles go undercover into a wealthy Long Island home as a servant, and much of the story is narrated from the servants’ hall and point of view.

   Scientific School writers sometimes paid close attention to issues of spousal abuse. These stories are fully feminist, and remind one of the attention that the women’s movement focused on this issue in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Ostrander also continues this tradition. At One-Thirty has a very detailed look at the problems of an abused wife.

   At One-Thirty centers on blind detective Damon Gaunt. Ostrander does a vivid job of evoking his world of sound, touch and smell. Gaunt makes many brilliant deductions from these senses, in a way that evokes Sherlock Holmes’ numerous deductions about his clients.

   Gaunt’s main detective work centers around flashes of insight into the situations in front of him. Ostrander makes it clear that he solves mysteries by pure thinking. This is definitely in the intuitionist tradition, and recalls both Sherlock Holmes before him, and such Golden Age intuitionist writers to come as Christie, Milne and Queen.

   Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

OSTRANDER, ISABEL (Egenton). 1883-1924. Pseudonyms: Robert Orr Chipperfield, David Fox & Douglas Grant. (Books published under the latter three pen names are not included here.)

      At One-Thirty (n.) Watt 1915
      The Crevice [with William J. Burns] (n.) Watt 1915
      The Heritage of Cain (n.) Watt 1916

      The Clue in the Air (n.) Watt 1917 [Timothy McCarty]
      Island of Intrigue (n.) McBride 1918
      Suspense (n.) McBride 1918
      Ashes to Ashes (n.) McBride 1919
      The Twenty-Six Clues (n.) Watt 1919 [Timothy McCarty]

      How Many Cards? (n.) McBride 1920 [Timothy McCarty]

      The Crimson Blotter (n.) McBride 1921
      McCarty, Incog (n.) McBride 1922 [Timothy McCarty]
      The Tattooed Arm (n.) McBride 1922
      Annihilation (n.) McBride 1924 [Timothy McCarty]
      Dust to Dust (n.) McBride 1924

      Liberation (n.) McBride 1924
      The Black Joker (n.) McBride 1925
      The Neglected Clue (n.) McBride 1925
      The Mathematics of Guilt (n.) McBride 1926

      The Sleeping Cat (n.) McBride 1926
      The Sleeping Cop [with Christopher B. Booth] (n.) Chelsea House 1927

[Editorial Comments.]

   Please see Mike Grost’s website A GUIDE TO CLASSIC MYSTERY AND DETECTION for more essays such as this on the history of Detective Fiction. If it’s your first visit, you’re bound to stay quite a while — and to come back often.

   For further discussion of Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among other contemporaneous authors, see the comments that follow Bill Pronzini’s review of Carolyn Wells’ novel, The Wooden Indian.

MURDER 101: NEW AGE. Hallmark, 2008; aka MURDER 101: LOCKED ROOM. Dick Van Dyke, Barry Van Dyke, Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke, Susan Blakely, Wendy Glenn. Director: David S. Cass Sr.

   On August 2, 2008, Hallmark Channel premeiered a two-hour film in its Murder 101 series, which stars Dick Van Dyke as Prof. Jonathan Maxwell, a university criminology instructor.

   In this one, a New Age guru is found shot dead in a locked meditation room along with four other people. Trouble is, they’re all in deep meditative trances when the crime is discovered. Even when the sheriff fires off a blank, they still remain in the trance state.

   Of course, when they do come ’round none of them remembers seeing the crime occur. A further complication is that no one heard the fatal shot, yet a test later proves that a firearms discharge would be heard outside.

   The gun itself, found next to the victim, had no silencer attached, and since there is no GSR [Gun Shot Residue] on the dead man, it is very unlikely he committed suicide. But a note, which many construe as indicating the victim contemplated killing himself, is found in his room.

   GSR is soon discovered on one of the four who were in the room at the time, but shortly after this person is arrested he lapses into a near-death state: “Suicide by coma; that’s a new one.”

   Meanwhile, someone tries to run over an associate of the dead guru in the hospital parking lot and later tries to tidy up the loose ends of the crime by cremating Jonathan — while he’s still alive ….

   This one reminded me of a first- or second-season Murder, She Wrote episode in which a group of people are in a hypnotic trance when a murder takes place right before them, but the similarity ends there.

   The violence content is quite low, with the script concentrating more on WHO, WHY, and HOW, a refreshing change of pace from the usual “crime drama.”

   I didn’t think this was the best possible treatment of the locked room theme — the impossible crime motif is by far my favorite — but it wasn’t all that gosh-awful either.

      Filmography:

Murder 101. 01-07-06. A successful executive is murdered in an explosion at his mansion, and an attractive female investigative reporter is suspected; she had been working undercover on a story about corporate scandal.

Murder 101: College Can Be Murder. 01-06-07. When Dr. Maxwell does not believe that Professor Archer Coe died of a heart attack, he hires his friend, PI Mike Bryant (Barry Van Dyke), to investigate.

Murder 101: If Wishes Were Horses. 08-18-07. A horse is stolen, and the owners receive a $100 million ransom demand; the trainer is later found dead.

Murder 101: New Age. 08-02-08.