Fri 29 Aug 2014
William F. Deeck
ERIC HEATH – Death Takes a Dive. Hillman-Curl, hardcover, 1938. Mystery Novel of the Month, no number, digest-sized paperback, 1940.
— Murder in the Museum. Hillman-Curl, hardcover, 1939. Mystery Novel of the Month, no number, digest-sized paperback, 1940 .
Attending a Hollywood party at which a man drowns, Winnie Preston, assistant to criminologist Cornelius Clift, Jr., better known as Copey, suspects murder rather than accident in Death Takes a Dive. It turns out that the victim had been attacked and strangled to death at the bottom of the pool. Winnie narrates the investigation, which has no interesting features and is excessively tedious.
On their way to get married in Murder in the Museum, Copey and Winnie stop at the home of Alexander Cameron, an Egyptology enthusiast who was one of Copey’s professors in college. Shortly after they arrive, Cameron is murdered in the museum he had built. Someone inoculated him with a rare Oriental poison.
If the someone who killed Alexander was not Alexander’s son, a physician who is in love with Alexander’s second wife, then we have a locked-room situation. For Copey and Winnie arrive at the museum door immediately after the murder — they have heard it committed over a “Radio Nurse,” an early form of intercom — to find the door locked. When they do get into the museum, they discover Alexander’s corpse, no murderer, and no means for the murderer to have got out of the museum.
Should you be able to accept Copey talking to his betrothed as if she were as dimwitted as the narrators S.S, Van Dine and Anthony Abbot, a Sausalito police chief so broad-minded as to say “Telepathy is almost an accepted thing nowadays,” strange tales of reincarnation, Cameron’s daughter who was scared by a dog, frequently goes about on all fours howling, and tries to kill one of the servants — didn’t provide her with milk bones, probably — and a few other miscellaneous oddities, you may enjoy the second and last novel featuring Copey and Winnie.
Note: Murder in the Museum has been reviewed once before on this blog, the earlier time by David Vineyard, some five plus years ago. You may find his comments here.
August 30th, 2014 at 10:53 am
My review of MURDER OF A MYSTERY WRITER (1955), also by Eric Heath, appears here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=543
I mention this because I assume you’d like to know more about Eric Heath and his rather inept way of writing detective fiction.
But more than that, the later book is a rewrite of DEATH TAKES A DIVE, and you might find interesting some comments and other discussion abou the earklier book by Bill Pronzini.
In fact, he says in part:
“…I found it so atrocious when I read it back in the early 80s that I wrote a six-page dissection of its plot absurdities and accorded it Alternative Hall of Fame status in Gun in Cheek (Coward McCann, 1982). A classic!”
This older review of mine is so old that in the meantime all kinds of format changes have crept in, and I can’t edit them out without rewriting and reposting the entire review. Bear with it, though. Fans of bad mystery writing should enjoy it!
August 30th, 2014 at 3:14 pm
It took me about 15 minutes, but that older review of mine is all cleaned up and looking a whole lot better.
August 30th, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Heath is about as alternative as you can get, but as bad mysteries go they are just dumb enough to be fun, and actually read a bit like a lesser B mystery programmer.
Winnie makes Poirot’s Hastings look like a genius, and Copey is so preposterous in his pronouncement he’s almost a parody of the great detective.
I can’t imagine anyone would like this as a real mystery, but as an alternative classic it is right up there and nowhere near as hard to get through as Harry Stephen Keeler can be.
It’s oddly readable for something that bad.