ALAN THOMAS – The Death of Laurence Vining. Benn, UK, hardcover, 1928. Harrap, UK, reprint hardcover, 1931. Lippincott, US, hardcover, 1929. A. L. Burt, US, reprint hardcover, no date stated.

   My copy of this hard-to-find locked room mystery is the Harrap reprint, and I see there’s another copy of this same edition offered for sale on the Internet with a $90 asking price. Otherwise you’ll have to come up with $200 and change for one copy I found of each of the Lippincott and Burt editions.

   I don’t think it’s worth even the $90, but there are some factors that make it worth talking about. The first I’ve already mentioned. The victim seems to have walked into a London tube station, taken a life down to the platform below, and when the gate opens, he’s found dead, stabbed to death in a way that suicide is out of the question, lying against the side of the compartment.

   Another aspect of this book that makes this interesting is that the dead man is a consulting detective who often offers his services to Scotland Yard, à la Sherlock Holmes. Laurence Vining is (or was), according to some, the “incarnation of the devil.” He solved his cases with no sympathies for the perpetrators of the crimes, no matter the circumstances they had found themselves in. He lived in a non-compassionate, black and white world, making enemies of nearly everyone whose paths he crossed, including his own servants and limited family.

    Dr. Ben Willing, on the other hand, a long time friend of Vining who traveled with him on his cases, is quite the opposite, capable of seeing the human side behind the unfortunates who ran afoul of Vining’s investigations. And of course it feels quite natural for Willing to offer his services to Inspector Widgeon in solving the murder of his long time friend, to which the policeman from Scotland Yard most willingly accepts.

   This is a unique twist on the Holmes-Watson stories that I don’t recall coming across before. Thomas is no Conan Doyle, but except for having problems adequately explaining the layout of elevators in England in the late 1920s to readers in the US almost 90 years later on, he acquits himself well.

   The locked room aspect, I am happy to say, is most cleverly done, but it is so intricately planned that it takes 33 pages and a diagram to explain. Books such as this one are exceedingly fun to read, but one does wonder why a blow on the head on a very dark night wouldn’t do just as well.

   Alan Thomas has 16 entries in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, half of them indicated as having only marginal crime content. Inspector Widgeon appears in one other of them, Death of the Home Secretary (Benn, 1929), and Bob Adey’s book on Locked Room Mysteries includes another in that category by Thomas, The Tremayne Case (Benn, 1929). Both of these titles are equally scarce, but not as pricey as this Vining one.