ALAN GREEN – What a Body! Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1949. Dell, paperback, 1951.

   The dust jacket blurb calls this first mystery “the funniest, risibility-ticklingest book … since Wodehouse.” It isn’t that good, but it does have its moments — so many of them, in fact, that What a Body! was voted a Best First Novel Edgar. It is not only comical in the droll, barbed fashion of the Forties, but has an “impossible crime” plot of the sort that John Dickson Carr  loved to hefuddle his readers with.

   When Merlin Broadstone is murdered in his fourth-floor room at the Broadstone Hotel on the island of Broadstone, Florida, millions of people cheer. Broadstone, the “Caliph of Calisthenics,” the “Dictator of Diet,” had made a fortune by zealously depriving people of liquor, tobacco, starchy foods, slothful behavior, and the joy of sex — all in the name of health and fitness. The Broadstone Hotel (and Broadstone Island) is a large and austere health spa, his monument to clean (if unhappy) living; it has been open only short while, and is populated at the time of Broadstone amazing demise by hundreds of his followers, members of his immediate family, and a number of VIPs, among the a Democratic senator, a Republican congressman, and a famous criminal lawyer.

   And Broadstone’s death truly is amazing. It seems he was shot to death inside his locked room, through a window open only a few inches, and at an angle that indicating the fatal bullet came from the swimming pool in the courtyard below. Not only that, but there is evidence that the murderer somehow entered the locked room after the shooting, on an inexplicable errand. According to Police Lieutenant John Hugo, the book’s nominal hero (who spends more ti courting Broadstone’s sexy blond niece, Sandra, than he does detecting), the person responsible is someone “who can walk on the surface of a body of water six feet deep while remaining invisible. He must also be a guy who has a compulsion to put pajamas on his victim after shooting him and who would walk through the walls of a locked room to do so.”

   The immediate suspects include Sandra; Broadstone; brother-in-law, Arthur Hutch; and the four other member of the family, none of whom liked the tyrannical old faddist; Senator Happy Ned Dumbrow, the owner of different island that Broadstone didn’t buy; a hulking young man named Lovechild who has a penchant for togas; and Daniel Joyce, the plump and middle-aged family lawyer to whom the damnedest things happen. It isn’t exactly love-smitten and bumbling Hugo who determines which of th4g is guilty and explains how the crime was accomplished (a simple and dexterous solution it is, too); actually, one of the suspects has to do it for him.

   The only real flaw in What a Body! is Green’s determinedly author-omniscient style, which at times becomes intrusive and gets in the way of continuity. The same is true of his only other mystery, They Died Laughing (1952), an equally clever and amusing locked-room puzzle about the murder of a TV comedian — on and off television.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.