Fri 12 Feb 2021
An Archived PI Locked Room Mystery Review by Doug Greene: TECH DAVIS – Terror at Compass Lake.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
TECH DAVIS – Terror at Compass Lake. PI Aubrey Nash #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1935. No paperback or other later edition.
This is a better-than-average Golden Age detective novel – indeed as a first novel it shows so much promise that I briefly toyed with the thought that “Tech Davis” may have been the pseudonym of a better-known writer. (No, not JDC; and I’m too uncertain to reveal my candidate.) At any rate, the book is well worth reading.
It begins when a cocky but otherwise featureless young private investigator named Aubrey Nash receives a letter asking him to investigate a locked-room murder at Compass Lake: “If any man was ever sealed into a room and inaccessible, it was Powell and yet in the six hours that we slept someone entered his den, buried a dagger in1 his back, and left.”
Nash however refuses to come. “Three days previously he had completed a case so persistently baffling and so challenging to his health – and even his life – that after solving it he had decided upon Europe and relaxation.” But when Nash receives a second letter telling him not to come, he can’t resist the challenge.
Tech Davis, whoever he was, knew how to structure a book. After this intriguing introduction, the book goes back in time to provide the background events from the viewpoint of one of the characters. It turns out that there has already been an earlier murder, officially labeled a suicide, and like many detective novels written during the depression several minor characters are engaged in financial hanky-panky.
The book includes two maps, one of a plan of the house, the other a drawing of the murder-room. Nash does a good job investigating the crime; the characters are acceptably delineated, and the solutions are good. Experts on locked rooms should be able to solve Powell’s murder more quickly than does Nash, but the book includes a clever, though unlikely, alibi for the first murder.
Terror at Compass Lake shows signs of a neophyte – the middle of the book has too much padding – but I certainly will watch for copies of Davis’s later novels (two of them according to Hubin) about Aubrey Nash.
Bio-Bibliograhic Update: According to the current version of Hubin, we now know that Tech Davis was the pen name of Edgar Davis (1890-1974).
The Aubrey Nash series —
Terror at Compass Lake (n.) Doubleday 1935
Full Fare for a Corpse (n.) Doubleday 1937
Murder on Alternate Tuesdays (n.) Doubleday
NOTE: This book was reviewed by Bill Deeck earlier on this blog. Check it out here. (That review includes one of the maps Doug refers to in this one.)
February 12th, 2021 at 11:19 pm
There is a brief obituary for Tech Davis in the NEW YORK TIMES. It’s short, so I hope it’s OK to include it here in full:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/13/archives/edgar-h-davis.html
“Edgar H. Davis, a former teacher of English at Columbia and New York Universities and Queens College, died here Friday. He was 84 years old and lived at 1 University Place.
“Mr. Davis, under the name of Tech Davis, was the author of several detective novels. He graduated from the University of Wyoming and studied at Columbia. During World War II he was education and religious editor for Newsweek.”
February 13th, 2021 at 6:32 pm
Interesting, but I’m not sure worth the effort considering.
February 13th, 2021 at 6:42 pm
Doug’s review makes it seen more appealing to me than Bill Deeck’s did. I’m sure I have all three books, but they’re fairly well packed away and hidden.
And so what good are they to me, then? Very little. Not much at all. Only the memories of tracking them down, in those halcyon pre-Internet bookstore-to-bookstore days.