Case of The Greek Room - Sax Rohmer

Story: Case of The Greek Room

Author: Sax Rohmer

Book: The Dream Detective (Queen’s Quorum Title)

Theme for the Month: Locked Room or Impossible Crime Stories

Sax Rohmer is most famous for the creation of Dr. Fu Manchu and has a number of other creations to his name - Paul Harley, Gaston Max, Red Kerry, Morris Klaw and The Crime Magnet.

The first story in this collection introduces us to the Occult detective Moris Klaw, an old antique dealer who has been fancying his chances as an amateur investigator by hanging about the Criminal Court. He has the eccentric habit of applying a scented spray (verbena) upon his bald brows from a cylindrical container hidden in the lining of his flat-topped hat.

The night attendant of the Menzies Museum is found dead in strange circumstances in the Greek Room: there are only two entrances to the Greek Room – one leads to the private quarters of the curator and is kept locked at all instances and the other through which the general public use to enter the Greek room and this has been locked by the guard with the key on him and all the doors of the museum are bolted from inside which would make it impossible for anyone to even enter the Museum even if he had a duplicate key. Cause of death is determined to be due to broken neck, after being in the last stages of exhaustion - as though there was a great fight and he was hurled upon by an opponent possessing more than ordinary strength. Further investigation of the premises brings to light the unlocked state of the glass display containing the Athenean Harp.

Enter Moris Klaw – he requests the curator to allow him to spend a night alone in the Greek room – upon the very spot of floor where the poor attendant fell – so that he could from the surrounding atmosphere recover a picture of the thing that the dead man had at the last! He says the Odic Force, the ether carries the wireless message – it’s a huge, sensitive plate – where the supreme thought preceding death is imprinted on the surrounding atmosphere like a photograph and he has trained himself to reproduce those photographs! And he has his beautiful daughter Isis to assist him in developing the negatives for these photographs. The next day Klaw declares that his psychic photograph is that of a woman dressed all in white; the attendant died with this picture in his mind and great fear of the Athenean Harp which she was playing! He makes his departure as quickly as his untimely entrance to carry out more research.

A few days later, the replacement attendant meets the same fate in the Greek room, the only difference being the presence of the Harp on the floor right next to the fallen man. A few other peculiar features come to light but none that can help them solve the problem – until Moris Klaw comes back on one fine day (after completing his research abroad) and elucidates the secrets of the Greek Room. An impressive debut for Moris Klaw!

The Calico Dog - Mignon Eberhart

Story: The Calico Dog

Author: Mignon Eberhart

Book: The Cases Of Susan Dare

Theme for the Month: Locked Room or Impossible Crime Stories

Idabelle Lasher has inherited millions of dollars from her husband which she needs to pass along to her long lost son who disappeared along with his nurse some 20 years back. First to turn up is Dixon with a very convincing story about how he remembers playing with the house pet - the Calico dog – a fact which no one else other than the Mother knows. Next to turn up is Duane – with exactly the same story about the Calico dog and an additional story about a rare family heirloom to prove that he is her son. The widow has her friend Major Briggs to seek advice from but his choice of Duane as the legitimate heir doesn’t convince her. She has no other choice but to call in Susan Dare to help her identify her real son.

Both the gentlemen have been thoroughly investigated and no evidence exists to suspect foul play. With nothing much to go on, Susan Dare requests her host to declare one of them as the legal heir and that she would transfer the title with immediate effect. This announcement, she expects, would bring out some disturbance in one or both men and would help in revealing the true identity of the heir. The party on the next day would turn out to be the climax to this drama. Susan & Mrs. Lasher part the company of the three gentlemen near the soothsayer’s door and but they quickly return back to the room where they parted when they hear a shot being fired. Major Briggs is found shot to death with no weapon nearby and no sign of the two gentlemen. The young men left the room at the same time, none was seen entering the room and none was seen leaving the room after the shot was fired. Susan Dare has to do some quick thinking to stop further catastrophe, the impossible trick as to how the major was killed is explained by the murderer himself but it is the lady detective who reveals the true heir.

Identifying the real heir forms the major plot element for most part of the story and is fairly and most skillfully clued. The impossible crime scenario comes in as a bonus towards the fag end of the story and is very quickly explained away – neither too complicated nor extraordinary in its conception.

Bird in the Hand - Erle Stanley Gardner

Story: Bird in the Hand

Author: Erle Stanley Gardner

Source: The Adventures of Lester Leith

Theme for the Month: Locked Room or Impossible Crime Stories

Erle Stanley Gardner is not a name that we normally associate with locked room mysteries but he has four such stories to his credit as per Robert Adey’s Locked room bibliography. 2 out those 4 feature Lester Leith, the Robin Hood of detectives who solved baffling mysteries in order to crack down on cracksmen. Instead of robbing the rich to help the poor, Lester robbed the crooks “of their ill-gotten spoils” and gave the proceeds to deserving charities – less “20 percent for costs of collection.” Gardner wrote around 75 stories featuring Lester Leith and 5 of these novelettes are collected in this volume including the 2 locked-room or impossible crime stories. The locked room puzzle of “The Exact Opposite” was featured in the locked room anthology ‘Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries’ and here is the second one.

An international gem thief has smuggled in a rich booty inside a big trunk with a secret compartment. He clears the customs and enters a very reputed hotel where each guest’s luggage is given a tag and is verified while it’s checked out. One without a tag can’t go out the hotel and the one with the tag has to verified and cleared before checkout. The gem thief is followed in by the police a few minutes later to arrest him but he is found dead inside a locked room (quickly explained - the murderer got in through the fire escape) with his big trunk missing! The trunk is so big that it couldn’t have been taken out of the window, it’s not inside the room and it’s not found in any of the rooms or for that matter in any part of the hotel. And it’s not of the type which could be dismantled and taken away.

The police spy who is undercover (to catch Lester red handed) as a valet to Lester Leith requests him to apply his mind and provide an ‘academic’ solution as he has done before on numerous occasions. Lester’s mode of operation generally is to device a con job in such a way that it provides both a solution to the case and pulls a fast on the police in helping himself to a part of the booty! The scam in this case is not only extremely elaborate but it is diabolic and wickedly funny. He goes in for the combination of a kleptomaniac & bloodhound-canary. What in heaven’s name is a bloodhound-canary (BC) one might ask. Here is what Lester gives as an answer: “The chief trait of BC is that it can trail things through the air – other birds, or airplanes, or falling bodies – anything that goes through the air. That’s due to its wonderful ability to recognize scents. We have canine bloodhounds that trail things across the ground. The rare BC does the same thing in the air a bloodhound does on the ground.”

With these two elements to work as his gargantuan con, he traps the murderer and identifies the invisible location of the trunk. It doesn’t end there – there is another impossible disappearance to contend for - just before the police is about to apprehend both the criminal and the booty, Lester has the chance to pilfer some of the best gems and it disappears as smoothly as the trunk had in the previous instance. Though the police know very well that some of the gems have been robbed right under their noses, no amount of search (including x-raying the canary!) yields them the goods and they have to let him go! The reader is in for a tremendous joy ride in this wonderfully constructed story.

The Sealed Room - Vincent Starrett

Story: The Sealed Room

Author: Vincent Starrett

Book: The Casebook of Jimmy Lavender

Theme for the Month: Locked Room or Impossible Crime Stories

Vincent Starrett has written 6 detective novels and around 500 detective stories for the ‘pulps’, out of which around 50 of them feature Jimmy Lavender and his assistant Charles Gilruth. 12 of these cases were collected in 1944 in ‘The Casebook of Jimmy Lavender’. Recently, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box has published 3 more volumes in addition to the original: The New Adventures, The Memoirs & The Return of Jimmy Lavender (which features 13 novelettes) and republished Casebook with 3 extra early stories.

The story Sealed Room opens with the door to a locked room being broken in by the patrolman. He is carrying out this task based on Miss Jane Howard’s request who suspects that there is something wrong with her rich politician employer Harper Wolgate when she comes in at 8.30 in the morning.  Sure enough, when the library door is broken down, Wolgate is found dead due to a bullet hole in his chest with no sign of the murder weapon. He is wearing his overcoat though it’s extremely warm inside the room and his silky hat is still perched on his sunken face. The two windows are securely fastened from the inside and there is no other possible entry into this room which is on the 8^th floor of the building. Fearing that she is the one who is gone be suspected, Jane calls her fiancé who in turn calls in Jimmy Lavender. A cursory glance at the library is all that is needed for the detective to remark that he knows the solution to the locked room conundrum (so did I and so will the reader familiar with the genre) – he says he knew the solution some twenty years back and he was just waiting for a case to present itself! Thus ends the first of the five chapters.

Rest of the story is devoted to finding the motive behind the murder (by the police) and to confirm the locked room solution that Lavender has in his mind. The motive becomes clear when it comes to light that the mysterious red diary is missing from the library safe. The other clue turns out to be a bloodied handkerchief (found in the overcoat) with initials ‘J.H’ which looks too big to belong to a woman. The scene shifts to a gambling den during the second half of the story and after two more deaths Lavender proposes his solution to the district attorney and the police investigator. Not a superlative locked room problem by any means but a worthy addition to the genre nonetheless.

The Bizarre Case Expert - William Arden

Story: The Bizarre Case Expert

Author: William Arden

Source: Ellery Queen’s Masters of Mysteries

Story Number: 61

Dennis Lynds has a lot of pseudonyms – he used William Arden to write 13 of the Three Investigator tiles and is now more popular for his Dan Fortune titles under the name of Michael Collins.

Sergeant Joseph Marx is the sole member of the central squad; a squad which gets cases that stumps the precinct squads but before the case ends up in the Unsolved File. One such case where he is called in is to explain the death of Mrs. Sally Tower, the circumstances of which go something like this: The residents of an apartment are unhappy about the noises coming in from 6B and hence call in the local police. They have to break open the door as the door is locked and chained; Sally has died of multiple blows to the head and her ex-husband is unconscious in the same room due to a hairline skull fracture with the only opening in the house being a window to the fire escape. Medical evidence points to the fact that the husband suffered the concussion before the woman met her death. When he recovers in the hospital, he tells the police about a masked burglar who entered through the opened window but the police find no such traces of a prowler.

A neighbor was constantly watching the door from the time the noise started till the police arrived on the scene; an invalid woman was sitting near the open window in her house and the fire escape under question was constantly being watched by her – no one entered the room through the window and no one escaped through that window! So the only explanation left for them to consider is the fact that the husband did indeed kill her wife but he tripped and fell leading to the fracture and the concussion (the wound to his head not being of the self inflicting nature) but they have a problem - they find no weapon in that room or anywhere outside the house which matches the wounds on them.

Marx first tries to break the alibi of the 2 witnesses who were guarding the door and the window but fails. His search for a weapon yields something but the problem with the instrument was that it was neatly arranged on a table and was too far away from the murdered woman for it to have been used by the husband! Marx goes back to the first report made by the patrolmen; collects all the people who were present when the door was broken; interviews each one of them and shows how the murderer, with the help of one of the unlikeliest of accomplices, was able to achieve his goal of setting up a perfect locked room murder!

Murder Behind Schedule - Lawrence G Blochman

Story: Murder Behind Schedule

Author: Lawrence G Blochman

Source: Clues for Dr. Coffee.

Story Number: 20

Lawrence Blochman wrote a series of stories in the golden age tradition featuring the Forensic Pathologist Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee. Most of his stories feature a murder where the cause of death remains a mystery, the facts of the case gathered from all the suspects at the scene of the crime and the case gets resolved after Dr. Coffee conducts the autopsy as the results from the autopsy not only provides the cause of death but it also clearly points out who the murderer is as only one person could have committed such a crime.

One such case happens to be what Lieutenant Ritter refers to as the “Dr. Fell Case” as the murdered man was found inside a locked study with no sign of foul play. Michael Waverly calls the police and informs in a curtailed message that someone is trying to kill him. When the police arrive at his doorstep, they find Paul Monson (Mrs. Waverly’s lover) ringing the door bell continuously, the sleepy wife opens the front door and when they break open the study door, they find the phone still hooked to the dead man’s arm and his face showing a sign of fright.

Ritter calls in Dr. Coffee to identify the cause of death. After conducting the autopsy, the reason for the death explains the locked room murder as well as the person who committed it.

The Locked House - Stephen Barr

Story: The Locked House

Author: Stephen Barr

Source: 21st annual anthology of the ‘Best Detective Stories of the Year’ published in 1966.

Story Number: 17

What are some of the statements which a critic or a person who abhors locked room mysteries could put forth for his defense? They could read something like this:

 “A locked room problem isn’t a mystery at all: it’s a self-contradiction”

 “What the author asks the reader to believe is that a man is found murdered in a place from which the murderer couldn’t have escaped, and yet the murderer is not there. Writers have various ways of circumventing this. For example, the victim committed suicide in such a way as to resemble murder. Or the victim was dealt the fatal blow before he locked himself in. Or the murderer locked on the door on the inside while he was still on the outside.”

“The shoddiest solution of all is that he DID, in fact, get out, and his escape appears impossible only because of the author’s incomplete and therefore unfair description of the circumstances. None of these faces squarely up to the real dilemma – that the murderer got out when he COULD NOT. That, by definition, is absurd.”

Looks like the author set himself the task to break their defenses by providing this tightly knit locked room murder which does not fit any of the categories mentioned above. This is a story where a man has been murdered in a locked house (decapitated body in the living room with the axe used for the deed in the underground cellar), the murderer is not present in the house but at the same time, the murderer did not leave the room! If Dr. Fell gave us 7 categories under which to categorize all the possibilities of a locked room murder, Stephen Barr brilliantly instructs us that this method could very well be the eight. This story was written in 1965 but a variation of this method was used recently in one of the episodes of Jonathan Creek. It would be really interesting to come across a few more.