By Child Undone - Jack Ritchie

Story: By Child Undone

Author: Jack Ritchie

Source: A New Leaf and Other Stories, Little Boxes of Bewilderment, Boucher’s Choicest.

Story Number: 24

For a person who wrote close to a thousand stories, it is very perplexing to know that there are only 3 collections of his short stories! And finding reasonably priced copies of these collections is indeed a challenge in itself!

Haven’t seen too many references being made to Jack Ritchie in relation to a formal puzzle plot story but from the few stories that I’ve read, when he tried them, he could certainly compete with some of the best. In this story, playing fair with the reader and at the same time making it unguessable, he tries the classic gambit of what-is-the-factor-linking-a-chain-of-murders?

The story starts with 2 random killings on successive days. Nobody pays heed to them until the police receive an anonymous letter intimating them that the same gun killed both. A succession of murders follows – each time the victim is a man and each time there is an anonymous letter; the fourth one which the police receive would have been mailed six hours before the actual murder.

Captain Hayes and Sergeant Harrison find no clues, no motives and no connection between the victims though they notice some common traits among the murdered men. But with each murder, they find that the connecting links are reducing and at the end of five murders they have all but given up on the possibility of there being anything common among them, until, the 10 year old kid (Harrison’s son) walks into the police station, glances at the list which Hayes is pondering over and tells them what the connecting factor is! Based on this information, they catch the murderer on his sixth crusade.

The Case of the Irate Witness - Erle Stanley Gardner

Story: The Case of the Irate Witness

Author: Erle Stanley Gardner

Source: The Case of the Irate Witness and Other Stories

Story Number: 23

One of the most productive authors, his creation Perry Mason outshines all the other three dozen characters that Erle Stanley Gardner created. He has contributed nearly 200 short stories to various pulp magazines but interestingly, wrote only 3 short stories (Crimson Kiss & Crying Swallow being novellas) featuring Perry Mason.

This story has all the typical characteristics of a Perry Mason novel minus the murder – Mason defending a client whom everybody thinks is guilty, district attorney who thinks he is gone lick the defense attorney for a change, antagonizing antics and a court room climax.

Somebody has broken into the Jebson Commercial Company vault to steal the 100,000 twice-a-month payroll, which had been brought up from a bank the previous day. The company has the habit of recording the numbers of all the 20 dollar bills from each payroll as soon they get the money from the bank and one such was made and is safely locked up in a safe for this payroll as well. Frank Bernal, the manager of the company reveals to the police that a man who had a criminal record was fired from his job the previous day. He is found and arrested when two twenty dollar bills from the robbed payroll are found in his possession. He claims that those 2 bills were given to him by the company accountant Ralph in front of the manager.

The irate witness turns out to be George Addey, owner of the garbage collecting business, who stores his money in garbage bins. Mason subpoenas Addey to appear in court with all the 20 dollar bills which he has received in the last one month. He shows that Addey could equally have been guilty as the numbers on some of his 20 dollar bills(30 days old) matches the list of numbers from the bills(tabulated a day before) of the robbed payroll. Mason quickly explains how this was possible by revealing the trick used and in the process identifies the culprit and points out that the clues were all there to figure out the guilty party if one just believed that the defendant was speaking the truth!

By His Own Hand - Rex Stout

Story: By His Own Hand

Author: Rex Stout

Source: Ellery Queen’s Twentieth Century Detective Stories (revised edition)

Story Number: 22

Rex Stout is most famous for his novels and novellas featuring Nero Wolfe & Archie Goodwin but he created a few more series characters and has a few short stories to his credit as well which he contributed mainly to the pulps.

40 million fans idolized “Kevin Kay” as the series hero of books, comics, movies and TV. Adam Nicoll has portrayed Kay in all the movies and the fans can’t separate one from the other. Another character “Cricket” in this series has been played by Amy Quong. Barry Maddox, a producer decides to put a Kay play on Broadway and gets the approval from Paul Griffin, the creator and the owner of the rights to the character. They have picked a new actor by the name of Levitan to play the character of Kay. This doesn’t go well with Adam; he flies down to New York with his wife to confront Griffin and Maddox with a lawsuit.

Alphabet Hicks is called in to Griffin’s house to iron out the situation and negotiate a deal which is suitable for everyone, which he fails to achieve. Two nights later when Hicks returns back to his house, he finds Sergeant Purley Stebbins waiting for him. He informs that Adam Nicoll died of cyanide poisoning when he took one of his vitamin tablets and hence asks Hicks to give a detailed account of the 2 hour negotiation which he had with the victim and the five suspects. Hicks receives a call later in the night asking him to come over and handle the situation suitably as each of the five knows that there is a murderer among them.

As soon as Hicks reaches Griffin’s house, he declares that he knows who the murderer is because of what was said by one of them when he was there on the previous occasion. He also informs them that this message was passed on to the police but they might not have seen the significance of it and hence he was gone try and make the murderer crack – which he does most efficiently!  

The Laughing Butcher - Fredric Brown

Story: The Laughing Butcher

Author: Fredric Brown

Source: Carnival of Crime -The Best Mystery Stories of Fredric Brown.

Story Number: 21

Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery author. His debut mystery novel ‘The Fabulous Clipjoint’ won the Edgar for the Best First Novel in the year 1948. He has contributed more than 150 stories to the pulps and yet, except for the connoisseurs of the golden age of detective fiction, he is hardly remembered today!

Bill Pronzini in the introduction to this collection has this to say about Fredric Brown: “He invented several ingenious new ways to tell his stories; he introduced dazzling, sometimes outrageous, sometimes delightfully preposterous plot devices, apparently for the sheer artistic pleasure of developing them into plausible stories.” The best example which meets all these characteristics is his masterpiece of psychological horror “Don’t Look Behind You”, in which the narrator reveals in the first paragraph of the story that it is the reader who is the intended murder victim and goes on to tell a story as to how it all came about.

Fredric Brown also wrote a few genuine locked room or impossible crime stories and I have picked one such for this post. The laughing butcher refers to the evil butcher of the town of Corbyville, a sideshow magician and mentalist belonging to the 1000 odd population of ex-circus people. The townsfolk suspect him of practicing witchcraft but the women just adore him. But he has his eyes for only one woman and that woman is married to his arch nemesis Len. One day, when Len is passing his shop, the butcher points out a doll to him to indicate that Len would die shortly. This results in a showdown in which the butcher comes up triumphant without breaking a sweat.  All this drama is being watched by a Chicago cop (who is on his honeymoon) standing in a bar across the road, a bar in which the bartender is a 4 foot dwarf and a champion chess player. The cop rescues Len from the butcher and on their parting, hears the evil laughter of the butcher echoing throughout the road.

After getting the complete story about the rivalry between Len & the butcher, the cop and his wife continue on their honeymoon journey. 2 weeks later, a headline catches the cop’s eye. The butcher has been lynched by the residents of the town as they suspected him of killing Len, who has met a most mysterious death. Two sets of prints are seen going towards the scene of the murder, one belonging to the dead man Len and the other belonging to a big heavyset man like the butcher. But other than that the snow is undisturbed, there’s no sign of the 2^nd man’s prints progressing beyond the scene of crime or going back and there’s no other clue to the identity of the murderer. So how did the second man vanish from that place when there are no trees or any other escape routes?

The cop decides to make a pit stop on the way back; he observes the scene of the crime, makes some deductions and leaves without revealing his conclusions as he says he doesn’t have any proof to back up his theory. Five years down the line, he reveals what exactly must have happened to his brother-in-law which provides an interesting variation to the impossible crime situation of the missing footprints in the snow.

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.

Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday - G.D.H & Margaret Cole

Story: Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday

Author: G.D.H & Margaret Cole

Source: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday (Queen’s Quorum title #77).

Story Number: 19

Superintendent Wilson has been coaxed by his friend and medical adviser Michael Prendergast to go on a holiday and as a result they both find themselves exploring the coast of Norfolk. On the second day of their trip, half a mile from the beach across the cliffs, they come across a ruined cottage and a solitary tent. Wilson notices these unique features about the tent: One side of the tent is torn, the bed inside is wet though the tent isn’t, there are half burned cheque-books, there is a blood stained knife and there is a bucket outside which doesn’t have any water even though it has rained. Wilson is able to deduce a lot of things from these details and he believes that the two men who occupied the tent are still somewhere in the vicinity with at least one of them being dead.

When they reach the cliff edge, they find a suicide note on a rock; down below, a dead body with a slit throat and with a razor beside it. 2 bloodstained weapons for 1 body? All this points to a badly bungled up murder made to look like a suicide. He closely inspects the sets of footprints present and points out a strange anomaly (which is succinctly explained with a detailed map):

a.    2 sets of prints are seen from the road to the tent

b.    1 set of prints from the tent to the cliff with deep impressions of the feet to suggest he was carrying the dead body

c.    1 set of prints back from the cliff to the tent

d.    Same set of prints seen going from the tent towards the road (opposite direction to that of the cliff) but it has the same deep impressions!

With a little bit of background information about the two people involved (and a few others), it is revealed that one of them had forged a check for a huge sum and hence could have resulted in a quarrel between the two men and led to the grisly event. But none of this fools Wilson. He quickly exposes the criminal who would have plotted a much more sinister and clever murder than that meets the eye!

The Mystery of The Sleeping-Car Express - Freeman Wills Crofts

Story: The Mystery of The Sleeping-Car Express

Author: Freeman Wills Crofts

Source: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, The Mystery of The Sleeping-Car Express & Other Stories. It can be read online here.

Story Number: 18

The story is divided into 2 parts. The first part provides the details of the double murder and its investigation. The initial setting of the railway compartments is explained brilliantly in a few short lines. Someone pulls the emergency brake to halt the night train in the middle of nowhere. The guard in the last coach looks out of the window to check what’s wrong and notices that a few men in the first-class coach are summoning for help through the windows. The first-class coach embedded between a sleeper-car and third-class coach has six compartments – the first 2 and the last two are occupied with the in-between ones being vacant. When the guard reaches the 5^th compartment, he notices that a woman is trying to open the door but the door is jammed and the door on the other side is blocked with 2 dead bodies – both shot in the head. The compartment on the right has 4 gentlemen but they are also in the same predicament of the door being winched. No gun is found in the compartment, the woman inside the compartment testifies that someone shot from outside but the neighbors on the right and the left swear that no one except the guard used the aisle! Also, the vestibule exits at both the ends of the coach were guarded, no one was seen exiting the train through any of the doors and all doors were under constant observation by the people who were craning their necks outside the windows, which leads to an impossible murder situation! And the guard is not the culprit! J 

What follows is a detailed investigation from the police – thinking that the murderer must have left the train when the train stopped, they search the area where the train had stopped, no man is found in any nearby village, no stranger was noticed anywhere, there were no other trains – either a freight or a passenger train which the escaped man could have taken. Next, they investigate all the passengers who were in that compartment and the story of every individual matches the facts in the case and hence the police end up clearing everyone. The case remains un-solved.

The second part of the story deals with the murderer confessing on his deathbed to a medical practitioner as to how exactly he committed the murder and escaped.

The solution is too technical and requires a thorough knowledge of the British Railway system to understand the mechanics of the crime – which puts the readers throughout the world at a great disadvantage. A detailed map of the set-up could have improved matters a bit but don’t think it would be sufficient; it would need a series of pictures showing the step by step movement of the criminal to make the reader understand what the author is trying to impart. I being from India and being a rail fan where the railway network was introduced by the British, was a lot more familiar with the terminologies and the set up to an extent, but have to admit the solution was hazy and have only a vague idea as to how it was done.

Unlike some of the others who were frustrated (rightfully so) with this story (saw their reviews online), it didn’t stop me any from enjoying it and hence its inclusion in this post. A few have pointed out that the collection ‘The Mystery of The Sleeping-Car Express and Other Stories’ has some top quality stories (including 5 more railway mysteries) and I am planning to read it if I can get a copy of this book for a fair price.

Probably these two sites with the pictures should help:

The story is set in 1909 – the compartment that fits best our story would the 1900s one and can be viewed here.

This link clearly shows the compartment set up.

But it is incomplete without a picture of the outside of the train and how the compartments were connected to each other – couldn’t get it in the limited time that I spent on it.