The Hiatus

After my 4th movement in as many years, I'd the privilege to lay my hands on novels by GAD authors whom I'd never read before - namely J. J. Connington, E.R. Punshon, R.A.J Walling & Todd Downing. In addition to that was the availability of a few locked room novels which had been reviewed by the fellow bloggers. I had to give in to the temptation and abandon my quest for short stories for a while. Some of the novels that I've read over this period include:

J. J. Connington - The Brandon Case
J. J. Connington - Jack-in-The-Box
J. J. Connington - No Past Is Dead
J. J. Connington - The Four Defenses
J. J. Connington - Grim vengeance
Todd Downing - Vultures in the Sky
E.R. Punshon - Information Received
E.R. Punshon - The Dusky Hour
R. A. J. Walling - That Dinner At Bardolph's
R. A. J. Walling - Corpse Without A Clue
Jefferson Farjeon - The Judge Sums Up
Jefferson Farjeon - Shadows By The Sea
Darwin Teilhet - The Ticking Terror Murders
Darwin Teilhet - The Feather Cloak Murders
William Wiegand - At Last, Mr. Tolliver
Wallace Irwin - The Julius Caesar Murder Case 
David Duncan - Shade of Time
Luis Fernando Verissimo - Borges and The Eternal Orangutans
Fredric Brown - Death Has Many Doors
Q Patrick - Return To The Scene
Jonathan Stagge - Death My Darling Daughters

Not that I've not been reading any short stories over these past few months - I've definitely consumed plenty of them but nothing much to write home about. In the next couple of months, I'll be trying to get back on track - to pursue my original plan of completing 20 'Queen's Quorum' & 20 'Crippen & Landru' titles by the year end.

The Monster - Vincent Cornier

Theme: Crippen & Landru Lost Classic Series

Story: The Monster

Author: Vincent Cornier

Source: The Dual of Shadows – The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth 

Story Number: 119

The only story in this collection which is an anomaly – in the sense that the solution is not dependent on any obscure scientific principle. This story was short listed for the Ellery Queen’s story contest and was included in The Queen’s Awards: Sixth Series in 1951.

It contains one of the cleverest ideas to be considered for a perfect crime. More like a perfect murderer. ‘The Great Travers Case’ starts with the finding of tortured animals on the Travers estate, followed by the cruel death of farm animals. Though many have a suspicion as to who is behind them, the police find no possible proof. When it finally looks like the killer has turned to humans, Barnabas is called in to investigate. And it doesn’t take him long to find the serial killer but he and the law is faced with a most curious situation – all the proof is available for his prosecution, the Judge will surely sentence him to death but immediately thereafter, the same Judge will have to release him and let him go scot free because of a loophole in the law! A loophole which no legislator had envisaged and a loophole which allows the perpetrator to walk out of the felon’s dock and continue to kill the fellowmen and women – to murder at will and whim!

The Duel of Shadows - Vincent Cornier

Theme: Crippen & Landru Lost Classic Series

Story: The Duel of Shadows

Author: Vincent Cornier

Source: The Duel of Shadows – The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth 

Story Number: 118

The Duel of Shadows is the 31^st in the Crippen & Landru “Lost Classics” series – it contains 11 stories featuring Cornier’s series detective Barnabas Hildreth, an agent of the British Secret Service. In most of these truly extraordinary cases, the reader is presented with a fascinating problem in what looks like an impossible situation with some supernatural elements to give it a wonderful atmosphere and the detective with his superior knowledge of some obscure concept of science is able to provide a scientific explanation to the strange phenomena observed earlier in the case. The reader really doesn’t have much of a chance to arrive at the solution before the detective does but that in no way hampers the reader from thoroughly enjoying the way in which the plot strands are peeled away like the peels of an onion to reveal a hidden scientific concept around which the whole solution to the impossible situation is based upon.

Consider the story under consideration – Henry Westmacott is sitting by his own hearthside in the drawing-room listening to a concert broadcast on the radio. His wife and a maid are the only two other occupants of the house. They both hear the concert abruptly ending midway and a big commotion from the room. When they enter the room, they find that Henry has been injured with a thick bullet - which has deflected from his shoulder and hit the radio. There is no weapon present in the room from which the bullet could have been fired and no individual was seen walking out of the room as the door was under constant observation. It is found that the bullet was very old and was so big that it could have been fired from only one pistol – that pistol turns out to be one of the two duel pistols which was fired only once in its lifetime some 222 years ago!

The other strange phenomenon is noticed by the photographer – when he develops the first set of exposures of the damaged radio set still having the bullet embedded in it, he notices a strange object like the planet Saturn in all the photos though there wan’ t anything of that sort in the room. When he takes a second set of exposures on a different day with exactly the same set of circumstances, the photos come out clear without any strange objects in them.

The solution which explains all the above problems depends on a series of scientific phenomena colluding together. This includes lead mining, marsh gas, growth of annular rings in an elm tree, properties of pitch-blende among many others! Though the critics have pointed out the non feasibility of a few aspects of the solution, it doesn’t really take away anything from this very well constructed story.

Perfect Alibi - Anthony Berkeley

Theme: Crippen & Landru Series

Story: Perfect Alibi

Author: Anthony Berkeley

Source: The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries

Story Number: 117

Roger Sheringham is meeting his friend Sir Wilfrid, the Chief Constable and is surprised to hear that the Chief Constable never had the chance to investigate a murder. When Sheringham eggs him on, Sir Wilfrid recollects a case which had murder written all over it but was closed as an accident only because none of the suspects had the opportunity to commit the crime.

It’s the story of the death of Eric Southwood, a lucky accident for so many people; for if ever a fellow deserved to be murdered it was Eric. He was a womanizer and he was hard pressed for cash! And he was making up to Elsa and her fortune; and Mr. & Ms. Allfrey(uncle & aunt to Elsa) took a dim view of him. But that didn’t stop them from having Eric as a guest for their house party. The other guests include a chap called Merridew and the Vesinet couple, invited only because of the well known affair between Eric & Mrs. Vesinet, an affair unknown to only Mr. Vesinet.

Amidst the party, Eric is found dead; shot from the front – the idea being the gun had caught in something and got fired accidentally when he tried releasing it from a thorny bush. Every one present at the party had a cast iron alibi for that particular duration – Elsa was picking berries and was under constant observation; Merridew was half a mile away; the Vesinets were sunbathing – they alibi each other; Mrs. Allfrey was inside the house all the time – vouched for by the servants; Mr. Allfrey was crossing the field and the alibi is provided by the constable on a beat; the constable is also able to provide an alibi for the Vesinets!

Roger Sheringham still believes that Eric was murdered and reveals his theory to Sir Wilfrid as to how one of the ‘Perfect Alibis’ was too perfect to be believed!

“Mr. Bearstowe Says…” - Anthony Berkeley

Theme: Crippen & Landru Series

Story: “Mr. Bearstowe Says…”

Author: Anthony Berkeley

Source: The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries

Story Number: 116

Roger Sheringham notices and approaches a woman who is as bored as himself in a beer-and-sausage party that he has ended up in. The woman just can’t stop talking about a Mr. Bearstowe. Roger believes that Bearstowe must either be her husband or a lover. He notices a few lone men and decides to guess who among them could be Bearstowe. When he asks her whether her husband is tall or short, he gets a strange answer from her saying that she doesn’t know.

A few months later, when Sheringham is waiting for his friend in the police station, the Superintendent asks Sheringham to tag along to interview a woman who has come to report her husband missing – whose body, the police already have in their possession. Sheringham doesn’t want to have anything to do with it and decides to skip away without being noticed but his interest is piqued when he identifies the woman as the same one whom he had met in a party and who couldn’t stop talking about a certain Bearstowe.

The woman who introduces herself as Mrs. Hutton tells a story about how she was supposed to have met her husband for lunch on the beach, how all his clothes were still on the beach but yet there was no sign of her husband. When the policeman asks her to give a description of her husband, pat comes a detailed description which even includes his chest measurements! When Sheringham mentions Bearstowe, she faints. When she is taken to the mortuary, she identifies the dead body as her husband Eddie without even opening her eyes!

The police investigation reveals that Mrs. Hutton was noticed with a clean shaven man near the beach, who ultimately is identified as Bearstowe. The police also have proof that Mrs. Hutton couldn’t have murdered her husband and all the evidence points to the absconding Bearstowe as being the murderer. Sheringham’s investigation on the other hand piles up the evidence that it was indeed a premeditated murder though he also clears Mrs. Hutton of any complicity. Just as in so many of his novels, the story ends with a final twist – a twist which is sprung as late as the final word of the story!

The Mystery of The Horne’s Copse - Anthony Berkeley

Theme: Crippen & Landru Series

Story: The Mystery of The Horne’s Copse

Author: Anthony Berkeley

Source: The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries

Story Number: 115

Anthony Berkeley, The Master of the Final Twist is most famous for his novel The Poisoned Chocolates Case. This collection starts off with the story “The Avenging Chance” – which is a shorter version of his most popular novel. The next best story which shows all the trademarks of his ingenuity is the strange phenomenon of the Horne’s Copse.

The story is told from the point of view of Hugh Chappell, the rich heir to the Ravendean family. After a party in his neighbor’s house, he decides to walk back to his house via the patch known as Horne’s Copse instead of getting the flat tire fixed. In the dark, he stumbles across a body with a bullet hole in the head – he strikes a series of matches to identify the body – which turns out to be that of his cousin Frank, who is supposed to be vacationing in Europe. He continues to his home and calls the police but the police fail to find neither a dead body nor any other sign like the burnt matches. A month down the line, he again comes across the dead body of his cousin Frank in exactly the same position but this time he has been stabbed with a knife. He makes sure that it is indeed his cousin by identifying a mole near the neck. Further to make sure that he is very much dead, he lights the matches and holds it near the open staring eyes and notices that there’s no flicker, the hands are ice cold, there’s no pulse and no heartbeat. He runs down to his house, calls the police and runs back to the spot where he saw the dead body to await the police. But to his dismay, the body seems to have vanished again!

He sends a mail to his cousin who is still in Europe and gets a reply back from him. When everybody starts thinking that there’s something wrong with his mind, he stumbles on the dead body for a third time! This time, he just leaves the countryside and goes into hiding in London.  A few days later when he ventures out to visit a shop, he reads about the news of his cousin’s murder. And he realizes that the police are on the hunt for him as he is their chief suspect! Luckily for him, he bumps into none other than Roger Sheringham, who decides to hide Hugh in his house till he solves the puzzling events of the Horne’s Copse and provides a most satisfying explanation to all the strange things witnessed by the narrator.

Mom Remembers - James Yaffe

Theme: Crippen & Landru Series

Story: Mom Remembers

Author: James Yaffe

Source: My Mother, The Detective

Story Number: 114

The last Mom story is a double bonanza in that there are two murder mysteries solved – one by Mom and the other by Mom’s Mom!

The case that Dave is investigating deals with what the police think as an open and shut case. Eighteen year old Ortiz is seen running away from the scene of the crime where a taxi driver has been stabbed after a holdup went terribly wrong. The witness is none other than Dave himself. But Ortiz says he was nowhere near the scene of the crime but decides not to reveal where he was at that crucial hour.

Mom compares this case to the first ever case that she was involved in, 45 years ago, on the eve of her marriage to Mendel. Mendel ends up drunk during the party dedicated to him on the eve of his marriage – which is considered as a sin by his Father (who is a Rabbi). A quarrel ensues and Mendel walks out of the house in a wild mood promising his Father that he would commit more sin. Next day, he is arrested for the murder of a girl and though he agrees that he committed a sin, he declines that he killed her. At the same time, he is very rigid in not giving away his whereabouts during the crucial hour of the crime. It’s Mom’s Mother who comes to the rescue – she poses a different question to 4 different individuals and based on the answers she is able to free Mendel and catch the guilty party.

Mom applies the same logic and the same motive from the old case to the present case; poses her customary 3 or 4 questions and shows how the police have blundered again in thinking that they have an open and shut case!