The Man Who Murdered in Public - Roy Vickers

Theme: Queen’s Quorum Titles

Story: The Man Who Murdered in Public

Author: Roy Vickers

Source: The Department Of Dead Ends

A unique story in this collection in the sense that everybody knows that the protagonist is a murderer but they just can’t prove it! George Carshaw’s first victim is Elsie, the maid against whom he harbors a revenge for the treatment she meted out to him in his younger days. Mode of murder – death due to drowning when the boat was overturned – the nearby tourists on the other boats see the accident but they don’t notice George holding the girl under the water. The verdict: death due to accident.

Second victim happens to be his first wife with the same modus operandi. The wife dies because she doesn’t know swimming. He pleads in front of the coroner that he couldn’t have saved her because he himself doesn’t know swimming. Every time he escapes the death row, he changes his name and moves on to a different location. Third victim happens to be his second wife in exactly the same manner as the previous one. This time, the police smell a rat. They realize that he collected huge insurance money on both the occasions. They also stumble upon the first death but they fail to see any motive in the first one. The public prosecutor declines to proceed with the case.

George is not so lucky when his third wife is killed in exactly the same manner – in front of all the witnesses. In the coroner’s court, a lawyer starts questioning whether he had taken insurance against his wife. When the answer is affirmative, they present to the coroner’s jury the two previous instances where George got away with murder and the insurance money. They come out with a verdict of willful murder and George is committed for trial on the coroner’s warrant. In the actual trial, it is proved that George is an expert swimmer but it doesn’t stop the clever defense lawyer from saving his client on a technicality.

So what more could the police do to apprehend this multiple murderer? Well, the help comes in the way of a ruby bracelet - a bracelet which is on the list of things stolen in a case that the police are investigating – a bracelet which the police find in a pawnshop – a bracelet which was given as a gift to the maid Elsie.

The Rubber Trumpet - Roy Vickers

Theme: Queen’s Quorum Titles

Story: The Rubber Trumpet

Author: Roy Vickers

Source: The Department Of Dead Ends, The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories

This Queen’s Quorum title collects the best ten of Roy Vicker’s celebrated Department of Dead Ends (DDE) detective stories. These are detective stories with a difference. As Ellery Queen says in his introduction, they are of the ‘inverted’ type of detective story. Knowing from the start who the murderer is, the reader is presented with the motive, the workings of the criminal mind, the crime itself, and all the clues. The ‘surprise’ in these stories is, of course, supplied by the way in which these murderers are detected; and this is where the DDE comes in – that repository of files which were never completed, of investigations without a clue and clues which led nowhere. From time to time, quite illogically, Inspector Rason finds a connection between happenings in the outside world and the objects in his Scotland Yard museum, events move inexorably to their appointed end!

George Muncey, under a fictitious name ends up marrying a maid, the marriage being witnessed only by the maid’s parents. The rubber trumpet of the story is a gift article bought by the maid on their honeymoon, the trumpet is thrown out of a moving train by George because he hates the noise which the trumpet creates, the police find a dead child on the same train and as part of this investigation, the trumpet which is retrieved on the railway line is sent to the DDE.

Since nobody knows who Muncey is, he thinks he is gone be safe if he murders the maid and he turns out to be right. He just moves to a different city, starts working in a chemist’s shop and ends up leading a married life with another woman. A few years down the line, the shop owner decides to sell some toys to his customers and one such toy on the counter turns out to be a rubber trumpet. This brings back some unnecessary memories for George. He destroys it in a furnace and puts the required amount in to the cash register. A few days later, the shop owner thinking that this would sell, brings out the entire stock of 77 trumpets! George Muncey again decides to pay for all 77 of them and destroy them. Unluckily for him, the case in which he is carrying them is stolen by a thief who ultimately is caught by the police. And what follows is a series of connections – leading the police to the murderer of the cold case of the murdered maid!

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!