True Crime Roundup VIII

Crime doesn't pay, but that won't stop some people.

(1) "Saving Youth From Heroin and Crime" (1924) (2 pages):

     Apparently there has always been a correlation between drug addiction and criminal activity:

. . . In addition to the passage of the anti-heroin bill, which prohibits the importation, manufacture, transportation or use of the drug in the United States, it is further recommended by the Association that Congress send circulars on the general facts of addiction to schools, colleges and voters, and thus reach the 23,000,000 young people in the nation's educational institutions before the school year is ended.  . . .

"Heroin appeared in America only ten years ago. Its spread to the present proportions in so short a time is appalling and indicates new factors in the problem of addiction. These facts, defined and pointed out by the Association, are: Every heroin addict, because of the drug's action on his brain, has a mania to spread his addiction to others; the drug is four times as powerful as morphin and comes in the convenient deceptive form of a white powder, called 'snow,' which is generally 'whiffed' into the nostrils. One 'snow party' a day for a week makes a youth an addict."  . . .

(2) "A Congressman Sentenced to Prison" (1924) (1 page):
     Somebody has to be the first:

". . . The important fact is that no man in this country, no matter how high and powerful his official position, is above the law or beyond its punishments."  . . .

     According to Wikipedia (HERE):

. . . [Representative Langley, in office since 1907] resigned [from Congress] in January 11, 1926, after being convicted of illegally selling alcohol. Langley had deposited $115,000 in his bank account over a three-year period despite earning only $7,500 a year as a congressman. He had arranged for "medicinal" alcohol to be released to New York-based bootleggers during prohibition. He also tried to bribe a Prohibition officer. His wife Katherine, then ran for his seat and won in the next election, loudly declaring that her husband had been the victim of a conspiracy. She also won the next election as well.  . . .

(3) "Outwitting the Safe-Breaker" (1924) (1 page):
     Is any safe really safe?

. . . "Time is the most important factor making for the success or failure of the safe-breaker when attacking a bank vault. Manufacturers of burglar-proof vaults, therefore, are concerned with constructing a mechanism which will require a maximum amount of time to destroy."  . . .

See the Wikipedia article HERE for more about bank vaults.

(4) "Evidence Gathered by Suction" (1924) (¼ of a page):
     It's probably not what you might think:

[Full article] Microscopic examination of the dirt and dust upon the clothing of suspects is a new scheme of the French police to catch criminals, we learn from Science Service's Daily Science News Bulletin (Washington):

"After cross-examination, the suspects are stript of their clothing, whose superficial dust is first examined under a strong microscope. A vacuum-cleaner is next applied to draw out other dirt into a pan. In some instances a more thorough process, in which heating figures, is used to separate all particles of foreign matter. From the dirt thus secured the detectives determine whether the suspect has been telling the truth. One murderer tried to prove an alibi by saying that he had slept in an open field the night of the crime. Microscopic examination of his clothing showed that he had slept in a quarry. An unsuspected carpenter was connected with a murder by means of sawdust found on a piece of overall which the victim had torn from his assailant and which was found at the scene of the crime. The chief value of the new plan has been in breaking down the bravado of criminals. They frequently confess when shown that their first stories were lies."

(5) "Scientific Bandits Who Land in Jail" (1924) (2 pages):
     The Newton Gang strikes again:

THE EXPLOITS OF JESSE JAMES as a train-robber in Missouri come to mind as one reads of "the most daring train robbery in railroad history"—the hold-up near Chicago of a solid mail and express train and the theft of some forty pouches of registered mail, said to contain between $1,000,000 and $3,000,000.

Wearing gas-masks, and equipped with an airplane and four automobiles; armed with gas-bombs, nitro-glycerin, dynamite, sawed-off shotguns, and automatic pistols, according to the story told the St. Paul Dispatch by the mail clerks as they pulled into the station with shattered windows and bullet-marked cars, ten or a dozen bandits apparently terrorized seventy or more armed guards and mail clerks aboard the train and accomplished their purpose within ten minutes.

They forced their way into the barricaded cars by breaking the windows with rocks, and then threw in vials of gas, which broke as they landed upon the floor. The clerks and guards, nearly overcome by the fumes, were forced to open the doors. The leader then donned a gas-mask, placed another on the chief mail clerk, and forced him, at the point of a gun, to point out the valuable mail-sacks, which were thrown into the waiting automobiles. A few hours later two of the machines, showing hard usage, were found abandoned along the highway, and by daylight the next morning a hundred motorcycle policemen and nearly a thousand government and railroad detectives, deputy sheriffs, and special officers were on the bandits' trail.  . . .

From the Wikipedia article about the Newton Gang (HERE):

The Newton Gang (ca. 1919 through 1924) was an outlaw gang of the early 20th century, and the most successful train robbers and bank robbers in history. From 1919 through 1924 the gang robbed dozens of banks, claiming a number of eighty-seven banks (unconfirmed) and six trains (confirmed). According to Willis Newton, the brothers "took in more money than the Dalton Gang, Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch and the James-Younger Gang combined." Also according to their own claims, they never killed anyone. It's true they were never charged with any death or injuries associated with their robberies, although one daylight robbery in Toronto, Canada proved nearly fatal for one bank messenger. Notable enough for the 1924 train robbery near Rondout, Illinois (the world's largest at the time), the brothers gained a second round of fame in retirement, when they participated in a 1975 documentary film, and then a more in-depth oral history project that eventually was published in book form, possibly one of the clearest records of a criminal career of the period, as told by the participants. This second round of fame led to a feature film [The Newton Boys] being produced by a major Hollywood studio, after the death of the last surviving brother.  . . .

Resource:
- You can find True Crime VII HERE.

Category: True crime

"Are You in the Nineteenth Century?"

"The Chronic Argonauts."
By H. G. Wells (1866-1946).
Short story.
First publication: The Science Schools Journal (1888).
Online HERE.

"The Chronic Argonauts" was Wells's first foray into time travel fiction and is very different from his famous The Time Machine (1895):

. . . This brief story begins with a third-person account of the arrival of a mysterious inventor to the peaceful Welsh town of Llyddwdd. Dr. Moses Nebogipfel takes up residence in a house sorely neglected after the deaths of its former inhabitants.

The main bulk of the story concerns the apprehension of the simple rural folk who eventually storm the inventor's "devilish" workshop in an effort to repay supposed witchery. Nebogipfel escapes with one other person—the sympa-thetic Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook—in what is later revealed to be a time machine.

The next part picks up with an unnamed "Author" character discovering the dazed Reverend Cook returned from unbelievable exploits after having been missing for three weeks. The remainder of the story is the Reverend's short retelling (again in the third-person) of the events that took place that night and the revelation that Nebogipfel is [SPOILERS]. (From a Wikipedia article HERE, since modified)

Resources:
- A graphic novel version of "The Chronic Argonauts" is discussed in detail HERE, from which came the illustrations accompanying this posting.
- The Time Machine recently got our attention HERE.

Category: Science fiction (time travel division)

A Tongue-in-Cheek Assessment of THE BIG BOW MYSTERY by the Author Himself

Never let it be said that Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) suffered from an excess of modesty. In his introduction to The Big Bow Mystery (1892), Zangwill assessed his own artistic achievement. (Note: Comments in [brackets] are our own gratuitous editorial additions.)

While Zangwill is being playful, through all the facetiousness he does offer sound advice to the would-be mystery fictioneer:

As this little book was written some four years ago, I feel able to review it without prejudice. [Sure you do.]

A new book just hot from the brain is naturally apt to appear faulty to its begetter, but an old book has got into the proper perspective and may be praised by him without fear or favor. [A bit presumptuous, don't you think?]

"The Big Bow Mystery" seems to me an excellent murder story, as murder stories go, for, while as sensational as the most of them, it contains more humor and character creation than the best. ["He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good." — Confucius]

Indeed, the humor is too abundant. Mysteries should be sedate and sober. There should be a pervasive atmosphere of horror and awe such as Poe manages to create. Humor is out of tone; it would be more artistic to preserve a somber note throughout. [When you have read The Big Bow Mystery, you'll see how facetious Zangwill is being here.]

But I was a realist in those days, and in real life mysteries occur to real persons with their individual humors, and mysterious circumstances are apt to be complicated by comic.

The indispensable condition of a good mystery is that it should be able and unable to be solved by the reader, and that the writer's solution should satisfy.

Many a mystery runs on breathlessly enough till the dénouement is reached, only to leave the reader with the sense of having been robbed of his breath under false pretenses.

And not only must the solution be adequate, but all its data must be given in the body of the story.

The author must not suddenly spring a new person or a new circumstance upon his reader at the end. Thus, if a friend were to ask me to guess who dined with him yesterday, it would be fatuous if he had in mind somebody of whom he knew I had never heard.

One would have imagined that nobody could take this seriously, for it is obvious that the mystery-story is just the one species of story that can not be told impromptu or altered at the last moment, seeing that it demands the most careful piecing together and the most elaborate dove-tailing.

Nevertheless, if you cast your joke upon the waters, you shall find it no joke after many days. This is what I read in the Lyttelton Times, New Zealand: "The chain of circumstantial evidence seems fairly irrefragable. From all accounts, Mr. Zangwill himself was puzzled, after carefully forging every link, how to break it. The method ultimately adopted I consider more ingenious than convincing." After that I made up my mind never to joke again, but this good intention now helps to pave the beaten path.

Resources:
- You can find The Big Bow Mystery online HERE.
- The GAD Wiki reviews of Big Bow are HERE.

Category: Detective fiction criticism (from a detective fiction author)

A Contemporary Reaction to THE TIME MACHINE

"In A.D. 802,701."
By Richard Holt Hutton (1826-97).
The Spectator, July 13, 1895.

The reviewer, Richard Holt Hutton, was, according to Wikipedia (HERE), the son of a Unitarian minister who adhered to that religion until the last forty-four years of his life.

In his latter days, Hutton's "innovations and unconventional views about stereotyped Unitarian doctrines caused alarm" among his friends. His theological views "gradually came closer to those of the Church of England, which he ultimately joined. He brought to his study of theology a spirituality of outlook and an aptitude for metaphysical inquiry and exposition which made his writings more attractive."

When in 1861 he became joint editor and part owner of The Spectator, Hutton "took charge of the literary side of the paper, and gradually his own articles became one of the best-known features of serious and thoughtful English journalism. The Spectator, which gradually became a prosperous property, was an outlet for his views, particularly on literary, religious, and philosophical subjects, in opposition to the agnostic and rationalistic opinions then current in intellectual circles, as popularized by T. H. Huxley."

Small wonder, then, that when Hutton encountered The Time Machine (1895) written by that ardently opinionated agnostic rationalist Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), he was less than enthusiastic about the bleak determinism which the novel evinces:

Mr. H. G. Wells has written a very clever story as to the condition of this planet in the year 802,701 A.D., though the two letters A.D. appear to have lost their meaning in that distant date, as indeed they have lost their meaning for not a few even in the comparatively early date at which we all live.

The story is one based on that rather favourite speculation of modern metaphysicians which supposes time to be at once the most important of the conditions of organic evolution, and the most misleading of subjective illusions.

It is, we are told, by the efflux of time that all the modifications of species arise on the one hand, and yet Time is so purely subjective a mode of thought, that a man of searching intellect is supposed to be able to devise the means of travelling in time as well as in space, and visiting, so as to be contemporary with, any age of the world, past or future, so as to become as it were a true "pilgrim of eternity."

This is the dream on which Mr. H. G. Wells has built up his amusing story of "The Time Machine."

A speculative mechanician is supposed to have discovered that the "fourth dimension," concerning which mathematicians have speculated, is Time, and that with a little ingenuity a man may travel in Time  as well as in Space.

The Time-traveller of this story invents some hocus-pocus of a machine by the help of which all that belongs or is affixed to that machine may pass into the Future by pressing down one lever, and into the Past by pressing down another.

In other words, he can make himself at home with the society of hundreds of thousands of centuries hence, or with the chaos of hundreds of thousands of centuries past, at his pleasure.

As a matter of choice, the novelist very judiciously chooses the Future only in which to disport himself.

And as we have no means of testing his conceptions of the Future, he is of course at liberty to imagine what he pleases.

And he is rather ingenious in his choice of what to imagine.

Mr. Wells supposes his Time-traveller to travel forward from A.D. 1895 to A.D. 802,701, and to make acquaintance with the people inhabiting the valley of the Thames (which has, of course, somewhat changed its channel) at that date.

He finds a race of pretty and gentle creatures of silken organisations, as it were, and no particular interests or aims, except the love of amusement, inhabiting the surface of the earth, almost all evil passions dead, almost all natural or physical evils overcome, with a serener atmosphere, a brighter sun, lovelier flowers and fruits, no dangerous animals or poisonous vegetables, no angry passions, or tumultuous and grasping selfishness, and only one object of fear.

While the race of the surface of the earth has improved away all its dangers and embarrassments (including, apparently, every trace of a religion), the race of the underworld,—the race which has originally sprung from the mining population,—has developed a great dread of light, and a power of vision which can work and carry on all its great engineering operations with a minimum of light.

At the same time, by inheriting a state of servitude it has also inherited a cruel contempt for its former masters, who can now resist its attacks only by congregating in crowds during the hours of darkness, for in the daylight, or even in the bright moonlight, they are safe from the attacks of their former serfs.  . . .

We may expect with the utmost confidence that if the earth is still in existence in the year 802,701 A.D., either the A.D. will mean a great deal more than it means now, or else its inhabitants will be neither Eloi nor Morlocks.

For in that case evil passions will by that time have led to the extinction of races spurred and pricked on by conscience and yet so frivolous or so malignant.

Yet Mr. Wells's fanciful and lively dream is well worth reading, if only because it will draw attention to the great moral and religious factors in human nature which he appears to ignore.

Resources:
- You can purchase Hutton's Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought HERE, or save a lot of money and read it online HERE.
- The Norton Critical Edition of The Time Machine is for sale HERE.

- Last year we discussed some of H. G. Wells's works HERE.

Category: Science fiction criticism

"I Love Mystery Novels and I've Tried to Write Them"

Curt Evans has posted on his The Passing Tramp weblog (HERE) about some of John Updike's (1932-2009) earliest reading experiences and provided a helpful link to a 2004 interview (HERE) Updike gave to The Academy of Achievement:

ACADEMY OF ACHIEVEMENT: You've said that you read a lot on the farm.

JOHN UPDIKE: Yes, of course. I had read somewhat before. I was an only child after all and only children tend to read.

My mother was a keen reader. My grandfather was a Bible and newspaper reader, so I saw a lot of reading around me. It's a world that a child can control.

There were things called Big Little Books then, which were essentially bound comic strips with one panel opposite a page of text, and it was an easy way to read, so I read a lot of those.

Then I graduated to mystery novels, some science fiction, the New Yorker humor.

He may have been a farm kid, but Updike's reading wasn't confined exclusively to The Old Farmer's Almanac:

ACADEMY OF ACHIEVEMENT: Who were your favorite authors?

UPDIKE: I loved Agatha Christie, of course. And also, an American team called Ellery Queen. I read a lot of Ellery Queen. Erle Stanley Gardner. I must have read 40 books by Erle Stanley Gardner before I was 15 or so.

So, I got the reading habit, and I slightly branched out, you know, and challenged myself.

I remember at the age of 15 going into the library and pulling down The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and reading it because I had heard that this was a modern masterpiece.

So, it was random reading, but maybe that's the best kind in a way. It's not forced on you and you get these glimpses, you know, of a wonderful world of books.

In Reading [Pennsylvania] there was a lovely Carnegie-endowed library with walls of books, and I remember I read through a whole shelf of P. G. Wodehouse.

Again my taste was to humor, I think, and it's odd that I didn't become a humorist really, although — just some humor perhaps in my work — but my first ambition as a writer was to become a humorous writer, to be like Thurber and Benchley and the lighter E. B. White, you know, to make people laugh. I thought that was a harmless thing to do. A thing that society never could have too much of, laughter.

Neverthless, Updike's fiction can be classed as realism — or as much realism as one should look for in fiction:

ACADEMY OF ACHIEVEMENT: It's striking that the books you first gravitated to were mysteries and crime stories, and yet the books that you became well-known for are about the everyday life of ordinary people in ordinary places.

UPDIKE: It is odd. I love mystery novels and I've tried to write them.

When I was in my teens I began to write a mystery novel and tried to figure out how to plot it. You sort of plot it backwards, you know. You know who did it and then you try to hide that, and I couldn't really do it. I'm not saying I couldn't do it if a gun was put to my head, but it felt unnatural and felt like a very minor kind of witnessing.

In other words, I was willing to be entertained by others, but I didn't want to write entertainments myself. I wanted to write books that told everything I knew, that were fully about life in my tame band of it.

So quite early I began to try to become a serious writer.

It's a little puzzling. I've written some science fiction. That may not be well-known, but a couple of my novels are located in a hypothetical future.

There is something about it that frees you up in a way. Your attempt is always to write about the world you know, but also to somehow get out of it, if only by a little jump or a trick. Something must be different so that your imagination is really engaged. You're not just spilling your life, but you're to some extent inventing another life.

ACADEMY OF ACHIEVEMENT: A lot of us readers feel honored by your paying so much attention to the likes of us, not great adventures but everyday people.

UPDIKE: Well, in a democracy in the 20th and 21st Century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

The trick about fiction, as I see it, is to make an unadventurous circumstance seem adventurous, to make it excite the reader, either with its truth or with the fact that there's always a little more that goes on, and there's multiple levels of reality.

As we walk through even a boring day, we see an awful lot and feel an awful lot. To try to say some of that seems more worthy than cooking up thrillers.

. . . which is debatable, to say the least, but, agree or disagree, you can purchase Updike's nonfiction collection Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism HERE.

Category: Detective fiction criticism (best-selling mainstream author division)

"He Had Decided That There Was Only One Possible Way in Which He Could Kill Vanderman and Get Away with It"

"Private Eye."
By Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner, 1915-58, and possibly C. L. Moore, 1911-87).
First published in Astounding, January 1949.
Online HERE.

One of many anthologies containing "Private Eye"

For better or worse, from childhood most of us are taught that God is always watching us — kindly parents assuring their children He’s watching out for us, indifferent parents scaring the bejabbers out of their kids with horror tales of what happens to willful children who refuse to eat their spinach.

One can only speculate how Henry Kuttner might have been terrorized in his infancy by the latter image of a vengeful deity — but like all good artists, he still managed to transmute submerged personal experience into public statement.

Kuttner’s prophetic novelette “Private Eye” (1949), in its own sly way, is provocative on several levels, touching on religion, social conformity, sexuality, hypocrisy, criminality, and the not always desirable impact of technology.

In an unspecified but not-too-distant future, the past is an open book and the Eye is always looking over your shoulder:

He had decided that there was only one possible way in which he could kill Vanderman and get away with it. He couldn’t conceal the deed itself or the actions leading up to it, or any written or spoken word. All he could hide were his own thoughts. And, without otherwise betraying himself, he’d have to kill Vanderman so that his act would appear justified, which meant covering his tracks for yesterday as well as for tomorrow and tomorrow.  . . . Going off to buy a gun, he felt uncomfortable, as though that prescient Eye, years in the future, could with a wink summon the police. But it was separated from him by a barrier of time that only the natural processes could shorten. And, in fact, it had been watching him since his birth. You could look at it that way . . .

He could defy it. The Eye couldn’t read thoughts. He bought the gun and lay in wait for Vanderman in a dark alley. But first he got thoroughly drunk. Drunk enough to satisfy the Eye.

Kuttner has gone Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) one better. In Bester’s dystopic future, telepathy, while uncommon, is possible but can be thwarted, as can Orwell’s omnipresent telescreens. In Kuttner’s world, nothing anyone has ever experienced is beyond the Eye, presenting a real problem for somebody contemplat-ing murder and hoping to get away with it.

“Private Eye” isn’t a whodunit; we’re inside the would-be killer’s mind all the way. As Kuttner notes in the story, it boils down to a case of “Actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea” versus “Acta exteriora indicant interiora secreta.” In such a society, with “God” constantly at one’s elbow — and with everybody acutely aware of that fact — crime has fallen to unprecedentedly low levels, and no one ever gets away with it.

From the passage above, the reader might think the murderer intends to shoot his victim, but he’s much more clever than that:

“Private Eye” by Henry Kuttner, writing as Lewis Padgett, dramatized for BBC Television as ‘The Eye,’ envisions a murder in a society where time-viewing makes it virtually impossible to commit one and escape punishment, but also which allows pleas of temporary insanity and self-defense.

The protagonist instead schemes to get close enough to the victim, who has married the woman he thought he loved, that he can provoke an attack by the victim and kill him in self-defense. The murder weapon is an antique scalpel used as a letter opener, whose presence between them is carefully orchestrated by the murderer. — "Time Viewer" (HERE) on Wikipedia (and, in case you’re wondering, evidently the BBC wiped ‘The Eye’, the only known filmed version of this story, to reuse the videotape).

Clearly, “Private Eye” is more than just crime fiction:

[It] is psychological science fiction at its best.

In a hypothetical future world, law enforcement institutions have developed the technological means to play back any event from the past, and thus ascertain the ‘true’ nature of any crime committed by anyone anywhere.

The main character of the story is a person raised by an authoritarian ‘fire and brimstone’ father who instills the fear of God into his son. The son as an adult attempts to plan out and commit the perfect crime, an act of vengeful murder, knowing full well that everything he does can be watched in retrospect afterwards by the law.

In a world of omniscient surveillance — both by God and concretely embodied and represented in the police of this futurist world — this man carries out the perfect crime. “Private Eye” examines the psychological repercussions of advancing technology and draws interesting parallels between the potential power of such technologies and traditional ideas about a judgmental, omniscient God contained in many of our religious belief systems. — Tom Lombardo, “Science Fiction As the Mythology of the Future” (online HERE)

Resource:
- "Private Eye" has been anthologized quite a few times; see HERE.

Category: Crime fiction (SF variety)

"All of Them Embody the Nowadays Increasingly Neglected Principle of Fair Play"

BEWARE OF THE TRAINS.
By Edmund Crispin (1921-78).
Penguin Books reprint.
1953. 158 pages: 16 stories.
For sale HERE.

Beware of the Trains is a collection of sixteen short mysteries by Edmund Crispin (real name: Bruce Montgomery) that appeared in London newspapers in the late forties and early fifties. It is therefore understandable that they would be short on character development; Crispin, in his Foreword, explains their lack of ambition:

A short story can aim either at atmosphere or at the anecdote; those which follow belong, with the exception of 'Deadlock', to the second category. All of them embody the nowadays increasingly neglected principle of fair play to the reader — which is to say that the reader is given all the clues needed to enable him to anticipate the solution by the exercise of his logic and common sense. He should note, however, that for the solutions of 'The Drowning of Edgar Foley', 'Within the Gates', 'Express Delivery', and 'The Golden Mean' he will require in addition some fragments of technical or near technical information on about the level of the average newspaper quiz.

Despite such disclaimers, however, all of the stories are accessible to any reader — which is not to say that Crispin, who read Modern Languages at Oxford, is incapable of linguistic flourishes on occasion. In the following excerpt, notice the carefully balanced phrasing that leads the reader onward to the "sting" at the end:

Thus it was that Gervase Fen, ambling with rather less than his usual vigour from St. Thomas's Hospital, where he had been visiting a friend, towards St. James's Park, through which he proposed strolling prior to dinner at the Athenaeum, paused to examine the brass door plates and signboards flanking this particular doorway; and in so doing found himself shoulder to shoulder with a man who had just half a minute to live.

Crispin's sleuth is Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, who is described thus:

His ruddy, clean-shaven face was pensive; his long, lean body sprawled gracelessly, heels on the fender; his brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up, as usual, in mutinous spikes at the crown of his head. For perhaps two minutes he remained staring, mute and motionless, into the amber depths of his glass . . . .

Fen is very much the armchair detective in these stories, solving cases purely with his intellect and scarcely exerting himself: no fistfights, gunplay, or car chases for him (quite different from the Fen of, say, The Moving Toyshop).

The stories (with random quotes):

1. "Beware of the Trains":

A whistle blew; jolting slightly, the big posters on the hoardings took themselves off rearwards — and with sudden acceleration, like a thrust in the back, the electric train moved out of Borleston Junction, past the blurred radiance of the tall lamps in the marshalling-yard, past the diminishing constellations of the town's domestic lighting, and so out across the eight-mile isthmus of darkness at whose further extremity lay Clough.

Fate had a conjuring trick in preparation, and they were needed as witnesses to it.

"It's occurred to me that he may be dead and cut up into little pieces. But I still can't find any of the pieces . . . .  Good Lord, Fen, it's like — it's like one of those Locked-Room Mysteries you get in books: an Impossible Situation."

Comment: It's up to Gervase Fen to connect the disappearance of a motorman (driver) from a train and the death of a burglar; it's murder, all right, and Fen's good friend, Detective-Inspector Humbleby of the Metropolitan C.I.D., can be relied upon to be flummoxed: "Rather a simple device, really . . . ." remarks Fen with a yawn. As in many of Crispin's short stories, the action takes place in a relatively short time period, between midnight and dawn in this case.

2. "Humbleby Agonistes":

"In my job," said Detective-Inspector Humbleby, "a man expects to be shot at every now and again. It's an occupational risk, like pneumoconiosis in coal-mining, and when you're on duty you've obviously got to be prepared for it to crop up. But a social call on an old acquaintance is quite a different matter."

". . . he's the sort of man it's impossible to visualise outside the context of dogs and guns and an interest in dahlias . . ."

. . . he had the precarious, CONSTRICTED air you notice in people who are trying to think of two things at once.

". . . the possibility of blackmail neither shocked nor astonished me particularly . . ."

. . . he'd stopped and was standing like a man in a trance, staring at the revolver in his hand as if he couldn't imagine what it was or how he'd come by it.

Comment: Gervase Fen as the perfect armchair detective, leaving it only to recharge drinking glasses; D.I. Humbleby recounts the odd occurrences involving an old friend from "the 1914 war," and Fen solves it in real time. The story's format was pioneered by Poe, utilized by Doyle on occasion, and is still favored by Paul Halter.

(Why "Agonistes"? This is speculative, of course: In John Milton's SAMSON AGONISTES, the sightless Samson — like the clueless Humbleby — is "Blind among enemies, O worse than chains"; the Inspector, being too close to the subject, could be metaphorically "eyeless in Gaza.")

3. "The Drowning of Edgar Foley":

In a room in Belchester Mortuary — a plain room with a faint smell of formalin, where dust-motes hung suspended in a single shaft of sunlight — the financier and the labourer lay on deal tables under greyish cotton sheets, side by side. The scene was of a sort to evoke facile moralising, all the more so since the labourer had left his wife moderately well off, whereas the financier had died penniless.

. . . if Fen had never set eyes on the widow of Edgar Foley, the topic of Foley's death might well have lapsed, and in that case an unusually mean and contemptible crime would probably have gone unpunished.

"Yes. HE'S where he belongs. And if his widow isn't exactly inconsolable, you can hardly blame her, can you?"

"You'd think it's best to let sleeping dogs lie." Fen lit a cigarette. "Only sooner or later, you know, they wake up of their own accord; and then there's liable to be trouble anyway . . . ."

"Just one thing," said Fen affably, "if you don't mind. It's this: after the recovery of Foley's body, what did you do with his boots?"

Comment: Fen is able to prevent a gross miscarriage of justice; speaking of which, a passage from Hans Gross's CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION serves to disprove an alibi; meanwhile Superintendent Best unwittingly aids Fen's investigation.

4. "'Lacrimae Rerum'":

"You chatter about 'the perfect crime'," said Wakefield irritably, "but you seem incapable of realising that it isn't a topic one can ARGUE about at all. One can only pontificate, which is irrational and useless."

"What I have in mind is a murder which was committed several years before the war — the first criminal case, as it happens, with which I ever had anything to do."

"The murderer is at the present moment living quite openly almost next door to New Scotland Yard."

". . . something in the last paragraph of that letter struck me as being ever so slightly odd . . . ."

". . . I was on the point of leaving, in a welter of civilities, before he quite unexpectedly let the cat out of the bag."

Comment: Fen reminisces about his first case, the one that got away. It helps, but is not essential, to be familiar with Tchaikowsky's Sixth Symphony; as for the title, it has a specialized significance for two characters. (Latin: "tears of the world", rerum being a feminine noun, which may or may not be of any significance.)

5. "Within the Gates":

It was immediately outside the entrance to an office building, within a stone's throw, almost, of New Scotland Yard, that the thing happened.

The assailant struck viciously at his victim's unprotected head, snatched the typescript from his hand as he fell, and scrambled back into the car, which slewed away from the curb with a squeal of tyres, and in another instant was gone.

"Discretion," said Fen with great complacency, "is my middle name."

". . . method, as opposed to intuition, always IS slow."

Comment: Fen witnesses a crime and smokes out a traitor; the death of a cipher expert leads our sleuth to a solution relating to cryptogams (note the spelling); D.I. Humbleby is still two steps behind Fen. (The title here is probably from Milton's PARADISE LOST, Book X, line 230: "Within the Gates of Hell sat Sin and Death".)

6. "Abhorred Shears":

"It's the Bolsover case," said Humbleby dolefully. "A person named Bolsover has been murdered, and I can't make out how it was done."

"Very earnest and science-minded, is young Fred: the sort," said Humbleby with all the savagery of a cornered humanist, "that reads books in his spare time about how motor-cycles work, with a widow's peak and dotty-looking eyes behind his glasses and a brash, cocky way with him."

"The next thing, obviously, was to discover which of our three suspects had opportunity to drop atropine into Bolsover's tankard. And for our sins, we found that they'd all had opportunity."

Comment: A comparatively slight story but with good deductions by Fen; Humbleby is certain one of three people murdered a new-found relative: They all had opportunity and motive but not, apparently, the means. (The title? Crispin explains in his Foreword: "The title 'Abhorred Shears' has caused some perplexity, and an explanation may perhaps be acceptable here. The relevant lines are in Milton's LYCIDAS: 'Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin spun life.' The particular Fury referred to is of course Atropos. And atropine, named after her, is the poison which figures in my tale.")

7. "The Little Room":

She was a trim elderly woman, well laced in, with greying hair and rather hard features, and she had a good command of that most devastating of a salesman's weapons, uninterrupted speech.

Well, they got engaged, and the wedding was all set for a day last June. And then, on the actual morning of her wedding-day, Betty disappeared.

For some little time he was happily occupied with filter paper, hydrogen peroxide, and a solution of benzidine sulphate in glacial acetic acid.

Comment: Fen goes house hunting and discovers skulduggery; the domestic impact of World War Two receives some comment; and the placement of a door bolt proves to be all-important.

8. "Express Delivery":

They looked slightly like giraffes, Fen concluded as he studied the photograph in question; and you would have taken them for brother and sister rather than for husband and wife.

A gawky, conscientious, desperately dull sort of man with thick-lensed glasses and a stammer. He was one of those unfortunate people who are obviously doomed to come to nothing however hard they try . . .

And then he checked himself, for Fen was staring at him with the eyes of a man half blinded by unaccustomed sunlight.

Comment: Fen and Humbleby unravel a knotty problem of murder-for-gain; the solution involves things that travel faster than sound. ("Express" in the title refers to what is commonly rendered "high-powered".)

9. "A Pot of Paint":

It was the flat of the spade that had knocked Church out, Fen supposed, and not the edge: lucky for him.

. . . and at the foot of the staircase lurked a stoutish lady, also elderly but with an air of settled misanthropy . . .

. . . "He's had a lucky escape," said the doctor, in the slightly petulant tones of one to whom an interesting fatality has been denied.

Comment: A case of robbery and assault solved by Fen, assisted by the sturdy Inspector Bledloe.

10. "The Quick Brown Fox":

"No, on the whole I don't think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they ARE addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime — which as a rule is extremely complicated — tends to make them over-elaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they're easy game . . . ."

. . . he had none of that appalling narrowness which you normally get in people who are engaged in breeding money from money.

". . . it was at this point in our conversation that we heard Eleanor's scream. Eleanor had gone to call her fiance down to his breakfast, and had found him murdered in his bed."

. . . "You think the solution obvious?" said Fen mildly.

". . . I hope no one will imagine I'm mocking at detective-story devices. In point of fact, I dote on them. But so long as criminals take them for a model, the police are going to have a very easy time; because . . . your genuinely murderous addict will dig his cunning and complicated pits for the investigators, only, in the upshot, to fall head first into one of them himself."

Comment: We all know who jumps over the lazy dog, but a too-clever murderer fails to allow for a typewriter ribbon; Fen outwits the killer — and Wakefield, an annoying acquaintance.

11. "Black for a Funeral":

At ten o'clock on the evening of July 24th, 1951, Police-Constable Albert Tyler set out on his bicycle from the little police-station in the village of Low Norton . . . P.C. Tyler struck out on the road eastwards and was presently swallowed up by the night. Thus began the curious affair of the disappearing car, the black neck-tie, and the abortive burglary.

. . . "Yes, he was a funny bloke: mad about the women, and not too scrupulous as to whether they were married or not. But in spite of that, you couldn't help liking him — same way you can like a cat, provided you keep your pet goldfish out of its reach."

. . . "So the conclusion you're forced to, really, is that for some unknown reason the murderer took the green tie off, and put the black one on, after he'd done the murder . . . . Perhaps," said Beeton without much conviction, "as a sort of gruesome joke: black for a funeral, you know."

Comment: For Fen, a case that's solved using a process of elimination; there is an impossible-crime element that Fen easily dispels; and he is ably assisted by the efficient country cop, Sergeant Beeton.

12. "The Name on the Window":

. . . his doorstep was occupied, he found, not by a dyspeptic, over-heated child with an unintelligible query, but by a neatly-dressed greying man with a red tip to his nose and woebegone eyes.

". . . there are big grounds, with an eighteenth-century pavilion about a quarter of a mile away from the house, in a park. That's where it happened — the murder, I mean."

". . . I gather he was also a good deal of a faddist — Yogi, I mean, and the Baconian hypothesis, and a lot of other intellectual — um — detritus of the same dull, obvious kind: that's where the ghost-vigil comes in."

Humbleby leaned forward earnestly. "Here is the point: windows nailed shut; no secret doors — emphatically none; chimney too narrow to admit a baby; and in the dust on the hall floor, only one set of footprints . . ."

Comment: D.I. Humbleby presents Fen with a "locked-room" problem on Boxing Day: the murder of an architect with several possible motives behind it. The solution involves a palindrome, and Gideon Fell and his famous locked-room lecture get a mention.

13. "The Golden Mean":

It was in the village of Chigfold, isolated on a corner of one of the Devon moors, that Gervase Fen encountered the only man who has ever seemed to him to be definitely evil.

That mere motive is no proof of attempted murder, he was well aware; yet . . . the possibility of accident scarcely even crossed his mind. Proof was the problem — PROOF.

"I'm telling you to get out and stay out, d'you hear? And to stop poking your superior nose into what doesn't concern you."

Comment: Fen is morally certain murder-for-gain is the motive but evidence is lacking, and Inspector Waycott thinks it was just an accident; the "deserted, wind-swept moorland" setting is used well. (The title refers to a precious metal standard, as Fen explains.)

14. "Otherwhere":

"We know who DID the killing — we're morally certain, that is — but the wretched fellow has an alibi and I can't for the life of me see the flaw in it."

"Perhaps there isn't a flaw in it . . . It wouldn't be the first time a moral certainty had turned out to be a total delusion."

So there you have all the ingredients for a thoroughly explosive mixture — and in due course it does in fact explode.

Comment: Murder — or self-defense? Only two people know for certain, and they're getting married — to each other: "Justice," concludes Fen, "has already been done." (This is the last Fen story in the collection.)

15. "The Evidence for the Crown":

Inspector George Copperfield . . . devoted his spare time to improving the prose style of his reports with the help of a volume entitled HOW TO WRITE GOOD ENGLISH: an innocuous occupation which in his more buoyant moments led him to suspect that he had missed a profitable vocation as an author of realistic crime-fiction in the manner of M. Simenon.

The murder shocked him, of course: as an ordinarily humane person he held no brief for violence. On the other hand, if someone had GOT to be murdered in Lampound, then Blanche Binney was undoubtedly an excellent choice.

There are plenty of would-be amateur detectives in the land; but to few is it given, as it was given to Barney, to provide the authorities with conclusive proof of guilt in a murder case. The thing came about by accident rather than by expertise, for Barney was a day-dreamer, not a serious criminologist; but this was one instance where a day-dreamer rather than a serious criminologist was what the police required.

Comment: Gervase Fen is absent from this story; it's murder, and maybe half the village has a motive; good twist at the end; the narrative is told in a lightly satirical style.

16. "Deadlock" (with 1 map):

My father disliked Murchison . . . So did I. So did Aunt Jessica. So did Captain Vanderloor. So, in fact, did everybody — which no doubt accounts for what happened to him.

And I just heard him say, as I closed the door behind me: "Curious about that blood . . . ."

I was at the age when I expected a detective to be hawk-eyed and ruthless, and I felt cheated.

Children and adults have very different values about some things — death in particular.

Comment: Another non-Fen story, a first-person narrative told through the eyes of a teenaged boy some years after the event; Crispin effectively relates a detective story and, using mainstream technique, assumes an elegiac tone that seems appropriate to lost youth and innocence.

Resource:
- We previously covered Crispin's Fen Country HERE.

Category: Detective fiction