Son of Gun in Cheek Read online

  Digby is only too happy to oblige. Along with Sergeant Allenby, he ventures to the island, where he meets the other experts, Palgrave’s wife and daughter, and a woman mystery writer who gave the world “that ripsnorting, odd thing, The Shrunken Arm.” No sooner do Gresham and Allenby arrive than More Strange Things Happen. An escaped convict from a nearby prison is on the loose and perhaps has made his way to the island. The Palgrave Diamond is stolen. Amon-Ya’s mummy case is likewise purloined. Murder most foul is committed in the mummy room, and an investigation of the mummy reveals that it is “bleeding.” It looks as though the terrible curse has claimed another victim.

  Ah, but what is the significance of the freshly baked biscuit? Why does Digby Gresham mutter “Holy kettlefish!” to himself while skulking around the grounds that night? Why does Allenby exclaim, “Holy catfish! Wouldn’t that rattle your wisdom teeth?”? Is something fishy going on? And can it be that part of the answer is the Hindoo microbe, the one that produces a red fluid that looks so exactly like blood you can’t tell the difference except under a microscope?

  There is more to the plot, much more, but these are the highlights. What also towers gigantically throughout are the lofty peaks and crags of Florence Mae’s prose. Unlike Mary Gaunt, she possessed a ready command of the English language—a too ready command, in fact. Her problem can be traced to the obvious facts that she did not own nor had she ever studied a grammar textbook, and that she did own and was forever consulting both a dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus. Unfortunately for her, she never quite grasped the proper usage of either Webster’s or Roget’s. Shades and nuances of meaning escaped her. Exact definitions of words seemed to befuddle her. She seemed to believe that all the words listed under a particular entry in Roget’s were exact synonyms, to be used interchangeably with that entry. She also seemed to believe that substituting big words for little words, and/or colorfully offbeat words for common ones, was the key to Good Writing.

  Consider, first of all, her blithe experimentation with verbs, nouns, and adjectives:

  For Digby Gresham’s diggings were salted away in a side street where traffic didn’t boil over much, especially on climatically indisposed evenings.

  The guard squinted at each in turn. Then his gaze volleyed to the locked rear deck of the roadster.

  “Justice isn’t functioning very shipshape.”

  Olive’s hands went to her head. She held the coppery locks tight as if either to stem the dull ache or to force her ideas back to their original jumping-off place. . . .

  Tragedy is seldom to be seen all labeled and carefully pigeonholed. It’s a matter of atmosphere, requiring a barometric nature to divine it.

  Nowhere else, in those dainty rooms, was there a sign of any lurking, impish face, spying on the antics she had been maneuvering.

  Instinctively Allenby’s eager, boyish glance romped to the girl’s left wrist.

  From the percolator in the recessed window, the housekeeper turned out another steaming cup, which she tempered deftly.

  Out of the unknown, the hinterland of the inexplicable, he divined the potency of what he had seen.

  Similes and metaphors were one of Florence Mae’s specialties:

  Gresham’s steel-gray glance crossed Allenby’s like swords suddenly freed of their scabbards.

  Again he blew pale amulets of [cigarette] smoke quite soberly.

  [The letter] drooped from his fingers like a limp chewed cigarette butt.

  [The wide piazza] was smothered in a riot of climbing roses, a pale patch of white, pink, and blood red, like the varied corpuscles in human veins.

  The siren was broadcasting, with all the strength of its metal lungs, the news that a man had escaped, a living link from the chain of human beings bound together in durance by the law. The siren started again, bellowing discordant yelps, signally out of tune on that peaceful, purple landscape.

  The two faced each other in that house of subtle double deaths. The soundlessness of the place was funereal, pent-up to the bursting point. It crashed about them in the utter absence of all movement.

  Her descriptions of people and places were another of her long suits:

  His face was brown, almost leathery tinted.

  His hands were extraordinarily delicate, out of proportion to his big, burly frame. The strength of his body seemed to have petered out also in his head.

  Delilah’s soft knock tapped on the door. It was like the woman’s cattish tread; like, too, the low swish of her gray uniform, which clung to her gaunt figure like a bit of fabric as bleached and flabby as if drained of all vitality.

  They ran along through tiny, tucked-in villages clinging to the rock-bound coast like barnacles, intershot with neatly tufted evergreens. A thousand-thousand Christmas trees reared emerald pompoms on the landscape.

  A half-dozen guards sprang up here and there on the rocks. The purple of twilight glazed the sea; a patch of contorted seaweed, matted and clumped like some aboriginal seine, bobbed between the accidental catamaran made by a couple of logs lashed together with driftstuff.

  The guards began a systematic peppering of weeds, logs, and all suspicious flotsam.

  Fog swathed the sea in thick bandages, coffin-cloth windings from out of the dusk. The house stood out, a patch of black, rent by placques of light. The fog sloughed away, like amorphous flesh, from the sloped sides of the bungalow.

  Florence Mae was no slouch when it came to dialogue, either, especially when either slang (Allenby) or pontification (Gresham) was involved:

  “Now,” appealed Allenby, with a long sigh that freedom of speech was his again, “what kind of a nut would light out with a mummy-case and go to such pains to snitch it? What under the cartouche of Amon-Ya would a guy want with such a thing? Unless he was a ‘cuckoo’ on ancient Egyptian stuff, bitten by a scientific bug or some great idea that he had lamped out something to startle the world with.”

  “So he’s a dealer in dope! And that’s why he’s so flush on the kalos. This stuff [money] looks like a young bank.”

  “Why, that’s worse than yellow! It’s canary—it’s cuckoo! Man alive, if you should whisper that to the yellowest journal afloat, they’d quash the tale as something born out of hash-hish or loco-weed. And yet—I know you. . . . There’s something very dark in Denmark or in the House of Palgrave.”

  “If the murderer himself is penned against his will to the unpleasant scene of crime, along with other nerve-wracking occurrences, his conscience will begin to peck at his vitals and his security. He’ll begin to conjure up bogies about something he imagines he has overlooked or overdone. Penning a murderer in close confinement, not only to the place of his crime, but to the victim, is strong, annihilating, nerve-wracking medicine. It’s the most powerful third-degree in my experience. For the really to-be-depended-upon inquisition is dealt out by human conscience, no matter how petrified it may be with the winding-sheet of many crimes.”

  “You’ve the wrong idea, Palgrave, that crime breeds only in filth, in poverty and in ignorance. . . . The crime of today is a high-powered, educated caste of monster which a terribly efficient twentieth century has developed to pernicious precosity.”

  And finally, Florence Mae was a mistress of the anticlimactic statement. She might as well have been summing up The Palgrave Mummy itself when she had one of her other characters say with a perfectly straight face:

  “It beats the devil. It’s diabolical. It’s fiendish. It’s just not right.”

  The Merrivale Mystery, JAMES CORBETT (1929)

  When this alternative tour-de-force was first hatched in England in the late twenties, Dorothy L. Sayers and S. S. Van Dine were among the leading exponents of the formal detective story. Little wonder, then, that young James Corbett should have wanted, in his very first mystery novel, to capitalize on the popularity of the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance by creating a cultured, snooty, somewhat effete super-sleuth of his own—one with ratioci-native powers far exceeding those of mere mort
als in the detecting racket. Thus we have Victor Serge (evidently pronounced “surge,” not “sir-gay”), “a man with a distinctive personality, and nothing was more impressive than his two brilliant dark eyes. They took in everything in a flash, yet they remained eternally smiling and self-possessed.” Serge occupies a London flat, “sumptuously furnished, with every sign of luxury and comfort,” which boasts of “two of the finest oil paintings in Europe, and the piano was the most expensive of its kind. Serge could play that instrument exquisitely, and as for the bookshelves, they were lined with a rare collection of treasures.”

  This ‘‘sleuth hound’s” philosophy of detection centers on something he calls “an occult pointer.” As he says early on to Ralph Moreton, his novelist friend and nominal Watson, “Just when a clue is remote, Moreton, when everything seems dead against you, and all the papers cry out about your lack of intelligence, Fate steps in with an occult pointer.” And just what is an occult pointer? Neither Serge nor Corbett ever explains, although Serge does offer this cryptic comment when Moreton ingenuously asks how long a clue has eluded him: “Two years. That happened in the Plymouth murder after the Armistice, and the Yard was baffled over that business. I had to confess failure for a long time, but I kept in touch with it, and in two years I got an anonymous post card and arrested my man.”

  According to Corbett and Serge, Scotland Yard is populated by dunces who blunder about obliterating evidence and who couldn’t solve a murder if the murderer sent them a postcard with his name on it. Nothing will do but to call on Serge at the drop of a corpse, any corpse, as long as it’s a member of the upper class. Which the Yard does when Sir Philip Merrivale is bumped off at Merrivale Hall, “a great lump of mystery” some two hours outside London. Will Serge take the case? Well, of course—but not until he and Moreton have discussed crime and criminals for a dozen pages, with special attention to the perfect crime. (Serge modestly says that if anybody could commit one, he’s the chap.) Serge also makes a number of other impressive statements during this interlude, among them: “The passion crime looks easy of detection, but after the passionate act is committed, and when the brain has cooled, a man often resorts to subtle stratagem to hide his guilt. A woman is different. A woman is at the mercy of primitive elements.” Not to mention occult pointers and male chauvinists.

  So Serge, with Moreton in tow, hies himself off to Merrivale Hall to dazzle us with his investigative prowess. Moreton is able to go along in the guise of Serge’s secretary because, we are told, “he had been studying for the Bar, but his pen brought him to a London publishing house, and his work secured him independence. Apart from that, he was the son of a wealthy stockbroker.”

  Upon arrival at the lump of mystery, Serge is immediately shown into the library, where “the dead body . . . remained on the floor as it had fallen [the night before], and the relatives, presumably acting on a hint from [Scotland Yard detective] Bancroft, made no effort to remove it.” Corbett, you see, had a blithe disregard not only for police procedure but for the laws of human decency. While Philip Merrivale’s corpse is allowed to lie undisturbed on the library floor overnight, a later victim of foul play is permitted to remain untouched for two days because an inquest into the death was postponed. None of the whacko inhabitants of Merrivale Hall seem particularly perturbed by this cavalier attitude toward the recently extinct; neither do Serge, Moreton, or any of the Scotland Yard cops. But then, these are not ordinary crime-solvers. Do they look for fingerprints or other clues? Or course not; Bancroft simply announces that there are none, and that’s that. Do they call in a police surgeon to examine any of the corpses littering the place? No way; they permit a relative of the victims to do the examining, without even bothering to check his credentials.

  What does Serge do, then, by way of master-detecting? Well, first of all, he whips out a cache of “wonderful instruments” that he proceeds to “pass over” the corpses—wonderful instruments that include a “magnetic lens and gleaming microscope.” (How he manages to find out anything by passing a gleaming microscope over a dead man is never explained. Secrets of the sleuth-hound trade, you know.) Serge also conducts interminable interviews with everybody in the household, most of whom are Merrivales and all of whom hate and keep trying to incriminate each other. And of course he runs around on all sorts of mysterious errands and in the interim makes cryptic remarks to let us know that he is ratiocinating furiously inside his wonderful brain.

  What he ratiocinates (after three murders by gunshot and an attempted poisoning) is a devilish scheme involving strange pacts, weird disguises, identical twins, a butler named Proust, and a sliding panel behind a revolving bookcase that leads to a secret passage. The motive behind all this mayhem doesn’t make much sense; neither does the rest of the plot. And neither does some of Corbett’s prose. While much of it is about as stimulating as watching grass grow, every now and then he makes you sit up and take notice with an alternative sparkler.

  [The Yard men] worshipped Serge as a super-intelligence, an admiration they did not extend to Frank Bancroft, who they felt was too conscious of his superiority, and although they respected him as a brilliant colleague, they had an instinctive sense that he was mediocre.

  The look on Stephen’s face was distinctly unpleasant. It contained all the malignity of hate, all the malevolence of evil, and even at a normal moment the features were not prepossessing.

  [George Merrivale] was a remarkable man in many respects. His dome-shaped head suggested the thinker and philosopher, and . . . he could change his expression without effort [which] signified great mobility of thought and temperament. Serge saw at a glance that he was dealing with an intellectual.

  “You don’t mean you will eat anything in that house?” [Moreton asked].

  “It depends on the courtesy of the inhabitants. Frankly, I am not thinking of the intestinal glands at present.”

  “Stephen is selfish and pig-headed to the bone. I never liked him, and never will. Has he offered you anything to eat? That’s what I’d like to know!”

  “We are putting up at the Talbot Hotel, Dunseaton,” Serge explained, with a little air of independence, “and we are not in the mood for gastronomy at present.”

  “Proust,” said Serge sternly, “who taught you to walk in that fashion? Your steps are feline and cat-like.”

  Had Tabitha’s words impressed Serge with real significance, and despite his protest at their incredulity had he given reality to the statement?

  “It seems that Cecil is killing himself with the accursed stuff, and the other two half-brothers are developing into congenital idiots.”

  The [police] men saluted in the darkness and stole away with furtive tread. They knew the anticlimax was at hand, and their satisfaction was unbounded.

  Such an auspicious debut did not go unrecognized in this country; The Merrivale Mystery was published here in 1931 by Mystery League, an outfit whose editorial staff had a keen eye for the alternative masterwork. Others that they gave us in the lamentably brief three years of their existence include Sydney Horler’s The Curse of Doone and Gwen Bristow’s and Bruce Manning’s The Invisible Host, about which see Gun In Cheek.

  Corbett went on to publish another forty-one novels in England, but it is not known by yours truly whether such early titles as The Winterton Hotel Mystery, The White Angel, and Murder at Red Grange (which presumably has nothing to do with the Ail-American football player of that era) also feature the deductive talents of Victor Serge. Sad to relate, only one of those other Corbett novels saw print here—and that one in 1957, half a dozen years after his last book appeared in the United Kingdom. This fact should not serve as a pat on the back for American publishers, however, or as an indictment of British publishers. Or vice versa.

  Hell in Harness, JOSEPH AUSLANDER (1929)

  1929 was a very good year for Hall of Fame classics, if not for stockbrokers and their clientele. What we have in Hell in Harness, though, is a most unusual inductee. On the one hand it is one of
those Prohibition gangster sagas in which a tough kid from New York’s “Hell’s Sink” rises, falls, and winds up in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The kid’s name is the Kid; some of his hoodlum pals have monickers like Lefty Louie, Gyp the Blood, and Panther Roop; the Sing Sing chaplain is Father Caffery. . . . Well, you get the idea.

  On the other hand, all of this is written in verse.

  Yes indeed. Thirty-five pages of rhyming verse, giving Hell in Harness the distinction of being the genre’s only epic mystery poem (the only one published by a major house, anyway). And such verse! Such alternative rhyming genius!

  Here are just a few examples:

  This story will not stop or stray;

  The Kid will put it his own way

  Straight from the shoulder as the Kid

  Always did the things he did.

  The Kid will carry it to that night

  At the Crescent Club when he pulled the fight

  Out of the trap; and I will tell

  Round by round, bell by bell,

  Every blow as it fell.

  Then the Kid picks up the thread

  With Spike and the bullet in Spike’s head.

  He drops it there; I step in there,

  Tell how they burned him in the Chair.

  Then it is over; there is no more:

  Someone opens and shuts a door.

  And:

  You couldn’t have paid me to go to school—

  I wasn’t built for the brand of drool

  They dished out; so I hookeyed instead

  and racked the cues for Sullivan Red

  Whose pool joint was the hang-out for

  Every pimp who had a whore

  Hustling for him: Hell’s Sink, all right,

  And no mistake, where day was night

  And night was the gunmen’s get-together;