Murder on the Blackboard (1932) by Stuart Palmer

A couple of months ago, I read Stuart Palmer’s debut novel, The Penguin Pool Murder, which introduced the world to Miss Hildegard Withers, teacher at Jefferson School and a battle-ax who stubbornly forces herself into murder investigations. While I had my issues with the book, I enjoyed it enough to set out to read the rest of the series. I intended to read it in order, and so downloaded Murder on the Blackboard…only to find that it was the third book in the series. More fool me. That aside, I sat down to enjoy a book that, as the title implies, brings murder very close to home for Miss Withers.

The book opens with Miss Withers sitting in on detention for one of her students, who made tactless comments about Anise Halloran, the sweet young music teacher, and her relationship with the school principal. Miss Withers hears the teacher’s heels clacking into the cloakroom before unsteadily heading out. When she goes to the cloakroom to see if Miss Halloran is alright, she finds the woman lying dead on the couch, her head caved in.

This is only the beginning of one of the worst days of Miss Withers’s life. When she returns to the school with NYPD Inspector Oscar Piper in tow, the body has vanished. Piper knows better than to doubt Miss Withers, but his search is cut short when the murderer bashes him over the head, leaving the investigation in the hands of Inspector Taylor. "She had little respect for the intelligence of the police when Oscar Piper was in charge of a case, and none at all now that he lay on the operating table in the emergency ward at Bellevue.” A feeling vindicated when Taylor latches onto the school’s drunken fool of a janitor, Mr. Anderson, as his prime suspect.

This is a surprisingly gritty book! We have critical comments on the use of the third-degree by the police, and the discovery of the victim’s body, while not dwelled on, is disturbing and treated as such by the characters. Miss Withers is on the defensive for much of the early chapters and it’s not until later that she’s able to really get a grasp on the case. The set-up is good. The idea of setting a murder at a school is an interesting one, and Palmer gives us a nice, multi-chapter section where Withers explores the school, looking for clues and a murderer. Palmer also throws multiple interesting questions at the reader. Why does the secretary have a gun loaded with two blanks? Why has Miss Halloran been acting sickly over the past few weeks? What is the meaning of the sequence of musical notes she scrawled on the blackboard? There’s even a minor locked room mystery thrown into the mix, as the janitor makes a surprise appearance in the school basement even after it’s been gone over with “a fine-toothed comb.” Twice! It’s a neat little problem. I enjoy these little locked rooms Palmer’s given the reader in the two books I’ve read.

Like Penguin Pool, even if you hit on the killer early, it’s still satisfying to see Withers piece everything together. There are some good clues throughout the book, and it’s always fun to see an author lay the groundwork for what the killer did without the reader noticing. And Palmer gets credit for subverting a common mystery plot point. But I don’t think Palmer quite sticks the landing here. Part of the problem is the characters. Palmer implies a lot of suspects—the various teachers at the school—but in practice we only focus on a handful of them, meaning the reader can probably hit on the killer through pure chance. There are also a couple of minor dangling loose ends, and the whole sequence with Professor Pfaffle, a criminologist, goes nowhere beyond letting Palmer take shots at psychology. And some of those questions I wrote earlier don’t get satisfying answers. The biggest example is the motive. “Why would someone kill the harmless music teacher?” is a question underlying the investigation, and when we get to the explanation, Miss Withers implies it’s important…and then just glosses over it. It makes for a slightly dull ending to an otherwise hard-hitting novel.

But you know what? I enjoyed this book anyway. I think it shows a more confident Palmer, with a more complex mystery for the reader to unravel. Miss Withers is on fine form too, high-handedly bulldozing her way through the investigation. All in all, I’d put this book about on the same level as Penguin Pool. I’m looking forward to seeing Palmer improve himself more. Recommended. (Although right on the borderline here.) 

Other Reviews: Ah Sweet Mystery! (contains other Miss Withers reviews), The Book Decoder, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, Bitter Tea and Mystery, Tipping My Fedora.

"The Violent End of Duncan Malveine" (2020) by nicked

And now, time for something completely different.

Outside of mystery fiction, my other big obsession is the Thief franchise. The first game, Thief: The Dark Project came out in 1998 and, along with Metal Gear Solid, played a key role in inventing the “stealth game.” (Although I know about its predecessors, such as Castle Wolfenstein.) The series revolves around Garrett, who used to be a student of a group of a secretive scholars called “the Keepers” before leaving the organization. Now he uses his training to work as a freelance thief operating in an unnamed city. Garrett would like to just steal enough loot to pay the bills and be left alone, but the Protagonist Curse means he inevitably gets sucked into saving the city, if not the world. But for all its influence, the franchise has had a very short shelf life: the original trilogy of games, a tepidly-received reboot/sequel in 2014, and now a VR game set after the 2014 game.

The franchise has retained its power thanks to a very active fan mission community. Ever since 1999’s “Gathering at the Bar,” there have been hundreds of missions placing Garrett in everything from basic Thief missions set in sparkling mansions to sprawling cities to horror to comedy. While there are less missions nowadays than there used to be, the community is still going strong. December 2023 saw the release of The Black Parade, a full campaign easily on par with, or even surpassing, the original games. With such a wide variety, it should come as no surprise that some creators have turned their hands to mystery.

One of the most prolific creators in this field is Nick “nicked” Dablin, who’s made almost two dozen fan missions since 2006. Most of nicked’s missions are high-quality missions that provide twists on the normal Thief format. “The Violent End of Duncan Malveine,” a fan mission for Thief's sequel, The Metal Age, is his most “technically ambitious.”

A journal in Garrett’s apartment sets the scene. Garrett has been eyeing Lord Malveine’s Star of Séraphine, “the world’s largest diamond,” but before he can make a move, Lord Malveine is murdered, meaning it’s likely that the diamond will pass to one of his children. Garrett is about to abandon the job when he’s introduced to an anonymous figure who asks him to track down Lord Malveine’s murderer. This person doesn’t care what Garrett steals, so long as he points to Lord Maleveine’s killer by leaving their portrait light on in the gallery. So Garrett gears up to infiltrate the manor.

Of course, not too many people are weeping over the dead man. There’s his wife, Elizabeth. Or his younger son Leon, a Pagan who resents his father’s conversion to the hyper-technological Mechanists. A conversion that’s also offended his eldest daughter and a priest staying at the estate. Or what about his older son, Raymond? He’s “a sadist with a mean streak” who’s determined to get into a vault built by Duncan’s father Gregor. Not to mention his wife, Lucy, a gambler with a temper. And that’s not counting the family doctor, lawyer, various other guests, and the servants. Which of them is the murderer?

Well, it could be any of them.

The mission’s gimmick is that it’s semi-randomized. I don’t mean in the Clue sense, where everything about the solution is random, but there are nine different choices of killer, each with their own method of committing the crime. The player will spend the mission sneaking through the manor, alternating between stealing loot and digging through the diaries and letters of the guests, figuring out who has an alibi, who has motive, who had the weapon, etc. The first time through, you’ll take extensive notes, desperately seeing who could and could not have committed the crime, you’ll angst over the autopsy report, and you’ll wonder if you have the right person right up until the ending.

Your later playthroughs will be much simpler. Part of this is just what happens when you replay something, but the fact is that the scenarios are too simple for the hardcore mystery fan. Once you know how the mission works, it becomes easy to check what you need to check and ignore everything else, even taking the randomization into account. In fact, the randomization kind of cuts against the mission. It gives the mission some replay value, but I think it would have been better off with two or three in-depth mysteries, with red herrings and double bluffs, then the current set-up with nine pretty basic scenarios. But I’m approaching this as a mystery fan, rather than as a Thief fan mission player. As a Thief fan, nicked does a great job here. Most people don’t think “Thief” and then “mystery,” so it was neat to see how nicked managed to emulate solving a mystery in a game engine not really suited for it.

And the thing is, this would be a very good mystery. You have maps, and the mansion is huge. There are plenty of suspects, with secrets ranging from the mundane to the disturbing. The gameplay mechanics—such as the security cameras you can turn off, but if you flip too many off they’ll all come back on—could be linchpins of a mystery plot. The best is the horror undertones. Nicked’s missions often feature horror, but the horror here got under my skin because you can actually completely miss it if you don’t explore thoroughly. It gives the mission an unsettling undertone if you don’t pick up on the dark thread weaving through it. There are cards and diary pages hidden throughout the manor, and every time you pick one up, there’s the sound of sliding metal from somewhere deep within the estate. “I don’t believe in curses,” Raymond brags, but the player will. It’s like if John Dickson Carr was inspired more by Lovecraft than by Poe. There are more jump scares involved than I would have liked, but most of the horror comes from the atmosphere and build-up.

So while I don’t know if this will be of any interest to this blog’s normal readers, I had a great time with this mission. It’s a solid Thief mission that any fan of the games should check out. Those who aren’t can safely pass on it, or just watch a Let’s Play. Even so, Recommended.

You can check out the mission (and nicked’s other work) here.

Towards Zero (1944) by Agatha Christie

I was inspired to read this book when I saw the commercials for the BBC adaptation. Look at when that came out. Now look at when I released this review. Clearly, a lot happened between then and now, but everything led towards this…

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s Superintendent Battle novels, and a very well-known one at that. It was interesting to compare this to my previous review of an Ellery Queen novel. The Queen novel technically has a stronger hook. Two characters enter the strange world of The Hamlet, meet the eccentric great detective, and we immediately go into an eye-catching murder. Christie’s book opens with lawyers and their hangers-on discussing a case, and yet while the Queen book is a little slow, Christie essentially rams a hook down the reader’s throat from the jump.

One of the attendees at the meeting is Richard Treves. Treves reflects that most mystery novels “begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day…All converging towards a given spot…And then, when the time comes—over the top! Zero Hour.” A philosophy that Christie follows here, as the next portion of the book shows the reader snapshots of different events, from an attempts suicide to Superintendent Battle’s daughter being accused of theft.

But the main focus is a triangle. Nevile Strange is a professional tennis player who’s recently divorced his wife Audrey for another woman, Kay. Still, Nevile feels bad about the whole thing and his guilt has led to him hitting on a terrible great idea: He and Kay will visit his mother-in-law at her home in September while Audrey is there. He’s very insistent that this was his idea, but Kay is skeptical. Also skeptical is said very traditional mother-in-law, Lady Tressilian, who dislikes the concept of divorce and isn’t fond of Kay anyway. Also going to be there in September is Mary Aldin, Lady Tressilian’s caretaker who comes into money if the old lady dies. Also present is Thomas Royde, a distant cousin of Audrey who still carries a torch for her and Ted Latimer, a dancer who carries a torch for Kay. Not to mention Mr. Treves himself.

This is already a trainwreck in the making…but the reader knows that it’s going to get worse. For one of the snippets we get is of a person plotting, “a clear, carefully detailed project for murder.” And the date of this plan’s climax? “A date in September.”

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s best works. She throws a lot of characters at the reader, and it’s a testament to her skill that they quickly sharpen and stay in the reader’s mind. There’s ghost-like Audrey, drifting through the house, seemingly inscrutable. There’s Kay, who beneath all her garishness truly cares about Nevile and, having schemed to get him in the first place, thinks she recognizes what Audrey is doing. Nevile himself is key to the narrative. While most readers will be appalled at his decisions, they are understandable. This is a man who has never suffered a serious setback in his life, and the idea that he’s willingly built a time bomb to sit on never seems to occur to him. The other characters are well-drawn as well. Of note is Ted. Normally, Christie’s angry young men tend to get eye-rolling pity at best, but here Christie gives a sharp scene with Mary where she recognizes his frustration and anger with all the snobs he’s surrounded by and offers him genuine sympathy. It’s a good scene and speaks to the depth Christie gives her cast. The only part that rings false is a last-second romance. You can kinda justify it if you tilt your head and squint a bit, but it still comes out of nowhere. And I don't like the language used to describe marriage.

I’ve been deliberately leaving out details about the murder, because I want to leave as much as a surprise for the reader if possible. While reading this book, I thought about Peter Lovesey’s The False Inspector Dew, another book with the same formula of having the murder occur halfway through with the first half of the novel being build-up. While I thought that Lovesey’s ended up being a pretty simple mystery, Christie manages to construct a much more dense and complex mystery from her page count. The reader is struck by a series of odd details about the crime—Why did the killer drug the maid, for instance—and the plot takes a number of twists and turns, subverting the reader’s expectations and sending them off asking new questions. I think that Christie could have highlighted some bits of evidence more—and it should go without saying, but some of those opening scenes have important clues—but she gives you most of the important bits and gives you plenty of time to chew over what they mean. And to fail to understand them, of course. I had been spoiled on this book before reading it, so it amused me to see how smoothly Christie introduced a series of red herrings designed to confuse the reader who thought they were a step ahead of the Queen.

Obviously, I had a blast with this book. Excellent characters interacting in a solid mystery. Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Only Detect, Mysteries Ahoy!, The Grandest Game in the World, Ah, Sweet Mystery!, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Clothes in Books, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, The Invisible Event (podcast, contains spoilers), and The Green Capsule.

The Tragedy of X (1932) by Ellery Queen

Image taken from The Invisible Event.

The year 1932 was a banner year for cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, better known for their pen name, Ellery Queen. After writing a couple of novels and short stories, the cousins made the decision to really buckle down and turn mystery writing into a career. That year saw the publication of The Greek Coffin Mystery and The Egyptian Cross Mystery under the Queen name, and the subject of today’s review, The Tragedy of X, published under the pen name of Barnaby Ross. (The sequel was published the same year.)

The Tragedy of X opens with Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno making their way to a house that could serve as the setting for the next Yukito Ayatsuji: “The Hamlet,” a castle populated by old servants with Shakespearean names and the hunchback Quacey, “the world’s premier make-up man.” And the lord of the castle is Drury Lane, a renowned actor who solved “the Cramer case.” Thumm and Bruno want his help in resolving “the Longstreet Murder.”

Harley Longstreet was a Wall Street broker, a swaggering bully who thought little of others. His birthday party was less a gathering of friends and more a barrelful of targets for Longstreet to shove around. The festivities were set to continue at another location, meaning that a gaggle of people crowd onto a streetcar. But on the way, Longstreet reached into his pocket, only to jerk it out. Something had pricked him. Minutes later, he died. The weapon proved to be a ball of nicotine-coated needles. Circumstances demonstrated that the only time the ball could have been planted was after the party boarded the car, but who was it?

There’s Longstreet’s fiancée, Cherry Browne, a “musical comedy actress.” There’s Michael Collins, a government man who’s convinced that Longstreet gave him a bad tip. The police really like Longstreet’s business partner, John DeWitt, who’s the frequent target of Longstreet’s bullying and possibly blackmail. Not to mention that Longstreet likely had an affair with his second wife and made a pass at his daughter. There’s motive for both women, and for the daughter’s boyfriend, Kit Lord, who laid Longstreet out with a punch. But the best efforts of the New York police are for naught, and the case hits a dead end.

Drury Lane astonishes his visitors when he says he already has a good guess about who the killer is, but demurs to identify Mr. X on the grounds of lack of proof. Mr. X has no interest in waiting for the denouement, however, and hurls a possible witness off a New York ferry. DeWitt is inexplicably on the scene and refuses to explain why, making him suspect number one is the eyes of the police, but Drury Lane—and the reader—are certain that Mr. X still lurks in the shadows…

It was only near the end that I realized that this was my first full Ellery Queen novel. I’d read a handful of radio plays and short stories, as well as The Tragedy of Errors years ago, but that was a (meaty) outline. For an introduction, it was good. Tragedy of X is a solid novel. It is a bit slow-paced; the Queen cousins lack Agatha Christie’s smooth prose and dialogue, and we really don’t see too much of the non-DeWitt suspects after the initial murder. It feels like we lurch from one murder scene to the next without much connecting them. It didn’t bother me too much, but I was aware of how much time it was taking to finish each section. And it’s not much of a “tragedy.” I can kind of see what the Queen cousins were going for here (ROT13: gur cybg vf rffragvnyyl n Funxrfcrnerna eriratr fgbel gbyq sebz gur cbvag bs ivrj bs gur vairfgvtngbef jub gel naq snvy gb fgbc gur zrybqenzngvp naq znfgre znavchyngbe ivyynva sebz rknpgvat uvf iratrnapr), but it didn’t come off like that for me because I wasn’t really connected to the characters. (ROT13: Naq jr qba’g urne nalguvat sebz gur xvyyre nsgre uvf neerfg. Jr qba’g rira trg dhbgrf sebz uvf pbasrffvba, Guhzz naq Oehab whfg fhzznevmr vg!)

I enjoyed the mystery though. Ho-Ling is a huge Queen fan who praises the novels as the height of logical detection; you’re granted all the clues and can follow along with the detective to the truth. And here, you can. Lane is right, you can solve the crime from the initial account of the investigation. I picked up on some of the same things he did and very well could have gotten it for myself. I do think the police would have hit on the key fact eventually, but I accepted it here. While there isn’t a big epic chain of logical deduction at the end, I did enjoy Lane’s explanation, especially the reason for why the killer had to leave behind a piece of evidence that directly incriminated them. Lane methodically demolishes every other choice the killer could have made, so by the end you’re nodding your head in agreement: The killer really did have to do that.

This book also marks the first (novel) appearance of that Queen staple, the dying message. The third victim crosses his middle finger and forefinger in “the protection-sign against the evil eye.” The final explanation of what this message means is played more as a nice final line to the book, but again, you can figure out what this message means, it’s just unlikely since the key information is only briefly given. But it is there.

So overall, I liked this book. While I can’t say that, if I’d read it with no context, I’d want to rush right out and get more, when reading it knowing that this is Ellery Queen, and that there’s more and better to come…well, I’m looking forward to it. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, The Green Capsule, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, and Dead Yesterday.