Murder on Wheels (1932) by Stuart Palmer

When I picked up the second book in Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers series, Murder on Wheels, I expected not to like it. Other reviews I’d read led me to believe that the book was obvious and not that good. But I wanted to read every book in this series, so I gave it a shot…and was pleasantly surprised.

The book opens with a car crash, a Chrysler smashing into a taxi, that draws the attention of a patrolman. Quickly he realizes that something is off: the Chrysler doesn’t have a driver. The man is lying in the street with a rope around his neck. At first it seems to be a bizarre suicide, but the cab driver protests that he saw the dead man“go up into the air […] and down the street…backwards.”

The dead man proves to be Laurie Strait, the bad ‘un of the Strait twins. Luckily, both Inspector Piper and Miss Withers are on the scene and take over the investigation. The Straits used to be New York elite but have fallen on hard times. The current occupants of the house are dotty Aunt Abbie, nervous cousin Herb, and the eccentric matriarch of the family, who’s one of the few to stand up to both Piper and Withers, along with her naked parrot. Hanging out in the background is Lew’s fiancée Dana (who’s in love with Laurie), as well as a traveling rodeo. The Straits went to their dude ranch last summer and it seems that Laurie earned the ire of the star shooter’s brother.

While the central problem is striking, once most readers see the word “rodeo,” a certain possibility presents itself. Other reviews I read gave me the impression that Palmer was going to try and make a twist out of this. But he doesn’t, actually. Withers and Piper realize the rodeo connection, but it doesn’t really help them, since there’s no way a man could swing a lasso at a moving car in New York and not get noticed. Nor are there any places where someone could drop a noose to catch the dead man. But again, Palmer wisely resolves this about halfway through, and his answer is a genuinely clever explanation that makes this a solid impossible crime novel.

Withers and Piper are on good form here. Withers is a little less blustery than in the preceding or following books but still takes the crown at the end. You see, Piper wants to get one over the amateur, meaning the two of them have a friendly bet going on over who can solve the case first. It’s not a major part of the plot, and frankly they share so much between each other that it’s not much of a competition, but it justifies Miss Withers keeping her conclusions to herself.

And good conclusions they are. I want to say that this is the most well-clued Miss Withers I’ve read. Some of them require some minor leaps, but for the most part when Miss Withers begins spelling out what happened and what led her to realize that, most casual readers will slap their forehead in frustration. I especially liked how she cleared an innocent man. Those who are better-read in the genre will likely anticipate some of the twists, but, as I’ve become one of those more experienced readers, I still appreciate a solid chain of logic, especially if I’ve reached the conclusions through genre savvy and not the evidence. The book isn’t perfect. There are some trails and evidence that either aren’t followed through on or get handwaved a bit at the end. For example, we learn one character has lied about something, but neither Piper nor Withers dig any deeper into this or interrogate this character further. And Withers’s explanation for a murder near the end of the book is hard to visualize.

But besides those flaws, I didn’t have a major issue with this book. I’d go as far as to say that it’s my favorite of the Miss Withers’ I’ve read. I didn’t expect much from this, but I’m happy to say I was wrong. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, Pretty Sinister Books (contains spoilers), The Invisible Event.

The Lost Gallows (1931) by John Dickson Carr

Twelve years ago, I read an article that Otto Penzler posted to hype the upcoming The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries. One of the books he mentioned in that article was The Lost Gallows by John Dickson Carr, where a dead man drives a car and a whole street vanishes. Needless to say, I was hooked, and I’m glad to finally have a chance to read it, courtesy of the British Library Crime Classics imprint.

While It Walks by Night was set in France, Gallows moves to England. We open at the Brimstone Club, where narrator Jeff Marle, detective Henri Bencolin, and other guy Sir John Landervorne are discussing crime and mystery. Specifically, they’re talking about a strange incident that happened to Dallings, a friend of Sir John. Dallings met a young woman at a nightclub and enjoyed an evening out. But when he took her home, he missed the address she gave to the cab driver and found himself lost in fog-coated London, on a street he didn’t recognize. And there, he saw the image of a gallows, and a man walking up them.

And someone has left a miniature gallows in the room with them…

The three of them set out for the theater to watch a show and talk to Dallings but are almost run over by a car belonging to Nezam El Moulk, another patron of the Brimstone. But there’s something wrong: The chauffeur is driving, but he’s clearly dead.“We were flying in pursuit of a corpse.” After a wild chase, the car comes to a stop outside the Brimstone, where it’s confirmed that El Moulk is missing. And then a police inspector arrives, asking about Ruination Street. He received a phone call earlier that night:“Nezam El Moulk has been hanged on the gallows in Ruination Street.” El Moulk has run afoul of Jack Ketch,“A familiar hobgoblin of nursery tales […] A hangman, an executioner, applied in general to all hangmen.” Almost ten years ago today, El Moulk was involved in a shady duel that left one man dead and another hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell. It’s this latter death that Ketch wants to avenge, but the man in question was presumed dead in the war and using an alias besides, meaning our heroes will have their work cut out for them.

I should temper expectations now. This isn’t an impossible crime novel. The “dead man driving a car” bit is quickly resolved. The search for Ruination Street isn’t about a vanishing street, but the protagonists trying to find out where it is in the first place. That being said, there is a minor locked room later in the book. It turns out that Ketch has been leaving “gifts” for El Moulk in his rooms and can even make his deliveries while the doors are locked. While the explanation isn’t original, Carr clues it well and Bencolin ties it into some of the other mysteries in the book.

Because Carr puts everything in this book. Dead men driving cars! Dueling detectives! (Not that Sir John does much.) Ancient Egyptian curses! Reincarnation! You name it, Carr probably tried to put it in this book. Carr-through-Bencolin gives a sermon about how“fiction is stranger than truth,” and oh boy does he live up to that. What’s remarkable is that all of this mostly comes together. Bencolin is ten steps ahead of everyone, and Carr uses this in a teasing and creative way. Twice before the ending, Bencolin pauses to explain to Jeff (and thus the reader) some aspect of the plot and clear up some of the mysteries, directing Jeff (and thus the reader) to take that knowledge and apply it to the overall plot. And it is well-clued. When I reviewed Night, I mentioned that the main twist was well-clued but the killer less so. Carr resolves that here. There are plenty of clues, including some very clever ones that made me want to reach through the book and smack him (laudatory). And he doesn’t even bring them all up at the end! The events are confusing, but a careful and thorough reader can see through them to the truth.

My main issue with the book is the suspects. The ones in Night were all insane; these are saner but more annoying. For some reason Carr gives them not accents, but very weird speech patterns. El Moulk’s drunken secretary gets the worst of this. I know that Carr will do this throughout his career, but here it makes the suspects hard to follow. They also aren’t well defined, fading in and out of the plot. The killer is well-concealed, but Carr gets an advantage from how easy it is to forget about some of the suspects.

I enjoyed this book. Like its predecessor, it’s more of a Gothic (and a quite dramatic one) than a mystery, but the mystery aspect is stronger. I don’t know if I’d call this a hidden gem, but I’d call it an underrated Carr. Recommended for Carr fans or those who have read a lot of grounded mystery novels recently and want something a bit mad.

The British Library edition comes with an added short story, “The Ends of Justice,” written for Carr’s college magazine, The Harverfordian. Bencolin is milder in this story, although his wrath is kindled by Bishop Wolfe, a “churchman turned detective.” Wolfe played a key role in the arrest of charitable-but-impoverished Tom Fellows, who now stands under a death sentence. He stands accused of murdering his cousin Roger Darworth, a spiritualist whose death would bring Fellows five hundred thousand pounds. Darworth feared Fellows and brought Bishop Wolfe, a Dr. MacShane, and Sir John to watch his study where he and Fellows would meet. Fellows entered, but when the trio heard nothing, they entered to find Darwroth handcuffed to a chair, stabbed in the heart. And although the window was open, it led out onto a field of unbroken snow…

Luckily for the police, Bishop Wolfe found a witness who saw Fellows leaving through a window, ensuring that Fellows was scheduled for an appointment with the hangman. But Bencolin realizes the truth and rushes to save Fellows’s life. But this is a young man’s work. The solution is set-up well and makes sense of the story in the same way that Gallows does, but the solution is a bit of let-down. This isn’t a lost classic Carr. It’s good work from a twenty-something, but not the work of a prodigy, more notable for its ending and its anti-clericalism. S.T. Joshi thinks that Bishop Wolfe is a jab at Chesterton’s Father Brown. Douglas G. Greene disagrees and I’m inclined towards him, or, if it is a jab, it’s not a good one. There’s really no relation between Bishop Wolfe and Father Brown besides them both being crime-solving churchmen.

But in spite of my grousing, this story is a nice bonus for the British Library edition, and worth reading for Carr fans.

Other Reviews: The Green Capsule, The Invisible Event, Only Detect, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, A Crime is Afoot, Playing Detective, Tangled Yarns. Spoiler-free analysis at At the Villa Rose.

The Naked Sun (1956) by Issac Asimov

Issac Asimov is a well-known science fiction author, but he dabbled in just about every genre. Thankfully, one genre he was quite prolific in was mysteries. Asimov’s oeuvre contains multiple armchair detective stories (the Black Widowers), a mystery set at the ABA, and the Elijah Baily novels, one of the earliest examples of the sci-fi hybrid mystery.

I’d read the first two collections of his Black Widower stories some time ago but only got around to reading his first Elijah Baley novel, The Caves of Steel, while reading for Alex’s New Locked Room Library. In short: I liked it. Great worldbuilding, good mystery. The book takes place on a future Earth where a large chunk of the population has traveled to the Outer Worlds to settle the stars. However, most of humanity remained on Earth, burying themselves underground in massive “Cities,” where they snarl in disgust at their “superior” interstellar brethren, the Spacers. Another distinct feature of this world is robots. Earth has mostly rejected robots except in limited capacities, while the Spacers embrace them. Robots follow the Three Laws, which essentially makes it impossible for them to harm a human. They’re mostly clunky machines with little ability to function outside of their parameters. But there’s an exception: R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot designed to be able to emulate humans. Together, Baley and Olivaw solved a murder on Earth, but The Naked Sun will take them up into the depths of space.

Baley is assigned to investigate a murder on one of the Outer Worlds, Solaria. It seems that his success in the previous book has reached further than he thought. But he’s also on the planet on a fact-finding mission: Earth chafes under the Spacers’ military might and Baley is supposed to find out what he can about Spacer culture to see if there are weaknesses that Earth might exploit should relations deteriorate. Baley finds the idea of going to a planet under an open sky to be terrifying, but he goes. Olivaw is there, posing as a resident of the planet Aurora, giving Baley a familiar face to cling to on an alien world.

And make no mistake, Solaria is alien. Asimov pulls a neat trick here. After immersing the reader in a world unfamiliar to the reader but familiar to the characters in *Caves, he now puts both characters and readers alike in a world with strange rules and customs. There are only “twenty thousand humans” on the entire planet, “ten thousand robots per human.” Solaria is much more dependent on robots than any of the Outer Worlds, with robots assigned to every household task imaginable. They also toil doing farming work. Since there are no human workers and the estates are so large, Solarians have little reason to interact with others in person. preferring to “view” through vivid holograms. Baley is disoriented by this odd world where “seeing” is deeply intimate and the world “children” is a taboo reminder of sex. A local doctor is respected not for his medical skill—he has little—but because he is brave enough to interact with bodies in person.

For the first half of the book, Baley conducts his investigation through viewing. The victim is Rikaine Delmarre, a “good Solarian” who was found bludgeoned to death in his home. Normally, suspicion would at once fall on his wife, Gladia, and indeed the common assumption among the suspects is that she is the killer. After all, there’s no way that any Solarian, much less Delmarre, would let anyone get close enough to commit a murder. But there’s a problem: no weapon was found at the scene, and Gladia had no chance to get rid of it. Of course, the household’s friendly and helpful robots might have cleaned it up (like they’ve done with any other evidence), but if not, Baley needs to find the weapon. But Baley soon finds himself frustrated with investigation over Zoom calls and decides that if he wants to solve this crime, he’s going to have to brave…the naked sun.

The impossible crime is similar to the one in Caves. The impossibility is split into two parts: There’s the “normal” aspect (no weapon) and the part that’s tied in with the setting (the victim wouldn’t have let anyone approach him). The explanation is solid without necessarily being spectacular. To Asimov’s credit, the false solutions are good and hinted at within the text, with some key flaws that make them, you know, false. Baley’s final explanation fits with the rules of both Solaria and the Three Laws in general, but I feel that Asimov could have hinted at it better. As is, Baley has a last-second eureka moment, rather than looking back on what he’s experienced and realizing how X could be part of a murder. Better handled are the two attempted murders in the book. Baley’s contact on the planet is poisoned and, like Delmerre’s murder, it seems impossible that anyone could have gotten close enough to commit the crime. Baley’s explanation for this—and a later attempt on his own life—takes advantage of a clever loophole in the Three Laws.

This is mostly Baley’s story. Those hoping for some teamwork between him and Olivaw will be disappointed, as Baley sidelines him early on (since Olivaw is compelled by the Laws to protect the agoraphobic Baley from the outside). Asimov does a good job of showing Baley’s progression from terror of the open, endless sky to embracing it. “He faced it because he knew he wanted to and because he needed to.” And Asimov ties his embrace in with the motive behind the murder, giving a bit more thematic heft to a motive that takes a bit of a swerve into explicit science fiction.

I quite enjoyed this one. Asimov plunges the reader into an alien world and gives them a solid mystery to boot. I think I’ll lean towards a Highly Recommended for this one. The mystery could have been just that little bit better, but the worldbuilding and Baley’s character arc put it over the top. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, The Case Files of Ho-Ling.