Dedlock said nothing.
Henley worked it out as he talked. “You hid all day in this cupboard with perhaps the most valuable letter in the collection. Why? You weren’t trying to return it to the archive. You could have done that at five o’clock when the place closed and you had the premises to yourself.”
Now everyone was listening to him.
“You slipped out, found my briefcase downstairs, and loaded it with Dickens memorabilia. But if you’d simply been planning to steal, you could have left immediately while the museum was still deserted. Instead, you went back to your hiding place and waited for everyone to return for the performance tonight.”
Dedlock appeared to gain some respect for Henley. “You’re clever for a Yank. Cleverer than most.” He glared with loathing at Thatcher Finn.
Then Henley caught on. “You came for revenge. You must have really hated Ravi Vikram. To wait here for him to arrive at intermission.”
“He got me sacked,” said Dedlock. “Complained to the board that materials were missing. All the evidence against me was circumstantial, but they held me accountable.”
Henley nodded. His eye caught on the apple core still in the corner of the room. “You were so tidy. Why eat the apple and toss the remains onto the floor?”
“I thought it was Finn’s apple,” said Dedlock. “I thought I was taking his briefcase from his desk.”
Henley understood it all. “You thought you were framing Thatcher Finn, not me. In one move you’d get rid of your accuser and your replacement. Did you expect to get your job back?”
Dedlock stared straight at him. “Not only would I get my position back, but the Governing Board would apologize for ever doubting me.”
When Henley eventually spoke to Suzanne McClain on the telephone, it was midnight in London, seven p.m. in the States. “I solved the mystery,” he said.
“Already?” She sounded genuinely impressed. “So tell me. Why did Dickens write novels instead of plays?”
“Because he could be in complete control as a novelist,” said Henley. “In plays actors could change lines or ad-lib or otherwise tamper with his scripts. When he was the narrator of a story, he was in total command of each gesture, speech, thought. He got to play every part himself, always perfectly.”
She approved. “How did you conclude that so quickly?”
He told her about his evening. “Jarvis Dedlock had scripted the plot right down to what the Governing Board would say when they reinstated him. But a couple of actors improvised and spoiled his production.”
She congratulated him. “What are you going to do in London for the next month?”
He had thought about that too. “I might as well take care of the Shakespeare authorship question while I’m here,” he said. “Stay tuned.”
Copyright © 2012 by W. Edward Blain
The Jury Box
by Jon L. Breen
The five novels of Derek Raymond’s Factory series (Melville House, $14.95 each) represent a landmark in British detective fiction. Downbeat, violent, sometimes depressing or even revolting in their uncompromising exploration of urban crime and morbid psychology, they are made palatable by superb prose style, very dark humor, and the uncompromising morality of their unnamed narrator, a lone-wolf London detective sergeant. They are both searing social documents and genuine if unconventional detective stories. In the first of them, He Died With His Eyes Open (1984), introduced by James Sallis, the sergeant becomes obsessed with a beating murder no one else seems to care about and the voluminous audiotapes the victim left behind. Unusual as it is, it follows a comparatively standard mystery structure, but the last, Dead Man Upright (1993), previously unpublished in the U.S., eschews by-the-numbers suspense for an anticlimactic arrest and a case study of the serial killer’s twisted mentality that fills up nearly the last third of the book. Others are The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985), How the Dead Live (1986), introduced by Will Self, and I Was Dora Suarez (1990).
Philip Wylie was one of the most versatile and (with his coinage of “momism”) controversial popular writers of the twentieth century. Surinam Turtle, Richard A. Lupoff’s Ramble House imprint, has revived two curiosities from early in his career. The real rarity is Blondy’s Boy Friend ($18), a romantic mystery redolent of the roaring ’20s, originally published in book form in 1930 as by Leatrice Homesley. The titular blonde turns detective initially to try to clear of murder her doctor boy-friend, who has offered the following sage advice: “Don’t bother your pretty head. Women weren’t cut out for detective work.” Plot and romance are equally preposterous, but it’s interesting as a period piece, and the nuttily ingenious whodunit surprise somewhat anticipates a famous detective novel. (Save Lupoff’s introduction for the end, if you don’t want to know which one.) The 1935 satire The Smiling Corpse ($18), written with Bernard A. Bergman, is notable for a cast of real people, including former Pinkerton man Dashiell Hammett and amateur sleuths S.S. Van Dine, Sax Rohmer, and G.K. Chesterton. J. Randolph Cox’s introduction describes his efforts to pin down the true authorship of a novel originally published anonymously.
The death in 2011 of Enid Schantz, proprietor with husband Tom of the Rue Morgue Press, was a great loss to the mystery world. But Rue Morgue continues its policy of reprinting outstanding English and American detective stories from the 1930s and after. Latter-day classicist Patricia Moyes joins the list with her 1959 debut Dead Men Don’t Ski ($14.95), introduced by Katherine Hall Page, first of 19 novels about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett and wife Emmy. Anthony Boucher praised the early work of P.D. James by averring that she was almost as good as Patricia Moyes. At the same price are accounts of impossible or inexplicable crimes by three stars of the Golden Age of Detection, American branch: Carter Dickson’s (John Dickson Carr’s) The Peacock Feather Murders (1937), about the outrageous Sir Henry Merrivale; Stuart Palmer’s second novel about schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, Murder on Wheels (1932); and Clyde B. Clason’s The Purple Parrot (1937), one of the better cases for classical historian Theocritus Lucius Westborough.
Also recommended to impossible-crime fanciers are Daniel Stashower’s The Dime Museum Murders (1999) and The Floating Lady Murder (2000) (Titan, $9.95 each), which offer a colorful view of late 1890s show biz and Harry Houdini, an admiring quoter of Sherlock Holmes, as likeable if egotistical comic sleuth. But is fellow illusionist Dash Hardeen, his brother and Watson, the real detective? The puzzle plots, with a locked room in the first and an illusion-gone-wrong in the second, are well managed with clues and surprises.
Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Maud Silver, an elderly and constantly knitting spinster sleuth, is quite different from the superficially similar Miss Marple: she’s a P.I. rather than an amateur, and her 1928 debut Grey Mask (Open Road e-book, $9.99) calls to mind Edgar Wallace and P.G. Wodehouse more than Agatha Christie. But with its nice writing, rocky romance, and sinister masked villain, it’s loads of fun.
Perfect .38 (Ramble House, $30 hardcover, $18 trade paper) comprises two of William Ard’s novels about New York shamus Timothy Dane. His first-person debut The Perfect Frame (1951) takes the familiar P.I. jumps with flair, but the third-person .38 (1952), in which Dane the conflicted romantic meets his mirror image in a new- style white-collar mobster, is a vast improvement, with characters better drawn and the story arc more original. As Francis M. Nevins’s introduction suggests, Ard began by imitating Spillane but his heart wasn’t in it.