E. C. Bentley | Trent's Last Case | Trent's Own Case | Trent Intervenes | H. Warner Allen | R.A.J. Walling | Anthony Berkeley
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
Trent's Last Case (1913)
Trent Intervenes (collected 1938)
"The Ministering Angel" (1938)
The Corpse in the Green Pyjamas / The Cat and the Corpse (1935) (Chapters 1-5, 12)
The Corpse With the Blue Cravat / The Coroner Doubts (1938)
A Corpse By Any Other Name / The Doodled Asterisk (1943) (Chapter 1)
The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries from Roger Sheringham's Casebook
Other short stories
E. C. Bentley was a British newspaperman. He only wrote four mystery books, but he was immensely influential and prestigious in his time. His reputation peaked around 1940, when first Dorothy L. Sayers, and then Howard Haycraft, identified his Trent's Last Case as the start of the modern mystery novel. Haycraft was particularly impressed with Bentley's naturalism, a low key approach that excluded melodrama. Sayers admired the many cultural references in Bentley, and what she regarded as his fine writing. Both critics were also impressed with Bentley's characterization. They felt Bentley brought new realism, craftsmanship and believability to the detective novel, which they asserted had been largely dominated by melodrama and purple prose before Bentley's time.
Evaluating Bentley's claim to be the Father of the Golden Age Mystery Novel is difficult today. Bentley's contemporary, R. Austin Freeman, was also writing Golden Age style novels in this period, such as the classic The Eye of Osiris (1911). Dozens of mystery novels were published in the 1910's; I have read only a few, and do not yet have a clear understanding of this era.
Without really being a full member of the Realist school, Bentley was a strong influence on them. Many of Bentley's mysteries focus on alibis. He was a pioneer of the "breakdown of identity" approach used by the school to create fake alibis: see the article on realist detective fiction for a discussion of this technique. So his mysteries are very close to the realist school in their plot and detective technique. He was also an early exponent of the cultural tone loved by Dorothy L. Sayers. By contrast, there are differences in content between Bentley and most realists. His stories do not tend to have a "background", an inside look at some business or institution. His hero is a reporter, not a policeman. Only occasionally does science play a role in the tales. In short, while his tales anticipate the form of the realists, he differs from them in content. Bentley's content, and his naturalistic style, seem closer to Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and other Golden Age authors of British country house mysteries, and he was probably a direct influence on these writers.
This book is often cited as the first work of The Golden Age of mystery fiction. It has an impressively clever plot, one that contains not one but two solutions to the crime. It was written in 1910-1911, and published in 1913. Such multiple solutioned construction will be a major influence on both Anthony Berkeley and Ellery Queen.
Trent's Own Case (1936), which Bentley wrote with H. Warner Allen, is the only other novel featuring Trent. Allen's wine detective William Clerihew makes a cameo appearance here, solving the mystery of a champagne cork. The chapter with Clerihew ("Felix Poubelle 1884") is among the best in the book. In real life Allen, like his detective, was an expert on wines, publishing numerous books on the subject. This novel is full of many little subsidiary mysteries, each lasting a chapter or two, and each focusing on a new cast of characters. It gives the work as a whole the feel of a short story collection, or a loosely linked short story sequence à la The Arabian Nights. Many of the sections of the novel deal with ingenious criminal or quasi-criminal schemes. Like many of the short stories in Trent Intervenes, these sections seem inspired by the Rogue tradition. The vanishing son here (Chapter 10) seems allied with "The Vanishing Lawyer" (1937) of the collection. While some of these individual sections are well done, the book as a whole is a disappointment.
There are also many signs of similarity with Dorothy L. Sayers in the book. The story is crammed with cultural allusions and quotes from poetry. Trent's Last Case (1913) is packed with similar poetic quotes. There is also a wallowing in snobbish high life. Intermixed with all this high toned or at least upper crust material is a look at decadent personal and sexual relationships. While all of this material is very low key compared to the raciness of the 1990's, it recalls Sayers' similar interest in the decadent. I can't say that I really like or enjoy any of this decadence; this sort of stuff just seems mildly repellent to me in both Sayers and Bentley.
There are also many scenes set in France in this novel, a location that recalls Freeman Wills Crofts. Sure enough, the novel drew euconiums from both Sayers and Crofts. There is also a fairly ingenious alibi.
E.C. Bentley's Trent Intervenes is the only collection of stories about Philip Trent. The stories were not collected in book form till 1938, but some of them go back to 1914, one year after the publication of Trent's Last Case (1913), although most of them were first published in 1937 and 1938. Although Bentley's novel is a precursor of the Golden Age, only some of these tales fit Golden Age murder mystery paradigms. Instead, many (8 of the 12 stories) are tales of clever rogues and their crooked schemes. These tales do not entirely fit the paradigms of Rogue Literature either: they are told from the detective's point of view, not that of the rogue's, and are genuine mysteries, with the rogue's behavior explained only at the end of the tale. Still, most of these stories center around clever criminal schemes, and do not involve murder. Among the better such works are "The Vanishing Lawyer" (1937), "The Public Benefactor", and "The Little Mystery" (1938). The late Trent story that is uncollected in Trent Intervenes, "The Ministering Angel" (1938), also deals with ingenious schemes, although this time they are not perpetrated by a rogue, but by a more sympathetic character. A few of the tales are Golden Age, puzzle plot murder mysteries; two of these are the best stories in the collection, "The Sweet Shot" (1937) and "Trent and the Bad Dog" (1937). The plotting style of these latter two works is unbelievably close to Agatha Christie; if they had been published anonymously, I would have attributed them to Christie herself. Christie is on record as regarding Trent's Last Case as one of the three best mysteries of all time, so there is close affinity between the two writers. "The Sweet Shot" is also one of Bentley's few excursions into the technology oriented tales popular among the Realists of his day.
Trent does most of his sleuthing by engaging in conversation with members of the working class and lower middle class, and painlessly extracting information from them in passing, about the upper class suspects with whom they have been in innocent contact. These working class characters are usually shown to be nice pleasant people, although occasionally they can be crooked. Trent is suave, smooth and debonair, not to mention exquisitely well mannered and correct, and is intended to be the opposite of the dramatic, eccentric sleuths of other writers. He is a decently behaved upper middle class professional man, who is always polite to the tradesmen with whom he comes into contact. It is a relation that can have all sorts of political meanings read into it: there is almost an economy of information, which flows from the workers to the upper middle class Trent. Trent then analyses the information, generating hypotheses about by whom and how the crime was committed. Trent in turns sends this information on to the police, and to his editors and the public in form of newspaper dispatches (Trent is a working reporter, although infinitely more genteel than the "Front Page" style American reporters of the era. Bentley was a newspaperman himself, specializing in editorials for a well known newspaper of the time.) The passage of information to the police is a well marked out, discrete event in the stories: Trent often writes the police letters summarizing what he has learned, for example. The information chain starts with the working class characters themselves, who are always watching, watching, watching the behavior of upper class bad guys, recording it all. They function almost like a monitor or an error log in a computer program. They also are somewhat like the Chorus in a Greek play. They do not seem to be in a position to do anything with the information they gather about the bad guys, but they record it all.
While Trent makes disapproving noises about the rogues' behaviors, sometimes dispensing little sermonettes at the end of the stories, Bentley clearly had considerable sympathy for many of his rogues. The stinging class resentment that animates the villain of "The Public Benefactor" doubtless struck a chord in many of Bentley's readers. The ingenious mystery plot of this tale also serves as a metaphor for full scale class revolt, with the Greek Chorus of working people finally doing something to revolt against the upper classes.
Rogue literature in general centers around public desire to tweak the noses of authority figures. Bentley clearly hated doctors, thought lawyers and judges were always rude, condescending, and offensive, and often crooks, and enjoyed mocking the clergy. Bentley also follows another standard pattern of the Rogue school: having his rogues dress in the clothes of the upper classes as part of their plots. The breaking down of class distinctions, with characters moving from one social class to another, forms a key plot pattern in several of the tales: "The Public Benefactor", "The Ordinary Hairpins" (1916). The heroine of "The Clever Cockatoo" (1914) gets better from her illness only when she participates in lower class Italian life, a memorable scene with symbolic overtones. These attitudes are especially noticeable in the earliest stories in the collection, those dating from 1914 - 1916.
Bentley saves most of his opprobrium for foreigners, especially Americans, who often turn out to be no good. The early Agatha Christie also had an obsession about Americans. Nor will the "what's-a-matta-you" dialect of the Italian suspect in "Trent and the Bad Dog" endear him to Italian-Americans. Bentley is far more progressive with women's issues; the portrait of the battered wife in "The Sweet Shot" is one of the most important in Golden Age mystery fiction, along with Mary Roberts Rinehart's "Alibi For Isabel".
Bentley's creative imagination clearly felt that apartment houses somehow were likely to break out into physical violence, as happens in three of these tales. The violence in two happens on stage, involving the police vs. rogues, and reminds one of thrillers of the John Buchan - Edgar Wallace variety. Buchan was Bentley's publisher, a link between two writers who otherwise do not seem very close artistically. This sort of violence does not happen very often in British Golden Age detective fiction, although John Dickson Carr included such mild thriller elements as part of his finales in novels like Hag's Nook (1933).
Bentley's stories are short and to the point, with little excess baggage. But they often come in pairs, with each being a variation on a theme. There are two Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, set in the English countryside; two tales about rogues who wind up battling the police in apartment houses; two tales about people who ingeniously disappear; two tales about scholars assaulted in the countryside; and two tales about English people traveling in the Mediterranean, who suffer from plots trying to convince them that they are going crazy. (This last plot, sans the Mediterranean setting, is a fixture of works like Gaslight. Was Bentley the first to use it, back in 1914? Lots of Bentley stories deal with people who are trapped in bad relationships or lives, and would like to escape.) This doubling allows Bentley to explore new ideas, but which are related to the plot of a previous tale. It also gives the collection as a whole a sort of artistic unity. There are other parallelisms which run orthogonal to these story pairs: there are two stories with mischievous animals, and two tales with courageous young girls who are down on their luck.
Bentley liked to make mystery plots out of complex word-play and literary allusions; this works better in "The Old-Fashioned Apache" (1937) than in "The Inoffensive Captain" (1914), but it never achieves a major triumph. One suspects it influenced similar linguistic mannerisms in Dorothy L. Sayers' first collection, Lord Peter Views the Body. Both writers break out in French, for example, Sayers in "The Article in Question". This is not Sayers' finest hour, either. As far as I can tell, no other Golden Age writers took them up on this, and the tradition died out, which is probably just as well. Bentley knew Sayers through their association with the Detection Club, and he wrote a Sayers parody called "Greedy Night". The best parts of this spoof are a series of playful cultural references early on, especially a nice comic bit about a medieval manuscript, but is otherwise ordinary. It does satirically pick up on Sayers' habit of having both the upper classes and intellectuals discuss abstruse subjects in the most frightfully casual language and slang.
Actually, given the complex patterns of British Golden Age history, it is hard to tell who influenced whom. Detective historian Sayers was aware of Bentley's magazine stories, for she included two of them in her anthologies, long before Bentley collected them in book form. Also, "The Clever Cockatoo" (1914), a story with a known early date, almost certainly influenced Sayers' "The Man With The Copper Fingers". (These two unpleasant horror stories are among my least favorite of their authors' work.) Similarly, "The Vanishing Lawyer" (1937) takes us into the territory of Freeman Will Crofts and his followers (Henry Wade, Father Knox) with its ingenious alibis, as does "The Unknown Peer" (1938); it is hard to tell who anticipated whom here, since Bentley had pioneered the use of clever alibis in his novels before Crofts had published a line. Inquiring minds want to know!
Jack Adrian has unearthed many forgotten short tales for his anthology Detective Stories From the Strand Magazine (1991). Two of them are by authors with associations with E.C. Bentley. Both the stories by Britishers Allen and Richard Keverne adhere fairly strictly to the Golden Age puzzle plot tradition. Allen and Keverne are both utterly obscure in mystery history, and it is interesting to see Adrian bring back these missing links in detective tradition. H. Warner Allen's "Tokay of the Comet Year" (1930) is a little piece mixing spies with detection. Both Allen's spies, and the rare wine "background" material are charmingly done. However, his plot, while complex and logically constructed, is very easily anticipated: I guessed each twist before it came up. As Adrian points out, Allen's detective, William Clerihew, seems to be named in tribute to Edmund Clerihew Bentley. In 1933 Allen would bring back his amateur sleuth in a book (which I have not yet read) Mr. Clerihew: Wine Merchant, and in 1936 he wrote Trent's Own Case with Bentley. The combination of spy material and puzzle plot detective story seems to be fairly common in fiction in the British tradition, especially among intuitionists (see Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Carr); I have seen it less often in more purely American writers, although Baynard Kendrick's The Odor of Violets is an American example. When Americans need to introduce thriller elements into their tales, they have the underworld and gangsters to draw on. The more class conscious British tended to use either rogues or spies, instead; both gentlemen jewel thieves and master spies, whatever their moral depredations, tend to be proper members of the upper classes. The use of spies often has the side effect of adding unpleasant doses of chauvinism and the-end-justifies-the-means moral decay to the generally more morally decent detective tale.
The Year of the Comet (1992) is also the title of one of the best mystery adventure films of recent years. Like Allen's story, it deals with rare wine, but otherwise there is no sign of influence between the two works. Both simply refer to a rare, real life vintage, "Tokay of the Comet Year". I would be surprised if the film's creators Peter Yates and William Goldman were even aware of Allen's story's existence.
Many of Walling's books were published under different titles in Britain and the Unites States. Below, each book is given first by its American title, then its British one, if the two differ.
That Dinner at Bardolph's (1927) is more a thriller than a detective novel, unlike Walling's later pure Golden Age detective novels. There is a murder mystery plot, but it takes up only a small proportion of the novel. The crime and its investigation largely take place off stage, thus further reducing its importance in the book. Much of the novel is instead taken up by the efforts of the hero to help various suspects evade the police and murderous villains, hiding them in various remote locations. We get a detailed look a high speed driving in Britain and the Continent, sometimes reaching up to speeds of forty miles per hour. Both the road scenes and the love interest in this book are charmingly done. The book is pleasantly written, but suffers from triviality. It seems destined to be placed in the "charming but minor" category.
Like later works of Walling, this one shows the influence of E.C. Bentley. As in Bentley, the tone throughout is suave and genteel, with many literary quotations in the dialogue. Walling shares Bentley's genuine refinement.
Also Bentley like: the treatment of servants as genuine characters, and not as stick figures. The hero's lower class chauffeur, Fenstock, shows fantastic resourcefulness in his maneuvering of suspects all over Britain. He comes across as more genuinely inventive than anyone else in the book; a case can be made out that he is the genuine hero of the novel, although he is denied the love interest given the upper class hero of the book.
Walling also gives a Bentley like critique of the stock market, and the sinister manipulators who control it. The hero is the only one in the story who is opposed to manipulating the market using inside information. The other characters all denounce him as a dangerous leftist for this, something he hotly denies. Today, of course, insider trading is seen as a serious felony, and people who do it are sent to prison for many years. Apparently in 1920's Britain, it was still legal and approved by many business people.
Like Bentley, R.A.J. Walling was a British journalist. Walling's The Fatal Five Minutes (1932) is a very minor British Golden Age detective novel. The first two chapters are not bad. These first introduce Walling's series sleuth Philip Tolefree, and then set up a web of relationships among the principal characters (and suspects). But nothing much of interest happens after that. Walling's detective story technique here is to have his suspects running endlessly around the murder scene before and during the crime, creating alibis and confusion. This does not build up much of a puzzle plot. There is also a very implausible subplot about blackmail. Walling's techniques, and his central puzzle plot gimmick (not revealed here), recall E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. So does the country house family with sinister romantic secrets plot. So does the treatment of the servants as serious suspects, something not always found in Golden Age mystery fiction. So does his smooth narrative tone, and air of offering a low key but judgmental and rather satirical and critical look at moneyed people from a middle class perspective. Both books feature a beautiful young woman unhappily married to a wealthy older man. Both also have sympathetic upper class young men among their suspects. Even the name of his detective parallels Bentley's Philip Trent. Walling's influence is a direct one from Bentley; he has little in common with the realist school, and his country house mystery seems closer in tone instead to Christie, Marsh, Innes, and other 1930's British authors.
Walling's The Corpse in the Green Pyjamas (1935) repeats almost all of these Bentley influences catalogued above, although there is no Bentley-like interest in alibis here. But somehow, it is a much livelier book. For one thing, instead of a conventional English country house, it takes place in a castle. This building, and the unusual Island House occupied by another family, show the Golden Age interest in architecture to advantage. Much of Walling's plot turns on hearing. He is interested in directions of sounds, and the ability of people to hear things through the walls of the castle. Such perceptions are integrated with his description of the castle architecture, and are often used to give it tactile reality. Listening is a basic mode for his detective. He is always trying to learn things through hearing.
For another, the plot takes several surprising turns. This is especially true of the first five chapters. After this, the police show up, and the plot is simply hashed over endlessly, till the solution is revealed in the finale (Chapter 12). This solution is logical, and surprisingly simple. In fact, what the reader thinks is the result of vast conspiracies, often turns out to be a simple thing. John Dickson Carr did a similar effect in "Cabin B-13", of reducing the complex to a simple explanation.
Most of Walling's characters are quite sympathetic. Except for the murder victim himself, a young rotter, they tend to be pleasant people. Aside from the aristocratic family that owns the castle, most work for a living, and could be described as middle class. Even the banker and the famous singer are self made men. Tolefree himself is a working private detective, something of a rarity in the British mystery novel of the era. He is an unpretentious, low key character, polite in the Trent tradition. He is depicted as a business person, and one shown interacting with the other middle class business people of the novel on a basis of equality. His relationships with the others start right at the beginning of the novel, and are a part of the warp and woof of the plot from its outset. His "drab" office, with its clerk and regular business hours, also underlines his detective's middle class status. His Watson, a salesman named Farrar, is also brought into the plot when one of the characters hires him for a business transaction. The little biography of Walling in the book similarly emphasizes his professional activity. It describes his career as a journalist in Plymouth, England, and describes his mystery writing as a direct outgrowth of his second career as the Magistrate of Plymouth.
The characters in Walling's book often communicate through letters. This makes each letter writer a temporary "narrator", and gives Walling's book the flavor of such 19th Century writers as Wilkie Collins. These letters are often concerned with business themselves, extending the network of business relationships in the book. The characters of the book show refreshing good sense. Few of them show the arrogance or obsessiveness that grip many Golden Age characters of other writers. As members of the middle class, they are used to working within limitations, and responding resiliently to adversity and obstacles. Mrs. Stratton, in particular, responds far more intelligently and flexibly that one might expect. Her behavior in such a sensible manner causes the author to respect her; had she gotten on a society lady high horse he would have viewed her with contempt. At the other end of the social spectrum, the servants also show a business like seriousness about their work, and get treated with respect for it by Walling. For example, they make appointments with the castle guests to do valet work, just the way the middle class characters in the novel make appointments to transact business. Walling treats them as far more intelligent and perceptive than most British authors of the 1930's do.
Color imagery only shows up in Walling when he is describing men's clothes. These usually suggest the role these men play in society: blue sophisticated clothes for the popular singer, green flashy duds for the cheap society crook, brown for the observant young footman. Walling always tends to see people through their job.
There are few nature descriptions in the book, and little interest in the sea or the natural areas in the British countryside, unlike other 1930's authors as H.C. Bailey or John Rhode.
Charles N. Williamson and Alice Williamson's "The Adventure of the Jacobean House", from The Scarlet Runner (1905), also anticipates R.A.J. Walling's The Corpse in the Green Pyjamas. Both stories involve a detective who checks into an old, architecturally complex building, and who does much sleuthing in the middle of the night while checking out strange passages in the building.
Walling was already near 60 when he began writing detective fiction. Unlike the largely young authors of the Golden Age, he is more oriented to his older characters. They come across as "normal", his viewpoint characters, the ones most richly drawn. The young people tend to be seen as either supportive or as problems to the older characters. This is clearly an older person's point of view on society. At the least, it offers a refreshing change from all the Bright Young Things in other Golden Age novels.
The Corpse in the Coppice (1935) is another Walling mystery in which the movements of people around the countryside form the main subject of the detection. In this, it resembles The Corpse With the Blue Cravat (1938). The countryside is the least eccentric or unusual here of any Walling novel, with no unusual architecture. It consists of a series of middle class homes and farms, joined by roads and footpaths. The local railway also plays a big role here. Despite the sheer conventionality of this setting, Walling manages to create much interest from it. The detectives spend much time trying to reconstruct the movements of the characters from physical clues they have left behind, such as footprints and tobacco ash. The hidden past of some of the characters is also important here, just as in the works of R. Austin Freeman. All of these elements, the ancient past of the characters and their sometimes mysterious identities, the typical English country setting, and the use of physical clues to reconstruct trails, mark this as one of Walling's most Freeman like works. The biggest problem here is the solution of the actual mystery at the end of the novel. This raises some worthwhile social issues, and has some surprising features. So it is by no means lacking in interest. Mainly however, it is disappointing. One finds it hard to believe that the innocent characters would not have spoken up about their problems long before. This is one of those novels in which the characters lie to and stonewall the police, preferring to keep their personal problems private rather than helping to find the killer. Such silence here seems implausible, but perhaps it was consistent with the mores of the time.
Walling's other series detective, Garstang, makes a brief off-stage appearance here. He will play a bigger role in The Corpse Without a Clue (1944).
Walling's The Corpse With the Floating Foot (1936) has some pleasant atmosphere. It takes place in a country inn, another Walling building with unusual architecture, being a converted mill. Like other of Walling's works, it is set in a small English town that is completely off the beaten track. There are recurrent themes in these books: inns and hotels as settings, and innkeepers as characters; lots of wandering around the hotels at night, with people constantly visiting each other's rooms; the mainly middle class characters, with one great house of the well to do nearby; an interest in waterworks; mysterious corpses, whose identity has been concealed by removing all identifying marks from their clothes and luggage; and strange disappearances. Foot continues Walling's interest in hearing: both Tolefree and the suspects get much of their information from listening.
Both Foot and the later The Corpse Without a Clue (1944) contain eccentric, self righteous characters who believe in taking the law into their own hands in a quest for justice, and gum up the works for the police and Tolefree. These characters also play a major role in complicating the plot of the novels, and adding to the mystification. Both books also share another kind of character: a learned philosophical individual, a vigorous, unpretentious man of around forty, who takes an enthusiastic amateur interest in crime detection. In Foot, we are talking about a Professor of Moral Philosophy; in Clue, a Canon of a Cathedral Town. In both novels this character is vaguely comic, there being a contrast between his scholarly calling and his zest for detection.
Walling has plainly been reading Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934). Both the setting, involving a mill on a small river, and elements of the crime plot, recall Sayers' book. The mill and river location also recalls Knox' The Footsteps at the Lock (1928).
Bill Pronzini, in 1001 Midnights, has rightly complained of Walling's dullness, and his willingness to ramble. This 300 page book goes on way too long, and would be much better at half its length. The best parts are the chapters describing the original crime (Chapters 1 - 5). The story picks up again in Chapters 7.3 and 8.1, which discover the McGuffin driving the plot, and which also contribute to the physical setting which is the charm of the tale. The other best section of the book is Chapter 11.3, which reconstructs the actual murder itself, and which also involves the book's location. However, the rest of the solution in Chapter 12, shows no imaginative ideas. Walling's books contain huge amounts of dull sections. One hesitates to call this padding. It seems much more to be material that Walling tried to make interesting, and failed. In Foot's case, this often deals with the wanderings of the suspects around in the dark, or with Tolefree's endless reconstructions of these wanderings using deduction - often from very shaky premises, in my opinion. These reconstructions, and the use of logic to analyze them, seem vaguely in the tradition of Ronald Knox. Walling's books all tend to be in their best in their early sections, when they are unrolling their plots.
The Corpse With the Blue Cravat (1938) is different in feel from Walling's other books. It is a pure puzzle plot mystery throughout. The detective and the other characters continually explore the opening murder, always trying to come up with new perspectives on the crime. Walling finds a surprising amount of interesting detail, in what at first looks like a relatively simple crime. Although the book is fairly slow moving, it manages to be absorbing reading throughout.
This book is set in Dartmoor, a unique place that is vividly described. Walling is most interested in human dwellings in Dartmoor, unlike Thomas Kindon's Murder in the Moor (1929), which is mainly interested in natural formations. He shows what the operation of a typical Dartmoor house and small farm might be like. There is a brief look at industrial mining and mineral processing operations in Dartmoor, an industry that takes up an entire small town. Walling's fascination with high technology enterprises in remote areas of rural Britain will return with the waterworks in The Corpse Without a Clue (1944). The hotel in the mining town also reflects Walling's on going interest in rural hotels. It is built as a series of cabins, like an American motel. All in all, Walling gives us a look at rural Britain rarely seen in other writers.
Walling's A Corpse By Any Other Name (1943) has its high point in Chapter One, which contains a vivid description of air raid in war time Britain. Reading it should make anyone skeptical about the "morality" of bombing civilian targets. The scene is that favorite Walling setting, a hotel, but the bombing eventually transforms it out of all recognition. After this point, Walling introduces a plot about two men who have disappeared, and their complex trail of espionage activities from Lisbon to England. This anticipates a similar, even more elaborate and ambiguous plot in Walling's next novel, The Corpse Without a Clue (1944). In general, much of the imagery of Name will reappear in Clue, but in a more complex, less straightforward, and more mysterious manner. Both books deal with war time espionage. Both describe the ruin that Hitler's bombing brought to Britain, Name by depicting the bombardment, Clue more subtly and more powerfully showing the long term aftermath. Both stories deal with bodies found in hotels after murders; Clue adds ambiguity by not identifying its corpse at the start. Both books contain much travel to rural parts of Britain, always a Walling specialty. Name is especially interested in unspoiled parts of rural Britain, areas so remote that they have not changed for hundreds of years. Name starts out well, but gradually becomes less and less interesting as it goes along. Its first few chapters are full of fairly interesting material, but eventually it turns into a huge shaggy dog story. The reader does not know much more at the end than they did in Chapter Four.
Walling's The Corpse Without a Clue (1944) is set in 1942 England; the war time atmosphere in the book is strong. There is a constant feel of things disappearing into the darkness, an awareness that the war was inflicting tragic damage on England. Most of the Bentley influence found in his earlier books has completely disappeared. The book is mainly notable for the extreme maze like aspect of the plot. It resembles, to a degree, such John Dickson Carr books as The Arabian Nights Mystery (1936), in the complexities of what is going on, and the strange twists and turns. Unfortunately, unlike Carr's work, Walling's book is not sustained. He runs out of inspiration after the first half of the book (Chapters 1 - 5). Nor is the book's ultimate solution distinguished. It does not really explain some of the odder features of the characters' behavior. Still, there are impressive moments in the first half. Anybody who builds a maze deserves some credit!
The events in Clue are often contradictory, and hard to explain. Walling calls the attempt to build a coherent, logical explanation for them an attempt to "rationalize" them. This is a good word, and a good concept. He also uses this word in Foot, but not as frequently. Reasoning in Walling often proceeds by discussion between Tolefree and one of his friends, who can be a policeman, the narrator, or an amateur friend who is joining in the detection. These characters often discuss logic itself, and the nature of reasoning. Such concepts as "rationalizing" help describe the kinds of reasoning going on in the discussions far more precisely. They form a meta-level to the discussion, one that points out and makes explicit its formal character as reasoning. "Rationalizing" would be a good term to introduce in discussions of mystery fiction in general. For example Baroness Orczy's stories often proceed by rationalization. They focus on contradictory situations that it seems very difficult to unite into a self-consistent explanation. At the end of the tale, The Old Man in the Corner succeeds in doing just that.
As well as being a Tolefree novel, this book also brings back Walling's long absent series character Garstang, star of two previous books, Stroke of One (1931) and Behind the Yellow Blind (1932). This novel will be Garstang's third and final appearance.
I am not a big fan of Anthony Berkeley. His multiple-solutioned The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) is more facile than really imaginative. Berkeley's key approaches derive directly from E.C. Bentley. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) has two solutions, and shows its detective failing to solve the mystery, with the true solution being only revealed by chance after the detective offers a false (if ingenious) explanation. Berkeley used this plot pattern repeatedly in his books, with numerous variations: both multiple solutions and failed detectives abound. Berkeley would go on to collaborate directly with Bentley, and Father Ronald Knox, in plotting the last three chapters of Behind The Screen (1930), a Detection Club round robin.
Berkeley had a real gift for parody. His contribution to Ask a Policeman (1933), another Detection Club collaboration, is a wicked spoof of Dorothy L. Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. "The Policeman Only Taps Once" (1936) is a hilarious takeoff on James M. Cain.
Berkeley was probably an influence on Ellery Queen. Such Berkeley short stories as "The Avenging Chance" (1929) and "The Wrong Jar" (1940) contain plot twists that show up later, with further variations, in the "minimalist poisoning" stories Ellery Queen wrote in the 1940's, such as Calamity Town (1942) and The Murderer Is a Fox (1945). And Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) is one of several Queen novels with more than one solution: these were probably influenced by Bentley's Trent's Last Case and Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case.
The solution of Berkeley's "The Mystery of Horne's Copse" (1931) is in the same tradition as John Dickson Carr's "Error at Daybreak" (1938) and Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Old Oak Tree" (1978).