In principle, the core concept of Murder by the Clock (1929), the debut novel for both author Rufus King and character Lieutenant Valcour, is a good one: the youthful Mrs. Endicott calls the police because she fears her husband has gone out that evening to pay off a blackmailer, only for Valcour, the policeman who responds to the call, to find Mr. Endiciott dead in his closet at the close of the first chapter. Thus, the focus of the mystery becomes the Endicott ménage itself, as the questions of who would have killed the master of the house, and why, take understandable prominence. And some fun ideas remain, but the book containing them doesn’t quite compel as it might.

The problem lies, in part, Valcour himself, or rather in author King’s utilisation of his process. While the man is captured beautifully in some tight phrasing that hints at hidden depths…

He rang for the elevator and shut his eyes while waiting for it to come up. There were times when they grew a little weary from looking too intimately upon life.

…and while there’s a splash of colour in his procedural brain, which means that he approaches the tricky situation intelligently but with an air of the knowingly fanciful in his musings (“That, of course, eliminated the gorilla.”), King seems to feel the need for certain passages to revolve around Valcour sittin’ and thinkin’ almost as if repeating what is known to the reader to ensure you’re keeping up. It reeks of a story that was originally serialised, even though I don’t think this was — Kelli Stanley’s introduction mentions that King wrote for the “the lucrative newspaper and magazine markets” but nothing about this being part of that writing — and periodically robs pace from this, pushing the denouement out about 30 pages past the point where I was struggling to maintain interest.

There’s some good writing, and King is to be applauded for a few crazy ideas that would work all the more brilliantly if he leant into the pulpy-ness of this, but he clearly wants to write a more serious novel of detection, leaving this feeling like a brother to the two Baynard Kendrick novels — The Odor of Violets (1941) and Blind Man’s Bluff (1943) — with which this is now stablemates in the range of American Mystery Classics reprints. It’s to be wondered if some of the more outré developments (the best of which is spoiled on the back cover, FYI) is what saw this included on the list of Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones, because, really, there’s not much else to mark it out.

There’s a fun second murder which leans slightly into borderline impossibility and as events in the house “[begin] to graduate into a catastrophe”, the professional relationships that Valcour enjoys with the men under his command really do come to the fore. There are echoes here of S.S. van Dine in the swarm of officers who semi-facelessly mill around and do all the important fringe work to allow our brilliant sleuth space in the centre of the narrative without getting too caught up in minutiae, and some like junior man Cassidy are delightful.

King, through Valcour, is also aware of the limitation of the purely procedural approach. As efficient as Valcour’s squad are — “its average of successes was greater than its average of failures” — the machine of justice they represent “remained at its best a machine”. The human element Valcour injects into the affair will of course, via a few gently misogynistic asides (c.f. “He often wondered why more women didn’t go mad while shopping”, and the one about women being born liars is a doozy), truffle out the solution. And it’s a good solution, but would again feel more apt if the wildness introduced earlier on was celebrated rather than constantly pegged back and had, as I’ve already suggested, come several pages sooner.

All told, I don’t know quite what to make of Murder by the Clock (its title, for one, mystifies me). With stronger plotting King could be an excellent proponent of the detective novel as it emerged from the fertile ground kept so profligate by the pulps, and if you told me he went on to pen a masterpiece or two, yeah, I could believe it. At first encounter, though, I think I’d have to wait for someone to decide more of these are worth republishing before I went searching for them, because a few months from now I’m going to find this on my shelf and wonder if I’ve even read it.