Another Tuesday in June, another book which has lingered on my TBR, and, coincidentally, another impossible crime. So, does Murder Most Ingenious (1962) by Kip Chase live up to its own self-confident billing? Sort of.

The setup sees the wealthy and unpopular Hubert Goodall, owner and operator of a small art gallery, take possession of a valuable Gauguin painting for display, only for the painting to be stolen and Goodall to be found stabbed in seemingly impossible circumstances: when the office in which the murder was committed under observation by a hired guard for all but a five-minute window (which is nowhere near long enough for the murder and theft to have occurred) and the gallery, we can confidently say, not entered by any other person.

“The most obvious puzzle here is opportunity. How does someone get into the room, kill Goodall, break into the safe, and get out — all without being seen by the guard? Impossible.”

Enter Lieutenant Carl Horowitz, not used to dealing with this sort of baffling crime, and the wheelchair-bound ex-detective Justine Carmichael (who, to avoid future confusion, is a man — and, no, that’s not a mistyping of ‘Justin’, he’s referred to as Justine several times herein and in the Chase’s other two novels). It is the ageing, irascible Carmichael who will be Horowitz’s saviour in this case, even if we, the reader, aren’t kept in on most of the developments that lead to Carmichael’s conclusions. Or even, in a frustrating structural choice, some of the events which pertain directly to the plot itself.

Even if you didn’t know the year of origin of Murder Most Ingenious, you’d be able to tell that it’s far from detective fiction’s high point simply by the way Chase meanders around the events in his own story: the discovery of two bodies is treated as a very sort of after-the-event affair (almost like ‘Oh, yeah, and someone has died since the end of that last chapter…’) and Horowitz and Carmichael, ostensibly the narrative’s main characters, don’t come into the book for about 20% and remain largely in the background thereafter. A lot of conversation between secondary characters is followed, and events of purely quotidian nature are dwelt upon and given as the final actions of chapters as if they have significance…only for none to develop. Yet Carmichael has the temerity to say, right before his big summation at the end, “It’s funny how these little bits and pieces…can add up to a complete picture” as if what we’ve seen is all in some way relevant.

And yet, for all its structural problems, and all the casual drunk driving, there are some nice ideas here. The central trio of war buddies have a well-drawn dynamic, recognising that different environments will inevitably result in different outcomes despite their shared history:

The bond between them as a result of their wartime experiences would always be strong, but it did not project itself into the future, only into the past.

And, too, the experience of war in some way inures them to the horrors of murder is neatly shown as false:

“Well, I guess seeing bodies lying around doesn’t bother you much, eh, Mr. Ortega?”

Tony didn’t smile. “It bothers me, Mr. Horowitz.”

Indeed, Chase’s dialogue is pretty good throughout, managing to give a sense of the people involved and their relationships without ever laying it on too thick. It’s a shame this doesn’t extend to the plotting, with Chase clearly not sure how to build around his central murder, the conversations around the commission of the crime going like this a lot of the time:

“This leaves us with two possibilities: one, the guard is lying; two, there’s a way of getting into this room we don’t know about.”

There was an apologetic cough from the man in the wheel-chair. “One other possibility, Carl”, he said.

“Yes, Carmichael?”

“Mr. Goodall may have committed suicide.”

The detective looked startled. “It don’t seem very likely, Carmichael. There were three or four stab wounds in the stomach, and besides there’s no weapon.”

“Oh, I agree, Carl. Of course he didn’t kill himself. It’s ridiculous. I just said technically it is a possibility.”

The solution, then, is an odd one in that some of it has been fairly — if not subtly — dropped in ahead of time, and some of it is so spectacularly Heath Robinson’d that you wonder how anyone could have made the connection necessary (a huge part of it all relies on the assumption that a woman was “snooping around as girls will” and takes something of no value purely because, well, that’s also the sort of thing a dame would do, right?). The motive, too, comes out of stark raving nowhere, and I defy anyone to learn it and find a place earlier in the novel that would have queued it up for release at a later point.

The actual impossibility, though, ain’t bad. It’s not great, and that “ingenious” in the title seems a little bit of a stretch — not least because in order to remain impossible it requires the police to be, like, so dense, and that security guard to lack basic human senses to the point that I think he legally qualifies as a houseplant, but it’s a significant step up on the methods we’re asked to believe in the previous two Tuesday books this month, so in present company it could almost be seen as worthy. Let’s say C- and move on.

In essence, Murder Most Ingenious is pretty much what I had expected, which was why it had lingered so long on my TBR: an example of an era that had no real conception of the novel of detection, and certainly something which has never seen any fair play declaration of clues or understood the concept of how to structure a narrative in a compelling way. “Sure, it would be nice to wrap the whole thing up, missing painting, killer and all in one neat package…” our detective laments and, yes, yes, it would, that’s arguably the point of this sort of undertaking. But, well, you can’t have it all. At least, not in this genre in the 1960s you can’t.

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See also:

TomCat @ Beneath the Stains of Time: All in all, Murder Most Ingenious definitely lived up to its book-title. A cleverly written and plotted detective story that harked back to the glory days of the genre, but the ending also showed the dark grittiness of the modern crime story. And the reader got a glimpse of a darker, more dangerous, side of the gray-haired, wheelchair bound retiree. However, even that was more classical than modern, because the morally questionable action of Carmichael can be found as far back as Sherlock Holmes and (more memorably) used by such writers as H.C. Bailey, Gladys Mitchell and Rex Stout. Chase can now be added to that list.