YOU ARE THE DETECTIVE

In a salute to Dennis Wheatley’s crime dossiers of the 1930s, Johnson and Cooper present a collage of evidential materials designed to elucidate, after first seriously obscuring, the perpetrator of an impossible crime.

Hours after six people are summoned on 27 November 1933 by threatening anonymous letters to 19 Tootley Row, the Mayfair house of “artist and sometimes poet” Ambrose Belvoir, another letter urges a neighboring tailor to summon the police immediately to a murder scene. That’s quite a surprise to Belvoir and his guests, who suddenly realize that one of their number, American novelist Roy Peterson, hasn’t just dropped off to sleep; he’s been stabbed to death by an icepick. But every one of the remaining guests—actress Vita Simpson, naturalist Lord Alfred Chomley, race car driver Felix Darlington, telephone operator Mabel Hickney, and cook Cloris Adder—swears that they didn’t approach the famously antisocial Peterson and that they didn’t see anyone else approach him, either. If no one laid a hand on him, how did he meet his end, and why? The novelty here is that instead of unfolding their whodunit in straightforward prose, the authors present a scrapbook of floor plans, black-and-red drawings of the crime scene and the suspects, newspaper clippings, transcripts of interviews with DCI Harold Jensen, and a climactic confession that makes the impossible murder look so easy that readers who haven’t figured it out already are likely to feel cheated. The forgettable characters are little more than cartoon types, but that’s entirely appropriate to their mode of presentation. A more serious criticism is that all those pictures contain remarkably few clues.

The result isn’t much of a mystery, but a stroll down Memory Lane with homicide obbligato.