Dead Man Inside (1931) by Vincent Starrett

It has been over a year since I have read anything by Starrett, an obscure American mystery writer, until American Mystery Classics began reprinting some of his work. To date I have reviewed, Murder on “B” Deck (1929) and The Great Hotel Murder (1935).

Starrett wrote in a variety of genres, as well as non-fiction. According to the introduction written by Otto Penzler, for the new reprint, he wrote ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933), the first full-length book to treat Holmes as a real historical figure’, as well as ‘The Unique Hamlet (1920)’. This was a Holmes pastiche in which ‘the great detective is faced with recovering the missing inscribed first printing of Hamlet’.

As you can see in the blurb below today’s read is concerned with a serial killer, in the truest sense with a murderer who sets out from the start to kill a series of people. This is not a mystery subgenre I read a lot of but when it works it can produce some really good stories such as The ABC Murders (1936) by Agatha Christie, Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) by Francis Beeding and The Bride Wore Black (1940) by Cornell Woolrich.

Synopsis

‘A strange sight greets Chicago haberdashery clerk Rufus Ker as he prepares to begin his workday by unlocking the door to Bluefield, Inc. A sign is attached to the glass. It reads: DEAD MAN INSIDE! I AM DEAD. THIS STORE WILL NOT OPEN TO-DAY.

Once inside, Rufus is relieved to discover the shop is still in one piece and assumes the sign to be a prank. But no one is laughing when Rufus realizes the dummy in the window is no dummy at all. It’s the body of his boss, Amos Bluefield, and unfortunately this is only the beginning….

Scientist, explorer, and former intelligence officer Walter Ghost has come to Chicago to research some history, but after a stint in the hospital due to appendicitis, he quickly finds himself investigating a string of puzzling murders. Ghost is certainly no stranger to playing detective, but if he’s not careful, he’s about to get more familiar with the hospital.’

Overall Thoughts

The oddness of the first two murders put me in mind of John Dickson Carr’s earlier work, with the more staged and public crime scenes. They are sort of in the manner of something like the hat stealing in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933). Not that shop front murders are unheard of crime fiction as both Ellery Queen and Vernon Loder centred a mystery story on such a crime scene.

Something that I was not expecting was the first change in focus that we get after the murder of Bluefield. Rather than attention being shifted to the police or the amateur sleuth, the narrative jumps into the household of Professor Moment and his grown-up daughter Holly and we see them discuss this crime based on the newspaper accounts. They are an amusing pair and part of me wonders if they were underused in the story. It quickly transpires that Holly might have seen a glimpse of the killer as she walked past the store the night of the murder. This is temporarily an exciting development, I say temporarily, as this element is only really used as a way of shoehorning Walter Ghost into the plot later. Nevertheless, this early domestic scene was unexpected, as it comes at the case from a more distant angle. It is an angle that we return to after the second killing, which takes place in chapter 3. In the first third of this story, you can’t complain about Starrett’s pacing or the amount of action which is packed in. The short chapters in this section add to the sense of speed and the reader is intrigued by the fact that the means of murder has still not been identified yet.

The narrative shifts its focus again though for the third murder, as a journalist and a doctor are our entry point into this theatre-set killing. The way there was no single figure taking us through these events was an unusual and interesting feature. The third murder gives us a little more description of the police who are beavering in the background trying to catch the killer. For example, there are two detectives called John Kelly and William Sheets. They are described as ‘thief catchers of reputation, and more than one mystery had been solved by their combined perseverance’. One of the characters says that there is “Nothing Holmesy about [them …] They wouldn’t know a steamfitter from a country parson by his coat lapel; but if one of these actorettes has anything on her conscience you can bet these birds will pry it loose.” Later they are summed up as “a couple of rat terrors in a roomful of mice”. So, in a way the police seem to be written more as hardboiled investigators. Perhaps this was to contrast with Walter Ghost.

Whilst by chapter 8 we know how the victims are being killed, there is still no central sleuth to follow. It transpires that Walter Ghost has been in hospital after having his appendix removed. It is through his own doctor, the one who was at the theatre when the third victim died, that Ghost gets involved in the case and we also learn that he knows the Moments. It only takes 68 pages for Ghost to make an appearance and that is by no means the longest amount of time a reader has had to wait until the main detective has appeared (see The Moving Finger (1943) or Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) by Agatha Christie), but there is definitely a delay in plot development from this point onwards. After 100 pages there is still no real leads for the characters to follow up and Holly’s tiniest extra recollection is unhelpful to reader. I would say there is a loss of pace as a consequence and the amount of theorising on thin air does not improve this. This sort of weakness, of the investigation being stretched out is one that I found in another serial killer mystery, Clifford Witting’s Midsummer Murder (1937).

I am not sure how I feel about Ghost. I think I enjoyed him more in his inaugural appearance in Murder on “B” Deck. Walter Ghost, according to Penzler’s introduction is not meant to be in the Holmesian mould. Penzler writes that:

‘He is a dilletante, with expertise in William Shakespeare and a number of arcane subjects, but he is not to be confused with two other famous detectives of his time, S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance and Ellery Queen’s Ellery Queen, both of whom would stop an investigation to offer a lecture on a subject so esoteric that everyone involved in the case sat mute and bored while the sleuth rattled on about a particularly fascinating insect or an artist unknown to mere mortals.’

This divergence from the Holmes’ template is perhaps viewable in this extract in which Ghost reveals his attitude toward detective work:

“I’ve played detective two or three times in my career, and always with a certain distaste. Mysteries attract me, but not detection in the ordinary sense.”

“You didn’t solve the mysteries?”

“They were solved. I don’t quite know how. Certainly by no brilliance of mine. I simply haven’t the sublime egotism – or lack of self-consciousness – necessary to a story-book detective […] I won’t be seen crawling about on my hands and knees, and I would positively refuse to disguise myself, even if it were possible.”

I found his attempt at modesty unconvincing (maybe a little snobbish?) and having an amateur sleuth disinclined towards detective work is a little discouraging for the reader. Furthermore, he decries ‘magazine detective[s]’ yet I don’t think he entirely separates himself from them, particularly in the way he mentally/intellectually tackles the case.

Overall, I would say Starrett sets up an interesting case, but I don’t feel he developed it in an engaging way. This is perhaps influenced by his choice in structure – although interestingly it was this very choice which helped me identify the killer before the halfway point. The way the story is told entails a lot of information being kept back from the reader, especially by Ghost, who solves the case off the page. This is not very satisfying for the reader, and it results in a long section where Ghost has to relate the background story to the crimes. His query over whether he should let the killer go free or not, which he addresses to his friends, didn’t feel appropriate to the story it was set in.

So, unfortunately, I would say this is the weakest Starrett mystery I have read so far, and I would recommend you try one of the others that I have reviewed first.

Rating: 3.5/5

Source: Review Copy (American Mystery Classics)

P. S. Who knew being single could make you a more likely murder suspect?

‘First of all, Phildripp was unmarried. This was no crime – but was it not possibly significant that he was, of all the men employed in the shop, the only man who had failed to marry? Married men with wives and children to support – or even just wives – were supposed, on the face of things, to have enough to worry about without going around murdering people. Not that married men did not commit murder: they did – they murdered their wives and other men’s wives. But superficially a case involving three dead men was more likely to be the work of a single gentleman, it was believed, than the work of a man charged with responsibilities remote from the very idea of murder.’