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VERNON LODER was a popular and prolific author of Golden Age detective mysteries and spy thrillers. He wrote 22 titles during the decade from 1928 to 1938. Subsequently Loder has been out of print and largely overlooked. Fortunately, the tide is turning. In 2013/14, two noted crime fiction commentators, Curtis Evans and J. F. Norris, championed a number of early Loder titles, the latter in a series of enthusiastic reviews. A flurry of e-reader versions of Loder stories followed. But it was not until 2016 that Loder made his first return in print since the 1930s with the re-issue of his first novel The Mystery at Stowe (1928) as part of the Collins Detective Story Club reprint series. In the original Preface, the Club’s Editor, F. T. (Fred) Smith had welcomed Loder as ‘one of the most promising recruits to the ranks of detective story writers’.

The Shop Window Murders (1930) was Loder’s fourth novel, after The Mystery at Stowe (1928), Whose Hand? (1929) and The Vase Mystery (1929). It was published by Collins in the UK, and with the same title by Morrow in the USA. The storyline is intriguing and unusual, with one of Loder’s more ingenious plots. The setting is Mander’s Department Store in London’s West End (loosely modelled on Selfridges in Oxford Street), owned by Tobias Mander and famous for its elaborate window displays. Early on a Monday morning, the crowds of passers-by pause to watch the window blinds being raised on a new weekly display, but the onlookers quickly realise that one of the wax figures is in fact a human corpse, shot and placed among the mannequins in the window display. Shortly afterwards a second victim is discovered, and this striking tableau begins a baffling and complex mystery tale. Was it murder and suicide, or double murder?

Loder draws a wide cast of diverse suspects, each with a motive for the killings. To a toxic mix of jealousy, fear, panic and anger, he adds further colour to the story with a proliferation of bizarre circumstances and enigmatic clues, displaying some fiendishly intricate plotting.

The case raises a fundamental question: why did the perpetrator of the killings leave so many signs and clues? Did it show a confused mind? Or was this a deliberate and clever attempt to confuse the police by leaving a trail of red herrings and different angles which implicated more and more characters and made proof of guilt harder to determine?

The police investigation is led by Inspector Devenish of Scotland Yard, who makes his sole appearance in Loder’s canon of detective novels. Devenish is intelligent, workmanlike, tenacious and indefatigable. He displays a strong moral compass, giving short shrift to those who lie when questioned, particularly a suspected blackmailer. He remains firmly in charge throughout, pursuing the case with impressive diligence and total absorption; though his superior powers of ratiocination are largely by dint of effort. In these qualities, Devenish perhaps resembles Freeman Wills Crofts’ famous series detective, Inspector French. He does not have any of the eccentricities which Loder bestows on some of his other police detectives: for example the likeable Superintendent Cobham in Whose Hand? (1929), who deliberately lulls suspects into a false sense of security by pretending to be an absent-minded blunderer (similar to the TV detective Columbo), and who often hums while investigating, alternating between opera arias and music hall tunes. Loder describes Devenish as ‘tall and thin, dark hair, dark eyes, and a swarthy complexion; he might have passed as a southern Italian’. Beyond this, we learn nothing of Devenish’s background or personal life, not even his first name. There is no amateur sleuth on hand to rival or potentially embarrass the police. Devenish works alone, assisted by Detective-Sergeant Davis and reports to Mr Melis, an Assistant-Commissioner. Melis is debonair, suave and ethereal, with the air of an amateur actor. But his ideas on the case often turn out to be perceptive and seminal, providing the germ from which Devenish produces workable theories.

The denouement is surprising, and not easily foreseen. But it is plausible and makes sense, even though partly speculative. It shows the plot to have been solidly clued for the reader who can follow the hints. Loder often shows villains falling prey to their own scheming and he does so again here. There is also a pervading sense of tragedy, almost tragi-comedy, affecting those directly involved. One of the killings involves a variation of a method of dispatch seen in other Loder novels. The other foreshadows the murder setting in Drop to his Death (1939), co-authored by John Dickson Carr (writing as Carter Dickson) and John Rhode.

The Shop Window Murders is an entertaining and richly plotted example of the Golden Age deductive puzzle novel. The unusual and bizarre crimes make it one of Vernon Loder’s best mysteries for bafflement and ingenuity. The narrative is direct, brisk and lively, and the complex storyline is absorbing, well-constructed and moves at a swift pace. Loder pays close attention to carefully worked-out and intricately structured plotting. But his skill in creating clever, insightful ‘good lightning sketches’ of characters, a feat praised by Dorothy L. Sayers in her review of Murder from Three Angles (1934), is also evident—Melis being a good example. The combination of subtle witty observations and good humour help to leaven an otherwise dark tale. Here is Loder describing Mander’s older female admirer: ‘She did not look an amorous type, though she was obviously endeavouring to hold her fugitive youth by the skirts’. Overall, the novel shows Loder writing with assurance and maturity as a crime fiction author.

Of particular interest to Golden Age aficionados will be the striking similarities between The Shop Window Murders and The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen, also published in the US and UK in 1930. It was only the second Ellery Queen Mystery, a year after the successful debut of The Roman Hat Mystery. The book begins almost immediately with a murder: a model inside the main shopfront window of French’s Department Store in downtown New York City is demonstrating some modern furniture and accessories on display, with a crowd watching from outside. When a button is pushed to reveal a concealed wall folding bed, out tumbles the murdered body of the wife of the store owner. The similarities continue: the owner has a private apartment above the store which the victim visits late one night when the store is closed. There are bizarre and unexplained clues, strange discoveries of unusual items found where they should not be, and a plethora of alibis and motives. The plot is ingenious, almost to the point of being overly complicated and involuted. Each small fact and clue is examined, discussed and (mostly) discarded with impressive deductive logic and reasoning. The rigorous intellectual approach is indebted to the popular Philo Vance mysteries of S. S. Van Dine. The climax is generously praised by the eminent critic Anthony Boucher as ‘probably the most admirably constructed denouement in the history of the detective story’. Following the trademark Queen ‘challenge to the reader’, it comprises 35 pages of tightly worded explanation, with the identity of the murderer only revealed in the last two words of the novel. Ellery Queen was the nom-de-plume of Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee, two cousins from Brooklyn. According to their biographer Francis M. Nevins, the novel was inspired after one of the cousins passed a Manhattan department store display window and stopped to look at an exhibit of contemporary apartment furnishings which included a Murphy bed. It is not possible to say whether Loder or Queen first conceived the idea of the store window murder, but the similarities between the two stories and close proximity of publication dates are certainly a remarkable coincidence.

Vernon Loder was one of several pseudonyms used by the hugely versatile and productive Anglo-Irish author Jack Vahey (John George Hazlette Vahey), 1881–1938. In addition to the canon of Loder titles between 1928 and 1938, Vahey wrote initially as John Haslette from 1909 to 1916, resuming writing in the 1920s as Anthony Lang, George Varney, John Mowbray, Walter Proudfoot and Henrietta Clandon. Born in Belfast, John Vahey was educated in Ulster and for a while in Hanover, Germany. He began his working life as an architect’s pupil, but after four years switched careers and sat professional examinations with a view to becoming a chartered accountant. However, this too was abandoned after Vahey took up writing fiction. He married Gertrude Crewe and settled in the English south coast town of Bournemouth. His writing career was cut short by his death at the relatively young age of 57.

The Loder novels were all published by Collins in the UK, and from 1930 his detective works were published under their famous Crime Club imprint. Several of his early novels (between 1929 and 1931) were also published in the US by Morrow, sometimes with different titles. The publisher’s biographical note on Loder, which appears in Two Dead (1934), mentions that his initial attempt at writing a novel (apparently never published) was during a period of convalescence in bed. Various colourful claims are made of Loder: he once wrote a novel on a boarding-house table in twenty days, serialised in both England and the US under different names; he worked very quickly, and thought two hours in the morning quite enough for anyone; also, he composed directly on a typewriter, and did not ever re-write. Whether these claims are true—or indeed laudable—is a matter for conjecture.

Loder had several recurring detectives. Inspector Brews and Chief Inspector Chace were each quite contrasting characters, the former a stolid local policeman with an emphasis on the importance of routine, the latter a highly efficient new breed of Scotland Yard CID detective. Brews appears in The Essex Murders (1930) and Death of an Editor (1931); Chace is found in Murder from Three Angles (1934) and Death at the Horse Show (1935). In his later espionage thrillers—Ship of Secrets (1936), The Men with the Double Faces (1937) and The Wolf in the Fold (1938), published under the separate Collins Mystery imprint—Loder’s protagonist was Donald Cairn, a British secret service agent involved in a series of thrilling adventures combatting continental spies in the lead-up to the outbreak of World War 2.

Loder never quite achieved the first rank of detective novelists, and has received scant attention in commentaries of the genre. Nonetheless, he was a popular, dependable author in the 1930s, and better than many; perhaps a paradigm of the English Golden Age mystery writer. The original Collins dust wrappers show that he was warmly reviewed: ‘The name of Mr Loder must be widely known as a reliable and promising indication on the cover of a detective story’ (Times Literary Supplement); ‘Successive books by Vernon Loder confirm the impression gathered by this reviewer that we have no better writer of thrill mystery in England’ (Sunday Mercury); ‘… just the effortless telling of a good story and meticulous observation of the rules’ (Torquemada in the Observer). And in 2014, J. F. Norris wrote: ‘… keep your eyes out for any book with the Vernon Loder pseudonym on the cover. They make for fascinating reading and are as different from the standard whodunits of his colleagues as champagne is to soda water.’

Since the 1930s Loder has remained out of print, and his works have largely been the purview of Golden Age book collectors, among whom he has a following, with scarce first editions commanding high prices. This welcome re-issue of The Shop Window Murders and earlier The Mystery at Stowe, should help Loder, deservedly, to be rediscovered and enjoyed by a new wider readership.

NIGEL MOSS

March 2018