The Double Thirteen Mystery – Anthony Wynne (1926)

One of my favorite reads last year was Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne.  Not only was it highly readable, but it featured a series of truly puzzling impossible crimes.  The good news – Anthony Wynne released nearly 30 mystery novels, and I’ve heard that he focused on impossible crimes.  The bad news – Murder of a Lady is the only Wynne novel you’re likely to get your hands on, as he seems to be one of those forgotten authors.

Until now.  Within the past year or so four Wynne novels have been reprinted, three of them by Spitfire Publishers.  I’ve collected all but one, and I’m somewhat diving into uncharted territory as I haven’t seen reviews of these (save for one over at Cross Examining Crime).

You can pat me on the back as taking one for the team with The Double Thirteen Mystery.  It’s not a bad read by any means, but it simply isn’t the type of mystery that I think most of us are looking for.

The story revolves around an investigation into the disappearance of some Russian ex-pats living in London.  The trail eventually leads to a country estate, where investigators find evidence of a car crash and eventually turn up the body of a murdered man.  Wynne’s series sleuth Dr Hailey sits back as another detective comes up with an elaborate explanation of what must have happened at the crime scene, and of course any reader will note that there are about 30 very thin assumptions being made.  And so then Dr Hailey spends the rest of the book troubled by something not feeling right about the solution, and slowly realizing that some of the assumptions were incorrect.  All so that come the end Dr Hailey can say “aha, things actually unfolded in a somewhat different way than we thought”, although none of it really seems to matter.

The story was written in 1926, and you can get a sense that car crash forensics may have been a novel topic for a reader at the time.  Wynne doesn’t make it quite as interesting as R Austin Freeman would have, and it feels more dated than intriguing.  We also have tropes of hypnotism, bad guys actually wearing black eye masks, and the sentiment that you can judge someone’s character purely based on their social standing – an attitude that Dr Hailey wearily reflects on, which is comical, given that Wynne and Hailey are guilty of it in spades throughout the book.

As a story though, this is a pretty good read.  Wynne isn’t a dull author and keeps the story moving with a near Croft-ian level of painstaking investigation.  And yet it ultimately ends up nowhere.  The big reveal of how the core crime unfolded doesn’t really serve any purpose other than “there must be a denouement”.  There’s a bit of a clever thing involving cryptography – seriously though, does any reader even attempt these cryptography puzzles? – which ties into the title of the novel (no spoiler), although I laugh, because I read this thing for 250 pages wondering when the title was going to come into play.

I think you’d enjoy this if you read it, but what’s the point of reading a mystery that doesn’t really deliver on the mystery?  There’s way too much else out there.

As for me, I’ll keep going with the Anthony Wynne novels, under the hope that I can uncover another locked room mystery as engrossing as Murder of a Lady.  I’m still hoping that Spitfire or another publisher continues to make them available.