Gun in Cheek Read Free

nature that puts him in a class with his obvious role model, Philo Vance. His stock-in-trade is solving crimes through "scientific deduction," which is a masking euphemism for the fact that he unravels the most convoluted, Van Dineish plots with a minimum of detection and a maximum of obscure textbook science and pathology.
    The most interesting of his cases is Murder on the Palisades (1930), in which a number of people are murdered in a gloomy old mansion on the New Jersey Palisades, across the Hudson River from New York City. Because Levinrew was a devotee of Van Dine, this novel, like his others, is chock full of footnotes, interminable question-and-answer sessions, befuddled cops, bizarre occurrences, and clues of the esoteric variety (the first few letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, play an important, if rather unbelievable, part in the plot). But it is none of these things that distinguishes Murder on the Palisades -,rather it is the sheer number of exotic methods of murder and attempted murder—certainly more than in any other mystery novel in the genre's history—and the identity of the "instrument" used in perpetrating most of the crimes.
    Characters are murdered, or almost murdered, by the injection of microorganisms to cause spinal meningitis; by mixing a quantity of ergotized (ergot is a poisonous grain fungus) flour with whole-wheat flour and baking it into a loaf of bread; by poisoning some chocolate-coated almonds with almond-tasting nitrobenzol; by injecting a drug called phiorizin, which causes diabetes, so that the person can then be given too large a dose of insulin, which will send him into fatal insulin shock; and by scratching a man's hand with a match that has been dipped into ajar of hydrophobia germs. But the crowning method is a locked-room murder in which a missile, presumably a stone, is hurled through a window to crush a man's skull but then "disappears" before the police arrive on the scene seconds later. The explanation for this one is demonstrated as follows by Professor Brierly:
    Â 
[They] suddenly saw an object, at the end of a rope, rise above the roof with incredible velocity.   Thi object described giant arc, and continued describing the arc, limited by the rope with undiminished speed…
The rope flattened out on the roof; the object at its free end continued with undiminished speed outward and downward, the rope flattened out against the rear of the building and the object at the end of this gigantic lash whipped through the closed window with a crash, shortly to reappear hanging taut at the end of the rope, oscillating gently.
    Â 
    According to the professor, this device—a large catapult affixed to the roof by bolts, with a rope stretching to it from a staple—works in the following manner:
    Â 
"This rope is taut. I have at the end of it in the toe of this stocking a stone a little larger than a baseball. I tied a piece of string around the stocking above the stone, although hardly necessary. I now put it into the catapult which is aimed upward in the direction of the garage door, in perfect line with the window. The force of the catapult will shoot it almost straight upward, but the pull of the rope on that staple will prevent it from going straight upward. Also, it will not jerk as it would if I propelled it straight upward or straight outward from the staple. No, this counter-force will make it describe the arc you saw. Whirl a watch-chain and see the undiminished speed with which it will wind itself around your finger, to the very end. Same principle involved here. The initial impetus on the end of the watch chain is not around the finger, but straight ahead or upward as it is here. This staple acts like the finger on the chain."
    Â 
    The person responsible for most of these fanciful acts is an embittered member of the household, the wife of one of the victims, who has been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a paralyzing attack of