The promise of the book proves to be hollow, unfortunately. And that’s because the book itself is all too full: too full of material imported from several different genres (there’s adventure of the Boy’s Own sort, and horror in the Island of Dr. Moreau tradition, and working-class social realism of the “kitchen sink” variety, and a dollop of detection as well), and too full of dense, thorny prose. Dickinson tends to write in an arty and elliptical style, and while that style definitely has its charms—he tosses off arresting, poetic phrases left and right—it doesn’t suit the thriller form. The language gets in the way of the action; in some passages, it’s hard to discern what’s actually happening amid the baroque manner of its telling. A good novel yearns to break free of this literary jumble, but it never gets off the island where Dickinson has marooned it.

[ADDENDUM: This novel, unlike some that I've reviewed in this space, well and truly deserves to be called a "forgotten book." Harper Perennial did reissue it back in the 1980s, as part of an excellent line of classic mystery reprints, but that was more than a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, on the Internet (that magical place that now constitutes our collective memory) the book appears to have left very few traces. The same goes for Fuller and his sleuth, Jupiter Jones. Not even Fuller's first detective novel, Harvard Has a Homicide (1936), which achieved a fair bit of renown in its own time, seems to have garnered much attention from online commentators. And a search for "Jupiter Jones" mostly turns up references to another fictional detective—one of the teenagers who star in the Three Investigators series, which I recall fondly as my literary way station between Encyclopedia Brown and Agatha Christie.]

As is usual for Carr, variations on “what might have happened” outnumber candidates for “who might have done it,” and the identity of the guilty party comes into view less through artful detection than by process of elimination. Add in just enough comedy and just enough romance and just enough Scottish atmosphere, though—along with two clever impossible-crime solutions—and the upshot is one of the author’s most agreeable tales.

The private-eye tale, at its best, hovers artfully between gritty realism in a “Naked City” vein and improbable fantasy in a “Baghdad on the Subway” vein. It sketches a familiar-looking urban jungle populated by guys wearing cheap suits and gals wearing cheap perfume, and it sends those people on a merry, madcap chase. Masur tries hard to achieve that potent combination but falters on both sides of the equation. His hardboiled details have a glossy, put-on look to them, and his overly dense yarn unwinds in ways that appear random rather than magical. In Jordan, Masur has created a likable sleuth, and his prose sparkles throughout. His story, however, merely glitters.

[ADDENDUM: Maybe I was too tough on this book. Several years have gone by since I read it (and since I originally wrote this review), and today I might take a kinder view of it. Many other folks, to judge from mentions of the book in the detective-fiction blogosphere, seem to like it well enough. The novel is indeed fairly derivative, and its plotting is too helter-skelter for my taste, but I've developed a growing fondness for the mid-century hardboiled genre from which it derives, and I've learned to accept that a revved-up plot counts as a feature—rather than a bug—in that tradition.]

In its beginnings, at least, the case here is one that Marlowe would recognize. Hired by a steel magnate to investigate the murder of his daughter and son-in-law, and also to recover a stolen necklace,Gunther starts out by rattling the cages of the criminal underclass, seeking clues from those who traffick in stolen goods, discounted lives, or both. In short order, though, his efforts rile the criminal overclass that runs the country. Members of the SS, the SA, and the Gestapo, and even Prime Minister Hermann Goering, take an unsettling interest in his work. Finally, after undergoing a host of beatings, a pair of seductions (one manipulative, one not), and a painful and painstakingly described stay at the Dachau concentration camp, Gunther succeeds about as well as an honest shamus in the Third Reich could ever hope to do. He finds the necklace, identifies a perpetrator for each of the many homicides that clutter his trail, and uncovers more information than he wants to have about the inner workings of the Nazi system. Still, one mystery of great personal importance to him remains open. What begins and mostly unfolds as an artful pastiche of the American detective story ends on a dark note that has a distinctly European ring to it: An echo from the world as envisioned by Kafka resounds in the distance. The detective has mastered one series of crimes, but he and the reader both sense that something unfathomably worse lies in the offing.

Some critics rate this densely layered tale as the best entry in the entire Wolfe corpus, and perhaps rightly so. The puzzle that Wolfe picks apart is one of the most adroitly constructed problems that Stout ever set for him. Behind it, moreover, is a tragic back story whose human dimensions—including the existential mystery that is Paul Chapin—span a wider range than Stout typically tried to cover. Still, the latter element fits awkwardly within the essentially comic world that Wolfe and Goodwin inhabit. In their later outings, not surprisingly, Stout rarely allows any other character to share the narrative spotlight that he shines warmly and narrowly upon them.

Bony, pretending to be a sheep rancher on holiday, gets to know the locals, as well as the ocean-etched landscape from which they sprang. They are the sea-salt of the earth, as it were, and Bony likes them all: the happy-go-lucky day laborers who drive a truck full of lumber across a perilous mountain route; the sad, half-sane Mary Wessex, who dreams of childhood pirate games and of men who went to war and never came back; the old craftsman Mr. Penwarden, who sculpts custom-made coffins that will last for ages in the unforgiving country ground. But, like the lighthouse, the people who live in its shadow send a mixed signal; they bid a visitor welcome, yet also warn him away. No one of their kind, they insist, could have anything to do with the dead man or his killing. While Bony locates spoors of the crime in Melbourne and in other dens of urban vice, his pursuit leads back to Split Point, where he must deal out truth and justice in his own semi-legal fashion. Relentless but not ruthless, Bony comes across as a Maigret of the bush—as a man, writes Upfield, “whose infinite patience was equalled by limitless sympathy.”