Among the dozens of books in my recently acquired collection of Detective Book Club anthologies are a few stories by Clifford Knight, about whom little has been written. Knight (1886-1963) was an American author who contributed to the pulp magazines and who invented the series character Professor Huntoon Rogers. Rogers is based in Los Angeles and is an English professor who seems to have a lot of time for amateur detection. The Golden Age Detection wiki (http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7930886/Knight%2C%20Clifford) lists two dozen books by Knight, most featuring Rogers, and a brief essay by Mike Grost, who considers Knight part of the Realist school of mystery writers, comparing him to Van Dine. The Classic Crime Fiction website says he also wrote under the pseudonym Reynolds Knight (http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/clifford-knight.htm).

The fifteenth Huntoon Rogers, The Affair of the Dead Stranger (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1944), starts out in Mexico. Knight’s ability to convey strong settings is mentioned in almost every article I found, and the first four or five chapters bring Mexico alive. Separate groups of U.S. tourists happen to meet in Taxco, spend some time together, and then go their own ways. Several of them find themselves on the same train back to the border crossing at Nogales, and one of them dies under suspicious circumstances. While the death occurred in Arizona, it’s clear the murder took place on the train, and the people involved all lived in and around Los Angeles, making any sort of forensic investigation challenging.

Another murder takes place in Los Angeles, almost certainly related to the first one. I was surprised that Knight didn’t make more of the complex jurisdictional issues this situation presented but focus was on the cranky wealthy main character and the relatives and friends around him. While the resolution makes sense, the path to it was needlessly complicated or not as explored as fully as it could have been, I can’t decide. All in all, there’s a lot to work with here with some great plot ideas and an interesting premise, but the execution fell down somewhere along the line.

The New York Times published a plot summary with no comment on 5 November 1944. Crime reviewer Isaac Anderson liked the earlier The Affair of the Ginger Lei (NYT, 1 May 1938) and The Affair of the Jade Monkey (NYT, 11 April 1943); he was less enthusiastic about The Affair of the Fainting Butler (NYT, 24 Oct 1943). I think it’s reasonable to assume the series was running out of steam by the time this book was written.

I am intrigued by the differences between authors that endure and those that don’t. Clearly Knight was popular enough to keep a publisher for more than 20 books during the 1930s and 1940s, but he fell out of favor after World War II for reasons that are not clear to me. Possibly his earlier books might interest students of the genre; this particular title, one of the last with Huntoon Rogers, rambles a bit too much to be considered one of his best.