Top Storey Murder (1931) by Anthony Berkeley

Last year, I ranked Anthony Berkeley among the "Top 10 Beneficiaries of the Reprint Renaissance" on account for going from practically being forgotten at the turn of the century to having his former prestige as an innovative, sometimes subversive mystery writer restored – which in Berkeley's case took a little longer than some of his contemporaries. A restoration process that started inauspiciously with The Roger Sheringham Stories (1993) and The Anthony Berkeley Cox Files: Notes Towards a Bibliography (1993), but the first real headway was made in the early 2000s.

House of Stratus reprinted a big chunk of Berkeley's then obscure, long out-of-print work like the then ultra rare The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and his celebrated masterpiece The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929). They also reprinted the superb Jumping Jenny (1933) and fan favorite to many, The Piccadilly Murder (1929). Funnily enough, the House of Stratus editions become overpriced collector item's not long after they went out-of-print. A small, independent publisher, Langtail Press, tried to revive those reprint, but it was the British Library Crime Classics and Collins Crime Club reissues that marked a more permanent return to print. In 2021, Collins Crime Club even reprinted The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) that had not seen a reprint since its original serialization/publication nearly a century ago. Not to mention the unearthed short stories that have been turning up in several anthologies and Crippen & Landru's published collection The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries from Roger Sheringham's Casebook (2004), which had two "enlarged editions" published in 2015 and 2023.

So bringing Berkeley's work back to print and restoring his reputation ("the cleverest of us all") can be called one of the success stories of the reprint renaissance. Somehow, someway, what should have been a regular Roger Sheringham novel decided to shroud itself in obscurity by defying getting reprinted.

Top Storey Murder (1931), alternatively published as Top Story Murder, was among the first to be reprinted by House of Stratus, in 2001, but no new editions since it slipped out-of-print again with used copies being unreasonably priced – dissuaded me from picking it up sooner. That and kind of expected Top Storey Murder to have been part of the British Library Crime Classics series by now. I'm sure Top Storey Murder is going to get a long overdue reprint before the decade is out, but recently lucked across a copy. So let's dig into this often overlooked, seventh title in the Roger Sheringham series.

Berkeley's Top Storey Murder begins with Sheringham meeting Chief Inspector Moresby for a lunch appointment as a way to keep in touch with Scotland Yard ("Scotland Yard called it ‘Mr. Sheringham working the pump-handle'"). However, the telephone cuts short their lunch appointment as Moresby is summoned to the scene of a crime at the top floor flat of Monmouth Mansions in Platt Street. A reclusive spinsters, Miss Adelaide Barnett, who had been found strangled with a rosery in her trashed, ransacked flat. The kitchen window was standing open and a rope, tied to the gas stove, was dangling out of it. Miss Barnett was a peculiar, somewhat hostile woman who garnered "a local reputation as a miser, with a bag of sovereigns sewn up in her mattress." Moresby warns Sheringham this going to be an ordinary case without much of interest to the amateur detective, "no fancy fandangos, like you get in the story-books," but Sheringham decides to come along regardless. And, despite being warned this is going to be a routine case, Sheringham immediately begins to theorize when observing the various clues/red herrings at the scene of the crime.

I think the first five chapters constitutes the best parts of Top Storey Murder pitting the imaginative, theorizing amateur detective against the practical, experienced and well-oiled police apparatus of Scotland Yard – briefly created a proto-police procedural. Moresby has a small army of experts going over the crime scene, which, of course, include the fingerprint man and police photographer. More interestingly is the presence of Inspector Beach, "specialised in this type of crime, burglary in flats," who makes a profile of the scene and checks the points ("there are twenty-two points I've got noted down") against the methods and habits of the career criminals in their filing cabinets. A single name rolls out of this process of elimination. Yes, like the board game Guess Who? Having observed all the clues and red herrings, Sheringham is convinced the murderer is one of the other residents of Monmouth Mansions.

Unfortunately, the police investigations begins to recede into the background as the police begins to search for the burglar-turned-murderer and Sheringham begins to pursue his own line of investigation.Top Storey Murder nearly reverts back to being an ordinary, 1930s whodunit in which a snooty amateur detective tries to best Scotland Yard. I liked Sheringham retreating to the Reading Room of the British Library to order his notes and think over the possibilities. Sheringham interacting with the suspects, sometimes under a false flag, is always fun, but it's the introduction of the victim's estranged niece, Miss Stella Barnett, who adds interest to the middle part and ending. Sheringham becomes more than just a little bit intrigued by the young, defiant woman who refuses to touch a penny of her misery aunt and even takes her on as his new private secretary. Stella takes to job, but simply refuses to play the Dr. Watson to Sheringham's Sherlock Holmes. If anything, Stella sandbags him and his "absurd theories" with predictable results on someone with Sheringham's personality ("the girl's becoming a positive obsession with me").

That helped the sometimes sagging middle portion from bottoming out and carry it to the conclusion, where Sheringham's unmatched talent for fabricating false-solutions got to shine in all its glory. Nothing to daunt Sheringham as he victoriously wiped the egg of his face.

So, while Top Storey Murder is not Berkeley's greatest or most original detective novel, it's still a very entertaining, top-notch Golden Age mystery playing the grandest game in the spirit of The Poisoned Chocolates Case and Leo Bruce's Case for Thee Detectives (1936). Very much worth a reprint and read!

The Man Who Died Seven Times (1995) by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

Three months ago, Pushkin Vertigo released Yasuhiko Nishizawa's Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, which is not only a very good, very unusual and original detective novel – one of my new all-time favorite detective novels. Not for any of the usual reasons most would expect from me. The Man Who Died Seven Times is at its core a fairly ordinary whodunit within a family circle without any bells and whistles, like locked rooms, unbreakable alibis and dying messages, except for one extraordinary detail.

Hisataro Oba, a.k.a. Kyutaro, is a 16-year-old high school student who has "the aura of some jaded old man" and people are always telling him he seems old for his age. That's because Kyutaro is, mentally speaking, years older than his classmates on account of experiencing frequent time loops lasting nine days. An unexplained, personal phenomena Kyutaro calls "the Trap" during which the same days repeats nine times. Kyutaro is the only one who's aware of the loop and can alter the events from the first loop ("the 'original' version of the day in question") to the final loop, but "whatever happens in the final loop becomes, for everyone else, the only version" of that day. And, for Kyutaro, the definitive version of that day. But without loosing his memories of the other versions. These time loops can happen "as often as a dozen times in one month, or only once in eight weeks."

Kyutaro used one of these time loops to ace the entrance exams for the exclusive Kaisei Academy, but the promise of a brilliant student delivered fluctuating results. Good results always depends on whether, or not, an exam coincides with a time loop. Beside cheating on his school exams, Kyutaro never had to deal with a serious situation, while stuck in the nine-day trap, until he goes to a New Year's family gathering at the mansion of his grandfather, Reijiro Fuchigami, and maiden aunt, Kotono. A fairly recently established tradition to repair family relations after the family fractured in several different branches following a fallout between Reijiro and two of his three daughters. Kamiji left home to pursue an academic career and married a young, promising student, Michiya Oba, who have three sons – Fujitaka, Yoshio and Kyutaro. The third and youngest daughter, Haruna Kanagae, followed suit and had two daughters, Mai and Runa. So that left Kotono, the second daughter, to look after their increasingly difficult father under dire circumstances, but their situation miraculously improved. A lucky windfall that turned their restaurant into a restaurant chain under the Edge Restaurant Group umbrella. So these New Year gatherings aren't only meant to get the family back together, but for Reijiro Fuchigami to pick a successor.

Nothing out of the ordinary happens, except for Kyutaro getting blackout drunk, when everyone goes home at the end of January 2nd, but Kyutaro wakes up back at his grandfather's house early in the morning of January 2nd. He has fallen into one the time loop traps. This time, the day ends in tragedy. Reijiro Fuchigami had spend this new version of January 2nd drinking by himself in the attic of the old annex building. There he was found murdered! What follows is a long, exhaustive day of police questioning and only Kyutaro knows the day is going to reset seven more times. And that his grandfather will be alive, and well, the next morning on the third version of January 2nd. And the next half dozen resets.

Kyutaro tries to prevent his grandfather from getting killed and protect one of his relatives from becoming a murderer, which turns out to be easier said than done even with multiple retries – like a number of stored lives in a game. Firstly, Kyutaro has to consider two outside candidates to inherit the company. Reijiro's assistant and driver, Ryuichi Tsuchiya, and Kotono's assistant, Emi Tomori. Secondly, the complicated, sometimes uncomfortably tangled family relationships from the simmering hatred between Reijiro's three daughters to cousins fooling around. Thirdly, Kyutaro has to do a lot of scheming, manipulating and maneuvering, but, try as he might, Reijiro dies in every loop ("He was dead. Of course he was"). This is the first time Kyutaro is trapped inside a loop with something as serious as a murder in the family. A murder that was not part of the original "schedule" of the day and not the only deviation on the original day that confounds Kyutaro.

Like I said, The Man Who Died Seven Times is not a detective story about the who, why and how, but how Kyutaro attempts to prevent a murder before the ninth loop makes it definite. Before the ninth loop, Kyutaro gets to see everyone he knows acts and respond differently under varying circumstances of that days. Sometimes the situation got very ugly, but, tragically, Kyutaro is the only one who remembers these alternate events of the eight loops. Showing the reader his jaded old man persona is not an act. However, The Man Who Died Seven Times is not a lightly-plotted, character-driven mystery employing the time loop device and the trappings of the detective story to explore the frayed relations between the various family members. That certainly is part of the story and plot, but the explanation for the murders of Reijiro Fuchigami and why he kept dying in every loop is genuinely clever. That last part is really key because what allowed this to work, so satisfyingly, is seeing it play out under different, manipulated circumstances, but always with the same confounding results. How that came about is simply brilliant.

So, if the story had ended there and then, I would have been more than satisfied, but some lingering questions and inconsistent details about Kyutaro's time loop experience remained. Those answers... no, that twist, bumped The Man Who Died Seven Times from merely an excellent take on the hybrid mystery to a masterpiece and personal favorite. That completely took me by surprise! This is not merely a good twist to end an even better detective novel, but the final touch to a very pleasing nestle doll pattern emerging from the overall story and plot. First you have an unvarnished, straightforward murder of the family patriarch, but within that simple framework there's Kyutaro reliving the same day nine times. His attempts to get a different outcome, and why he keeps failing, is what gives the plot its weight. Lastly, the twist on Kyutaro's time loop experience that gives yet another perspective on the previous versions of that early January day. If it's not perfect, it's close enough. Highly recommended!

Note for the curious: The Man Who Died Seven Times has had some interesting comparisons between Groundhog Day and various mystery writers, series and movies ("Groundhog Days meets Knives Out"), but the only comparison that would be on point is The Girl Who Leapt Through Time meets Case Closed.

The House at Devil's Neck (2025) by Tom Mead

Last year, Crippen & Landru published Tom Mead's first collection of short stories, The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments (2024), bringing together Mead's short impossible crime stories featuring his series detective, Joseph Spector – a retired music hall magician from a bygone era. That leaves the Hester Queeg short stories and some standalones for future collection, but first things first.

The House at Devil's Neck (2025), fourth novel in the Joseph Spector series, brings together two apparently different, but tightly intertwined, cases over a two day period in 1939. To be precise, the story takes place between August 31, 1939 and September 1, 1939.

First chapter finds the magician-turned-detective on a coach headed to the house in the wilds of Essex known as Devil's Neck, constructed in 1640 by the mystic Adolphus Latimer, erected on an island tenuously linked to mainland by a narrow causeway. So there's a lot of history attached to Devil's Neck. From the days Latimer crossed paths with the Puritan witch finder Samuel Draycott to serving as a military hospital during the Great War. Since practically every broom closet in England has a ghost of its own, Devil's Neck picked up a few ghosts and lingering memories over the centuries ("there are few places quite so notorious... save Borley Rectory, perhaps"). There were more than enough people who wanted to take a look around the place when its new owners opened it up to the public.

Joseph Spector shares the coach with a motley assembly of characters. There's the spiritualist medium, Madame Adaline La Motte, who's accompanied by a young woman, Imogen Drabble. Francis Tulp, a paranormal investigator, who previously appeared in the short story "The Sleeper in Coldwreath" (2023). A grieving mother, Virginia Bailey, whose son drowned himself after "getting his face blown off at Ypres." Walter Judd, a man of mystery, who boarded the coach under the name Edgecomb. Finally, the current caretakers of Devil's Neck, Clive and Justine Lennox.

Before the coach arrives and all hell breaks loose, the story moves back to London where Inspector George Flint and Sergeant Jerome Hook, of Scotland Yard, are confronted with erratic, suspicious looking suicide of a man named Rodney Edgecomb – who appeared to have gone mad. A call came in Edgecomb was "waving a loaded revolver, threatening both his secretary and his valet" and had locked himself into his house and study. When they broke down the door of his study, they were confronted with "the most obvious and inescapable case of suicide." Edgecomb's body was sitting behind his desk, gun lying between his feet, behind a locked door, bolted windows inside a sealed house crawling with police. Yet, Flint is not entirely sure it was suicide. Not without reason.

Flint remembers Rodney Edgecomb from a sensational case, "the sort of story Victorian novelists used to write about," which made headlines right before the outbreak of the Great War. In 1912, Edgecomb inherited a fortune when his older brother, Dominic, became one of the many lives lost when the RMS Titanic sank in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Following year, a man turned up in a London hospital claiming to be Dominic Edgecomb. That not only threw the inheritance question in disarray, but the issue proved to be "startlingly divisive" in the public debate. Rodney denouncing him and the man claiming to be Dominic shooting himself in a hotel settled the problem with the outbreak of the war smothering the rumors of murder. Flint took another look at the case as a young detective when the war was over, but nothing came of it and now, twenty years later, Flint is faced with another Edgecomb dying under bizarre, seemingly impossible circumstances.

Pleasantly, Flint and Hook do a good job without Spector there to pick apart the locked room for them. Flint actually makes quick and short work of the locked room trickery himself ("Spector would likely have taken seconds"), but other than the how, every clue and hint regarding the who-and why points in the direction of Devil's Neck. Only smudge, plotwise, is how the ending reduced Flint's moment of triumph to a false-solution.

Meanwhile, at Devil's Neck, the ghost hunting party that began with the obligatory séance, ending with a message scrawled on the ceiling that wasn't there when they entered the room, turns into something more serious when someone is killed – behind a locked door, of course. That's not the last impossible situation and locked room murder on the island, now entirely cutoff from the outside world. They witness a phantom soldier vanishing down a corridor without leaving footprints on the layer of the dust on the floorboards. It's the second impossible murder at Devil's Neck that stands out as the question is not only how the killer managed to either get into a locked room, or out, but how and why the killer place a cumbersome automaton in the room – which seems needlessly risky and theatrical. A trick that was done without disturbing the improvised alarm of strings and bells securing everyone's bedroom doors. The House at Devil's Neck continues the tradition of the 21st century locked room novel of stringing three, four or more impossible crimes situation together. Mead takes a technical approach to the locked room trickery, which is everyone's favorite approach, but I generally don't mind as long as they're not lazy string trick or incomprehensibly mechanical in nature. A fine line to traverse, to be sure, but Mead pulled it off. I really liked the simplicity of the first impossible murder that was staged at Devil's Neck and the second time one of these locked room revivalist used (SPOILER/ROT13) n pbva-gevpx to seal a room shut.

Just like the previous three novels, the locked room murders and impossible crime aren't even the main attraction of the plot. Mead has always shown a stronger and better hand when it comes to the who-and why. This time, Mead offers his readers not the customary rug puller of a solution, but a head spinner of an ending. You can draw all the obvious comparison to John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson and S.S. van Dine, but the only correct comparison here that stands is Brian Flynn on steriods. The locked room murders and other impossible situations are merely side effect of it.

So very much enjoyed The House at Devil's Neck as a retro-golden age detective novel complete with a challenge to the reader, footnotes to the clues and a bunch of locked room murders tossed into the melee. I also appreciated the backdrop, not of a former WWI-era military hospital, but its lingering ghosts and haunting memories. Memories of the wounded, disfigured men who had to wear tin masks with a doll-like recreations of their original features and a brief glimpse of Flint's time on the front. And, while Spector and Flint try to finally lay some of the lingering ghosts of the Great War to rest, the story ends as the next war begins. So look forward to see what Mead is going to do with his locked room murders and impossible crimes committed under cover of the blackouts and Blitz. It Patrols by Night!

The Third Lady (1978) by Shizuko Natsuki

At the turn of this century, Shizuko Natsuki was alongside Edogawa Rampo, Akimitsu Takagi and Seicho Matsumoto among the few Japanese mystery writers with a footprint in the Western genre composed of a dozen translated novels, collections and a scattered number of uncollected short stories – printed in publications like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Natsuki had twelve short stories published in EQMM, two in New Mystery and a series of six standalone mystery novels. However, developments since then have shown these pre-2000s translations to have only superficially scratched the surface of the Japanese detective story.

So the translations of Natsuki's novels have been overshadowed over the years and on their way to be practically forgotten. Yes, the dodgy translations has as much to do with it as the lack of reprints and a growing offering of better, more varied translations. Robert B. Rohmer, the translator, took some liberties with the original text to make alterations intended to make them more accessible to non-Japanese readers. For example, Natuski's most well-known novel, W no higeki (The Tragedy of W, 1982), was translated in 1984 under the title Murder at Mt. Fuji with one of the central characters changed into an American exchange student, Jane Prescott. Mt. Fuji is referenced only a handful of times, but it's a famous and recognizable landmark. So it was plastered across the cover as if they were printing a travel brochure. These were obvious marketing decisions, but decisions regarded as disrespectful to the author and insulting to the audience. Gave the whole story is strong sense of authenticity.

I, and others, had a spark of hope when a reprint of Murder at Mt. Fuji was announced as forthcoming, courtesy of Hutchinson Heinemann, but it turned out to be a reprint of the Rohmer translation – not a fresh translation. Without any good, new translations on the horizon, I decided to take another look at the translated novels. Flawed as they may be, I never fully lost interest in Natsuki's detective fiction.

Natsuki was billed as the "Agatha Christie of Japan," but the six novels translated between 1984 and 1991 were clearly picked as examples of the contemporary, character-driven crime novels of the day. So more P.D. James and Ruth Rendell than Agatha Christie. While it's true Natsuki doesn't appear to have been a mystery writer who tinkered with locked doors, railway timetable or dying messages a lot, she appears to have delighted in placing her characters in utterly bizarre, impossible situations. Kokubyaku no tabiji (Innocent Journey, 1975) has a suicide pact gone wrong when one of them survives to find the other dead with a knife in his back. Kaze no tobira (Portal of the Wind, 1980) has a murder interrupting a scheduled, revolutionary head transplant surgery. In Daisan no onna (The Third Lady, 1978), Natsuki blindfolded the inverted mystery, spun it around and then let it loose.

The Third Lady begins in the village of Barbizon, on the outskirts of Paris, where Kohei Daigo has attended a conference. Daigo is an assistant professor of hygiene at J university, in Fukuoka, happily married with two daughters, but, while killing time until he can catch his flight back home, he has a chance encounter – one that ends up completely uprooting his life. In the salon of Château Chantal, Daigo meets a woman during a power failure. During this intimate blackout, Daigo and the woman calling herself Fumiko Samejima become very frank and share a chilling secret. They both wish to see someone dead and buried.

Daigo's enemy is Akishige Yoshimi, professor of health at the J university, who squashed Daigo's damning report on the Popico cookies made by the Minami Food Company. A batch of cookies had been contaminated with a cancer causing mold, which had a caused a rise in cases of child cancer. Many died and practically every parent in the poor region were left with crippling debt from hospital bills. Yoshimi was trying to punish Daigo for his opposition by trying to get him dismissed or transferred to a rural university in Alaska. The woman Samejima wants dead is Midori Nagahara, eldest daughter of the owner of the Emerald View Hotel at Lake Hakone, whom she describes as arrogant with a heart as cold as ice. Two years ago, Nagahara killed someone and got away with it because the police was unable to proof it even was murder. That undetected, unresolved murder is the reason why Samejima is determined to get some off-the-books justice ("...my heart will know no peace until she is dead").

Before the lights come back on, the woman who called herself Fumiko Samejima is gone. Daigo is left behind with a lot of questions to muse over, but, when he returns home, life appears to have resumes to relative normalcy. That's until some time later when Akishige Yoshimi is found poisoned at his home. Daigo is, of course, among Inspector Furukawa's primary suspects, but Daigo possesses a cast-iron alibi that he knows was created for him by someone who knew where and when Yoshimi was going to die. So the police turn their attention to the elusive, unidentified woman who was seen with Yoshimi and near his home at the time of the murder. But is she the woman whom he met in France under those strange circumstances? And, before too long, Daigo receives a subtle hint regarding Midori Nagahara and the Emerald View Hotel. Just like the old saying goes, one good deed deserves another, which is when the wheels really begin to come off for Daigo – who's as amateurish as murderers come. That also makes me wish there were more interactions between Inspector Furukawa and Daigo or more scenes from Inspector Furukawa's perspective. I really liked Inspector Furukawa and how he pursued Daigo with a Columbo-like tenacity ("...with that same smiling face, pretending that he had just run into Daigo by accident, the way he always did").

The Third Lady is not that kind of procedural puzzle mystery in which alibis get demolished, identities broken down and hidden connections get uncovered. What's at the center is Daigo's obsession with a woman who he has only heard and touched in a pitch dark salon somewhere near Paris. A meeting resulting in two murders, but, as the sketchy premise and book title suggests, there's a snag somewhere in this strangers-on-a-train pact. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed The Third Lady back in 2011 and praised the final twist "poignant, sorrowful and tragically inevitable," but above all it's an incredibly cruel twist. Cruel to the point where you can almost count Daigo among the victims, but beautifully and effective executed. More importantly, there's a graceful simplicity to the devastating truth that makes the already bleak ending as dark as night. So you can see why Shizuko Natsuki received some translations during the 1980s and '90s, because she appears to be of the modern school. However, if you take everything from the premise to the bleak conclusion, The Third Lady strongly reminded me of Paul Halter's work. Only thing missing was a locked room murder or other impossible crime.

That brings us to the elephant in the room named Robert B. Rohmer. The translation is an improvement when it comes to story-ruining alterations and character inserts. I'm a bit suspicious about the first chapter taking place in France and the references to the rural university in Alaska, but only real problem with the translation that's far from the same quality as the translations we're treated to today. Nevertheless, even this less than perfect translation can't take away Natsuki penned a fresh and original take on both the inverted mystery and the strangers-on-a-train/murder-by-proxy motif with The Third Lady. So recommended to fans of both with the caveat that a better translation would likely make it even better.

By the way, if anyone from Crippen & Landru is reading this review, this probably the best time to put together a Shizuko Natsuki collection with those fourteen short stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and New Mystery (Divine Punishment and Other Stories of Crime & Retribution). A collection like that would be a welcome addition to the growing list of translated Japanese detective fiction. Note that most of the short stories were translated by Gavin Frew, not Rohmer.

Locked and Loaded, Part 6: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

For some reason, I thought the previous "Locked and Loaded" was posted earlier this year, somewhere around March, but “Locked and Loaded, Part 5” was posted last November and forgetting to do another one of these wasn't for a lack of choice – more a lack of availability of some of the choosier items. There are still of a ton of rarely reprinted, mostly uncollected short stories eluding me. Stories such as Brandon Fleming's "The Case of the Armour Figure" (1922), Arlton Eadie's "The Clue from Mars" (1924), Vincent Cornier's "The Dust of Lions" (1933) and Victor Maxwell's "The Siege at 2242" (1933).

Despite some elusive obscurities and rarities, I think I hoarded an interesting medley of short stories over these half dozen "Locked and Loaded" reviews covering a period of 118 years. Not all masterpieces or outright classics, but a diverse, imaginative lot of short stories, published between 1905 and 2023, taking on the locked room and impossible crime problem in their own way. Surprisingly few duds and stinkers considering the randomness when raking one of these patchy reviews together. Let's see if I can keep up this hot streak of moderate success.

B. Fletcher Robinson's "The Vanished Billionaire" first appeared in the February, 1905, issue of the American edition of Pearson's Magazine, which is a slightly altered version of "The Vanished Millionaire" from Robinson's The Chronicles of Addington Peace (1905). For some reason, the name of Robinson's detective was changed from Addington Peace to Inspector Hartley, of Scotland Yard, for the American publications among other minor alterations – like change from millionaire to billionaire. Even though the first modern-day billionaires wouldn't come around until the late 1910s, early '20s. I should also note Robinson collaborated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and foolishly declined to be credited as a co-author. It has been suggested had he been credited as not only the co-author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, but as the person who helped to bring Sherlock Holmes back, Robinson's own detective fiction would not been so thoroughly forgotten today. Would they be remembered on their own merit or riding the coattails of an inverness cape? Time to find out!

Silas J. Ford, billionaire of the title, "established a business reputation in America that had made him a celebrity in England" and, according to the tradition of the American self-made man, he kept his name in the papers ("...full of praise and blame, of puffs and denunciations"). Ford gave the newspaper something to write about when he disappeared on dark, snowy night in December under seemingly impossible circumstances. During the night, Ford had left his bed to venture outside and a trail of his distinct boot prints that ended in the middle of a field of smooth, unbroken snow twenty feet from the wall surrounding the property ("apparently he had stepped into space")! Inspector Hartley is dispatched to the scene of the disappearance and foreshadows that this case is going to be more about the why than the how. The core plot and motive for why Ford had to disappear wasn't bad, not for a detective story from 1905, but explanation for the no-footprints is dumb even for 1905. I would have taken one of the routine solutions over (SPOILER/ROT13) “ur gvrq ba gur obbgf va erirefr snfuvba” naq gura ohatyrq vg, juvpu yrsg oruvaq gur “fgenatr rivqrapr.” Lbh nyzbfg qrfreir gb or sybttrq qbja n frperg cnffntr sbe rira qnevat gb fhttrfg fhpu n fbyhgvba. A shame as the presentation of the no-footprints was very well done for the time and one of the earliest no-footprints impossible crimes on record. So it's also one of those rare duds in this series of blog-posts, judged solely on its merits as an impossible crime story.

Stuart Palmer's "The Monkey Murder," originally published in the January, 1947, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, has to be one of the oddest, most bizarre short stories in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series. Halfway between an inverted detective story and a very bizarre locked room murder. Inspector Oscar Piper tells Miss Withers about George Wayland, "the wife-strangler, blast him," whom he believes got away with murdering his wife by dressing her death up with "a phony religious-cult background." Janet Wayland body was found in the back bedroom lying tied, hand and foot, on a sort of sacrificial altar overlooked by the idol of big, ugly monkey god – whose tail was tightened around her throat. The whole scene, behind a bolted door, looked like "looked like the nightmare of a Hollywood set-designer for B-budget horror pictures." Piper has a pretty good idea how the bolted door was worked, but unable to get evidence that sticks. So they had to let Wayland go.

There's something else about the technically unsolved case bothering Piper. Wayland is, beside the spousal murder, the personification of "Mister Average American" and "the average citizen commits the average murder." So where did the plain, unimaginative Wayland got the idea to strangle Janet with the tail of the tail of an East-Indian monkey-god and stage it as an outlandish cult killing ("that, plus the locked-room thing..."). An out-of-character murder. Miss Withers decides to take a crack at the case herself, however, she gets exactly the same result as the New York police: Wayland laughing in her face. So she's forced to set a baited, legally dubious trap proving Wayland is a hall of fame idiot after all. Palmer neatly weaved several plot-threads, big and small, together into this very well-done short story. And while a fairly minor locked room mystery, Miss Withers' explanation added a small twist to the locked room-trick with a detail Piper had overlooked. Miss Withers, Inspector Piper and Palmer seldom disappoint and "The Monkey Murder" is no exception.

Bill Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop," originally published in the July, 1973, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, appears to be one of Pronzini's least known, overlooked short impossible crime stories – mentioned in neither Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). The story is both good and amusing. Detective-Sergeant Renzo Di Lucca, "a dedicated, patient and observant cop," who always gets paired with rookies. Something he sees as a chore as "there were problems with every rookie." The problem with his latest assignment, Tim Corcoran, is that he has too much imagination that turned every routine case into "puzzles of magnitude." So when they're called to the scene of a murder that has many of the tropes from classic detective fiction, Corcoran's imagination begins to run wild.

Simon Warren is shot and fatally wounded behind the locked door of his private library. When the door is broken down, Warren's whispers to his butler the cryptic words, "pick up sticks," before dying. That and the murder weapon apparently evaporated alongside the murderer from the locked library. Corcoran is ecstatic that he not only gets to investigate a real locked room murder, but a locked room with a dying message tucked inside. Di Lucca constantly has to serve as an anchor for his rookie assignment, which came down to shooting down Corcoran's false-solutions. I really liked Corcoran's false-solution, wrong as it may be, because it showed more imagination than the old dodge the murder actually used. However, everything from the shooting, vanished gun, dying message and locked room-trick were skillfully tied together to provide an overall satisfying short story. So it's odd "The Methodical Cop" is not better known (at least among his own impossible crime work) even if its a classic case of the false-solution outshining the correct answer.

Note for the curious: Pronzini reworked the plot of "The Methodical Cop" into the Carpenter & Quincannon short story "Pick Up Sticks" (2021), which was combined with the short story "Quincannon in Paradise" (2005) and reworked into the final, novel-length Carpenter & Quincannon The Paradise Affair (2021).

Bill Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have," originally written for the anthology Partners in Crime (1994), is yet another minor affair when it comes to the miracle problem, but a fun enough short story for fans of Ellery Queen. Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry are the co-authors of the Sam Fernando mysteries, "one of the most promising series of detective novels the 1950s had yet seen," which he plots and she writes. They specialize in locked room murders and other impossible crimes under every imaginable circumstance and variation. So when one of their friends and avid collector of detective novels is shot in his library, the police asks their help as authorities on storybook murders and locked room-tricks. Because every exit from the house was either locked, bolted or under observation ("...like something from one of our books"). So a fun enough short story for its character rather than its plot which would have been perfect for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) anthologies.

So, yeah, the selection of the short stories, so far, is fairly solid, story-and character-wise, but not terribly inspiring when it comes to their locked room and impossible crime plots and tricks. Get ready for a surprise, because the best one of the lot comes from a writer of techno-thrillers!

James H. Cobb's "Over the Edge," originally printed in the July, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, stars Kevin Pulaski, "four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month deputy sheriff," who debuted in the novel West on 66 (1999) – appeared in a handful of short stories. This story begins with Pulaski taking his lover, Princess, along to meet a teenage informant on a lookout moonlighting as a daytime lover's lane. So they decide to stick around, fool around and enjoy what looks like lovers' tiff in another car ("all we needed was a bag of popcorn"). When the man drives away, the woman stays behind in her own car and she stays put. They ignore her, however, Pulaski becomes suspicious after a while and wants to see if everything is right. At that the moment, the woman "slowly and deliberately drove her car off the edge of the overlook" into the canyon below. The police believe it was a clear case of suicide, but Pulaski believes it was murder and they wish the deputy good luck with his investigation.

There's no mystery about who engineered her murder, but since the man had driven away and secured an alibi, before she drove over the edge, Pulaski is faced with an impossible crime. This time, the trick is not based on an old locked room dodge, but entirely original and not impossible to figure out. Pulaski even thanks the murderer, "in a world of plain old day-in day-out mayhem, this is the first time I've ever worked one of these fancy, set-up killings like Ellery Queen writes about." Although I have come to associate these kind of inverted howdunits with those type of tricks with Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series. Needless to say, I enjoyed Cobb's "Over the Edge" and is the standout here. A candidate to be included on the future revision of my locked room/impossible crime lineup of favorites.

Finally, Maria Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye," published in the December, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has only two distinguishing features. Firstly, the staging of an impossible strangling of an elderly, wealthy American tourist traveling alone in a glass capsule on the London Eye. Secondly, it was published in the same year as Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery (2007). But other than that, the story simply redresses an old locked room-trick in modern garb. It's not a bad story, but I didn't like it. By the way, wasn't there a another short story from the same period about an impossible crime on the London Eye?

So, not the strongest of randomly picked stories from the "Locked and Loaded" franchise, but a fairly decent line-up. Robinson's “The Vanished Billionaire” was a dud. Palmer's "The Monkey Murder" is fun, but, even with the twist in the tail, a minor locked room piece. I greatly enjoyed Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop" and was firmly on Tim Corcoran's side, but pretty minor stuff with a better false-solution than correct answer. And, again, Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have" is a fun short story, but not to be recommended for its locked room plot. Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye" has a good setting and nothing more than that. Cobb's "Over the Edge" looms largely over them as the best of the lot.

Straight to Your Heart: Case Closed, vol. 95 by Gosho Aoyama

Gosho Aoyama's 95th volume of Case Closed picks up where the previous, absolutely packed volume ended that was crammed with familiar faces, storyline developments and a cliffhanger to a tantalizing murder case featuring two imaginative impossible crimes – apparently committed the long-nosed Tengu of Japanese folklore. First a short recap. Conan has temporarily returned as Jimmy Kudo to attend a class trip to Kyoto to link up with Rachel complete with will-they-won't-they overtones, but their class trip runs into a class reunion of a university film club that quickly ended in bloody murder.

Their screenwriter is brutally murdered in his hotel room with a big pool of blood and bloody footprints staining the ceiling, which suggests the killer yanked the victim up in the air to kill him and then casually walked across the ceiling. And walked, or flew, out an open window on the 15th floor. A second murder is committed in the open street with another trail of bloody footprints walking sideways along the wall. In this closing chapter, the murderer attempts a third murder with footprints from an apparently invisible man approaching him on a bridge, but, by that time, Jimmy had already closed the net around the killer.

I think this story is far better for its long-awaited developments in the overarching storyline with all its character-arcs than the fantastically-staged series of impossible slayings, which are excellent in presentation, but poor and unconvincing in execution – especially the first murder and the last attempt are unconvincing. I suppose the trick for the first murder could have a whole lot more convincing in a smaller, more intimate setting, but not here or on this scale. I didn't think much about the other impossibilities with the inexplicable appearance/disappearance of the Tengu (SPOILER/ROT13), fbeg bs, tvivat njnl gur zheqrere, orpnhfr gur crefba jub jnf greebevmrq ol vg unq ng yrnfg gb or va ba vg. Lbh pna'g uvqr fhpu n guvat vafvqr fbzrbar'f ubgry ebbz, fhqqrayl fpner uvz jvgu naq znxr vg qvfnccrne, hayrff gung crefba vf chyyvat gur fgevatf be vf na nppbzcyvfu. A commendable attempt to weave four impossible crimes into a fairly short story, but again, far better for the storyline-and character-arc developments.

The second story deals with the direct fallout of the previous story, because Jimmy Kudo, "the top teen detective of the east," resurfacing to solve a murder case involving well-known filmmakers has started a buzz. Kudo's return ("Rumors of His Death Debunked") trended on social media, became the top news story online and attracted the attention of the news media. So now Conan is in deep trouble as reporters with camera crews besiege his home and everyone who knows Jimmy Kudo, which is bound to get noticed by the Black Organization. Meanwhile, Anita and the Junior Detective League go to the home of classmate who failed to show up at school that day. When they enter the home, they find the first of a trail of clue to an indoors treasure hunt and they fear the little girl might have gotten trapped somewhere while following the clues. So they retrace their girl's step by following the clues her grandmother left behind. Yes, a very minor story intended to break away from Conan's precarious situation and the growing interest in Jimmy Kudo's return, but by no means a bad story. Where, and how, they discovered the girl involves something I always imagined would make for a first-rate locked room-trick, but, to my knowledge, it has yet to be used. So overall a better story than the previous landmark story and Conan learns the name of the Black Organization's boss. We all know who he really is, right?

The fallout from Jimmy Kudo's headline grabbing return continues into the third story, but also has a pretty good, self-contained detective story to offer.

Richard Moore netted an aristocratic client, Gunzo Morooka, who received a threatening note to stay clear of the Black Bunny Club ("...if you value your life"). So they meet at the Black Bunny Club to discuss the case. Black Bunny Club is a "gentleman's club" where hostesses are dressed as scantily-clad bunnies raising the question how Conan and Rachel were even allowed on the premise. When food and dinner arrives, one of the bunnies is poisoned and hospitalized with only three suspects who could have poisoned her drink. So, on the surface, it's the customary whom-of-the-three-did-it staple of this series, but how the drink was poisoned is rather ingenious and makes the story standout. Case Closed is going to be interesting study material in the future for how the traditional 20th century detective story adapted itself to the 21th century. So good story that also has Toru Amuro as Moore's disciple to look over Conan's shoulder with a cliffhanger that would been a perfect conclusion to this volume.

The last two chapters begins a story that will be concluded in the next volume and deals with "a serial killer who targets female cops." More precisely, the female cops of the traffic division and colleagues of the series regulars Yumi Miyamoto and Neako Miike. At the end of the last chapter, the serial killer left three bodies behind and his second victim left a cryptic dying message: a bloody finger pointing towards a swing set on a child's playground. So we'll find out what that's all about in the next volume.

So, when it comes to the individual plots, this volume was a mixed bag, but very rewarding for long-time fans of the series as the game finally appears to be afoot. Like Ho-Ling said in his 2018 review, the stories show "Aoyama is busy moving his pieces for an event which might very well be the ending of this series." It really comes across like that, but then again, this volume was originally published in 2018 and vol. 107 was published earlier this year. So maybe not yet, but look forward to the next volume.

And Cauldron Bubble (1951) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's And Cauldron Bubble (1951), thirty-ninth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series, begins with Lady Blanchflower being summoned to the bedside of her elderly, dying husband, Sir Hugo Blanchflower, who needs to unburden his conscience – whispering a terrible, long-held secret into her ear. Sir Hugo passed away moments later and left behind more than a grieving widow ("...something like Terror had joined hands with Sorrow").

Over the following years, Lady Blanchflower was allowed to continue to live in the cloister apartments of Quinster Castle by the Duke of Quinster. Every evening, Lady Blanchflower is escorted to the Red Deer Hotel for dinner by one of its permanent residents, Mrs. Whitburn. She became Lady Blanchflower's "inseparable evening companion" in the Red Deer's dining room among the permanents, regulars, locals and commercial travelers. So nothing to indicate something suspicious was a afoot and "the two ladies were in better spirits" than normally, but, one morning, Mrs. Whitburn is discovered missing from the Red Deer Hotel and her bed doesn't appear to have been slept in. She was last seen escorting Lady Blanchflower back home, but nobody answers at the cloister apartments.

After several hours go by without a sign of life, a police goes around to have a look at the cloister apartment to make a gruesome discovery: Lady Blanchflower's body lying on the floor of the lounge with a silk stocking, belonging to Mrs. Whitburn, "twisted tight" around her neck and a man's wig is found under her body – no trace of her dinner companion. Even worse, the Duke of Quinster was in residence at the time his dear, old friend was dastardly murdered ("...this is an outrage") and refuses "to allow any damned local policeman to take a case of this importance" ("nothin' less than Scotland Yard itself for Lil Blanchflower!"). Scotland Yard dispatches Inspector MacMorran to Quinster Castle and he brought along that amateur meddler of renown, Anthony Bathurst.

However, the Chief Constable and the local police inspector, Guthrie, aren't exactly thrilled the Duke called in Scotland Yard over their head. And even less thrilled when learning MacMorran brought along an amateur detective to work on the case ("does he hold your hand—or do you hold his?"). But it adds a nice, welcome bit of friction to their joined investigation, especially when Bathurst gets it wrong a few times. In his defense, this is a particular tricky, multi-pronged problem.

Firstly, what happened to the missing Mrs. Whitburn? Should she be considered as a suspect on the run or another victim? If the latter, what happened to her body? Whom of the two was the primary target and who's collateral damage? A difficult problem that needs time and some spadework to resolve, but the real stumbling block in their investigation proves to be motive. Not a ghost of a motive can be found to harm either of the elderly, inoffensive ladies nor does the missing Mrs. Whitburn has a reason to kill Lady Blanchflower. That's both the biggest strength and greatest flaw of And Cauldron Bubble.

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor of In Search of the Classical Mystery Novel, called And Cauldron Bubble as a return to the whodunits in his introduction to this new Dean Street Press edition, but it would more accurate to call it a whydunit to the point where it probably would have worked better as an inverted mystery – considering motive is the only thing obscuring the murderer's identity. Not locked doors, unbreakable alibis or false-identities. I can't deny Flynn cooked up a very clever, incredibly ruthless scheme in which the murderer is practically gifted a golden window of opportunity to commit an unsolvable crime. That's no exaggeration and the reason why not only Bathurst struggled with finding a solution, but everyone armchair detective looking over his shoulder. Flynn sewed it up so tightly, you either have to be Mycroft Holmes or a super-AI to reason the correct answer from the scant few nebulous hints (not clues). Sure, you can say in hindsight that the clue of the note saying, "Come quickly—Mistress away," is obvious when you realize Flynn plotted the whole thing, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. So that the very fallible Bathurst reasoned the too well-hidden truth from these nebulous hints is something of a Herculean achievement.

Flynn was being far too clever for his own good here and that came at the expense of the fair play, but not the only thing that irked me a little. Firstly, what was the point of opening the story with that deathbed scene? I'm still not entirely sure what that was all about. Secondly, Flynn overlooked an important consequence of (SPOILER/ROT13) ohelvat n obql ng gur obggbz bs n ynetr urnc bs jnez, fbsg naq fzbxvat znaher. Rira vs gur zheqrere jber birenyyf, ur jnfa'g tbvat gb pbzr bhg pyrna fzryyvat yvxr n ebfr tneqra. Ur jbhyq arrq obgu n tbbq fpeho qbja naq jnfu uvf pybgurf, juvpu pbhyq or qbar jvgubhg trggvat pnhtug, ohg gung fzryy jnf pbzvat jvgu uvz vagb gur ubgry. Gung fubhyq unir orra abgvprq be erzrzorerq nsgre gur obql jnf qht hc.

And Cauldron Bubble ended up being a mixed bag of tricks with some good, even brilliant ideas, but lacking in execution and can only be recommended to fans of the series on account of Bathurst trying to grapple with a murder without an apparent motive or viable suspects. If you're new to Flynn and Bathurst, I recommend starting at an earlier point in the series.

Murder as a Fine Art (1953) by Carol Carnac

E.C.R. Lorac's Murder as a Fine Art (1953), as by "Carol Carnac," is the ninth, or possibly tenth, title in the Chief Detective-Inspector Julian Rivers series and a novel listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) describing an unusual impossible murder involving a marble statue – a statue "too heavy for anyone to have moved from its plinth." So it was added to the locked room/impossible crime wishlist, but Murder as a Fine Art had been out-of-print for decades until fairly recently.

Martin Edwards and the British Library Crime Classics have done great work in revitalizing Lorac's legacy with their series of reprints, but hardly expected the obscure, practically forgotten Murder as a Fine Art to be reprinted anytime soon. I expected Lorac's best-known locked room mystery, Rope's End, Rogue's End (1942), to make it back to print before Murder in St. John's Wood (1934) or the other Carnac title, The Double Turn (1956). Not that I'm complaining as Murder as a Fine Art proved to be an excellent addition to the run of Lorac reprints.

Murder as a Fine Art takes place against the backdrop of the Ministry of Fine Arts, created "during that short period of optimism following World War Two," but, like so many fictitious British ministries, it was a bureaucratic disaster from the start. First of all, the ministry is roofed under "a white elephant of a building," Medici House, which had been vacated by another ministry ("you might have smelt a rat when the Ministry of Food agreed to vacate it"). Joyce-Lawrence, the first Minister of Fine Arts, wanted to put together a collection of art works of "National Importance," but he only had enough to rake together a collection of obscure, often unsigned contemporary paintings – referred to "the Minister's funnies." Joyce-Lawrence died in office and was replaced by an economic-minded, competent administrator who made a lot of cuts and trimmings to the ministry, before passing away himself. So the third and current minister, Humphry David, finds himself in charge of a bloated bureaucratic apparatus with an incomprehensible, practically worthless collection of modern paintings and an army of Civil Servants who don't know anything about art, but some pretend they do. Edwards aptly described this ministry as a "mildly Kafkaesque establishment" in his introduction.

One such Civil Servant is Edwin Pompfret, the Deputy to the Permanent Secretary, who likes modern art because it's modern to do so and dresses for the part. Pompfret has an artistic vendetta against the enormous, several tons weighing marble statue of Earl Manderby gracing the elegant stairway. Pompfret hates the marble monstrosity with a passion ("...labels us as Philistines") and has suggested more than once to topple it off its plinth, because it would be "a wonderful sight to see it bounce down the stairs." So when his broken, mangled body is found lying on the stairs surrounded by smashed, bloodstained chunks of marble, everyone assumed he had accidentally killed himself trying to topple Earl Manderby. Chief Detective-Inspector Julian Rivers arrives on the scene with Detective-Inspector Lancing in tow to announce Pompfret was murdered. How could anyone have moved that chunk of marble? Let alone tipping it down a staircase towards the obliging victim! This murder comes in the wake of Humphry David getting suspicious something very dodgy is going on, somewhere, in his ministry.

So an enticing premise to a story running along three different lines, neatly brought together. There is the well-realized backdrop and depiction of the fictitious, slightly satirical ministry and digs at modern art. Lorac basically smashed bureaucratic skulduggery together artistic shenanigans with amusing results. Not quite the Ministry of Administrative Affairs from Yes, Minister, but enjoyable nonetheless. And provides for an excellent backdrop for a good, old-fashioned and theatrically-staged impossible murder.

That impossible murder is the second line, or plot-thread, showing Lorac approached the detective story in her own way and the locked room mystery was no exception. Most of theorizing and proposing of false-solutions comes from gossip at the ministry with lunchroom theories covering everything from carjacks to vibrations from the basement accidentally toppling the statue. You know, the kind of solutions and tricks a normal person would suggest to such a problem, but Lorac provided a solution that's both bonkers and oddly practical (ROT13: “abj, zl znfgrecvrpr, Jvyr R. Pblbgr, Fhcre Travhf!”). Brutalism applied to the art of murder! What really deserves a chef's kiss is using such a trick inside a historical building housing the Ministry of Fine Arts. Even though the clueing is a touch spotty, simply as a long-overlooked impossible crime novel, Murder as a Fine Art is worth renewed attention from locked room aficionados. Lastly, arguably the weakest aspect of the story and plot, the rather plain procedural investigation from the dry, colorless Rivers and his many colleagues doing routine work, while Rivers and Lancing ask questions. They do a thorough, competent job showing Lorac's detective fiction can be classed as an ancestor of the post-WWII police procedural, but the investigative parts lacks the color and imagination of everything surrounding it. A routine approach to a decidedly non-routine case or ordinary murder. Something you simply notice while reading along, but not something to detract from the plot or diminish my enjoyment.

So, all in all, Murder as a Fine Art is a surprisingly good vintage mystery from the dying, twilight years of the Golden Age detective story and maybe my favorite Lorac, so far. Highly recommended!

By the way, I can already taste the disagreement in the air over the impossible crime, but, unlike Earl Manderby, I'm not budging an inch. Murder as a Fine Art is one of the ten best impossible crime novels from the 1950s!

The Hit List: Top 7 Most Murderable "Victims" in Detective Fiction

So over the past year, or two, the idea for a rogues' gallery of the classic detective fiction emerged from the comments left on some of my reviews by Scott, a regular in the comments, but not a comic-like gallery with the expected suspects – like Professor Moriarity, Arnold Zeck, Arsène Lupin and Renya Karasuma. A gallery of the most odious, morally reprehensible and murderable victims. The type that makes it entirely understandable someone went through the trouble of putting together a clockwork alibi or create a locked room illusion just to get a stab at them.

I started compiling a list half a year ago, but thought it too basic a list with too many recently reviewed titles on them reads on them. So it got shelved for the time being. It has been months since "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohir Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 26-50" was posted and needed a filler-post. I really want to do "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorites from a Decade of (Shin) Honkaku Translations," but have to wait until everything published this year has been read and reviewed. Yukito Ayatsuji's Tokeikan no satsujin (The Clock Mansion Murders, 1991) sounds like it could become my favorite in the series and don't want to count out Seishi Yokomizo's Kuroneko tei jiken (The Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, 1947) or Yasuhiko Nishizawa's Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995).

So probably won't get around to doing that list until January, February of next year. I didn't want to do a basic list with simple favorites from a specific author, publisher or go back to the locked room well again. Believe me, I could have easily done "The Hit List: Top 10 Locked Room Mystery Novels That Need to Be Reprinted" part two. That brought me back to this list of murder victims who made us either glance questionably at our moral compass or outright root for the killer to get away with it. Putting the list together was not as easy as thought.

I was dissatisfied with the original top 10 with too many entries feeling like filler-entries compared to the marque entries. So decided to trim the list down to seven and pair each entry to one of the seven deadly sins, but that proved to be too awkward and distracting. If you scroll down the list, you find a few characters who could be paired with gluttony and greed, but those sins would underplay the reason why they made the list in the first place. So ended up with just seven entries.

 

The malefactors are presented in order of appearance:

Charles Augustus Milverton from "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (1904) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905)

Why not start out with Charles Augustus Milverton, "the king of all the blackmailers," who has the distinction of not only being one of the OG of "murderable victims," but the poster boy of "murderable victims" of the pre-1930s detective story – before financiers and bankers took over the torch. I can't remember how many times an old-timely mystery referred to blackmailers as bugs or vermin who deserved to be exterminated. So their murder is often likened with community service. Not without reason. Milverton planned to publicly destroy a young woman to ensure future victims are more compliant to his demands. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a knights errant, a spot of burglary, but they end up witnessing Milverton getting shot and killed. They do absolutely nothing about it. Holmes even tells Lestrade "there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge." That remained prevailing opinion on blackmailers for decades.

Mary Gregor from The Silver Scale Mystery (1931) a.p.a. Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne

Another common victim of the early 20th century detective is the cruel, penny pinching family patriarch, or matriarch, who make their relatives dance like puppets from their purse strings. Mary Gregor is different for two reasons: she's not the family matriarch, but the sister of the patriarch and her hold over the family is a very disturbing, subtle kind of evil. Mary Gregor acted like a benevolent dictator who could wrap the most spiteful slander in the kindest words and always willing to forgive people for sins she invented. That alone hardly warrants murder, but her project to destroy the bonds between her nephew, his wife and two-year-old son in order to take the child comes a lot closer. Mary Gregor stands out as a subtle piece of evil not only in this early Golden Age detective novel, but among Wynne's own work that can be marred by Victorian-era melodrama and histrionic characterization.

Sandra, the Fat Lady from The Fair Murder (1933) by Nicholas Brady

I'm not easily shocked and have even gotten some funny looks for laughing at the blunt, edgy try-hard shit of Michael Slade, but Brady's The Fair Murder managed to do it. A detective novel deceptively presented as a weird, offbeat whodunit about the murder of the Sandra, the Fat Lady, who's found stabbed to death in her tent and it falls to Reverend Ebenezer Buckle to catch her killer – which doesn't sound too shocking or off the beaten path. However, what Reverend Buckle uncovers towards the ends makes The Fair Murder one of the darkest, grisly 1930s mysteries and Sandra the most deserving character to have a dagger shoved down her gullet. A monster without the excuse of being an actual monster.

Samuel Ratchett from The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) by Agatha Christie

I'm sure many feel about Samuel Ratchett, an alias of Cassetti, the way I feel about Sandra and holds a similar "vintage victim" position as Charles Augustus Milverton. Samuel Ratchett, an American businessman, traveling on the Orient Express asks fellow passenger and sleuth extraordinaire, Hercule Poirot, to be his bodyguard. Poirot turns him down and after a restless night on the Istanbul-Callais coach, Ratchett is found covered with stab wounds in his berth. Poirot quickly figures out Ratchett's real identity and the shocking crime he has been running away from. Leave it to Christie to exploit the "murderable victim" trope up to the hilt to create its most infamous example.

Quentin Trowte from The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) by Christopher Bush

The reprint renaissance has, over the past ten years, unearthed several new names for this list and Quentin Trowte immediately stood out when I read The Case of the Missing Minutes back in 2018. An elderly, psychological sadist who has custody of his 10-year-old granddaughter and they live together in a dark, remote house – where she's home schooled and sleeps in a windowless bedroom. When the servants in their cottage hear screams comings from the house at night, Ludovic Travers goes out to investigate. Travers not only finds a dying Trowte, stabbed in the back, but a frightened, malnourished child with evidence something disturbing had been going on at night in that house. Quentin Trowte and Mary Gregor would be a match made in hell or a child's nightmare.

Miss Octavia Osborne from Murder in the Family (1936) by James Ronald

I was tempted to drop Miss Octavia Osborne in favor of Paul A. Moxon and Sydney Deeping (Freeman Wills Crofts' The Mystery on the Channel, 1931) or Jesse Grimsby (Bruce Elliott's You'll Die Laughing, 1945), but they felt too like filler entries. Miss Octavia Osborne almost feels harmless compared to the previous entries, however, I noted in my review she establishes herself as top 10 material for most murderable victim in a detective story. Someone who's described by her youngest relatives as an acid-tongued, sniffy-nosed old megalomaniac who takes great pleasure in nurturing grudges over years and even decades. She takes even greater pleasure in turning down her brother, who married against her wishes, when he's let go from his job. So needs money to carry over his family, until he finds a new position. Now turning someone down is one thing, but Miss Octavia does it by inflicting as much damage as possible to point where you'd think she's baiting her family in taking a swing at her. Again, not the worst offender on the list, but thought at the time she deserved to make the cut.

Battery Sergeant-major William George Yule from Subject—Murder (1945) by Clifford Witting

You would assume the worst character in World War II detective novel would be found on the Axis side, but Battery Sergeant-major William George Yule, “Cruel Yule” to his enemies, abuses his position at a training camp to abuse and bully everyone below him – physically and mentally. Some of his victims were transferred or demoted while others have committed suicide. Not even animals were sparred his tortures. A sadistic bully of the first water whose end comes with “the harsh, brutal justice of the Dark Ages” executed with all the ingenuity of the Golden Age detective story. Brutal enough for a ping of pity even for character like Yule. Very much deserving of his spot in this rogues' gallery.

 

You know what, maybe I should have just done a top 10 favorite hybrid mysteries instead of holding a beauty pageant for corpses. This was a terrible idea, Scott. No idea why you bothered suggesting it. ;)

Notes for the curious: I didn't want to clutter up and derail this list with the first entry, but "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" feels like it could have been written by Doyle's brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung. If Hornung had written it, the story would have ended a little differently. Raffles and Bunny would have stepped over Milverton's body, pocketed the table silver and send a complimentary bouquet of flowers to a certain woman the next day.