Black Run (2021) by D.L. Marshall

D.L. Marshall's Anthrax Island (2021) was one of last year's standouts, a hybridization of the action thriller, espionage and the classically-styled detective story, which introduced his lead-character, John Tyler – a sort of black opts mercenary. Anthrax Island takes him to Gruinard Island where experiments were carried out to weaponize anthrax spores during the Second World War that had rendered the island inhospitable for humans and animals alike. Only pocket of habitability is a sealed research outpost. A small cluster of ten, bright orange cabins on stilts forming a U shape and connected by narrow, plastic tunnels. Tyler is dispatched to the island to help the scientific research team trapped inside the base, but claustrophobic setting and post-apocalyptic aesthetics soon become the backdrop for a good, old-fashioned locked room murder.

Normally, the book cover of Anthrax Island would have been enough to never give the book or author a second glance as it screamed out everything that makes the modern thriller so unappealing to me. I would never haven given it a shot, if Steve Barge had not praised it as "one of the best modern mysteries" and picked it as his 2021 Book of the Year. Toss in an impossible crime and you grabbed my attention. And he was not wrong. Marshall wrote an immersive thriller that worked equally well as a locked room mystery and the quarantined setting, deadly contagion and even a Russian treat makes it the mystery-thriller encapsulating the early 2020s. I'm sure genre historians of the future will have a field day with Marshall's Anthrax Island. So it easily secured a place on this blog's yearly roundup of 2022 as well as an eventual place on "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Whenever I'll get around to updating it again.

Steve also reviewed the John Tyler novel, Black Run (2021), praising it as an "absolute top-draw twisty thriller" and very exciting read, but admitted the locked room ("...the room is very, very locked") murder "seemed more of an afterthought" – which is not the reason why I hesitated to immediately pick it up. I like detective stories that use a strong, evocative and perhaps even unique settings dripping with atmosphere to full effect. Black Run has a pretty tall wave to climb in order to live up to its predecessor. Honestly, I was a little skeptical if this second title could pull it off. But was I right? Well, let's find out!

Marshall's Black Run reads like a novelization of a bullet pumping, blood spurting 1980s style action movie switches back and forth between different timelines of the same story.

Firstly, John Tyler is hired to extract (i.e. kidnap) a target ("a traitorous, murdering scumbag") from the French Alps and transport him back to England, but the target surrounds himself with armed bodyguards. These interspersed chapters tell the story of how Tyler eventually captures the target and countdown to the current, second-half of the story ("Twelve days previously," "Eleven days previously," etc). Secondly, the second-half of the story concerns with the transportation of the target to England and the troublesome, blood-drenched voyage to reach that safe harbor. Tyler goes to an old contact, Captain Miller, who smuggles "pretty much anything else UPS won't carry" on his old, rusty Cold War era transport ship. Tiburon is undeniably a great setting. A dark, grimy old ship with passageways of "damp, dimly lit tunnels of pipes and metal" and "faded Nineties neon paint ran down the walls" like "a ghost train of badly painted Simpsons characters and Sharpied quotes in German" – strange, otherworldly looking "in the flickering light and red emergency lighting." Just one problem: Captain Miller does not smuggle people. So when the crew of modern-day pirates discover Tyler's team brought a captive aboard and somebody issues a one million euro bounty on their “cargo,” the proverbial shit starts hitting the fan... hard. The bodies begin to drop fast and hard in both narratives, but the one of importance is the murder of Tyler prisoner under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Tyler stowed away his prisoner in the old center tank, tied to a chair and a sack over his head, right beneath his cabin. The hatch is the only entrance to the sealed tomb below and covered by a bed, which had to be moved aside to open the hatch. Tyler also put a smartwatch on the prisoner to monitor his heartbeat, but, when he notices on his app that the prisoner's heartbeat has flatlined, he goes inside the sealed room. And finds a body with a knife sticking out of his chest! The data from the smartwatch eventually hands him incontestable proof someone had stabbed his prisoner while he "was lying across the only entrance."

A good, neatly posed locked room problem and liked how it incorporated the evidence of the smartwatch and heartbeat monitor, but the solution to how it was done is immediately obvious. This is the kind of locked room-trick that once you know how it was done, you'll know who did it and probably why as there's only way to do it under the given circumstances. And the main principle behind the trick is almost as old as the genre itself. Not so long ago, I reviewed a mystery with a very similar locked room setup and trick. However, it's something that will only somewhat bother people on deeply entrenched on this side of the fandom rather than those who want to read a nail-biting, action packed thriller. So probably a good decision to treat the locked room here as a minor side-puzzle as it would not have carried the plot. I still appreciated the locked room mystery got to play a small part in what is essentially a hard thriller. Even if the bit part is that of a simple stowaway.

At this point, I began to fear there was nothing left to discuss as the past and present narratives is a twisted thriller crammed with double-crosses, counter-plots, shootouts and Michael Slade levels of gruesome violence – leaving little doubt Tyler is a little more than a morally ambiguous mercenary. Then the story did something that caught me by surprise as it concerns something I tend to dismiss in detective stories.

I've mentioned before how kidnap stories lend themselves poorly to any type of traditional detective story and, to my knowledge, has never produced a classic or writer whose name became synonymous with it. There have been some halfhearted attempts and Gosho Aoyama tries his hands at one every now and then in the Case Closed series with varying degrees of success (e.g. vol. 72), but never a genuine masterpiece like there have been with locked rooms, dying messages, multiple-solutions and least-likely-suspects. It's always a sub-plot or complication to the larger plot. So why expected anything more from a thriller? Well, Black Run might have actually accomplished the impossible by delivering a great, nigh classic, kidnap tale 182 years after Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story by placing a spare heart of the horror genre underneath the floorboards of the locked room in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). Yes, it was stuffed deep within a modern, heavily leaded thriller, but the end dovetailed everything from the two narratives together to great effect. And since the series has one foot firmly in the traditionalists camp with its impossible murders, isolated locations and surprise twists, it counts as a detective story as well. Parts of it anyway. More importantly, it narrowed

And while hidden deep inside a heavily leaded thriller, it beautifully dovetailed everything from the two narratives together. Yes, it was stuffed deeply within a heavily leaded thriller, but, since the series has one foot firmly in the traditionalists camp with its impossible murders and surprise twists, it counts. More importantly, it narrowed what appeared to be a large, yawning gap between Anthrax Island and Black Run. Not quite there on the same level as Anthrax Island, but it pulled through in the end and left me excited to see in what kind of godforsaken hellhole Tyler ends up next. So much can be done with the premise of mystery-thrillers in dangerous, isolated locations. I can imagine Tyler getting locked up in some outpost prison with a serial killer who leaves bodies in locked cells or having to provide protection to an archaeological excavation that comes under siege. Either way, a third Tyler novel is apparently in the work and my basic pattern recognition tells me the title will probably begin with a C (Close Quarters?).

So to cut this long, quasi-coherent ramble short, I recommend starting with Anthrax Island before tackling Black Run, but, let the reader be warned, the latter depicts death and violence with all the subtlety of an old LiveLeak video. Up next... returning to the Golden Age with my favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr.