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!