The Sentry-Box Murder (1935) by Newton Gayle

"Newton Gayle," a pseudonym, was a partnership of strange bedfellows between Muna Lee and Maurice Guinness, a human rights activist and an oil executive, who collaborated on five detective novels about Jim Greer and Robin Underwood – a British detective and his Dr. Watson. Their stint as detective novelists lasted from 1935 to '38 during which they produced a short-lived, colorful series detective novels tied to the regional mysteries of Todd Downing, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield.

Lee was a long-time resident of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who lived there from the early 1920s until her death in 1965 and was married to the man who would become Puerto Rico's first governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. Guinness was a Shell Oil executive stationed in Puerto Rico. So the island was the stage of two of their novels. Murder at 28:10 (1936) takes place during a hurricane and perhaps "the only crime novel to feature a series of barometric charts." The other is The Sentry-Box Murder (1935), alternatively published as Murder in the Haunted Sentry Box, which is also their best-known novel despite being as long out-of-print, little read as the other four titles in the series. Getting listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) always helps keeping total obscurity at bay.

The Sentry-Box Murder begins on the Calypso, Lord Dampier's ship, which has to make a stopover in Puerto Rico to replenish their fuel supply. Jim Greer and Robin Underwood are on holiday aboard the Calypso, following their "final triumph in solving the O'Donnell Formula mystery," which is where Dick and Cay Piper live – old friends of Underwood. Piper works as an agent for the Canadian-Caribbean company. A job consisting "mostly in herding a lot of tourists round" and "making them happy" ("...requires more tact, diplomacy, and ingenuity than Foreign Service ever did"). Their arrival coincides with Piper having to entertain a VIP party headed by a powerful US senator, John Monarch, who brought along an entourage. Monarch's wife and former actress, Melita Avery, his nephew Elmery Coulton ("...a queer duck") and the lawyer Fergus McKelvie. The party is rounded out by Blaise Grassington, public utilities magnate, and Stella Tophet ("...she's indescribable"). So part of the entertainment for tourists is a treasure hunt at the historic fortress of El Morro with its haunted sentry-box. Piper invites Greer and Underwood to join the treasure hunt, but the outsiders notice Monarch is as powerful a figure as he's unpopular. Suspect "there might develop considerable drama not on Dick's program." They proved to be correct.

During the treasure hunt, Coulton discovers Monarch's body inside the sentry-box with a bullet between his eyes! Shot at close range, indicating the killer was in the sentry-box with him, but two sentries standing guard kept a constant eye on the box and only saw Monarch go inside. And no gun found inside the box! So how did the killer manage to shoot him when nobody could have gone in, or out, without being seen by the guards?

This naturally all smacks of John Dickson Carr or Hake Talbot. A brief history tells of two haunted sentry-boxes on the island "supposed to be the special domain of the Devil." One of the boxes, one at San Cristóbal, makes people vanish without a trace, while this one at El Morro kills people. So basically a classic room-that-kills and it's mentioned Monarch, an Irish-American, has a banshee in the family. However, the supernatural frills are just that, frills and background decoration. Nothing is done with it. So to present it as anything even remotely Carr-like or an ancestor of Talbot would be misleading. If the writing duo of Lee and Guinness modeled their work on anyone, it probably was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the American mystery writers of the day such as S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen.

Jim Greer and his narrator, Underwood, give the story a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson vibe, but that's because Underwood is more like a Dr. Watson than Greer is a Sherlock Holmes. Greer simply is another attempt to imitate, improve and maybe try to humanize the Philo Vance type of detective character – which was done here with various degree of success. Greer is certainly a fun enough detective, sneaking and sleuthing in the background, obsessing over nebulous clues and minor matters. Like a packet of soiled shirts left in the bushes, scribbles on a cuff, whispered threats of revenge and fretting over the disharmonious array of motives ("where's revenge!"). Like I said, a fun enough character who fulfills his duties as Great Detective, but ultimately a fairly paint-by-numbers detective character. You can honestly say that about most of the characters and plot. Funnily enough, that's where the book's greatest strength shines the brightest.

I think the greatest accomplishment here is how the authors trotted out a cartload of old, recycled ideas, tropes and cliches and somehow made it feel like a fresh treatment. Not just because of its colorful backdrop by staging a murder during a treasure hunt in "an old Spanish castle on a tropical island." For example, the solution to the impossible shooting of Monarch in the sentry-box dates back to (SPOILER/ROT13) Qblyr'f fubeg fgbel “Gur Ceboyrz bs Gube Oevqtr” (oryvrir vg jnf hfrq va n Cuvyb Inapr abiry) and has been used way too often as a cheap, rage-inducing cop out explanation for various impossible crime stories with vgf fhvpvqr-qvfthvfrq-zheqre tbgpun. But here it was used to disguise a murder as an impossible murder. Yeah, that part falls a little flat without playing up the supernatural part, but liked how it was integrated with the treasure hunt and appreciated it tried to do something good with an otherwise terrible idea. That and not getting another fhvpvqr-qvfthvfrq-nf-zheqre fbyhgvba. Another thing done very well was how Greer worked towards a neatly posed false-solution, but, as to be expected, the correct solution underwhelms. Worse even, it betrays the authors hadn't played quite as fear with their readers as the list of clues would suggest.

That there's always a "but" is what keeps Gayle's The Sentry-Box Murder from a place in the first-ranks of 1930s mystery novels, but, to give it a positive bend, it's a solid second-stringer. Remember a second-stringer is not the same as a second-rate mystery. The Sentry-Box Murder is not second-rate, but misses the rigor and finesse of a truly first-rate mystery. Just a solid second-stringer that some probably wish had been more like Carr or Talbot. If you want an alternative take, Pietro De Palma, of Death Can Read, reviewed The Sentry-Box Murder in 2022 and called it a "beautiful novel from the golden age of mystery!"

Notes for the curious: to be fair to Lee and Guinness, they appear to have improved from book to book. Their first, Death Follows a Formula, also seems to be their worst with the detection being drowned out by lectures on oil manufacturing and economics. So, if that's true, The Sentry-Box Murder stands as a marvelous improvement. Martin Edwards reviewed Murder at 28:10, praising the building of tension and its sound plot, but thought the characterization was flimsily. Edwards also reviewed Sinister Crag (1938), "appealing and atmospheric," which is the last in the series. Death in the Glass (1937) has not been reviewed recently, but contemporary reviews appear to have been mixed. One calling the book a smooth, well done, but average, mystery and the other it had to odor of "desperate originality" about it. So maybe they relapsed in that one, but their partnership seemed to have ended when they started to get it down. I suppose Guinness was called away from Puerto Rico, because he returned decades later with three solo-thrillers, Man in Danger (1961), Man on the Run (1962) and Man Against Fear (1966), published as by "Mike Brewer."

Best Served Cold: Case Closed, vol. 96 by Gosho Aoyama

This is probably going to be a slightly shorter review than usual, because Gosho Aoyama's 96th volume of Case Closed only has one completed story, book-ended by the conclusion and setup to stories from the previous and next volume – which doesn't make for a great reading experience. Ho-Ling Wong noted the same problem in his 2019 review of vol. 96 ("...one of the worst volumes of the last decade or so"). The reader has been warned!

So this volume begins with the conclusion of the "The Female Officer Serial Murders" setup in the last two chapters of the previous volume. Normally, that's done in the opening chapter, but there three more chapters. Had it been tidied up in one, or two, chapters it would have been like any other volume in the series with one conclusion and two complete stories. Maybe even a one-chapter setup for the opening story of the next volume, but I'm padding now.

Yumi Miyamoto and Neako Miike, officer of the traffic department, get drag into the case when two of their colleagues are murdered. First victim was Sergeant Momosaki, found in a park, who "used her last moments to point at a swing set" as a dying message and killer struck again later that same day – throwing Lieutenant Shiori Yagi out of a building. She also used her last moments to give her colleagues a clue to the killer. But the killer left a calling card behind at both crime scenes: a bent 200-yen coin that has a depiction of cherry blossom ("...emblem of the Japanese police") engraved on it. So the murderer obviously has it out for female officers of the traffic department. There are three suspects who were involved in traffic incident, days before the murders, during which they had a heated argument with several female traffic officers. So pretty much one of those familiar who-of-the-three stories, but disliked how very similar, somewhat specific motive was tacked on all three suspects. On the other hand, I liked the idea how every cop in trouble, whether they died or survived, tried to transfer information to their colleagues in the form of a dying message. The meaning behind those dying messages form a pleasing thematic pattern, but an idea that needed a better, longer treatment than it received here. By the way, this story also provides a resolution for the Detective Chiba and Neako Miike story-arc going all the way back to vol. 75.

The first, only complete story in this volume is a self-parody of the Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner feud between Jirokichi Sebastian and Kaito KID. I started out as a big fan of Jirokichi trying to ensnare KID with his elaborate, expensively baited and widely publicized traps. Their first few duels from volumes 44 and 61 were series highlights, but suppose they were hard acts to follow as their last few encounters have been a little underwhelming. So not a bad decision to go for a self-parody, because it would have been worst Jirokichi/KID caper to date. Jirokichi has new bait to tempt the KID, the Fairy's Lip, "one of the biggest conch pearls in the world," but how to present and protect it poses a problem. Fortunately, a familiar face turns up, Inspector Takaaki Morofushi, who advises to have the conch pearl exhibited frozen inside a block of ice and placed in a guarded, makeshift room of tempered glass. And some other high tech precautions that should prevent KID from getting out of the glass room with the pearl.

So far, a fairly typical setup for a Kaito KID caper, but this time you get to see KID at work and he's not disguised as Inspector Takaaki Morofushi. KID has hidden himself among the guards posted around the glass room with the block of ice, but is having second thoughts when notices "those two sleuths," Conan and Harley, "plus a cop who's not a total dummy," but an incident makes him decides to go ahead with the heist. From the start, KID is nearly caught out, but things get farcical when he takes the place of someone in Conan and Harley's group. You can see one scene coming from that very moment and this gag, sadly enough, carries the story. KID steals the ring and solution is OK-ish, but still no idea how he could have pulled it off, under those circumstances, within ten minutes. So fun enough, but nothing more than that.

The last story begins with Conan, Rachel, Sera, Serena and her boyfriend, Makoto, coming out of the theater having just watched The Avengers The Amazers movie when they stumble into a hostage situation. Makoto, a karate champion, jumps to the rescue only to discover he interrupted a shoot for the TV series 48 Detectives. And the gun toting criminal he kicked into next week was a stuntman. So now they need a stuntman and they immediately see potential in the karate champion, but Makoto's stint as a stand-in stuntman ends with two murders on set. And, according to tradition, will be concluded in the next volume.

So not much to say, except Sera trying to pry the truth out of Conan and even asks Rachel if she's ever seen Conan and Jimmy together. Very much to her surprise, Rachel tells Sera how Conan went to a school play Jimmy was in ("...Jimmy solved a mystery during the play, while the brat sat in the audience pouting"). I believe this is a reference to a story not reviewed on this blog and barely remember it, but how it's describe here makes it sound like a hilarious case of bi-location in close proximity, especially from Sera's perspective – who's convinced Conan is Jimmy ("...Conan and I picked Jimmy up from his house the next morning").

There's not much else to say about this volume, except how this series structures its serialized chapters and volumes worked against it. I simply recommend everyone reading this in the near of distant future to read volumes 95, 96 and 97 without big gaps of time between them.

My Grandfather, the Master Detective (2023) by Masateru Konishi

Masateru Konishi, a TV and radio writer, debuted as a novelist in 2023 with Meitantei no mama de ite, vol. I (Stay a Great Detective), retitled in English to My Grandfather, the Master Detective, which is partly based on the author's "own experience of caring for his father with dementia" – netted the book the 21st "This Mystery is Amazing!" Grand Prize. Last year, the English edition of Konishi's My Grandfather, the Master Detective, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, was published by Macmillan. And, from what I gleaned, this series is a trilogy with the title of the last volume suggesting a definitive ending. So assume a translation of the second title in the series will be published later this year.

My Grandfather, the Master Detective is an interconnected collection of short stories, some
would probably call it an episodic novel, of six chapters (or short stories) about 27-year-old school teacher Kaede and her grandfather. Kaede's grandfather is a retired school principal, born storyteller and an avid reader diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia. Even when struggling with dementia, Grandfather is one hell of an armchair detective during his better, lucid moments.

So the first chapter, "Those Little Scarlet Cells," is an introduction to Kaede, Grandfather and how they try to cope with his diagnosis. Dementia with Lewy Bodies, "the third dementia," which are "tiny, fried-egg-shaped crimson structures" found on the brains and brain stems of patients causing Parkinson's symptoms, hypersomnia, spatial recognition impairment and very vivid visual hallucinations. Grandfather is not only an avid reader, but, back in the 1970s, he was a core member of the Waseda Mystery Club, a university club, who met at cafe Mon Chéri to "froth in excitement over the latest mystery novels" – meetings that would "produce a whole slew of famous mystery writers and critics." Ever since her grandfather's diagnosis, Kaede has become something of a mystery magnet and brings the puzzling mysteries, big and small, to her grandfather to help keep his mind deteriorating too fast ("...mystery was the best medicine for her grandfather"). As her Grandfather says, "Hercule Poirot is always talking about his 'little grey cells,'" but "in my case, due to the reddish-orange appearance of those Lewy bodies scattered throughout my brain, I have 'little scarlet cells.'" Their armchair sessions aren't only to discuss mysteries and puzzles, but simply for Kaede to spend time with her grandfather.

The first real case is the second, promising titled story, "The Izakaya Locked Room Murder Mystery," which also introduces two recurring characters, Iwata and Shiki.

Iwata is a male colleague Kaede and Shiki one of his high school friends who recently got involved in an actual impossible murder. Shiki was visiting a small, intimate sports bar to watch the football match, soccer for you Americans, between Japan and Saudi Arabia with his group occupying one of the two tables. When one of his friends gets up to go the toilets, supposedly free, he finds it locked, blood seeping out from under the toilet door and when looking over the top of the door sees the body of shaved, tattooed and pierced man sitting on the seat – "a knife-like object sticking out of his back." This is murder poses a double impossibility as nobody had seen the victim enter the bar and the toilet supposedly unoccupied, which means "the victim had to suddenly appear in the toilet and the killer to vanish" without being seen. Kaede decides to bring this locked room problem to her grandfather who, between drags from a cigarette, beautifully reasons two linked solutions: an incomplete, false-solution and a complete correct one. But was even more impressed with Konishi creating an impossible crime without any actual locked room-trickery. So, needless to say, "The Izakaya Locked Room Murder Mystery" is my favorite part, but it's the characters, all of them, whom drive the plot and story. Not the baffling impossible murder. That's true of all the stories, although a good locked room is always appreciated.

In the next story, "The Vanishing Person at the Pool," Kaede attends a reunion lunch of her old university class where she hears about a strange, inexplicable incident that happened at her grandfather's old school. A new, young teacher, only referred to as Madonna-sensei, vanished as if by magic in front of the children of her swimming class. When the lesson ended, Madonna-sensei blew her whistle to signal the class the get out of the pool and head for the showers, but, after the pool emptied, the children heard a splash behind them. So they assumed Madonna-sensei was taking a quick swim and, "kids being kids, they started complaining that Sensei was having all the fun." However, she didn't came back to the surface or climbed out of the pool. She had simply vanished as if the water had dissolved her! Kaede, of course, brings this mystery to her grandfather. Now the solution to the impossible disappearance is decent enough, not great but decent, but the reason why she had disappear and who had a hand in became a little too rich. This whole story reminded me of one of those ropey episodes from Jonathan Creek like No Trace of Tracy (1997) and The Curious Tale of Mr. Spearfish (1999).

Fortunately, the third story, "They Were Thirty-Three," is a better story despite being half the length of the other stories. Kaede is worried about signs that her grandfather is on the decline. So she tells him about an incident from her own classroom. She was teaching a sixth grade class that has an unusual trio, two boys and a girl, whom she compared to Harry, Ron and Hermione from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series – an inseparable trio always at the center of attention. One day, Harry shared a scary story in class about a crying ghost girl connected to a WWII air-raid shelter that used to stand on spot of the classroom. Kaede immediately put an end to the scary stories and started the English conversation lesson, during which they're not allowed to speak Japanese, but they heard someone say in Japanese, "lonely and tearful." But nobody could have spoken those words! So was it the ghost girl or someone else, but the main question remains "how a thirty-third suddenly turned up in a class of thirty-two." A very well done riddle in story form with clues hidden in both the outline of the problem and the floor plan of the classroom.

The last two stories, "The Phantom Lady" and "The Riddle of the Stalker," are connected as the first introduces a problem, Kaede's stalker, that will be resolved in the last story. "The Phantom Lady" has another, rather pressing, case needing a brilliant armchair detective first. On an early Saturday morning, Iwata is jogging along the riverside when he witnesses a struggle between two men under the bridge. One man leaves the other man seriously wounded and unconscious with a knife in his stomach, which leads the police to arrest and incarcerate Iwata on suspicion of assault and attempted murder. Only witness, a woman power-walker in a hoodie, is nowhere to be found. Kaede and Shiki come to the rescue of their friend, but the witness has not only vanished. She doesn't even appear to have existed at all! They had seen the woman in hoodie on their previous jog through the area and assumed she's a regular of the route, but other regulars don't remember ever having seen a woman power-walker in a hoodie along the riverside route. Just like the other stories, there are many literary references to other phantom person stories like Cornell Woolrich's Phantom Lady (1941), John Dickson Carr's radio-play "Cabin B-13" (1943) and the 1800s urban legend of the vanishing lady at the Paris Exposition, but not Basil Thomson's short story "The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser" (1925) collected in Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2025). I think Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Leather Man" (1992) warrants a mention as not only a great take on the phantom person device, but the episode from the Furuhata Ninzaburo series described here sounds very similar to Hoch's story. Anyway, this is not bad take on the phantom person and how the woman in a hoodie faded out of existence and unwilling to come forward.

On a side note, "The Phantom Lady" begins with an interesting discussion between Kaede and Shiki when Iwata interjects with his "Pro-Wrestling and Mystery Equivalence Theory" stating "pro-wrestling and mysteries have a lot in common." What follows is a fun, brief discussion going from Iwata's shallow comparisons ("wrestlers with mystery-related nicknames...") to Shiki pointing out their commonalities when it comes dramatics ("all these storylines converge perfectly at the final match in the grand arena"). Personally, I've always been baffled that something as American as pro-wrestling never was the subject of a vintage sports mystery novel or even thriller. Just that one short story by Craig Rice. That as an aside.

My Grandfather, the Master Detective concludes with "The Riddle of the Stalker" bringing everything, and everyone, together, but can't say much about it except to expect a modern rendition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dying Detective" (1913). But with an actual dying detective. And it makes you really root for grandfather as he has to take on both his granddaughter's stalker and his dementia. A very well written conclusion to round out this first volume.

First of all, this review mainly focused on the plots, but the stories making up My Grandfather, the Master Detective are mainly character-driven mysteries – even when they involve locked rooms or diagrams. Not only Kaede and her grandfather, but everyone around them. From her friends to the team of caregivers surrounding her grandfather. And, of course, the people involved in the various cases and problems. They all reminded me of the mysteries-with-a-heart from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series, where people are the metaphorical pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together to get the complete and correct picture, whether it be a locked room murder or ghostly chatter in a classroom. Add to this the relationship between a granddaughter and a doting grandfather struggling with his dementia, you have something very different from what I expected when this translation was announced as forthcoming. I expected a Japanese take on James Yaffe's "My Mother, the Detective" series, but Masateru Konishi delivered something entirely different with My Grandfather, the Master Detective. Not in the least for creating a memorable armchair detective and an even better pair of detectives & co! So a warm recommendation and hopefully Louise Heal Kawai gets to translate the second and last book in the series. Fingers crossed!

Invitation to Murder (1953) by Ab Visser

Ab Visser was a Dutch writer, editor, critic, reviewer, poet and a tireless advocate of the Dutch detective story, who tried to position himself as the Frederic Dannay of the Low Countries, but not with the same rate of success as his American counterpart – not even remotely close. Between the late 1960s and early '80s, Visser launched two ill-fated, short-lived magazines, Pulp and Plot, that lasted only a handful of issues. During the early '60s, Visser took on the editorship of an ambitious project, "Zodiac Mysteries," which would have consisted of twelve, zodiac-themed detective novels from a dozen different writers. But for some reason, the project was abandoned after the eighth novel was published. At least we got Ton Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) out of it!

Another problem is that Visser was more active as a mystery critic, editor and reviewer than writing actual mystery and detective novels. Visser wrote a couple of crime thrillers like De samenzwering (The Conspiracy, 1965), De kat en de rat (The Cat and the Rat, 1967), Het kind van de rekening (The Child Who Paid the Price, 1969) and the short story collection De chanteur (The Blackmailer, 1970). Only one true, classically-styled detective novel.

Visser submitted Uitnodiging tot moord (Invitation to Murder, 1953) to the detective story competition, organized by A.W. Bruna & Zoon, but the first prize went to, what's considered today, the first homegrown hardboiled thriller, Parels voor Nadra (Pearls for Nadra, 1953) – penned by journalist Joop van den Broek. Eline Capit came in second with De Wolven en de schapen (The Wolves and the Sheep, 1953) and was published in America two years later under the title Run from the Sheep. Third place unaccountably was awarded to Bob van Oyen's terrible Na afloop moord (Afterwards, Murder, 1953). Visser's Invitation to Murder won one, of four, consolation prizes alongside Madzy Ford's De speurder zoekt een spook (The Sleuth in Search of a Ghost, 1953), Bert Japin's Stenen voor brood (Stones for Bread, 1953) and Josine Reuling's Poeder en parels (Powder and Pearls, 1953). So a Dutch detective story competition is won by a hardboiled thriller, a crime comedy and something amounting to an anti-detective story. I swear, this country is as hostile an environment to the traditional detective story as Mars is to Earth life.

Invitation to Murder got published and reprinted in the 1953 Bruna omnibus together with the Ford and Japin novels, before it dropped into obscurity for the next thirty years. A year before his death, Visser edited the anthology 3 klassieken uit de Nederlandse misdaad literatuur (3 Classics from Dutch Crime Literature, 1981) and placed Invitation to Murder among the classics. If you're wondering, the other two classics are August Defresne's Moord (Murder, 1931) and Ben van Eysselsteijn's Romance in F-Dur (1934). Not that it helped either the book or its author as both were forgotten again when Visser died in 1982.

So why did I mark Visser's Invitation to Murder down as a Dutch detective novel of potential interest on these shaky credentials? Visser reportedly wrote it as an homage and parody of Agatha Christie with nursery rhymes as a leitmotiv for murder. I thought that sounded like a fun, harmless mystery and a safer bet than usually, considering how I normally go about trying to find good, old-fashioned Dutch detective fiction. Let's find out how it panned out.

Maarten Roesink is a poor, struggling and unrecognized poet with an estranged girlfriend, piles of unpaid bills and an unfinished novel, but nothing to the detriment of his ego, sense of self-importance or that of his poetry – which he blamed on the public ("...a monstrosity of bad taste"). That helped to make him decide to accept the invitation from his aunt, Ina Roesink, to stay with her so he can work on his novel and poetry in peace. Since his landlady is pressing him for rent and his stepfather is talking about getting him a decent office job, Maarten decides to accept his aunt's invitation ("...she may be a cultural barbarian, but she has money..."). So packs a suitcase, borrows some money and travels to Aunt Ida's home, Villa Lucie, in the village of Drechteroord in Gelderland. When he arrives, something is not quite right.

Maarten is greeted by the newly hired housekeeper, Miss Mieke Kremer, who had neither been informed about him or the other guests ("...I seem to have ended up in a boarding house"). There are five other guests: Christiaan and Tine Henkelmans with their two children, twenty-year-old Hortense and eighteen-year-old Eddie. Mrs. Maud de Groot, elderly widow, who's Aunt Ina's oldest friend. Aunt Ina herself is nowhere to be found and no one knows where she or what happened to her. Maarten has to cycle down to the village to file a missing person's report, but is spending the next day bumming cigarettes, trying to borrow money and planning to return home. Only for Aunt Ina to turn up dead as a door nail. She's found inside a kitchen chest, hit over the head, before it was tightly nailed shut.

That brings the police to the villa, represented by Inspector Wietse Dijkstra, who's your typical, anchored to earth Dutch policeman which Visser punctuated by making Dijkstra a Frisian ("...his accent betrayed the Frisian, who speaks Dutch with difficulty"). What follows is largely a paint by numbers investigation revealing the victim was far from a sainted figure to her family and friends. Dijkstra more than once "would swear that all the guests entered into a conspiracy to murder Miss Roesink," because everyone has a motive, they're lying about something and nary an alibi to be found. However, I liked Dijkstra's quick, rapid fire Q&A with all seven suspects as opposed to the usual "dragging the Marsh." I also should mention that the stay at the villa and the death of his aunt starts an unexpected maturing process in the otherwise egocentric poet. Maarten today would have been accused of suffering from main character syndrome, but what if such person suddenly finds himself "not only an heir and witness, but also, and perhaps primarily, a suspect" in a sensational murder case? So slowly, but surely, a change comes over Maarten between the moment his aunt's body is discovered and Dijkstra hits upon the solution.

So we arrive at the most exciting, nerve-wrecking point in any Dutch vintage mystery: the solution. Is it going to hold itself together to deliver at least a fairly decent conclusion, underwhelm or completely fall apart? Good news, bad news. The good news is Visser, stylistically, remained consistent and a breeze to read, but ended bitterly disappointing. You can argue the only real crime happened towards the end, when Visser knifed his own story and let it bleed out over its last two chapters. I can only explain it by giving the solution (SPOILER/ROT13): Nhag Van jnagrq gb rzcgl bhg gur xvgpura purfg jura gur yvq qebccrq ba ure urnq, genccvat ure vafvqr frevbhfyl vawherq naq hapbafpvbhf. Fur unq nfxrq gur ivyyntr pnecragre, n qehax, gb pbzr bire naq anvy gur purfg fuhg, juvpu ur qvq jvgubhg ybbxvat vafvqr. Fb na nppvqrag gung ybbxrq yvxr zheqre ol hayvxryl pvephzfgnaprf. Invitation to Murder is basically one of those detective novels walking back its entire premise and the whole story itself into one big, blood-red herring. Something like that can absolutely be done, and successfully, but not it was executed here as it only leaves you with the feeling you just wasted your time – someone with Visser's credentials should have known better. Even more so thirty years later, when he inserted it into the 3 Classics from Dutch Crime Literature anthology.

I really wanted to like Invitation to Murder and silently rooted for Visser to carry the story and plot pass the finish line, but the end result is not the stuff of classics. Far from it. I would have been perfectly happy with a serviceable mystery. So my search for another Cor Docter or Ton Vervoort continues and hope you me on my next wandering through the post-apocalyptic landscape of the Dutch detective story.

Above Suspicion (1922/23) by Robert Orr Chipperfield

Several years ago, I reviewed the "Otto Penzler's Locked Room Library" reprint edition of The Clue in the Air (1917) by Isabel Ostrander, a pre-Van Dinean pioneer of the American detective story, whose detective fiction can be described as premonitions of the coming Golden Age – lacking only in finesse. Nick Fuller said it perhaps best, "impressive because it is ahead of its time, disappointing because fair play is still in the future." A comment made in reference to Ostrander's second McCarty and Riordan novel, The 26 Clues (1919), but also perfectly describes and sums up The Clue in the Air. Ostrander could have easily become the mother of the American detective story, a good decade before the publication of S.S. van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926), had she been a bit clairvoyant on top being farsighted.

Ostrander died young, aged 40, in 1924 and only got to witness the early dawn of the Golden Age, but not the rise of Van Dine and his followers. That probably makes her one of those legitimate "what-if" case had her health not been so bad and had lived another twenty, thirty years. So, while being mostly a historical footnote and genre curiosity today, I was still incredibly curious about one of her last detective novels, Above Suspicion (1922/23), published only a few years before her death.

Above Suspicion was first serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly, as by "Robert Orr Chipperfield," between November 11 and December 16, 1922 and published as a complete novel the next year. Above Suspicion is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) with a no-footprints impossibility. A no-footprints mystery, let alone a good one, were less common in the pre-1930s impossible crime genre. So why take a gamble on it? Adey's description of the impossible situation in combination with the book title and another scrap of information suggested a possible solution, but didn't want to thumb to the back of Locked Room Murders and potentially spoil a good, early and rare 1920s impossible crime novel – figuring it would turn up, somewhere, eventually. That happened last November.

Serling Lake reprinted Above Suspicion, under the Chipperfield name, as part of their "Impossible Crime Classics" series. I wasn't impressed with their first half dozen titles of mostly second-and third-rate pulp, like Joseph Gollomb's The Girl in the Fog (1923), but the selection began to improve with reprints of Elsa Barker, Henry Leverage and Charles Chadwick's The Moving House of Foscaldo (1925/26). At least, the reprints begin to get more interesting and the Chadwick reissue reeled me back in. So let's find out if Above Suspicion is another one of Ostrander's anachronistic genre curios or succeeds as an early, Golden Age detective novel.

Above Suspicion wastes no time by first introducing most of the main characters, setting the stage or even the mood, but begins with the discovery of the murder. Joseph Benkard, a Wall Street financier, is found dead next to a stone bench on the terrace of his sister's new, partially finished country house in Sunny Beach. Someone had struck him down from behind without leaving either a weapon or footprints on the recently sanded floor. It's unlikely the murderer smoothed out the tracks, because "the smoothin' out would show same as footprints" ("how'd he go?"). How this impossibility is laid out eliminates most of the routine and hack tricks for the no-footprints problem, but I'll get back to the impossible crime.

The problem of the footprints is only one, of three, standouts making Above Suspicion a noteworthy detective novel from the early 1920s. Other two are the detective and victim. Ostrander created one of the first blind detectives, Damon Gaunt, but here she introduces, what could be, one of the first working class detective, Geoff Peters – a stone mason working on finishing the house. A simple, down-to-earth man clad in dirty overalls and always seen mixing cement or puttering around. Contrary to tradition, Peters is a detective who tries not to stick his nose where it has no business being, "tain't any o' my business," but someone who's acutely aware of everything happening around him. Peters is the one who takes the initiative when the body is discovered by having the crime scene roped off and calls for the medical examiner. Doc Hood rates Peters highly as an amateur detective as helped the local police out on several murky murders ("you gave me some good ideas that helped a lot when Jim Hicks was found dead in the swamp and again when old Mrs. Beckley was murdered in her barn"). No idea if they're references to previous stories or merely apocryphal. Note that a policeman refers to Peters later in the story as that "hick Sherlock" from Sunny Beach.

So you get an amateur detective, clad in dirty overalls, snooping and eavesdropping between "doin' odd jobs round concrete and stucco." And, every now and then, puts on his Sunday suit and straw hat when needing to talk to people in town or at the bank. Pretty much the exact opposite of the American detectives who would start appearing over the following years like Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, Thatcher Colt and Nero Wolfe.

Joseph Benkard is not your typical, 1920s victim either. I mentioned in the past how bankers, financiers and stockbrokers took the torch from blackmailers as popular murder victims after the stock market crash of 1929, but Above Suspicion was a good eight years ahead of the curb – certainly in attitude. Benkard was known, not always for the right reasons, as "one of the most daring, brilliant speculators" and his past Wall Street shenanigans drives part of the plot. Having ruined more than one man and driven some of them to suicide, which has resulted in receiving threatening letters, twice a year, on the same dates. But there's also his domestic roguery involving trying to marry his niece to a shady friend/business enemy. And a young man who's very much opposed to those plans. Peters and Benkard perfectly complimented each other, as detective and victim, who elevated and added interest to what would otherwise have been a fairly routine investigation. That brings us to the surprising conclusion of Above Suspicion.

I mainly read this to see what Ostrander could do with the no-footprints scenario in 1922 without expecting too much from the who or why. I didn't even expect all that much from the no-footprints trick, because it was written in the early twenties. It's not a period when the locked room mystery and impossible crime blossomed. Just scratching that curiosity itch and crossing another locked room title from the impossible crime list. When I got to the penultimate chapter, it seemed like Above Suspicion was going to follow the pattern of The Clue in the Air and The 26 Clues. A detective story that in many ways feels ahead of its time, until it falls apart as a detective stories in the last chapter or chapters. Well, that didn't happen here!

In that penultimate chapter, the supposed murderer obligingly commits suicide and leaves behind a written confession, but the last, short chapter, "Geoff Minds His Own Business," Peters turns the official explanation into a false-solution – reveals an entirely different solution. A solution that comes with an entirely new take on how the murderer pulled off the footprints-trick, which is a far more involved trick than most of us would expect from 1922 mystery novel. I also thought it was a nice touch Ostrander used a real cliché of the detective story (ROT13: gur cevingr frpergnel qvq vg) as the story's false-solution. By the way, Adey wrote down the false-solution in Locked Room Murder, not the correct one given in the last chapter. This surprise solution comes with two caveats. Firstly, it can be debated how fairly clued the surprise solution really is. Secondly, the footprints-trick showed what story needed even more than clues was a floor plan and crime scene diagrams.

Smudges aside, Above Suspicion ended up being a better, more consistent and well-rounded detective novel than The Clue in the Air, helped by a memorable detective and original impossible crime. Not a flawless, perfectly polished detective novel, but a clear case of the pros outweighing the cons. So not just for genre scholars and impossible crime fiends!

Murder of a Matriarch (1936) by Hugh Austin

Hugh Austin, a true enigma, was a mystery writer about whom very little, or anything, is known and what's known doesn't always appear to be correct as he was an American, but according to his GADWiki he was British – complete with an incomplete bibliography. What can be said for certain is that Austin wrote nine detective novels featuring either his New York lawyer Wm Sultan or Lieutenant Peter Quint of the Homicide Bureau of the city of Hudson. And two, or three, standalone mystery novels.

They were well enough received at the time. Curt Evans, of The Passing Tramp, mentioned in his review of Austin's Murder of a Matriarch (1936) that Anthony Boucher called for the Peter Quint series to be reprinted in the 1960s, but "sadly no one has heeded that call even today." However, Coachwhip has reprinted the Wm Sultan novels, Drink the Green Water (1948) and The Milkmaid's Millions (1948), as a twofer and the non-series Death Has Seven Faces (1949). His six detective novels and locked room mysteries from the 1930s remain out-of-print. Robert Adey highlighted Austin's quartet of impossible crime novels ("all competent") in the introduction of Locked Room Murders (1991), under "More Golden Age Contributions," which uncharacteristically spoils the solution of Austin's The Upside Down Murders (1937). But then again, the impossibility in that one concerns the murderer's fingerprints that "do not match up to any of the suspects in a guarded area." So it could only have been one of two tricks. What's left to say about Hugh Austin is a matter of opinion.

While not widely read today, some fanatics managed to dip into Austin's work from the thirties and appeared to have needed the first two books to find his footing in the genre. Nick Fuller abandoned It Couldn't Be Murder (1935) halfway through, because the style was "horribly clumsy, with short, jerky sentences alternating with bathetic purple prose" and Jason Half thought Murder in Triplicate (1935) delivered "a good plot and poor writing." Austin improved considerably on his third try judging from the general positive feedback on it. Curt Evans praised Murder of a Matriarch in the above mentioned review for its "lively characterization, pointed satire, a clever puzzle and credible police procedure." The book has also been mentioned on this blog a few times over the years, but more on that in a moment.

So the work of Austin, particularly his locked room mysteries, have been creeping up my wishlist for a while now and thought it would be a nice idea to ring in the New Year with a potentially long-lost, Golden Age classic from the 1930s – because it has been a while since I discussed a 1930s Golden Age locked room mystery. You have to go back exactly a year to last January.

Hugh Austin's Murder of a Matriarch takes place at the home of the titular matriarch, Mrs. Hortense Farcourt, who's a nasty, sanctimonious widow with "the confidence of seventy-one years of undenounced deceit." When her henpecked husband kicked the bucket, the family began to understand who had been pulling the purse strings tight behind the curtain. Her daughter, Clara Irving, now wants the money, clothes and social status that had been denied by having to live on the salary her father's company paid her husband, Dwight – who left a position at another company to come work for Farcourt Chemicals. Dwight never got his promised nor his wife all the things her mother had promised her ("...if it was in your power to give them"). They're not only one's who suffering under Mrs. Farcourt's stinginess and sadistic tendencies veiled with a nauseous air of feigned virtue. She has taken in her 20-year-old, orphaned grandniece, Nan Rogers, together with her ten years younger brother Jeddle "Jed" Rogers. Nan, of course, is put to work as a cheap, extra pair of hands around the house and Jed is just a 9-year-old boy who wants a puppy, but plays an important part in all that happens at the house.

So all of this still sounds fairly conventional, for a 1930s family whodunit, but the first-half is wholly dedicated to showing Mrs. Farcourt is not merely your typical family matriarch/patriarch who enjoy making their relatives dance like puppets on a purse-string. She's more than a genuinely despicable person. She's cruel in a way only a dumb, thoroughly selfish and self absorb person can be at the cost of everyone around them. Mrs. Farcourt is the reason why Murder of a Matriarch has been mentioned a couple of times on this blog over the years.

Last year, I cobbled together "The Hit List: Top 7 Most Murderable “Victims” in Detective Fiction" based on a discussion with Scott, a regular in the comments, about who would make the cut for a rogue's gallery of the most reprehensible, murderable villains-turned-victim. Scott regularly mentioned Mrs. Farcourt who's not unlike Mary Gregory (Anthony Wynne's The Silver Scale Mystery, 1931) and Miss Octavia Osborne (James Ronald's Murder in the Family, 1936). If I had read Murder of a Matriarch before making that list, Miss Octavia would have surrendered her spot to Mrs. Farcourt. However, what made Mrs. Farcourt a memorable character rather than another dime-a-dozen domestic tyrants is the character of her nine year old grandnephew, Jed. Just a lonely child without friends to play with and only his uncle, Hal Farcourt, as an ally who generally does what bored, nine year old kids did when they had no phones to play around with. That causes a lot of problems leading up to the murder, but what really made my blood boil were the scenes in which the old harridan tries to manipulate and mold Jed's behavior, even personality, by subjugating to the sugary, nauseating stories of Rose Girl and Billy Boy – writing to tell children how to be good boys and girls. Fortunately, these intolerable stories complete with personalized addition have no effect on Jed. Only one he enjoyed was Billy Boy and His Enemy, because Billy Boy got a teeth knocked clean out of his head.

You have to read for yourself to get an idea how malicious and damaging a person Mrs. Harcourt really is, but, to give a clear example, the first cracks in the sibling bond between Nan and Jed already appear under the stress. That sibling bond, of two orphans, is the one thing bridging that ten year gap between them. So damaging or even destroying it is just evil. And then two incidents happened that bring the police into the house.

Mrs. Farcourt nearly trips down a flight of stairs over one of her canes and her poor, long-suffering cat, mockingly named My Comfort, is poisoned. She believes these were attempts to murder her and calls the police, demanding the "head of the murder department," throwing such a row they eventually dispatch Lieutenant Peter Quint to see who's getting murdered. And even to Mrs. Farcourt surprise, Quint appears to take the case seriously. I think the readers who have taken a great dislike to Mrs. Farcourt will enjoy the scene in which Quint effortlessly gets her to reveal her true face without realizing it ("...she considered herself as inscrutable as the night, as deep as the sea"). Quint and his colleague have to return the house that same night when Mrs. Farcourt is shot dead while sitting in her chair at the window.

Murder of a Matriarch comes with an Ellery Queen-style "Challenge to the Reader," but the story following the long, eagerly anticipated shooting Gr'aunty Hortence is in the mold of an early police procedural. Quint naturally has a whole police department and laboratory at his back, but they take care of the routine police work in the background or off-page. So the investigation is mostly of Quint and Sergeant Hendricks questioning everyone at the house, while noting there were more motives than alibis going around. One character I forgot to mention is Mrs. Farcourt older, doddering brother, Willie Jeddle, who let's everyone (including the police) know he hated his sister ("she wasn't any more human than a leech") and "were act of human kindness to wish her dead." Plenty of motives and not enough alibis to pick apart is not the only complication. A problem arises from the murder weapon and ballistics. There's still that impossible crime that landed it a place in Adey's Locked Room Murders.

It's always a tricky thing to pull off a satisfying locked room murder or other impossible crime when the book is nearing its conclusion, because a good one generally needs time and consideration. So when an impossible crime is introduced late into a story, they tend to be minor and routine affairs. The locked room situations from James Ronald's Sealed Room Murder (1934) and Jonathan Latimer's Murder at the Madhouse (1935), but Murder of a Matriarch proved to be an exception to the rule. Austin deserves credit for how the locked room came as a result from everything preceded: a poisoning with prussic acid inside a watched kitchen and no trace of the poison to be found inside. I really liked Quint's false-solution preceding the correct one. This time, the false-solution didn't outshine the correct one. Although I had been playing with a similar idea for the locked room-trick, I preferred the much more practical correct solution. The false-solution was fun and clever in parts, but a bit pulpy and barely credible. So perfectly suited to throw out as a false-solution!

So, yes, I enjoyed my introduction to this obscure, unjustly forgotten Golden Age mystery writer. Murder of a Matriarch is perhaps not quite as crisply plotted as the best known mysteries from his better remembered contemporaries, but Austin played the Grandest Game with a lot of heart and respect. Most impressively, the story and plot largely concerned the actions of a convincingly, well-drawn nine year old boy who could have been written by Gladys Mitchell – only mystery writer who knew how to portray normal children. Jed Rogers would not have been out-of-place in a Mitchell novel and is the MVP of Murder of a Matriarch. A reprint is deserved and long overdue!

Well, that's the first of the year. Happy (belated) 2026 everyone!