Detection by Moonlight

Not All That Glitters is Gold

2012-03-03T10:12:00.000-08:00

"So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible."
- Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

I always put in an effort to compose a preface for the reviews published here, because I prefer a quick warm up to jumping in cold, but the problem with critiquing out-of-print and un-heard of detective stories is that, once in a while, you come across a writer whose name is completely encrusted with the stains of time – making it somewhat of a trial to find info to write a proper introduction.

Joseph Bowen is one of those unremembered names whose memory has been slowly obnubilated with grime and dust, as one decade succeeded another, and the only part of the man's legacy that is still legible is his name on the cover of The Man Without a Head (1933). Its story takes place in the sleepy village of Taos, situated in New Mexico, where a local boy, named Manuel Cortina, who holds the position of deputy sheriff, is confronted with a brutal murder by decapitation in the sealed and dilapidated home of one of the towns most eccentric citizens.

The ill-starred, but necessary, victim in this yarn is Edward Ponsonby, who, in a far and forgotten past, was one of the more important men in the region and entertained well-positioned individuals at his home, but, as the years brought the unwelcome comforts of a coffin closer, the man and his house fell into decline. Ponsonby's weakened position within the community also made way for rumors and the most persistent one is that he has a hoard of stolen gold stashed away, somewhere in his crumbled down abode, but his own behavior also fans the fires of town gossip as he's involved with two of the local women – one of them a bootlegger and the other married with a second lover on the side.

Suspects aplenty, you would say, when the deputy sheriff of Taos, who's holding the fort in absence of the sheriff, finds himself confronted with not only the decapitated and mutilated remains of Ponsonby, but also with the problem of how the murderer gained access and fled the scene of the crime with a door that was locked from the inside and windows that were covered with undisturbed cobwebs – not to mention the fact that a half-savage guard dog roams freely about the premise. Unfortunately, after this tantalizing problem is set-up, it begins to deteriorate until it resembles the crumbling, ramshackle home of the victim.

Bowen gently picks up the entire premise he had set-up over the course of fifty pages and discourteously dumps it in the trashcan, when, shortly after the reader has passed the halfway mark, Manuel Cortina receives a note from his colleagues that tied the fingerprints on the blood-spattered axe to Thomas Jenkins – one of the four miners left alive who reputedly brought their stolen gold to Ponsonby. You see, rumor has it that he betrayed them, even sullied his hands with blood, in order to keep all that gold and pitted the four men against one another and this ended with a prolonged jail sentence for Jenkins.

Of course, this clumsy attempt at hoodwinking the reader has given the entire game away and even a novice can make an educated guess at what really happened.

SPOILER (select to read): the plot of this book basically rips-off and sews together the solutions of Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890) and The Valley of Fear (1914), which Bowen, perhaps subconsciously, confirmed when he referenced Sherlock Holmes towards the end. No other fictional detective is mentioned, except for the maverick detective.

Admittedly, I was expecting a surprise like that from the outset, but the manner in which Bowen approached the plot, and bungled it, just screams sheer incompetence and this only got worst when he decided it was finally time to let the reader in on the secret of the tightly locked front door of the murder house. One of the few good parts in this book were the descriptions of the rundown house that was completely inaccessible from the outside, but this only made it more of a let down when Cortina came up with an uninspired, run-of-the-mill solution and not a very original one at that! If you're a writer and you want to insert a locked room in your mystery, but insist on explaining it away with a routine method, at least give it a novel twist (c.f. Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Solid Key, 1941).

As a reviewer who loves detective stories, I always try to accentuate one or more positive attributes of a bad or average mystery novel, be it a cast of well-drawn characters or a clever locked room trick, but I can't think of a single really good thing in this case – and this also put an emphasis on all of its short comings such as the unconvincing characters and setting (with exception of the house, but we only get a good look at it at the beginning of the story).

Well, now that I think of it, there's one positive thing I should mention and that is that Joseph Bowen, in spite of all his bungling and short comings, had his heart in the right place. I think he genuinely wanted to write a baffling detective story in which the sleuth shares all his clues with the reader, as they close-in on the truth with each passing chapter, but, in the end, his best was simply not good enough.

So no recommendations this time, I'm afraid.

From the Files of All Souls

2012-03-01T03:56:00.007-08:00

“All Souls Law Cooperative works like a medical plan. People who can’t afford the bloated fees many of my colleagues charge buy a membership, its costs based on a scale according to their incomes. The membership gives them access to consul and legal services all the way from small claims to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
- Ted Smalley (“The Last Open File,” from The McCone Files, 1995)

They say that behind every good man stands a strong woman, in which case Bill Pronzini can rest easy knowing that "the founding 'mother' of the contemporary female hardboiled private eye" has his back. Marcia Muller has written 29 novels and published two collections of short stories featuring her female private gumshoe, Sharon McCone, who shares her universe with her husbands "Nameless Detective." I realize that mentioning the fact that Muller took home a Private Eyes Writers of America Live Achievement Award should take priority over noting the fact that they occasionally pooled their series detectives, but I really, really love crossovers. I really do.

Anyway, Marcia Muller made a previous appearance on blog when I reviewed Double (1984), in which "Nameless" bumps into Sharon McCone at a conference for private investigators. It was tremendously fun to watch two universes collide and morph into one world, but I had only explored one of them before and therefore missed that small, but essential, part that prevented me from truly appreciating the novel for what it was. I vowed that I would remedy that omission post-haste, but don't pull a third degree on me to get an answer as to why it took six months before I decided to pick up The McCone Files (1995). You should allow some thing to go unexplained.

I expected Marcia Muller to have a similar style as her husband, as both have identified their work as humanistic detective fiction, which is, of course, their main resemblance, but the McCone stories in this collection have without the presence of "Nameless' an entirely different atmosphere. I'm not sure if I can explain this feeling, but the earliest "Nameless" short stories, which, I think, stand the closest in comparison to the ones collected here, have that classical gritty feel – while these stories seem to be written in full-color. I know, it's a lousy way of explaining it, but perhaps it's the way in which Muller use words to paint an evocative landscape or urban setting. It really gives you the feeling that you're right there with Sharon McCone when she's exploring a valley on horseback, wanders through a surrealistically described building where urns are stored or walks up and down the street of a poor and crime ridden neighborhood.

But let's take them down from the top:

The Last Open File

This collection opens with a story of how Sharon McCone, after her previous employer kicked her to the curb, for not taking "direction well" and being "nonresponsive to authority figures," became a staff investigator for All Souls – a legal outfit designed to help the less fortunate in society rather than squeeze a few last bucks out of them. McCone's first assignment consists of tracking down a man who left a young, naïve girl with a stack of unpaid bills and a handful of bounced checks. It's an interesting, open-ended story that will find closure in the final story of this volume.

Merrill-Go-Round

A mother asks All Souls to help her find her child, a 10-year-old girl named Merril, who went missing after a whirl on a merry-go-round, but she's very reluctant to involve the police and the matter is dropped on Sharon McCone's desk – who grapples with it until she has wrestled the truth from it and as a result may have mended a broken family.

Wild Mustard

Sharon McCone has a favorite restaurant, situated above the ruins of San Francisco's Sutro Baths, that she likes to patronize with regular visits and during each meal she observes an old Japanese woman, wearing a colored headscarf, scouring the slopes for edible herbs. But when the old woman fails to put in an appearance, McCone begins to slowly lose her appetite and starts' digging around the place – and what she uncovered is one of those unfortunate tragedies that usually merits no more than a few lines on page 3.

The Broken Men

The longest story in this collection, at forty and some pages, has Sharon McCone moonlighting as a personal bodyguard for a famous clown-duo, Fitzgerald and Tilby, during their gig at the Diablo Valley Clown Festival, but when one of them splits and leaves a body, garbed in his custom, in his wake it becomes one of those regular working days for McCone. A well-written story that is a lot closer to a traditional mystery than the ones preceding it and also has a nicely imagined, tranquil scene in which McCone explores the region on one of the gentlest (read: slowest) horses in the west.

Ho-Ling would love and hate this story at the same time!

Deceptions

McCone haunts the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge, where "some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its decks," hoping to find a vestige of Venessa DiCesare – a young law student who left a suicide note in her car and disappeared. I'm afraid this was, for me, a somewhat forgettable story and the evocative opening was the only thing that stuck to my long-term memory. Well, they can't all be winners.

Cache and Carry (co-written with Bill Pronzini)

It was a nice surprise when I turned over the final page of the previous story and read that this one was co-written with her husband, Bill Pronzini, co-starring his "Nameless Detective," who Sharon affectionately nicknamed Wolf, and the problem he helps her solving is of the impossible variety! The entire story consists of a telephone call between McCone and Nameless, in which she relates to him the facts in the case of a theft of two grand from a locked and secured room at a Neighborhood Check Cashing – and this suggests that the money never left the room but it was stripped-searched without results. So it’s up to "the poor man’s Sir Henry Merrivale" to locate this apparent invisible cubbyhole. Good, short and simple.

Note that McCone has no clue who H.M. is. *shakes head disappointedly*

Deadly Fantasies

Marcia Muller manifests herself in this story as a more traditional plotter and dreams up an ingenious method to administrate poison, in this case, to a young heiress who inherited her fathers multi-million dollar company and came to All Souls because she's afraid that her brother and sister, whose names were conspicuous by their absense in their fathers will, are slowly poisoning her. I, too, suspected that her siblings were feeding her something, such as unfounded suspicions to feed her paranoia and get a court to declare her mentally unsound and usurp the family fortune, but the ending turned out to be quite different – and far more tragic.

All the Lonely People

A series of burglaries has been tied to a dating service, All the Best People, and McCone has filled out one of their application forms and braves the dating scene – looking for a man with a raccoon mask and a stuffed sack flung over his shoulders. As a crime story, it's not spectacular but a lot is made-up with McCone going on actual dates to probe for a lovelorn housebreaker.

The Place That Time Forgot

Sharon McCone is engaged to track down the estranged granddaughter of an old shopkeeper, Jody Greenglass, whose ramshackle store sneaked away from the march of progress and stands steadfastly in defiance of the rapidly changing world around it. McCone goes through the skeleton-stuffed closet of the Greenglass family and dusts off a lot of old family tragedies, but a catchy and soulful tune leads her to the end of her quarry.

Somewhere in the City

On October 17, 1989, a major earthquake that killed over seventy people and injured thousands struck the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the scene in which Sharon McCone finds herself after her last conversation with an anonymous phone caller, who has been making threatening calls to the Golden Gate Crisis Hotline, but when the city began to shake the last thing she heard, before the connection was broken, was a cry for help. Undoubtedly, the most original and fresh story in this collection.

Final Resting Place

A friend of McCone asks her help in finding out who has been leaving flowers at the San Francisco Memorial Columbarium, where the urn encapsulating her mothers ashes are interred, and what the relation of this person was to her mother – and when she begins to dust-off this problem she naturally uncovers another dreadful secret. The best part of this story was Muller's almost surreal description of the Columbarium where urns are stored under a leaky roof.

Silent Night

This Christmas tale reminded me of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," but instead of going on a wild goose chase for a fabulous jewel McCone spends her Christmas Eve looking for her missing nephew – and finds out how little she really knew about the boy. Along the way she also meets a few of society's misfits who spend their evening alone and makes for a nice, humanistic story.

Benny's Space

All Souls is engaged on behalf of Mrs. Angeles, a poor and hardworking mother whose social status condemned her to an even poorer neighborhood, who has been bombarded with death threats – after witnessing a local gang leader being shot. The case is referred to their staff investigator, Sharon McCone, and comes to a conclusion that puts the murder in a whole new perspective. This crime story really benefited from the poor, violent neighborhood that functioned as its backdrop.

The Lost Coast

A local politician and his wife are under siege from a nefarious stalker, who sends dramatically worded death threats and sends floral arrangements suitable for funerals, and Sharon McCone ends up looking into the matter and stumbles over a body before she got hold of the truth – which turns out to be one of the oldest crimes in the book. I wonder if Muller found inspiration for this story in Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin because it strangely felt like one of their cases. Perhaps it was the threatening floral arrangement in combination with the murderer being trapped on an inconsistency in a statement.

File Closed

Sharon McCone's tenure at All Souls has come to an end and opened up an investigation firm of her own, but as she's cleaning out her old office she comes across her first, unclosed file – and decides to give it one last shot to tie-up all the lose ends before opening a new chapter in her life. This is perhaps the best kind of story to end a collection with.

A Knife for a Knave

2012-02-26T03:18:00.006-08:00

“Playing detective isn’t all fun. Somebody’s going to suffer. And it’ll be a nice somebody; all our prime suspects are good people and the victim was a bastard.”
- Lolly (Murder at City Hall, 1995)

Edward I. Koch is a former attorney at law and retired politician, who exchanged the court room for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, where he served as a Congressman from 1969 to 1977, and presided over New York City as its 105th mayor from 1978 to 1989 – and this last political tenure formed the basis for a handful of detective novels "penned" in collaboration with subsequently Herbert Resnicow and Wendy Corsi Staub.

In his foreword, Koch notes that he loves to write and "decided to create a fictional Ed Koch who could be mayor of New York forever in a series of mysteries" and that he "joined forces with Herb Resnicow, whose fertile mind can conjure up the plots of the criminals as mine moves to undercover those plots and catch the crooks." I found it hard to gauge how much ink Koch himself contributed to this novel, but the construction of the plot, as he pointed out himself, definitely bore a number of the architectural features that are telling of Resnicow's style and it wouldn't surprise me if he also did most, if not all, of the writing – as a literary subcontractor, of sorts, for the ex-mayor. But more on that later.

Murder at City Hall (1995) has Ed Koch exercising one of his mayoral authorities that is rarely, if ever, wielded by a governing head of a city: the authority to perform marriages. Koch has granted a friend permission to use City Hall chapel for her daughter's wedding and even consents to perform the ceremony himself, but as he legally ties the enamored couple together someone else is cutting the lifeline of Karl Krieg short – a dishonest and despised property developer. He was found in an alcove in the chapel, after most of the attendees where heading for the gala reception at the Plaza Hotel, stabbed to death with a homemade knife wrapped in a paper napkin that functioned as a makeshift handle.

The fact that the wedding chapel has one entrance, no windows and that nearly everyone who was in attendance had to pass through a metal detector makes it somewhat of a puzzle how the knife was brought into the chapel – unless it was carried inside by someone who didn't had to pass through the metal detector at all. And guess who that person was? The mayor himself! This leaves Koch in a tight situation, one that could cost him City Hall, and decides to take it upon himself to figure out the identity of the person responsible for the murder of one of his city's most hated citizens – which he does with the ardor of an enthusiastic amateur detective and with the helping hands of his friends.

Gumshoes who operate as an equal team, like the tandem of Mayor Koch and his friend Lolly in this novel, can be seen as a staple of Resnicow's detective fiction, although, I think he glutted on this when Koch's parents flew-in to help him solve this murder and save his job. But then again, this was probably done as a request from Koch as a surprise for his folks.

Anyway, there are also other aspects of the plot that are covered with Resnicow's fingerprints, such as the personality of the victim (who are seldom possessors of a sympathetic personality in his stories), the modus operandi (stabbing is his preferred method) and the comedy, but, unfortunately, it lacked one of his clever trademark solutions that would've explained the presence of the knife by exploiting the layout and architectural features of the chapel to by pass the metal detector. The actual solution was pretty mundane and uninspired, although, there was a somewhat clever, but false, solution proposed right before the real killer was unmasked and that makes me wonder if the final explanation was dreamed up by Koch and Resnicow included his own answer to the questions proposed in this book as a false solution – which showed more foresight and ingenuity than the one they eventually went for.

Before wrapping this review up, I have to make one more observation and that is how much Koch struck me as a P-G incarnation of Sir Henry Merrivale (including an associate nicknamed Lolly!) – bouncing snappy comments off his secretary and the press hounds. I have no idea how much this fictionalized Koch resembled the real man, but I love the idea that Koch came to Resnicow with a Carter Dickson novel and asked him if he could make him a bit like H.M. Hey, it would mean that he has taste.

All in all, this was a nice, lighthearted detective story from a mystery writer who revived the classic Golden Age Detective novel during the 1980s, but was, alas, unable to do that same trick in this story – which ranks a lot closer to Murder, She Wrote than any of the past masters he paid such a beautiful tribute to in the Gold and Bear series. It's still a nice read, but I think you have to be fan of Herbert Resnicow to really enjoy it.

By the way, does anyone want to hazard a guess how many times I wanted to type Edward D. Hoch instead of Edward I. Koch?

Edward I. Koch

The Koch Mysteries:

Murder at City Hall (1995; with Herbert Resnicow)
Murder on Broadway (1996; with Wendy Cori Staub)
Murder on 34th Street (1997; with Resnicow and Staub)
The Senator Must Die (1998; with Wendy Cori Staub)

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

And I wrote a short overview of Herbert Resnicow's life and work:

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

Letting Sleeping Gods Lie

2012-02-23T01:16:00.001-08:00

"It was now that the scene became suddenly of another world, a place of visions and chimeras, hideous because unexpected, terrifying because unexplained. Wide awake and in full possession of my faculties as I knew myself to be, I was at that moment the central figure of a nightmare."
- John Marriott (The Sleeping Bacchus, 1951).

Over the past few weeks, there have been brief periods of clarity in which I questioned the veracity of my hastily and overenthusiastically drawn decision that put a copy of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) in my covetous claws. It's tantamount to supplying an anxious pyromaniac with a box of matches, a can of lighter fluid and a derelict building to frolic around in and then act surprise when you notice the fiery tongues licking at its structure – after the first fire engines pulls up on the curb. Not to mention that this niche of the blogosphere has been doing an excellent job in itself, especially as of late, in forcing me to continuously rearrange my wish list. I mean, how can you ignore a review like this?

Hilary St. George Saunders, perhaps better known under the penname he shared with John Palmer, “Francis Beeding,” took a rather unconventional approach when he laid the groundwork for his novel The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) – which was originally a French mystery by Pierre Boileau. Saunders stumbled across a copy of Le Repos Bacchus (1938) in a Parisian bookshop and cheekily asked its author permission to emend and rewrite the book in English, which, needless to say, he got and from this arose a classic tale of a debonair gentleman thief portrayed on the canvas of a grand detective story.

The purloining of an invaluable objet d'art commonly fills the pages of a short story or relegated to the grade of a sub-plot and when such a theft takes top priority in a novel, it's usually in a caper. But this book is not an off-shoot of the Rogue School of Fiction, in which we tread on the heels of a gentleman about town as the charming fellow relieves overstuffed bankers and icy widows, dripping with diamonds, of their hoarded wealth, but one that has its roots firmly planted in the grounds of that nightmarish wonderland, "with all the mad logic of a dream," that writers like John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot used to frequent.

Ex-war veteran John Marriott receives a pressing message from his uncle Walter Thresby, a famous art collector, asking him to go on his behalf to Montreal to supervise the purchase of a painting after Thresby received a distressing message (i.e. blackmail note) from an old acquaintance – a thief nicknamed "Zed" who once before intervened in one of Thresby's attempts at obtaining a picture.

But before Marriott could lift his heels, Thresby is robbed of the showpiece of his collection, Leonardo da Vinci's "The Sleeping Bacchus," which was spirited away from his locked and secured gallery under baffling circumstances and despite catching one of the thieves they are unable to find a trace of the picture. More miracles are afoot in this story: one of the thieves returns to the estate, retrieving a cylinder from the grounds encompassing the gallery, has a run in with Marriott, who ends up tied to a fence (see the cover), and proceeds over the moors towards an "unclimbable" fence and conquers it in a matter of seconds – which could only have happened if he phased through it like a ghost. A third impossibility involves the vanishing of a Black Maria (a police van) with its occupants.

I think this story perfectly demonstrates the fallacy of Van Dine's Rulebook that states that there must be a corpse, none to be found between the covers of this book, and shows the allurement of the impossible (crime) that can turn, if properly handled, even a simple domestic problem into a genuine puzzler. But as much as I dote on these locked room mysteries, I loved the second half of the story, in which "Zed" reveals himself in a wonderful scene to John Marriott and his uncle, even more and enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game that ensued – as the former tries to relieve them of a King's Ransom in exchange for the sleeping deity while the latter attempt to retrieve the painting from its unlawful owner. Pierre and Raoul, two veteran buddies of Marriott, who eventually solve the theft and explain the string of seemingly unexplainable events that have plagued them, are assisting them in this endeavor.

The disappearance of Da Vinci's painting and the ghostly intruder, who braved an impregnable fence the way a phantom would've done, are satisfyingly explained – even though I feel a bit iffy about the fairness of them. But then again, my reading of this book has been very fragmented and perhaps missed out on one or two of the finer details that were given.

On a whole, this is an excellent, but atypical, detective story that deserves a spot in the gallery next to the masterpieces crafted by John Dickson Carr and Joseph Commings – acknowledged grandmasters of this form. But it also deserves praise for introducing a wonderful and striking villain. I know the person behind the "Zed" persona is not suppose to garner sympathy from the reader and should even be considered annoying, but I found myself unable to feel any aversion and even cheered this bandit on. It might be misplaced sympathy, but who's complaining when the fun keeps piling on?

Recommended without hesitation!

Just Like a Shadow

2012-02-19T12:43:00.000-08:00

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."
- Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

Glancing back at the previous reviews, penned in this series, I noticed that I prefaced each of them with a mournful remonstrance against the publishing schedule of Viz Media or lamenting the fact that older detective fans are finding it difficult to warm up to this splendid series – which is a repetitive cycle that needs to be broken. There's just one problem: the spark of inspiration was engaged elsewhere and left me here with nothing more than a vast expanse of blankness (i.e. nothing) to lead into the review.

So this left me with only one recourse: shout outs! When you have finished reading my commentary on the stories collected in the forty-first volume of Case Closed/Detective Conan you might also want to check out The Study Lamp and The Ingenious Game of Murder.

Darrel, who also takes a look at little known mystery writers who were expunged from popular view, maintains the first blog and managed to dredge up a name, from the genre's murky past, that even John Norris and Curt Evans never met before – which is no mean feat! Arun is the game master of the other blog and the mysteries that wander into his crosshairs are of the short story variety. Short stories are often overlook, but on his blog they get an opportunity to bask in the same spotlight as their novel-length companions.

And now, on to the review!

Sidelined

This brand new volume opens with a story that picks up the thread that was dropped at the end of the previous collection, in which the famous Sleeping Moore flubbed a ten-million-yen case and burned through most of the dough before he had actually earned it – leaving him and his daughter in a world of trouble. Luckily, for them, his ex-wife, ace-attorney Eva Kaden, takes it upon herself to solve this case for them, but she has to compete with an old high-school alumni, Vivian Kudo, who also happened to be Conan's mom. Unfortunately, for the reader, they come across as a bunch of Mary Sues and the only surprising aspect of this story was how uninspired and unconvincing the plot was. A poor start of an otherwise interesting volume.

"Darkness there, and nothing more"

After the mess that Richard Moore left is cleaned up, Vivian Kudo decides to treat her son and the brats from the Junior Detective League on a special pre-screening of Samurai Kid II, but, once again, murder intervenes and leaves the pint-size detective with a baffling conundrum: how could a murderer silently navigate through a darkened and cluttered room? The solution is a variation on a timeworn trick, but it perfectly fits in with the background of the story and was well clued.

The Body in the Porsche

The police have closed off the Touto Department Store after the body of a murdered man was discovered, inside a parked Porsche, in the underground car park and Conan has to piece together this puzzle in order to lift the cordon. It's a tricky and a somewhat farfetched solution, but it shows that gimmicky tricks a la The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) work a lot better in comic format than in prose. However, the main attraction of this story is the reemergence of the Black Organization, who seem to have been on their tails like a shadow from the start of this volume, and they may have finally stumbled to their secret!

This also sets-up the next story arc, in which Conan and Anita visit her sisters old residence, serving now as an illustrators studio, in order to retrieve a message she may have hidden there, but that is something that will be revealed in the next volume. Oh, but before they can pick up the hidden message they have to solve another murder case. One of the current residents, believe it or not, was poisoned around the same time those two dropped in on them.

All in all, this was a good volume, especially for fans of the ongoing storyline, involving the Men in Black, but Aoyama seemed a bit off with most of the stories here. The motives, for example, seemed as if they were introduced as an after thought and the tricks impressed me as complex for the sake of being complex – without even as much as a touch of his usual genius (his quality/output ratio is amazing). Only the excellent second story formed an exception to this pattern. It's still a decent volume for the fans, but not one that was a good as usual, however, every once in a while you come across a volume that performs a bit below par. Oh well, the main story in the next volume promises to be a blast (murder on a ghostship during a dress party)!

FYI, it's still my one-year anniversary in the blogosphere today and the next review will, hopefully, be up within the next few days and it probably won't surprise you if I tell you I will take a look at another impossible crime novel.

Hooray for Homicide: One Year Anniversary!

2012-02-19T01:46:00.002-08:00

Statler: "I loved it!"
Waldorf: "So what? You also loved World War II."
- The Muppet Show.

Life of the party

One year ago, today, I was launched into the blogosphere with a brief and flimsy review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946) and gathered momentum in the weeks and months that followed – mainly due to the people who took the time to read and comment on my vague ramblings.

It is, therefore, with a great deal of embarrassment that I have nothing to mark the occasion, like a cross-blog examination of a writer or a slew of themed reviews, which makes me feel like a clueless host who finds a throng of partygoers on his doorstep and has to inform them that there isn't a party today. I wish there was one, but time has only permitted me to post regular reviews, however, once I have unpinned myself from underneath its pointed handles I will vary my output again.

So, once again, I would like to thank everyone who has turned this blog into one of their regular haunts on the web and hopefully you will continue to patronize this blog in the future. And if you want to know how this blog came about, you should read this post.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

2012-02-16T02:39:00.009-08:00

"In my twelve years on this spinning ball we call Earth, I've seen a lot things normal people never see. I've seen lunch boxes stripped of everything except fruit. I've seen counterfeit homework networks that operated in five counties, and I've seen truckloads of candy taken from babies."
- Fletcher Moon (Half-Moon Investigations, 2006).

When Curt Evans, under the moniker of The Passing Tramp, set off on his solitary expedition to roam the derelict legacies of the neglected mystery writer of the past one of the first dilapidated careers he wandered pass was that of J. Jefferson Farjeon – a copious writer from the Golden Era who fell by the wayside. I will refrain from summarizing his excellent introduction to Farjeon, but suffice to say, I felt compelled to check out these remnants for myself.

One title in particular caught my perusing eye, Holiday Express (1935), which Evans provided with this capsule synopsis:

“In this train mystery thriller the protagonist is a wonderfully-characterized child, an ingenuous young boy, and the book is written as if he himself had written it.”

And (later on in the comment section):

“Holiday Express is really cute, by the way. It comes complete with misspellings! Farjeon does a brilliant job of assuming the mindset of his young protagonist.”

If you've been keeping tabs on this blog, you might have bumped into the high opinion I have of Gosho Aoyama’s Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) series or picked up a few lines from a soliloquy praising Craig Rice's Home Sweet Homicide (1944) in the comment sections, which makes it, hopefully, unnecessary to explain why this book ended up with a train ticked with the bookshelves of yours truly printed on it as its destination.

The Holiday Express, whose compartments are as jam-packed with gargoyles as the famed Orient Express that stranded in the pages of one of Agatha Christie's most famous whodunits, departs for Tom, a fair-haired boy no older than twelve, as the start of an uneventful seaside holiday with his parents and sister, but the characters he meets aboard the train toppled any plans he might have had for sand castles or reading the latest Edgar Wallace thriller after swimming. First of all, there's a girl, named Joan, whom Tom refers to in his narrative as The Love Interest, who seems to have garnered the unwanted attention of her strange assortment of fellow travelers – which comprises of a fat man, a guy with a scar across his face and a chap with a monkey.

Tom and Joan's adventure begins innocently enough, as the former tramps up and down the train, slipping in and out of compartments and bumping into the key players along the way, but when he tries to return a bag that Joan dropped on the platform it gets pinched from him and its rightful owner kidnapped! So what does a boy of barely twelve do in such a situation? Tell his parents or inform the ticket collector? Nope. Tom bails from a moving train into a dark tunnel and begins chasing the kidnappers with only his D.I. (Detective Instinct) to go on.

It would be criminal to spoil his experiences and endurances, as he treks through the countryside, but it's an exciting and wonderful journey fraught with dangers and peculiar characters as he's determined to save Joan from the clutches of her captors – and this makes for a captivating read. Yeah. That was a horrible, forced and cringe-worthy pun. My well-meant apologies.

Anyway, what really makes this book a fun read is not necessarily that it's a dangerous joyride, full of thrills and action, but the narrative voice of the young protagonist – which is not only cute, as Curt Evans mentioned, but engaging as well. Tom tells more than just his story; he involves the reader by talking directly to them and explains, for example, why he withheld certain information or events in order to enhance the dramatic effect of the story. You almost feel like Bastian who reads about Atreyu's journey in The Never-Ending Story (1979), except there aren't any Luck Dragons or Rock Eaters to be found roaming around the tracks of the Holiday Express.

When I picked up this book, I expected to find a predecessor of Eoin Colfer's Half-Moon Investigations (2006), but found, instead, something that amounts to a missing link to many of the detective stories, adventure yarns and cartoons with teenage protagonists that I enjoyed – or at least it felt like that to me.

I love Aoyama's Detective Conan, Colfer's Fletcher Moon, Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Rice's Home Sweet Homicide, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon (1945) and this novel felt like the link that connected them all together. But then again, that may be a hallucinatory by effect from the nostalgia rush I had when reading this book and penning this review. Hey, I'm a suffering chronophobiac. These nostalgic mood swings can hit you like a sledgehammer!

All in all, Farjeon did an admirable job in capturing and assuming the mindset of his boy protagonist and marooning him on a world inhabited with trouble. The ensuing game of hide-and-seek between Tom and the gang will not fail to get your undivided attention from the moment the story departs until it comes to a stop at the final terminal. In short, this book is just fun.

This review and the one preceding it were rather short and compendious, but you can put that down to the whims of that tyrant on the wall known as a clock, however, I hope to babble on endlessly again in my next review. So let the reader be warned!

Now You See Him, Now You Don't

2012-02-12T03:07:00.001-08:00

"Are you watching closely?"
- Alfred Borden (The Prestige, 2006)

Appointment With the Hangman (1935), penned by T.C.H. Jacobs, a prolific British writer of tall tales of thrills and deductions, commences with a prologue, in which Michael O'Conner is sentenced to seven years of penal servitude for his share in the heist of a parcel of the finest diamonds that were ever delved out of the African mines – and their value is estimated at eight hundred thousand pounds. He was offered a reduced sentenced in exchange for the name of his partner in crime, but O'Connor has different plans in mind for the man who betrayed him and one of the police officers reflects that if he ever saw the inside of a prison again it was to keep an appointment with the hangman.

The locality for the first chapter changes from a gloomy prison cell to a Cornish hotel, situated at the seaward end of a cove, where the owner, David Lock, is an underling of Kaspar Khron – a theurgist who can perform supernatural feats such as traveling to the fourth dimension. When this part of the story opens up for business, the hotel begins to slowly fill itself with guests who want to attend one of Khrone's séances. There's a Miss Tingle, who's as devoted to Khrone as Lock, Jimmy Buller, an undercover journalist, Sir Manfred, a retired judge and believer in the occult, Reginald Ruffles, a hare-toothed young man who doesn't seem to be too bright, and Dr. Hamilton – who's a skeptic and determined to find a rational explanation for the miracles that he's about to witness.

This part of the story, counting a hundred pages or so, has the tendency to come off confusing and slightly erratic due to the introduction of the aforementioned characters – some of who turn out to play a role in two separate storylines involving the purloined stones and those who enwreathe the miracle worker. Sorry to say, this is also turned out to be the only interesting part of the book.

Jabocs captives his readers for a short duration with a slew of apparently supernatural phenomenon: Khrone's white Chinese cat, Chan, appears, for a brief moment, to be endowed with the ability to speak with a human tongue while his master levitates in front of an awestruck audience before slowly disintegrating in front of their eyes and eventually completely dissipates from a locked room. He also walks on air and subdues a malevolent elemental spirit. Unfortunately, these are mainly unconvincing, second-rate parlor tricks that you might expect from a third-rate conjurer who tries to impress a bunch of uninterested kids at a birthday party. The only exception is how Khrone disintegrated himself. That was actually a clever and original trick, but then again, every hack magician with some loose change in his pockets can purchase a good trick and I have nothing but scorn for the manner in which he explained the levitation part.

SPOILER (select text to reveal spoiler): mirrors and wires were eliminated early on in the story, which left Jacobs limited imagination with only one option: Khrone actually levitated. Yup, everything else was fake except for the part he was unable to explain. Ugh. What a hack!

The Detection Club should've dispatched an envoy to his home to discuss that part of the solution with him, and with that I mean that Dorothy L. Sayers wags a disapproving finger at him while John Dickson Carr and John Rhode are smashing his typewriter to pieces.

Anyway, not much else of interest is happening at the hotel. O'Connor's storyline fizzles out after passing the halfway mark and the diamonds are relegated to the status of a McGuffin. There's also a poisoning plot hovering inconspicuously in the background, but nothing is done with that until its time to send some of the characters off to the gallows to meet their appointment with the hangman.

I have the feeling that Jacobs attempted with this novel to play the role of Victor Frankenstein. He cut and sewn together a number of different parts of the genre, hoping to create a monster of a mystery, but ended up with a hump of in-animated, decaying meat and shame should hang like a hangman's noose on him for submitting this botched experiment to his publisher. A very early contender for worst detective story read in 2012!

If you carefully read between the lines of this review, you'll notice a lack of enthusiasm for this novel and I was seriously tempted to turn this review into a mock guest post, in which I let Jafar, from Disney's Aladdin, review this book by posting a clip of him singing You're Only Second Rate. The lyrics really fit the theme of the book and perfectly sums up my opinion of it.

And once again, a dissapointing read has translated itself in a shoddily written review. Oh well. And let me know what you think of the increased font size!

Murder in Any Language

2012-02-09T00:46:00.001-08:00

"It's an imperfect world; always will be, as long as human beings are around. And only a fool thinks there's such a thing as a perfect crime."
- Gil Grissom (Max Allan Collin's The Killing Game, 2005)

The Boekenweek (book week), held each year in March, ever since its inception in 1932, is an annual "week" of ten days that is dedicated to Dutch literature. A well-known writer, who earned his or her place on the printed page, usually Dutch or Flemish, is asked to write a book, as a rule these are novella-length stories, that is presented as a Boekenweekgeschenk (book week gift) to everyone who purchases a book or becomes a member of a library – and in 1973 this honor was bestowed on Bertus Aafjes.

Bertus Aafjes (1914-1993) was a famed poet, novelist and world traveler, but, thanks to that peculiar sense known as hobby deformation, I always associate him with a wonderful series of historical mysteries featuring the venerable and sapient Judge Ooka – an 18th century magistrate who presided over Edo.

Before Aafjes sat down to write the book week gift, he had produced four volumes of Judge Ooka stories and was now commissioned to pen a fifth, however, there was one stipulation: it had to be adaptable for television. This left the poet of crime in somewhat of a quandary, since there were few Asian actors in the Netherlands at the time and therefore the focus of the story had to be somehow on his compatriots. Luckily, there was a stretch of time in Japanese history, known as Rangaku (Dutch learning), when the borders were as tightly closed as the door to Dr. Grimaud's study and the only Europeans who were allowed passage were Dutch traders. During those years, the Dutch enclave of Dejima was there umbilical cord to the outside world and through this contact they kept taps on the Western progress in science and technology – as well as art and literature.

Well, that takes care of one problem and resulted in Een lampion voor een blinde (A Lantern for the Blind, 1973), in which Judge Ooka is en route to Dejima to escort an envoy, De Hofstoet, from the Dutch enclave back to Edo – where they will give their homage to the Shogun. Judge Ooka is a student of Rangaku and this enabled him to communicate with the people in charge of the Dutch factory, however, his studies were not enough to fully prepare him for this meeting. Big portions of the first half of this novella concern themselves with contrasting Dutch with Japanese culture and they are engrossing if you enjoy history, but this is, after all, a detective story and soon the first problem arrives at the horizon – and it's not Commadore Perry's ship.

The last ship that arrived from Amsterdam, De Liefde, brought two heelmeesters (surgeons), the experienced Bading and the young Oranje, and one of them will be appointed as surgeon in Japan – while the other will be shipped off to a settlement in Siam. However, they both want to stay in Japan and each claimed that the other stole a letter, during their voyage, which confirmed their position as surgeon on Dejima and destroyed it. This makes it impossible to establish who's telling the truth and the decision is now up to the Opperhoofd, Captain Simon Slingeland, nicknamed The Red Oni from Holland, when they reach Edo, but the silent rivalry between the surgeons has set the tone for their journey – and during one of their first dinners Ooka makes a terrible mistake that will result in the death of one of them.

One night, Ooka tells them how he hanged two murderers on the eye-witness testimony of a blind woman and this immediately prompted an observation from the surgeons how they could've committed the perfect murder – if only they had known that the woman was blind. The judge realizes that he has made a horrible mistake, but is unable to prevent a murder. Nevertheless, when it happens even he's surprised at the devilish ingenuity on the part of the killer. It's not Oranje or Bading who was felled with a bullet, but the Opperhoofd, Slingeland, and Bading accuse Oranje of the foul deed backed up with the testimony of a blind maid.

The girl was unable to understand what was said before the shot was fired, since they spoke Dutch, but she recognized the voice and mannerism of Oranje. You can probably guess what scheme Bading had in mind, but the best part is that nobody was really fooled and knew, or suspects, what really happened. But it's impossible to proof. The perfect crime! And the only disappointing part of the story is, perhaps, that Ooka resorted to a bluff to ensnarl the murderer instead of hatching one his Machiavellian traps, but let's not split hairs over a minor imperfection in an otherwise engrossing and charming story.

Een lampion voor een blinde is not only one of my favorite Dutch detective stories, but also one of the best inverted mysteries, set during a very interesting period in history, I read and deserves to be translated – along side all those wonderful short stories.

This is the second book reviewed for the 2012 Vintage Mystery Challenge: Dutch Delinquencies:

My VMC2012 list:

Een lampion voor een blinde (A Lantern for the Blind, 1973) by Bertus Aafjes

De moord op Anna Bentveld (The Murder of Anna Bentveld, 1967) by Appie Baantjer

De onbekende medespeler (The Unknown Player, 1931) by Willy Corsari
Voetstappen op de trap (Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937) by Willy Corsari

Een linkerbeen gezocht (Wanted: A Left Leg, 1935) by F.R. Eckmar

Spoken te koop (Spooks for Sale, 1936) by F.R. Eckmar
Dood in schemer (Death at Twilight, 1954) by W.H. van Eemlandt

Fantoom in Foe-lai (The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959) by Robert van Gulik

Het mysterie van St. Eustache (The Mystery of St. Eustache, 1935) by Havank

Klavertje moord (Four-Leaf Murder, 1986) by Theo Joekes

Het geheim van de tempelruïne (The Secret of the Temple Ruins, 1946) by Boekan Saja

I also reviewed one of the short story collections in this series, which you can read here.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

2012-02-06T04:34:00.001-08:00

"Better a good neighbor than a distant friend."
- Dutch proverb.

As an ardent collector of detective stories, I have to confess to an appalling trait that the preponderance of books, in my collection, has to endure after the postman drops them off. I have no problem investing time and money in order to acquire a particular novel or collection of short stories, but I have to begin flipping through its pages, as soon as it has shed its cardboard package, or it will languish on the snow capped tops of my to-be-read pile for weeks, months or even years! This was also a fate suffered by Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X (2005), which reached the shores of the English language last year and I immediately pounced on the hardcover edition, however, it took me until now to actually read it – and only after being nudged. Not to mention that the paperback release is just around the corner!

In Japan, The Devotion of Suspect X is part of an ongoing and acclaimed detective series, in which an assistant professor of physics, Manabu Yukawa, nicknamed "Detective Galileo," abets one of his old friends, Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police, in his investigations. At first glance, this structure suggests a platitudinous take on the classic amateur detective, who has to solve the cases for an unimaginative policeman, but this is not entirely the case with this book – which feels more as an upgrade than as a throwback.

The story begins, as so many do, with a man and woman, Yasuko Hanaoka and Shinji Togashi, but in this tale they separated long before the readers meets them in the opening chapters. And for good reason, too! Characters like Togashi are to the modern crime novel what the tyrannical patriarch, who had a stranglehold on the purse strings of his relative and altered his will on a whim, was to the traditional whodunit. He was a bum and a drunk, who abused and leeched off his ex-wife and stepdaughter, Misato, which, needless to say, put a strain on their marriage – and eventually Yasuko and Misato left him. However, Togashi proved to be as persistent as a tick and it took some effort to shake him off their backs, but, in the end, they were able to settle down and began reshaping their lives.

Unfortunately, for them, it takes Togashi only a year to track them down and the confrontation escalades in a scuffle, in which Yasuko and Misato kill their tormentor. Still dazed and confused over what they just did, their next-door neighbor, Ishigami, a first-rate mathematician whose heart secretly beats for Yasuko, appears, like a deus ex machina, to expel their demon once and for all. He removes the body from their apartment and constructs an alibi for them. It's a clever scheme calculated to have the delusory appearance of a common place crime, but there's an unfathomable depth to it and it would have gone without a hitch where it not that Kusanagi mentioned Ishigami's name in passing to Yukawa – one of his old friends from University.

One of the most interesting part of this novel is that Yukawa and Ishigami, from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of this story, act as (im)partial observers – while it's their minds that drive the events that everyone is a part of. Yasuko and Misato function as a proxy for Ishigami, who, in turn, has to adjust his plans when Yukawa is beginning to see through them. This makes The Devotion of Suspect X a very character-driven crime novel, but one that managed to impress me from start to finish and found myself rooting for Yasuko, Misato and Ishigami! If there ever was a bunch of conniving, but endearing, murderers who deserved to get away with murder, literarily, it's them and you almost get annoyed at Yukawa's persistent deconstruction of Ishigami's plan – which felt tantamount to destroying a beautiful piece of art work.

I guess I also have to address the controversy this book whipped up back in 2006, when it swiped the Honkaku Mystery Grand Prize for best orthodox mystery novel. Some well-known mystery critics drew question marks around this decision and wondered aloud about the veracity and fairness of the clues, which, I think, is an apparent qualification to win the prize – and I have to admit that they do have a point.

This story is an inverted mystery and the issue of fair play clueing here is a bit different than in your standard whodunit. It's not about whether the reader has been furnished with all the necessary clues and hints to have a shot at solving the case themselves, but how the detective arrived at that point. This is were you bump into the only flaw I could find in this novel: Yukawa arrives at his conclusions, which he admits to at one point in the book, intuitive rather than deductively and what's more damning is that his guesses were mostly based on 20-year-old memories of Ishigami – which I found, to be completely honest, rather ridiculous.

For example, Yukawa became suspicious of Ishigami after his old school chum made a casual remark that he was losing his hair, which prompted a memory that the Ishigami he knew, from over 20 years ago, never cared about his physical appearance and began drawing conclusions from this. Well, people change, especially after two decades, and the fact that he assisted in a murder, no matter how good his intentions are, proves that he was no longer the Ishigami that Yukawa once knew – and this is were the critics have a point. On the other hand, the final twist that was uncovered in Ishigami's plan oozed with brilliance and completely took me by surprised. It was also reasonable clued.

As a whole, The Devotion of Suspect X is worthy of the praise and recognition it has received as well as being an excellent example that a capable and clever mystery writer can construct a classically-styled, multi-layered plot in a modern-day setting – which makes this a book that can be enjoyed by both detective and thriller fans.

Fellow mystery enthusiastic, Ho-Ling, has more on Keigo Higashino on his blog – including reviews of his, as of yet, untranslated novels and adaptations. I recommend you check it out.

Treasure Island

2012-02-03T11:16:00.001-08:00

"When the mainsail's set and the anchor's weighed
There's no turning back from any course that's laid
And when greed and villainy sail the sea,
You can bet your boots there'll be treachery."
- Shiver My Timbers (Muppet Treasure Island, 1996).

Well, this pass week, which was, to say the least, draining, did not left me with a lot of moments needed to read through Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet's The Feather Cloak Murders (1936) at my usual pace, but I persevered and managed to squeeze this review out before the official kick-off of the weekend!

After his first adventure in the "barbaric Northern states" of America, recorded in The Ticking Terror Murders (1935), the brave Baron von Kaz embarks on an impetuous detour to his native Vienna – where he's expected to realign himself with the once trampled monarchists. But the Baron is drenched in thoughts of Caryl Miquet, a mere plebeian who played on the heartstrings of the exiled aristocrat, and when a certain Mr. Hiroshita offers him a $1000 fee to accompany him on his voyage aboard on ocean liner bound for Honolulu, Hawaii, which also has Caryl Miquet's name on its passenger list, the plan to help an emperor climb back on the throne of Austria is bumped down a few places on his lists of priorities.

At first, Von Kaz assumes that he's simply escorting a wealthy importer in possession of an expensive piece of merchandise, a jade coin emblazoned with the image of a lion, but ends up spending the crossing confined to their cabins – drinking and playing cards. The reason for their seclusion is Carl Kohler, a Hawaiian from Germanic extraction, who's eager to speak with the importer privately. However, when the Baron stumbles across Kohler's body on a deserted section of the deck, a tufted and feathered steel dart, quietly discharged from the barrel of an air pistol, stuck in his chest, it becomes apparent that there's more at stake than just a decorated gobbet of jade – which his client confirms after docking in Honolulu.

However, the first hurdle presents itself when the Baron simply wants to report his discovery of the body to the proper authority, the ships captain, but finds a skeptic who knows that he spend a considerable stretch of the voyage intoxicated – and presumes that he stumbled out of his cabin in an alcohol fuelled trance and now imagines tripping over corpses, killers and air guns at every turn. It doesn't help, either, that the body has disappeared, probably chucked overboard, when they finally decide to take a peek and only two facts speak in favor of the Baron's story: the presence of blood on the scene and the fact that Mr. Hiroshita is also silenced with a dart from an air gun shortly after their arrival in Hawaii.

But before he was shot, Mr. Hiroshita told the Baron a fabulous tale of a map that marked the location of a lost Inca city in Mexico, buried with its treasures, and later he hears of a rare red diamond that any collector would empty his bank account for as well as stories of the titular feather cloak of Prince Puakini – one of the ancient chieftains of the island. The feathers for those cloaks were plucked from birds that are now extinct and assembling them took up to two generations, which resulted in only one set of cloaks every one hundred years and an original one would fetch a small fortune on the private market.

These stories give the place a touch of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), but, unfortunately, most of these treasured artifacts turn out to be McGuffin's that are disregarded and forgotten about when the final chapters come into view – and this gives the conclusion an incomplete feeling. Notwithstanding this deficiency, The Feather Cloak Murders does not end on an entirely unsatisfactory note, since most of the important plot threads are neatly tied up in the final chapters, but the solution wasn't as impressive as the setting that the Teilhet's so evocatively brought to life.

The Hawaiian islands, on which the Baron tramps about over the course of his investigation, almost became a character in themselves and function splendidly as a backdrop for this story – providing even an ancient and concealed lava tunnel for an exciting dénouement. I feel that the book, as a whole, and then in particular its somewhat fragmented plot, benefited from this evocative surrounding and the history that came with it. It's what made the story, for the most part anyway, stick together.

I also enjoyed the character of the brave Baron Franz Maximilian Karakôz von Kaz a lot more than I did in his previous outing, The Ticking Terror Murders, in which he struck me as a capricious assortment of oddities – even though he was at his best there when he was at his worst. But here he felt a lot more approachable and human, as he was not just occupied with breaking and entering or braining an innocent shopkeeper with his loaded green umbrella/sword stick, and showed more than one side of his personality – like his genuine infatuation with Caryl Miquet or how disturbed he was when her nephew was savaged with a spade by the murderer. What emerges is a far more believable character than merely a figure of fun that's only there for laughs and to provide a solution when the time has come to wrap things up.

While this was not one of the best detective stories I have read, The Feather Cloak Murders was still a very likable and pleasant companion that could not be accused of that one unpardonable sin: namely that of being dull. It's a story that's simply in motion and this makes it disappointing that the plot wasn't any better or that it didn't follow up on all of its tall tales of treasures and lost cities. There was something worthwhile buried in this narrative, but its authors failed to bring it completely to the surface of its pages.

The Case Book of the Brave Baron von Kaz:

The Ticking Terror Murders (1935)

The Feather Cloak Murders (1936)

The Crimson Hair Murders (1936)

The Broken Face Murders (1940)

Dead Man's Clue

2012-01-29T02:29:00.001-08:00

"Philip Linton, whose testimony had helped convict nineteen murderers, died in the belief that the mute testimony on the floor beside him would help convict a twentieth. He was a good cop to the very end."
- David Alexander's Murder Points a Finger, 1953.

The name Ellery Queen has always been synonymous with The Dying Message, permanent associates like John Dickson Carr and The Locked Room Mystery and Agatha Christie and The Closed Circle of Suspects, but this liaison never produced a work that became the flagship for that particular brand of detective fiction – unlike The Hollow Man (1935) and The Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

You could argue on behalf of The Tragedy of X (1932), introducing the Queenian motif of the dying message, but the moribund clue didn't turn up until the final quarter of the book and it's not one that has aged well. Its interpretation relies on a nugget of trivial, everyday knowledge that the passage of time relegated to the dustbin of history and not something contemporary readers should be expected to know. So Ellery Queen's close association with The Dying Message seems to have more to do with their prolific output than that one of their stories became a textbook example of the form.

This is not a putdown of Ellery Queen, but after I had finished reading David Alexander's Murder Points a Finger (1953) I was seized by the realization that it was, perhaps, the first detective novel I read that was as exemplary for The Dying Message as Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930) was for The Private Eye and Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) for The Hybrid Mystery.

Murder Points a Finger sets about when the hour-glass of a former police lieutenant, Philip Linton, only has a few grains of sand left in it and murder is accompanying him on the way home. Linton was a much-lauded expert on fingerprints and had spend the bulk of his years on the force in the identification department, where his expertise on the esoteric patterns of whorls, arches and loops helped secure convictions for nineteen murderers – and his cryptic dying message may put away another one.

Not long after returning home, the murderer forces an entrance and fires a bullet from a forty-five in Linton's belly before taking off again. The dying detective is painfully aware that he has precious few minutes left and takes what is closes at hand, a set of fingerprint cards, to spell out the name of his assailant and dies assured that his friend, Dabney Ashton, will figure it out. Of course, you have to accept the premise that the murderer is satisfied with the belly shot and immediately leaves without making sure that Linton is dead and unable to call for help – or leave an incriminating message. Anyway...

The Clue of the Dying Detective

Philip Linton's friend, Dabney Ashton, is a distinguished theatrical performer with one or two television parts to his credit, an accomplished chess player and a ex-special agent who decoded enemy messages during The Great War, but this does not make him the perceptive debonair amateur sleuth – who picks up on all the subtle hints that the police missed. On the contrary, he's quite inept when it comes to police work, despite his knack for puzzles, and a burden on the investigating officers. Ashton is unable to correctly translate his friends dying clue, which, almost immediately, results in the police going for the simplest answer and swear out an arrest warrant against Linton's foster son, Abner Ellison. Meanwhile, everyone is on the lookout for Linton's granddaughter, Pat, who was kidnapped after she went out to dinner with her fiancé, policeman Allan Walters, on the night of her grandfathers murder and Ashton's meddling could very well have been the driving motive behind a second murder.

Needless to say, as the investigation drags on without the desired results, Ashton begins to feel that he has let everyone around him down and this provides the story with a realistic view on the infallible storybook detective, but, at the same time, it also fully embraces some of the more bizarre features that can be found in the works of members from the Van Dine-Queen School. In the background of the story, the sentry towers and battlements of Mad Hatters Castle, erected by an Albanian who amassed a fortune with cheap, knock-off hats that were copied from more expensive models, casts dark shadows over the events and inspiration for the solution is found in an old speakeasy, "Gypsy's Cosmic Tea Room," that went on after the prohibition era ended – and provides a dwelling for some of the cities most eccentric drinkers. This makes the story read, at times, like one of those half-conscious, lucid dreams in which imagination and reality merge together effortlessly and this partly prompted me into placing an order for another one of his books. But more on that when it arrives here in a few weeks time.

The solution is not a disappointing one, however, it won't kick you in the teeth and leave you stupefied, either, as any seasoned reader of detective stories will probably catch up with the murderer before arriving at the halfway mark of the book – even if you fail, like yours truly, to decipher the clever, but ultimately, simple dying message. But the predictability of the murderers identity does very little damage to the overall quality of the story, at least, there were not any serious scratches on the reading pleasure that I derived from this book.

On a whole, a very satisfying, if a somewhat unusual, detective story that ranks alongside Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935) and Pat McGerr's The Seven Deadly Sisters (1948) as the best mysteries I have read this month – and with that we've come full-circle! The three best detectives I devoured in the first month of this year are all exemplary stories for The Locked Room Mystery, Closed Circle of Suspects and The Dying Message as well as representing three succeeding decades.

A Tough Nut to Crack

2012-01-25T10:36:00.001-08:00

"What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer."
- Hugo Gernsback.

Raymond Chandler once said of Dashiell Hammett, one of the trailblazers of the Hardboiled School, that he returned murder in the capable hands of those individuals who were not faced by the seamier side of life – committing crimes for a reason and not to provide a body to reinvigorate the reader's interest in chapter XII. The mean streets supplied them with the simply means for murder that excluded the hand wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish, however, quite a few of their literary decedents tugged the hard-bitten private eyes on their sleeves into a more classically furnished environment.

Over the course of forty books and stories, Bill Pronzini drew a detailed picture of the life of his nameless gumshoe, resulting in one of the most realistic and well-rounded characters in the genre, but he still stumbles over murders that could have sprang from the imagination of John Dickson Carr (c.f. Hoodwink, 1981). Henry Kane's The Narrowing Lust (1955) has his "private richard," Pete Chambers, confronted with an apparent suicide in a secured room with all the doors and steel shutters locked from the inside and Michael Collins' one-armed shamus, Dan Fortune, grapples with the handle of quite a different locked door problem in the short story, "No One Likes to Be Played for a Sucker."

Manly Wellman's Find My Killer (1947) is another excellent sample of taking the tough, street hardened private eye, with a take-no-nonsense attitude, and assign him to a case that should've been entitled The Pistol Murder Case signed by S.S. van Dine.

Find My Killer opens with Jackson Yates, an ex-policeman operating on a free-lance basis, dropping by at the office of J.D. Thatcher, a lawyer who turns out to be a woman with eyes that are two different shades of blue, hoping to procure an open spot as a bodyguard for one of her clients. Unfortunately, for him, the services of a bodyguard are no longer required and he's not the only one who's miffed about it. Yates finds one of his would-be-contenders for the job harassing Thatcher and quickly disposes of him in a good, old-fashioned bare knuckle fist fight. Impressed with his quick and effective performance, Thatcher offers Yates a partnership on a job that could very well put a $5000 check in their pockets.

Richard Ealing offered this bounty, written down in an official codicil that was attached to his will, to everyone who can find his killer and deliver the proof needed to secure a conviction, but the problem is that his death is being written-off as a suicide – which is sort of a problem when you intend to tag someone for murder. Consider the facts: Richard Ealing drew his last breath in the gunroom, after a slug from a derringer, a short-barreled pistol, hit him in the chest and the weapon was still clutched in his hand. Paraffin tests showed the presence of gunpowder residue on the dead man's hand and the door of the room was locked from the inside. A tough nut that has to be cracked if they want to slap either his much younger wife, her lover, his personal physician or any of the other stock-in-trade suspects with a murder charge and cash in their just reward.

Wellman delivered with this novel a text book example that shows how to intersperse hardboiled sequences, in which, for example, our narrator has to go to blows with a dunderheaded homicide cop, with a cleverly conceived plot that contains big chunks of clues – both real and false. Although the clue to the murderer's motive wasn't given until quite late in the book.

Anyway, what makes this book, IMHO, special is that the structure of the plot rests on forensic science, such as ballistics and pathology, placing the story somewhat awkwardly in the Scientific School of Detection. But these scientific elements or cleverly exploited, on both sides of the table! As a matter of fact, it's done so well that I can almost forgive him for the routine solution and off-hand explanation of the locked room angle, which was the only plot thread that did not came true to the promise that its premise made and a bit more originality, in combination with the forensic portion of the solution, would've turned this into an impossible crime novel to take notice off.

Otherwise, it comes recommended for being a perfect specimen of what was conceived before the shotgun wedding between the Golden Age Detective Novel and the Hardboiled Private Eye Story.

A World of Wonders

2012-01-22T13:29:00.001-08:00

"Beauty, following the sun's example, prevents us seeing what's around it whenever it appears."
- Philon.

Whether you're carefully perusing the brittle pages of an old-fashioned whodunit or shooting over the fresh leaves of a neo-orthodox mystery, you are allowed one assumption if the sleuth hound happens to be nipping at the heels of a pernicious serial killer: the individual laboring fervently on the body count rarely does it to give sway to a twisted impulse, beaten into him as a child with a bible, or mere caprice. Serial killers that stalk the dark alleyways of this neighborhood of the detective story possess more refinement, cunning and are often as playful as a kitten with an attitude. A few well-known examples are Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders (1936), Ellery Queen's A Cat of Many Tails (1949) and Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981).

Paul Halter's The Seven Wonders of Crime (1997) follows a somewhat similar route as its predecessors, but this time the seemingly unstoppable sequence of murders are perpetrated by an individual who's artistically inclined – as well as mischievous and machiavellian.

The elusive murderer, who seems to take pleasure in taunting and challenging the police with paintings that have cryptic hints plastered across their canvases, draws inspiration for a series of utterly bizarre and apparently impossible murders from the immense and architectural masterpieces of the ancient world: the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. From this premise emerges a fascinating picture as each murder in the chain corresponds, one way or another, with one of the wonders erected by the erstwhile civilizations that used to inhabit this globe – and their appearance makes it tempting to ascribe these crimes to one of the deities that were worshipped during those earlier times.

Naturally, these artistically inspired crimes eventually come into the peripheral vision of Owen Burns, an aesthete who considers murder to be one of the fine arts, and seems overwhelmed with the morbid creation of these felonious wonders. As his chronicler, Archilles Stock, notes, at one point in the book, is that his friend wallowed through this case as a shadow of his former self – completely blinded by the beauty that shrouded the truth behind these murders.

Let's consider some of these gruesome, but wondrous, works of art, which began with the death of a lighthouse keeper on a cut-off islet during a severe thunderstorm as a scream bellowed over the waves to the mainland – which is connected to the islet but during a storm the path to the lighthouse is temporarily inaccessible. People saw the man turn into a human torch on the parapet, but they were unable to reach him until the storm has quieted down and when they finally reach the lighthouse they find that someone had locked the old man in. Another murders offers the problem of a man who was felled by a crossbow bolt that was dispatched from such a distance and angle that it could only have happened if the archer was soaring through the sky on the flying nimbus of Sun Wukong.

I have picked out these two particular scenarios, because they are both original in their representation and inspired in their explanation – which made for a few new wrinkles in the pond of this beloved sub-genre of us. From the remaining five seemingly impossible murders two have a decent solution, two more are disappointing and one of them is simply preposterous. It involves a man who was uncovered in a house surrounded by un-trodden ground and the cause of death is dehydration, but there's a full carafe of water within arm reach of the deceased. I was expecting a solution as clever as the one Ronald Knox put forward to explain the starved man in his famous short story, "Solved by Inspection," but the answer is as psychologically impossible as the physical representation of the murder. But if you string together the seven murders that are, to all appearances, completely impossible, the ones with a stronger construction can easily carry the weaker ones and the section of the book where they are explained away, one after another, is the most satisfactory part of the story.

However, if the seven impossible murders represent Halter's strength, coming up with baffling premises, which are, often enough, accompanied with clever explanations, than the characters and setting represent his weaknesses – which were also present in the previous novels I have read.

There's still very little sense of time, place or characters, who seem to be unaware that they are people from the Edwardian period, which doesn't help, at all, in bringing that specific era alive like you should expect from someone who is seen as the modern-day heir of John Dickson Carr. Halter's idea of writing historical fiction seems to be throwing around a few allusions to the clattering of horses hooves in the opening chapters and hope that it will resonate with the reader until the closing parts of the book. It didn't.

I also noticed that the worlds in which he situates his novels can be very claustrophobic. The Seven Wonders of Crime reputedly infuses the nation with dread and terror, as the citizens breathe a sigh of relief when they find out that the next name in the headlines isn't theirs, but the investigators focus their attention on a single household – which makes this amazing case feel like a surprisingly domestic affair. Contrast this with Queen's A Cat of Many Tails, in which the city of New York is turned into cowering and frightened character as the murderer bumps off one its citizens after another.

Paul Halter remains a somewhat problematic writer, but one who has his heart in the right place and continues to exhume a part of the genre that others thought was buried forever. His only response to their horrified looks is a smug grin, that seems to suggest an unembarrassed pride at having just crammed over half a dozen impossible crimes between the covers of a single novel, which is a very infectious attitude that makes you want to overlook his flaws.

All in all, The Seven Wonders of Crime is an interesting, neo-orthodox detective novel that should have a spot on the shelves of every enthusiast of locked room mysteries and classically styled whodunits, but you have to take the good with the bad and accept the short comings that encircle the plot. The unbreakable chain of murders and their supernatural appearance are the main attraction of this novel with the actual murderer and clues a nudge or two below, however, they are not entirely without interest. Not perfect, but not bad either.

Remember, if you purchase a copy of this book, whether it's digital or paper bound, you are giving John Pugmire are helping hand in bringing more of these stories to an international audience and show the publishing world that there are readers interested in this neo-orthodox movement – and this may open-up Asia for us somewhere in the future!

Even in the Best Families

2012-01-21T02:16:00.001-08:00

"But, my family being what it is, even those short periods furnished plenty of incidents that might have been the prelude to a murder..."
- Sally Bowen (The Seven Deadly Sisters, 1948)

When you closely scrutinize the list with names of novelists that have one or more detective stories to their credit, it's not always an inexplicable enigma how a bunch of them ended up, knee-deep, in the boggy mire known as biblioblivion and are sinking ever deeper with each passing year. They may have had a feeble grip on their plots or sketched their characters without turning them into portraits. Their dialogue may have reverberated with the buzzing of insipid babbling or they were competent, but lacked that modicum of originality necessary to stand out in the crowd. On the other hand, if you see a writer trudging through that slough and bog who had everything, from a way with words that gave the illusionary thumbing of a heartbeat to their characters to a surprisingly effective and novel way to tackle plotting, you can't help but stare in disbelief as they slog pass you.

Pat McGerr was one of those mystery writers who had the ability to draw convincing characters, construct ingenious plots without being over-elaborate and presented them in an unconventional way – which also had a surprising touch of realism. McGerr reasoned that the basic formula, for penning a traditionally-styled whodunit, hinges on figuring out whom of the suspects planted a dagger in the neck of the body, but what if a detective story kicks-off with divulging the identity of the culprit and you have to work your way back in order to figure out who was murdered? This simple reversal allows a writer to turn even the simplest of crimes into genuine puzzlers and her first effort with this plot device, Pick Your Victim (1946), is one of the authentic masterpieces of the genre, but McGerr outdone herself with her second novel, The Seven Deadly Sisters (1948), in which we are unaware of both the identity of the murderer and the victim – an absolute gem of a who-was-done-in-and-by-whom!

Sally Bowen has moved with her newly acquired spouse, Peter, back to his native England to settle down and start a family of their own, but a frantic letter from a friend, expressing condolences and sympathy over the fact that her aunt committed suicide after poisoning her uncle, throws a sizeable peddle in the tranquility of her mind – especially since the letter neglects to mention any names. The problem is that Sally Bowen has seven aunts who are all, more or less, unhappily married and equipped with adequate motives to act on the "till death us part" line from their wedding vows.

Here's how the titular sisters are introduced in the dramatis personae in the Dell edition:

Aunt Clara:

The oldest sister, a determined matchmaker. Her domineering tactics force all of her sister in more or less unhappy marriages.

Aunt Tessie:

The schoolteacher sister, remains a spinster into her thirties. She finally marries a man younger than herself.

Aunt Agnes:

The shrewish sister, is a redhead who makes life miserable for two husbands.

Aunt Edith:

The weak sister, was maneuvered into an unhappy marriage and finds solace in the "magic bottle."

Aunt Molly:

The beautiful sister, is a free-lance artist. Too much prodding toward matrimony has made her afraid of men.

Aunt Doris:

The glamorous sister, very frankly likes men, and she doesn't let the conventions cramp her style.

Aunt Judy:

The youngest sister, is only a few years older than Sally. She has been spoiled by too much indulgence.

The knowledge that one of her aunts poisoned her husband without knowing which one prevents Sally from immediately establishing contact with the home front, but the uncertainty wages a war with her peace of mind and begins to tell her husband all about her family during an all-night conversation – from which a picture emerges of a family that could've been a happy one if one of them didn't do all the wrong things for all the right reasons.

This on-going flashback covers a period of several years and tells how most of the sisters were married off to the wrong husbands, recounting heated domestic disputes and uncovers underlining relationships that could've been lifted from the storyline of a second-rate, mid-day soap opera, but the way in which McGerr exploits these elements is everything but corny – and would make for a great television drama! But within this narrative there are also a few neat clues tucked away, accompanied with some clever misdirection, but I have to beat my own drum, once again, for being extremely lucid in picking up on all the hints and pointing the finger at the murderer before arriving at the final chapter, however, this took nothing away from a very effective conclusion – which felt both logical as well as an inevitability.

The only part that gave me pause for thought was the feasibility of Sally being able to give her husband an accurate, detailed and uncolored account of events stretching back several years that provided him with the information needed to positively identify the murderer and her victim, but if you can accept that premise you have a brilliantly executed and original detective story on your hands. I recommend this one without hesitation.

I have one more Pat McGerr novel on my to-be-read pile, Follow As the Night (1951), but I will safe that one for the one-year anniversary of this blog – which began with a review of her first novel.

Culte des Mortes

2012-01-17T12:51:00.001-08:00

"I met murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him—"
- Masque of Anarchy

In the introductory chapters of Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), Robert Adey compiled a comprehensive summary of this particular sub-genre and underlines notable works from established novelists and writers whose names have dimmed in our collective recollection. One of these unnoticed, fleeting shadows from the past, whose career lays in the same negligent state as that of the crumbled remnants of a headstone, is a "seasoned wanderer" named Theodore Roscoe – who wrote part of his masterpiece, Murder on the Way! (1935), on a candle-lit cemetery near Leogane! If that doesn't set the mood, nothing does.

This barbarous and grotesque narrative embarks on its grim journey when the two main protagonists, artist Edwin Cartershall, who also narrates the story, and his fiancé-to-be, Patricia "Pete" Dale, receive a late-night visitant, a character plucked from the fantasies of Lewis Carroll, named Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines – who contented himself with the title of Comte de Limonade. Tousellines introduces himself as the solicitor of Pete's uncle, Eli Proudfoot, recently departed from this world, and invites them to tail him back to the decaying chateau of his late employer, situated in Morne Noir, Haiti, for the final rites and the reading of his will.

Uncle Eli shuffled off his mortal coil in the confines of his moldering library, where his remains were found slumped in an armchair with a bullet hole defacing his visage, and the local authority, represented here in the presence of Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse, of the Garde d'Haiti, presumes that the man robbed himself of his own life. However, the absence of a gun also leaves him with the option of murder, but only seems to have considered this possibility with the scourge of the local inhabitants firmly set in his mind – the voodoo-driven zombies of Haitian legend!

You have to keep in mind that this book predates most, if not all, of those bad, cheesy low-budget horror flicks and the zombies that reputedly stumble around in this book are lifted from folklore instead of Hollywood. Tousellines provides Cartershall and Pete with the following description of Narcisse's first suspect:

"A zombie, m'sieu, a zombie is one who has died but is not yet dead. A corpse resurrected by witch’s doctors magic from the grave. A living dead man who returns as the slave of some master, who may labor in the field or walk with silent steps on errands of revenge."

But the scenes awaiting them at the dilapidated, colonial chateau, where the rhythmic rumbling of ceremonial drumming, emanating from the wilds encompassing the estate, never ceases, can be best described as the drug-fuelled phantasmagorias of an opium addict. There's the unconventional funeral of Uncle Edi, prepared for burial according to Haitian voodoo rituals, and the reading of a will – which turns all of his prospective heirs into pawns in a game with a one hundred thousand dollar inheritance as the big prize.

The assortment of potential heirs, aside from Dale and her artistically inclined friend, could've been escapees of a freak show, especially when hurdled together in one room, and between them there are enough murders to furnish a new wing for the black museum. These seven blood hounds that follow murder in his footsteps are a British peer who has done a twenty-year stretch for murder, a tattooed deserter from the United States Navy, a Dominican with bloody hands and no tongue, an Albino youth with an attitude, a one-armed Jamaican witch and her half-wit son named Toadstool and an exiled German bluebeard who was an embarrassment to the home front. The only thing they have to do in order to procure the inheritance is simply staying at the chateau for twenty-four hours after the funeral and they can ascent the list if the person ahead of them in the line of successors leaves or croaks! Murders, resurrections, impossible disappearances, rebel uprisings and hair-raising situations tag each other in and out at a frightening and dazzling pace.

Murder on the Way! clues us in on what And Then There Were None (1939) would've been like if the names of John Dickson Carr or Hake Talbot were plastered across its front cover. Theodore Roscoe does not only share their taste for Grand Guignol, but also their gift for conjuring up an apparently demon haunted world where everything is possible – even the impossible!

At one point in the story, the second heir in line, the tongue-less Ti Pedro, is locked into the room where Uncle Eli used to store his rosewood coffin and that storage room pretty much amounts to a plastered and sealed room – without any easy entrances or escape routes. The door was locked from the outside, with the solitary key in constant possession of a police officer, while an interconnecting door was nailed shut and the only window was covered with undisturbed cobwebs, but despite these obstacles someone managed to shoot him through the top of his head. Later on, the shadowy murderer vanishes from a dead-end point in a subterranean tunnel and Roscoe explains these miracles of black magic away with the same ease as the sun shoos away the stars at dawn. The only thing that marred the pleasure for this reader was my own cleverness at picking up on nearly all the clues that helped me identify the murderer earlier on in the story, but what an enterprising and spirited murderer with a truly original scheme that anticipates a rather famous cartoon series.

This is nothing short of a bloody tour-de-force and an unapologetic flight of fancy, which does a breath taking job at merging the plot of a fair play mystery with components of thrilling tales of adventure and making it feel like a horror story. Readers who prefer their detective stories with an air of literacy are best advice to stay out of its way. This is genre fiction in its purest, undistilled form and only recommended to habitual users.

On a final note, according to short autobiography in this book, Roscoe was also the author of a detective story that just might be the scarcest title in all of mystery fiction:

"At the age of eight, he was the author of a thrilling mystery, 'The Sheriff of Red Roach Ranch,' published in a hand-bound edition limited to one copy."

I can only imagine the number on the price tag of that book, if it ever appeared on the second-hand book market.

From the Gullet of the Serpent

2012-01-14T08:19:00.001-08:00

"Always remember, it's a trick. Keep that in mind and you can figure out how it's done."
- Columbo (Columbo Goes to the Guillotine, 1989)

One thing that has confounded me, ever since I read about it, years ago, is how the man who delivered Sherlock Holmes into this world, the embodiment of scientific and logical reasoning, turned to the paranormal – suspending his rational faculties and empirical enquiry in order to wrap an aching heart in the false comforts of spiritualism. Well, confoundedness is perhaps not the best word to describe how I think of Conan Doyle's innate longing for life beyond the grave, roused after having laid so many loved ones to rest, but it's not what you'd expect from a man of science and medicine. However, this confidence in the existence of ghosts and fairies, professed by a man who, ironically, was also one of the leading lights in a nook of the literary world that adopted the same skeptical stance towards mediums as one of their biggest detractors, Harry Houdini, turns into a charming characteristic when juxtaposed with the questionable claims made by one of his fellow composers in crime around that same time.

Elsa Barker was a minor name in the publishing industry, who lived abroad during the years leading up to The Great War, but ensured that the memory of her name would linger on with the publication of Letters from a Living Dead Man (1914) – a collection of epistles dictated by a Los Angeles court judge named David P. Hatch after his death in 1912.

During the year of Hatch's passing, Barker was in Paris when she begins to feel "strongly impelled to take up a pencil and write" and churned out a stack of letters, which were all signed with an anonymous X – or at least so it appeared. But when this discerning woman of letters learned that X was also a nickname for a judge, back in the United States, she astutely drew the lines to connect the scattered dots and came to the only sensible conclusion: she had become a receptive medium for messages from the spirit world. Over the next five years, Barker ghosted two more compendiums of Hatch's letters, War Letters from a Living Dead Man (1915) and Last Letters from a Living Dead Man (1919), and a book composed of free verses, Songs of a Vagrom Angel (1916), dictated to her by an angel. No. I'm not making this up.

These books made quite a splash in mediumistic circles around the globe and there seems to be a resurged interest in them now, but, at the time, the veracity of them was called into question and their intermediating author slowly evanesced from the printed pages after the hype died down. But during the late 1920s, Barker made a grand reentry into the publishing world and this time took a stab at the popular detective story – penning three novels that featured the celebrated crime expert Dexter Drake and his chronicler Paul Howard.

The Cobra Candlestick (1928) was their first recorded outing in the field of criminology, at least, one that filled the pages of a full-length novel and the opening chapters suggest strong influences from S.S. van Dine and Conan Doyle, but without falling into the trap of becoming a carbon copy of the originals – and nearly all of their faults were barred from this novel. The first chapter has the tone of a Van Dine novel as the narrator, Paul Howard, reminisces over the case of the cobra candle stick, which he describes as the strangest case they worked on since he took up the position of Dexter Drake's personal assistance two years previously.

Dexter Drake is not a dilettante who began meddling in murder cases merely to pass the time between cocktails, collecting rare artifacts and quoting obscure passages from curious volumes of forgotten lore, but established himself as an independent consultant who earned the admiration of Scotland Yard and the Sûreté – among other respectable police organizations around the world. Howard describes him as a debonair man of the world with black eyes that weigh everyone on invisible scales and he turns out to have an extraordinary faculty for languages, however, he lacked the insufferable character traits that would qualified the murder of Philo Vance as a justifiable homicide. Anyway, regardless of his considerable intellect and talent, he comes across as a nice and respectable person with a great deal of respect for professional policeman, who, in turn, are competent professionals instead of the bumbling, ineffectual idiots that Doyle interjected into the genre.

The case commences when a messenger, named Percival Crumbie, arrives at their abode with a hastily scribbled note from his neighbor, Madame Marshbitter, containing an urgent plea to immediately come down to her home, situated in a rural area of Connecticut, where her only son was murdered in the library under inexplicable circumstances.

John Marshbitter was on his own in the library, poring over his notes, when a well-aimed blow crashed through the roof of his temple, killing him almost instantaneous, but the exists of the room were under constant observation by various family members and guests of the house. Marshbitter's mother-in-law, Mrs. Frew, was lounging on the couch in the hallway, his son and daughter, Ted and Mary, were on the veranda outside and the man who rented their summer house, Nicholas Pogue, was in the next room playing on the piano facing an interconnecting door and they all swore that nobody left or entered the library during the time of the murder.

This makes for a tantalizing problem, especially for such a distinguished and lauded detective as Dexter Drake, but a prior commitment necessitates his presence in Washington and he sends Paul Howard ahead of him to lay the preliminary groundwork for his investigation. Consequently, the Great Detective is absent for a large portion of the book and this struck me a conscious nod to The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), which, in turn, also gives Howard and Sergeant Doon an opportunity to shine as detectives – and upon Drake's return they are able to present him with a lattice work consisting of facts, clues and red herrings.

What complicates John Marshbitter's murder is not necessarily the seemingly impossible nature of his death, but determining the truthfulness of the witnesses stationed at the exits of the library and the opportunities they had at their disposal to sneak in and deliver the fatal blow. This gives the book more of a how-was-it-done feel than that of a locked room mystery, however, it's a nifty idea to leave it undecided whether or not the characters are facing a classic locked room problem, which is even further complicated when the suspects began to drag red herrings across the trail – making it even harder to separate the real facts from the fabricated ones. I also found it amusing that every type of letter that can mystify a detective story turns up in this book: anonymous letters, threatening letters, unfinished letters and hidden letters.

The outcome is a gratifying and complicated plot, which does a surprisingly competent job at directing attention away from the obvious suspect and dropping clues that played fair with the reader. The only blotch on the solution is that Dexter Drake withheld one piece of information that would've told you how the murderer escaped the closely observed library, but then again, once you suspect this person and have familiarized yourself with the facts you can, as an experienced reader of detective stories, pretty much guess how this trick was pulled off and roll your eyes at it. Much more rewarding is putting the sequence of events, leading up to the murder, in the correct order to form a complete and coherent picture of what happened at the Marshbitter estate.

All in all, this book turned out to be pleasant surprise and was worth the gamble I made when I purchased it. The book modeled itself on detective stories from previous eras, but with most of their weaknesses, clichés and stock-characters absent and with shades of the ingenious plotting that became synonymous with detective stories from the 1930-and 40s – as well as a playing reasonably fair with the reader. There are still a fair amount of imperfections to be found in this book, but, in the end, it was far above any expectations I had of it.

The Dexter Drake and Paul Howard Mysteries:

The Cobra Candlestick (1928)

The C.I.D. of Dexter Drake (1929)

The Redman Cave Murder (1930)

By the way, I was planning to lay off locked room mysteries until, at least, February, but then a special package arrived a week or two earlier than expected and I simply have to dig into them as soon as possible.

Physics of the Impossible

2012-01-10T09:44:00.001-08:00

"...from this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
- Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980)

Thirty-three years after publishing a very unconventionally structured locked room mystery, The Seclusion Room (1978), Dr. Fredric Neuman, Director of the Anxiety and Phobia Treatment Center at White Plains Hospital, came out with a sequel, Come One, Come All (2011) – which is synopsized as a "a locked room mystery, and a take-off on the locked mystery" as well as a "comic novel, but realistic." I mentioned this prospect of a new, potentially interesting impossible crime yarn in the penultimate paragraph of my review, but this news was received with a bit of skepticism from the proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books, John Norris.

Come One, Come All is a chunky, self-published novel, but the only real faults to be detected were those of a typographical nature that one expects from a book that was wrung through the innards of an independent printing press and even these printer's errors were kept at a minimum – and with that I mean that I have seen much, much worse. This is a more than passable edition for a self-published novel, comparable to John Pugmire's self-published translations of Paul Halter's locked room mysteries, and the only real drawback is that the text is sparsely spread out over the pages, which gives it a bloated and off-putting appearance. I estimate that the actual page count would be around 250-300 pages instead of the 455 pages that it counts now.

But now, on to the review! Psychiatrist Abe Redden, the main protagonist from the previous book, The Seclusion Room, is pried loose from his comfort spot, at Four Elms psychiatric hospital, to temporarily strengthen the staff of The Women's Health Center – where the winds of change are whipping up a storm in 1970s New York City. Abortion has been legalized and due to some controversial treatment programs, the health center is now under constant siege, from pro-life supporters and gay rights activists, but internally the place also rambles like a biscuit tin full of loose screws, nuts and bolts.

The man who occupied the seat of director, Charles Wegner, was transferred to the morgue after a fatal heart attack, but a whiff of gossip can be detected in the corridors, suggesting that the director was poisoned, and one of their doctors, Tina Cantor, in charge of a controversial new treatment program, may be a nymphomaniac with literary aspirations – who seems to already have penned a best-selling, fictionalized expose of her private life under the nom-de-plum of Dr. Y. Naturally, she becomes the love interest of Dr. Redden, but he's also confronted with problems of a professional nature: there's a patient, checked in under the name Adam Adamson, who claims to come from 150 years in the future and knows from his time that Redden will end up burning down the hospital, that is professionally attached to the health center, but he's unable to remember specific details about this historic event in the making.

Adamson's zany lectures on 22nd century life makes him sound as a writer for The Guide attempting to describe a futuristic incarnation of the human race, but then again, these short vignettes impressed me from the very start as an unabashed homage to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Adamson after all does mean "son of Adam." Yeah, it makes more sense if you have one of my mental afflictions, but you get my drift.

Anyway, the first part of the book, roughly 170 pages, does not read like a detective story at all, but as a warped comedy of manners that is unable to restrain Murphy's Law and twists like a knife in everyone and everything that is brought up on its pages. It's not until the center is confronted with the physically impossible murder of their new director, Patricia Robinson, that the detective story begins to the feel the knifepoint pricking its jugular.

Robinson was discovered behind the door of her examination room, locked with a key from the inside that was still in the lock when it was busted open, and the broken window only affords an easy entrance and quick exist with the aid of a ladder – not to mention that the alleyway beneath the window was guarded at each end by a policeman. At first, Dr. Abe Redden, backed-up by a few other characters, appear to approach this problem in a light hearted, comical way, throwing allusions around to Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and Rex Stout and proposing prosperous solution, such as an examination table that was fixed to propel Robinson head-first against a filing cabinet, but the actual answer to this locked room problem is as solid a put-down as the door itself!

This joke-explenation, at the expense of the locked room mystery, was probably meant to be somewhat of a letdown, but the solution is so incredibly simple and rational that Neuman just might have come up with something completely new here. It's so simple, that it could've easily been overlooked from the time Edgar Allan Poe penned "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). I tend to like in the context of this story.

Unfortunately, the other compartments of the solution, the identity of the murderer and the accompanying motive, proved to be far less interesting and suffered from under exposure and sparse clueing. But this hardly affected the enjoyment derived from the overall story, which, I think, says something about how much I have begun to enjoy Neuman's take on the detective story – in spite of the fact that they are awfully modern in tone and take frequent potshots at our beloved impossible crime story. However, Neuman seems to understand that you can bring up loaded topics, like abortion, religion and sexuality, in a detective story without overburdening your characters with them and make them wallow in angst for hundreds of pages on end. I also appreciated the fact that he didn't walk around on tip-toes and blatantly poked fun at everything, which is how it should be done.

Hopefully, I have not over praised this book, but I completely enjoyed this funny, but also intelligent, take-off on the locked room mystery, the characters that wandered across its pages and its sense of humor – which hovered between darkly twisted and delightfully juvenile.

Simply put, I found this book a riot!

Snow Blind

2012-01-06T15:04:00.001-08:00

"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
- Albert Einstein.

As the days that lead up to the one year anniversary of this place dwindle down, crossed off the calendar, one after another, like names on the guest list of Mr. U.N. Owen, it slowly began to morph back to its original incarnation – a blog that is dedicated to the great old detective stories of yore! There was a stretch of time when this place resembled a shrine for new-fangled, neo-orthodox mysteries, but it appears that the ghosts of past writers, such as Anne Rowe and Willy Corsari, reclaimed this digital mausoleum from the living. Well, they are about to welcome another revenant spirit, whose memory has faded like a neglected black-and-white photograph, in their midst.

Kay Cleaver Strahan is one of those names that has been accumulating dust in the attic of our collective memories for decades, but nobody seems to remember why, exactly, this author was stored up there. I guess it was a convenient, spacious spot when they began tidying up the genre.

Strahan was a writer who designed a number of plots that functioned as the structural skeletons for seven mystery novels, which were, in turn, craftily deconstructed by a seasoned crime analyst, named Lynn MacDonald, and, from what I gathered, there was a different approach in storytelling in each of these narratives. Her endeavors at finding new and fresh perspectives, to put a detective story on paper, were rewarded when her novel Footprints (1929) became the recipient of the Scotland Yard Prize – handed out by 100 independent booksellers that were affiliated with the Collins Crime Club for the best mystery of the year.

Footprints opens in the present time, which, in this novel, is 1928, but spends most of its pages on looking back at a murder that was committed in the year 1900 and we are almost immediately confronted with a rather dubious and shaky confession. Neal Quilter confesses to his sister, Judy, that he has come to believe that it was him who was responsible for the death of their father, all those years ago, but the circumstances, in which the murder was carried out, won't allow this admission of guilt to stand.

The Quilter's are among the best-known families in Oregon, whom transplanted their lives and family tree from the South during the Civil War, and lived together, as an outwardly happy and caring family, on a big farm known as Q 2 Ranch – until the report of a pistol shot ripped through their lives and awakened that ogre known as suspicion. This one shot was enough to wrench them all from their peaceful slumber, but they found themselves unable to leave their bedrooms – as their doors were all locked from the outside. The keys were later found in a pile on a table in the bedroom of Richard Quilter, who was dying in his bed from a gunshot wound in the chest, next to an open window with a rope dangling out of it.

Richard Quilter, with his dying breath, murmured the words, "red mask," as he inclined his head towards the window, however, when the shot rang out it had stopped snowing for some time and the house was marooned in an expanse of unbroken snow – and there were rolls of undisturbed snow on the windowsills. This literarily threw the possibility of an intruder out of the window, but the absence of a gun in the room makes suicide as unlikely a possibility as murder and the case went unsolved for three decades.

That is, until Dr. Joe Elm, the likeable family physician and friend, who shares the concern of his friends over the mental well being of Neal, decides to consult Lynn MacDonald – a renowned criminologist. Nearly thirty years have elapsed since the fatal bullet was fired and there's little left for her to go on. The house has been remodeled and refurnished several times, family members have died off and the intervening years have made the memories of those who are still alive unreliable, but the family does have in its possession two parcels of letters that were penned by the youngest members in the house, Neal and Lucy, to their sister Judy – who lived away from home at the time.

Based on these scraps of paper, written by a child and disturbed young man, MacDonald has to come up with, not only, a possible murderer, but also gauge for a motive and figure out the method. The picture that emerge from these letters is refreshingly different from your usual, stock-in-trade dysfunctional family and showed a relatively normal family who are attempting to deal with problems that life throws at them. There's a less-than-popular in-law making an entrance into the family and there are financial problems that may force them to sell their ranch, but no stereotypical patriarchs ruling over the private lives and clutching the purse strings of the family with an iron first or fooling around with changed wills.

It's a fairly realistic portrayal of a family during the early 1900s, or, at least, I imagine it is not an entirely unrealistic representation of such a family during that period in time and the biography of the Quilters, provided by Dr. Elms, is equally fascinating – placing this book in the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection. This detailed description traces the family history of the Quilter's all the way back to the settlement of America and their exodus from the South because of their commendation of slavery. Not to mention that it also introduces several plot devices that would resurface in the succeeding decades: Q. Patrick's S.S. Murder (1933) also uses a series of letters to relate the story, the retrospective look at a murder from the past foreshadows Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs (1943) and Sparkling Cyanide (1945) and Ellery Queen (who debuted in the year this book was published) would make the dying message their trademark.

The only thing that mucks it up is the almost Gladys Mitchell-like vagueness where the solution is concerned. There's an interesting false solution proposed towards the end before the actual culprit is revealed in the final sentence of the book, but this impressed me more as a guess than as a statement of fact. This last moment "surprise" left absolutely no room whatsoever to explain how this person was either locked into the bedroom or trodded over snow without disturbing its surface, although, if you know who is fingered for the murder you can pretty much guess the method. But it's a sloppy writing/editing job on the part of both the writer and editor. This is a shame, because up till the final pages this has been an excellent read and could easily become a favorite of mine – even with a routine solution to the impossible nature of the murder.

All in all, this is a nicely written story that must have seem like a breath of fresh air at the time and some of its originality still shines through, which makes it worth picking up when you come across a dirt-cheap copy of the book, but the ambiguous (read: sloppy) ending should not make this one of your top-priorities on your wish-list.

K.C. Strahan's bibliography:

The Desert Moon Mystery (1927)

Footprints (1929)

Death Traps (1930)

October House (1932)

The Meriwether Mystery (1932)

The Hobgoblin Murder (1934)

The Desert Lake Mystery (1936)

When the Past Wears Us Down

2012-01-04T09:20:00.001-08:00

"It appears to be an impossible crime, but there are no impossible crimes, only misunderstood crimes."
- Stanley Baum ("The Stolen Saint Simon," 2000)

"Willy Corsari" (1897-1998)

Wilhelmina Angela Douwes-Schmidt was born on December 26, 1897 in Sint-Peters-Jette (Brussels, Belgium) and drew her last breath more than a hundred years later on May 11, 1998 in Amstelveen (The Netherlands). She was brought up in an artistic family, as a daughter of an operatic father and a pianist mother, instilling a love for the performing arts from early childhood and destined her for a life in the spotlights, but it was a talent for the written word that brought her lasting fame and an international audience.

Under a fictitious name, that of Willy Corsari, she began dabbling in a variety of genres and themes, touching everything from psychological novels and stage plays to children's literary and detective stories – which were also introduced into the English, French, German, Russian, Norwegian and Danish languages. This puts her in the same league as Robert van Gulik and Appie Baantjer, whose books also scaled the language barrier into the welcoming hands of a whole new flock of readers, but neither of them, not even Van Gulik, was as classically styled as Corsari. The book I picked from her body of work, Voetstappen op de trap (Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937), to commence this Vintage Mystery Challenge of 2012, can only be described as a blend between the British whodunit, with a plot that has its roots firmly planted in the works of John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie, and the continental roman policier.

The key figure of this novel is Sir John Judge, born as Jan Rechter, who left Holland to find his luck in Britain and found it. As an entrepreneur, he put a considerable sum to his name and was even knighted for his business endeavors. Judge was also well-liked among his peers and threw money at people like candy to kids on the fifth of December, but the affluent philanthropist also harbored a darker, secretive side – one not known to his family and immediate associates but it garnered him a sworn enemy. While he was still living in his adopted homeland, a crooked man tried to kill him and were it not for the intervention of his close friend, Tjako Kiliaan, who took a bullet in the arm, he would've returned to his birthland in a casket.

But in spite of the best efforts by those celebrated men of Scotland Yard, this mysterious individual, with his crooked appearance, was never collared and once more became a fleeting shadow from Sir John Judge's apparently unmarked past, however, it infused his wife, Anja, with dreadful premonitions and visions – which persisted to haunt her restless nights even after moving back to the Netherlands. These phantasms feed her fear and whisper to her that her husband is still in danger of losing his life to an assassins bullet, but when she asks, in her desperation, Inspector Robert Lund for help all he can do for her, at that moment, is come down to their estate, De Berkenhof, and talk with her family and friends.

Inspector Lund, by the way, is the archetypical Dutch storybook detective from the pre-1960s period and comparable protagonists can be found in the mysteries from the hands of Tjalling Dix and Ben van Eysselsteijn, but Corsari might have carved the mold from which their detectives were cut. Lund is a regular homicide detective, "who looks even younger than he is," with a wife at home and got were here's now through competence and methodical police work. As I noted here, the Dutch detective story has not, as far as I am aware, an "amateur reasoner of some celebrity" or a nosy, scheming spinster who are constantly inserting themselves in murder cases or stumble over blood-spattered corpses. The detectives are always professional policemen. This has its advantages, but also its limitations. You don't have to over tax your readers credulity in order to place your detective in the middle of a murder mystery, over and over again, but on the other hand, a policeman is bound to his jurisdiction and thus limited in your settings (with exception of the occasional busman's holiday) – and our part of the genre really misses a memorable character like Sherlock Holmes.

Anyway, back to the story! The nightmarish specter, that has haunted Anja ever since the attempted murder back in England, finally seems to have reemerged and presented itself in a solid form to confront her husband, however, the only occupant of the locked study, after the door was busted open, was the body of Sir John Judge – and his murderer had dissipated as rags of mist that were blown away by a gust of wind.

The key of the door was still stuck in the lock from the inside, the windows were securely fastened and an interconnecting door was blocked, from both sides, by a bookcase stuffed with hefty tomes and a cabinet filled with porcelain. It's the condition of this sealed environment that, at first, suggests an accident, but evidence at the scene (i.e. a fresh bullet hole that can not be accounted for) indicates that his death is a murder, one that defies common sense, but a murder nonetheless.

Lund finds himself not only confronted with a death that simply could not have happened, but also with an array of suspects who obviously belong on the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. There's Sir John's overwrought wife, Anja, and his carefree friend Tjakko, but also a limb and sickly looking secretary named Philip Gardner. Lady Cochat and her 10-year-old son Allan, who seems, at first, to have the personality of an automaton and the one who heard the titular footsteps on the stairs, and the frightened Mrs. Canna – who's is foully poisoned a day after the murder and mumbled a few cryptic words before sinking into a deep coma. There are more players, of course, but listing the entire dramatis personae here seems pointless. But take it from me that a line-up of the suspects resembles a stack of cards from the board game Clue.

I never expected that there were actual Dutch detective stories, from the efflorescent era of the genre, that were this classically styled and ingeniously plotted – and even able to toy with me as if I were new to this game! I had a germ of an idea of what actually happened in that locked study, but I kept switching suspects and methods around on at least five different points in the book – which was encouraged with a barrage of twists and a false solution that told a chilling part of the actual solution. There were one or two coincidences that helped move the plot along in certain parts, but that hardly took anything away from the story and when the solution came it was a satisfying one. A nifty play on the least-likely-suspect gambit. It showed, quite clearly, that Corsari was aware what her fellow artists in crime were up to overseas and the ending of this story also impressed me as a nod and a wink at John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle.

But honesty compels me to point out two minor blotches: the third-person narrative does not read as smooth as could've been, especially during descriptive passages, and one component of the solution was withheld, but I am prepared to show leniency on that point – seeing as Lund was unaware of this, as well, and there were more than enough other clues to look at! All in all, this was an excellent read and a top-notch detective story that deserves a translation, if it hasn't been already, and if you come across one of her translated titles I can help you help you determine whether or not it's one of her detectives.

Well, that was the first book that I knocked-off the list for the VMC2012 and I think we're off to a good start. Not to mention that I can actually put a Dutch impossible crime novel on my list of favorite locked room mysteries now!

My VMC2012 list:

Een lampion voor een blinde (A Lantern for the Blind, 1973) by Bertus Aafjes

De moord op Anna Bentveld (The Murder of Anna Bentveld, 1967) by Appie Baantjer

De onbekende medespeler (The Unknown Player, 1931) by Willy Corsari
Voetstappen op de trap (Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937) by Willy Corsari

Een linkerbeen gezocht (Wanted: A Left Leg, 1935) by F.R. Eckmar

Spoken te koop (Spooks for Sale, 1936) by F.R. Eckmar
Dood in schemer (Death at Twilight, 1954) by W.H. van Eemlandt

Fantoom in Foe-lai (The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959) by Robert van Gulik

Het mysterie van St. Eustache (The Mystery of St. Eustache, 1935) by Havank

Klavertje moord (Four-Leaf Murder, 1986) by Theo Joekes

Het geheim van de tempelruïne (The Secret of the Temple Ruins, 1946) by Boekan Saja

Their Last Bow

2012-01-02T09:59:00.001-08:00

"A theater can be a dangerous place, like all places where crowds of people gather."
- Karen Gregg (The Gold Gamble, 1989)

The plot of The Gold Gamble (1989), contrived by that architect of crime, Herbert Resnicow, has a poetic structure – since it's the farewell performance of his golden pair, Alexander and Norma Gold. It's hard to gauge, though, if these final acts were penned with their retirement in mind or whether his commitment to other projects prevented him from returning to them, before his death in 1997, which is not an unlikely scenario, as the 1990s saw him outsourcing his talents to abet the likes of Pelé and Edward I. Koch with their literary aspirations, but on the other hand, the story does read like a best-off compilation of their previous investigations – and they seem to have full-filled nearly everything they set out to do in their first outing.

As I said before, The Gold Gamble bears all the familiar hallmarks of their antecedents with the New York Police Department and the criminal elements that patronized the museums and theatres of Manhattan, from a theatrical backdrop to a locked room conundrum with a solution that relays on the architectural features of the building, but there were also one or two notable changes in the personal situation of the lead roles.

Alexander and Norma amassed considerable wealth as consulting detectives, which is easy enough to do when your primary costumer base consists entirely of billionaires, setting them up for life – but continue to work to keep Alexander's brain cells from accumulating rust. It's, therefore, fitting that their final clients are, more or less, themselves when a murder threatens their $2.5 million investment in a Broadway musical.

Guys and Dolls was a critically acclaimed musical, based on a number of short stories that were penned by Damon Runyon, that premiered on Broadway during the early 1950s and Maxwell Sapphire, a washed up, but not untalented, producer wants to revive the play. It's the last opportunity he has at reestablishing himself as a theatrical producer, but the lack of financial funds keeps Sapphire from brightening his dimming star and ends up knocking on the Gold's door with his hat as a begging bowl in his hands. Well, at first he tries to keep up a front, but this, of course, evolves in a mental sparring match between him and Alexander – in which the intellectual heavyweight knocks him down a peck or two.

I really take delight in these customary, cerebral fencing matches between Alexander and his prospective clients, even though the roles were reversed here, but there was a tell-tale clue stuck between the pages that strongly hinted that you have to be a fan, like me, to appreciate these segments. Whoever owned the copy, I just read, before me left a one-line note that stated, "not bad but hard to get into." Well, I guess I sort of see this persons point, since these conversations do tend to drag on a bit, but I also love how unapologetically these books are in their lighthearted intellectualism and love for the arts. It's as if Resnicow bluntly says: this is a fun, but clever, detective story and you can take it or leave it! Needless to say, I took it!

But back to the story at hand: a financial agreement is reached between them and Sapphire, who, for some reason or other, I envisioned as Vincent Price, pockets the checks needed to set everything in motion, but there's a snag that could bring down the curtain on the show before it even opened – Sapphire's late night snack, Lisa Terrane!

Lisa Terrane is an inexperienced, untalented and spiteful chorine who got herself a small part in the show and is an understudy for the lead role of Adelaide, played by Carol Sands, but that's hardly enough to satisfy that enormous ego or quell her delusions of grandeur! So you would expect that Carol Sands has to be on her toes for dropping chandeliers or poisoned bottles of champagne, but it's her unimportant, easily replaceable understudy who is brutally murdered in her dressing room – killed with a clot of cold cream and a towel (read the book for details). Exeunt Lisa Terrane.

This unexpected exit of Lisa Terrane, should, in theory, have made everything run a lot smoother, but Carol Sands was the only other person on the floor when her understudy was being smothered and this lands her another leading role as the prime suspect in a murder enquiry – and with only three days before the critics' preview everything seems to be crashing down around them.

Alexander and Norma not only have to exonerate their leading star, but also cast someone else in the role of the murderer and figure out how this person was able to sneak pass the doorman, a guy named Pops, without being seen – which is a lot harder than you'd think. As a doorman, Pops appears to be omniscient, all-knowing and all-seeing. He sits in a booth and notes down everyone who comes and goes, even when he seems to be immersed in a complicated crossword puzzle, and sneaking pass him seems as impossible as bolting from a locked room or trotting over a field of virgin snow without leaving footprints. Norma tried and failed miserably. The secret of Pop's apparently super sensitive sensory perception is as clever as it simple and integral to the entirety of the solution to the problem of entering a floor whose entrance was under constant observation. It's not the most ingenious or mind-blowing impossible situation Resnicow dreamed up in this series, but, once again, it's completely original and shows how you can use an entire building to create the illusion of a sealed environment.

Note, however, that tracing the steps from the crime-scene back to the murderer of Lisa Terrane does not, necessarily, mean that they have saved the show and their multi-million dollar investment, because the guilty party can still be another person who can't be missed or replaced on a short-term notice – such as another one of their lead stars or the director. It's the proverbial quagmire and it will take a lot of brainpower to drag them out of it.

All in all, The Gold Gamble is another amusing detective story that provides its reader with an intricate puzzle, set against a background of a musical production in absolute peril, which also does a fairly good job at scattering the clues around the stage and corridors of the theatre – and the only thing I can raise against this book is that the pace is a lot slower than usual and that a map would've been neat feature during the reconstruction of the crime. Nevertheless, the love Resnicow had for both the detective story and the performance arts dazzles like a lead star on opening night, but if you are new to his work I recommend you make the acquaintance, of Alexander and Norma, over the coarse of one of their previous cases.

I have now read all of the Gold Murder Cases, five novels in total, but instead of giving the bibliography in chronologically, I will post them in order of strongest to weakest:

The Gold Deadline (1984) [*****]

The Gold Frame (1986) [****]

The Gold Curse (1986) [****]

The Gold Gamble (1989) [***]

The Gold Solution (1983) [***]

I also reviewed the entire Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987) [*****]

The Hot Place (1990) [**]

And wrote a short overview of Herbert Resnicow's life and work:

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

The Skeleton in My Clock

2012-01-01T05:33:00.001-08:00

"With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air..."
- Oscar Wilde (The Balled of Reading Goal, 1898)

The Maestro!

I have broached this matter once before, when I posted a similar, but much briefer, message to the John Dickson Carr mailing list, in which I had set forth my reasons for suspecting that the greatest mystery writer who ever lived might have suffered from chronophobia – a suspicion that I based on his treatment of time and his depictions of clocks in his stories.

Douglas Greene professed skepticism, since Carr never exhibited any of the textbook symptoms that are listed for this condition, such as panic and terror, but I don't manifest these symptoms, either! It doesn't have to be extreme, like mine, which rarely goes beyond depressive bouts of nostalgia and a chronic intolerance for ticking clocks. Anyway, the matter wasn't definitely settled, one way or the other, but since we just entrusted another twelve-month period to the earth, I thought it was a perfect time to state my reasons for suspecting this to a broader audience – and see what you will make of it.

There was, first of all, his compelling sense of nostalgia and yearning for simpler times, which is probably why he turned to historical fiction when the 1950s rolled around – in an attempt to escape from a world that resembled his less and less with each passing year. This longing to slip through the cracks of time is reflected in the protagonists from The Devil in Velvet (1951) and Fire, Burn! (1957), who defied the then known laws of the universe and peddled up-stream in the river of time. I also think it's telling that he, more than once, compared events in his books with a Punch and Judy show (fond childhood memories clawing to the surface?).

Than there are the clocks and bells, often emerging as an allegory for death, the inevitable passing of time and usually closely associated with the demise of a character – and occasionally emblazoned with the face of the Grim Reaper himself!

Here's a list of examples:

1) The murder weapon from Death Watch (1935) is a gilded clock handle and features a macabre Skull Watch.

2) Marcus Chesney uses a clock handle as part of his psychological experiment, moments before he's murdered, in The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939).

3) A clock in a store window and the sound of church bells has an important bearing on two seemingly impossible murders in The Hollow Man (1935).

4) Another representation of death as a clock/time can be found in The Skeleton in the Clock (1948).

5) "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks," collected in a volume entitled The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), brings the great detective face to face with a man who smashes every clock he sees to pieces.

6) The victims from two stage/radio plays, "Thirteen to the Gallows" and "A Man Without a Body," were flung from the top-floor of a clock/bell tower.

7) In another radio play, "The Hangman Won't Wait," church bells are the first thing the falsely accused Helen Barton hears, when she regains her lost memory, in the condemned cell on the eve of her execution.

8) "The Villa of the Damned," yet another radio play, has a unique victim for an impossible disappearance act: time itself!

These are just the examples that I can remember, but I am sure more of them could be added to this list and I still find them, especially combined, very telling and think it gives my suspicion some credence. But I would like to know what you think: are these the ramblings of a basket case, who tries to project his own mental short comings on his hero, or the astute observations of a brilliant armchair psychologist?

A Deluge of Poison

2011-12-30T06:30:00.001-08:00

"Society murders are a pain in the neck."
- Inspector Barry (Up to the Hilt, 1945)

When you read contemporary criticism of the genre, it takes an informed and primed reader to immediately dispel their false impression that the field, during that prosperous first half of the previous century, resembled the grimy, nearly dried-up pool that it is today – with one monoculture dominating the market (i.e. the run-of-the-mill ~~thrillers~~ crime novels you find in bookstores today). This faux representation often suggests that the genre was ruled over by a court of female writers, known as the Queens of Crime, which consisted of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. You can also earn a sparkling Lion King sticker if you namedrop Josephine Tey.

This simplistic, almost childlike, delineation of the genre is not only incorrect, but also deprecating to the myriad of published writers who were active at the time and especially to the women of this profession – who are dismissed either out of ignorance, such as Christianna Brand and Gladys Mitchell, or for having written their books on the wrong continent. It is, after all, a well-known fact that Britain was the comfy home of the literate, if slightly snobbish, puzzle-orientated mystery novel, while the Americas were the tough slummy back streets of the detective story and therefore writers such as Craig Rice and Dorothy Cameron Disney seem to have never have existed in their world at all.

This is why it's left to me, a dilettante instead of an actual scholar, to praise Anne Rowe's Too Much Poison (1944), a distinctly British mystery penned by an American woman, for its striking portrait of an unhappily married nurse, embroiled in two upper-class poisonings with snake venom, and her engaging narrative voice that continuously invites you to read one more chapter – which can also be frustrating if you're attempting to read it during one of the busiest weeks of the year!

When Mona Randolph married Dr. Harvey Carstairs, a rising Park Avenue specialist, he convinced her to keep their marriage under wraps – until he had established himself within the Manhattan social set as a physician to the rich and famous. This situation seemed to drag on interminably, while Mona acted as his secretary-nurse and furnished him with what little money she had, until her sister, Iris, married into a wealthy and well-bred family. Mona's newly acquired in-laws are not exactly charmed when they learn of her secret marriage arrangement with the young doctor and forbid Iris to see her until the Carstairs publicly acknowledge their marriage. At first, these demands seem like a blessing in disguise, to the downtrodden and neglected wife, as she can finally cash in on the interest rate of her sacrifices and take her rightful place next to her husband as Mrs. Carstairs.

But there's just one problem: her husband is involved in a serious affair with another woman, socialite Caryl Ellington, and wants to sever the ties that bind him to his common and homely wife – who had faithfully stood by his side for over three years and it takes the interference from his influential colleague and friend to make an honest woman of Mona before they each go their separate ways. During a celebrative get-together, at their home, they reveal their marriage to the world, but since this is a detective story the party is really nothing more than a prelude to murder.

First the atmosphere of this belated wedding reception is poisoned when Caryl Ellington, with her café society cronies, crash the party and followed-up with a botched suicide attempt of one of Harvey's patients, one Joyce Prentiss, who's murdered minutes later – when one of the guests introduces her to a lethal dose of poison tapped from the fangs of an exotic cobra. Enter Inspector Barry, assisted by Cliff Mallory, a renowned polo player and amateur sleuth who also moonlights as Mona's knight in shining armor, whose combined jobs consist of capturing the snake that slithered from the grassy front lawn into this party, assertively mingling with the other guests, before striking at its victim.

The most valuable asset this novel has, as I mentioned at the start of this review, is its preterite narrative, which is both inviting and lucid, however, its splendid characterization also makes it a perfect piece of counter-evidence against the claim that mystery writers from 1930-and 40s dotted on the upper classes. This story sketches a decidedly unflattering picture of the social set of the time and their cheerful, devil-may-care demeanor is nothing more than a thin veneer that gives their rather shallow existence a buoyant coating – and their petty stance against and ill-treatment of Mona Carstairs garners them no sympathy whatsoever.

So character-wise, Too Much Poison is an excellently written, in-depth story that does an above average job at bringing the people that populate its pages and their problems to live, however, it's kept from obtaining a place in the first ranks by a sloppily clued ending and a few missed opportunities. The clues are thinly spread out over two hundred and some pages and the main one isn't brought up until the second murder, which is committed with only quarter of the story left to go, and everything that could've clued you up on the motive was unfairly withhold. I also felt that more could've been done with the origin of the snake venom, which was explained in a rather off-hand manner, and the method for the public poisoning of Joyce Prentiss would've easily lend itself for an seemingly impossible situation – which certainly would have elevated the plot above that of merely avarage.

This makes Too Much Poison an excellent reading experience for fans who enjoy detective stories for their characters and past settings, without paying too much attention to the clues or be distracted by inconsistencies in the plot, but it will leave readers who want a fair shot at solving the problem themselves with a slight feeling of disappointment after they turn over the final page. In short, this novel could've been better and it could've been worse, but I still think it's worthy of our attention – if only for the characters.

I scribbled this review in haste, as it's the last one of this year and time hasn't been entirely on my side, but I hope the amount of mistakes has been kept at a minimum and hope to welcome you all back in the new year – and wish you all the best during those dozen months that make up 2012!

Anne Rowe's bibliography:

Curiosity Killed a Cat (1941)

The Little Dog Barked (1943)

Too Much Poison (1944)

Up to the Hilt (1945)

Fatal Purchase (1945)

Deadly Intent (1946)

The Best of 2011: A Year in Review

2011-12-26T05:31:00.002-08:00

"Every New Year is the direct descendant, isn't it, of a long line of proven criminals?"
- Ogden Nash

Christmas with Detective Conan

There were a number of motivating factors for starting this blog, but the most important one was the presence of another blog on the web, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, maintained by Ho-Ling – who is perhaps the only other person here, in the Netherlands, as consumed and enamored with classical and neo-orthodox detective stories as I am. I have been following his train of thoughts on the genre ever since it embarked on its journey, back in 2009, but it wasn't until his review of Ayatsuji Yukito's The Decagon House Murders (1987) that a light bulb appeared above my head and the filament began to glow. "Hey," I thought, "I can do this, too!" and when I told him the response was brief and to-the-point: "Do it!"

I finally had found a path that, in the deluded, self-made reality that exists only in the brain box of yours truly, might end, if properly treaded, with me becoming a 21st century equivalent of Anthony Boucher or Frederic Dannay – and usher in the dawn of a Silver Age of Detection. But in spite of this enthusiasm driven folie de grandeur, I still found remnants of doubts and uncertainty, which were left there by my notorious super-sloppy-typing-skills and could prove itself to be a handicap in this endeavour, but these fears turned out to be unfounded – as the responses that began pouring after putting up the first couple of review were overwhelmingly positive. Not only in the comment section of this place, but also in responses left on other websites, like the GADdetection Group, and I want to bestow my gratitude on each and everyone of you who took the time to peruse my vague little ramblings and compile responses.

It's thanks to you that the page counter sped by the 10.000 mark after only a few months, which, I think, proves that readers who enjoy a classically constructed detective story shouldn't be listed as extinct – and this is also reflected in the blogs from fellow mystery addicts who were also able to garner unexpected successes and popularity with their mystery blogs:

Patrick released At the Scene of the Crime only a short month after I opened up this place business, but just as quickly became one of the must-read blogs for everyone who enjoys a good, old-fashioned whodunit. Pretty Sinister Books covers a more broader scope of fiction, but when he dabbles in Golden Age Detective fiction you can be assured that the stories are obscure and that you probably haven't read it. One of his semi-regular features, entitled Left Inside, is one of the best things going in the blogosphere today! Sergio from Tipping my Fedora and Steve the Puzzle Doctor from In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel are the all-rounders of our crowd, covering everything from classic mysteries and modern crime stories to historical fiction and thrilling movies, which makes their blogs perfect places to seek inspiration if you have no clue what to read or watch next. Keep up the good job in 2012, guys! Bev from My Reader's Block and Patti from Pattinase are the glue of the community with their Vintage Mystery Challenges and the Friday's Forgotten Books listings. William's Traditional Mysteries has really taken off in the past few months and specialized himself in short, to-the-point reviews of both GAD and neo-GAD mysteries. Definitely recommended! Mystery scholar and author of the forthcoming Masters of the Humdrum Mystery (2012), Curt Evans, has began blogging and will be wondering through the genre, as The Passing Tramp, and has already established himself as rival to John Norris – when it comes to brining up obscure, nearly forgotten detective stories that most of us probably have never read before. Les Blatt's weekly audio reviews keeps us posted on which past gems are currently in print. And then there's the always knowledgeable Xavier Lechard, who blogs over At the Villa Rose, whose posts are infrequent but always worth reading.

I also want to thank authors Bill Pronzini and M.P.O. Books, for tirelessly bouncing emails back-and-forth with me, and Patti for welcoming me as a contributing member of the FFB crew.

And now it's time to announce the best and worst detective novels and short story collection read during the year 2011!

My top 35 of favorite detective novels read this year (in alphabetical order):

The Trampled Peony (Bertus Aafjes, 1973)

Mystery and More Mystery (Robert Arthur, 1966)

Jumping Jenny (Anthony Berkeley, 1932)

The Last Chance (M.P.O. Books, 2011)

The Case of the Solid Key (Anthony Boucher, 1941)

The Wooden Overcoat (Pamela Branch, 1951)

Death of Jezebel (Christianna Brand, 1948)

Fire, Burn! (John Dickson Carr, 1957)

The Dead Sleep Lightly (John Dickson Carr, 1983)

Killed on the Rocks (William DeAndrea, 1990)

Killed in Fringe Time (William DeAndrea, 1995)

Death in the Back Seat (Dorothy Cameron Disney, 1937)

The Strawstack Murders (Dorothy Cameron Disney, 1939)

The Anubis Slayings (Paul Doherty, 2000)

The Stoneware Monkey (R. Austin Freeman, 1939)

Something Nasty in the Woodshed (Anthony Gilbert, 1942)

The Fourth Door (Paul Halter, 1987)

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (H.R.F. Keating, 1979)

The Last Express (Baynard Kendrick, 1937)

Mother Finds a Body (Gypsy Rose Lee, 1942)

Mr. Splitfoot (Helen McCloy, 1968)

Pick Your Victim (Pat McGerr, 1946)

St. Peter's Finger (Gladys Mitchell, 1938)

The Seclusion Room (Fredric Neuman, 1978)

The Glass Mask (Lenore Glen Offord, 1944)

Death and the Maiden (Q. Patrick, 1939)

Hoodwink (Bill Pronzini, 1981)

Shackles (Bill Pronzini, 1988)

The Tragedy of Errors (Ellery Queen, 1999)

Black Widow (Patrick Quentin, 1952)

The Gold Deadline (Herbert Resnicow, 1984)

The Dead Room (Herbert Resnicow, 1987)

Death on the Board (John Rhode, 1937)

The Anagram Detectives (Norma Schier, 1979)

The Silver Scale Mystery (Anthony Wynne, 1931)

Special Awards:

The Worst Mystery Read in 2011: Elvire Climbs the Tower (Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe, 1956)

The Best Impossible Crime Story Read in 2011: The Dead Room (Herbert Resnicow, 1987) (just for being completely original in its set-up and execution)

The Best Short Story Collection Read in 2011: Murder – All Kinds (William DeAndrea, 2003)

The Greatest Discovery of 2011: Herbert Resnicow

Well, that was it for this summing up. I hope everyone had a magical Christmas and wish you all the best in 2012!

The Ghost in His Name

2011-12-22T06:22:00.002-08:00

"Who do you think you are, Ellery Queen?"
- Melva Lonigan (Crime on My Hands, 1944)

During the early 1940s, Craig Rice, Queen of the Screwball Mystery, collaborated as a scenarist on The Falcon movies, which starred actor George Sanders as a debonair gentleman detective with an appreciation for the female form, and from this pool of creative consciousness eventually sprang Crime on My Hands (1944) – a lighthearted detective romp in which George Sanders takes it upon himself to clear-up a number of fatal shootings on the set of an action-packed Western.

The name that was printed on the front cover and across the title page of this book was that of George Sanders, but there was, at least, one silent partner, working behind the scenes of this project, who did most, if not all, of the work. Craig Rice was the ghost in the typewriter, however, it's unclear if Cleve Cartmill, who seems to have strayed from his usual haunts, science-fiction and fantasy, to help her pen this facetious detective novel. But then again, it's not entirely impossible, either, and his part could've been limited to lending his expertise, as a science-fiction writer, to help her with the technical details on one of George Sanders' inventions – which he rigged up in order to trap the killer. It proved to be unsuccessful enterprise.

Crime on My Hands opens with a sneak-peek at George Sanders at work, as he shoots one of the final scenes for his latest movie, Die by Night, in which he plays the role of a self-assured, philandering amateur sleuth to perfection, but the thespian has grown tired of always playing the detective.

"The vogue is for the light-hearted playboy with a butter heart and iridium brain to become involved in a murder situation. Now the audience knows that I, as the amateur detective, am going to triumph in the end. There's no suspense, except of an intellectual nature. The melodramatic action seeks to cover that dramatic fault, but I know suspense is lacking. I can't be wholehearted about it when I know that I will win, no matter what."

Fortunately, for him, he had to foresight to hire a clever and competent business agent, Melva Lonigan, to look after his professional interests and she managed to procure a contract in his name for the lead role in Seven Dreams – a fast-paced, action-filled Western fraught with danger and romance set against the backdrop of a barren, sun blasted desert landscape. Unfortunately, for him, this change of pace and setting is short-lived, as he, once again, finds himself hunched over the sprawled, blood-spattered remains of an extra, in the middle of a circle of wagons, but this time the cameras aren't rolling and the microphones are turned-off – and our on-screen gumshoe quickly notices that movie villains are nothing like their the real-life counterparts.

This murderer, for example, neglected to lither the scene of the crime with incriminating evidence for him to glance at and mutter cryptic remarks. As a matter of fact, this evasive gunman even expunged the few tell-tale clues, such as a film can protecting the undeveloped scene of the fatal shooting and a pair of silver handled revolvers, which our self-styled amateur sleuth had to go on. Not a good sport at all.

What I found interesting, whilst reading this book, was how well Rice had obliterated nearly every trace that could identify her as its author. There are still one or two sequences in this book that bear a partial finger print of her style, such as filming a scene in an artificially created sand storm, in which Sanders seems to be confronted with his shadowy adversary, and the parade of suspects who came tramping into his cabin during a botched attempt at entrapping the gunslinger, but, all in all, this is not a detective story that conformed to her usual style.

In a way, this is also quite amusing, if you take into consideration that the authorship of Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942) were ascribed to her. I have only read the latter, but I immediately understood why people found it so easy to believe that they were penned by Rice – since they were covered with, what appeared to be, her fingerprints. There was a whiff of surrealism that emanated from the pages, the three main characters formed a unity (all but one of Rice's series detectives are team players) and the zaniness was vintage Ricean.

Lee's authorship of The G-String Murders and Mother Finds a Body has now been established and they were probably put down on paper with Rice's style and plotting technique in mind – which simply explains how a not entirely untalented amateur could equal the best efforts of a professional. Crime on My Hands also reinforces this claim, in a topsy-turvy way. Why would she ghost one book in her own, unique and easily identifiable style and cleverly disguise the other. I mean, if I wouldn't know any better and was asked to hazard a guess, as to who ghosted this book for George Sanders, the closest I would get to hitting the mark would be blurting out Stuart Palmer's name – on the fourth or fifth guess.

On a whole, Crime on My Hands is an OK story of crime and detection, but a must-read for fans that prefer their sleuths at their most amateurish and face their perils and brave their dangers in an upbeat manner – with a roguish grin plastered across their face. It's just plain fun, even if the track to the solution runs along a badly maintained railway line. But that shouldn't impair the fun derived from the overall story. The Rue Morgue Press should definitely take a look at this one for their catalogue.

There's a second detective novel that bore the name of George Sanders on its cover, Stranger at Home (1946), but this one was from the hand of Leigh Brackett – a writer primarily known for her science-fiction and screen writing. But contrary to its, more well-known, predecessor, this book is actually still in print and one that I will probably take a look at in the upcoming year.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

2011-12-18T06:10:00.001-08:00

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

According to the back-flap of the dust cover, wrapped around the binding of the first printing of The Seclusion Room (1978), its author, Dr. Fredric Neuman, is a practicing psychiatrist from New York – which probably explains why this story left me in a confusing, dual state of adoration and detestation. Psychiatrists are apt to mess with your mind like that.

In many ways, The Seclusion Room is a model of what contemporary ~~mystery~~ crime writers, who took it upon themselves to blur the borders and shove the genre into the mainstream, should be aiming for. On the other hand, the inveterate classicist within me was not amused at the solution, which, admittedly, was clever enough, but something important and essential was sacrificed in order to achieve its effect. But let's begin at the beginning.

The backdrop of this story is a psychiatric hospital, named Four Elms, where, during the waking hours of a particular dreary and unwelcoming morning, Dr. Abe Redden is roused from his reverie by the ringing of the telephone – which conveys immediate summons to one of the wards. One of his patients, Seymour Ratner, seems to have committed suicide behind the blocked door of the seclusion room, one end of a strip of cloth knotted around his neck and the other end tied to the radiator, but the circumstances in this bare room, with check-ups at fifteen minute interval, should've made this impossible. Even more baffling is the fact that Seymour Ratner was thoroughly searched before being secluded, however, when they finally pried open the door to the room they discovered that he had a knife in his possession and used this to carve the words THEY HAVE KILLED ME in the linoleum floor!

But murder is as infeasible as suicide, since this hypothetical murderer would not only have to be invisible, in order to sneak around in the hallway unobserved, but also able to phase through a solid door of a room that was temporarily made inaccessible by plugging the keyhole with a wad of wires – and a freak accident doesn't account for the presence of the knife and wire in the room.

Detective William Moore is not only confronted with a death that seems factually impossible on all counts, but also with an assortments of suspects and witnesses that could've wandered from a nightmarish rewrite of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Schizophrenics, alcoholics, child abusers, manic-depressives, rapists and half of these people are on the staff of the hospital!

However, it's not Detective Moore's footsteps who the readers follows, as you wander through the dimmed corridors of this institution, but those of one of their staff members, Dr. Abe Redden – whose wry and cynical narrative voice will delight fans of such writers as William DeAndrea and Raymond Chandler. The way in which he delineates characters, both patients and staff members, sketches situations and his pessimistic observations makes this an enthralling read, which, at times, really made this a book elevate itself above its status as genre fiction.

The Seclusion Room is a very modern novel that takes a serious approach at characterizing and fleshing out the inhabitants of the psychiatric wards, nurses stations and doctors offices at Four Elms and grapples with serious topics, such as a rape, but this does not mean that the book takes itself too seriously – as the characters and setting also easily lend themselves to a few very funny, but dark, comedic sequences. My favorite part from the book is probably when Redden and Moore visit the pathologist, who lectures them and tells anecdotes while his arms are buried in the abdominal regions of his latest patient. Yes, I'm aware that I have issues.

So, I hear you wonder, what's exactly the problem with this book? Everything I have said up this point indicates that I regard this a novel as a companion to those that were penned by Bill Pronzini, Herbert Resnicow and William DeAndrea. The problem is that the cleverness of this detective story is that the plot starts out with a baffling, classically-styled locked room problem that could've been lifted from the pages of a John Dickson Carr novel, "with all the mad logic of a dream," but once the story has descried itself, after a morbid send-up of the classic scene in which all of the suspects are gathered in the library, what is left of the problem is nothing more than a routine, common garden-variety crime, which, in essence, I liked, but to achieve this effect the locked room angle was turned into a sacrificial lamb.

In spite of the fascinating set-up and the fact that it secured a spot in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), this is not a locked room mystery and the explanation to why I was dropped-off at the final page of this story with a split personality.

Overall, this is a very well written novel, populated with intriguingly sketched characters set in a world that sometimes resembles a ghoulish fun-house packed with cracked mirrors, and the modernistic approach to the traditional detective story definitely deserves praise, but this was one of the first novels I picked from Adey's listing of locked rooms and expected much more of this as an impossible crime story.

The technical aspect of the solution was a bit of a let down, but not disappointing enough to prevent me from further pursuing this author and he recently published another detective novel, Come One, Come All (2011), which is described as "a locked-room mystery, and a take-off on locked room murder mysteries" as well as a "comic novel, but realistic." So that one will be near the top of the heap for next year.

In conclusion, I'm left with only one more thing to say: Dr. Neuman, if you read this, you owe me a free consult! ;)

Death Throws a Party

2011-12-14T15:18:00.001-08:00

"No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully."
– Nero Wolfe.

The trees have shed their leaves, which blanket our lawns and sidewalks, as the days have become notably shorter, the nights a lot colder and we pour ourselves a warm beverage – while we wait for the first snowflake to drop or a pond to freeze over. Decorated trees adorn our living rooms and dens. Jolly-looking, white-bearded, red-clad men in shiny boots took up their residence in the store windows and radio DJ's receive letters from listeners who threaten to burn the station to the ground if they play Wham's Last Christmas one more time. Ah, yes, Christmas must be upon us!

Over the past few years, I made it a holiday tradition to read two or three Christmas themed mysteries or detective stories with an evocative winter setting. Last year, it was the turn of Pierre Véry's The Murder of Father Christmas (1934) and Anthony Abbot's The Creeps (1939), but for this yuletide I had only one book lined up, Rex Stout's And Four to Go (1958), which can be put down to the fact that stories from the first category are becoming a bit scarce. I have less than a handful of them to go and I will spread them out over the years ahead of us, but, for the moment, it's time to head back to that familiar and comfy brownstone of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin – and is there a better spot in "Cloud Cuckoo Land" to spend Christmas than at their place?

Snuffing up the mouth-watering aromas wafting from Fritz's kitchen, taking a stroll through the forest of orchids on the greenhouse roof and listening to the bickering, between Wolfe and Goodwin, emanating from the office as they plot petty larceny and throw marriage licenses around. Yup, there's only one place like that on the printed page!

Christmas Party (also published as The Christmas Party Murder)

The detective business has been rather slow at that famous brownstone, on West 35th Street, and without a profitable client or pressing matters to tend to, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin gave up on resisting their juvenile tendencies – which means that they no longer put in effort not to annoy one another too much. An agitated Archie is the first one to clamber out of the trenches of this childish workplace skirmish, after finding out that he's been scheduled to drive his oversized employer to Mr. Lewis Hewitt, who'll be entertaining a well-regarded hybridizer from England, on the same evening he's expected at a Christmas party, and charges straight ahead to deliver a cataclysmic blow to Wolfe's disposition: slapping a marriage license for himself and a woman named Margot Dickey on his desk.

Wolfe's response is a predictable one, "you are deranged," but Archie claims this battle and takes his fiancée to the party, however, it comes to an abrupt halt when the host, Kurt Bottweill, takes a swig from a poisoned goblet of Pernod – and the fatter-than-usual Santa Claus, who was tending the bar, vanished like smoke through a chimney. Plot-wise, this is a not ingenious or complexly plotted detective story, but a typical, average fare that you come to expect from Rex Stout. Luckily, we don't read his stories for their plots, but to cross the threshold of that comfy brownstone and spend a few hours in the company of a bunch of character who, at times, make you feel like you're visiting old friends and they wrapped themselves up in enough trouble to keep the story moving along nicely.

Easter Parade (also published as The Easter Parade Murder)

Mr. Millard Bynoe, an affluent man with a deep-rooted love for flowers, succeeded where Wolfe has been failing for years: cultivating a flamingo-pink Vanda, "both petals and sepals true pink, with no tints, spots, or edgings," but he simply refuses to display the orchid until the next International Flower Show – which is in this story marked down on the calendar for the following year. Wolfe finds this stalling unacceptable, but a rumor has it that his wife persuaded him to let her wear a spray of it during the church service on Easter Day, which inspires the stout detective with arguably the worst scheme of his career! He begs Archie to act as a go-between in attracting and hiring a thief to pluck the rare orchid from the innocent woman's bosom, but the plan goes awry when Mrs. Bynoe collapses in the street and Archie was seen running after the orchid snatcher.

Wolfe and Goodwin find themselves, once again, in a world of trouble and this time they have more on their plate than just a baffling and daring murder – literarily committed in the public eye. The gumshoes also have to obliterate any trail of the petty larceny of a flower that might lead to their doorstep. A great story, character-wise, but also depressing as hell that Stout wasn't able to do more with the plot – which could've been turned into a full-fledge impossible crime story with just a little bit more imagination.

Fourth of July Picnic (also published as The Labor Union Murder)

And while we're on the subject of impossible crimes, this story secured a spot in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) as a falsely advertised locked tent mystery. Nero Wolfe has agreed to venture outdoors to give a speech at a picnic of the United Restaurant Workers of America, under the condition that they stop pestering his personal, live-in gourmet chef, Fritz Brenner, to join their union, but a body turns up with a knife handle protruding from his back – and the locked and watched environment of the tent only functioned as a pool to keep the splash of dodgy characters from spreading all over the place (i.e. create a closed-circle of suspects situation). This was the least interesting and exciting story of this collection with its only really interesting point being Archie's short biography of himself.

Murder is No Joke

In spite of what the title, in combination with the theme of this collection, might suggest, this is, sadly, not a story with a plot that revolves around an April Fools joke with a killer of a punch line – which would've been great if only for the interaction between Wolfe and Goodwin on that day! But no, this is the only novella in the collection without a holiday theme, however, the plot of this story finally shows a shimmering of imagination. Flora Gallant asks Wolfe for help in dealing with a woman who has a negative influence on her brother, but the shrew is murdered in mid-conversation with Wolfe and Archie on the phone! The clueing was still below par, but the central idea was not devoid of merit and once again makes you wish Stout had been more adept were his plotting skills were concerned.

All in all, a fairly average outing for these two gumshoes, which derives it interest mainly from the situations they find themselves in rather than from their plots, but that's to be expected and not something I will hold against Rex Stout. These are stories about two detectives rather than detective stories and fans will no doubt delight in the way these two spend their holidays. Recommend... if you are a fan.

Les Blatt also reviewed this book, as an audio podcast, last Monday over at Classic Mysteries.

And on an unrelated note: I now own a copy of Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes and have already placed several orders based on descriptions in this book. Two very obscure, somewhat scarce and pricey titles will arrive here within the next 4-5 weeks, but a third, less obscure, book was delivered today and will be up next on this blog. So you know what to expect from this place in the new year: more impossible crime!

A Greek Tragedy

2011-12-12T14:23:00.001-08:00

"Take me away, far, far from Thebes,
quickly, cast me away, my friends—
this great murderous ruin, this man cursed to heaven,
the man the deathless gods hate most of all!”
– Oedipus

Over the summer, I reviewed Moord op het eindexamen (Murder During the Final Exams, 1957), an proficiently plotted and intelligently written detective story set at a small-town gymnasium during a hectic and enervating exam period, which was partly extracted from real-life – since the author himself was an educator. Tjalling Dix was the nom de plume of Libbe van der Wal, a well-regarded professor and former rector at a gymnasium in Delft, who probably escaped from the pages of a Michael Innes novel, but you have to read my previous examination of his work if you want to be formerly introduced to this delightful don.

Een kogel voor Oedipus (A Bullet for Oedipus, 1954) was the first of only two detective novels to appear from the hand of Van der Wal and the backdrop for this one, instead of the buzzing teachers lounge and the austere classrooms, is a perturbed theatre company, Het Grote Toneel (The Grand Theatre), whose members are united only in their common hatred for their director and lead player.

Gustaaf de Waeles was a gifted and accomplished actor, but he was also a vulgarian at heart who took up blackmail as a leisure entertainment.

As a manipulative oppressor, who made a sport out of slithering in between the bed sheets of any woman he found even remotely attractive and resorted to extortion if people didn't comply with his wishes, De Waeles was unrivaled. Needless to say, this thespian will not be as successful in drawing tears at his own funeral as he drew people when he took the stage, but then again, that can be considered as a trifling matter if you bowed out with a bullet wound in your head – and your murderer dressed up your final performance as an un-theatrical suicide. Heck, he even took his last bow off-stage!

During the intermission of Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the King, the main attraction of The Grand Theatre is all of a sudden taken ill, claiming to be unable to stumble back on stage, he heads back home. For the second act, the role of Oedipus was played by De Waeles' personal substitute, who was unable to sustain the quality of acting of their lead man and the play was somewhat of a bust, but this was made up, for them anyway, when they heard that the illness was probably due to a case of acute compunction – which prompted him to take his own life!

The body of the actor was found in his own living room, unceremoniously slumped on a sofa in a dark corner of the room with a revolver, that seems to have slumped from the dead man's hand, on the floor, but it's the inartistic nature of this suicide that awakens a deep suspicion within the theatre-loving Inspector Joris de Corthe. De Corthe's theory that the man was shot is not very popular with his superior, who prefers a simple suicide over a complicated homicide, but the story that the silent witnesses have to tell him, ranging from a pair of clean shoes and broken coffee cups, slowly, but surely, convince him that his inspector might be on to something.

I can understand why this book was well received by the critics, whom, especially over here, have not always been patrons of the classical whodunit novel, on the contrary, but they must have fallen for Dix's characterization – which was described by one reviewer at the time as follow, "...can put people on paper, roughly sketched, but always on the on-the-mark and life-like." It probably also helped a lot that most of the characters carried emotional baggage from the war with them, a popular subject in Dutch literature, as they refer to family members who died during those dreadful years and one of them is even a political delinquent – who was recently released from jail after serving a term in prison for collaborating with the Germans.

Plot-wise, this book also deserves praise for its simple, but nonetheless clever, construction, even though a lot of the conventions seem to have been culled from the pages of detective stories that were penned during the 1910s, as nearly all of the suspects were trudging around in the murder room, one after another, before the police were finally brought in, which resulted in one or two clues being dropped. However, in this case it added some considerable charm to the story and minor quibble measured against the overall quality of the story.

There were clues, some better than others, such as the brilliant hint of the broken coffee cups, that did an excellent job at both telling you the truth as well as directing your attention away from the obvious culprit – and make you rethink your position and isn't that what a good detective story is suppose to do? The only thing I can hold against this book is that it didn't came alive in the same way that its successor did, which, I think, can be ascribe to the fact that everything in this story took place off-stage and was focused completely on the characters and plot. He simply neglected to turn the theatre into a stage for this story, but, as I noted before, this is a lesson he learned from and was not repeated in his next novel.

Overall, this is another competently written and cleverly constructed detective story from a writer who, sadly, only penned two of them and is all but forgotten today. A revival in his native country seems unlikely, but perhaps, one day, his work can be introduced to a more appreciative, English-reading audience. Hey, we can hope!

On a final note, I would probably murder indiscriminately in order to take a peek at the drafts/notes of his two detective stories (that is, if they exist), because I suspect that both were originally envisioned as full-fledge locked room mysteries, but something kept him from doing it. It could be that coming up with a good and original solution was a lot harder than he anticipated or that his publisher rejected it as unfeasible, but the crime-scenes in both novels were a bolt away from becoming sealed rooms.

Other Dutch mysteries discussed on this blog:

Bertus Aafjes' De vertrapte pioenroos (The Trampled Peony, 1973)

A.C. Baantjer's Het lijk op drift (The Corpse Adrift, 1998)

M.P.O. Books' De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011)

Tjallin Dix's Moord op het eindexamen (Murder During the Final Exams, 1957)

Ben van Eysselsteijn's Romance in F-Dur (Romance in F-Dur, 19??)

The Dark Forest

2011-12-10T06:25:00.001-08:00

"An arrow may fly through the air and leave no trace; but an ill thought leaves a trail like a serpent."
- Charles Mackay.

When I first accompanied Sir Hugh Corbett and Ranulf-atta-Newgate on one of their royal assignments, chronicled in The Devil's Hunt (1996), they were ordered to go down to the university town of Oxford, where death was haunting the college hallways like an elusive ghost and an ungraspable presence, known as the Bellman, slithered through the streets after dark to post treacherous letters on church doors, in order to restore equilibrium and dispense King's justice – in which they succeeded but at a price! An arrow plugged Corbett, but it was uncertain if the wound would prove itself to be fatal one and readers found themselves dangling on that cliffhanger for nearly three full years. I recommend going over my review of that novel before reading this one.

The Demon Archer (1999) picks up the threads, which spins the yarn of Sir Hugh Corbett's career, and we learn that the King's favored clerk was able to disentangle himself from the cold, protrusive embrace of the fray-cloaked specter of death, with only a scar to remind him of their short-lived fling, and once again able to serve the crown that rests on the brow of Edward I.

When Corbett and Ranulf report back for duty, they are dispatched post-haste to the estate of the murdered Lord Henry Fitzalan, who was felled by an assassin's arrow during a hunting party in Ashdown Forest, and his death may have political ramifications – since Philip IV of France had handpicked him to lead an English envoy into his kingdom. A suspicious honor, to say the least, and Edward I wants Corbett to find out as much as possible, under the cover of a murder investigation, but the assassination of the detested nobleman might have a germ that shot it roots a lot closer to home.

Lord Henry Fitzalan was a man who consorted with harlots and witches and his lecherous tendencies made him the scourge of the local women, but also within his own domestic circle he was resented. He kept his younger brother, Sir William, on a short leash and lived with his half-sister, Lady Madeleine, the stringent mother superior of St. Hawisia's priory, in a permanent state of armed truce and the forests encompassing his estate seemed to be teeming with natural enemies – one of them an outlaw who refers to himself as the Owlman.

I remember reading a comment once, from a reviewer, stating that Paul Doherty seemed more comfortable when he was operating within borders of medieval England and the intricate web of deception, intrigue and hidden motives he wove between the estate of the slain nobleman and the court of Philip IV seems to support that statement – as he effortlessly manipulated every strand in this vast mesh of plot threads without loosing grip on even a single one of them. This is not a feat that is achieved in even the best stories from the Ancient Egyptian series, but here it's pulled off to near perfection and this is reflected in the quality and construction of an excellent plot – even though the main clues were ambiguous and the story lacked the lure of an impossible situation. The narration was also more lucid with a body count that failed to run itself up into the double digits. Yes, that's right, your eyes can wander from one chapter to another without stumbling over, at least, two or three bodies along the way!

It's obvious that Paul Doherty is in control of this story, but the same can't be said about Corbett and Ranulf. The former has a hard time getting a firm grasp on a solution for the problems facing him and is even treated to a rhapsody of whizzing arrows, while Cupid empties his quiver with amazing aim and accuracy on the latter – who promptly falls in love when his eyes comes to rest on the beautiful daughter of one of the suspects.

Corbett eventually succeeds to pull away the cowl, which shrouded the face of his adversary who lurked in the shrubberies and loosened a barrage of arrows that claimed four victims, after he finally managed to put a name to the first victim of this demonic archer – a woman whose naked and decaying corpse was left on the doorstep of the priory. But the political angle, centering on the British envoy and the Treaty of Paris, was wrapped up with as much satisfaction as the murders in Ashdown Forest and fitted seamlessly with the actual historical facts and evidence of what was going on at the time.

The Demon Archer is another fascinating and lively sketch of a time when court intrigue dictated the political agenda of Europe, which Doherty perfectly captured and re-imagined as a modern detective story, mingling historical facts and faces with fictitious crimes and characters, and it works!

Please note that I am really tired when this was written (been busy) and this may or may not have translated itself into a sub par review (can't even tell that at the moment), but rest assured, I will be back on the old track for the next one!

A Casualty of War

2011-12-05T11:44:00.001-08:00

"All war is deception."
- Sun Tzu.

I can't remember if I brought this up before or not, but I have a soft spot for detective stories set during the dark years of WWII. The atmosphere provided by the black-outs, food rationing, air-raid drills and German bombers roaming the skies are often integral to the plot and offer up a picture of a time that now seems as far removed from our every day reality as a medieval castle under siege – even though there are still people around who lived through the war that tore the European continent asunder.

It was also a period that had the elements needed to furnish a story with an array of backdrops, characters, circumstances and motives unique to that point in history and these scenarios were explored in-depth by mystery writers, back then and now, in their stories. Case in point: John Rhode's The Fourth Bomb (1942).

Yardley Green is one of those sleepy hamlets, tucked away in the placid, slumberous countryside, which makes it an unlikely military objective for air raids from enemy bombers, however, one evening the dozing members of this community find themselves rudely awakened when an enemy aircraft drops a stick of bombs on them – which leaves two people wounded and one dead. The only fatality is a merchant in precious stones, Mr. Sam Gazeley, found in a ditch beside the crater of the fourth bomb and naturally the local authorities presume that the man was killed by the impact of the blast – and chalk his name up among the casualties of war.

But was Sam Gazeley a victim of an enemy attack or was he perhaps struck down by someone a lot closer to home? The situation at the bomb site seems to be favoring the former, but it quickly proves to be a problematic solution that is unable to erase every single question mark, that are doodled all over this case, when it becomes clear that a special belt, with small pockets filled with valuable diamonds, was not strapped around the waist of the dead merchant – and failed to turn up on what now turns out to be a crime-scene. As a result, Jimmy Waghorn is drawn into the case and he quickly comes into contact with a witness who spoke with Gazeley at the moment when the German aircraft began unloading its explosive cargo on Yardley Green!

Unfortunately, Waghorn is also tied to the Intelligence bureau, which does not give him the time needed to close the book on this investigation himself, but there's always his old friend, Dr. Lancelot Priestley.

The opening chapters were bursting with promise, demonstrating once again the dubious nature of the claims that John Rhode penned stories that could turn every long-suffering insomniac into a droopy-eyed Rip van Winkle, but this time that quality of story telling didn't sustain itself and the middle section can easily be summed up as a distribution point for providing his severest critics with ammunition. It was lethargic, repetitive, and, worst of all, just plain dull! The plot came into motion again when Dr. Priestley took over from Jimmy Waghorn, but that was when there were only thirty pages left to go and I was simply incapable of caring who had done in Gazeley (or what had happened to the diamonds) at that point in the story. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I rather liked watching the cerebral Dr. Priestley play the role of a modern day dues ex machina, logically explaining that what eluded mere mortals, and the final chapter was very well written – even if the ironic turn of events was rather predictable.

The Fourth Bomb is a classic example of a novel that should've been a novella at most. It has an excellent set-up and the solution is adequate, showing a rather clever crime made possible due to the wartime conditions, but everything that was uncovered in between them should've been condensed to one or two chapters – which would've made for a splendid novella instead of the bogged down novel that it is now.

Going over this review, I can't help but be surprised at how another disappointing read translated itself into a shoddily written review. Why can't I be better at this stuff?

Anyway, on a slightly unrelated note: I have found a solution to the ratio problem between GAD and Post-GAD reviews. I wedge this Golden Era between 1920 and 1950, but since I will partake in Bev's Vintage Mystery Challenge of 2012 I will simply copy her Gold standard by adding a decade to mine – which will immediately smoothen out the discrepancy in the ratio. Moving the goalpost: problem solved... for now. ;)

An Old Master in New Amsterdam

2011-11-30T13:59:00.001-08:00

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
- G.K. Chesterton.

Over the past two or three months, I have been making futile attempts at pouring an equal amount of book reviews of detective stories from two contrasting eras into this blog, but the scale refuses to cooperate – and tips in favor of the classically styled, neo-orthodox mysteries instead of those that were actually penned during the efflorescence of the genre. So I have decided to even out the ratio between GAD and Post-GAD stories by reading them alternately in order to intersperse the reviews. Of course, this determination to straighten out this uneven distribution of stage time guarantees absolutely nothing and it's not an unimaginable scenario that, within a week or two, I will look back at this post and think, "well, that didn't happen," but hey, at least I tried. Sort of, anyway.

But enough of this palaver, it's time to make this spot once again pulsate with the linguistic rhythms of ritualistic drumming that will gently mesmerize you into a state of relaxation – in which you will be possessed by a dawning realization that your cluttered bookshelves feel very bare if Herbert Resnicow isn't wedged in between Helen Reilly and John Rhode.

The plot of The Gold Frame (1987) centers on a long-vanished, previously unknown, painting from the brush of one of the greatest painters from the Dutch Golden Age, Jan Vermeer, which was confiscated during the German occupation and ended up behind the Iron Curtain – before it resurfaced and was offered for sale to Mr. Daniel Belmont.

Mr. Belmont is the founder of The Fine Arts Museum of New York, which was erected out of love for his now late wife and their shared adoration for the Dutch Masters of the 17th Century, who presently has a seat on the Board of Trustees – and it has always been a dream of the old man to secure an original Vermeer for his museum. The serendipitous acquisition of this long-lost masterpiece, entitled The Girl in a Blue Kimono, seems to have fulfilled this longing as scientific testing of the paint layers and wooden panel check out and experts affirm that it's unmistakably a Vermeer. Well, all except for one of the conservators, a woman named Hanna Becker, who's a self-styled authority on Vermeer and is emphatic in her verdict that the painting is a forgery. But here's the snag: the only person who possesses the talent and skill required to forge a Vermeer that could pass for the genuine thing is Hanna Becker herself!

A pernickety job for the Golden Pair of Detection, Alexander and Norma Gold, but they can procure a six-digit paycheck if they can determine the paintings origin – whether it's an authentic Vermeer or a fraudulent imitation. However, there are two constituent elements frustrating Norma and Alexander in their investigation and one of these foils is the very man who has to sign that big paycheck.

Mr. Belmont has an incurable affinity for playing cat-and-mouse games and found a playmate in Alexander, but you have to read their intellectual fencing match for yourself – it's cerebral art! The other complication is the murder of the detested and corrupt director of the museum, Orville Pembrooke, who was found in his private dining room with his custom-made oyster knife protruding from the back of his neck – which drove a wedge between the atlas and the occiput.

"Aha," I hear you mutter, "another one of Resnicow's ingeniously and uniquely constructed locked rooms I have read so much about!" Well, yes and no. The murder of Pembrooke is not a traditional locked room mystery, since everyone had an opportunity to walk in on him and soil their hands, but there are some other features that suggest an impossible crime – depending on what your definition of that is. First of all, according to the medical evidence, Pembrooke didn't resist his assailant when the knife was planted in his neck and this person struck with tremendous force, but left Pembrooke's fingerprints on the handle un-smudged! And no, no, no, you have to give Resnicow more credit than that! The knife was neither dropped on/or thrown at Pembrooke. I'm inclinded to declare this as an impossible murder, but it's really up to the individuel reader to decide for themselves which label they will apply to this crime.

While the murder of the unpopular director provided an intriguing how-the-heck-was-it-done situation to the plot, I must admit that I found it less enthralling than the truth behind the re-emergence of an Old Dutch Master in New Amsterdam and how Resnicow avoided one of the familiar pitfalls found in detective stories with a plot focusing on a lost Shakespeare manuscript or a previously unknown piece of art – even though the illustration on the front cover suggests otherwise.

I also appreciated the picture Resnicow painted (pun fully intended) of what goes on behind the art-strewn walls of a museum and watch characters like Freya Larsen, chief conservator, at work as well as reading how she and her colleagues squall with pleasure at the fact that their boss is en route to the city morgue. They really couldn't be happier even if they were given Rembrandt's The Night Watch, and not openly reveling at his untimely, but welcome, passing is perceived as a suspicious act!

The Gold Frame might have one or two plot threads that will fail to completely excite you, but collectively they make for another riveting read that blends engaging storytelling and deft characterization with a touch of charming, unapologetic humor – making for an excellent piece of intelligent escapist fiction. I guess a term in obscurity is his punishment for refusing to explore the dark, frightening catacombs of the human psyche and not let Alexander's recovery put a strain on his marriage with Norma. That's what you get for daring to be entertaining in this day and age.

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

Herbert Resnicow: Building a Career On Crime

2011-11-27T10:15:00.001-08:00

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."
- G.K. Chesterton.

Herbert Resnicow

Herbert Resnicow (1920-1997) was a civil engineer, earning his degree at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, who made a drastic career move at the age of 60 – when his first detective novel, The Gold Solution (1983), landed him a nomination for an Edgar statuette in the category Best First Novel. Resnicow was unable to secure the coveted price, but the tone was set and he wrote a score of classically-styled whodunits in the succeeding decade, featuring the wise-cracking behemoths Alexander and Norma Gold or the entrepreneur Ed Bear and his philosopher son Warren, as well as outsourcing his talent to abet Edward I. Koch and Pelé with their literary aspirations.

In spite of these accolades, Herbert Resnicow has evanesced from popular view and virtually nothing is known about his life – at least not online. Nearly every scrap of personal information I have on him was culled from his obituary, which also mentioned that he served overseas with the Army Corps of Engineers during WWII and left behind a wife, four children and four grandchildren, but a synopsis or review of one his detective stories were even harder to find before I took up his cause. This makes me feel at times as if I'm the only who cares and appreciates this neglected, modern-day practitioner of the locked room mystery who did his part in continuing a fine old tradition that is worth preserving.

The Style

Herbert Resnicow came into this world during the same year that the 1920s were born, which has a mark in my book indicating the dawning of the Golden Era of Detective Fiction, and when you look at the style, tone and characters that populate the Alexander and Norma Gold stories, it's simple to discern the type of mysteries Resnicow must have enjoyed reading during his lifetime – and perhaps even read when they were first published during the 1930-and 40s.

The novels that have the Golden Pair at their helm are archetypical mysteries of the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection, slightly updated and resettled in the 1980s, but nonetheless feel as the genuine thing.

In my review of The Gold Deadline (1984), I remarked that Alexander and Norma could've been conceived after splicing and stitching together the genetic materials of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with those of Jeff and Haila Troy, but that's not an entirely fair assessment of their characters. The resemblances are merely superficial and a closer inspection will reveal a set of characters that are defined by their own personalities.

Alexander Gold is a physical and intellectual heavyweight on the rebound after a near fatal brush with death, but he feels that his recovery is stagnating his massive intellect until one of his friends, a high profile criminal lawyer, who sort-of plays the John Markham to his Philo Vance, proposes that he solves complex, seemingly insoluble problems from the comfort of his armchair – with his quick-witted, Amazonian wife doing the necessary leg-work and inducing witnesses and suspects to subject themselves to one of Alexander's cross-examinations. While this may come across as a rip-off of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, spiffed up as one of those facetious husband-and-wife detecting teams with a penchant for risible banter and bouncing affectionate insults off each other, it's a resemblance that is merely familial rather than the result of cloning. But you have get to know them yourselves to see how much they really differ from Wolfe and Goodwin.

The characterization of Ed Bear and his son Warren, who find themselves forced by circumstances, rather than by boredom or the prospect of a large fee, to don a pair of deerstalker in The Dead Room (1987) and The Hot Place (1990), were done on a more serious and sober note – and their cases are less jocular in tone than those taken on by Alexander and Norma. The sobering effect in these stories is the developing relationship between father and son, which needed maintenance after the unexpected passing of their wife and mother, but this never casts a grim shadow over their personalities or the plot. This also gives it a surprising touch of realism, because the situation is handled in the same way a reasonably normal and average family, with all their faults and imperfection, would deal with such situation and in spite having lost the most important person in their life they found themselves trust back into their everyday life – which is what usually happens in real life. The situation they find themselves in is in a way very similar to that of Ellery and Richard Queen, but their relationship was never explored like this and that makes the Bear's a more interesting and rounded set of characters than the Queen's.

However, it's not just the detectives that inhabit these stories that reflect the American detective story of the 1940s, but also the backdrops of their investigation – which either gives you an inside tour of an institution or have cultural backgrounds.

The Gold Solution is an in-depth look at a New York architectural bureau and The Dead Room takes a peek at the inner-workings of a company that produces audio equipment, while The Gold Deadline and The Gold Curse (1986) reflect a genuine love for the theatre and performance arts, which he confessed to in his preface of The Gold Deadline, and the people the Gold's or the Bear's have to deal with are usually professionals, enthusiasts or intellectuals – staples of the Van Dine School. These "behind-the-scene" looks are often as fascinating as the plot itself and in the instance of The Gold Solution, which had a conclusion that left me a bit under whelmed, it even saved the story for me.

The solutions of these mysteries also often hinge on how the crimes were committed, but I will come back on that when I discuss the locked room mysteries.

The Formula

Formula is perhaps the wrong word, but Resnicow undeniable drew up a blueprint for his detective stories and constructed the bare outlines according to the instructions on this drawing. However, this does not mean that one book is identical to another, but more a repetition of certain writing techniques – most notable in the way he introduces and fleshes out the personalities of the victims (who are seldom the recipients of this readers sympathy). The fatalities are always introduced as if they are faceless props in a murder play, but their exit is quickly followed-up with a meticulously detailed account of their life, either in a written report or during a verbal interview, which often feel as a short story within a novel – and the best of these can be found in The Gold Solution and The Gold Deadline. This psychological analysis and in-depth look at a character's personality is another element that can be found in detective stories whose authors attended classes at the Van Dine School.

The Locked Rooms

When Herbert Resnicow exchanged his drafting pencil for a typewriter (or an early PC), he brought with him over forty years of experience and knowledge of construction and engineering – and this is reflected in his unique approach to the locked room problem.

The closed environments constructed by Herbert Resnicow are not confined to hermitically sealed studies, bolted bathrooms or inaccessible towers, but revolve around entire floors or even an entire building – fully three dimensional spaces where characters move freely from one floor, room or spot to another. Yes, I know what you think, but rest assured hat I'm aware of the difference between an impossible crime and a closed circle of suspect's situation. These stories are full-fledged locked room mysteries, but with a completely different and often very satisfying spin on them. This is also what makes Herbert Resnicow more than just a mere throwback to the glory days of the detective story. He not only picked up the threads of tradition, but also weaved new patterns with it.

The murder in The Dead Room, for example, is committed in a watched, dim and multi-level archaic chamber, designated for acoustic testing and experimentation, and offers a one-of-a-kind solution that is custom made to the interior and situation of that echoless room. The crime-scene in The Gold Solution is an entire top-floor apartment, designed as a tightly sealed fortress, while The Gold Curse stages it murder during a performance of Rigoletto, turning the entire podium in a open sealed room under constant observation, but his most daring and ingenious locked room trick can be found in The Gold Deadline. A locked and guarded theatre box may seem claustrophobic in comparison with the other closed-off spaces, but the way in which Resnicow employs the entire building is simply marvelous and even logically explains why anyone would go to such insane and risky lengths to create the illusion of an impossible murder. Its solution is also unique and tailor made to fit the setting and circumstances in which the murder was committed!

When it comes to drafting and constructing a locked room, Herbert Resnicow was one of the greatest architects in the genre, with a touch madness not entirely uncommon in geniuses, and I think John Dickson Carr would've been delighted that his beloved locked rooms were carried into the 1990s by a such a talented and expert craftsman.

However, I don't think that Herbert Resnicow's legacy is that of a locked room artisan, but that of a risible mystery writer of logic who conclusively demonstrated that entertainment can be both lighthearted and intellectual stimulating as well as proving that there's always a place on the printed page for Great Detectives – no matter what era is we live in.

Why he's all but forgotten today, even by my fellow mystery aficionados, is beyond me and a mystery that may remain unsolved, however, I will continue to beat his drum and I just hope my little scribbles will do his name and work justice.

Note: I have not yet to read any of his Crossword Mysteries or collaborative efforts, but expect reviews of The Gold Frame (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989) to turn up before the end of the year. As a matter of fact, I have already begun in The Gold Frame and it's shaping up to be another excellent read – set at a museum and involving paintings from an old Dutch masters!

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)