Stuff of Legends: C.M.B. vol. 3-4 by Motohiro Katou

Yes, I know, I know. The plan was to have gotten well on the way towards Q.E.D. vol. 50 and the crossover with C.M.B. out of the way, which once again got sidetracked, but this time I have a scapegoat an excuse – namely the "New Locked Room Library." So you can blame Alexander for organizing that massive distraction. That was last year. I intend to pick up where I left off with last years reviews of C.M.B. vol. 1-2 and Q.E.D. vol. 39-40 with a review of C.M.B. vol. 3-4, before finally tackling the crossover event between these sibling series. I recommend taking a look at the review of the first two volumes, if you need a refresher what this series is about.

The first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's C.M.B. vol. 3, "Lost Relief," centers on the three rings, "C," "M," and "B," the three curators of the British Museum gifted to their 14-year-old apprentice, Sakaki Shinra. Whomever possesses one of the rings can count on plenty of funding and unfettered access to normally restricted archives for their research, archaeological digs or building up a collection or museum. So giving all three rings to one person, let alone a teenager, is unprecedented in the 200 year old tradition.

"Lost Relief" introduces a rival for the young museum curator and amateur detective in Shaw Bentley, head of research at the British Museum, who believes Professor Stan, Professor Ray and Professor Morris had no right to hand the rings over Shinra ("those rings have been demoted to a toy for some kid in the east"). So "the youngest researcher in history" is determined to pry one of the rings, but the only way to officially come into possession of a ring is if Shinra gifts him one. Shaw travels to Japan to visit Shinra at his hidden museum to propose a sporting challenge for one of his rings. A month ago, a ship was intercepted with a cargo of stolen historical artifacts, en route to a shady collector, which included a stone relief illustrating an Aztec sacrificial ceremony – except the part depicting the part of the altar has gone missing. Smugglers claimed it was complete, but when it arrived at the Japanese warehouse for inspection, the altar piece was missing.

Shaw proposes that the first one to find the missing piece wins. If he finds it, Shinra has to give him one of the rings, but if Shinra finds it first, Shaw will give him a solid gold statue he found in Columbia for his museum. Shinra even sweetens the deal with a challenge of his own. In case the missing piece isn't found, but Shaw can deduce what's depicted on top of the altar, Shinra will accept defeat. This story is obviously intended to introduce the characters of Shaw Bentley and his bratty, personal chef, Linda, while filling in some of the details of Shinra's backstory. That being said, the problem of the missing relief piece is not half bad and, more importantly, perfectly solvable for the keen-eyed armchair detective. So a good, fun opener of the third volume.

By the way, Shaw called Shinra's museum "a warehouse of trash" that's "full of strange children's junk," which is not true, but also betrays a body without a romantic bone in it and perhaps even lacking a soul. I would love to climb a tree to get into Shinra's museum (it's only entrance/exit) to roam around all those displays with ancient artifacts or horsey-ride the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.

The second story of this volume, "Modern Legend," is one of those strange, character-driven, human-shaped puzzle stories I have come to associate with Q.E.D. A story playing on Japanese urban legends like "Hanako-san of the Toilet" or "The Slit-Mouthed Woman."

Meiyuu Private High School becomes a hotbed for gruesome, terrifying urban legends about bodies being found in horrific circumstances ("a dead body found in the mountains... a body beaten by the branches of a willow... and a body buried in a bamboo grove..."). Shinra sets his classmate searching for the person behind the urban legends when he suggested the stories might have originated from one and the same person. This leads them to the crusty owner of a music store, his shed and talk about a bone-colored boat. But is he's hiding some horrific crime inside that shed? Meanwhile, Nanase Tatsuki, the Kana Mizuhara to Shinra's Sou Touma, learns more about Shinra's family and circumstances. And at the same time trying to civilize socialize him. Another good, fun little mystery with an interesting solution (ROT13: gung'f bar jnl gb fraq fbzrbar n zrffntr, V fhccbfr), but not as solvable (for western readers anyway) as the previous one with the spotlight being on Shinra's character and background. It was really sad seeing Shinra cleaning his museum, open its doors and waiting for visitors who never came. But a good story to close out this volume.

C.M.B. vol. 4 comprises of a single, long story, "Judean Fortune," which is best described as Dan Brown getting the shin honkaku treatment. A international despite has arisen from a potential discovery in the Roman Colosseum, Italy, which was called in by special investigator working on historical sites. A special investigator working for the not so catchy named Private Historical Site Investigation Company, run by Jamie Charles, who was hired by Israel to investigate certain claims regarding a mysteries treasure. Her investigator called in to report he had actually found the treasure, "a Judean treasure," but got himself killed in the ruins of the Colosseum under very mysterious, borderline impossible, circumstances – impaled through the chest with a trident. The place where he was murdered makes it incredibly difficult to effectively wield a trident as a murder weapon. Even if he was attacked from above. Not a full-blown locked room murder, but enough to make for an intriguing howdunit with a visually pleasing solution. The victim also left something that functions as a dying message regarding the treasure.

However, the case started a diplomatic incident between Italy, Israel, the Vatican and the Knights of Malta. So the British Museum is assigned with the investigation as a neutral, third party and they delegated the investigation to the keeper of the three CMB rings. Shinra nearly causes another international incident when he initially refuses the assignment, but agrees when he gets to bring Nanase Tatsuki along to Italy.

"Judean Fortune" basically is "Lost Relief" on a much bigger, grander scale and pretty fun adventure mystery with a couple of clever touches. Most notably, the solution to the quasi-impossible murder at the ruins which has a solution that's just perfect for the visual detective story. There's a second, quasi-impossible situation when they get attacked at night in the streets of Rome by an ax-wielding knight in armor, but, when the police investigates the site of the attack the next day, no strike marks from the ax are found on the walls. Neither are full-blown impossible crimes, but once again, they make for a couple of visually appealing howdunits. The historical plot-thread about the long-lost, hidden treasure has an answer of epic historical proportions with potential world destabilizing consequences. So it ends with (ROT13) gur jubyr guvat trggvat pbirerq onpx hc, but nothing to take away from this extremely fun, richly-plotted historical adventure mystery. Although it cannot be denied that the rich plot would have been more at home in a Ruritanian setting than one resembling the real world.

So have now read the first four volumes, but think I can see the most important difference between C.M.B. and Q.E.D. Katou used the shonen manga format in Q.E.D. as a vehicle for the detective story and the detective story as a vehicle for a shonen manga in C.M.B., if that makes any sense. Which is why Q.E.D. feels more grounded and realistic compared to C.M.B. with its less than realistic premise and a protagonist who's the personification of Peter Pan Syndrome. Sou Touma is just an introverted math genius and teenage detective. You remember the type from high school. But both series compliment each other splendidly. And fascinating how they both use their premises and medium to find new ways to tell a good, old-fashioned detective stories. So very much look forward to their big crossover story, finishing Q.E.D. and exploring C.M.B. further in the near future.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories (1923) by Wadsworth Camp

Wadsworth Camp was an American reporter, playwright and a noteworthy, often overlooked mystery writer from the 1910s, when the genre began to gradually move away from the Doylean era and rivals of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote most of his detective novels during the First World War – which were lean years for the genre. During those war years, Camp produced several, what can be called, proto-Golden Age mysteries. Similar to Frederic Arnold Kummer's The Green God (1911) and Isabel Ostrander's The Clue in the Air (1917), Camp's House of Fear (1916) and The Abandoned Room (1917) are in many ways ahead of their time, but, in other ways, hopelessly chained to their period. A reminder that the detective story, as we have come to know it today, was still very much a work-in-progress during the 1910s and '20s.

However, the best of these early, transitional mysteries (not penned by G.K. Chesterton or R. Austin Freeman) aren't without (historical) interest or completely lacking as detective novels. Camp is one of those fascinating, early pre-GAD mystery writers whose work read like a direct ancestor of John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot and Paul Halter.

House of Fear takes place in an abandoned, decaying and reputedly haunted theater where the resident ghost of a dead actor prefers to play his part to empty seats, but gets disturbed when a theatrical producer wants to revive it – starting a procession impossible incidents and unnatural deaths. The Abandoned Room is thick with atmosphere reminiscent of Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944) with the dead ceasing to be dead upon being touched and other apparently supernatural happenings. Camp, of course, never reached their heights as a mystery writer, but liked them enough to seek out more. Camp was not the most prolific of mystery writers with choices being limited to Sinister Island (1915) and a collection of short stories.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories (1923) is listed online as a collection of seven ghost stories and the reason why I didn't give it much attention, until a reliable source identified them as detective stories. Several sounded promising enough. So on the big pile it went.

Just one more thing before delving into this collection... it takes a few stories to get to the really good stuff. So bear with me.

The collections opens with "The Communicating Door," originally published in the September 15, 1913, publication of The Popular Magazine, which can probably be blamed for getting the collection tagged as a bundle of ghost stories. Dawson Roberts, a young lawyer, is determined to rescue Evangeline Ashley from her husband, John Ashley, but he has tucked her away in Ashley House – a large, rambling place in the remote parts of northern Florida. Roberts is not deterred and travels to Florida to find a pallid, haggard and ghost haunted Evangeline at Ashley House. She only want to go with him, if he can proves she has only been imagining things ("...find a natural explanation"). This involves a ghost story surrounding one of her husbands long-dead ancestors and a communicating door locked, and rusted, shut for the better part of a century. "The Communicating Door" reads like the setup of one of Camp's locked room novels and concludes with several seemingly impossible incidents and an unnatural death. Camp impressively gives answers in short order, "everything can be normally explained," but leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the events have a natural or supernatural explanation. A short story with timely charm, even if it was already a good decade out-of-date by 1913.

A note for the curious: "The Communicating Door" is another example of Camp's detective fiction being a direct ancestor of Carr. Carr himself successfully stitched together the detective and ghost story in his short story "Blind Man's Hood" (1934) and the standalone novel The Burning Court (1937).

"Hate," originally published in the April 3, 1920, publication of Collier's and is a departure from Camp's usual murders in old, decaying haunted building to tell a crime story of the Roaring Twenties. David Hume and Edward Felton, "rival proprietors of secret and luxurious gambling houses," having being going at it over a beautiful chores girl, Baby Lennox. The so-called "politer underworld" agreed one would inevitably put the other out of the way. Hume fires the first proverbial shots by pulling a dirty trick on Felton placing him in jail, but bail is posted and Felton is determined to kill Hume. Camp's series-detective, Jim Garth, is present to see the first attempt fail and hear Hume promise, "when you get too much for me I won't try any cheap gun play" ("the cops will only wonder at the beautiful floral offering I'll send for your funeral..."). Felton thinks that's a splendid idea and Hume is found the next day gassed to death in his room. A murder-disguised-as-suicide with a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing towards Felton, but the courtroom wizardry of a young, hungry prosecutor secured a conviction – sending Felton to the death house to be electrocuted. After the verdict, the prosecutor begins to second guess himself and begs Garth to find out if he send the right man to the chair.

Right up until the end, "Hate" is not a bad 1920s crime story with a reverse take on the locked room mystery ("...suicides by gas, as a rule, lock their doors and are content without such extras as chloroform") and some courtroom dramatics, but the conclusion is a muddled, open-ended mess. The whole story is concerned with getting a confession from Felton, whether he's guilty or not and never bothers with the truth. Did he kill Hume or was it somebody else? Camp never gives an answer while an obvious solution is staring everyone in the face. Hume was already dying from an incurable disease. Everything suggested to me Hume killed himself and left behind evidence of murder to frame Felton, but botched it as the evidence under normal circumstances would never have resulted in a guilty verdict or even get to trial. Only a young, hungry prosecutor determined to make a name for himself ensured the plan worked. That would given the story a pitch-black ending as the prosecution hammered on "this revolting idea of the murder of a dying man to satisfy an evil vengeance before nature could interfere." So this story can be filed under "Missed Opportunities."

"The Dangerous Tavern," originally published in the July 24, 1920, publication of Collier's, hands Jim Garth "one of the queerest cases" of his career. A young, barefoot, half-dressed woman was found nearly frozen to death on a country road near a place called Newtown. The trail leads Garth to a remote, deserted and inhospitable tavern where he engages in a nighttime battle of cat-and-mouse with several dangerous criminals who don't shy away from murder. A fun, lively gangster story, but not really my thing.

"The Haunted House," originally published in the January 8, 1921, publication of Collier's, is the first truly good story from this collection. Jim Garth is asked by Simon Allen, an ex-poet, to come to the lonely village of Ardell to prove he's not the victim of self-hallucination. Simon lost his wife three years ago and, ever since, "the house has been full of Helen" and her presence is beginning to take a toll on his sister – who lives in the house with their invalided father. Simon knew Helen was unhappy in Ardell and longed for the city, which is why he's guilt ridden over her death and refuses to live in the house. Whenever he has to stay the night, Helen never fails to put in a ghostly appearance. So what's behind these haunting, domestic events? Garth has to take on the role of John Bell instead of Sherlock Holmes to get to the bottom of this case, which leads him down the dark, gloomy family vault. A very nicely-done, well-handled surprise is waiting for both Garth and the reader. Not to mention a good, not wholly unoriginal solution that wouldn't be out-of-place in a detective story from 1931.

So an excellent short story all around and, together with House of Fear and a short story later in this collection, Camp's best to the early Golden Age detective story. "The Haunted House" is another example of how Camp reminds of Carr. This time, the story recalled my favorite radio-play by Carr, "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1942), which has one of my favorite lines, "but the dead sleep lightly... and they can be lonely too." Camp is a bit more wordy than Carr, but "Helen's only lonely... she wants company" ("it's wicked of you to be afraid of her") and "you wouldn't let her go when she was alive, Simon, you can't be cross with her for staying now that she's dead" landed just the same. I don't think Camp has ever been mentioned as a possible influence before, but wouldn't be surprised if a young Carr had read Camp's novels and short stories.

For example, "Defiance," published in the December 24, 1921, publication of Collier's, is another short story full with Carrian vibes and the damned cussedness of all things general – especially the setup. Dr. Jimmy Wilmot is visited one evening Stacy Baldwin, a young scoundrel, who has a bullet wound and a strange story to tell. When he arrived home that evening, someone was hiding behind the curtains with a revolver and fired a shot, but Baldwin carries a loaded cane and struck the arm behind the flash ("...if I didn't break a bone I gave a beastly bruise"). So he'll be on the look out for anyone with his arm in a sling. At the same time another patient arrives. A veiled woman with a beastly bruise on her arm and circumstances lead the doctor to discovering her identity, Anna Baldwin. The wife of Stacy Baldwin. What's worse, Dr. Wilmost has always loved Anna. Now he had unwittingly "delivered her helpless into the hands of her vicious husband." I don't Camp pulls it off as good as Carr would have done, but still a pretty solid, early Golden Age detective story from a writer who often appears to belong to a different era.

No original publication date or magazine appearance is known for the next story, "Open Evidence" (1923?), which could mean it was previously published under a different title or this is its first appearance in print. But whatever the case may be, it's unjustly forgotten, overlooked short story. Camp's best piece of detective fiction. A fully-fledged, Golden Age locked room mystery complete with false-solutions and a detective anticipating both Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. More importantly, the solution might be a first. I'll get to that in a minute.

The story takes place not in an old, dark and decaying building, but on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue office building where a writer, named Hudson, is kept from his work by the telephone ringing in the doctor's office next door. And it has been going on for twenty minutes. So goes to the janitor to complain, but, when he looks through the mail slot, they start to break down the door. They find the doctor lying on the floor, stabbed with one of his own scalpels, but the door is locked and bolted on the inside. However, the connecting door opens into Hudson's tiny workroom and only he knows nobody left through that door. Something that looks very suspicious and immediately calls in the help of a private investigator, Parsons, who looks more like a dandy than a private detective. Parsons draws up two dummy cases before revealing the real murderer and locked room-trick ("I will show you a more obvious exit"). That locked room-trick has, as of now, some historical significance (SPOILER/ROT13): n dhrfgvba nebfr fbzr lrnef ntb ubj bevtvany gur fbyhgvba gb gur frpbaq vzcbffvoyr zheqre va serrzna jvyyf pebsgf fhqqra qrngu jnf va avargrra guvegl-gjb, juvpu unf fvapr orpbzr fbzrguvat bs na byq qbqtr. Vg srryf yvxr vg zhfg unir orra hfrq orsber fhqqra qrngu, ohg abobql pbhyq pbzr hc jvgu na rneyvre rknzcyr. Ubjrire, V abgrq ng gur gvzr na rneyvre rknzcyr, be gjb, cebonoyl rkvfgf va na bofpher fubeg fgbel sebz gur gjragvrf. V guvax guvf bar dhnyvsvrf. Gur gevpx vf nqzvggrqyl n ybat-jnl-ebhaq irefvba bs gur gevpx, ohg abg gbb qvssrerag naq npuvrirf gur fnzr rssrpg (zheqrere fghzoyvat vagb gur ebbz nsgre gur ybpxrq qbbe vf oebxra bcra). So, you anthologists out there, take note of this unjustly overlooked locked room treasure from the early Golden Age. Same goes for Max Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" (1914) and Laurence Clarke's "Flashlights" (1918).

The seventh and final story, "The Obscure Move," was originally published in the May, 1915, issue of Adventure and is a fun, lighthearted and warm story of crime and adventure. Morgan is a successful private detective, "commonsense and a sense of humor were his own stock in trade," who specialized in tracking down swindlers. The latest crook he's hunting down is a man named Duncan, of the Duncan Investment Company, who had fled with large sums of investment money. Duncan "revealed the attributes of an eel" as he keeps dodging Morgan, while the pursuing Morgan forces Duncan to turn in his tracks several times. A cat-and-mouse chase leading to a logging camp in Florida where they both get lost in the swamps. So they have to survive together, until they can find their way back to the camp. Such an ordeal allows for some misplaced sympathy to grow on Margon's part for someone who ruined numerous people, but not a bad story to round out this collection.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories is the mixed bag of tricks to be expected from an obscure, 1920s collection of only seven short stories, but here it can be put down to personal taste. Not a the lack of quality. "The Haunted House" and "Open Evidence" are the standouts of the collection and my personal favorites with "Defiance" following behind at a distance. "The Dangerous Tavern" and "The Obscure Move" are both well written, but not for me. Only the first two stories, "The Communicating Door" and "Hate," came up short, but even they had their moments. Not to be overlooked, the best stories showed Camp was not hopelessly shackled to the turn-of-the-century period of the genre and could write fully-fledged, Golden Age mysteries. And had he continued to write stories like "Open Evidence," Camp would not have been half as obscure as he's today. Very much worth a look!

The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) by Clayton Rawson

Recently, I reviewed the last of the unread Great Merlini mysteries that resided on the big pile, namely The Headless Lady (1940), which proved to be surprising in just how radically different it's from Clayton Rawson's better-known Death from a Top Hat (1938) and "From Another World" (1948) – two classics which gave him the reputation of a locked room artisan. The Headless Lady dispenses with the locked room murders and impossible disappearances in favor of cast-iron alibis, dodgy identifies and an escalations staged around a three-ring circus. In spirit, The Headless Lady stands closer to the works of Christopher Bush and Brian Flynn than John Dickson Carr or Hake Talbot.

The Headless Lady left me with two thoughts. I already mentioned in that review it left me with the idea that Rawson's biggest contribution was not his bag of locked room-tricks, but creating the archetype of the magician detective in the Great Merlini. What I didn't bring up is how the plot almost suggested, or revealed, Rawson's background and ethics as a magician hamstrung his abilities to deliver satisfying solutions for his locked room scenarios. Reluctant to give away trade secrets. Rawson appeared to be more comfortable handling a non-impossible crime story, toying around with alibis and identities, than a grand-scale, Carr-like locked room mystery. Such as the impossible crime extravaganza Death from a Top Hat or the atrociously bad No Coffin for the Corpse (1942).

So decided to take another look at the second novel in the Great Merlini series, The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), to test that fan theory hypothesis. I read The Footprints on the Ceiling ages ago in an old, dated Dutch translation (De voetstappen op het plafond) and remember practically nothing of the overall story or plot – except for the upside down footprints and some other (minor) impossibilities. Hey, subverting your expectations is not my job.

First of all, The Footprints on the Ceiling is a tightly packed, complicatedly-plotted mystery piling incident, on incident, right up till the end. I'm going to gloss over a lot of details as encapsulating everything that goes on is next to impossible.

The story begins with Ross Harte reading a curious notice in the newspaper, "WANTED TO RENT: Haunted House, preferably in rundown condition. Must be adequately supplied with interesting ghost," which leads him to the Magic Shop. And from there the story quickly begins to resemble a story of old-world adventure and harum-scarum. The shop assistant, Burt, tells him Merlini is away at the moment, but the magician detective has been looking for him and investigating the spooky history of Skelton Island, which is a small island in the East River – "a stone's throw from Manhattan." Skelton Island has a "positively lurid" history of piracy, sunken treasure and a haunting. In 1850, Captain Arnold Skelton, "an eccentric, fiery-tempered old boy," appeared out of nowhere to settle down in New York. Rumors at the time opined the old sea-devil bought Skelton Island and built his house with pirate loot. The Skeltons were never able to shake-off their pirate legacy, but instead became rather proud of it over the generations ("adds an interesting spot of color to the ancestral tree"). There are still three Skeltons living on the island, Linda together with her two half-brothers, Arnold and Floyd, which has become a hotspot for spiritualism, treasure hunters and other criminal activities. However, the spiritual star attraction is not the noisy ghost of Captain Skelton, but Colonel Watrous' prize medium, Madam Rappourt, who both previously appeared in Death from a Top Hat.

Colonel Watrous is a psychic researcher of two decades and believed Madam Rappourt to be genuine article. And wrote extensively on her in his latest book Modern Mediums. Going as far as saying that "psychical research can rest its whole case on her phenomena," but doubt has began to set in ("she's up to something even stranger than usual") and wants an outside opinion. So turned to the Great Merlini to sound out the medium. Linda Skelton happened to be greatly interested in psychic matters and asked the Colonel to bring along Madam Rappourt when requesting permission to investigate the deserted, reputedly haunted house on the island. A séance is being planned that gives Merlini the opportunity he needs. Ross Harte is instructed to go the island with his camera "loaded with infra-red film" and a loaded .32 automatic.

Now all of that sounds conventional enough for a Golden Age novel. A mystery novel covering everything from a fraudulent medium, séance shenanigans and an isolated island to the figure of the Great Detective trying to disentangle a tangle of Grade-A alibis, seemingly inexplicable occurrences and a very subtle murderer. This is, however, only the introduction to the environs of the story and some of the colorful characters dwelling there. When the plot kicks off, it gives the strong impression Rawson patterned The Footprints on the Ceiling after Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1936). Before he can even get to the island, Ross Harte's suitcase gets switched for one crammed with "funny-looking old coins, worn and wobbly about the edges" and inscribed "GEORGIUS III—DEL GRATIA" – dated 1779. But loses this treasure as soon as he gained it when he gets blackjacked from behind. Everything begins to rapidly accelerate once they land on Skelton Island.

Merlini, Harte and the Colonel go to the haunted house to inspect it when they hear footsteps upstairs, but the only one they find upstairs is Linda Skelton. She has been dead for hours from cyanide poison. So what happened to person they heard walking upstairs and where did the intruder disappeared to as the only way out is a forty feet drop to the dark river below? A sudden fire breaks out in the cellar. The phone line is cut and someone scuttled all the boats, which marooned them on the island. Not to mention the curious footprints on the ceiling of the crime scene, "one uncanny, inexplicable footprint after another," stopping "directly above the open window and the sheer 40-foot drop outside" ("an upside-down procession of surrealist impossibilities"). Believe it or not, this is still only a small sample of everything Rawson throws in the direction of his characters and readers. A naked, unidentified body of a man is discovered in a locked hotel room who died of the bends and shootout happens towards the end with one of the bullets magically changing direction mid-air.

So, on paper, The Footprints on the Ceiling is as much an impossible crime extravaganza as Death from a Top Hat, but with key differences. One, the impossibilities are not overplayed and treated like the small puzzle pieces of a bigger, overall picture. That helped to manage expectations. And, two, none of the tricks really hinge on any type of magic-tricks or techniques. Rawson constructed the plot entirely around the gentle art of misdirection and the principles of deception ("...nothing more than psychology turned upside down and inside out"). Without the risk of breaking the magician's code, Rawson put those minor impossibilities to better use than those from Death from a Top Hat and the footprints-trick even allowed for a flicker of inspired clueing you normally find only in an Agatha Christie or Christianna Brand story (SPOILER/ROT13: jura bar bs gur punenpgref bofreirf nobhg gur sbbgcevagf, “fher, gur thl gung znqr ’rz vf gjryir srrg gnyy naq pna jnyx ba uvf unaqf”). Like I said, the impossibilities here are only pieces of a larger, incredibly jumbled puzzle that, perhaps, has too much going on with too many independently moving parts. It's easy to lose track of all that's going on on the island and to pull the plot-threads together in the end without dropping one, or two, would have been impressive feat. But to do with a solution almost bordering on the believable is the work of master. Not a second-stringer. So either that old, crummy Dutch translation was rubbish or my taste had not yet matured or been fine-tuned enough to appreciate this gem.

On top of all of that, Rawson peppered the story with fascinating tidbits of the arcane and macabre. The dead man in the hotel room who died of the bends provides an opportunity to discuss "compressed air as a murder device," how it can be done, impracticable as it may be, as well as pointing out its horrific effects – "it carbonates the blood, literally turns the victim into a human soda-water bottle." What about the reverse, death by implosion, which could happen to the hardhat divers of the past. If the surface pump would let the air pressure go, the tons of water pressure would squeeze a diver right up into his helmet and taken out with a spoon ("divers have facetiously referred to the results of a squeeze as 'strawberry jam'"). Another chapter delves into the subject of poisons and makes an inventory of all the available poisons on the island with final tally coming to thirty ("this case is getting to be a toxicologist's nightmare"), which makes the island something of a poisoner's paradise. And a fascinating sidetrack in the forgotten history of the so-called Blue Men. In earlier days, doctors prescribed silver nitrate for stomach ulcers or silver salts for epilepsy, but they turned their patients skin permanently blue. Some were condemned to earn their living as freak show attractions ("billed as The Great What-Is-It From Mars").

It all makes for a rich storytelling adding to a crazy, but surprisingly lucidly-plotted detective story. Something that had no right to work or even be successful, but, somehow, someway, Rawson pulled it off with flying colors. The Footprints on the Ceiling might very well be the best trick Rawson ever played on his readers and is the detective novel he should be remembered for today (together with The Headless Lady). Highly recommended!

Beached (2018) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning's debut novel, Adrift (2017), introduced marine biologist and dive instructor in the Florida Keys, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who's forced by circumstances to play amateur detective when divers begin to disappear around a haunted shipwreck – miraculously reappearing miles away against the current. It earned the book a spot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and likely would have given it a pass without that mention or knew it even existed. Adrift appears a bit too modernistic on the surface and billed as a suspense thriller, but the fast, character-driven storytelling had a traditional bend and had all the promise of a diamond-in-the-rough. So the second and so far last entry in the series, Beached (2018), was added to the wishlist. A story that plunges Mer into the murky, watery world of deep sea treasure hunters and nautical archaeology.

Having now read both Adrift and Beached, I can say this series is closer related to the adventure genre (Indiana Jones and Lara Croft get mentioned in passing) that either the traditional detective story or modern crime novel.

Browning seems to have little interest in murders as the body figuring in Adrift is in the peripheral of the plot that mainly focuses on the haunted shipwreck and Beached is basically a treasure hunt fraught with serious dangers. These both read like Young Adult mysteries with hints of The Three Investigators (The Secret of Skeleton Island, 1966), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! ("A Clue for Scooby-Doo," 1969) and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest ("The Darkest Fathoms," 1996), but written for an adult audience as Mer's personal life and issues hold as much sway over the story as the almost innocent, adventure-style plots. There's the thriller-like opening of Beached that would have been hitting a little too hard in a The Three Investigators novel. 

Beached opens on a quiet, sunny day on the deck of the LunaSea during off season, "today a family of four made up the entirety of the LunaSea's manifest," when spots a dark shape in the water. Mer is still pretty new to the Keys and Captain Leroy Penninichols tells her the dark shape is probably a so-called square grouper, a plastic wrapped bale of marijuana, but the package turns out to contain duct taped bricks of cocaine, a 300-year-old gold contain and some serious trouble – a GPS tracker. And, pretty soon, they got company. So they have to race to get the family out of the water, warn the coast guard and get the hell out of there. Whomever is after them, they are shooting at the fleeing charter boat until a patrol boat could escort them to safety. The square grouper was lost in the chase, but Mer later finds the coin aboard the LunaSea.

A gold coin dated 1733 and inscribed, "Initium sapientiæ timor domini" ("Wisdom begins with the fear of God"), which turns out to be a Spanish escudos, a "portrait dollar," sometimes referred to as a doubloon ("pieces of eight"). A very rare, valuable coin linked to the legend of the Thirteenth Galleon ("...an old legend that tells of cursed gold"). In 1733, a Spanish treasure left the port of Havana, Cuba, to voyage home, but the fleet was caught in a hurricane and "most of the ships ran aground on the reefs dotting the Keys." Supposedly, rumors and legends tell of a thirteenth ship filled with gold had joined the fleet as pirates mostly targeted solitary ships.

The 1733 gold coin proves there's more history than legend to the story of the Thirteenth Galleon and Mer gets caught between two unsavory, dangerous characters. A modern-day treasure hunter, Winslet Chase, who has been bound to a wheelchair ever since an accident during a rogue diving operation and a modern-day pirate/smuggler, Bart Kingston. Mer is not the only person who's caught between them. A Cuban immigrant and ex-archivist from Havana, Oscar, worked in a government archive and found "the coin, the manifest and a note hidden in the binding of an old ship log."

After the high-speed chase scene in the opening chapter and finding the coin aboard the LunaSea, the pace of the story slows down as Mer begins to research the coin to dealing with the two treasure hunters. Not a very pleasant experience. Over the period of a week, Mer goes from being scared to being extremely pissed ("what a difference a week made"). She scraped together a team to find the shipwreck before Chase and Kingston. What follows in the last leg of the story is a cat-and-mouse game above and under the dark, deep blue. There are some good underwater scenes and particular likes the scene in which Mer ("...did most of my research in the Arctic, studying the biogeography of Arctic cephalopods") has a moment with an octopus as she explores its den. But that's about it. Beached is as simple and straightforward as two opposing parties trying to find a sunken treasure and completely lacked the detective pull of Adrift. It really is like a novel from The Three Investigators series written for adults as the opening, ending and some of the characterization is certainly not something you'll read in any juvenile mystery.

However, it's an interesting direction to take in a series presented as modern mystery-thrillers and without the necessity of a murder plot, the stories can focus and workout plot-ideas that would have been merely secondary plot-threads in an ordinary crime or detective novel. I also liked the balance between Mer's "Pandora-sized curiosity" and scientific training, which often lands her in trouble when applied outside of the controlled conditions of an experiment. Something that's also reflected in how a sense of realism is applied to the scrappy, adventure-style plots and how fast things can go south. So would like to have seen this series develop further and, if you follow the theme of the book titles, the fourth book would very likely have been titled Derelict and that can only be a take on the mystery of the Mary Celeste – which would be the perfect mystery for this series. Browning appears to have either put the series on hiatus or abandoned it entirely as she has started a new, more serious series under the name "M.E. Browning." So what began as a precarious swan dive for lost treasure could very well have been Mer's swan song.

So not sure whom to recommend Beached, because readers of this blog will likely find it nothing more than a contemporary curiosity with too many modern intrusions. Adrift is much better in that regards and both remain an interesting take on the thriller/mysteries of today.

The Student Body (1958) by Nigel FitzGerald

In the previous blog-post, I looked at Nigel FitzGerald's second of only two impossible crime and locked room mystery novels, Suffer a Witch (1958), which confirmed my suspicion that his last novel, Affairs of Death (1967), constitutes the scraps left at the bottom of the barrel – ending his run as a mystery writer on a whimper. However, in spite of the book's shortcomings, it couldn't disguise FitzGerald was a polished writer with a verve for characterization and local color. Not to mention trace evidence suggesting FitzGerald might have been a pretty decent plotter during the earlier stages of his career. While the plot would have worked better as a short story or novella, Suffer a Witch confirmed all my suspicions. 

So wanted to take a closer look at FitzGerald's second locked room mystery, The Student Body (1958). The description of the impossibility in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) sounded absolutely intriguing and comments promising "an extremely lively" tale of murder and intrigue. Sure enough, The Student Body is an explosive mixture of the Cold War spy-thriller, college-set detective story and a quasi-inverted mystery with hints of the police procedural and comedy of errors. A very weird, but very well-done and strangely effective concoction. 

The Student Body largely takes place at Christchurch College, Dublin, which was founded in 1557 and "there is no record of murder having been committed within its precincts until the fourth centenary year of its existence." There are two students, Jer Milne and Don Carton, who had a hand in bringing murder to the respectable college.

Jer and Don go to a local restaurant to celebrate passing an exam with a few drinks and two young repertory actresses, Rona and Peggy. Some ten days previously, Rona and Peggy had been in London where they visited a famous church, but they arrived at the moment a Hungarian Baroness, "a political exile in Britain," was murdered right as the service was beginning – a knife-handle protruding from her back. Rona and Peggy witnessed a small, swarthy blue-eyed man hurrying from the church as he stripped dark gloves from his hands as he went. They now spotted that very same man sitting at the corner of the bar "placidly completing the crossword puzzle in the Irish Times and taking occasional sips from a glass of dry sherry." Don proposes to ask advice from Aidan "Radish" Roberts, literary editor of the Dublin Observer, who also happens to be at the bar. The long and short of the opening chapters is that they take the only logical and rational course of action anyone would take in their situation. They kidnap the man and take them to their college rooms to be questioned. 

The Student Body is a mystery-thriller of hot, young and alcohol fueled Irish blood operating under Murphy's Law. So everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Firstly, their room is entered by a small group of party crashers lead by the lecturer in English language and literature, Dermot Gray, who's accompanied by his sister, Mrs. Nuala Norden. George Kerry, inter-varsity heavyweight champion, who brought a keg of beer. Secondly, this distraction caused a cat-and-mouse game between the mysterious, possibly red assassin and the heroes in which they constantly turn the tables on each other. Thirdly, the scrap ends with the man being tied and is locked behind two doors with a bicycle padlock on it for good measure. As an extra precaution talcum powder is scattered thickly over the approaches to the door on the landing. When returning from having a good meal and drinks, they find the locks and talcum powder undisturbed, but their captive has the handle of knife sticking out of his back. So what to do, except cover everything up and dump the body. Something that proves easier said than done.

The trickiness with some locked room murders and impossible crimes is that the method can expose a murderer too soon, which is kind of the case here. The locked room-trick itself is sound enough, but everyone who has read a decent amount of detective fiction will figure it out in no time. Even if you happen to suck at figuring out these locked room puzzles, FitzGerald hammers down all the clues and hints to ensure the solution is impossible to miss. I suspect FitzGerald intended to have the locked room puzzle crystal clear and practically all tidied up when he returned to it in the last chapters, because the second-act shifts gears as it becomes somewhat of an inverted mystery. Nevertheless, easy to solve as the trick may be, the locked room functions as a fun little side distraction to the overall plot and interesting FitzGerald developed a sudden, short-lived fascination for impossible crime fiction in 1958. Going by these lines, "the impossible situation: murder in a locked room which no one could have entered or left" and "a weapon which for obvious reasons could neither have been fired through the keyhole nor thrown through a window," he probably read some locked room mysteries at the time – which found expression in Suffer a Witch and The Student Body. And looking at the first-act of The Student Body, I wouldn't be surprised if Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) were on his big book pile.

The second and final-act is a different story as Superintendent Patrick Duffy, of the Detective Branch of the Garda Siochana, enters the picture and the story becomes an undeclared inverted police procedural. The body had been dumped and fished out of a bay, which is why Superintendent Duffy is unaware he has an impossible murder on his hands and simply hopes to find the murderer by identifying and retracing the victim's steps. How very Freeman Wills Crofts of him! So, of course, Duffy pretty quickly uncovers a trail leading straight to Christchurch College and discovering the victim crossed paths with Radish and the college party numerous times. All the while, the reader is in the fortunate and rare position of knowing more than the detective and thus the second, last-minute murder is not very effective as a red herring. So, knowing more than Duffy, regrettably reinforces a dry, anti-climatic ending ("I can say now that there will almost certainly be further charges") to what's otherwise a lively and entertaining story. You have to tolerate the poor decisions making skills of the characters in order to enjoy it. 

The Student Body and Suffer a Witch show FitzGerald was a writer stuck between two distinctly different periods of the genre, a transitional period from the cerebral Golden Age detective stories to the darker, character-driven crime novels that came to dominate post-1950s, which tried to merge by picking and merging the best of both. So the murders, motives and subject material tend to be a little darker, grittier and uneasier than your average, 1930s detective novel, but there's always one or more puzzling components to the case. Such as the second murder from Affairs of Death, the impossible disappearance in Suffer a Witch and the locked room mystery here. FitzGerald can be clumsy, plot-wise, when it comes to ending a story, but he deserves to be acknowledged for an early writer who tried to adept the traditional detective story to the changing times. Not a perfect mystery writer or mystery series, but a valiant and much appreciated attempt to keep the detective story alive and relevant.

Pray for the Dawn (1946) by Eric Harding

Eric Harding's Pray for the Dawn (1946) could have been the poster child for obscure, out-of-print and virtually impossible to obtain mystery novels that might have been completely forgotten today had it not been for a single, minuscule plot-thread – securing a place in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Adey even highlighted Pray for the Dawn in the preface as "a thriller rather than a detective novel" with "a degree of novelty" that's "well worth seeking out." Another stroke of luck that would eventually wrest the book away from total obscurity is John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, who loves extremely scarce mysteries crammed with occult lore and voodoo rituals. 

John Norris reviewed it back in April, 2021, which promised something along the lines of Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way (1935) meets Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). A detective novel ("albeit a very unconventional one") disguised as an adventurous thriller with an atmosphere of slowly mounting terror on an isolated island. So it begged to be reprinted. Ramble House agreed with that sentiment and republished Harding's Pray for the Dawn for the first time since its original publication 75 years ago.

Before delving into the story and plot, I need to note that I decided against tagging this post as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime." The impossibility is described by Adey in Locked Room Murders as "an encoffined dwarf," dead for ten years, "is seen to breath and perspire," but it's such a minor piece of the puzzle that presenting it as a locked room would detract from it as an excellent mystery-thriller. So, now, on to the story itself!

Barry Vane, a ballet dancer and member of the Carl Velte International Ballet, who narrates the story as he travels to the remote home of his uncle, Nathan Claymole. A former explorer, crook and trader in native artifacts, but Barry recalled precious little of his uncle except, a little uneasily, "the hints and rumours whispered about him by other and more respectable members of the family" – having "done nothing to enhance the prestige of the white race" during his time in foreign parts. So quite the black sheep of the family. Barry had not seen his uncle since he was a child and was pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation that suggested "something in the nature of a reunion" with the premise that the visit would be to his advantage. Just at the time when an accident had shelved his dancing career.

The dark, lonely house, "quite a haunted sort of place," which is encircled by a stream, "more of a torrent than a stream," called the Boa ("like a great mad snake") that can only be reached by crossing "a damn' rickety plank" serving as a bridge. The house is covered on the inside with animal skins, spears, knives and shields with shrunken heads decorating the mantelpieces. So a perfect place to either have an old-fashioned detective story or a pulp-style thriller. Either will do. And when Barry finally arrives, the normally quiet, largely empty house has filled with relatives who haven't seen one another in decades. Firstly, there's Toby Judd, or Uncle Judd, who's technically an outsider as he accepted the invitation on behalf of his late wife, Jennie. A niece of the host. Caroline Claymole is "the most tyrannical zealot" of the family with narrow, religious convictions who disapproves of her brother Nathan and browbeat her young daughter, Betsy. Oscar Claymole is a cousin of Caroline and is already "a bundle of nerves" who "looked utterly miserable" when he was introduced to Barry. Bret Jenson is their American cousin whose calm, self-assurance "almost amounted to conceit" and Barry would come to detest him intensely before many hours were passed. Miss Sylvia Bream "is a more distant but nevertheless most charming member" of the family with whom Barry very quickly falls in love. Great-uncle Jonah Clay is the ancient relic of the group and gives meaning to the phrase, "death outliving the grave." Finally, there's the African servant, Kish, who's a somewhat sinister character who utters such pleasantries as "heads—men heads" and "dead sometimes come to life."

So the macabre, outright bizarre stage is set, but it takes a while for Nathan Claymole to appear as he has been standing guard over the body of a dead dwarf. However, the dwarf was no ordinary man!

N'olah was a witch-doctor of the Javiro tribe of South America, "died ten years ago tonight," but Nathan tells his relatives "a devil-man does not die like an ordinary person" and "wakes again in his own good time" – which he believes will happen that night. So he has been watching over the body since dawn, because he's dangerous and must not awake alone. Not even Nathan wants a sadistic, undead murderer "who takes human life for the joy of killing" walking around his house unsupervised. The family even gets to view the terrifying body in his oblong coffin, which is when they see the body breath and perspire. So, as to be expected, Nathan and Kish happened to be out of the bizarre room when N'olah apparently stirred from his "uneasy sleep" and disappeared. Nathan orders Kish to smash the support to the bridge to trap the N'olah on the island. And them with him! What could possibly go wrong? A family member is found strangled in his bedroom with the dwarf's strangling cord, "a plaited raffia loop," still around the victim's neck. There were "eight strangling loops on the dwarf's bandolier." Suggesting there's a noose for each of Nathan's visiting relative.

So it goes without saying the rapidly unfolding events places even more stress on the already strained group of people. While the "regression into savagery" never reaches the levels of Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934) or Christie's And Then There Were None, you can feel that even the rational character have sunken ankle deep into madness with a few of them teetering on the edge as the horrific events begin to translate into outright hysteria. Since the story is presented as a adventurous thriller with supernatural overtones, you really have to read for yourself what goes down on that scary, isolated island in the middle of nowhere. It makes for an excellent read!

Regardless of all its sensational, pulp-style thriller trappings and mounting hysteria, Harding craftily hid a pure, Golden Age detective story underneath it all. John Norris wrote in his review (linked above) that's not unfair "to reveal that all of the supernatural events will turn out to be rationalized." I agree as it both reassures the readers of our blogs that there's payoff in the end and it enhances the fun of trying to work out the solution, because you have an actual shot at doing it. Once again, to quote the real expert, "scattered throughout the story are multidinous red herrings" alongside "several cleverly planted clues." A noteworthy clue that can be safely pointed out the Author's Note at the start of the story in which Harding apologizes for having written "a story of adventure to pass away a peaceful hour" instead of "an exercise in detection." He also points out "a deliberate and intentional gap in the continuity of the story," which "the astute arm-chair detective will readily assess the significance of this omission." A lesser mystery writer would never have dared such a bold move and should have made me more alert than I already was, because the misdirection and red herrings were as good as the fair play clueing. There's a red herring that likely was not intended as a red herring, but it worked as one in 2022. You see, the covered, western sandals of N'olah and Barry noticing his wrists ended in stumps left me very suspicious as I imagined something straight out of a Japanese, horror-tinged detective novel. A piece of body horror coming to life would not have been out of place in Pray for the Dawn, but Harding slipped something a little more sophisticated, oddly traditional pass me unnoticed. Something that has been done before and since the book was published, but seldom executed with the skill, cunning and careful construction as seen here. Just as impressive is how the solutions to the murders contrasted with its fantastic premise and storytelling. Harding ended up having his cake and eating it too! And he got away with it!

So, all in all, Pray for the Dawn is an excellent, unjustly overlooked and forgotten mystery-thriller not only deserving of being resurrected, but makes you mourn the fact Harding only passed through the genre. If he had stuck around, Harding could have been a fan favorite like John Dickson Carr, Theodore Roscoe and Hake Talbot. Recommended as a highly unconventional, but strangely successful detective/thriller novel. 

Just explain one thing to me: how is it possible Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning's The Invisible Host (1930) won the 2021 Reprint of the Year Award, while a novel like Pray for the Dawn was ignored? I need to understand how it happened.

The Illusionist (1970) by Stephen Frances

Stephen D. Frances was a "South London-born clerk turned journalist turned author" who founded his own publishing company in the mid-1940s, Pendulum Publications, which "released a variety of fiction," but garnered most of his fame as "one of the earliest exponents of the British pseudo-American gangster books" – published as by "Hank Janson." During the 1960s and early '70s, Frances tried his hands at espionage with the John Gail series and wrote at least one standalone adventure-and suspense novel under his own name. That standalone is centered around a very particular problem earning it a listing in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). 

So, normally, that's more than enough to get my full attention, but Frances' The Illusionist (1970) languished for years on my wishlist as the impossibility seemed too slight to prioritize tracking down a copy. Only to come across an interesting review on Fang's Mystery Blog, a Chinese-language blog dedicated puzzle-oriented detective fiction, which I ran through Google translate. That's how I learned there was more to The Illusionist than merely being a largely forgotten suspense novel from the seventies with "the explanations for the two impossible crimes, ancient and modern, being reasonable." There's even a third impossibility sandwiched between the ancient and modern ones, but I'll get to them in a minute.

Firstly, I should point out here that The Illusionist is essentially pulp fiction, but not the Vietnam War inspired pulps of the late '60s and '70s. The Illusionist is a kind of throwback to the pulps from the early twentieth century exemplified by its larger-than-life protagonist, the Magnificent Saki.

The Magnificent Saki "is Hawaiian by birth, American by nationality and a British resident from choice" as well as "a direct descendant of Tupia," the Polynesian King, who holds a triple doctorate in literature, philosophy and science – in addition to being an art connoisseur and "a student of the forgotten knowledge of the primitives." He studied under a Tibetan Llama and financed many archaeological explorations which he has led himself, but Saki also practices martial arts and has the children of the Japanese Consulate General as his students in Ju-Jitsu and Karate. More than anything else, Saki is "a hypnotist, a telepath and a clairvoyant" whose "hobby is creating illusions" and "never performs for payment." A golden-skinned, black-haired enigma with penetrating and hypnotic green-eyes. Saki has a tall, fair-haired youth, Arbuthenot, who he calls Flash ("because I'm always so bloody slow") and acts as the mystic's chauffeur, assistant and companion. And they enjoy bouncing insults back and forth.

So the Magnificent Saki has a reputation that casts a long shadow that guided a well-known expert on the Aztec civilization of ancient Mexico to his doorstep.

Professor Howard Morgan has "excavated ruins, interpreted the Aztec's ancient sign language and translated some of their ancient manuscripts," but during his studies he came across 2000-year-old historical mystery. A mystery centering on the question whether or not "the power of a clever priest is more subtle than the vengeance of a long-dead Aztec King." Yes, I think Frances mixed up the Aztecs with the Maya. Anyway, two-thousand years or a few centuries ago, the High-Priest Xtocoplus betrayed the trust of King Quinatzin when he took away his young bride, Lama, on their wedding night. Xtocoplus boldly claims that "it is the will of the Gods that Lama becomes of her High-priest instead of the King of the tribe," but Quinatzin demands "a sign from the Gods that shows that our Hogh-priest has been specially selected for favour." King Quinatzin orders Xtocoplus to be "sealed in a stone sarcophagus" at dawn and lowered down to the bed of a deep, dark lake. So he can prove his magical powers by returning from his watery prison to claim his bride, but the ancient manuscripts neglected to tell how the story ended.

However, the professor followed the clues in the manuscripts and found the great lake referred
to in the writing, which was dragged and they discovered "the stone sarcophagus of Xtocoplus lying upon the floor of the lake" – only the heavy lid had been wrenched off the coffin "which was quite empty." Saki observed "time and water would eat away all human remains," but the High-priest was sealed away wearing all his gold, gem-studded ceremonial regalia. So the professor wants to know how the High-priest could have either freed himself from the stone coffin or death itself and had to coffin transported to his private museum. The Magnificent Saki and Flash accompany Professor Morgan to his home, where they are going to spend the weekend, to subject the coffin to a close inspection. This is where the second, not so very successfully plot-thread comes into play.

Someone is very obviously trying to kill the professor and failing miserably. Professor Morgan had a close brush with a speeding car, a poisoned arrow and even gets attacked with a sacrificial knife, but a hero is only as good as the villain he has to vanquish. When your hero is the Magnificent Saki, you need a better villain than a feeble-minded, butter-fingered bungler who comically throws around ancient weaponry with the same success rate as Wile E. Coyote. I actually began to suspect Saki was pulling double duty as both hero and villain as the story implied Saki Xtocoplus were one and the same person. I know, I know. I have suspected a character before of being a biological immortal, but, in my defense, Xtocoplus is described as the spitting image of Saki and wouldn't be surprise in the least if Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark series inspired Frances to write The Illusionist (c.f. "The Day of the Wizard," 1964). There was another plot-thread introduced early on in the story that began promising enough with Flash having several encounters in the house with a young woman, but she keeps disappearing and everyone denies her existence. I particular liked the scenes in the kitchen and the butler advising Flash to wean himself off drugs. It was very John Dickson Carr-like in how the mystery was initially presented, but quickly resolved and disposed of.

So the main pull of the plot is the historical mystery of Xtocoplus and the two impossibilities performed by the mystic-detective. Saki is going to spend the night in the locked museum, sealed inside the stone sarcophagus to meditate, which is "swathed in ropes" and transported the next morning to the goldfish pond – where it will be completely immersed in water for "as long as seems satisfactory to everyone." But even when locked and sealed away, Saki's astral projects his essence and appears to the household as a ghostly, purple radiating figure with a sardonic grin. When they unlock the museum, to knock on the coffin, Saki answers with knuckle-rapping from the inside that "sounded gay and mocking." Naturally, he also manages to escape from the submerged sarcophagus in almost nonchalant way.

The astral projection-trick is a modern (1970s) update of an age-old dodge and interestingly linked to Saki's disappearance from a locked museum and sealed sarcophagus, which presents a legitimate locked room-trick. But one part of the trick raises an eyebrow. And marred by Frances unfairly withholding important information from the reader. The simple and straightforward solution to the historical impossibility is much better, which nicely dovetailed past and present as well as making clever use of its setting. But, once again, The Illusionist is not a traditional, fair play detective novel. So you're not getting a change to arrive at the same conclusion as the detective.

Just like Tony Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972), Frances' The Illusionist happened to be mainstream crime/suspense novel centering on an impossible situation or two. So you can't hold them to the same standards as Carr and Hoch. The Illusionist would completely disintegrate, if judged purely as a traditional, fair play mystery novel. However, if you strip down the plot to its impossible crime ideas, you're left with a premise that would be very much at home in some of the better episodes from the Jonathan Creek series. Every now and then, I come across a novel or short story, usually written by an amateur or outsider, which feels so close to Jonathan Creek that's easy to see how it could be rewritten as an episode. Such as John Russell Fearn's Within That Room! (1946), Roger Ormerod's More Dead Than Alive (1980), Roy Templeman's Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998) and David Cargill's The Statue of Three Lies (2011). You can add The Illusionist to that list.

So there's definitely something to recommend here, but you probably need an unhealthy obsession with locked room and impossible crime fiction to be able to see it.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.