It's the Numbers That Count: Q.E.D. vol. 44-46 by Motohiro Katou

I ended the review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 42-43 with the plan to have this series wrapped before July, which can be done at the current rate in four twofer reviews, but alluded to similar plans and intentions before – rarely panned as originally intended. Going by past results, it probably would have meant a review of vol. 50 wouldn't have materialized until January or February 2026. I'm going to step up with two threefer reviews this month, review vol. 50 next month and tidy it all up with part two to "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 1-25." After that, I'll turn my attention to Motohiro's C.M.B. series interspersed with reviews of Q.E.D. iff. I've not forgotten about that recommendation of the archery-themed murder case from The Gordian Knot series. So that concludes these household notes, unto to the review!

The first, of two, stories from Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 44, "Tuba and Grave," brings back the three disaster magnets of the Sakisaka Private High School Detective Club, Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato.

This time, they caused a minor uproar when mistaking a sleeping drunk, on a park bench, for a victim of foul play with their wildly incorrect deductions ("the suspect is possibly an alien, because we didn't find footprints"). So the "absolute imbeciles" get reprimanded, loose access to their club room for a week and warned their club will be disbanded if they get involved in another incident. Before long, those three find themselves in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation when they witness an actual murder: a man being strangled behind a building and his body dragged into an abandoned factory. They decide to call-in an anonymous tip and the police turns up with the man they recognize as the killer to open the factory, which searched top from bottom starting with a suspicious looking case – containing a tuba. A second, obvious place is what looks like a makeshift grave, but only contained a visually pleasing arranged collection of garbage. Props to the police detective for clearing away the junk to continue digging. No evidence of a body or crime was discovered.

So where could the body have been hidden when the police "turned the entire place upside down and didn't find a thing?" The detective club, once again, turn to Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara to bail them out, but Touma tells them the police will figure it out without their help ("...make sure that you behave and get the club back"). His advice falls on deaf ears as the club goes ahead with their own investigation and Mizuhara doing some legwork in the background, until Touma reappears to reveal what really happened at the factory. Touma's solution to the problem turns, what appeared to be an impossible disappearance of a corpse, into a Columbo-style breakdown of the murderer's alibi and ends up hanging him with his own incriminating words.

So a really excellent and entertaining story. Loved the cheekiness of the method even though (ROT13) vg'f abg n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel ng nyy, ohg nppvqragnyyl nccrnerq gb or bar qhr gb gur qrgrpgvir pyho'f vagresrerapr. Gur zheqrere bayl jnagrq gb evt hc na nyvov. By the way, I'm starting to develop a soft spot of the Detective Club. They're absolutely useless idiots, but they mean well.

The second story from vol. 44, "Questions," is one of those puzzles-with-a-heart that are scattered across this series. Touma receives a cryptic invitation to a getaway at a luxurious villa. The invitation is a card with the word "QUESTION" on the front and Fermat's Last Theorem on the inside. And he was not the only one to receive an invitation. Several people going through a divorce have gathered at the villa with similar, cryptically-worded invitations. What follows is basically a cross between a treasure hunt and personal journey's of rediscovery. Touma primarily functions as a sideline oracle giving mini-lectures on mathematics, history of mathematical ideas and "an ever-expanding universe of numbers" ("...didn't understand a thing...").

A decent, if not particular memorable, entry in the series and Katou has done better puzzles-with-a-heart stories before. However, the ending admittedly made for a nice finishing touch to this character-driven story.

The first story from Q.E.D. vol. 45, "Venus," is a somewhat off-beat whodunit. Himichi Sayaka, a second year college student, is arrested on suspicion of having killed her ex-boyfriend, Mizushima Takuya – a third year student. Mizushima Takuya was found beaten to death in his apartment with door and windows securely locked from the inside, however, Himichi Sayaka has a spare key. She was seen near the apartment at the time of the murder and a bloodied baseball bat was discovered behind her own home. They had been fighting over money he owed her. So the prosecution can prove means, motive and opportunity, but the prosecutor has her doubts and asks Touma to see if he can spot a frame job. Mizuhara remains perplexed important people keep asking Touma for help ("but... this guy is still in high school"). If she has been framed for murder, the crime becomes an impossible one.

This story is, strangely enough, interspersed with comic-y vignettes in which a Venusian space girl, named Serge, teaches a talking raccoon in dungarees about the solar system. I really liked the one panel blending the retelling of how the murder was discovered with a floor plan of the crime scene. Some artistic touches that helped to make it stand out and cushion two notable short comings: a murderer who suspiciously stands out and a surprisingly routine locked room-trick for this series. That being said, the conclusion is solid enough with Touma eliminating all but one of the suspects before trapping them with their own words ("...something only the murderer could have known..."). A fair effort.

The second story in vol. 45, "First Love," can be read as an improvement on the previous story. Koba Tomotoshi is pretty average, second year student at Sakisaka High School. And to his very great surprise, Nitobe Rena asked him one day to be her boyfriend.

Nitobe Rena is the beautiful, popular girl at school and their relationship painted a target on his back. Something happened some time later when he took her back to his house and barely inside, they hear a thump coming from the balcony. What they find on the balcony is the body of a fellow student wrapped inside a bag. So how did the body end up on the balcony? It couldn't be a bizarre suicide, because the apartment is on the seventh floor of a twelve floor building and the body would have landed on an upper apartment balcony. Since this incident, Nitobe's parents have forbidden to see Koba. In desperation, he turns to the teenage genius and classroom detective of his school. Touma is currently engaged on, what they call, the Rakugo Artist Case. Mizuhara gets to play detective, collect evidence and contribute a pretty solid false-solution to the story. I had the most fun with this story playing armchair detective. I had a good idea about the who and why, but was stumped by the how. Something I should have figured out, but somehow missed entirely. Yes, I can be very dense at times, but well played regardless!

The first story from Q.E.D. vol. 46, "Broken Heart," is the Rakugo Artist Case and is one of those stolen money stories Katou has done before, but this one has a neat and original wrinkle on the classic locked room situation. The setting of the story is the comedy theater Shitamachi where the princely sum of five million yen is stolen from the senior Rakugo artist, Tsubakiya Kamekichi, who brought the money along for safekeeping. And to ensure its safety during the performance, the money was locked inside a wallet with padlock secured to the handle of a steel ornamental jar. Only to discover later that evening the stacks of bills had somehow been replaced with blank paper! So how was the money taken from the locked wallet? The locked wallet-trick is only a relative small part of this character piece with its theatrical backdrop and backstory of young, aspiring actress/comedian/narrator, but just loved the visual imagery of the locked wallet hanging on a jar.

You don't find that many impossible crime novels or even short stories fiddling around with padlocks, because you have to ignore the fact they're not all that reliable and easily picked open. Suppose the same holds true for this story and the possibility alone should have made the person watching over the jar the primary suspect. Just going with the story, Katou demonstrated yet again you can achieve great effects with relatively simple, straight forward tricks. Loved it!

For those sick and tired of me droning on about locked rooms and alibis, the next story is for you. "Pilgrimage" is probably the darkest, most disturbing story this series has told and has Touma reconstructing a long-forgotten, deeply buried secret dating back to the Second World War. The story begins in the present with Uchibori Koyuki, a proof reader, finding an unpublished manuscript written by her late father, Shoichiro, who was a non-fiction writer. Manuscript is titled Pilgrim and has three handwritten notes on the cover, "rejected," "coincidence?" and "intentional?" Why was it rejected and shelved? She shows the manuscript to Touma and he found the subject matter more interesting than the reason why it was rejected. Pilgrim tells the tragic story from the early 1940s of a serial robber who accidentally killed one of his victims, a young newlywed woman, which forced him to flee the country. Yamai Seimei was eventually captured in Hanoi, Vietnam, ensuring "the bastard will get the death penalty." Usui Shigeru, victim's husband, travels to Hanoi under wartime circumstances, but halfway through he decides to continue the journey to Hanoi on foot – about a 1000 km journey. Two months later, Usui Shigeru arrives at the court in Hanoi and asks the court to spare his wife killer by commuting his death sentence to a prison sentence. But why? More importantly, why was it not enough to save the killer from death? And, of course, the reason is also why the manuscript remained unpublished.

A very dark, disturbing reason. Not that you would get that impression from the description, so far, because “"Pilgrimage" starts out with a human touch of Chestertonian wonder. A man forgiving and sparing the life of his wife's murderer following a mysterious, self-imposed pilgrimage and the wonder what he could have experienced during those two months. Only for it to turn in a terrifying, pitch-black and nightmarish horror plucked from the pages of an Edgar Allan Poe tale. Or, in this case, Edogawa Rampo. Bravo!

So, on a whole, not a bad collection of stories covering these three volumes. "Tuba and Grave," "First Love" and "Pilgrimage" are the obvious standouts and personally liked "Broken Heart" for its locked wallet mystery. Only "Question" and "Venus" trailed behind, but even they had their moments. Far from disappointed and look forward to the next three volumes, which you can expect before too long.

Ho-Ho-Homicide: "A Murder in Christmas Village" (2015) by Alex Colwell

I first read about Alex Colwell's short story, "A Murder in Christmas Village" (2015), on a now long since deleted website, "The Locked Room Mystery," containing a page listing nineteen seasonal detective novels and short stories – titled "A Locked Room Christmas." Colwell's "A Murder in Christmas Village" was the last, then most recent entry on the list and introduced as the first in "an exciting new cozy mystery series set in quaint, idyllic Christmas Village" where "no one locks their door but locked room mysteries and impossible murders abound."

Normally, the phrase "cozy mystery" is enough to make me turn around, but the idea, or gimmick, of an annual series of Christmas-themed locked room mysteries appealed to me (of course!). So chucked the short story on the big pile and forgot about it.

I recently went through the archived pages of the defunct "The Locked Room Mystery" website and it reminded me "A Murder in Christmas Village" was still residing on the big pile. So looked up the series, to see what has been added to it in the intervening years, but Colwell appears to have abandoned the series after only a single short story – proceeded to drop off the map. A second short story, or novel, seems to have been in the works with "Halloween Villa" in the title. Nothing materialized and this short story is no longer available. I got my hands on a lost locked room mystery, before it got lost 

Alex Colwell's "A Murder in Christmas Village" is a short, sweet and simple seasonal locked room mystery with the kind of killing one doesn't usually associate with cozies. Willard "Wild Willy" Wilkinson, of Wild Willy's Western World, got his throat cut in the property room of the Crestview Theater. The body is lying some five feet into the room and the floor is covered in fresh sawdust, which has impressions of two sets of print, but "neither of which could have belonged to the killer." No weapon was found in the room and the only door locked.

So a double impossibility with a body inside a locked room and a murderer who left no footprints in the fresh sawdust on the floor. Maybe even a triple impossibility, if you count the absence of a murder weapon as an impossible problem. Sheriff Fell is tasked with investigating this bizarre, locked room slaying assisted, sort of, by Mrs. Maribel Claus ("yes, he's my husband"). The clueing here is so fair blatant, the solution is not too difficult to put together before Mrs. Claus passes Sheriff Fell that to-do note to catch the murderer. "A Murder in Christmas Village" only true shortcoming, however, is not that it's too easy to solve, but that it could very well have been a minor locked room gem had it been just a little more original. The solutions to the problems of the locked door, no-footprint and absentee murder weapon are all tricks more than a little familiar to mystery fans – especially those obsessing over impossible crimes. The tricks were put to good use, but not enough to make it anything more than a charming, if bloody, little holiday locked room mystery perfectly suited to warm and brighten those cold, dark days of December. Hey, freshly spilled blood from a severed carotid artery is bright and warm!

A shame Colwell gave up on this series after only a single short stories, and writing in general, because would have liked to see him develop and continue this tradition of holiday-themed impossible crime stories. A tradition that would eventually have added up to a charming (Crippen & Landru?) collection of short stories (Ho-Ho-Homicide: Mrs. Claus Celebrates the Holidays).

13 to the Gallows (2008) by John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Douglas G. Green's founding of Crippen & Landru, a small publishing firm specialized in short story collections, whose first publication was John Dickson Carr's Speak of the Devil (1994) – a BBC radio serial originally written and broadcast in 1941. C&L was decades ahead of the curb and gave mystery fans a taste of the coming reprint renaissance with their "Lost Classic" series. A series of short story collections comprising of such early gems as Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), Craig Rice's Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002), Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin (2003), Joseph Commings' Banner Deadlines (2004) and Ellery Queen's The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005). Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999).

There are fortunately no signs C&L is slowing down or stopping anytime soon as Jeffrey Marks, "the award-winning author of biographies of Craig Rice and Anthony Boucher," took over from Douglas Greene as publisher in 2018.

In March, I reviewed one of their latest publications, Pierre Véry's Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937). A collection of imaginative short mystery stories, translated from French by Tom Mead, published in 2023, but was unaware of the C&L's 30th anniversary and neglected to mention it when I wrote the review. It was not until a review of Edward D. Hoch's The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) appeared on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel that I was reminded of C&L's 30th anniversary. So a good excuse to finally move those Anthony Berkeley, William Brittain and Hoch collections to the top of the pile, but not before revisiting one of my favorite C&L collections from my all-time favorite mystery writer.

13 to the Gallows (2008) is a collection of four, never before published manuscripts of stage plays John Dickson Carr wrote during the early 1940s and collaborated on two of the plays with his friend and then Director of Drama at the BBC, Val Gielgud – who had a "shared interest in detective stories and fencing." Gielgud wrote detective novels himself and you would think the name of a British broadcast legend on the covers of Death at Broadcasting House (1934), Death as an Extra (1935) and The First Television Murder (1940) is a guarantee to keep them in circulation, but they have all been out-of-print for ages. This collection of stage plays is the first time his name appeared on a piece of detective fiction in over thirty years. What a way to make a comeback!

Just one more thing before delving into these plays. 13 to the Gallows is edited and introduced by Tony Medawar, a researcher and genre archaeologist, who also littered it with Van Dinean footnotes and even included "Notes for the Curious." Medawar's detailed introduction should give you an appreciation of the time and work that went into the making of this volume of "Lost Classics." One of the many fascinating background details is that it was "the late Derek Smith who first conceived of this collection." So with that out of the way, let's raise the curtain on this collection of stage plays from a once forgotten period of Carr's writing career.

The three-act play "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (1942) is the first of two collaborations between Carr and Gielgud, which is also the first of two plays that take place in a BBC radio studio. In this case, it's the cellar below a country house on the outskirts of a provincial town that was taken over by the BBC as an emergency security set of studios. When the story begins, they're rehearing the first episode of a true crime program called Murderer's Row starring ex-Chief Inspector Silence to talk about the Kovar case. It was his first big case ("I hanged the criminal") in which Thomas Kovar shot his wife's lover. A part of the program is a dramatic reenactment of the shooting, but the producer, Anthony Barran, made the unfortunate call to cast Elliott Vandeleur and Lanyon Kelsey as the murderer and victim – because Kelsey is rumored to be involved with Vandeleur's wife, Jennifer Sloane. So all the ingredients for murder all there, cooped in a small radio studio, while an air-raid goes on over their heads outside.

One of them gets fatally shot during the on-air performance, but who pulled the trigger and perhaps more importantly how was it done? Silence is on hand to handle the case, until the police arrives, collects two .22s from the studio, but one "has never been fired" ("...barrel's unfouled") and "the other was full of blanks." So what happened to the murder gun? Silence turns the studio inside out and has everybody searched without finding as much as a shell casing. Nobody could have drawn or ditched a gun without being seen, but somebody, somehow, managed to pull it off. The impossibility of a shooting in a closed spaced by an apparently invisible killer and the puzzle of the vanishing gun are perfectly played out, which both have simple, elegant and yet satisfying solutions that simply works on stage. These impossibilities are dressed with the personal and backstage drama of the characters mirroring the old murder case and the running joke of Silence being frightened of microphones. Simply the kind of story fans of Carr and impossible crimes in general. However, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" is not even the best play in this volume.

A note for the curious: Medawar noted in the afterword to the play that the impossible murder recalls one of Carr's short stories, "although the details of the mystery are entirely different," but I think Max Afford's The Dead Are Blind (1937) warrants a mention here. A locked room mystery staged inside a radio studio. You can also find similar impossible shootings with vastly different solutions in Stacey Bishop's Death in the Dark (1930) and Christopher Bush's The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935).

The second, three-act Carr-Gielgud collaboration, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944), is set this time in a Midlands school converted into a wartime emergency studio for the BBC. The program being produced is a spin-off episode, of sorts, of In Town Tonight entitled Out of Town – a series of special items split up between three towns in Britain. Barran from "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" returns to produce Barchester part of the program, but, during the rehearsals, slowly sees the whole thing disintegrating in front of his eyes. Even having to entertain the idea of interviewing a man who trains and imitates sea lions. Fortunately, the town has something of a notorious local celebrity, Wallace Hatfield.

Hatfield is a builder who had converted the school into a radio studio and, several years before, was tried for the murder of his wife, Lucy. Not only was he acquitted, but the death dismissed as a tragic accident as the prosecution couldn't even prove it was murder. Lucy had fallen from the belfry, "seventy or eighty feet," scattered round the body were flowers with Hatfield being the only person near the tower. What saved his neck is that the police found only Lucy's footprints in the dust up in the belfry. So nobody could have pushed her. Hatfield still believes she murdered and agrees to be interviewed, which initially was supposed to be conducted by an ex-Scotland Yard inspector. Program director, Sir John Burnside, insists on his old OC, Colonel Sir Henry Bryce, former head of the Indian Police. Sir John gushing over his old OC is another strain for the harassed producer culminating with Barran calling the old OC "son of a cock-eyed half-caste Indian constable" right when Colonel Sir Henry Bryce his entree. Just in time for history to repeat itself as an invisible killer throws another person from the belfry.

Medawar notes in the introduction "Carr clearly contributed to the mystery and Gielgud the authentic details of broadcasting" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" very clearly has Carr's fingerprints all over the plot and storytelling. From the comedy and clueing to the impossible crime reworked from his Suspense radio-play "The Man Without a Body" (1943). Only smudge is that the murderer is an absolute idiot, but other than that, as good and solid a mystery as its predecessor. A vintage Carr. A pity he never considered reworking "The Man Without a Body" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" into a Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. I gladly would have traded one of the final three Merrivale novels for The New Invisible Man.

The last two plays were solo projects, "a version for the stage of his famous BBC series Appointment with Death," beginning with the short play "Intruding Shadow" (1945), which is tightly-plotted little story of domestic murder – staged at the home of a well-known mystery writer. Richard Marlowe is the author of such celebrated detective novels as Death in the Summer-House, Murder at Whispering Lodge and The Nine Black Clues, but the story finds him dabbling in true crime of the fictitious kind. Marlowe wants to scare the pants of Bruce Renfield, a West End blackmailer, to make him back off from one of his victims and hand over the blackmail material. In order to achieve his goal, Marlowe is going to make both of them believe he's about to murder Renfield. After all, this is Golden Age mysteries in which a blackmailer is the type of person "who deserves to die" or "to be scared within an inch of his life." A plan that spectacularly backfires when Marlowe finds a dying Renfield on his doorstep shortly followed by Inspector Sowerby.

Apparently, "Intruding Shadow" was met with some reserved praise from the critics, but on paper, it's easily the best of the four plays Carr wrote during the war years. A short, pure undiluted detective story recalling that small gem "Who Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939/40). Both stories are essentially Carr successfully pulling an Agatha Christie-style whodunit without any locked rooms or other impossible crimes. There is, however, a typical, Carrian Grand Guignol scene involving the corpse. So a great detective tale all around!

The fourth and last (short) play, "She Slept Lightly" (1945), belongs together with The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) and the previously mentioned radio-play, Speak of the Devil, to Carr's earliest experiments in mixing the detective story with historical fiction, which he kind of pioneered starting with plays and short stories – e.g. "The Other Hangman" (1935) and "Blind Man's Hood" (1937). After the 1940s, Carr began to write fully fledged historical mystery novels decades before the historical mystery became a subgenre of its own. Regrettably, Carr's historical (locked room) mysteries and thrillers either criminally underrated or outright ignored. A real shame as some of the Carr's best work from the 1950s and '60s can be found among his historical novels. Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is one of the best historical mystery-thrillers ever written and one of Carr's finest novels from the post-war period.

Just like Captain Cut-Throat, "She Slept Lightly" is a mystery-thriller set in Napoleonic France and brings several characters together in the home of Belgian miller while the Battle of Waterloo rages on in the background. Firstly, there's the elderly Lady Stanhope, "her enemies might call her a little mad," whose carriage overturned and needs the miller to guide her through the French lines. The second arrival is a wounded British soldier, Captain Thomas Thorpe, who's looking for the young girl in Lady Stanhope's company. She, however, denies the existence of the girl. Major von Steinau, a Prussian Hussar, is another one who's interested in this apparently non-existent woman and not without reason. He hanged her only a year ago for spying ("I saw the rope choke out your life"). So how could she be alive and walking around?

Like I said, this is more of a historical mystery-thriller than detective story with the apparent impossibility of a woman who was hanged and lived to tell about it as a small side-puzzle, but I can see why this historical melodrama is not going to excite everyone. I enjoyed it. However, I'm also very, very partial to the type of historical mystery as envisioned by Carr, Robert van Gulik and Paul Doherty. So feel free to disagree on this one.

So the quality of the plays, purely as detective and thriller stories, is uniformly excellent, but, more importantly, 13 to the Gallows plugged another fascinating, once completely forgotten gap in Carr's body of work – similar to the obscure radio-plays collected in The Island of Coffins (2021). That's the greatest contribution C&L had made in helping to restore Carr back to print. A highly recommendable, must-have volume for the true JDC aficionado and might pick up The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and Adventure (2022) before tackling the Brittain and Hoch collections.

Slings and Arrows: Q.E.D. vol. 35-36 by Motohiro Katou

The first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 35, "Two Suspects," is a surprisingly uncomplicated, straightforward case of burglary gone wrong when the owner of a moving company, Yoshimitsu Ryozo, discovers a burglar in the manager's office – working on the safety deposit box. So the burglar takes a crowbar to the owner's skull and leaves him seriously wounded. Yoshimitsu Ryozo is either unable, or unwilling, to identify his attacker, because due to his own past "often hired those with criminal backgrounds." Only viable suspects are two of his staff members, Saburo Mikawa and Kurose Yasumasa, who have several counts of theft and assault on their record.

So a simple, but tricky, case handled by Inspector Mizuhara's subordinate, Asama Kiyori, who's very keen to impress his superior. Naturally, Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara come along to drop by something for Detective Sasazuka and Kiyori is surprised when he asks Touma's opinion on the burglary ("why are you asking that stuff to a kid?"). Sasazuka explains Touma is "a genius who is respected by Inspector Mizuhare" ("so... the inspector has some like that?"). Kiyori asks Kana Mizuhara to rope in Touma to help him solve the case. After all, if the subordinate bungles an investigation, it reflects poorly on his superior, i.e. her father.

While there are only two suspects, they both have a financial motive and their alibis "only supported by someone very close to them." Just having two, or three, suspects can make things a lot more difficult and complicated than an entire swarm of suspects, which these manga detective series regularly demonstrate. Touma is not easily fooled and points out that the one difference between the suspects is "your impression of good or bad with regards to their circumstances." Logically untangles that neat, knotted little problem. A very minor, but solid, story that curiously leaves one small plot-thread unresolved.

The second story, "Christmas Present," sounds out-of-season, but the December holiday is only a small, unobtrusive decoration to a fun parody of the theatrical mystery – even poking fun at the shin honkaku-style locked room puzzles. This story centers on two of Sakisaka High School clubs. Firstly, the Drama Club whose president is a brilliant, promising young actor, Shiroi Kentarou, but despite his acting skills ("...almost at par with the professionals") is the reason why the club is bleeding members ("...he's clumsy as hell"). Always making some thoughtless mistake leading to one members, after another, giving up on the club and now they're given an ultimatum: get new members after the Christmas show or get disbanded! The notorious Detective Club comes to the rescue, but their president, Enari "Queen" Himeko has one condition. It has to be a mystery play. Not that they have script ready, but Detective Club has that covered as well, which means turing to Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara for help. Touma is tasked with penning a script on the spot. Which he does.

So, of course, the collaboration between the two clubs is not exactly going smoothly and even is threatened to be canceled all together, but, for me, the highlight is the trick Touma's dreamed up for the mystery play, Murder at the Pentagon House. The play is about a murder committed in a small, pentagon-shaped house with the door and windows locked from the inside. Sure, the locked room-trick is completely tongue-in-cheek ("W-wow, such a trick exists?! No wonder it's called Pentagon House"), but nonetheless quite clever and original. More importantly, the trick can be easily used in an actual comedy mystery play. A fun, cheeky send-up of the theatrical mystery and shin honkaku impossible crime tales.

"Kurogane Villa Murder Case" is the first of two stories from Q.E.D. vol. 36 and brings Sou Touma to the Kyoto to meet with Jinnai Ryozaburou.

Jinnai Ryozaburou is a lecturer at K University whose mentor, Yanosuke Kurogane, hanged himself at his home five days previously and nobody knows why. Professor Kurogane lectured on theoretical physics for thirty years and renowned as a great researcher, but had treated a promising assistant professor badly. Namely trying to take credit. Karasuma Renji is viewed by the police as a person of interest in their ongoing investigation, but he's "impossible to handle" and tries to make himself look suspect ("this detective is an idiot"). A second murder happens when all of Professor Kurogane's friends and associates gathered at his home to mourn him. One of his potential successors is hit with an arrow while walking down an outside, roofed corridor that poses something of a problem, because long corridors like that were used for archery competitions during the Edo period – where the trick lies in distance combined with the low ceiling. A target at the end of the corridor with a low ceiling overhead limits the angles in which an arrow can be loosened. So the murder is an impossible one as "it'd require the power of a rifle" and "the aim was even a bit off..." On top of that, Karasuma Renji alluded before the murder to Zeno's Arrow Paradox.

Touma gives a clue to the solution to Kana, "the key to solve this case is why did the culprit choose an arrow as the weapon," but the arrow-trick should have been offered as a false-solution – a trick that sounds nice enough in theory. But would simply not work in practice. No matter how skilled the archer who shoots the arrow. Even if it can be done as described, there's no way it can be accurately aimed to hit a fatal spot. And, no, I don't think (ROT13) n funqbj frra sebz n guveq-sybbe ebbsgbc, cbxvat bhg sebz gur pbirerq oevqtr nqwnprag gb pbeevqbe, vf rknpg rabhtu gb uvg gur ivpgvz evtug va gur arpx. A pity as I like archery-themed detective stories of which there are only a scant few. On the other hand, the solution to the murder-disguised-as-suicide of Professor Kurogane had a much simpler, elegant solution. That murder is a quasi-impossible crime with the question being how the killer managed to enter and leave the house without being seen or leaving footprints in the snow outside the study. A mixed bag of a story.

The second and last story from this volume, "Q & A," is one of those unorthodox, character-oriented puzzles drawing on Touma's time as an MIT student in the United States.

Glass Rosfeller is an American banker who helped Touma securing research grants, when he was still studying abroad (see previous reviews), but Rosfeller intends to retire and wishes to hand over the business to one of his four children, Ian, Walter, Freya and Wood. So has an unusual favor to ask from Touma. Rosfeller wants him to select the most suitable one to succeed him and in order to do so has them gathered in a luxurious villa, on an island, in the middle of Aegean Sea. Touma brings along Kana and his younger sister, Yuu Touma. Only other people present on the island is the caretaker and his son. This all appears to be conventional enough and most readers will probably expect someone to be murdered, likely under seemingly impossible circumstances, but what happens is a series of minor and more serious incidents. There's a blackout. The gas and warm water gets turned off. The son of the caretaker is injured and finally an explosion. This short, strange series of events is retold several times from the perspective of everyone present on the island. Every time one of these incidents happened, they were all scattered around the villa or the island. A story with a really, really razor-thin plot, but Katou deserves credit for how he handled it and making it feel more substantial than it actually is. So not entirely without interest, but a minor and unmemorable entry in the series.

Obviously, vol. 36 is on a whole weaker than vol. 35 with "Christmas Present" being the standout of the two collections and the first story, "Two Suspects," standing as a solid, no-frills detective tale. "Kurogane Villa Murder Case" is not a bad story, but the arrow-trick is hard to credit and "Q & A" is one of those stories I've completely forgotten when getting to the next two volumes. Still an enjoyable read overall. You can probably expect the next Q.E.D. review by the end of the month.

Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980) by Phillips Lore

Terrence Lore Smith was an American crime-and mystery writer probably best remembered today, if he's remembered at all, for his bestselling novel The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1969) about a computer programmer turned jewel thief – which was turned into a popular movie in 1973 starring Ryan O'Neal and Jacqueline Bisset. Something ran in the family as Smith was the son of a Methodist minister, Charles Merrill Smith, who wrote the Reverend Randollph series comprising of six or seven novels. I'm not entirely sure if the last title in the series, Reverend Randollph and Modern Miracles (1988), ended up being published or only announced as forthcoming.

Charles Merrill Smith died in 1985 and the few listings that can be found online credits his son as the co-author, suggesting Terrence Smith was either completing an unfinished manuscript or intended to restart the series, but died tragically that same year. Terrence Smith worked part-time as a courier for the Pikes Peak Library District in El Paso County, Colorado, while driving the library van on an icy road lost control and got hit by another car. Smith died from his injuries on December 7, 1988, aged 46.

So perhaps Smith's untimely death got the book canned, whether it be legal issues or simply an unpolished manuscript, but Reverend Randollph and Modern Miracles has a brief plot synopsis ("...miraculous, paranormal murders are occurring and the minister-sleuth must find an earthly explanation...") and someone rated it four-stars on Goodreads – implying it got published and copies still exist. But only in hardback. And the lack of paperback reprints made the hardback edition ridiculously rare. So rare you can't even find exorbitantly prized copies online! I'm not sure if it should be added to the list of lost mysteries or the one with all the extremely scarce titles, but fortunately, father and son collaborated on three detective novels during their lifetime. Writing under their shared pseudonym of "Phillips Lore," Charles and Terrence Smith penned Who Killed the Pie Man? (1975), Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980) and The Looking Glass Murders (1980). All three novels were published by Playboy Press and starred a multi-millionaire attorney, Leo Roi, who inherited the fortune his father raked together with his Prohibition-era shenanigans.

This short-lived series would not have caught my attention, or interest, had Murder Behind Closed Doors not been listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). An enticing entry describing four distinctly different (attempted) locked room murders. However, I got my copy of Locked Room Murders when I was still skeptical and hesitant when it came to detective fiction published after the 1950s. Everything about Murder Behind Closed Doors impressed me as one of those locked room curiosities that occasionally popped up during the second-half of the previous century. I reviewed a few on this blog like John B. Ethan's The Black Gold Murders (1959), Robert Colby's In a Vanishing Room (1961), Stephen Frances' The Illusionist (1970) and Tony Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972).

What earned Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors a special notation on my wishlist was a comment from John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, praising it as "a much better book with an unusual locked room plot" in his review of the first novel in the series, Who Killed the Pie Man? – calling Lore "one of the better locked room mystery writers of the 1970s-1980s" elsewhere. A copy finally landed in my lap last December and I can say right off the bat that Murder Behind Closed Doors is not a curiosity. It's actually quite interesting for two reasons: how it resettled a more or less traditional detective story of yore in then modern-day America and how the concept of a locked room murder is treated and received by the characters. So it proved to be an unexpectedly fascinating read considering the '80s presented something of a small revival for the traditional detective story and locked room mystery. Let's take a closer look at the story.

Phillips Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors is dedicated to Raymond Chandler, "for his unparalleled Philip Marlowe—the great American detective," but reads like a mash of John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen. Funnily enough, every chapter begins with a quote from A.A. Milne's work. Chandler dragged Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922) behind the shed in his 1944 essay "The Simple Art of Murder" ("if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce"). Just one of the clues Lore had his tongue placed firmly in his cheek when he wrote the book. Anyway...

Leo Roi is a multi-millionaire lawyer, or to be more precise, an investigative attorney whose partner, Jack Pine, handles the courtroom end of business ("I build briefs and Jack tries the cases. It works pretty well"). Since he has more than enough money, Roi can afford to dabble in ethics, "lawyers' ethics are generally no better than those of the ordinary run of humanity, but I keep thinking they should be," who's not opposed to somewhat bending the rules. But never breaking them. A much needed quality when an old friend, Smith "Soldier" Jones, comes knocking to represent and possible defend one of his friends, Robert A. Garrison. A sculptor of some local fame wanted for questioning regarding the strangling of a Chicago advertiser, William Helld.

The Chicago advertising agency of Fruin, Helld, Forbes & Bascom threw a party for the cast and crew of the Black Ram Players to celebrate the opening of their play, Black, White and Blond, which was held at the home of the victim – whose body was discovered in the coach house studio of Garrison. That makes the case potentially explosive in 1980s America, because Garrison was Helld's "longtime companion." Roi assures his friend that fact does not bother him, personally or professionally ("as a man I'm more interested in my own sex life and love life than other people's"). Agrees to accompany Garrison to the police station, expecting him to be at least held as a material witness, but surprisingly get brushed off and send home. Why? Roi gets the answer from the Sun-Times crime reporter, Art Hough. The murder of William Heldd is a "puzzle mystery, locked room murder" as the door, windows and even the skylight were all found securely locked from the inside. They have a good laugh about it. Roi and Hough explain to Garrison that locked room murders only happen in fiction and "they never occur in reality." This locked room murder is no different as it's not really a locked room murder at all.

Hank Davis, "international film star who is appearing in the production," discovered the body when he missed Helld at the party, went looking for him and saw him lying on the floor of the coach house. And broke one of the windows to get inside. So he's the only one who logically could have staged an impossible crime by pretending he broke into a tightly locked coach house and the police is simply waiting with an arrest until they can pin a motive on him. Davis and Helld were ex-lovers before Garrison entered the picture. Either way, Roi's client is off the hooks for murder. Or so they believe.

A week later, they have "a real, live, genuine, double-dyed, locked-room, puzzle-mystery murder" on their hands when an anonymous tip leads the police to a second body, shot to death, inside the locked and bolted den of the coach house. A second locked room murder that places an entirely different complexion on the first. So now they have two impossible crimes. Hough points out to Roi that "most of the methods used in locked-room murders are absurd or unworkable and not the sort of thing anyone would really do" ("that's what makes this case so fascinating"), but admires "someone wild and crazy enough to kill with a flair" as most killings tend to be routine and boring ("...except to the participants"). Roi figures the seemingly impossibilities is a signature as easy to identify as a fingerprint, because "there just can't be that many people who could conceive of and execute two locked-room murders." But to find that person, Roi has to look beyond the private life of the victims and suspect.

That brings him to the theatrical company and advertising agency, which is when the story begins to taste a little pulpy. The play is produced by the son of a mob boss, Giovanni Palese, who tries to go legit and is busy cleaning up his public image doing charity or funding "art crap," but getting publicly involved in a double murder case could undo all of that – which gets the sympathy of the attorney. And even promises to look out for his interest, if the case allows it. Only for a third victim to get run through with a rapier inside the locked theater. The two characters Roi encounters at the advertising agency, Anson Forbes and Bonita Bascom, would have been completely at home in a 1940s pulp magazine or Clayton Rawson novel. Yes, there's a fourth locked room, of sorts, involving an elevator, but Lore saves that one for the very end of the story.

So how does Murder Behind Closed Doors stack up as a modern-day locked room mystery? Better than expected, but not for the reasons some might assume.

Firstly, the quality of the locked room-tricks with the first one being the best of the four. Theoretically, the trick is kind of brilliant, original even, but, as the crime reported predicted, somewhat absurd and perhaps impractical. Nonetheless, it's the kind of creative solution you hope to find in a locked room mystery. The second locked room-trick has been done before and since, while the third one is merely a filler impossibility (ROT13: n frys-ybpxvat qbbe) and even the murderer admits to that fact. So, on that account, it's more or less what you can expect from a most detective stories trying to string together more than two impossible crimes. What makes Murder Behind Closed Doors noteworthy, beside the first locked room, is how the impossibilities are treated and received. Going from bemused disbelief someone actually was stupid enough to try rigging up a storybook murder to almost surprised admiration a murderer is actually going around leaving bodies in locked rooms. A reader unaware of the history or status of the genre in 1980 might get the impression from Murder Behind Closed Doors the Golden Age-style (locked room) mystery never went away and Lore took the old warhorse for a little joyride. Instead of going through a two decade dark age. Lore unwittingly produced a very fitting novel to kickoff that first, short-lived revival and makes want to do another historical retrospective taking a closer look at the '80s. That's something for later this year.

Secondly, Murder Behind Closed Doors is not only about four impossible crimes. There's also the who-and why to be considered, which proved to be as unusual as the how with a memorable murderer and motive for creating a series of locked room murders – all “clued” in a somewhat unorthodox manner. I liked how the full solution punishes readers who (ROT13) whqtrq n obbx ol vgf pbire naq qernqrq n pregnva glcr bs fbyhgvba gb gur ybpxrq ebbzf jura n pregnva punenpgre vf vagebqhprq. I feared that possibility and even considered that character working cahoots with another character to get the job done (nsgre nyy, gur svefg ivpgvz jnf fgenatyrq). So the eventual solution came as a nice surprise. Even the routine solution to the second locked room murder and the attempt at a fourth was put to good use at the end. There is, however, an overall drawback to the story.

Lore tried to pack a lot in a very short novel counting a little more than a 180 pages with a lot of blank pages between chapters, whittling the page-count down to under a 170. In those pages, Lore introduced three locked room murders, separate casts of characters (theater and agency), plant clues, sprinkle around some red herrings and even introduce a personal sub-plot for Leo Roi involving his wife, Christina. Not to mention the delayed investigation until the second murder is committed. So Murder Behind Closed Doors was not bad at all, but obviously could have been better had it been given more room to develop. In that regard, Murder Behind Closed Doors reminded me of the work of Ton Vervoort, e.g. Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964), whose novels were written in a loose, light style with a small page-count, but always pleasantly full of clever ideas and unexpected surprises. Although you can't escape the feeling it could have been even better had it been properly worked out. Judging by Murder Behind Closed Doors, I suppose the same can be said about this series.

Nevertheless, as you can probably gauge from this unnecessarily long, rambling review, I enjoyed this unusual locked room mystery and the reason why you can almost certainly look forward to a retrospective of the 1980s impossible crime revival sometime in the near future. In the intervening time, I'm going to hunt down a few additional titles from that decade and this series. Probably The Looking Glass Murders. Next up... a return to the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries!

London's Glory (2015) by Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler was a British author of some fifty novels and short story collections, covering everything from fantasy, horror and science-fiction to none-fiction, but what he'll be remembered for the most is the creating the first "Great Detective" series of the 21st century – recounting "the adventures of the two Golden Age detectives investigating impossible, modern London crimes." The two detective detectives in question are the nonagenarian Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. A specialist police team created after the outbreak of the Second World War to ease the heavily burdened, overstretched Metropolitan Police Force originally intended to investigate sensitive cases that could cause scandal or public unrest. However, the "peculiar" in Peculiar Crimes Unit often brought problems to their desk of a decidedly odder, weirder and sometimes outright impossible nature. Just as odd, weird and impossible are Britain's weird and forgotten who worked for the PCU over the decades with Bryant and May as the unit's never-changing constants.

This series together with writers like Lawrence Block, William L. DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini helped thawing out my fundamentally-minded purist mindset that viewed everything published after the Golden Age as irredeemable trash. I enjoyed the first half dozen novels, but On the Loose (2009) and Off the Rails (2010) lost me. I briefly returned to the series in 2016 with a review of the excellent locked room mystery, The Memory of Blood (2011), but the burgeoning reprint renaissance and translation wave distracted my attention away from the PCU series. So had half-forgotten about the series when the tragic broke earlier this year that Fowler had passed away after battling cancer for three years. After mentioning the PCU series in "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years," I decided a return was in order before the end of the year. Why not reacquaint myself with the series through one of the two short story collections?

London's Glory (2015) collects ten short stories, a bonus story, a lengthy introduction, introductions to the stories and some other extras – like an illustration of the PCU HQ and "Arthur Bryant's Secret Library." So quite the must-have volume for fans. Before the going over the stories, I should note that the short story format is perhaps a little too crammed and narrow for this particular series to thrive. A lot of the stories have great hooks and fantastic setups, but feel like they ended just a few paces after leaving the starting plot. Such as the first short story.

"Bryant & May and the Secret Santa"

Bryant and May are called to the Selfridges department store where a strange, potentially suspicious fatal accident occurred. An 11-year-old boy was brought to the department store by his mother to get a picture with Santa Claus and get an early Christmas present. After the picture was taken and the present received, the boy was seen in the store "holding the torn-open box in his hand and appeared to be in a state of distress." And then ran out into the street "where he was his by a number 53 bus." So the first question is what the kid found inside the box, but the odd part is that the box was found to be completely empty. This leads the two nonagenarian detectives to the St. Crispin's School for Boys and its culture of persistent bullying among the first-year students. But then the story just ends when the solution falls into their lap. This story feels like the initial idea for a novel-length mystery with the accident bringing the PCU to St. Crispin's School to bring clarity to the dark doings among the students and teachers. Just as a short story, it feels undeveloped and rushed.

"Bryant & May in the Field"

John May is given an opportunity to get Arthur Bryant out of the "musty deathtrap" doubling as the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit with the promise of a good, old-fashioned impossible crime. The body of Marsha Kastopolis is found on Primrose Hill with her throat cut ("a real vicious sweep") with “just her footprints leading out to the middle of the hillslope and nothing else" ("not a mark in any direction that he could see"). Phantasos Kastopolis is not to cut up about his wife's murder ("she was getting as fat as a pig") and already under scrutiny by the authorities over his real estate shenanigans, tax schemes and health-and-safety violations, but did he kill his wife or someone else? And how was it done? Well, the trick is a tricky one and difficult enough to present convincingly in a modern setting, but the complete lack of any kind of clue or even a ghost of a hint (whfg fubj fbzrbar sylvat n xvgr ba gur uvyyfybcr) made it a disappointing impossible crime story. A fun enough short story in other regards, but nothing more than that.

"Bryant & May on the Beat"

Something of a short-short: Bryant and May investigate the death of William Warren, a part-time musician, who ran a stall in Camden Market where sold homemade woolly hats and music instruments – apparently died of anthrax in his closely-shut apartment. A rather good short-short with something resembling fair play and the first one from this collection I liked. Interestingly, this and the previous story stand closer to the impossible crime fiction from L.T. Meade (A Master of Mysteries, 1898), Max Rittenberg (The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases, 2016) and Keikichi Osaka (The Ginza Ghost, 2017) rather than G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr.

"Bryant & May in the Soup"

This is the first short story in the collection drawing on the long, ramshackle history of the PCU, "Arthur Bryant's memoirs are unreliable in the extreme, especially when it comes to dates," stretching from World War II to the first decades of the 21st century – taking the reader this time to the days of the Great Smog of London. A lethal smog that descended on the city from December 5 to December 9, 1952. There were thousands of fatalities, "the young and the elderly died from respiratory problems," while staining "London's buildings black for fifty years." An already sick coach driver, Harry Whitworth, braves the deadly fog to go to work, but, shortly after arriving, climbed up into the driver's seat of the nearest coach. Placed his hands on the wheel, sighed and died. Bryant and May have to figure whether it was the fog that killed him or whether there was some other, more nefarious cause. The murder method is undeniably clever, but another instance of a potentially excellent detective novel wasted on a short story. Those five days are the perfect backdrop for a dark, moody detective novel with an atmosphere and plot as a thick as the fog that clings to the streets and buildings.

"Bryant & May and the Nameless Woman"

The introduction names Margery Allingham as one of Fowler's favorite Golden Age writers, praising The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) as "a dark, strange read that leaves its mark," which rang some alarm bells. Allingham wrote a couple of solid short stories, but I'm not a fan of her novel-length mysteries. So imagine my surprise when having to conclude "The Nameless Woman" turned out to be the standout of London's Glory. A woman, who refuses to give her name, comes to John May to tell him that she intends to kill a man, Joel Madden, nothing he can say or do will change her mind. So why bother coming and expose her murderous intentions? She figured the police would come for her regardless. Just a week later, May learns that a Joel Madden had been found dead, drowned, in the rooftop swimming pool of an exclusive city club and the mysterious woman was picked up on the building's CCTV. What follows is May interrogating the woman interspersed with flashbacks to murderer with puzzle consisting of anticipating the exact murder method and the name of the nameless woman. An excellent, quasi-inverted mystery ending on a surprisingly lighter, typically PCU note.

A note for the curious: the strange swimming pool drowning recalls similar problems from Ronald Knox's "The Motive" (1937) and Joseph B. Commings' "Murder of a Mermaid" (1982), but Fowler came up with an entirely different method.

"Bryant & May and the Seven Points"

This short story is simply modern-day pulp thriller. Bryant and May are called upon to investigate the disappearance of Michael Portheim, "an MI5 officer and mathematician specializing in codes," who was caught on CCTV entering a park – no footage of him coming back out again. A subsequent investigation turned up nothing and the authorities began to fear Portheim was either murdered or kidnapped. So without any further leads forthcoming, they began to clutch at straws and turned to the PCU. Bryant and May pick up a trail ("...as part of his training he also learned circus skills") that brings them to a sideshow revival of the old freak shows, which has been reinvented as a magic show of body horror ('You'll Be Jolted by Electra the 30,000-Volt Girl," "Nothing Can Prepare You for Lucio the Human Pin-Cushion," and "Prepare to Be Horrified by Marvo the Caterpillar Boy"). Lording over this Arcade of Abnormalities is a villainous Russian dwarf with bright-red horns surgically mounted to his skull. This story almost reaches comic book levels of villainy, but it's a fun story and has a really good, truly horrifying explanation for what happened to Portheim. I wonder if Fowler read Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933).

"Bryant & May on the Cards"

This is another modern-day, pulp-style thriller, but less darker and more fun than the previous story. Ian McFarland is a down on his luck, complete broke man whose wife unceremoniously and cruelly left him ("his life, over at the ripe old age of twenty-nine"). One day, McFarland finds a fancy looking credit card with a phone number and passcode to activate the card. Evidently a mistake, but he calls the number anyway and learns they offer a very particular service, "we could kill your wife." Mandy McFarland is shot death behind the reception desk of the posh restaurant The Water House by a masked man and her murder puts the PCU on the trail of a sinister figure who setup a so-called Elimination Bureau. A very fun, old-fashioned pulp-thriller resettled in today's London. Fowler was really good at these "new pulp" stories.

Regrettably, the remaining four short stories are all fairly minor and not especially interesting. "Bryant & May Ahoy!" has Bryant and May going on a long overdue, shipboard holiday in Southern Turkey, but Bryant eyes his fellow passengers suspiciously and eventually has to solve an attempted poisoning. "Bryant & May and the Blind Spot" is a Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright story recounting her disastrous, short-lived stint as part of Adrian Dunwoody's security detail. "Bryant & May and the Bells of Westminster" is the second historical taking place in the 1960s as Bryant and May investigate the classically-styled murder of Simon Montfleury, stabbed in the library of Bayham Abbey, but somehow, this story simply didn't do it for me. Finally, "Bryant & May's Mystery Tour" is a fun short-short in which Bryant takes May aboard a double-decker bus to go and meet a murderer, but it's obvious in which direction the solution is headed.

So, all in all, London's Glory is like most short story collections a mixed bag of tricks. Surprisingly, it's the least traditional stories like "The Nameless Woman," "The Seven Points" and "On the Cards" that stole the show. However, they served their purpose in refreshing my memory and will return to the novels next year. I just have to decide whether I'll pick up where I left with The Invisible Code (2012) or first dip into a novel like The Bleeding Heart (2014) or Wild Chamber (2017).

The Kindaichi Case Files: Death TV by Yozaburo Kanari and Fumiya Sato

I'm consistently about two months, give or take a week or two, ahead on schedule with enough blog-posts and reviews queued to occasionally slip away from the blog without it getting noticed, which every now and then runs into a scheduling problem – occasionally leaving a place open for an upcoming reprint, new release or translation. Something that doesn't always work out. This time, I was left with a week-sized hole in the November schedule and needed something to plug the gap. But what?

I considered doing another Q.E.D. review or perhaps redo and expand on my two old posts about detective stories lost to history, "The Locked Room Reader: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories" and "The Locked Room Reader: A Return to the Phantom Library," but decided to leave them for another time. I moved away this year from The Kindaichi Case Files to focus on Q.E.D. and wanted to briefly return to the former before trying to finish the latter in 2024. I wanted to revisit a volume from the original run of the series that has a story somewhat befitting for these cold, dark and short winter days.

To the Yozaburo Kanari fans among you who feel the icy clutch of despair, you can rest your mind. I'm not going to gift myself an early Christmas present by laying in on Kanari. So you won't hear me saying Kanari has all the creativity and originality of a "Jingle Bells" cover. I'm not going to waste a single word on telling you Kanari handles his plots with the skill and subtlety of an American Civil War surgeon treating a leg wound. Not a hint, nor a murmur, that an old, battered copy of Plotto (1928) would probably have made a better leadwriter for this series (Story by Plotto, Art by Fumiya Sato). This is going to be a fair and balanced review, like The Demon God Ruins Murder Case, but I've a ROT13 question at the end for those who believe Kanari got the short shrift for The Mummy's Curse – copying his homework from Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). More on that in a moment.

Death TV was originally serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from March 17 to May 26, 1993, under the title The Snow Yashka Murder Case and TokyoPop released an English translation in 2003. I remembered it as a surprisingly decent entry early on in the frist series, but not too difficult a task coming right alongside The Opera House Murders and The Mummy's Curse. So let's find out how well it stands up to a second glance.

Hajime Kindaichi has taken a part-time job at a local television station to kill time during the winter break, working as an extra and runner for Shock TV, which is "a hidden-camera show that plays pranks on celebrities." The "victims" for the latest episode are the actress Rie Kanou and the pop singer Reika Hayami. Death TV is, in fact, the introduction of two recurring characters, Reika Hayami and Superintendent Kengo Akechi, who's there to lend an air of authenticity to the prank. Shock TV lured the two celebrities to the village of Segoori, in the shadow of Taisetsu Mountain in Hokkaido, where the villa of the well-known, famously reclusive painter Issei Himuro stands – designed "as a museum to display his own work." So the gallery snaked around the house, surrounding the rooms in the center, which makes it the perfect location for a hidden-camera murder mystery patterned after the local legend of the Snow Demon. Rie Kanou and Reika Hayami are made to believe they're in the middle of a real-life Seishi Yokomizo mystery, but Kanou smells a typical Shock TV scam and so the crew have planned "a prank just for her." Only then things go horribly wrong.

The villa is divided in two parts, a main building and annex, which face each other, but a river and deep canyon sits between the two buildings. A bridge connecting the villa's two part washed away the previous summer and the only other bridge is a twenty minute drive away. Rie Kanou gets left behind in the annex together with the cameraman, Michio Akashi, while the cast and crew move to the main building to observe their victim through the hidden-cameras and setting off remote controlled special effects. Someone wearing the custom and mask of the legendary Snow Demon appears on their monitors. Whoever is behind the mask, the figure is carrying an ax. Only thing the cast and crew can do is watch helplessly as the Snow Demon plants the ax into Kanou's skull. The outside cameras picks up one last glimpse of the murderer as the Snow Demon vanished into the snowstorm ("leaving the villa quiet once more"). Michio Akashi is nowhere to be found and everyone else has an alibi as solid as permafrost. All of them being together twenty minutes away from the crime scene. Akashi is quickly found to have been innocent when his body turns inside a snowman clutching a dying message. And they're not the last to fall victim to the Snow Demon. The last murder is committed in a room with the door and windows locked from the inside.

However, the additional murders, dying message and locked room-trick are pretty much irrelevant to the plot. The dying message is not considered until the conclusion and the locked room-trick is an old dodge, which is surprising as this always makes work of its impossible crime. The whole story of Death TV is driven by two thing: the admittedly brilliant alibi-trick to the first murder and setting Superintendent Akechi up as a rival detective to Hajime Kindaichi (playing the Simon Brimmer to Kindaichi's Ellery Queen). Akechi is as trying and hard to like in his first appearance as Philo Vance in The Benson Murder Case (1926). A young, arrogant "career cop" who studied criminal psychology in the United States and due to his education, started as an assistant inspector instead of working his way up. And loves to refer to his time abroad ("of course, I've already seen many similar cases in Los Angeles"). Akechi challenges Kindaichi and Inspector Kenmochi, “to find out whose tactics are more effects,” which provided the plot with an opportunity to have Kindaichi bat away several false-solutions. Akechi becomes more palpable as a character in later appearances and even starred in his own spin-off series, but here served his purpose by playing the fallible detective who ends up getting a much deserved kick in the pance.

Regrettably, everything outside the central alibi-puzzle and rivalry between the two detective is subpar. I already mentioned the wasted dying message and routine locked room-trick, but the murderer stands out from the moment the murder is committed. Even if you don't know, exactly, how it was done, the story makes it very clear only that person could have done it. But then Kanari had to apply one of his famous, oh-so subtle plot-touches to the character of the murderer. So here comes my ROT13 question: fb lbh qrpvqr gb frg lbhe qrgrpgvir fgbel va n fcrpvnyyl qrfvtarq ivyyn, pbzcyrgr jvgu bqq nepuvgrpgheny naq ynaqfpncr srngherf, jurer n snzbhfyl erpyhfvir cnvagre yvirf uvqqra oruvaq fhatynffrf naq n snprznfx. Lbh unir n zheqrere jub'f nyzbfg vafhygvatyl boivbhf naq gur bayl guvat gung nfcrpg bs gur cybg unf tbvat sbe vgfrys vf n ernyyl bevtvany nyvov-gevpx. Jul purncra vg ol gelvat gb or gbathr-va-purrx pyrire ol anzvat gur zheqrere Nlngfhwv? I completely missed that the first time around, but now it stood out and it annoyed more than it probably should have. What really annoyed me was the motive. Not the repetitiveness of this overused motive, particularly in this series, but how the ending revealed the victims, relatively ordinary people, to have been almost comically evil ("scram, you brat"). I'm the last detective fan to complain about shallow characterization, but Jesus Christ, the only thing missing was them laughing maniacally among the burning wreckage.

I remembered Death TV as a surprisingly decent, early entry in the series and, as you can probably guess, it has not entirely stood up to a second reading. The plot rests entirely on breaking down the murderer's crafty alibi and the rivalry between Akechi and Kindaichi livens up what would otherwise have been a paint-by-numbers, shin honkaku-style detective story, but not enough to recommend it. And certainly not worth tracking down one of those ridiculously overpriced, secondhand copies of the TokyoPop translation.