On Matters of Grave Concern

"Though everything will seem dark to you now, remember that even behind the darkest clouds of night there shines the moon of dawn."

- (Robert van Gulik's "The Wrong Sword," from Judge Dee at Work, 1967)

The Body Snatchers Affair (2015) is the third, full-length novel in the historical Carpenter and Quincannon series, which began with a standalone book, Quincannon (1985), that formed the basis for a series of magazine stories and an excellent selection of those stories – collected as Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998). 
 

In 2011, I announced on my blog that the William Roos and Aubrey Kelley of our time, Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, were collaborating on a series of novels starring the duo of gumshoes operating in the San Francisco of the late 1890s. The Bughouse Affair (2013) and The Spook Lights Affair (2013) were the first to appear and The Plague of Thieves Affair (2016) is slated for release early next year, but first let's take a look at The Body Snatchers Affair. 

The lion's share of The Body Snatchers Affair is modeled around the plot of a short story, "The Highbinders," from Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services, in which the body of a Tong leader, Bing Ah Kee, is unceremoniously snatched from his coffin – a potential triggering move for a small-scale civil war on the streets of Chinatown.

Quincannon is hired to fetch a drug-addicted lawyer, James Scarlett, from an opium den, but his half conscious quarry is fatally shot while attempting to carry him out of the Chinese Quarters. The last words Scarlett uttered, "blue shadow," amounts to a dying message, however, the explanation for this part of the plot is the same as in the short story. So it won't yield any surprises, if you've read and remember that particular story, but a good and interesting expansion nonetheless.

While Quincannon attempts to quell a rising fire in Chinatown, Sabina Carpenter has one or two problems of her own to take care of, one professional in nature and the other personal, but in both cases she tries to keep Quincannon in the dark as much as possible.

The professional problem concerns a client of hers, Mrs. Blanchford, who received a $75,000 ransom note for the return of her late-husband's remains. Mrs. Blanchford's husband was interred in the family mausoleum and the door can only be opened with a key that was in a safety-deposit box inside a secured bank building, but the note contained Ruben Blanchford's wedding ring and a piece of satin cut from the lining of a casket.

It's completely impossible to enter the solid looking, family crypt and take away the body, but the casket proved to be indeed empty upon inspection – which is what is being carefully kept from Quincannon. Sabina knows he would insert himself in her investigation, because Quincannon "fancied himself an expert on that sort of mystery" and wants to solve this locked room case herself. If, like me, you fancy yourself a student of the Grandest Game in the World (the obligatory John Dickson Carr reference) then the disappearance from the crypt won't pose much of a challenge for you, but that doesn't make withholding an impossible problem from a locked room enthusiast any less reprehensible. That's like taking painkillers from a sick person. You just don't do that.

Coming: 2016

However, I enjoyed how the two seemingly unrelated cases of body snatchings dovetailed with each other without actually being intertwined. 

The personal problem begins with Carson Montgomery, a metallurgist, who's vying for spot coveted by Quincannon, but Sabina (a former Pink Rose operative) has always been resistant to male advances (especially Quincannon's) ever since losing her husband in the line of duty. Just when Sabina thinks Carson may be the new man in her life, she notices an old, familiar face is watching them. The crackpot who claims to be Sherlock Holmes, first appearing in The Bughouse Affair, has been shadowing them and this eventually leads to a mining scandal from a decade ago and an (unsolved) murder in the background. But more importantly, it casts an interesting light on the bughouse Holmes and his possible role in the next novel. 

My theory: the twist is that the bughouse Sherlock Holmes was Professor Moriarty all along, who thought Quincannon was the actual Holmes in hiding and that gray-flecked, bootleggers beard one of his disguises. The Plague of Thieves Affair could be a hint at Moriarty's next big caper. 

Conclusion: The Body Snatchers Affair has everything what you've come to expect from Pronzini and Muller, but be warned, the book contains material that readers who were onboard with series before 2013 are already familiar with. That being said, I can't wait for the release of The Plague of Thieves Affair. I'm sure it'll contain another impossible problem or two.

Come Into My Parlor

"Well, one of us must have killed him!"

- Mrs. White (Clue, 1985)

Last year, the first officially sanctioned Agatha Christie pastiche, The Monogram Murders (2014) by Sophie Hannah, was released and garnered criticism for its implausible, convoluted plotting and inaccurate portrayal of Hercule Poirot.

The estate has always been protective of Agatha Christie's intellectual property and never allowed an author to pen a continuation or a previously unrecorded case in one of her series before, which is probably why this one fell short of the mark.

For over ninety years, the only standard for an Agatha Christie novel was set by the Queen of (Golden Age) Mysteries herself, which is a tough bill to fill for any contemporary crime novelist. It would be like asking Napoleon III to equal Napoleon I on the battlefield. Sure, you could expect the same results, but disappointment probably won't be trotting far behind those expectations.

How different was the situation at the beginning of this millennium: there was still entire stack of Hercule Poirot mysteries to be filmed, Miss Marple eagerly awaited a return to the small screen and a handful of stage plays were being novelized by Charles Osborne – a journalist and author of The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (1982).  

During the late 1990s, early 2000s, HarperCollins were reissuing all of Christie's book in hardback in the order they were originally published, which included new material such as Black Coffee (1998), The Unexpected Guest (1999) and Spider's Web (2000) – novelisations of stage plays that didn't endure the same, long-running success of The Mousetrap (1952-present). Well, in my time away from this blog, I serendipitously came across a beautiful, hardcover edition of Spider's Web and finally got around to reading it. You know you're reading a previously unexplored minefield by Christie, when you find out you have been eyeing the wrong suspect the entire time.

Christie wrote Spider's Web in 1954 for "the British film star, Margeret Lockwood, who wanted a role that would exploit her talent for comedy" and "stayed for 774 performances" at the Savoy Theatre in London.  

The story opens at Copplestone Court, eighteenth-century country home of Henry Hailsham-Brown, Foreign Office diplomat, and his wife, Clarissa, who's entertaining friends and waiting for her husband to return home from work. It's a warm, homely picture that's disturbed when a man named Oliver Costello is announced by the butler. Costello was the man who probably introduced Henry's first wife, Miranda, to the drugs that destroyed their marriage, but Costello has married Miranda and now she wants their daughter, "Pippa," back from Henry – who's scared to death of her mother and Costello.

Agatha Christie: The Last True Queen of Great Britain

There's one particular aspect of that plot strand that's rather dark and atypical for Christie (Costello sexually abused Pippa), which could be something Osborne added to make the story more appealing to readers of modern, psychological-and character driven novels of crime. After all, the dark cover of Spider's Web is stamped with "A Novel" instead of such vulgar terms as "A Mystery" or "A Thriller," but at least it's less pretentious than "A Literary Thriller." Anyway, moving on.

Clarissa doesn't breath a word of the visit to her husband, because he has returned with the rather important tasking of hosting a (secret) meeting at their home between the premier of the Soviet Union and the British Prime-Minister. The only thing Clarissa has to do is leave ham sandwiches and hot coffee in the library, while he's going to fetch the "guests," but in that very same library she stumbles over the lifeless body of Costello – clobbered over the head with something sharp. Luckily, Clarissa has the clarity of mind to do what everyone would do in such a situation: call a couple of friends to hide the body.

The three friends are her godfather, Sir Rowland Delaheye, Hugo Birch and a young man, named Jeremy Warrander, who's in love with Clarissa and after some convincing (including setting up a bridge-alibi), they decide to help. To quote Warrander, "what's a dead body or two among friends?" Unfortunately, an anonymous phone call was made to the police telling them there has been a murder at Copplestone Court and they send Constable Jones and Inspector Lord, who doesn't believe there hasn't been a murder and makes things very difficult for them – especially after he's been proven to be correct.

Clarissa has to draw from her rich well of imagination, which often wondered what she would do if she ever found a dead body in the library, to find explanations for the ever-expanding web of lies she's weaving to keep everyone out of trouble. Even going as far as drawing up a dummy case against herself, claiming self-defense, to protect Pippa. The living quarters setting and group of friends, having each others back, recalled London Particular (1952) by Christianna Brand, but done in the light-hearted, good natured humor reminiscent of Kelley Roos and the Tommy and Tuppence stories in Partners in Crime (1929).

Throw-in a dead antique dealer, a hidden drawer containing an envelope and autograph of Queen Victoria and a good use for that hoary, 19th century plot-device known as the secret passage and you have a fun, fast-paced comedy thriller in which the reader is in the pleasant position of knowing more than Inspector Lord, but not enough to know who's hand is actually behind it all. Not in my case, anyway.

I'll return presently with a new review/blog-post.

The Fog is Rising

"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Yellow Face," from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1893)

I've been cranking out reviews and filler posts on a semi-regular basis for over four years and received around a dozen offers over that period to accept review copies, which I all turned down. The kind gestures from these publishers were appreciated, but you'll need a smooth talking conman to even make me consider touching a contemporary thriller or something reeking of neo-noir.

Last week, a new and independent publisher, Dean Street Press, was kind enough to send me two e-books that fitted this niche corner perfectly, The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man's Quarry (1930) by Ianthe Jerrold, which feature an introduction by Curt Evans – who's still far ahead of me on this trail of obscurity.  

The synopsis and introduction for The Studio Crime is what grabbed my attention and immediately tossed it on the top of the pile. I did "see certain resemblances to Golden Age murder master John Dickson Carr" in the plot summery. How could I resist? 

The Studio Crime begins on "a foggy night," as a small party is gathering in the lower floor, studio apartment of Laurence Newtree, where the thick fog inspires the guests to discuss murder and the psychology of its perpetrators. One of them remarks, "it's a bad night for most things," but "a good night for crime." Someone agreed.

Gordon Frew is the upstairs neighbor of Newtree, a collector of oriental rugs and bronze statues, who expected the party to drop by later that evening, but doesn't respond to their knocking. The tightly closed front door is partially demolished to discover Frew slumped over his writing table, garbed in a dressing gown, with a brass knife-handle protruding from between his shoulder blades. There is a back window, wide open, with a drop of several feet on top of a sloping roof of an outhouse, which throws the concept of a locked room mystery out of the window. However, I'll get back to this point in a moment.

Detective-Inspector Hembrow of Scotland Yard is put on the case and finds among the party guests an old friend and ally, John Christmas, who assisted him on several previous investigations such as "the extraordinary affair known as the Museum murder" – in which a journalist was found murdered in the reading room of British Museum. The names of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are evoked more than once, but I found Christmas and Hembrow very reminiscent of the good natured, woolgathering amateur and the more fact-based, Man of the Yard from the Anthony Berkeley mold. But Christmas said it better:

"I am afraid my methods are not what Hembrow would call sound. The sound detective collects facts and deduces his theory from them. I prefer to create a theory out of the broad characteristics of the case, and then test the facts to see if they support my theory. If they don't, of course the theory falls to ground; and if no other rises from the ruins to take its place, I have to give the affair up as hopeless."

Well, there's an abundance of odd characteristics and seemingly conflicting facts to build multiple theories around, which should keep any armchair detective as occupied as Christmas. First of all, there were the peculiar encounters in the fog with a mysterious man in a fez. You have to wonder if this aspect of the plot influenced John Dickson Carr when he wrote The Arabian Nights Murder (1936) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1937). Secondly, there's a large network of hidden, cross-relationship between the victim and many of the suspects, from a ghost writer to the owners of a rundown antique shop, surrounded with a smorgasbord of 1920s tropes: wills, pieces of papers, lost handkerchief, etc.

However, Jerrold's writing and characterization lifted The Studio Crime well above the average detective yarn from that period, but I just have one problem with the solution – which has to do with the locked front door. Mild spoilers ahead!

The final twist implies the murder of Gordon Frew was an impossible crime, but it was never explained how one of the people involved was able to walk out of the studio and leave the door locked from the inside. I read the book over several days and thought I might have missed or forgotten something, went back and forth. Searched for keywords and reread some parts, but I can’t find it. The door was definitely locked from the inside and it was Christmas who opened it: "...Christmas who, with his arm through the door, turned the key in the lock with a sharp click." So how did that one person manage to leave the room and leave the key on the inside of the door in lock-position?  

I encountered a similar problem with Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929), which was well written and characterized with an intriguing problem, but the final revelation lacked an explanation for the impossible component of the plot. And they were both published in the same year! 

Well, let's end this lukewarm review here, but I'll get back Dead Man's Quarry before long and that one doesn't include an impossible crime for me to get disappointed over, if it isn't properly handled.

The Man from Taured

"Someone had only to ask them how a man might be murdered inside a locked room, or how many words could be anagrammed from PEORIA, or whatever, and they had to find out the answer. They were possessed, if you like, by demons of problem-solving. The majority could only shake their heads at the time-wasting foolishness of it all."

- John Sladek (author of Black Aura, 1974) 

There's a string of filler-posts in the archived section, The Muniment Room, collecting instances of that much-maligned plot-device, The Locked Room, invading our normal, everyday world with its insanity. I managed to churn out five parts, before running out of examples. You can read them here: I, II, III, IV and V.

Well, I recently stumbled across a gem of a story, involving an apparent traveler from a parallel universe and an impossible disappearance from a locked-and guarded hotel room, but everything seems to indicate it's just another urban legend – which was reportedly written down as an anecdote in Into Thin Air: People Who Disappear (1979) by Paul Begg. The premise was also too good to be true, because it read as a plot outline for a hitherto unknown, lost manuscript of a third Thackeray Phin novel.

The account of the incident may vary from one telling to another and the background details are vague, but here's the main gist of the story.

Somewhere in the hot, sweltering summer of 1954, a bearded businessman from Europe arrived at Haneda Airport, Tokyo, which was a common commute for the man as he spoke fluent Japanese – among other languages. There was nothing uncommon about the man, but that changed the moment custom officials took a peek at his documents. The man was from a non-existent country named Taured, situated on the border between France and Spain, but the man's passport looked legit and "normal" – as it showed visa stamps proving he had traveled to various countries across the globe. However, the company he was having a meeting with had never heard of him and neither had the hotel he had booked a room at.

Naturally, the man was convinced he was being the subject of an elaborate hoax and claimed Taured had existed for a thousand years, but our maps only showed the tiny Principality of Andorra where the man's home country was supposed to be.

The custom officials detained the man in a nearby hotel in a top floor room and stationed a pair of immigration officers in front of the door, but when they enter the room on the following morning the man has vanished – alongside his personal documents from police custody! There were only two possible exists in the room: a window with a hundred feet drop and a door that was locked from the outside and guarded.

There you have a potential premise for an impossible crime novel and I'm convinced it was started by a frequent flyer from the 1950s, who killed time on the plane by reading detective-and SF stories. However, that still doesn't give us a rational answer as to how an inter-dimensional traveler could've disappeared from a locked and guarded hotel room. So I came up with two possible solutions for you to pick from, but they have one weakness: they depend on a conspiracy with a small gang of accomplishes to pull it off, which might even be a government agency. Who knows. It was the Cold War. That would be the only explanation I could offer for the disappearance of the Taured documents from police custody.

First of all, the explanation for the country of Taured and the official-looking documents remains the same in either scenario. The preposterous story in combination with properly stamped papers from an alternative time-line was meant to throw custom officials of their routine, which prevented the man from being properly processed. Technically, the man hadn't broken any laws, because all of his travel documents seemed in order. Just not for this particular strand of reality.

Now there are two possible ways the escape from the hotel room could've worked, but they aren't exactly elegant and lean heavily on accomplishes buzzing around in-and outside of the hotel. But that's because I only have some sketchy, surface details to work with.

Scenario 1: the man was locked in a hotel room on the top floor with a hundred feet drop beneath the windowsill. There were (apparently) no balconies on that side of the hotel and bare of any narrow side-ledges. However, a platform for window cleaners can move freely, up and down, without attracting any suspicion. One or two accomplishes lower the platform to the window of the occupied room and whisk away the traveler. They take the service elevator to the garage, while the man is probably hiding inside a laundry basket or donned the window cleaners uniform with sunglasses – never to be seen or heard from again as they sped away in an unmarked van.

I don't know if the window was found latched from the inside, but a piece of strong, thin thread could do the trick. Or another (sinister) accomplish, such as one of the immigration officers, could've locked the window when he was pretending to inspect it – after discovering the hotel room empty.

Scenario 2: this scenario takes some gross liberties with the story and presumes a lot, but, again, I have very little to work with here. The first presumption is that the staff of the hotel is involved in the conspiracy to get that man out of custody. The second presumption is that there is a change of the guards halfway through the night. The third presumption is that the first two guards were tired and a little careless in handing over the guard.

Let's assume the hotel manager (imagine a Japanese version of Basil Fawlty) has been breaking his head how to get that man out of the hotel, before the proper authorities get involved, when halfway through the night a fresh pair of officers appear to relieve the first two and, before he knows it, blurs out they're guarding room E-11 – instead of E-12. The manager accompanies them to the floor, while chatting with them to keep their attention occupied, and when the elevator door opens one of the guards immediately comes towards them. It was the guard standing on the right side of the door of E-12, left side of room E-13, while the one the right side of E-12 remained in his position. The fresh guards didn't notice the original position of the guard and simply assumed stood guard on the left side of E-11. The second pair of officers was now guarding an empty hotel room.

After the change of guards, the manager immediately called room E-12 to explain the situation to the traveler and that he would come up presently with an early breakfast. The guards wouldn't be suspicious about a guest having an early breakfast and they hear the voice from E-12 speaking fluent Japanese, while they were guarding some crazy European. The breakfast is brought to the room by the manager on a covered trolley, which would serve as a temporary hiding place for the traveler – while being wheeled pass the guards next door. Guards would hear the knock of the manager being answered in Japanese and the manager humbly apologizing for the delay. While they hear this typical, mundane hotel scene, the manager serves a dirty plate and used cup of coffee as the traveler worms himself inside the trolley. So in case they checked that room, they found traces of a one-night guest who probably had an early flight.

This way the phantom guest who never checked in and the phantom guest who never checked out are actually one and the same person.

Well, that's the best I could muster. Hopefully, I have made the ghosts of John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie proud. Anyhow, I've rambled on long enough. I'll be back before long with a regular review.

P.S.: You can find many versions of this story by searching for "the man from Taured."

Gasping for Breath

"They're queer-looking things... some of 'em look like sea-monsters that haven't grown up."

 - Sgt. Heath (S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case, 1934) 

The Case of the Gold-digger's Purse (1942) is the twenty-sixth entry in Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series and the opening of the story enmeshed the cunning defense-attorney in a tangle of extortion, theft and murder – which began with a seemingly uninteresting and innocent consultation on gold fish.

Harrington Faulkner is in the real-estate business, where he amassed a king's ransom, but only cultivated a single passion to spend his dollars on: breeding gold fish.

Faulkner raised a particular strain of Veiltail Moor Telescopes, a gold fish completely cloaked in funeral black and often referred to as the "Fish of Death," but this school of rare fish are suffering from a deadly decease known as gill fever. A young, poor chemist and pet shop employee, Tom Gridley, developed a formula that cures gill fever. However, Gridley is suffering from tuberculoses and should take a break from work to recover, but he can't afford to leave his job and now his beautiful girlfriend, Sally Madison, is extorting thousands of dollars from Faulkner – in exchange for the formula.

A gold-digging extortionist and a bout of gill fever aren't the only plagues pestering the aquarist. Faulkner has had a fall-out with his business partner, Elmer Carson, who slapped a restraining order on Faulkner, which forbids him from removing the aquarium and its content from their shared office.

Mason is reluctant to get involved, but curiosity keeps getting the best of him until he and Della Street are in legitimate danger of becoming accessories after the fact in the murder of Harrington Faulkner. It begins when the office is burgled and the aquarium looted, which gives Mason an opportunity to make some astute deduction about the soup ladle, the pole it was mounted on and the size of the room. By the way, the theft was briefly teased as a locked room mystery. 

The gold fish are eventually found, alongside Faulkner's body, on the bloodstained bathroom floor of his home and Mason's typical, almost routine manipulation in murder cases has now dug him a hole for two. 

One of the most attractive aspects of the Perry Mason series, as an unabashed neo-classicist, is how densely plotted each novel is. There's barely any fat on the bone, so to speak. The multitude of cross-and hidden relationships and the motives that drives those relationships are often complex, which is exactly the case here, but there's also the physical evidence and how you can play around with that. There's a missing bullet from a previous murder attempt on Faulkner, a half dead gold fish that could indicate the time of death, fooling around with fingerprints and cheque stubs – and the titular purse stuffed with damning evidence.

Mason has to play a tight game of bluff poker and live up to his name as a courtroom magician in a preliminary hearing to prevent a murder trial for the wrong person. The courtroom chapters tended to drag on a bit, but you can't blame craftsmen, Gardner and Mason, for taking the time to work their magic.

In short: a good mystery from a solid series. Hopefully, the next review/blog-post will be substantially better written than this one.

The previous Perry Mason novels I have reviewed:

The Case of the Baited Hook  (1940)

The Case of the Empty Tin (1941)
The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942)

The Case of the Gold-digger's Purse (1942)
The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943)
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)

Fishing for Answers

"A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime."

- Mark Twain

The 51st volume of Case Closed, known to most as Detective Conan, starts off with the concluding chapter of a story that began in the previous volume, in which Conan and Harley were reminiscing over the telephone about one of their first murder cases.

Over a period of several years, two men apparently took their own lives while riding alone on a ski lift. They were shot through the head and a bag filled with snow was found next to them, which could be interpreted as a calling card of the malevolent snow spirit – whom reputedly haunts the white-topped mountain peaks of the region. I mentioned in my review of the previous volume I had a rough idea how the murderer pulled off this trick. Well, I was partially right, but nice to see how Aoyama took a different approach to create this illusion, because I was expecting something along the lines of the no-footprints trick from volume 20.

However, the amount of familiar (side) characters and detectives crawling the slopes of that resort made Aoyama's bustling, ever-expending universe look like a small world after all.

The second story can be filed away under filler material and consists of two chapters. Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore are enjoying some refreshments at Café Poirot when they are launched into a search operation for a missing child. The only clues they have to go one are a some cryptic text messages of which this was the last one, "I'm scared of dying like a fish in a net." It's short. It's simple. It's filler. But passable filler.

In the third story, Doc Agasa takes Conan and the Junior Detective League along to the beach to dig around for clams. At the beach, they meet a group of college students and lovers of delicious shellfish, but they become very gloomy when a recent hit-and-run accident is mentioned. The one who appeared to have been constantly depressed is found not long after in what looks like a suicide, but Conan figures there's more to it than that and figures out how someone managed to poison a bottle of green tea without being observed – which makes this an impossible crime story and a pretty clever one at that.

However, the best poisoning story (IMHO) from this series still comes from the 15th volume, in which a moneylender is administrated cyanide in his locked office building. The explanation is given in a chapter aptly titled, "The Devil's Summons." 

The next story is another short one, spanning only two chapters, which spoofs "Tortoiseshell Holmes," a cat-detective created by Jiro Akagawa, but being aware of the cozy cat detectives would be enough for us (Western readers) to appreciate this story. Moore has to baby-sit his wife's new kitten, Ricky, who's giving subtle hints that are helping him deciphering a coded text message for a client. These code-cracking stories are next to impossible to solve, but I managed to solve this one instinctively. Or, as I like to call it, "educated guesswork."

Finally, the last three chapters form the last story of this volume and returns to one of the locations from volume 5, but the story turned out to be a bit of a disappointment – in spite of two different locked room mysteries. The first one concerns a window that was nailed shut from the inside, but can still be opened by a demon to peek out and this has been witnessed. This is followed by a hanging in a room of which the doors and windows were locked from the inside, but the tricks were as old as the house they were staged and there was a simple, elegant explanation for the second impossible situation.

The hanging victim had a special key chain on her belt that attached the keys to a tape measure that stretches for three feet and springs back when you let go of it. It was suggested that the murderer pulled the key under the crack of the door, locked it, and let go of it – so it would spring back to her waist. However, the key wasn't found on the chain, but inside the room on top of a keyboard. It couldn't have been tossed under the crack of the door into the room. So how should it have been done? The key should've been replaced with a duplicate on the chain that looked different from the original key of the door. Maybe with a plastic cover over its head. Or a label reading, "office," or something. The original key was right there in the room, which would make it unnecessary to try if any of the other keys fitted the lock in the door. Especially if they appear to be for locks outside of the house. I know it sounds disappointingly simple, but not as disappointingly simple as the actual solution.

Anyhow, this was a decent collection of stories with a dud at the end, but these collections are always fun to read and good stories to pick up your reading pace again after a short break. Yes, I'm still steady on schedule with being behind on all my reading.

Uncage the Black Lizard, Part VII: Closing the Book

"If you drink much from a bottle marked poison it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."

- Alice (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

A few days later than anticipated, but finally was able to turn over the final page of Otto Penzler's mammoth-like anthology, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), which packs nearly a thousand pages worth of impossible crime fiction in one book – from Edgar Allan Poe and John Dickson Carr to Edward D. Hoch and Bill Pronzini. 

But, first of all, the reviews up till now of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries:

- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part I.
- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part 2: A Foot in the Door.  
- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part 3: In a Puff of Smoke.
- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part 4: How Keen of You.
- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part 5: Chambers and Cartridges.

- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part 6: Breaking and Entering.

- Uncage the Black Lizard, Part 7: Closing the Book.

The final four stories that round out this collection are, thinly, spread over the remaining two categories, One Man's Poison, Signor, is Another's Meat and Our Final Hope is Flat Despair, which borrowed from another locked room anthology to fill them. That I found to be slightly disappointing. 

"The Poisoned Dow '08" by Dorothy L. Sayers was originally published in the February 25, 1933, issue of The Passing Show and first collected in Hangman's Holiday (1933). Sayers is primarily known today for her creation of a well-bred, aristocratic amateur sleuth, named Lord Peter Wimsey, but not as well known is her creation of Montague Egg – a traveling salesman who lives by rules and wisdoms contained within the Salesman's Handbook. There are eleven stories featuring Montague Egg, which were collected in Hangman's Holiday and In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939), and the opening of this story is (as far as I remember) fairly standard for the series: Egg arrives at the home of a customer, Lord Borrodale, only to be greeted by a uniformed policeman. Lord Borrodale was discovered in his study, door locked from the inside and windows protected with burglarproof locks, succumbed to nicotine poisoning from a doctored bottle of wine. However, the sealed bottle was opened in front of Borrodale and, except for the victim, nobody seems to have had the opportunity to administrate the poison. Egg finds an explanation that would've received the nodding approval of John Rhode, but the clues left for the reader to reconstruct a complete picture were rather sparse. It's a pity Egg and Wimsey never collaborated together on a case.

"A Traveller's Tale" by Margaret Frazer originally appeared in The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000), edited by Mike Ashley, which places an impossible situation in medieval England. A wine merchant, William Shellaston, his wife and young son are found dead inside a carriage, but none of their servants heard any outcry nor saw someone approaching the wagon – so how could someone have administrated poison to them? I think the situation in combination with its solution makes it closer related to an "How-Dun-It," such as Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927), but close enough to qualify as a locked room mystery. Fairly good, but not very memorable. I didn't remember anything from this story from my first reading, years ago.

"Death at the Excelsior" by P.G. Wodehouse, of Wooster and Jeeves fame, was first published in the December 1914 issue of Pearson's Magazine, which I reviewed early last year – alongside some other uncollected short stories. You can read the review here.

The final story is collected under Our Final Hope is Flat Despair and is accompanied by the following description, "some stories simply can't be categorized," which in this case isn't entirely true. I would file this story away under a good example of a Hoist On Their Own Petard and it came from the pen of a fellow mystery blogger, Connoisseur in Murder and successful crime novelist.

"Waiting for Godstow" by Martin Edwards was first published in The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, which gives the reader a front-row seat to the unraveling of a common, garden-variety murder case from a local news item. Claire Doherty has convinced her hunky toy boy to bump off her cheating husband, Karl, in a hit-and-run "accident," but Karl turns up alive after the job was supposed to be done. What's more: Karl accidentally killed his old mistress! So how could her husband murder someone at one end of town when there were people who swore he was somewhere else, while yet another person is convinced he just ran him over with a stolen car. The only thing Claire can eventually do is waiting for Sgt. Godstow, who's never even aware that's handling an impossible crime. I think this story would've made a great template for an episode of Columbo or Monk.

This was a good, solid round of stories to end a good, if uneven, collection of locked room mysteries, impossible crimes and miraculous thefts on.

So in summation:

The pros of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries:

- The most frequently, over anthologized-and collected stories (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") are, by and large, contained to the opening column of stories.

- The inclusion of some truly obscure, rarely reprinted stories that are hard to find (e.g. James Yaffe's "The Department of Impossible Crimes," J.E. Gurdon's "The Monkey Trick" and Nicholas Olde's "The Invisible Weapon.")

- The anthology patched-up some obvious gaps in my reading (e.g. Lord Dunsany's "The Two Bottles of Relish" and Jepson & Eustace's "The Tea Leaf.")

- The anthology contained a few great new discoveries (e.g. Manly Wade Wellman's "A Knife Between Brothers," Fredric Brown's "The Laughing Butcher," Stephan Barr's "The Locked Room to End Locked Rooms," Meade & Eustace's "The Mystery of the Strong Room" and Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Bird in the Hand.")

- Good introductions by the editor, Otto Penzler.

The cons of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries:

- There were too many stories that repeated the same kind of tricks (e.g. icicle weapons, suicides disguised as murders and the same variations with time-and space manipulation), which can give new readers the impression the locked room is a one-trick pony.

- Reprinted a number of stories originally written for The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, which is an anthology fans more than likely have already read.

- There were, altogether, too many stories I had already read in this anthology.

- Allowing John Sladek's "By An Unknown Hand," at the moment only available in Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2003), to escape, to be anthologized, yet again. I know there are a lot of mystery fans who'd love to read it, but don't want to buy a SF-collection for one detective story.

 

Results may vary from reader-to-reader. I'll be back soon with a regular review.