A Decagonal Shaped Puzzle

"These writers (with others like them) are the aristocrats of the game, the old serpents, the gambit-devisers and trap-baiters whose strokes of ingenuity make the game worth playing at all."

- John Dickson Carr ("The Grandest Game in the World," from The Door to Doom and Other Detections, 1980)

In late June of this year, John Pugmire's Locked Room International published a translation of a landmark mystery novel from the land of the rising sun, Yukito Ayatsuji's, Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), which is credited with launching the neo-orthodox (shinhonkaku) movement – and putting an end to the dominance of the socially conscious crime novel. If only that would happen over here in the West.

The Decagon House Murders was translated by our very own tour guide through the largely uncharted territory of the Japanese mystery novel, Ho-Ling Wong, who also wrote a postscript on the Kyoto University Mystery Club. They stood at the cradle of this movement and a thinly disguised version of the club (and its members) figure prominently in the book.

A short introduction on the neo-orthodox movement was penned by Soji Shimada, author of that bloody tour-de-force known as Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981), and sandwiched between the introduction and after word is the answer to an all-important, but rarely posed, question: what do you get when you populate Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) with the type of characters from Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996)?

Tsunojima is a small, deserted island off the coast of Japan and would've simply been one of the many, undistinguished rocks in the island nation if it weren't for the burned down ruins of a mansion and decagon-shaped house – which where the scene of a gruesome, quadruple murder case less than a year before the opening of the story.

So it goes without saying that the island is the perfect location for an excursion for the members of a certain university mystery club.

The club-members are known throughout a majority of the story by their adopted nicknames: "Agatha," "Carr," "Van Dine," "Ellery," "Leroux," "Orczy" and "Poe," which are, of course, names of famous mystery writers from the past – primarily from our Golden Age. One of them was exposed in the prologue to harbor plans to commit a small-scale massacre on the island, but the letter promising five victims, a detective and a killer at the end of their stay is taken as a joke or attempt at setting up a murder game.

There are also letters circulated to club members on the mainland, which pertain to tragedy that took place on the island several month ago and a death related to the mystery club itself. 

From this point on, the narrative alternates between the mainland investigation into the past murders and the rising body count on the island in the present. The former poses some interesting questions: why did the murder take several days to murder three or four people? Why was the hand of one of the victims severed? Where's the gardener who disappeared after the murders? Why do the current series of murders on the island tend to mimic the ones from the past?

My exposure to Japanese mysteries have mainly come from comics (manga) and some cartoons (anime), such as Case Closed and The Kindaichi Case Files, but you can easily see how the neo-orthodox movement influenced even that specific branch of mystery fiction. There's the cast of high-school or university students in a remote, isolated location with a dark crime in the past and a murderous avenger in the present, which is also pretty much a basic plot synopsis of every Kindaichi story. Perhaps the best example comes from an animated series, Detective Academy Q, which has several episodes forming The Kamikakushi Murder Case and has arguably the best use of bizarre architecture – alongside several seemingly impossible disappearances. I should re-watch those episodes one of these days and review them here. They were really clever.

However, as interesting and gratifying as the unapologetic attitude as an anti-modern crime novel might be, The Decagon House Murders has one or two flaws that you might expect from a debut novel – even from a (re)debut of an entire genre.

The plot is furnished with all the classic trappings of a Golden Age mystery, but the clueing is sparse and you need experience, combined with some intuition, to make a stab in the right direction. You can't really play the clever and smug armchair detective, as the story begins to unravel, but the only real drawback for me was that the story lacked an impossible crime! There were none! Absolutely zero! And this book was published by Locked Room International! Shocking, Watson! Shocking!

Anyhow... considering what The Decagon House Murders has done for my beloved, classically-styled detective stories in the East, as well as being an incredibly fun book to read, I was more than willing to look pass these minor flaws. And I'm very grateful to both Ho-Ling and Pugmire for tossing this one over the language barrier. May it be the first in a long row!

Finally, the legacy of The Decagon House Murders gives me an opportunity to say to (the memory of) Julian Symons what should've been said a long, long time ago: in your face, you dry-mouthed fairy!

The Artistic Touch

"Arsène Lupin is a delicate, squeamish burglar. He loathes bloodshed, he has never committed a more serious crime than that of annexing other people's property... And what you're saying to yourself is that he is not going to burden himself with a useless murder. Quite so."

- Maurice Leblanc (Arsène Lupin in "813," 1910)

The 53rd volume of Case Closed, known better in some parts of the world as Detective Conan, opens with the longest story in this installment and concerns Kaito KID's latest caper – or so it appears.

Takeyori Oikawa is a renowned artist responsible for a series of paintings depicting the "beauties of nature," which is one canvas removed from being a complete set. The fourth and final picture in the series is about to be unveiled, but in a note the infamous, white-clad thief promises to swoop down from the moonlit sky and scoop up the freshly painted masterpiece.

As a precaution, Oikawa takes the only security measure that helped in the past against the sticky-fingered magician: the presence of a certain detective, named Richard Moore, and the little brat who's always tagging along. However, the great "Sleeping Moore" and Conan are unable to prevent the painting from disappearing from a semi-locked and guarded room, but there's a bigger problem – KID may've broken his own code and taken a life during the heist.

Of course, this isn't strictly speaking a Kaito KID caper, but a Columbo-esque inverted story that's well motivated and clued. A locked room-style trick is used to create an alibi and to round out a solid plot, which makes this my favorite story from this bundle. The actual presence of KID in the background is merely an added bonus.

The next story covers only two chapters and is what Bill Pronzini would've called a "humanist crime story," even though there is no (real) crime in the story. What makes it a humanist story is the motivation behind a game of code cracking that Ms. Koboyashi created for her students in Class B-1 and that's all I can really say about this revoltingly adorable story.

A note for the curious: there's a note in the story signed with "The Fiend with 200 Faces," which is a reference to Edogawa Rampo's Kaijin nijuu mensou (The Fiend with Twenty Faces, 1936). The book was published in English in 2012 and has an introduction written by our fellow Connoisseur in Crime, Ho-Ling.

In the third story from this volume, a young boy comes to the office of Richard Moore with a peculiar and cryptic story of having witnessed a crime around New Year. The kid saw a man throw a body from a bridge in the river and the identity of the victim may be that of a missing rock star, but the account of the boy is reads like cipher – which includes allusions to "a scary picture of a nail" and "a big shining hammer."

The objective of this story is not so much the who-and whydunit angle, but retracing the steps of the child and making sense of his cryptic remarks, while the shadow of the Black Organization hovers in the background. And the possible connection between the B.O. and the apparently clumsy Eisuke Hondo, who keeps hanging around Conan and Moore.

The final chapter of this volume is a set up of a story that'll be concluded in the next volume and begins when Eisuke brings a case to Moore's office that bears a striking resemblance to "The Red-Headed League" from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891). This quickly leads them to the scene of a murder and Conan again feels the presence of the Black Organization, but that's a story for the next volume.

So, all in all, a fine collection with a solid opening story and some interesting side-developments concerning the main storyline and recurring characters.

I'll be back ASAP with a regular review. Probably a locked room mystery from Japan. Who knows!

Just Like in the Movies

"So our final toast is inevitable."

- Gervase Fen (Edmund Crispin's Frequent Hearses, 1950)

My undying love for John Dickson Carr's detective fiction is well documented on this blog and grab every opportunity to reference his stories in otherwise unrelated posts, but the backlog of his unread work has rapidly diminished over the years – leaving only a handful of standalones, historical novels and short stories.

Well, there was one novel in the Sir Henry Merrivale series, And So to Murder (1940), which lingered on the pile for years, but decided it was time to finally wrap up that series. So here we go.

The setting of the story is Pineham Studios during middle-and late August, "before there had come any glimmer of events that were to shatter Europe by the end of the month," where several movies are being shot. One of the productions is based on a best-selling, but scandalous, novel, entitled Desire, which was written by a canon's daughter from a small village.

Monica Stanton is elated to have gained a position at the film studio as a scriptwriter, but those feeling quickly subside when Monica learns she isn't going to work on the adaptation of her own novel. A producer by the name of Tom Hackett assigned her to work on a script based on William Cartwright's latest detective novel, while Cartwright is adapting her novel for the big screen – which brings back memories of Monica's annoying aunt grieving over the fact she didn't write a nice detective story like Cartwright.

Of course, Monica and Cartwright are simply ignoring their true feelings for each other, but, luckily for them, an aspiring murderer is driving them closer together by targeting Monica.

A spate of incidents occur over several weeks, which include water in an innocent looking bottle being replaced with sulfuric acid and the same corrosive liquid is pored down a speaking tube – nearly disfiguring Monica. There are anonymous letters being passed around and a poisoned cigarette almost took the life of one of the actresses, but the problem is that these incidents are merely (detective) interruption in a character-driven, comedy of manners-style novel. And that makes it very difficult to review this book.

There are several titles from the Merrivale-series, written under the name of "Carter Dickson," in which Carr attempted to take a different approach to the detective novel, such as A Graveyard to Let (1949) and The Cavalier's Cup (1953), but they were still detective stories. Surprisingly, for Carr, And So the Murder merely masquerades as one and the mystery elements that are present are poorly handled.

A portion of the information pertaining to the plot was withheld from the reader and that's detrimental to any impact the solution might have had, which had some points of interest. But were ultimately lost in the mess. A lot of the trouble could've been prevented if they simple had decided to lock a few doors or hire security guards. You have to wonder why H.M. even bothered with this case at all.

And So to Murder has some points of interest: the depiction of the film studio and what goes on there were interesting, as were the characters buzzing around the sets and the flashes of humor, but as a detective story it was as unsatisfying as Seeing is Believing (1941) and Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956). I can only really recommend this one to completists.

So, there you have it, after several years I finally wrote and posted as less than enthusiastic review about a John Dickson Carr novel, which I hope will be as rare an occurance as a snow-covered Sphinx.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

John Dickson Carr:

The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942)
The Bride of Newgate (1950)
The Third Bullet and Other Stories of Detection (1954)
Fire, Burn! (1957)

The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983) 

Carter Dickson:

The Judas Window (1938)

And So to Murder (1940)

The Department of Queer Complaints (1940)
She Died a Lady (1943)
The Cavalier's Cup (1953)

Bone Dry

"If we're going to get to Mars, we're going to have to clear the maps. The dragons, Cyclops, and other monsters of the mind must be killed, and the siren exposed for the fraud she is."

- Robert Zubrin (The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, 1996)

Manly Wade Wellman was, what you would call, a "fictioneer" and his bibliography covers a multitude of genres, which range from fantasy and horror to science-fiction and detective stories – raking in several awards along the way, e.g. World Fantasy Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award.

I previously reviewed two stories from Wellman's body of work: an impossible crime novel with a hardboiled edge, entitled Find My Killer (1947), and a short story, "A Knife Between Brothers," collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014).

It's purely coincidental that both tales are listed in Locked Room Murders (1991), but the subject of this review, Devil's Planet (1942), apparently escaped Robert Adey's attentive eye. That's a shame, because it's an efficacious example of the science-fiction/mystery hybrid and predates Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) by more than a decade – which is considered to be the prototype for these type of genre-benders.

Devil's Planet was originally published as a book-length novel in Startling Stories and takes place on the dry, parched surface of a dusty, drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century. And that's more than 900 years in our future!

The protagonist of the story is Dillon Stover, who grew up on the laboratory farm of his late grandfather in the Missouri Ozarks, but has recently inherited both a small fortune and a mission from the old man: perfecting the condenser-ray to make rain possible again on the thirst-choked planet. But, before he can get to work, Stover visits Pulambar, "the Martian Pleasure City," which is the last place on Mars with lakes, canals and a well of trouble!

Mace Malbrook is one of the (main) oligarchs presiding over Mars and the foundation of their rule is a tight grip on the water monopoly, but the first encounter between Strover and Malbrook ends with the former clipping the jaw of the latter – giving Malbrook an opportune excuse to get rid of Strover through a crooked duel.

News of the altercation and possible duel between the two spreads, which makes Strover the prime-suspect when Malbrook dies in a mysterious explosion behind the locked door of his private and fortified room. A dying Martian, Prrala, was with Malbrook when the explosion occurred and claims Strover appeared in the room, while he was actually on the outside of the room.

However, Prrala's final words are enough for Chief Agent Congreve of the Martio-Terrestrial League Service to place Strover under arrest, but that’s when the story really begins to move. Strover manages to escape from both the prison and the city. Nearly dies in one of the sun drenched deserts of Mars. Returns to the city and dons an ancient disguise to examine the scene of the crime, while dodging an eager murderer with an expending body count.

Wellman adroitly blended fast-paced story telling with a well thought out plot and encapsulated all of these different elements in a new and fascinating world, which only seems to have one drawback: this universe appears to have stagnated, culturally and technologically, after the 20th-and 21st century, because there are references to "an ancient but most readable work," known as Alice in Wonderland, and the New York theatrical world of the twentieth century, but nothing more recent than that. The technology is unimpressive for a story that's set a millennium from now on a nearby planet, which is exemplified in the clunky, simplistic robot servitors trudging around the story.

Plot-wise, a seasoned mystery reader should be able to piece together the identity of murderer and motive together, but the method for the locked room explosion deserves a nod of acknowledgment, because it's clever and reasonably well clued. I wonder if the idea for this trick and futuristic locked room scenario came to Wellman after reading [SPOILER: Nine Times Nine (1940) by Anthony Boucher].

Anyhow... if this poorly written review has made you curious about this exemplary specimen of a hybrid mystery, you can pick up a copy of Devil's Planet from both Adventure House and Ramble House.

A Room That Kills

"Something happens in this house, and no living soul knows what it is, for they who have seen it have never yet survived to tell the tale. It's not more than a week back that a young gentleman came here. He was like you, bold as brass, and he too wanted a bed, and would take no denial. I told him plain, and so did my man, that the place was haunted. He didn't mind no more than you mind. Well, he slept in the only room we have got for guests, and he—he died there."

- Liz (L.T. Meade & Robert Eustace's "The Mystery of the Circular Chamber," from A Master of Mysteries, 1898) 

Secret of the Blue Room is a black and white movie thriller/detective from 1933 and was based on a German movie from the previous year, Geheimnis des Blauen Zimmers, which received two additional remakes by Universal – one as The Missing Guest in 1938 and the other as Murder in the Blue Room in 1944.

The original remake of the German movie was considered to be a lost movie, before it apparently resurfaced some years ago and now you can even watch it on YouTube.

Secret of the Blue Room attracted my attention when reading a glowing review describing the movie as "a gem of a locked-room mystery" with a "tight-as-a-drum plot" that "doesn't have an ounce of fat to it and moves quickly." Well, that was all the encouragement needed to make this movie a priority and the first half was like seeing Carter Dickson's The Red Widow Murders (1935) or Helen McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968) spring to life!

The location of the movie is an old, medieval castle in the possession of Robert von Helldorf (Lionel Atwill), Lord of the Manor, who's hosting a birthday party for his daughter, Irene (Gloria Stuart), and invited three of her friends and potential suitors – Captain Walter Brinks (Paul Lukas), reporter Frank Faber (Onslow Stevens) and a young cub named Thomas Brandt (William Janney).

They have a gay old time, playing the piano and singing songs, but when they sit down for drinks and cigarettes the conversation turns to the subject of ghosts. Lord von Helldorf is pressed by the party to tell the story of the Blue Room, which harbors a tragic and bloody history. Von Helldorf's sister and best friend died under peculiar circumstances in the Blue Room and suicide appeared as unfeasible as murder, because motives and means were lacking.

A third tragedy happened when "a detective made up his mind to spend a night in the blue room," but in the morning they found him on the floor "with his face frozen in a look of agonizing horror." He had died of fright! The room was locked and remained unopened for twenty years.

The three suitors want to prove their courage to Irene and decide to each spend a night alone in the murderous room, but the place lives up to its reputation and Brandt is the first to go. There was only key to the room and it was stuck in the lock from the inside. The open window had a drop of several feet and landed in a moat, but the body is not found and suicide is as unlikely as murder – just like twenty years ago!  

Note for the curious here: Secret of the Blue Room is a low-budget movie and this was apparent when they forced the door by ever so gingerly nudging it, because I suspect everything around them might have come crashing down had they applied any real force to the set piece. A door that can be forced that easily can be opened and closed with a large paperclip. Anyhow...

After having absorbed its first victim in two decades, the room truly awakens from dormancy and Faber is shot there while playing on the piano. A gun vanishes from the room after it was locked and Irene is attacked by a mysterious man, which is the point where they decide to call in the police – arriving in the form of Commissioner Forster (Edward Arnold).

The questioning of the occupants and servants of the castle by Commissioner Forster is interspersed with vignettes from the servant quarters, populated by some enjoyable characters, before the room is being investigated and several traps are sprung – ending with a gunfight between the murderer and last remaining suitor inside the castle.

Secret of the Blue Room is an unpretentious, well-paced compound of the thriller and mystery genre with elements of the classic horror story with its dark, wind battered castle, but robbed itself of a classic status by plundering the moth-eaten bag of tricks from the late 1800s for the explanation. A seasoned mystery addict will recognize the bits and pieces borrowed from Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and "The Empty House," from The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903), but the overall movie was too charming and fun to care about the punctuation marks that ended it. The plot may've been littered with old tropes, but the movie used them very well.

So if you ever wondered how stories in the spirit of Wadsworth Camp's The Abandoned Room (1917) and John Dickson Carr's "The Devil's Saint," collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983), translates to the screen... well... you'll be able to waste a fun little hour on this movie.

Somewhere in Time

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of dawn."

- H.G. Wells (The Discovery of the Future, 1901)

L'image trouble (The Picture from the Past, 1995) is the ninth Paul Halter novel published in English by John Pugmire's Locked Room International, which has become of inestimable value to incorrigible addicts of impossible crime stories – such as yours truly.

The Picture from the Past is partially set in the last year of the 1950s and finds Chief Inspector Archibald Hurst of Scotland Yard, accompanied by Dr. Alan Twist, in pursuit of the notorious Acid Bath Murderer, before they recede into the background of the story.  

The lion's share of the book consists of a narrative divided between the past and present, which describe apparently unrelated events, half a century apart, but they begin to intertwine and betray some astonishing parallels as the story progresses.

On the 1959 end of the story, there's John Braid and his newlywed wife, Andrea, who recently moved into their new home in the quiet village of Shapwick. John was able to afford to cough up the money their new home, but is as furtive about his job in the city as the respectable Mr. Neville St. Clair from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), which is something that's eating away at Andrea.

However, John has something else gnawing at his mind: an old photograph of a street in London from around the turn of the century. It evokes strong, unexplainable emotions. John even allows himself to be hypnotized by the shady owner of the local bric-a-brac shop to penetrate the mist enshrouded parts of memory lane, but they only manage to retrieve a few references to notes of music – and murder!

The story-line that's set in the past is written in italic and focuses on the Jacobs family, which is torn apart when three men clad in black murder Mrs. Jacobs in the streets without an apparent reason. A senseless death that was prophesized by a local soothsayer and it wouldn't be the last death he foretold.

As you might remember from past ramblings or my old review of the Jonathan Creek episode Time Waits for Norman (1998), I have a special interest in (impossible crime) stories that play around with the notion of space-and time – which Halter pulled off amazingly well for someone who's main flaw is often failing to create a sense of time and place for his (historical) settings. I loved how the echoes from the past began to manifest in the present story line, while the characters from the present discussed time travel, reincarnation, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) and newspaper reports of the elusive Acid Bath Murderer. I'd like to brag that I quickly caught on how the past storyline related to the present one, which was very Carrian in nature and much appreciated.  

As to be expected from its author and niche-publisher, The Picture from the Past contains not one, but two, locked room mysteries.

In the storyline from the past, the fortuneteller, Jack Atmore, is found murdered behind the locked door and tightly shut window of his own home, but even more peculiar is the ominous letter he send himself – warning himself of his imminent death. The second impossibility is the baffling disappearance of John Braid from a partially locked-and watched set of rooms, but the solutions aren't breaking any new ground. It's even admitted in the explanation of the disappearance that's on old trick and the solution for the locked room murder was a trek across well-trodden ground. 

However, the locked room mysteries were only small side issues in a larger, over-arching plot that playfully combined two different narratives and toyed around with overlapping, parallel time-lines that managed to work in a serial killer plot in the background. Not everything is always perfectly executed or convincingly explained by Halter, but his imagination is something I have grown to admire.

The characterization seemed sharper than usual in some characters, but that appeared to depend on their importance and prominence in the story. I have said it before, but I believe Halter severely handicapped himself by setting his stories in England.

If I remember correctly, Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) is the only Halter novel I have read to date that convincingly pulled off the English setting, but that was because he visited the location before writing the book. I think problems usually bugging his work, such as an unconvincing depictions of the historical settings and English characters with a Gallic flavor, would've vanished like a magician's assistant had they been set in France – something along the lines of a Henri Bencolin-style series reminiscent of early Carr. It would've gelled better with Halter's love for the grotesque.

So, all in all, The Picture of the Past was an interesting treatment of a theme that even today remains largely unexplored and while the plot isn't picture-perfect (pun!), I can't help but admire the effort at creating a complex, time-shattering mystery.

I guess Dr. Twist summed up why I liked this story more than I should have: "you're also... attracted to the past, which fills you with nostalgia. In particular, you love the last century."

Finally, I have to thank John Pugmire for his tireless work in getting these books translated and published... only to have sit there and hear us moan about some imperfections in the plot. Forgive us, John! And know that we're aware that you're spoiling us.  

Tailing the Devil

"If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it."

- Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Purple Wig," from The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914) 

The late Edward D. Hoch was a giant during his lifetime as one of the most prolific mystery writers of short stories, which are the bedrock of the genre, and Hoch put nearly a thousand of them to his name – published in such magazines as Famous Detective Stories and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

A number of popular series characters emerged form these stories, but, arguably, the most memorable and timeless figure from Hoch's cast of detectives is Simon Ark.

Simon Ark appeared in Hoch's first short story, "Village of the Dead," in 1955 and was characterized over the years as a wandering soul, "searching the world for a long time, perhaps for centuries, in hopes of meeting the devil in combat," who may've been a Coptic priest in the early centuries of Christ – roughly 2000 years ago!

City of Brass and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971) collects one novelette and two short stories, in which Ark detects and vanquishes a variety of evils.

The first story in the collection is the titular novelette, "City of Brass," which originally appeared in the 1959 September issue of The Saint Mystery Library and it reminded me of the Wrightsville stories from the Ellery Queen series.

The place where this short novel takes place, Baine City, is larger and denser populated than Wrightsville, but the flavor was similar due to the plotting being toned down in favor of the (religious) themes with a dash of characterization.

Baine City is an upstate New York town dominated and depended on a single industry: Baine Brass. However, it has made the city a prosperous and peaceful slice of America, which slowly comes to an end when rumors begin to circulate about sinister and unethical experiments at Baine University – carried out by Professor Wilber.

The murder of a graduate student, Cathy Clark, seems to be connected to Wilber's experiments and possible motives and suspects are entwined in all of the social layers of the town. Ark investigates the murder alongside his nameless narrator over a Fourth of July weekend, which comes to a dramatic close at the funeral of the victim.

I don't think the explanation will manage to surprise anyone who's consumed even half the amount of detective fiction that Hoch produced during his lifetime, but the fairness in clueing was appreciated and it was a nice, charming story to read. Once again, I recommend this novelette to fans of the Wrightsville novels by Ellery Queen (e.g. Calamity Town, 1942).

"The Vicar of Hell" is the second story in the collection and was first published in Famous Detective Stories in August of 1956. 

The tale is set in London and concerns a lost tome, The Worship of Satan, published in the 17th century, but copies were confiscated and destroyed by the government. The volume discussed two suspicious deaths from 400 years ago, which are the poisoning of James Butler in 1548 and the sudden passing of Sir Francis Bryan – whom Oliver Cromwell once revered to in a letter as the Vicar of Hell.

Three centuries has passed and a copy has resurfaced! However, the person wanting to sell the book was found murdered under circumstances that would draw the envy of the writers of Midsomer Murders: pinned against the wall like a cross with three arrows and pentagram scrawled in blood on the floor.

Simon Ark and the nameless narrator are primarily occupied with tracking down a band of roving Satanists, which gives the story a trashy and pulpy flavor, but the hiding place for the book was genuinely clever and sidestepped the pitfall that usually befalls detective stories involving lost manuscripts – e.g. Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding (1948) and John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933). I suspect this bit of the story was refurbished as a Nick Velvet story, because it's too perfect not to have used it for one of his thefts.

The final story, "The Hoofs of Satan," was first published in Famous Detective Story in February 1956 and listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but it's not an impossible crime story.

Obviously, the inspiration for this story came from an incident from 1855 in East and South Devon, England. A trail of hoof-like marks appeared after a snowfall and ran for miles, which even appeared in normally inaccessible places for none-winged creatures – such as on top of houses, narrow walls and enclosed courtyards and gardens. The hoof-marks in this story never perform any of those incredible feats, but form two lines coming and returning to the nearby woods. There presence is merely strange, but not impossible.

The explanation is well clued and motivated, but hardly original and Hoch lessened some of the effect of revelation by revealing in the opening there would be a murder. That should've been part of the revelation and something the reader could have anticipated based on the hints.

The 1855 incident was discussed in depth in Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (1929) by Rupert T. Gould, which I reviewed here.

So, all in all, a short and decent collection of short stories, but not the best example of Hoch's talent as a mystery writing machine.

On a final note, the next couple of reviews will also be of recent releases and include such writers as Yukito Ayatsuji, Paul Halter and Case Closed.