Riddle Me This

"My reputation as a meddler had preceded me..."

- Hildegarde Withers (Stuart Palmer's Miss Withers Regrets, 1947)

Stuart Palmer's The Cases of Hildegarde Withers (2012) is an abridged edition of an early compendium of short stories, collecting only five of the eight original stories from The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), which is the sole drawback of this collection. On the upside, the book still consists of a handful of Palmer's lesser-known, but quality, detective stories about his popular and incomparable series-sleuth, Miss Hildegarde Withers.

Miss Withers is an angular, prim-looking schoolteacher at Manhattan's Jefferson School, where she presides over a third-grade class of hooligans, but she also has an uncanny knack to always be around when a body turns up – earning herself a reputation with the NYPD as a "meddlesome old battleaxe." Fortunately, she also happens to be one "the smartest sleuth" in or "out of uniform."

On the surface, it seems like your standard detective series with an inquisitive, nosy spinster as the protagonist, such as Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Maud Silver, but (IMHO) Palmer and Miss Withers are leagues ahead of their competition. Even John Russell Fearn's wonderful Miss Maria Black is only a distant second in my book.

One of the reasons is the figure of Miss Withers, who's far more convincing character than many of her counterparts, but even more important is that Palmer possessed both a brain and imagination, which he used to construct some clever and imaginative (puzzle) plots – e.g. The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933), The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937) and Nipped in the Bud (1951). But he was equally adept at writing short detective stories (e.g. Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, 2002).

So you can read the content of The Cases of Hildegarde Withers as specimens of Palmer's versatile talent as a mystery writer, because the short stories within this collection range from whodunits, alibi-tricks, a smash-and-grabber and a locked room story of the inverted variety! Let's take a crack at them.

The first story, "The Puzzle of the Scorned Woman" (a.k.a. "The Riddle of the Lady from Dubuque"), was originally published in a December, 1947 publication of New York Sunday News, which cast Miss Withers in the role of "a precautionary measure." Elsie Pender has trouble accepting that the man she loves, Paul Severance, is going to marry another woman and she wants Hermione Lapham to pursued her daughter to blow of her marriage to the plastic surgeon, which is, naturally, out of the question.

However, Pender appears to have gotten her hands on a .38 automatic and Mrs. Lapham is afraid the girl might do something irreversibly stupid. So the head of the Homicide Division, Oscar Piper, turns to the department's gadfly, Miss Withers, because it's difficult for them to act when nothing concrete has happened. But there's not much she can do: Pender is found in Severance's private office with two bullet-holes in the chest and an obviously forced suicide note besides her. Miss Withers solves the case by making an astute observation about her clothes and gloves, which tested negative when they were subjected to a nitrate test. A good, short and simple story with a nifty little twist in the tail.

The next story, "The Riddle of the Yellow Canary," first appeared in a 1934 issue of Mystery and is my personal favorite from this collection!

A music publisher from Tin Pan Alley, Arthur "Art" Reese, has a pesky problem on his hands, named Margie Thorens, who has made it "necessary that she be quietly removed" and has working on a scheme for months – which is put into action with near perfection. Reese slips Margie a poisoned capsule and dictates song lyrics to her while he watches her die, but the clever part is that the song text can be construed as a lyrical suicide note. And as a finishing touch, Reese's leaves her body behind in a room with "a door locked on the inside." The locked room trick is a very simple one, but you rarely get an impossible angle in an inverted mystery. So that was a nice feature.

Inspector Oscar Piper invites Miss Withers to accompany him to the scene, because she always wanted to know how "the police can spot a suicide from a murder," but the bugbear of the police department becomes convinced this suicide is a well-disguised murder. She got a substitute teacher to take over her class and devoted her time to study locks and poisons, but the tale-tell clue came when she discovered the victim had a pet canary. A chirping little creature who proved to be the not so silent witness that strapped Reese to the electric chair. It's an absolute ace of a short story.

The third story of the lot, "A Fingerprint in Cobalt" (a.k.a. "The Riddle of the Blue Fingerprint"), was first published in 1938 in New York Sunday News.

The story opens, uneventfully, at an auction of antiques and the audience show a complete disinterest in a mahogany wardrobe. A heavy beast of burden that took three men to lift onto the platform, but auctioneer is not easily deterred and orders one of his helpers to open to wardrobe to show everyone how much storage space they could own. Someone else had noticed that convenience as well. When the wardrobe is opened, the body of a man comes tumbling out.

Dr. Carl Brotherly was a collector of "Oriental statuettes" and tucked inside his shirt was a postcard-sized photograph of a fingerprint, but why was it found on the body of a murdered collector? Luckily, Miss Withers had a very good reason to be in attendance at the auction and discovers why the police were unable to identity the fingerprints, which points straight to the motive for the murder and the murderer. Another simple, but good, story with a pretty novel idea (the titular fingerprint). I believe the idea, along with the basic premise, could have been developed into a full-length detective novel.

The fourth story, "The Riddle of the Doctor's Double," has a copyright date of 1936, but doesn't appear to have a publishing history prior to 1946 when it was printed in the August issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I can only assume that the story was shelves, or failed to sell, on account of the underperformance of the plot. The premise was promising enough, but the solution was painfully transparent.

Inspector Piper and Miss Withers are present to give aid to an old, feeble and dying man, but his personal physician informs the duo that he believes a very impatient would-be-murderer is helping the old man along to the other world – which is confirmed when, a short while later, the man is murdered in his own bed. However, the person who was admitted to the sick man was his own doctor. Or to be more accurate, the person appeared to be a spitting image of the doctor. And the latter came around to see his patient mere minutes after his double had done the dirty work.

A fantastic premise with all the potential in the world, but everyone with measurable brain activity can see through the charade. A surprisingly poor attempt at a least-likely-suspect story from one of the Greats of the Golden Age. But hey, every short story collection has an obligatory dud or two. Even in a slim volume like this one.

Finally, we get around to "Green Fire" (a.k.a. "The Riddle of the Green Ice"), which was first published in The Chicago Tribune in 1941 and has an unusual kind of problem for Miss Withers: a series of smash-and-grabs of jewelers display windows, but the latest one leaves a police officer dead – shot while he tried to stop the criminal. You would expect such a plot between the pages of a hardboiled crime story, but Miss Withers make some astute observations and clever deductions that provides Inspector Piper with profile of the jewel-snatcher.

Such as the criminal being an egomaniac (the brick was wrapped as a gift with happy birthday on it, because the jeweler's shop was celebrating an anniversary), wanted by the police (desperate enough to shoot his way out of the situation) and he was new to the jewel racket (since he left a valuable green emerald). However, the story has much more to offer as the criminal returns for that "25-carat hunk of green ice," eludes the dragnet, while Miss Withers also has to tango with a mad house-painter and locate the hiding place of the missing emerald.

Sounds confusing? Well, perhaps. However, the story is much clearer than my brief description, but the overall effect is somewhat marred by Palmer's attempt to pack as much plot in twenty-some pages. I think this story warranted a larger page-count. Still, it's nice little story showing what happens when a spinster sleuth, like Miss Withers, makes a wrong turns and ends up on those mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Glad to report she was able to hold her own!

All in all, a well balanced collection of short stories consisting of three good ones, one dud and a minor gem. So not bad. Not bad at all. But the collection and stories were so short that this read was hardly more than an appetizer. Who knows. Maybe I'll pull one of Palmer's unread Miss Withers novels from my shelves as a follow up, but we'll see what the next blog-post will bring.

Hell's Gate

"In this world, there's no such thing as the perfect crime!"

- Hajime Kindaichi

Last week, on the recommendation of our guide in the world of shin honkaku, Ho-Ling, I decided to take one last crack at the Kindaichi franchise with a recent animated series, Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R), which was originally aired in Japan between 2014 and 2016. The third time proved to be the charm!

Hajime Kindaichi

I watched a two-part episode, The Blood Pool Hall Murder, which revolved around a very tricky murder committed during an annual Go tournament between two rivaling school teams. A short, clever and pleasantly put together detective story that made excellent use of its background and even had some Go-themed sleight-of-hand – such as the killer's alibi-trick and the victim's dying message. So I wanted to try a longer, multiple episode story next and one of them was recommended to me twice.

The Prison Prep School Murder Case consists of five twenty-minute episodes and offers an intricate, multi-layered plot with one hell of an alibi-trick. A trick that turns a string of gruesome murders into a large-scale impossible crime! So let's dig in, shall we?

As noted in my brief introduction of The Blood Pool Hall Murder, the protagonist of the series, Hajime Kindaichi, has an astonishing IQ of 180, but has earned himself a name as a lazy underachiever and his grades have finally caught up with his reputation – placing him in danger of having to repeat a year. Luckily, his long-time friend, Nanase Miyuki, knows of a good prep school and generously offers to come along on a cram course. There is, however, one problem: the prep school in question resembles and operates like prison.

Gokumon Prep School is a study retreat, known among its students as "Hell's Gate," where the first body is discovered as soon as Kindaichi and Miyuke stepped inside the school building.

One of the former students, Moroi Ren, who revisited the school to do a test is fatally poisoned in the counseling room and pressed the alarm bell in his death struggle. The poison was introduced with several needle pricks to his hand and the local police assumes the murder is a random act done by another student, who cracked under the pressure, but Kindaichi believes the murderer had singled out Moroi as a target and knows it was done – a trick known as "Magician's Select." Regardless, this doesn't bring them any closer to the person responsible for the poisoning and only established that something dark is bubbling beneath the surface of Gokumon Prep School.

During the final half of the opening episode, Kindaichi and Miyuke bump into two of their policemen friends, Police-Inspector Kenmochi and Superintendent Akechi. The former has been in charge of the school poisoning case, while the latter confirms Kindaichi suspicions that his old nemesis has a hand in the murder. A magician and criminal genius, known as the Puppeteer from Hell, who made his first on-stage appearance in The Magical Express, but eluded capture after being revealed by Kindaichi.

Now he "manipulates people like puppets" and "writes perfect criminal scenarios for people who bear grudges." So the young detective has quite a challenge ahead of him! 

Hell's Puppeteer appears in the crowd

The next episode moves the large cast of characters, including Kindaichi and Miyuke, to the secondary buildings of the school, called Moonlight and Sunlight, which are situated in a dark, sprawling forest with an hour's walking distance between them – something that becomes relevant when the impossible alibi-trick comes into play. But more on that presently.

Kindaichi and Miyuke are split up and assigned to two different groups. A science-and a humanities-oriented group, but this is also the point in the plot where the school demonstrates it's deserving of its nickname and reputation. The students are stripped of their personal belongings and clothes, which are replaced with prison-style jumpsuits. Some students with poor grades can even be locked up in solitary confinement to help them completely focus on their studies.

So you can say that the administration of Gokumon Prep went out of their way to conform to the nightmarish image we have in the West of juku (cram schools).

Anyway, the harsh, closely watched environment does provide safety to the students from the unknown murderer and even Akechi is present in the (undercover) role of instructor, but students still manage to go missing from the premise. One after another, students from both groups began to disappear after walking out of a full classroom. One was ordered to fetch a fresh piece of chalk from the hall closet, while another finished a test and was excused. The viewer is aware that they were murdered, but the bodies are nowhere to be found and everyone simply assumes they wandered into the woods – after cracking under all of the pressure. Something that's apparently not all that uncommon at Gokumon.

All of this takes up two-and-a-half episodes and this was, perhaps, too slow, but the pace picks up when all of the bodies, one after another, turn up in thematic fashion that alluded to the material they had been studying. So that was an interesting and unexpected twist in the plot. However, what really saved the episode is the unfurling of the complicated and involved explanation for the apparent impossibilities surrounding the murders over the next two episodes.

Initially, I feared my review of The Prison Prep School Murder Case was going to be lukewarm, because I erroneously thought I had figured out the who, why and how of the case, but it turned out my explanation had only touched upon the most elementary parts of the solution. And was completely wrong about the ingenious alibi-trick.

In my first review about this series, I mentioned a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," on which I commented what kind of alibi qualifies as an impossible problem and the episodes that make up this case tick all of the boxes – since every potential suspect were together, in the same room, when the murders happened. So none of them appeared to be, physically, capable of being the killer. I really thought I had stumbled to the truth, early on in the story, when one of the episodes showed a birds-eye view of the grounds surrounding both buildings. It's what gave me an idea how murder could be committed in each building while everyone was alibied. But my solution was childishly simple compared to what was revealed.

Sure, you can argue that the magnificent alibi-trick is too complex and involved, but my only real complaint about it is that the entire story was obviously written around this idea. The trick came first and the story second, which explains the shoddy pacing in the first two episodes and the extreme rules of the prison-like prep school. As the strength of the whole story hinges on the trick, the writer had not much to work with in the setup of the story and the tight regime was needed to make the plot work.

However, if you want pure, undiluted ingenuity, you will appreciate the overall plot of The Prison Prep School Murder Case. Arguably, it's one of the better examples of how an elaborate alibi can turn a detective story into a full-bloom locked room mystery. I really wish I could tell more about the nature of the trick, but that would be spoiling the surprise and that's a capital offense around these parts.

Finally, I need to point out that, at times, the story tried too hard to touch a dramatic note, but regularly failed at it. And the final, over-the-top showdown with Hell's Puppeteer was preposterous! With his hell-fire magic, flower darts and high-school drama-class dialogue. Nevertheless, I did chuckle when the Puppeteer told Kindaichi he wanted to meet him again "on the stage of another atrocity." Oh, no, I thought, does that mean Yozaburo Kanari is going to write their next case?

Alright, alright! I promise that's the last swipe I'll take at Kanari in this series of reviews, I swear!

Wired for Destruction

"Knowledge is progress. We gain knowledge through observation and logic—inevitable logic. And logic tells us that two and two make four—not sometimes but all the time."

- Prof. Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen (Jacques Futrelle's "The Leak," collected in The Jacques Futrelle Megapack: Tales of the Thinking Machine and Others, 2013)

Henry Leverage's name is little-known today and even the GAD Wiki doesn't have him listed among their legion of obscure mystery writers. However, he filled the popular slick and pulp magazines of his day, such as Cosmopolitan, Black Mask, Argosy All-Story and Detective Story Magazine, but what set Leverage apart is that his career, as a writer, really began when he was an inmate of Sing-Sing Prison – where he fulfilled the duty of editor of the prison magazine, The Star of Hope.

The scant crumbs of information on the web does not mention the reason for Leverage's incarceration, as you don't "interrogate a prisoner concerning his past," but he was released in 1919 and used his personal experience to write "crook fiction." In 1925, he created a unique-sounding series-character, Big Scar Guffman, who is a prisoner serving "a life sentence plus fifteen years" and struck me as a hardboiled counterpart to the usual assortment of charming thieves, conmen and swindlers found in rogue fiction.

Despite his proclivity for stories that center around criminals and prison inmates, Leverage wrote (at least) one cerebral detective novel in the tradition of the American mystery writers who valued ratiocination.

Whispering Wires (1918) was published almost a century ago and must have been written when Leverage was still behind bars, but the plot of the story is genuine interesting and stands on the border dividing two distinct periods in the history of the genre – namely the Doylean Era of crime-fiction and the coming Golden Age. Good news is that the Golden Age-like elements have the upper hand here. The story plays entirely fair with the reader and one of the main focal points of the plot is an apparently impossible murder.

A locked room mystery boosting a solution that must have been very impressive and novel for the period, but I am getting ahead of myself here.

Triggy Drew is a private-investigator who operates "the greatest city of the modern world," New York City, who did not "overrate his own powers" and built a reputation on hard, solid work. He wasn't always perfect at the job, but good enough to net him a wealthy client who always called on him when he needed a detective.

Montgomery Stockbridge is a Munitions Magnate and the first time he had hired Drew was to track down an absconder, which he did to the full satisfaction of his employer. So when Stockbridge went up against Mortimer Morphy, "the Wolf of the Ticker," Drew was tasked with gathering evidence proving "the gentleman bank-wrecker" had appropriated large amounts of money and wrecked a score of homes – culminating with a conviction at the end of a long, drawn-out court battle. When he was sentenced to ten to twenty years in state prison, Morphy swore he would get back at Stockbridge "if it took the longest day of his life." And a bizarre death-threat brings Drew back into the employ of Stockbridge.

Someone used the name of Stockbridge's physician to order the superintendent of Ridgwood Cemetery to have a grave dug in the family plot, because "a death was about to occur in the Stockbridge family." A threat punctuated by a whispering voice over the telephone promising that they would go after his daughter, Loris, as soon as they were finished with him. So Drew takes the case and leaves his client behind inside a sealed room, a "double-locked and triple-watched library," but, at the end of the day, they're forced to take an ax to the sturdy library door.

The telephone in the library was engaged, but Stockbridge remained unresponsive and when the ax had done its work they discover why: Stockbridge lay crumpled on the floor with a gunshot wound to the side of the head and the only living presence in the library was his pet magpie – screaming, "Ah, Sing," over and over again. So how did the murderer entered, or exited, a sealed room? A room with thick walls, a hardwood floor and a smoothly plastered ceiling. One with all the windows and doors securely locked from the inside and closely watched from the outside.

As one of the characters observed, the shooting of the Munitions Magnate appears to be a complete and utter impossibility!

I mentioned earlier on this review how the book fits within the tradition of the American detective story of the ratiocinative variety. Leverage makes several allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, as he refers to the impossible murder as "a second Rue Morgue" and described the magpie "as stately as a raven" who seemed to crow "Nevermore," but there are also, what I believe to be, several subtle nods to Jacques Futrelle – who's known as the creator of the Thinking Machine.

The Thinking Machine is known to snap at everyone who dares to suggest a problem appears to be an impossible one, because "nothing is impossible." Drew gave a similar response by stating that there's no such word and invoking it is "a fool's excuse." You can add to that a character who's plotting behind bars (c.f. "The Problem of Cell 13," 1905) and the technical nature of the solution, which is reminiscent of Futrelle's scientific-and technological based detective stories.

So I found it intriguing to see the (possible) influences of these two early, pre-GAD writers on a detective story is, essentially, a Golden Age mystery. Well, for the most part anyway.

Another element that makes Whispering Wires a Golden Age-style tale of ratiocination is the presence of several clues that, when spotted, reveal the whole truth behind the murder. You should be able to the deduce the who-and how of the murder based on the clues hidden in the story. Once you grasp the truth behind the locked room trick, you should be able to deduce the well-hidden murderer, because the nature of the trick and motive leaves only one possible suspect. Admittedly, the identity of the murderer is less interesting than how this person to shoot someone in a sealed and watched room, but they nicely tied together by the clues. So you really have no excuse to not get it right with this one.

Some of you might dismiss the book, based on my review, as being too transparent, but keep in mind that the passage of time has dulled the originality of the plot. The technical side of the story, such as the crossed wires and smooth bullets, is not as exciting to us jaded, modern-day readers as it probably was to the average reader of 1918 – when telephones had just experienced its first commercial growth and the cleverest detective stories were still ahead of them. I can imagine readers at the time being impressed by the plot and the innovations it contained. After all, a "threat-by-wire" was a new and novel way of telling someone they were going to enjoy the unwelcome comforts of an early grave. We take instant death-threats for granted today! ;)

Additionally, the readers were given a very real shot at solving the problem of the locked room and identifying the shooter themselves. Sure, the clues are easier spotted today than they were back then, but even then they were planted in the text for the observant reader to find and interpret. And that's pretty nifty for a mystery published in 1918.

Long story short, I liked this simple, straightforward and well-clued detective novel with a locked room murder that slammed the door on all hoary, moth-eaten bag of tricks from the previous century. No secret passages of trained, gun-wielding monkey within the pages of this yarn!

So, if this overlong, semi-coherent babbling managed to produce a spark of curiosity, you can pull Leverage's Whispering Wires from Gutenberg and read the story for yourself.

Oh, a final note of warning: try to avoid looking at the original book cover. It spoils an important part of the solution. The reader has been warned!

End Game

"Just like there's no perfect tactic in Go, there's no perfect trick for a criminal."

- Hajime Kindaichi

In the tail of comments on my previous review, the subject of (Japanese) anime was brought up and Ho-Ling suggested Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi Return), which can be streamed (for free) on Crunchyroll.

Some of you long-time readers might remember my rants about one of the writers, Yozaburo Kanari, who has all the creativity of an echoing well and his copy-paste plots prevented me from fully enjoying the original run of the series, but other parts of the series was written by Seimaru Amagi – who wrote the excellent Tantei Gakuen Kyu (Detective Academy Q). According to Ho-Ling, the plotting of this new Kindaichi series is "generally much closer to one of those longer Detective Academy Q stories." So why not give the series a third shot now that Kanari is out of the picture?

Ho-Ling recommended several episodes with enticing sounding titles, such as The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Death March of Young Kindaichi, but settled for a short, two-part episode: The Blood Pool Hall Murder. I figured a shorter story would be a nice way to get into the series and the background of the story captured my interest.

First of all, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the series, the protagonist is a high school student, Hajime Kindaichi, who comes across as a lazy goof and an underachiever, but he's a genius with a staggering IQ of 180 – which he probably inherited from his famous grandfather, Kosuke Kindaichi. Some of you might recognize that name as the detective from Seichi Yokomizo's celebrated Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and you would be right. Kindaichi used to evoke his name, early on in the series, but this resulted in some copyright issues and now only refers to a famous grandfather (i.e. "I swear it on my grandfather's name").

Kindaichi is also one of the biggest murder magnets in all of detective-fiction, rivaling Jessica Fletcher, Conan Edogawa and the English county of Midsomer for the number one spot, which is perfectly demonstrated in The Blood Pool Hall Murder. After all, who would have thought a competitive game of Go between two rivaling school teams would end with the death of one of the players?

Once a year, the rivaling Go Clubs of Fudou High and Kaiou Academy hold a multi-day tournament with the three best players from each club, but the former has seen its membership dwindling and are short one players – bringing the high school detective into the picture. Kindaichi was taught to play Go by his grandfather and is added to the team consisting of the only two remaining members of the club, Kosumi Yukari and Kaihou Manabu. And their opponents are serious and tense bunch of students.

Mitsuishi Isao is the slightly arrogant, serious-minded captain of Kaiou Go Club, but his hopes to train as a professional player were dashed when he beaten at the Insei exam by the second member of his team. Amamoto Kaori is already well-known as a female player and has the skill-set required to become a professional player. The final member is a shy, withdrawn young man, Hoshi Keima, who was the former junior champion of Reversi.

So, on the surface, the tense atmosphere appears to be nothing more than the byproduct of the usual rivalries dominating the world of Go and the first part of the story is, somewhat, reminiscent of a regular episode from Hikaru no Go. However, that all changes in the final ten minutes when one of the players, Hoshi, briefly disappears. Hoshi is nowhere to be found. Until someone notices a sinister message, spelled out with black and white Go stones, in the garden pond: "Hoshi is dead in the Blood Pool Room." And that's where they found his body, flung over an upturned game board, with marks around his throat.

 

"Hoshi is dead in the Blood Pool Room"

There is, however, one problem: the murder room was checked several minutes before the message in the pond was found, which means the body was placed there within a five-minute window and that makes the murder a quasi-impossible crime – since everyone had an alibi for that period. I really had some internal arguing with myself whether or not this episode qualified as an impossible crime story.

Back in March, I responded to a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, titled "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," in which I said that an alibi story can only be considered an impossibility under one very strenuous condition: the alibi should not merely rely on witnesses (who can be misled) or items (such as theater or movie tickets), but the murderer should appear to have been physically incapable of having carried out the crime. I gave a rather famous Agatha Christie novel as an example and referred to an episode from Monk in which the culprit was in a coma at the time of the crime, but David Renwick also wrote several interesting variations on the impossible alibi for Jonathan Creek – e.g. Time Waits for Norman (1998) and Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999).

I believe the alibi-trick tiptoed the line between a regular alibi-trick and an impossible crime, but tilted a bit too much to the former to be considered an impossibility (as it relies on the item bit). However, the trick is clever piece of misdirection. Sure, the killer played a dangerous game by relying too much on everyone's assumptions and predicting their movements, but, purely as a plot-driven detective, it's pretty clever and satisfying.

One other thing that should be mentioned is the Go-themed dying message: Hoshi's body was found with his hands tied behind his back and he had been stuffed away somewhere before he was murdered. Somehow, he was able to stuff his pocket with a certain amount of black and white Go stones. Usually, Japanese dying messages and codes are hard to translate, but the color-coded dying clue here is pretty much universal and works in every language. I really wanted to kick myself for having missed the obvious message those stones tried to convey.

I had a good idea who the murderer was, but not exactly how the alibi-trick was done or how the victim's dying message confirmed my suspicion.

So, all in all, The Blood Pool Hall Murder was a nice way to get back into this series and looking forward now to the larger, four-part episodes with some proper locked room mysteries. You can expect me to return to this series before too long. 

But, for now, I want to end this review with an important question directly related to the Kindaichi series: when will Ho-Ling finally renounce Kanari and all his hackiness?  

Tragedy of Errors

"It can only be attributable to human error."

- HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968)

Kate Wilhelm has a long service record as a fiction writer, debuting with a short story in a 1956 issue of Fantastic, who contributed to such a wide variety of publications as Cosmopolitan, Asimov's Science Fiction, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – a variation of genres that can also be found in her novels. Over a period of half a century, she penned an impressive stack of detective and science-fiction novels.

Well, I recently stumbled across one of her many detective stories and found the book in, what could be considered, an obvious place, but had not expected to it there: namely my own TBR-pile. I had completely forgotten about its existence until recently.

Last week, one of my fellow bloggers, "JJ," attempted to help me find a modern-day locked room mystery and hinted, before the blog-post went live, that the book he had been reading was originally published in the late 1980s – which activated my fanboyish curiosity and began to check my backlog. After all, there couldn't be that many impossible crime novels published on the tail-end of the eighties, right?

Apparently, there were enough of the infernal things to prevent me from correctly identifying the book, but did come across a peculiar looking locked room title, on the big pile, promising a manor house mystery covered with the fingerprints of the science-fiction genre.

Smart House (1989) tells the story of the brainchild of a computer prodigy, Gary Elringer, who founded the Bellringer Company, but the hard-and software business stopped being profitable once the boy genius began to work on his most ambitious project - "a computerized, automated house." A project that has become a deep, dark financial rabbit hole and not every one of the the nine shareholders are thrilled with Smart House. Gary's furious older brother, Bruce, is even attempting to organize "a palace coup." However, the computer genius is spoiled to the core and expects things to go his way, which is how things usually turn out.

So when Gary invites the shareholders to his futuristic home, situated on the Oregon coast, everyone turns up. And they all go along with the ridiculous demonstration he has planned for them.

A "stupid game of murder," called Assassins, in which players are assigned a designated victim by the computerized house and they have to eliminate their target "in front of a single witness" and log the kill into the computer – after which the house assigns a new victim to the successful killer. Each kill earns them one vote and the last one standing takes all. The "weapons" (i.e. toys) are kept in a showroom, inside a case with "a computer lock," which allows players to pick only one weapon for every kill. 

 

It's "a game for children," one of them complains, "grown-up people don't play such childish games," but they all go along with Gary's wishes. And that makes for some nicely imagined scenes.

The group of shareholders, and players, consists of professional, intelligent and respectable people, but Gary puts them in such a position that they find themselves sneaking around an intelligent house, logging every step they take, while being armed with children's toy – such as squirt guns, ribbons and balloons. It's reminiscent of the surrealistic quality often found in the work of Ellery Queen. A feeling strengthened when, shortly after each other, two people die under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Rich Schoen is the architect who helped design the house and his body turns up in a closed elevator, which had the air sucked out of it by the automatic vacuum system. A short while later Gary's body is found inside a sealed-off Jacuzzi. The computer logs proved nobody was near them at the time they died and the police decided there were glitches in the computer program, but an computerized, semi-sentient house that can kill its occupants would prevent the company from recuperating as much as a dime that went into its creation.

So they engage a couple of private-investigators to prove a human murderer was responsible for both deaths. Unfortunately, at this point in the book, the story experienced a slump.

Charles Meiklejohn and Constance Leidl were obviously meant to be a modern-day equivalent of Frances and Richard Lockridge, as they, too, are a childless couple with a bunch of cats, but the former misses the joie de vivre of the latter. They did, however, do some proper detective work by going over everyone's movements, and such, but these chapters were bare of any interest and the snail pace of the story-telling did not exactly help either.

What about the impossible angle, you ask? Well, I should have half expected this from a hybrid mystery, but the answer to how anyone could wander around the house without being logged is the science-fiction equivalent of a murderer using a skeleton key in a locked room mystery – which is a letdown to say least. Particularly when its given around the halfway mark. It's a real buzzkill on the rest of the story.

Smart House slightly redeemed itself in the end with a somewhat decent explanation, but it showed that the book should have been written as a novella-length story.

Well, as you can judge by my comments on the opening chapters, I really wanted to like the book, as a whole, which prevented me from skimming to the end or giving up altogether. However, the story becomes tedious drag between the discovery of the bodies and the explanation. A real shame as the ideas present in the story had real potential and some of the science-fiction elements are now reality (e.g. handheld computers and A.I. surveillance). So, sadly, I can only recommend Smart House as a curiosity of both the detective-and science-fiction genres.

No idea what I'll dig up next, but, hopefully, something good again and might pull another impossible crime story from the bookshelf, because I just noticed this is my 299th blog-post tagged as a locked room mystery!