Brought to Light (1954) by E.R. Punshon

Brought to Light (1954) is the thirty-second detective novel in the estimable Bobby Owen series, published when E.R. Punshon was an octogenarian and had only two years left to live, but the characters, plot and story-telling still bristled with the vitality and inventiveness of the early novels – barely any wear or tear. I think Nick Fuller described the story perfectly when he called it the work of a man half Punshon's age.

Punshon not only retained his vitality as a story-teller, but also remembered how to design a maze-like plot out of numerous, intertwined plot-threads and manipulated those strands like a nimble-fingered puppeteer. This is what makes even late-period Punshon a treat to read.

Reprinted by Dean Street Press

Brought to Light brings Bobby Owen, Deputy Commander of the Metropolitan Police, to the pleasant country town of Penton, "once upon a time the capitol of the Kingdom of Mercia," where he had been given a course of three lectures to the West Mercian Police. The West Mercian Chief Constable, Major Rowley, had offered modest prizes to his men for the three best essays on these lectures and Owen was tasked with picking the winners, but his attention is drawn away to the lingering residue of a tragic, long-buried love story in a nearby village – involving grave robbing, lost poems and murder.

Hillings-under-Moor is "a scattered, lonely sort of place" laying on "the fringe of the Great Mercian Moor." The only claim to fame this tiny village has is a lonely grave in the churchyard.

Janet Merton was the lover of a celebrated poet, Stephen Asprey, who placed his love-letters and unpublished poems in her coffin when she passed away, because one day, he wanted the world to know what it owed the woman who had rekindled his Muse. So the grave began to attract coach parties, American tourists and passing motorists, who often "try to chip off bits of the tombstone for what they call souvenirs," but there has also been much talk about opening the grave to retrieve the letters and poems. A proponent of opening the grave is Edward Pyle, of the Morning Daily, who has a lot of back-room pull and even got a question asked about it in Parliament – prompting the Home Secretary to promise a request for opening the grave would receive "favourable consideration." However, Pyle faces stiff opposition.

The grave is a freehold of the Merton family and is now in name of Miss Christabel Merton, a niece of Janet Merton, who says she will never agree to its opening.

The Duke of Blegborough also has his personal reasons why he would prefer the Merton grave to remain undisturbed. His wife had died from taking an overdose of sleeping pills and, locally, there were whispers the Duchess was poisoned by the Duke, because he believed she had cheated on him with the famous poet, Asprey. The Duke is afraid that the love-letters mentions his late wife and fan the flames.

However, if you think this is the whole premise of Brought to Light, you're sorely mistaken and need to read more Punshon. This is only the beginning.

Several years ago, the previous rector, Mr. Thorne, left the rectory one night for an evening stroll and has never been seen or heard of since. There were gossip that Thorn was heavily in debt or got himself involved with a woman who had disappeared around the same time, but other simply assumed he has lost his way on the lonely, desolate moor when he was caught in one of the moor mists that can come up out of nowhere – simply walked circles until he died from cold and exposure. The present curate-in-charge, Mr. Day-Bell, wants Owen to take charge of the Thorn case in the hope that it will smother the rumormongers. Mr. Day-Bell also worries the Merton grave might be opened without permission.

The widow of the poet, Mrs. Asprey, lives nearby the churchyard in "an old, half-ruined house" and is "a formidable old lady." She had chased Pyle from her home with a revolver and she has been making the victory sign above the grave of Janet Merton. There's a Samuel Chrines, a "petty scribbler," who claims to be the love child of Asprey and Pyle has brought a hard-bitten, unsavory character, named Item Sims, with him from London.

Reprinted by Ramble House

So, there you have, as I remember them, all of the plot pieces and, towards the halfway mark of the story, a burned-out caravan with a body inside is found on the Great Mercian Moor.

Deputy Commander Owen takes charge of the investigation and calmly, but competently, traces down the murder weapon and talks to everyone involved with grave, which actually reminded me of Ngaio Marsh. However, Brought to Light is not guilty of, what Brad of Aw, Sweet Mystery calls, "dragging-the-marsh." The characters he talks to are interesting or unusual. Such as John Hagen, church sexton and a passionate, self-taught classical scholar, who only lives for his books. Combine this with a pleasantly tangled plot, rich writing and an equally rich backdrop brimming with ancient history – which has always been one of Punshon's strong points. Death Comes to Cambers (1935) and Ten Star Clues (1941) are good examples of Punshon's sense of time-and place.

I mentioned in my opening that there was barely any wear and tear, but the keyword there is barely and there a little bit of wear in these very late-period Bobby Owen stories that should not go unmentioned. At this late hour, Punshon evidently had become less adept at hiding the murderer from his readers. I spotted the murderer here even sooner than the one in Punshon's swan song, Six Were Present (1956), but hardly something to complain about in this case. Brought to Light is an impressive and imaginative piece of detective-fiction from a 82-year-old man. So I can forgive Punshon here for having failed to pull the wool over my eyes.

However, I do prefer early-period Bobby Owen to the high-ranking, battle-tested Commander of the Metropolitan Police. Owen was at his best when he was young, fresh-faced policeman, slowly climbing the ranks, while traveling the countryside on his motor cycle to go from one murder to the other. Or the period when he was working for the Wychshire County Police (e.g. Diabolic Candelabra, 1942). But that is a personal preference. Not a complaint. 

 

So, all in all, Brought to Light turned out to be a worthy addition to this excellent series. It was perhaps not entirely flawless, but Punshon had barely lost a step in nearly half a century of writing, beginning with The Mystery of Lady Isobel (1907), which is a welcome change from the dramatic decline in quality that usually befalls prolific writers towards the end of their careers – which unfortunately happened to my favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr. So it was nice to see that one of my other favorites had remained (nearly) at the top of his game towards the end.

The Rokubu Demon: Q.E.D, vol. 2 by Motohiro Katou

Back in March, I reviewed the first volume from the once long-running Q.E.D. series, a detective manga written and drawn by Motohiro Katou, originally serialized between 1997 and 2014 in Magazine GREAT, Magazine E-no and Magazine Plus – selling over 3 million copies of the 50 volumes that make up the entire series. The main-character of Q.E.D. is Sou Touma, a teenage genius, who's an MIT graduate and moved back to Japan to be a normal high-school student. Once he's back in school, Touma becomes friends with a classmate, Kana Mizuhara, who's a social and athletic sixteen year old. She plays the Archie Goodwin to his Nero Wolfe.

The second volume, as every volume in this series, is divided into two separate, longish stories. So the cases are usually longer than those found in Detective Conan, but shorter than the novel-length detective stories from the Kindaichi series.

The first of these two stories, "Rokubu's Treasure," checks all of the boxes of a conventional, shopworn detective story regularly found in anime-and manga mysteries: a small, secluded village with a dark back-story and a curse laid upon it. A murderer who walks around dressed like a Scooby Doo villain, long buried family secrets and bizarre murders, which usually links the family skeletons with the village history – which could be a rough outline of the recently reviewed The Headless Samurai. Touma even observes that "these kind of myths are often found" throughout Japan However, I did very much appreciated what Katou ended up doing with the plot. Something that was slightly different.

Touma and Mizuhara are sitting at the edge of his swimming pool when the former receives a package from the United States.

Diane Butler is the archaeology speaker whose lectures Touma attended in America and she send him sheaves of old, crumbling and bug-eaten documents written in Japanese. The package also includes a small bottle with a shiban mushi (death bug) in it and a letter with a request to translate the ancient documents. Butler contacted him on behalf of a friend, Shizuna Kotohira, who comes from a rich family with "a wide expanse of land with hotsprings" and accepting the request comes with a holiday trip to the Kotohira family estate. This was enough of an argument for Mizuhara to pressure Touma into accepting.

When they arrive in the village, Touma and Mizuhara wanted to ask directions at the police station, but they find the place deserted and learn from one of the locals that the village policeman has been called away on a case – a university student had been attacked by someone dressed as the Rokubu Demon.

The victim was part of a group of university students who were looking for the treasure from the legend Rokubu goroshi (Rokubu murder). As they resume their foot-trip to the estate, Touma and Mizuhara recall the legend of the pilgrim visiting all of the holy grounds throughout Japan, but the pilgrim was ambushed and murdered when he passed through this village. They took the treasure he was carrying, a golden Buddha, but, with his last breath, "the pilgrim condemned the villagers with a terrible curse." An old and familiar tale. The difference here is that the locals are convinced that the ancestors of the Kotohira family murdered the pilgrim and had drawn their wealth from stolen treasure.

Touma working on his social skills

When they finally arrive at the estate, they are (eventually) let in by the family caretaker, Hyoe Kariya, who brings them inside where they meet the group of university students. Toshio Hiraki (post-graduate student), Kiyoko Mejiro (third year university student) and Jin Takano (fourth year university student) – who has a bruised cheek and a black eye from the attack. This group is accompanied by the history lecturer of University Y, Akihiko Nezu. One more student, Yamashiro, has gone missing since the attack happened and the village policeman, Ryosuke Kizaki, is organizing a search.

A search that ends when the group arrives at a shrine, where they find Yamashiro's body, "stabbed with a staff" and "positioned like a sitting Buddha." A mocking message had been scrawled on the wall, "a fitting punishment for a treasure hunter." Another student is murdered not long thereafter with a screwdriver. So we have violent attacks, murders, hidden treasure and a cryptic map showing where the treasure is hidden, which is why Shizuna Kotohira needed help. This is also the point where I began to have my doubts about the story.

There's more than enough plot here, but the whole structure seemed to very loosely put together. Nothing seemed to hang together or fitted like it should. We have a murderer, who plays dress up, attacking some and killing others. The murders also widely differ in modus operandi: one of the victims was impaled with incomprehensible strength and the body was put on public display, while the second victim was stabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. Why evoke a legend for one murder and resort to a common stabbing for the other? And why did the murderer not go after the person who was cursed, Kotohira? Obviously, the plot-strands were tied together, somehow, but the knots that held these strands together didn't appear to be tightly fixed.

Luckily, Mizuhara relighted my hope with by asking the key question: "don't you think his actions are too inconsistent?" Touma's answer: Yes. Yes, it is. The solution already shows an improvement in Touma's plotting.

Touma gives the reader a perfectly logical, completely acceptable answer for the inconsistencies in the crimes and they're heavily influenced by previous events, circumstances and simply what's possible at that moment – which is an unusual, but pleasant, way to tell a detective story. The murders are a good example of this plotting technique. Why did the murderer impale the first victim? The answer is a practical one and, when you read Touma's reconstruction of this murder, you'll immediately get a tell-tale clue to the murderer's identity. Because only one person could have committed the murder that way. Why, then, did the murderer stabbed the second victim with a screwdriver? An event from earlier on in the story is the reason why this murder happened the way it did.

It all forms a nice, coherent picture and the crimes fit the character of the tragic murderer. On top of that, the first murder has a nifty alibi-trick and Touma performs his duty as detective by logically eliminating all of the innocent suspects until only the murderer remains.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to discover this story had been playing possum the whole time, only to spring back to life to deliver a solid ending, but have a minor gripe about the second murder. In the murderer's situation, it was a far too risky murder and, as this person should have learned by now, not everyone acts as a willing lamb to the slaughter. Otherwise, this story is a notable improvement over the stories from the first volume.

I hope this means that this series is, quality-wise, will follow a similar evolution as Detective Conan. A splendid series that had began weakly, but improved with each passing volume.

The second story in this volume is "Lost Royale" and is much shorter than "Rokubu's Treasure," which begins in a kendo dojo, where Mizuhara is practicing. A fellow kendo student, Iwasaki, is going to visit her grandfather in the hospital after the lesson and Mizahara decides to go along with her – grabbing Touma with them who happened to be loitering outside. However, when they arrive at the hospital, they find a man in the hospital room who's screaming at Iwasaki's grandfather, Oji.

According to the man, Oji claimed to have found "the legendary seventh royale car," a Bugatti Royale Type 41, which was designed by Ettore Bugatti as the biggest, most luxurious and expensive automobiles money could buy in the 1930s. Bugatti intended to sell these luxurious cars to the royalty of Europe, but only six cars were produced and three sold before production stopped. So the Royale became a legendary car and collectors, as well as museums, "try their hardest to obtain them" and a persistent rumor tells of a seventh, unaccounted Royale – a rumor rooted in the many shenanigans of Adolf Hitler. Oji apparently found the fabled Royale, but now refuses to talk about it. After the angry man takes his leave, Oji confides in the three that the car was stolen from him by an old friend, Yasuhiko Tomizawa.

Tomizawa is an incredibly rich man and owns a number of buildings in town, which is where this story takes an interesting turn. Touma, Mizuhara and Iwasaki try to find the car by studying the floor plans of the buildings owned by Tomizawa and sneaking into these places to inspect the possible hiding places. Mizuhara is becoming a regular Carmen Sandiego!

The hiding place of the car turned out to better than expected, because assumed the 6.7 meter long car would be found inside a large trailer van. I had not expected a piece of old-fashioned stage magic to mislead everyone. Unfortunately, the story does not play particular fair with the reader. There's not a single clue to the hiding place and this is a missed opportunity, because in Detective Conan this trick would have come with a strong visual clue in the background of the panels. The reader should have gotten the whole back-story of the car or that last, important part a whole lot sooner.

All in all, this was a passable story with a good premise and great use for our beloved floor plans, but the plot is marred by a lack of fair play. So this volume ends on a slightly weak note. However, I'm still very hopeful about this series. The stories are not stellar, but this second volume already shows improvement and hope this will continue in the third volume. I'll try to get to that third volume sooner rather than later.

The Fort Terror Murders (1931) by Van Wyck Mason

Francis van Wyck Mason was an American historian, importer, writer and, while barely sixteen years old, traveled to Europe in 1917 to fight in the First World War and enlisted in the French army where he became "a decorated artillery officer." By the end of the war, Van Wyck Mason was only seventeen and had achieved the rank of Lieutenant in the United States Army. Van Wyck Mason re-enlisted in the U.S. army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, effectively putting his writing career on hold, where he worked as Chief Historian on General Eisenhower's staff and was tasked with documenting the war for future generations – during which he achieved the rank of Colonel. Someone should seriously consider writing a historical perspective on the war-time service of mystery writers during the First and Second World Wars.

In the interbellum, Van Wyck Mason attended university, started an importing business, traveled the globe in pursuit of antiques and began to write stories for the pulps.

Van Wyck Mason sold his first eighteen stories without rejection and soon published a novel, Seeds of Murder (1930), which introduced his series-character, Captain Hugh North, who's in the employ of the Army Intelligence Service and appeared in nearly thirty novels – bowing out more than three decades later in The Deadly Orbit Mission (1968). Yes, as you can probably gauge from that book-title, the Captain North series are mostly intrigue novels tinged with spy material and seemed outside of my field of interest. However, just like with my previous read, I was beckoned to this series by an alluringly titled novel.

The Fort Terror Murders (1931) is the third entry in the Captain Hugh North series and the plot-description suggested a story in the spirit of one of Carter Dickson's spy-tinged impossible crime novels (e.g. The Unicorn Murders, 1935), but turned out to be a Golden Age mystery harking back to the days of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Interestingly, The Fort Terror Murders is one of those rare, novel-length detective stories that has a coded cipher as the centerpiece of the plot. Not the murders. Not the inexplicable disappearances. A coded cipher is the master key that unlocks and solves the mysteries of "that infernal old fort." Usually, you only see that in short stories or juvenile mysteries.

Captain Hugh North is on Luzon Island, in the Philippines, where he's a guest of the polo team of Fort Espanto and learns over dinner the back-story of "the famous ghosts of Fort Espanto."

Fort Espanto is an octagonal star fort and was erected in 1660 as a Jesuit monastery, which gathered wealth beyond belief, but in 1767, they were ordered out with very little ceremony and the monastery was converted into a military fort – ever since "old Fort Terror" could have served as "the subject of a horror story." The fleeing padres left behind a well-hidden treasure and the key to finding its hiding place was locked away in a coded cipher. A cipher consisting of two, ebony-beaded rosaries threaded on an extremely long, fine gold chains and "a wrinkled little piece of sheepskin-parchment" bearing only two words, "Pater Noster." And this story has attracted several unlucky treasure hunters to the fort.

Fort Espanto

In 1801, Captain Julio de Ribera, a Spanish officer, claimed to have deciphered the code and knew where to look for the Jesuit treasure, but vanished during the night from the fort. There were sentries on the walls and at the gate, its only entrance and exit, but Capt. De Ribera was nowhere to be found. During the war, in 1916, two men came all the way from Spain to study the enigma of Fort Espanto and they were stabbed to death in the great central gallery of the fort.

During dinner, it becomes apparent that Lieutenant Dale Bowen has an interest in the back-story of the fort and has been looking into its history with Ricardo Mendez. The cousin of Captain Barrett's fiance, Inez Sarolla. Mendez excitedly interrupts the dinner and excitedly announces to everyone that he has found the treasure, "millions in gold, in silver, and in gems," which annoys Lt. Bowen extremely – who makes a futile attempt to silence him. So the cat is out of the bag and the dinner party is determined to take a look at the treasure that evening.

Their exciting evening of hunting for a fabled, long-lost treasure in an abandoned, crumbling and ghost-infested fort comes to an abrupt end when Mendez is fatally knifed and Lt. Bowen vanishes as impossibly as Capt. De Ribera a century before. Capt. North takes immediate charge of the case and places a cordon of soldiers around the fort. Once more, the dark, grim fort is search top to bottom, but not a trace of Lt. Bowen is found. On the following day, soldiers who guarded the fort during the night reported hearing ghostly moans and groans. And to make this enigmatic conundrum complete, they find a piece of paper on Mendez with "beware the lesser brother as you would the grave" written on it.

Firstly, the impossible disappearances are, as you probably deduced by the plot-description, explained away with a slight variation on one of the oldest (locked room) tricks in the book. However, Van Wyck Mason deserves to be praised for the way in which he refurbished and presented this age-old plot-device. Something to be expected from an importer of antiques, I suppose. Anyway, it was acceptable enough within the confines of this story and Van Wyck Mason wisely made the impossible disappearances a secondary plot-thread, which was not made too much of a mystery about. The solution was hinted at early on in the story. So, yeah, I can live with this aspect of the plot.

The ghostly groaning and moaning recalled two other (impossible) vanishing (short) stories: MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries, 1982) and Keikichi Osaka's "The Guardian of the Lighthouse" (The Ginza Ghost, 2017).

But, as said before, the centerpiece of the plot is the coded cipher and Capt. North even briefly launched into a lecture on codes, ciphers and code-breaking. 

Unfortunately, this lasted for less than a full page. A missed opportunity. I think a well-written, chapter-length lecture on ciphers and code-breaking would have greatly enhanced the reputation of The Fort Terror Murders, because the plot already makes it tempting to draw a comparison to Carter Dickson's earlier Sir Henry Merrivale novels – throw in a code-cracking lecture and you have an often cited mystery novel. The code itself is pretty ingenious and only marred by the fact that the intricate puzzle can only really be deciphered within the story. This is only, somewhat, made up by a clever little twist that the unlucky treasure hunters had not calculated on. So this only leaves Capt. North with having to find the murderer, but was not overly impressed with that end of the plot. Nothing really special or memorable.

The Fort Terror Murders is a code-cracker with impossible disappearances in a decaying, star-shaped fort with a haunted history as a secondary plot-thread, but Van Wyck Mason wrote an engaging, colorful story around this premise and has two very memorable, thrill-filled set pieces – in which he was definitely showing off his pulp-roots. One of these scenes, has Capt. North fighting a gravely agitated, venomous cobra with a polo mallet and it was awesome. The second scene has Capt. North observing a hallway through a keyhole, trying to find out who's leaving their room after the lights go out, while an armed shadow creeps around the window behind him.

Van Wyck Mason knew how to pen a good, old-fashioned yarn and, in spite of some problems with the plot, enjoyed my time with The Fort Terror Murders. I would like to try another Capt. North novel, but the previously mentioned Seeds of Murder appears to be the only other traditionally-structured detective story in the series. So, any and all, recommendations are more than welcome.

In a Vanishing Room (1961) by Robert Colby

Robert Colby was a writer of tough, fast-paced paperback originals and his short stories were regularly printed in two popular publications, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Michael Shayne's Mystery Magazine, but only readers and collectors of hardboiled paperback originals appear to remember his work – some of whom believe Colby "never got the fame and recognition that he deserved." Honestly, I likely never would have given Colby a second glance had it not been for an alluringly titled novel, In a Vanishing Room (1961), which sounded full of promise.

So, I looked into the book and found a short, but helpful, review on MysteryFile. The review accurately described it as a minor story with "no frills in the telling" and "action packed content" that "zooms right along." But what caught my eye was the description of the titular gimmick: a basement room that vanishes alongside with the entire basement! I found an impossible crime novel Robert Adey missed in Locked Room Murders (1991). Well, you know me, the promise of an impossible crime is enough to rope me in.

In a Vanishing Room is a pacey, thrill-filled chase story and the trouble begins when the unlikely protagonist, Paul Norris, boards a plane in Miami, Florida to go to New York.

Norris has been on a downward spiral ever since his wife divorced him and savagely began to drink, escape in cheap thrills and throwing away a hundred seventy-five bucks every five work days in Miami – where he worked as an account executive for a major company. His self-destructive behavior puts him on notice with the company and without work, Norris would be broke in three-weeks time. So he asked to be transferred to the New York branch, but there he has to reapply for a position and, with nothing to lose, he boards a plane to New York. And there the trouble begins.

At the terminal of the International in Miami, Norris witnesses an "odd, tense little scene." Norris was waiting in line to collect his ticket when a man brushed his arm, who then broke out in a sprint towards the exit, dropping his bag along the way, shortly followed by two raw-boned, crew-cut blond men in dark suits in pursuit – who returned less than a minute later to retrieve the fallen bag. When he arrived in New York, Norris is approached by a red-headed woman, Eileen Taggert, asking if he was the last person who came off the plane. Taggert had been waiting on her lawyer, Harry Wheeler, who apparently was the man being chased in Miami by the two men in black.

This is the point where the plot becomes a bit tricky to describe, because this is a chase story, fraught with danger and double-crosses, which rapidly moves from one scene to another. However, I can tell you that the plot is propelled forward by a signed receipt from Morgan van Lines, Inc. for a packed crate. Or, as one of the characters referred to it, "the awful box." The crate supposedly holds "something worth millions" and everyone wants to get their hands on the crate or receipt, which was slipped in Norris' coat-pocket when Wheeler brushed up against him at the airport and drags him into a dangerous adventure that even brings him to San Diego – where an entire basement miraculously vanishes.

Norris is hired by the owner of the crate, Everett T. Kavanagh, to have it picked up in San Diego and sends his personal secretary, Marian Collison, along with him. Shortly after they arrived, Norris and Collison find themselves face-to-face with a hired gunman in a basement room. They come out alive, but, when they returned the next day with the police, an elderly woman lived at the address and the door to the basement now opened into a broom closet – nothing to indicate any trickery. It was a normal broom closet with a broom, dust pan and a mop. Unfortunately, the solution for the vanishing basement is very basic where disappearing houses, rooms and streets are concerned.

I fear experienced mystery readers will immediately catch on to how the trick works when they try to find their way back to the house. Regardless, I found it interesting that a miraculous, Carr-like impossible problem has been used in a story that also featured a brutal rape-murder. That's quite a contrast.

On a side note, I may have found an original, if unlikely, way to make a basement vanish as if by magic. You (uhm) simply fill the entire basement with concrete, until it reaches the top of the steps, after which its floored and carpeted over. The nook behind the former basement door can be converted into a broom closet. Even if the broom closet is taken apart, because the carpeting looked suspiciously recent, all they'll find is (what looks like) the concrete foundation of the house. And that's how you make a basement disappear. Don't try this at home, kids.

There's not much more that can be said about the book. In a Vanishing Room is a fast-paced, thrill-filled chase story crammed with deceitful characters, double-crosses, murder and a multi-million dollar stake, but the bloody gunfight that settled the plot was a reminder why I prefer the traditional, plot-driven and clue-filled detective story. Obviously, Colby was not writing a traditionally-structured detective story and can understand why people like these fast-moving, hardboiled crime stories, but my preferences in crime-fiction simply lie elsewhere. In a locked room.

Still, it was a quick, interesting read and made for a nice little excursion outside of my usual boundaries, but my next post will be a return to my beloved Golden Age. I found something that has potential. Something that is giving off Carrian vibes.

The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018) by James Holding

James Holding had worked most of his life at one of the world's largest advertising agencies in New York City, but retired early from his position as Vice President and Copy Chief to pursue a life-long dream of becoming a published author. A dream whose fulfillment became inextricably entwined with the legacy of two mystery writers, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who are better known under their collective penname of "Ellery Queen."

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine rejected Holding's first submission, but the second short story he mailed them, "The Treasure of Pachacamac," was accepted and published in the June, 1960 issue of EQMM. Holding published an additional six short stories that year and, during his storied career, he would sell nearly 200 short stories to EQMM, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but also published a school of children's (detective) novels – three of them appeared in the Ellery Queen, Jr. series.

I have an active "Juvenile Mysteries" toe-tag on this blog and will tackle the EQ Jr. series in the future, but also have an eye on Holding's non-series The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet (1968). So you can expect something from me on those titles at a later date.

The series that irrevocably linked Holding to Queen comprised of ten short stories about Martin Leroy and King Danforth, two collaborative mystery novelists, who wrote "more than 500 mystery books" about their series-character, Leroy King, of which "over 80,000,000 copies" had been sold in every language throughout the world – which were originally published between 1960 and 1972 in EQMM. Holding used the "The Location Object Mystery" title structure of the early EQ international series (e.g. The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932).

All ten short stories are (kind of) interlinked as they take place during a world tour aboard a Norwegian cruise ship, Valhalla, on which the two mystery novelists and their wives, Carol and Helen, are constantly confronted by puzzling problems. Martin, King, Carol and Helen primarily act as armchair detectives and the varied nature of the problems they discuss places the series squarely between the Puzzle Club stories from Queen's Experiments in Detection (1968) and the Black Widower series by Isaac Asimov.

Back in March, Crippen and Landru published The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018), edited and introduced by Jeffrey Marks, which gathered all ten stories and has a comprehensive bibliography of Holding's work at the end of the book. And this collection is the subject of today's blog-post. So, once again, let's take down the stories from the top.

This collection begins with "The Norwegian Apple Mystery," but have already discussed this story in my review of The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018).

The second story "The African Fish Mystery" and our detectives left their cruise ship at Cape Town and embarked on a short, inland tour of Southern Africa by car, intending to rejoin the ship at Durban, but, when they're sixty miles out of Pretoria, their driver makes an intriguing remark about a previous client, Mr. Duke Carrington – who had come into "a great fortune" when he returned from his tour. Apparently, a relative in England had died and left him a large estate. However, Leroy and Danforth quality the story as a hoary old chestnut and begin to wool-gather, which is slowly shaped into an alternative explanation for Carrington's sudden windfall. An alternative explanation confirmed when they discover a hole in a mosquito net. A good and fun take on the armchair detective story.

The next port of call in this collection, "The Italian Tile Mystery," is also its longest story and the plot concerns a coded message hidden in the illustrated tiles of a coffee table!

Leroy, Danforth and their wives have, once more, disembarked from the cruise ship and are currently staying at the Savoia Hotel in the cliff-side village of Positano, Italy, but "the onslaught of rain" forces them to spend an afternoon in the hotel launch. During this rainy afternoon, they noticed a "peculiar collection" of illustrations on the tiles of a tiny coffee table. The proprietress of the hotel, Mrs. Cardoni, tells them the table was made by an American, Lemuel V. Bishop, who was a lonely, absent-minded professor of Italian literature and only had a brother back in America – a well-known lawyer who disapproved of his impractical brother. So the professor began to work on a coffee table and had confided in Mrs. Cardoni that the table was "one will his stuffy brother might have trouble reading."

Unsurprisingly, Leroy and Danforth are intrigued by the coded message in the tiles and begin to brainstorm with Helen and Carol. I think this initial approach to the puzzle was absolutely sound, considering they had nothing else to go on, but they took some imaginative leaps of logic and luck to arrive at the correct conclusion. So, on a whole, this was not a bad story and the central puzzle was an interesting one. However, I was not entirely convinced by the method of the detectives here.

The fourth story is "The Hong Kong Jewel Mystery" and takes place on-and around the cruise ship, Valhalla, which is docked at Kowloon and our detectives disembarked to accompany Carol and Helen on a sightseeing tour and shopping spree in Hong Kong. When they return to the docks, the vast hull of the ship is festooned with Chinese coolies, hanging by ropes and slings, rapidly applying a coat of fresh paint, but when they return to their cabins they make an unsettling discovery – all of their jewelry has been stolen. Detective-Inspector Lo of the Tsien Sha Tsin Police Station was only able to recover the least expensive pieces of jewelry.

So it comes down to Leroy and Danforth to find out where the thief, or thieves, have stowed away the loot until it was save to retrieve it. A good and amusingly written story, but not really outstanding as a hidden object puzzle.

The next story is "The Tahitian Powder Box Mystery" and the problem here is why someone is emptying boxes of Chanel Number Five bath powder out of a porthole window, but the plot is minor one that left no impression on me. So moving on to the next story.

The sixth entry is the title-story of this collection, "The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery," in which Valhalla has dropped anchor in Zanzibar harbor and the passengers hastened ashore to take a tour of the island. The Leroys and Danforths hired a car to take a circular tour of the island, which brought them to the ghost village of Bububu, where only the ruins of two buildings stand – one of those ruins used to be the Red Rooster Hotel. When they inside, in what used to be the hotel bar, they find a man in a very loud sport shirts slumped over a table. Dead drunk. A picture with a Polaroid camera is snapped to immortalize the scene and the man, or rather his shirt, is later identified as one of their fellow passengers. Only problem is that he's a teetotaler and the shirt is a unique, one-of-a-kind item. So who was the drunk in the ruins of the hotel bar and why was he wearing Harry's shirt?

The answer is not too difficult to deduce, especially once you learn about the conditions of a certain will, but that takes nothing away from this highly enjoyable story with that bizarre, slightly surrealistic, scene in the hotel bar.

The next story, "The Japanese Card Mystery," is my personal favorite and has a splendid impossible crime plot closely related to the premise and explanation of a little-known locked room yarn by Richard Curtis – entitled "Odd Bodkins and the Locked Room Caper." Carol and Helen have become acquainted aboard the cruise ship with Mr. Sakaguchi, who has a niece in Tokyo gifted with "extra special card sense," and can even identify a randomly drawn card long-distance over the telephone!

Mr. Sakaguchi consents to a demonstration: the six of diamonds was randomly drawn from a deck of fifty-two cards and the radio operator called the niece, who was a thousand miles away, over the radio-telephone. She never spoke a word to Sakaguchi over the radio-telephone, but immediately named the correct card when she was asked which one they had drawn at random. A complete and utter impossibility! However, Leroy and Danforth are convinced this is "some kind of con game," but figuring out how this long-distance card trick works is easier said than done. There are even a couple of false solutions and one of them my explanation, which was thrown out as a false solution a page or two after it had occurred to me. Something I can really appreciate in a detective story.

So this was a well written, cleverly plotted and fairly original impossible crime story that kept pace with the reader who like to play armchair detective themselves.

The next story is "The New Zealand Bird Mystery" and is a darker than usual story for this series. A much-liked passenger of the Valhalla, Homer Rice, has killed when the cruise ship was docked in Hobart, Tasmania. Rice had been hit over the head and a large sum of money had been carrying on him was taken. A simple and sordid crime, but a triangular piece of paper with an incomplete message on it tells a different story to Leroy and Danforth. The murderer never makes an on-page appearance and you can hardly consider the story fair play, but the motive definitely had an interesting angle to it. In my country, we would call that kind of decoy a lokvogel. ;)

The penultimate story is "The Philippine Key Mystery" and only one of two impossible crime stories to be found in this collection, which has a premise recalling Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13" (The Thinking Machine, 1907) with an original solution perfectly fitting with the prison backdrop of the plot. The Leroys and Danforths have come to Zamboanga City, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, where they witness an incident that prompts them to pay a visit to the Governor of San Ramon Penal Colony, Señor Bollo – who tells them of the only prisoner who managed to escape from his prison. An escape that can only be described as miraculous, because not only did the prisoner had to get pass through a locked door and over a heavily guarded wall, but he had to do so with a wounded foot.

By the end of the story, Leroy and Danforth pieced together a solution that explained how the prisoner worked his vanishing act from a locked and guarded prison complex. One aspect of the explanation may tax your credulity, but, as said above, it's very much in keeping with the prison backdrop of the story. The result is an attractive and original locked room story.

Finally, "The Borneo Snapshot Mystery" closes out this collection and begins when Danforth, unable to sleep, takes a late-night stroll and finds a dead man sprawled on deck at the foot of the steps – a massive head wound "left no doubt the man was dead." The peculiar gray dust on the bruised skin turns out to be tiny colored glass spheres, which immediately places them on the trail of the murderer, but this opens the door to a second mystery: why was the victim dead-set on getting his hands on a photograph that was taken of him aboard the ship? This was an OK story, but nothing more than that.

Note to the curious: according to a previous story, "The Japanese Card Mystery," the Leroy King mysteries had sold 80,000,000 copies world-wide, but this story claims they have sold more than 125,000,000 copies of their books. These stories take place during a three-month world tour. So this would mean they moved 45,000,000 books while on holiday. I'm mildly skeptical of those numbers.

All things considered, The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories is a fairly regular, nicely balanced collection of short stories: there were a handful of solid entries ("Norwegian Apple," "African Fish," "Zanzibar Shirt" and "Philippine Key"), an absolute standout ("Japanese Card") and the practically inescapable dud ("Tahitian Powder Box") - rounded out with some average, but passable, material ("Hong Kong Jewel" and "New Zealand Bird"). So, quality-wise, I was satisfied with these ten stories, but the real attraction of the book is that it offers an entire, unjustly forgotten series of armchair detective stories. A series I actually wanted to read ever since learning about it, in the 2000s, on the EQ website.

The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories definitely comes recommended and especially to mystery readers with an affinity for Ellery Queen.