Asteroid Blues: "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941) by Ross Rocklynne

Back in 2015, I reviewed a full-blown science-fiction novel, James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), which was brought to my attention by a 2013 blog-post by Ho-Ling Wong, who was surprised to discover a science-fiction title had procured a high-ranking spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100 list – beating such classics as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and William L. DeAndrea's The HOG Murders (1979). And not without reason!

Inherit the Stars is pure science-fiction with the plot of a scientific detective story and has an ending as memorable as its fantastic premise.

A mummified body of a normal sized, anatomically modern man in a spacesuit is found on the Moon in the far-flung year of 2027, but carbon dating says the body and equipment are over 50.000 years old! During this period in history, mankind was a primitive hunter-gatherer. So how did a body from the Upper Paleolithic in a highly advanced, nuclear powered space suit end up on the surface of the Moon in 2027?

Ho-Ling ended his own review with saying that the astonishing answer to this conundrum "makes quite the impression" and he wasn't wrong, which is why we have shamelessly appropriated it from the science-fiction genre and we're not giving it back – it's ours now! Well, I always wanted to read another science-fiction-style mystery novel with a similar kind of premise and I serendipitously found one. It even counts as a Christmas tale!

Ross Louis Rocklin was an American science-fiction writer, under the name of "Ross Rocklynne," who was a regular contributor to such science-fiction magazines as Astounding Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and Planet Stories. Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" is a novella originally published in the June, 1941, issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a who-will-be-done-in-type of detective story reminiscent of Pat McGerr (e.g. Pick Your Victim, 1946).

The story begins with Lieutenant Tony Crow of the IPF chasing a couple of outlaws, Johnny Braker and Harry "Jawbone" Yates, across the asteroid belt when his ship crash landed on the base of a mountain on Asteroid 1007 – a shootout ensues and the outlaws are apprehended. During the shooting, Crow found a cave in the base of the mountain and inside was a human skeleton! The remains of a human being who had existed in "the dim, unutterably distant past" before the asteroid and "the human race had come into existence." An old ring or gold, inset with an emerald, gleams on "the long, tapering finger" of the skeleton. And one of his prisoners is wearing an identical ring with exactly the same, very distinctive flaw in the stone!

Crow, Braker and Jawbone are picked up by the ship of Professor Overland and his daughter, Laurette, who were in the asteroid belt to trace faults, strata and striations on one asteroid and link them up with others. They are investigating a theory claiming that "the asteroids used to be a planet." So, when Professor Overland hears of the skeleton, he turns around the ship to return to Asteroid 1007, but the revolutionary new H-H drive in the ship fling them millions of years back into the past. A time before the asteroid belt. A time when it was still a planet, but not for very long.

A crescent-looking planet is visible as a small moon in the sky, but this is an "invading planet" and grows steadily larger with each passing day. And as this moon-like planet grows in the sky, tidal winds increase savagely. So they have roughly nineteen days to patch up their ship and escape being obliterated when these doomed planets collide – except there are some problems. Such as two attempted murders. Another problem is that the entire crew is gripped by the conviction that one of them has to die, in order to provide the skeleton in the cave of the future asteroid, but who's going to be left behind? A conviction strengthened when it proves to be impossible to get rid of the ring.

The problem of the skeleton on Asteroid 1007 is the detective hook of the story and the solution was a truly surprising, but the clues require an imaginative leap of logic to put two and two together. So not every mystery reader is going to be blown away by it or may even regard as a cheat. I simply wanted another relatively good or passable take on an impossibly ancient human remains found on a celestial body and "Time Wants a Skeleton" gave me exactly what I wanted. Only reason why I didn't tagged this review as a "locked room mystery" or "impossible crime" is because time travel was involved, but the identity of the skeleton is what makes it qualify as a genuine hybrid mystery. And a good one at that!

So the story, as a whole, is more science-fiction than mystery, but I thought the time-paradox was very well handled and made for one of the better science-fiction detective stories I have read to date.

Granted, my reading of classic science-fiction has been limited almost entirely to hybrid mysteries and one thing that has always bugged me is that many of them had problems with envisioning a far-flung future beyond the basics – like rocket ships, space suits, robots and laser guns. Not everyone had the world-building abilities of Isaac Asimov (e.g. The Caves of Steel, 1954). Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on Mars a thousand years in the future, but is littered with 20th century references and clunky technology. Giving you the idea culture and technological has stagnated, before it collapsed, during those thousand years. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) concerns a planetoid in the asteroid belt settled by miners with advanced spaceships, but courtroom photographers still used old-school flashbulbs.

This certainly was not the case with "Time Wants a Skeleton." You can really believe the story takes place in the far-flung future. Or, as is the case here, the dim, distant past.

You're probably wondering how a science-fiction story about a time-paradox, a haunting ring and a doomed planet can be considered a Christmas tale. Well, the story takes place between early December and Christmas. Christmas plays a part in the resolution of the time-tied skeleton in the cave on the asteroid that used to be a planet millions of years ago. You have to read the story yourself to find out how that plays out. The good news is that you can find the Astounding Science Fiction issue, which contains this novella, on the Internet Archive by clicking here. Enjoy!

Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" was, as far as I can judge, a good time travel yarn with a detective hook and a solution for the skeleton on the asteroid that's very different from Hogan's Inherit the Stars. So mystery readers who were impressed by Hogan should definitely read Rocklynne's novella.

By the way, I like to believe Lt. Tony Crow is one my distant descendants. :)

The Murder of Father Christmas (1934) by Pierre Véry

Last week, I reviewed Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999). An enchanting detective story with a dreamy, fairy tale-like quality that reminded me of another French mystery novelist, Pierre Véry, who once said that "what counts for an author," and a person, "is to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" – of that person "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery." Véry would probably have defined The Man Who Loved Clouds as "a fairy tale for grown-ups" and of his few mysteries to be translated into English can described exactly like that.

L'Assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) was translated by Alan Grimes and published in 2008 by Troubadour Publications, which came with a brief, but insightful, introduction by Roger Giron.

Véry was "a bookseller in rue Monsieur-le-Prince" and this period in his life inspired him to write Léonard ou les délices du bouquiniste (Léonard or the Delights of the Second-Hand Bookseller, 1946), "a charming novella," which made him a visitor to the genre from mainstream fiction. A literary visitor who, according to Xavier Lechard, brought "whimsy and gentle surrealism" to our genre and his first foray was "a pastiche of the English detective novel," entitled Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930), but also penned a couple of locked room mysteries – Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934) is one of them. Hopefully, The Four Vipers will eventually be translated into English (are you reading this, Pugmire?).

Until that day comes, we have to help ourselves with what we have and that is a mildly surrealistic, Christmas-themed mystery novel that reads like a fairy tale for grown-ups.

The Murder of Father Christmas takes place in Mortefont, a large town in the county of Meurthe-et-Moselle, where the parish priest, Father Jérôme Fuchs, becomes the victim of an attempted burglary in early December. Father Fuchs had just locked away the reliquary of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the region, when the incident happened, but the intruder miraculously got away from his pursuer.

Somehow, the burglar escaped from "the room on the first floor of the sacristy" without "going back by the staircase" or by "leaving footprints on the muddy earth in the garden" underneath the open window. And this attempt is complemented by an anonymous letter warning the priest "a gang of burglars is preparing to plunder the churches of our region." So they decide to enlist the help of discreet, private-investigator. Enter Prosper Lepicq, Barrister at the Paris Law Court.

Lepicq holds office in modest apartment overlooking the courtyard on the ground floor of a building in rue de Valois in Paris. The office has a room with three large armchairs, a large table stacked with papers and filing cabinets, labeled A to Z, line the wall, but this is only a facade – because "the files were stuffed with blank paper" and "the filing cabinets were full of old newspapers." Lepicq is two months behind on his rent and has a secretary who feverishly began to write gibberish to simulate hard work when their client came to visit them. So pretty much a low-rent Arthur Crook, but this was undoubtedly the most memorable scene of the whole story.

Lepicq immediately disappears from the stage and his place is taken by a Portuguese nobleman, the Marquis de Santa Claus. The children of Mortefont begin to believe he has come to their town to search for an ancient, long-lost relic, the Golden Arm of King René of Anjou, which is rumored to be buried somewhere in the ruined abbey of Gondrange or a nearby castle. One legend says that if "you ask the evening star, you will find the hidden Golden Arm," but this hidden treasure is only a minor plot-thread to give a magical or romantic touch to the story.

Meanwhile, there are two gems stolen from the relic of Saint Nicholas under seemingly impossible circumstances from the locked vault and a German-looking stranger is found murdered near the entrance of an underground passage close to the castle – clad in a Santa Claus custom! So who was the victim and who had been the second Santa Claus? I first read The Murder of Father Christmas nearly a decade ago and was surprised upon my second read to discover the plot was far more consistent than I remember it.

My recollection was that the story was written as one of Gladys Mitchell's imaginative flights of fancies, such as The Rising of the Moon (1945), but the plot here provided answers. And there's logic to all of the madness. Even if it's "the logic of tales of the fantastic." So it was more in line with G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Stars" (collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911).

The explanation to the impossible escape from the sacristy was silly, at best, but was nicely tied to the inexplicable theft of the gem-stones, which showed a glimmer of ingenuity in its simplicity. This brace of impossibilities are also very minor aspects of the plot with most of the plotting work being put into the murders. I suppose this was, combined with the fairy tale atmosphere of the story, why Halter's The Man Who Loved Clouds reminded me so much of Véry's The Murder of Father Christmas. Two very different detective stories cut from the same magical cloth.

So, in closing, The Murder of Father Christmas is a charming, spiritedly written mystery novel and perfect as a holiday read during those long, dark, but cozy, days of December. As long as you don't expect a stone-cold classic. But highly recommended, if you like to read Christmas-themed (detective) fiction during this time of year.

Lastly, I want to warn readers who want to read The Murder of Father Christmas to hurry with procuring a copy, because the book has been out-of-print for years and secondhand copies appear to be scarce, which are already being offered at exorbitant prices – going all the way up to several hundred dollars or pounds. There are, however, still a few affordable copies floating around. So you better be quick about it.

Creepy Crawlers: "Tarantula Bait" (1932) by Paul Chadwick

Paul Chadwick was a pulp writer of many pennames and created the Secret Agent X series, but from 1931 to 1936 he wrote close to forty short stories about an unusual detective-character, Wade Hammond – which appeared in Dragnet-Detective Magazine and Ten Detective Aces. Hammond is a newspaper writer and amateur detective specialized in strange, out-of-this-world criminal cases. A category known in the pulps as weird menace, which has close, familial ties to the impossible crime story.

Chadwick is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but, on his website, Mike Grost briefly discussed one of Chadwick's short stories, "Tarantula Bait," which he described as an "example of a true impossible crime tale" with "numerous impossibilities." As you can probably guess, my interest was piqued by this obscure, long-overlooked impossible crime story.

"Tarantula Bait" was originally published in the September, 1932, issue of Dragnet-Detective Magazine, but the story can more easily be found in Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames (1993) and The Weird Detective Adventures of Hammond Wade (2006). The plot frames the impossible crime tale as a weird menace story and is (somewhat) comparable to Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way (1935), Fredric Brown's "The Spherical Ghoul" (collected in Death Locked In, 1987) and John Russell Fearn's Within That Room (1946) – basically a Scooby Doo for grown-ups kind of story. And this one comes even with its very own monster-of-the-week!

An unnamed city, which could be New York, is gripped by sightings of an abnormally large spider.

The first sighting of the "Tarantula" occurred a couple of nights before the opening of the story, when a man crossing Hamilton Square claimed to have seen "a great, black, eight-legged creature," which was seven feet in diameter – moved like "the spirit of death" itself. Faith Tashman is the latest to have a close encounter with the giant spider, but the beast has followed her back to her home. And attacks her in the bedroom, while there were policemen in the house!

Faith Tashman is found on the sidewalk, beneath her bedroom window, with two "terrible wounds" in her neck. Holes where "gigantic fangs" seemed to have penetrated!

Wade Hammond is tasked with putting a stop to this creature, whatever it may be, but, before he can do that, has a close brush, or two, with the Tarantula. Hammond is an eye-witness to the two second, seemingly impossible murder by the spider when its shadowy body ambushes a man. The spider had struck for its victim's jugular veins, but, before Hammond can raise his gun, the black, "ghastly shadow" had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come – as if it had blended with the larger shadows of the trees. A second, too close for comfort confrontation happened during a warm night when a huge, black "something with hairy legs" attempted to attack Hammond in his bedroom. But "the black bulk" vanishes as miraculously as before.

This attack on Hammond reminded me of one of the many impossibilities from Lou Cameron's Behind the Scarlet Door (1971), in which the detective is attacked by an invisible, cat-like creature when he entered his locked, darkened apartment. Funnily enough, "Tarantula Bait" and Behind the Scarlet Door are both weird menace/impossible crime stories with a locked room idea that ran along similar lines. Only difference is that Hammond took that idea to a whole new level. And on a much larger scale.

Hammond has only two clues to work with: a white powdery substance and "a strange whisper of sound" that "seemed to fill the air" when the spider vanished from his bedroom. These clues nicely fit with one of the suspects from a small group of characters, who could have been plucked from the pages of a Clayton Rawson detective story. So the story worked as a fair play detective story, because there were essential clues to the who-and how.

However, I'm afraid Grost has slightly oversold the story, as an impossible crime tale, by calling it "a gem." The story was a fun read and (sort of) works as a fair play detective story, but the solution to the impossibilities, original as the trick may be, is hard to take seriously – pure Scooby Doo with a dash of Wile E. Coyote. And grotesquely humorous when presented with a straight face.

So, "Tarantula Bait" is a good, pure pulp detective story with an entertaining take on the impossible crime problem and deserves to be considered for inclusion in a future locked room anthology, but hardly a gem of the locked room and impossible crime genre. You can put that down to the silly, cartoon-like explanation for the spider-like killer. Still, if you like weird, carny and pulp detective stories, like Brown or Rawson, you can't go wrong with Chadwick's "Tarantula Bait."

The Man Who Loved Clouds (1999) by Paul Halter

Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) is his fifteenth mystery novel to be translated by the inestimable John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, which is a magical, dreamy and fairy tale-like detective story with several impossible crimes – something of a cross between Gladys Mitchell (e.g. Death and the Maiden, 1947) and Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947). An uncommon combination that worked better than expected!

Mark Reeder is an absent-minded journalist with the habit of forgetting his car-keys, papers or "who-knows-what else" and his editor calls him a man with his head in the clouds. This is the literal truth. Reeder loves clouds and "could spend hours watching them."

So when he lost an article that was due to go to the printers, his editors told him to take his annual leave and he packed his bags, jumped in his car and followed the clouds – which brought him to the village of Pickering. Upon his arrival, Reeder laid eyes on "the most exquisite creature" he has ever seen, Stella, who's the daughter of the late lamented John Deverell. A local artist who committed suicide two years ago.

Reeder is told by one of the villages that Stella "a bit special" and appears to possesses the magical abilities of a real-life fairy!

Stella was born in "a house haunted by moaning winds," which was build on top of a hill overlooking "the sea-lashed reefs" below, where the never-ending winds play like "the mournful screeching of a demented violin." The wind blows there all the time and has taken many lives over the centuries. However, Stella emerged from that haunted, wind-blown place with the ability to become invisible, as is she was carried away by the wind – something that often happens when she enters a small copse called the Fairy Wood. At first, the villagers assumed there was hiding place in the copse, but nobody has been able to find it.

The village policemen even set a trap for her by staking out the copse and she managed to completely disappear from "inside a guarded perimeter," but these are not the only miracles she performed. Stella can turn stones into gold simply rubbing them and predict the future. She predicted the deaths of three villagers.

So, having heard all of these stories, Reeder decides to enlist the help of Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst, who witness first-hand how Stella turns ordinary stones into cold and accurately predicts the death of three men. One of these men died in front of Reeder under baffling, seemingly impossible circumstances. Reeder saw with his own eyes how this man began to fight with the wind, which was blowing furiously, when he was suddenly plucked from the ground by "a violent gust" – simply disappeared into the darkness. As enticing as all these miraculous events are, they do not represent the best aspects of the plot. And they have very simplistic answers. You might be surprised to learn that I didn't care about that at all here.

The Man Who Loved Clouds is a superbly imagined and wonderfully executed detective story, in which the splendid who-and why of the plot were marvelously intertwined with the more wondrous plot-threads of the story. Plot-wise, this is easily one of Halter's best mystery novels on par with La septième hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991), Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) and La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005). But the dreamy, fairy tale-like story-telling is what turned this book into something truly great and memorable.

One of Halter's compatriots and fellow mystery writer, Pierre Véry, once commented that "what counts for an author (and for a person) is to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were." A child "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery," but "so pure, so pure." Halter did exactly that and The Man Who Loved Clouds is, what Véry would call, "a fairy tale for grown-ups."

I believe Véry would have liked The Man Who Loved Clouds and Halter's story-telling here is, in spirit, very close to the only detective novel I have read from Véry's own hands, namely L'assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934), which is also a (minor) impossible crime story with that wondrous, fairy tale-like atmosphere. Now I want to re-read it more than ever before. And, hey, just look at the time of the year! ;)

My sole complaint, which is a very minor one, is that the book-title is a bit of a misnomer and a better title was suggested in the story. Reeder described Stella as "the daughter of the wind" and that would been a more fitting book-title, but, other than that, this was an excellent, imaginative and memorable detective story. I have struggled with Halter in the past, but it's detective stories like these that makes it perfectly understandable why JJ feverishly rants and raves about his work. 

The Man Who Loved Clouds is recommended without reservations.

Holiday Hang-Ups: "Beef for Christmas" (1957) by Leo Bruce

Rupert Croft-Cooke is best remembered as the mystery novelist "Leo Bruce" and signed that name to one of my favorite series of detective stories about "an engaging vulgarian," Sgt. Beef, who loves to drink beer, playing darts and embarrassing his long-suffering chronicler, Lionel Townsend – who's more of a stickler for conventions than the boorish Beef. Townsend often wondered how anyone "as ingenuous as Beef" could "match his wits against the subtle brains of clever criminals" and "defeat them." But this is the inevitable result of his involvement in any case he decides to take on.

The series only has six novels and a smattering of short stories, which are mostly collected in Murder in Miniature and Other Stories (1992), but there were two short stories that remained uncollected until very recently.

"Beef for Christmas" was originally published in the November 8, 1957, issue of The Tatler and Bystander and was rediscovered by one of the obvious suspects, Curt Evans, who observed that the story would "grace any anthology of British detective stories" – a comment Martin Edwards, a writer and anthologist, took to heart. Edwards used the story to close out his anthology Silent Night: Christmas Mysteries (2015).

The story is fairly typical for a Christmas-themed mystery: Sgt. Beef is hired by "one of the richest men in the country," Merton Watlow, who's determined to spend all of his money before the grave calls him. Watlow has poured "a couple of Prime Ministers' salaries" into the upkeep of his opulent, fully staffed houses and overly expensive trinkets. Naturally enough, the family doesn't like it one bit. They're of the opinion that Watlow has to live on his interest for their benefit, which is a very vocal opinion within the family, but this only made him worse – turning his spending spree in "a sort of race." Recently, Watlow has been getting anonymous letters urging him to stop spending money or else!

Watlow decided to invite Sgt. Beef to come down to Natchett Grange to spend the Christmas holiday together with his family. I should mention here that Watlow gets a kick out of letting his relatives see him spend hundreds of pounds on a Christmas party. So what could go possibly wrong?

The kindred of their host consists of his nephew, Major Alec Watlow, along with his wife and daughter, Prudence and Mollie. There's his late sister's daughter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Siddley. And their feeble-minded son, Egbert.

As usually, Townsend is slightly discomfort by Beef's lack of manners, apparent alertness or showing "appreciation of the privilege" of being chosen by such an important man to clear up a problem in his household – even becoming embarrassed when he produced a bulky notebook and a stump pencil to take down names. However, the real shock comes after an evening of entertainment, complete with a stage, when they find one of the members of the household hanging from a rope in his room. But the victim is not who you expect it to be!

So this is a case of murder disguised as a suicide and the crux of the plot is a clever alibi-trick worthy of Christopher Bush and Detective Conan, which both have used variations on this particular idea to create cast-iron alibis for their murderers. The trick here is equally well-handled with some good hints, rather than out-right clues, how it was done. However, I can't help but feel that Bruce's take on this trick might have worked better had the plot been tooled as an inverted detective story.

Nonetheless, the plotted fitted nicely together and Beef was amusing as ever, which made this a good, fun and Christmas-themed detective story that can be used to kill half an hour with during those dark, cold days of December.

Stranger at the Inlet (1946) by Martin Colt

A year ago, I reviewed The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) and The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy (1959) by "Bruce Campbell," a penname of Sam and Beryl Epstein, who cemented their legacy as the pioneers of the present-days Young Adult genre with the acclaimed Ken Holt series – which tended to be darker and more intricately plotted than most juvenile mystery series of the period. What's not as well known is that Ken Holt has a predecessor, Roger Baxter, who appeared in a couple of novels during the late 1940s.

The series comprises of three novels, Stranger at the Inlet (1946), The Secret of Baldhead Mountain (1946) and The Riddle of the Hidden Pesos (1948), which were published under two different names, "Charles Strong" and "Martin Colt." A very short-lived series, but as highly regarded by fans as the more well-known Holt series. And not without reason!

Roger Baxter is the 14-year-old protagonist of the series who lives with his 12-year-old brother, Bill, in the small, coastal town of Seaview and they were obviously the prototypes for Ken Holt and Sandy Allen.

Roger is, very much like Ken, the meticulous, rationally-minded thinker of the two. However, the difference between Ken and Sandy, who are the same age, is due to intelligence, while the difference between Roger and Bill is clearly age, because Roger has already began to mature and Bill is still in the phase between childhood and adolescence – which can make him a little bit naive at times. Roger and Bill are two very well-drawn, believable child characters on par with the children and teenagers found in the work of Gladys Mitchell.

The story opens during the summer holiday and the boys are planning to make a windmill on top of the empty cottage, owned by their parents, which they have come to regard "more or less as their private property." Unfortunately, their mother informs them the cottage has been rented for two months to a man, Robert "Slim" Warner, who wants a quiet place to recuperate from an operation. Luckily, Slim has no problem with Roger and Bill mounting a windmill on the roof of the cottage to generate electricity for the cottage. However, they soon begin to pick up hints and clues that Slim is not who he says he is.

Slim says he came to Seaview to convalesce, but carried around heavy bag, two at a time, without any trouble or pain. He drives "an old wreck of a car," but the motor in it "sounds almost brand-new." A power generator was delivered to the cottage, but Roger knows he never send the telegram to ask for it. And then there's the mysterious, late-night visitor to the cottage and they boys overheard them talking about Smugglers' Island.

An answer to all of these questions come, roughly, a quarter into the story, which plunges Roger and Bill head first into an exciting adventure that involves an elaborate smuggling operation – who use the peaceful, out-of-the-way seaside town as a clearing point. But this is all I can say about the plot without giving away too much.

What I can say about the story is that plot has a lot of nuts and bolts, which makes it a younger relative of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. The early chapter detailing how Roger, Bill and Slim build the windmill on top of the cottage reads like a partial instruction manual and they learn how to operate "a six-volt radio." As well as getting a crash course in Morse code. A combination of the two is put to ingenious use when they find themselves in a tight corner towards the end of their adventure. Obviously, a book that was written for young boys and teenagers.

The sole weakness of this excellently written novel is that the chase was more exciting, and fun, than the eventual capture of the culprits, which hardly came as a surprise. Something that enervates most juvenile mysteries for older readers.

Nonetheless, Stranger at the Inlet is a beautifully written, characterized and adventurous mystery novel with an equally beautiful, well-imagined backdrop. The writers evidently knew and respected their young audience, which they would come to perfect in the Ken Holt series when their plots became really trick and far more serious – fraught with very real, dangerous situations and consequences. So these two series are without question a cut above other juvenile series and can be enjoyed by young and old alike. Just for that, they deserve to be rediscovered.

The Strawstack Murder Case (1936) by Kirke Mechem

Kirke Field Mechem was a Kansan historian, poet and playwright who, during the heydays of the genre, wrote an excellent detective novel in the tradition of The Van Dine School of Mystery Fiction, but The Strawstack Murder Case (1936) was first published under a bland, meaningless "publisher-mandated" title – namely the awful A Frame for Murder. A mistake that was corrected in 2013 when Coachwhip Publications republished the story under its original and intended book-title.

Curt Evans provided this new edition with a lengthy, informative introduction and mentioned that the publisher "didn't think strawstacks would sell books." Ironically, just three years later, Dorothy Cameron Disney published "a very well received mystery," entitled The Strawstack Murders (1939), but, in defense of the publisher, there might have been a good reason for their decision. Nicholas Blake had debuted the previous year with A Question of Proof (1935), which also had a body-in-the-haystack plot.

So, if you take that into consideration, you can understand why the publisher wanted a different title for the book, but not why they settled on such a bad, uninspired and nonsensical title. Anyway...

Mechem joined the "goodly company of traditional mystery authors" of The Van Dine School with The Strawstack Murder Case, but Mechem also stands out in this class for two reasons. Most of the Van Dinean writers come from the East or West Coast, mainly New York or California, but The Strawstack Murder Case is set in Witchita, Kansas – smack in the middle of the Heartlands of the United States. This gives the book a strong rural and regional flavor. Secondly, Mechem had a better sense of humor than most writers of this school with the exception of Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice. The best example of this can be found in the opening chapter.

The detective of the story is Steven Steele, the Philo Vance of the Great Plains, who is ranting in the opening chapter to his chronicler, Bill, about "the kind of tabloid authorship" that are turning his cases into sensational, tarted-up pulp-stories and particularly dislikes their account of The Wade Packinghouse Murder Case – re-titled in the fictionalized version to The Slaughterhouse Mystery. Steven Steele has become Vincent Veale. A gun-toting pulp hero without a hint of Steele's impressive reasoning and deductive abilities. He sadly concludes that "readers nowadays don't want reasoning mixed with their detection" and advises them to "go out and get some gangster's reminiscences." So I immediately warmed to both Mechem and Steele!

Regardless of this trend in popular fiction, Steele get to test his deductive abilities and reasoning skills when the news breaks that a prominent Wichita oil operator, Ralph "Lucky" Loundon, has been brutally murdered near his hunting lodge.

The body of Loundon was found "buried in a strawstack" by two teenage boys and this provides the plot with a quasi-impossible situation, because the stack of straw is of an "extraordinary dimension" and extended nearly fifty feet from east to west with steep sides – making it practically "impossible to climb." So how did the body end up at the top of the strawstack? A tree near the strawstack has broken branches and the discovery of "a matted bunch of coarse light-brown hairs" on the body suggests an ape! Naturally, an ape-like creature has very little to do with the murder and the explanation is far more ingenious than that the trick from that famous Edgar Allan Poe story.

However, as baffling as the physical evidence at the scene of the crime is the personal circumstances of the victim and the cast of characters that had surrounded him.

Lucky Loundon is described as "an overgrown boy," with a good heart, who had helped half "the oil men in the territory at one time or another" and pioneered the Meridian oil field by raising “a forest of greasy derricks” across the river from his lodge. There are, however, still more than enough people with a potential motive to murder Loundon.

Loundon used to be married to Lola van Roth, daughter of radio pastor Reverend Raymond Dwight van Roth, who also has a troublesome son, Jack, who may, or may, not have gotten on the wrong side of the law. And there motive is tied to a $50,000 life insurance policy that goes to Lola upon Loundon's death. On a side note, Curt Evans observed in his 2012 review that Mechem painted "a memorably withering satirical portrait" of the pastor that he wondered if the pastor had been based on "a specific Midwestern clerical radio personality," which would be Charles Coughlin – commonly known as Father Coughlin. I have no idea if this true, but the comparison is an interesting one. And, if this was the case, Mechem properly disguised him. I would not have thought of this comparison myself.

There are more suspects Steele has to consider: a potential love-interest, Dora Monest, whose uncle, Juan Monest, is an investor in Loundon's many businesses. Fielding Garnett is Loundon's partner in his oil operations and Charles Ripley is the vice-president, general manager and chief engineer of Loundon's Dragonfly Aircraft Company. I like to believe this company made the dragonfly seaplane from Palmer's The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934). Lastly, there's a surgeon, Dr. Herbert Vernon. All of them are tied together, either financially or with personal secrets, which makes for a knotty, delightful detective story. But the story even gets better after the halfway mark!

An oil well explosion provides the backdrop of a second murder, disguised as suicide, and the description of this fiery disaster was very well done and fascinating to read. Coachwhip seems to have penchant for republishing disaster-themed detective novels. Tyline Perry's The Owner Lies Dead (1930) has a disastrous mine explosion, Allan Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942) has a handful of survivors aboard a sunken submarine and Carolyn Thomas' Narrow Gauge to Murder (1952) concerns a tragic narrow-gauge railroad accident – here have an oil well erupting in deadly fire killing three men and wounding numerous others. Coachwhip should seriously consider reprinting Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1942) to add a deadly flood to the lineup. Two more and you have the Seven Plagues of Detective Fiction! :)

All things considered, The Strawstack Murder Case was more than worthy of being resurrected. The story is very well written, cleverly plotted and properly characterized strengthened by the rarely used regional backdrop of the American heartlands. I think the book will be greatly enjoyed by readers who enjoy the traditional, puzzle-oriented detective novels by the Van Dine-Queen School and especially to readers who are fond of Clyde B. Clason. From all the writers from this school, Mechem is stands closest to Clason. In any case, The Strawstack Murder Case comes highly recommended!

A note for the curious: Mechem wrote a second detective novel with Steven Steele at the helm, entitled Mind on Murder, but the manuscript was rejected by the publisher, because it dealt with a touchy subject – and, as a result, the book is now lost to history. One these days, I'm going slap together a follow up to my post on lost detective stories. Sadly, I learned of even more examples since that post went up in 2016. Some of you will be surprised to learn how many lost manuscripts John Russell Fearn has under his belt!

Sexton Blake Returns: "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909)

Back in March, I reviewed Derek Smith's Model for Murder (1952), a surprisingly cerebral entry in the colossal Sexton Blake Library, which is probably why the novel remained unpublished for more than six decades until John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, got his hands on the manuscript – publishing it as part of The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014). A splendid volume that includes the all-time classic Whistle Up the Devil (1954) and Come to Paddington Fair (1997).

The Sexton Blake Library consists of roughly two-thousand short stories, novels, stage plays and comic books, written by over two hundred writers, but ended my review by saying I would likely never read another Blake story during my lifetime. A well-known problem with the Sexton Blake series is quantity over quality that helped it acquire a reputation of a badly dated, second-rate pulp-series.

Hardly a year has gone by since my review of Model for Murder, but I recently came across a short Sexton Blake story that actually looked promising. And the story delivered on its promise!

"The Grosvenor Square Mystery" was anonymously published on October 26, 1909, in Answers and is a bone-fide locked room mystery with a solution that cleverly moved away from the secret passages of eighteenth century detective fiction.

The setting of the story is the house of Sir George Hilton, in Grosvenor Square, which is an ancient mansion furnished "the heavy style of the early Victorian era" and has "prevailing air of solidity" with its solid doors, locks and bolts – solid shutters on all the windows. However, this was not enough to keep out a thief and valuables began to disappear from the locked apartment "sacred to the use" of Sir George and his wife.

An apartment has four interconnecting doors: two of them lead to the rooms Sir George and Lady Hilton, one to a boudoir and the last one to a bathroom, which pretty much eliminated a secret passageway or hidden trick-door. You can only enter the apartment through one of these four doors. All of the doors were fitted with "patent locks, bolts and burglar alarm," but despite these security measures valuable rings, necklaces, scarf-pins, a pearl pendant and a purseful of sovereigns were taken from that locked apartment. This culminated in the theft of "a packet of State papers."

These inexplicable string of thefts began to foster "an actual spirit of mutual suspicion" and mistrust between Sir George and Lady Hilton. So they decided to take Blake as an undercover house guest and have him bust open their locked room conundrum.

Blake makes short work of the case and the revelation of the thief doesn't come as an astonishing, gut-wrenching surprise, but, where the plot becomes interesting, is the explanation to the problem of the locked apartment – a solution that was original, inventive and clever for the period. You can say that the unknown author of this story took a locked room idea from the eighteenth century reworked it by applying some of that twentieth century ingenuity that G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr would bring to the impossible crime story in the subsequent decades.

A note for the curious: the Kindaichi series has a locked room story that uses this exact same idea, but made it even better by elaborating on it and the result was awesome.

So, considering the poor reputation of the Sexton Blake series, "The Grosvenor Square Mystery," as a second-string Sherlock Holmes imitation, wasn't all that bad and the locked room angle was surprisingly good. Particularly for 1909. The plot lacked proper clueing and the culprit was obvious, but the impossible crime and solution makes this story potential anthology material.

You can read story here.