Fear and Trembling (1936) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's Fear and Trembling (1936) is the nineteenth novel of the Anthony Bathurst mysteries and, like my previous read in the series, The Horn (1934), begins with an unaccountable disappearance and full with Sherlockian allusions, but Flynn has a phenomenal trick up its sleeve – a trick worthy of that Golden Decade of the Golden Age. The way in which this trick was executed proved Anthony Boucher was right that the rules of the detective story can only be broken, twisted or subverted by people who understand and respect them in the first place. 

David Somerset is an analytical chemist with his own manufacturing company, Somerset and Sons, which he runs together with his twin sons, Geoffrey and Gerald.

A respected chemist with a respectable family business, but the start of the story finds David Somerset en route to a secretive meeting with a syndicate in the smoke-room of the Golden Lion in East Brutton, Gloucestershire. The syndicate is a "strange company" of five foreign-looking men dressed in dinner jackets with a white gardenia and they're prepared to part with "a truly noble sum" in exchange for something Somerset possesses. Somerset believes what he has to offer is worth ten times as much ("one million pounds paid in notes") and the negotiations reaches a deadlock, which then heats up with threats and "stupid talk of murder." And the chapter ends with Somerset bending his head to listen to the syndicate's revised terms.

The second chapter brings Gerald Somerset to the office of Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police, to tell that both his father and brother have disappeared on the same day. On the morning of March 12, Somerset had issued instructions to his sons not to come to the office until midday, but when they arrived, they found that their father had left early in the morning and had not returned – he never did. That same night, Geoffrey didn't come home. Vanishing as completely as his father. So what's going on?

Anthony Bathurst is only too happy to give Sir Austin and Gerald a helping hand, because this knotty problem appeals to him, but admits he hasn't a glimmer of an idea and confided in Sir Austin that he hopes they haven't sent Gerald to his death. Bathurst is justified in believing the case outside routine when the bodies of father and son are found in a copse. David Somerset was shot through the head and Geoffrey had a fractured skull, but, while David Somerset was clasping a revolver, the possibility of murder/suicide is rejected as "fantastic rubbish." Chief Detective Inspector Andrew MacMorran and Bathurst have a long haul ahead of them with more disappearances and murder. 

Fear and Trembling is a genuine, 1930s detective novel, but Flynn wrote and structured the story like a turn-of-the-century adventure thriller with Bathurst retracing Somerset's footsteps on the day he vanished, tracing the elusive syndicate and trying to figure out what they're after – bringing him face to face with a femme fatale. A mysterious woman who acts as a spokesman for the syndicate and she manages to unbalance the normally smart-alecky detective. Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, who wrote the introduction for these new Dean Street Press editions noted in his 2018 review described the flirting between the two as "antagonism interlaced with compliments and a little innuendo" and "cut from the same cloth" as the romances found in John Dickson Carr's work. Steve's not wrong. There's even a fleeting hint of Carr when the woman vanishes from moving taxicab tailed by the police, but their entanglement reminded me of Spike Tracy's predicament with Patsy in Harriette Ashbrook's Murder Comes Back (1940).

Not unexpectedly, chasing this mysterious woman and syndicate around places Bathurst in one, or two, tight corners. Flynn used the aftermath of one of these situations to recreate a scene from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905). This is not the only hint of Sherlock Holmes in the story.

So you might be wondering how, what appears to be a Doylean thriller, turns into a proper, fairly clued and inventive detective story, but it's difficult to describe or provide some finer details without giving anything vital away – which would ruin the excellent ending. However, I can say that the second half has one of the all time greatest bookshelf clues I've ever come across and a very relevant clue to the main crux of the plot. And good plot at that. The basic idea behind the plot is something that has been done before and since, but how it was done is something else I've never seen before and is quite ingenious and shrewd. There's one detail that gives me pause for thought, but suppose that can be put down to the times and certain aspects of police work not being as thorough as they are today. See if you can spot it.

Yeah, all things considered, Fear and Trembling is a mystery novel impersonating a turn-of-the-century thriller, but with the inner workings of a cleverly twisted, 1930s detective story with plenty of clues and misdirection to keep the reader engaged. I completely agree with Steve that this is one of Flynn's ten best novels that should have made him a much better-known mystery writer during his lifetime. Highly recommended!

Spent Matches (1996) by Shelly Reuben

Shelly Reuben is a New York private detective, arson investigator and an Edgar nominated crime novelist whose goal is to bring "the emphasis on values, heroism and moral conflict" which "so characterized the great novels of the nineteenth century" – updated to reflect "the issues, settings and circumstances of our time." Spent Matches (1996) certainly resembles a Victorian-era serial novel with its multiple, interwoven storylines with a shared cast of characters and settings. But that's not what put the book on my radar.

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) erroneously lists Spent Matches as a 1986 novel concerning the "destruction of paintings by fire in a secure museum" and impressed me as something similar to Herbert Resnicow's 1980s impossible crime novels. A completely wrong impression that was corrected upon reading. I was surprised my second, more informed impression proved to be spot on when I found Reuben's quote about wanting to enlarge the scope and scale of the nineteenth century novel to include modern issues and settings. She definitely succeeded in summoning the ghost of the Victorian serial novel with these three, interconnected stories about firebugs and the man who brings them to justice, Wylie Nolan. But what about the locked room, you ask? Good question!

Luckily, Spent Matches deserves to be listed in Skupin's Locked Room Murders and the stated problem is a genuine impossibility, complete with a false solution, that takes up the majority of the story.

Wegman Zigfield is an 80-year-old entrepreneur who bought an old church and converted it into the Zigfield Art Museum, exhibiting only representational art, classic or contemporary, but his son, Former, is "an ardent admirer" of Sarkin Zahedi – who's also his closest friend. However, Zigfield hates all abstract art and forbade his son to bring Zahedi's work into his museum. So he concocted a scheme and, behind his father's back, Fromer applied for a grant, printed catalogs and sent out press releases to the media. Canceling the exhibit would mean getting entangled in expensive litigation, but Zigfield punished Fromer by replacing him with Jiri Hozda as associate director. A man who has a very personal reason to dislike modern art. Zigfield also reduced the exhibit from ten to five paintings and moved it to the Parlor Gallery, which has "stained glass windows, restricted wall space and skylights." But that's where the trouble begins.

On an early Friday morning, the museum guard is put into the action by the smoke alarm in the Parlor Gallery, but when he unlocks the door, shielding his nose with one hand, he discovers nothing was on fire inside. The Sarkin Zahedi collection was "reduced to empty rectangles suspended on sooty walls" over "neat piles of debris that had accumulated on the floor."

The laying down of the problem of the locked gallery demonstrated a reassuring awareness of the impossible crime story. The heavy door and windows were securely locked with no evidence of "forcible entry into the gallery prior to the fire" or even anyone entering the museum during the night. A keypad automatically records everyone entering on a printout in the security room and the motion detectors in the corridors weren't triggered. Zigfield tells Nolan that he doesn't like locked room mysteries and Nolan has to admit it's "one of the weirdest damn fires" he has ever encountered, because it looks as if the room either committed suicide or a ghost did it – a ghost who burned the paintings one by one. Solution to this locked room problem is good and delightfully demonstrates, metaphorically, "why so many arsonists become their own victims." However, you can make a rough guess what happened, because putting the clues and significance of certain things together requires some expert knowledge. Nolan even had to consult a higher authority on a piece of evidence. Still a very well done impossible crime with an original premise and satisfying conclusion.

On a side note, I suspected a slightly different solution, based on the layout of the gallery,
resembling the brilliant locked room-trick from "Petals of Envy" (Fire Investigator Nanase, vol. 1).

There are two more storylines in Spent Matches. One of these

Seems fitting

storylines centers on Mathilda Yee, an attorney, who has her office in the same building as Nolan, but lately, someone has been starting fires in the ladies' room. Whoever is responsible is trying to frame her. Nolan makes quick work of this case and have nothing else to say about it. This plot-thread was a little too modern for my taste.

Strangely enough, I found the third and last plot-strand weirdly compelling and this one focused on a young man, Camden "Camelot" Kimcannon, who has an extreme, almost retroactive, case of arrested development – who lives with his verbally abusive mother. Nevertheless, he's, what can be called, an eccentric dreamer who dresses like an artist, or poet, from a bygone era and even writes with a quill pen! His attic room is crammed with books on King Arthur and nothing else that "wasn't conceived of earlier than a century ago." A dreamer who has buried his soul deep in the past, but in a stunted, childlike manner. Camden volunteers at the museum in the naive hope of getting to help with the exhibition of pre-Raphaelite paintings, but the guest curator, Georgina Weeks, decides to allow him to help her. She also tries to get him away from his mother, but this will disastrous consequences when he becomes the suspect in an arson homicide. Nolan again goes to the scene of a fire to look at the evidence the flames left behind.

Nolan annoyed me when he appeared in the gallery case, but improved as a character over the course of the story and shined, as an arson investigator, in the last case as he gave a brief and interesting look at how an arson/crime scene investigator works – comparing his method to that of a forensic pathologist. Years later, these kind of scenes would form the basis for the whole CSI franchise. 

Spent Matches is despite its Victorian-like plot structure and an original locked room problem a modern, character-driven crime novel and had no reason to like it, but quite enjoyed this modern curiosity. Not a classic of its kind. Certainly not! But a fascinating curiosity of the locked room mystery tucked away in modern crime novel with balanced characterization showing both the darker and lighter facets of human nature. So not recommended to everyone who reads this blog, but if it can keep the Grand Inquisitor of the Plotting Department reading, you also might find it worth your time.

The Horn (1934) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Horn (1934) is the fifteenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, like The Triple Bite (1931), Flynn wrote it as an homage to his favorite mystery writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which took its cue from Doyle's most well-known short story, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892) – more than a hint of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Flynn didn't merely wrote throwbacks to a previous, gas-lit era of the detective story. He upgraded the Doylean detective story to the standards of the Golden Age and The Horn is no different! 

Mark Kenriston, of Ilmington House, Whitton, is a young man with "an open, sunny disposition" and
a personal horizon "innocent of the smallest cloud." Mark is engaged to be married to Imogen Halliwell, but, on the eve of his wedding, he told everyone following a dinner party that he was going to take a walk down to the village. And that was the last occasion on which he was seen.

Two months pass without any news, or leads, in

the case and Mark's sister, Juliet, is on the verge of getting married herself with the wedding only a fortnight away. Someone has begun to frighten and terrorize Juliet.

Juliet had been badly affected by her brother's disappearance and her doctor recommended plenty of sunshine and open air, which is why it was decided to move her to Mark's bedroom. Several times, Juliet was awakened during the night by "a curious pitter-patter of feet," or something rushing across her face, like "an animal of some kind" – shades of Stoke Moran and Dr. Roylott! Whatever it was, she caught a flash of it as it escaped through the open window. Juliet's nerves has also been shot to pieces by "a curious noise" heard outside Ilmington House during the early hours of the morning. The braying of a gigantic horn!

So Juliet's fiancé, Julian Skene, has good reasons to believe history about to repeat itself and turns to Anthony Bathurst for help.

Bathurst assumes the scanty disguise of Anthony Lotherington (his middle name), an author, who has taken residence at Samuel Fairbrother's The Rifleman Inn to take in the local color for his prospective book on Northumbrian superstitions. But he's immediately recognized by Juliet and Mark's aunt, Sophie St. Alary, who decides to take him into her confidence about a package Juliet had received. A package containing a watch, a knife, a pair of scissors and thirty-one gray buttons cut from a flannel suit that "the ill-fated Mark Kenriston had worn just before he had slipped over the earth's edge." And with it came a letter with three dates and a curious phrase, "seek the reversed apron." These are not the only clues and hints littering the place that range from a stolen hunting horn and horse racing (of course) to the personality of Marquis de Sade and a locked shed.

So as he pokes and probes the problem from all sides, the day of the wedding comes nearer and, before everything is said and done, two more people have disappeared.

As said above, Flynn paid tribute with The Horn to Conan Doyle and "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," but plotted like a detective story of its time and, considering the story centers on several disappearance, I suspect Doyle wasn't Flynn only inspiration – because The Horn bears some resemblance to Freeman Wills Crofts' The Hog's Back Mystery (1933). I know the gap between the two is a narrow one and it could be a case of parallel thinking, which took the same basic idea in two different directions, but it's telling that two of the disappearances, in each book, took place under somewhat similar circumstances. But, once again, Crofts and Flynn told two very different stories based on the same basic idea. Naturally, arrived at two very different conclusions.

And, while The Horn is written like a Victorian-era melodrama, Flynn gave it a typically, 1930s plot with plenty of clues, some misdirection and "a moderately respectable alibi." The solution is ultimately a simple one, but it took me some time to put everything together only to have briefly sand thrown in my eyes towards the end. Something that would have been a bit of a cheat in any other detective novel where it not for the theme of the story that murder "as a pure expression of sadism is almost unknown." And this case is the almost in that sentence. This is perhaps the reason why the 2020 Dean Street Press edition is the first time the book has been reprinted in "in any form since its original publication."

The Horn ranks alongside Invisible Death (1929), The Orange Axe (1931) and The Edge of Terror (1932) as a solid Flynn novel wonderfully blending the detective story of Doyle's days with those from the 1930s. Flynn was criminally underrated during his lifetime and deserves a posthumous membership to the Detection Club!

The Great Revolt (2016) by Paul Doherty

I'm an idiot and chronologically challenged! Back in 2016, I read Paul Doherty's Bloodstone (2011), a book reviving the Brother Athelstan series, which had lain dormant since The House of Shadows (2003) and Doherty began to work prodigiously towards the Great Uprising of 1381 – the major story-arc of the series. I told in my 2018 review of The Straw Men (2013) that it was my intention to read these new novels in chronological order, but, as you probably noticed, the previous review was of The Herald of Hell (2015). There are two novels between The Straw Men and The Herald of Hell, Candle Flame (2014) and The Book of Fires (2015). Somehow, I had already crossed them off the list in my mind. Why? Because I'm an idiot, that's why. You can jeer and mock me in the comments.

The Great Revolt (2016) is the sixteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, set in June, 1831, when the Great Community of the Realm and the Upright Men began their bloody purge of London.

Brother Athelstan is at the mother house of the Dominican order, Blackfriars, where he had been summoned to provide assistance to a papal envoy. The boy-king, Richard II, had returned from a pilgrimage to the tomb of his great-grand father, Edward II, with the conviction his ancestor was a saint and a royal martyr – "a true martyr king" like "other saintly monarchs" in "the misty history of the English crown." So he petitioned "the Holy Father for the formal opening of the process for the beatification and canonisation of Edward II" and since Urban VI has a rival pope, Clement VII, residing in Avignon, which makes it desirable for Rome not to alienate the English crown. Athelstan is asked to help gather evidence in favor of canonization of Edward II, but that's easier said than done. Edward II was a divisive monarch with evidence suggesting the deposed king had been freed and fled to the continent, which would be embarrassing for both King Richard and the Pope. And are the 54-year-old secrets worth keeping to the point of murder?

One of the papal envoys, Brother Alberic, collected evidence against the dead king's reputation in his role as advocatus diaboli (devil's advocate), but when the story open, the door to his room is being battered down. A room with only a very narrow, lancet window and a heavy, elmwood door securely locked and bolted from within, but Alberic had been "brutally stabbed" with "an ancient-looking dagger" nobody recognizes. Even stranger is that Alberic was a former soldier, still young and vigorous, but there's no sign or "even a scratch of any struggle or challenge." Alberic is not the last to die violently on consecrated ground of Blackfriars.

You shouldn't expect too much from the locked room-trick, because it's based on a simple idea that has been explored before, but it was put to good use here and the reason why there wasn't any signs of a struggle was genuinely clever and a splendid hint to the identity of the elusive assassin. Just like Steve, the Puzzle Doctor, something "I haven't seen before." This portion of the plot is basically a historical mystery within a historical mystery, linking the tumultuous events of 1327 and 1381, which proved to be tapestry of long-held, treasured secrets and bloody murder – set against a background resembling the end of days. Brother Athelstan and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, move back and forth between Blackfriars and London.

The footmen of the Upright Men, the Earthworms, were out in full force and directed the grisly
executions and feel slightly guilty for snickering at the lively crowd heckling the unsteady, piss drunk executioners gruesomely botching a beheading as "butter-fingered fumblers." How can you not love the English? But as the revolt drew on, the bloodshed was used to settle old scores and attack the vulnerable as the streets were littered with corpses knifed, garroted or dangling from ropes. So wherever they went there were torn down walls, shredded gates and fences, burning houses and "summary execution at different places along the way." Everywhere they passed where "scaffolds, gibbets and gallows festooned with corpses" or "decorated with bloody body parts and severed heads." Even by Doherty's own standards, The Great Revolt has an incredibly stacked bodycount.

But while they're deep into enemy territory, surrounded by

anarchy and murder, Athelstan and Sir John have their concerns. Sir John wants to be with King Richard when the time comes to meet the rebels and their mysterious leader, Wat Tyler, while Athelstan is deeply concerned about his parishioners. Most of them were taken prisoner and spirited away before the violence erupted, but one of them, Pernel the Fleming, was drowned and her house torched. She may have had a connection to one of the people currently sheltering at Blackfriars. Athelstan also worried about his non-human friends such as his old horse and that wily, one-eyed tomcat, Bonaventure, who had been "his constant dining companion" and credited the cat with "more wit and sense than all his parishioners put together."

So, needless to say, The Great Revolt is an eventful novel in which Doherty took some creative liberties in tying together his fictitious plot-threads with the historical accounts of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the death of Edward II, which he acknowledged in his Author's Note. But, to quote Doherty, historical novels "often reflect a reality based firmly on fact rather than fiction." I think The Great Revolt succeeded in being both an engrossing historical novel and a well done detective story. Definitely recommended!

By the way, how amazing would it be if Doherty's detective fiction was actually history. Just imagine our history books littered with accounts of Egyptian judges, royal clerks and Dominican friars solving locked room murders, dying messages, complicated ciphers and hounding ancient serial killers.

The Herald of Hell (2015) by Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty's The Herald of Hell (2015) is the fifteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, originally published as by "Paul Harding," which takes place in May, 1381, as "the day of the Great Slaughter" of the Upright Men dawned and "the flame of rebellion would burst out" – a period when conspiracies, fear and murder engulfed London. The Herald of Hell is the mysterious envoy of the Upright Men who "appears at all hours of night outside the lodgings of loyal servants to the crown" to intimidate and threaten them with doggerel verses. But the Herald is the least of Brother Athelstan's problem.

John of Gaunt, self-styled regent, protector and uncle of the boy-king, Richard II, has designs of his own with his Master of Secrets, Thibault, secretly meeting with one of the leaders of the Upright Men, Wat Tyler. What they have to say to each other is plain treason concerning the fate of Richard II and an enigmatic cipher, which was seized from one of the Upright Men's courier, Reynard. Only thing that was missing was the alphabet, or key, to decipher the message. Something even the cruel, tortuous interrogations of the time had failed to bring forth. 

Master Thibault allowed Reynard to recover in Newgate with "the opportunity to reflect and mend his ways," which could net him a full pardon from John of Gaunt. And, in the meanwhile, Master Thibault tasked Amaury Whitfield with breaking the cipher. This is where carefully laid plans slowly begin to unravel on all sides.

Amaury Whitfield is a clerk of the secret chancery and skilled in cryptic writing, but recently, he began to understand how far the web stretched and a nighttime visit from the Herald of Hell impelled him, under the cover boon days, to flee to the Golden Oliphant – Southwark's most notorious brothel. There he attended with his minion, Oliver Lebarge, the Festival of Cokayne. But, on the morning following the festivities, Whitfield failed to emerge from his room and the door had to broken down with a battering ram. Inside they find Whitefield dangling from a rope which had been lashed to a lantern hook on the ceiling beam! The key was still on the inside of the lock, eyelet covered, while the windows shutters were closed and barred. The room is situated at the top of the house and overlooked, besides a sheer drop, a garden where guard dogs roam at night. So how could have been anything but suicide?

A highly agitated Master Thibault officially commissions Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, and his secretarius, Brother Athelstan, to investigate the mysteries at the Golden Oliphant. And to unlock the cipher.

The brothel proves to be a hotbed of murder, treachery and intrigue with a second cipher to a long-lost treasure, the Cross of Lothar, the presence of a spy of the Upright Men and a second, quasi-impossible murder late in the story when one the characters tumbles down the steep, narrow staircase – which is still a fraction of what happens in this 200-page novel. Doherty ensures his reader is never bored with his characters constantly plotting, and counter plotting, or dragging cartloads of corpses across its pages. Something is always happening and "everything is connected" like "beads on a string."

One aspect I deeply admire about Doherty's best detective novels is how they're written as historical epics without diluting the detective story elements, such as A Murder in Thebes (1998), which is a trick he repeated in The Herald of Hell. While treason is plotted and the Earthworms, foot soldiers of the Upright Men, openly roamed the city and intervened in executions, the attention on the Golden Oliphant remained tight and focused without making it feel isolated. The solution to this portion of the story is excellent with the events at the Golden Oliphant best described as a Golden Age-style locked room mystery transplanted to 1381.

The first locked room-trick is a variation on an age-old trick and how it was done is easy enough to figure out, but the small variation successfully blinded me about another key aspect of the solution. Second, quasi-impossible murder has an equal simplistic explanation, but the aim of that trick was to create the kind of alibi you would expect to find in a Christopher Bush novel. 

Naturally, there much more to the plot with many moving parts and additional corpses, such as the treasure hunt, ciphers and the personal challenges and dangers the friar has to face before he could move towards "a logical conclusion to a most vexatious problem" – reconstructed, piece by piece, during a lengthy exposition. Something that was necessary to tie everything together, but certainly didn't detract from the overall story. The book ends on a kind of cliffhanger that will be concluded in The Great Revolt (2016), which very likely going to be my next read.

So, all things considered, Doherty has plotted better locked room mysteries, but The Herald of Hell is one of his better historical novels in which he seamlessly blended historical events with pure fiction. Highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: The Herald of Hell is a crossover novel by stealth! One of the places that plays a role in the story is a church, St. Mary Le Bowe, where a hundred years ago a Laurence Duket had fled to for sanctuary. The church was "locked and sealed for the night," but, when it was unlocked the following morning, the priest found Duket hanging from a wall bracket and "the King sent a royal clerk to investigate." I knew this sounded familiar, and yes, it turns out this is a reference to the first Hugh Corbett novel, Satan in St. Mary (1986)! Unfortunately, it spoiled the name of the murderer, but to have iron-clad proof of Athelstan and Corbett living in different timelines of the same fictitious universe is the stuff of fandoms!

Locked and Loaded: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

Last year, I put together a hypothetical locked room anthology, "The Locked Room Reader XI: Locked Out," composed of short stories that were overlooked and never appeared in any of the anthologies published between The Locked Room Reader: Stories of Impossible Crimes and Escapes (1968) and The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths (2020) – a list appended with my personal wishlist. A wishlist with interesting and intriguing-sounding stories that have been rarely been reprinted or stuck in obscure, often hard-to-get magazine publications.

Regrettably, most of the obscure stories on that wishlist remain out of my reach, but the backlog of short locked room and impossible crime stories has grown exponentially over the past twelve months. I've to acknowledge and thank Alexander, of The Detection Collection, who helped padding that backlog.

The backlog has become so cluttered that it was time for another bloated compilation post with review of uncollected stories. So let's dig in!

Table of Content:

"Murder on a Bet" by H.C. Kincaid

"The Loaded House" by Francis Bonnamy 

"The Thumbless Man" by Charles B. Child

"The Man Who Wasn't There" by Charles B. Child

"Murder in a Locked Box" by Patrick Meadows

"Virgil Tibbs and the Fallen Body" by John Ball

"The Gallowglass" by David Braly

H.C. Kincaid's "Murder on a Bet" appeared in the November, 1950, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as an "ultra contemporary" take on the locked room trope with a solution promising “the stuff of tomorrow's news.” A prediction that has since come true.

The story centers around a group of six businessmen who only have two things in common, "an almost fanatical respect for the pledged word" and "predilection for murder mysteries," which lead to a discussion and a challenge at the Malunion Club. A recent issue of EQMM had a locked room story and John Hendrix "vigorously denounced" such stories as unrealistic and gimmicky. Victor Julian challenges his opinion and assures everyone he could device a method without "the use of any mechanical device or any deception of the senses." So a $150,000 challenge is written down on paper.

Hendrix agreed to take residence in a hotel room stocked with enough food and drink to last him a week, which then has to be locked from the inside and the doors as well as the windows sealed shut with strips of adhesive tape – guards from a reputable detective agency were posted in the corridor for the whole week. When the time limit had expired, they opened the hotel room, noting the seals were intact, but Hendrix was dead. And there wasn't a mark on his body or a trace of poison in his system. Doc Kay is called in by the businessmen to help them get out of this mess and clear their names from suspicion.

A clever, two-part trick with the administration of death being a modern update of a trick that seasoned mystery readers will probably recognize, but Kincaid found a new way to use a locked, sealed and closely guarded room. A story worthy to be anthologized. 

Francis Bonnamy's "The Loaded House" was first published in the December, 1950, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as one of the winners of a short story contest. "The Loaded House" impressed the jury as a "bright and amusing" story with "a strange sort of Southern hospitality" and "chockful, ram-jam-loaded with detectives" – as multiple characters contribute to the solution. The breezy, lighthearted and sometimes flippant tone of the story did remind me of Delano Ames and Kelley Roos.

Francis "Frank" Bonnamy is the assistant of the well-known Peter Utley Shane, head of the Department of Criminology at the University of Chicago, but during his wartime stint, he lived in Alexandria, Virginia. The old port is preparing to celebrate its bicentennial and Frank wants to show his wife, Mavis, the place to meet the delightful friends he made there. There is, however, a problem. Every time Frank stays in that part of Virginia, the area "becomes littered with the sudden dead" and his old landlady greets him with, "Oh no! Not Death's advance man!" And the good, old detective curse lives up to it reputation when the Bonnamys gets invited to a housewarming party to unveil a garden-sized swimming pool with a body floating in it! A second body turns up on the doorstep, shot through the head, which is what earned this story a spot in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

However, to qualify the second murder as an impossible crime stretches the definition a little, but I'll allow it as it made splendid use of the historically rich past of the town and the antiques that litter the place. A very well done detective story that convinced me to take a closer look at Francis Bonnamy sometime in the future. I've know become incredibly curious about Death on a Dude Ranch (1939), A Rope of Sand (1944) and The King is Dead on Queen Street (1945).

Charles B. Child's "The Thumbless Man" was originally published as "The Invisible Killer" in the
January 21, 1955, publication of Collier's and reprinted under its current title in the December, 1961, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It's one of those altogether too rare archaeological mysteries with an originally imagined premise and a good solution.

Chief Inspector Chafik J. Chafik, of the Baghdad police, is summoned to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city, Akkar, where two bodies were found in a burial chamber. One of the bodies is close to 4000-year-old with a modern knife in his back and the second, much fresher, body belongs to a representative of the Department of Antiquities, Jamil Goury – who was found with strange strangulation marks on his throat. And those marks suggest he had been killed by someone with exceptionally hard, thumbless hands. What makes the murder an outright impossibility is the passageway into the tomb was very narrow and one section could only be passed by crawling. Goury headed a party into the tomb, but appeared to be attacked, and strangled, while the people behind were unable to help or save him. Only person on the other side is a dusty corpse almost as old as recorded history. 

"The Thumbless Man" is a truly wonderful story with a fascinating backdrop and impossible crime, but it's Chafik who steals the show with his lines and some excellent scenes. Such as when Chafik has a brush with death and awakens inside a tent to immediately admonish the first person he sees by saying, "I did not die here; my corpse should not have been moved." Chafik also channeled John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin when telling the murderer that "the devil and I have much in common" and gave [redacted] a taste of hell by placing [redacted] in Goury's position. I seriously need to go after a copy of Child's The Sleuth of Baghdad (2002).

On a side note: Steve, of MysteryFile, reviewed "The Thumbless Man" back in May and, while he liked the story, questioned why "the killer decided to go to such length to commit such a murder" that's bound to raise more questions than a staged accident. A collapse, or faulty wiring, would have been as dangerous to the murderer in those circumstances as to the victim. So the murderer adopted this roundabout way to create an impossibility that also functions as an alibi.

Charles B. Child's "The Man Who Wasn't There" was published in the April, 1969, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings Chief Inspector Chafik to the home of an Egyptian exile and recluse, Faris Zakir. Constable Abdul Rahim had been called three times to the house in one week on account of an unauthorized person entering the premise. A person who was seen and left "alien footprints" on the stairs to an unoccupied upper floor and vanished, but even more baffling is how this person managed to enter the house. The place was practically a fortress with a heavy bar on the front doors and all of the windows either protected with iron grills or shuttered. Chafik leaves the inexperienced constable in charge of the case, which proves to have fatal consequences.

Unfortunately, Child glosses over the impossibility of the footprints on the stairs, which detracted from the overall quality of the story, but the dangerous game Chafik plays with the murderer to extract an unlawful kind of justice was excellently done. So this one was better written than plotted.

Patrick Meadows' "Murder in a Locked Box" is a short-short story, originally published in the August, 1969, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and takes place in a police station where a "dropout from the underworld was comfortable and coddled" in a prison cell – while closely watched by Chief Delany on TV screen. Chief Delany witnesses "Chops" Moran dropping to floor, twitches twice and then remained eerily motionless. Moran had been poisoned with cyanide and suicide is out of the question, but how then was the poison administrated? Chief Delany makes short work of the case and apprehends the murderer before this person can even begin to feel apprehensive about being caught. This is not bad for something so short, but neither is it particular clever or memorable. A snack sized locked room story and nothing more than that.

John Ball's "Virgil Tibbs and the Fallen Body" was first published in the September, 1978, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings the impossible crime to the modern police procedural. Police Detective Virgil Tibbs is present when body falls with "a violent thud" on the sidewalk of a towering building. Tibbs notices some clues arguing against suicide, but an interview with the building's general manager makes murder equally impossible. Only a few windows in the building can be opened and then only very slightly, which barely allows enough room to crawl through. Since the building is only partially rented out, everything above the thirty-second floor is blocked-off and access is severely restricted. And the dust on the roof was undisturbed. So where did the body come from since "he couldn't have fallen out of the sky."

The solution is interesting, but terribly unconvincing with the who-and why treated as an afterthought and left me somewhat disappointed. It could have worked, if the idea had been elaborated on. No recommendation here. Nonetheless, I've now bumped Ball's Singapore (1986) op my to-be-read pile to see what he did with a novel-length locked room mystery.

David Braly's "The Gallowglass" was originally published in the August, 1986, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and collected in Murder at Teatime: Mysteries in the Classic Cozy Tradition (1996), which will make some of you cringe, but don't despair. This story is not a cozy. "The Gallowglass" is an old-fashioned, traditionally fashioned locked room mystery with everything but a warm, cozy backdrop for a gruesome killing with a medieval weapon.

On a dark, stormy night, Sergeant Brian Sullivan is taking a locksmith to a mansion in the County of Cork, Ireland, which used to belong to a 17th century gallowglass (mercenary) who had built the original house that formed the center of the current building and, when he was slain in battle, cursed the place – swearing he would kill every Englishman "till the crack of doom." However, the ghost is one of the two things that attracted the very English Dr. George and Elizabeth Harrogate to the mansion with the other being that "Ireland doesn't tax authors" (kind of true). Dr. Harrogate makes his money with writing textbooks, science-fiction novels and working on his invention, the sea camera. A combination of photography and computer radar that would show "a lake or sea as being transparent."

They lived there for three years without anything untoward happening, but, during one of the greatest storms the locals can remember, Dr. Harrogate uncharacteristically bolted his study door. And he doesn't respond to his wife's knocking. So she calls the police, but even the locksmith is unable to force the sturdy, solid oak door and the windows were nailed close years ago. When they finally managed to break into the room, they find Dr. Harrogate's body with battleaxe "embedded deeply" in his chest and the papers concerning his invention are missing.

Sergeant Sullivan arrested a well-known housebreaker, who was seen near the house at the time of the murder, but has no earthly idea how he managed to get out of that tightly shut room. So they fly in Detective Chief Inspector Phelim Kane from Dublin to Cork to help Sullivan with that last piece of the puzzle, but Kane is there "to investigate all aspects of the case" and investigate he does. Kane arrives at an entirely different conclusion than his local colleague.

The locked room-trick is fairly simple and straightforward, but not one of those hackneyed, routine solutions so often employed by writers who wanted to write a locked room story without knowing how to plot one – like turning a key with special tweezers or drawing a bolt with string. Braly was a little more sophisticated than that and his explanation nicely dovetailed with the situation of the house, the storm and fitted the murderer perfectly. I also admired how effortlessly the story slipped into an adjacent genre in its closing pages.

Braly's "The Gallowglass" is another story deserving the attention of editors and anthologists for inclusion in a future locked room collection.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed my rambling about all these loose, uncollected locked room and impossible crime stories. Hopefully, they will one day find their way into another locked room anthology. And that I'll have read most of the obscure stories in that hypothetical anthology is a sacrifice I'm willing to make for all of you.

Sleightly Invisible (1986) by Patrick A. Kelley

Back in March, I reviewed the third novel in Patrick A. Kelley's short-lived Harry Colderwood series, Sleightly Lethal (1986), which comprises of five novels about a poor, down-on-his-luck magician who moonlights as a private detective with the characters and milieus fitting the fan-and popculture themed mysteries – which proliferated during the 1980s. A period highlighted in my review of Anthony Oliver's The Elberg Collection (1985).

There are, however, two big differences between the Harry Colderwood books and other fan-and popculture themed mystery novels from that decade.

Firstly, Kelley's plots tend to be razor thin with very little adherence to the traditional detective story and appear to lack any interest in developing (new) locked room/impossible crime ideas, which marked these eighties reimagining of the fair play detective story. Such as Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981) and Richard Purtill's Murdercon (1982). Secondly, Kelley obviously wrote this series with a TV deal in mind with the stories designed for small screen adaptation. From the uncomplicated, easy to follow plots to the not quite stock, but still colorful, characters (clowns, psychics and magicians), settings and scene-driven narratives. The series was written like an '80s crime drama and it would surprise me if it wasn't shopped around the networks. 

So the books are fast and fun to read, but the plots won't leave a lasting impressi on on you. This was true for Sleightly Lethal and it will be the same story with Sleightly Invisible (1986).

Sleightly Lethal attracted my attention with its intriguing cover and brief plot description, "it was murder, not magic, that put a dead clown in a locked safe," but it couldn't be further away from an impossible crime and Sleightly Invisible promised one of those séance mysteries with a missing coed as "the star of the seance" – murder is "the uninvited guest." So, in combination with the suggestive cover, it was not unreasonable to expect something in the spirit of John Sladek's Black Aura (1974) or Peter Lovesey's A Case of Spirits (1975). Well, that wasn't the case. Oh, there were fraudulent psychics with an ending staged around a séance, but, by that the time, the story had morphed into something more in line with Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death (1987). Cover and short synopsis were made and worded to sucker in readers like me.

The story opens with Harry Colderwood performing street magic on the sidewalks of small, entertainment starved town, where he was passing through when his van broke down, but his act is sabotaged. And the culprit is his old nemesis, Birch Osborne. An ex-mentalist who, ten years ago, came very close to cashing in on Colderwood's $10,000 open challenge "to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal powers." Osborne had mocked "the laws of probability to the tune of three million to one," under close scrutiny of witnesses and cameras, when he named every card in a shuffled ESP deck in the exact order. For a whole day, the newspaper had celebrated Colderwood's defeat and it had taken him that much time to duplicate the mind reading stunt, which allowed him to stop payment on the check.

But while Colderwood's career went into a tailspin, Osborne won the lottery and voluntarily withdrew from the spotlight to live under his real name, James Cassileth, as a financial adviser. Now someone is trying to pin a serious crime on him.

One week before, a grad student in psychology, Chana Coolidge, had been kidnapped from her college library and clues were scant, but the story really heated up when her father arrived in town with his own hired help, Virginia Porter – an old and experienced hand at the psychic game. She brought her assistant and background investigator, George Zimbardo, who unearths "scraps of information that Porter can pretend to have psychically divined." Porter gave a TV interview in which she gave an uncharacteristically detailed description of the kidnapper. A description of Osborne and there are more clues that someone is trying to lead the police to his doorstep.

Osborne was very persuasive in convincing Colderwood to take the case and he discovers two important things: Chana's was doing a class project on behavior modification with the "ironclad stipulation" that "the subject of the experiment must be informed that he is the subject," but Chana had confided to her professor that she hadn't informed her subject. And now she was afraid of him. She had only submitted the title of her paper, The Game Player. Second thing coming to his attention is an experimental new hybrid game, Ultra, combining "the strategy of board games with the physical skills of sports" with costumed players being chased through a maze, based on computer-fed commands, while "shooting at each other with infrared-emitting gun" – dressed in the aesthetics of a fictitious fantasy series, The Zon Universe. So pretty much a cosplay version of 1980s Photon Laser Tag.

Admittedly, the internet aspect of the game seems a little ahead of its time, but suppose it was possible with sending short text commands and the maze provided the story with two of its best set pieces. Colderwood decides to investigate the Ultra game after closing hours and ends being chased through the maze by someone in lizard suit and a very real gun. Later he decides to stage the séance there, but more than that can't be said about the plot. Simply because there's not much more to tell.

You barely notice how little movement there's in the plot and even a late murder of an important character (shot with an arrow) goes by practically unnoticed, because you'll have reached the ending when you finally catch on how threadbare the plot really is. So he definitely knew how to tell a yarn and showed he understood with plotting with the clues he planted that hinted at what was happening, and why, but choose to keep things as simple and uncomplicated as possible. One of the reasons why I suspect he wrote the series with a TV deal in mind and perhaps knew the 1970s Ellery Queen TV series was canceled because (according to co-creator William Link) was too complicated for its own good. So he went in the opposite direction. I wonder if the failure of NBC's 1986 Blacke's Magic spoiled things for Kelley and Colderwood.

So, on a whole, Kelley's Sleightly Invisible was not necessarily a bad read, but it was very bland without anything to recommend unless you have a special interest in fiction featuring magic and magicians. I can also imagine people who grew up during the '80s and were deep into some kind of fandom/culture would get a nostalgic rush out of this series. Everyone else is advised not to break their piggy bank to obtain copies.

Sudden Death (1932) by Freeman Wills Crofts

This year, the Collins Crime Club imprint, of HarperCollins, reissued six long out-of-print novels by Freeman Wills Crofts in two batches of three with the second batch comprising of Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), Crime at Guildford (1935) and the novel that has been on my wishlist for ages, Sudden Death (1932) – which is Crofts' take on my beloved locked room mystery. Inspector Joseph French has build a reputation on being "invariably sceptical of alibis" and breaking them down with painstaking work and dogged determination. Sudden Death demonstrated French is as adept at tearing down locked rooms as he is at disassembling faked alibis with no less than two impossible murders coming his way!

Sudden Death also showed Crofts could be more, if he wanted to be, than a plot-technician with the story's viewpoint alternating between French and a young woman, Anne Day.

Anne had spent most of her early life in an old Gloucester parsonage attending her reclusive, scholarly father, Reverend Latimer Day, but when he passed away, she was left homeless with "an income of barely thirty pounds a year" – only lucky enough to find a job as a companion to an elderly lady. But when she died, a then 28-year-old Anne was forced back to the registry offices of London with no special qualifications while "shoes and gloves, and latterly even food and lodging" becoming "more and more hideously insistent problems." One day, Anne is offered a position in the home of Severus Grinsmead to help his sick, semi-invalid wife, Sybil, run the household. A well paid position with a very generous advance. Naturally, not everything is as rosy as it seems.

Surprisingly, coming from Crofts, there's a hint of The Had-I-But-Known School in the opening chapter with the line "had she known all that awaited her at Ashbridge," she "might well have drawn back in dismay" from "the agonies of fear and horror and suspense which she was fated to endure with the Grinsmeads."

Sybil is a sickly, cold and deeply suspicious woman and it takes Anne some time to gain her confidence, but she didn't need it to understand that the relationship between husband-and-wife resembles that of an armed truce between two hostile nations. Sybil is aware her husband is having an affair with the local grass widow, Irene Holt-Lancing, which convinced her that they want her dead and biding their time for the right moment – ensuring Anne there will be an accident or "it may look like suicide." Puzzling, Anne becomes privy of evidence and information both confirming and contradicting Sybil's deadly fears. I think False Impressions would have been a better title than Sudden Death, because it fits so many aspects of the plot and story.

Nevertheless, not everything is laden with impending doom or suspicion. Anne comes to find out that the governess to the Grinsmead children, Edith Cheame, shares a similar life story to her own and that Severus Grinsmead's mother is not quite as stiff or censorious as Sybil made her out to be. She also strikes up a friendship with the children and gets on with the chauffeur/gardener like a house on fire. So she could almost forget her employers unhappy marriage, infidelity and suspicion, but that all changes one morning when Anne went to her bedroom to bring her tea. Anne's knocking remained unanswered by the invitational click of the electric, push-button operated bolt. She then noticed that there was "an odd smell of gas" in the corridor and quickly realized "gas was simply pouring out" of the keyhole of Sybil's room. A hammer and chisel were needed to demolish the lock and open the solid door, but help had arrived too late. Inspector Kendal, of the local police, goes over the room with a fine tooth comb, but finds "an enclosed affair" that "you couldn't very well temper with." So concludes it was a suicide and that's the verdict at the inquest.

There are, however, some minor details bothering Kendal and Scotland Yard assigned Inspector Joseph French to the case to go over all the details again and give them a second opinion. I suppose this is where people who dislike Crofts will very likely stop liking Sudden Death.

Crofts tried to write a novel of character (singular) with Anne Day as in the lead during the first third of the story, but French's thorough and painstaking investigation of the locked room problem proved his heart lay with the nuts and bolts of the plot – coming up with a number of ways to gas someone behind a locked door. My fellow impossible crime enthusiast and Crofts aficionado, "JJ” of The Invisible Event, suggests in his review that "dazzling array of options" can be counted as "a Locked Room Lecture that predates that of The Hollow Man (1935) by John Dickson Carr," but Crofts is "less showy" about it. For once, I've to agree with JJ. Crofts doesn't break the fourth wall to acknowledge the reader and it's not presented as a lecture, but it can be read as a proto-Locked Room Lecture. Something that will no doubt please anyone with a special affinity for impossible crime fiction.

Another thing that occurred to me while reading is Crofts might have created the most convincing and believable of all so-called fallible detectives. Anthony Berkeley usually made an ass out of Roger Sheringham (e.g. Jumping Jenny, 1934) and Ellery Queen too angsty (e.g. Ten Days' Wonder, 1948), but Crofts created a competent, intelligent and imaginative Scotland Yard inspector, which are admirable qualities, but they come without cast-iron guarantees of success attached to them. French is not an enigmatic detective who can deduce the truth from a bowl of daffodils or the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime, but he does use the Sherlockian inspired method of rejecting the impossible and "see what is left." A thorough, painstaking process of elimination and fine-tuning of possibilities that has many dead ends and constant second guessing whether, or not, he was building his theories on "an foundation of sand." And it was a nice touch by making French sink his teeth in the case with a future chief inspectorship in the back of his mind.

You can, however, argue French came up a little short on this occasion with only a second death preventing a terrible mistake when one of his main suspects committed suicide in a room with all the doors and windows locked, or fastened, on the inside – forcing him to go back to the drawing board and start over again. So how good is Sudden Death as a locked room mystery novel with its two murders-disguised-as-suicides in completely locked rooms? Well, not too badly!

The solution to Sybil's murder in her locked bedroom is, to my knowledge, original and don't believe it has been used since, but, as you can probably guess, the trick is a technical, semi-mechanical nature. Not everyone is going to like it. The solution to the second impossibility is an old dodge of the locked room story, but it was put to good use and provided the story with a last clue to the murderer's identity. So, on balance, Sudden Death is not a classic of its kind, but as a good and solid take on the impossible crime novel. And not one that should be solely judged on the content of its locked rooms.

Crofts was one of the often maligned, so-called humdrum writers who were more interested in the how than the who-and why, which means that their murderers tend to be easily spotted. I wrongly assumed that the case here, but the murderer and motive were cleverly hidden with "the closed room as a blind." Crofts knew what makes a sound plot tick and that makes it the more baffling he left a small aspect of the first locked room murder unexplained. I can accept that from a mystery writer who's more interested in character or storytelling or a second-stringer, but the Chief Engineer of Crime should have known better and it seriously detracted from, what would otherwise have been, the best Inspector French novel to date. Now I have to reluctantly place it slightly below The Sea Mystery (1928), Mystery in the Channel (1931) and The Hog's Back Mystery (1933).

Omission not withstanding, Sudden Death is a fine piece of old-fashioned, Golden Age craftsmanship and it was fun to see the master of the unbreakable alibi apply himself to the locked room mystery while dabbling a little in domestic suspense and HIBK. Sudden Death shows Crofts is as deserving of being revived as he was undeserving of his old reputation as the writer who cured insomnia. Now all I want is a reprint of Crofts' second locked room novel, The End of Andrew Harrison (1938), but until then, my next stop in the series is probably going to be Sir John Magill's Last Journey (1930). So stay tuned!