Last One to Leave (2022) by Benjamin Stevenson

Benjamin Stevenson's first two Ernest Cunningham novels, Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone (2022) and Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2024), are not only the two highlights of 2025, but represent another step towards a Second Golden Age for the detective story – only the holiday theme kept from dipping into the third novel. I realize it has been a newly established tradition for Christmas to come earlier, and earlier, each year, but figured a review of Everyone this Christmas has a Secret (2024) would still be on early side.

So decided to hold off on Everyone this Christmas has a Secret, until at least the leaves start to turn brownish. Fortunately, the Ernest Cunningham series is not Stevenson's first stab at the detective story. Stevenson wrote two novels about disgraced TV producer Jack Quick, She Lies in the Vines (2019) and Either Side of Midnight (2020), of which the second is an impossible crime novel concerning a shooting on live television ("One million witnesses... One impossible murder"). That one is currently on the big pile, but there are also two short novels, Find Us (2021) and Last One to Leave (2022), collected under the title Fool Me Twice (2024). Last One to Leave sounded like an intriguing take on the classically-styled detective story with a modern framing. Or, to be more precise, the premise struck me as specifically tailored for playing the Grandest Game in the World.

Ryan Jaegan is a widowed father of a 12-year-old daughter, Lydia, who entered his name for competition thrown by a notorious Youtube channel, CashSmashers. A channel with millions of subscribers, hundreds of millions of views and a major sponsorship from a gambling company, providing them with ample resources to pull some outrageous stunts – like dropping parachutes with sacks of money from a helicopter ("they were chasing clicks and views, after all"). They also do competitions with big money prizes. Such "Last One to Leave" contests where a group holds on to a luxury car with the person who holds on to it the longest gets to keep it. Ryan has little money and has debts with the wrong kind of people. So reluctantly agrees to participate and finds himself competing with six other people for a clifftop mansion worth four million dollars.

This contest is similar to the car contest, but much more involved with more room and opportunities for shenanigans. The rules are deceivingly simple: each contestant places one of their hands on a wall and, from there, they're free to roam and move around as much as they like as long as their hand continues to touch the house. Last person to let go wins the four million dollar mansion. Ryan is not the only one there to win the game and the CashSmashers team aren't above manipulating the contest, because "they need high drama, big twists, to make things viral."

So two days and several eliminations later, sleep deprivation, muscle cramp and lack of food begin to take toll, but Ryan and the remaining participants get really tested when one of them turns up apparently dead – lying next to the bag of money with a knife sticking out of him. Is it really a real murder or simply the CashSmashers stepping of their game now that the remaining contestants are vulnerable? They told them over the speakers to keep playing, but what if the body is real? But how can "you commit a murder unseen in a house full of cameras" where everyone's movement is restricted to the length of their arms?

The solution to the impossible stabbing does not disappoint. Not merely as a clever new wrinkle on the "invisible assailant" impossibility, but the cleverly-hidden, fairly clued and foreshadowed murderer complete with a very fitting motive. That's impressive considering Last One to Leave is basically short, tightly packed novella/short novel playing out like a tale of suspense, but framing the story and plot as a closely controlled, constantly surveillanced contest allowed Stevenson to play up/exploit both the suspense and puzzle elements simultaneously. A good example is how the characters refuse to take their hand off the wall when faced with emergencies and even a possible murder, which also helps to enforce the impossibility of their situation. And makes for one hell of an ending when Ryan exposes the murderer!

What I liked even more than the superb blending of suspense with an excellently played out impossible crime, is to get another fine example of a good, old-fashioned detective story with a gritty, contemporary setting, characters and motivation – fitted together as naturally as a dagger, stingy patriarch and a locked library. Last One to Leave was very reminiscent of A. Carver's The Dry Diver Drownings (2024) in that regard, in which a bunch of YouTubers chase clicks, but, instead of a crazy contest, it's about shooting a creepypasta video interrupted by several locked room murders. So glad to finally see these type of (locked room) mysteries appear in the West, because it's something I have come to associate with Japanese shin honkaku mystery writers and anime-and manga mysteries over the years. Yes, whether you like suspense and thrillers or the puzzle-oriented detective story and locked room puzzles, Stevenson's Last One to Leave has it all in a compact, well-paced story. One for the 2025 best-of list!

Black Lake Manor (2022) by Guy Morpuss

For years, Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, has been running an irregular, sporadic series of blog-posts, "A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat," delving into the impossible crime fiction mostly published outside of the circle of the traditionalists crime writers – results have varied wildly. From the fairly average and interesting, but flawed, to the terrible and unspeakably awful (e.g. Andrew Mayne's Angel Killer, 2014). So you can Jim's reviews have been mostly "BEWARE OF HACKS" warning signs, however, one of the reviews looked promising.

Last year, Jim reviewed an ambitious, wildly imaginative hybrid mystery novel, Black Lake Manor (2022) by Guy Morpuss, which mixes the traditional detective story with futuristic technology and a drop of native magic.

If you have followed this blog in recent years, you know I've been bitten by the hybrid mystery bug. I suppose you can trace this newfound obsession back to discovering the science-fiction mysteries by John Russell Fearn and Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942), but the Japanese shin honkaku hybrid mysteries really inflamed it. A trend that started with Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Death, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) which tosses actual zombies inside, what would have otherwise been, fairly normal detective novels. Letting the undead loose inside a traditionally-styled, fair play mystery is not merely a novelty to put a new spin on things, but it allowed the authors to put an entirely new dimension on the detective story and its many tropes – like the isolated setting and locked room mystery. Takekuni Kitayama's time-bending reincarnation mystery Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) and Kie Houjou's "Ryuuzen Clan" series that closed the deal and sold me on hybrid mysteries.

They're also the reason why I hesitated picking up Morpuss' Black Lake Manor. Jim praised Black Lake Manor for "being mind-and genre-bending stuff in the best way" and the comment "not even sure if thus is an impossible crime novel at all" adding more intrigue. But could it be as good as Houjou's Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) and Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022). Well, I was in the mood for a hybrid mystery and it was either Edward D. Hoch's The Frankenstein Factory (1975) or Black Lake Manor, but have already reviewed several of Hoch's short stories and collections recently. So why not take Jim up on one of his risky recommendations, but where to even begin?

Black Lake Manor takes place across a period of nearly 250 years, stretching from 1804 to 2045, but all take place around Black Lake Manor on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. So I'll gloss over a lot of background details and characters in order to avoid massive spoilers and keep this post from resembling a bloated canal corpse.

This sprawling, ambitious story begins in 1804 when a storm wrecked a ship, Pride of Whitby, in Pachena Bay and only seven men made it to shore, but they had guided their lifeboat into the mouth of the cave when "a roar from overhead had heralded the collapse of the cliff face" – which trapped them inside. The main storyline is interspersed with short, to the point chapters following their harrowing ordeal. The next dozen, or so, chapters skip between 2023, 2025 and 2045 to introduce the hybrid elements to this detective story with the two most important (for the purpose of this review) characters being Lincoln Shan and his ex-fiance, Ella Manning.

Lincoln Shan is a member of the Akaht First Nations band, of Vancouver Island, some of whom have a special ability, only once in their lifetime, to turn back time six hours by saying kuwitap ("...and the wolf ate time"). Lincoln used this one-time ability in 2025 to earn a small fortune and setup of his own tech company, Orcus Technology. Twenty years later, Lincoln has become a tech billionaire whose company owned half of British Columbia and "more oil rigs than most small nations," despite presenting himself to the world as an eco-warrior.

In 2045, Lincoln's company had made a huge breakthrough in hard light research. They had overcome the one major problem with hard light, "ridiculous amounts of power required to turn photons into something solid," which they succeeded in making portable. Now all you need to create a hard light, life sized copy of yourself is a small, white disk costing only five cents to produce. Lincoln calls them ghost dancers, a nod to his Akaht heritage, demonstrates them at an exclusive get together at Black Lake Manor. Where most of the hundreds of guests present are ghost dancers with the actual people being scattered all over the world, but a storm provides a far more effective demonstration of how realistic the ghost dancers are when it takes out the data connection. Just like that, the guests disappeared, "champagne flutes and wine glasses crashing to the floor, followed by a flutter of white discs," leaving only a handful of real people behind at the manor – nicely setting the stage for murder. Lincoln's body is found the next morning in his locked office under circumstances resembling a ritual sacrifice!

I already omitted a lot of details, and characters, and there's not much that can be told pass this point without treading into spoiler territory. So let me first try to answer Jim's question: is this actually an impossible crime novel? My answer: probably. Black Lake Manor obviously is not a straightforward impossible crime where locked doors, closed windows and CCTV footage create a locked room murder or impossible crime, but the circumstances surrounding and leading up to the murder. So more of an impossible crime in retrospect, when you get the full picture, which perhaps has gotten a bit lost in the wealth of ideas. I suppose you can compare it to the granddaddy of hybrid mysteries, The Caves of Steel (1953/54) by Isaac Asimov, which technically counts as a locked room mystery, but labeling it as one is sort of misrepresenting it. The Caves of Steel and Black Lake Manor blended genres which may, or may not, have led to an incidental impossible crime or two. For example, Lincoln was followed into his study by a ghost dancer, apparently providing an easy solution, but the ghost dancers have a no-harm constraint similar to Asimov's First Law of Robotics from The Caves of Steel. When you toss in some electronic, automatically sealing door locks, possibility of AI operated ghost dancers and time manipulations, you can understand why it's status as an impossible crime is not entirely clear.

That surprised and pleased me the most. I was a little bit skeptical and hardly expected it would be on the same level of the aforementioned Japanese hybrid mysteries, which have already spoiled me, but Morpuss and Black Lake Manor more than held their own! Morpuss deserves a ton of credit for the clarity he brings to an ambitiously structured detective story playing around with multiple timelines, time resets and futuristic technology by telling only what important to the story or relevant to the plot. So the story doesn't get bogged down by having to explain what can be done with the tech or how time-bending ability works at its core, which still got a banger of an ending out of it with a solution. Showing the hybrid mystery unlocks all kind of doors previously closed for the classically-styled detective story. Let me tell you, the nitty, gritty technical aspect of murder makes for a darkly comical visual image and the second time one of these bizarre detective novels made me laugh at someone getting brutally murdered. That's not even the best or most surprising part of the solution! More importantly, Morpuss didn't neglect to drop some clues and red herrings, while manipulating and toying around with time rewinds and hard light tech.

So the only thing to nitpick about is that Morpuss has not only setup a series, but a whole world, he's unlikely to return to. From what I gathered, Morpuss writes standalones exploring his favorite theme, "a twist on reality, and playing with the consequences," which started with Five Minds (2021) in which five people share one body – "possibly with a murderer." A Trial in Three Acts (2025) looks to be a cross between the theatrical, Golden Age-style mystery and a courtroom drama. Sounds suspiciously normal, but it's about an on-stage decapitation and may, or may not, be another impossible crime. Well, only one way to find out.

I know I'm risking creating a rift in the space-time continuum, but this has to be second or third time I end up 100% agreeing with Jim. Black Lake Manor is fantastic in every definition of the word. Highly recommended!

Reckoning at the Riviera Royale (2022) by P.J. Fitzsimmons

P.J. Fitzsimmons' Reckoning at the Riviera Royale (2022) is the fifth, of currently nine, novels starring Anthony "Anty" Boisjoly, idler and sleuth, who accepts an invitation from his mother to join her on the Côte d'Azur – where he intends to have an awkward confrontation ("...did you arrange to pop off Papa?"). Anty travels to the Riviera Royale, "an ornate, Victorian-era hotel and casino," on the island of Cap Royale. When he arrives, Anty learns from his mother a violent death has taken and the killer is scheduled to be executed.

The victim is a clown, Malandrino the Magnificent, who was touring the Riviera by steam yacht as part of Deebee Digby's Cirque d'Azur. What remained of Malandrino, dressed in a mouse custom, was found in the cage of the circus elephant, Thumpy, where the animal had stepped on him ("repeatedly, by all evidence"). Deebee intends to recuperate the financial loss suffered from losing his center ringer by executing Thumpy in "the most spectacular fashion possible" and "sell tickets to the event." Previous novels shown Anty to be a friend to the animals, striking up a friendship with a cemetery crow in The Case of the Carnaby Castle Curse (2022), who's naturally appalled at the prospect ("has this elephant received due process under French law?"). Anty is determined to proof Thumpy's innocence and prevent Deedee from being publicly executing him.

Good on him, however, have to admit the following exchange between Anty and Deedee made me laugh when Deedee tells Anty electrocution is going to be the method of execution.

 

Anty: "you can't electrocute Thumpy."

Deedee: "I wouldn't have thought so either, but the manufacturer stands by his generator. I have a written guarantee."

 

Fortunately, true to his intrepid nature as a sleuth hound, Anty uncovers clues and evidence Malandrino was "murdered by human hand" with more than enough motives to go around – not only for torturing animals. Malandrino is one of those characters whom Scott, a regular in the comments, would probably nominate for the Hall of Shame of "murderable victims" who had it coming. Just one problem: everyone with a motive also have a collective alibi. Everyone was on a yacht out on sea enjoying a seafood barbecue and fireworks ("alibis all round"). They're the bunch of strange, eccentric characters you'd expect from a detective story with a circus background. You have Malandrino's replacement act, Norton Bean, who's better known as "Beano, The Astounding Bounding Bean." A bigger hack reviewer than yours truly, Max Minefield, who considers himself to be the circus critic. Bidelia Mimpley and Myrtle Biddicomb, known as the biddies, are two spinsters and circus fans ("camp followers") who never miss a show. Anty even meets two obscure relatives, Aunt Jacqueline Quillfeather and her daughter Chadwick. So even without a second body turning up and cheating going on in the hotel casino, Anty can't get around to having that sit down with his mother

This series is billed as a series of locked room mystery novels and Fitzsimmons comments in the afterword that Reckoning at the Riviera Royale has "one of the more original impossible murders that Anty has had to untangle." I agree that the solution to the murder of Malandrino is not only original, but ingenious, daring and absolutely hilarious – which perhaps not everyone's going to buy. Something straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, almost too preposterous to even take as a joke, had it not been for Fitzsimmons trying to make it sound plausible. Not an easy task when your tongue is planted firmly in your cheek. How the trick is made to look somewhat credible does have a touch of John Dickson Carr (phffrqarff bs nyy guvatf trareny). That being said, it's not an impossible crime or anywhere near something resembling a locked room mystery. It's a howdunit, an absolute bonkers howdunit, in which alibis have to be broken down instead of locked doors. So, plot-wise, more like Christopher Bush than Carr. Well, if Bush had been a longtime resident of a mental asylum.

That's just one murder. Anty still has to deal with a second murder, the shenanigans of his newfound relatives and find a minute to have that talk with his mother about his father's untimely passing. This is done with the customary light, humorous tone and witticism from previous novels, but Reckoning at the Riviera Royale has a plot that comes closer to matching the best in the series, The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (2021). The Case of the Canterfell Codicil (2020), The Tale of the Tenpenny Tontine (2021) and the already mentioned The Case of the Carnaby Castle Curse all had the series trademark humor and genre spoofing, but their solutions lacked the imagination that made The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning such a promising introduction to the series. Not a criticism that can be leveled against Reckoning at the Riviera Royale. So, if you want a mystery with some color and imagination flashing out of its plot, Fitszimmons and Reckoning at the Riviera Royale have you covered!

I loved it enough to The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich (2023) up the pile, but first need to get around to a few other recently published locked room mysteries like J.L. Blackhurst's Smoke and Murders (2024) and Tom Mead's recently published The House at Devil's Neck (2025).

A Gumshoe with Sea Legs: "Death at the Porthole" (1938) and "The Eye" (1945) by Baynard Kendrick

Baynard Kendrick is best known today for creating one of the most successful blind detectives in crime fiction, Captain Duncan Maclain, who not only overshadowed his other creations, but completely eclipsed a character like Miles Standish Rice – a Miami-based detective character. Rice appeared in three novels and seventeen short stories published in Black Mask, Mystery Novels Magazine and The Saint Mystery Magazine. I remember enjoying The Eleven of Diamonds (1936) and The Iron Spiders (1936), but not nearly as good as the best Captain Maclain novels (e.g. The Whistling Hangman, 1937). So they form a clear example of a main series character and secondary one.

I recently stumbled to the fact Kendrick had a third, short-lived and practically forgotten series-character. Cliff Chandler is the dandy, debonair ship's detective whose job it's to protect "the welfare of transatlantic passengers on the S.S. Moriander," which is an interesting premise for a series, but Chandler appeared in only two short stories published seven years apart.

The first of these two short stories, "Death at the Porthole," originally appeared in a 1938 publication of Country Home Magazine and reprinted in the November, 1944, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. "Death at the Porthole" takes place during the tenth, uneventful voyage of the S.S. Moriander, departing Southampton for New York, when "even the usual run of petty cardsharps seemed to have deserted her" – not much "guarding the passengers' welfare" to do. Although there are some curious incidents. Chandler meets a lovely young woman aboard, Elsa Graves, who appears to be packing a gun, but why? M. Jean Martone, "manufacturer extraordinary of a select line of cosmetics," accidentally falls overboard and has to be rescued. Finally, the woman with whom Elsa Graves shared a cabin, Dorette Maupin, is found dead with a broken neck. Chandler is a man of action who "thrived on excitement," but he has to do some real thinking and a bit of detective work to crack this case.

Even without the presence of the famous blind detective, "Death at the Porthole" is unmistakably a Baynard Kendrick detective story. It has a foot in both the hardboiled private eye story from the pulps and the formal detective story, which comes on account of the well-played who and how. Particular the latter is a dead giveaway as it plays on Kendrick's favored method of (SPOILER/ROT13) oevqtvat gur qvfgnapr orgjrra ivpgvz naq zheqrere, hfhnyyl ol qebccvat be guebjvat fbzrguvat, juvpu graq gb perngr na vzcbffvoyr fvghngvba be nyvov nybat gur jnl. "Death at the Porthole" can be linked to the previously mentioned The Whistling Hangman and The Eleven of Diamonds when it comes the how, but, of course, not worked out to the same extend. So rather simple by comparison, however, the bravado of the (ROT13) frpbaq zheqre is appreciated.

Kendrick's "Death at the Porthole" is not a classic, criminally overlooked short story from the detective story's golden era, but it's a promising start to what could have been a fascinating and fun series of pulpy short stories.

The second, and last, short story in the series, "The Eye," originally appeared in the November, 1945, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and leans more towards the pulp-thriller than the detective story – giving Cliff Chandler all the excitement he wanted. Chandler is approached by a frightened VIP passenger, Moira Nelson, who's a famous screen actress making the crossing with her 12-year-old son, manager and bodyguard. Moira Nelson received a threatening call pressing her to wear a pearl necklace, worthy fifty thousand dollars, to the ship's concert the next night or her son will pay the price. Having listened to her story, Chandler does an impromptu piece of armchair reasoning and not a bad solution either. But his solution ends playing right into the culprit's hands. So, as the villains reveal themselves, "The Eye" turns into a pulp caper with a delicate hint of piracy and how the ship's detective resolves this case is notably different from the first story (oyvaqvat entr). I was entertained enough and the trap triggered by Chandler's false-solution a clever touch, but I'll probably won't remember any of it. Not without looking back at what I wrote here.

"Death at the Porthole" and "The Eye," while not a bad or outstandingly good, are understandably footnotes in Kendrick's work, but there was potential had the series continued. I suspect this would have been one of those series best read in a collection of twelve or fifteen short stories, because atmosphere and backdrop (i.e. shipboard setting) is as important as a decent plot. Something like James Holding's The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018), but more hardboiled.

A note for the curious: Cliff Chandler has been called the only ship's detective in the genre, but there's Cutcliffe Hyne's "The Looting of the Specie-Room" (1900) and John Dickson Carr's 1940s radio-detective, Dr. John Fabian, whose cases are gathered in The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021).

Reunion with Murder (1941) by Timothy Fuller

Reunion with Murder (1941) is Timothy Fuller's third novel about Harvard man and amateur sleuth, Edmund "Jupiter" Jones, who appeared in a handful of mysteries starting with Harvard Has a Homicide (1936) – ending with the previously discussed Keep Cool, Mr. Jones (1950). A tightly-packed crime yarn clearly intended to modernize and reboot the series, but Fuller abandoned the series after its publication. Nonetheless, it rekindled my interest in the series and tracked down a copy of This is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943). A mystery from the American murder-can-be-fun school that would have been right at home in the catalog of the Rue Morgue Press. I fortunately had the foresight to also get a copy of Reunion with Murder. Three times must be the charm as it's Fuller's most accomplished, fully rounded detective novel.

The titular event of Fuller's Reunion with Murder is the first reunion of the Class of '31, Harvard College, that brought over a hundred alumni to the Syonsett Beach Hotel.

On the second day of the reunion, two alumni out on an early morning round of golf find the body of Sherman North near the eleventh tee of the Syonsett Golf Club. North's body was still dressed in dinner jacket, color rumpled and black tie twisted, but more concerting is the gaping bullet hole in his chest. North was rooming at the hotel with fellow attendee Edmund Rice, a humorist, who wakes up that morning with a hangover and scraped, bloodied hands. No memory of what happened when he was blackout drunk. What's more, Rice has to be the best man next day at a wedding of his college chum, Jupiter Jones, currently teaching at Harvard's Fine Arts Department. That's when he remembers, "Sleuth Jones."

So the best man getting involved in a murder at his tenth college reunion a day is "damned inconvenient," but Betty Mahan joins her soon-to-be husband for a day of prenuptial sleuthing.

There's much more to the murder than an apparent drunken, motiveless shooting on the golf course under cover of night. Firstly, North was knocked unconscious, driven in his own car to the scene of the crime and shot, which is a reasonable precaution, but why attract attention by firing half a dozen of extra shots – which were noticed. Secondly, there's a trail of high heeled woman's footprints "coming across from the clubhouse and ending at the top of the tee" where they stop and vanish ("...must be some explanation for their disappearance"). Yeah, I didn't expect a (minor) impossible situation of no-footprints variety not mentioned in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). But there are also slightly more traditional clues strewn around the crime scene. Like a broken watch and watch charm in the form of a miniature sword. So both police and amateur detective have their work cut out. Really enjoyed how Jupiter buttered himself up in order to slip himself into the investigation.

Reunion with Murder is as humorous and satirical in tone as This is Murder, Mr. Jones. Fuller lightheartedly poked fun at Harvard culture, detective fiction and reunions ("probably some Stone Age massacre had gone off rather well and the participants vowed to meet again in a year and talk things over"), but Reunion with Murder has a serious pall hanging over it in the shape of the war raging on in Europe and the feeling they'll be soon dragged into it. This comes especially to the front during the second-half of the story fueling discussions, but just as serious is Jupiter transforming into a White Knight for North's widow, Ann North. At one point, Jupiter even comes to see her as the "symbol of the Perfect Girl, the Dream Girl who didn't exist," while Betty is standing right next to her. Over the course of his private investigation, Jupiter breaks enough laws to potentially get him thirty years in prison simply to protect Ann. And he's very serious about it.

So not everything is played for laughs and the armchair detectives out there better keep that in mind when trying to piece together this "macabre puzzle." I think the conclusion, and the twisted path it takes towards that conclusion, is what makes Reunion with Murder Fuller's best contribution to the American detective novel.

First of all, there's the unusual and unforgettable circumstances of the denouement taking place right after the wedding and during the costumed parade closing out the reunion. Jupiter, dressed as Superman, gathers the principle players to explain what happened. Or, at least, the parts he knows about. Jupiter's ingenious, fractured solution is a Golden Age delight of plotting succeeding in having its cake and eat it too. You know what I mean when you read it. The core idea is admittedly not original with Fuller, but he sure did something different and original with it to make it his own. Something that pleasantly took me by surprise, but a lot made sense the moment the truth dawned on me. Of, course, how the murder is resolved among the Harvard boys is something most readers today will find hard to swallow and perhaps is easy to point to the looming war as a motive. However, I think Fuller simply had been reading a lot of John Dickson Carr at the time and got inspired. Everything from the murderer inexplicably attracting attention post-murder and the vanishing footprints to letting a cleverly hidden, but exposed, killer get away for morally dubious reasons just smacks of Carr – not to mention old-world chivalry streaking the characters and plot. No wonder I enjoyed it so much!

Fuller's Reunion with Murder is a first-class Golden Age mystery, one of the better American collegian detective novels, which deserves to be reprinted. It would be a great fit for Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics line of reprints. I suppose I'll finish the series, backwards, by rereading Three Thirds of a Ghost (1941) next and closing out with Harvard Has a Homicide. Stay tuned!

Note for the curious: while churning out this review, I stumbled across the fact Fuller wrote short stories and one of his stories, "The Second Visitor," features Jupiter Jones. “The Second Visitor” made its first and only appearance in the September, 1937, issue of The American Magazine. So it has slipped through the cracks and forgotten about, but perhaps a short story worth reviving for a future American Mystery Classics anthology. Fuller wrote a few more short stories that appear to be (possibly) criminal in nature: "An Acquaintance with Thieves" (Britannia and Eve, Jun. 1948), "The Husband Who Disappeared" (Cosmopolitan, Jan. 1950), "His Wife Cried Wolf" (This Week, Jul. 10, 1955) and "A Shot in the Dark" (Bluebook, Apr. 1956).

Hold on a second! Just one more thing: Just discovered "The Second Visitor”" was reprinted, only once, in the Spring, 1953, issue of Triple Detective. Strange that the only Jupiter Jones short story was never reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or any of the Ellery Queen anthologies. So it either was really overlooked and forgotten about or it's just shit.

The Case of the Curious Heel (1943/44) by Ken Crossen

Back in February, I reviewed Ken Crossen's The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints (1944), second and last novel in the Jason Jones and Necessary Smith series, which is an incredibly fun, pulpy impossible crime tale with Crossen fanboying all over his favorite mystery writers, characters and novels – complete with a locked room lecture ("...guess I can say a few words on impossible situations"). So pulp at its most entertaining. On the other hand, Crossen's The Laughing Buddha Murders (1944), starring the American-Tibetan detective Chin Kwang Kham, turned out to be a letdown. Disappointing since Crossen used The Case of the Phantom Fingerprints to promote The Laughing Buddha Murders and that raised certain expectations. Crossen's The Case of the Curious Heel (1943/44) and Murder Out of Mind (1945) fortunately still looked very promising.

In fact, Anthony Boucher praised Crossen's The Case of the Curious Heel as "a high-grade pulp yarn" about impossible murders piling up around an obnoxious ex-pulp writer "whose identity is fun to guess."

The Case of the Curious Heel was originally published in the May, 1943, issue of Baffling Detective Mysteries and opens with the introduction to that obnoxious ex-pulp writer, Johnny Bell, who got his start in pulp magazines like Detective Yarns Weekly – before getting moving on to the slicks and Hollywood ("writing pictures for Dorothy Lamour, Paulette Goddard, Rita Hayworth"). Bell is currently working on a mystery play written, directed and produced by himself. So every time Bell completed a scene, he gathers a group to act out the scene as a test run. The Case of the Curious Heel begins on the evening of one such rehearsal and it's a full house. There's his wife, Betty Bell, his private secretary, June Hayes, and his ghost writer, Bennett Barlay, who carries on the Johnny Bell magazine stories so his employer can concentrate on his movie scripts and stage play. Further more, there are Willard Duncan, a literary agent, Manny Ladd, press agent, Ray Martin, a Hollywood columnist, and the author of the Freddy Hack mysteries, Gregor Fain. Lastly, the actress Karen Russell and the man who coughed up ten grand to back the play, George Porter.

Before they play out the scene, the reader gets an example why some might consider their host to be a perfectly viable target for shooting practice. Bell calls everyone present leeches, parasites and sponges ("every one of you would starve to death if it weren't for me"). When everyone there knew Bell's "a real vampire" living "on the literary blood of others," among other charming personality traits and habits.

Surprisingly, it's not Johnny Bell who bites the dust during the rehearsal. The scene they rehearse has Karen Russell's character picking up a gun to shoot Manny Ladd's character, but, when she pulls the trigger, it actually goes off. Ladd getting fatally shot is the first (quasi) impossible situation of the story. The gun was not only supposed to be empty, but was proved to be empty when "Bell put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger five times" to show it was a harmless prop. Bell "then he tossed the gun to the girl" and "she held it until she pulled the trigger." They all swore the gun was empty when it fired a very real bullet. Another peculiar aspect is that only Bell and June Hayes knew beforehand what the scene was about and that it involved a gun. Only two people knew beforehand what was going to happen in the scene, Bell and June Hayes. So only they knew it would involve the gun he had brought back from Hollywood. That looks bad for Bell.. or was there a mix-up with him being the intended victim? Bell hires a private investigator, Necessary Smith, to look after his interests and work alongside the "poor man's Nero Wolfe," First Grade Detective Jason Jones. They're two characters who deserved a longer run than they got.

Jason Jones, round, red and jovial, has "a working agreement" with his superiors to never get promoted in exchange for solving those pesky cases "that the captain said couldn't be solved." That way, Jones can attend to his wife's cooking and tending his geraniums in his rooftop hothouse instead of having to worry about work floor politics and rivalries. This arrangement also allows Jones to handle cases according to his own unhurried, armchair methods. Jones believes the right technique is simply waiting rather than wear himself out chasing around or thinking deeply about clues, "murderer feels pretty safe as long as he sees all that activity," but when the detective sits around, ignores the clues and ask a few routine questions the murderer gets nervous – which is when they make mistakes. Jones very much admires characters like Nero Wolfe and Mycroft Holmes. Necessary Smith is your average, 1940s American gumshoe who legally changed when his ex-boss, Bruce Elliott (the Bruce Elliott?), regularly interrupted his verbal reports with the question, "was that necessary, Smith?" His boss thought that was funny. So, when he retired, handed the business over to Smith.

Jones and Smith make for a fun detective duo who have their work cutout for them as it becomes ever clear they're dealing with a killer who has "the fiction mind." Not only the dubious shooting of Manny Ladd and it's various possibilities, but also second body turning up behind the locked door of a lavatory and "a fly couldn't get in that room without the door opening for him." Boucher wasn't wrong to call this a high-grade pulp yarn, but I'll get to the plot in a moment.

The Case of the Curious Heel is still a pulp mystery. Even the best pulp mysteries lacked the rigorous plotting and polish of their Golden Age counterparts, because they were written at piece rate with much shorter deadlines. Every now and then, a pulp writer would deliver a more polished detective novel, like James Ronald's Murder in the Family (1936) or John Russell Fearn's posthumously published Pattern of Murder (2006), but they're the exceptions and The Case of the Curious Heel is not. For example, Crossen lightly rewrote/copied passages between Jones and Smith from The Case of the Curious Heel for The Laughing Buddha Murders. Jones even launches into a locked room lecture. So the story more than once gave me a light sense of déjà vu, but there's also the occasional sloppiness in details. In the first chapter, Barlay is scolded for pointing out the locked room murder from Bell's stage play is practically the same as the impossible shooting from his short story "Thumbs Up for Death." This story is referred to again later on in the story as "Thumbs Up for Murder." Something you can't help but notice. By the way, as an aside, Bennett Barlay is one of Crossen's pseudonyms.

Anyway, the plot is definitely a cut, or two, above the average '40s pulp yarn. Not for the usual reasons either. Normally, the impossible crime in a pulp-style locked room mystery is the most substantial plot piece with the who and why usually being obvious from early on in the story – which here was the other way round. I suppose that's on theme as 2025 has not been a great year for finding an abundance of excellent impossible crime and locked room mysteries. Crossen handled the murderer's identity and motive with more skill than expected going by my previous two reads. Solution is only really hampered by the trick used to shoot the first victim, which is dodgy from start to finish. So much could have gone wrong, (SPOILER/ROT13: jung vs, nsgre chyyvat gur gevttre svir gvzrf, chyyrq vg n fvkgu gvzr gb naabl gur areibhf tngurevat rira zber? Jung vs gur tha jnf cbvagrq ng fbzrbar ryfr gung fvkgu gvzr? Jung vs Oryy unq chyyrq gur gevttre n fvkgu gvzr juvyr gur tha jnf cbvagrq ng Ynqq be gur zheqrere? Jung vs Oryy fvzcyl unqa'g chyyrq gung fghag? Which would not have been out-of-character and would have tossed a huge spanner into the murderer's plans. The locked room-trick used in the second murder is perfunctory, but neatly used for a false-solution and providing an even neater twist to Jones' explanation.

Crossen's The Case of the Curious Heel is indeed a quality piece of pulp fiction. Maybe not the very best locked room pulp, plotwise, but Necessary Smith and Jason Jones make up where the plot lacked. I would have like to have seen more of them or at least gotten a few short stories out of those apocryphal cases Jones mentioned. Jones' short teaser of "The Case of the Missing G-String" sounds like a trip!

Note for the curious: the locked room from the stage play is briefly described, but not in too great detail and no solution given. The gist of the locked room is that a man is found under circumstances giving "a perfect picture of suicide." A room with every door and window locked from the inside ("...impossible for anyone to get into the room without crawling through the keyhole"). Only real detail is the thumb print of one of the (innocent) suspects being discovered in the center of the ceiling. So not much to build an armchair solution around, except that the thumb print on the ceiling probably means a wire/pulley trick was involved to turn the key from the inside. A trick requiring a ladder to setup and that allowed for the artistic touch of the faked thumb print on the ceiling. Otherwise, it would be too inconvenient and risky to lug a ladder around the house just to put a thumb print on the ceiling. Why not simply put it on an untampered window catch to muddy the waters? But if a ladder was needed to setup a wire/pulley trick, the ceiling print would be even more incriminating for a frame job than a print on a window catch. There's no reason why people wouldn't leave prints on window catches. They were made to be handled, but the ceiling of a crime scene is a different. I'll shut up now. :)

A Challenger Appears: C.M.B. vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou

Three months ago, I finished Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series with my review of vol. 50 and compiled "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 26-50" as a follow-up to "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 1-25" shortly after – decided to take a short break from Katou's detective fiction. A short break that lasted about a month longer than originally intended. Having "spammed" Q.E.D. reviews earlier in the year, I wanted to return to C.M.B. before starting on Q.E.D. iff.

The first, of two, stories from C.M.B. vol. 5, "Gutenberg Bible," brings a rare visitor to Sakaki Shinra's strange, hidden Museum of Antiquity. A young, foreign woman, Mau Sugal, who carries around a huge, briefcase-like backpack and speaks Japanese perfectly.

What she brought along is a historical treasure: a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible. She wants Shinra, holder of the "C," "M" and "B" rings, to give his expert opinion and, if possible, authenticate it. When he asks where the page came from and under which circumstances it was obtained, Sugal tells him she "cannot reveal that due to the exact wishes of the customer." Shinra flat out refuses to authenticate the page much to the annoyance of his friend, Nanase Tatsuki ("she's in trouble and needs your help"), but he can't risk the Gutenberg page being sold on the black market with his seal of authenticity stamped on it. The black market in stolen art and archaeological artifacts is at the heart of this story, because the page naturally attracts the attention from both criminals and the law. A case that also involves a rumored, hitherto unknown copy of the Gutenberg Bible locked away in a safety deposit box.

So a really fun story, but, plot-wise, impossible to spoil as the story introduces Mau Sugal with the ending revealing and setting her up as an antagonist to Shinra – more like a good natured frenemy. Mau Sugal returns in the next story.

"Spirit of the Forest," second and last story of vol. 5, sees Sugal coming back to Shinra's museum ("are you here to steal again?"). She wants him to accompany her to the jungles of Borneo to help find someone he knows, Sadaman the herbalist, who "can cure people with his knowledge of the different types of herbs growing in the forest." That talent attracted the attention of the CEO of Navaro Pharmaceuticals, Levy Noble. She saw possibilities to create new medicines to combat the bacteria that start to show immunity to current medicines, but an incident happened. Lloyd Shorts, a plant hunter, accompanied by an investigator, John Baits, were dispatched to make contact with Sadaman, but, on their second meeting, Baits was killed ("...his head was cut off") and Lloyd run into the jungle in a panic – screaming he's "gonna be killed by Sadaman as well." This murder comes with a ghostly impossibility. Right before the body was found, someone saw Baits walking across a bridge and followed him, but only bumped into Lloyd on the other side. And he hadn't seen Baits come by. So a dead man walking inexplicably vanished into thin air!

However, "Spirit of the Forest" is more like one of those character-driven puzzles from Q.E.D. in which the importance is on Shinra trying to find and understand the lessons Shadaman taught him as a kid. Not necessarily the criminal scheme playing out behind the scenes. While the ghostly disappearance on the bridge has a glimmer of originality, the solution represents one of those rare instances where the visual language of manga is not at all complimentary to trick. Normally, they show the still largely untapped potential of visual impossible crimes, but this just looked preposterous. A trick that should have been described and left to the imagination. This has not been a great year for finding gems of locked room mystery and impossible crime story.

So, on a whole, a fun enough, if unchallenging, story which also sums up this fifth volume in toto. Fun but not especially challenging, plotwise. You can write that down to being early in the series and having to introduce and setting up recurring characters and storylines. But fine for getting back into the series after a hiatus.

C.M.B. vol. 6 is made up a single, longish story, "Canopus," digging into Shinra's sometimes tragic background. The story takes place in Cairo, Egypt, where a deranged serial killer is taking a scenic tour of the historic city and generally being a bad guest in a foreign country. First stop of this serial killer is Cairo's Museum of Antiquity where a man is shot, killed and mutilated. Only other thing the killer left behind was a shell casing engraved with Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, the bullet damaged an ancient artifact that had been excavated by Shinra's late mother, Haruna. That brings a distraught Shinra to Cairo to hunt down the shooter who damaged the artifact.

Speaking of Shinra's family, "Canopus" is the other part of the crossover with Q.E.D. that began in "Pharaoh's Necklace" from vol. 28. Shinra and his cousin Sou Touma, along with Kana Mizuhara, happened to be in Cairo at the same time, which means they get to interact and exchange advise. Tatsuki uses the meeting to subtly get more background information on Shinra out of Touma and Mizuhara. Meanwhile, the serial killer continues his murder spree as more mutilated bodies and hieroglyphics shell casing turn up near Egypt's historical landmarks.

So there's plenty going on with enough room to work out the three major plot points. Firstly, the very sad, sometimes brutal backstory of Shinra's relationship with his mother and how he lost her. Secondly, while the serial killer doesn't pose a terribly complicated plot-thread, there's reason to the killer's madness to give it that good, old-fashioned whodunit tug. Thirdly, Shinra playing armchair detective to dispel the countless myths, conspiracy theories and apparent anomalies surrounding the construction of the pyramids – acknowledging his take is “just a hypothesis" with "no tangible evidence." I really enjoyed this segment short as it was! It reminded me of MORI Hiroshi's short story "Sekito no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) in which several armchair sleuths pore over an architectural conundrum from 7th century India. The crossover part simply is a bonus!

C.M.B. vol. 6 is a solid, single story volume doing an admirable job in balancing character-and series building with the various plot-threads, past and present. So probably going to read up to vol. 10, before starting on Q.E.D. iff and alternate between the two series. Stay tuned!

A Yacht Sets Sail (1947) by Deck Dorval

"Deck Dorval" is the joined pseudonym of three Belgian authors, Frans van Dooren, Jef Beeckmans and Jos Deckkers, who had a forty-year friendship "based on their mutual interest in Esperanto, philosophy and literature" – evidently they loved detective stories. Together, they collaborated on two detective novels, Zwarte kunst (Black Arts, 1947) and Een jacht vaart uit (A Yacht Sets Sail, 1947). Van Dooren took on the bulk of the plotting and writing, Deckkers edited and Beeckmans gave it his critical eye.

That's the shortened, simplified history of the short-lived "Deck Dorval" series of detective novels, but putting its backstory together was a mini-puzzle.

Not every source mentions/recognizes Van Dooren's co-authors and some confusion exists over the original publication year of Black Arts and A Yacht Sets Sail, which is either 1945 or 1947. I believe the latter is the correct year as the 1945 date comes from a single source and it probably wasn't best year to launch a book with the whole World War II kerfuffle coming to an end. Curiously, the same source also mentions Van Dooren was known for a popular radio-series, Inspecteur Kant knapt het op (Inspector Kant Fixes It), that aired for 104 episodes on Radio-Antwerpen, but nothing can be found online – no air dates, episode descriptions or cast listings. So don't know if there's any relation between the Inspector Kant from the radio-series and Inspector Xaverius Kant from A Yacht Sets Sail. Nor am I sure if their books were originally written in Esperanto and then translated into Dutch/Flemish or the other way round. If they were written in Esperanto first, the translator, Christian Declerk, can probably be counted as the fourth collaborator to complete this "Quentin Quartet." Finally, the "Deck Dorval" name resurfaced after a forty year hiatus when Black Arts and A Yacht Sets Sail were reissued in the 1983 and 1990 as Boze geesten (Angry Spirits) and De dood aan boord (Death on Board). A few years later, Van Doorner, now in his late eighties, unsuccessfully tried to revive the series with two new novels, Kazinski komt te laat (Kazinski Arrives Too Late, 1992) and Urd Hadda werd vermoord (Urd Hadda was Murdered, 1993). Deckkers and Beeckmans had both died by then and Van Dooren followed his friends in 1996. So a bit of a scattered history, but now you're all caught up.

Some of you know I like to poke around the desolate ruins of the Dutch-language detective story from time to time. You can find a short overview of my findings in the review of Ine van Etten's De moord in het openluchtmuseum (Murder at the Open Air Museum, 1954). While poking around, I came across a few references to Deck Dorval with A Yacht Sets Sail appearing to be the best of their efforts. So jotted it down for future reference, but copies of both the original editions and reprints aren't available in abundance. I kind of forgot about it until someone got me a copy! Let's see how well it stands up as a detective story.

As you probably guessed from the title, A Yacht Sets Sail takes place aboard a large, luxurious private yacht, Zeevalk, property of an American industrialist and millionaire, Otto S. Maxton – who invited a dozen notables along on this leisurely voyage. There's his fellow industrialist, Herman Steinmann, who's accompanied by his wife, Maria, and their son, Alex. Count and Countess de la Fosse. Jean Baptiste de Groot, doctor of medicine, who brought along his wife, Sophie. Jean Dubois, a poet, Juan Gulopez, a Spanish philosopher and European chess champion, and a Miss Stella Sterlen. Additionally, Maxton brought along his private secretary, Miss Yvonne Durlet, manservant/butler, Henry Higgs, and notary/lawyer, Theodore van der Meersch. Last, but not least, the Flemish policeman Inspector Xaverius Kant.

Inspector Kant is both a little baffled Maxton invited a simple policeman along on a pleasure cruise aboard a private yacht in the company of high society, but also scolds himself ("...old fool") for having falling for the charms of Miss Durlet. Other than that, the voyage is calm and peaceful, until an incident with a drunken sailor bothering Countess de la Fosse. A normally minor, forgettable incident that ends up giving the entire crew an alibi when a shot rings out from Maxton's cabin. Someone shot the millionaire through the back of his head with a heavy caliber weapon, which left a terrible mess on the cabin floor. A bloodied button in Maxton's hand appears to give an early solution to the case, but Kant exposes the tell-tale clue for the red herring it really is and a second death deepens the mystery even further. A murder presented as a suicide, but, once again, Kant spots the camouflage and cuts right through it.

This is the point where the plot becomes tricky to discuss in detail as A Yacht Sets Sail is a as-describe-on-tin detective novel, which is both its primary strength and biggest weakness.

Firstly, the plot holds together, technically speaking, which makes for a genuine, if somewhat bland, Golden Age shipboard mystery. However, the two central plot-pieces, first and second murder, retread old ground. So you can easily see in which direction the ending is heading, despite the sincere attempts to fairly hide it. It betrays the authors were amateurs, well-intended amateurs, but amateurs who simply lacked the experience, polish and confidence to carry this piece of fan fiction to the status of a respectable second-stringer – because they showed less confidence in their own (hidden) ideas. The ending reveals the (SPOILER/ROT13) pnova jurer Znkgba pbhyq unir orra n irel hahfhny naq bevtvany ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel, juvpu jnf “ybpxrq” ol gur furyy pnfvat. Jura gurl bcrarq gur qbbe, nsgre urnevat gur fubg, gur qbbe fjrcg nfvqr gur furyy pnfvat naq cebirf abobql pbhyq unir yrsg gur ebbz nsgre gur fubg jnf sverq. I suppose they feared developing this “missed clue” into a full-fledged plot-thread would have given away too much, but would also have given Kant a break from interviewing everyone to chew on that puzzling aspect of the case. It certainly would have put a stamp of their own on the plot.

So the only surprising bit about the ending is how Kant's solution is revealed to be a false-solution by another character, a rival detective is always fun, but here it really came at the expense of Kant's character. Why not make both their solutions kind of correct? It can be done without altering a single letter, or comma, to the story. Simply have the culprit from the false-solution intervene with the plans from the correct solution and the result would be exactly the same, but with a pleasing bit of complexity and some depth added to it. Yes, having multiple culprits can be hackwork, but it can work with the right story. A Yacht Sets Sail is one of those stories in which multiple culprits would not have only worked, but improved the plot with the professional's practical solution paired with the armchair musings of the amateur. So there's definitely more here than the three authors got out of it and had they shown a bit more confidence and daring, A Yacht Sets Sail could have been more than merely an average, inoffensive and lightweight shipboard mystery.

Well, I guess the search for good, classic, or classically-styled, Dutch detective fiction continues. Surely, there has to be another locked room gem like Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) or a treat like Ton Vervoort hidden somewhere?

Under Siege: "The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" (2000) by Edward D. Hoch

In 1995, Edward D. Hoch introduced a new character to his gallery of detectives, Alexander Swift, who's a civilian investigator and spy for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War – appearing in thirteen short stories between 1995 and 2007. Crippen & Landru collected the entire series under the title Constant Hearses and Other Revolutionary Stories (2022). I have not read anything from this series before, but one story was recommended, sometime, somewhere by someone, as an excellent historical impossible crime mystery. So decided to start as an appetizer to the series.

"The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" was first published in the December, 2000, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and takes place in September, 1781, "nearly a year since Benedict Arnold's treasonous attempt to surrender West Point to the British." General Washington received secret intelligence Benedict Arnold, now a general in the British army, has returned and is planning expedition somewhere in Connecticut to divert a part of the American army away from Washington's campaign in Virginia. Washington dispatches Swift to find out Arnold's exact plans and alert the militia in Connecticut.

That brings Swift to the city of New London, on the Thames River, defended by Fort Trumbull on the west bank and Fort Griswold on the eastern side of the river. Fort Griswold, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Ledyard, is where Swift spends the night, but wakes up the next morning to the news "that British troops had landed under cover of darkness" and "were attacking on both sides of the harbor" – defenses were overwhelmed and eventually crumbled. Colonel Ledyard surrenders the fort and his sword to Lieutenant Colonel Potter, a Loyalist, who immediately plunged the sword into Ledyard's chest. Swift is together with the colonel's widow, two captains and two lieutenants the only survivors who now find themselves confined to guarded colonel's quarters.

Emily Ledyard demands her husband to be avenged, "one of you four, my husband's trusted officers, take revenge for his death by killing Colonel Potter by any means possible." She suggests the four draw straws, so none of them knows who really done it, which they do. Colonel Potter ends the day on the receiving end of a sword thrust, but the four officers were imprisoned together with Swift and Emily Ledyard when Potter was murdered. More pressingly than an apparent impossibility, Arnold telling he has to solve the murder because he intends to hang the murderer before departing. And if the murderer is not found before, they will all hang. So that's quite an incentive to play detective.

"The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" has a fantastic setup, plenty of historical drama and a few memorable scenes like the siege or the murder of Colonel Ledyard, but the plot is not one of Hoch's finest. I liked the idea of turning the locked-and guarded room inside to create an alibi that stands like a fortress, but found the explanation to be disappointingly unimaginative and second-rate. So, purely as a detective story or locked room mystery, "The Sword of Colonel Ledyard" came up short, but harmless as a fun, entertaining historical yarn.

Note for the curious: Mike Grost points out on his website that the Alexander Swift series can be read as an episodic novel as "the tales build on each other" to "form a united sequence, in some ways similar to a novel." So perhaps being chronologically challenged is the problem here.

The Will o' the Wisp Mystery (2024) by Edward D. Hoch

The Will o' the Wisp Mystery (2024), introduced by Tom Mead, is the latest collection of Edward D. Hoch short stories from Crippen & Landru and covers two short, but complete, series with the first being "an incredibly audacious experiment in storytelling" – a short novel made up of short stories. Six short stories, "The Pawn," "The Rook," "The Knight," "The Bishop," "The Queen" and "The King," originally serialized in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from April to September 1971 under the name "Mr. X." The Will o' the Wisp Mystery was reprinted in complete form a decade later in the anthology Ellery Queen's Maze of Mysteries (1982), before descending into obscurity. A shame as it's one of Hoch's more inventive pieces of detective fiction. Not only for its storytelling structure!

The one-shot detective of this unusual mystery is David Piper, the Manhunter, who works for the fictitious, ambiguously-named and underfunded Department of Apprehension. Piper's department assists other law enforcement agencies in "the capture of escaped convicts, the location of parole violators" and "even on occasion the return of runaway teenagers to their parents."

So when a prison bus transferring six criminals to jail gets hijacked, the Manhunter has to track down and apprehend the escaped prisoners. Busting a prison bus that leaves two guards dead, one injured and half a dozen criminals being pursued by man nicknamed "The Manhunter" sounds hardboiled, but there's a traditionally, fairly-clued puzzle plot – cleverly hidden underneath its timely trappings. Over the course of half a dozen stories, Piper attempts to find a connection between Nick Bruno ("underworld king"), Hugh Courtney ("impostor and murderer"), Kate Gallery ("murderess"), Charlie Hall ("swindler and card cheat"), Jack Larner ("bank robber and car thief") and Joe Reilly ("forger"). And, again, why they were busted out considering the people who organized the prison van ambush paid big money ("...my theory that they're together on some sort of big caper"). Each of the six stories has a self-contained piece of the bigger picture, tied to each of the six escapees, but every story ends on a cliffhanger. And, of course, they start bleeding into each other.

For example, the second story, "The Rook," one of the escapees turns up dead and murdered in a hotel room, which is solved, but Piper has some lingering questions regarding the circumstances of the murder ("...we're being maneuvered into making exactly the moves that someone wants us to make"). So even with the killer in custody, the murder continues to cause trouble later on in the story. That makes for a very short, very compact novel of no more than six "chapters," but, as previously mentioned, The Will o' the Wisp Mystery is not merely a mystery novelty item. Solution to what lies behind the prison bust and trail of bodies, or what the hypothesized big caper could, is original, imaginative and fairly clued. Piper even tries to buy time in the last chapter by going over all six clues. I found one clue particularly ingenious and think many of today's detective fans would agree.

Let me tell you, I did some self-congratulatory back-patting when the solution I pieced together turned out to be correct. I half expected I got hold of a juicy red herring, but the modern-day Mycroft Holmes right on the money. When a detective story is actually good, like The Will o' the Wisp Mystery, the readers always wins whether you solve it or get properly hoodwinked – because both are satisfying for different reasons. For me, anyway. Just for its titular story, The Will o' the Wisp Mystery comes highly recommended.

This collection has more to offer as it includes all seven short stories in the short, but long-lived, series about an inner city priest, Father David Noone. Mead described Father Noone as "a decidedly off-beat creation," compared to other clerical sleuths, who deals with the grittier, urban crimes of modern America. Simply put, they tend to be more character focused stories than most of Hoch's mysteries. Well, they aim for that early post-WWII realism. Hoch himself has said in an interview Father Noone is a character he kept "around for just the right type of story" appearing only sporadically in his short stories. Father Noone's first three appearances were spread out over a twenty-some year period from 1963 to 1985, while the final four were published between 2002 and 2004.

"Game of Skill," originally published in the December, 1963, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, introduces Father Noone as he takes over the duties of the absent Monsignor at St. Monica's. On a Monday evening, Father Noone gets a threatening phone call from a man, "I'm going to blow up your church on Sunday morning." The man calls back everyday with the same threat, but everyday with a bit more venom. Father Noone is, of course, much more interested in reaching out to this troubled soul and tries to engage with him every time the phone rings. This builds up towards the Sunday mass with, story-and character-wise, an effective ending, but otherwise not much of a detective story. Hoch's early work, especially from the 1960s, is a bit spotty as some stories were just typical, gloomy 1960s crime stories (e.g. "The Oblong Room," 1967).

The next story, "The Thing in Lovers' Lane," first appeared in the July, 1971, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and is a slight improvement on the first story published eight years previously. Father Noone's parish is rocked to its foundation when a young priest, Father Kling, is killed, under compromising circumstances, in a lovers' lane – dying in the arms of a woman named Stella. Both were "shot to death in the front seat of her car." Understanding the true relationship between the two victims is the key to solving the case. A marginal improvement over the first story with a little bit more meat to the plot, but the "clueing" here shows Hoch was more interested in the characters than the plot (ROT13: jul qebc gur X jura Y jbhyq unir orra fb zhpu orggre, orpnhfr Fgryyn Xvat fbhaqf orggre naq n yvggyr rnfvre gb zvff guna Fgryyn Yvat, juvpu whfg fgnaqf bhg).

I reviewed the third story in the series last year, but "The Sweating Statue" (1985) is the best of the three Father Noone stories published before the 2000s. Yes, it helped that has a solid and somewhat unique impossible situation to center the story and characters around.

"One More Circus," originally published in the May, 2002, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is the first Father Noone short story from the second, short-lived period in the series from the early 2000s. So you get a far more polished story from an older, experienced Hoch than the first two stories from the '60s and early '70s. And it shows! Father Noone is asked to take on the duties as temporary chaplain for the performers of the Breen Brothers circus out in Montana, because "the Catholic Church in America was besieged by an acute shortage of priests." Father Noone agrees as it's only a three-day job, "you wouldn't miss any Sunday Masses," but his stay at the circus ends with a terrible, tragic accident revealed to be a cleverly-disguised murder – before reverting back to being a tragedy. In some ways, “One More Circus” is a similar to "Game of Skill," but the ending is better handled and thus far more effective. Even though it's not much of a detective story.

"The Arrow of Ice," original to the anthology Murder Most Catholic: Divine Tales of Profane Crimes (2002), finds Father Noone's parish during a tumultuous period. A part of his parish, "clinging to the past," are in a uproar over the plans to renovate and modernized the church. They're demonstrating the plans and the architect, Porter Macklin, who's going to redesign the church. Meanwhile, the other parishioners are preparing for an upcoming festival featuring ice sculptures. Between all of this, the visiting architect is found murdered in the kitchen of the rectory with a sliver of ice sticking out of his bloodied throat. This is one of Hoch's lesser-known, rarely discussed stories and so hoped, based on the title, it would be some clever take on the impossible crimes with the normally trite icicle weapons, but no such thing. Just a competently put together, but unremarkable, whodunit. Same can be more or less said about the next story.

"The Hand of God," first published in the January, 2003, issue of EQMM, brings Father Noone to St. Joan of Arc college to attend a conference, but it gets cancelled when a sophomore student, Darcy Clemence, is shot and killed. A second body is soon found suggesting suicide with the victim having left behind a suicide note and confession on his computer ("I didn't mean to kill her"). So was it a murder/suicide or a double murder? I think the best aspects of "The Hand of God" is its college setting and Father Noone hitting upon the solution during a performance by college drama club of Sidney Kingsley's Detective Story. Both helped to prop up the plot and solution.

"Searching for Sammy Sand," originally published in the August, 2004, issue of EQMM, is the seventh and final story in the Father Noone series. There's still a shortage of priests and Father Noone is asked to act as chaplain at the county jail, until they have a permanent replacement. One of the prisoners, Roger Colone, claims to be innocent and asks Father Noone to help him find a man by the name of Sammy Sand. Colone is a landlord who rented one of his houses, off the book, to this Sammy Sand, but turned the place into a drug house. What's more, the refrigerator, "often contains chemicals used to manufacture synthetic drugs," was booby trapped with a grenade. However, it was a police officer who opened the fridge and died in the explosion. And, of course, Sammy Sand is nowhere to be found. So it was Colone who was left holding the bag. Father Noone can never ignore a plea for help and begins to snoop around. The plot behind the elusive Sammy Sand and the booby trapped fridge is not terribly complex, but Hoch created some pleasing plot-patterns out of this atypical situation for a detective story. I suppose its fitting this series ends with Noone telling the culprit, "I can hear your confession."

So how to rate The Will o' the Wisp Mystery as a whole? The titular story, or short novel, is the main attraction of the collection and worth the price of admission alone, but the Father Noone stories are the customary mixed bag. "The Sweating Statue" is the standout of the series and “Searching for Sammy Sand” is probably the only other story that'll stick in my mind, which probably not going to be true for the other stories – especially the first two. But then again, I'm probably not the right person to appreciate this series. So get the collection for The Will o' the Wisp Mystery and take the Father Noone stories as an extra.