The Communicating Door and Other Stories (1923) by Wadsworth Camp

Wadsworth Camp was an American reporter, playwright and a noteworthy, often overlooked mystery writer from the 1910s, when the genre began to gradually move away from the Doylean era and rivals of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote most of his detective novels during the First World War – which were lean years for the genre. During those war years, Camp produced several, what can be called, proto-Golden Age mysteries. Similar to Frederic Arnold Kummer's The Green God (1911) and Isabel Ostrander's The Clue in the Air (1917), Camp's House of Fear (1916) and The Abandoned Room (1917) are in many ways ahead of their time, but, in other ways, hopelessly chained to their period. A reminder that the detective story, as we have come to know it today, was still very much a work-in-progress during the 1910s and '20s.

However, the best of these early, transitional mysteries (not penned by G.K. Chesterton or R. Austin Freeman) aren't without (historical) interest or completely lacking as detective novels. Camp is one of those fascinating, early pre-GAD mystery writers whose work read like a direct ancestor of John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot and Paul Halter.

House of Fear takes place in an abandoned, decaying and reputedly haunted theater where the resident ghost of a dead actor prefers to play his part to empty seats, but gets disturbed when a theatrical producer wants to revive it – starting a procession impossible incidents and unnatural deaths. The Abandoned Room is thick with atmosphere reminiscent of Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944) with the dead ceasing to be dead upon being touched and other apparently supernatural happenings. Camp, of course, never reached their heights as a mystery writer, but liked them enough to seek out more. Camp was not the most prolific of mystery writers with choices being limited to Sinister Island (1915) and a collection of short stories.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories (1923) is listed online as a collection of seven ghost stories and the reason why I didn't give it much attention, until a reliable source identified them as detective stories. Several sounded promising enough. So on the big pile it went.

Just one more thing before delving into this collection... it takes a few stories to get to the really good stuff. So bear with me.

The collections opens with "The Communicating Door," originally published in the September 15, 1913, publication of The Popular Magazine, which can probably be blamed for getting the collection tagged as a bundle of ghost stories. Dawson Roberts, a young lawyer, is determined to rescue Evangeline Ashley from her husband, John Ashley, but he has tucked her away in Ashley House – a large, rambling place in the remote parts of northern Florida. Roberts is not deterred and travels to Florida to find a pallid, haggard and ghost haunted Evangeline at Ashley House. She only want to go with him, if he can proves she has only been imagining things ("...find a natural explanation"). This involves a ghost story surrounding one of her husbands long-dead ancestors and a communicating door locked, and rusted, shut for the better part of a century. "The Communicating Door" reads like the setup of one of Camp's locked room novels and concludes with several seemingly impossible incidents and an unnatural death. Camp impressively gives answers in short order, "everything can be normally explained," but leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the events have a natural or supernatural explanation. A short story with timely charm, even if it was already a good decade out-of-date by 1913.

A note for the curious: "The Communicating Door" is another example of Camp's detective fiction being a direct ancestor of Carr. Carr himself successfully stitched together the detective and ghost story in his short story "Blind Man's Hood" (1934) and the standalone novel The Burning Court (1937).

"Hate," originally published in the April 3, 1920, publication of Collier's and is a departure from Camp's usual murders in old, decaying haunted building to tell a crime story of the Roaring Twenties. David Hume and Edward Felton, "rival proprietors of secret and luxurious gambling houses," having being going at it over a beautiful chores girl, Baby Lennox. The so-called "politer underworld" agreed one would inevitably put the other out of the way. Hume fires the first proverbial shots by pulling a dirty trick on Felton placing him in jail, but bail is posted and Felton is determined to kill Hume. Camp's series-detective, Jim Garth, is present to see the first attempt fail and hear Hume promise, "when you get too much for me I won't try any cheap gun play" ("the cops will only wonder at the beautiful floral offering I'll send for your funeral..."). Felton thinks that's a splendid idea and Hume is found the next day gassed to death in his room. A murder-disguised-as-suicide with a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing towards Felton, but the courtroom wizardry of a young, hungry prosecutor secured a conviction – sending Felton to the death house to be electrocuted. After the verdict, the prosecutor begins to second guess himself and begs Garth to find out if he send the right man to the chair.

Right up until the end, "Hate" is not a bad 1920s crime story with a reverse take on the locked room mystery ("...suicides by gas, as a rule, lock their doors and are content without such extras as chloroform") and some courtroom dramatics, but the conclusion is a muddled, open-ended mess. The whole story is concerned with getting a confession from Felton, whether he's guilty or not and never bothers with the truth. Did he kill Hume or was it somebody else? Camp never gives an answer while an obvious solution is staring everyone in the face. Hume was already dying from an incurable disease. Everything suggested to me Hume killed himself and left behind evidence of murder to frame Felton, but botched it as the evidence under normal circumstances would never have resulted in a guilty verdict or even get to trial. Only a young, hungry prosecutor determined to make a name for himself ensured the plan worked. That would given the story a pitch-black ending as the prosecution hammered on "this revolting idea of the murder of a dying man to satisfy an evil vengeance before nature could interfere." So this story can be filed under "Missed Opportunities."

"The Dangerous Tavern," originally published in the July 24, 1920, publication of Collier's, hands Jim Garth "one of the queerest cases" of his career. A young, barefoot, half-dressed woman was found nearly frozen to death on a country road near a place called Newtown. The trail leads Garth to a remote, deserted and inhospitable tavern where he engages in a nighttime battle of cat-and-mouse with several dangerous criminals who don't shy away from murder. A fun, lively gangster story, but not really my thing.

"The Haunted House," originally published in the January 8, 1921, publication of Collier's, is the first truly good story from this collection. Jim Garth is asked by Simon Allen, an ex-poet, to come to the lonely village of Ardell to prove he's not the victim of self-hallucination. Simon lost his wife three years ago and, ever since, "the house has been full of Helen" and her presence is beginning to take a toll on his sister – who lives in the house with their invalided father. Simon knew Helen was unhappy in Ardell and longed for the city, which is why he's guilt ridden over her death and refuses to live in the house. Whenever he has to stay the night, Helen never fails to put in a ghostly appearance. So what's behind these haunting, domestic events? Garth has to take on the role of John Bell instead of Sherlock Holmes to get to the bottom of this case, which leads him down the dark, gloomy family vault. A very nicely-done, well-handled surprise is waiting for both Garth and the reader. Not to mention a good, not wholly unoriginal solution that wouldn't be out-of-place in a detective story from 1931.

So an excellent short story all around and, together with House of Fear and a short story later in this collection, Camp's best to the early Golden Age detective story. "The Haunted House" is another example of how Camp reminds of Carr. This time, the story recalled my favorite radio-play by Carr, "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1942), which has one of my favorite lines, "but the dead sleep lightly... and they can be lonely too." Camp is a bit more wordy than Carr, but "Helen's only lonely... she wants company" ("it's wicked of you to be afraid of her") and "you wouldn't let her go when she was alive, Simon, you can't be cross with her for staying now that she's dead" landed just the same. I don't think Camp has ever been mentioned as a possible influence before, but wouldn't be surprised if a young Carr had read Camp's novels and short stories.

For example, "Defiance," published in the December 24, 1921, publication of Collier's, is another short story full with Carrian vibes and the damned cussedness of all things general – especially the setup. Dr. Jimmy Wilmot is visited one evening Stacy Baldwin, a young scoundrel, who has a bullet wound and a strange story to tell. When he arrived home that evening, someone was hiding behind the curtains with a revolver and fired a shot, but Baldwin carries a loaded cane and struck the arm behind the flash ("...if I didn't break a bone I gave a beastly bruise"). So he'll be on the look out for anyone with his arm in a sling. At the same time another patient arrives. A veiled woman with a beastly bruise on her arm and circumstances lead the doctor to discovering her identity, Anna Baldwin. The wife of Stacy Baldwin. What's worse, Dr. Wilmost has always loved Anna. Now he had unwittingly "delivered her helpless into the hands of her vicious husband." I don't Camp pulls it off as good as Carr would have done, but still a pretty solid, early Golden Age detective story from a writer who often appears to belong to a different era.

No original publication date or magazine appearance is known for the next story, "Open Evidence" (1923?), which could mean it was previously published under a different title or this is its first appearance in print. But whatever the case may be, it's unjustly forgotten, overlooked short story. Camp's best piece of detective fiction. A fully-fledged, Golden Age locked room mystery complete with false-solutions and a detective anticipating both Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. More importantly, the solution might be a first. I'll get to that in a minute.

The story takes place not in an old, dark and decaying building, but on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue office building where a writer, named Hudson, is kept from his work by the telephone ringing in the doctor's office next door. And it has been going on for twenty minutes. So goes to the janitor to complain, but, when he looks through the mail slot, they start to break down the door. They find the doctor lying on the floor, stabbed with one of his own scalpels, but the door is locked and bolted on the inside. However, the connecting door opens into Hudson's tiny workroom and only he knows nobody left through that door. Something that looks very suspicious and immediately calls in the help of a private investigator, Parsons, who looks more like a dandy than a private detective. Parsons draws up two dummy cases before revealing the real murderer and locked room-trick ("I will show you a more obvious exit"). That locked room-trick has, as of now, some historical significance (SPOILER/ROT13): n dhrfgvba nebfr fbzr lrnef ntb ubj bevtvany gur fbyhgvba gb gur frpbaq vzcbffvoyr zheqre va serrzna jvyyf pebsgf fhqqra qrngu jnf va avargrra guvegl-gjb, juvpu unf fvapr orpbzr fbzrguvat bs na byq qbqtr. Vg srryf yvxr vg zhfg unir orra hfrq orsber fhqqra qrngu, ohg abobql pbhyq pbzr hc jvgu na rneyvre rknzcyr. Ubjrire, V abgrq ng gur gvzr na rneyvre rknzcyr, be gjb, cebonoyl rkvfgf va na bofpher fubeg fgbel sebz gur gjragvrf. V guvax guvf bar dhnyvsvrf. Gur gevpx vf nqzvggrqyl n ybat-jnl-ebhaq irefvba bs gur gevpx, ohg abg gbb qvssrerag naq npuvrirf gur fnzr rssrpg (zheqrere fghzoyvat vagb gur ebbz nsgre gur ybpxrq qbbe vf oebxra bcra). So, you anthologists out there, take note of this unjustly overlooked locked room treasure from the early Golden Age. Same goes for Max Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" (1914) and Laurence Clarke's "Flashlights" (1918).

The seventh and final story, "The Obscure Move," was originally published in the May, 1915, issue of Adventure and is a fun, lighthearted and warm story of crime and adventure. Morgan is a successful private detective, "commonsense and a sense of humor were his own stock in trade," who specialized in tracking down swindlers. The latest crook he's hunting down is a man named Duncan, of the Duncan Investment Company, who had fled with large sums of investment money. Duncan "revealed the attributes of an eel" as he keeps dodging Morgan, while the pursuing Morgan forces Duncan to turn in his tracks several times. A cat-and-mouse chase leading to a logging camp in Florida where they both get lost in the swamps. So they have to survive together, until they can find their way back to the camp. Such an ordeal allows for some misplaced sympathy to grow on Margon's part for someone who ruined numerous people, but not a bad story to round out this collection.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories is the mixed bag of tricks to be expected from an obscure, 1920s collection of only seven short stories, but here it can be put down to personal taste. Not a the lack of quality. "The Haunted House" and "Open Evidence" are the standouts of the collection and my personal favorites with "Defiance" following behind at a distance. "The Dangerous Tavern" and "The Obscure Move" are both well written, but not for me. Only the first two stories, "The Communicating Door" and "Hate," came up short, but even they had their moments. Not to be overlooked, the best stories showed Camp was not hopelessly shackled to the turn-of-the-century period of the genre and could write fully-fledged, Golden Age mysteries. And had he continued to write stories like "Open Evidence," Camp would not have been half as obscure as he's today. Very much worth a look!

Delicious Death for Detectives (2022) by Kie Houjou

I previously reviewed the first, of currently three, genre-bending detective novels in Kie Houjou's "Ryuuzen Clan" series that successfully added new dimensions to the classically-styled, traditionally-plotted shin honkaku mysteries – weaving together the logical with the fantastical. Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) is a superb time travel mystery and Ho-Ling Wong's review of Katou no raihousha (Visitors on the Isolated Island, 2020) makes it sounds like a prototype of what the detective story might look like a hundred years from now. When the detective, horror and science-fiction genres blend together to create a new entity. The third entry in the series keeps the plot a bit more grounded without time travel or otherworldly entities in order to create an insanely tangled, multi-level detective novel that might very well end up fulfilling the role of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) of this century's iconic detective novel.

Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) is one of Houjou's two novels nominated for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." So, with that out of the way...

Kamo Touma from The Time Traveler's Hourglass returns to take on the double role of protagonist and antagonist. Kamo is a magazine writer with a column in the monthly magazine Unsolved Mysteries, "The Pursuit of Truth," in which he presents "alternative explanations" to old, presumably settled cases. His analyses revealed quite a few miscarriages of justice resulting in several wrongful convictions getting overturned. That gave him a reputation of being something of an "amateur detective" and landed him a very special invitation.

Kurata Chikage is a game producer at MegalodonSoft who produces open-world RPG games and the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns caused a boom in game sales. MegalodonSoft into Virtual Reality and created the hit sensation Mystery Maker. A VR game in which "players take on the role of one of the world's top amateur detectives" and "participate in the solving of various difficult incidents" or battle Dr. D, the King of Crime, in Story Mode – even creating original scenarios. Sixty million sold copies later, Kurata and MegalodonSoft expect to release Mystery Maker 2 in February, 2025. By the way, Delicious Death for Detectives takes place in the far-away future of November, 2024. Kurata is organizing an internal event as a special demo, or, to be more precise, "a closed circle event." She asks Kamo to create/design a challenging scenario and play the role of murderer in the play test demo of the VR version of Mystery Maker 2.

The group of people she invited to go head-to-head are "the top real world amateur detectives" who are "to act as detectives and murderers" in an intense battle of wits and cat-and-mouse. Well, Kurata restricted her picks to the amateur detectives of Japan. The first of these amateur detective is the cousin of Kamo's wife, Ryuuzen Yuki, who's a struggling mystery writer under the name "Ryuuzen Yuki." Roppongi Shido is a retired investigator, critic and reputedly an off-the-book consultant to the police ("...often assisted with investigating cases in secret"). Fuwa Shinichiro is the director of the Shinjuku-based Fuwa Detective Agency with a reputation to match. Michi Chiaki describes herself as a job hopping, jack-of-all-trades "who mostly solves or prevents scams for clients." Azuma Yuzuha is an administrator for a hospital, but her brother was a famous detective who died in the line of duty and she carries on his work with her sister-in-law. Hajime Kindaichi Sou Touma Kyu Renjo Kenzan Ryohei is the obligatory, teenage high school detective who solved the cipher murder case at his cram school and several other incidents at his regular high school. Munakata Nozomi is simply known as the drifting detective whose only companion and Watson is a husky, Retsu. Kamo makes eight.

MegalodonSoft honors the time-honored traditions of the detective story and holds the three-day event at Megalodon Manor (floor plan included) on the island of Inunojima in the Seto Inland Sea ("the building certainly resembles the sort of mansion you'd see in a mystery novel"). A VR version of Megalodon Manor was created, called Puppet Hall (floor plan included), where the demo takes place and can be accessed through a full body VR control device – named RHAPSODY. But before the games can even begin, Kurata goes rogue and informs the detectives that there has been a serious change of plan. The game is still going ahead as scheduled, but, this time, being a fallible detective comes with consequences. Kurata states, "normally, the ones who suffer for your mistakes are others, but in this game, you'll be asked to bet your own lives." If the Detectives or Murderer (Kamo) fail to fulfill any of their victory conditions, they'll be killed on the spot. Everyone was given a MegalodonSoft smartwatches that has "death trap" device with a remote controlled poisoned needle. And, to absolutely ensure their cooperation, she gifted similar smartwatches to their loved ones.

You have heard of puzzling brain teasers? Delicious Death for Detectives is a puzzling brain thriller!

I should point out here that all of this is an overly simplified, stripped down summary of the story's setup as it not only has to introduce the characters, laying the groundwork of the plot and explaining the rules of the game, but also has to do a bit of world-building regarding the VR setting of Puppet Hall. An entirely new, specialized setting, "a space set up specifically for a game of deduction," that comes with its own sets of possibilities and limitations. For example, the VR gear is ID-locked with an iris scan bio-authentication and players who get killed in the game, but not IRL, can be resurrected as ghosts with a halo hovering above their virtual avatar to give evidence. So the in-game murderer (Kamo) has to be careful not to be identified when carrying out the murderer. That's why the character of the murderer has the ability to extinguish the lights in the building during "Crime Time" and has night vision function.

So, roughly, the first quarter of Delicious Death for Detectives gives the reader a lot to digest and can be counted as its sole shortcoming as Kurata, in her role as Gamemaster, keeps adding new details and bits of information when the game has already started – giving the impression the story's not playing entirely fair. That's not the case, of course, but simply spacing everything out in order to not give the reader an even info dump to digest. I think it would have been both helpful, not to mention very fitting, if the book had opened with a short game guide explaining the rules, mechanics, maps and list of the in-game inventory and players. It would have smoothed out the opening stages of the story, but, once you get pass that, you get a detective novel like few others. Even by the standards of hybrid mysteries!

I already noted Kamo has to play a double role of detective and in-game murderer. Only the reader, up to a certain point, knows Kamo is the murderer in Mystery Maker 2, but not how he engineered the (locked room) murders. So the murders in Puppet Hall can be taken as semi-inverted mysteries in which the reader knows whodunit, but, frustratingly, not howdunit. Getting caught, having his tricks exposed or successfully defending himself by demolishing a wrong theory, it has deadly consequences either way. If Kamo gets exposed, or one of his tricks, he and his family dies. But if he successfully defends himself, the detective whose theory got demolished is marked for death. The person charged with carrying out the real-world executions is simply called the Executioner and someone hidden among the other players.

I'm going to reveal too many of the details about the impossible crimes themselves, but they deserve to discussed as they're all gems, especially those staged in Puppet Hall.

Firstly, there's the murder Kamo staged in a storeroom barricaded from the inside, which appeared to be the central locked room puzzle of the story as it received a considerable amount of attention and scrutiny – two detectives tacking a crack at it complete with diagrams. A pleasure for everyone who enjoys Ellery Queen-style chains-of-deductions, building false-solutions before tearing them down again centered around the fallibility of the detectives. All the solutions, correct or not, to this locked room puzzle are ingenious and original, but surprisingly conventional compared to the other impossible murder in the VR space. Secondly, around the same time, someone else is poisoned in a locked room and it didn't appear it would develop in anything particular noteworthy, but it ended up giving the book its claim to at least the status of a locked room/hybrid mystery classic. The brilliant solution completely took me by surprise and left me speechless. Revealing a string of pretty unique clues and its brazen originality functioning as a red herring. Is this one of the most pleasing locked room-tricks to mentally visualize? Well, what more can I say? It's a masterclass in how to integrate an invented world or fantastical elements into a fair play (locked room) mystery. And how such a setting can unlock new possibilities to plot and tell a detective story.

If Delicious Death for Detective had been a smaller-scale detective novel restricting itself to experimenting with a locked room murder inside a VR game, it would have still been a first-rate, highly original and fresh treatment of the classical manor house mysteries. Delicious Death for Detectives is a big picture mystery and story continues to twist and turn right up till the epilogue as more people die. But as false-solutions get demolished, the Executioner begins to kill detectives in Megalodon Manor under seemingly impossible, or mysterious, circumstances. I've still barely scratched the surface of this insanely intricate, densely-plotted detective novel climaxing on the third day during the final round of "Answer Time" when Kamo has to reason for everyone's life. Like I said, the story never settles down until the epilogue. All done according to the fair play rules of the grandest game in the world.

I can go on lavishing praise on the story and plot, but you get the idea by now. It's a superb detective novel. A prototype of the detective story of the future and likely going to be a modern classic. What deserves to be pointed out is how it reads like the past, present and future of the genre coming together Megalodon Manor/Puppet Hall, but mostly done very subtly and without referencing famous detective stories or locked room lectures. Those not overly familiar with Japanese mysteries, in all its guises, will no doubt see shades of Christie's And Then There Were None, Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Leo Bruce's Case of Three Detectives (1936) and Ellery Queen, but was particular pleased to spot all the nods to everyone favorite manga mystery series. Some were more obvious ("...the black shadow figure from a certain mystery manga") than others (VR setting and smartwatch hostages), but enjoyed. I really believe what was done with the specialized setting and plot is a glimpse of the detective story of the future.

 Delicious Death for Detectives is not the first hybrid mystery discussed on this blog proving not everything under the sun has been done before, but Kie Houjou delivered a particular effective, convincing and basically a textbook example of the hybrid mystery done to near perfection. And produced a classic locked room mystery in the process. Hopefully, I get an opportunity to read the second, utterly bizarre sounding, Visitors on the Isolated Island one of these days, but, in the mean time, Delicious Death for Detectives comes highly recommended!

Hold on a minute: I have one, very minor, thing to nitpick about. I don't like the title Delicious Death for Detectives or, to use the apparently correct title, "Delicious Death" for Detectives. Just Deserts for "Great Detectives" would be a better fit for an English title, but even that one sounds too cozy-like and this is a story that would actually benefit from a simple, straightforward title. Something like Death and the Great Detectives or Deleting the Great Detectives.

Deathwatch: "The Oblong Room" (1967) by Edward D. Hoch

Earlier this month, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's short story collection The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023), gathering fifteen stories in the Captain Leopold series from the 1981-2000 period, which comes with a detailed introduction and series retrospective – written by the celebrated French anthologist, Roland Lacourbe. The introduction directed my attention to a particular short story in the series.

"The Oblong Room," originally published in the July, 1967, issue of The Saint Magazine, is together with "The Leopold Locked Room" (1971) the "most frequently republished Hoch stories," but, somehow, always confused "The Oblong Room" with "The Problem of the Octagon Room" (1981). So was a little surprise to read Lacourbe describing "The Oblong Room" focusing "less on who killed the victim than why" and "the motive, once discovered, will be one of the strangest in detective fiction." That doesn't sound like a locked room mystery at all! Sure enough, it turns out to be the exact opposite of a locked room mystery.

Captain Leopold and Sergeant Fletcher have an apparently open-and-shut case on their hands when they're called to the scene of a murder at the men's dorm of the local university. Ralph Rollings, a sophomore, is found stabbed to death in his dorm room and the obvious suspect is his roommate, Tom McBern, who refuses to talk and demands a lawyer – while an obvious motive begins to emerge ("they probably had the same girl or something"). There are, however, some baffling details complicating, what should have been, an open-and-shut case. When the bloody scene was discovered, Ralph had been dead for the better part of a day and the only thing Tom is prepared to admit is staying with the body in the locked dorm room for the past twenty-two hours. Captain Leopold and Sergeant Fletcher also have to take the drugs found in their room into consideration and the testimonies from other students about their strange relationship and the sway Ralph held over people ("...a power you wouldn’t believe any twenty-year-old capable of").

So the murder is not about whodunit and how the murder was pulled off, but what happened in that dorm room and why. A what-and-why-dun-it. Hoch obviously used the Captain Leopold series to experiment as "The Oblong Room" would not have worked as well in the Simon Ark or Dr. Sam Hawthorne series. Hoch's experiment here was not without consequences.

"The Oblong Room" was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine before The Saint Magazine bought and published it. Apparently, the solution has certain elements that "scared off some editors" at the time, but "The Oblong Room" in the end won Hoch an Edgar Award. Deservedly so? Yes... and no.

I think "The Oblong Room" is a good crime story, certainly for the time, but not one of Hoch's best short stories for two reasons. Firstly, the story and those controversial elements feel like a product of its time and, as far as sordid crimes go, relatively tame by today's standards – both real and fictitious. Secondly, the story needed to be longer for the ending to be truly effective. Captain Leopold noted himself that the problem with this case is that didn't get to meet the two principle players until the damage was already done. Well, that can in this case just as well be applied to the story and reader. If you're going to write a what-and-why-dun-it, you need to do more character work than was done here. Other than that another competent piece of work from Hoch.

After this short story and the previous short story collection, it's time for something slightly more traditionally plotted. Stay tuned!

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012) by E.X. Ferrars

"Elizabeth Ferrars" ("E.X. Ferrars") is the pseudonym of prolific, long-lived British mystery writer, Morna Brown, who wrote seventy-one detective novels and filled two short story collections over a period of half a century – between 1940 and 1995. I thought the last holdouts of the British Golden Age were Gladys Mitchell (The Crozier Pharaohs, 1984) and Michael Innes (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986), but Ferrars still had enough gas in the tank to go another decade. In his blog-post “The Country Cottage Murders of Elizabeth Ferrars,” Curt Evans wrote that "had Ferrars not suddenly expired in 1995 at the age of 87, there's every reason to believe that she would have keep going with her writing, perhaps even into the 21st century" as "there's no sense of the steep mental slippage" marring the later works of so many of her contemporaries.

I only sampled a few of Ferrars' detective novels over the years, while Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Death in Botanist's Bay (1941) and The March Hare Murders (1949) have not moved an inch towards the top of the big pile in years. Recently, the name Ferrars came back to my attention and decided to move her up the pile starting with her second short story collection.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012), published by Crippen & Landru and introduced by John Cooper, collects seventeen short-shorts and short stories. The first six short-shorts feature a retired private investigator, Jonas P. Jonas, who badgered the wife of his nephew, a professional writer, to put his past triumphs to paper – fitting considering their publication date. Cooper writes in his introduction the stories were published "during one week in 1958 from December 8 until December 13 in the London Evening Standard" ("...a pre-Christmas treat for the readers of this newspaper"). So a retired detective trying to get his memoirs written at the very tail-end of the late, late Golden Age is a great premise, but only the first two stories are noteworthy with the remaining four being little more than amusing anecdotes.

In "The Case of the Two Questions," Jonas tells the story of the time a woman came to him with two strange questions. Can a middle aged woman go out of room, grab a rifle, run a hundred yards to shoot a man and come back within five minutes "without puffing for breath or having a hair of her head disarranged"? And is it possible for "a car to be driven through a watersplash and back again, without its tires getting wet"? Ferrars spins a clever detective story out of these question covering less than a handful of pages and its short length is its only drawback. A slightly longer treatment of the plot-idea would have made for a first-rate howdunit bordering on an impossible crime.

The second story, "The Case of the Blue Bowl," is the short-short done to near perfection. Jonas recalls the first time he heard about how birds learned to poke through the tops of milk bottles left on doorsteps to get to the milky cream. This fact came to his attention while investigating the disappearance and subsequent murder of a village miser, Old Mrs. Toombs, who was supposed to have a small fortune sewn up in her mattress. Jonas shrewdly uses this knowledge in combination with the titular blue bowl left on the victim's doorstep to deliver her murderer to the hangman. A fine example of the detective short-short and even better as a miniature replication of the British village mysteries of the 1930s.

Not much can be said about the other four short-shorts as they're little more than thinly-plotted, mostly forgettable anecdotes. "The Case of the Auction Catalogue" finds Jonas aboard a train when a woman is found strangled in the end compartment and the first suspect is the passenger who hurriedly left the train at the previous stop, but Jonas demonstrates his innocence based on an auction catalogue the suspect left behind. "The Case of the Left Hand" has Jonas recall the time he had to go to a pub to identify a wanted criminal in disguise and only knows the suspect has a partially paralyzed left hand. Jonas helps an old woman in "Invitation to Murder – One the Party Line" who believes "she'd been listening to a murder being plotted on the telephone." The last story of this short-lived series, "A Lipstick Smear Points to the Killer," comes the closest to matching the first two stories and concerns an elderly man found dead sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee on the arm of the chair – an inexplicable half-moon of lipstick on the rim. But in the end, too slight to match the first two stories.

So an enjoyable enough series of short-shorts and loved the premise of a retired detective trying to get his memoirs ("nostalgic memories of crime and criminals") committed to paper in 1958. I just wish all the stories were either as good as "The Case of the Blue Bowl" or came with a somewhat substantial plot like "The Case of the Two Questions" to make this series a little more than an amusing genre curio/footnote.

The other eleven mysteries in The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries are not classically-plotted detective stories, but darker, character-driven crime fiction of the modern school. So not every single story in this section is going to be to my taste, which you should keep in mind when I'm giving some of the stories a short shrift. I do like a good inverted mystery with a biting twist and this collection has a few of them.

The first of these stories is "Custody," originally published in A Suit of Diamonds (1990), which follows Ray Bagstock in tracking down his ex-wife and children to the small town of Dillingford. Ray is determined to take the children away from Lucille and move abroad, because she's a bad mother and a violent fight over this ended in a divorce with Lucille getting custody of their two children – which proves to be easier planned than executed. Particularly when becoming the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his landlady. And the care he took in covering his tracks in finding his ex-wife only makes him look even more suspicious. Surprisingly, the depressingly dark conclusion is more opportunistic than the carefully laid trap I expected, but somehow it worked. Even though it required the shocking incompetence of the police to get to there.

"The Trap" was published in the May, 1961, issue of My Home and is a throwback to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches." Miss Isobel Allen takes the position of an elderly, invalided woman, Mrs. Buckle, who lives remote cottage. Isobel was hired by Mrs. Buckle's sister, Jean Chantry, but she notices something is off as soon as she arrives and even gets an ominous warning, "if unkindness is all you encounter in this house, Miss Allen, you'll be lucky" ("you should prepare yourself for far worse things"). Things move on from there. All I can say about this story is that the ending doesn't feel like the cop-out it is and that's something of an accomplishment.

The next story, "Stop Thief," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 24 (1992) and concerns a married couple, Peter and Coralie Gates, who recently suffered a miscarriage and their lost has affected Coralie's mental health. She has begun to shoplift from the village stores and to Peter's absolute horror word is getting around the much more modern minded, sympathetic village community ("I don't want sympathy!"). I struggled to care about the story, characters or what appeared to pass for a plot, but, fair's fair, the ending pulled it together and delivered with a cruel twist.

"The Long Way Round," first published in Winter's Crimes 4 (1974), is exactly the type of inverted mystery I enjoy the most. A type of inverted mystery sometimes referred to as "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories in which a carefully laid crime or scheme falls apart based on a small, devilish detail – which the oblivious culprit overlooked. One of the best-known examples around these parts is William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965) and John Sladek's "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) deserves a nod. This story is an excellent take on the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Leo and Melanie are married antique dealers traveling to Cyprus to visit a troublesome relative, Uncle Ben, who undeservedly inherited a big sum from his sister without sharing a penny ("...he had merely said that at least he could now afford to take himself off their hands..."). Leo has a foolproof plan to rectify that mistake and inherit the money from his soon to be late uncle. Only for a very tiny, but very important, detail to upset his whole plan ("Oh, God, God!") with the setting being more than just story dressing. Maybe my favorite short story from this collection as a whole.

The next story, "Fly, Said the Spy," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 15 (1983) and is an odd, but compelling, mixture of espionage with domestic intrigue. A nuclear physicist working at a secret research institute has been spilling secret for the past ten years and getting paid for it, but now he has received a warning that the gig is up. So now he either has to bite down on a cyanide capsule or leave everything, including his wife, behind to start a new life under a new name provided by the people who paid him. Not exactly my thing, but not a bad story.

"Instrument of Justice," published in Winter's Crime 13 (1981), reads like a modern crime story, dark, grim and populated with flawed or unpleasant characters, but the story is cleverly-plotted full with unexpected twists and turns. The story begins with Frances Liley reading the obituary of Oliver Darnell, "a painter of very abstract pictures," who had been blackmailing Frances ("two thousand a year...") with salacious photographs, but relieve makes place for horror. She has to find the photographs before someone finds them and sets out to ensure an opportunity to search his studio. What should have been a relatively save, risk free undertaking becomes a complicated situation when a murder is put in her way. Cold, calculated manner ("she was not a nice person, she thought") in which she takes care of both the blackmail material and the murderer makes "Instrument of Justice" the standout story of this collection. A plot, no matter in what shape it's bend or twisted, can do wonder even for the darkest, grittiest of crime material.

The next two stories are not particularly interesting, nor memorable, short-shorts originally published in the Evening Standard. "Suicide" (1963) revolves around two questions: did the dead woman found in an old quarry take her own life or was she murdered and why would she or her killer leave on the car's headlights? "Look for Trouble" (1964) brings the police to a hair salon following a string of burglaries and a murder. Short, not bad and completely forgettable.

"Justice in My Own Hand," originally published in Winter's Crimes 20 (1988), reads like a patchwork of ideas and plot points from other stories in this collection without improving on any of them. So not much to say about this story, except that I didn't care about it. Fortunately, the last two stories end this collection on a high note.

"The Handbag," originally serialized in two-parts in July 2 and July 9, 1960, publication of The Star Weekly Magazine, is the exact opposite of the previous story. It reads like the Golden Age has recently passed away, but its presence (or spirit) is still lingering around the place. Dorothy Clare's father recently passed away when an old friend, Vivian Alford, appeared out of nowhere to take her away for a much deserved break from grieving, but their holiday destination turns out to be a small, grayish inn – somewhere in the bleak, rainy border country. Dorothy slowly begins to believe Vivian has an ulterior motive to drag her along to that place. A suspicion that becomes stronger when Vivian strong arms her into coming along on a sightseeing expedition of Harestone House ("it's hundreds of years old..."). A strange house tour conducted by the blind owner of the house, Mrs. Hunter, during which both Vivian and a priceless cup go missing. So what happened? A modern crime story with all the trappings of a classic country house mystery complete with slippery red herrings.

The collection closes out with a story that could have easily been rewritten as a slightly lengthier Jonas P. Jonas short story. "Sequence of Events," originally published in Winter's Crimes 9 (1977), brings the celebrated Evening Standard reporter Peter Hassall to the village of Newton St. Denis. Hassall is writing a series of articles on forgotten murders, but always ends up solving "the problems which, over the years, had baffled the police." This story reads like the first in a series tells of the first forgotten murder Bassall investigated. The murder of Dr. Joseph Armiger, a retired researcher, who several years ago was found beaten to death next to a letter box in the village and the main suspects were a gang of boys on motor-cycles ("...seen that evening driving wildly through the village"). But no case against them could be made. So, five years later, Bassall travels to the village to make inquiries, but found nothing new until speaking with a local mystery writer, Everard Crabbe. And he has a story to tell. Or, to use his own words, "all I'm telling you about is a sequence of events." A sequence of events centering on a neighborly feud Armiger and Albert Riddle over stolen coronations, vandalized gardens and threats. The ending presents the reader with two possible solution: a simple, sordid and uncomplicated explanation and a more complicated one echoing a very famous detective story. Needless to say, I prefer Crabbe's sequence-of-events interpretation of events, but, either way, a solid story to close out this collection.

So, all in all, The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries is a surprisingly good, nicely balanced selection of short stories considering how far most of the stories are outside of my wheelhouse, but, looking back over the review, I liked more of them than expected. Most of the short-shorts are flimsy and forgettable, except the first two featuring the titular detective, but only "Justice in My Own Hands" truly disappointed. And while I didn't care for the majority of the story, most of the time, I admired how Ferrars manage to turn me around right at the end ("Custody," "The Trap" and "Stop Thief"). More importantly, "The Long Way Round," "Instrument of Justice" and the last two stories are first-rate short crime-and detective stories which gave me something different to chew. A little different than what usually gets reviewed on this blog, but variation is the spice of life and this collection shows our genre has plenty of variety to offer.

I suppose the biggest takeaway from The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas is that Ferrars, who debuted in 1940, could just as easily turn her hands at modern crime fiction in all its gory, depressing grittiness as a good, old-fashioned whodunit. So I'll also bump Give a Corpse a Bad Name up a few places on the big pile.

The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1929) by Brian Flynn

I took a break from Brian Flynn after a string of disappointing novels, ranging from the awful The Sharp Quillet (1947) to the middling Reverse the Charges (1943) and The Swinging Death (1948), but the untimely death of Rupert Heath didn't, exactly, put me in the mood either – resulting in the temporary shuttering of Dean Street Press. Yes, temporary, because DSP is back in a limited capacity. DSP send out an email, back in May, announcing they have "now officially transitioned into Dean Street Press Limited" to continue their "legacy of uncovering and revitalizing good books." Recently, they reprinted Eleanor Farjeon's Miss Granby's Secret (1940) under their "Furrowed Middlebrow" banner.

As of this writing, nothing new has been added to their series of vintage mystery reprints, but surely, they at least want to finish up reprinting Flynn and Moray Dalton. Just not in the same quantity as before. Either way, a good time to finally return to Flynn and others resurrected by DSP.

The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1929), published in the US as The Crime at the Crossways, is the seventh title in the Anthony Bathurst series and not one that appealed to me at first. Bathurst is largely absent from the story and the plot description didn't capture my imagination at the time, but The Creeping Jenny Mystery is apparently a first-rate, 1920s detective novel ("...lines up four surprises as neat as a row of dominoes, and topples them with skill"). Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn called The Creeping Jenny Mystery as "a deeply satisfying mystery" with "no massive bells and whistles on it" ("no locked room, no unbreakable alibi"). So decided to store it away for my return to the series and having now read it, I have to disagree with Steve on The Creeping Jenny Mystery not having any massive bells or whistles.

If bells and whistles are defines as tropes like locked room murders, cast-iron alibis and dying messages, The Creeping Jenny Mystery plays on a trope not often explored in a Golden Age country house whodunit – namely the gentleman thief. Or perhaps, in this case, a gentlewoman cat burglar.

Over the course of six weeks, Creeping Jenny became a household name in the southern counties of England following a series of "daring robberies" from its stately homes. A calling card was left behind after each robbery reading, "With Creeping Jenny's compliments. She takes but one." Creeping Jenny pinched Sir Graeme Grantham's diamond tie-pin and Mrs. Stanley Medlicott's pearl necklace, but left "very much more valuable articles" untouched ("quite in accordance as it were with the terms of the visiting-card"). This places the character of Creeping Jenny firmly in the tradition of the gentle rogues from Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles to Edward D. Hoch's Nick Velvet and Gosho Aoyama's Kaitou KID. Henry Mordaunt, K.C., has read about the thefts in the newspaper and worryingly notices Creeping Jenny getting nearer to his own home, The Crossways. Not without reason. The local papers have reported extensively on the engagement of his youngest daughter, Margaret, to Captain Cyril Lorrimer. And she was to receive from her fiancé the famous "Lorrimer Sapphire" for her engagement ring. Mordaunt has a hunch that the famous is exactly the type of thing to attract the thief and upset the engagement party. Sure enough, Mordaunt receives a note from Creeping Jenny announcing the intention to visit the engagement party at The Crossways ("expect me some time after eleven o'clock to-night").

Nothing appears to have happened during or after the party, but, on the following morning, a body is found lying in "a huddled heap of horror" at the bottom of a disused well. By the way, bodies down the well is the DSP version of bodies in the library as they happen to have several vintage mysteries in their catalog in which a body is discovered at the bottom of an old, disused well. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, bodies-in-wells is not an overly used crime scene or premise, even in classic mysteries, but keep finding them in the DSP reprints. Just from the top of my head, you have Flynn's The Creeping Jenny Mystery, Moray Dalton's The Strange Case of Harriet Hall (1936), E.R. Punshon's Murder Abroad (1939), Francis Vivian's The Singing Masons (1950) and one, or two, other titles that escape me at the moment – probably something by Christopher Bush. But that as a side observation. After the shocking and brutal murder, they discover the sapphire is gone after all despite certain precautions and security measures. So the game is very much afoot.

Anthony Bathurst is, as noted above, is largely absent from the story and his place is taken by two other characters. Inspector Baddeley, of Scotland Yard, whose previous appearance was in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), and the lawyer Peter Daventry from The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) and Invisible Death (1929). Daventry wants to call in Bathurst, "Sir Austin Kemble, the Commissioner of Police, simply swears by him," but Mordaunt doesn't want an amateur detective meddling in the case ("certainly not at this juncture"). Bathurst appears in name only, until "Chapter XVI" to answer Daventry's letter about the case. Even then it takes a while before he finally appears, in person, to tidy up the whole mess. Until that moment arrives, tagging along with Baddeley and Daventry is not a chore at all. Baddeley and Daventry tackle the case with competence and zest.

A case comprising not only of a stabbed body at the bottom of a well, the theft of the famous sapphire, the mysterious identity of Creeping Jenny and the role she, or he, played in this country house drama, but other issues muddying the solution – ranging from a stolen dagger to an extraordinary bet made regarding the sapphire. Flynn weaves all the different, apparently crossed and knotted, plot-threads together, before pulling them apart again, with equal skill. Flynn understood his genre tropes and knew how to find his way around a plot. That allowed him to sometimes get away with certain things that would have died a death in the hands of a less talented writer. For example (SPOILER-ISH/ROT13) gur zheqrere'f vqragvgl naq zbgvir ner obgu pyrireyl uvqqra sebz gur ernqre, ohg gur zheqre boivbhfyl cynl frpbaq svqqyr gb gur inevbhf cybg-guernqf yvaxrq gb Perrcvat Wraal zlfgrel. Ubjrire, Sylaa cerfragf vg va fhpu n jnl vg qbrfa'g srry yvxr vg cynlf frpbaq svqqyr nf vg'f tbbq rabhtu gb unir pneevrq n pbhagel ubhfr zlfgrel jvgubhg fgbyra trzf be png ohetynef. V nyfb rawblrq ubj boivbhf gur nafjre vf gb gur Ehffryy Fgerngsrvyq cybg-guernq, hayrff lbh'er hanjner gur nhgube jnf n znffvir Fureybpx Ubyzrf snaobl. But adds to the overall enjoyment either way.

So, on a whole, I think The Creeping Jenny Mystery shows the detective story was ready to leave the 1920s behind and enter its golden age, plot-wise, because the story itself reads like it was written 8-10 years earlier. It reads like the Roaring Twenties had just begun, instead of being on its last leg, with its country house setting, stolen jewels and a cast of bantering Bright Young Things. Only difference is that the scene of the murder is a disused well rather the customary private study or library. A slightly tighter plot, detection and storytelling could have pushed to the first-ranks of such earlier titles like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and The Orange Axe (1931). Other than that, The Creeping Jenny Mystery reads like a fond farewell to the 1920s detective story plotted with nearly all the ingenuity of the then coming golden decade. So more than a little recommended to fans of Flynn and Golden Age detective fiction.

Murder Most Monstrous: Case Closed, vol. 91 by Gosho Aoyama

The 91st volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series opens, traditionally, with the conclusion of the story that was setup, and closed out, the previous volume bringing Conan, Harley and the gang to the remote of village of Yadori – invited by the mayor to participate in a treasure hunt. They're not the only one who received an invitation to hunt for the legendary treasure at the abandoned hotel. A party comprising of a disgraced archaeologist, Michiki Tanzawa, a horror novelist, Fumie Masuko, a historian, Yasukatsu Someji and a young reporter, Hajime Tsurumi. Someji is killed under bizarre circumstances ("...killed by the legendary monster").

Yadori and surrounding area is the home of the legendary monster from Japanese folktales, the Nue. A creature with the head of a monkey, body of a tanuki, legs of a tiger and the tail of a snake. The previous volume ended with the Nue making an appearance.

When they arrived at the abandoned hotel, Rachel and Kazuha hear "this freaky cry" as the lawn around them catches fire. Next thing they see is the enormous monster coming around the corner of the hotel, "high as the second-floor windows," who sank its teeth into "DANGER, DO NOT ENTER" sign and pulled it out – before wandering back into the forest. The sign is found along the path the beast created with bite marks on it. Nearby the sign is the claw-marked body of the historian, Someji. Both the bite marks on the danger sign and claw marks on the victim's back are huge. This is only the beginning as this volume continues the story with a second, neatly-posed impossible crime.

The group is informed that the arrival of the police can take a while. So it's suggested everyone retreats to their rooms, until they arrive, but Conan, Harley and the Mayor remain behind on the lawn to discuss the case. Shortly thereafter, the people who retreated are hanging out of their windows to listen to their conversation or tell them to keep it down. While this little scene plays out, the strange cries are heard again, patches of grass started to catch fire and a scream is heard from the open, third-floor window of Tanzawa. Conan and Harley find Tanzawa dead from poisoning and "marks under his chin that looked like a snakebite," but the door was locked from the inside and the open window watched by Conan and Harley. So were the other suspects hanging out of their windows.

Needless to say, I enjoyed this despite one, or two, shortcomings. Firstly, the plot is a bit patchwork, which is not uncommon for this period in the series, but, this time, it didn't feel like a story written around a trick or plot-idea. Secondly, while it feels like a cohesively-plotted detective story, some parts work better than others. The poisoning in the locked room is the part that works the best and liked how (SPOILER/ROT13) gur gjb fhttrfgrq snyfr-fbyhgvbaf unir na ryrzrag bs gur gehgu. The appearance of the Nue in the story's opening-act certainly deserves points for its creative presentation and original solution, but not wholly convincing under these circumstances and the clueing is not as crisp as the story would like you to believe. So how the hulking, two-story high Nue appeared is not really solvable. But, visually, still a very appealing trick to see play out. Oh, and the last panel introduces a new character setting up a story-arc for Harley involving an obsessive fan/stalker. I've rambled on enough about this one story.

The second story marks the return of Jirokichi Sebastian, head of the Sebastian Conglomerate, who has been chasing Kaitou KID, a modern-day Arsène Lupin, since the events in vol. 44 and their rivalry has been the detective genre's version of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner – complete with ridiculously elaborate, baited traps. It's what help make Jirokichi my favorite recurring character for some time, but their rivalry perhaps peaked after vol. 61 as the quality of heists began to taper off with each subsequent appearance of the two. This story has not convinced me their rivalry has not run its course.

An elderly widow, Kimika Tomoyose, reaches out to Jirokichi with an antique puzzle box, called "The Wooden God," made by the legendary craftsman from the Bakumatsu era, Kichiemon. A historical, in-universe figure whose various, nineteenth century mechanical marvels appeared in previous stories like the Iron Tanuki (vol. 65) and the hungry store house (vol. 66). The puzzle box was left to her by her husband, but the instructions to open the box is hidden somewhere in his rare book collection. A collection counting over ten thousand books! Mrs. Tomoyose offers to donate the collection to the Sebastian Library on the condition Jirokichi finds the instructions. Inside the box is the world's largest moonstone, Luna Memoria, "one of the big gems sought by the Kaito KID." Jirokichi smells an opportunity to let KID figure out how to open the box and catch him at the same time. So a public challenge is issued to Kaitou KID as Jirokichi begins to prepare another fail proof, tightly secured trap with past experiences in mind.

However, the story is not really about how to open the puzzle box or moonstone, which become something of an after thought to the story, but three mini-puzzles, of sorts. Firstly, Conan's aware Kaitou KID is already in the building and likely disguised, but whose identity and face did the master of disguise "borrow" this time? After realizing KID is inside, Conan notes that everyone's "starting to look suspicious." This mini-puzzle has clearest clueing in this volume. Secondly, the location of the piece of paper with instructions on how to open the box, which is tied to the third, more personal memento left behind in the box. So, on a whole, the story is not a bad one, but feels very slight for one featuring both Jirokichi and KID. If you remove them, the story would have been one of those character-oriented, heart-shaped puzzles Motohiro Katou does so well in Q.E.D.

I've been looking forward to the third story of this volume for years. A new assistant teacher, named Rumi Wakasa, is introduced to the class of Conan, Anita and the Junior Detective League at Teitan Elementary School. Conan and company accompany Rumi to the old, creepy looking storage shed on the school grounds to get powdered limestone for the dodge ball court, which turns out to have a cellar. At the bottom of the cellar stairs, Conan finds a decayed skeleton in a pile of powdered lime. The police assumes the man died as the result of an unfortunate accident, but is there a link between the skeleton and a gang of burglars who disappeared with two-hundred million yen in gold bullion. And in the mean while, Conan and the Junior Detective League go to work on an old, coded message they discovered in the cellar. But the key to code is not as easily cracked as Conan first assumed. Japanese code cracking stories rarely translate into English as they were intended and this one is no different, but the main point of the story is to introduce a new character. She's naturally not who she seems to be, but a klutz who's not who she appears to be gave me déjà vu.

The last two chapters setup a story that will be concluded in the next volume in which Conan gets dragged by Rachel, Serena and Sera to the shopping mall to try on and buy swim suits ("this must be boring for you, Conan"). While shopping, they meet a thoroughly unpleasant costumer and Sera remarks, "just the type of person who's get offed in a mystery novel" ("you'll jinx things and make it come true"). That customer is found strangled to death in a dressing room moments later. Only clues are a smear of lipstick on the victim's thumb and a dying message. Not to be overlooked, Conan began to recall dim childhood memories of meeting Sera at the beach after seeing her in a bathing suit. That always does the trick when you need to jog your memory. Apparently, answers are forthcoming in the next volume.

So, on a whole, the stories in this collection are more entertaining than good and mainly served to setup new pieces of the on-going storyline than posing first-rate, standalone mysteries. Yes, the ending is not yet in sight as the Japanese releases have reached, as of this writing, volume 105. That makes me very curious what Viz is planning to do once they catch up with the original releases. Hopefully, it'll open the door to translations of other Conanian adjacent media/spin-offs/novels.

The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) by Edward D. Hoch

The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) is the thirteenth volume of Edward D. Hoch's fiction, published by Crippen & Landru, collecting fifteen short stories from his series of police procedurals featuring one of his most enduring creations, Captain Jules Leopold – who appeared in over a hundred short stories. A not inconsiderable chunk of Hoch's output counting nearly a thousand short stories covering more than a dozen different series and standalone stories.

Captain Leopold is the head of the Violent Crimes Squad of Monroe, a fictitious town somewhere in Connecticut, who's a normal, competent and levelheaded policeman. So he's basically a modern-day Inspector French. Being one of Hoch's rare conventional characters doesn't mean his caseload is always normal or everyday. I know Captain Leopold from the odd anthologized short story which tended to be locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories. I suppose the known of these stories "The Leopold Locked Room" (1971) in which Captain Leopold is framed for the murder of his ex-wife, but not to be overlooked is "Captain Leopold and the Impossible Murder" (1976) staging a locked room slaying in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam.

There is, of course, more to the Captain Leopold series than an excellent impossible crime story or locked room mystery every now and then. Roland Lacourbe illustrated this in his excellent introduction and detailed overview of the series, "The Best of Captain Leopold," which opens The Killer Everyone Knew. A insightful, non-spoiler introduction for those not overly familiar with the series or are new to it and a refresher course for those who might not have encountered Captain Leopold for while. After all, the last Captain Leopold story, "Leopold Undercover" (2007), was published seventeen years ago and The Killer Everyone Knew is the first Captain Leopold collection since Leopold's Way (1985). So this publication was long overdue. Even longer than that second Ben Snow collection.

Lastly, before delving into this collection, the stories in The Killer Everyone Knew originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1981 to 2000. Yes, this is a shoddy attempt to prevent another unnecessary long and bloated SSC review. So with that out of the way...

The first story, "The Woman Without a Past" (1981), confronts Captain Leopold with the double murder of an unmarried couple, Judy Thomas and Carl Forrester, who were gunned down on their own doorstep when returning home from a birthday dinner. She has a past going back only ten months before it goes completely blank and he has forty-eight cans of ether in the closet. So who was the killer after, Judy or Carl? A good and intriguing setup, but, in the end, not much of a mystery as the culprit is glaringly obvious in spite of wearing the garb of the least-likely-suspect. I think the next story would have made a better opener to this otherwise excellent collection.

"Captain Leopold Beats the Machine" (1983) is a neat little impossible poisoning mystery. Tommy Rusto is a two-bit criminal implicated in the fatal car bombing of Vice-Mayor Mark Prior, but now that his trial is coming up, he's ready to talk and name names. So the D.A. asks Captain Leopold to borrow their interrogation room and for him to be present as a witness, which is when things take a turn for the worst as Rusto asks for a cup of coffee – brought to him by Captain Leopold. Rusto takes a sip of the coffee, mutters something about the taste of the coffee ("this coffee tastes...") and drops dead from cyanide poisoning. The coffee came from the vending machine of the police squad, which is taken apart and closely examined, but is proven to be clean and not tampered with. So who poisoned the stool pigeon and how? Well, those are, admittedly, not terrible difficult questions to answer and it's strange Leopold is never considered as a suspect. Nevertheless, it's a good, timely example of the detective story exploring new possibilities technology can bring to the table (beside a cyanide laced coffee) and loved the clue that identified the murderer. To quote Leopold, "this is truly the age of the machine."

The third story, "Finding Joe Finch" (1984), begins with the announcement of Captain Leopold's engagement to Molly Calendar, a defense lawyer, who appeared in the previous story as Rusto's legal representative. A strain is placed on the engagement following a deadly payroll robbery at the Greenways factory. The primary suspects is one of the factory workers, Joe Finch, who's nowhere to be found. Not to mention that he's the brother-in-law of Lieutenant Fletcher. This causes some problems at home ("...you're all the same, aren't you?"). So more of a police procedural with troubled cops than a proper detective story, but the clueing is fair and the factory setting well realized. And added something to everything from the characters and storytelling to the plot.

I already reviewed "The Murder in Room 1010" (1987) back in June alongside Hoch's "The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper" (1987) and "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" (1991), but it's a small gem of an impossible crime story.

"The Crime in Heaven" (1988) boosts one of Hoch's most creative and original setups when a woman comes to Captain Leopold to report a murder far, far outside of his jurisdiction. Mrs. Roberts has been communicating with the spirit of her grandfather, dead for half a century, through the medium Madame Vane and her spirit guide, Grey Elk ("they're often Indians, you know") – whom she accuses of murdering her dead grandfather! During their last séance, Mrs. Roberts heard the voice of Grey Elk screaming at her grandfather and someone saying, "put down that gun," before a gunshot rang out. Nothing was heard after the shot and Madame Vane refused any more seances. Something weird or unusual happened, but where do you even begin to investigate when "the murder victim was a man who's already been dead for fifty-five years"? Captain Leopold's colleague, Sergeant Connie Trent, plays a big role in unraveling this criminal scheme gone horribly awry. Simply a great story with an original approach to presenting and picking apart a plot.

The title story of this collection, "The Killer Everyone Knew" (1989), begins when Captain Leopold is visited by a criminal psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur Frees, who works with convicted murderers. Dr. Frees regresses them through hypnosis to the moment of the murder and he's convinced one of his patients is innocent. Five years ago, Ralph Simmons was identified by several witnesses as the man "who'd taken Laurie Mae Nelson out to her car in the parking lot and strangled her." So he was arrested, put on trial and sentenced to twenty years to life ("...still protesting his innocence"), but now Dr. Frees claims his hypnotic sessions uncovered Simmons was "nowhere near the scene of the crime that night." Captain Leopold is more than a little skeptical, but promises to look over the file. And the case notes don't look too promising. But, curiously, it turns out the witnesses have begun to die. This story is a bit of downer as it obviously leans more to the serious crime story/police procedural, but how Leopold uses a chain-of-knowledge, rather than evidence, to identify the murderer is not bad. That and it was interesting how Hoch decided to tackle the shopworn premise of a man innocently convicted of murder.

If you think "The Killer Everyone Knew" is a bit depressing, you haven't read "Captain Leopold's Birthday" (1990). Captain Leopold is not looking forward to his coming birthday as the department's mandatory retirement policy is "now only twelve short months away." On top of that, Leopold learns that an ex-colleague from the Arson Squad, Marty Doyle, died from a heart attack a year into his early retirement. Something that has unexpected consequences when one of the Doyles neighbors is shot to death with a target pistol and Leopold has to investigate a murder involving people he knows personally. A dark, gloomy and somewhat depressing cop drama/police procedural, but Hoch (SPOILER/ROT13) uvatrq gur jubyr guvat ba n pyrireyl uvqqra, grpu-onfrq nyvov hfvat gur pncgnva uvzfrys nf n jvgarff. So I didn't hate it, nor loved it, but definitely liked how it reads like a miniature version of a Roger Ormerod novel with its dead ex-cop and use of a target pistol as murder weapon.

The cover image of this collection comes from the next story, "The Retired Magician" (1991), which plays out over the course of several months. Captain Leopold learns that the famous stage magician, Rex Furcula, retired to Monroe and bought a house complete with a small carriage house to store his magic collection and memorabilia – nothing much was heard of him for several years. Two years later, Furcula sister is murdered when she caught a burglar in the carriage house and killer is killed himself during his getaway. So an open and shut case. Over the course of several months, Leopold and Molly become acquainted with Furcula and his wife. Leopold begins to like the Furcula's, but suspicion begins to sneak in when he learns about a one-million dollar life insurance policy. Just like in a magic act, "nothing is ever quite what it seems." I enjoyed the deliberate vagueness, but clued, of the setup punctuated by a new wrinkle on a classic idea. A solid Hoch short story!

"Puzzle in a Smoke Filled Room" (1991) is another story with a premise as intriguing as it's original. The men of Fire Company 5 respond to a house fire and find a woman in pajamas on the doorstep begging to save her husband who went to bed early, but, when entering the burning, smoke filled bedroom, they hear the crack of an exploding cartridge. Firefighter Randy Dwyer is fatally hit in the chest by bullet. The victim of a bizarre, but not an unheard-of, accident in which "the intense heat of the fire had detonated the powder charge in several pistol cartridges stored in the homeowner's bedroom." However, the bullet that was removed from the body has lands and grooves on its sides proving "it had been fired from a gun barrel." Captain Leopold and his team go from a freak accident to a quasi-impossible murder. So it's unfortunate the solution doesn't hold up. I can overlook Leopold not immediately grasping (SPOILER/ROT13) gur fvtavsvpnapr bs na rkvg jbhaq gung fubhyqa'g or gurer, ohg jung nobhg gur cngubybtvfg? Fubhyqa'g ur, bs nyy crbcyr, abgvpr gur obql unf bayl bar ragel jbhaq naq bar rkvg jbhaq, ohg fgvyy qht n ohyyrg bhg bs gur ivpgvz'f purfg? Juvyr gur frpbaq ohyyrg jnf sverq guebhtu gur svefg ohyyrg jbhaq, vg qvqa'g sbyybj gur genpx bs gur svefg ohyyrg be gurl jbhyq unir pbyyvqrq. Naq gur cngubybtvfg jbhyq unir qht gjb fyhtf bhg bs gur obql. So loved how the story was presented, but its resolution left me unconvinced. Only just realized the method is basically a poor, simplified reworking of a rather elaborate trick from another and better Captain Leopold story.

"The Summer of Our Discontent" (1992) is not so much a detective story as it's an important character-arc. Captain Leopold has the long-dreaded retirement talk with Chief Ringold and agrees to retire by the end of the month. Everyone assumed Lieutenant Fletcher is going to be promoted to captain and appointed commander of the Violent Crimes Squad, but Chief Ringold tells him Lieutenant George Vivian, of the Burglary Squad, is picked as his successor – which comes as a smack in their face. Things get worse when one of Vivian's men, Sergeant Patrick O'Mera, is found shot dead in his patrol car with evidence suggesting bribery and corruption. The excellent and fitting motive behind the murder should have made this story a worthy retirement case for Captain Leopold, but everything felt mired in needless cop drama. So the story becomes more about how this murder is going to ruin Vivian's promotion and hand it back to Fletcher rather than allowing Leopold to tidy up his last case, before officially handing over the reigns to Fletcher. Why not do the same thing, except (ROT13) Ivivna trgf cebzbgrq gb pncgnva naq pbzznaqre bs gur Ohetynel Fdhnq? Gung jnl, gur zbgvir fgvyy jbexf jvgubhg gur fbncl qenzn gung pbhyq bayl raq bar jnl.

"Leopold at Rest" (1993) is a minor, but pleasantly surprising, story showing Fletcher in Leopold's role as head of the Violent Crimes Squad handling everyday routine cases like an attempted murder. Charlie McGregor was shot by his wife's lover, Tod Baxter, who's released after his brother backed the half-million dollar bail. Another story that's pleasantly mysterious about the direction of the story, but the ending delivered. Not a very happy ending, but unexpectedly good after the previous two stories. This series is strong on unexpected, original motives and cleverly-hidden criminal schemes. So even the stories leaning heavily in the direction of the dark, grim police procedural and character-driven crime fiction feel more substantial, because they have a plot to stand on.

"Leopold Lends a Hand" (1995) is another good one bringing together the classically-styled detective story and the modern police procedural. Captain Fletcher is short staffed, "more cases than the Violent Crime Squad can handle at the moment," which is why he asked Leopold to help out with some routine questioning of witnesses at the scene of a murder. Construction workers discovered the body of Vladimir Petrov, a Russian businessman, when they returned to work on his million dollar, partially finished condominium – shot twice in the chest. Petrov possessed a couple of antique religious icon, dating back to sixth or seventh century, which are worth a small fortune and considered to be potential motive. Only then Fletcher is shot and seriously wounded. Suddenly, Leopold is back on the job as "acting head of the Violent Crimes division," when another complication rears it ugly head. The woman who appraised one of the icons, Rachel Dean, is shot and killed behind the locked door and barred windows of her private office. She lived long enough to leave behind a dying message! A detective story with a dying message inside a locked room comes with certain expectations, regarding the solution, but Hoch delivers the goods. More importantly, it came with that jolt of surprise I remember from my first encounters with Agatha Christie. I need to nitpick a little here and point out the central idea behind the locked room-trick had been tried before, one or two times, but Hoch arguably employed it to greater effect.

I didn't like the next story, "The Mystery That Wouldn't Stay Solved" (1997), which brings a true crime writer to the retired Leopold to discuss one of his old cases. Nine years ago, Alex Clemmins received the death penalty for the car bombing that killed his wife and their two young children. Now that the execution is less than a week away, the case is getting renewed attention in the media with rumors swirling around about new evidence. Leopold begins to suspect "the evidence that convicted him might be flawed." The previous stories set the precedent that even the stories leaning more towards the police procedurals and crime stories aren't without plot virtues, but that's not the case here. If "Leopold Helps a Hand" shows what the traditional, but modernized, detective story could have been in the nineties, "The Mystery That Wouldn't Stay Solved" rubs the tripe we got instead in your face.

"The Phantom Lover" (1999) is another fairly minor, unusually structured story beginning as a missing person's case. Stanley Falkner is fairly well-known in the city, "a local Realtor who dabbled in politics," who had a very public, headline making brawl with Lynn at a restaurant ("she'd jabbed him in the neck with a salad fork..."). So she becomes a person of interest when her husband goes missing and is found shortly thereafter dead in a gravel pit. Surprisingly, Lynn comes clean halfway through and confesses she conspired with her lover, Gavin Stark, to dispose her husband – which gets her indicted on two counts ("second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder"). However, the so-called phantom lover is nowhere to be found and when she recants her confession, the case against her threatens to collapse. Lynn has a rock solid alibi for the time Gavin killed Stanley. So, unless the D.A. can produce Lynn's lover, there's "no way the D.A. can prove a conspiracy." Captain Fletcher has his work cut out as Leopold is "following this case closely in the papers." Like I said, the structure is unusual, for a detective story, but the truth behind the phantom lover left me unimpressed.

The final story, "The Emerald Expert" (2000), ends the collection on a high note. Leopold and Molly open their home to a French gemologist, Henri Scarlotti, who has come to the United States to testify as an expert witness on behalf of the defense in the Jaspar case. Jeff Shields and Beryl Constantine, his girlfriend, stand trial for the murdering and robbing of a jewelry salesman, Alex Jaspar. Both were caught in New York when they tried to dispose of the stolen emeralds, or so the prosecution claims, but they claim to be innocent. Scarlotti can apparently prove the emerald they tried to sell in New York were mined in a different location than Jaspar's stolen emeralds ("...a small sample from the gem's surface is measured for oxygen isotopes"). This provides the story with fascinating sidelight on emeralds and emerald mining, before the home of the Leopolds becomes a crime scene. Scarlotti was shot and killed in their home! The solution is pretty solid with a surprising killer and, once again, an original motive. So a fine and fitting story to close out this overall excellent collection of Captain Leopold stories.

Lacourbe writes in the introduction that the stories have "verve and imagination" in their variation with "the weirdness of many of the situations" standing "in sharp contrast to the seeming banality of the cases themselves." Something all the stories in this collection can attest to, whether they're good or not, but it's also impressive when you hold the stories up to Hoch's other series. Lacourbe notes that Leopold is one of Hoch's most grounded series-character. Leopold is not a gunslinger from the Wild West (Ben Snow), a thief-for-hire (Nick Velvet), a locked room expert (Dr. Hawthorne) or an immortal detective (Simon Ark). Just a normal, everyday homicide cop who relies as much on his experience as he does on his intelligence and Hoch genuinely tried to create miniature versions of the then contemporary, character-driven crime drama's and police procedurals – complete with their dark, gritty tone and bleak endings. So not everyone is going to like, what Mike Grost dubbed, "The Gloomy Tales," but I admired Hoch craftily giving a classical twist to most of these bleak, gritty modern-day police procedurals. And with only four less than stellar stories, The Killer Everyone Knew ensured Leopold's Way is on its way to the top of the pile. Simply a must-read for Hoch fans!

A note for the curious: if you ever wondered what the mostly untranslated, Dutch police procedurals/detective stories by M.P.O. Books/"Anne van Doorn" are like, The Killer Everyone Knew comes pretty close to the short stories collected in De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, 2018) and Meer mysteries voor Robbie Corbijn (More Mysteries for Robbie Corbijn, 2021). Just throwing that out as a reminder there's still some untranslated gold over here.