The Dairy Devil (1975) by Ton Vervoort

Back in 2022, I concluded my run of reviews of the lamentably short-lived, surprisingly classically-styled Inspector Floris Jansen series written by the Dutch editor, translator and chess player Peter Verstegen – who published his detective novels under the name "Ton Vervoort." A run of reviews starting in 2021 with the sometimes Ellery Queen-ish Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and concluded with the spy procedural Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965). Moord onder the mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) deserves a special mention as a series highlight and an unmistakable Dutch detective novel, but pretty much finished the series. Or so I thought.

Vervoort wrote three short stories of which at least "De juwelen van een weduwe" ("The Jewelry of a Widow," c. 1960s) features Inspector Floris Jansen, but not sure about the harder to find short stories "Burleske aan de galg" ("Burlesque on the Gallows," 1965) and "Het alibi" ("The Alibi," 1968). Further more, there's a dossier novel and a special, shortish science-fiction mystery. That last one turned out to have been an unexpected, overlooked final entry in the Floris Jansen series making it one of most curious of all genre curiosities. I mean, how many detective characters have bowed out of the genre from a future timeline in an alternative reality? But first things first.

De zuivelduivel (The Dairy Devil, 1975) is more of an illustrated short story than a short novel, commissioned by the Centraal Schoolmelkcomité, which was distributed free of charge among the secondary school students in Den Haag (The Hague) attending schools with new, subsidized refrigerators for school milk – a project of the then Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. There was also contest with a boatload of prizes attached to The Dairy Devil, but more on that later. Vervoort packed a lot of world building, sometimes visionary world building, into this short story-ish science-fiction mystery taking place in an alternative 1990, then still 25 years into the future, when the country had slipped into a soft dystopia.

When it comes to the visionary part, Vervoort was sometimes decades ahead of our timeline as the euro had already replaced the gulden, everyone communicated with videophones (smart phones), students attending classes through wirevideo (zoom) called "multimedia distance learning" and predicated a Chernobyl-like disaster. This one took place in the United States. Where he missed the boat was water driven cars and the entire country running on green energy, but there's also the political climate where a radical, green feminists party has seized power who demolished all but the historical center of Amsterdam to build huge, chalk white teepee tent-like solar-and wind powered buildings. Worst thing that can happen in this society is not going to a now comfy prison, but being sentenced to a spell in a social reeducation camp.

Most of important of all, the changes to the language as everything is now written phonetically and Vervoort wrote The Dairy Devil in this new, dumb down Dutch spelling. It's not exactly an Orwellian kind of New Speak, but it makes everyone sound like they were just punched in the mouth.

This is the strange, completely altered society in which André Geuskens, an old school bank robber, is released following a lengthy term in prison. André is reluctant to leave his lazy prison life behind to work as a janitor at a mega school, but it's either taking that job or go to a re-education camp. André reports to Adriaan Suurbier, history teacher and vice-principle at a mega school, who has some problems of his own. A generous offer to let the elderly, previous owner of the building he purchased as an investment has come back to bait him when science made life extending breakthroughs – practically guaranteeing Mrs. Terpstra would be celebrating her 100th birthday. Adriaan needs to get rid of her and sees an opportunity in André to create a cast-iron alibi, because they're both bald, chubby guys.

Adriaan also works part-time for a dairy company where has to hand out prizes to every hundredth customer who leaves a certain department store with one of their new dairy products in their shopping cart, until getting to the thousandth customer. So he manages to get André to take his place for the day, while Adriaan strangles Mrs. Terpstra and stages a burglary. Yes, this little book was handed out to children alongside their carton of milk and straw. Adriaan has his airtight alibi with André as his unwitting accomplice when Floris Jansen, now Chief Commissioner, appears on the final page. Jansen has no lines in this story, but he has a list and yellow cape Adriaan/André wore for the dairy job. And that's where The Dairy Devil ends!

The next page says, "you will not find the solution of the detective story in this book," but "if you have read the story carefully, you can discover for yourself why and how" got caught. Students are asked to write how they think Jansen solved the case. The ten best solutions can win one of the super prizes (cassette recorders, portable radios, photo cameras, etc.) and a hundred consolation prizes (Ton Vervoort's own detective novels). Prizes were awarded during a festive meeting during a dairy congress in 1975 and every participant would receive a booklet over the mail with the best solutions and Vervoort's own solution. I tried to do some armchair archaeology wizardry and enthusiastically started digging around, but have not been able to find anything about this dairy congress, the prize winners or the booklet with solutions. Considering it took place half a century ago and involved students from a select number of schools from only one region, the booklet with official ending is probably lost to history. Another volume for the Phantom Library.

So here's my solution: When Adriaan was instructing André on the dairy job, he told him to expect a winner roughly every hour, but André is not particular keen on working long hour and not above cutting corners. André likely figured that the only thing really expected from him was producing a list with the ten winners of the day. So why hang around all day counting people with dairy products in their cart when he could simply pick the first ten and call it a day. Does it really matter if they were actually the hundredth, two-hundredth or thousandth customer who bought those products that day? Not to André. When the police started contacting the winners to check Adriaan's alibi, they discover he really doesn't have an alibi at all. It would also turn André from an unwitting accomplice into an unwitting hero who spoiled a killer's plan. I can also see some technical-minded students suggesting the button Adriaan pressed to switch off Mrs. Terpstra's high-tech TV might have been a recording button capturing the murder and its aftermath. Not a solution I would have accepted, but the kind of creative thinking that would probably be awarded with a Ton Vervoort paperback.

Ton Vervoort's career as a mystery writer and his Floris Jansen series didn't strand for a lack of creativity, imagination, variation or interest. Who else would bring his series character back after a ten year hiatus for, what's basically, a walk-on cameo in a limited distributed book for school students in a specific region... that also happens to take place in an alternate future. The Dairy Devil is not a top shelf detective story, but it deserves a prominent, top shelf spot in the detective story's curio cabinet. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to work this into my rambling, but back in May, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's The Frankenstein Factory (1975) set in an alternate, early 2000s and published the same year as The Dairy Devil. Vervoort's alternate 1990 looked a more like the 21st century than the alternate 2000s from The Frankenstein Factory. No internet or cell phones and the story's "Computer Cops" operate from an office in the World Trade Center. Just something I noticed.

By the way, if you ever disagree with me on something and you want to call me names in the comments, but you don't know the correct racial slur for Dutch people, I accept zuivelduivel. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) by Benjamin Stevenson

Last year, I tried the first of Benjamin Stevenson's Ernest Cunningham novels after some initial skepticism, but Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone (2022) sold me on Benjamin's hilarious, classically-styled meta whodunits and quickly followed it up with Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (2023) and eventually Everyone This Christmas has a Secret (2024) – bridging the gap with the non-series Last One to Leave (2022). Benjamin dominated "Murder in Retrospect: The Best and Worst of 2025" as my find of the year. Only drawback to writers from this early, burgeoning second Golden Age is that you can't dip into their complete body of work at your leisure. We now have to wait for the next one to be written and published.

I was more than a little curious when Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) was announced as the title of the fourth Ernest Cunningham novel. A bank robbery and hostage situation is not exactly synonymous with the Golden Age detective novel. Ernest himself admits only example of a bank robbery in classic crime fiction is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed-League" (1891), but, at the same time, holding up a bank has a quaint and retro vibe in 2026. So was curious to see how Stevenson was going to work a bank robbery with hostages into a grand old detective story.

Everyone in This Bank is a Thief opens with Ernest Cunningham, mystery fiction expert and amateur detective, trapped inside a bank vault with about fifteen hours of oxygen left to go and decides to write down everything that happened up until his imprisonment – basically a record scratch, freeze frame with the text "you're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation." So how did he end up trapped inside a sealed vault? Ernest wanted to put his experience and successes as an amateur detective into practical use by starting his own detective agency, but he and his fiancee, Juliette, have been unable to secure a business loan to get started. From Sydney to Perth, they have been turned down by every bank and even a shady, diamond-toothed loans shark called their business plan high risk. So it was an unexpected break when they received an invitation from Winston Huxley, owner of Huxley's Bank, "one of the oldest family-owned banks in the country."

So they travel to the old gold mining town of Huxley, but it turns out Winston Huxley wants Ernest to do a job. Huxley's brother, Edward, is co-director and head of security who changed the code of the bank vault in the basement before disappearing. Now they can't get to the cash or safety deposit boxes to serve their rural, old-fashioned customers and could seriously damage their reputation if it gets out. Ernest needs a bank loan and Huxley needs a detective ("open my vault, and I'll open your agency"). A good deal, however, when they leave his office to get to work, they find someone in a black hoodie, fencing mask and gun holding up the teller. One push of the panic button, the alarms started wailing and shutters came down trapping everyone inside the bank. Ernest and Juliette become two of the bank robber's instant hostages as the police and media begin to gather outside.

This group of hostages consist of the security guard, Felix, the new receptionist, Michelle, a movie producer, Remy Allard, a teenage gaming streamer, Eric, a priest who doesn't speak, Father Gabriel, and a young, dying girl and her caring grandmother, Cordelia and Laverna. And, of course, the director himself. Ernest calls himself a reliable narrator who writes the complete, accurate truth and that goes for the book title. Everyone present is planning to steal something, one thing or another, but "not everyone is conducting a full-on heist" ("that would be ridiculous"). This gives way to a pleasing, increasingly entangled plot, developments and complications. For example, the masked bank robber demands a single dollar from the inaccessible bank vault and cracking the new code is one of Ernest many headaches. And, if things aren't complicated enough, someone gets murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances. A case of apparent case of spontaneous human combustion in front of Ernest that turns his fellow hostages in potential suspects. What he decides to do next also makes him a bit an amateur idiot. And that's a plus for the overall story!

Like I said in previous reviews of this series, Stevenson understands how to lie through his teeth without writing a single untrue word coupled with the comedians touch to exaggerate in order to clarify, which I consider to be invaluable tools for writing and plotting mysteries – especially when handling a dozen different plot-threads. It also allows to stretch things just a little without doing any actual damage to the plot or characters. I mean, I loved the bit with the parrot ("I am not a clue").

So the plot never became muddled and the story remained crystal clear as the various, sometimes intertwined, plot-threads slowly get picked apart. I particularly liked Ernest solution for "the world’s slowest bank robbery," one of the individual problems, but Stevenson practically delivers on all of them with the overall solution tying everything to the central plot taking the whole cake. Only time I thought Stevenson was stretching things a bit too far was (ROT13) gung gur cybg unf gjb pbzcyrgryl vaqrcraqrag pnfrf bs fcbagnarbhf uhzna pbzohfgvba, but other than that, Everyone in This Bank is a Thief is another superbly done, retro-GAD novel. A retro-GAD novel with an atypical framing and backdrop for a classically-styled detective novel, but one that feels "deliciously old-fashioned" in this day and age. Ernest, our always reliable, resourceful narrator and one of the Great Detectives of this Golden Age revival, is really starting to resemble a battered, scarred warhorse. I fear Stevenson is going to turn him into a nine-lives cat and the series by killing him off in the tenth book.

Fortunately, the fifth Ernest Cunningham novel won't be out for at least another year and a tenth novel not before 2032 or 2033. See how handily I turned that pesky luxury problem into neat coping mechanism?

Anyway, it's amazing a series like this was a mere pipe dream only 10, 15 years ago and now they keep rolling off the press. So you can expect Everyone in This Bank is a Thief to make an appearance on my 2026 best-of list and I'll bridge the gap to the next Ernest Cummingham novel with Stevenson's Either Side of Midnight (2020) and Find Us (2021). Stay tuned!

Jack the Poetical Private (1997) by MORI Hiroshi

In 2013, the Breakthrough Bandwagon Books translated and published over half a dozen short stories by MORI Hiroshi, associate professor, engineer and somewhat of an experimental mystery writer, which included two short stories in his popular S&M series, "Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) and "Dochiraka ga majo" ("Which is the Witch?," 2001) – collected under the title Seven Stories (2016). We had to wait until 2022 for the BBB to translate, serialize and publish the first S&M novel, Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996). Since then, the BBB has published MORI Hiroshi's S&M novels Tsumetai misshitsu to hakase tachi (Doctors in the Isolated Room, 1996), Warawanai sugakusha (Mathematical Goodbye, 1996) and recently Shiteki shiteki Jack (Jack the Poetical Private, 1997).

MORI Hiroshi's Jack the Poetical Private, translated by Ryusui Seiryoin, differs from the previous novels as the plot has no fixed location. The Perfect Insider takes place at the Magata Research Institute on Himaka Island, Doctors in the Isolated Room is set in a low-temperature laboratory at the Polar Environmental Research Center and the backdrop of Mathematical Goodbye is Three Stars Mansion, but Jack the Poetical Private has a serial killer working the college circuit with a free roaming plot.

Jack the Poetical Private finds Sohei Saikawa, associate professor in the Department of Architecture, National N University, as a guest lecturer in the Department of Home Environment Studies at S Women's University. Saikawa is to teach a course to its third-year students, but his arrival coincides with a brutal, inexplicable murder. Satomi Maekawa, a second-year student from T University, was found inside the small, securely bolted log cabin behind the Home Environment Studies – normally used as a study room or meeting place. She had nothing on except her underwear revealing a shallow knife wound ("...ran in a straight line from the victim's left chest to her lower right abdomen") and beside the body, the log cabin was otherwise pristine ("...so clean that it looked like they had used a vacuum cleaner"). Soon there would be another locked room murder. This time, the victim is first-year student from S Women's University, Motoko Aida, whose body was found in the liquid nitrogen pump shed T University. She had also been strangled, undressed and worked over with a knife, but the wounds this time appeared to form the letter "Z." And, somehow, the murderer left the door blocked from the inside.

So the impossible murders of two university students, killed on each others campuses, should be grist on the mill of every academic detective, but Saikawa could barely be less interested. Only showing mild curiosity why the murderer "created such a locked-room situation in the first place." Saikawa actually figures out the locked room-tricks, but leaves the problem for his pupil, Moe Nishinosono, to solve. She solves both locked room-tricks nearly as quickly as her mentor, but the methods in this case do not reveal the killer. This is where Jack the Poetical Private begins losing some of its urgency and the plot stalls just a little.

Moe is left alone to poke and probe the university murders on her own when Saikawa goes abroad on a business trip, but she ends up reflecting on their relationship, "she began to feel that Assistant Professor Saikawa was far farther away than China," concluding that "murder cases no longer mattered to her at all" – until she made a questionable discovery. Minoru Yuki is an eternal student at N University whose musical career has over taken his academic education. Moe sees parallels between the lyrics of his song "Jack the Poetical Private" and double murder case. However, the lyrics supposedly alluding to the murders is the dodgiest part of the plot, because the lyrics are vague enough you can read anything in it. Like astrology or a palmist's prediction. Even worse, you have to take a very literal interpretation and ignore the overall context of the song to conclude that "the lyrics are full of expressions that hinted at those murders." You can pick and choose phrases ("...in exchange for everything in this room...") and say they allude to the tragedy from The Perfect Insider. Poor logic and reasoning, especially coming from Saikawa's pupil.

Where the story, and plot, begins to pick up again is with the third locked room mystery and a fourth murder. This third locked room interestingly takes place around the anechoic chamber and the nearby materials testing room at N University, which is all I can say without treading into spoiler territory. However, this third locked room demonstrates more complexity and imagination than the first two. More importantly, it's this third locked room and fourth murder finally giving the reader an opportunity to begin acting as an armchair detective. Just not based on the clues or the previous murders and incidents, but simply based on knowledge of detective stories and plots. For example, how is the reader supposed to have known (SPOILER/ROT13) Puvxn Fhtvgb obhtug gur fubrf Zbr unq orra rlrvat ng gur syrn znexrg? Not an unimportant detail as Saikawa points out the murders would have remained unsolved had that not happened. So the third and fourth murder is what made me suspicious of the murderer (ROT13: nsgre nyy, hfvat n frevrf bs zheqre gb pnzbhsyntr gur erny zheqre, be zheqref, vf abg rknpgyl n eribyhgvbanel vqrn gbqnl be va gur yngr avargvrf). After this, the story loses some of its urgency again until Saikawa returns to solve the case with a solution that sometimes feels more like imaginative leaps than a logical chain of deductions. That can be blamed on how disjointed the plot comes across in the home stretch.

First of all, I think the best and strongest aspect are the locked rooms. Not for their solutions/tricks, which are all of the technical variety, but why the murders were turned into full-fledged, bizarre locked room slayings that could have featured in a Danro Kamosaki novel – because it really looked like the killer was brute forcing them into existence. So liked the general idea of why a murderer would create a series of risky locked room situations with the third being the best. Purely as a locked room mystery, Jack the Poetical Private has something of interest to offer. The problem is that the solution revealed how disjointed and loose the overall plot is. MORI Hiroshi had a plan and even a blueprint Jack the Poetical Private with all the parts of the plot laid out on the floor, but didn't assemble and screw the whole thing together. And the vagueness of the motive didn't exactly help to tighten those loosely fitting joints.

So you can see how Jack the Poetical Private could have been a better detective novel had the plot been treated with the same rigor as the previous novels. It has still has its strong points as well as a few interesting ideas and discussions. There's a brief discussion early on in which Saikawa gives his take on the locked room problem ("...creating a room that’s completely unaffected by external factors is probably impossible"). But as a whole, Jack the Poetical Private is a marked step down from The Perfect Insider, Doctors in the Isolated Room and Mathematical Goodbye. Only recommended to fans of the S&M series, Japanese mysteries and impossible crime fanatics like myself.

By the way, as of this writing, the BBB has not began the serialization or even announced the translation of the next S&M novel, Fuin saido (Who Inside, 1997), which is supposedly an important entry in the series. This delay probably has to do with last years problem when "all of The BBB's works disappeared from eBook stores for several months due to a problem at the stores." So hope they'll get back on track soon and continue the series, even if this last one fell short of the mark. I really hope they have plans to translate one of Ryusui Seiryoin's own detective novels.

Go with the Plan: Q.E.D. iff vol. 3-4 by Motohiro Katou

The first, of two, stories making up Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 3, "Three Killers," concern three women, Kurotsu Yui, Okada Miki and Fujishima Akiko, who have all fallen victim to Yamaguchi Senji – president of a predatory investment company ("let them try and sue me"). They all three lost much more than just money giving them a pretty strong motive to murder him. Only for an opportunity to presents itself.

Yamaguchi Senji's company holds and manages art pieces for investment, but clients rarely get their money or art pieces back. So the company has build up a modest stock of art pieces and intends to auction them off during a special gathering at his lavish mansion, which he pitches as "if everybody were to buy art works at high prices" then "the market price would also increase" and everybody profits. Yamaguchi Senji intends to make an absolute killing by emptying out their stock, but the three women plan to make a killing of their own. But here's the kicker. They're working independently from each other, not in tandem, who come each with a plan of their own that collide head on the moment they're put in motion. So, needless to say, the result is a beautiful and confusing mess.

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara were asked to try and get back a dish the company took to be invested, but never paid out or returned the dish. They also happened to be there when Yamaguchi Senji met his strange, violent end Touma offers a solution in return for the dish. Touma's explanation of the chain of events from that evening is quite impressive from the blood soaked bed, a dead snake in the trash and a dented vase to an empty, thoroughly searched room – only stretching it when it came to how the body ended up in the pool. Other than that, "Three Killers" is a mostly very well done inverted mystery taking The Trouble with Harry approach to murder.

The second story from Q.E.D. iff vol. 3, "The Bike Thief," begins as a fairly minor character-piece, centering on a six-year-old incident, when Sou Touma briefly returned to Japan from America over the summer holiday. An even younger Touma was weeding a garden as a summer job when coming across a brand new bike in the tall grass with a price tag on it. The bike was reported stolen from a shop and the local policeman believes Touma pretended to find the bike he stole himself, because a witness claimed a child cycled away on it. Touma denies it and the incident remained unresolved, until Touma returned to the village to witness an old house being demolished. So meeting the people from back then again brings up the old incident and honestly didn't expect too much from this story, except coming up with a creative reason to steal and dump a brand new bike. That it delivered. It also had an unexpected good method to steal a bike. On a whole, "The Bike Thief" turned out to be a much more involved detective story than its opening suggested and solid closer to this volume.

The first, of two, stories from Q.E.D. iff vol. 4, "The Jade Miko," really should have been a volume-length story. The backdrop is Indigo Island, ruled over by the Yuna clan, where a small community have lived generations by farming and fishing. Now the community is being ripped apart over plans from a Tokyo developer to turn the island into a holiday destination by building a resort, but the plans face opposition from half the islanders. A situation hardly improved by the disappearance of the company's surveyor and gets even worse Yuna Aoi, head of the Yuna clan, "divined that the body was buried on another island." She "divined perfectly" where the body was buried, but that only made her suspect in the eyes of the police. Fortunately, Yuna Aoi's younger sister, Shiomi, is a friend of Kana Mizuhara and they entice Touma to come to Indigo Island to sort the case out. What they find on the island is not merely a dispute over a development project that ended in murder, but a murder tied to the history and mythology of the Yuna clan and island. There is, of course, talk of an old curse that has struck down people before and apparently continues as two more murders follow. Two seemingly impossible murders!

First of these two impossible murders begins, similarly to the first murder, with a disappearance. This time, it's the company's lawyer who goes missing and during the subsequent search a cave is inspected, before high tide, but is found to be empty – only for a second search to reveal the body. So how did the murderer get the body inside the cave when it was under water? I had a pretty good idea how this trick was done, but not the second one. And that one takes the prize! A body is found nailed with a knife to the sacred tree on the beach, but "there are no footprints on the sand" anywhere near the crime scene. Funnily enough, I recently mentioned in my review James Scott Byrnside's "Red River" from The Architecture of Murder (2025) how difficult and tricky the no-footprints scenario is to pull off successfully and satisfyingly. Even more difficult to achieve with the no-footprints problem is being original. Byrnside ticked all the boxes with "Red River" as I can't recall having come across anything similar, but Katou definitely came up with a new solution here. I'm truly surprised nobody has come up with it before! In a way, it's the easiest and maybe even the most logical way to do it.

"The Jade Miko" is solid story overall hampered only by the fact that it should have been volume-length story, because the plot needed more space and getting rid of the next story would be no great loss to the series.

I've barely anything to say about the second and last story, "H.N. (Handle Name)," which somehow feels oddly out of date. A story that could have been published in the early or mid-2000s. Sou Touma helps out a cyber security expert, Matt Brown, who stopped an online casino from being hacked and now he's being targeted by the elite hacker known as Crash. But this story is more cringe than anything else. So not a great story to end this volume, or review, on, but not a bad haul altogether. "The Jade Miko" is the highlight of these two volumes, closely followed by "Three Killers" and "The Bike Thief" developed into something interesting towards the end. Only "H.N. (Handle Name)" was bad, surprisingly bad. Well, three out of four ain't bad.

Next manga mystery review is going to be either Case Closed or C.M.B.

The Pelham Murder Case (1930) by Monte Barrett

Percy Montgomery "Monte" Barrett was an American author, newspaperman and cartoon writer from Mitchell, Indiana, who co-created with artist Frank Ellis the original "spunky girl reporter" character, Jane Arden – cited as the prototype for similar characters like Lois Lane. More importantly than having co-created an internationally syndicated daily comic strip, Barrett had a brief stint as a mystery novelist during the early 1930s.

Barrett wrote three novels, The Pelham Murder Case (1930), Murder Off Stage (1931) and The Wedding March Murder (1933), starring a professional mystery writer and sometimes amateur sleuth, Peter Cardigan, who closely works together with Lieutenant Murphy. A standalone mystery, Murder at Belle Camille (1943), appeared a decade later. Barrett's detective fiction has been out-of-print for nearly a century, only Murder at Belle Camille was reprinted in 1954 under the title A Scream in the Night, but the Peter Cardigan novels have not been reprinted in over 90 years. So it's no mystery why Barrett and Cardigan have been largely forgotten today. Only reason The Pelham Murder Case was even on my radar and wishlist is its inclusion in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). So when Coachwhip Publications came out with a brand new reprint of The Pelham Murder Case, back in March, I immediately picked up a copy. Try and keep me away from a vintage locked room mystery!

The Pelham Murder Case finds Peter Cardigan as a guest at a house party at Pelham Manor. There's the host, John Pelhem, his brother, Renny Pelham, and their niece Barbara, who's engaged to a man twenty years her senior, Hillary Astair – which has lead to a big problem. Barbara has fallen in love with a handsome, boyish and rising New York architect, Gordon Smith, who's also present. Furthermore, there's the sister of John and Renny, Aunt Agatha, Dr. and Mrs. Fisk. Last, but not least, the Countess of Desborough ("a woman of undoubted attraction") who fascinates Cardigan. So your ordinary, everyday problems rarely resulting in murder most ingenious outside the pages of a detective novel.

Fortunately, The Pelham Murder Case is a detective novel and that very night Cardigan is discussing detective fiction and murder with Renny. Surprisingly, Cardigan is not a fan of detective stories relying subtle poisons and guns concealed in chimneys, because those methods are very rare in real murder cases ("...unfair competition"). Cardigan explains that "the baffling point of a mystery is not the method by which the victim is killed," but "the method by which the slayer cloaks his identity" and "you have a first-class mystery story." Their discussion is interrupted by a gunshot. A gunshot coming from behind the locked door of the library. The door is opened with a spare key and inside they find John Pelham's body, sprawled beside the desk, holding a revolver. So it obviously looks like suicide, but many small details don't add up like the main key not being found inside the library. Cardigan calls in his old friend, Lieutenant Murphy, who gives the amateur detective a free hand to do as he sees fit.

It's very obvious from the book title, publication date and basic premise Barrett aligned himself with S.S. van Dine and his followers, but The Pelham Murder Case also belongs to a specific type of mystery novel that appeared from the late 1930s to the early-mid 1930s. A period when the Golden Age detective started to take definite form and things could get a little meta at times. Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and "The Locked Room Lecture" from John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) are the two best-known examples, but there earlier, lesser-known examples like Walter S. Masterman's The Wrong Letter (1926), Alan Thomas' The Death of Laurence Vining (1928) and Lewis George Robinson's The Manuscript Murder (1933). Something that came up earlier this year in John Norris' review of Norman Forrest's Death Took a Publisher (1936).

The Pelham Murder Case falls in that category and not only for starring a clever, mystery writing snoop, but the discussion in the second chapter on realism in detective fiction, murder methods and plot by a gunshot – which can be read as a pre-Challenge to the Reader. Barrett wrote and plotted The Pelham Murder Case in the spirit of, what would come to known, as the Grandest Game in the World. However, this spirit and attitude, dismissing the cliches and tropes of the past from the start, obliges the writer at the very least to do something fresh or novel. In this case, the old-fashioned weekend party mystery with a murder in a locked library. Well, that proved to be a mixed bag.

When I finished The Pelham Murder Case, I picked up Locked Room Murders and flipped to the section with solutions to see if Adey had anything to say about it. He did and called it "a very muddled affair." I disagree... kind of. It's true that the impossibility of the first murder is not clearly stated and that has all to do with the murderer inexplicably taking the key, which destroys the locked room situation needed to pass the murder off as a suicide. The crime scene is also raided of all its potential clues and red herrings, adding to its muddled appearance, but new information is received returning the status of locked room mystery to the first murder. But by this time, I think most modern readers have caught on to who-and how. I suppose the solution was fresh enough in 1930, but not something that's going to hoodwink the genre savvy, cynical readers and armchair genre scholars of today. So a good try regardless.

There is, however, a second impossible murder, complete with a floor plan, towards the end showing a great deal more complexity and ingenuity in setup and solution. This second impossibility, a late and welcome surprise, allowed Barrett to come through on some of the expectations/promises raised by the first couple of chapters. So no idea why Adey ignored that second impossibility in Locked Room Murders.

On a whole, The Pelham Murder Case is far from a flawless locked room mystery and the passage of time blunted some of its strong points, but at least Barrett played the Grandest Game in the World with gusto and enthusiasm. There were moments when Barrett could be as cavalier as the man who coined the phrase making The Pelham Murder Case a fun, fast-paced read that knew when it was time to wrap everything up. So not an unhesitatingly recommendation, if you simply want a baffling whodunit, but well worth if you're interested in obscure, long out-of-print locked room mysteries or seeing how the Golden Age took shape.

The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Reprints from Rue Morgue Press

 

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the permanent shuttering of our beloved, dearly departed Rue Morgue Press following a string of disasters from flood damage, health issues and financial problems to the death of Enid Schantz – severely reducing their output. Rue Morgue Press limped on until around 2015 and permanently closed down when their website went offline a year later. Tom Schantz followed Enid Schantz in 2023, aged 79, marking a definite end of an era.

It cannot be overstated how important Tom and Enid Schantz were to, what we have come to call, the Reprint Renaissance. And everything that followed in its wake.

Rue Morgue Press was not only one of the first independent mystery publishers setting up shop on the internet to cater directly to readers who simply love good, old-fashioned whodunits, but they also had consistent quality – because they wouldn't reprint just any old mystery novel. They concentrated, what they called at the time, "the second rank of mystery writers from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s," but who today would consider writers like Nicholas Blake, John Dickson Carr, Stuart Palmer or Craig Rice second rank? That had more to do with a lack of availability at the time than quality. Rue Morgue Press fixed that problem by simply reprinting their work over a nearly twenty year period from 1997 to 2016.

So there was a real sense of loss when they permanently closed down. Not that the end of the Rue Morgue Press ushered in a new dark age or an ink drought, because the avalanche known as the Reprint Renaissance had already started around 2014. It's just depressing the Reprint Renaissance was without the Rue Morgue Press, but at least Tom Schantz got to see that Reprint Renaissance blossom into a Golden Age revival. So, on this tenth anniversary, I wanted to commemorate their contributions to the revival of the traditional detective story by picking and highlighting my ten favorite Rue Morgue Press reprints.

If this list appears somewhat conventional, compared to previous lists, that speaks volumes of what Rue Morgue Press has done to resurrect the legacies of authors who were shrouded in near total obscurity only two decades ago. So here's to the Rue Morgue Press!

Thou Shell of Death (1936) by Nicholas Blake

Thou Shell of Death previously appeared on "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories" and briefly considered a replacement (A Question of Proof, 1935), but Thou Shell of Death is the superior of those two Nigel Strangeways novels – appearing on that previous list as a contender for best Christmas mystery. The shooting of a World War I flying ace, on Boxing Day, shows Blake could as good as his Golden Age contemporaries delivering a perfect "blend of steely logic and pure moonshine."

Come Away, Death (1937) by Gladys Mitchell

Gladys Mitchell was one of those obscure, out-of-print mystery writers who had been all but forgotten at the start of this century. Only a few dedicated fans kept her memory alive, until the Rue Morgue Press started reprinting Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley series in 2005. Since then nearly all of her work has been reprinted in hardback, paperback and ebooks by numerous publishers, but it began with the Rue Morgue press. Come Away, Death is the most striking and memorable of their Mitchell reprints. A bright, exuberant and colorful tale steeped in Greek mythology, pseudo-archaeology and creeping madness as Mrs. Bradley joins Sir Rudri Hopkinson's tour of Greece to probe the Eleusinian Mysteries. A mystery novel only Gladys Mitchell could have written.

Postscript to Poison (1938) by Dorothy Bowers

I have read three of Dorothy Bower's five detective novels, but Shadows Before (1939) and the overpraised Fear and Miss Betony (1941) disappointed after the superb Postscript to Poison. Bowers seems to have been one of those mystery writers who nailed it on their first try and then fail to live up to it on their second, third and fourth try. A pity as Postscript to Poison is an Agatha Christie-esque poisoning mystery involving a diabolical matriarch miraculously recovering from near death, only to be poisoned when she was about to change her will. Not as cliché or trope-y as it sounds and still remember the wonderful solution. It's exactly the kind of mystery novel that gets it author labeled a Crime Queen.

The Man from Tibet (1938) by Clyde B. Clason

Clason has been somewhat overlooked during the Reprint Renaissance, but the Rue Morgue Press reprinted Clason's celebrated locked room mystery, The Man from Tibet, all the way back in 1998. Clason's The Death Angel (1936) was one of the last reprints Rue Morgue Press managed to get published. So you can call Clason one of their flagship authors and they reprinted many of his excellent detective fiction over the years like Blind Drifts (1937), Dragon's Cave (1939) and Poison Jasmine (1940), but The Man from Tibet remained Clason's flagship novel. A pure, Golden Age baroque mystery in which an antiquarian and collector dies under inexplicable circumstances inside the locked Tibetan Room of Chicago luxury apartment – solved by professor of Roman history, Theocritus Lucius Westborough. A highlight of the classic American detective novel from one of the brightest students of the Van Dine-Queen School.

The Judas Window (1938) by Carter Dickson

Rue Morgue Press was also among the first to attempt bringing John Dickson Carr back into print and was torn between picking The Crooked Hinge (1938) and The Judas Window (as by "Carter Dickson"). I decided to go with the classic. A vintage locked room mystery and courtroom drama rolled into one with H.M.'s only appearance in the role of barrister as he attempts to save a young man from the gallows.

The Frightened Stiff (1942) by Kelley Roos

Kelley Roos, a shared pseudonym of William and Audrey Roos, is my favorite discovery from the Rue Morgue Press as their Jeff and Haila Troy series has one of my all-time favorite comedic mystery novels. The Frightened Stiff is a genuinely funny mystery novel even after more than eighty years and begins with the Troys moving into their new basement apartment in Greenwich Village. Haila's first lines set the tone of the story, "jumping from a window would bring no release," but even worse is Jeff recognizing their apartment as his old speak easy. And the body of a naked man in their back garden doesn't help either. Normally, these comedic mysteries with bantering, wisecracking husband-and-wife detective teams take a light touch to the plot, but the Rooses were solid plotters. The Frightened Stiff is their masterpiece!

Home Sweet Homicide (1944) by Craig Rice

Where to even begin? Home Sweet Homicide centers on the three children of a widowed, mystery writing mother, Dinah, April and Archie, who grab the opportunity to get some much needed publicity for their mother when shots ring out in their otherwise quiet neighborhood. So they lay a trap for both the killer and bachelor homicide detective. This is a sickening sweet detective story as the children were based on Rice's own and it has been suggested she wrote Home Sweet Homicide as an apology to them. Whether that's true, or not, the result is a detective novel you wish was twice as long and glad it never got a sequel to spoil the magic.

Nipped in the Bud (1951) by Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer is another once famous mystery writer who was reintroduced through the Rue Morgue Press after having falling into obscurity. I believe their reprint of Palmer's The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) had their most iconic and recognizable cover art, depicting Miss Withers and Oscar Piper among a colony of penguins, but Nipped in the Bud has always been a favorite. Palmer's best known novels were published in the 1930s and '40s, but wrote two of his best in the early 1950s. Nipped in the Bud has Miss Withers and her beloved poodle, Talleyrand, trailing a possible witness and chief suspect in a murder down to Tijuana. This comes with all of Palmer's customary humor, charm and ingenuity, but even better than the characterization, storytelling and plotting is the shape of the plot. Mike Grost summed it up perfectly: "if one were to construct a diagram of the book, the best approach would be a 3D model using a set of Tinkertoys" as "each colored stick would represent a different branch of the book's plot, which forks off in all directions making a three dimensional tree." So no idea why it's not better known.

The Youth Hostel Murders (1952) by Glyn Carr

When first learning of Glyn Carr and his unique output of detective fiction, it can feel like reading about an alternate universe John Dickson Carr. Glyn Carr was the penname of Showell Styles, an explorer and mountaineer, who wrote fifteen climbing mysteries taking place "among the crags and slopes of peaks scattered around the world" – solved by Shakespearean actor and mountaineer, Abercrombie Lewker. So this Carr became known for so-called open-air locked room mysteries ("...managed to find a way to lock the door of a room that had no walls and only the sky for a ceiling"). I wouldn't strictly call them locked room mysteries, more howdunits, but enjoyed their reprints and particularly The Youth Hostel Murders. Lewker goes undercover at a youth hostel following the suspicious death of a rock climber and there appears to be a link to an ancient stone circle where the Old Ones dwell. The Youth Hostel Murders is basically Scooby Doo for adults.

The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert

Just like Blake's Thou Shell of Death, Gilbert's The Danger Within previously appeared on "The Hit List: Top 10 Fascinating World War II Detective Novels," but it's too good and too much of a classic to be left off. The Danger Within, alternatively published as Death in Captivity, was inspired by Gilbert's experience as a prisoner-of-war and escapee in Italy producing an unforgettable, semi-autobiographical wartime mystery thriller taking place among British prisoners of an Italian POW camp. A daring escape is being planned and prepared, but an inexplicable murder in the partially collapsed escape tunnel threatens to put a stop to "The Great Crawl" of Campo 127. The Danger Within is not only one of my all-time favorite detective novels, but, in my opinion, one of the best detective novels from the second-half of the previous century.

The Architecture of Murder (2026) by James Scott Byrnside

Last year, James Scott Byrnside published It's About Impossible Crime (2025), a collection of original short stories, in which he paid homage to MacKinlay Kantor's It's About Crime (1960) and radio director William Spier – who worked on The Adventures of Sam Spade and Suspense. Shortly after it's publication, Byrnside started working on a second collection of stories and posted updates on his blog how the collection was coming along.

The Architecture of Murder (2026) was released in early April and is made up of four, pulp-style novellas "about constructed realities that turn on their creators" and impossible crimes, but "the solutions are tied to the characters completely." However, The Architecture of Murder is a better collection of locked room murders and miraculous misdeeds than It's About Impossible Crime, which succeeded as retro-GAD mysteries, but hadn't all that much to say about its impossible crimes. Not to mention that its best story, "Instrument of Death," is a non-impossible crime tale. That's not the case here and one of the novellas from The Architecture of Murder become an instant favorite right after finishing it. Can you guess deduce which one?

"Killer Pete" begins with Horace Cobb, engineer and inventor, being found shot inside his workshop, "locked, bolted from the inside," where he worked on automatons with completed and half-finished mechanical creations filling the crime scene – everything from a ballerina and tin terrier to the classic chess player. However, the largest of the automatons, a cowboy, stood in the middle of the workshop holding a .38 revolver in its right hand ("...iron index finger firmly entrenched inside the trigger guard"). Killer Pete can move, fire the gun and even speak ("how does my lead taste, bucko?"), but was it Killer Pete who shot Cobb or was it someone else present at the house when the shot rang out? More importantly how was it done and why was the only key to the door taped to the floor some distance away from the locked door? Those aren't the only curious aspects confounding the murder.

So the police call upon Rowan Manory and his assistant, Walter Williams, who are the best private investigators money can buy in Prohibition-era Chicago. Locked room slaying and other impossibilities are Rowan Manory's bread and butter, but even he's taken aback by the presentation of this particular locked room shooting. But not for very long. While it's true the solution is tied to the characters completely, it's the bizarre crime scene and locked room-trick making "Killer Pete" a killer yarn. Only smudge on the story is that it was published in 2026, not 1926 or 1936, but I won't hold that against Byrnside. A banger of an opening to this second collection!

"Madmen Prefer Blondes" brings a serial killer to the Windy City, cutting the throats of young blondes, but Sergeant Delbert Grady has an even bigger problem on his hands. William E. Dever is the new mayor who played it by the book and expected the police to play it straight, not drink or swear ("worst of all, bribery was a crime again"). Dever turned down Grady's request to hire Rowan Manory in favor of a criminal psychologist, Ferris Brandt, "responsible for the capture of two multiple murderers" believing it's time the public sees its police catching the criminals rather than "some freelance gumshoe" – who's not cheap either. Grady has to work together with Brandt and his psycho-analytical profiling of the razor wielding maniac, but, when things eventually go south, Grady gets to call in Manory and Williams. Chasing the killer's bloody, twisted trail stops at the door of a locked room with two more bodies inside. Trying to muddy the waters with a locked room murder is always a risk when Manory is on the case!

This impossible murder is introduced with only a dozen pages left to go, however, it has some pleasant complexity as there are no gaps for wire-tricks and the heavy, brass bolt could not have been manipulated with magnets. The locked room-trick itself is not routine either, although (ROT13) vg'f n fvzcyvsvrq inevngvba ba gur gevpx sebz gur svefg fgbel. So, the locked room, for me, helped punch up the ending, but kudos to Byrnside for penning a story that reads and feels like it could have come from pulps like Ten Detective Aces or Dime Detective Magazine.

"Red River" takes place fifty years after "the only recorded murder in Red River," a small, out-of-the-way town, which happened when a stage magician, Ambrose Kellach, came to the town – whose assistant, Sandy Brown, grew up in Red River. So her return home was something of triumph turned tragedy when she plummeted from the rafters. However, the cause of death was not the fall, but strangulation and the towns people turned on the magician. Ambrose Kellach was beaten into a bloody pulp, dragged to the cemetery, hanged from a lone tree and finally buried in an unmarked grave. Now, half a century later, Bradley Friedman, head of the local theater, discovered Kellach's trunk in the theater's attic with notes on a lost magic called "The Unwalked Path." Friedman decides to perform the trick for a group of friends at his home.

There's a small structure, called Folly House, surrounded in all directions by a moat with only way in, or out, being a narrow wooden footbridge. Friedman has a special pair of shoes with unique, diamond-patterned soles ("...that cannot be reproduced") and covers the footbridge in a layer of hydrated lime. Friedman tells his friends he's going to cross the bridge, leaving a one-of-a-kind trail of footprints, go inside and all they have to do is return in fifteen minutes. He'll be miraculously standing on the lawn to greet them with "singular and impossible-to-replicate shoes" left inside Folly House. And, of course, the trail of footprints on the bridge would have been left completely undisturbed. So, when they return fifteen minutes later, Friedman is not there to greet them and they find his body inside Folly House! But how was the murder to cross the bridge without disturbing the diamond-patterned footprints?

Red River has a big problem. Not only are they ill-equipped to handle a murder, let alone a murder of the impossible variety, but the town will have a vote on the sale of the town's mineral rights in two weeks. So the last thing they need is the prospective buyers learning Red River has a cut-throat running amok and decide to hire an expert, Rowan Manory. Even he can't prevent the murderer from striking a second time under extremely bizarre, Theodore Roscoe-esque circumstances. And, once again, there's only a single track of prints going up to the body. I've said before how I consider the no-footprints problem to be most difficult and tricky of all impossible crime scenarios to pull-off both successfully and satisfyingly, which is difficult as the scope and range is much more limited than your standard locked room mystery. So always admire when a writer pulls one off without leaning on one of the routine tricks or basic principles. I think Byrnside added something new to the range of possible solutions to the no-footprints problem, because I can't recall anything similar. Just as important (well, almost as important) as a pair of original no-footprints impossibilities is the intertwining of past and present leading to two more murders. If there's anything to complain about it's that "Red River" is not a novel-length mystery, but, other than that, it's arguably Byrnside's best piece of impossible crime fiction to date. A personal favorite and must read for fans of Paul Halter and Tom Mead!

Finally, "The Carny Murders" is a standalone, pulp-style mystery thriller without Manory and Williams rounding out The Architecture of Murder. A very seedy, pulp-style mystery at that as it takes place behind the scenes of the traveling Hargrove Carnival involving such characters as a tattooed lady, a ventriloquist, a missing psychic and her replacement, a bearded woman, their grimy boss and one of his ex-employees – who returned to pick up something he had stowed away. The trouble really begins when their various "shenanigans" become entangled with murder when sliced, cut-up bodies begin turning up. Similar to the second, pulp-style story about a mad slasher, there's a locked room murder towards the end. It didn't work for me this second time around. I like a good carnival or circus setting and atmosphere as much as the next mystery fan, but I'm always wary of the carny-type solution like a human fly or trained animals. I'm not a fan of that type of solution and "The Carny Murders" is no exception. However, as carny as it may be, it was undeniably used for great effect and ending. Just not something you can present to me after the first and third story.

So, on a whole, The Architecture of Murder exposed my traditional leanings still have a strong sway over what I like and prefer. I can enjoy a good, pulp-style locked room mystery, but, if you give stories like "Killer Pete" and "Red River" in the same collection, it's impossible not to play favorites. I highly recommend this collection on the strength of those two novellas. Highlights of the 21st century locked room and impossible crime story.

A note for the curious: it's been a while since I shared one of my incorrect armchair concoctions. So the first no-footprints problem from "Red River" had not only the undisturbed footprints on the lime covered bridge as an obstacle, but also the high, brittle reeds throughout the water and escaping through the water would leave a trail of damaged reeds ("...even with stilts..."). Two things got me thinking: the name of the trick ("The Unwalked Path") and Friedman's theater background. What if the trick was nothing but showmanship and stage dressing? What if Friedman had donned a waterproof dungaree and had carefully cleared a path through the moat and replaced them with fake, but sturdy, reeds (i.e. stage props). So, for the trick to work, all Friedman had to do is hide a waterproof dungaree inside Folly House and make big showing of creating the prints on the footbridge. When everyone is away for fifteen minutes, he puts on the waterproof and leaves through the path of fake, harder to break reeds. The murderer could have seen the preparations and decided to make use of the invisible exit. Don't worry, this armchair solution is not anything like Byrnside's two solutions nor anywhere near as good.

Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling (2023) by P.J. Fitzsimmons

P.J. Fitzsimmons' Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling (2023) is the seventh historical locked room comedy in the Anthony "Anty" Boisjoly series, sporting a title that could have been used for an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You!, but "longer and more involved" than previous entries – which "took appreciably longer to complete." Fitzsimmons noted in the afterword it took long enough to start receiving messages asking if he had given up writing. So Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling was not quite the quick read as the previous novels, but therefore no less amusing and entertaining.

Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling finds Anty Boisjoly, Vickers and apprentice valet Pendurby staying as guests at Ficklehouse House overlooking the forestry town of Ficklehouse Felling. Anty's cousin, Ripley Quillfeather, is engaged to Fabricia Ficklehouse and there something of a family get together at the ancestral seat of the Ficklehouse forestry firm that include Facricia's brother Tucker, their grandfather Ogden and his sister Maud. A special guest for the occasion is Professor Smudge, a psychic medium, to satisfy Ogden's latest interest in spiritualism. So the first chapter has them gathered around a table in the darkened library, holding hands, as Professor Smudge predicts "one of us will die in most strange and tragic circumstances" before night falls again. Anty believes Professor Smudge to be "a feckless, shameless swindler with the ethics of dry rot," only for the prediction to come true with eerie accuracy!

Maude Ficklehouse is found crushed to death underneath an immense, wrought-iron chandelier in the high-ceilinged gallery room ("...must have plunged some twelve feet..."). That just brought a smile to my face. I've always said a falling chandelier is the gentleman's weapon of choice and surprisingly rare for something that's supposed to be a trope. Anty and Inspector Ivor Wittersham argue whether, or not, this is an impossible murder and, honestly, only tagged this review as a locked room mystery on Anty's say so – because both impossible crimes lacked something essential. More on that in moment. So from the opening séance and prediction of impending death to Meade getting crushed by a chandelier under supposedly impossible circumstances, it sets certain expectations for locked room fans, but Fitzsimmons approaches the classically-styled detective story a little different from the today's locked room specialists like Paul Halter and Tom Mead. Getting a laugh is as important as the plot in this series.

Such as Ogden's determination to write his memoirs, assisted by Fabricia as in-house editor, filled with "ribald anecdotes" from his younger days ("Maude was determined to stop it ever being published, you know"). Some of which involve the shenanigans of Anty's grandfather and a young Vickers. Fitzsimmons, if you ever happen to come across this review, please give us a one-off with Tolbert Boisjoly and a young Vickers set in the 1870s! Anyway, the manuscript has the curious ability to duplicate itself, but is far from the only troublesome aspect plaguing Anty and Wittersham. Professor Smudge starts to believe his own hype. A prodigal, penniless son suddenly turns up out of the blue. Ogden's art collection that had gone up for sale without his knowledge and a one-legged duck, named Lefty, roaming Ficklehouse Felling. An age-old rivalry between Vickers and the aging Ficklehouse butler, Thistletine. The lingering question whether Maude even was the intended victim and whether more murders can be expected.

That is, of course, exactly what ends up happening. A poisoning behind a locked door and locked windows ("...largely typical for windows"), but, once again, Anty and Wittersham argue over its status as a locked room mystery. So, while I appreciated dropping a chandelier on the first victim and the second murder has a clever idea lurking behind it, what it sorely needed was a simple floor plan of Ficklehouse House. A lack of floor plans and maps is a general short coming of this series, especially when it helps for clarity and fairness' sake. Like that second locked room poisoning, but, like I said, there's a clever idea behind the how. I also couldn't help being amused at the revelation the murderer's whole scheme can be summed up as (ROT13) n snvyher nppbzcyvfurq. I thought that was funny and not irrelevant to the plot as it provided one of these clever ideas making Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling one of the better entries into the series. Even though it came up short in the locked room department.

Fortunately, I have come to appreciate this series for its characters and lighthearted humor, making them perfect palette cleansers, with every good locked room or deeper plot merely being a bonus. That being said, I hope there's another The Case of the Ghost Christmas Morning (2021) or Reckoning at the Riviera Royale (2022) among the currently four remaining Anty mysteries.

Note for the curious: the eleventh novel in the Anty Boisjoly series, Massacre at Market Middling (2026), was released in April.

Strange Buildings (2023) by Uketsu

Last year, I looked at two pictorial novels, Henna ie (Strange Houses, 2021) and Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022), written and crafted by the masked horror/mystery Youtuber "Uketsu" – which received mixed reception in these parts of the fandom. I enjoyed both as something straying off the beaten path without getting lost or stuck. Strange Pictures and Strange Houses aren't without shortcomings, but neither are they novelty or gimmick mysteries like the dossier or photographs novels of the past. That being said, I can also understand why some expected something closer to the detective story rather than just being adjacent to it. Although being adjacent to the detective story is quite fitting for a series written and plotted around floor plans.

Well, I have some good news for those who have been either critical or skeptical about Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. Pushkin Vertigo has published Uketsu's third entry in the series, Henna ie 2 (Strange Buildings, 2023), which is a follow up to Strange Houses. More importantly, Strange Buildings is much closer to what most expected from the first two novels. You can almost call it a grand-style, Soji Shimada-esque detective story in certain regards.

Strange Buildings is both a real and fictitious follow up to Strange Houses beginning with a brief introduction from the author explaining how "readers began sending me their own 'house' stories" and their strange floor plans. So after numerous interviews, arduous research and analysis, the authored gather enough material to put together another book – comprising of eleven cases presented as file chapters. These chapters, or files, are reports of the interviews and excerpts from books, magazine articles or diaries full with diagrams, floor plans and other illustrations. However, these file-chapters are difficult to review as they're not really short stories in the traditional sense. They primarily present the problem or puzzle, but end leaving most questions unanswered until the last, longest chapter connecting all the strange, disordered dots. I'm going to blast through them in short order without going over the finer details or characters to avoid spoilers.

The first file is "The Hallway to Nowhere" and has the author interviewing a woman who's childhood home had "an unexplained, dead end hallway." A simple problem to start out and, by itself, this would have made for an excellent slice-of-life mystery, but the ending throws up another nagging mystery. The second file, "Nurturing Darkness," takes a darker turn as it focuses on a house where a teenage boy brutally killed his mother, grandmother and younger brother, but had the layout of the house something to do with the boy snapping? "The Watermill in the Woods," third file, is an excerpt from an old, fictitious book of "accounts by various people of their travels in Japan." The excerpt concerns a small, watermill house without any water near it and a room without a door with a senseless alcove in its wall ("...like something from a dream"), but is there something darker lurking inside this fairy tale-like structure? The fourth file, "The Mousetrap House," has the author interviewing a woman who had sleepover in high school, but it ended with the grandmother of her friend taking a fatal tumble down the stairs. However, she has the idea something about the house was designed to kill the old woman. "The House Where It Happened," the fifth file, has the author helping out a friend whose house turned up on an app identifying it as a 1930s crime scene.

This is where the cases begin to bleed into each other. The sixth file, "The Hall of Rebirth," is an excerpt from a magazine article, "REVEALING THE TRUTH OF A MYSTERIOUS CULT," which was the first of a supposedly two-part expose of the Rebirth Congregation – only "the publishers pulled the second part." So the author only has the first part of an undercover report of the cult's gathering at the titular hall with its peculiar architecture and strange rites. "Uncle's House" is one of the shortest files without any floor plans, diagrams or illustrations, but excerpts from a young boy's diary dying of abuse and neglect. This is not even the grimmest part of the story. The next two files, "The String Phone" and "Footsteps to Murder," are connected. The former tells the story of a young girl who talked in her bedroom with her father over a string phone, but everything changed the night their neighbor's house burned down. "Footsteps to Murder" has the author interviewing the man who lost his parents as a small child in that house fire, but who started the fire? The tenth file, "No Escape," tells the story of a woman and her young child trapped inside a yakuza run brothel to pay off her debt. Yes, it's grim.

Finally, "The Vanishing Room," in which the author helps out a friend who has a childhood memory of finding a new door in his home that opened into a ridiculous tiny room with a small, wooden box on the floor ("...something terrifying was inside"). I felt very smug when glancing at the floor plan and immediately spotting where the tiny room was hidden, but finding the room is the easy part. Getting the damn door open is where it gets tricky.

So having gathered and presented his eleven cases, the author has also collected double as many of loose threads, lingering questions and outright mysteries. The author turns to Kurihara, an architectural draughtsman, who's armchair deductions and solution takes up the last quarter of the book. Kurihara's elaborate deductions slowly reveal an intriguing blending of the classical and modern schools of crime-and detective genres. The classical elements comes from the floor plans and how they fitted together in the end, which is what gives it that Shimada-esque quality. And, yes, that imagery running through everything also helped. I couldn't help but be reminded of Senseijutsu satsujin jiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Strange Buildings has a plot-structure with classical features recalling the grand-style detective novel, the interior is more in the style of contemporary noir. Some of the answers and backstories, like the one to "No Escape," get very gritty, brutal and a little disgusting.

Uketsu brought these classical and contemporary approaches together under those timeless themes of old sins casting long shadows and murder coming at the cost of more than just one life. That makes Strange Buildings Uketsu's best and most accomplished novels that has been translated, so far. I'm sure some of you will still disagree.

Somehow, I have a reputation of being an uncompromising, hard headed traditionalist, but, as my recent interest in hybrid mysteries has shown, I'm not opposed to experimenting or exploring new frontiers – on the contrary. I encourage it. I just believe experimenting or exploring shouldn't mean destroying or abandoning what came before, but building on it to create or reach something new. That's one of the reasons why I have been enjoying this series more than others. Uketsu's work is definitely something different from your normal, everyday mystery writer or even shin honkaku authors, but they build on and around something familiar. A sound, solid foundation to build something completely crazy on. I approve and look forward to the translation of Henna chizu (Strange Maps, 2025).