Death in 13 Rooms (2026) by A. Carver

Last month, A. Carver published the fifth title in the Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow series, entitled Death in 13 Rooms (2026), which is a collection of previously unpublished short stories that has, sort of, been foreshadowed in previous novels – teasing comments about cases like "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." Fans of the series will be glad to see Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia front and center of these thirteen short stories. Cornelia was sorely missed in The Dry Diver Drownings (2024) and Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025) was pretty much a standalone mystery that happened to feature Alex and Cornelia. They're back, front and center, picking apart and dispelling thirteen locked room mysteries and other crimes of the impossible variety.

First things, first. Death in 13 Rooms has a brief "Author's Note" noting that "the following stories are presented in the order they were written." So the stories improve as Carver gets a hang of the short story format, because that's a bit of different game than the tightly-plotted, fairly clued and novel-length locked room extravaganzas of The Author is Dead (2022) and The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023). What's also worth mentioning as a sign of the time is that the standard legal disclaimer now includes "no generative artificial intelligence was used in the making of this book, nor any previous books by this author" beside the usual this is a work of fiction and resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Now, onto the stories!

"The Hunting Room" is one of the cases previous novels referenced, "the hunting room that opened fire on the Greenlove family," which conjured up an image of a very different kind of room-that-kills – one that opens fire on anyone who tries to enter. I even imagined a shoot out with an empty room and the whole idea amused me to no end. Carver wrote a different kind of impossible crime than the allusion suggested beginning when Alex and Cornelia are out and about when they gunshots and a scream. So when they go investigate, they arrive at a manor house with body and prosthetic leg lying on the lawn. However, the family already apprehended the murderer, old Sir Harry Greenlove, who apparently shot his own son from the window of the Hunting Room. Only old Sir Harry, only him, had access to the Hunting Room at the time of the shooting. Cornelia has her suspicions and together with Alex she sticks her nose where it doesn't belong and pieces together an entirely different solution. While not what I expected, "The Hunting Room" is a good, Arthur Porges-esque locked room mystery and liked how the solution revealed that the impossibility was of a different nature than the premise suggested. A solid opening story!

The second story, "The Knife in the Devil's Throat," was referenced in Hangings at Hempel's Green as the first time Alex and Cornelia crossed paths with Detective Inspector Peveril. Their first meeting happens when a rescue mission turns into a homicide investigation. Four school girls and their teacher found themselves trapped by rising floodwaters in the Devil's Throat cave and a team of expert divers were assembled to get them out, but, when they divers returned for the last time to get the teacher, they return to his bloodied corpse. However, none of the four girls could have cut his throat as they were all sedated as they were rescued one by one. And no weapon was found on either the girls or inside the cave and flooded passage. Alex has been following the news as one of the girls is an old school friend and, when her great-aunt smells an inexplicable crime, they're on the case. 

This story has a lot of going for itself, a disaster/survival mystery in a miniature, but hated the solution for the vanishing knife and shockingly unoriginal coming from Carver – who has been everything but unoriginal in explaining miracles. A type of vanishing-trick I simply detest as a solution for disappearing weapons and other items. No matter how it's dressed up and presented, but the who, why and circumstances in which the murder makes for a fascinatingly good and modern detective story. Just not a very good locked room mystery.

The third story, "Where the Crows Gather," returns to form as Alex and Cornelia are out and about again when they meet a police officer asking then if they're "here for the murder." The murder in question is that of Professor Pierre Surrey and appears to have been the victim of a blade-wielding fiend, "some are calling him the Night Ripper," who chased the professor up to his front door, killed him and disappeared without ever showing up on the CCTV footage. Cornelia's obsession with impossible crimes rivals my own and jumps on the opportunity to tackle this apparently invisible killer. She and Alex, of course, succeed in doing so and liked the solution tying the invisible attacker roaming the neighborhood with the apparent inexplicable murder of the professor. A short, simple and satisfying story.

By the way, nearly every story in Death in 13 Rooms either has a diagram, floor plan or even the odd family tree, but "Where the Crows Gather" has a grainy, timestamped frame from the CCTV footage – showing nothing more than an empty front garden. Maybe a small, unimportant detail, but a detail that tells there's now such a thing as a 21st century locked room mystery.

Next up is "Vote for Murder" and has Alex accompanying Cornelia to the polling station, a school building, to cast her vote in mayoral race between Andrew Stilldare and Geoffrey Uppermere. When they arrive at the polling station, Alex and Cornelia find that the two candidates are also there to cast their votes. Stilldare and Uppermere banter a bit and the former disappears behind the curtain of the small, crammed voting booth. Shortly after a thock is heard as Stilldare toppled out of the voting booth with "an arrow buried in the centre of his forehead." So with Alex and Cornelia sitting right there when the murder happened, they piece together how someone could have fired an arrow inside "a space no larger than a phonebox." The impossible murder here is very reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Voting Booth" (1977), but Carver had a far superior solution to this conundrum.

Only drawback of "Vote for Murder" is that the locked room is so tight, and the murder so specific, there's only one way it could have been done. Other than that, another good and solid locked room mystery.

"The Second Problem of the Potting Shed," one of the collection's shortest story, makes it abundantly clear Carver had been reading Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne series when writing this and the previous story. Hoch's "The Problem of the Potting Shed" (2000), collected in Challenge the Impossible (2018), is one of my top 10 Dr. Hawthorne stories and Carver picked up the gauntlet to provide an alternative solution to the problem of a body inside a locked garden shed. Carver's story begins with someone complaining to Alex and Cornelia about their neighbors potting shed, which has two major problems. Firstly, the potting shed is an eyesore and, secondly, that their neighbor is lying dead inside – "none of us can understand quite how it happened." The potting shed has a single, fixed window and the door "crudely locked by winding a length of string around a pair of hooks set in the door and doorframe." So how could the murderer have escaped from this locked shed? Like I said, this is one of the shortest stories here and therefore less complicated than other, but very much appreciated Carver's practical, cleverly clued approach on how to leave a body inside a locked shed. Hoch would have approved!

The sixth story, "The Suicide Selfie Curse," is both longer than the previous stories and one of my favorites from this collection. A story that can be seen a companion piece to The Dry Diver Drownings.

Alex and Cornelia have started to become known enough as amateur detectives that sometimes a problem is brought to them, instead of being drawn to them like the murder magnets they are. This time, Alex's attention is drawn to the tragic deaths of two internet personalities, Melanie "Melodramassacre" Douro and Roshni "Roshni Relates" Patil – respectively a horror streamer and true crime podcaster. Melodramassacre was the first to die when she visited a secluded tower, Hopeloss Monument, standing on a wooded hilltop inside a small clearing. She took a selfie on the tower's stone balcony and fell to her death. Roshni Relates, the second victim, had came to the tower to do a piece on Melodramassacre's death, but she suffered the same fate as she fell to her death following a selfie. What's more, there are witnesses who believe the girls were shoved to their death by something invisible.

It goes without saying Cornelia pricks up at the prospect of an intangible killer shoving people from a tower, but Alex is more reserved and reluctant "to just go hassling poor bereaved strangers from out of the blue." She's overruled by Cordelia, but not without consequences. Firstly, they get to witness the third victim plunge to her death and get to confirm the tower is empty. Secondly, Alex beats Cornelia to the correct solution and now Cornelia has to sit back trying to figure out what Alex spotted that she has missed. So, character-wise, “The Suicide Selfie Curse” is treat for everyone who missed Alex, Cornelia and their interactions, but Carver also presented an interesting new variation on the death by defenestration from a locked room conceit with the last sentence revealing the method. Not to mention a very effectively done scene revealing the murderer. "The Suicide Selfie Curse" is an impossible crime story for the 21st century and a fine, anthology worthy impossible crime story at that.

The seventh story, "Shadows of the Solitary Man," begins with Cornelia dragging Alex out of the bed to go to the home of Elias Morass, a collector of manuscripts, who has sold her manuscript of rare, unpublished detective novels in the past and now claims to have gotten hold of Hake Talbot's unpublished, long-lost third novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness – which is one of our near mythical treasures. Alex and Cornelia arrive at the strange, box-like and walled-in house, they're greeted by Detective Sergeant Jones-Smith. Not long before they arrived, a man dressed in black and wearing a motorcycle helmet forced his way into the house with a gun. There were five people present at the time, Elias Morass, his three children and a journalist. The masked man took one of them hostage, killed Elias and escaped outside where he vanished into thin air. Sounds relatively simple and straightforward for an impossible disappearance, but there's an ambitious and intricate scheme lurking underneath. However, the story is not entirely flawless as both the ambitious plot and daring murder needed more space to breath. I think the setup alone would have justified the length of the story and it's a pity Talbot's lost manuscript was only peripherally involved in the case. And no lore or mini-lectures on the detective story's lost media. So a good short story that could have been even better had it been longer, but handling a plot and idea like this in short story form is still impressive.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the next story, "A Diaphanous Wall of Jericho," which begins when Alex and Cornelia take a stroll through the graveyard of the village near their home. Alex to visit the graves of victims in their murder cases "whom she felt a responsibility to at least remember" and Cornelia "to gloat over all the people she had outlived" ("I have finally beaten you"), which is the best scene/part of this story, but then Cornelia spots a hat perched on top of a tree – asks Alex to fetch it for her. However, the hat was stained with blood and Alex saw a body through the top window. The tree is standing in the garden of the vicarage and "a strange house it was" occupied by two normally opposing clergymen, Reverends Viridian and Hurt, who previously appeared in Hangings at Hempel's Green. Recently, they found a common enemy and tore down the wall dividing their semidetached houses which was replaced by an invisible wall. They can't cross into each other's part of the house, because they both wear ankle monitors ("...can only be deactivated by both of our thumbprints at once") and deafening alarm goes off when they cross the invisible border. That complicated the problem of the body inside the locked room upstairs. Not to mention the two other potential suspects one of whom can't walk and the other has two broken arms. Or who they are and why they were there.

Carver was mentally in novel-mode here and definitely tried to cram too much into this short story, which made it more muddled as it rushed towards its conclusion. So this one didn't work for me, but that's inevitable with anthologies and short story collections.

"Where Good Intentions Go," on the other hand, is another favorite and a future addition to "The Locked Library." Alex and Cornelia have taken a holiday to the island of Snute where there's a pristine, secondhand bookshop without a digital presence, but, barely arrived, they bump into Jane Blue from "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." This time, her brother Dominic got himself involved in murder and pretty much the only suspect the police has. Dominic is doing intern work for a company manufacturing marine equipment and have been on the island to do a cross between a promotion and a competitive experiment for their underwater habitats ("they float on the surface of the ocean, with like a one-person hotel room underneath") called Isolation Submersibles pods. Lilian LeRouge, a famous documentary maker, and marine scientist Fiona Dieve have agreed to test the pods by seeing who can stay down the longest. And, since they're rivals, neither is willing to be the first to quit. Dominic's job is to bring them supplies and do daily checks, but one day, several months into the competition, he finds Lilian dead in her pod. Only they had keys and a picture is automatically taken every time someone opens the door.

So who else could have done it? But then a curious clue turns up inside the locked room establishing a link with the other locked pod "separated by miles of ocean." And this is followed by another murder under similar impossible circumstances. I love it when mystery writers get creative with their locked room settings as it opens the door to get creative and even original with the solution, which is an opportunity Carver took with both hands. Purely as a locked room mystery, it crackles with originality, especially the second murder. But on a whole, "Where Good Intentions Go" is a solid and another anthology worthy story. I love a good, rare underwater locked room mystery.

The tenth story, "The Man Who Read William Brittain," is obviously a homage to another master of the short detective story, William Brittain. This story follows Mr. Lionel Suss, an elderly chemistry teacher, who's a big fan of Brittain's detective fiction and particular the Mr. Strang series. Even trying to model himself after Mr. Strang. There are, however, no real mysteries or puzzles to be solved at Yew Valley Secondary School, until he's told a student was seen roaming around in the chemistry room – followed by "a bright flash in the room" ("...that boy's been playing with the gas taps..."). So they rush to the chemistry room to find it locked and empty, but someone had turned on all the gas taps except the master valve. There's an obvious suspect in Yew Valley's most notorious student, Bryson "Bud" Bruin, who appears to have more than one impossible trick up his sleeve for his teachers. Not only did he appear to have vanished from a locked classroom, but chalk writing inexplicably appeared on the blackboard after the locked classroom was entered. 

This little prank has some serious consequences for Mr. Suss as it's made clear somebody has to take responsibility, if this results in a scandal. So the only thing Mr. Suss can do is step in the shoes of his hero and explain the apparently impossible, which he does with logic and reason. So all's well that ends well, but, some time later, something unexpected turned up to put a new perspective on his clever solution. Showing him that climbing on the shoulder of giants, even fictitious giants, takes more than adapting their style and mannerism ("What would Mr. Strang think? What would William Brittain think?"). Simply an excellent mystery and homage! 

By the way, this story also has a nod and wink to The Kindaichi Case Files as the chemistry room has a ghost story said to be one of the Seven Mysteries of Yew Valley Secondary ("though what exactly the other six were, nobody was exactly clear").

The next story, "The Horrendous Occurrences of Colonel Henry Haunt," is tremendously entertaining parody of Hoch's Simon Ark series. Colonel Haunt, narrator, is now an old widow with grown-up children and grandchildren, but while his mind is going he still has clear and fond memories of an old friend, Simon Set. An apparently ageless, eternal wanderer he befriended in the Middle East during his time in the army. Colonel Haunt hasn't heard from Simon Set in ages when a mysterious invitation to come to a remote, rundown mansion to witness a special demonstration. A demonstration for only a handful of people: an American businessman named Mr. Glass, Colonel Haunt, Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia. Simon Set, accompanied by his servant Long Shi, reveals to the group that he's 268-years-old and ready to finally share his secret for a price. Not without a convincing demonstration.

Simon Set has constructed a glass pyramid, containing black box, in which he will be sealed shut. Naturally, he disappears from the black box and reappears an hour later. Dead and decades younger! Cornelia, one of Simon's ardent critics, is not impressed in the slightest. Simply as a locked room mystery, this story offers what you can expect from stage magic shenanigans. No, the strength of the story is in the narrator who's not always there, the characters and getting to see a slightly villainous version of Hoch's Simon Ark. So not a blistering original impossible crime story, but tremendously entertaining homage.

That brings us to the penultimate tale, "Disappearance at Loch Dreich," in which Carver gets creative again with the setting. This time, Alex and Cornelia are holidaying at Loch Dreich somewhere in the remote Scottish Highlands and stay at one of the four old hunting towers currently "submerged past the first storey by flowing and treacherous floodwaters." They occupy the Library Tower as it houses a huge collection of rare, out-of-print mystery novels, but the other three towers are also occupied. Cal, Isa, and Tam, members of Wyrdine University's Paranormal Research Society, have the South Tower. Donald, an unpopular member of the same society, has Well Tower. Evelyn LeRouge, professional treasure hunter, is staying at the Oxbow Tower. The area is rich in history and legends of ancient treasures and stories of the Loch Dreich Monster. So how could one of them have vanished from their tower that was tightly locked from the inside and surrounded by floodwater? Followed by a gruesome slaying under nearly identical circumstances? Carver put the setting and circumstances of the flooding to great use to spin a pretty good impossible crime yarn with, what can be called, a custommade solution for the various impossibilities. So, needless to say, I liked it.

Finally, the thirteenth and last story, "The Tumbling Tower," closing out Death in 13 Rooms. Cornelia is once again dragging Alex along to the home of a collector who has the only surviving copy of an unknown Walter S. Masterman mystery novel ("...consequence when a warehouse holding an author's books is destroyed in the Blitz"). When they arrive, history finally caught up with the surviving copy of Masterman's novel as the house burned down to the ground. Cornelia refuses to give up and contacts the collector's nearest relative, Sir Francis Omar, who has a library of his own. And offers Cornelia to poke around. But while they are there, Sir Francis falls from the top of a tower and "grimly impaled on the rusted metal spikes of the gate." There was, of course, nobody else present up there when they saw him fall. Only two other people were present, Fernie and Hope, who were both so-called lost souls taken in by Sir Francis. Why is Fernie accusing Hope, a pale, undernourished girl younger than Alex, of having killed her entire family?

The problem with this last story is that it's perfectly fine by itself, not great, but fine. However, as the thirteenth and last story, it comes across as patchwork with Cornelia hunting for long-lost mystery novel and an impossible murder involving a tower, but not nearly as well-done or executed as in those previous stories. The locked room-trickery not as original or imaginative as what came before it. So not necessarily a bad story, but well below average for this collection and not the best story to close out on. Maybe it would have been better if the last two stories had been switched around.

So, there you have it, the thirteen, brand spanking new impossible crime stories making up Carver's Death in 13 Rooms. For me, "The Suicide Selfie Curse" and "Where Good Intentions Go" are the two standout stories with only "The Knife in the Devil's Throat," "A Diaphanous Wall of Jericho" and "The Tumbling Tower" falling short of the mark – one reason or another. Nailing it ten times out of thirteen is not bad and what makes Death in 13 Rooms a first-rate and noteworthy addition to the growing stack of locked room-themed anthologies and short story collections, but personally enjoyed the insight the short stories offered into Carver's mind as a writer and plotter. Carver's novels have on average four, or five, locked room murders and other types of impossible problems that get properly explored and examined. You can't write a Carver novel like The Christmas Miracle Crimes in short story form and it was interesting to watch Carver trying to contain that rich plotting style and creativity to the confines of the short story. These stories also revealed Carver's fascination with the role weapons can play in helping to make a murder look completely out of this world. Death in 13 Rooms could just as easily have been titled Wonder Weapons or An Armory of Miracles.

What more can I say? Carver's Death in 13 Rooms is a buffet for locked room addicts and impossible crime fiends. I look forward to the next meeting with Alex and Cornelia!

Locked Room Puzzles (1986) edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini

So, back in May, I added "The Locked Library," a companion page to "The Muniment Room," which is a permanent, easy to edit update of "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Murders & Impossible Crimes" – essentially doubles as my version of "99 Novels for a Locked Room Library." I kind of forgot to post a short blog update to draw everyone's attention to the new page and there has been a lull of impossible crime reviews this month. No opportunity to mention it in passing. That oversight has been corrected and now onto the next.

Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) was the last impossible crime novel to be reviewed on this blog with not even short locked room mystery story between then and now. A whole month with only a single locked room mystery reviewed! I've no idea what came over me, but was determined to close out this month some impossible crimes.

I decided to take this opportunity to finally reread Locked Room Puzzles (1986), edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini, which is the third of five themed mini-anthologies in the Academy Mystery Novellas series. Locked Room Puzzles was my second ever, locked room-themed anthology after Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) that gave me a rare John Dickson Carr novella and second stories for Edward D. Hoch, Bill Pronzini and Clayton Rawson – whom I all read for the first time in Ashley's anthology. So thought it was time to give Locked Room Puzzles a second read.

The first, of four, novellas is John Dickson Carr's "The Third Bullet," originally published (as by "Carter Dickson") in 1937, but this shortened version appeared in the January, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. "The Third Bullet" features a rare, one-shot detective character, Colonel Marquis, who's the Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and prototype character of Colonel March from The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Note a similar one-shot detective starred in one of Carr and Val Gielgud's stage play, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944). Colonel Marquis and his subordinate, Inspector Page, confront a murder as confusingly impossible as any of the case brought Colonel March's Department D-3 at Scotland Yard.

Mr. Justice Charles Mortlake, recently retired, was a so-called red judge presiding over "serious offenses like murder or manslaughter," but the liberal judge was well-known for his leniency on the bench. However, Justice Mortlake was surprisingly hard on a man, named Gabriel White, who got "fifteen strokes of the cat and eighteen months' hard labor for robbery with violence" – despite it being his first offense based on shaky evidence. White didn't take the sentencing, nor the flogging very well and threatened the judge, which he kept up even after being released. White apparently kept his word, entered the judge's guarded house and shot him inside his private pavilion practically in front of two policemen. Even admitting to having fired one of the shots, but a shot, he says, completely missed Mortlake. A second gun is discovered hidden inside the pavilion, but then the autopsy reveals the bullet came from a third, yet to be discovered gun. That makes the whole mess a total impossibility, because "out of four sides of a square, one was a blank wall, one was impregnable with rusted bolts, and the other two were watched." So nobody, except White, could have shot Mortlake inside that locked and guarded pavilion, but he appears to be innocent. Who did it and how?

I guess whittling down "The Third Bullet" from a novel to a novella has come at the cost of Carr's normally cavalier clueing, but nonetheless enjoyed this competently put together little locked room puzzle. While not as strongly clued as a top-tier Carr, "The Third Bullet" demonstrates his talent for misdirection and muddying the waters without muddying the story or plot. So, of course, the Merrivalean blinkin' cussedness of things has a big sway over the plot making the simple and straightforward look labyrinthine. All perfectly handled by Colonel Marquis and Inspector Page. So the only thing that can really be said against "The Third Bullet" is that Carr has written better locked room mysteries, because of course he has.

The second story is Bill Pronzini's "Booktaker," plucked from the short story collection Casefile (1983), which finds the Nameless Detective in his brand new, Dumm Street office when a client comes knocking, John Rothman – owner of San Francisco's largest secondhand bookshop. A three-story building crammed with everything from "reading copies of popular fiction and nonfiction to antiquarian books, prints and the like," but someone has been helping themselves to rare books, etchings, prints and old maps locked away in the third-floor Antiquarian Room. A room that's always kept locked with only Rothman and two employees having keys ("...out of bounds to customers..."). The room is also protected by an electronic gateway that triggers an alarm if anyone tries to leave the room with an item that wasn't scanned and cleared. Somehow, it barely slowed down the thief and Rothman suspects an inside job.

Nameless gets hired to go undercover at the bookstore under the ever so subtle alias of Jim Marlowe ("...in honor of Raymond Chandler") and root out the thief. And rooting around his does. More than enough rooting and digging to make the thief nervous enough to do something really stupid and short sighted, but too late as Nameless already figured out who and how of behind the impossible thefts. "Booktaker" is one of a dozen novels and short stories Pronzini contributed to that mysterious, short-lived locked room revival from the 1980s and one of my favorites from this series. Not only has it a great and surprising premise for a hardboiled detective story with a solution as clever as it's simple, but it has a fantastic example of a red herring doubling as a clue (SPOILER/ROT13: jul gur guvrs unq gb tb sebz fgrnyvat ener obbxf gb inyhnoyr zncf vf obgu n terng pyhr naq na rssrpgvir fzbxr fperra). So, yes, this one more than stood up to another, long overdue reread.

The third story is Clayton Rawson's "From Another World," originally published in the June, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, in which Ross Harte visits the Great Merlini hoping to learn something about ESP and PK. Harte is writing a magazine article on Extra Sensory Perception and shortly has to interview a millionaire, Andrew Drake, who wants to invest millions of dollars into psychic research – if he can be convinced. So a demonstration is planned between Drake and a well-known medium, Rosa Rhys. Merlini smells trouble when he hears her name and when they arrive at Drake's home, they're met by Dr. Garrett, who had just arrived following a distressed phone call from Drake. Rosa Rhys and Drake had locked and sealed themselves away in his private office for their ESP experiment, but they give response to their knocking. So they break down the door to find Rosa knocked unconscious and Drake dead from a stab wound. The door and windows were not only securely locked from the inside, but sealed was not only tightly locked from the inside, but the door was sealed with gummed paper tape!

"From Another World" is a fairly well-known, often anthologized story and not entirely without reason. Rawson came up with a good and original locked room-trick to explain that tricky conundrum of the so-called tape sealed room, however, it was pointed out a few years ago it has a giant, gaping plot hole I missed the first two times. Now that it has been pointed out and reading back my review of The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective (1979), "From Another World" definitely has lost some of its former prestige. I still liked the idea behind the locked room-trick.

Finally, Edward D. Hoch's "Day of the Wizard," originally published in the August, 1963, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, mixes exotic adventure, impossible mysteries and Cold War intrigue in Egypt. The US government desperately needs Simon Ark to help them track down the wreck of a plane, carrying a highly secret and sensitive cargo, which crashed somewhere in the desert at the end of World War II. So they ask Ark's friend and his nameless narrator to track the ancient detective down, presumably somewhere in Cairo. Our narrator has the luminous idea to ask a local magician, the Wizard, to issue an open challenge to Simon Ark to solve his most miraculous of magic tricks ("you get the publicity and I find Simon").

The Wizard agrees and asks him to buy a good, strong and reliable padlock to securely lock an empty cabinet. The door is closed, the padlock snapped into place and the keyhole plugged with a matchstick ("...broke off flush with the surface of the lock...") – sealed with drops of candle wax. The Wizard then asks what should appear inside the locked and sealed closet when they open it the next day ("the most beautiful girl in Cairo"). Simon Ark turns up before the closet is unsealed, but when it's opened, the problems really begin. A drugged, unconscious woman is found lying at the bottom of the closet followed by a murder and a track through the desert to hunt for the wrecked airplane and its mysterious cargo. Rest assured, "Day of the Wizard" is better and more consistent than my description perhaps suggests. Hoch expertly strung together the miraculous appearance of the girl in the closet and the murder with the hunt for the lost airplane and it's highly sensitive cargo, even throwing in an impossible disappearance during a brief desert sandstorm ("...vanished now as completely as if the sand had swallowed her up"). And played more than fairly with the reader. That makes for a very attractive, slightly unusual story and a highlight of the Simon Ark series. I agree with Mike Grost that this is "one of Hoch's most Carr-like stories."

Historically, "Day of the Wizard" is a fascinating and not wholly unimportant contribution to the locked room mystery simply on account of the padlock. I commented in the past you rarely ever see padlocks being used in locked room mysteries, because they're notoriously unreliable and easy to pick open. So it really difficult to pull off a convincing impossible crime scenario when the only thing keeping the door locked is a simple padlock. Hoch picked up the challenge like Carr and Rawson tackled the problem of the tape-sealed room to deliver the most definitive padlock-trick. Great stuff!

Greenberg and Pronzini's Locked Room Puzzles is perhaps not the greatest or most exciting locked room anthology you can get your hands on today, it's still a great starter anthology for those new to the wondrous world of impossible crimes and locked room murders. Locked Room Puzzles gives you an obscure John Dickson Carr novella, Rawson's famous take on the tape-sealed room and two gems from Hoch and Pronzini. So a must-have for everyone who wants to build their own locked room library.

The Flow of Time: Case Closed, vol. 98 by Gosho Aoyama

Later this year, Viz is going to publish the English edition of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 100, but, considering the original Japanese releases currently count 108 volumes, it will be another two, three years before the English releases have fully catch up with the Japanese – presumably around the time vol. 110 or 111 gets published. Gosho Aoyama is older now and not able to produce weekly chapters for serialization, slowing down the number of volumes in recent years. So we're good here until at least 2029. There are still more volumes to go before hitting 100.

This 98th volume traditionally begins with concluding the case that closed out the previous volume, but this time, it needed two chapters instead of the customary one to tidy everything up. But for a good reason.

Previously, Doc Agasa brought a small, antique plate to an appraiser after seeing a similar plate being valued on TV for nearly a million dollars, but the appraiser received three identical plates for appraisal. So there's some counterfeiting going on. Just when Doc Agasa, Conan and the Junior Detective League arrives, the appraiser is killed right under their nose. Only suspects are the three owners of the other plates. They provide a twofold problem: who killed the appraiser and who owns the real antique plate? Answer to both questions would have been enough to make this solid entry in the series, but there's so much more going on in the background with the larger storylines and character-arcs. Sera is also there and she not so subtly needling Conan and Anita about their secret ("I need the drug that corrects the flow of time"). Fortunately, Subaru Okiya to temper her curiosity, but this gives Conan some food for thought regarding Sera and the sister she keeps locked away from the world.

The next story sees the return of Momiji Ooka, a high school heiress, who has romantic designs on Harley Hartwell, despite him only being interested in Kazuha – who's more than aware of Momiji's scheming ("...tryin' to get her claws into Harley"). Momiji's latest scheme to win Harley is staging a code cracking competition between him and Jimmy Kudo, the other famous teenage detective, but the code was devised by a woman for her four sons who grew up separated due to financial problems. Well, the code cracking cases in this series usually don't work very well in translation and the first-half of the story was carried by the characters. A friendly rivalry between brothers in deerstalker made all the more fun that Jimmy couldn't be there in person, but "communicates" through Conan over the phone.

So cracking the code leads them to an abandoned warehouse, where they also find the four long-lost brothers reunited, but one of them has been murdered with the other three becoming instant suspects. This murder is far more solvable than code. Maybe too solvable as the crystal clear clue of the broken glasses meant one of two possibilities, there weren't any clues or even vague hints for one of those possibilities. Still a good, fun and entertaining story for long time fans of the series.

The third story is not unlike the first in story-and plot structure as it weaves plot developments of the various storylines and character-arcs with a regular case. This case begins with Yumi stalking her boyfriend and shogi champion, Shukichi Haneda, who has been acting mysteriously and evaded her questions about where he was going – which turned have an innocent enough reason. He was having practice matches with three promising future shogi players. One of those three players is found dead at his condo lying next to an upturned shogi board with two of its legs removed, which is nearly identical to the recent murder of another shogi player. That victim was found near a shogi board missing only one of its legs and the pattern holds when a third victim is found next to a one-legged shogi board. Will there be a fourth victim?

Conan, as always, works it out and demolishes a cleverly constructed alibi to reveal the killer, but Shukichi beat him to it and promptly becomes a captive. So the story gets an opportunity to fold this case together with the main storylines. My only gripe is that that pistol shot was ridiculous even by comic book standards. Not even Lucky Luke could have made that shot! Other than that, the best story from this volume.

Traditionally, the last chapter sets up the story that will be concluded in the next volume. Yumi Sekizawa, a school friend of Rachel and Serena, is throwing a joint birthday party with her older sister, Remi – whose birthdays are only days apart. When the birthday cake is brought out, the lights are switched off and someone is killed in the dark. What adds interest to the story is Sera trying to get a particular item off Conan. That will all be concluded in vol. 99.

So, all in all, Case Closed, vol. 98 is as close as you can get to classic Case Closed, but with more, urgent developments in the current and main storylines. That makes me wish I could read Case Closed like C.M.B. and Q.E.D., but hey, patience has gotten me this far. So look forward to the release of volumes 99 and 100 later this year.

By the way, on a final note, years ago I remarked how much time must have passed since the first volume, but was repeatedly told not to be autistic as only about a year had passed in-universe. I don't want to nitpick details, however, the code breaking story begins on the first day of summer break ("school's out for summer!") and the last chapter takes place in mid-February. Now, I'm no mathematician or whizkid, but I'm pretty sure that's a good for seven to eighth months of in-universe time passed.

Death Came Through the Snow (1957) by Frits de Winter

Frits de Winter was a Dutch journalist, translator and a second generation detective novelist whose father, Jan de Winter, wrote juvenile mysteries and more than twenty novels about the Limburg police inspector, Paul Nijst – which apparently enjoyed some popularity during the 1960s. Frits followed in his father's footsteps and debuted as a 19-year-old with De dood kwam door de sneeuw (Death Came Through the Snow, 1957). Five years later, Frits returned to the genre and published five novels, De dode moordenaar (The Dead Murderer, 1962), Dood op een zomerdag (Death on a Summer Day, 1963), Bloedgeld (Blood Money, 1963), Muziek, maanlight en moord (Music, Moonlight and Murder, 1964) and De papiermoorden (The Paper Murders, 1964), under the penname "Fred Summer."

I've been interested in Death Came Through the Snow ever since learning it existed, because a classically-styled detective novel written by a teenager brought James Yaffe, Leonard Thompson and locked room mysteries to mind. That and just look at the cover! I would have gladly taken on a gamble on it, but the book has been out-of-print for nearly seven decades and secondhand copies, cheap or overpriced, appeared to be scarce.

So kept quiet and never alluded to Frits de Winter or Death Came Through the Snow on this blog, because why draw unwanted attention to any copies that might turn up? Well, copies not only proved to be scarce, but even rarer, less often sighted than a planetary alignment – snuffing out most of my hope of ever reading it. But then, to my very great surprise, Delpher digitized and uploaded a whole slew of Dutch detective novels including De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow! Delpher is a project of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) to preserve the paper trail of Dutch culture by digitally preserving old newspapers, magazines and books. Legally downloadable to read and study at your leisure. That means exploring the ruins of the Dutch-language detective story is back on the menu.

This time, I'm spoiled for choice for easier access to some potential interesting, promising-sounding novel for future reviews, but first wanted to take that gamble on Death Came Through the Snow. Even though July is not the best time to be reading and reviewing a Christmas mystery. Let's find out whether De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow belongs on that frustratingly short list of good, traditionally-styled vintage Dutch detective novels or another bust.

Death Comes Through the Snow takes place sometime in the late 1940s as Bob Welters, a Dutch journalist, is traveling from the Netherlands to France with his wife, Charmaine, to spend Christmas with her uncle, Vincent de Blancheville – who resides at an old, now war damaged castle. Not only the castle suffered battle scars, but De Blancheville was practically blinded and only employs ex-soldiers who hobble around on prosthetic limbs with horrendously scarred faces. So a cozy place to celebrate the holidays, but Bob and Charmaine aren't the only invitees. Firstly, there are Jean and Paul de Blancheville, twin brothers, cousins of Charmaine. Countess de Taronne, a widow, who's De Blancheville's nearest neighbor. Guillaume Poruc, an arms manufacturer, who brought along his exasperating wife, Madame Poruc. Charles Homles, a self-styled amateur sleuth, who's accompanied by his wife and an old army general from the First World War, De Battance. Finally, Pierre Bondôle, a friend of De Blancheville, who plays butler for the occasional.

So, as the conclusion of the third chapter says, "the guests for the Christmas party with Death had arrived" and they wake up the next morning to find the world covered in a thick, white blanket of snow, but Guillaume Poruc is missing – apparently didn't sleep in his bedroom. They eventually discover his body hanging from a huge, stone cross in the ruined chapel of the castle! And, not unexpectedly, the snowfall cut the remote castle and nearby village off from the outside world. No police coming for at least two days. So it's up to Bob and Homles ("he had taken a correspondence course to become an amateur detective") to play emergency sleuths. They can't prevent from another member of the Christmas party briefly disappearing before turning their hanged, theatrically posed corpse is found.

Not what I expected or imagined from the title and cover art. I imagined and hoped on something in the spirit of the Henri Bencolin mysteries written by a young John Dickson Carr barely out of his teenage years, but the first-half shaped suggested early Ellery Queen from International series (e.g. The Egyptian Cross Mystery, 1932). So wasn't entirely dissatisfied and went into the second-half with good hope of finally reporting back on a worthwhile Dutch detective novel, but that second-half was also the point where De Winter lost interest. The plot became a mess with a third murder and an attempted fourth, briefly teased as a locked room mystery, which turned out to be separate plot-thread from the first two murders. It needlessly muddled and complicated a plot that was already unraveling itself. And not in a good way.

Despite two amateur detectives, it's the murderer who suddenly exposes themselves when time came to wrap things up. From all the characters that could be arbitrarily picked from the cast of characters, this character is the worst and most disappointing De Winter could have picked. While motive possessed a glimmer of originality, it was entirely wasted here as the murderer was ever so slight mad. So it's fortunate Death Came Through the Snow is a short novel you can race through in a couple of hours and that I got to read it for free or else I would have been really angry and disappointed. At least I know now De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow is not some grand, long-lost and hopelessly out-of-print, out-of-reach classic of the Dutch detective novel. The next few reviews of these forgotten, Dutch mysteries should hopefully see an uptick in quality. Wordt vervolgd!

A note for the curious: one small detail I forgot to mention is that Frits de Winter placed Death Came Through the Snow in the same fictitious universe as his father's Paul Nijst series. When Bob learns Homles fancies himself a detective, he smiles and recalls his friend Paul Nijst, Chief Inspector in Maastricht, "who hated nothing more than amateur detectives." That makes me wonder if he borrowed Bob and Charmaine from that series.

A Murder is Announced (1950) by Agatha Christie

Some years ago, while reviewing Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), I claimed the biggest difference between the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series is that the latter never produced a genre classic or even a great detective novel – like Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). Even some of Christie's standalones, like And Then There Were None (1939) and Towards Zero (1944), rank higher than the best Miss Marple novels. The comment section had one answer to that: A Murder is Announced (1950). So decided then to give it a reread one of these days to see if it can stand spine to spine with Christie's best Poirot and standalone mysteries.

A Murder is Announced opens on the morning when the inhabitants of the village of Chipping Cleghorn get their morning papers. Their local Chipping Cleghorn Gazette has an eyebrow raising ad: "a murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation." Everyone who reads the announcement assumes some sort of party ("The Murder Game—That kind of thing"), but Miss Blacklock and Miss Bunner, of Little Paddocks, didn't plan or advertised a murder party – suspecting Miss Blacklock's younger, mischievous live-in cousins. Patrick and Julia Simmons claim innocence and so they decide to go along with it to see what happens. Sure enough, friends and neighbors begin to arrive at the appointed time.

There's Mrs. Swettenham and her son, Edmund, Colonel Easterbrook and his wife, Laura, Reverend Julian Harmon and his wife, "Bunch," and a pair of spinsters, Hinchliffe and Murgatroyd – who love to play amateur criminologists. Furthermore, there's the cook, Mitzi, who's afraid to be murdered and a young woman, Philipa Haymes. So this group is gathered at Little Paddocks when the lights go out when a masked, hooded figure with a flashlight and revolver stormed into the house yelling, "STICK 'EM UP." Two shots are fired followed by a third. The masked man lying on the floor, dead, who turns out to be a Swiss man, Rudi Scherz, who works as a receptionist at the Royal Spa Hotel. Detective Inspector Dermot Craddock is tasked with finding out what Rudi Scherz was up to and how he died? Was it an elaborate robbery attempt or did he try to shoot Miss Blacklock under cover of a stick up? Did he accidentally shoot himself, took his own life or was he cleverly murdered?

So, first of all, I have to agree with the people, who defended the book, that the plot has a fantastic hook and Miss Marple shines as a detective. She arrives in Chipping Cleghorn shortly after Inspector Craddock's primarily investigation with, what he calls, "a severe attack of Nosey Parkeritis." Miss Marple almost seems better fitted for the post-WWII Britain than those tight-knit, unchanging villages from the 1930s and '40s.

It has been remarked that Christie started to decline and struggle with the modern world when the 1960s rolled around, which translated into uncharacteristically poor, unpopular novels like At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Third Girl (1966) and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) – capped by Postern of Fate (1974). An incomprehensible mess of a mystery novel. That's not the case here even though Chipping Cleghorn is not an isolated village that was left untouched by the deep changes of the post-war upheavals. Chipping Cleghorn is as much affected by post-war austerity and shortages as any other place. A time of ration books, identity cards and not exactly legal barter systems to get an extra pound of butter or cut of meat. And discussion around the radio set on "the horrors of atomic warfare." More than the austerity, rationing and the possibility of nuclear war is how "the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart." Nobody could really be sure anymore who there neighbors really are, even though most people think they know. A not unimportant plot point tailored to Miss Marple's talent as a detective. Just a harmless, old lady asking questions whether people remembered such and such, thumbing through photo albums and picking up pieces of gossip, but neither does she neglect the more tangible, physical clues. A Murder is Announced is loaded with clues and red herrings, which is what makes Christie's best novels so fun to reread (especially when you only remember parts of the solution).

I had more or less forgotten about the two additional murders confronting Miss Marple and Inspector Craddock. Christie, as so often, handled these additional murders very well as they're not "dummies" to pad out the story or liven up the plot. Rudi Scherz was even in this post-WWII Britain a stranger and outsider, but the second and third murders strike closer to home. And those murders have a genuine emotional impact. Which in turn gives weight to the tragic conclusion. By the way, A Murder is Announced has given me a new understanding of The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962). I always believed The Mirror Crack'd could have been the classic Miss Marple novel and Christie's last hurrah as a mystery writer had she not dulled the blow of the first murder with its fantastic and original motive with several muddled, unnecessary murders of unimportant characters who didn't matter. Christie obviously tried to pull another A Murder is Announced and missed.

Only thing that can be said against A Murder is Announced is that's nigh impossible not to spot the murderer early on. I dimly remember from my first, long-ago read being suspicious of this character, but even that came with the up-sight of getting a masterclass in plot construction, clueing and misdirection. Christie demonstrates how to effectively muddy waters while simultaneously laying out a clear, fairly clued path to the truth.

So that finally brings me back to everyone who went to bat and defended A Murder is Announced. Where they right calling A Murder is Announced near peak Christie worthy of the laurels it received. Well, yeah, having reread it, they might have had a point. Don't let it happen again.

Out for Delivery: "The Jersey Devil" (1971) by Edward D. Hoch

Some months ago, I reviewed a short story from Edward D. Hoch's Captain Leopold series, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970), which Alessandro favorably compared in the comments to the subject of today's review, "The Jersey Devil" – originally published in the October, 1971, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Famously collected in Leopold's Way (1985).

"The Jersey Devil" begins when Captain Leopold gives Lieutenant Fletcher a lift home following a long shift working on a barroom knifing when the police radio gives out an alert of a house alarm. Leopold and Fletcher are only a block away. So they go to investigate and chase two figures fleeing the burglarized home, a young man and woman, who escaped. But not without a fight. Leopold broke his wrist when trying to grab the man, ripped his pocket and spilled most of the loot. A valuable collection of stamps belonging to Oscar Bailey, a collector and dealer, who's still missing one of his most valuable stamps from his collection.

That missing stamp is "a rare Hawaiian Islands stamp, two cents, issued in 1851," but Leopold is drawn to one of the recovered, unusual looking stamp. A large, brown and poorly printed stamp showing "a crude drawing of a winged demon flying over a row of houses" with words across the top – saying "Jersey Devil—Ten Cents." Bailey is very evasive about that stamp calling it joke with no value, but there's where the case should have ended for Leopold. However, Leopold decides to consult a stamp collector from the area, Dexter Jones, who tells him the Jersey Devil is part of "a semisecret, privately-owned postal system operated in competition with the government" ("...isn't that against the law?"). This operation is run by the owner of a New Jersey trucking company, Benedict Corflu. A character I would like to have seen more of and found his illegal, but convenient and tacitly tolerated postal system fascinating.

After this, "The Jersey Devil" regrettably takes a different track as Dexter Jones is shot and killed. I have to admit it's a small, technically achievement how Hoch constructed the plot to allow for a last-minute solution, but the need for a body spoiled this story. The thief really made a mad dash up the escalation ladder by going from pawing a stolen stamp to first degree murder, especially when the story itself pointed out the culprit had a ready-made excuse (ROT13: cergraqvat gb svaq vg jura erzbivat gur pnfg). So, technically, the plot holds together, but not convincingly. I know that's rich coming from someone whose obsession with locked room mysteries and impossible crimes has been called alarming and a red flag galore, but the murder here had the same effect as dropping a brick through wet tissue paper.

“The Jersey Devil” had a good and promising start, but the ending left me unconvinced and underwhelmed. It should have been just about the stolen stamps and shadowy postal system. So not one of my favorite Captain Leopold stories.

The Case of the Running Man (1958) by Christopher Bush

The Case of the Running Man (1958), the 52nd entry in the Ludovic Travers series, rang in the last phase of Christopher Bush's decades-long run as one of Britain's premier mystery novelists as two more would appear in the late 1950s and counting down the final ten over the following decade – published between 1960 and '68. Bush was also one of the then rapidly shrinking group of Golden Age writers who made out of the Atomic Fifties into the Swinging Sixties, until Michael Innes turned out the light (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986). None of them fared as well in adapting to the changes and upheavals of post-WWII Britain as Bush. Some even prefer the trim, sleek private eye novel that the series became in the 1950s to the elaborately-plotted affairs of the 1930s.

I'm still in two minds which period I prefer, because there's a bias favoring earlier novels like Dead Man Twice (1930), The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) and The Case of the Green Felt Hat (1939). I'm simply partial to unbreakable alibis, linked corpses and the occasional impossible crime, but, while different from the 1930s novels, the best of the 1950s and '60s have an attractiveness of their own. Novels like The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954), The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) and The Case of the Russian Cross (1957) are tidy, compact mystery novels discreetly carrying on the Golden Age detective story. The Case of the Running Man can be counted among those better novels from this last period in the Ludovic Travers series.

Travers, "a collector in a very humble way," is killing some time by wandering around Christie's to view the antique furniture and pictures. There he meets an elderly, practically blind collector, William Weddall, who's being assisted by his American chauffeur, Sam Martin. Weddall is an eccentric character and was taken aback when learning Travers is a private detective heading his own agency, "a very reputable one," but recovers and asks for a business card – because he has "a pretty important assignment in the near future." Over the following weeks, several small, but curious, incidents happened involving Weddall. First of all, Travers spotted him at the station deliberately missing his boat train while being tailed by a private investigator from City Detection Ltd. Secondly, Travers receives his important assignment from Waddell over the post asking him to fly to France to post a letter in Paris. Further more, Travers was hoaxed for some reason over the telephone and eventually receives two visitors, Sam Martin and Scotland Yard's Inspector Jewle, who want to talk with him about Weddall's untimely death.

Weddall's home and estate is Hinchbrook Hall, "show-place for his antiques and paintings," where he fell from a top floor window ("...and his head wasn't at all a pretty sight"). Suspiciously, an unidentified man was seen running away from Hinchbrook Hall right after Weddall's death. So an accident is presumed, murder is suspected. And the reason why Jewle asked Travers to come down to Hinchbrook Hall to have a look around. Sam also turned to Travers as he believes Weddall was murdered and wants to hire him to find the killer.

I should point out here that the 2022 reprint of The Case of the Running Man was praised for its depiction and treatment of Sam Martin, a black man, who had a very un-British master/servant relationship with Weddall even for 1958 ("very democratic... the way, for instance, he and Sam were more like friends"). That's why Sam engaged Travers to find Weddall's killer. So, really, Sam's just a character in a detective story like the rest of the cast with his actual, not wholly unimportant, contribution being a client of the Broad Street Detective Agency – handing Travers a reason to play his card very close to the chest. Travers needs to do a good deal of digging and thinking in a case with no obvious motives and immediate suspects. A case where the behavior of the victim is as baffling as his own death and second, unambiguous murder could bring a solution either closer or pushing it farther away.

This is, of course, glossing over nearly every character and the finer plot details making up The Case of the Running Man. Like I said, the Ludovic Travers novels from this period tend to be sleek, compactly-plotted mysteries and The Case of the Running Man is a very sleek, compactly-plotted mystery and going into the finer details edges closely to spoiler territory. While sleep and compact, The Case of the Running Man has two smudges. Firstly, the plot probably would have worked even better had been presented as inverted mystery as the obvious murderer was propped up by a fantastic motive and alibi-trick. I have seen one, or two, variations on this motive before, but it's still great and believe this is the earliest example on record. Secondly, the alibi-trick, while absolutely grand and strengthening the ending, it's a literal throwback to one of the earlier novels. Bush employed a variation on this alibi-trick even better twenty years before. Again, the alibi-trick is still great, tightly executed and ensured a satisfying conclusion. But not quite good enough to place it among the top tier titles from this series.

Other than that, The Case of the Running Man comes highly recommended to longtime fans of the series.

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!