Like a Thief in the Night: "The Diamond Pentacle" (1939) by Carter Dickson

John Dickson Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle," published as by "Carter Dickson," originally appeared in The Times on November 15, 1939, but reprinted only once in Merrivale, March and Murder (1991) – a now out-of-print collection with a three-digit prize tag for used copies. So, consequently, "The Diamond Pentacle" ended up as one of Carr's least-known, most obscure short stories. Even more so after The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021) gathered Carr's extremely obscure Dr. John Fabian series.

Only two people have reviewed "The Diamond Pentacle" over the years and they praised it. Pietro de Palma, of Death Can Read, opened his review calling it "among Carr's best short stories ever," while Christian Henriksson of Mysteries, Short and Sweet liked the solution to the locked room "because Carr bamboozles us all with a twist that is superb in all its simplicity." Let's find out!

Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle" takes place during a lazy, midsummer getaway at Broadlawns where Sheila Lake is spending a fortnight with her fiancé, Dick Mason – chaperoned by Major and Mrs. Prentice. They are friends of Sheila's uncle and aunt, Bartholomew and Martha Lake, currently away on business. They're at the very least suspicious, because Dick has been tight lipped and secretive about his occupation and wealth ("...your Aunt Martha rather prefers the measles to me"). And it doesn't help he has a penchant for some wild ideas ("like that scheme of yours for robbing the Bank of England"). Story's opening finds him reading the biography of an escape artist, named Mephisto, who "had wormed his way out of locked rooms, locked safes, Russian prison-vans and roped chests at the bottom of a river." That leads to a discussion and a bet.

Sheila is sleeping in the bedroom of her uncle and aunt, which has the properties of a burglarproof safe. The bedroom windows are covered with solid, narrow iron grills and a nearly two inch thick door with "a bolt like a bank vault." Not without reason. The bedroom has a small wall-safe, protected with a letter-lock combination, storing the titular pentacle. Dick tells Sheila he can probably sneak into her bedroom at night, while the room is securely locked and bolted ("I won't touch the safe"). Somehow, Dick manages to take Sheila's wristwatch from her bedside stand and replaces it with his own. But the second time, Dick has gotten hold of the pentacle. But why? And how! This two night miracle is followed by the arrival of a letter from a private investigation firm and the return of Sheila's aunt and uncle. Yes, the solution places a great spin on what appeared to be the case.

Now, simply as a short detective story and locked room mystery, "The Diamond Pentacle" is fairly minor stuff coming from a writer like Carr, but therefore not any less entertaining. And, yes, the final twist is great in all its simplicity. What it perhaps lacked was an additional ten pages and a floor plan of the bedroom to push my opinion closer to that of Pietro. But as it stands, I very much enjoyed "The Diamond Pentacle" and even more enjoyed reading a "brand new" Carr. It makes me want to finally pick up one of those last remaining unread Carr novels like The Nine Wrong Answers (1952), Scandal at High Chimneys (1959) or Deadly Hall (1971).

The Double Death of Frédéric Belot (1932) by Claude Aveline

Evgen Avstine was a French editor, poet, publisher and writer born to Russian-Jewish parents who wrote everything from non-fiction, poetry, novels, radio dramas, screenplays and stage plays – published under his penname "Claude Aveline." The detective novel was not overlooked by Aveline. While not a prolific mystery novelist, Aveline delivered a celebrated, often reprinted classic of the French detective novel with La double mort de Frédéric Belot (The Double Death of Frédéric Belot, 1932). A novel that has been cited as a major inspiration for Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

The Double Death of Frédéric Belot was not only translated into English by Ann Lindsay and published in 1940, but the translation was reprinted three times over the following decades. After the last reprint from 1974, Aveline and The Double Death of Frédéric Belot appear to have been largely forgotten outside of the Francophone world. I decided to finally take a look at this reputed French masterpiece, because Pushkin Vertigo pushed back the release Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) from this month to April 2027.

That and I just thought it funny to pick Aveline's The Double Death of Frédéric Belot as a substitute for Boileau's Six Crimes Without a Murderer. It's (somewhat) on theme!

Chief Inspector Frédéric Belot is considered by the Special Branch "as the finest inspector ever," praised for his "exceptional intuition" bordering on second sight, whose colleagues often call out in unison, "this is a job for Belot," when baffled by a puzzling or even dangerous case – personally directing raids on gangs ("...sworn to have his scalp"). Frédéric Belot is not the detective of The Double Death of Frédéric Belot for a very obvious reason. That part goes to his subordinate and godson, Inspector Simon Rivière, who discovers a dying Belot in his apartment on Rue de Crimée. Shot through the head and chest with his revolver lying nearby. Rivière gets a double shock when he finds the dead body of another man in an adjoining room, shot through the chest, who's the spitting image of Frédéric Belot. Right down to a revolver lying next to the body ("two Belots... one dead, the other dying"). So... what the hell?

First of all, the bizarre situation of the dying policeman and the body of his double in the next room earned the book a mention in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but I have to disagree. The Double Death of Frédéric Belot is not a locked room murder or any kind of impossible crime. However, the premise and the resulting problems and complication reminded me more than once of Christopher Bush's work from the 1930s. A bizarre, double murder closely-linked in time or place was a favored plot-device of Bush at the time and got a lot of mileage out of it. Bush had already published Dead Man Twice (1930) and Dancing Death (1931), but returned to it frequently until the 1940s with novels like The Case of the April Fools (1933), The Case of the Bonfire Body (1936), The Case of the Hanging Rope (1937) and The Case of the Tudor Queen (1938). That, too, is an unfair comparison as the whole story and plot has nothing to do with breaking down alibis, locked doors or even identities.

 

 

The Double Death of Frédéric Belot is written like a typical, 1930s detective novel complete with floor plans relevant to the plot, but underneath that traditional exterior is a character-driven crime novel concerned with two questions: what happened and why? So not the customary who or the always popular how. That makes it hard for me to properly judge it, because I couldn't disagree more with John Norris who stated in his 2021 review The Double Death of Frédéric Belot that "real people always make for more intriguing mysteries than locked rooms and invisible killers." John obviously needs to reread The Three Coffins (1935), but I can't deny that this character-driven, almost modern crime novel is a well-written, captivating read. My only complaint, plotwise, is that answer to the most fascinating aspect of the story (who's the double, what was his role and why) is simply told to Rivère in Part 4 ("The Chief's Story").

Other than that, I'm not blind for how The Double Death of Frédéric Belot became a crime classic in France or why it's English translation was reprinted in the 1960s and '70s. It's simply a good crime novel with a truly fantastic, no-gimmicks needed premise, but, on a whole, I'm perhaps not the right person to fully appreciate it. I'm more of Herbert & Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932) kind of guy.

Note for the curious: I didn't know where to squeeze this into the review, but I mentioned The Double Death of Frédéric Belot was a major inspiration for Boileau and Narcejac. Aveline himself seems to have been inspired by S.A. Steeman's La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th-13th, 1931) in which the detective is also taken out of the story following a bizarre shooting with two victims. It should be noted that writers have playing with this idea for years (e.g. Alan Thomas' The Death of Laurence Vining, 1928).

The Mystery of Hunting's End (1930) by Mignon G. Eberhart

Last year, I reviewed Mignon G. Eberhart's From This Dark Stairway (1931), fourth in the Nurse Keath and Lance O'Leary series, which takes place during the night shifts at Melady Memorial Hospital during an extreme, oppressive heat wave – where a doctor is brutally murdered and a patient inexplicably disappears. Eberhart wrote a grand example of the early 1930s American detective novel with From This Dark Stairway which skillfully ends with the revelation of the murderer's name. It goes without saying I appreciated Eberhart's imaginative approach and handling of the central impossible crime. So it's to be regretted Eberhart returned to the impossible crime story and locked room mystery only three more times over her six decades of writing.

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists The Mystery of Hunting's End (1930) and the short story "The Calico Dog" from The Cases of Susan Dare (1934) and From This Dark Stairway is not listed in either Adey nor Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). A fourth locked room mystery is tucked away at the tail end of Eberhart's career, but this 2003 review by Barry Ergang suggests Next of Kin (1982) is a far cry from her 1930s impossible crime fiction ("...barely touched on or pondered by anyone, police included, and its simple solution is glossed over..."). That's perhaps to be expected as Eberhart relatively quickly moved from detective fiction to suspenseful romance novels with light mystery plots.

So that left The Mystery of Hunting's End, but it has together with From This Dark Stairway sufficiently impressed me to add the remaining novels from this short-lived series to the wishlist. The Patient in Room 18 (1929) and While the Patient Slept (1930) sound promising enough.

The Mystery of Hunting's End, second in the series, begins with two letters bringing Sarah Keate to a remote hunting lodge somewhere in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The first letter is from Miss Matil Kingery, a well-known society figure, writing Keate was recommended by Lance O'Leary and needs a nurse to take care of her elderly aunt, Miss Lucy Kingery – who's an invalid bound to a wheelchair. The second letter came from O'Leary urging Keate to accept and recognize him as a former patient when they meet at Hunting's End without mentioning he's a policeman. There's a reason why O'Leary has joined to get together under false flag.

Five years previously, Huber Kingery died at Hunting's End during a weekend party of an apparent heart attack, but he was actually shot and his murder hushed up ("so you bribed the coroner"). After all, there were “social positions to be considered” and a case of murder would threaten "the solvency of the Kingery Trust Company." Matil was only seventeen when her father was murdered and accepted the explanation of the adults around her, but now she has a good reason to find the killer. So she arranged a reunion of the same group plus Keate and O'Leary.

This mixed group of friends and business associates of the late Huber Kingery. On the business side you have Julian Barre, Lal Killian, Newell Morse and Gerald Frawley, while on the social half you Signor Paggi was his wife, Helene, and Terice, Baroness von Turcum. There are also two domestics, Brunker and Annette, but one of the more interesting characters is that of the big gold and white collie dog, named Jericho, who belonged to Huber Kingery. Jericho becomes a sad-eyed, whining and nervous wreck with a drooping tail before they even arrived at the hunting lodge – acting really strange when coming near "his dead master's room." Even stranger is when a stray cat wanders into the hunting lodge and begins to act as strangely as Jericho when passing the door of the death room. Since the hunting lodge is packed, someone has to sleep in Huber Kingery's room. Gerald Frawley offers to take the room and that not wholly unexpectedly ends with a gunshot. However, it appears as if nobody could have fired the shot.

The only window was closed and fastened with the shutters securely bolted and the adjoining bathroom was bolted, too, on Frawley's side. The door to the bedroom was standing open, but under observation by two people, one of them being Keate, who heard voices coming from the room before the shot rang out. But when they entered a second, or two, later "there was no one there" but "the dead man." And, to make things even worse, a blizzard trapped them there for the coming days with limited supplies. So they're stuck with a corpse and a killer, while a blizzard rages outside, barely enough to eat and no end in sight to the string of strange incidents surrounding the murder. Such as the discovery of a toupee that first disappears and then mysteriously reappears. A murder weapon that should be on the premise, but no weapon is found beside O'Leary's own gun ("you'd think that on a trip to a hunting lodge there would be all kinds of guns..."). A supply of rat poison disappears from the pantry and Keate looses one of her knitting needles. And more smaller and bigger mysteries complicating this double murder of past and present.

So you can describe The Mystery of Hunting's End as a fairly conventional detective novel typical for the period, which would mostly be correct, except it would also do the book a small injustice. Eberhart showed here what can be done even within the strict confines of the closed-circle whodunit set in a remote, isolated location with some unconventional moments and scenes. I found it refreshing O'Leary admitted he's "too accustomed to the police paraphernalia" and "laboratory facilities" as he finds himself somewhat at a lost without the backing of the whole police machine. Not always fully in charge of the case or in command of the situation. Chapter XI is a treat in that regard! Eberhart turns the table on the conventions and what is to be expected from a novel like The Mystery of Hunting's End. I would not have been opposed to have seen that scene fully played out to the end.

Eberhart showed less imagination and creativity where the choice of murderer and motive is concerned, but she ensured that at least the murderer didn't stand out like a burning house in a snow storm. The solution to the impossible murder can be considered crude and the type of locked room-trick not always popular with impossible crime fans, but, once again, Eberhart handling made the trick smoother than it had any right to be – generously helped by hunting lodge setting. So, in this case, I had no problem with it.

On paper, The Mystery of Hunting's End should have been a solid, enjoyable second-string mystery novel and nothing more than that, but Eberhart somehow pushed it to be more than a second-stringer. Only the spotty clueing keeps the book away from a place in the first ranks. That... and you have to really do your best to ignore how badly O'Leary messed everything up and morally bears some responsibility for the additional murders. It was pointed out Huber Kingery was buried and not cremated. So all that needed to be done was get permission from Matil to exhume the body, confirm he was shot and he would have had the whole group in a vice grip without the need for theatrics and murder at an isolated hunting lodge during a blizzard. But then again, if O'Leary had acted sensibly, we wouldn't have gotten this charming and well-written locked room mystery. I can forgive his lapse in common sense on this occasion.

Going by The Mystery of Hunting's End, From This Dark Stairway and a few short stories, it's a shame Eberhart choose to abandon the detective story proper in favor of standalone mysteries of a romantic nature. I suppose it was more lucrative, especially after the 1940s, but it would have been great to have had a detection-oriented Eberhart who continued to write until the late 1980s. So, in closing, The Mystery of Hunting's End is a pleasantly conventional mystery with a few original touches that's well worth a read for fans of vintage mysteries.

The Ghost Walks: Case Closed, vol. 99 by Gosho Aoyama

So, before getting to the 99th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, some fantastic news for those who have been reading reviews of this series on various blog various blogs, but have been hesitant to pick it up – mainly due to the growing size of the series. I can understand why not everyone wants to start on a new series with a backlog of nearly 100 volumes. Next year, Viz is going to re-release Case Closed in 3-in-1 volumes under its original title of Detective Conan with the names of the main characters restored. Shinichi Kudo instead of Jimmy Kudo. The first of these new omnibus editions, containing vol. 1, 2 and 3, is scheduled for publication in February 2027. Now let's take a look at Case Closed, vol. 99!

This volume starts, as usually is the case, with the conclusion to the story that closed out the previous volume. Conan, Rachel, Serena and Sera attend the birthday party of a classmate and her older sister. During the party, the room was darkened to show slide in the dark when someone collapsed. The victim of cyanide poisoning and someone, somehow, had written the phrase "Divine Punishment" on his forehead with permanent marker in the dark. Fortunately, the spot where the murder took place was "basically a fenced-off area" limiting the number of suspects to just four. A fairly typical Aoyama story with its mysterious poisoning at a restaurant and a pretty solid one at that, but honestly could have done without the complications of the written message. It would have made for much tighter case.

What adds importance to this story are developments and revelations in the ongoing storyline and storylines of the various recurring characters. Note that this story specifically mentions Jimmy Kudo's been missing for the past six months and a similar remark about only 6-8 months have passed since the first volume ("you haven't even been here a year"), which doesn't bother me at all. Who am I to disagree with Aoyama? If he says only about six months have passed than that's what we're going with. That's fine.

The second story is difficult to describe as it's quite an unusual one for this series. Conan and the Junior Detective League accompany their teachers, Kobayashi and Wakasa, to remote farmhouse to get two new chickens for their school – which the farmer donated to them. On the bus to the farm, they meet three, unsavory looking men heading in the same direction intending on making money out of something. Toru Amuro is also on the bus heading to the same destination. When they arrive, they find the farm abandoned, the chicken coop empty and damaged, but things get worse when investigating the wooded area surrounding the farm. Someone gets taken hostage, while others end up being locked inside a cellar with a corpse. And they can only communicate with those above through their detective badges. This story is more of a what-happened-and-will-happen than anything else. Not half bad either for such an unconventional story that took its time to take form. There are also more developments to the main storyline as Amuro discovers an unexpected clue at the farm directly linked to another major plot-thread.

So, on to the next story, which is another rather unconventional case for this series. If I remember correctly, this could actually be the first armchair detective story in the series. Yoko Okino, the famous Japanese idol, visits Richard Moore's office to consult him on something that had happened to her recently.

Yoko Okino is going to play the lead role of a ghost detective in an upcoming TV series joined the group scouting for locations, which included "a classic creepy old manor" where "a woman really, truly went missing" – never to be seen again. When they viewed the location, the manor house was being used as a summer retreat for the family owning it. They would become suspects when Yoko hears someone groaning, followed running down the hallway, which leads to the discovery of a trail of blood ending halfway down a dead end corridor. Someone of the family goes missing and sends a photo of playing cards spelling out a coded message, before being found in the locked attic with a crossbow bolt through his back. So the primary suspects are the victims three relatives, but there's a catch. One of them is in a wheelchair, one is walking on crutches and one has an arm in a sling. So no easy solution to the murder or coded message is found. And why send a coded message instead of a simple text or calling. Yoko came to Moore to ask him to solve the case, but Moore is trapped on the toilet without toilet paper and too embarrassed to call out. Even more so, when he hears the mystery-loving sushi chef Kanenorih Wakita has joined the party, fearing mockery ("...your brain spins as fast as your bathroom roll").

So it's Conan and Wakita who sit down to listen Yoko's story, examine the evidence and try to sort out the case. Surprisingly, the vanishing footsteps and locked attic were easily explained away, but cracking the coded dying message or answering why the victim didn't simply call for help take more work. But answering those two questions leads to a diabolical twist. Who did what and why seems to be the theme of this volume. I liked it!

This volume ends with the first chapter of a story that'll be concluded in the opening chapters of the next volume, but what a story it promises to be! Jimmy/Conan's father is Booker Kudo, a celebrated mystery novelist, who has a reputation as an amateur detective and quasi-official consultant to police – recently made the news. Kudo solved a phony Kaito KID case ("...too shoddy to be the work of the real Kaito KID") and is currently working on a serial locked room murder case. He practically solved the case and is going to reveal the solution on a TV special. But gets taken out by a case of food poisoning. So his wife and famous actress, Vivian Kudo, takes his place and drags in their son Jimmy/Conan to put the finishing touches to the solution. That locked room case is fascinating. Three different, apparently unconnected people were found murdered inside their locked apartment. Each time, the method of murder was different except for the locked apartments and "clutter around the door" showing nobody could have left without disturbing it.

Conan concludes one person committed all three murders using "the same trick to create the locked room," but then his mother goes down with food poisoning. Noboy to take Booker and Vivian Kudo's place. Only for an unexpected person to arrive at the Kudo home. What a great cliffhanger to lead into Case Closed, vol. 100!

So, yeah, Case Closed, vol. 99 is a great volume without a bad story and some exciting developments for long-time fans of the series. Very much look forward to that milestone volume!

This Time Forever (1957) by John Glasby

In 2021, I reviewed A Time for Murder (2002/13) by John Glasby, a prolific fictioneer of the 1950s and '60s, who produced science-fiction, westerns, hospital romances, war stories and crime fiction – nearly 300 novels, novellas and short stories. Glasby made a comeback in the 2000s on the insistence of his literary agent and pulp historian, Philip Harbottle. A Time for Murder was the first new entry in Glasby's series about Johnny Merak, "an ex-con turned private eye," which appeared alongside reprints of the first and third novel from the series' original run. The second novel remained out-of-print due to copies being ultra rare, extremely elusive and practically impossible to come by. That is, until recently!

Some months ago, Wildside Press reprinted This Time Forever (1957) with a short, insightful introduction from Harbottle explaining how it slipped through the cracks and accidentally became a unicorn to collectors. When attempting to track down a copy to reprint, Harbottle contacted known collectors from across the world, but learned "that they too were searching for this elusive title" ever since Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Murders (1991). How a copy eventually turned up and lead to this reprint is something you have to read for yourself or listen to Harbottle tell about it by clicking here.

This Time Forever begins with Johnny Merak and his assistant, Dawn Grahame, being summoned to the offices of a federal investigator, Harry Grenville, who would like to draw on the expertise of an ex-crook. A case dropped on his desk involving Charles Dempster, "a top-line financier and diamond dealer," whose record is spotless making him untouchable to the authorities – lately received some alarming and threatening letters. There was an attempt to kidnap his daughter. What's behind the plot suggests something outside the ordinary criminal business of settling scores, shake downs and protection rackets. But before they can finish their talk, Grenville is called and informed Dempster was found dead twenty minutes ago.

Charles Dempster died from hydrocyanic acid poisoning in his private, windowless study with the door locked from the inside and the only key tucked away in his pocket. So the police at the scene call it a suicide, but the discovery a crumpled playing card in Dempster's hand suggests murder to Merak. A similar playing card had turned up years earlier on the body of a slain gangster and the cards are linked to an underworld figure known only as The Joker. Merak decides to take on this case involving mobsters, hired guns, dangerous dames and trail of dead informants and witnesses, but just as dangerous is his past as an ex-criminal. An ex-criminal turned private investigator asking pesky, nosy questions in a world where asking questions is frowned upon. Even more so when those questions comes from a traitor.

So more than enough happens between the opening and closing stages of this short, fast-paced gangster mystery, but not much (plotwise) can be said about it. It's pretty much Merak trying not to get killed, trying to talk to people before they get killed and keeping an eye out for Dawn. Harbottle wrote in the introduction Glasby's publisher employed some dishonest, unsavory tactics to keep the printing presses running like underpaying authors and guaranteeing their best talent to publish everything they wrote, tempting them "to churn out first-draft material" without "any need for polishing or revision" – ready to be sold and published. There's a definitely a first-draft feeling to This Time Forever and often reads like it was originally published in a 1940s pulp magazine. Which has a charm of its own. Fortunately, there's something to be said (plotwise) about the opening and closing stages which is where This Time Forever has something to offer to detective fans like us.

First of all, the solution to the locked room poisoning is almost too good and too clever for such a straightforward, pulp-style thriller populated with gangsters, hit men and the occasional drive-by shooting. A locked room-trick that could have been plucked from the impossible crime fiction by Arthur Porges. So locked room fanatics and collectors mainly interested in the impossible crime element can be assured the solution doesn't turn on something disappointing or lame like a hidden contraption with a poisoned needle or a swallowed capsule delaying the effects of the poison. Secondly, the choice of murderer here was interesting as well, especially since I considered another character based on a sentence I took as a hint/challenge to the who/why. I was seeing more than was really behind it.

That's where the first-draft, pulpy feel and problem comes into play. A fully fleshed-out, revised and polished version of This Time Forever would likely have given more consideration to the murderer's identity and problem of the locked room poisoning. It would have made for a far more successful fusion of, as Adey described it, "the classic detection novel with the American gangster thriller." As it stands, This Time Forever should not disappoint fans of the (Americanized) pulp-style mysteries by John Russell Fearn, Gerald Verner and James Ronald with pleasantly inventive solution to the locked room poisoning. Something that's always a gamble with these type of pulpy mysteries that play the Grandest Game faster and looser than their counterparts from the detective story proper, but the best of them bring a great deal of imagination and ingenuity to the table. Glasby brought some of that to the table when it comes to the impossible crime. I think most people who pick This Time Forever up today mostly pick it up for the locked room angle.

You haven't seen the last of Glasby on this blog. I have become interested in the Johnny Merak novel The Wheel Spins Thirteen (2009). It's probably not an impossible crime novel, but just like the idea of a man beating a crooked roulette wheel three times on the same night and walks out with a million dollars.

Crime in May (1946) by Marten van Alland

Back in July, I reviewed a long out-of-print, practically forgotten Dutch mystery novel, De dood kwam door de sneeuw (Death Came Through the Snow, 1957) by Frits de Winter, but, as some of you know by now, the quality of Dutch detective fiction is all over the place – nearly impossible to gauge quality beforehand. That's because not much has been written about them for decades or even reviewed. It doesn't help that nothing ever gets reprinted in this country.

I likened trying to track down genuinely good, classically-styled Dutch mystery novels to trying to find your way through a maze blindfolded or playing Marco Polo by yourself. De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow was one of those blind picks based on nothing more than the attractive cover art suggesting a John Dickson Carr-like mystery, which wasn't anywhere near to what it turned out to be. The first-half suggested some influence from early period Ellery Queen, but collapsed during the second-half into an utter mess. Sometimes it feels like the bad detective novels in my country outnumber the good ones ten to one.

On the upside, I also mentioned in the review tracking down and doing some basic quality probing has now become a lot easier and inexpensive. Delpher digitized and uploaded a stack of out-of-print detective novels as part of their project to preserve the paper trail of Dutch culture. Legally downloadable to read and study. One of their uploads has been on my list for a very long time.

Misdaad in mei (Crime in May, 1946) is the only detective novel by "Marten van Alland," a pseudonym of Pieter Mello Heil, who was a journalist, poet, teacher and writer – mostly remembered today for his journalistic writing and nursery rhymes (as by "Peter"). After the end of the Second World War, Heil published his only detective novel that even in my country was surprisingly well received. That probably also has to do with the fact Crime in May takes places between 7th and 15th of May, 1940. Days before the German invasion started on May 10. Before the war, Crime in May presents a conventional, Golden Age-style detective story that happened to play out during those final days of peace.

The setting of Crime in May is the home of Charles Floorman, somewhere near the east border with Germany between the fictitious town Middeldam and the village of Veenkaneel, where the police are called to by Dr. Schuilvink. Charles Floorman was found dead in his bed with a small, puncture-like chest wound indicating he had been stabbed with "a long, needle-shaped weapon" like a knitting needle. Inspector Richard Krook, "under the inspiring leadership of Inspector Wieland," is determined to make this murder his case, but he has to content with a houseful of academic snobs as potential suspects. There's the victim's brothers: the physicist André, professor of psychology and philosophy Constantijn and professor of law Ferdinand. They have a sister, Mrs. Van Gent-Floorman, who's married to Hendrik van Gent who has a doctorate in Eastern languages. They have two children, Arnold and Loes, who also have a role the play as does André's son, Gustaaf, and Charles' assistant Bertus Murks.

So this is a family that discuss scientific topics at the breakfast table, but also like to look down on everyone and each other's special subjects ("we have utmost respect for philosophy and practice it ourselves as a pastime and mental exercise, but what is expected of a Floorman is objectivity, not fanciful speculations"). That's why they didn't like Charles.

Charles Floorman was not a professor or even an academic scholar, but a dreamer and jack-of-all-trades who struck out on his own as an inventor and made a small fortune. The villa has a private laboratory on the third-floor, covering the entirety of the house, where conducts experiments with his assistant, Bertus, in practically every field that holds his interest. Inspector Krook's guided tour of the laboratory is a borderline science-fiction scene. Charles was working on a water-powered engine and Krook was shown designs of an enormous airplane without propellers, or wings, that can "take off vertically and can float like zeppelins" – which sounds like a UFO. These science-fiction vibes quickly subside, but thought it worth mentioning. What follows is far more conventional detective novel that's not without some truly clever, borderline ingenious touches to the plot and story.

First of all, the laboratory and Charles Floorman's research is the reason why the villa is locked up after sundown. That was the case on the night of the murder, but not everyone in the house when the murder took place. Three were somewhere else at the time giving them an alibi. Krook is not blind to the possibility the murder could be either a closed-circle situation in which the murderer is one of the people inside the house or a locked house mystery with murderer somehow penetrating the securely locked villa. You won't find the answer by checking the toe-tags on this review! Not to mention the puzzling problem of the missing murder weapon. Krook handles these problems and the special pool of suspects with skill, intelligence and patience.

There are two moments where Krook stands out and shines: deducing something about the crime scene had been altered, something add and peculiar, that added a new layer to the plot and his chain of reasoning demonstrating why only that person could have done it – and nobody else. Krook's chain of reasoning and deductions doesn't go as deep as we have come to expect in recent years, but it was fun to see it properly done in my own language for once. It goes to show just how influential Ellery Queen was outside of the non-English speaking world. Ellery Queen is also one of maybe a handful of prolific, Golden Age mystery writers who had practically their entire work translated into Dutch. So not including "A Challenge to the Reader" is missed opportunity.

Crime in May is not just about the mysterious, puzzling murder of Charles Floorman, but the impending invasion and outright war brewing in the background. While the police go over all the evidence, suspects and theories, the days goes from May 7 to May 10. Basically a hard countdown only the reader is aware of. When the countdown is about to run out, the spy-thread that had been lurking in the back springs to the foreground. However, I thought the spy-thread was a bit muddled, but nothing to the detriment of the main plot. Krook solves the murder right at the time war breaks out and only gets to explain his case to Wieland during the first days of occupation. So, yeah, a bit of a downer ending, but with a flicker of hope.

I'm really pleased to have finally found another Dutch detective novel that successfully carried the story and plot across the finish without collapsing or ending in disappointment. Van Alland carried it across the finish not merely for the form. Even without the usual allusions or references, Van Alland obviously knew what a detective story needed and what it could do without. And brought some much needed imagination with a dash of originality to too often dry, stodgy Dutch detective story. Such as his handling of the question whether the killer was left or right handed, the ambiguity of the murder (closed-circle or locked room?) and the wonderful solution to the vanished murder weapon. So, by the standards of the Americans, British, French and Japanese, Crime in May is a solid, second-string mystery novel, but for Dutch mystery fans starved of good, homegrown vintage detective fiction it's a treat! You can find and read Van Alland's Crime in May here.

Note for the curious: Well, more of an observation. Wouldn't it have been funnier, and better, if the ending had gone into science-fiction/alternate history territory by having the invading Germans being met with the secret wonder weapons from Charles Floorman's laboratory?

First Contact: Q.E.D. iff vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou

The simply titled story "Even" opens Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 5 and begins when Ashikaga Ren, a second-year university student, tumbles down a cliff and needed to be airlifted to the hospital – except this wasn't an ordinary hiking accident. A note was found at the scene ("Got Dumped, Don't Want to Live") turning an unfortunate hiking accident into an attempted suicide. Only for the case to take an unexpected turn at the hospital.

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are in the hospital visiting Mizuhara's father, Inspector Mizuhara, who was injured in the line of duty. Mizuhara passes the hospital room of the still unconscious Ashikaga Ren when she notices his oxygen mask has been removed and the heart rate monitor turned off. She immediately calls a nurse and begins to look around, which leads to her chasing a masked figure in a white doctor's coat through the corridors and down the staircases of the hospital. This masked, white coated figure runs into a dead end hallway and inexplicably disappears into thin air! A short hallway ending in a double door that's not only locked, but securely chained together and padlocked. Only thing the vanished figure left behind is the white doctor's coat. Touma finds out the victim had three people, all fellow students, who visited the hospital that day. So they begin probing the suspects and their relationship with the victim involving relationship troubles, borrowed money and stolen exam papers.

I think what I liked most about this story is how clearly the problem of who, why and how is presented. And liked how they logically linked together with one springing from the other. However, the solution to the disappearance from the dead end corridor, while visually pleasingly, is so blindingly obvious I rejected it out of hand – which kind of betrayed the who and eventually why. Not to mention the vanishing-trick only worked, in a way, because it was shown and not explained in a block of text. So "Even" is not a thoroughly bad story, but neither is it a top-tier entry in the series.

The second story, "The Imperfect Locked Room," has Inspector Mizuhara back on the job and going over a murder scene a second time. Takamatsu Kiminobu, a retired prosecutor, was found stabbed to death in his bedroom of his house. Only other person present was his nurse, Itami Sayoko, who claimed someone had knocked her out. However, the police found all the windows securely locked from the inside, the house keys inside the victim's pockets and "no suspicious people on the security camera at the entrance way" ("so this was a locked room murder"). So the inspector in charge concluded the nurse was the murderer and arrested her. Inspector Mizuhara has his doubts as a nurse has much easier methods at her disposal to kill an sick, elderly man than a knife and casting herself as the only possible suspects. What he finds is fresh evidence the murder took place in garage. So the nurse was released.

This blunder forces the higher ups to send someone down to direct the local investigation. This person is Tanabata Kikuno, Assistant Inspector of MPD Division, who's a young, eager policewoman ever ready to put the handcuffs on the murderer. She learns from Inspector Mizuhara that this case is not going to be easy, considering the status of the policeman who made the premature arrest. Inspector Mizuhara also tells her the case possibly has a connection to an unsolved, seemingly impossible and unsolved murder, nearly two years ago, when a dying woman was found in one of the toilet stalls of a night club, but CCTV footage showed nobody going inside – except the victim and the people who discovered the murder. So, inevitably, Tanabata Kikuno meets Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara leading to the solution to the two murders. Once again, the plot has its weak points as the murderer stands out and the solutions to the impossible crimes lack Katou's customary imaginative solutions or even simplistic complexity. The locked room-trick used for the murder at the night club toilets was especially unconvincing with the first one turning on the why rather than the how. It really is the strong ending that holds “The Imperfect Locked Room” together.

Fortunately, the two stories making up Q.E.D. iff vol. 6 is a return to form and starts with a character-piece, "The Man Who Claimed to Land on the Earth." This story begins with a prologue set in 1986 when a young woman, Morita Kinue, is living in America with a man named Dominic. Something her parents back in Japan oppose and beg her to come, but she refuses and ends up giving birth to a son, Wataru. Morita Kinue has been cut off by her parents and Wataru grows up in poverty, until he joins a youth gang and dies in a shootout aged 14. The story then moves to the present and marks the return of Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato who last appeared in Q.E.D. Vol. 44. They're now in university and have opened the Mystery Research Society, but this story is not about their usual shenanigans. This time, Mulder seems to have a problem that truly appears to be out of this world.

A blond foreigner, named Simon, turned up out of nowhere at his grandmother's house to start taking care of her, but even stranger is his claim to have landed on Earth from another planet ("...I used a wormhole to shorten the distance"). Naturally, the family's more than a little suspicious, but their grandmother refused to show him the door. And a secret DNA test reveals the mysterious Simon to be related to them. So they go to Sou Touma who becomes very interested when he hears Simon has been talking about "cosmic strings, wormholes, casimir's effect and other such strange terms." Simon showcases some of his other worldly abilities by vanishing from a closely watched changing room and appearing inside a locked house, but don't read this story for those fairly minor locked room situation. This is one of those character-puzzles and it's not even about who Simon really is. It's about why he's there and why he choose to tell such an outlandish story. This is more like the Katou I know and like!

The last story from vol. 6, "Sudden Change," allows me to end this double review on a high note. Kana Mizuhara is on a part time job delivering coffee when she walked into a police investigation.

Egota Wataru is the producer behind the popular TV show Nangoku Cop, "the detective drama where the guy uses handcuffs like an acrobat," who was having a meeting with the cast and crew to discuss the next season of the show. Somehow, he ended up on the roof and either accidentally fell to his death or jumped on purpose, but soon, the possibility of murder turns up. A possibility turning an accidental death or suicide into an impossible murder as nobody could have reached the roof when he fell from it. And everyone has an alibi. You can definitely spot the murderer, one aspect simply invites suspicion, but figuring out how it was done is bit trickier. Touma understands what can happen when someone finds themselves in an inescapable situation. Katou brilliantly fused the problem of the locked room mystery with that of the unbreakable alibi, complimented by an unexpectedly dark twist in the motive. A must-read for fans of Tetsuya Ayukawa and a fantastic story to end this review on.

She Woke to Darkness (1954) by Brett Halliday

She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett Halliday").

That story begins with Halliday attending the 1953 Edgar Allan Poe Awards Dinner, hosted by the Mystery Writers of America, where he chats and drinks with the likes of Robert Arthur, Fred Dannay and Clayton Rawson ("...I don't know what happened to John Dickson Carr”). Halliday is looking forward to meeting Dorothy Cecil, a fictitious mystery writer, but she drifts away in the crowd and Halliday is introduced to a young woman. Elsie Murray is a big fan of the Michael Shayne novels and has the complete series in hardcover from Dividend on Death (1939) to One Night With Nora (1953). She lures Halliday back to her apartment under somewhat false and mixed circumstances.

Elsie has written a half finished manuscript, titled She Woke to Darkness, partially based on a real, unsolved incident that happened to her and had no problem writing down the first fifty pages on paper ("...because I was dealing with real facts"), but now she's stuck on the middle part – asks Halliday to read it and advise her what to do with it. Halliday reads the first chapter of the manuscript and discovers the story concerns a woman, named Aline Ferris, who wakes up from one of her drunk, blackout stupors in a hotel room with two dollars stuffed down her underwear and a dead man lying on the bathroom floor. She has no memories of what happened at the party she attended. After reading the first chapter, Halliday decides to give Elsie a phone call, but a man picks up the phone and discreetly hangs up without saying anything. But it sounded like a policeman's voice.

After a phone call to a friend, Halliday is told Elsie was found strangled after the police received an anonymous tip about a dead woman in the apartment. That's a problem for Halliday. Scores of witnesses had seen them leave the banquet together, his fingerprints were all over her apartment and her lipstick on him. So call Shayne back in Miami and asks him to get on the next plane to New York. By the way, the New York friend Halliday called to learn what had happened at Elsie's apartment is the real-life, true crime writer, Edward D. Radin, who's constantly in the background helping and covering for Halliday ("if they ever learn the truth, I'll be sunk in New York..."). Radin and Shayne tell Halliday to sit tight and go over the manuscript again while waiting for the law to catch up with him.

There's an interesting possibility arising from reading the manuscript as one of the characters clearly used Aline Ferris to arrange an alibi. Just one problem. Elsie told Halliday she had changed all the names and physical descriptions of the people involved. So while the manuscript clearly points in the direction of the killer, the trick is matching the fictionalized person to its real-life counterpart. Casting the tough, hardboiled private eye novel as a meta-fictional biblio mystery is a stroke of absolute genius!

Michael Shayne arrives in New York after the halfway mark and acts like he knows he has only half the normally allotted time to close the case. Not at all bothered by the fact that a private detective from Miami has no official standing in New York. Shayne simply shoves a big fist under the nose of every unwilling witness or potential suspect and tells them to “start talking.” So not the hardboiled analog of Ellery Queen I encountered in previous novels, but still tremendously fun as Halliday (the writer, not the character) was not above poking fun at himself. For example, Shayne gets told by one suspect to "check up on an out-of-town writer named Brett Halliday" who "writes those lousy books about a dumb redheaded private eye in Miami." Shayne races through the second-half to find the real killer, tear down alibi and clear his friend's name from suspicion of murder.

I should warn some of the people who follow this blog not to expect a multi-layered, grand-style whodunit or a tricky alibi-breaker. She Woke to Darkness is not that kind of novel. From what I understand, She Woke to Darkness represents a shift in the series as Halliday started to put more emphasis on "the sexiness and violence in dialog among a lower class of despicable characters." You definitely wouldn't pick this up to meet a bunch of pleasant characters who happened to get themselves involved in a double murder case. She Woke to Darkness is one of those transitional novels from the 1950s the previous era of the genre was starting to disappear in the rear view mirror. But how She Woke in Darkness was framed and played out carried everything to something more than an early, 1950s sleazy crime novel. Yes, the self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humor and cameos also helped making it something more than thin-ish, grimy plot underneath. She Woke in Darkness is together with Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) my favorite Shayne novel to date.

The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) by Jamie Probin

Last time, I reviewed "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin, a mathematician, who has written a short series of impossible crime and locked room mysteries about a mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who acts as a special consultant to Scotland Yard and Sûreté. "The Episode of the Nine Monets" and The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) form the "Le Fantôme Saga" with the former being a prequel to the latter.

Le Fantôme is the classically-styled, phantom thief who has terrorized the museums and private collectors of France and Britain for years. Only real opposition came from Dr. Harris and Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble of the Sûreté. The last three starred in "The Episode of the Nine Monets" as they try to figure out how their nemesis spirited away a valuable painting from a locked townhouse. They triumph in cracking the locked room problem and get back the stolen painting, but Le Fantôme is still on the loose and more popular than ever. The Thirteenth Apostle is the concluding chapter of this saga.

Before getting to the story and plot, I need to get one thing out of the way first concerning the story's pacing and structure of the plot. Probin pieced out the story in lumps, big and small, which tend to shift around a bit, chronologically speaking, leaving dramatic turns of event hanging to allude to a future crime or go over previous trodden ground – making it somewhat repetitive. I essentially agree with Jim a thorough editing job would have resulted in an ever better detective novel. Superb even! However, the pacing, structuring and lapses of repetitiveness surprisingly didn't bother me at all. The Thirteenth Apostle is a fantastical, seemingly impossible crime caper about a phantom thief toying with the combined police forces and a amateur detective of two countries. So the repetitive patches and the lumpy, dramatic and sometimes episodic nature of the plot gave it the air of a turn-of-the-century French feuilleton. I liked that aspect, but yes, Jim's point still stands. With that out of the way, let's begin.

Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle begins on April 21, 1935, when a dozen of prominent French and English citizens, under the cover of dusk, heading towards the Eiffel Tower. All of them received a politely-worded, but urgent, invitation punctuated by a veiled, hard to ignore threat to show up. Who didn't need to be coerced to come are Dr. Samuel Harris and Henri Toussante, head of the Sûreté, because they know Le Fantôme is up to his old tricks again. And their best shot to finally catch the notorious phantom thief.

Le Fantôme reveals himself to the gathering through a gramophone recording à la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The voice of Le Fantôme announces to them his intention to steal the twin Bombay Diamonds, "their acquisition would be the pinnacle of my calling," of which one permanently resides in the Louvre. Le Fantôme claims to have already stolen the other diamond that was on display at the Palais de Chaillot and informs the group gathered at the Eiffel Tower they're going to help steal the second diamond from the Louvre ("to put it bluntly, you all have secrets..."). Leaving them to deliberate and make a decision, but Toussante is already on the counter offensive and apparently one step ahead. Toussante has brought the diamond Le Fantôme claims to have stolen from Palais de Chaillot.

The setup to this first of numerous impossible crimes is a slow burner, but played to great effect and pay-off as the clandestine meeting on the Eiffel Tower culminates with the disappearance of the closely watched diamond and murder – a poisoning as inexplicable as it's shocking. And why I'm being sketchy on the details to avoid spoilers. So everything and everyone, "suspect and police alike," is subjected to a thorough search without finding the diamond or a even a hint how it vanished in the first place. The poisoning appears to be equally baffling and impossible, but there are more puzzling aspects to the theft and murder. Why was there an abnormally, almost unnecessarily, large dose of poison in the glass? Why did the victim picked up the glass and deliberately smashed it before dying? Why the hell did this dose of poison have such a flair for dramatic timing? You can perhaps count that last one as a third, borderline impossibility.

While a slow burner of a start, the setup to this impossible crime extravaganza is absolutely fantastic with false-solutions being bandied about during the initial investigation at the Eiffel Tower. I'm a sucker for false-solutions! So would have loved for The Thirteenth Apostle to have continued along these lines, while picking up the pace along the way, as it headed towards the next couple of locked room murders. This is the point where the story begins to move on to the next lump of plot as the dramatic, illusory crimes at the Eiffel Tower remain unresolved for the time being. A move bridged with an excerpt from the fictitious book, Ghost in the Machine: the extraordinary career of Le Fantôme, teasing Le Fantôme's "last and most infamous accomplishment" ("the murder in the Oglethorpe Crypt"), but first, there's another impossible crime. An impossible crime pushing Le Fantôme to near mythical status in the minds of the investigators.

Nearly half a year later, in November, everyone who was present "that most unpleasant evening at the top of La Tour Eiffel" reunite at Chateau Lambert in Montanix-des-Alpes, France. Their association with a notorious, unsolved case and status as potential suspects is becoming troublesome ("...our lives will be forever tainted..."), which is why they have decided to get together to try and solve the case themselves. However, the plan to pool their knowledge, go over the facts and attempt to weed out the truth gets ditched when they learn of the local legend.

Chateau Lambert has an ancient, austere and brooding tower, Chambre de Justice, which once served as a holding cell for condemned prisoners and, over time, the tower became the stuff of legend – basically a room-that-kills. A room sparing anyone who's truly innocent, but beheads any person spending the night the tower alone with a serious crime on their conscious ("a room with pretensions of being judge, jury and executioner"). So the gathering decides to let the tower decide who's innocent and guilty. That goes about as well you'd expect, only with a slight twist as the murder is not exactly what was expected from the tower room.

This poorly done, messy review only gives you a fraction of what happened between the prologue and the impossible murder at the Chambre de Justice. So when the story finally arrives at its end stage, The Thirteenth Apostle only has a handful of chapters left to go. I started to wonder what Probin could possibly do with the murder at the Oglethorpe Crypt, which had been alluded to in both the prologue and interlude. It turns out not all that much. Well, not in terms of creating the crowning achievement of that promised trilogy of impossible murders, but at least it served another, not unimportant, purpose. I can see why Jim was disappointed as it hyped as the story's main event.

So, as a locked room mystery, the impossible murder at the Chambre de Justice stands as the best of the three. I very much enjoyed how Probin set it up as a shin honkaku-style impossibility, only to turn around to deliver a very Paul Halter-esque locked room mystery. The inexplicable poisoning and disappearing diamond from the Eiffel Tower stand out more for its dramatic staging, iconic backdrop and some truly first-class misdirection. So two, out of three, is not a bad return for a mystery novel with multiple impossibilities. What actually did disappoint me is how blatantly obvious it's who's behind the Le Fantôme persona. For more reasons than one, Probin made it impossible to ignore this character as a serious candidate to the point I began to second guess myself. I even entertained the idea of two Le Fantômes. The original, happy go-lucky Le Fantôme who robbed museums and the person who usurped his identity to go on a murder spree. That also didn't turn out to be the case and robs the story of some of its mystification (ROT13: gur svefg zheqre naq gursg nera'g unys nf onssyvat jura lbh fhfcrpg gung punenpgre bs orvat gur cunagbz).

Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle is that good, old-fashioned mixed bag of tricks. I think I enjoyed more than Jim, but have to agree there's definitely an even better, tighter-plotted detective novel lurking in there somewhere. That said, The Thirteenth Apostle is still an impressive, ambitious first stab at locked room mystery novel showing how much things had already changed by 2020. Not so long ago, novels like Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and Eric Keith's Nine Man's Murder (2011) were seen as events because they tried or pretended to write retro or modern locked room novels. We come a long way in a very short amount of time.

So definitely going to check out the other two short stories and hope Probin hasn't forgotten about that short story collection Six Impossible Things.

Note for the curious: just one more thing about that over hyped impossible crime in the crypt that was tucked away at the end. This impossible situation was described in the prologue as practically a hermetically sealed tomb with a door can be barred from the inside with a wooden, six inch thick beam that can be placed horizontally in two thick iron brackets. The prologue noted this can only be "done from inside the crypt" and Dr. Harris says "no amount of jiggery pokery could possibly allow the door to be locked from the outside." When I read the prologue, I immediately saw a very simple way to hermetically seal that crypt from the inside. Just place two pieces of ice inside the iron brackets, place the beam on top, step out and close the door. As the ice melts, the beam drops into the brackets barring the crypt from the inside.

The Art of Stealing: "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin

Jamie Probin is a British-born mathematician currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches mathematics at Charleston Southern University and writes detective novels and short stories featuring his mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who's something of a locked room specialist. I should have gotten to this series before now, but it got loss in the mass of reprints, translations and neo-Golden Age mysteries. That's until Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, reviewed Probin's newest, non-series short story "Chapter 17: Perroquet Explains" (2026). So moved this series up the big pile.

I wanted to begin with Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle (2020), but the short story "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) is a prequel and Jim's review suggested reading it before the novel ("...because it sets up the world well..."). What it sets up, or rather introduces, is a duel between the master criminal Le Fantôme and the Sûreté, Scotland Yard and Dr. Harris.

Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble, of the Sûreté, have been trying to put a stop to the shenanigans of Le Fantôme for years, which is easier said than done considering the phantom thief's affinity for the impossible crimes and a gift for disguises – getting bolder with each new scheme. Such as Le Fantôme's latest caper involving the inexplicable disappearance of an early, little-known work by Claude Monet, "never exhibited publicly," belonging to the millionaire banker Jacques DuFresne. It hung in DuFresne's Paris townhouse, securely locked, bolted and barred from the inside, but nevertheless disappeared from the locked townhouse. Even stranger, Le Fantôme exchanged the Monet for a plain, white canvas with "a childish outline of a ghost etched into the centre with a few simple strokes of black paint." I wonder if Probin is familiar with Kaito KID from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series.

Anyway, Dr. Harris is mentioned only in passing, "ask his opinion, see if he has any ideas," but it's the men of the Sûreté who score a point over Le Fantôme. Patrick Larson, in particular, gets to play a big role with his rather unorthodox methods uncovering several copies of the stolen Monet have been sold shortly after the theft. That nicely added another impossibility to the impossible theft: how do you make a whole bunch of near perfect copies of a painting that has never been publicly displayed? Good enough copies to fool a string of collectors. However, the trick to make the Monet vanish from a locked townhouse is the better, more imaginative and fairly-clued of the two impossibilities. More importantly, "The Episode of the Nine Monets" is exactly what a story about an Arsène Lupin-style character pulling off impossible crime capers should be... incredibly fun and entertaining.

I said Sûreté scored a point over Le Fantôme. They cracked the locked room problem, recovered the stolen painting and boosted their reputation, but not "the money Le Fantôme had gained from selling the forgeries" or the criminal himself – who has now captured the public's imagination ("the mood was ripe to embrace a Robin Hood-style folk hero"). The Thirteenth Apostle is going to conclude the Le Fantôme saga featuring "a trilogy of impossible murders." So that one is going to be next and hopefully it lives up "The Episode of the Nine Monets." A highlight of the 2020s impossible crime story and locked room revival.

A note for the curious: the ending half-raises a point I have wondered about before. This series takes place sometime in the early-1930s, several years after "the great depression had thundered through France and the rest of the western world,"
which is why Le Fantôme was becoming an anti-hero here. I have sometimes wondered if the figure the Gentleman Thief could have ever challenged the popularity of the Great Detective. Writers like Maurice Leblanc and E.W. Hornung made their mark with Arsène Lupin and Raffles, but the Rogue School perhaps needed their own Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr more than a great depression. I do wonder sometimes about that strange, alternative universe where the Gentleman Thief overtook (even if only briefly) the Great Detective in popularity.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944) by Kelley Roos

Last time, I reviewed the splendid novella "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by "Kelley Roos," a shared penname of William and Audrey Roos, which finds their normally bantering, wisecracking mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy during a messy breakup – only for a murder to bring them back together. A humorously written, deftly-plotted and clued novella. Its only negative is its short length that left me wanting a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy outing, but have already reread The Frightened Stiff (1942) and There Was a Crooked Man (1945) is (as of this writing) still out-of-print. So decided to reread that other favorite from the series.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), fourth in the series, starts on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in
September. Jeff and Haila promised their housekeeper to take her 7-year-old son, Chuckie, off her hands by taking him to Central Park to sail his model boat on the lake. Building and sailing model boats on a small lake or pond is not merely a pass time for children like Chuckie. When they get to the park, Jeff and Haila are introduced to several members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club, which "sails the sea" on "Saturday, Sunday and holiday afternoons."

Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club is headed by the Commodore, Austin Marshall, who's a wealthy man with many, many hobbies and interests. Bernard Marshall is his lazy, younger brother and fellow Knickerbocker as is their young nephew, Carl Marshall, currently on leave from the army. George Penny, a crusty, old and wheelchair bound man, who's accompanied by his daughter, Penny – who's sort of engaged to Carl. Tony Gilbert, a charming, well-known stage actor, who's currently appearing in another Broadway smash hit. Finally, William Philips, another wealthy model ship enthusiast and their cabin boy, Chuckie. So the scenery is near idyllic, "only the silhouette of the towering apartments and hotels" kept "you from forgetting that this was New York," but then the inevitable murder happens. A seemingly impossible murder!

Austin Marshall is seen climbing the stairs to a lonely bench, on promontory, overlooking the park, sat down and enjoyed the scenery. Only person who came to have a chat was Philips, but left him and, ten minutes later, Marshall was found dead with "a thin, nail-like piece of steel" sticking out of his neck. Somebody, within that ten minute window, sneaked up to Marshall and stabbed him. However, that appears to be patently impossible as "there's no dobt that no one went within fifty feet of the victim between the time he talked to Philips and his death." The police points out the stabbing was such "a precision job" that it could not have been projected from a distance.

Now, this is where the story becomes extra hilarious if you have just read "Death is a Trouper." Jeff refuses to have anything to do with the case and not only turns down Lieutenant Hankins, but even intends to return an anonymous delivered, one-thousand dollar fee to find the Marshall's murderer. This horrifies Haila ("...not wanting to witness the Troys' return to poverty...") who takes desperate measures to secure (i.e. steal) the fee and basically forces Jeff to solve the murder. Jeff and Haila's lighthearted banter and bright dialogue are the highlight of the story, which is unquestionable where Sailor, Take Warning! can match wits with The Frightened Stiff. Not that the Rooses neglected to pack the plot with incidents, twists and turns.

For example, I had entirely forgotten Sailor, Take Warning! has not one, but two, impossible crimes: Philips' wife, Diane, is knocked unconscious and her attacked escaped from a locked, observed house. Another trail leads the Troys to Walter Davisson, a radio psychologist known as The Marriage Doctor, whose wife, Marjorie, has a flirtatious affair with Tony Gilbert. A man, by the name of Robert Nichols, pops up out of nowhere pleading with Jeff to find his missing daughter leading to a wild goose chase from New York to Hoboken. Not to mention the Troys get burglarized and Haila finds to her horror that the thousand dollars she stole from Jeff was stolen. So the Troys are busy enough between talking and poking around the members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club.

As noted in the previous review, when the Rooses and Troys are at their best, they were a good deal better than the more famous mystery writing, husband-and-wife teams or snooping couples of their day. There's a reason, both good and bad, why Sailor, Take Warning! is considered to be the Rooses second best detective novel.

Firstly, the humor and dialogue can match themselves with The Frightened Stiff, but the plot turned out to be more of a mixed bag than I remembered. The holds together for the most part, despite the various, seemingly irrelevant sub-plots and the Troys tramping around the city, especially liked the solution to the impossible stabbing in Central Park – even though it reworks a very old dodge. Nevertheless, I liked how it was put to work here. It just worked for me in this setting. And, yes, one point makes its status as an impossible crime somewhat dubious. I'll take even as a borderline impossible crime. The problem of the attacker getting out of a locked house is nothing special and only a very minor plot-thread/distraction. So don't expect too much from that locked room problem. Nor do I have a problem with the choice of murderer as it nicely fitted the method. Where the Rooses tripped up and robbed themselves of another The Frightened Stiff is the motive.

I'm always annoyed when a writer tacks on the motive at the end as an afterthought. It's not always story-ruining bad, mostly just lazy, something you can even get away when a story's focus is on picking apart alibis, locked rooms or deciphering dying messages and code messages. Or when it's a really basic motive like the victim turning out to have been blackmailer or something. The not at all unimportant and far from basic motive was here not merely tacked on as an afterthought, but dropped on the reader like an ACME anvil. That's why I remembered it and was on the lookout for any kind of clue, hint or trace of foreshadowing. A slight, shaky case can be made it was, sort of, alluded to when (ROT13) Wrss wbxvat fnlf gb Puhpxvr “gurer zvtug or n Anmv ntrag nebhaq,” ohg gung bss-unaqrq, nccneragyl haeryngrq dhvc gb n puvyq pnzr sbhe cntrf vagb gur fgbel. So you can hardly be blamed for having forgotten about that fleeting remark and connected it to that in order to anticipate such a twist and turn of events. Hell, even with remembering it, and knowing it was coming, it still was a jarring turn of events. And genuinely damaged it as a fairly mystery. Why it came up short compared to The Frightened Stiff and had to take second place.

I really hate to nitpick about the motive, because Sailor, Take Warning! is nearly as good as The Frightened Stiff in every other way, but the motive turned out to be rather important. It's just dropped out of nowhere to reveal (ROT13) lbh unir orra ernqvat n dhnfv-fcl zlfgrel gur jubyr gvzr. Not that it couldn't have worked, but not how it was handled here. I think writers of the caliber of William and Audrey Roos should have known better. That being said, Sailor, Take Warning! is still an incredibly fun read for fans of the characters and screwball mysteries in general.

Hopefully, there's some kindly publisher out there who decides to finally reprint There Was a Crooked Man or publish a volume with the Rooses uncollected novellas. Just one for the suggestion box. :)