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!

Jack the Poetical Private (1997) by MORI Hiroshi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pelham Murder Case (1930) by Monte Barrett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Thou Shell of Death (1936) by Nicholas Blake

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

Come Away, Death (1937) by Gladys Mitchell

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

Postscript to Poison (1938) by Dorothy Bowers

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

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

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

The Judas Window (1938) by Carter Dickson

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

The Frightened Stiff (1942) by Kelley Roos

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

Home Sweet Homicide (1944) by Craig Rice

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

Nipped in the Bud (1951) by Stuart Palmer

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

The Youth Hostel Murders (1952) by Glyn Carr

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

The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert

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

The Architecture of Murder (2026) by James Scott Byrnside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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