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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Thou Shell of Death (1936) by Nicholas Blake

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

Come Away, Death (1937) by Gladys Mitchell

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

Postscript to Poison (1938) by Dorothy Bowers

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

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

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

The Judas Window (1938) by Carter Dickson

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

The Frightened Stiff (1942) by Kelley Roos

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

Home Sweet Homicide (1944) by Craig Rice

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

Nipped in the Bud (1951) by Stuart Palmer

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

The Youth Hostel Murders (1952) by Glyn Carr

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

The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert

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

The Architecture of Murder (2026) by James Scott Byrnside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange Buildings (2023) by Uketsu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murder at the New York World's Fair (1938) by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (Writing as "Freeman Dana")

Phoebe Atwood Taylor was an American mystery writer and creator of Asey Mayo, the Codfish Sherlock, who appeared in over twenty mysteries rich in New England atmosphere, authentic Cape Code characters and screwball-y comedy – kin to Craig Rice's boozy mystery farces. Taylor also penned eight novels featuring Leonidas Witherall under the name "Alice Tilton" and a special, once somewhat rare, standalone mystery as by "Freeman Dana."

Murder at the New York World's Fair (1938) was commissioned and written under supervision of Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, who picked Taylor to represent 60,000, of a 10,000,000, words time capsule buried to commemorate the 1939 New York World's Fair. So, yes, the book fittingly takes place in the future or, as it's known at the New York World's Fair, the World of Tomorrow. It was republished in 2012 as an ebook by the short lived St. Swithin Press and a paperback reprint appeared in 2024 from Chosho Publishing. Why not finally take a crack to see if it's more than just a historical genre curiosity.

The story opens with 68-year-old Mrs. Daisy Boylston Tower, widow of a former governor, escaping from the home of her nephew and his wife, Egleston and Elfrida. She had been a guest of Egleston and Elfrida for months to recover from a broken hip and a bout with pneumonia, but, she simply had enough of being a prisoner a place "where her food was censored, where they choked beef tea down her throat, tried her door knob when she refused to answer a knock." So she borrowed money from the cook and exited the house stowed away in the back of a laundry van. Daisy Towers plan is to go to the New York World's Fair ("I've been to 'em all, since I was a mere child at the Philadelphia Centennial"), but getting there is not as easy as her disappearance has not gone unnoticed ("...dragging horse ponds for my body..."). Along the way, en route to the World's Fair, Daisy picks up a few friends.

Firstly, she comes across a newspaper reporter, Sam Minot, who unaccountably got fired that morning and is being stalked ever since by a man he calls Comrade Glue. Secondly, Daisy's former companion, Cherry Chipman, who's handing out coupons and special tickets to "De Luxe World's Fair Train, The Golden Dart." Sam has his doubts about the authenticity of the tickets as he knows the Golden Dart is the private train of "that millionaire with all the pictures," Conrad Cassell. The tickets turn out to be dodgy, but Cassell takes the deception in good stride and the party ends up at the New York World's Fair. However, Daisy, Sam and Cherry don't get an opportunity to go sight seeing as they have run around the place in disguise to dodge everyone who's looking for them. Such as the police when it's announced pictures from Cassell's collection have gone missing, presumably stolen.

So the first-half is very much a screwball comedy with mystery element apparently having to take a backseat to the adventures and antics of Daisy, Sam and Cherry. And, yes, promoting the World's Fair. The third chapter reveals a body had been found in Cassell's private office on the Golden Dart, but somehow not reported and this was done to keep the action at the World's Fair. In fact, the victim's identity is not revealed until chapter seven, of ten, but, when it was finally revealed, the victim's identity gave the plot a much needed jolt – as it raced towards it conclusion. A conclusion revealing the completely bonkers scheme underneath it all, complimented by one of the pettiest motives on record, which I found more of an attraction than the story's setting. A credible solution? Not really, but it entertained the hell out of me!

Taylor's Murder at the New York World's Fair is a light, fast paced screwball mystery unmistakably belonging to the American murder-can-be-fun school, because getting neck deep into trouble is more fun when you do it with family and friends. Murder at the New York World's Fair takes that sentiment to heart. While not as tightly plotted or fairly clued, it more than warrants comparison to other murder-can-be-fun writers like Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer and Kelley Roos. Murder at the New York World's Fair is well worth your time if you like your vintage comedy mysteries.

The Argosy Library: Four Corners, vol. 2 (2020) by Theodore Roscoe

Theodore Roscoe was an American biographer, historian and one of the finest pulp writers of the day, known for his gripping tales of exotic adventure and thrilling horror that appeared in magazines like Argosy, Adventure and Short Stories, but detective fans know him for his novels Murder on the Way! (1935), I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) and Z is for Zombie (1937) – all reprinted during the past ten years. Three utterly bizarre, wildly imaginative takes on the locked room mystery and the reason why I call Roscoe "the John Dickson Carr of the Pulps." And, as it turned out, there are many more detective novels and impossible crime stories to be found among Roscoe's work. Such as Roscoe's Four Corners series published in Argosy from 1937 to 1941.

The Argosy Library: Four Corners, vol. 1 (2015), published by Steeger Books, collects the first five, of ten, novelettes about the good citizens of a small town a 100 miles outside of New York. So, technically, this is not a series of pure detective stories, but stories about a small American town and its people. There is, however, always something happening in Four Corners involving crime, mystery, rural intrigue and the occasional witch hunt. I wouldn't be surprised if Four Corners was the model for Ellery Queen's Wrightsville and Shinn Corners from The Glass Village (1954).

The Argosy Library: Four Corners, vol. 2 (2020) collects the remaining five novelettes and begins with a banger, "Ghoul's Paradise," originally published in the November 26, 1938, issue of Argosy – telling the story of the Easter clan. "King" Isaac Easter, now nearly in his nineties, made a fortune as "a patent medicine king" before the war and rules over his family from their curious, multi-colored house. King Isaac lives on the top floor of the red cupola, "sittin' on the moneybags," where he keeps his children on a short leash by “dolin' out a penny here and a nickel there.” So his children aren't exactly fond of him, but neither do they particularly like each other and each painted their part of the house in a different color to mark their territory. They're the kind of family, living in the type of house, you expect to find in one of EQ's Ellery-in-Wonderland novels like There Was an Old Woman (1943) or The Player on the Other Side (1963). Horror is waiting in the wings to take the stage.

King Isaac is not planning on dying, or staying dead forever, because he saved a bottle of Easter's Elixir of Life ("...it says on the bottle it can raise the dead...") and even had a special tomb built behind the house. A tomb with a lock on the front door that would take "a blowtorch to open it" and, unique to this tomb, a backdoor that "only be opened from the inside." King Isaac is to be put in the tomb with the elixir and the key to the back door, which is done when he not wholly unexpected passed away. Someone even puts a bullet into the body to ensure the old man stays down, but days after the funeral, they find the back door standing open, the coffin empty and the bottle half emptied. King Isaac was gone! This apparent resurrection cause the first wave of panic and sensation in Four Corners, but people really begin to panic when the undead figure of King Isaac returns with his trusty hunting bow and quivers of arrows to pick off his own children, one by one. King Isaac's return from the dead is followed by a string of seemingly impossible situations and crimes.

There's the locked tomb and a dead man walking about who not only leaves fingerprints behind, but a scent trail the police dog picked up. One of the Easter children is killed inside a locked bedroom, the dead man appearing in the flesh and vanishes from his pursuers as by magic. This story is one of those impossible crime extravaganzas in miniature and the explanation for how the dead man walked is memorable, to say the least, hampered only by a lack of rigor normally to be expected from a detective story featuring a series of impossible crimes – which, technically speaking, it isn't. But where "Ghoul's Paradise" lacked in rigor, it made up for in sheer imagination and a terrifying atmosphere.

So my only real complaint is that Roscoe didn't expand this novelette into a full-fledged detective novel. A novel-length treatment of "Ghoul's Paradise" would have given Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) a run for its money. Yes, I should have reviewed this story separately, but I'll try to keep it short from here on out.

The second story is "The Man Who Hated Lincoln," originally published in the February 18, 1939, issue of Argosy, which is another great yarn, but for vastly different reasons – a surrealistic blending of history and fiction. This story actually begins with a brief, nicely done introduction of Four Corners as our narrator is passing through the small, out-of-the-way town. The narrator, a history student and writer "fascinated by the mystery of John Wilkes Booth," is told by the hotel keeper about an elderly recluse living on Blackberry Hill who "saw Abraham Lincoln assassinated." So decides to pay the nearly 100-year-old hermit a visit and is greeted by "a bloodless museum dummy in the costume of another period" wearing a tall, black stovepipe hat. This lively, chattering skeleton has a lot to say about President Lincoln's assassination and his opinions do not conform to the accepted story or sentiments ("my dear young man, many people in 1865 quite approved the assassination"). And the longer the conversation goes on, the more sneering the recluse becomes to the memory of Lincoln, "the scarecrow from Illinois," very much to the shock of the narrator. This concoction of accepted history, conspiracy theories and lingering, unsolved questions ("the aftermath of Lincoln's murder was a-foul with such creeping mysteries") blends "delirium and reality" as the story climaxes with the recluse reconstructing the murder in his living room for a one-man audience. That leads to answering that all-important question: who's the hermit? What else can be said except that Roscoe was a fantastic storyteller and yarn spinner.

"There Are Smiles That Make You Happy," originally published in the March 11, 1939, issue of Argosy, sees the return of the Sheriff Whittier's 12-year-old son, Bud, who figured in "I Was the Kid with the Drum" from Four Corners, vol. 1. Bud becomes involved in the eternal triangle between his cousin Mary Farwell and her two suitors, "Smiling" Charlie Knight and "Horse" Horace Dangler. Bud prefers "Smiling" Charlie or "Horse" Dangler, because Charlie's "jovial, gold-grinning, full of jokes and laughter." Dangler is the village dentist with awls, picks and drills. When war breaks out in 1914, Charlie enlisted in the Canadian kilties while Dangler stayed behind. Charlie never returns home, presumably killed in action, Mary promises to marry Dangler if she hadn't heard from Charlie within a year.

Well, a year goes by and the wedding is ready to go, but, the night before the wedding, Charlie turns up out of the blue – a returned witnessed by Bud and Dangler. However, Charlie vanishes as quickly, and mysteriously, as he appeared under, what can be called, quasi-impossible circumstances. Every road out of Four Corners that night was either blocked by repairs, construction work and accidents or under observation by state troopers hunting for bootleggers. Charlie, nor his red car, is anywhere to be found along the way as speculation, rumors and tall stories run rampant, but the accepted wisdom is that they get answers when the ice goes. So the story slowly unfolds over a period of months ("...a winter of sensations") along mostly expected lines, except for one small twist giving the story one of those wonderfully macabre scenes. Once again, Roscoe was a marvelous storyteller and agree with Jim he had a talent for making normally minor affairs feel like the big, impactful events that they really are in such a small community like Four Corners.

"Stay As Sweet As You Are," originally published in the May 20, 1939, issue of Argosy, again has a part for Bud to play, but the main stage is the candy store on the corner of Maple and Walnut Street run by the Anvegine sisters, Melina and Belle. Melina is older, dominating sister who keeps Belle on a short leash and inside the house. So that becomes a problem when the newly arrived town pharmacist, Stick Hilton, begins courting Belle. Only to end up getting engaged to Melina and eating poisoned chocolates. This story could have been the weakest of the collection, perhaps even series, however, Roscoe's ability to create convincing child characters deserves credit when compared to some of his contemporaries. I was also amused Roscoe (ROT13) ghearq guvf pevzr qenzn vagb n fyvpr bs yvsr zlfgrel jvgu gur fvfgref nf gur chmmyr gung arrqrq gb or fbyirq va gur raq. So not the best story the series has to offer, but readable as ever with a few good bits and scenes.

"Ghost On Lonesome Hill," originally published in the December 27, 1941, issue of Argosy, is the shortest story and closes out this collection, and series, with a deafening dud that should have been a standalone pulp thriller. Johnny Harter, a reporter on a fishing holiday, becomes interested in the local haunted house. It was once the home of the Colebaugh brothers, until one murdered the other during an argument. Presumably an argument over money ("...said the fight had started over an arg'ment about Calvin Coolidge"), which was never found and the place had been abandoned for nearly twenty years. So basically a treasure hunt in an old, haunted house that becomes a thriller when Harter finds himself neck deep in trouble, but culprit turned out to be a prize idiot. Not the good, amusing kind of prize idiot. It's not necessarily a bad story, but, by the standards of this series, it's wildly unimaginative.

So maybe it's good thing Roscoe ended the series with "Ghost On Lonesome Hill," because the last two stories were no patch on the first eight, often superb and evocative stories and obviously had run its course. However, the first three are absolutely great, all for different reasons, and worth the price of admission. I think the regulars of this blog will particularly enjoy "Ghoul's Paradise" as reads like a fever dream of Talbot's lost third impossible crime novel. A unique series of borderline crime-and detective fiction that I highly recommend.

The First Television Murder (1940) by Val Gielgud and Eric Maschwitz

Val Gielgud, an actor, director and broadcaster, was a pioneer of radio-and television drama at the BBC and served as head for both their drama departments – even directing the first ever drama for British television. Gielgud had a side hustle, writing detective and thriller novels, producing a respectable body of work from 1931 to 1975. I suppose his best known work today are his two collaborations with John Dickson Carr, collected in 13 to the Gallows (2008), but used to be better known for collaborating with another friend on a series of detective novels. 

Between 1933 and 1940, Gielgud worked on five Inspector Simon Spears novels with close friend and then former deputy editor of the Radio Times, Eric Maschwitz, who also wrote under the name "Holt Marvell." Three of the novels, Death at Broadcasting House (1934), Death as an Extra (1935) and The First Television Murder (1940), draw on their firsthand experience working behind the scenes of early radio and television. They have been out-of-print for ages and consequently all but forgotten today, which even without having read them always baffled me. Here you have a trio of mysteries taking place in the world of early radio and television, written by insiders, giving them at least an historical excuse to justify a reprint every now and then. Nope.

So have always been interested in Gielgud's early, media centered mysteries, notably The First Television Murder, because the title is no exaggeration. Prior to it, television sets only rarely turned up in detective stories as a background novelty (e.g. E.R. Punshon's The Bath Mysteries, 1936). The First Television Murder predates Pat McGerr's Death in a Million Living Room (1951) by more than a decade. I was very curious to see how Gielgud could do with television this early in the game.

Gielgud and Maschwitz's The First Television Murder, also published simply as The Television Murder, begins when Mr. Winthrop Bruce, the BBC Television Director, receiving a request to show Gloria van Zuyl around Alexandra Palace – where "the Television Service lived and moved." Gloria van Zuyl, known to the general public as "The Twenty Million Dollar Girl," is a rich heiress who's to receive a fortune upon the death of her bedridden grandfather, Abraham van Zuyl. She married an Italian nobleman, Count Benito Ferrari. And, recently, she purchased a "phenomenal ruby" called "The Peacock Throne" said to be cursed. The last owner, Van Zeeland, "died curiously, too, in Amsterdam" on the day he received the ruby. Bruce is not too keen to guide people around the studios "as though it were the Zoo on Bank Holiday," but couldn't turn down this request. However, the tour is a great success and Gloria even does a test screening on closed circuit. A test screening that goes so well, she's offered to be interviewed on the weekly program Picture Parade.

Gloria at first turns down the offer, but has second thoughts and accepts to be televised. It should be mentioned that between the opening chapter and Gloria's televised interview, the eternal triangle is established as Gloria is not a happily married woman and has a friend, David Calthrop, who's very interested in seeing her happy. So guess how that ends! While she's being interviewed on live television, Count Ferrari is shot and killed at their home and scene confronting Inspector Spears could have figured in one of John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell novels.

The shooting took place in Abraham van Zuyl's bedroom. The butler had heard, what he believed to be, was a car backfiring followed by the ringing of the bell at Van Zuyl's bedside. What the butler discovered was Count Ferrari, shot through the heart, lying on the floor of the bedroom with a small automatic pistol beside the body and Van Zuyl lay collapsed in the bed – shock causing "a paralytic stroke of the most serious kind." So is unable to tell them what, exactly happened, but the scene gets stranger. Count Ferrari is clutching a tube of lipstick which he used to scribble the letter "CA" on the wainscoting and the Count had an argument with Calthrop right before the televised show began. But that possibility is thrown for a loop when fingerprints found on the pistol are identified as belonging to Gloria van Zuyl!

So there's a prize suspects, who confessed going "to the house with the express intention of having a showdown" and "admits to being there until after the Countess first appeared on the Television screen," implicated by the victim's unfinished dying message. This simple, straightforward case against Calthrop collapses by the clear, tidy prints on the murder weapon belonging to Gloria. She can't possibly have fired the shot, because "she was five or six miles away, at Alexandra Palace, appearing in front of a Television camera, with about half a million witnesses to prove it." On top of that, the ruby has disappeared. Spears has his work cut out for him with this "stark raving impossibility."

I should mention here that the various characters working at the television studio remain involved in the investigation ("one day Spears would get into trouble for carting interested amateurs around with him"). From what I gathered, some also figured in Death at Broadcasting House and Death in Budapest (1937). The backstage snapshots of early, 1940s television is one of the main draws like the brief look at the big green O.B. (Outside Broadcast) Van with its mass of cables going from the van, cameras to some distant power supply – a sight new enough to draw a crowd to see television-in-action. In 1940, the medium of television was still in its experimental phase and was suspended in Britain for the duration of World War II. So placing a television broadcast central to the plot gives this detective story something of character, or personality, of its own. I can imagine the scenes related to the broadcast and its technicalities might have impressed readers as something out of H.G. Well rather than a good, old-fashioned detective novel. I also appreciated the unexpected excursion to my country, because Spears is convinced there's a link there with the murder ("...I'll lay you a hundred Dutch guilders to a Black Tulip...").

So it really is a pity the television background and trip to the Netherlands (for me) are what lifted The First Television Murder ever so slightly above average, second-tier mystery novel. Gielgud and Maschwitz were not incompetent plotters, but showed no imagination when it came to the bare bones of the plot and solution. Despite the tangled, knotted appearance of the impossible shooting, the solution is ridiculously basic to the point I shouldn't be tagging this review as a locked room mystery, but I'm not having that discussion again. It doesn't help that the solution packs, what's essentially, a double anticlimax that left me wondering what Carr could have done with this story. Sorry for nosediving this review in the end, but blame the authors for writing a historical curiosity instead of a historical curiosity that's also a first-rate mystery. If you're only interested in a good detective story, you shouldn't give The First Television Murder your top priority, but, for a historical first, it's well worth a read.

That Thing Upstairs: "The Doctor Sees a Ghost" (1933) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements

I recently reviewed Fear of Fear (1931) and Blind Man's Buff (1933) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements, a husband-and-wife writing team, which I liked enough to bump the other two Jimmy Lane novels, Seven Suspects (1930) and Shadows (1934), up a few places on my wishlist – except that both remain obscurely out-of-print as of this writing. So turned my attention to their short stories to see if they wrote anything for my liking. Well, I definitely found something.

Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements' "The Doctor Sees a Ghost" was published in the December, 1933, issue of Mystery and concerns an unnamed, two-year-old boy who's behavior has been disturbing his father ("...been going on for weeks").

Gessler has been to several, highly paid pediatrics and other specialists, but the boy is perfectly healthy and "normal in every respect." So why has the nurse packed her bags ("...she won't stay another day") and what was the reason for the changing the nursery twice? Gressler, tired and nervous, eventually finds his way to another specialist, Hallowell, tells him the boy plays Pease Porridge Hot after he's put to bed ("and other games like Peekaboo and Simon Says Tumbs Up"). Hallowell tries to assure him there's nothing abnormal about two-year-olds playing games, or prattling to themselves, but Gessler's convinced the boy is talking and playing games with his dead mother – who died six months ago. Gessler begs Hallowell to come to his home to witness the baby's unsettling behavior for himself.

So not a bad premise at all, but, considering the short length of the story, I expected the ending to take one of two directions: Gessler murdered his wife and the guilt is driving him out of his mind or the nurse has some sort of connection to his wife and is avenging her by making Gessler believe her ghost is talking and singing songs to their son. The implied threat there is making Gessler fear what her ghost might tell the boy when he gets old enough to understand. I personally preferred the latter as fear is an important driving factor and theme running through both Fear of Fear and Blind Man's Buff. It fitted both the tone of the story and the authors other work, but then the ending revealed I had been reading a ghost story all along. A better twist than the one the story threw up!

Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements' "The Doctor Sees a Ghost" is exactly as described on tin. But, in my defense, Mystery is a detective fiction magazine and the December 1933 issue even carries a short story from Stuart Palmer's Miss Withers series. So assumed it had to be a detective story, not a ghost yarn, maybe even a detective story with a supernatural flavoring. That didn't turn out to be the case. That leaves only Ryerson's solo short story, "The Purple Shadow" (1925), as of possible interest. In the meanwhile, I'll keep an eye out for Seven Suspects and Shadows.

Blind Man's Buff (1933) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements

Back in March, I reviewed Fear of Fear (1931) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements, a husband-and-wife writing team, who collaborated on novels, short stories, plays and movie scripts – notably several movie adaptations of S.S. van Dine's Philo Vance mysteries. Ryerson and Clements wrote a handful of detective and thrillers themselves, published between 1930 and 1937, starring playwright and amateur sleuth Jimmy Lane. Their detective novels had been out-of-print for nearly a century, until Coachwhip Publications reprinted two of the Jimmy Lane novels and the standalone mystery-thriller The Borgia Blade (1937).

I was interested in Fear of Fear ever since coming across it in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but the story and plot has more to like than just a well-handled impossible crime. A must-read for fans of the Van Dinean detective story and writers like Clyde B. Clason and Roger Scarlett. So picked up the reprint of Blind Man's Buff (1933).

Ryerson and Clements' Blind Man's Buff takes a different track by moving away from the brownstones and mansions that usually provide a backdrop for these Van Dinean detective novels. Instead, the story brings Jimmy Lane and his chronicler, Philip Carter, to Sycamore Island in New York – private domain of the Conroy clan. Lane and Lucia Conroy, a rising novelist, were working on a stage adaptation of one of her novels when she dropped their work to announce she has to leave for a month. A short while later, Lane receives a telegram from Lucia imploring him to come to Sycamore Island and bring "Northwest Mounted." Lane's nickname for Carter dating back to their college days. So it must be serious!

When they arrive, Lucia seems fine and tries to dismiss the telegram as a ploy to lure them away for a much deserved holiday. However, Lucia quickly admits to Lane she had reason to suspect her cousin Sally had been murdered the previous year.

Sycamore Island was the property of the late family patriarch, Nathan Conroy, who's tomb stands on top of the hill overlooking the Conroy home below. Nathan Conroy's slightly peculiar will shackled the Conroys to the island as the prospective legatees are required to spend "the month between September fifteenth and October fifteenth out of every year" on the island. At the end of the ten year period, Nathan's property and fortune will be divided among the surviving legatees. Last year, on their ninth reunion, Sally dies on the veranda after drinking tea-punch dosed with chloral hydrate. Sally's death was dismissed as a suicide, but this year, Lucia "discovers a note scribbled on the fly-leaf of the book she was reading the afternoon of her death" reading "MURDERED." Dr. Mark Dietrich, Sally's brother, convinced Lucia the note was written while she was in a delirium. Lane and Carter remain suspicion, which is why they decide to stay on. And, of course, murder is in the offing. But what happens before is just as fascinating. Not only for its introduction of the eccentric family full of "brilliance and charm."

First of all, let's get the family out of the way first (is what the murderer said). There is Lucia's drinking twin brother Lee and her fiance/adopted cousin, Douglas, who's a broker and sports fan. Dr. Dietrich's wife, Connie, who flirts with their Italian cousin, Count Roberto Patri. Tony Patri is half-brother and came along for the ride. Judith Conroy is their aunt and Hagar Conroy is their batty, mystery loving great-aunt. Finally, there's the grotesque caretaker, Henry Harker, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Prill, who both have a stake in the inheritance question. So, en route to the first murder, the topic of detective stories and fair play comes up.

Great-aunt Hagar has a temper tantrum over a mystery novel she has been reading, "swindling cheat," which amused everyone as "this was by no means the first time she had burst out." She had been reading a mystery in which a man is shot on page 12 and "along about a hundred and forty you're told the murdered man once had a brother who quarreled with him and went to Borneo in 1885," only to arrive "on page three hundred and fourteen" to "discover he did the killing" – basically robbing the reader of his time and money ("...writers oughtn't to be allowed to cheat like that"). So they have a spirited debate about fair play in detective stories ("all I ask is that the murderer be prominent in the story"), suggesting an International Code for Detective Fiction ("...death penalty for infringement") and agree to do a short story contest. Everyone is to write a short story following the agreed upon code of conduct to be submitted before eight the following night.

So, the next night, the short story contest is preceded by a game of blind man's buff while a storm was brewing outside. A not unimportant link in the chain of events, which becomes clear when they get to the stories. There's an extra, tenth story in the pile titled "Murder in the Conroy Clan" describing the gruesome murder of Roberto Patri. According to the story, Roberto's body will be found, hands and feet tied, lying on the floor of the breakfast room "shirt covered in blood" with "a gaping wound in his throat" and "a gory knife at his feet." The scene described in the story is exactly what they find when they go to investigate the breakfast room. And, of course, the raging storm cuts them off from the outside world for the next day or two. However, isolating the small island here is not merely a convenient plot-device to create a very tight, closed-circle situation without any possible outside meddling. More on that in a moment.

Jimmy Lane and Philip Carter, once again, have to play Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but even the brilliant Lane is struggling with the multitude of puzzling aspects, possibilities and rising body count. Who wrote that tenth short story? Why was Roberto wearing Tony's torn, stained shirt? What is the connection between Roberto's murder and Sally's presumed suicide? Who wore the slicker? What happened to the dog, Truffles, when he briefly disappeared without a trace from the tiny island? Lane tries to take a strictly logical approach to these countless problems and demonstrates a pleasing ability to consider ideas that are the extreme opposite of each other. At one point, Lane compares himself with "a scientist in a laboratory who has a culture containing a thousand different germs and knows that one of them is responsible for a disease," only "by a process of elimination that he can find the culprit." This cold, clinical and logical approach is hampered by the murderer keeping a steady pace. Every murder is preceded by the discovery of a new, short chapter "Murder in the Conroy Clan" identifying the next victim. Curiously, this leads to several locked rooms and impossible crimes being teased, but never executed or immediately dispelled. Like the snoring corpse! Not that Blind Man's Buff needed any locked room murders or impossible poisonings as it has more than enough going for itself. Most has been barely touched upon or mentioned in this review. You can discover that for yourself.

So, there are a few things that stand out, having now read Fear of Fear and Blind Man's Buff. Firstly, Ryerson and Clements clearly understood what makes a detective story tick giving particularly this novel an Ellery Queen-like, meta-fictional quality (c.f. The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932). I suspect EQ was in their mind when plotting and writing Blind Man's Buff. Lane even winked "A Challenge to the Reader" when telling Carter, "you're in possession of every fact" and "seen every clew" needed to come to the same conclusion. Blind Man's Buff could have just as easily been titled The Italian Shirt Mystery. More importantly, Ryerson and Clements had a knack for inconspicuously hiding their murderers among a small cast of characters. Neither the murderer from Fear of Fear nor the one from this novel had any right to be this inconspicuous. I eventually cottoned on the murderer, but even then had some things incorrect or not exactly correct. Either way, I had fun trying to put all the pieces together myself and got pretty far, before the final chapters rolled around. So, purely as a whodunit, Blind Man's Buff can more than hold its own against its contemporaries, but one aspect pushed it to be something more than a solid round of the Grandest Game in the World.

What earned Blind Man's Buff the status of minor classic, arguably one of the best stuck-on-a-island mysteries from the period, is the secret of the island itself and how it relates to Nathan Conroy's strange will. Now that's (ROT13) nccylvat gur neg bs zheqre gb pbzcyrgr, hggre znqarff. Honestly, something I have come to expect from Japanese mystery writers of today rather than from a good, old-fashioned Golden Age detective novel from the Van Dine-Queen School. I can recommend Blind Man's Buff for that part alone with the detective story surrounding it being quality bonus content. So, hopefully, Coachwhip decides to followup their 2023 reprints with reprints of the remaining two Jimmy Lane mysteries, Seven Suspects (1930) and Shadows (1934).

Murder in the Air (1931) by Darwin L. Teilhet

Darwin L. Teilhet was an American journalist, advertising executive, screenwriter and novelist who started out as a mystery writer, authoring seven detective novels from 1931 to 1940, four of which forming a short-lived series – featuring the irrepressible, slightly unhinged Baron von Kaz. Hildegarde Teilhet co-wrote three of the brave Von Kaz novels, but her husband began his literary career with three standalone mysteries.

The most notable, best remembered of Teilhet's trio of non-series mysteries is the prescient The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), which takes place in Germany when the Nazis rose to power. It has the distinction of arguably being the first ever World War II detective novel beating Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) by two years. A big reason why it was reprinted in 1985 by Polygonics. Death Flies High (1931) and Murder in the Air (1931), a pair of aviation-themed mysteries, aren't as well remembered today, but that can be put down to neither having ever received a reprint. So, you can say they flew under our collective radars. Murder in the Air is an interesting case as it's not only an impossible crime novel listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but the central impossibility is based on a famous, real-life disappearance from the late 1920s. More on that aspect in a moment.

Murder in the Air opens with Peter Blue, a reporter for the Paris Journal, getting fired by editor, Henry Jackson, because he has "muffed every good story" given to him. Just when is ready to leave, the telephone rings with bombshell news. Dr. von Dolbenstein, "biggest financier in Europe," vanished from his tri-motored, Rhorbach monoplane while it was flying five thousand feet above the English Channel. There were five other passengers, not including the pilot and navigator, who saw Von Dolbenstein go into the lavatory alone and not coming back – no answers to their calls or knocks. So they broke down the door only to discover Dr. von Dolbenstein has vanished into thin air! What followed was a search of the small plane from cockpit to tail-end without finding a trace. They even tried to open the cabin door, to see if he might have accidentally fallen out, but "the blast of wind from the propellers was too strong" ("we couldn't budge it"). Only thing they can do is radio the police that a well-known, influential financier known on two continents has inexplicably gone missing from a sealed airplane in mid flight.

So, if this situation sounds vaguely familiar, the "fantastic disappearance" of Von Dolbenstein was based on a notorious, real-life disappearance under very similar circumstances. On July 4, 1928, the Belgian financier Alfred Loewenstein, third richest man in the world at the time, flew from Croydon to Brussels on his private air plane with a group of six people. They reported seeing Loewenstein going to the lavatory and not returning. Only difference is that when they checked the lavatory, they found the entrance door open and it was assumed Loewenstein had accidentally plunged to his death. However, the official reading didn't stop the speculations and conspiracy theories. Teilhet's Murder in the Air probably was the first fictionalized take on the case, but not the last as you might also be reminded of Franco Vailati's Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) and Helen McCloy's short story "The Case of the Duplicate Door" (1949) collected in The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003).

Back to Peter Blue and Henry Jackson. When news arrives, Jackson has no reporters on hand and dispatches Blue to the airport to report on, what could be, the biggest breaking story of the decade. Blue, as the on-the-ground reporter, learns the other passengers consisted of Von Dolbenstein's two secretaries, Frederick von Stallf and Miss Geraldine "Jerry" Howard, two other well-known financiers, Harvey Gerbé and Sir William Wallace, and a former secretary, John Carson – who forced his way onto the plane before it took off. Lastly, the pilot and navigator, Clarence Pierce and Erich Rask. Blue also learns there's another layer to the seemingly impossible disappearance as "a cordon of men surged around the monoplane even before its wheels had bounced on the ground" ensuring Von Dolbenstein couldn't have been hiding on the outside, dropped off and escaped. Shortly following the disappearance, the man who called in the tip to Jackson is murdered in one of the hangars. And the victim left behind a dying message suggesting a link with the disappearance mystery.

However, this murder is of peripheral importance to the story and plot as it's barely mentioned again until towards the end. The story that follows is more of a medium boiled, almost pulp-style mystery with the plucky, elusive Miss Howard and the hardboiled John Carston giving him the most trouble, which comes with plenty of physical altercations. For example, the fifth chapter opens with a bandaged Blue waking up in a hospital bed.

Beside a couple of unruly suspects, Blue also has to deal with George St. Armand, the newly appointed Chef de la Sûreté, who's convinced Carson and Miss Howard are behind the disappearance ("they are two of the most infamous criminals"). Much to Blue's dismay who has become very interested in Miss Howard and somewhat confused why she's protecting Carson. There is, of course, the inexplicable mystery of Von Dolbenstein's disappearance from an airplane and the trouble his disappearance is causing. Before he disappeared, Von Dolbenstein was ready to market a new technical marvel, "a new, secret Diesel airplane," but the plans vanished alongside the financier. So the investors are ruined and a newspaper report how "the crash of the von Dolbenstein bubble" has already resulted in two suicides.

I have mentioned on this blog before how the "financial wizards" of the early 20th century took over the role of popular villains and ready-made, murderable victims from blackmailers in detective fiction following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 – e.g. The Mystery on the Channel (1931) by Freeman Wills Crofts. Murder in the Air is another example, but with a slight twist bringing me to the solution.

Murder in the Air is Teilhet's first stab at the detective story, a stab full of energy and enthusiasm, but a still inexperience hand at plotting reveals itself in the solution. First of all, Teilhet made a capital mistake confirming my initial suspicion was spot on. What was that mistake (HUGE SPOILER/ROT13): gur bcravat abgrq gur qbbe bs gur yningbel jnf ybpxrq naq unq gb or oebxra qbja, ohg gung ybpxrq qbbe jnf arire zragvbarq be pbafvqrerq ntnva nf n cneg bs guvf zhygvynlrerq ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel. Jul? Orpnhfr gur ybpxrq qbbe cynlrq ab cneg va gur fbyhgvba. Fb gur svanapvre unq gb unir unq n unaq va uvf bja qvfnccrnenapr. So that brought me halfway towards the correct solution, but muddled the method a little as I considered something a little different. Something silly that was rightfully mocked in the story itself. Teilhet deserves credit, given the limited scope the situation allows for locked room trickery, for not going full pulp and trying to deliver a somewhat detective-worthy solution to the impossible disappearance. The trick is a rather involved one, but not overly convoluted, but undeniably marred by (SPOILER/ROT13) qrcraqvat ba zhygvcyr pb-pbafcvengbef naq nppbzcyvprf. Jung vf guvf... na rcvfbqr bs Wbanguna Perrx? On the upside, while the dying message is only a small part of the plot, its solution shines with brilliant simplicity. It simply stands out against the involved vanishing-trick.

So, all in all, Murder in the Air is a diamond-in-the-rough written and plotted around the central idea of how a man can disappear from an airplane, but how that idea was executed caused the plot to experience some turbulence. Other than the rough patches on the plot, Murder in the Air is highly readable, fast-paced medium boiled mystery-thriller with pulp leanings and full of promise Teilhet would deliver on in future novels. It made me curious about Teilhet's second novel and aviation mystery, Death Flies High, which looks to be a classic, closed circle whodunit aboard a transatlantic flying boat. On the wishlist it goes!