The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.