Dead Men's Guns: "The Cold Winds of Adesta" (1952) by Thomas Flanagan

Thomas Flanagan was an American university Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialized in Irish literature and wrote an award-winning historical novel, The Year of the French (1979) – which was turned into a TV-series in 1982. Flanagan also made a modest contribution to the detective genre with eight short stories that were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The most well-known of his short stories is perhaps is "The Fine Italian Hand" (1949), collected in The Locked Room Reader (1968), but four of the eight stories form a short-lived, almost entirely forgotten series of detective stories with an intriguing and original premise. 

Between 1952 and 1956, Flanagan wrote four stories about a military policeman, Major Tennente, who lives and works in an unnamed country ruled over by a dictator, the General. Mike Grost suggests that the unnamed country "seems to be Franco's Spain." The unifying theme of the stories is Major Tennente trying to be a decent, upstanding policeman who nonetheless serves a corrupt and totalitarian regime. A tricky balancing act of morals and personal convictions that foreshadow Josef Skvorecky's Lieutenant Josef Boruvka series from the 1960s (e.g. The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka, 1966), which takes place in Communist Czechoslovakia. The series kicked off with a prize-winner! 

"The Cold Winds of Adesta," originally published in the April, 1952, issue of EQMM, won the magazine's annual short story contest and eventually ended up with the other First Prize winners in Ellery Queen's The Golden 13 (1970). More importantly, the story is listed and described as a very good impossible smuggling problem by Brian Skupin in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019).

Major Tennente is dispatched to a border post located in the lonely, mountain pass near the town of Adesta, five minutes from the border with a neighboring, unnamed Republic. Lieutenant Bonares suspects a wine merchant, Gomar, is smuggling weapons into the country through the deserted, rarely used pass of Adesta. A peculiar merchant who drives his own truck, loaded with caskets of wine, every night to a country that produces more than enough wine on its own, which had been going on for two weeks – attracting the suspicion of the authorities. However, the border patrol of two countries were unable to find as much as a single shell casing inside the truck or casks.

Gomar is "first searched by the border guards of the Republic" and then, while "his truck visible at all times to Bonares," moves down the mountain road to the next checkpoint where "he is searched a second time." So without finding a hidden cache of firearms, they have to let him go through every night and watch on as Gomar drives down "the twisting, dangerous road toward the lights of the town of Adesta." There's a historical mystery, of sorts, adding another layer to the impossibility.

During the Revolution, or "the war of liberation," the last remaining Government army that remained intact tried to cross the border to the Republic, but they were turned back and returned to surrender themselves to the General. But they returned without their arms. Presumably, they buried their guns and rifles somewhere along the border and mountains of Adesta. When the war ended, the General sent a commission to the region to comb the area. They erected a hut and moved outward, inch by inch, but they came up empty handed. So the impossibility is that either the border guards would have discovered the guns in Gomar's truck or the military commission would have found them fifteen years ago. Major Tennente has reasons to believe the smuggled weapons came from this long-lost arms cache with enough guns for an entire regiment, but where were they stashed away and how were they sneaked pass the border?

The solution is impressive in how it tied every aspect of the story together and satisfyingly dovetailed the smuggling operation with the political background and history of the country to the duality of the detective. Major Tennente is an interesting detective character whose situation allows him to act a little differently from detectives from more democratic countries. Such as shooting one of the casks of wine or cultivating a short temper, but someone "noticed that Tennente's infamous temper was his servant" and "it exploded only when he chose." A necessary facade for someone who fought in one of the armies opposing the General and without any friends in high places.

But, purely as an impossible crime story, the solution to how the guns are smuggled into the country was not all that impressive with exception how the historical plot-thread tied into it all. So, on a whole, "The Cold Winds of Adesta" is a very well written detective story with an at the time fresh and original premise, but, in the end, more impressive for its storytelling than plotting. 

A note for the curious: a completely different solution occurred to me while writing this review. The story is careful to point out "the pass of Adesta is almost never used," where rumors tell of a hidden cache of arms from the days of the Revolution ("an old wives' tale fifteen years old"), but what if Gomar used the pass and its history as a smokescreen? What if he wanted the border guards to think he was smuggling guns and rifles? So he begins making the trips without anything on him until enough suspicion has been aroused. Once they begin to search his truck and casks for guns and rifles, Gomar begins to smuggle something a little smaller and easier to hide. That could be everything from money, gold or precious stones to documents or simply drugs. All things that are a lot easier to hide when the guards are only interested in finding weapons.