Phantom Pests: Tom Mead's "Invisible Death" (2018) and "The Walnut Creek Vampire" (2020)

Tom Mead is a British mystery writer, or, to be more precise, a mystery fan and "student of the locked room" turned mystery writer whose favorite authors include John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot, Christianna Brand and the post-Golden Age luminaries Edward D. Hoch, Paul Halter and Soji Shimada – all names closely linked to the locked room mystery. Mead has written sixteen short stories to date that appeared in publications like Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Detective Mysteries. So far as I can see, the lion's share of his short stories fall into the category of locked room and impossible crime fiction. 

I tracked down two of Mead's short locked room mysteries in anticipation of my copy of his debut novel, Death and the Conjuror: A Joseph Spector Locked Room Mystery (2022), which should arrive before too long. 

"Invisible Death" was originally published in the December, 2018, issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine and reprinted in Chilling Crime Short Stories (2022). A locked room tale clearly showing the influence of Carr and Halter's plotting technique and storytelling on Mead. The narrator, Michael, tells the reader the story of the time when he and his then fiancee, Ruby, decided to spent Christmas of 1935 with her parents, Colonel and Mrs. Soames. A small, intimate family gathering during the holiday that also included Ruby's cousin, Bill, who "fancied himself an adventurer and had just got back from the Australian outback." So, as was the custom back then, the topic of conversation turns to ghostly yarns recalling two of Carr's short stories, "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) and  "Persons or Things Unknown" (1938), which has Colonel Soames tell a ghost story from the Great War – giving the impression of a story-within-a-story. During the winters of 1915 and '16, Colonel Soames was stationed in Albania and the “ghoulish folklore” of the region began "to exert an insidious effect on the soldiers." One wounded soldier, in particular, began to talk about how he's being stalked by a creature from Slavic folklore, the Samodiva.

One night, Colonel Soames saw the white-shaped creature for himself, "like our most trite conception of a ghost," as the creature extended "its white-robed arms" to envelope the soldier "in a dark embrace." That was the end of the soldier. Colonel Soames concludes his tale that he lately has experienced the same dread he felt that night in 1916 ("as if the Samodiva might have remembered my face"). So when the family goes to the village, Colonel Soames retreats to his private studio to paint, but, when they return, they find the door locked and no response to their knocking. When the door is battered down, they find Colonel Soames had been "stabbed in a hermetically-sealed room" with "no visible weapon in sight." Since everyone had been out of the house at the time of the murder, the family were alibied and in the clear. Two decades pass, before Michael can finally slot the puzzle pieces together that have been there all the time.

The locked room-trick is not bad at all, a nicely executed twist on an old dodge, but the clueing is a trifle weak and that regrettably detracted from the overall story, which has a genuinely surprising murderer and motive – which showed "Halter-the-Bleak" also has a sway over Mead's impossible crime fiction. So a perfectly serviceable locked room mystery that could have been so much stronger had the clueing been just a little bit bolder. 

"The Walnut Creek Vampire" was originally published on the Crime Readers' Association website in 2020 and takes place in October of 1962 in the San Franciscan suburb of Walnut Creek. A time of the year when the streets were "carpeted with crisp dead leaves" and "the house fronts papered with skulls and pumpkins" like "a picture-postcard Halloween season." But this season, the peaceful suburb is terrorized by a vampire who hunts pets and local wildlife. A dead cat and raccoon, "bled dry," were found with double puncture marks in their neck. A local boy on his way home from the library is chased by "a creature out of some old creaky Universal picture" and even the blood bank is burglarized. So this naturally caused a localized panic as residents "stopped letting their pets roam free" and "a strict curfew was put in place for the youngsters."

The vampire scare gets a weird twist when a well-known, perfectly healthy hypochondriac and recluse, Norris Cooper, unexpectedly died of a heart failure while "completely sealed up in that fortress of his." Detective Kemble turns to the Miss Marple of Walnut Creek, Mrs. Hester Queeg, to help him find a solution to all these bizarre, downright impossible happenings ("I know you have a nose for this kind of strangeness"). Mead came up with an original explanation to the locked room problem that would not be out of place in a short story by Arthur Porges (c.f. "Dead Drunk," 1959), but, if the clueing in "Invisible Death" is a trifle weak, the clueing in “The Walnut Creek Vampire” is practically non-existent. You have no change, whatsoever, to arrive at the exactly same conclusion as Mrs. Queeg. A very inspired guess could push you in the direction of how it was done, which could tell you whodunit, but not why or how dead animals figure in the whole scheme. 

"The Walnut Creek Vampire" has a better, much more original, locked room-trick, but "Invisible Death" plays the game a little fairer with the reader and therefore the better detective story of the two. Mead plays his cards way to close to his chest. I don't know whether he's afraid of giving away too much, too soon, or is one of those mystery writers (like Hake Talbot) who needs a novel-length canvas to work his magic to full effect. Either way, Death and the Conjuror is going to answer that question pretty soon. To be continued!