Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022) edited by Otto Penzler

Back in 2018, Otto Penzler, of MysteriousPress and the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, founded Penzler Publishers and launched the company's first imprint, American Mystery Classics, dedicated "to reissuing classic American mystery fiction" personally selected by Penzler – which include Greats likes of Baynard Kendrick, Stuart Palmer, Craig Rice and Ellery Queen. Regrettably, I have either already read and own the books currently reissued or they're not prioritized on my wishlist. So never got around to reading one of their reissues or anthologies, until now. 

When the impossible crime-themed anthology Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022) was announced as forthcoming, it was the first title that got me genuinely excited for American Mystery Classics. Some of that initial enthusiasm began to wane when the line-up of stories turned out to be mostly a best-of selection from previous locked room anthologies. Eight of the fourteen stories collected here can be found in the other, well-known locked room anthologies with three of them having appearing together in Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982). So not the most original and inspired selection of stories, but, as the resident locked room fanboy, it simply was impossible to ignore this anthology for too long. This anthology has three stories I've not read yet, which is something, I suppose.

Just one more thing before diving into this collection: I'm going to skip over the following stories, MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (1930), Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Yellow Canary" (1934), John Dickson Carr's "The Third Bullet" (1937) and Clayton Rawson's "Off the Face of the Earth" (1949), which have been discussed on this blog before. I'm also skipping Queen's novella "The House of Haunts" (1935), known better under the title "The Lamp of God," because want to reread and review it separately. And with that out of the way, let's take a closer look at this latest locked room anthology. 

Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries opens with an unusual story, Anthony Boucher's "Elsewhen," originally published in the December, 1946, issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, which combined elements of the locked room mystery and the unbreakable alibi with pure science-fiction – centering on a homemade time machine. Harrison Partridge, or the Great Harrison Partridge, begins the story with announcing to his sister, Agatha, he has invented "an actual working model of a time-traveling machine." The world's first ever time machine, however, the first model has a number of limitations as it can only travel to the past and only a few minutes, which Partridge eventually stretched that period to "a trifle under two hours." While not suited to go adventuring through the distant past, Partridge decides to use his machine to remove a relative who stands in his way to a huge inheritance. A perfect murder in a library with the door and all the windows locked on the inside, basically an impossible crime, "that could never conceivably be proved on him or on any innocent." However, the victim's secretary was inside the library when the murder was committed and therefore seen by the police as the only one who could have done it. So his fiance hires Boucher's series-detective, Fergus O'Breen, whose presence has some interesting implications. Boucher, Palmer and Rice created a shared universe through cameos and crossovers in which time-travel is now possible!

I had forgotten how good "Elsewhen" really is! One of those finely-crafted, practically flawless gems of the science-fiction mystery hybrid, but it's as out-of-place here as it was in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories (1987). The locked room-angle is only there to hand the police a ready-made suspect and give Fergus O'Breen a reason to get involved. And he focuses entirely on trying to break down an impeccably-timed alibi. "Elsewhen" is an imaginative exploration of the idea that an alibi is a locked room in time and a locked room an alibi in space, but still feels weirdly out-of-place among proper impossible crime stories. 

Fredric Brown's "Whistler's Murder,” originally published in the December, 1946, issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, was new to me and the story began promising enough. Mr. Henry Smith, of the Phalanx Insurance Co, goes to the home of a client, Walter Perry, who has not paid the current premium on a $3000 policy. So he come to collect the premium or the policy expires, but, when Mr. Smith arrives at the house, he spots a wreath hanging on the front door and finds the police inside. Walter Perry is suspected of having murdered his uncle, Carlos Perry, as he admitted to having written the threatening letters that turned the house into a locked and guarded fortress. And the police is stuck as to how he could have entered the house with two detectives standing guard on the roof. Fortunately. Mr. Smith has a gift for observation and quickly deduces the truth, but the solution is even by pulp-standards utterly preposterous. You might pull such a trick on unsuspecting witnesses in the dark, but not with trained observers. I refuse to believe those two detectives would spot it and go, "that looks completely normal and natural." Not anywhere neas as good as some of Brown's other short locked room mysteries. 

Joseph Commings' "Fingerprint Ghost" was first published in the May, 1947, issue of 10-Story Detective Magazine and opens at the Sphinx Club where the well-known miracle smasher, Senator Brooks U. Banner, is told by magician Larry Drollen about the murder of Dr. Gabriel Garrett – who had been stabbed in his office with a silver-handled knife. The police had no clues and no leads. A week ago, a spirit medium, Ted Wesley, claimed that for "a large fee he'd return Garrett's spirit to earth and have him name his killer." Drollen challenged Wesley to forfeit the fee if, "under identical circumstances," he "couldn't produce bigger and better ghosts." And perhaps trap the killer himself. A séance is arranged under very tight, strictly controlled conditions as Drollen is tied to a chair, "trusted up like a hogtied steer," inside a curtained cabinet. The other participants sit around the table in straitjackets and touching feet with the only door locked and guarded on the outside. So how's it possible Drollen ended up with a knife in his chest? Why do "the fingerprints on the knife did not belong to anyone who had been in that room"?

This story has a better premise than execution with the tightly-controlled séance demonstrating how good Commings was at dreaming up impossible crime scenarios, but the solution is neither one of his best or most original. I suppose Penzler considered the remaining, uncollected Senator Banner stories from too late a date to be included in Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (e.g. "The Invisible Clue," 1950), but why not pick a better story from Banner Deadlines (2004) like "Murder Under Glass" (1947). It has an impossible murder inside a bolted room made entirely of glass with a very fitting and original solution.

The next story is Mignon G. Eberhart's "The Calico Dog," originally published in the September, 1934, issue of Delineator and the second of three stories that were completely new to me, which fortunately turned out to be really good. Susan Dare is a mystery novelist who occasionally plays detective herself and she asked to help out a wealthy widow, Mrs. Idabelle Lasher. Twenty years ago, Mrs. Lasher's then 4-year-old, Derek, disappeared alongside with his nursemaid. So they always suspected she had stolen their son as there never was any attempt to demand ransom, but, recently, Derek has a returned. Rather, "two of him has returned." First came Dixon followed a short time later by Duane. Strangely enough, they both tell an identical story and share the same, early childhood memories like the green curtains in the nursery, a teddy bear and a calico dog – things "only Derek could remember." One is clearly lying, but who? This is a neat little play on the Tichborne Claimant, but, in order to force an answer, Susan Dare accidentally sets a murder into motion. Someone gets shot at a Charity Ball while the only other people in the room were together in a fortune teller's tent and the only, unlocked entrance was under observation. The locked room-puzzle is only a tiny cog in the overall plot that does not come into play until the final-act and quickly solved, but the simple, elegant solution perfectly fitted that final-act. But the fairly, well-clued conclusion to the claimants is where the story truly shines. I particular liked how Susan Dare tried to glean clues from a nursery school report card. 

Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Exact Opposite," originally published in the March 29, 1941, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly, which features Gardner's pulp hero and gentleman crook, Lester Leith – who "goes about hijacking robbers out of their ill-gotten spoils." So a cross between a detective and Robin Hood whose eternal rival is a police detective, Sergeant Arthur Ackley. He believes Leith is unaware that his personal valet, Beaver, is a plant, but Leith knows. And uses it to his advantage or play them against each other, which is very much the theme of this story.

Beaver tries to entice Leith to take an interest in the murder of an explorer, George Navin, who had been "mixed up with some kind of a gem robbery." Navin had thoroughly explored the Indian jungles where discovered a hidden sect and a huge temple complex guarding "a beautiful ruby, the size of a pigeon egg, set in a gold border which had Sanskrit letters carved in it." So he took the ruby, photographed it and published it in his book, which puts members of that "peculiar religious sects" on his trail. Yes, this pulp territory! So he took precautions by turning his house into a small fortress and spends the night in a room considered "virtually burglar-proof" with "a guard on duty outside of the door all night," but he's murdered one night and ruby vanishes from the safe. However, this neatly posed locked room murder disappears into the background as the story concentrates on the three-way tug-of-war between Ackley, Beaver and Leith. More importantly, the conning shenanigans of Leith and how they can possibly help him pulling the wool over everyone's eyes to get a hold of the ruby. So a great, tremendously fun story, but, judged purely on its merits as a locked room mystery, it's a pretty routine affair at best.

Gardner's "The Exact Opposite" is one of the three stories previously anthologized in Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries and think "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" (1945; collected in Two Clues, 1947) would have been a better, more interesting choice. The story is rarely mentioned and not very well-known as an impossible crime story, but it's good and has a rural backdrop that would have been a nice change of scenery at this point in the collection. 

C. Daly King's "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem," originally published The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935) and later reprinted in The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) and The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006). Trevis Tarrant is on the death when the naked body of female model is discovered in the penthouse studio of an eccentric artist, Michael Salti. So the police puts out a dragnet, but Tarrant is left behind with the nagging question how Salti got out of the studio with every door and window locked or fastened on the inside. Tarrant calls it "the most perfect sealed room, or rather sealed house, problem ever reported" and the story has a reputation of being "one of the best locked room tales" in the series, but not one that's really deserved. While the clue of the moved easel is clever and inspired, the locked room-trick is as unimpressive in its simplicity as it's utterly disappointing. More importantly, why is this story not only included in the same anthology as MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock," but were stuck together in the middle? One review commented that this anthology is "really for newcomers to the genre," but fail to see how this selection will leave a good impression on those newcomers. Or explain why some of us fanatically obsess over these infernal locked room and impossible crimes. 

I think "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" (1935) would have been a better story to include here as it's the better story of the two that does something genuinely different with the haunted house setting. 

Craig Rice's "His Heart Could Break" was first published in the March, 1943, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, collected in The Name is Malone (1953) and reprinted in The Locked Room Reader (1968). John J. Malone is easily my favorite shady American lawyer-detective who can boost he never lost a client, but that reputation nearly is shot to pieces when he defended Paul Palmer on a charge of murder. Palmer had supposedly shot his uncle, Carter Brown, but "everything had been against him" as the jury, "composed of hard-working, poverty-stricken men," liked "nothing better than to convict a rich young wastrel of murder" – worse still, "they'd all been too honest to be bribed." The trial had been Malone most notable failure, but he knew "some interesting facts about the judge's private life" that allowed new evidence to be turned up for a new trial. Of course, "the evidence would have to be manufactured before the trial," but that's the least of Malone's worries. Arthur Crook and Perry Mason have nothing on Malone! But when Malone goes to the prison to visit his client, the guards and him discover Palmer swinging from a rope in his cell. And with his dying breaths says, "it wouldn't break."

Malone swears he'll prove Palmer was murdered and make an awful stink about it, but he's faced with a double-edged impossibility. Although a two-sided improbability is probably a better description. On the one hand, why would an innocent man who has been told he's getting a new trial hang himself, but, on the other, how could he have been killed while imprisoned? Malone tackles that tricky problem in his own, unique way ("I'm not insane... I'm drunk. There's a distinction”) with an excellent use of the dying message and the half-remembered lyrics of a song haunting the lawyer throughout the story. One of the best stories in this collection and really need to return to Rice sometime soon. 

Manly Wade Wellman's "Murder Among Magicians" originally appeared in the December, 1939, issue of Popular Detective and reprinted in Sleight of Crime: Fifteen Classic Tales of Murder, Mayhem and Magic (1977). Another story that began promising enough with Secutoris, "foremost stage magician and escape artist of his day," playing host to four magicians and a newspaper reporter at his Magic Mansion. Secutoris shows them his latest apparatus and gives them a demonstration, but, when the door to the magician's closet is unlocked and opened, the body of Secutoris slumps to the floor. I liked the setting and cast of characters, but the plot turned out to be poor with an uninspired, third-rate locked room-trick. You should at least expect a cheap magic trick or some easy sleight-of-hand, but even Victorian spiritualists would turn up their nose at that kind of cheap trickery.

The anthology closes out with Cornell Woolrich's "Murder at the Automat," originally published in the August, 1937, issue of Dime Detective Magazine, which appeared alongside Gardner's "The Exact Opposite" and Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" in Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries. Woolrich's name is inextricably linked to noir and suspense fiction, but, occasionally, "he also wrote detective stories that were meticulously plotted" and "even took on the great challenge of the locked room puzzle on three occasions" – like the classic "The Room with Something Wrong" (1938). And they tend to be a little darker in tone than your average, 1930s locked room mystery. Leo Avram is an unlikable, penny-pinching miser who leaves his wife and two hungry stepchildren every evening to go to the same automat to treat himself to a coffee and a bologna sandwich, but this time his sandwich was loaded with cyanide. The police quickly establishes that "there was clearly no slip-up or carelessness in the automat pantry," which means "cyanide got into that sandwich on the consumer's side of the apparatus." So either he committed suicide or one of the other customers poisoned his sandwich, but the sandwich was wrapped up and sealed in wax paper. So there's no way it could have been opened and closed again without attracting attentions or suspicion. A splendid setup and backdrop not often seen in Golden Age detective stories, which actually reminded me of those impossible poisoning stories set at eateries or barrooms in the Case Closed series. Such as the sushi bar murder from vol. 63 in which the victim is poisoned after taking a random plate of food from a conveyor belt, but, as said, Woolrich's take is much darker and grittier. But a pretty good story nonetheless with an excellent solution. A strong and solid short story to round out an otherwise standard and, on a whole, a pretty mediocre anthology.

So, as you probably noticed, this anthology has not elicited the kind of response you expect from a rambling, unapologetic locked room fanboy. The selection of stories is both disappointing and repetitive with eight of the stories having appeared in other locked room anthologies, which are well-known to the core audience who will be immediately drawn to a short story collection entitled Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries. Something that would have been acceptable enough had the absolute cream of the crop from those anthologies been selected to introduce newcomers to the locked room mystery, but the overall quality of the locked room-tricks is below average with the impossible crimes being only minor elements in some of the better stories (e.g. "Elsewhen," "The Calico Dog" and "The Riddle of the Yellow Canary"). Not to mention how some stories together makes the genre appear repetitive and two-dimensional ("The Light at Three O'Clock," "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem" and "Murder Among Magicians"), which certainly helped cheapen Kantor's excellent suspense mystery. And that while there are so many great, unanthologized (American) locked room mysteries that could have been included. Such as Frederick I. Anderson's "Big Time" (1927), Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935), Gerald Kersh's "Karmesin and the Meter" (1937), Theodore Roscoe's "I Was the Kid with the Drum" (1937), Fredric Brown's "Miracle on Vine Street" (1941), D.L. Champion's "The Day Nobody Died" (1941) and Helen McCloy's "The Singing Diamonds" (1949). Those stories would have given a much better, more varied impression of the genre to newcomers. But enough saltiness for one review. I'll try to pick something good for the next one.