Shot Down: "The Case of the Musical Bullet" (1974) by Edward D. Hoch

Between 1973 and 1984, Edward D. Hoch wrote fourteen short stories about two agents from Interpol, Sebastian Blue and Laura Charme, who specialized in airline related crimes and work from a top floor office at the Interpol headquarter in Saint-Cloud, Paris – collectively known as the Interpol series. Back in 2019, I reviewed the third story in the series, "The Case of the Modern Medusa" (1973), which immediately became a personal favorite. "The Case of the Modern Medusa" is easily one of the best and most original locked room mysteries Hoch devised over his five-decades spanning career. So was very curious about the second and last impossible crime from this series that Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders (1991).

Hoch's "The Case of the Musical Bullet" has, to my knowledge, only appeared in the March,1974, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and presents the two Interpol agents with a case of potential international complications.

Pierre Brider is a civil servant "holding a somewhat unique position in the French government" as "he acted as the liaison man with various foreign governments arranging joint space shots and satellite launchings." Brider is fatally shot on an Air France flight waiting to depart from Paris to Shanghai and the French government refuses to discuss his assignment, but it's assumed it was to negotiate a joint French-Chinese space project. However, the circumstances in which Brider was shot and killed presented the authorities with something of an impossible crime.

No gun could have been taken aboard as every passenger and all carry-on baggage is searched or checked with a metal detector. The stewardess "swears the seat next to him was unoccupied all the time they were taxiing for take off" and "how do you shoot someone on an airliner without anyone knowing it” or hearing something? So the French government asks Interpol to investigate and specifically ask for Sebastian Blue to lead the investigation. Blue and Charme have their investigation kneecapped from the beginning as passengers were transferred to another plane, "they were searched, of course, but no weapon was found," and "scattered over half the world." But they're not entirely bereft of clues. Brider was dictating into a tape recorder moments before he was shot, "perhaps the tape recorder is rigged to fire a bullet," but the recorder had not been gimmicked and listening back to the recording, they hear Brider being interrupted mid-sentence by "a series of musical tones" punctuated by a grunt and silence – like he had been shot with "a musical bullet." How very Carr-like of Hoch to link the clue of the titular bullet to the clue of the chiming clock in the victim's office showing Blue what really happened on that grounded Air France flight.

However, the explanation to the who-and why behind the murder is far better than the how, which is a variation on a type of trick not particular popular among locked room and impossible crime aficionados. Hoch's variation of the trick is, of course, marginally more acceptable than others examples (ROT13: sbe bar, gur zheqrere ersenvarq sebz oernxvat gur jrncba ncneg naq fjnyybjvat gur cvrprf), but not by much. I think most readers can make a pretty good guess how Brider was shot and find it to be more or less in line with the solution. So, purely as a detective story, "The Case of the Musical Bullet" is typical Hoch, simply a good and decent job, but, as a locked room mystery, the story is not a patch on the preceding "The Case of the Modern Medusa." Not one I would recommend for inclusion in a future locked room/impossible crime anthology, but would love to see Crippen & Landru collect all fourteen Blue and Charme stories in a single volume. It sounds like a fun, relatively consistent, but overlooked, series with such intriguing titled stories like "The Case of the Flying Graveyard" (1976), "The Case of the Five Coffins" (1978) and "The Case of the Drowned Coroner" (1984). Either way, I'll definitely return to this series at some time in the future.