The English Garden Mystery (2022) by Dan Andriacco

Last time, I babbled incessantly about "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century," rattling on how the reprint renaissance and translation wave is already leaving its traces, but those visible traces do not stop at a locked room resurgence – even if you don't always get that idea from this blog. So today's review has no murders in hermetically sealed rooms or someone disappearing at the end of a trail of footprints in the snow. Instead, it's a pure, undiluted fair play whodunit.

Back in November, I learned of Dan Andriacco's The English Garden Mystery (2022) when Ellery Queen: A Website on Deduction highlighted it as "an homage to Golden Age great Ellery Queen." A modern-day mystery complete with a dying message, false-solution, challenge to the reader and even a subtitle ("A Problem in Deduction"). Andriacco is a former journalist, reviewer and an active member of the Baker Street Irregulars who writes detective novels and wrote on his blog, "all of my books owe a lot to Golden of mystery fiction," but none more than The English Garden Mystery. In another blog-post, "The Logical Successor to Sherlock Holmes," Andriacco calls his series-detective a devotee of EQ whose "exploits often include the Queenian tropes of the dying message and the false-solution" with his latest adventure being "an out-and-out homage to Queen."

The English Garden Mystery is the thirteenth novel starring the celebrated mystery writer, Sebastian McCabe, whose side career as a local amateur detective is chronicled by his brother-in-law, Jeff Cody. The entire series takes place in the small town of Erin on the banks of the Ohio River and the town with its inhabitants appears to be as much of a "character" as McCabe and Cody. An apparently living, breathing and buzzing community as the story is littered with footnotes referring back to previous events or appearances of characters and locations. Such as meeting with a local lawyer or museum director whom McCabe and Cody had met before other times, "on the edges of cases," which have footnotes referring back to two short stories, "Art in the Blood" and "Foul Ball" – respectively collected in Rogues Galley (2014) and Murderer's Row (2020). While another footnote informs the reader that the setting from No Ghosts Need Apply (2021) had "gone out of business after COVID and a murder." Yes, even the fictitious town of Erin, Ohio, was unable to escape the pandemic and The English Garden Mystery finds the town "much changed by the COVID-19 pandemic" with "some of our old friends gone forever and others transformed."

I mention all of this because, as of this writing, The English Garden Mystery is the latest addition to the series and, chronologically challenged as ever, I dropped in at the end simply for the dying message, false-solution and EQ fanboying. That left me feeling disconnected from most of the characters and parts of the stories, but that's wholly on me. Not Andriacco. So this review will be limited to discussing the plot and its treatment of those Queenian tropes of the dying message and false-solution.

The English Garden Mystery begins as Erin emerges from the COVID lockdowns and their social bubbles, "still stir-crazy from a year of social distancing and Zoom meetings," to attend a fundraiser for the Erin Arts Council in the English garden at the Bainbridge family compound of houses known as Stratford Court. Ezra Bainbridge is "the pater familias of one of the oldest of Erin's old-money families" and Shakespearean scholar who named his triplet daughters, Desdemona, Portia and Ophelia, after characters from the Bard's plays ("...Des is the bad girl, Portia is the socialite and Ophelia is the scholar"). The story's opening finds the elderly Ezra Bainbridge in poor health, "battling brain fog in the wake of COVID-19," confining the patriarch mostly to a wheelchair and getting pushed around by his much younger wife, Fleur. She gets accused by Desdemona and Portia of elder abuse and adultery, but their sister Ophelia does not believe it. So asks McCabe and Cody to drop by Stratford Court to observe for themselves nothing is going on ("nobody observes more than Sebastian McCabe, except maybe Sherlock Holmes on a good day").

Before the long, the personal favor becomes a full-blown murder case when Ophelia's body is found, "hit in the head with a marble bookend in an art deco design," holding a bright yellow bell-shaped flower – a columbine from the garden at Stratford Court. Erin Police Chief Oscar Hummel believes the murder is a bungled burglary, but McCabe believes the presence of the flower argues otherwise. Ophelia was a puzzle fiend who loved word games, anagrams and "the dying message stories of detective story great Ellery Queen" who reviewed detective stories for the Oxford Gazette and taught a course on "Locked Rooms and Dying Messages." So reasons a dying Ophelia must have taken "the columbine out of that vase after the killer left as she sought to tell us who killed her." A classic dying message straight out of the Golden Age detective stories! Why not? Leaving a dying message is something that would occur to someone who reads and collects Ellery Queen. Just one problem: the murderer is not even close to being done and every murder comes with its own floral tribute. So the flowery clue goes from a potential dying message to the killer's cryptic calling card. Or is it?

I noted earlier that airdropping into the thirteenth title in the series with its living setting and cast of recurring characters made me feel disconnected from the characters and parts of the story, but nothing to muddy the clarity or cleverness of the EQ-style plot.

Andriacco carefully constructed the correct-and false-solution alongside each other with enough clues and red herrings to delight, or frustrate, the amateur armchair detective who wants a shot at beating McCabe to the solution. Something that's absolutely doable with the given clues, even if you miss a small detail or two. Although the hook of the plot is the dying message/calling card and false-solution, The English Garden Mystery played the Queenian trope of the fallible detective card slightly better. There was already a hint and characters suggesting McCabe's luck ("let us say good fortune rather than luck") as the local Sherlock Holmes is eventually going run out, which all nicely builds up towards gathering all the suspects in the library to present and destroy the false-solution – punctuated by a short challenge to the reader ("...he didn't see it. Neither did anybody else. Do you?"). I just wonder how far Andriacco played out the fallible detective card as the ending left me with the feeling the second solution is also incorrect and will come back to haunt him in a future mystery novel. Something that does not appear unlikely in a series like this, but I could be wrong.

Either way, The English Garden Mystery succeeded with flying colors in capturing the feeling of the characters wandering into an EQ-style novel that fully does justice to the favorite tropes of those two mystery writing cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. If there's anything to nitpick at, it's that perhaps more could have been done with the English garden with its riot of lowers, bronze fountain and statue of a flute-playing Pan to evoke that "Ellery-in-Wonderland" atmosphere of There Was An Old Woman (1943) and The Player on the Other Side (1963), which would have been perfect for a story taking place right after the characters emerged from the pandemic lockdowns. Other than that, The English Garden Mystery is a compelling detective novel that comes highly recommended to every Ellery Queen fan and West 87th Street Irregular. But if you're completely new to series, like me, the characters can make you feel like a stranger among friends.