77 North (2023) by D.L. Marshall

Last year, I did my best Herodotus impression and wrote up "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years" tracking the changes of everyone's favorite subgenre over the past two decades – evolving into something of a revival. A revival whose seeds were planted by the reprint renaissance and translation wave, which started showing fruit towards the end of the last decade. So far, the harvest has been plentiful and growing.

Just in the past year, locked room and impossible crime fans were treated to James Scott Byrnside's Monkey See, Monkey Murder (2023), A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023), Anne van Doorn's Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) and Tom Mead's The Murder Wheel (2023). J.L. Blackhurst's Three Card Murder (2023) and Gigi Pandian's Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) and The Raven Thief (2023) are currently residing on the big pile. One of the more intriguing takes today on the traditional detective story and locked room mysteries comes from D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series.

Marshall smashed together the action-packed, 1980s movie thrillers and weaves deceivingly intricate plots throughout the gunfights, standoffs, hand-to-hand combat and betrayals. No matter where on the planet Tyles finds himself, the morally ambiguous mercenary is always confronted with killers who execute their victims under apparently inexplicable circumstances. Anthrax Island (2021) brings Tyler to the post-apocalyptic Gruinard Island contaminated with deadly anthrax spores where the first murder is committed in the locked and watched radio room. Black Run (2021) takes place on an old, rusty Soviet era transport ship filled with modern-day pirates, smugglers and assassins as Tyler's cargo (a prisoner) is knifed to death inside the sealed tank of the ship. Steve, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, called the series "the lovechild of Alistair Maclean and John Dickson Carr." While the impossible crime took a backseat in the second novel, it was still a cracking good read. And looked forward to the third title.

77 North (2023) concludes, what's hopefully, the initial trilogy and wraps up all the ongoing storylines and plot-threads in an unrelenting, action-packed survival thriller – a very clever plot lurking underneath it all. The ending suggests 77 North is not going to be Tyler's last appearance ("one last job"), but a lot happens between the opening and closing pages. Like a lot.

John Tyler is "dead in the eyes of the world" and so has the freedom to move around to extract revenge on the people responsible for killing his older brother, Justin. Tyler takes his bloody vengeance on a world tour as he goes from Rio and the coast of Croatia to Amsterdam to pick off a group of ex-special forces turned private military ("real close-knit team"), which was bound to get him noticed. Tyler is trapped by the man who helped him to die and stay dead. And he needs him to a job. There's a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Golubev, who has setup shop in one of the roughest, most inhospitable parts of Siberia. Somewhere deep into the Arctic Circle, Severnaya Zemlya, stands a Cold War era "hotel" where the KGB experimented with ESP, astral projection and telekinesis. So remote enough to conduct some shady, downright illegal business deals and sales, but Golubev attracted the attention of certain people when he got his hands on a small amount of bioweapons. Normally, those people are not interested in obsolete Soviet weapons, but they are interested in Golubev's bioweapons expert, Professor Balakin, who wants to get out. Professor Balakin is wiling to trade the name of "a Russian double-agent well-placed within NATO" in exchange for a white picket fence in the United States. Only they hit a snag. One of the two agents sent out there was killed under mysterious circumstances. Somehow, the professor knew John Tyler is alive, because he secretly requested Tyler to get him out of there.

This barely touches on all the intricate details, characters and plot-threads of the story's opening pages as Tyler takes the place of the dead undercover agent to get the intel and protect the second agent, Dr. Carr – a legit bioweapons expert. They went to the Arctic hotel undercover of checking out the goods on behalf of General Kayembe, dictator of the central African country Nambutu, who also happens to be a friend of Tyler. So no problem to go down there as the general's man on the ground, but getting to the hotel is an ordeal and sets the tone for the rest of the story. Tyler has to battle both the unforgiving climate ("the Arctic Circle wants you dead, and will try at any opportunity") and creeping, disappearing shape fleeting across the ice shooting at him and leaving behind a burned body. That's just before arriving at the isolated hotel of a Russian arms dealer with a private army who's hosting a who's who of terrorists, cartel members, killers and "probably just a few shady fuckers who wanted big guns."

First of all, the settings is one of the strongest and most attractive part of this mystery-thriller series. John Tyler can be placed in settings and circumstances in a setting that would be off-limits for a "normal" amateur detective or police inspector. For example, I can't imagine Carver's Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow setting foot on Gruinard Island or Byrnside's Rowan Manory getting a fee big enough to board the Tiburon. 77 North does not disappoint in that regard. The place is like a decaying time capsule of the 1970s with portraits of Brezhnev hanging askew on half-collapsed walls with peeling, mustard-yellow wallpaper where Golubev conducts his business. Strewn with relics of the period ("Urbexers or eBay profiteers would have a field day with the kitsch"). But the place also has a "destroyed wing." Decades ago, experiments where carried out there involving psychic and paranormal phenomena to create super soldiers, but one experiment reputedly lead to a deadly fire destroying half the building. This ruined section is sealed off from the rest of the building by a huge steel door ("the kind you'd see on a ship or submarine"). Underneath the old hotel is a nuclear bunker from the Cold War "designed to withstand a two megaton nuclear strike nearby." And with a history like that, the place acquired a ghostly resident. They call the ghost the White Demon or Pozharnyy, "Fire Man," who stalks its dilapidated corridors as a harbinger of doom, death and burned corpses. Great stuff!

The nuclear bunker underneath the hotel naturally becomes the scene for a locked room murder. Tyler is alone with two other people in the sealed bunker when one of them is burned to death, inside a locked section of the bunker, but the relatively small, hermetically bunker had been searched top to bottom – offering no hiding place or escape route for the murderer. And no source of ignition. No our mercenary has a problem with the ruthless arms dealer.

I'm not going to attempt to give you an idea about what happens next as this is only a mere fraction of what goes down during the first half of the story, which is interspersed with flashbacks to Tyler's first time on the job back in 1999 when he joined his brother in Nambutu. And everything is connected to everything.

77 North is first and foremost an first-rate thriller, as intricate as it's exciting, rarely letting up its relentless pace. So while a mystery-thriller, of sorts, it's not a tale of detection or deduction, because the punishing pace and pile-on of incidents, twists and turns simply won't allow for it. However, you're strongly advised to pay attention as the keen eyed armchair detective can pick up enough clues and hints to get a long way towards the correct solution. On top of that, Marshall wonderfully used the melee of the action thriller for some good, old-fashioned trickery and misdirection in a way that would difficult to pull-off in a garden variety murder case. More importantly, this series perfectly demonstrates why having a sound plot and some historical genre awareness is a rock-solid foundation for the characters and story to stand on (*). After all, if this series had been about Tyler simply shooting his way to the final chapter, I would never have bothered with it nor would the series have stood out from the raft of other action-oriented thrillers. Now they are something more than just action-thrillers or locked room mysteries. I suspect genre scholars and locked room fans of the future will look back with great interest to these first three John Tyler novels.

Hopefully, Tyler has enough fuel left in the tank to take on future assignments as I feel the series has not yet ran its course. So much more can be done with those specialized, usually off-limits settings. Something like a black site prison in some jungle outpost where prisoners are killed in locked and guarded cells or a prequel novel with Justin Tyler set during the Yugoslav Wars to give his younger brother a breather. Until then, the Tyler Trilogy comes highly recommended as a truly new and radically different take on the traditional locked room mystery.

*: see my review and comments on Pierre Siniac's Un assassin, ça va, ça vient (Death on Bastille Day, 1981).