Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) by Gigi Pandian

I recently read J.L. Blackhurst's Three Card Murder (2023) and revisited two of Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini mysteries, The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) and The Headless Lady (1940), which all have one thing in common – applying the art of stage magic and illusions to the detective story. I suppose Clayton Rawson founded, what can be called, the sleight-of-hand school and only recently realized it has some loyal adherents. Not just back then, but today.

Tom Mead praised the Great Merlini series as "the purest example of the overlap between professional magic and professional mystery" ("in both cases, the key to the trick lies in the art of misdirection"). Rawson and the Great Merlini appear to the biggest source of inspiration for Mead's two Joseph Spector locked room mysteries, Death and the Conjuror (2022), The Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre (2024). Mead is not the only locked room champion today who cited Rawson and Merlini as an influence, Gigi Pandian. I reviewed The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) in 2019, but only "The Haunted Room" (2014) stood out to me. However, I probably would have enjoyed the collection a lot more had the introduction not spoiled the theme linking all the short stories together.

In 2022, Pandian started the "Secret Staircase" series entirely dedicated to the traditional craftwork known as locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Pandian is not the first, or last, who in recent years began an impossible crime series. I really should have waited until 2025 with "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years," because a few extra years would given a clearer picture and more to talk about than just the firsts in all these new series – many from debuting and/or self-published authors. So the locked room revival is still very much in its It Walks by Night (1930) phase en route to the modern-day equivalents of The Three Coffins (1935), The Judas Window (1938) and Rim of the Pit (1944). I'm getting off-topic.

Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) is the first of currently two novels and one novella in the "Secret Staircase" series with the third novel, Midnight Puzzle (2024), getting published next month. This series stars a disgraced stage magician, Tempest Raj, who previously appeared in the short story "Tempest in a Teapot" (2015) collected in The Cambodian Curse. A botched escape trick nearly killed her and pretty much ended her career, because everyone assumed she had "replaced the vetted illusions for something far more dangerous" ("...putting her own life and those of many others in danger"). Tempest believes the illusion had been sabotaged by her former stage double, Cassidy Sparrow. Either way, Tempest is back home with her father, Darius, and the family company, Secret Staircase Construction. A business specialized in creating secret rooms and hidden doors like "a bookshelf that slid open when you reached for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" or "perhaps a door in a grandfather clock that led to a secret garden." Tempest has to consider working for her father, if she can't get her career back on track.

Tempest goes with the Secret Staircase crew to the home of a client, Calvin Knight, who bought a 110-year-old house and moved in with his six-year-old son, Justin, but while renovating the place, it seems like the the house is "hiding something" – not counting the secret room they built behind a bookcase. When they break open a very old wall, they discover a dusty sack with black hair sticking out. And inside is the body of Cassidy Sparrow. But how did her body end up inside a wall that hadn't been worked on or tempered with for at least half-a-century?

A fresh, barely cold body inside an old and practically hermetically sealed crawlspace, walled up for the better part of a century, is fantastic premise for an impossible crime story. So it's unfortunate that impossibility is not the focal point of the plot. You can even argue the story turns into something entirely different once the body is pulled out from behind the wall.

After the body's discovery, the story shifts focus to the more personal mysteries surrounding Tempest. Five years ago, her mother disappeared and her ghost has been haunting Tempest ever since she returned to Hidden Creek, which comes on top of the family curse ("the eldest child dies by magic") and a treasure hunt for her inheritance. And introducing recurring characters. So it might appear as if things are happening or being investigated, but, beside the opening and closing chapters, not all that much happens. Just a lot of talking and very little in the way of an actual detective story. Now that can be largely put down to Under Lock & Skeleton Key having to setup the series and the second novel, The Raven Thief (2023), appears to be detection oriented with no less than four impossible crimes, but neither the characters nor the story pulled me in. I like the idea of "a haphazard team of misfit craftspeople" fitting people's home with elaborately hidden reading rooms, nooks, secret doors and fantasy locks or how all of Pandian's series-character occupy a shared universe, but this just didn't do it for me.

That's the double-edged sword of the miracle problem. A reality-defying impossibility or even a simple locked room murder is always a great hook for a classically-styled detective story, but it obliges the author to do something with it – preferably something good or original. So when you pull a freshly murdered corpse from a dark, dusty crawlspace sealed for decades, like a rabbit from a top hat, it sets certain expectations that were ignored. However, the next entry in the series look a lot more promising and apparently begins with a body miraculously appearing during a mock séance. I've noticed a lot of the current locked room revivalists enjoy making bodies impossibly appear instead of making them disappear. That's something to keep in mind, but next up, a return to Case Closed and promising-looking Golden Age whodunit.