Dr. Morelle Investigates (2009) by Ernest Dudley

Vivian Ernest Coltman-Allen, known better under his adopted stage-and penname of "Ernest Dudley," was an English actor, dramatist and mystery writer who created the popular BBC weekly radio series The Armchair Detective – reviewing "the best of the current releases of detective novels, dramatising a chapter from each." The program reviewed John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and that attracted the attention of Fearn's agent-biographer-champion Philip Harbottle some fifty years later. Harbottle became Dudley's friend and agent, which is why Dudley's otherwise obscure detective fiction is still in print today. Harbottle has worked decades to ensure the writers under his care, like John Russell Fearn, Gerald Verner and Ernest Dudley, remain in print.

Dr. Morelle Investigates (2009) collects two long-ish short story adaptations of a radio and stage play, "Locked Room Murder" (1954) and "Act of Violence" (1959), solved by the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Morelle ("he is also an expert on crime"). Dudley created Dr. Morelle for the BBC radio anthology series Monday Night at Eight and was a hit with the audience leading to a movie, TV series, stage play and a series of short stories and novels. So this two-story collection of a radio-and stage adaptation sounded like a potentially fun and interesting follow up to John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud's 13 to the Gallows (2008).

“Locked Room Murder” is an adaptation of a stage play, Doctor Morelle, Dudley co-wrote with the then Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, Arthur Watkyn.

The story begins one late Saturday evening when Brian Cartwright is visited by four friends, Philip, Nigel, June and Evelyn, who were involved in a drunken, fatal hit-and-run accident – learning from a radio broadcast the victim had died. So they turn to their friend in something of a jam, but Cartwright happen to be in desperate need of money and turns his hand to a spot of good, old-fashioned blackmail. Cartwright promises to keep his mouth shut in exchange for two-thousand pounds ("between the four of you that shouldn't be embarrassing"). A demand that doesn't go unchallenged as one of them sends Cartwright a death threat, but Cartwright turns the table on them by inviting them to dinner with three additional guests. The first is a journalist, Bill Guthrie, who was already interested to write about the history of the house for his "Criminal Corners of London" column ("some female was battered to death a hundred years ago where your pantry is now"). The last two are Dr. Morelle and his secretary, Miss Frayle.

Cartwright shows them the death threat ("We have till nine o'clock. So have you. R.I.P.") and calls their bluff in front of three witnesses. Either they agree to a simple transaction or he's going to police. Cartwright is going to wait until then in his study with the doors locked from the inside and the windows to the balcony securely bolted, but, when the clock strikes nine, they hear a gunshot from the locked study. Who killed Cartwright and how, when he was all alone with every entrance locked and bolted from the inside? Dr. Morelle takes charge of the case and solves the murder in exactly an hour, but is it any good? That's a bit of a mixed bag.

"Locked Room Murder" is not a very challenging, or fairly played, detective story with, what some would consider to be, a second-rate locked room-trick. There is, however, a pleasing cat-and-mouse atmosphere permeating throughout the story. You have a brazen blackmailer trying to get back at his victims when one of them threatens him anonymously, but the story also appeared to toy with its audience. The locked room-trick might not be the stuff of legends, neither was it overtly apparent from the start with the crime scene littered with "clues" all suggesting different possibilities. From the planned, short blackout as the electricity company changes over to a new grid system and Cartwright smoking a cigar in a pitch-black room to the old-fashioned telephone with separate mouthpiece and receiver bolted to his desk all suggested different possibilities. Even the money troubles and the victim's brazen behavior implied the dreaded suicide-disguised-as-murder was not off the table. Dr. Morelle struggled with spotting the locked room-trick as well and has to accept the murderer's challenge to find it before the hour is out or become the next victim of the devilish murder method.

So, while not one of the most ingenious detective stories ever conceived, "Locked Room Murder" nonetheless turned out to be a fun read with a minor, but pleasing, element of the unexpected.

The second short story, "Act of Violence," is an adaptation of a Dr. Morelle episode from Monday Night at Eight. Dr. Morelle and Miss Frayle are invited over to dinner by Professor Owen a day before he's going to marry his secretary, Mary Lloyd, who secretly loves his laboratory assistant, Glyn Evans. Along the way, Dr. Morelle and Miss Frayle pass a gas station run by a Robert Griffiths. Dr. Morelle recognizes him as the young man who was on trial and sentenced to hang for murder, but had been reprieved to begin life anew. There's a manuscript of a dramatic sketch, sent in anonymously to the local dramatic society, which reenacts the murder that almost hanged Griffiths ("...only a short sketch but it certainly packs a punch"). Griffiths is going to play his own part!

This sounds a little disjointed and Dudley takes his time to set everything up, while leaving the reader in the dark about the direction the story is eventually going to take, but the potential for a good detective story was there – depending on how the ending is going to pull everything together. And that's the problem. Dr. Morelle ties everything together, but the solution is not all that impressive and made the long preamble feel like stalling and padding out the story. Dudley should have focused either on the domestic story of the eternal triangle or gone with the theatrical storyline and the anonymous manuscript, because this didn't work.

So, thematically, Dr. Morelle Investigates makes for interesting comparison material to the stage plays by Carr and Gielgud, but should have read these two adaptations before, not after, 13 to the Gallows as Carr is a hard act to follow. At least "Locked Room Murder" was fun and entertaining.

13 to the Gallows (2008) by John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Douglas G. Green's founding of Crippen & Landru, a small publishing firm specialized in short story collections, whose first publication was John Dickson Carr's Speak of the Devil (1994) – a BBC radio serial originally written and broadcast in 1941. C&L was decades ahead of the curb and gave mystery fans a taste of the coming reprint renaissance with their "Lost Classic" series. A series of short story collections comprising of such early gems as Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), Craig Rice's Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002), Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin (2003), Joseph Commings' Banner Deadlines (2004) and Ellery Queen's The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005). Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999).

There are fortunately no signs C&L is slowing down or stopping anytime soon as Jeffrey Marks, "the award-winning author of biographies of Craig Rice and Anthony Boucher," took over from Douglas Greene as publisher in 2018.

In March, I reviewed one of their latest publications, Pierre Véry's Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937). A collection of imaginative short mystery stories, translated from French by Tom Mead, published in 2023, but was unaware of the C&L's 30th anniversary and neglected to mention it when I wrote the review. It was not until a review of Edward D. Hoch's The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) appeared on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel that I was reminded of C&L's 30th anniversary. So a good excuse to finally move those Anthony Berkeley, William Brittain and Hoch collections to the top of the pile, but not before revisiting one of my favorite C&L collections from my all-time favorite mystery writer.

13 to the Gallows (2008) is a collection of four, never before published manuscripts of stage plays John Dickson Carr wrote during the early 1940s and collaborated on two of the plays with his friend and then Director of Drama at the BBC, Val Gielgud – who had a "shared interest in detective stories and fencing." Gielgud wrote detective novels himself and you would think the name of a British broadcast legend on the covers of Death at Broadcasting House (1934), Death as an Extra (1935) and The First Television Murder (1940) is a guarantee to keep them in circulation, but they have all been out-of-print for ages. This collection of stage plays is the first time his name appeared on a piece of detective fiction in over thirty years. What a way to make a comeback!

Just one more thing before delving into these plays. 13 to the Gallows is edited and introduced by Tony Medawar, a researcher and genre archaeologist, who also littered it with Van Dinean footnotes and even included "Notes for the Curious." Medawar's detailed introduction should give you an appreciation of the time and work that went into the making of this volume of "Lost Classics." One of the many fascinating background details is that it was "the late Derek Smith who first conceived of this collection." So with that out of the way, let's raise the curtain on this collection of stage plays from a once forgotten period of Carr's writing career.

The three-act play "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (1942) is the first of two collaborations between Carr and Gielgud, which is also the first of two plays that take place in a BBC radio studio. In this case, it's the cellar below a country house on the outskirts of a provincial town that was taken over by the BBC as an emergency security set of studios. When the story begins, they're rehearing the first episode of a true crime program called Murderer's Row starring ex-Chief Inspector Silence to talk about the Kovar case. It was his first big case ("I hanged the criminal") in which Thomas Kovar shot his wife's lover. A part of the program is a dramatic reenactment of the shooting, but the producer, Anthony Barran, made the unfortunate call to cast Elliott Vandeleur and Lanyon Kelsey as the murderer and victim – because Kelsey is rumored to be involved with Vandeleur's wife, Jennifer Sloane. So all the ingredients for murder all there, cooped in a small radio studio, while an air-raid goes on over their heads outside.

One of them gets fatally shot during the on-air performance, but who pulled the trigger and perhaps more importantly how was it done? Silence is on hand to handle the case, until the police arrives, collects two .22s from the studio, but one "has never been fired" ("...barrel's unfouled") and "the other was full of blanks." So what happened to the murder gun? Silence turns the studio inside out and has everybody searched without finding as much as a shell casing. Nobody could have drawn or ditched a gun without being seen, but somebody, somehow, managed to pull it off. The impossibility of a shooting in a closed spaced by an apparently invisible killer and the puzzle of the vanishing gun are perfectly played out, which both have simple, elegant and yet satisfying solutions that simply works on stage. These impossibilities are dressed with the personal and backstage drama of the characters mirroring the old murder case and the running joke of Silence being frightened of microphones. Simply the kind of story fans of Carr and impossible crimes in general. However, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" is not even the best play in this volume.

A note for the curious: Medawar noted in the afterword to the play that the impossible murder recalls one of Carr's short stories, "although the details of the mystery are entirely different," but I think Max Afford's The Dead Are Blind (1937) warrants a mention here. A locked room mystery staged inside a radio studio. You can also find similar impossible shootings with vastly different solutions in Stacey Bishop's Death in the Dark (1930) and Christopher Bush's The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935).

The second, three-act Carr-Gielgud collaboration, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944), is set this time in a Midlands school converted into a wartime emergency studio for the BBC. The program being produced is a spin-off episode, of sorts, of In Town Tonight entitled Out of Town – a series of special items split up between three towns in Britain. Barran from "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" returns to produce Barchester part of the program, but, during the rehearsals, slowly sees the whole thing disintegrating in front of his eyes. Even having to entertain the idea of interviewing a man who trains and imitates sea lions. Fortunately, the town has something of a notorious local celebrity, Wallace Hatfield.

Hatfield is a builder who had converted the school into a radio studio and, several years before, was tried for the murder of his wife, Lucy. Not only was he acquitted, but the death dismissed as a tragic accident as the prosecution couldn't even prove it was murder. Lucy had fallen from the belfry, "seventy or eighty feet," scattered round the body were flowers with Hatfield being the only person near the tower. What saved his neck is that the police found only Lucy's footprints in the dust up in the belfry. So nobody could have pushed her. Hatfield still believes she murdered and agrees to be interviewed, which initially was supposed to be conducted by an ex-Scotland Yard inspector. Program director, Sir John Burnside, insists on his old OC, Colonel Sir Henry Bryce, former head of the Indian Police. Sir John gushing over his old OC is another strain for the harassed producer culminating with Barran calling the old OC "son of a cock-eyed half-caste Indian constable" right when Colonel Sir Henry Bryce his entree. Just in time for history to repeat itself as an invisible killer throws another person from the belfry.

Medawar notes in the introduction "Carr clearly contributed to the mystery and Gielgud the authentic details of broadcasting" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" very clearly has Carr's fingerprints all over the plot and storytelling. From the comedy and clueing to the impossible crime reworked from his Suspense radio-play "The Man Without a Body" (1943). Only smudge is that the murderer is an absolute idiot, but other than that, as good and solid a mystery as its predecessor. A vintage Carr. A pity he never considered reworking "The Man Without a Body" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" into a Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. I gladly would have traded one of the final three Merrivale novels for The New Invisible Man.

The last two plays were solo projects, "a version for the stage of his famous BBC series Appointment with Death," beginning with the short play "Intruding Shadow" (1945), which is tightly-plotted little story of domestic murder – staged at the home of a well-known mystery writer. Richard Marlowe is the author of such celebrated detective novels as Death in the Summer-House, Murder at Whispering Lodge and The Nine Black Clues, but the story finds him dabbling in true crime of the fictitious kind. Marlowe wants to scare the pants of Bruce Renfield, a West End blackmailer, to make him back off from one of his victims and hand over the blackmail material. In order to achieve his goal, Marlowe is going to make both of them believe he's about to murder Renfield. After all, this is Golden Age mysteries in which a blackmailer is the type of person "who deserves to die" or "to be scared within an inch of his life." A plan that spectacularly backfires when Marlowe finds a dying Renfield on his doorstep shortly followed by Inspector Sowerby.

Apparently, "Intruding Shadow" was met with some reserved praise from the critics, but on paper, it's easily the best of the four plays Carr wrote during the war years. A short, pure undiluted detective story recalling that small gem "Who Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939/40). Both stories are essentially Carr successfully pulling an Agatha Christie-style whodunit without any locked rooms or other impossible crimes. There is, however, a typical, Carrian Grand Guignol scene involving the corpse. So a great detective tale all around!

The fourth and last (short) play, "She Slept Lightly" (1945), belongs together with The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) and the previously mentioned radio-play, Speak of the Devil, to Carr's earliest experiments in mixing the detective story with historical fiction, which he kind of pioneered starting with plays and short stories – e.g. "The Other Hangman" (1935) and "Blind Man's Hood" (1937). After the 1940s, Carr began to write fully fledged historical mystery novels decades before the historical mystery became a subgenre of its own. Regrettably, Carr's historical (locked room) mysteries and thrillers either criminally underrated or outright ignored. A real shame as some of the Carr's best work from the 1950s and '60s can be found among his historical novels. Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is one of the best historical mystery-thrillers ever written and one of Carr's finest novels from the post-war period.

Just like Captain Cut-Throat, "She Slept Lightly" is a mystery-thriller set in Napoleonic France and brings several characters together in the home of Belgian miller while the Battle of Waterloo rages on in the background. Firstly, there's the elderly Lady Stanhope, "her enemies might call her a little mad," whose carriage overturned and needs the miller to guide her through the French lines. The second arrival is a wounded British soldier, Captain Thomas Thorpe, who's looking for the young girl in Lady Stanhope's company. She, however, denies the existence of the girl. Major von Steinau, a Prussian Hussar, is another one who's interested in this apparently non-existent woman and not without reason. He hanged her only a year ago for spying ("I saw the rope choke out your life"). So how could she be alive and walking around?

Like I said, this is more of a historical mystery-thriller than detective story with the apparent impossibility of a woman who was hanged and lived to tell about it as a small side-puzzle, but I can see why this historical melodrama is not going to excite everyone. I enjoyed it. However, I'm also very, very partial to the type of historical mystery as envisioned by Carr, Robert van Gulik and Paul Doherty. So feel free to disagree on this one.

So the quality of the plays, purely as detective and thriller stories, is uniformly excellent, but, more importantly, 13 to the Gallows plugged another fascinating, once completely forgotten gap in Carr's body of work – similar to the obscure radio-plays collected in The Island of Coffins (2021). That's the greatest contribution C&L had made in helping to restore Carr back to print. A highly recommendable, must-have volume for the true JDC aficionado and might pick up The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and Adventure (2022) before tackling the Brittain and Hoch collections.

Teacher's 'Tec: Q.E.D. vol. 37-38 by Motohiro Katou

The first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 37, "Murder Lecture," begins with Inspector Mizuhara asking Detective Sasazuka to attend a special lecture, "prepared specially for field officers," to make an extensive report – believing it will benefit their division. Fortunately, Sasazuka does not have to travel down to Izu Peninsula alone as Sou Touma is curious to hear what the FBI profiler has to say and Kana Mizuhara came along for the sea, food, hot springs and "other cool stuff." Just when they arrive, a typhoon is approaching and the weather is not going to be their only problem.

There's a small, select group of attendees comprising of three metropolitan police officers, Arita Seiji, Seto Kokichi and Shigaraki Yotaro, and someone from the prosecutor's office, Imari Yumi. Lastly, the FBI analyst and profiler, Meissen Kutani. So the story begins with these characters listening and discussing the subject material of Meissen Kutani's lecture, which is "all about the theory of probability" and the reason why profiling is only "a supporting tool" and "nothing more." Or using statistics to pinpoint areas prone to crime. Naturally, Touma launches in a couple of mini-lectures touching on the Broken Window Theory, Birthday Paradox and the Law of Large Numbers. So you have all kind of detectives discussing crime solving and prevention techniques, which makes for an interesting read, but the lecture on very real-world crime gets interrupted by a very classically-styled murder when Seto Kokichi fatally stabbed in his room.

Nobody could have left the premise, nobody could have come in from the outside and the rapidly approaching typhoon is keeping the police away for a good twenty-four house – marooning them with a handful of suspects. All of them well versed in murder and how to properly investigate them. "Murder Lecture" proved itself to be an excellent detective story with the murder, not actually an impossible murder, turning on a cleverly contrived alibi. A trick as elegant and ultimately simplistic as the satisfying locked room-trick from "The Detective Novelist Murder Case" (vol. 33). This story also sets the stage, so to speak, for these two volumes in how they creatively utilize floorplans.

The second story, entitled "Anima," is plot-wise a relatively minor entry in the series. One of those character pieces with a small, but this time not unoriginal, puzzle with the solution meant to explain more about the characters involved than merely solving a tricky puzzle.

This time, Kana Mizuhara becomes involved with the woes of a small animation studio. She happened to find a folder containing keyframes, "a very important item in animation," which she returns to the animation studio to the great relief of the production assistant, Ebisawa Kouji. But the keyframes turn out to be copies of the original. And they discover the originals were water damaged. Presumably by a leakage from the kitchen directly above the production room. Why did the popular animation supervisor, Yukimiya Yuko, suddenly leave? Sou Touma gets roped in to sort it all out. So, despite its overall simplicity, the story has several interesting features. Firstly, its use of architecture and a floorplan of the animation studio, "an apartment with its walls knocked down," to find the origin of the water leakage. Yes, a very minor, insignificant puzzle for a detective story, but of integral importance in explaining the actions of Yuko. Secondly, the behind-the-scenes look at an animation studio with a somewhat dark undertone as the people who work their make long days and barely any money, especially a small studio. And that can take its toll on people. So the ending can be a bit of downer, but a really good and solid story.

The first of two stories from vol. 38, "Empty Dream," concerns the son of the wealthy Shimamoto Family, Shigehiko, who continued to finance the disastrous movie projects of his two old school friends, Kuse Yumeji and Tamotsu Enno.

Kuse Yumeji is the hopelessly optimistic, financially irresponsible movie producer who never wavers from his believe he has the next big hit on his hands ("if this fails, I'll commit seppuku") or that their lucky break is just around the corner. Tamotsu Enno is the author who provides him with a never-ending supply of scripts. Their first movie, The Metaphor Murder Case, was also their first, but not last, flop ("...they weren't the runaway hits that we expected, but for, it's like an underground volcano ready to erupt"). Shigehiko kept giving them money, until his family cut him off and threw him out of the house. Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara become involved with them when trying to find a copy of the now obscure The Metaphor Murder Case. Shigehiko takes them along to the house party the producer is throwing to get them a copy of the movie, but, as to be expected, Kuse Yumeji is murdered in his private cinema.

What's unexpected, however, is the way in which the murder is presented and committed, which I'm not going to describe here as it would spoil the effect, but wonderfully imaginative and cleverly executed – which again makes great use of the setting to create a superb alibi-trick. Even allowing for a false-solution as Touma begins to eliminate all the suspects, one by one, before explaining who of the people he just eliminated stabbed the producer. And how it was done. Simply a good detective story with a great idea for an alibi-trick executed with skill. I'm more than satisfied with this one!

The last story from this volume, "17," is one of those odd, impossible to pigeonhole that apparently exist only in this series. The story begins with a short prologue set at the beginning of the 18th century, Edo period, as an elderly man and a young girl oversee the construction of a shrine. They remark that "the one who will be able to solve the mystery of this small shrine, will definitely appear someday" and transcend "the flow of time." Back to the present-day, Kana Mizuhara has bullied Sou Touma into taking a part time job at the shrine to help out the hospitalized priest. The neglected neighborhood around the shrine is experiencing a resurgence in tourism due to a popular historical TV drama. So they want to built a museum to stimulate the renowned interest from the public in the region and local economy, but, in order to do so, the small, neglected and centuries old shrine has to be leveled. And with it with go any chance to decode the mystery the young girl, Aisa tried to leave to the world. Sou Touma takes a crack at the puzzle, but it should be noted Aisa was a 14-year-old math genius.

This story throws together history, math puzzles and the history of math and math puzzles to create one of those human-puzzles. The story is not so much about the cracking the code of the old shrine as trying to understand what, exactly, Aisa tried to tell them from across the centuries with the shrine acting as her telephone. It's a strange kind of archaeology, similar to MORI Hiroshi's short story "Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999), but it worked.

So, all in all, I think it's fair to say there's a nice balance to these two volumes both starting out with a traditionally-styled detective stories sporting two original alibi-tricks, before experimenting a little with their second stories. They all have something to recommend for various different reasons, but gave me practically nothing to nitpick about. Great job, Katou!

Hold on a minute!: I've a burning question for those more knowledgeable on everything Katou. I'm steadily approaching the crossover event between Q.E.D. vol. 41 and C.M.B. vol. 19, but in which order do I need to read them?

The Silent Service (2024) by M.P.O. Books

In 2022, E-Pulp announced two forthcoming series by Dutch crime-and detective writer, M.P.O. Books, who debuted twenty years ago with his first of eight novels in the District Heuvelrug series, Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004) – a typical, European-style police procedural/thriller. Over those two decades, Books turned his hands to everything from police procedurals and police thrillers to modern takes on the classical locked room mystery and short stories of every stripe. The short story form is not especially popular in my country, but Books is a Sherlock Holmes fanboy who refuses to give up on the short story without a fight.

Those two new series demonstrate his versatility as a crime-and detective writer. Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023), published as by "Anne van Doorn," introduces Detective Krell of the 16th Precinct in midtown Manhattan confronted with a seemingly impossible murder in a secure, top-floor penthouse of a New York skyscraper. So a fresh take on S.S. van Dine and Ed McBain by presenting it as a Dutch-style politieroman (police novel). However, the Gisella Markus series stands in stark contrast to the New York Cops series.

Gisella Markus first appeared in the final District Heuvelrug novel, Cruise Control (2014), pitting her and her team against a coldblooded, cruising serial killer – who even targeted one of her close friends and colleagues. She now has her very own series of police thrillers, starting with In diepe rust (In Deep Peace, 2022), but not a series likely to excite the people who follow this blog. This new series unmistakably falls into the modern school and Markus a model of the troubled cop of contemporary crime fiction. A character burdened with personal and professional problems that sometimes get intertwined to complicate things even further, but the crimes also tend to be a lot dirtier and grittier with no pretense of trying to plot a whodunit masquerading as a police thriller. That's doubly true for the second novel in the series.

De stille service (The Silent Service, 2024) begins on an unexpectedly cold, slippery night, "the kind of night where anything could happen at any moment," when two patrolling policemen find an old model car that had hit a tree head on. The driver seat is empty and the driver is nowhere to be found. So they assume some kids took it for a joyride and scattered after loosing control on the slippery road and hitting the tree, but then they open the booth of the car to make a gruesome discovery. A horrifically mutilated, raped body of a young Asian girl. Gisella Markus, of the district police in Amersfoort, is tasked with leading the investigation, but that's easier said than done when her rival, Lex Renkema, is part of the team. They fundamentally disagree about the direction the investigation should take.Markus has her eyes on a local art dealer, Roderick van Amstel, who lives nearby the crash site and could have potentially hidden away the driver. Going by the circumstances in which the murder came to light, Markus even suspects there might be an alternative funeral service running along the silent escort service the victim fell prey to. Renkema finds the idea of a "clandestine cemetery" preposterous and thinks they should focus their efforts on finding the driver ("...because we are certain that he's involved"). And then there the problems in her private life, which get hopelessly entangled with her investigation. So more than enough to keep Markus both busy and awake at night.

So, as most of you can probably gather, The Silent Service is not the kind of crime fiction people who read this blog traditionally enjoy, which is heavily slanted towards the traditionally-plotted mysteries rather than character-driven crime novels, but the story is not without interest – plot-technically speaking. The crashed car is a treasure trove of DNA evidence and so the story is not really about finding the murderer, but identifying and dismantling the organization around the silent service. A potentially fascinating idea to give a classical slant to a thriller trying to go for dark, gritty realism. It's not used like that here and it didn't try to, but it could have been played out like that.

Other than that, I don't have much else to say about The Silent Service except that it's a solid, well written police thriller showing why Books is the most underrated, underappreciated genre writers of the Netherlands. Whether he's plotting a locked room mystery or writing a character-driven thriller. I prefer the former to the latter, but they deserve to be better known.