Cabaret Macabre (2024) by Tom Mead

Previously, I revisited The Red Widow Murders (1935) by John Dickson Carr, writing as "Carter Dickson," which got a long overdue reprint from Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics and their new edition comes with an introduction from the rising locked room specialist, Tom Mead – who has been a busy bee lately. Beside writing introductions, Mead translated Pierre Véry's famous short story collection, Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937), published by Crippen & Landru in 2023. And, of course, working on the third title in the Joseph Spector series of historical locked room mystery novels.

I got off to a rocky start with the Joseph Spector series. I thought Death and the Conjuror (2022) was a promising debut with its heart in the right place, but not the second coming of John Dickson Carr. That opinion received some daggerish glares. The Murder Wheel (2023) vastly improved on its predecessor and a noteworthy locked room mystery purely on the strength of the third, brilliantly-staged impossibility of a body materializing inside a sealed trunk on stage. So hoped the next one continued this streak. I'm glad to report Cabaret Macabre (2024) not only continued this upward trend, but ended up being leagues ahead of Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel as a modern-day, Golden Age detective novel. A detective novel that can be summed up as Brian Flynn meets Paul Halter.

Cabaret Macabre begins with the discovery of a steamer trunk washed ashore on Rotherhithe beach, "it smelt worse than anything the Thames had ever spewed up before," which contains the decomposing body of a man – his face turned to pulp from numerous blows with a hard object. Before Inspector George Flint, of Scotland Yard, can give the problem of the faceless man in the trunk his full attention another problem presents itself.

Miss Caroline Silvius comes to see Flint on behalf of her older brother, Victor Silvius, who has been locked away as a patient in a private sanatorium, The Grange. Nine years ago, Victor was a 19-year-old youth who attacked and nearly killed the infamous hanging judge, Sir Giles Drury. Victor was madly in love at the time with Miss Gloria Craine, who worked as private secretary to the judge, but she died under mysterious circumstances ten years ago during a Christmas gathering at the Drury's country retreat, Marchbanks. The police wrote her death off as a suicide, but why take your own life using strychnine? Victor believed Sir Giles had killed her and attacked him with a knife, which was a costly mistake ("men like Sir Giles Drury make powerful enemies"). Sir Giles is a member of an influential drinking club, "The Tragedians," whose members include the experimental psychiatrist and head of The Grange clinic, Dr. Jasper Moncrieff ("...also cheerfully performed the odd lobotomy on troublesome sons or daughters of his high-society friends"). Caroline is convinced they're now trying to kill her brother ("...started with slivers of glass in his mashed potato").

At the same time, Lady Elspeth Drury contacts Joseph Spector, retired magician and consulting detective, because someone wants her husband dead. Sir Giles has been receiving poison pen letters and she believes the person responsible is Victor who has resumed his campaign of terror against her husband. What's more, the whole family is gathering again at Marchbanks in the run-up to the Christmas celebrations. There are Sir Giles and Lady Elspeth's troublesome sons, Leonard and Ambrose Drury. Sir Giles' illegitimate son, Sylvester Monkton, and Lady Elspeth's son from a previous marriage, Jeffrey Flack. Leonard is accompanied by his secretary, Peter Nightingale, who recently returned after working abroad for the explorer Byron Manderby. Marchbanks is only a stone throws away from The Grange. What could possibly go wrong?

Spector is right there when the first body is found, lying in a rowboat, in the middle of a small lake frozen over with a thin layer of ice. That facts turns this murder into Schrödinger's crime. If the body had been placed inside the boat and shoved from the jetty into the lake, before it began to freeze, all the suspects "have fairly solid alibis," but, if it was done after midnight, the murder suddenly becomes an impossible crime – because the ice is "not solid enough to take the weight of two grown men." So was "it a problem of time or space?" Mead wrote in his acknowledgments that has been delving into "the byzantine complexity" of several Japanese mystery writers and Tetsuya Ayukawa was no doubt on that pile. The second impossibility, a brutal shotgun murder, has another wonderful setup that to my knowledge has never been used before. I'm not going to give anything away here, but it sure is one way to break open a locked and watched room. As far as the solutions go, I think I enjoyed the trick to the second murder better than the first (MILD SPOILERS/ROT13) fubjvat lbh pna tb onpx gb gur jryy naq ersheovfu na byq gevpx nf ybat nf lbh pna nqq fbzrguvat arj be qvssrerag gb vg, juvpu pregnvayl vf gur pnfr urer. And it worked like a charm! However, the solution to the first impossible murder is not to be overlooked (SPOILERS/ROT13), juvyr n grpuavpny-gevpx (gung graq gb or yrff fngvfslvat guna gevpxf cynlvat jvgu fcnpr/gvzr), Zrnq perngrq n yrtvgvzngr ybpxrq ynxr zlfgrel. Hayvxr gur cebzvfrq ybpxrq ynxr zlfgrel V erivrjrq rneyvre guvf lrne.

Jim, of The Invisible Event, once compiled a list with locked room mysteries where "the setup is baffling and the solution ingenious." If I ever put together my own version of that list, Cabaret Macabre is a strong contender to make the final ten. However, the two excellently handled locked room murders only represents one aspect of larger, incredibly elaborate webwork-like plot.

The challenge to the reader, or the interlude, notes Cabaret Macabre has thrown out "more bodies, more clues, more deceptions, than even Joseph Spector is accustomed to" ("a webwork of murder"). This is really a densely-plotted detective novel in the best tradition of webwork plotting, which also makes it tricky to give an idea just how dense without giving anything away. Just that the story, plot and even the characters turn, twist and curl right up until the last page like a bucket full of epileptic snakes and bringing it all to a convincing (enough, overall) conclusion is Mead's greatest accomplishment to date – which could have easily gone the other with an ambitious, webwork-like plot like this one. Particularly (SPOILER/ROT13) jura gurer ner frireny zheqreref ehaavat nebhaq. Some pieces of the overall plot are better, or more convincingly, presented and resolved than others. For example, the dark, bleak answer to what really happened to Miss Moira Crain showing that Mead, like Halter, is no writer of snug, cozy mysteries. Great stuff! On the other hand, there's the final, final twist (ROT13: ...tebff) In bringing this Swiss watch of a mystery novel together that fitted, Mead has delivered a glorious tribute to the Golden Age detective novel that perfectly captured the bright, vivid imagination and daring ingenuity of the 1930s locked room mystery.

Nearly as important, Cabaret Macabre showed my comments about giving this new generation of traditional, Golden Age-style mystery writers time to grow and hone their skills is better than rolling out blind praise Death and the Conjuror could never live up to. This is what nearly tripped Halter's entry to an international audience when the translation of Le roi du désordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1996) failed to deliver on the years of hype and myth building. It took Carr himself a solid five to ten years and a dozen novels to go from It Walks by Night (1930) and The Bowstring Murders (1933) to The Three Coffins (1935) and The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). Good news here, of course, is that it has only been three years and the third Joseph Spector novel can actually be compared to some of Carr slippery, early wire-walking acts, plot-wise, like The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Unicorn Murders (1935). So there's much to look forward to! And I very much look forward to the fourth title in this series.

A note for the curious: I know some are worried whether this current renaissance can be maintained, but don't worry, that genie isn't going back in the bottle. Just look who took up the banner of the traditional detective story and locked room mystery: Tom Mead, Gigi Pandian, Martin Edwards and recently J.L. Blackhurst joined the party with her brand new "Impossible Crime" series. Not to mention a very strong, innovative independent scene with the likes of James Scott Byrnside, A. Carver, J.S. Savage, K.O. Enigma and H.M. Faust. So give everything time, space to breath and enjoy your front row seat to the blossoming of a second Golden Age.