Every now and then, I do one of these "Locked and Loaded" posts to read and review mostly obscure, often uncollected short locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories covering nearly a century of miraculous crime fiction – stretching from Charles G. Booth's "One Shot" (1925) to James Scott Byrnside's "The Silent Steps of Murder" (2023). I discuss those two short stories, and everything in between, in Part 1, 2, 3 and 4. This fifth installment adds three more obscure, rarely reviewed short locked room mysteries and one magnificent impostor. So without further ado...
Verner is called to "Grove's Lake Cabins" by the local sheriff to assist him on an apparently open-and-shut case that simply doesn't sit well with him ("...I don't believe the evidence"). The owner of the cabin park, Grove, was found with a knife sticking out of his chest behind the triple locked door of the cabin he shared with his niece, Ellen Grove. A large, spacious cabin has a large room and bath at each end separated by an insulated wall with no door in it, which divides the living quarters of niece and uncle. So when her uncle failed to emerge from his part of the cabin, Ellen grabbed an electric saw and cut a doorway into the insulated dividing wall as it would have been easier than to smash the door or one of the windows. Unfortunately, cutting a doorway into the dividing wall immediately elevated Ellen to the status of prime suspect as the only door on her uncle's side was locked, bolted and securely chained – similar to the door on her side of the cabin. So nobody could have sneaked out that way, once Ellen had cut through the wall and ventured inside to discover the body. And, of course, the windows were all securely locked as well.
A phenomenal locked room setup! One that today's crop of locked room specialists would probably get a lot of mileage out of and had the solution been more than an elaborate take on a familiar locked room-trick, it would have been a little more than merely a solid locked room howdunit. Nevertheless, I enjoyed "The Drop of a Pin," especially the whole setup, enough to keep an eye out for the other stories. Christopher Anvil and Richard Verner might be of interest to Crippen & Landru as there appear to be enough material for a short story collection.
Robert C. Schweik's "Imagine a Murder," originally published in the June, 1978, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is another story from an even shorter-lived, now forgotten series of detective stories. This series of three short stories stars an amateur detective of the old school, Professor Paul Engel, whose method is simply to analyze a problem, speculate on it and apply a dab of rich imagination – "just imagine what possibilities there are." So when his friend and bookseller, Harry, overhears the murder of his roommate over the telephone, Professor Engel is on his way to put his analytical mind and imagination to work. The victim, Markham, was an accountant working on a report that would place someone behind bars and called Harry to ask him to post a letter, which is when he got shot. Inexplicably, the place was locked and bolted from top to bottom ("...the entire apartment was buttoned down"). So how could the murderer and gun vanish from a thoroughly locked room with a crowd gathered in the hallway outside the locked door shortly after the gunshot rang out?
This story shares some outward similarities with Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin." Schweik created a pleasingly tight and baffling locked room scenario with the revelation of the murderer's identity adding a second, quasi-impossibility in the form of a cast-iron alibi. One hinging on the other. Just like the previous story, "Imagine a Murder" is an elaborate, pleasing and, in this case, fairly clued reworking of a classic locked room-technique/trick. So not a blistering original, cutting edge locked room mystery, but a solid, competently plotted impossible crime story. And not a bad one to help fill a future impossible crime themed anthology.
Cardula is paid a handsome fee to locate and retrieve the painting, which is simple enough, but the theft of the painting and how it was stolen comes with a neat, well-done little twist worthy of Edward D. Hoch's best Nick Velvet stories. Of course, the fun and main draw of the story, and obviously the series as a whole, is Cardula's double role as detective and vampire. So another series of stories that needs further attention and looking into at some future date.
The last two short stories were nominated in the first round of voting for the "New Locked Room Library" and come from the same author, "Miŏgacu." Just like the previous review, I was gives copies of the short stories and told not to be smart ass who asks too many questions. So no background on the author nor stories except that "Miŏgacu" is a huge mystery fan who wrote the following two short stories as a homage to the Grandest Game in the World with the hope of having them properly published one day.
"Eggnog and the Cylinder" (2023) can be categorized as an impossible crime caper in the style of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and Gosho Aoyama's Kaito KID. A French millionaire by the name of M. Aristide Benguet bought "the largest purple sapphire in the world on a whim" and decided to keep The Feline of Somerset in a locked room at his country home, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, to be displayed at a fancy Christmas party – which caught the attention of a renaissance criminal. Phantom Thief Lenoir, "dashing and masked," has become the scourge of the rich and famous of Europe as a modern-day Robin Hood. M. Benguet is taking extreme measures to protect the sapphire by engaging four different detectives/security agents from across the world to guard the sapphire in the locked room during the party. There's a rotating system to allow the detectives to take a break ("...stretch your legs, empty your bladder, grab some champagne"), but three detectives will stay with the sapphire in the locked room at all time.
A fail proof security measure, however, when their assignment comes to an end, they discover the sapphire has been replaced with a fake! Somehow, someway, Phantom Thief Lenoir switcharoo'd The Feline of Somerset under the nose of four detectives inside a securely locked room.
This story comes with a short "Author's Postface" in which "Miŏgacu" explains the inspiration for "Eggnog and the Cylinder" came from reading a description of the locked room puzzle in Marcel Lanteaume's untranslated, frustratingly out-of-reach Trompe l'oeil (1946) – realized "there is a very simple solution." That very simple solution is actually the cleverest, wildly imaginative and most original locked room-trick of the stories discussed so far. A trick certainly in the spirit of Lanteaume "in which imagination leaps confidently over probability" and perhaps a trick that would be hard to swallow in a regular locked room mystery, but perfectly suited for "a Japanese-y phantom thief story." It's unexpected gems like this making the future of the traditional Western (locked room) mysteries look very bright indeed. Not to mention a story with the potential to age like fine wine, if it ever turns out "Miŏgacu" constructed to correct solution from a short description of Lanteaume's Trompe l'oeil locked room puzzle. And makes me want to overlook (ROT13) gur znffvir onyyf vg gbbx gb abzvangr uvf bja jbex sbe pbafvqrengvba.
The second story, "The First Meeting" (2017/23), is a homage to the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries (and a pastiche, of sorts) and particular to the teenage detectives of series such as Case Closed, The Kindaichi Case Files and Q.E.D. Niimoto Tadashi is the son of a typical, storybook detective, Tsukiko, who had to solve the Yellow Mask Mystery on her wedding day. Tadashi was never shielded from his mother's investigation, but "never knew corpses raining down upon him" like some other child detectives. So a relatively normal childhood, but, on his sixteenth birthday, Tadashi "made his first step to detectivehood." Tadashi got his own Watson, Zhenya, who's the son of a Russian scientist staying as a guest at the Niimoto home. Tadashi and Zhenya throw themselves at a local locked room murder.
On the morning January 18, 2005, the esteemed neurosurgeon, Furuta Fujio, was found stabbed to death in his stuffy, everyday working study with door locked from the inside and the key sticking out of the keyhole – windows either didn't open or looked over an obstacle. Such as a roaring river or locked garden gate. So the scene of the crime resembles "an impenetrable capsule," but trick is not nearly as good or even half as inspired as the brilliant solution to the previous story. An enormous step down, judged purely as an impossible crime story. On the other hand, simply as a homage to those meddling kid detectives of the manga/anime corner of the shin honkaku mysteries, "The First Meeting" is first class.
Not a bad harvest for a handful of, more or less, randomly selected short stories. Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin" and Schweik's "Imagine a Murder" didn't bring anything new or really innovative to the table, but showed some ingenuity in presentation and a solid hand in their solutions. Despite the misleading title, Ritchie's "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" is an unexpected treasure and it goes without saying "Eggnog and the Cylinder" is the standout with "The First Meeting" having charm and qualities outside of its locked room puzzle. I told you I would pick something good eventually. :)
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