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 Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999).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.

The Case of the Burnt Bohemian (1953) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's 42nd Ludovic Travers novel, The Case of the Burnt Bohemian (1953), takes place during the period in the series when Travers juggled between his positions as chairman of the Broad Street Detective Agency and, what they call, "an unofficial expert" to Scotland Yard – whenever Chief Superintendent George Wharton has a case requiring more than routine police work. A specialist with an agile mind "to theorise and suggest." Bush neatly used this juggling between positions to present Travers with two separate, apparently unconnected cases that quickly turn out to be closely intertwined.

The Case of the Burnt Bohemian begins on a routine office day for Travers at the Broadstreet Agency when a prospective client calls with a request somewhat outside the daily routine.

Dr. Arthur Chale, a psychiatrist, believes his life is in danger ("we deal with all sorts of queer people, you know") and wants to know whether the agency can "supply some sort of bodyguard." Travers advises Chale to go to the police for protection, "it's their business to do the job for nothing," but he doesn't want publicity nor name the person who's threatening him – agreeing to discuss the matter personal the following day. This strange phone call does not sit well with Travers who immediately begins to dig around for background information on the psychiatrist, which "produced a story of blackmail, hypnotism, collaboration with Germans and a probable shooting against a wall" ("all the ingredients needed, in fact, for a popular thriller"). That's only one-half of his problem. The other half comes when Wharton calls to ask him come to a place called Borden Walk in Chelsea.

A reclusive, completely unknown painter, Vandyke Sindle, is found stabbed to death and badly burned in the north top studio of the Chelsea flat in Borden Walk. Sindle was found lying face down in a little bonfire, but the fire was discovered in time to prevent it from consuming the whole place. And the body. However, Sindle's back was badly burned with his face and hands entirely destroyed ("even the dental plates had gone"). So was the fire started to conceal the cause of death or the victim's identity? Travers then begins to uncover links between the case of the so-called nervous psychiatrist and the burnt bohemian cemented when a second murder comes to light and Chale failed to meet his appointment. A problem as pretty as it's tricky!

I recounted in past reviews how Bush pivoted from the traditional, 1930s British whodunits to the realism of the American hardboiled school, of Raymond Chandler, slowly transforming Travers from an amateur detective into a private investigator – who narrates his own cases. This transition was not without some rough spots or growing pains resulting in a few poorly plotted novels (e.g. The Case of the Fourth Detective, 1951), but Bush rebounded around the mid-1950s. While the plots were trimmed down affairs compared to the elaborately-plotted 1930s titles, the plots began to resettle along classical lines (e.g. The Case of the Three Lost Letters, 1954) and Bush appeared to draw on the detective stories he probably enjoyed reading earlier in the century. The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) feels closer to the work of J.J. Connington and R. Austin Freeman than his own work from the '20s and '30s. You can say practically the same about The Case of the Burnt Bohemian with the emphasis on the problem of blurred, destroyed or faked identities rather than picking alibis apart. The term alibi is probably uttered fewer than a half dozen times, but the problem of identification, obscured pasts and possible motives offer the two detectives with plenty of material to check up on or theorize about. Props to Bush for revealing that one “twist” well before the ending, because that possibility should be gnawing away at every reader at that point. So instead of trying to draw out a cheap surprise, Bush used it to send Travers and Wharton back to the drawing board to start again from scratch.

The Case of the Burnt Bohemian is an engrossing, fairly clued and cleverly constructed detective novel, but even more than that, I enjoyed seeing Travers and Wharton back together again – both of whom can be counted among my favorite detective characters. When this series and the genre was its height, Bush nailed the relationship dynamics between the amateur detective and professional policeman perfectly with Travers and Wharton. Travers even gets upstaged a couple of times by the theatrical Wharton to show he's no Lestrade. Travers describes their collaborations as "a peculiar, haphazard, spasmodic kind of association" in which Wharton ("as Grand Inquisitor") takes care of the routine, while Travers "supposed to have the right kind of manners to interview the right kind of people" and permitted under Wharton's scrutiny to theorize. Travers explains: "if I'm wrong, the theory was mine. If it looks promising, it's ours. If it happens to be a winner, I ultimately discover that it was his." Or, when Travers points out the clues/tells they missed, Wharton nonchalantly responds, "funny you should miss a thing like that."

It's one of the elements making the 1930s and early '40s titles a highlight of both this series and the Golden Age detective story. It's therefore sad to see Bush had obviously grown tired of Wharton and had no more need for him as a character. Travers is even becoming tired of his shenanigans. Bush began to fade him out of the series, before quietly retiring him after his brief appearance in The Case of the Russian Cross (1957). Wharton in these 1950s novels does feel a bit like a relic from the series past, but I'll always appreciate the "Old General" and it was good to see him back again with Travers this late in the game. And tackling a worthy case to boot. Highly recommended to fans of the series.

The Hit List: Top 5 Intriguing Pieces of Impossible Crime Fiction That Vanished into Thin Air

Earlier this year, I put together a depressing list of our genre's so-called "lost media" section, "The Hit List: Top 10 Works of Detective Fiction That Have Been Lost to History," which focused exclusively on destroyed or irretrievably lost novels and short stories – eschewing still existent, unpublished manuscripts. Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole and Christianna Brand's The Chinese Puzzle are merely taking their time to get to the printers.

So the list ranges from Jacques Futrelle and the last batch of "The Thinking Machine" being among the casualties of the Titanic disaster to a collaboration between John Dickson Carr and playwright J.B. Priestley which never materialized. All the entries on the list were in various stages of completion, before the manuscripts got lost in a shuffle or simply destroyed. Never to be seen again in our reality, but I like to believe there's an alternate reality where Joseph Commings' One for the Devil and Hake Talbot's The Affair of the Half-Witness secured a place on "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes."

I wanted to do another one of these lists, but had no original idea or worthy topic and "The Hit List: Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated" didn't garner nearly enough reader suggestions to do a follow-up. Only recently it hit me. Something was left on the cutting room floor of the previous hit list that could be marshaled into a small, hopefully interesting addendum to the list of lost detective stories.

From my studies of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019), I found several novels and a collection of short stories of a particularly elusive nature going beyond being out-of-print, scarce and expensive – like A. & P. Shaffer's Withered Murder (1955). A short list of titles that were, technically speaking, published, but barely left a trace of their existence. Some would have been all but forgotten today had they not been listed by Adey and Skupin in Locked Room Murders. So here are five published locked room mysteries and impossible crime fiction that appear to have vanished into thin air.

 

1. Murder Through Locked Doors and Other Stories (????) by Jan Deuell

The first title on this list Jan Deuell's Murder Through Locked Doors and Other Stories. A collection of short stories listed in Skupin with three stories, "Murder Through Locked Doors," "The Spread-Eagled Man" and "The Case of the Castle Keep," published by Llanelli. Nobody knows when the collection was originally published and no copies can be found online or anywhere else for that matter. Only site mentioning the collection is Allen J. Hubin's "CrimeFiction IV, Part 31," suggesting "Jan Deuell" is probably a pseudonym and lists an additional, presumably non-impossible crime, story for the collection, "The Edinburgh Mail." These often tantalizing-sounding puzzles are solved by Gorden Darch and Doctor Jan, but not much else is known about this truly forgotten series. However, I have a theory to explain it.

I think the Gordon Darch and Doctor Jan stories were published or serialized in the Welsh newspaper The Llanelly Mercury, but never officially collected and published. This very ephemeral Murder Through Locked Doors and Other Stories could be nothing more than a scrapbook with the clippings of Deuell's newspaper serials or stories, which somehow ended up in Adey's impossible crime collection. A single, undated scrapbook of newspaper cuttings explains why neither Adey nor Skupin could give its original publication date, because the idea of Murder Through Locked Doors and Other Stories never got that far.

 

2. The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom (1937) by Esther Fonseca

This is the only dodgy title on the list as it's closer to an scarce extremely, out-of-print novel, but the reportedly 2012 reprint apparently disappeared without a trace.

I first learned of Esther Fonseca's The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom in Locked Room Murders: Supplement and noted a UK edition from 2012, but all the internet could turn up was a contemporary review of the original, 1937 US edition – published by Doubleday, Doran. I eventually cottoned on to the fact that the opposite page has a number of entries from Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series from the 2010s. So to the mention of a 2012 reprint of The Thirteenth Bed in the Ballroom is simply a print error, which doesn't make the original edition any less obscure or rare. It has a few mentions online and that one review, but nothing else. Not even a book cover. Fonseca's Death Below the Dam (1936) fared a little better as used copies are still available. Just not cheaply. A shame. Something about the plot speaks to me ("a breaking dam... raging flood waters... an isolated island... and a murderer at large").

 

3. Pattern of Terror (1987) by Ayresome Johns

"Ayresome Johns" is the pseudonym of the late George Locke, pharmacist, antiquarian bookseller, bibliographer and publisher, who was primarily involved in the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Locke was also involved with the detective genre and not only published the first version of Adey's Locked Room Murders in 1979, but also published The Roger Sheringham Stories (1993) and The Anthony Berkeley Cox Files: Notes Towards a Bibliography (1993). A good two decades ahead of the reprint renaissance. More importantly, Locke wrote a fascinating sounding impossible crime novel under his "Ayresome Johns" penname.

Adey lists Pattern of Terror with no less than three impossible situations: death by shooting with "no external wound to correspond with the heart wound," an inexplicable poisoning and "various locked room murder" – "actual and proposed." The detective tackling these problems is "ace investigator of the Antiquarian Booksellers Society of Great Britain," John Anderson. I peeked at Adey's comment at the back of the book, while holding my hand over the solutions, praising it as "a great pudding-mix of a novel" and called the solution to the first impossibility ingenious. Regrettably, Locke was a small, independent publisher who only printed limited copies. So available copies or additional information are non-existent. I really would like to see Pattern of Terror return to print, because it strikes me as the kind of wildly imaginative detective story that would be much appreciated in today's reprint renaissance and locked room revival. Fingers crossed!

 

4. Murder at the Drum Tower (1965?) by Ning Xu

Just like the previous entry is a perfect fit for today's locked room revival, Ning Xu's Murder at the Drum Tower sounds like it missed out on the current translation wave. Skupin notes in Locked Room Murders: Supplement that Murder at the Drum Tower was published by Australian publisher Whitecross in 1994, but good luck finding any trace or scrap of information on the book. You really to vary and juggle your search terms to get an atom of proof the book actually exists. So there's a ready-made translation out there, somewhere in the Australian outbacks, of a Chinese detective novel centering on a stabbing and shooting inside a locked tower room. For some, unsubstantiated reason I assume Murder at the Drum Tower is a historical mystery. So a reprint would make an interesting companion piece to Chin Shunshin's Pekin yūyūkan (Murder in a Peking Studio, 1976), Futaro Yamada's Meiji dantodai (The Meiji Guillotine Murders, 1979) and Taku Ashibe's Koromu no satusjin (Murder in the Red Chamber, 2004)

 

5. The Mountain by Night (1997) by Maisie Birmingham

Maisie Birmingham is the author of the short-lived Kate Weatherly series, published during the 1970s, but added one last title to the series decades later. Skupin's introduction to Locked Room Murders: Supplement highlighted The Mountain by Night as "worthy of note" concerning a strangulation in a locked house, but, once again, copies appeared to be non-existent. I suspected at the time Birmingham had privately published The Mountain by Night, because Amazon gives "M.P. Birmingham" as its publisher. This proved to be a correct assumption.

A 2021 comment from Jamie Sturgeon shed some light on the elusiveness of The Mountain by Night: "the Maisie Birmingham was published by the author herself, I corresponded briefly with her (in the early 2000s I think it was) and she sent me a copy, all I remember is that it was spiral bound and was a locked room mystery, I sold the book to Bob Adey hence it turning up in the Skupin book. As to what happened to Bob Adey's copy I do not know." I later came across this archived link providing some background on the series, a plot description of The Mountain by Night and how "copies of the book can be purchased from the author." So a limited print run of a privately published novel is the culprit once again and fear detective novels like Pattern of Terror and The Mountain by Night are in danger of eventually becoming irretrievably lost. But not all hope is lost. Derek Smith's Come to Paddington Fair started out as an unpublished manuscript written in the 1950s, before Japanese collector Mori Hideo published it in a limited print-run of a hundred copies. John Pugmire's Locked Room International finally made it widely available a decade ago when they published The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014). A year later, LRI reprinted a separate, long overdue edition of Come to Paddington Fair. So there's still some hope, but time in their case is probably ticking.

An honorable mention: Jacques Aanrooy's Off the Track (1895) and Sir Henry Juta's Off the Track (1925). The 1895 novel was published in South Africa by J.C. Juta & Co and has a detective by the name of Donald Fraser cracking the case of a fatal stabbing in a locked surgery, while the 1925 novel has a Ronald Fraser tackling a stabbing in a locked consulting room. A case of parallel thinking? Blatant plagiarism? Well, neither. Jacques Aanrooy was the pseudonym of a South African judge, lawyer and politician, Sir Henry Juta, who probably reworked his old, forgotten novel to be republished under his own name. It's impossible to check to what extend the 1925 title is a rewrite of the 1895 original, because the one thing both versions have in common is how just how scarce they have managed to made themselves. If they differ enormously, I would love to see a twofer reprint edition. Yes, this honorable mention is just an excuse to have a cover included in this poor excuse of a filler-post and "off the track" fits the theme of the list. So there you go.

If I'm going to do another one of these hit lists, I'm going to pick a more upbeat topic without trying to find an excuse to meander on about obscure, long-lost locked room mysteries.

The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) by Rudolph Fisher

Rudolph Fisher was an African-American physician, radiologist and a notable author from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but, during the early 1930s, Fisher turned to the popular detective stories of the day and penned The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) – which was successful enough to be adapted into a stage play in 1936. In his introduction to the 1971 edition, Stanley Ellin writers Fisher "devoted himself to some serious study of what made the books of both Hammett and S.S. van Dine tick, since both their approaches are clearly evident in The Conjure-Man Dies." An intricately-plotted mystery in the classical mold with characters and dialogue "wholly of Hammett's realistic school" ("Fisher's own sympathies and interests lie with Hammett, much as he deferred to traditional techniques").

Over the past few years, The Conjure-Man Dies has been reprinted several times starting with the 2017 edition from Collins Crime Club. These new editions all come with the posthumously published short story "John Archer's Nose" (1935) and Ellin's old introduction, which is kind of a problem. They should have asked someone like Curt Evans to write a fresh introduction to place the book in the proper light and historical context, genre-wise, because Ellin showed some prejudices of his own where the classical detective story is concerned. Ellin called the structures of the classical Golden Age mystery "as rigid as those of a Japanese no play, their characters one-dimensional, their styles generally florid, representative of the snob's idea of Good Writing." A dismissal of the entire genre apparently based on nothing more than a rereading of S.S. van Dine and points anyone to his work "questioning what might seem excessively harsh judgments in the foregoing" ("luckily, in 1930, there crept into this WASP paradise of genteel murder a serpent named Dashiell Hammett"). Van Dine and particularly his creation Philo Vance have received their fair share criticism over the past century, not always without reason, but discarding a whole segment of genre based on the work of one man is hilariously shortsighted. In this case, it's hilariously shortsighted for several reasons.

First of all, it undersells just how closely Fisher aligned himself in The Conjure-Man Dies with the Van Dine School, but also overlooks that the Van Dinean detective story is pro-Civil Rights, which Mike Grost wrote about on his website – filed under "Van Dine School: Pro Civil Rights" ("...this starts with S.S. van Dine in The "Canary" Murder Case, 1927)." A point conveniently ignored to trash the classical whodunit and almost condescendingly excusing Fisher's indulgence on account of him injecting some realism and a cast of black characters into those tired old plot devices and techniques. So the introduction ends up being very one-sided and not particular fair to what Fisher attempted to do as a whole, because those Van Dinean elements dominate and dictate the majority of the story. Not to mention the introduction strikes a jarring note for a reprint edition published right in the middle of a reprint renaissance and something of a revival of the Golden Age detective story. A more up-to-date introduction with a better, deeper and fairer understanding of the historical context around both the book and its author would have complemented this new run of reprint editions.

So, with that gripe out of the way, it's time to get to the really important stuff. How good is The Conjure-Man Dies as a detective novel? Time to find out!

The Conjure-Man Dies takes place for the most part in a dark, gloomy three-story house on Thirteen West 130th, Harlem, where the conjure-man N'Gana Frimbo receives clients who wish to have their fortunes read. Frimbo has room for his conjuring tricks "hung from ceiling to floor with black velvet drapes" and from the center of the black-clad ceiling a chain suspended a chain single, strange source of light over a chair behind a large desk – leaving everything else unlighted. So "the person who used the chair beneath the odd spotlight could remain in relative darkness while the occupant of the other chair was brightly illuminated." A bizarre room that becomes a macabre murder scene when the conjure-man dies in the middle of a session. One moment he was speaking, the next moment he was dead as a door nail. This brings the first of Fisher's two intended series-characters to the scene.

Dr. John Archer is called upon to attend to Frimbo, but quickly determines he had been
stunned by a blow to the head before the unseen, unheard murderer expertly choked him to death with a handkerchief. That makes it a case for the police. Enter Perry Dart. Detective Dart was one of the first black members of Harlem's police force "to be promoted from the rank of patrolman to that of detective," but greatly admires Dr. Archer. Welcomes his opinions on this puzzling case ("...he's a better detective than I am—missed his calling, I think"). After all, how could a man have been stunned and choked in a room with someone else present and the door under observation? And getting away without being seen or heard?

While the Harlem backdrop is a little different from the usual Manhattan setting, you can already spot many of the Van Dine School features. There's the friendship between the amateur and professional detective who closely work in tandem or the action largely being confined to the crime scene, which also explores the movements of the half dozen suspects around the building before and after the murder. A murder and crime scene that appears to be strange, surreal or downright impossible and the Van Dinean elements continue to pile on. Such as a wall adorned with horrifying masks, broad-bladed sword, arrows, spears and murderous-looking clubs – not all are decorative. Private collections or even entire, in-house private museums are often found in the works of Van Dine School writers. Just to give an idea how deeply the book is rooted in the Van Dinean tradition and not something that should have been dismissed out of hand so easily. But, yes, there are a few notable differences and divergences from your standard Van Dine-Queen style detective novel.

Firstly, Dr. Archer's medical background and interest in forensic science allows the already tricky plot to toy around with fingerprinting, blood typing and dental works. Something more in line with R. Austin Freeman than Van Dine. Secondly, the undisguised racial issues set against Depression-era Harlem with its gambling, racketeering and other seedy gang activities going on in the background sharply sets it apart from the works of Anthony Abbot, Clyde B. Clason and Kelley Roos. In that regard, Ellin was right Fisher's having one foot in Hammett's camp gave The Conjure-Man Dies some of "the qualities of a social document recording a time and a place without seeming to." A unique contribution to the Van Dine-Queen School. There is, however, one more thing where the book really diverges from its Van Dinean counterparts and the followers of Hammett's new realism.

I already mentioned the murder of the conjure-man has a surreal feel about it, "the utter impossibility of any man's talking, dead or alive, when his throat was plugged," which is dialed up almost to the max during the second-half – starting with the disappearance and reappearance of Frimbo's corpse. Stylistically, it's a stroke of genius to have that plot development echo, or rather mirror, the discovery of the murder in the most fantastic way imaginable. And some of the scene following the reemergence of the corpse sometimes felt like reading a pulp-style mystery by Theodore Roscoe. That being said, Fisher retreats deeper into pulp territory as the final chapters roll around and results in a heavy-handed ending with a labored solution. I agree with Jim it requires "an almost Bond Villain level of organisation which sort of comes out of nowhere" betraying the hand of an inexperienced, debuting mystery writer and plotter.

Nevertheless, The Conjure-Man Dies is brimming with promise, wildly imaginative ideas and two engaging lead characters with a pair of potentially great recurring characters in Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkings. Fisher intended to continue the series and revealed in interviews "he had at least two sequels planned, one of which, provisionally entitled Thus Spake the Prophet," but died in 1934 at the age of 37 from abdominal cancer probably caused by his x-ray experimentations. It would have been interesting to see how Fisher would have developed as a mystery writer and whether, or not, his plotting abilities improved. Either way, John Archer and Perry Dart series would certainly have its loyal fans even today. More importantly, a full-fledged Archer and Dart series might have inspired as like Fisher to try their hands as the Greatest Game in the World. Just like Van Dine inspired an entire following who would go on to improve on the ideas he introduced in the less than perfect Philo Vance series.

Death of an Author (1935) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Caroline Rivett was a British mystery novelist who, over a thirty year period, penned over seventy detective novels and a smattering of short stories – published under her two pennames, "E.C.R. Lorac" and "Carol Carnac." Lorac's work was highly regarded during her lifetime, but, as so often is the case, they went out-of-print and mostly out of circulation upon her death in 1958. If your reputation hinges on easily available, secondhand copies of a book like Murder by Matchlight (1945), you can almost under why she had been dismissed for decades as "pedestrian and forgettable." Fortunately, Martin Edwards and the British Library Crime Classics series have gone a long way in restoring Lorac's reputation with reprints of some her better work such as These Names Make Clues (1937), Bats in the Belfry (1937) and Checkmate to Murder (1944). The subject of today's review is arguably the finest Lorac reprint to date.

Last year, British Library reissued Lorac's Death of an Author (1935) and marked this forgotten, out-of-print gem's return to print for the first time in close to a century. A very fitting title to reprint today considering the premise and characters populating the story aged like a vintage bottle of wine.

Death of an Author begins with a successful publisher, Andrew Marriott of Langston's, giving some attention to one of their prize authors, Michael Ashe, whose novels are "regarded as the best things of their type since Conrad" ("...and they sold"). Ashe terrifies Marriott by threatening to turn to crime fiction to fight the early onset of fossilization ("I'm getting stylised"), which is countered by the shocked publisher that "crime stories are a legitimate branch of fiction, but they're mere ephemerals" selling like hot cakes today – gone tomorrow. This was not an uncommon opinion among Golden Age mystery writers. Agatha Christie believed her detective stories had a sell-by date, but history, especially the past two decades, proved them wrong. If only John Dickson Carr knew one of the monstrosities of the modern age (the internet) would end up giving his beloved impossible crime story the room (of course, locked from the inside) it needed to thrive like never before. Anyway, Ashe points to another one of Marriott's prized authors, Vivian Lestrange, whose bestseller, The Charterhouse Case, is "a crime story that is in the rank of first rate novels." Ashe asks his publisher to arrange a dinner party and introduce him to his fellow writer, but Marriott tries to explain Lestrange is a notorious recluse.

That and there's another problem. Ashe believes Lestrange is a man and an ex-convict, but Marriott has actually met Lestrange in person and was astonished to discover his top-selling "thriller merchant" proved to be a tall, slim and capable young woman. Surprisingly, Miss Lestrange accepts the invitation under the condition that Ashe respects her privacy and not leak her secret to the public. The meeting between Miss Lestrange and the bewildered Ashe is very amusing, which Lorac evidently had fun writing down. And not without reason.

Martin Edwards writes in the introduction that "she adopted the ambiguous writing name of E.C.R. Lorac because of a suspicion of prejudice against female authors." Lorac was so good at hiding her identity that she was often referred to by reviewers ("Mr. Lorac can write") and fellow authors ("his Inspector Macdonald is one of the most sympathetic professional detectives that I have had the luck to encounter," Nicholas Blake) as a man. I think the assumption a man was behind the Lorac pseudonym had more to do with the technical side and murder methods featuring in her plots that recall the work of the so-called "humdrum" mystery writers, which is commonly associated with male writers. If you read a mystery in the "Had-I-But-Known" vein with an ambiguous name on the cover, the first assumption most readers would make is that it was probably written by a woman. But there have been male writers who dabbled in the feminine HIBK school (e.g. Baynard Kendrick's Blood on Lake Louisa, 1934). Back to the story.

Three months later, the same woman goes to the police who announces herself Vivian Lestrange's secretary, Eleanor Clarke. She's worried sick about her eccentric and reclusive employer, because he appears to have simply disappeared.

I should note here that this case is not in the hands of Lorac's celebrated policeman, Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald of Scotland Yard, but handled by the local policeman Inspector Bond and Chief Inspector Warner of the C.I.D. – who enters the picture after the former has "done a steady week's work investigating the disappearance." Bond and Warner are an engaging pair of characters and investigators, but, sadly, Death of an Author is their only recorded case. The introduction suggests the characters were probably abandoned, prematurely, when Lorac jumped ship from Sampson Low "to the more prestigious Collins Crime Club imprint." Death of an Author was incidentally her last published by Sampson Low. Whatever the reason might have been, Lorac presented Bond, Warner and the reader with a pretty problem to pick apart.

Eleanor Clarke explains Vivian Lestrange is an eccentric recluse, practically cripped with rheumatism, who dislikes visitors and publicity. And lived pretty much in complete anonymity. So, when people began to pester him, Eleanor Clarke took on the role of Vivian Lestrange. Just one tiny problem: Lestrange always wore gloves and nobody outside the small household has ever laid eyes on the celebrated mystery novelist. Only person who could have corroborated her story is Lestrange's housekeeper, Mrs. Fife, but she has also disappeared without a trace. What, exactly, is going on?

Bond and Warner have opposing views of the case, or rather about Clarke's absurd story in addition to a noticeable lack of background, which arouses the suspicion of the former. Bond sees her as "one of those queer secretive women" who appeared to have been very much at home with her equally secretive employer. Could they have been one and the same person after all. Warner gives her cool, collected account of the strange situation a bit more credit, but wonders whether they're "handling a case for a psycho-analyst, a case of perjury or a murder case." Everything they uncover along the way proves to be "susceptible to various interpretations" to an almost maddening degree. Even the eventual discovery of a body only ends up deepening the problem instead of giving some much needed clarity to the two detectives.

Death of an Author is an exemplary detective novel in how it takes an ultimately simple situation and turned into a maze-like structure merely by playing a game of Guess Who? with the cast of characters. A very intense, hard fought game of Guess Who? that chipped away at Warner's sanity and remarked towards the end, "if I petitioned Parliament do you think I could get an enactment that no man writes under any name but his own” and “his finger-prints be registered on the title page?" ("it oughtn't to be allowed... hardened offenders... recidivists..."). It goes without saying Death of an Author emerged as splendid detective novel comparable to the best from Christopher Bush, Freeman Wills Crofts and especially Brian Flynn. My favorite Lorac reprint to date. Highly recommended!

The X-Files: Case Closed, vol. 89 by Gosho Aoyama

The 89th volume of Gosho Aoyama's long-running Case Closed series begins, as so often, with winding up the story that started in the previous volume. Rachel, Serena and Masumi wanted to try their hands at an all-girl band and go to a sound studio to practice, where they bump into another amateur girl band, but quickly turns into a full-blown murder investigation – when the drummer of the other girl band is murdered. Strangled with a weapon that cannot be found on the closely searched and guarded premise. And, to make things even more difficult, the security camera had been partially covered with a phone on a selfie-stick at the time of the murder. Inspector Meguire humorously observed in the previous volume how every amateur sleuth in town is on hand to solve this case. Everyone from "the kid detective" (Conan) to "the barista detective" (Toru Amuro) and they make short, efficient work of this tricky murder case.

I ended my previous review with the remark the story could go one of two ways, pretty average or surprisingly good. Fortunately, the story ended up being mostly good with a plot hinging primarily on how the murderer simultaneously created an alibi and managed to spirit away the murder weapon. Only the tinkering with the motive somewhat cheapened the overall story a little bit (ROT13): gur niratre zbgvir vf n jryy-jbea, phygheny gebcr bs Wncnarfr qrgrpgvir svpgvba, juvpu V pna npprcg, ohg qvfyvxr guvf nggrzcg gb fcvpr vg hc ol univat gur zheqrere orvat jebat nobhg gur ernfba gurl qrpvqrq gb gnxr fbzrbar'f yvsr. Va guvf pnfr, gur zbgvir fhqqrayl orpnzr n pbagbegvba npg jurer abar jnf ernyyl arprffnel. That minor complaint aside, this is on a whole a pretty good story.

The background decoration on the cover already gave it away, but the second story is indeed a now out-of-season Christmas mystery story and a good one at that!

Doc Agasa takes Conan, Anita and the Junior Detective League to the department store, "all Christmassed up," to cash-in his coupon for a lunch at the gourmet restaurant at the top of the department store – before the kids scatter across the place to hunt for presents ("...texting me about presents they've found for themselves"). But while they're amusing themselves, the gourmet chef is stabbed and wounded outside the restaurant where they just ate. And the assailant ran down the staircase. Conan alerts the Junior Detective League to "get to the nearest staircase and keep an eye on anyone who emerges." The police detained three customers who were caught hurrying away, "all covered in sweat," but all have ready-made excuses. So the testimony of the Junior Detective League should settle the matter, however, when they regroup they all give a different description of the fleeing attacker ("all our eyewitnesses disagree").

Conan begins to reconstruct their movement, talk with other potential witnesses in order to prove that not only the three different descriptions were correct from the start, but "that all three testimonies point to the same person." Very well played and an excellent treatment of the one-of-three suspects-type stories that features regularly in this series, which this time felt completely fresh and invigorated. This is also how the Junior Detective League should be used.

The third story is something really special. Last year, I reviewed The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) by Mack Reynolds in which I remarked that the potential puzzles posed by flying saucers, space invaders and futuristic technology would make a nice change from haunted houses, dodgy seances and lingering curses – which normally haunt the impossible crime genre. A locked room mystery, impossible crime or simply a straightforward detective story presented as something straight out an episode of The X-Files is not entirely unheard of, listed half a dozen examples in the review ranging from Fredric Brown and Clayton Rawson to Q.E.D. and Jonathan Creek series, but the plotting potential of UFO sightings and alien interlopers remains largely untapped even today. I'm really glad I can add the third story from this volume to that very specialized list of (impossible crime) stories.

Hina Wada is a 17-year-old student and rival of Rachel in the school karate students, but now she come to ask her father, Richard Moore, to take on a most unusual case. She was out jogging in Haido Park with her karate club when she suddenly spotted a decidedly alien-looking craft in the sky ("the classic cigar-shaped model"), which she tried to pursue, but it was gone by the time she reached the top of the stairs. This is incidentally the exact same public park and stairs where the attack from vol. 84 and vol. 85 occurred. Richard Moore advertises his detective agency with the promise he'll "pursue any case to the end of the universe." So off to the park they go to investigate a potential alien presence in Japan ("Yoko Okina is playing a paranormal investigator in a new TV show... so dad's into aliens now"), but find an unexpected twist instead.

In the park, they come across Detective Chiba investigating a truly bizarre, dead end case. Kyogo Nakatsu was the editor of a UFO magazine whose body was found lying face down in recently pored concrete. There was, however, no concrete in his lungs. Nakatsu was suffocated before he fell into the concrete, but it gets even stranger. Next to the magazine editor was his freelance photographer, Yusuke Kuchiki, lying face up in the then hardened concrete. After the police cuts him out, Kuchiki swears "an alien came out of UFO, killed Nakatsu in mid-air, then got back in the UFO and flew away." Strangely enough, the hardened footprints in the concrete and absence of a murder weapon do not contradict his outrageous claim. No drag marks to suggests shenanigans with the body. The two sets of footprints are equally deep and both sets face the same direction ("...no sign that either person walked out"). Conan is not easily fooled, "this crime was committed by a human being," but how exactly was it was done? The solution is good and technically sound, but, where the story really stands out, is how effectively it put everything at work. From the UFO sighting and the suspect's claims of an alien killer to the tricks being employed, which resulted in an inverted detective story with a new take on the no-footprints impossibility that gave the murderer a rock-solid alibi. An alibi while only being an arm-length away. Brilliant stuff!

The last, full-length story from this volume is a continuation, of sorts, of the story from vol. 85 in which Shukichi Haneda, a shogi player, was on the verge of collecting all seven crown titles – seven national shogi championships of Japan. Shukichi Haneda handed his girlfriend, traffic cop Yumi Miyamoto, a sealed envelope with the request to not open it until he has collected all seven titles. Inside is a signed marriage registration to which she only has to sign her name. So, having won all seven titles, she can sign the paper, but she lost the envelope. Fortunately, Conan is on hand to help her finding it, which leads to mean, old caretaker of the building who a shogi fan. The old man finds her unworthy to marry a master of game, but gives her an opportunity to get it back by cracking a code he created. A fun enough story, but nothing particular good or outstanding. Obviously intended as a springboard to the next story.

The story ends with a reference to Shukichi Haneda's late brother-in-law, Koji Haneda, who was a master shogi and chess player before dying under mysterious circumstances during a chess tournament in the United States. Anita recognizes the name as she seen it on the same list with Conan's real name on it. Oh, the plot thickens! So the final chapter begins with Conan and Anita researching the case, which happened seventeen years ago, but they quickly become distracted by a much more recent murder case. That morning, the body of the president of a real estate company was found in the outside guesthouse of his estate holding a pair of novelty scissors Doc Agasa invented. But, as they begin to investigate, they begin to notice a resemblance to the murder of Haneda seventeen years ago. This promising story is going to be concluded in the next volume.

I think it's a fair conclusion to state vol. 89 is not only a huge improvement over the previous one, but can be counted as one of the strongest volume without a longer case, major event or crossover appearances in a long time. It almost read like a throwback to an earlier period in the series. Greatly enjoyed it! And very much look forward to beginning the countdown to vol. 100!