The Moving House of Foscaldo (1925/26) by Charles Chadwick

Charles Chadwick was an American author, lawyer, sportsman and a former college athlete, a Yale strongman, who competed in the 1904 Summer Olympics and nearly won bronze in the men's hammer throw event – narrowly missing out on the medal by a few meters. Chadwick was a lawyer by trade who served as New York City's deputy assistant district attorney, worked as a sports writer for New York World and contributed short stories for publications like The Popular Magazine, The Ladies' Home Journal and Sport Story Magazine. Much more important than his public service and dalliance with sports is the fact Chadwick published two detective novels during the 1920s.

Robert Adey not only listed Chadwick's The Cactus (1925) and The Moving House of Foscaldo (1925/26) in Locked Room Murders (1991), but highlighted and praised them in the introduction ("both are well worth reading"). I mentioned Chadwick's two detective novels in 2022 blogpost "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," but their obscurity and not having been in print for a century appeared to be an obstacle to their speedy return to print, one way or another. So was pleased when I recently came across a fresh reprint of Chadwick's The Moving House of Foscaldo.

Last year, I reviewed a reprint of Joseph Gollomb's The Girl in the Fog (1923) from a small, independent publisher, Serling Lake, which specialized in reprinting obscure, out-of-print locked room mystery novels – under the banner "Impossible Crime Classics." That sounded better than it was at the time as the then modest selection consisting mostly of earlier, poorer works from the public domain. Gollomb's The Girl in the Fog is nothing less than third-rate tripe and the titles added over the past year weren't much better, at least until recently. G.E. Locke's The Scarlet Macaw (1923) and Elsa Barker's The Cobra Candlestick (1928) aren't the best locked room mysteries the twenties produced, but have come across much, much worse from that decade (e.g. Robert Brennan's The Toledo Dagger, 1927). J.M. Walsh's "atmospheric mystery" The Hairpin Mystery (1926) and Henry Leverage's "high-stakes thriller" The Purple Limited (1927) seem to have some potential. It's their brand new edition of The Moving House of Foscaldo that made me bite again.

Before delving into this long lost, long forgotten detective novel, I should mention the curious, short publication history of The Cactus and The Moving House of Foscaldo.

Adey's Locked Room Murders names lawyer Bob Ellis as the detective of The Cactus, solving a stabbing in a locked room, whom previously appeared in two short stories, "Pawn to Queen's Eighth" (1910) and "The Twist of the Screw" (1912), published in The Popular Magazine as by "Daniel Steele." I checked and they appear to be the same character, but no idea why the short stories were published under a penname and the novel under his own name. The Cactus only appeared in the US and begins with an impossible murder in Greenwich Village, New York, which leads Ellis to Mexico. The Moving House of Foscaldo, a standalone, was serialized in The Elks magazine from October 1925 to February 1926 and published as a book only in the UK. So this probably contributed to them not getting reprinted over the past hundred years, but it also didn't help Chadwick simply stopped writing novels and even abandoned short stories by the end of the twenties. A shame as he seems to have been one of the better writers of the pre-and early Golden Age mystery with a healthy interest in locked rooms and impossible crimes. The two-parter, "Ellis in Search of a Feather," published in the January 15 and February 1, 1913, issues of The Popular Magazine, looks to be a locked room mystery. Chadwick's short stories needs further investigation, but, for now, let's take a look at his second and last detective novel.

The setting here is a lonely, wooded and cliff-bound island near the French coast, Island of Foscaldo, which has an old, Dutch-style windmill tower perched on a cliff as its dominating landmark – known as la maison mouvante, the Moving House. It stands "dizzily on the cliff's very edge" held in place by "two chain stays whose huge rusted links fastened back into the rocks." Count Foscaldo built the windmill-like structure following his escape to the remote island during the Reign of Terror of Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. So the Island of Foscaldo is shrouded in obscure, forgotten history, mysterious structures and scenery that belongs on the canvas of a Romanticists painting. That's brought Peer Rackstrom, a landscape painter, to the island and becomes deeply entangled in a series of increasingly mysterious and dangerous adventures.

It begins innocently enough when Rackstrom finds an ancient, weathered brass key with a barely legible legend, "XETGAMAINFECI," engraved on it. A key belonging to the Royal locksmith, Gamain, who betrayed King Louis XVI? And, perhaps, linked to the armoire de fer, or iron box, which "had been taken from the walls of the King's chamber" to be stashed away on the island. So, of course, he loses the key. Next he catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman on a sailboat who looked at him in surprise, "like some wild creature," picked up anchor and sailed away. What really sets the ball rolling is the arrival on the island is several men from Paris. Firstly, there's Inspector Auguste Prontout, Prefecture of Police, who has come to the island with his subordinate, Dirmoir, to arrest one of the most dangerous man in the country, Gabas. Wanted for murder and robbery in the Marie Lafitte case. Inspector Prontout enlists Rackstrom's help, but ends up getting a front row seat to an inexplicable, seemingly impossible vanishing-act.

One night, Rackstrom observes Gabas going inside the windmill, closely followed by Dirmoir, but only Gabas comes back out muttering a strange goodbye ("Ha! Dirmoir! Adieu"). Rackstrom goes inside expecting to find a crime scene, but after searching the place, top to bottom, concludes "the place was empty of any soul" except himself. Gabas could not have concealed the body, anywhere, because of "the tower's simple, rude, unfinished mode of interior construction" – in which "planking, timbers and everything was exposed to view." So how did the policeman disappear when Rackstrom saw him following Gabas inside through the only entrance, and exit, to the windmill tower? And without a sign, or trace, of a struggle!That's not the last time someone vanishes from the windmill nor was it the first time it happened.

A promising and, above all, surprising beginning recalling, or rather anticipating, the French mystery writers from the 1930s. Writers like Stanislas-André Steeman, Gaston Boca, Noel Vindry, Pierre Véry, Herbert & Wyl, but the second-half suggests, if Chadwick was in influenced by French mystery writers at all, that influence likely came from Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc. Both parts surprised me. I expected tougher stuff from an All-American college athlete, who competed in the Olympics, like Hake Talbot's Rogan Kincaid in The Hangman's Handyman (1942). Not a novel of adventure and romance soaked in French romanticism living up to Véry's credo "what counts for an author" is "to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" so "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery." That becomes particularly true around the second-half when every resemblance to a traditional detective, even by French standards, mostly comes to an end. Mostly.

The second-half finds Rackstrom and the woman on the sailboat exploring, and getting themselves trapped, inside a cavern system, but their subterranean adventure is not as cliché, dated or hackneyed as it sounds. It actually has a modern touch as their ordeal plays out like a video game in which they need to explore, solve puzzles and collect items to unlock new areas helped by a series of diagrams drawn to map the caverns. Yes, the pattern emerging from the diagrams and mapping attempts can be taken as a hint. And, eventually, reveals the solution to a century old mystery that has largely gone unnoticed by history. I also liked the scene in which Gabas explains his strange backstory to Rackstrom claiming royal blood and being haunted by his ancestors. Not haunted by their ghosts, but by "inherited memories." Like I said, The Moving House of Foscaldo might appear dated at a glance, but Chadwick didn't rely on them to fill the pages of a serial. He really tried to do something with the story and succeeded admirably, definitely by 1920s standards. That doubly goes for the impossible crime element.

That bizarre, crumbling cliff-bound structure dominates the story, especially during the story's opening and closing stages. I mentioned in a previous review how the 1920s was the decade when the 1930s, Golden Age detective story was beginning to take shape and solidify, but that came with growing pain and the overall quality being all over the place – until roughly 1927, 1928, when some real progress was being made. The solution to the impossible disappearances, past and present, is far above the average for the time and shows Chadwick liked to make work of his impossible crimes and locked room puzzles. A perfect fit for this kind of story and much more satisfying than my practical half-baked armchair solution. It all makes for a highly readable, absorbing and atmospheric tale of adventure, romance, mystery and history.

Chadwick's The Moving House of Foscaldo is undoubtedly a novel of adventure and romance with detective story elements rather than a detective novel with a dash of adventure and romance, but, if you're looking for something off the beaten track, it comes highly recommended! Fingers crossed The Cactus is next to be reprinted by Serling Lake. And, hopefully, a few more of the obscure, choosier items on my special locked room wishlist.

Note for the curious: my half-baked, completely wrong armchair solution "cleverly" hinged on a simple principle of magic tricks and illusions. Everything that should make the trick more difficult for the magician/culprit actually makes it easier. Rackstrom claims the body could not be concealed owning to the nature of the ramshackle windmill, but what if he simply didn't search good enough? The windmill has as to be expected sail arms that have long ceased to revolve and the canvas had torn and sagged over time. What if one of these torn, sagging sails created a fold, or pouch, in which a body can be tugged away. This pouch can be accessed from the inside the mill by moving some of the loose timber aside to create a small opening to worm a body through, before putting the timber or planks back in place. That way, you can search the place, top to bottom, all day long without ever finding a body.

The Nature of Things: C.M.B. vol. 7-8 by Motohiro Katou

Following a short hiatus, I returned to the work of Motohiro Katou back in September with a review of C.M.B. vol. 5-6 and the intention was to have gone through the first ten volumes, before the end of the year, but just noticed I forgot to do C.M.B. vol. 7-8 last month – having reviewed Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 95 in October. So guess you can call that a return to tradition.

Katou's C.M.B. vol. 7 differs from previous volumes in both the C.M.B. and Q.E.D. series, which normally contain two longish stories or occasionally a single long story (e.g. C.M.B. Vol. 4), but Katou this time tried his hands at four shorter stories. So the plots and storytelling tend to be smaller in complexity and scope than the longer stories. The result's as mixed and varied as the stories themselves.

"Locust" is the first of these four shorter stories and best described as an ecological mystery-thriller, of sorts, which takes place in one of those remote, mountainous villages named Yamanomizu – plagued and torn by several divisive issues. First of all, the village is divided over the plans to build a road to bring government money to the village and province, but half the village opposed the plans because they "feared that the forest would be torn down." Secondly, the province where the village is located has a plague of locusts and in three days, "the village and their crops will be attacked by the locusts." So the villagers in favor of the road want to spray everything from the fields to the forest with insecticide ("...going to be torn down anyways"). Thirdly, local children spotted a rare, beautiful bird in the forest, "never seen before," but nobody believes them. One of the kids heard of Sakaki Shinra, curator of Shinra's Museum of Antiquities, who takes Nanase Tatsuki to Yamanomizu. Shinra has a pretty good idea about the bird, but seems more interested in the locusts and, of course, someone tries to protect money making road project to give the story a mild touch of the thrillers. Not much of a detective story, plotwise, but the backdrop allowed for a few good, nicely drawn scenes towards the end.

The second story, "Iron Door," is a different story altogether! Mau Sugal, the black market broker, returns to the Museum of Antiquities to take Sakaki Shinra and Nanase Tatsuki along on an unusual treasure hunt. She brings them to an abandoned factory with a once buried, now excavated bunker doubling as an army research laboratory during the Second World War. This leads to a long, dark passageway with a huge, heavy steel door at the end. A door that used to be opened with a motor, but the motor was destroyed when the place was closed and sealed. So now it takes the combined effort of three, or more, people to open it. Mau believes "there's some treasure behind this door," but she needs the other two to help her pry it open. When they do, they find an empty storeroom with the fresh corpse of an elderly man inside, 81-year-old Gomoku Shigetsuga. He turned up shortly after the place was excavated and unsealed to claim the place couldn't possibly be empty.

So while "Iron Door" is as long, or short, as "Locusts," it's a much denser story with a packed, nestling doll-like plot – stacking mystery upon mystery. Who trapped and killed the old man? How did the murderer opened, and closed, the door without help? What did the victim know about the wartime secrets buried in the bunker? And what happened to those secrets? Is there still something hidden in the bunker that the police overlooked? How does Mau figure in this case and why did she leave cartoon smoke after discovering the body? The answers to all these questions nicely dovetail together with the unusual impossible crime situation making it standout, but even better than the original, quasi-inverted take on the locked room mystery is the clearly written, cleverly hidden dying message. Maybe the best use of the hidden dying message since the Columbo episode Try and Catch Me (1977). The best story of the volume!

The third story, "In the Civic Pool," is not necessarily bad, but it has a threadbare plot and a very forgettable story. Tatsuki takes Shinra and some of her classmates to the public swimming pool where they become entangled in a series of mini-mysteries involving missing concert tickets, a water beetle supposedly "extinct in Tokyo" and figure in the swimming pool who disappears like a ghost when looking in its direction. All very simple mysteries with simple, straightforward answers. Only thing that really stood out is Shinra taking care of the water beetle, but other than that, Katou still has to figure out how to translate his trademark character-driven, slice-of-life puzzles to the one-chapter story format.

This volume ends on a high note with a pleasingly conventional mystery, “The Turk,” which is the famous chess playing automaton that toured and enraptured Europe in the 18th century. A replica of the Turk is currently part of Tagame Tatsuo's collection of antique “mechanized puppets” and Shinra, holder of the "C," "M," and "B" rings, has full access to the collection for his research – even gets to play to play the celebrated automaton. During their round of chess, the automaton fails while a robber smashes a display and gets away with three valuable puppets. Shinra promises to get back the antiques in exchange for the replica of the Turk. So the solution appears to entirely hinge on breaking down the alibi of the person who operated the automaton. Shinra reminds everyone the Turk is "not a mechanized puppet," but "more of a magic trick." Like I said, a pleasingly conventional detective story.

By the way, I liked Tatsuki's false-solution infusing the 18th century illusion of the chess playing automaton with modern technology.

Katou's C.M.B. vol. 8 continues the format of vol. 7 with four shorter, one-chapter stories and the first story is “One Hundred and Thirty Million Victims.” Detective Inspector Takeshi receives a picture of an ant-lion accompanied by threatening letter promising that, "on November 6th, at 6 PM, I will enact my revenge. The 130 million people of Japan will be the victims." Takeshi goes to Shinra to use him as a soundboard and, pretty soon, a lead presents itself. A man by the name Yoshikawa Masahisa was arrested and convicted for a disgusting crime: robbing a young mother and kicking over the baby carriage, which injured the baby. So the media and public came down like a ton of bricks on him and his family. However, the real culprit was found years later and Yoshikawa Masahisa was released from prison without a word of apology from the media and public. The story is about trying to prevent someone from taking revenge, however, the ending showed that not everything is as it seems. A prescient ending at that for a story originally published in 2008 (likely had a magazine appearance in 2007). A good opening act!

"A Meteorite" is the second and my personal favorite story from this volume. Shinra travels to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian operated spaceport in Kazakhstan, where "something cumbersome" crashed nearby and created a giant crater – a large meteorite. There are, however, two problems. Firstly, the representatives of Kazakhstan and Russia both stake claim the meteorite. Secondly, the meteorite itself has impossibly disappeared without a trace. Not only the meteorite has disappeared, but they couldn't find a bit of debris or single fragment of it at the impact site. Someone, somehow, cleaned out the entire site in a mere three days. And, given the circumstances, that's a Herculean task. What a great and original premise! Shinra also has to take a well-known meteorite hunter and the locals into consideration when answering these questions and arbitrate the outcome. Yes, the explanation how the impact site was cleaned out is as clever as it's cheeky. Simply a good, fun and original mystery.

The third story of this volume, "A Strange Tale from Kushino Mura," gets a little experimental. This story finds Shinra and Tatsuki on a skiing holiday, but, where the ski resort stands today, once stood a mountain settlement, Kushino Village. Shinra naturally gets interested in the backstory of this forgotten village and an old man tells them to visit the shrine, if they want to know more. A shrine dedicated to the cats that once saved the village and a faded backstory, barely legible, written on the wall mentioning demonic possessions, deaths within three days and a husband and wife ("...one of them died"). A short time later, Shinra and Tatsuki get caught in a blinding snow storm, on the advanced trail, that somehow flings them back into the past. On the day when Kushino Village was born into tragedy. So they have to figure out the source of the original tragedy to prevent another, but what gave the story a real chill is when Shinra realizes the truth behind their time-slip adventure (ROT13: n gvzr-ybbc va juvpu crbcyr “ercrngrqyl qvr, sberire”). Not exactly a classically-styled detective story, but this one is more about storytelling than laying out an elaborate plot. I enjoyed it.

On a side note, "A Strange Tale from Kushino Mura" is not the first time-slip mystery to feature in Katou's detective fiction. "The Legacy of the Sage," from Q.E.D. vol. 19, transports Kana Mizuhara from 2004 to 1927 where she meets Sou Touma's historical double.

"The Statue of a Male Goat" is the fourth, and final, story from this volume. Shinra is drawing plans, in class, to redo the layout of his museum and he has the resources to do it ("...already hired a moving company"). Meanwhile, the owner of small, struggling moving company is offered a big sum of money to swap the titular statue from the museum's collection for a replica, but stealing from Shinra is not as easy as taking candy from a baby. Another fairly minor story, but always welcome a return to Shinra's museum.

So these eight stories from C.M.B. vol. 7 and 8 present the proverbial mixed bag of tricks. "Iron Door" is the obvious standout and my favorite for boringly predictable reasons with "The Turk" and "A Meteorite" following close behind. I liked "A Strange Tale from Kushino Mura," but more as a historical flight of fancy with criminal intent than as a proper detective story and "One Hundred and Thirty Million Victims" has a memorable conclusion. "Locusts" is mostly scenery, "In the Civic Pool" and "The Statue of a Male Goat" give little to comment on. Not bad, on a whole, considering Katou switched from longer to shorter stories as none of the stories are bad, but some work still needs to be done. I'm curious to see how Katou is going to continue these short, one-chapter stories in C.M.B. vol. 9 and 10 next year.

Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928) by John Rhode

Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928) is only the fifth novel, of more than seventy, in the Dr. Lancelot Priestley series by "John Rhode," a pseudonym of John Street, which used to be one of his many out-of-print, hard to get and expensive titles to get a hold-of – until Spitfire Publishers reprinted it last year. Rhode's Tragedy at the Unicorn also used to be one of those rare, out-of-print impossible crime novels from a well-known mystery writer and the reason why it had been on my locked room wishlist for ages. So this is another obscure title that can be crossed off the list.

Tragedy at the Unicorn takes place in-and around the Unicorn Hotel in the seaport town of Clayport, "one of the best-known yachting centres on the south coast," which is run by Mrs. Burgess and her two daughters, Joan and Phyllis. Clayport is the home port of the Levity, a ketch, belonging to Bob Weldon, the skipper. Levity's crew comprises of Richard Gateman, Percy Hunter and the story's narrator, Mr. Attercliffe, who are all frequent guests at the Unicorn Hotel. But they're not the only guests who checked in on that late summer afternoon. There's Edward Motimer, a yachtsman, who owns a motor cruised named Dreamland, the detestable Dr. Victor Grinling and his valet, Ferguson. And, of course, it's the caustic Dr. Grinling who's going to end up causing trouble for everyone.

Next morning, Ferguson is unable to wake his master ("let sleeping Grinlings lie") and it takes a while before they can unlock the bedroom, but, when they finally go inside, they find Dr. Grinling lying "stone dead" in his bed. An empty syringe is found on the bedside table alongside a phial with small tablets of heroin ("one-sixth of a grain"). So remember the previous review in which I pointed out Helen McCloy's Dance of Death (1938) was written during a period when heroin was an over-the-counter drug? I couldn't have randomly picked a better book to make that point as Dr. Gringling was in the habit of taking "heroin injections for sleeplessness," remarking "he would have no difficulty obtaining the stuff" and "would know it would do him no harm" – "unless he took an overdose." If I were a publisher, I probably would have inserted a bunch of vintage ads for heroin cough drops and cocaine-laced "patent medicines" ("COCAINE TOOTHACHE DROPS, NOW WITH EVEN MORE COCAINE!"). That's not all.

A postmortem reveals had injected heroin, but what killed him was a second injection with morphia. Not the heroin. There were morphine tablets mixed with his heroin tablets, "all similar in appearance," which could make an accidental overdose, suicide or murder ("MRS. WINSLOW'S SOOTHING SYRUP FOR TEETHING CHILDREN, NOW WITH EVEN MORE MORPHINE!!"). Superintendent Collins is the first to take a crack at the case, but Dr. Priestley arrives right before the halfway mark to take charge of the investigation. This is, of course, one of Dr. Priestley's earlier cases and has yet to become the sedentary armchair oracle of later books. So the chapter following his arrival sees him all over the hotel to inspect and oil locks and hinges. Unfortunately, this proves to be short-lived as Tragedy at the Unicorn regrettably ended up being a flawed, undefined work of its time and an author who still has to find his footing in the genre.

The 1920s was a decade when the Golden Age detective story of the 1930s and '40s was taking shape and solidifying, which naturally came with some growing pains. Tragedy at the Unicorn goes from a promising, early Golden Age whodunit during the first-half to an uninspired, routine thriller in the second-half – involving a smuggling operation (of course). That's not a spoiler. It's patently obvious from the start smuggling is going on the background and it became the focal point of the second-half. Funnily enough, the smuggling operation is partly run by a Dutch gang peddling drugs between Clayport and Rotterdam, because why not ("THE NETHERLANDS, NOW WITH EVEN MORE CANNABIS!!!"). Dr. Priestley even translates a telegram in Dutch, even though his "knowledge of Dutch is not very extensive." Other than that, it has nothing noteworthy or anything particular to recommend. Just a smugglers doing what smugglers do.

So what about the murder of Dr. Grinling? The locked room setup looked promising: a solid door locked from the inside with the key still in the lock that "turns very stiffly." Only window was shut and fastened. The connecting door was locked with the key hanging on a board Joan's bedroom and blocked on both sides of the door by heavy washing stands. More than enough room to work out a halfway decent locked room-trick, but Rhode kept the locked room-trickery very rudimentary and very, very disappointing. Rhode at least tried to do something with the murderer's identity and motive, but the result is not exactly the stuff of classics. Both obvious and disappointing. So, simply as a detective novel or locked room mystery, Rhode's Tragedy at the Unicorn has nothing to offer or recommend. Unless you're a John Street completist or one of those nuts trying to go through every title Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders (1991). Rhode was much more successful with the impossible crime story in novels like Invisible Weapons (1938), Death in Harley Street (1946) and the "Miles Burton" novel Death in the Tunnel (1936). So I'll recommend them instead.

Note for the curious: why not end with a halfway decent solution, for 1928, to the locked room that occurred to me after the murder was discovered. What if Dr. Grinling told his killer to come to his room after he retired, but instructed the killer to come through the connecting door. Yes, the killer has a way to unlock the door. So they move aside the washstands, the killer unlocks the connecting door and enters to conduct their shady business. The killer is, of course, well aware of Dr. Grinling's habit to take a shot of heroin before going to sleep and brought along a syringe loaded with morphia. When the doctor was distracted, the killer swapped the heroin syringe for the morphia one. The killer left the room, locked the connecting door, washing stands returned to their original place and Dr. Grinling took his deadly injection in a perfectly locked room. This brilliant piece of armchair reasoning fell apart when it was shown he had taken both the heroin and morphia injections. At least I enjoyed cranking out this review.

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Dance of Death (1938) by Helen McCloy

I previously reviewed Tage la Cour festive short story, "The Murder of Santa Claus" (1952), before that Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024), but also wanted take a look this year at a couple snowy, wintertime mysteries – considered giving John Dickson Carr's Poison in Jest (1932) a second look. When going through the options, I spotted a title that had completely slipped my mind over the years.

Helen McCloy's Dance of Death (1938), alternatively published as Design for Dying, is the first book in the Dr. Basil Willing series that has been hailed as one of the better, stronger debuts from the American Golden Age. More recent reviews praised McCloy's debut for remaining remarkably topical during the more than eighty years following its first publication. So let's find out if this is indeed one of the best debut of a 1930s detective novelist and series character.

Dance of Death takes place in New York City during a cold, snowy day in early December and begins when two men on snow removal duty find "a stiff in the snow" on 78th Street, but not an ordinary stiff. The body belongs to a young, unidentified and cheaply dressed woman, who had been buried beneath a snowdrift for hours, but the body was neither cold nor frozen – inexplicably hot to the touch ("...hot as a fever patient"). Even stranger, the medical examiner found a vivid, canary yellow stain underneath her make-up and concludes she had died of heat stroke on a winter night! So the curious little case, dubbed by the press the "Red Hot Momma Case," comes to the attention of General Archer, the Police Commissioner, and Dr. Basil Willing.

Dr. Willing, psychiatrist attached to the district attorney's office, discovers the victim could possibly by a young debutante, Miss Katherine "Kitty" Jocelyn, who had her "coming out" party on the night of her murder. That's where the case begins to twist and turn, because she appears to be still alive. She was in fact seen dancing when she already supposed to be dead under a heap of snow. Only for her poor cousin, Ann Jocelyn Claude, to turn up claiming she took Kitty's place at the coming out party at the behest of her cousin's stepmother, Rhoda Jocelyn. Dr. Willing can't detect any lies in her stories nor any mental aberrations or being unbalanced ("she's as sane as you or I"). So what really happened to Kitty during her party and how, exactly, was she murdered and ended up on a New York sidewalk under a pack of snow? These are only the first of many, many puzzling questions arising from the discovery of Kitty's body, the events that took place during the party and the people who were present.

When it comes to the plot, McCloy creates a pleasingly intricate, uncluttered patterns with every answer revealing a new mystery, or puzzling aspect, that needs to be explained – like a Russian nestling doll. Particularly the better part of the first-half dealing with the body's discovery and the problems the police faced with identifying the body, but the entire story is, plot-wise, grand from start to finish. I'll get to the solution in a moment. What also deserves to be mentioned is how well the story, as a whole, has aged and agree with many of reviewers from the past two decades who called Dance to Death remarkably modern. Similar to Christianna Brand's Death in High Heels (1941), McCloy's Dance to Death reads like it was published only thirty, forty years ago. Not only because Dr. Willing brings a psychological facet to the investigation. That has been done before McCloy and her psychiatrist detective arrived on the scene. The modern feeling has more to do with the background of the central characters.

Kitty is not the rich heiress her stepmother has everyone believe and, "famous for her svelte and willowy figure," she has to earn money on the side with endorsements for cosmetic products or patent medicines. You can call Kitty a 1930s analog of social media influencer. Note that the story mentions that the guest list is made up of other debutantes and bachelors who know Kitty only from published photographs and gossip columns. Dr. Willing actually linked the body in the snow to Kitty when remembering spotting her face in a magazine ad for a so-called reducing medicine, named Sveltis, advertised as a miracle cure requiring no diet or exercise ("...I can eat all the chocolates and marshmallows I like without counting calories"). Don't forget, this story takes place during a period when stuff like heroin was an over-the-counter drug. That all helps build Dance of Death up to a detective novel that feels distinctly different and even unique from its contemporaries. The solution continued that pattern revealing an interesting choice of murderer with a suitable unusual motive and a new method for murder. A method that nearly produced a genuinely perfect murder had it not been for that Merrivalean cussedness of all things general.

By the way, Dance of Death is generally considered to be an impossible crime novel and Robert Adey even listed the book in Locked Room Murders (1991), but, in my often ignored and discarded opinions, it would be more accurate to describe it as a howdunit – a borderline impossibility at a stretch. Dance of Death presents a poisonous puzzle that can stand comparison with the best from Agatha Christie. That's what you should expect. Not an impossible crime a la carr, but what a howdunit!

So what more can I say? It's writers like McCloy and novels such as Dance of Death that put the gold in the Golden Age detective story. Simply great stuff that somehow still comes across like a fresh treatment of the conventional whodunit today. Highly recommended!

Cracking Nuts: "The Murder of Santa Claus" (1952) by Tage la Cour

Tage la Cour's "Mordet pa julemanden" ("The Murder of Santa Claus," 1952), a parody-pastiche, originally appeared in a Danish crime anthology, Mord til jul (Murder for Christmas, 1952), before a translation was privately printed a year later and La Cour gifted a copy to Frederic Dannay – who's one half of the "Ellery Queen" partnership. Dannay was charmed enough by La Cour's "The Murder of Santa Claus" to have it published in the January, 1957, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

La Cour wrote "The Murder of Santa Claus" as a "sincere homage to the inimitable Agatha Christie" and EQMM presented to the story to their readers as "the cleverest parody of Hercule Poirot we have ever read." Let's find out.

"The Murder of Santa Claus" finds M. Hercules Poire and his biographer lazying around on Christmas Day with the radio softly playing Holy Night, Silent Night in the background. It appeared there would be no seasonal murders that Christmas "accompanied by the tunes of church and sleigh bells," until an urgent telegram arrives from Lady Gwendolyn: "AN ATROCIOUS MURDER COMMITTED TONIGHT AT DRUNKARD CASTLE. COME AT ONCE."

Lord Drunkard had been dressing himself up as Santa Claus in the library when he stabbed in the back with the obligatory, oriental-looking dagger and lived long enough to leave an unfinished, not very helpful dying message – reading "I'm being murdered today by—." Upon arrival at Drunkard Castle, Poire finds everyone with "exception of the corpse" gathered in the hall. I mean everyone. Every stock character is present from the son who had a bone to pick with his father and daughter in need of money to marry an Italian count to family from Australia and the police arrested a passing tramp. So finding the murderer should be easy enough for the Great Detective, but "no cases are quite that simple" when M. Poire as demonstrated by his solution.

Tage la Cour's "The Murder of Santa Claus" is best summed up as a short, but wonderful, piece of Grade-A nonsense in the spirit of Robert L. Fish's Schlock Homes series and Arthur Porges' Celery Green stories. A fun little story for the holiday. However, the best parody-pastiche of Hercule Poirot is still Amer Picon from Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936).

Notes for the curious: Somehow, I forgot to mention "The Murder of Santa Claus" appeared in that Danish anthology under the penname "Donald McGuire." From what I've been able to find online, Murder for Christmas is collection six short stories of which five are Danish translations of British authors. So my guess educated guess is that the editor, Tage la Cour, sneaked in his own, homegrown story under a foreign flag. I also forgot to mention that this story was translated into English by Poul Ib Liebe and the privately published edition came with illustrations from Lars Bo.

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe (1946/47) by Seishi Yokomizo

Ever since the publication of Seishi Yokomizo's Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) in 2019, Pushkin Vertigo has put out a new translation from Yokomizo's celebrated Kosuke Kindaichi series every year and have likened it to opening a cache of previously inaccessible Golden Age detective fiction – a veritable treasure trove of vintage murder. The newest title in the series of Kosuke Kindaichi translations is a twofer comprising of two shortish novels, Kuronekotei jiken (Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, 1946/47) and Kurumaido wa naze kishiru (Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, 1949?). Their original publication dates are a bit sketchy, because the Pushkin Vertigo editions give the 1970s publication dates from the "Yokomizo Boom," but most of them were first serialized. Sometimes not published as a complete book until years or decades later and finding the correct dates can be a puzzle with Yokomizo. I'm too much of an internet autist to ignore it and go with post-GAD, 1970s dates. So hope I got then right.

I was thinking of reviewing Murder at the Black Cat Cafe and Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? separately, but why make a needless, confusing mess of things?

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe uncharacteristically begins with subtle, winking "Challenge to the Reader," packaged as an prologue, explaining how "dear Mr. Y" (Yokomizo) became Kosuke Kindaichi's official biographer when working on a serialization of the murders in the old honjin – based on what the locals told him. This serialization attracted the attention of the Great Detective himself and offers Yokomizo to provide him with his personal case notes for future novels ("...write a little more about what a handsome devil I am"). Yokomizo not only accepts, but even has something of a wishlist and hopes Kindaichi encounters a so-called "Faceless Corpse" case. This trope is the Japanese variation on the "Birlstone Gambit" in which the murderer swapped identities with the victim whose identifiable features were destroyed to create a least-likely-suspect scenario. A trope that has been done to dead over the past hundred years to the point where, aside from a few exceptions, it "has been the solution offered in most detective novels that have dealt with this theme until now." Yokomizo received a package of papers from Kindaichi detailing a faceless corpse case deviating from the normal formula.

This is only the prologue and Yokomizo already demonstrates why I rank him alongside Golden Age luminaries like Anthony Berkeley, Christianna Brand and John Dickson Carr. Your normal, everyday mystery writer who hit upon a clever, brand new variation on the Birlstone Gambit would not trumpet that fact before the story even begins and use the readers familiarity/expectations as a smokescreen hiding the actual solution and real clues. And we would have praised it. Yokomizo here warns the reader ahead Murder at the Black Cat Cafe is a faceless corpse puzzle "in which the victim and the culprit haven't switched places." A mystery writer giving themselves a handicap at the start is taking fair play to the next level! So on to the story itself.

If it weren't for the challenging prologue, the backdrop, bloody crimes and characters populating Yokomizo's Murder at the Back Cat Cafe do not suggest a traditional detective story playing on one of its oldest tropes – something more noir-ish and hardboiled. The mise-en-scène is a place in a far flung place only referred to as G—Town where behind the High Street lay a rabbit warren of backstreets, alleyways and passages commonly known as "the pink labyrinth" and "the alleys of temptation." These narrow, maze-like streets and passages were lined with red and violet lanterns to differentiate between bars and brothels. Curiously, this shady place sprung up around, and took over, a traditional neighborhood. So you have thatched cottages and farm houses next to brothels or cafes with old temples, shrines or a graveyard in their back yard adding "an even more complex and bizarre colour to the local scenery." Black Cat Cafe can be found, somewhat isolated from the other cafes and brothels, along a backstreet known as the Back Cut.

Behind the Black Cat Cafe stands an ancient Buddhist temple and neglected, overpopulated cemetery. That's where a police constable doing his rounds finds Nitcho, a young monk, apparently digging a hole, but what he's really doing is digging up a body. Nitcho explains he had spotted a leg sticking out of the ground at the back of the cafe and uncovered the partially decomposed, maggot infested body of a murdered woman, especially her facial features have become unrecognizable ("...eyes and nose were completely gone"). Detective Inspector Murai not only has a faceless, unidentified murder victim on his hands, but the owners of the cafe recently packed up their belongings and sold the place. And, with them, the girls who worked there scattered. So it's Murai who spends most of the story trying to piece this sordid puzzle together in a procedural way, while "wrestling with a nagging sense that something was not quite right" about this faceless corpse case.

Kosuke Kindaichi appears on the scene near the end to solve the case and promises to show them a phantom, "lots of phantoms around after the war nowadays," but this phantom is "the culprit in the murder case at the Black Cat." It's almost impressive Kindaichi's explanation feels almost as lengthy as what preceded it without becoming tedious. So the prologue was not so much Yokomizo giving himself a handicap, but a gallant attempt to level the playing ground more fairly for the reader. Considering the story's relatively short length with an intricate, complicated solution, the question can be raised how fair the plot really is, but what made it work for me is the cheeky epilogue. Just pointing out something I had already forgotten and never took into consideration. I thought it was proverbial cherry on top!

So that brings us to the second, shorter bonus novel, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, which is technically part of the Kosuke Kindaichi series, but Kindaichi is only mentioned by name. Surprisingly, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? is a roughly thirty pages shorter than Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, but feels and reads like it's twice as long. And not because it's a drag to read.

Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? is one of those elaborately written, baroquely-plotted Japanese family murders, akin to Yokomizo's own Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and Taku Ashibe's more recent Oomarike satsujin jiken (Murder in the House of Omari, 2021), but on a much smaller scale – like a pocket sized honkaku mystery. So the story begins with a family history going over the struggles of the Honiden family, from "the village of K––," over the decades from the early 1900s to the end of the Second World War. I'll be skipping those details with the story really picking up with a series of letter from the sickly, seventeen year old Tsuruyo written to her brother, Shinkichi, who's convalescing at a tuberculosis sanatorium. She writes to him how things have taken a turn for the worst back at home when their older brother and head of the family, Daisuke, returns home from the war. Daisuke returned with scarred, disfigured face and lost both of his eyes now replaced with glass, lifeless prosthetic eyes. Yes, the character with the disfigured, sometimes masked face often turn up in Japanese detective fiction and is something of a stock character. I again refer to Yokomizo's The Inugami Clan or Yukito Ayatsuji's Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988). This becomes a problem as not everyone is entirely sure the scarred man who returned from war is actually Daisuke. And causes an ever increasing strain on the family, until people begin to die. Starting with an apparent tragic accident, but soon culminates in a couple of bloody, gruesome murders told in a series of news paper clippings.

When the murders appear to have resolved themselves, Tsuruyo becomes one of the most tragic one-shot detective when she realizes the shattering truth behind the family murders. What she realizes certainly can be called a vintage, first-rate Golden Age plot, but the most striking is the grim, dark nature of the whole story. Not a spark of hope or an upbeat note to be found. A good, solid detective story nonetheless. A genuine bonus!

So, yes, I very much enjoyed Yokomizo's Murder at the Black Cat Cafe and Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? They're a bit more offbeat and different, compared to the previous translations, but that has more to do with their shorter length and the diminished role of Kosuke Kindaichi than the quality of the plots. A welcome addition to my increasingly crammed shelve of Japanese detective fiction. I look forward to the next Yokomizo translation, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), coming next year.

As if By Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes (2025) edited by Martin Edwards

If you regularly check in on this blog, you probably noticed my all encompassing, all consuming addiction undying love for impossible crime fiction and it tends to dominate the blog, despite trying to keep everything varied and interesting – only to keep slipping into a brown study of locked room mysteries. After the galore of miracle murders from the previous three reviews, I elected to pick an anthology of short stories next that reflects the scope and richness of the traditional detective story. I picked Martin Edwards' latest anthology from the British Library Crime Classics series, As if By Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes (2025). And, yes, I'm well aware it's an anthology of locked room and impossible crime short stories, but that's just a coincidence/unimportant detail/you being needlessly difficult. You can pick your excuse today!

As if By Magic is the second impossible crime-themed anthology Edwards has put together following Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). So a followup was long overdue and knew this second anthology was coming, but tempered my expectations until I knew its content. I had some mixed results with locked room anthologies over year, which is partially my own fault.

I have been fishing in the pool of uncollected, rarely anthologized short impossible crime stories for years and even have an irregular blog-series "Locked and Loaded" (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) dedicated to them. So when an anthology appears, like David Stuart Davies' Classic Locked Room Mysteries (2016) or Otto Penzler's Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), the selection of stories can underwhelming with very little new to offer. Well, an early and promising review on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel confirmed As if By Magic collected a host of obscure, rarely reprinted stories alongside a number of the usual suspects – like "THE FINEST SHORT STORY EVER WRITTEN!" (Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood," 1947). So immediately ordered a copy!

Martin Edwards' As if By Magic collects sixteen short stories of which the following eight have been read and reviewed on this blog before: L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "The Warder of the Door" (1898), James Ronald's "Too Many Motives" (1930), John Dickson Carr's "The Wrong Problem" (1936), Margery Allingham's "The Border-Line Case" (1937), Vincent Cornier's "The Shot That Waited" (1947), Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood" (reviewed with "The Wrong Problem"), Julian Symons' "As if By Magic" (1961) and Christianna Brand's "Murder Game" (1968). So, for the sake of brevity, I'll be skipping those seven stories and go over the remaining Eight. Eight out of sixteen for a modern locked room anthology is not a bad score for me. My only real complaint is that Edwards opted for "The Wrong Problem" and "The Shot That Waited" instead of Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle" (1939) and Cornier's "Dust of Lions" (1933). One day, one day...

So that makes the first story under examination E.C. Bentley's "The Ordinary Hairpins," originally published in the October, 1916, issue of the Strand Magazine, in which Philip Trent is commissioned to paint a portrait of Lord Aviemore. Trent had previously done a sketch of Lord Aviemore's late sister-in-law, Lillemor Wergeland, who disappeared from a ship following the death of her husband and son – written off as a suicide by drowning. Or was it murder? Trent becomes interested in the cold case and, over the course of months, slowly follows the trail to an obvious conclusion. Better written than plotted and a weak pick for an impossible crime anthology. Fortunately, the next one is a minor gem that has been on my wishlist for ages.

Will Scott's "The Vanishing House" was culled from a "highly-regarded," but out-of-print collection of short stories entitled Giglamps (1924). Douglas G. Greene, co-founder of Crippen & Landru, praised this "collection of short stories about a tramp who sometimes act as detective runs afoul of the law himself" – saying "I have seldom enjoyed a book more than Giglamps." This particular short story has been on my wishlist ever since coming across it in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Where the impossibility is concerned, "The Vanishing House" didn't disappoint. A story that follows Giglamps on a very strange night when he goes to sleep in an old, abandoned barn and wakes up to find that someone has swapped his worn, dirty boots with brand new ones. Not wanting to stick around, Giglamps flees the barn and stumbles through the dark, until spotting a lighted window several hours later. However, Giglamps overhears a conversation, "if yer catch anythin' listenin', shoot it," convincing him to trod on, but has to return to the house when someone is killed on its doorstep. So goes off to fetch a policeman.

When he returns to the house with a village constable in tow, the scene appears to have impossibly altered. There's no body in front of the house, but a body is found half a mile away. So it appears someone moved the body between Giglamps witnessing the murder and returning with the police, but the victim is still clutching a clump of grass ("...if they move him it tears away"). That suggests the house that stood there was either miraculously vanished or moved without leaving traces ("cottages can't walk, my lad—not in these parts"). The solution not only makes "The Vanishing House" a gem of the 1920s impossible crime story, but for me a highlight of this anthology. I hope Martin Edwards is pestering the British Library to get Giglamps reprinted.

Anthony Wynne's "The Gold of Tso-Fu," originally published in the February, 1926, issue of Flynn's Magazine, begins with nerve specialist and amateur detective Dr. Eustace Hailey dropping by at the China Bank offices of Sir Thomas Evans – who had asked him to come to discuss an urgent matter. Barely arrived, Dr. Hailey is informed something terrible has happened and is brought to ornately-decorated, almost surrealistic room in the bank building dominated by "a huge effigy in freshly gilded wood" of "some oriental deity seated on his throne." Underneath the throne was the body of Mr. Harrier, one of the bank directors, who had been stabbed to death. However, the door of the room had been under constant observation from the time Harrier had entered the room to the moment the murder was discovered. Nobody was seen going, or coming out, during that time. Even stranger, Sir Thomas begins to act unhinged from admitting to having committed the murder and challenging Dr. Hailey ("I have set you a puzzle to solve") to drawing a gun. So a very promising and puzzling opening, but Wynne's unable to sustain this is in the second-half of the story as the plot succumbs to its pulp trappings with a very gimmicky, time-worn locked room-trick and solution. That while there's a much better, much more elegant possibility staring you in the face. Not one of Wynne's finest locked room mysteries.

Hal Pink's "The Two Flaws," a six-page short short, was syndicated in numerous newspapers in 1934 and has Inspector Wenshall explaining to Superintendent Carson how the murder of Clive Burgess is a simple, open-and-shut case – everything points to Marriott, victim's business, as the culprit. Burgess was found seated behind his desk of his locked office with key lying on the table with the other two keys belonging to Marriott and the landlord ("...he is in Germany"). Burgess also left an unfinished dying message on the writing pad reading "M-A-R" ("what more do you want?"). Superintendent Carson, along with the reader, spots the locked room-trick that was evidently employed and exposes the two fatal flaws to ensnare the murderer. So not the most original locked room mystery, but competent and good enough for a short short. I found it interesting that the locked room scenario was used to frame an innocent man without locking him inside the office with the victim.

Ernest Dudley's "The Case of the Man Who Was Too Clever," first published in Meet Dr. Morelle (1943) and reprinted in Dr. Morelle Elucidates (2010), brings Dr. Morelle and his secretary, Miss Frayle, to a block of flats to visit a friend, but screams coming from the next door flap draws him into a murder case. They find a Mr. Collins banging on the locked door of his bathroom, calling to his wife, but she doesn't answer and so they break down the door. What they find is Diana Collins dead from an overdose of laudanum. Dr. Morelle looks straight through the suicide setup and makes short work of Collins. Even though the explanation of how Collins worked the locked bathroom setup is dull and unimaginative, it could have been tremendously improved with an honest story title. Something like "The Case of the Man Who Was Really Stupid" or "The Case of the Dumb Murderer," because Collins really wanted that meet and greet with Albert Pierrepoint.

Grenville Robbins' "The Broadcast Body," originally published in the June, 1936, issue of The 20-Story Magazine, should have been the standout of this anthology. The premise is fantastic in every sense of the word! Professor John Manfred invites his nephew to attend a private experiment with a revolutionary invention that's going to change the world forever, the Body Broadcaster. Professor Manfred is going to broadcast his bodily self from his laboratory at Hampstead to his brother's laboratory at Dulwich. A machine that can "actually broadcast solid bodies through the ether" and "goods can be broadcast as easily as men and women." An epoch-making, history altering invention, but, of course, something goes wrong during the test run. The professor climbs inside a sealed box, crammed with machinery, gadgets and a transmitter, which is followed by an explosion and the professor has disappeared – an explosion happened simultaneously at the laboratory at Dulwich. Only without him emerging before his brother as intended. So was he now "wandering in a disembodied state in some curious fourth dimension" or is there a natural, much more mundane explanation? In this case, the answer, unfortunately, is yes. The solution is simply dropped into the nephew's lap and how the professor escaped from the room just feels like a cheat. A real pity as the setup is fantastic, but liked the historical snippet mentioning television.

Funnily enough, "The Broadcast Body" was published in the same year as E.R. Punshon's The Bath Mysteries (1936) that also mentions and shows an early and experimental television set.

Michael Gilbert's "The Coulman Handicap," originally appearing in the April, 1958, issue of Argosy, takes a procedural approach to the problem poses by a seemingly impossible, inexplicable vanishing act. Detective Sergeant Petrella is part of a twenty-four men team observing, tailing and hopefully trapping a notoriously slippery go-between thieves and fences, Mrs. Coulman. And keeps a cut as a service fee ("just like a literary agent"). Petrella is close on her heels when she slips inside a bar with only entrance/exit and disappears into thin air. Gilbert gave me a little hope by apparently eliminating the obvious, disappointing type of explanation for these kind of vanishing acts, only to reveal it's just a variation on that type of solution. Other than the uninspiring ending, the opening was very good and liked the idea of an impossible disappearance disrupting, what should have been, a routine police operation.

This anthology ends, for me, on a high note with the next story. Geoffrey Bush, son of Christopher Bush, was a composer, musical scholar and a member of the Carr Society who famously gave Edmund Crispin the idea for the most famous of all short shorts, "Who Killed Baker?" (1950). "The Last Meeting of the Butlers Club," published in the March, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is Bush's hilarious take on the glorious of the detective story of yesteryear and "the wave of weekend country-house murders that swept over England in the '20s and '30s." What is to become the last meeting of the Butlers Club is attended by a handful of the last, aging members of ex-butlers who pooled their modest inheritances from their generous employers to get a taste of the good life. So they begin to reminiscence about the good, old days and the times they were nearly arrested for murdering their generous employers. But every time the policeman wanted to put on the handcuffs, a gifted amateur detective appeared scoffing at the idea that the butler did it. Whether it was Dr. John Thorndyke and Philo Vance to Lord Peter Wimsey and Father Brown, they always appeared to bail out the butler with a ludicrous solutions. A marvelous piece of genre parody that can be compared to other locked room satires like Morton Wolson's "The Glass Room" (1957), John Sladek's "The Locked Room" (1972) and, of course, Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936).

So, as always, As if By Magic is a mixed bag of tricks with Scott's "The Vanishing House" and Bush's "The Last Meeting of the Butlers Club" being my personal favorites and liked Pink's "The Two Flows," as a competent obscurity, but found the remaining short stories lacking – especially when it comes to the locked rooms/impossible crimes. That's where this anthology, as an anthology of locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, comes up short. However, I only read half of the stories and skipped some of the better picks by Allingham, Brand, Carr and Cornier which would have balanced out the overall quality of the selection. And maybe I'm demanding of these types of locked room anthologies, because (ROT13) qvfthvfrf, fgrccvat bhg (gevpx) jvaqbjf naq xavsr-fcvggvat fgnghrf isn't doing it for me. Well, that should teach me not to write the introduction before finishing the book.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024) by Benjamin Stevenson

Benjamin Stevenson, an Australian stand-up comedian and mystery author, delivered two highlights of the current Golden Age revival, Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone (2022) and Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2023), but had to wait with third Ernest Cunningham novel on account of it being a "Christmas Special" – springtime was too early (or too late) to read/review a Christmas mystery. I was tempted to put up a review of Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024) during the summer, but decided to wait until the days started to shorten.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is also a bit shorter in length than the previous two novels. Practically a novella padded with decorated pages and others as white as every Christmas Day should be, but fair's fair, it makes the hardcover edition a very wraptable present to give over the holidays. More importantly, it's as good as the first two despite being much smaller in scope and introduced a completely new, seasonally-themed gimmick. There are twenty-four chapters and twenty-three end with an illustration of a small, opened door or window revealing the clue from that chapter. So like an advent calendar of clues!

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret begins a week before Christmas and Ernest is busy with Juliette planning their wedding when Ernest receives a plea for help from his ex-wife, Erin, who's been arrested on suspicion of murdering her new partner, Lyle Pearse – an ex-Hollywood actor turned philanthropist. Erin had woken up that morning to discover she was covered in blood, a bloody knife at the top of the stairs and Pearse lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. A dying message, "CHRISTMAS," scrawled on the floor with a bloody finger. So, having solved two murder sprees, Ernest travels to Katoomba to try prove Erin's innocence, but that's not as easy as she "stuck with the worst version of the story." That version involves first, of two, impossible situations Ernest encounters on his third case. Erin listens to white noise to fall asleep, "Tokyo Railway in the Rain," but she remains a very light sleeper. So, if the murder was a frame job, how could the murderer have dumped blood on Erin without waking her up? Admittedly, the impossibility is not as self apparent as described, kept wondering why Ernest called it an impossible murder, but the ending made it very apparent it can be counted as an impossible crime. And not a bad one, either! Just not as clearly stated as it could have been, however, the best is yet to come.

Lyle Pearse's abandoned his acting career and returned to Australia following the death of his brother, overdosed on bad drugs, which drove him to create a foundation to help ex-addicts get back on their feet – creating "long-lasting reform" by igniting passion. So many of the foundation's graduates of the program ended up working in theaters build by the foundation like The Pearse Theater in Katoomba. Every year, they have a tour with all of their success stories ending with a black-tie Christmas finale in Katoomba.

This year, the tour finale, now memorial, is headlined by the victim's friend and stage magician, Rylan Blaze. The big illusion of the night is a combination of the guillotine and bullet-catch trick. But by that time, Ernest has picked up enough bits and pieces of what could be clues that he believes the wax bullet had been swapped for a real bullet. And rushes the stage causing absolute pandemonium. Blaze is effectively trapped inside the guillotine, because the gun with presumably a live round has a laser trigger activated by movement. When the timer hits zero and the blade drops, Blaze's head rolled over the stage! Something that should be impossible, because the dangerous looking blade is nothing more than "flimsy paper." Ernest has his work cutout with two murders, two impossible crimes, a bloody dying messages, stockings worth of clues and a cast of suspects comprising of the magician's assistant, a stagehand, a hypnotist, twins and even a dead guy.

Now this probably doesn't sound a whole lot smaller in scope, or shorter, than the previous two novels, but it really is about the half shorter. Stevenson simply spun a great deal of complexity out of an ultimately simple case with skill and humor. Not just depending on the two impossible situation to give weight and bulk to the plot.

Firstly, there are the everyone and secrets from the book title. A festive, tinseled web of secrets complicating everything and beautifully making use of Christmas traditions, old and new. Secondly, gimmicky as it sounds, the advent calendar guarantees a richly-clued, fair play detective story with the clues forming, as John Dickson Carr described it, a pattern of evidence that, when put together, reveals the whole design – which is the hallmark of great detective fiction. So the advent calendar gimmick made the clueing even better. Not to mention Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret fulfills its obligation to actually do something with the story's holiday theme and found a way to use some Christmas traditions, old and new, to tell a detective story. And, yes, the solution to the impossible decapitation on stage is grand. Not terribly complicated or disappointingly simple and fairly original when it comes to inexplicable beheadings topped off with a memorable denouement when Ernest begins to eliminate his suspects, until the murderer remains. Where and how it happens is what makes it memorable. That poor guy is starting to look like a battered warhorse!

So as a modern, retro-GAD detective novel, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is a treat for the holidays with nothing to complain or nitpick about. Beside the story and an excellent plot, the main attraction of the series remains Ernest Cunningham as the narrator ("reliable narrator here"). Well, that and the return to the plotting standards of the Golden Age, but have taken a real liking to Ernest's narrative style. Like giving spoilers of what's ahead in the story, but his spoilers have all the quality of a wish granted by a monkey's paw. There's always a catch or twist. So to say I enjoyed Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret would be an understatement and had I read it last year, it would have easily made "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories." If reading Christmas mysteries is one of your December traditions, Stevenson's Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is as good as they come. I very much look forward to Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026).