Black Lake Manor (2022) by Guy Morpuss

For years, Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, has been running an irregular, sporadic series of blog-posts, "A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat," delving into the impossible crime fiction mostly published outside of the circle of the traditionalists crime writers – results have varied wildly. From the fairly average and interesting, but flawed, to the terrible and unspeakably awful (e.g. Andrew Mayne's Angel Killer, 2014). So you can Jim's reviews have been mostly "BEWARE OF HACKS" warning signs, however, one of the reviews looked promising.

Last year, Jim reviewed an ambitious, wildly imaginative hybrid mystery novel, Black Lake Manor (2022) by Guy Morpuss, which mixes the traditional detective story with futuristic technology and a drop of native magic.

If you have followed this blog in recent years, you know I've been bitten by the hybrid mystery bug. I suppose you can trace this newfound obsession back to discovering the science-fiction mysteries by John Russell Fearn and Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942), but the Japanese shin honkaku hybrid mysteries really inflamed it. A trend that started with Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Death, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) which tosses actual zombies inside, what would have otherwise been, fairly normal detective novels. Letting the undead loose inside a traditionally-styled, fair play mystery is not merely a novelty to put a new spin on things, but it allowed the authors to put an entirely new dimension on the detective story and its many tropes – like the isolated setting and locked room mystery. Takekuni Kitayama's time-bending reincarnation mystery Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) and Kie Houjou's "Ryuuzen Clan" series that closed the deal and sold me on hybrid mysteries.

They're also the reason why I hesitated picking up Morpuss' Black Lake Manor. Jim praised Black Lake Manor for "being mind-and genre-bending stuff in the best way" and the comment "not even sure if thus is an impossible crime novel at all" adding more intrigue. But could it be as good as Houjou's Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) and Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022). Well, I was in the mood for a hybrid mystery and it was either Edward D. Hoch's The Frankenstein Factory (1975) or Black Lake Manor, but have already reviewed several of Hoch's short stories and collections recently. So why not take Jim up on one of his risky recommendations, but where to even begin?

Black Lake Manor takes place across a period of nearly 250 years, stretching from 1804 to 2045, but all take place around Black Lake Manor on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. So I'll gloss over a lot of background details and characters in order to avoid massive spoilers and keep this post from resembling a bloated canal corpse.

This sprawling, ambitious story begins in 1804 when a storm wrecked a ship, Pride of Whitby, in Pachena Bay and only seven men made it to shore, but they had guided their lifeboat into the mouth of the cave when "a roar from overhead had heralded the collapse of the cliff face" – which trapped them inside. The main storyline is interspersed with short, to the point chapters following their harrowing ordeal. The next dozen, or so, chapters skip between 2023, 2025 and 2045 to introduce the hybrid elements to this detective story with the two most important (for the purpose of this review) characters being Lincoln Shan and his ex-fiance, Ella Manning.

Lincoln Shan is a member of the Akaht First Nations band, of Vancouver Island, some of whom have a special ability, only once in their lifetime, to turn back time six hours by saying kuwitap ("...and the wolf ate time"). Lincoln used this one-time ability in 2025 to earn a small fortune and setup of his own tech company, Orcus Technology. Twenty years later, Lincoln has become a tech billionaire whose company owned half of British Columbia and "more oil rigs than most small nations," despite presenting himself to the world as an eco-warrior.

In 2045, Lincoln's company had made a huge breakthrough in hard light research. They had overcome the one major problem with hard light, "ridiculous amounts of power required to turn photons into something solid," which they succeeded in making portable. Now all you need to create a hard light, life sized copy of yourself is a small, white disk costing only five cents to produce. Lincoln calls them ghost dancers, a nod to his Akaht heritage, demonstrates them at an exclusive get together at Black Lake Manor. Where most of the hundreds of guests present are ghost dancers with the actual people being scattered all over the world, but a storm provides a far more effective demonstration of how realistic the ghost dancers are when it takes out the data connection. Just like that, the guests disappeared, "champagne flutes and wine glasses crashing to the floor, followed by a flutter of white discs," leaving only a handful of real people behind at the manor – nicely setting the stage for murder. Lincoln's body is found the next morning in his locked office under circumstances resembling a ritual sacrifice!

I already omitted a lot of details, and characters, and there's not much that can be told pass this point without treading into spoiler territory. So let me first try to answer Jim's question: is this actually an impossible crime novel? My answer: probably. Black Lake Manor obviously is not a straightforward impossible crime where locked doors, closed windows and CCTV footage create a locked room murder or impossible crime, but the circumstances surrounding and leading up to the murder. So more of an impossible crime in retrospect, when you get the full picture, which perhaps has gotten a bit lost in the wealth of ideas. I suppose you can compare it to the granddaddy of hybrid mysteries, The Caves of Steel (1953/54) by Isaac Asimov, which technically counts as a locked room mystery, but labeling it as one is sort of misrepresenting it. The Caves of Steel and Black Lake Manor blended genres which may, or may not, have led to an incidental impossible crime or two. For example, Lincoln was followed into his study by a ghost dancer, apparently providing an easy solution, but the ghost dancers have a no-harm constraint similar to Asimov's First Law of Robotics from The Caves of Steel. When you toss in some electronic, automatically sealing door locks, possibility of AI operated ghost dancers and time manipulations, you can understand why it's status as an impossible crime is not entirely clear.

That surprised and pleased me the most. I was a little bit skeptical and hardly expected it would be on the same level of the aforementioned Japanese hybrid mysteries, which have already spoiled me, but Morpuss and Black Lake Manor more than held their own! Morpuss deserves a ton of credit for the clarity he brings to an ambitiously structured detective story playing around with multiple timelines, time resets and futuristic technology by telling only what important to the story or relevant to the plot. So the story doesn't get bogged down by having to explain what can be done with the tech or how time-bending ability works at its core, which still got a banger of an ending out of it with a solution. Showing the hybrid mystery unlocks all kind of doors previously closed for the classically-styled detective story. Let me tell you, the nitty, gritty technical aspect of murder makes for a darkly comical visual image and the second time one of these bizarre detective novels made me laugh at someone getting brutally murdered. That's not even the best or most surprising part of the solution! More importantly, Morpuss didn't neglect to drop some clues and red herrings, while manipulating and toying around with time rewinds and hard light tech.

So the only thing to nitpick about is that Morpuss has not only setup a series, but a whole world, he's unlikely to return to. From what I gathered, Morpuss writes standalones exploring his favorite theme, "a twist on reality, and playing with the consequences," which started with Five Minds (2021) in which five people share one body – "possibly with a murderer." A Trial in Three Acts (2025) looks to be a cross between the theatrical, Golden Age-style mystery and a courtroom drama. Sounds suspiciously normal, but it's about an on-stage decapitation and may, or may not, be another impossible crime. Well, only one way to find out.

I know I'm risking creating a rift in the space-time continuum, but this has to be second or third time I end up 100% agreeing with Jim. Black Lake Manor is fantastic in every definition of the word. Highly recommended!