Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist (2025) by P. Dieudonné

Earlier this month, E-Pulp released P. Dieudonné's thirteenth novel in the Rotterdam police series, Rechercheur De Klerck en de dode weldoener (Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist, 2025), set during those cold, dark days between Sinterklaas and Christmas – when the strangest cases happen in the Netherlands. At least, that's what A.C. Baantjer tried to make happen in De Cock en een dodelijke dreiging (DeKok and the Deadly Threat, 1988), but it never got anywhere. So good to see Dieudonné giving it another try with Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist.

This curious case begins innocently enough with an elderly, obviously lonely woman, Neeltje van Kwawegen, calling the police to report that her beloved Tom has gone missing. She can't bear the thought of spending Christmas without him and even accuses her neighbor of murder. Albert Cornelis de Waal, a young cop, takes pity and answers the call. When he arrives at her apartment, De Waal indeed finds a lonely, elderly woman living a dozen, or so, cats. Neeltje's beloved Tom is indeed a tomcat who has gone missing. I was only half joking when ending the review of the previous De Klerck novel hoping the thirteenth would be titled Rechercheur De Klerck en de dertien katten (Inspector De Klerck and the Thirteen Cats), because it would be too tempting not to do for a Baantjer fan. Dieudonné is the Baantjer fan. Not that I expected this book to actually feature a dozen, plus one, cats. Let's return to the story.

Neeltje is a deeply superstitious woman, referring to the number thirteen as "a dozen plus one," who believes Tom's disappearance is a bad omen as the tomcat was her fourteenth feline and she's now left with a dozen, plus one – bound to bring misfortune ("...expect death and destruction"). What else can the kindly De Waal do, except to promise to look around for Tom? Next day, Inspectors Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver are called to the same apartment complex where a prominent, dying citizen of Rotterdam is found brutally murdered in his own home.

Waldemar van Henegouwen was a well-known, beloved city philanthropist whose charity, Weldaad aan de Maas, dedicated to help the poorer people of the city and terminally ill children. It earned him a knighthood and numerous other prestigious awards. Van Henegouwen was dying himself with only a month, or two, left to live, but why kill a terminal ill, dying man? Why use a harpoon to run him through to leave him pinned to the chair? Someone is laboring very hard this December on their ponderous chain! And the strangeness doesn't end there. When reviewing the security footage, De Klerck and Klaver not only spot their colleague De Waal, but someone dressed up as the Grinch in Santa Claus custom. Klaver is shocked by the costumed figure, because only the night before he had attended a benefit show organized by Van Henegouwen's charity. A comedy-magic act by Felix Froentjes and his sons, Floris en Frans-Jan, who performed a magic portal-trick with them dresses as the Grinch's Santa Claus. Felix Frientjes was Van Henegouwen's best friend and Frans-Jan was a former tenant who got kicked out for being a nuisance, but is there connection with the murder? There's also two handymen with a criminal records, Neeltje's cat hating neighbor, the missing cat and a Commissioner De Froideville who's being more difficult than usual.

Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist is as packed as a Christmas stocking filled with more than one surprise and definitely marks a return to form after the uncharacteristic messily plotted Rechercheur De Klerck en de stille hoop (Inspector De Klerck and the Silent Hope, 2025). Dieudonné is definitely back to his old tricks here with the exterior of the story belying the intricate scheme and plot cleverly hidden underneath. When it comes to the conclusion, the temptation is there to draw comparison to some of the Golden Age names, but here it would constitute a spoiler. That solution can be worked out, roughly speaking, by the time De Klerck pieces the whole thing together. And it turns out the missing cat had a not unimportant role to play in this Christmas drama. So perhaps the book really should have been titled Rechercheur De Klerck and de dertiende kat (Inspector De Klerck and the Thirteenth Cat), but in every other way it can stand with the best in the series like Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020) and Rechercheur De Klerck en moord in scène (Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene, 2021). You can definitely expect Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist to get a spot on a future followup to "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories."

There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940) by Michael Innes

Last year, I posted "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories" ranging from a few celebrated classics (Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas, 1938) and a couple of recent reprints (Rupert Latimer's Murder After Christmas, 1944) to more modern titles (James Yaffe's Mom Meets Her Maker, 1990) and even a fresh one (A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes, 2023) – sprinkled with a few short stories (Herbert Resnicow's "The Christmas Bear," 1990). Nick Fuller, of the Grandest Game in the World, turned up in the comments to suggest a few alternatives like G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Stars" (1911), Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936) and Michael Innes' There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940). I had read the Chesterton story and Mitchell novel, but not the Innes novel. So tossed it on the December pile for this year.

There Came Both Mist and Snow, published in the US as A Comedy of Terrors, is the fifth novel in the Inspector John Appleby series and the first to establish a formula. The late Wyatt James wrote on the GADWiki that There Came Both Mist and Snow was the first Innes "cloned over and over again" with "odd folks in a decayed, or not so decaying but threatened, fancy house" tucked away somewhere in rural England. A formula that nonetheless lends itself perfectly for a family Christimas mystery, which just so happened to be mentioned in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Not that it influenced my choice, of course. It's not even an impossible crime at all. So, really, this one is for you, Nick!

Arthur Ferryman, "fashionable contemporary novelist," is on his way to Belrive Priory to spend Christmas with his cousin Sir Basil Roper and their extended family, mostly "cousinly relationships," while doing narration duty. So the first half dozen chapters has Ferryman describing the surroundings, introducing the family and indulges, in what can be deemed, literary flourishes – peppered with archaic words and pretentious phrases ("...desuetude of agriculture"). Not exactly a good beginning to convince those who find Innes too dense and at times pedantic to be truly enjoyable. A style, I think, worked best in his early, magniloquent detective fantasies like Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) and Lament for a Maker (1938), but its effectiveness varies in a conventional country house mystery. So the chapters leading up to the crime can be a slog to get through, but even then the preamble was not without its moments. In the first chapter, Ferryman gives a description of the historical surroundings, "park, mansion and ruins," where the modern world is already taking root. Notably the giant, flickering mechanical neon sign of Horace Cudbird's brewery, "Cudbird's Beers are Best," which has become something of a local attraction and landmark. Casting a futuristic play of light, color and moving shadows on its surroundings that people watch from their terrace.

One other scene worth mentioning is the ill-fated attempt at an impromptu parlor game, Shakespeare's bells, which revolves around quotations from Shakespeare involving bells ("who can keep Shakespeare's bells ringing longest?"). Since most of Shakespeare's bells toll for the departed, this "literary competition" lost its lighthearted touch to a funereal atmosphere. It probably also didn't help that revolver shooting was picked as another game to living up the Christmas party. So, yes, the first-half moves very slowly and feels directionless, until one of the cousins is shot and wounded. Wilfred Foxcroft, a banker, is shot while writing a letter in his uncle's study shortly before the arrival of Sir Basil's mystery guest, Inspector John Appleby, who immediately takes charge of the case.

The attempted murder gives the story and plot some much needed focus and direction, because the shooting poses a number of tricky questions besides the routine ones. Who was the intended target, Wilfred or Sir Basil? Could the shooter have mistaken Wilfred for his uncle when he was sitting at his desk? Both were dressed in "the sort of uniform that a dinner-jacket constitutes." Why was Wilfred so imperfectly shot and what happened to the gun? Like I said, the problem of the gun is not an impossible crime as reported, it could have been tweaked into an impossible crime, but it would have neither been good nor particular satisfying – underwhelming at best. Innes smartly invested in another aspect of the plot that allowed the story to largely pull itself together in the second-half.

Ferryman gets roped in by Appleby to help, "as a sort of Watson," who gets to hear "seven principal theories sponsored by seven different people" in the tradition of Anthony Berkeley and Christianna Brand. Not all of the false-solutions are worthy of the comparison as they merely more than accusations or simplicity itself, but the last four, or so, are an exercise in the art of plotting and writing in giving original explanations for the all-important, imperfect shot. Even more impressively, Innes clued or foreshadowed every one of these false-solutions. I gladly would have accepted either Cudbird or Appleby's false-solution as correct solution to the case. Unfortunately, the correct solution is disappointing lacking the imaginative originality of the false-solutions preceding it. Not the first time one, or more, false-solutions undermine the ending of a detective story, but here it was more damaging as it needed a punchy conclusion after a rough, directionless first-half and the promise of its second-half pulling itself together.

There Came Both Mist and Snow is not without its moments, qualities or flashes of ingenuity, but, on a whole, too uneven to be truly good or recommend. The problem is in the first-half and the ending. The crawl that is the first-half is a test patience, which is deadly for a lighthearted country house mystery, but following up that parade of imaginative false-solutions with an explanation lacking all of their qualities is bound to disappoint – especially one (ROT13) erqhpvat gur fubbgvat vg gb n qhzo nppvqrag. Innes should have gone with Appleby's false-solution and called it a day. I suggest trying What Happened at Hazelwood (1946) instead.

I don't want to give up on Innes and Stop Press (1939) sounds like a trip, but Nick Fuller added a warning to his review that somehow feels directed at me. Stop Press is according to Nick an acquired taste and some readers might hate it, "particulary those who read little but detective fiction, and who read only for plot." That's not entirely true, but wholly incorrect either. So maybe A Private View (1952) or The Bloody Wood (1966) next?

The Clock House Murders (1991) by Yukito Ayatsuji

Pushkin Vertigo has, as of 2025, published four novels in Yukito Ayatsuji's "Bizarre House Mysteries" series, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, but the most recent addition to the list, Tokeikan no satsujin (The Clock House Murders, 1991), is the fifth title in the series – not the fourth. Ningyōkan no satsujin (The Doll House Murders, 1989), fourth in the series, provides "a change from the formula up until now" and therefore skipped over The Clock House Murders. That and Ayatsuji was really keen on getting The Clock House Murders published in English. Ayatsuji even suggested to Ho-Ling translating it after Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988) and before Meirokan no satsujin (The Labyrinth House Murders, 1988). I don't think I would have minded either way, because The Clock House Murders always seemed like a potential personal favorite in the offing. I wasn't wrong!

You know you're in for a treat when the book opens to a pair of floor plans with all the elaborate intricacies and complexities of clockwork mechanics. Not to mention a dramatis personae of more than thirty characters and a list of chapter titles promising Ayatsuji's signature dueling narratives.

The Clock House, in Kamakura, is one of the bizarre, gimmicked buildings designed by that eccentric architect, Nakamura Seiji, who had an acquired taste when it came to designing private dwellings. A specialist in designing "out-of-the-ordinary buildings" and every building "has some kind of concealed novelty," which had seen "a number of bloody incidents" since his grisly death four years ago – written down in Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987). That specialization attracted a special set of clientele with their own special, or peculiar, wishes and quirks. Clock House was commissioned by Koga Michinori, former chairman of Koga Clocks, who has a valuable collection of 108 antique clocks stored away in a place as strange as the underground maze of rooms from The Labyrinth House Murders. You need the floor plans to get a clear picture of the layout, but basically comprises of two sections, the New Wing and Old Wing, separated by two sets of double iron doors. The former is the most normal part of the house, outside of the clock tower locals call the "whimsical clock," but the latter is a Nakamura Seiji vintage creation. A semi-basement, quasi-circular webwork design of windowless rooms, twisted corridors and dead ends crammed with ticking clocks. And, most notably, a private living quarters semi-attached to the wing by a long hallway called the Pendulum.

So the building itself is already a puzzle box waiting to be explored and picked apart, but the Clock House became the scene of tragedy and mystery soon after the New Wing was completed. Koga Michinori died shortly after and "a lot of other people died at around the same time." Most tragically of all was the death of Koga's 14-year-old daughter, Towa, whose ghost now reputedly haunts the house and roaming the surrounding forest. The people currently in charge of the house always denied requests from spiritualists, ghost hunters and the media to poke around the place, until now.

Kawaminami Takaaki, previously appearing in The Decagon House Murders, is the rookie editor of Chaos ("The Magazine That Goes beyond Science") and working on a special feature, "Confronting the Ghost of the Kamakura Clock Mansion." Chaos and a famous psychic, Kōmyōji Mikoto, secured permission to lead an expedition into the abandoned Old Wing – where they'll locked themselves in for three days. This expedition comprises of the Kawaminami, his editor-in-chief, a photographer, the medium and six members students from the Mystery Club of W— University. Not a Mystery Club interested in detective fiction, but "the supernatural kind of mystery." Since the Clock House is a creation of that eccentric architect, Kawaminami tells his friend and amateur detective, Shimada Kiyoshi, about the ghost hunting expedition.

Ever since The Decagon House Murders, Shimada Kiyoshi has been researching Nakamura Seiji's work and traveled "across the country to examine the buildings he left" such as the Mill House in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture. Shimada arrives at the Clock House when Kawaminami's group had already locked themselves inside the Old Wing. So he's left prying into the mysteries surrounding the house from the New Wing without being aware of the wholesale slaughter going on inside the securely locked Old Wing. So there you have the dueling narrative between Shimada's outside perspective of the case and Kawaminami on-the-ground reporting. What ended in a small scale massacre started innocently enough: a séance with all the standard trickery of ghostly knocks and a candle suddenly going out "as if an invisible person had suddenly pinched the wick," but then Kōmyōji vanishes without a trace from the locked wing. And then the gruesome killing begins with no way out or way to contact the other wing ("this house was designed to keep people locked inside").

Some of those murders are, of course, of the seemingly impossible kind where the killer strikes down the victims inside locked and barricaded rooms. However, the locked room murders here are only small cogs in the larger machinery that's The Clock House Murders. Not at all the focus of the story and plot, nor what makes it the most impressive of the "Bizarre House Mysteries," so far. So don't expect grandiose, overly elaborate locked room-tricks, whatever the floor plans might suggest, but something more subtle and closer to Agatha Christie than S.S. van Dine or John Dickson Carr.

The Clock House Murders is ultimately a first-rate whodunit hinging on something entirely different than locked doors and inexplicable disappearances. Ayatsuji deserves praise for how fairly he played out everything, even if it threatened to reveal too much. One incident stands out that made me glance in the direction of the murderer, but it's always better to play fairly than withhold vital clues. Ayatsuji understands that. Not only when it comes to the who, but the motive and method as well. Leave it to a Japanese mystery writer to use a small massacre as a red herring! Just on that score alone, The Clock House Murders is practically an immaculate, classically-style detective novel taken to the extreme. That would have made for an impressive, plot-technical achievement and storytelling, but what made The Clock House Murders the stuff of classics is the secret of the house itself. And what made all those murders in the locked wing possible.

I have described certain stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series as “puzzles-with-a-heart” and can be applied to The Clock House Murders, but for very different reasons as the stories from Q.E.D. are character-driven mysteries in which a person is the puzzle – while here we have a plot-oriented variant of puzzles-with-a-heart. I found that truly impressive. Most locked room fans prefer the Chesterton-Carr approach to the impossible crime problem over technical solutions involving strings or mechanical devices, because they tend to be the most satisfying (i.e. misdirection over mechanics). Successfully combining the two is a rare achievement indeed with the real horror of the story not being the haunting, or murders, but learning how all that came crashing down in tragedy, upon tragedy, culminating in wholesale bloodshed. The Clock House Murder is to Ayatsuji what The Three Coffins (1935) is to Carr or And Then There Were None (1939) to Christie. A 400 page gold brick of a detective novel and look forward to Kuronekokan no satsujin (The Black Cat House Murders, 1992) coming next year!

An English Murder (1951) by Cyril Hare

An English Murder (1951) by "Cyril Hare," penname of Alfred A.G. Clark, was adapted from a radio-play, "Murder at Warbeck Hall," broadcast by the BBC on January 27, 1948 and a digest paperback was published in the US several years later – reprinted under the title The Christmas Murder. Hare's An English Murder is one of the better known, widely read holiday mysteries even before the reprint renaissance incidentally revived the Christmas detective novel.

I read Hare's An English Murder pre-blog and most of the details had faded from my memory, which is why it only got an honorable mention on "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories." Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, on the other hand gave An English Murder the second place in her "Epic Ranking of Christmas Mysteries" listing 40 titles in total. I figured a revisit was in order.

Warbeck Hall, "oldest inhabited house in Markshire," is the backdrop where the feeble, dying Lord Warbeck is preparing to celebrate, what's going to be, his last Christmas. So he has invited his last two living relatives, some acquaintances and still has a house guest, the Hungarian-born historian Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink, who's going through historical documents in the muniment room – studying developments of the English constitution during the 1700s. However, the problem is not a lingering house guest, but Lord Warbeck's relatives and trying to maintain the golden rule of no politics at Christmas. Richard Warbeck, Lord Warbeck's son, had "the misfortune to be born into the first generation of the dispossessed," because he was destined to be a lord without money or a manor. The post-WWII upheavals and austerity both cleaned out the estate and makes untenable to hold on to the manor house when Lord Warbeck passes away. So now Richard heads a Fascist organization, the League of Liberty and Justice, not unlike Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Richard sees his father's cousin, Sir Julius Warbeck, as the enemy within and the driving force behind all these changes. Sir Julius, "Chancellor of the Exchequer in the most advanced socialist government of," is an avowed democratic socialist who hates Richard and looks forward to the moment when there are "no more Warbecks of Warbeck Hall" ("the next Budget would see to that"). Even joking at breakfast he's going to put another sixpence on the income-tax.

So that all ensures a gloomy, somewhat tense and potentially hostile Christmas, but it's also a Christmas celebrated under post-war austerity. There no tree nor decorations and not a single mention of presents or Santa Claus. A dying Lord Warbeck gets to observe how the snow temporarily covered the traces of "neglect and disrepair or recent time," which were left neglected and broken due to a lack of funds. The celebration itself, a simple dinner, is not the event it once was when Briggs, loyal butler, had a kitchen staff of four and two footmen under him. An English Murder breaths atmosphere of the post-war malaise in Britain with its ongoing rationing, food shortages, housing crisis and the feeling that the fabric of British society was being unraveled. That marked a lot of the post-WWII British mysteries, especially the works of Christopher Bush and E.C.R. Lorac, but also novels like E.R. Punshon's Music Tells All (1948) and Leo Bruce's Cold Blood (1952). I don't think it has ever been as pivotal to a detective story or used as effectively than here.

Hare is confident in taking the time in this already shortish novel to introduce the characters, outline their backstories and setting up all the pieces, before getting to the murder – a dozen, or so, pages short of the halfway mark. To ring in Christmas Day, they pop a bottle of champagne at the stroke of twelve "to drink in the festive season, according to custom," but one of the glass contains a deadly dose of cyanide. And, to give it an old-fashioned touch, a snowstorm cuts them off from the outside world. So the official investigation, for the time being, falls into the hands of Sergeant Rogers, Special Branch of Scotland Yard, who had been assigned as Sir Julius' bodyguard. Dr. Bottwink is the one who, of course, pieces together the correct solution.

I think Dr. Bottwink is the best and most interesting character from An English Murder. A serious treatment of the Hercule Poirot-type detective character: an outsider to British society, a Hungarian-born Jew, whom everyone assumes is out of depth when it comes to the intricacies of English customs ("...funny little foreigner"). It's noteworthy that Dr. Bottwink is the only character who's not being skewered and satirized. He's not taken very seriously, most of the time, but comes through in the end when he gets to explain the murder is not only "an essentially English crime," it's a murder that "could only have happened in England." That brings us to the best part of the book and possibly it's sole smudge.

An English Murder has all the trappings of a country house whodunit, albeit one under austerity measures, but the question here is not one of who or how. The question here is one of motive. Dr. Bottwink explains "a motive that is valid for one form of society may be totally non-existent in another" and "the social and political framework in which it occurs" must be considered – after which finding the killer "becomes a mere matter of simple deduction." This is usually applied to the regional/topographical detective novel taking place in foreign climes. Think of writers like S.H. Courtier, Todd Downing, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield, but Hare applied it perfectly to the quintessential English country house mystery. The motive earned An English Murder its status as a minor classic. A motive as unique as it's cleverly-hidden and maybe too well-hidden for its own good. Not that Hare went out of his way to unfairly hide it and Dr. Bottwink even tells the reader, through Rogers, where to find the solution, but you have to break off the story to do some homework. That's easier done today, as you only have take out your phone to at least get a summary, but not something you should expect a reader to do. So the integral part of the solution hinges on a piece of specialized knowledge. Even that shortcoming, somehow, fits the story perfectly.

So not your typical Christmas country house mystery, like those from the vastly fading 1930s, but the ingeniously plot and original motive proving the Golden Age detective story still had a few tricks to play going into its twilight decade.

Notes for the curious: Hare died in 1958 and left behind an unfinished, untitled manuscript of a second Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink mystery novel. Martin Edwards "has read the fragment but though he praised the characteristically careful, yet easy, style, comments that it offers no hint as the direction in which the story was heading." That's another title for the list of lost detective fiction. I don't remember if I got the idea to name my blog archive "The Muniment Room" from An English Murder, but, considering the role it played in the story, the idea probably appealed to me. I probably also thought it funny the book opened with an angry, bewildered Dr. Bottwink pouring over the illegible scribbles and hieroglyphics in the muniment room and "muttered maledictions on Lord Warbeck and his ill-mended quill pen" across two centuries. You can draw your own comparisons between the writings of the historical Lord Warbeck and my reviews. 😃

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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