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).

Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025) by A. Carver

Well, it has been about a year since the publication of A. Carver's third novel in the Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow series, The Dry Diver Drownings (2024), which differed by shining the spotlight almost exclusively on Alex Corby – while her great-aunt Cornelia took a backseat. The various locked room murders and impossible situations were also less complex than those found in The Author is Dead (2022) and The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023), but that's because the story had so much more to offer than a tangle of miracle crimes neatly bundled together. From letting Alex tackle a case mostly on her own without her great-aunt at her back to the solution with a rug puller of a motive.

Carver's fourth Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow novel, Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025), is not so much change from the previous novel as it's a complete departure. Alex and Cornelia are mostly background characters, who don't really come into play until the end, but the various, double-layered locked room hangings can be meted against the dozen impossible crimes making up The Author is Dead and The Christmas Miracle Crimes.

The backdrop is the remote, extremely culturally isolated and lonely old-world English village of Hempel's Green. A place where time has difficulty getting a foothold as it "had kept the skyline clear of mobile phone masts and wind turbines, no matter what advantages they might bring." Only concession to the modern world is a "a tech shop" selling and repairing pre-millennial appliances like "fax machines, dial-up modems and brick phones." Tony Castle inherited a house from his grandparents in Hempel's Green and decided to temporarily move in to get away from personal troubles, but notices something wrong about the village and its aging, shrinking population – "desperately needing new blood" ("...but never wanting it"). Tony was taken under the wings of Miss Kathy Hark, village spinster ("...because she was maybe forty and single"), who introduced him to the village customs and some of its more normal members. So he receives the shock of his life when he drops by Kathy's house to find her body with the murderer presumably still inside. What ensues is a game of sneak and run through the house between Tony and the unseen murderer, but, when he finally comes out, Kathy is hanging from a light fixture. And the murderer escaped "through two layers of locks."

Detective Inspector John Peveril, newly transferred to Hempel's Green, believes it to be a suicide considering the body was hanging inside a locked room that's inside a locked house. Peveril's suicide theory is strengthened when Kathy's closely-guarded secrets is brought to light. A secret Tony unbeknownst shared with Kathy. Tony becomes determined to find her murderer, despite Inspector Peveril's lack of interest and joins the Knocker's Night organizing committee. Kathy was not only one of its members, but headed a faction wanting to modernize Knocker's Night in order to expand its appeal. This is, of course, opposed by a faction determined to preserve the history and traditions of Knocker's Night ("...history does not exist to be palatable"). Even without knowing the exact details of Knocker's Night, I sympathized with the traditionalist faction. Sure, add some frills and flowers to the gallows or tie nooses from multicolored ropes, but why do away with the gibbet That's a perfectly fine gibbet! The gibbet stays!!

Hangings at Hempel's Green is longer than the previous three novels and can be roughly divided in three parts of about a hundred pages each. That's why I'm glossing over a lot of details and characters. So the first part is to introduce the cast of characters, giving a look around the village and present the first two, of four, locked room hangings. Another member of the organizing committee is murdered under impossible circumstances at her home echoing the first murder. That comes down to the body first being seen through a window and ending up with a curtain cord around her neck inside a bolted room. A noteworthy part is Inspector Peveril's hilarious false-solution dismissing the case as a freak accident involving a door being slammed shut so hard "to cause a security chain on the doorframe to fly up and fall into place in its slot." However, the second and third part are the best parts for two very different reasons.

The second part delves into the customs, traditions and delightful local legend at the heart of Knocker's Night, but also the struggles the committee faces to keep the tradition alive with a graying, dying population and calls for change – while preparing what could be the last Knocker's Night. So the second-part builds up towards the yearly Knocker's Night with its ancient customs, strange costumes and the traditional procession up Gallows Glade to hang three effigies. These kind of isolated communities with their own cultural off-shoot rituals and festivals is something I have come to associate over the years with the Japanese detective story, especially the anime-and manga detective series, e.g. Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998). So it's fun to see a distinctly modern, Western locked room mystery take a swing at one of these fictitious anthropological treasures as a stage for murder. More importantly, the preparations for Knocker's Night and everything leading up to the event itself serves as stage to present the third, marque impossibility of Hangings at Hampel's Green. I'm not going to describe it, or give any exact details, but the theatrical staging of this third hanging is as original as how it was pulled off. A tailor-made solution for a tailor-made impossible crime! That's always good for extra bonus points in my book.

That brings the story the third and final part in which Alex and Cornelia finally get to play their part. Alex made a few brief appearances during the first and second part, but Cornelia doesn't appear until the last leg of the story. However, before they can reveal what really happened, the murderer has one more quiver, or in this case a length of rope, to create a fourth locked room situation in a place called Windmill House. A place that had been thoroughly searched, bottom to top, securely locked the place up, but, when they returned, they found a body inside casually dangling from a rope – like "a perverse magic." The plot is not done twisting and turning as Inspector Peveril gets an opportunity to redeem himself as a detective and delivers an elaborate, not entirely implausible sounding false-solution as the official police verdict. Alex and Cornelia, of course, hold all the cards in the end that provide all the answers. And, considering what came before it, the last chapter is a lengthy one as it needs to take its time to clearly layout everything that happened, how and why.

So let's begin with the meat of the plot, the quartet of inexplicable hangings. Like I said, the third hanging during Knocker's Night is the centerpiece of Hangings at Hempel's Green as an impossible crime novel. An impossible crime original in both concept and execution. The first and second locked room hangings are slightly simpler affairs, but only by comparison to the third and liked the complications that helped to create the second locked room. A great piece of entanglement! The fourth and final hanging didn't get the room it perhaps needed, being placed so close to the ending and perhaps the impossible murder should have ended with the third one on Knocker's Night. It would have been a great and dramatic climax to the killer's little murder spree, but just as a locked room, it benefited from the same quality as the third one. Another trick tailor-made for the occasion!

So, as a locked room mystery, Hangings at Hempel's Green definitely is a return to the first two novels with their galore of miraculous crimes, but, as Alex points out, "there's whodunnit and whydunnit too, you know." I honed in on the correct murderer early on in the story, but couldn't make the connection between the who and why. No idea why, but, for some reason, it took longer than it should have for that to click into place. That was not for a lack of clues, hints or a lack of fair play in general, which remains one of the main draws of this series. You know, beside the galore of locked room murders and other impossible crimes complemented by the crime scene maps and diagrams. So, once again, the plot and story is up to scratch with the first two novels, but there's a big but. Cornelia was already sorely missed in The Dry Diver Drowning, but here both Alex and Cornelia are largely absent (working off-page), until the closing stages. Tony simply is not a great replacement for Alex and Cornelia. An interesting choice for a fallible, emotionally invested detective, but not a character who should have taken their place in an already longer than the previous novels. Maybe it could have worked if Tony's narrative had been interspersed with Alex going home to report and Cornelia making comments from an armchair with a mystery novel on her lap, but their mostly off-page presence made Hangings at Hempel's Green feel more like a standalone mystery than an Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow novel. That's bound to disappoint a few people.

I recommend reading Hangings at Hempel's Green as a standalone mystery that just so happened to feature Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow, but it's main attraction are the four inexplicable hangings, the intricate web that has been spun between them and, yes, the overall characterization of the village itself. I just really missed Alex and Cornelia. I hope they're back, front and center, in their fifth novel or maybe short story collection with those unrecorded cases like "The Devil's Throat Incident." Well, I guess we'll find out in about a year's time. 

Murder of the Admiral (1936) by Steve Fisher

Steve Gould Fisher was an American pulp writer and ex-Navy officer, serving four years on a submarine, where he cut his teeth as writer by penning articles and short stories for publications like Our Navy and U.S. Navy – earning the moniker of "The Navy's Foremost Writer." From the 1930s until the '50s, Fisher prolifically contributed to the detective and pulp magazines of the day, notably The Shadow magazine. Fisher also wrote close to twenty crime, detective and thriller novels, screenplays and television scripts.

During the 1930s, Fisher created a striking series-character, Lieutenant Commander Sheridan Doome, who's the U.S. Naval Intelligence's in-house ace detective. Doome is tasked with investigating crimes committed within the jurisdiction of the Navy like ships, dockyards and bases. Sheridan Doome is not a striking character on account of wearing a Naval cap, instead of the figurative deerstalker, but the scars and injuries he suffered in a ship explosion during the World War. Doome miraculously survived, however, the surgeons had to put permanent steel plates over his entire chest and back. But they could do very little to patch up his face. Doome's head is like "bleached white bone" with a "scarred face as hairless as a piece of worn velvet" with black blotched for eyes and "a grim slit" as a mouth. On the upside, the steel plates made him practically bulletproof. Doome has a talent that made him very valuable to keep around.

Sheridan Doome is a first-rate detective who possesses "a brain so cunning, so astute, that there was not a man in the service who could match it" shielded behind an expressionless face on top of six feet four uniformed man – which makes him a nightmare fuel personified. Doome appeared in two novels and fifty-four short stories published in The Shadow magazine, where Doome became a hit with readers.

Now, I probably would never have heard or even become remotely aware of this once popular series had Fisher's Murder of the Admiral (1936) not been listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). So it ended up on the special locked room wishlist, but, unbeknownst to me, Murder of the Admiral was reprinted a few years ago by Age of Ages. Their reprint edition just wasn't available in my country and overlooked it entirely. Very irritating, but hey, you know me where locked room mysteries are concerned. Unless they reside in a parallel universe or don't exist, I'll get a hold on them sooner or later.

Murder of the Admiral, originally as by "Stephen Gould," begins with Sheridan Doome being assigned a new assistant, Rush Evans, who does a bit of writing on the side and narrates this story. Evans had grown bored with the peacetime routine and relished the opportunity to work alongside the well-known Navy detective. Even with the knowledge that Doome's previous assistant was killed on the job and wanting "to leap for the nearest window" when meeting Doome for the first time, but they quickly solidify into a great team. There are several weeks between their meeting and Doome summoning Evans to fly with him to a battleship, somewhere North of the Panama Canal, which has become the scene of a curious suicide of the battleship division's commander, Admiral Brown – who appeared to have shot himself after performing poorly in a war game. A war game exercise ending with a very angry, frustrates Admiral Brown yelling threats of suicide, murder and borderline treason, before kicking his flag lieutenant out of the room. The lieutenant had only just left the room when the gunshot was heard and another lieutenant across the Admiral's room was immediately at the door. So nobody could have left the room without being seen by the two lieutenants, proving suicide, but Doome suspects murder. That's where the trouble really begins as the partnership between Doome and Evans embarks on its maiden voyage.

Doome first inspection of the ship finds two stowaways: a well-known, but disastrously bad spy, Sonia, who imagines herself to be the next Mata Hari ("she was a bit demented on it..."). The other stowaway is a 19-year-old woman, Miss Judy Morrow, who's an aspiring author with three published short stories to her name. She wants to write a novel about stowaways and tagged along with Sonia in slinking aboard the battleship. However, Doome and Evans have the most trouble with the rotten apples among the ship's crew who defy and frustrate them at every turn often at the cost of their own lives. Some of the characters in this book appear to have a damaged sense of self preservation. This enrages Doome enough to briefly make him loose his cool, "when you are safe, you run out the door screaming bloody murder and you get murdered," telling them "you can all go back to your rooms, wander around the ship or do anything else you please." Doome was done trying to protect them and getting to the murderer through routine questioning. A satisfying response to the ship of fools that's starting to resemble Charon's ferry.

I want to mention here that Sheridon Doome is not at all the grotesque, theatrical puppet that comes across from this cursory glance. There's a theatrical element in the way Doome presents himself in public and acts when on a case, but that's all it is. Theatrics. When in private, Evans and the reader gets a glimpse of the person behind scarred, skeleton-like features and not merely his traumatic baggage – like having a son who believes he died in the explosion. Doome takes a genuine interest in his new assistant, encourages him to continue writing, plays matchmaker and occasionally showed he still had a (melancholic) sense of humor ("for a monster with a face like a battlefield, I do all right, don't, Rush"). Doome never showed this side when out on a case, but showing those brief, private moments balanced out his character and enhanced the scenes when playing up the detective-from-hell role. A good example of this is when Doome finds that one of the rotten apples among the crew grew up on the notorious East Side of New York. In private, Doome reflects on the abhorrent living conditions on the East Side that turned its children into career criminals, drug addicts (“dope fiends”) and poor, broken labors ("...they are the products of the East Side"). A surprising bit of social commentary to find in this often typical, pulp-style mystery and what makes Sheridan Doome the backbone of the story.

Not that the plot is bad. I would even call it above average for a pulp-style locked room mystery, but the plot is not spotless due to the usual shortcomings of the pulps. First of all, the shooting of Admiral Brown is not the only (quasi) impossibility of the story. There's another shooting in a darkened room in the presence of multiple witnesses, however, their solutions wouldn't secure Murder of the Admiral a place on anyone's list of favorite locked room mystery and impossible crime novels. Better in presentation than in how they're resolved. There is, however, a third impossibility tucked away in the appropriately titled chapter “Ship's Morgue” that briefly makes you believe you're reading a Theodore Roscoe novel. Not much is done with it as an impossible situation, but serves as a not unimportant piece of the puzzle. Surprisingly, Fisher included an unusual challenge to the reader, "WHO IS THE KILLER?," telling the reader "all of the action, clues and questions have pointed out that the killer can be only one person" and gives you two extra hints – ends with asking the reader to "write the name of the person you believe guilty here." While there's some stretching going on when it comes to murderer's identity, you can actually work it out based on the clues and chain of events. It's also a bit of an old dodge. So not as blistering original or rigorous as its Golden Age counterparts from the mid-1930s, but, for a pulpy mystery, Murder of the Admiral is first-rate entertainment and a great introduction to an unjustly forgotten character from the pulps. And, to quote Rush Evans' closing lines, "I knew, not unhappily, that there would be others."

Top Storey Murder (1931) by Anthony Berkeley

Last year, I ranked Anthony Berkeley among the "Top 10 Beneficiaries of the Reprint Renaissance" on account for going from practically being forgotten at the turn of the century to having his former prestige as an innovative, sometimes subversive mystery writer restored – which in Berkeley's case took a little longer than some of his contemporaries. A restoration process that started inauspiciously with The Roger Sheringham Stories (1993) and The Anthony Berkeley Cox Files: Notes Towards a Bibliography (1993), but the first real headway was made in the early 2000s.

House of Stratus reprinted a big chunk of Berkeley's then obscure, long out-of-print work like the then ultra rare The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and his celebrated masterpiece The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929). They also reprinted the superb Jumping Jenny (1933) and fan favorite to many, The Piccadilly Murder (1929). Funnily enough, the House of Stratus editions become overpriced collector item's not long after they went out-of-print. A small, independent publisher, Langtail Press, tried to revive those reprint, but it was the British Library Crime Classics and Collins Crime Club reissues that marked a more permanent return to print. In 2021, Collins Crime Club even reprinted The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) that had not seen a reprint since its original serialization/publication nearly a century ago. Not to mention the unearthed short stories that have been turning up in several anthologies and Crippen & Landru's published collection The Avenging Chance and Other Mysteries from Roger Sheringham's Casebook (2004), which had two "enlarged editions" published in 2015 and 2023.

So bringing Berkeley's work back to print and restoring his reputation ("the cleverest of us all") can be called one of the success stories of the reprint renaissance. Somehow, someway, what should have been a regular Roger Sheringham novel decided to shroud itself in obscurity by defying getting reprinted.

Top Storey Murder (1931), alternatively published as Top Story Murder, was among the first to be reprinted by House of Stratus, in 2001, but no new editions since it slipped out-of-print again with used copies being unreasonably priced – dissuaded me from picking it up sooner. That and kind of expected Top Storey Murder to have been part of the British Library Crime Classics series by now. I'm sure Top Storey Murder is going to get a long overdue reprint before the decade is out, but recently lucked across a copy. So let's dig into this often overlooked, seventh title in the Roger Sheringham series.

Berkeley's Top Storey Murder begins with Sheringham meeting Chief Inspector Moresby for a lunch appointment as a way to keep in touch with Scotland Yard ("Scotland Yard called it ‘Mr. Sheringham working the pump-handle'"). However, the telephone cuts short their lunch appointment as Moresby is summoned to the scene of a crime at the top floor flat of Monmouth Mansions in Platt Street. A reclusive spinsters, Miss Adelaide Barnett, who had been found strangled with a rosery in her trashed, ransacked flat. The kitchen window was standing open and a rope, tied to the gas stove, was dangling out of it. Miss Barnett was a peculiar, somewhat hostile woman who garnered "a local reputation as a miser, with a bag of sovereigns sewn up in her mattress." Moresby warns Sheringham this going to be an ordinary case without much of interest to the amateur detective, "no fancy fandangos, like you get in the story-books," but Sheringham decides to come along regardless. And, despite being warned this is going to be a routine case, Sheringham immediately begins to theorize when observing the various clues/red herrings at the scene of the crime.

I think the first five chapters constitutes the best parts of Top Storey Murder pitting the imaginative, theorizing amateur detective against the practical, experienced and well-oiled police apparatus of Scotland Yard – briefly created a proto-police procedural. Moresby has a small army of experts going over the crime scene, which, of course, include the fingerprint man and police photographer. More interestingly is the presence of Inspector Beach, "specialised in this type of crime, burglary in flats," who makes a profile of the scene and checks the points ("there are twenty-two points I've got noted down") against the methods and habits of the career criminals in their filing cabinets. A single name rolls out of this process of elimination. Yes, like the board game Guess Who? Having observed all the clues and red herrings, Sheringham is convinced the murderer is one of the other residents of Monmouth Mansions.

Unfortunately, the police investigations begins to recede into the background as the police begins to search for the burglar-turned-murderer and Sheringham begins to pursue his own line of investigation.Top Storey Murder nearly reverts back to being an ordinary, 1930s whodunit in which a snooty amateur detective tries to best Scotland Yard. I liked Sheringham retreating to the Reading Room of the British Library to order his notes and think over the possibilities. Sheringham interacting with the suspects, sometimes under a false flag, is always fun, but it's the introduction of the victim's estranged niece, Miss Stella Barnett, who adds interest to the middle part and ending. Sheringham becomes more than just a little bit intrigued by the young, defiant woman who refuses to touch a penny of her misery aunt and even takes her on as his new private secretary. Stella takes to job, but simply refuses to play the Dr. Watson to Sheringham's Sherlock Holmes. If anything, Stella sandbags him and his "absurd theories" with predictable results on someone with Sheringham's personality ("the girl's becoming a positive obsession with me").

That helped the sometimes sagging middle portion from bottoming out and carry it to the conclusion, where Sheringham's unmatched talent for fabricating false-solutions got to shine in all its glory. Nothing to daunt Sheringham as he victoriously wiped the egg of his face.

So, while Top Storey Murder is not Berkeley's greatest or most original detective novel, it's still a very entertaining, top-notch Golden Age mystery playing the grandest game in the spirit of The Poisoned Chocolates Case and Leo Bruce's Case for Thee Detectives (1936). Very much worth a reprint and read!

The Man Who Died Seven Times (1995) by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

Three months ago, Pushkin Vertigo released Yasuhiko Nishizawa's Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, which is not only a very good, very unusual and original detective novel – one of my new all-time favorite detective novels. Not for any of the usual reasons most would expect from me. The Man Who Died Seven Times is at its core a fairly ordinary whodunit within a family circle without any bells and whistles, like locked rooms, unbreakable alibis and dying messages, except for one extraordinary detail.

Hisataro Oba, a.k.a. Kyutaro, is a 16-year-old high school student who has "the aura of some jaded old man" and people are always telling him he seems old for his age. That's because Kyutaro is, mentally speaking, years older than his classmates on account of experiencing frequent time loops lasting nine days. An unexplained, personal phenomena Kyutaro calls "the Trap" during which the same days repeats nine times. Kyutaro is the only one who's aware of the loop and can alter the events from the first loop ("the 'original' version of the day in question") to the final loop, but "whatever happens in the final loop becomes, for everyone else, the only version" of that day. And, for Kyutaro, the definitive version of that day. But without loosing his memories of the other versions. These time loops can happen "as often as a dozen times in one month, or only once in eight weeks."

Kyutaro used one of these time loops to ace the entrance exams for the exclusive Kaisei Academy, but the promise of a brilliant student delivered fluctuating results. Good results always depends on whether, or not, an exam coincides with a time loop. Beside cheating on his school exams, Kyutaro never had to deal with a serious situation, while stuck in the nine-day trap, until he goes to a New Year's family gathering at the mansion of his grandfather, Reijiro Fuchigami, and maiden aunt, Kotono. A fairly recently established tradition to repair family relations after the family fractured in several different branches following a fallout between Reijiro and two of his three daughters. Kamiji left home to pursue an academic career and married a young, promising student, Michiya Oba, who have three sons – Fujitaka, Yoshio and Kyutaro. The third and youngest daughter, Haruna Kanagae, followed suit and had two daughters, Mai and Runa. So that left Kotono, the second daughter, to look after their increasingly difficult father under dire circumstances, but their situation miraculously improved. A lucky windfall that turned their restaurant into a restaurant chain under the Edge Restaurant Group umbrella. So these New Year gatherings aren't only meant to get the family back together, but for Reijiro Fuchigami to pick a successor.

Nothing out of the ordinary happens, except for Kyutaro getting blackout drunk, when everyone goes home at the end of January 2nd, but Kyutaro wakes up back at his grandfather's house early in the morning of January 2nd. He has fallen into one the time loop traps. This time, the day ends in tragedy. Reijiro Fuchigami had spend this new version of January 2nd drinking by himself in the attic of the old annex building. There he was found murdered! What follows is a long, exhaustive day of police questioning and only Kyutaro knows the day is going to reset seven more times. And that his grandfather will be alive, and well, the next morning on the third version of January 2nd. And the next half dozen resets.

Kyutaro tries to prevent his grandfather from getting killed and protect one of his relatives from becoming a murderer, which turns out to be easier said than done even with multiple retries – like a number of stored lives in a game. Firstly, Kyutaro has to consider two outside candidates to inherit the company. Reijiro's assistant and driver, Ryuichi Tsuchiya, and Kotono's assistant, Emi Tomori. Secondly, the complicated, sometimes uncomfortably tangled family relationships from the simmering hatred between Reijiro's three daughters to cousins fooling around. Thirdly, Kyutaro has to do a lot of scheming, manipulating and maneuvering, but, try as he might, Reijiro dies in every loop ("He was dead. Of course he was"). This is the first time Kyutaro is trapped inside a loop with something as serious as a murder in the family. A murder that was not part of the original "schedule" of the day and not the only deviation on the original day that confounds Kyutaro.

Like I said, The Man Who Died Seven Times is not a detective story about the who, why and how, but how Kyutaro attempts to prevent a murder before the ninth loop makes it definite. Before the ninth loop, Kyutaro gets to see everyone he knows acts and respond differently under varying circumstances of that days. Sometimes the situation got very ugly, but, tragically, Kyutaro is the only one who remembers these alternate events of the eight loops. Showing the reader his jaded old man persona is not an act. However, The Man Who Died Seven Times is not a lightly-plotted, character-driven mystery employing the time loop device and the trappings of the detective story to explore the frayed relations between the various family members. That certainly is part of the story and plot, but the explanation for the murders of Reijiro Fuchigami and why he kept dying in every loop is genuinely clever. That last part is really key because what allowed this to work, so satisfyingly, is seeing it play out under different, manipulated circumstances, but always with the same confounding results. How that came about is simply brilliant.

So, if the story had ended there and then, I would have been more than satisfied, but some lingering questions and inconsistent details about Kyutaro's time loop experience remained. Those answers... no, that twist, bumped The Man Who Died Seven Times from merely an excellent take on the hybrid mystery to a masterpiece and personal favorite. That completely took me by surprise! This is not merely a good twist to end an even better detective novel, but the final touch to a very pleasing nestle doll pattern emerging from the overall story and plot. First you have an unvarnished, straightforward murder of the family patriarch, but within that simple framework there's Kyutaro reliving the same day nine times. His attempts to get a different outcome, and why he keeps failing, is what gives the plot its weight. Lastly, the twist on Kyutaro's time loop experience that gives yet another perspective on the previous versions of that early January day. If it's not perfect, it's close enough. Highly recommended!

Note for the curious: The Man Who Died Seven Times has had some interesting comparisons between Groundhog Day and various mystery writers, series and movies ("Groundhog Days meets Knives Out"), but the only comparison that would be on point is The Girl Who Leapt Through Time meets Case Closed.

The House at Devil's Neck (2025) by Tom Mead

Last year, Crippen & Landru published Tom Mead's first collection of short stories, The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments (2024), bringing together Mead's short impossible crime stories featuring his series detective, Joseph Spector – a retired music hall magician from a bygone era. That leaves the Hester Queeg short stories and some standalones for future collection, but first things first.

The House at Devil's Neck (2025), fourth novel in the Joseph Spector series, brings together two apparently different, but tightly intertwined, cases over a two day period in 1939. To be precise, the story takes place between August 31, 1939 and September 1, 1939.

First chapter finds the magician-turned-detective on a coach headed to the house in the wilds of Essex known as Devil's Neck, constructed in 1640 by the mystic Adolphus Latimer, erected on an island tenuously linked to mainland by a narrow causeway. So there's a lot of history attached to Devil's Neck. From the days Latimer crossed paths with the Puritan witch finder Samuel Draycott to serving as a military hospital during the Great War. Since practically every broom closet in England has a ghost of its own, Devil's Neck picked up a few ghosts and lingering memories over the centuries ("there are few places quite so notorious... save Borley Rectory, perhaps"). There were more than enough people who wanted to take a look around the place when its new owners opened it up to the public.

Joseph Spector shares the coach with a motley assembly of characters. There's the spiritualist medium, Madame Adaline La Motte, who's accompanied by a young woman, Imogen Drabble. Francis Tulp, a paranormal investigator, who previously appeared in the short story "The Sleeper in Coldwreath" (2023). A grieving mother, Virginia Bailey, whose son drowned himself after "getting his face blown off at Ypres." Walter Judd, a man of mystery, who boarded the coach under the name Edgecomb. Finally, the current caretakers of Devil's Neck, Clive and Justine Lennox.

Before the coach arrives and all hell breaks loose, the story moves back to London where Inspector George Flint and Sergeant Jerome Hook, of Scotland Yard, are confronted with erratic, suspicious looking suicide of a man named Rodney Edgecomb – who appeared to have gone mad. A call came in Edgecomb was "waving a loaded revolver, threatening both his secretary and his valet" and had locked himself into his house and study. When they broke down the door of his study, they were confronted with "the most obvious and inescapable case of suicide." Edgecomb's body was sitting behind his desk, gun lying between his feet, behind a locked door, bolted windows inside a sealed house crawling with police. Yet, Flint is not entirely sure it was suicide. Not without reason.

Flint remembers Rodney Edgecomb from a sensational case, "the sort of story Victorian novelists used to write about," which made headlines right before the outbreak of the Great War. In 1912, Edgecomb inherited a fortune when his older brother, Dominic, became one of the many lives lost when the RMS Titanic sank in the northern Atlantic Ocean. Following year, a man turned up in a London hospital claiming to be Dominic Edgecomb. That not only threw the inheritance question in disarray, but the issue proved to be "startlingly divisive" in the public debate. Rodney denouncing him and the man claiming to be Dominic shooting himself in a hotel settled the problem with the outbreak of the war smothering the rumors of murder. Flint took another look at the case as a young detective when the war was over, but nothing came of it and now, twenty years later, Flint is faced with another Edgecomb dying under bizarre, seemingly impossible circumstances.

Pleasantly, Flint and Hook do a good job without Spector there to pick apart the locked room for them. Flint actually makes quick and short work of the locked room trickery himself ("Spector would likely have taken seconds"), but other than the how, every clue and hint regarding the who-and why points in the direction of Devil's Neck. Only smudge, plotwise, is how the ending reduced Flint's moment of triumph to a false-solution.

Meanwhile, at Devil's Neck, the ghost hunting party that began with the obligatory séance, ending with a message scrawled on the ceiling that wasn't there when they entered the room, turns into something more serious when someone is killed – behind a locked door, of course. That's not the last impossible situation and locked room murder on the island, now entirely cutoff from the outside world. They witness a phantom soldier vanishing down a corridor without leaving footprints on the layer of the dust on the floorboards. It's the second impossible murder at Devil's Neck that stands out as the question is not only how the killer managed to either get into a locked room, or out, but how and why the killer place a cumbersome automaton in the room – which seems needlessly risky and theatrical. A trick that was done without disturbing the improvised alarm of strings and bells securing everyone's bedroom doors. The House at Devil's Neck continues the tradition of the 21st century locked room novel of stringing three, four or more impossible crimes situation together. Mead takes a technical approach to the locked room trickery, which is everyone's favorite approach, but I generally don't mind as long as they're not lazy string trick or incomprehensibly mechanical in nature. A fine line to traverse, to be sure, but Mead pulled it off. I really liked the simplicity of the first impossible murder that was staged at Devil's Neck and the second time one of these locked room revivalist used (SPOILER/ROT13) n pbva-gevpx to seal a room shut.

Just like the previous three novels, the locked room murders and impossible crime aren't even the main attraction of the plot. Mead has always shown a stronger and better hand when it comes to the who-and why. This time, Mead offers his readers not the customary rug puller of a solution, but a head spinner of an ending. You can draw all the obvious comparison to John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson and S.S. van Dine, but the only correct comparison here that stands is Brian Flynn on steriods. The locked room murders and other impossible situations are merely side effect of it.

So very much enjoyed The House at Devil's Neck as a retro-golden age detective novel complete with a challenge to the reader, footnotes to the clues and a bunch of locked room murders tossed into the melee. I also appreciated the backdrop, not of a former WWI-era military hospital, but its lingering ghosts and haunting memories. Memories of the wounded, disfigured men who had to wear tin masks with a doll-like recreations of their original features and a brief glimpse of Flint's time on the front. And, while Spector and Flint try to finally lay some of the lingering ghosts of the Great War to rest, the story ends as the next war begins. So look forward to see what Mead is going to do with his locked room murders and impossible crimes committed under cover of the blackouts and Blitz. It Patrols by Night!