Puzzle in Porcelain (1945) by Elizabeth Gresham (writing as "Robin Grey")

"Robin Grey" was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Fenner Gresham, of whom not much is known today, except that she was involved with the Virginia theater scene and wrote both stage plays, novels, short stories and non-fiction – notably the Jenny Gilette and Hunter Lewis series. This series began with Puzzle in Porcelain (1945) and Puzzle in Pewter (1947), but it took a quarter of a century before Puzzle in Paisley (1972), Puzzle in Parchment (1973), Puzzle in Parquet (1973) and Puzzle in Patchwork (1973) to be published. Steve, of Mystery File, hypothesized in a 2013 comment Gresham "had the book written but no publisher for them until Curtis, a small and all but obscure paperback publisher in the 1970s came along and made her a deal." Adding "same thing happened with Mike Avallone and several of his Ed Noon PI novels in pretty much the same time period." So thank you Curtis for preventing four more novel from entering the Phantom Library forever.

The first two novels from the 1940s were published as by "Robin Grey," while the 1970s
paperbacks appeared under her own name, but there never was much of a mystery about the authorship.

I found a short write up from Times-Register, "Mrs. Greshham Will Publish Mystery Novel," which announces Gresham's forthcoming debut and introduces her two series-character, Jenny and Hunter. A second, 1947 write up from Times-Register informs Mrs. Thomas B. Gresham, of Salem, has published her second mystery novel, Puzzle in Pewter, full of local color. Interestingly, it mentions the book is dedicated to Roger Boyle, director of the Virginia Players at the University of Virginia, who "was instrumental in the formulation of the chief character in the stories." The piece optimistically ends with the news "Mrs. Gresham is currently at work on a third mystery novel" and "she has indicated that the Hunter Lewis series will be continued." That, as we know now, took another 25 years when Puzzle in Paisley finally made it to print.

I believe I first read about Gresham in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-45 (2009) praising Puzzle in Porcelain as "a pleasing debut" with "some agreeable fresh angles." Looking a bit further into the series, the Jenny and Hunter mysteries sounded like a series the Rue Morgue Press overlooked to reprint. Well, I was not wrong! Puzzle in Porcelain would have been right at home in the reprint catalog of the Rue Morgue Press alongside Delano Ames, Kelley Roos and Margaret Scherf.

Puzzle in Porcelain introduces Hunter Lewis, a tinker/handyman, who makes a modest living mending valuable, or mechanical, things and drives a homemade, Frankenstein-like car ("ugly and noisy") which he built from the chassis up – affectionately called the Mongrel ("...no alley pup ever represented more breeds than Hunter's masterpiece"). Jenny Gilette, the narrator, is Hunter's next door neighbor and she been pursuing him for years to the point where everyone half-jokingly sees it has her job. So they make for a fun, lively pair of lead characters and Jenny makes for an engaging narrator and Watson. Or, as she's called towards the end, "Amanuensis Extraordinary to that stubborn sleuth."

The scenery of Puzzle in Porcelain is Albemarle County in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Yankee transplant and local humbug, Thomas Pottle, drops by Hunter's workshop to ask to have a garden statue of Psyche mended, which had been reduced to “a basket of china chips” – deliberately destroyed when a stone hit it. Pottle tells Hunter he had been out in the garden that morning and, when bending down to pick a flower for his buttonhole, heard a hiss and the statue shattered. When he stood up to look saw Jake, "bpoor-white boy who lived in the strip of woods between Pottle's place and Scottswood," twenty foot away with a silly grin on his face. Hunter finds it hard to believe Jake had thrown the rock ("that boy wouldn't touch a rabbit"), but promises to come over to collect all the pieces. That evening, Jenny goes to a dinner party at Scottswood where the reader gets a brief demonstration why Pottle is not particular popular in the community, as well as introducing the tight-knit group of suspects.

Firstly, there are Dan and Virginia Scott, of Scottswood, who are the neighbors of Thomas and Edna Pottle. They have Dan's 92-year-old grandfather, Colonel Bedford Scott, living with them who still has it out for those Yankees ("...blood hasn't had time to cool since sixty-five"). Gordon Claibourne, Virginia's cousin and Pottle's lawyer, Dr. Keith and a newcomer from Norway on the University faculty, Erik Salten. And, of course, Jenny.

Next morning, Pottle's body is found on his own doorstep, dead as a door nail, who appears to have succumbed from the poisonous effects of a rattle snake bite. Sheriff Dick Cox, Jenny's cousin, remarks that it's "very unusual for rattlers to come so far into the lowlands," but retracing Pottle's steps reveals evidence he had been attacked by a rattle snake, ran all the way home and the exertion hastened the action of the poison. So a clear, cut and dried case without a hint of mystery, until Hunter begins to notice inconsistencies and convinced the sheriff his idea of a human hand rather than a wayward snake being responsible was not "altogether mad." Hunter and Jenny embark on their first case.

A case that's more like a Herculean task and not merely because they have to get around in the clunky, noisy Mongrel. They have to prove it was murder, before they can go on to the who and why. And how do you fake, what looks like, a completely explainable death by snake bite? While they begin their sleuthing, the parade of clues and red herrings, ranging from a broken statue and brown beans to dead fish and the sounds of hissing and rattling, keeps growing – seemingly never getting closer to the truth. Not even a second death, presented as a suicide, nor another snake attack brings Hunter closer to cracking the case. On the contrary, the sheriff is ready to close the case after the latest snake attack resulting in something I have never seen before in a detective story, past or present. Hunter is far from satisfied and continues to poke around, which is when the suspects band together to legally prevent him "from further private ferreting into our affairs." Something that should have been explored and exploited better, but it's one of those fresh angles that makes Puzzle in Porcelain a smidgen more than just a pleasing debut!

There are no obviously nods or references to other mystery writers, or characters, but Gresham evidently must have been an enthusiastic consumer of detective stories. She shows throughout the story a good understanding of what makes a detective story tick and, perhaps more importantly, what came before her. That allowed her to find and work those fresh angles Boucher praised. It's only in the finer details of the solution, primarily method and motive, you notice the still inexperienced hand of the first-time (but promising) mystery writer still needing some time and a touch of polish. Other than that, I greatly enjoyed Puzzle in Porcelain and liked how the story kept making me second guess my brilliant armchair solution. I was sure I had figured it all out when deducing the method, which I did, but not fully. So well worth picking up, if you come across a copy. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep an eye out for a copy of Puzzle in Pewter.

The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich (2023) by P.J. Fitzsimmons

P.J. Fitzsimmons' The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich (2023) is the sixth entry in the Anthony "Anty" Boisjoly series of Wodehousian locked room mysteries, set in the late 1920s, which brings Anty and Vickers to the fictitious gorge of Glen Glennegie, Scotland – where he has to serve as judge in a whiskey competition. Kilcladdich and Kildrummy, dual villages divided by Glen Glennegie river ravine, which "supplies the icy clear hill water that balances the local magic." Namely whiskey. There are two master distillers, Lummy MacAlistair and Duncan MacAngus, whose respective clans have been feuding for generations. A feud dating back to a golf game from 1767 that "resulted in a rift between the families which has survived to this day." A long-standing feud with customs and traditions of their own.

Once every decade, there's a competition between the two distilleries for the right to label their whiskey "Glen Glennegie" for the next ten years. So, during the final stages, the master distillers locked themselves inside their distilleries in order to guard the secrets of the process. A jury of three decide the winner and Anty inherited the seat on the jury from his late father, but, when he arrives in the Scottish highland, trouble is not only brewing... it has already exploded!

Lummy MacAlistair was blown to pieces when his distillery exploded, likely an accident, but Anty is suspicious the accident happened right before the competition. Not to mention the apparent impossibility of it having been murder ("...what we have here is a locked room mystery"). However, the story doesn't plunge headfirst into classically-styled locked room case meticulously picking apart various (false) solutions to the impossibility like a few of my recent reads. The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich is primarily a comedy with detective interruptions with the first-half going over the territory, its history and characters populating the village – something that normally doesn't bode well for the quality of the plot. So it's very fortunate for this series Fitzsimmons is a funny writer who knows his way around one-liners, punchlines and absurd anecdotes. I'm no Wodehouse expert and have read bits and pieces of criticism from Wodehouse fans, but, when it comes to genre spoofing and satire, Fitzsimmons very much writes in the tongue-in-cheek tradition of Leo Bruce, Edmund Crispin and R.T. Campbell.

Fitzsimmons has always been upfront that he writes the Anty Boisjoly series "strictly for laughs" with result being "either an inexcusable offense to several beloved canons or a hilarious, fast-paced, manor house murder mystery." This series has also shown with The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (2021) and Reckoning at the Riviera Royale (2022) what can be done when the laughs and chuckles are backed by a good, solid plots. The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich is mostly played for laughs and that can be frustrated when the plot had enough to match those two earlier novels.

First of all, the "impossible coincidence" of the two master distillers dying in apparent accidental explosions in their locked and barred distilleries. There's a third, very minor, locked room in miniature concerning ten bottles of whiskey added to a locked cabinet when the key was accounted for ("...nearest locksmith that can copy that key died in 1902"). Regrettably, The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich is not very impressive as a locked room mystery, comparable to the earlier The Tale of the Tenpenny Tontine (2021) and The Case of the Carnaby Castle Curse (2022), but the motive saved it from being just satire sporting a tartan deerstalker. The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich operates on its home brew of loopy logic and crooked rules, which Fitzsimmons cleverly employed to create a plot that could not have worked anywhere else except in Kilcladdich and Kildrummy ("we might be by Michael Innes"). So the digging into the history, characters and long-standing feud ended being more than a bantering exercise in exchanging barbs. I also enjoyed the scene in which Anty tries to explain to the Scottish policeman that America has gone dry ("you're saying that America has outlawed alcohol"). That needed some processing of its own.

So while I enjoyed The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich, it was more for the characters and humor than the plot and can only recommend it those already a fan of the series. I'll probably get to the next title, Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling (2023), before too long but hope to have something good from the Golden Age next. Stay tuned!

Panic Party: Case Closed, vol. 97 by Gosho Aoyama

Gosho Aoyama's 96th volume of Case Closed starts out, as is tradition, with the conclusion to the story that closed out the previous volume when Conan, Rachel, Sera, Serena and Makoto wandered onto the set of 48 Detectives – confusing a hostage scene for the real thing. Makoto, a karate champion, disabled the stuntman playing the hostage taker and obliged to take his place to finish the shoot.

However, the shoot ends with two murders. The first murder is when one the actors falls to his death from a top floor window of an abandoned building and a member of the crew is mysteriously poisoned with cyanide. There is, of course, a trick that allowed the murderer to pull off both murders with an alibi in the pocket, but this time the tricks aren't the stitched together Frankenstein-tricks bugging some of the stories from these later volumes. They're simple, somewhat elegant and satisfying, especially the first one. Even more fun is what's happening in the background of the story. Sera is convinced Conan and Jimmy are one and the same person. She has been poking and prying for information, which doesn't make it easier for Conan to solve the murders and has to use Serena ("...deduction queen Serena in action") to pull his "Sleeping Moore" act with Sera watching ("he uses Serena when Moore isn't handy"). I also liked how Makoto and Rachel prevented the murderer from committing suicide with Rachel echoing Conan's sentiment ("no matter whose life it is, it's too precious to take"). Conan has always disapproved of detectives turning a blind eye to murderers intending to take the easy way out. A fun and, plot-wise, decent story.

The second story is a good, old-fashioned closed circle whodunit. Richard Moore receives a letter from a client, named Taisei Nichihara, who included a code, a 500,000 yen retainer and four train tickets – destination an abandoned, mountaintop church in Nagano Prefecture. A friend of the client hanged himself in the old church and wants it investigated. But why did Moore need to bring three other people along for the case? The three others include, naturally, Conan, Toru Amura and the sushi chef the mystery loving sushi chef from vol. 92, Kanenorih Wakita. When they arrive at the church, they find a group of five people ("we went to high school together") and discover Moore's client is the man who hanged himself. So they have been all lured to the church under false pretenses and, as to be expected, a blizzard traps them inside church for a day. All they can do trying to figure why they were brought to the church, decipher the coded message and hunt around for clues. Only for one of them to walk straight into a booby trap and another is found poisoned.

Similar to the previous story, the tricks used to build up this story aren't the Frankenstein stitch jobs from recent volumes and wonder if the original Japanese volumes received similar criticism for it. The tricks here are simple, but not too simple and possess a kernel of elegance. Such as how the murderer picked the victims and a good booby trap every now and then is to be appreciated, but it has to be admitted that it also makes for another fairly minor chapter in the series. Very enjoyable nevertheless, if only because it has been a while since this series featured such a classically-styled mystery story.

The third story is short, two chapter inverted mystery in which the killer rigged up a daring, seemingly unbreakable alibi. Maika Zenda, a school teacher, discovers that her fiance, Toji Fukikoshi, is a marriage swindler who has another girlfriend stashed away in luxurious summer house – which throws her in a murderous rage. She stabs him and then have the body appear during a school trip to the woods to forage for wild vegetables. Zenda worked it in such a way proving she could not have dragged the body and propped it up against a tree backed by photographic evidence. Only problem is that the children on the trip are Conan and the other members of the Junior Detective League. This story actually felt more like one of those earlier cases than the previous story nicely balancing the central trick with the characters and story. Not to mention the clueing is surprisingly sharp as Conan reasons the truth from a missing four-leaf clover and mud stains. So a very well done, completely solvable alibi cracker.

The last, incomplete, story being setup here will be concluded, as is tradition, in the next volume and begins with a callback to a case from vol. 12! In that case, Doc Agasa brought the Junior Detective League to the house of his late uncle, "the guy with the sun, star and moon code built into his house," where he found a wooden box containing a small antique plate. A black lacquer tray, to be precise, recently featured on an antique TV show where its value was an estimated 100 yen ("about $1 million"). Doc Agasa was not the only person who had the idea to have his tray appraised, but the appraiser had received three other trays and, to his surprise, "all three trays turned out to have the same carving" ("...at least two are counterfeit"). Doc Agasa is invited, along with the other owners, to the home of the appraiser, but there the appraiser is attacked with a spear. When Doc Agasa goes to get help, the attacker returns to finish the job. So a who-of-the-three whodunit that will be concluded and resolved in vol. 98.

So, all in all, the cases making up vol. 97 aren't the most spectacular this series has produced during its long run, but they had pleasing consistency, purely as detective stories, while the red threads and character-arcs of the main storyline continue to move and develop in the background. A great volume in a small, modest way on way to vol. 100. Just two more to go!

Fear of Fear (1931) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements

Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements were an American husband-and-wife writing tandem, "of varied and prodigious talent," whose output included novels, short stories, stage plays and film scripts like the 1930s Philo Vance movies – which lead to a brief friendship between Ryerson and S.S. van Dine. Van Dine credited her with saving the screen adaptation of The Canary Murder Case (1927) from the "Hollywood morons" and their propensity to mutilate the source material. However, they had a falling out years later when Ryerson suggested "Hammettizing" Vance for The Casino Murder Case (1934) to go for that Nick and Nora Charles movie charm. Van Dine was not thrilled as he "loathed the character Nick Charles."

Ryerson not only worked on some very popular detective movies, but also collaborated with her husband on a handful of Van Dine-style mystery novels. The fifth novel, The Borgia Blade (1937), is a standalone thriller.

Their first four novels, Seven Suspects (1930), Fear of Fear (1931), Blind Man's Buff (1933) and Shadows (1934), star author, playwright and amateur sleuth, Jimmy Lane, whose Van Dinean chronicler is Philip Carter – all out-of-print for over 90 years. Until a few years ago, when Coachwhip Publications reissued Fear of Fear and Blind Man's Buff with an always insightful introduction from Curt Evans. Ryerson and Clements' Fear of Fear happened to be on my specialized wish list ever coming across it in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). That and I really like the Van Dine-Queen School of detective fiction. Let's dig in.

Fear of Fear begins with Carter telling the reader "the time has come to tell the truth about the murders on Russian Hill" almost two years ago. Jimmy Lane had already achieved his first success as an amateur detective "during the ghastly week of the Lopez murders" (probably a reference to Seven Suspects) when he receives a message from Lane to come to dinner ("...bring pistols for two"). Lane had a chance meeting with Miss Norah Fallon, a film actress, who had a big problem. She had fallen into the clutches of a blackmailer and famed spiritualist, Harlan Grant, who "advised on business deals, drew up horoscopes and arranged love-affairs" at his house on Russian Hill. And, of course, raising the spirits inside his private séance room. Grant has "gone nutty" about Norah Fallon and is determined to drive a wedge between her and her fiance, Dick Stoddard. He's gotten hold of some "awful stuff" from her past that looks worse than it is depending on how it's explained. Lane, ever the gentleman, promises to help, but then the unexpected news breaks that Grant died from cerebral hemorrhage in his locked séance room. However, the promise still stands to retrieve the blackmail material.

Lane and Carter go to the trio of tilted, adjacent houses on the slope of Russian Hill where Grant lived with his family and next door to a long-time friend. There's his older brother, the Colonel, whose daughter Chanda is married to the wheelchair bound chemist Otto Steeb. They have two Indian servants, Singh and his wife Lalah. Dr. Waverly, a physician and spiritualist, lives next door. Lane worms his way into the household under the guise of writing an article for the Occult Review, but, before too long, Captain Hemming and Sergeant McCarthy return to the house to begin a murder investigation. A keen-eyed undertaker at the funeral parlor noticed an irregularity, called the police and an autopsy was performed revealing "Grant did not die a natural death" – although the doctors are "unable to agree upon the cause." So now they have a seemingly impossible murder on their hands!

First of all, Ryerson and Clements deserve a ton of credit for how they handled the locked room and attention given to the finer details. The only door to the séance room was bolted tight from the inside with Lane remarking "I don't believe even Philo Vance could figure out a way of locked it from the outside," but the floor plan of the crime scene included something immediately aroused my suspicion and a bit of preemptive, uncalled for disappointment. A subsequent and very thorough investigation of said something eliminated one possible disappointing solution to the locked room. Ryerson and Clements allow the curious and suspicious armchair detective to examine the whole room and everything bound to get them suspicious through characters, which allows for a series of false-solutions to be proposed and demolished. I should mention here, a little less than halfway through the story, it's revealed Grant was not entirely alone in the room. Mowgli, a tiny marmoset, was beside the body, but the authors had a very practical use the tiny monkey. Mowgli is "too small to have committed a murder" and not strong enough to have drawn the bolt. And Mowgli being unharmed disposed of another potential locked room-trick. A detail that should have been mentioned earlier, but very well and cleverly handled once it was brought up.

This is, technically, not the last impossible crime of the story. Adey listed only Grant's death in Locked Room Murders, but the second murder can be categorized as a (borderline) impossible crime and there's a mysterious incident involving Lane's wire-haired terrier, Ruggles ("...his little whiskered face showed horror...") – coinciding with an uptick in so-called paranormal activity. All the astrology, table tapping and even spirit photography started out as plain cover and background decoration for a common conman and blackmailer, but second-half leaned into its supernatural trappings with sightings of the yellow ghost. One witness was a police officer who described the entity as "like a yellow veil" between the curtains, while another witness called it a light. Another witnesses comes forth to tell he has seen a full body apparition. That adds a new dimension to some of the puzzling aspects and clues from the first-half "such as the faint, elusive fragrance of jasmine" and the phrase "fear of fear" that plagued Grant for the past two weeks. Or why he can only manifest spirits of certain people.

So both the first and second-half are full of interest, but for different reasons. The first-half for the investigation of the locked room and the second-half for going the John Dickson Carr-Hake Talbot route, atmosphere-wise. Ryerson and Clements tie everything together wrapped with an unusual motive and a murderer who didn't stand as much as they should have in this small cast-of-characters. There's a trace amount of pulp to the over solution, like the locked room-trick, but never anywhere near lurid levels of bad pulp fiction. Just a small dusting. Ryerson and Clements kept the story in detective story territory unmistakably belonging to the Van Dine-Queen School. Going by Fear of Fear, I would place Ryerson and Clements between Clyde B. Clason and Roger Scarlett with this one being comparable to their best locked room mystery novels. A highly enjoyable and satisfying locked room mystery that should be better known among impossible crime enthusiasts. The reprint of Blind Man's Buff has been jotted down on the wishlist.

Note for the curious: Ryerson and Clements dedicated Fear to Fear to “Our Friend Willard Huntington Wright and His Friend S.S. van Dine.”

Bad Weather: "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "The Rainy-Day Bandit," originally published in the May, 1970, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, begins three months into the crime spree of a modern-day highwayman, the Rainy-Day Bandit – who comes and goes with the rain. A bandit with a cloth mask and a shiny, nickel-plated revolver always striking in the daytime when its raining heavily.

This crime spree started simple enough with the stickup of a parking meter collector during a January rainstorm, but the Rainy-Day Bandit developed into a John Dillinger-type robber for his next few capers. Holding up a gas station, an insurance office, a branch of a big bank and recently "cleaned out six cash registers in a supermarket while fifty people watched" ("the guy's got guts..."). When a rich gambler was robbed of his deposit en route the bank, the papers begin to "treat him like a modern Robin Hood." Captain Leopold, head of the Violent Crimes Squad, tells Sergeant Fletcher "some day an eager citizen's going to jump him, and then we'll either have a captured bandit or a dead hero."

When a body is found in an alley with a gunshot wound, it appears the Rainy-Day Bandit claimed his first victim. The body is that of James Mercer, an insurance agent, who was making collections in the neighborhood. And, of course, the money is gone. Tommy Gibson, of Robbery, believes the murder is a Rainy-Day Bandit caper gone wrong, but Captain Leopold leaves all his options open. Leopold and Fletcher go down the list of collection stops. However, the Rainy-Day Bandit himself eventually turns up in their murder investigation adding an unexpected complication to the case. A complication hitting a little too close to home for Leopold.

"The Rainy-Day Bandit" is a showpiece of Hoch's ability at constructing short story plots with two different, but linked, plot-threads neatly tied up in a brief, fairly clued short story – packaged as a police procedural. I figured out the solution to both problems, but can only lay claim to a scrap of cleverness for identifying the Rainy-Day Bandit. I dumbly stumbled across the murderer by accident. You see, the name of one of the characters rang a bell in the dusty part of my brain storing obscure, mostly useless and arcane trivia as scraps of a phrase started floating to the surface. So looked it up and what I was trying to remember is the grim, now obsolete phrase (ROT13) "gnxr n evqr gb glohea." Only vaguagly similar to the name of that character, but that character turned out to be murderer. Hoch was not trying to be funny on the sly, but it would have been a funny clue disguised as an Easter egg had (SPOILER/ROT13) gur anzr bs gur zheqrere orra glohea vafgrnq bs glqvatf.

So, all in all, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" is another solid and competent showing from Hoch as Captain Leopold's slowly starting to become a personal favorite among Hoch's gallery of series-detectives. Leopold is probably not going to surpass Dr. Hawthorne and Ben Snow, but Simon Ark and Nick Velvet should be worried. You can expect more Hoch and Captain Leopold in the future. I'm toying with the idea to single review the short stories from Leopold's Way (1985) and compile those reviews in a single post/review of Leopold's Way. But we'll see.

The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks (2024) by Danro Kamosaki

Last year, I discovered Danro Kamosaki's "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series, translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmmiicnana," which aims to push the limits of the impossible crime story by pumping it full of performance enhancing substances – results didn't disappoint. That is, if you're addicted to locked room mysteries to the point it has family and friends worried. But if you're a locked room addict, the premise of this series is a dream come true.

A suspect on trial for Japan's first ever, real-life locked room murder was acquitted, because the prosecution could not provide a solution or theory explaining the locked room. So, "if the scene is a perfect locked room, it's the same as the culprit having a perfect alibi," became a legal precedent over night as impossible crimes started to dominate Japan's crime statistics ("...a third of all murders..."). Along with the rise of locked room murders came a whole new industry of experts ranging from detectives and criminals specialized in impossible crimes to appraisal companies checking houses for secret passages or hidden rooms.

Kasumi Kuzishiro, an 18-year-old high school student, often feels like he's involved in half of all locked room murders plaguing Japan. Usually, Kuzishiro is dragged along by his childhood friend, Yozuki Asahina, to go hunt for UMA (Unidentified Mysterious Animal) in a remote, isolated place that becomes the scene of a series of impossible murders. Misshitsu ougon jidai no satsujin – Yuko no yakata to muttsu no tricks (Murder in the Age of Locked Rooms – The House of Snow and the Six Tricks, 2022) brought them to the former house of a famous mystery novelist hosting half a dozen locked room murder, which is incidentally also the most conventional of the three. The second title in the series, Misshitsu kyouran jidai no satsujin – Zekkai no katou to nanatsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Mania – The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks, 2022), takes the isolated island trope, understandably popular in Japan, to the extreme and adds an extra impossibility to the tally – while maintaining a decent balance between quality and quantity. So every single one is a winner, but most show imagination, originality and some are so good they could have solo carried a locked room mystery novel. Even if they can be a little outlandish at times. Danro Kamosaki evidently wrote this series for the love of the game and the game here is a locked room extravaganza. The third title in the series is no exception.

Misshitsu henai jidaino satsujim – Tozasareto mura to yattsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Fetishism – The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks, 2024) begins with Yozuki dragging Kasumi on another UMA hunt, but they get lost and end up in strange, remote village just in time to get embroiled in what came to be called "Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case."

Japanese detective fiction is littered with these strange, fictitious and isolated villages with their own unique history and customs. Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998) is always my go-to example, but Yatsuwako Village takes that concept and takes it to another extreme. Yatsuwako Village is tucked away inside a vast limestone cavern, "twenty times the size of the Tokyo Dome," shaped like a giant square with a massive fissure, dividing the village into east and west halves, connected by a bridge – where five hundred villagers lived and worked for generations. Stranger yet is its architecture and folklore. Every building in the village is a white, box shaped structure with steel doors and fixed windows. They're all plastered over until they're airtight. This is done to keep the kazeitachi, "a beast of the winds that can transform its body into air and infiltrate a house through the tiniest gap," out of their homes. Beside a wind yokai, Yatsuwako Village is also the home of a family of mystery writers dominating the locked room genre in Japan.

Zerohiko Monokaki, family patriarch, multimillionaire, all-purpose genius and occasional mystery writer, whose children would go on to dominate the Japanese mystery scene by combining the locked room puzzle with their own specialized subgenre/category of detective fiction. Ryouichirou Monokaki (social school), Kyoujirou Monokaki (hardboiled), Isaburou Monokaki (forensic/medical), Tabishirou Monokaki (travel mysteries), Fuika Monokaki (sci-fi mysteries), Funika Monokaki (YA mysteries), Fumika Monokaki (historicals), Mei Monokaki (Gothic). There's also Camembert Monokaki, the fifth son of the family, who's not a genius mystery novelist ("...just a pretty face"). Lastly, Fuichirou Monokaki, eldest son of Zerohiko and former head of the family, considered to be greatest locked room artist the country produced and passed away several months before the story's opening. So the Monokaki family dominated the ranking of publications like This Locked Room Mystery is Amazing! for years, but not wholly unopposed. Teika Ojou, the Young Empress of Japanese Mystery, took the #1 spot several times during their reign ("...state of locked room mysteries was a battle between the Monokaki Family and Teika Ojou").

Curiously, Teika Ojou is currently staying at the Monokaki mansion to dodge one of those pesky deadlines. The impossible crime lore of the village doesn't end there. The Eight Locked Room Masters of the Showa Era were "eight genius mystery novelists who appeared one after the other in the 1940s" and a collaboration between them was announced in 1953, which brought them to the village. And, of course, they were brutally murdered. A collection of their best locked room-tricks disappeared never to be found. So, in order to appease their spirits following a string of deaths and misfortunes, the murdered authors were enshrined as "a composite deity under the name Yazuwako Myojin" – dedicating a yearly festival to it. This festival is about to start when Kasumi and Yozuki wander into the village, just in time for the killing to begin. It starts out in a borderline cartoon-ish way.

During the festival, in the middle of a crowd, someone dressed as the kazeitachi, black cloak and a mask of a weasel, shoots Fuika Monokaki in the head, throws a smoke bomb and disappears alongside the body. However, this first murder is not the first impossibility of the story. That comes next! Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the village during the week long celebration and "anyone who violates this taboo will be killed by the curse of Yatsuwako Myojin" ("...the pain the curse inflicts as you die is beyond imagining"). Considering they have a shooting on their hands and murderer on the loose, they try to get out only to find the sole entrance cut-off. And then one of the villages, before bright red flames started streaming from his mouth and bursting into "an enormous pillar of fire." The man had burst into flames with nobody standing near him! From that point onward, Kasumi and Yozuki are confronted with apparently never ending series of locked room murders of various complexities.

There are more of them than the book title suggests. So the impossible crimes, like in the previous novel, are divided in more digestible lumps with the first five dominating the first-half. I already mentioned the spontaneous human combustion in the tunnel entrance, but soon they get confronted with four gruesome murders they dubbed "The Locked Villa," "The Locked Storehouse," "Locked Room of the Spiderwebs" and "Bloodstained Japanese Locked Room" – executed in both sections of the village. Kasumi and Yozuki briefly get separated when the bridge linking both parts goes down stranding Kasumi on the east side and leaving Yozuki on the west side. There some unusual detectives arise to give the first, mostly false-solutions to the locked room killings. You can argue this first badge of locked room murders can be paired, thematically speaking.

First of all, the murders in the villa (east village) and the spiderweb room (west village), which are first explained (independently) by a twin-switch trick. You see, three of the Monokaki daughters are triplets. While I normally detest "twin magic," the way they were used for the false-solutions here are perfectly fine or horrifyingly brilliant. Preferable to the correct solutions, especially the solution to spiderweb room. By the way, the spiderwebs refer to the spiderwebs blocking a secret passageway and provides a double-layered (false) solution. One with the kind of horror (concerning the body) you almost expect from Japanese mystery writers and the other feels like it belongs in a cozy mystery (involving the spiderwebs). The correct solution to the locked villa is certainly an inventive, very involved trick, but found it to be the least impressive trick of the bunch. My reaction to learning the answer was pretty much the same as Kasumi, "of course they did."

The murders in the locked storage room and Japanese room are examples of that shin honkaku specialty, the corpse-puzzle. The locked storehouse involves a mutilated body found hanging in a curious position, unlikely in hangings, but somehow the murderer had evaded being caught on the security footage. This is perhaps the easiest one to solve, but a nicely done locked room puzzle and a typical example of the corpse-puzzle and what can be done with it. However, the murder in the Japanese room is a highlight of the book! A decapitated body is found inside a so-called Japanese room with sliding doors, doors without locks, but "an extremely unique locked room" is created by the spray of blood from the decapitation. The spray of blood splattered on the sliding doors, where the doors touched, "dried to the consistency of dry oil paint." So how could the murderer have left the room after the murderer without disturbing the blood pattern on the door? The visual image the solution conjures up is pure, undiluted nightmare fuel that makes grisly scene of the murder itself seem warm and cozy. It almost feels wasted in a novel crowded with elaborate, often technical locked room murders and impossible crimes.

Yes, this is a very densely-plotted mystery that's all about tricks and locked room obsessed characters, but there was a short, too short, reflection on the impact of locked room murders becoming a major social issue on the character-driven, realism obsessed social school of crime fiction – whose writers struggled with their new reality. Basically, "the positions of locked room authors and social school authors had been completely reversed." I thought it was an interesting side effect on society and culture from locked room murders becoming an everyday reality. Back to the onslaught of locked room murders.

At this point, another friend of Kasumi turns up to assume the role of detective and solve the case, Shitsuri Mitsumura, who was to nobody's surprise in the village all along. She's one of those locked room obsessed character with a talent for seeing right through every trick. Kasumi calls her "an apostle of the locked room," because "if there was a God of Locked Rooms in this world, and that God had to pick one person from Earth to be his messenger, she would definitely be the one he'd choose." Once she destroyed the false-solutions and resolved the previously discussed murders, the process begins with a whole new array of stranger, more elaborate locked room murders. These are "The Locked Temple," "Locked Room of Four Color Boxes" and "Locked Underground Maze."

The locked temple is the least complicated, most straightforward of this badge, conventional even, but the next few get really bizarre and progressively larger in scale. Like the body they found in a room crammed with boxes of various sizes and colors blocking the door opening inwards, which looks like a game of Tetris was interrupted when a body materialized. A locked room premise that tickles the imagination and liked the explanation, but, at this point, the plot gets a crammed while the story needs to hurry on – lessening the impact of the tricks a little. Same goes for the murder in a massive, watched indoors maze giving away Danro Kamosaki is a Yukito Ayatsuji fan, but it honestly needed its own novel in combination with the bonus content. Why stop at eight? As the plot unravels further, it's revealed there's a ninth and tenth locked room mystery hiding in the Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case. The ninth locked room, a truly gargantuan locked room, shows the advantages of a customized setting designed to host a series of impossible crimes.

So, once all the locked room-tricks have been revealed, there only a few characters left standing who could have perpetrated this small scale massacre. It's not the murderer's identity that makes the solution memorable, but the motive behind the murders and locked room trickery. A unique motive that could have only emerged in this strange, locked room obsessed world.

Danro Kamosaki created a plot technical marvel in the impossible crime genre with his three "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" novels, but, crazy as it may sounds, this series is not done yet! There's still the unresolved, ongoing storyline involving Kasumi Kuzishiro, Shitsuri Mitsumura and Japan's first unexplained locked room murder that started the locked room craze. So a fourth book is probably in the works, but no idea where Kamosaki could go from here. Maybe a locked room serial killer terrorizing an entire city or a trail of impossible crimes scattered across a hundred year period. Either way, I hope to get to read it. Let's tidy up this messy, overlong rambling review.

Like I said, The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks is overflowing with clever, often wildly original locked room-tricks and a buffet for impossible crime fanatics who want to read about ingenious locked room murders without storytelling and characterization distractions. However, the amount of tricks and ideas crammed into this novel is perhaps too much and came at the cost of the latter, much more elaborate and sometimes interconnected tricks – which needed more space to fully do them justice. That would have doubled the size of the book, but I would have taken a two volume treatment of the Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case. This simply packed too much in too short a novel making it harder to keep track of everything and detect along. Regardless, The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks is still a mind boggling achievement, technically speaking, even when compared to the previous novels. I stated in the past four impossibilities is magical number, or sweet spot, because you start running into quality control problems when trying to juggle five, six or more. You can't possibly deliver good, satisfying or even original solutions for each of them. Danro Kamosaki proved me wrong with this series. While overdoing it just a bit, I really shouldn't complain about a mystery giving me nearly half a dozen locked room murders littered with floor plans, diagrams and time tables.

Highly recommended for locked room fanatics, but to be avoided, like the plague, by everyone with a low tolerance for locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Note for the curious: here's my idea about what could be behind the first locked room murder that kicked off the locked room craze. Having now read all three, there's an increasing madness surrounding the locked room phenomena. From the rise in crime in the first novel to the religious sect in the second and finally descending into real madness in the third. An obsession manifesting in complex physical and technical locked room-tricks. So wouldn't it be ironic if that was first locked room murder was a non-impossible crime disguised and made to look like a locked room murder from fiction. A disguise protecting it from the then most well-known solution from fiction and forcing the police, prosecution and any amateur detective to chase a phantom trick. Not sure how it was done and, technically, it would count as a locked room-trick, but one subtle enough be overlooked in this universe obsessed with physical and technical, science-based tricks.

By the way, the phrase "phantom library" is used in reference to a fictitious library said to contain "every locked room mystery ever written" ("...2,628,000 locked room mysteries...").