First Contact: Q.E.D. iff vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou

The simply titled story "Even" opens Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 5 and begins when Ashikaga Ren, a second-year university student, tumbles down a cliff and needed to be airlifted to the hospital – except this wasn't an ordinary hiking accident. A note was found at the scene ("Got Dumped, Don't Want to Live") turning an unfortunate hiking accident into an attempted suicide. Only for the case to take an unexpected turn at the hospital.

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are in the hospital visiting Mizuhara's father, Inspector Mizuhara, who was injured in the line of duty. Mizuhara passes the hospital room of the still unconscious Ashikaga Ren when she notices his oxygen mask has been removed and the heart rate monitor turned off. She immediately calls a nurse and begins to look around, which leads to her chasing a masked figure in a white doctor's coat through the corridors and down the staircases of the hospital. This masked, white coated figure runs into a dead end hallway and inexplicably disappears into thin air! A short hallway ending in a double door that's not only locked, but securely chained together and padlocked. Only thing the vanished figure left behind is the white doctor's coat. Touma finds out the victim had three people, all fellow students, who visited the hospital that day. So they begin probing the suspects and their relationship with the victim involving relationship troubles, borrowed money and stolen exam papers.

I think what I liked most about this story is how clearly the problem of who, why and how is presented. And liked how they logically linked together with one springing from the other. However, the solution to the disappearance from the dead end corridor, while visually pleasingly, is so blindingly obvious I rejected it out of hand – which kind of betrayed the who and eventually why. Not to mention the vanishing-trick only worked, in a way, because it was shown and not explained in a block of text. So "Even" is not a thoroughly bad story, but neither is it a top-tier entry in the series.

The second story, "The Imperfect Locked Room," has Inspector Mizuhara back on the job and going over a murder scene a second time. Takamatsu Kiminobu, a retired prosecutor, was found stabbed to death in his bedroom of his house. Only other person present was his nurse, Itami Sayoko, who claimed someone had knocked her out. However, the police found all the windows securely locked from the inside, the house keys inside the victim's pockets and "no suspicious people on the security camera at the entrance way" ("so this was a locked room murder"). So the inspector in charge concluded the nurse was the murderer and arrested her. Inspector Mizuhara has his doubts as a nurse has much easier methods at her disposal to kill an sick, elderly man than a knife and casting herself as the only possible suspects. What he finds is fresh evidence the murder took place in garage. So the nurse was released.

This blunder forces the higher ups to send someone down to direct the local investigation. This person is Tanabata Kikuno, Assistant Inspector of MPD Division, who's a young, eager policewoman ever ready to put the handcuffs on the murderer. She learns from Inspector Mizuhara that this case is not going to be easy, considering the status of the policeman who made the premature arrest. Inspector Mizuhara also tells her the case possibly has a connection to an unsolved, seemingly impossible and unsolved murder, nearly two years ago, when a dying woman was found in one of the toilet stalls of a night club, but CCTV footage showed nobody going inside – except the victim and the people who discovered the murder. So, inevitably, Tanabata Kikuno meets Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara leading to the solution to the two murders. Once again, the plot has its weak points as the murderer stands out and the solutions to the impossible crimes lack Katou's customary imaginative solutions or even simplistic complexity. The locked room-trick used for the murder at the night club toilets was especially unconvincing with the first one turning on the why rather than the how. It really is the strong ending that holds “The Imperfect Locked Room” together.

Fortunately, the two stories making up Q.E.D. iff vol. 6 is a return to form and starts with a character-piece, "The Man Who Claimed to Land on the Earth." This story begins with a prologue set in 1986 when a young woman, Morita Kinue, is living in America with a man named Dominic. Something her parents back in Japan oppose and beg her to come, but she refuses and ends up giving birth to a son, Wataru. Morita Kinue has been cut off by her parents and Wataru grows up in poverty, until he joins a youth gang and dies in a shootout aged 14. The story then moves to the present and marks the return of Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato who last appeared in Q.E.D. Vol. 44. They're now in university and have opened the Mystery Research Society, but this story is not about their usual shenanigans. This time, Mulder seems to have a problem that truly appears to be out of this world.

A blond foreigner, named Simon, turned up out of nowhere at his grandmother's house to start taking care of her, but even stranger is his claim to have landed on Earth from another planet ("...I used a wormhole to shorten the distance"). Naturally, the family's more than a little suspicious, but their grandmother refused to show him the door. And a secret DNA test reveals the mysterious Simon to be related to them. So they go to Sou Touma who becomes very interested when he hears Simon has been talking about "cosmic strings, wormholes, casimir's effect and other such strange terms." Simon showcases some of his other worldly abilities by vanishing from a closely watched changing room and appearing inside a locked house, but don't read this story for those fairly minor locked room situation. This is one of those character-puzzles and it's not even about who Simon really is. It's about why he's there and why he choose to tell such an outlandish story. This is more like the Katou I know and like!

The last story from vol. 6, "Sudden Change," allows me to end this double review on a high note. Kana Mizuhara is on a part time job delivering coffee when she walked into a police investigation.

Egota Wataru is the producer behind the popular TV show Nangoku Cop, "the detective drama where the guy uses handcuffs like an acrobat," who was having a meeting with the cast and crew to discuss the next season of the show. Somehow, he ended up on the roof and either accidentally fell to his death or jumped on purpose, but soon, the possibility of murder turns up. A possibility turning an accidental death or suicide into an impossible murder as nobody could have reached the roof when he fell from it. And everyone has an alibi. You can definitely spot the murderer, one aspect simply invites suspicion, but figuring out how it was done is bit trickier. Touma understands what can happen when someone finds themselves in an inescapable situation. Katou brilliantly fused the problem of the locked room mystery with that of the unbreakable alibi, complimented by an unexpectedly dark twist in the motive. A must-read for fans of Tetsuya Ayukawa and a fantastic story to end this review on.

She Woke to Darkness (1954) by Brett Halliday

She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett Halliday").

That story begins with Halliday attending the 1953 Edgar Allan Poe Awards Dinner, hosted by the Mystery Writers of America, where he chats and drinks with the likes of Robert Arthur, Fred Dannay and Clayton Rawson ("...I don't know what happened to John Dickson Carr”). Halliday is looking forward to meeting Dorothy Cecil, a fictitious mystery writer, but she drifts away in the crowd and Halliday is introduced to a young woman. Elsie Murray is a big fan of the Michael Shayne novels and has the complete series in hardcover from Dividend on Death (1939) to One Night With Nora (1953). She lures Halliday back to her apartment under somewhat false and mixed circumstances.

Elsie has written a half finished manuscript, titled She Woke to Darkness, partially based on a real, unsolved incident that happened to her and had no problem writing down the first fifty pages on paper ("...because I was dealing with real facts"), but now she's stuck on the middle part – asks Halliday to read it and advise her what to do with it. Halliday reads the first chapter of the manuscript and discovers the story concerns a woman, named Aline Ferris, who wakes up from one of her drunk, blackout stupors in a hotel room with two dollars stuffed down her underwear and a dead man lying on the bathroom floor. She has no memories of what happened at the party she attended. After reading the first chapter, Halliday decides to give Elsie a phone call, but a man picks up the phone and discreetly hangs up without saying anything. But it sounded like a policeman's voice.

After a phone call to a friend, Halliday is told Elsie was found strangled after the police received an anonymous tip about a dead woman in the apartment. That's a problem for Halliday. Scores of witnesses had seen them leave the banquet together, his fingerprints were all over her apartment and her lipstick on him. So call Shayne back in Miami and asks him to get on the next plane to New York. By the way, the New York friend Halliday called to learn what had happened at Elsie's apartment is the real-life, true crime writer, Edward D. Radin, who's constantly in the background helping and covering for Halliday ("if they ever learn the truth, I'll be sunk in New York..."). Radin and Shayne tell Halliday to sit tight and go over the manuscript again while waiting for the law to catch up with him.

There's an interesting possibility arising from reading the manuscript as one of the characters clearly used Aline Ferris to arrange an alibi. Just one problem. Elsie told Halliday she had changed all the names and physical descriptions of the people involved. So while the manuscript clearly points in the direction of the killer, the trick is matching the fictionalized person to its real-life counterpart. Casting the tough, hardboiled private eye novel as a meta-fictional biblio mystery is a stroke of absolute genius!

Michael Shayne arrives in New York after the halfway mark and acts like he knows he has only half the normally allotted time to close the case. Not at all bothered by the fact that a private detective from Miami has no official standing in New York. Shayne simply shoves a big fist under the nose of every unwilling witness or potential suspect and tells them to “start talking.” So not the hardboiled analog of Ellery Queen I encountered in previous novels, but still tremendously fun as Halliday (the writer, not the character) was not above poking fun at himself. For example, Shayne gets told by one suspect to "check up on an out-of-town writer named Brett Halliday" who "writes those lousy books about a dumb redheaded private eye in Miami." Shayne races through the second-half to find the real killer, tear down alibi and clear his friend's name from suspicion of murder.

I should warn some of the people who follow this blog not to expect a multi-layered, grand-style whodunit or a tricky alibi-breaker. She Woke to Darkness is not that kind of novel. From what I understand, She Woke to Darkness represents a shift in the series as Halliday started to put more emphasis on "the sexiness and violence in dialog among a lower class of despicable characters." You definitely wouldn't pick this up to meet a bunch of pleasant characters who happened to get themselves involved in a double murder case. She Woke to Darkness is one of those transitional novels from the 1950s the previous era of the genre was starting to disappear in the rear view mirror. But how She Woke in Darkness was framed and played out carried everything to something more than an early, 1950s sleazy crime novel. Yes, the self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humor and cameos also helped making it something more than thin-ish, grimy plot underneath. She Woke in Darkness is together with Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) my favorite Shayne novel to date.

The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) by Jamie Probin

Last time, I reviewed "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin, a mathematician, who has written a short series of impossible crime and locked room mysteries about a mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who acts as a special consultant to Scotland Yard and Sûreté. "The Episode of the Nine Monets" and The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) form the "Le Fantôme Saga" with the former being a prequel to the latter.

Le Fantôme is the classically-styled, phantom thief who has terrorized the museums and private collectors of France and Britain for years. Only real opposition came from Dr. Harris and Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble of the Sûreté. The last three starred in "The Episode of the Nine Monets" as they try to figure out how their nemesis spirited away a valuable painting from a locked townhouse. They triumph in cracking the locked room problem and get back the stolen painting, but Le Fantôme is still on the loose and more popular than ever. The Thirteenth Apostle is the concluding chapter of this saga.

Before getting to the story and plot, I need to get one thing out of the way first concerning the story's pacing and structure of the plot. Probin pieced out the story in lumps, big and small, which tend to shift around a bit, chronologically speaking, leaving dramatic turns of event hanging to allude to a future crime or go over previous trodden ground – making it somewhat repetitive. I essentially agree with Jim a thorough editing job would have resulted in an ever better detective novel. Superb even! However, the pacing, structuring and lapses of repetitiveness surprisingly didn't bother me at all. The Thirteenth Apostle is a fantastical, seemingly impossible crime caper about a phantom thief toying with the combined police forces and a amateur detective of two countries. So the repetitive patches and the lumpy, dramatic and sometimes episodic nature of the plot gave it the air of a turn-of-the-century French feuilleton. I liked that aspect, but yes, Jim's point still stands. With that out of the way, let's begin.

Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle begins on April 21, 1935, when a dozen of prominent French and English citizens, under the cover of dusk, heading towards the Eiffel Tower. All of them received a politely-worded, but urgent, invitation punctuated by a veiled, hard to ignore threat to show up. Who didn't need to be coerced to come are Dr. Samuel Harris and Henri Toussante, head of the Sûreté, because they know Le Fantôme is up to his old tricks again. And their best shot to finally catch the notorious phantom thief.

Le Fantôme reveals himself to the gathering through a gramophone recording à la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The voice of Le Fantôme announces to them his intention to steal the twin Bombay Diamonds, "their acquisition would be the pinnacle of my calling," of which one permanently resides in the Louvre. Le Fantôme claims to have already stolen the other diamond that was on display at the Palais de Chaillot and informs the group gathered at the Eiffel Tower they're going to help steal the second diamond from the Louvre ("to put it bluntly, you all have secrets..."). Leaving them to deliberate and make a decision, but Toussante is already on the counter offensive and apparently one step ahead. Toussante has brought the diamond Le Fantôme claims to have stolen from Palais de Chaillot.

The setup to this first of numerous impossible crimes is a slow burner, but played to great effect and pay-off as the clandestine meeting on the Eiffel Tower culminates with the disappearance of the closely watched diamond and murder – a poisoning as inexplicable as it's shocking. And why I'm being sketchy on the details to avoid spoilers. So everything and everyone, "suspect and police alike," is subjected to a thorough search without finding the diamond or a even a hint how it vanished in the first place. The poisoning appears to be equally baffling and impossible, but there are more puzzling aspects to the theft and murder. Why was there an abnormally, almost unnecessarily, large dose of poison in the glass? Why did the victim picked up the glass and deliberately smashed it before dying? Why the hell did this dose of poison have such a flair for dramatic timing? You can perhaps count that last one as a third, borderline impossibility.

While a slow burner of a start, the setup to this impossible crime extravaganza is absolutely fantastic with false-solutions being bandied about during the initial investigation at the Eiffel Tower. I'm a sucker for false-solutions! So would have loved for The Thirteenth Apostle to have continued along these lines, while picking up the pace along the way, as it headed towards the next couple of locked room murders. This is the point where the story begins to move on to the next lump of plot as the dramatic, illusory crimes at the Eiffel Tower remain unresolved for the time being. A move bridged with an excerpt from the fictitious book, Ghost in the Machine: the extraordinary career of Le Fantôme, teasing Le Fantôme's "last and most infamous accomplishment" ("the murder in the Oglethorpe Crypt"), but first, there's another impossible crime. An impossible crime pushing Le Fantôme to near mythical status in the minds of the investigators.

Nearly half a year later, in November, everyone who was present "that most unpleasant evening at the top of La Tour Eiffel" reunite at Chateau Lambert in Montanix-des-Alpes, France. Their association with a notorious, unsolved case and status as potential suspects is becoming troublesome ("...our lives will be forever tainted..."), which is why they have decided to get together to try and solve the case themselves. However, the plan to pool their knowledge, go over the facts and attempt to weed out the truth gets ditched when they learn of the local legend.

Chateau Lambert has an ancient, austere and brooding tower, Chambre de Justice, which once served as a holding cell for condemned prisoners and, over time, the tower became the stuff of legend – basically a room-that-kills. A room sparing anyone who's truly innocent, but beheads any person spending the night the tower alone with a serious crime on their conscious ("a room with pretensions of being judge, jury and executioner"). So the gathering decides to let the tower decide who's innocent and guilty. That goes about as well you'd expect, only with a slight twist as the murder is not exactly what was expected from the tower room.

This poorly done, messy review only gives you a fraction of what happened between the prologue and the impossible murder at the Chambre de Justice. So when the story finally arrives at its end stage, The Thirteenth Apostle only has a handful of chapters left to go. I started to wonder what Probin could possibly do with the murder at the Oglethorpe Crypt, which had been alluded to in both the prologue and interlude. It turns out not all that much. Well, not in terms of creating the crowning achievement of that promised trilogy of impossible murders, but at least it served another, not unimportant, purpose. I can see why Jim was disappointed as it hyped as the story's main event.

So, as a locked room mystery, the impossible murder at the Chambre de Justice stands as the best of the three. I very much enjoyed how Probin set it up as a shin honkaku-style impossibility, only to turn around to deliver a very Paul Halter-esque locked room mystery. The inexplicable poisoning and disappearing diamond from the Eiffel Tower stand out more for its dramatic staging, iconic backdrop and some truly first-class misdirection. So two, out of three, is not a bad return for a mystery novel with multiple impossibilities. What actually did disappoint me is how blatantly obvious it's who's behind the Le Fantôme persona. For more reasons than one, Probin made it impossible to ignore this character as a serious candidate to the point I began to second guess myself. I even entertained the idea of two Le Fantômes. The original, happy go-lucky Le Fantôme who robbed museums and the person who usurped his identity to go on a murder spree. That also didn't turn out to be the case and robs the story of some of its mystification (ROT13: gur svefg zheqre naq gursg nera'g unys nf onssyvat jura lbh fhfcrpg gung punenpgre bs orvat gur cunagbz).

Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle is that good, old-fashioned mixed bag of tricks. I think I enjoyed more than Jim, but have to agree there's definitely an even better, tighter-plotted detective novel lurking in there somewhere. That said, The Thirteenth Apostle is still an impressive, ambitious first stab at locked room mystery novel showing how much things had already changed by 2020. Not so long ago, novels like Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and Eric Keith's Nine Man's Murder (2011) were seen as events because they tried or pretended to write retro or modern locked room novels. We come a long way in a very short amount of time.

So definitely going to check out the other two short stories and hope Probin hasn't forgotten about that short story collection Six Impossible Things.

Note for the curious: just one more thing about that over hyped impossible crime in the crypt that was tucked away at the end. This impossible situation was described in the prologue as practically a hermetically sealed tomb with a door can be barred from the inside with a wooden, six inch thick beam that can be placed horizontally in two thick iron brackets. The prologue noted this can only be "done from inside the crypt" and Dr. Harris says "no amount of jiggery pokery could possibly allow the door to be locked from the outside." When I read the prologue, I immediately saw a very simple way to hermetically seal that crypt from the inside. Just place two pieces of ice inside the iron brackets, place the beam on top, step out and close the door. As the ice melts, the beam drops into the brackets barring the crypt from the inside.

The Art of Stealing: "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin

Jamie Probin is a British-born mathematician currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches mathematics at Charleston Southern University and writes detective novels and short stories featuring his mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who's something of a locked room specialist. I should have gotten to this series before now, but it got loss in the mass of reprints, translations and neo-Golden Age mysteries. That's until Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, reviewed Probin's newest, non-series short story "Chapter 17: Perroquet Explains" (2026). So moved this series up the big pile.

I wanted to begin with Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle (2020), but the short story "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) is a prequel and Jim's review suggested reading it before the novel ("...because it sets up the world well..."). What it sets up, or rather introduces, is a duel between the master criminal Le Fantôme and the Sûreté, Scotland Yard and Dr. Harris.

Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble, of the Sûreté, have been trying to put a stop to the shenanigans of Le Fantôme for years, which is easier said than done considering the phantom thief's affinity for the impossible crimes and a gift for disguises – getting bolder with each new scheme. Such as Le Fantôme's latest caper involving the inexplicable disappearance of an early, little-known work by Claude Monet, "never exhibited publicly," belonging to the millionaire banker Jacques DuFresne. It hung in DuFresne's Paris townhouse, securely locked, bolted and barred from the inside, but nevertheless disappeared from the locked townhouse. Even stranger, Le Fantôme exchanged the Monet for a plain, white canvas with "a childish outline of a ghost etched into the centre with a few simple strokes of black paint." I wonder if Probin is familiar with Kaito KID from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series.

Anyway, Dr. Harris is mentioned only in passing, "ask his opinion, see if he has any ideas," but it's the men of the Sûreté who score a point over Le Fantôme. Patrick Larson, in particular, gets to play a big role with his rather unorthodox methods uncovering several copies of the stolen Monet have been sold shortly after the theft. That nicely added another impossibility to the impossible theft: how do you make a whole bunch of near perfect copies of a painting that has never been publicly displayed? Good enough copies to fool a string of collectors. However, the trick to make the Monet vanish from a locked townhouse is the better, more imaginative and fairly-clued of the two impossibilities. More importantly, "The Episode of the Nine Monets" is exactly what a story about an Arsène Lupin-style character pulling off impossible crime capers should be... incredibly fun and entertaining.

I said Sûreté scored a point over Le Fantôme. They cracked the locked room problem, recovered the stolen painting and boosted their reputation, but not "the money Le Fantôme had gained from selling the forgeries" or the criminal himself – who has now captured the public's imagination ("the mood was ripe to embrace a Robin Hood-style folk hero"). The Thirteenth Apostle is going to conclude the Le Fantôme saga featuring "a trilogy of impossible murders." So that one is going to be next and hopefully it lives up "The Episode of the Nine Monets." A highlight of the 2020s impossible crime story and locked room revival.

A note for the curious: the ending half-raises a point I have wondered about before. This series takes place sometime in the early-1930s, several years after "the great depression had thundered through France and the rest of the western world,"
which is why Le Fantôme was becoming an anti-hero here. I have sometimes wondered if the figure the Gentleman Thief could have ever challenged the popularity of the Great Detective. Writers like Maurice Leblanc and E.W. Hornung made their mark with Arsène Lupin and Raffles, but the Rogue School perhaps needed their own Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr more than a great depression. I do wonder sometimes about that strange, alternative universe where the Gentleman Thief overtook (even if only briefly) the Great Detective in popularity.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944) by Kelley Roos

Last time, I reviewed the splendid novella "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by "Kelley Roos," a shared penname of William and Audrey Roos, which finds their normally bantering, wisecracking mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy during a messy breakup – only for a murder to bring them back together. A humorously written, deftly-plotted and clued novella. Its only negative is its short length that left me wanting a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy outing, but have already reread The Frightened Stiff (1942) and There Was a Crooked Man (1945) is (as of this writing) still out-of-print. So decided to reread that other favorite from the series.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), fourth in the series, starts on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in
September. Jeff and Haila promised their housekeeper to take her 7-year-old son, Chuckie, off her hands by taking him to Central Park to sail his model boat on the lake. Building and sailing model boats on a small lake or pond is not merely a pass time for children like Chuckie. When they get to the park, Jeff and Haila are introduced to several members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club, which "sails the sea" on "Saturday, Sunday and holiday afternoons."

Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club is headed by the Commodore, Austin Marshall, who's a wealthy man with many, many hobbies and interests. Bernard Marshall is his lazy, younger brother and fellow Knickerbocker as is their young nephew, Carl Marshall, currently on leave from the army. George Penny, a crusty, old and wheelchair bound man, who's accompanied by his daughter, Penny – who's sort of engaged to Carl. Tony Gilbert, a charming, well-known stage actor, who's currently appearing in another Broadway smash hit. Finally, William Philips, another wealthy model ship enthusiast and their cabin boy, Chuckie. So the scenery is near idyllic, "only the silhouette of the towering apartments and hotels" kept "you from forgetting that this was New York," but then the inevitable murder happens. A seemingly impossible murder!

Austin Marshall is seen climbing the stairs to a lonely bench, on promontory, overlooking the park, sat down and enjoyed the scenery. Only person who came to have a chat was Philips, but left him and, ten minutes later, Marshall was found dead with "a thin, nail-like piece of steel" sticking out of his neck. Somebody, within that ten minute window, sneaked up to Marshall and stabbed him. However, that appears to be patently impossible as "there's no dobt that no one went within fifty feet of the victim between the time he talked to Philips and his death." The police points out the stabbing was such "a precision job" that it could not have been projected from a distance.

Now, this is where the story becomes extra hilarious if you have just read "Death is a Trouper." Jeff refuses to have anything to do with the case and not only turns down Lieutenant Hankins, but even intends to return an anonymous delivered, one-thousand dollar fee to find the Marshall's murderer. This horrifies Haila ("...not wanting to witness the Troys' return to poverty...") who takes desperate measures to secure (i.e. steal) the fee and basically forces Jeff to solve the murder. Jeff and Haila's lighthearted banter and bright dialogue are the highlight of the story, which is unquestionable where Sailor, Take Warning! can match wits with The Frightened Stiff. Not that the Rooses neglected to pack the plot with incidents, twists and turns.

For example, I had entirely forgotten Sailor, Take Warning! has not one, but two, impossible crimes: Philips' wife, Diane, is knocked unconscious and her attacked escaped from a locked, observed house. Another trail leads the Troys to Walter Davisson, a radio psychologist known as The Marriage Doctor, whose wife, Marjorie, has a flirtatious affair with Tony Gilbert. A man, by the name of Robert Nichols, pops up out of nowhere pleading with Jeff to find his missing daughter leading to a wild goose chase from New York to Hoboken. Not to mention the Troys get burglarized and Haila finds to her horror that the thousand dollars she stole from Jeff was stolen. So the Troys are busy enough between talking and poking around the members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club.

As noted in the previous review, when the Rooses and Troys are at their best, they were a good deal better than the more famous mystery writing, husband-and-wife teams or snooping couples of their day. There's a reason, both good and bad, why Sailor, Take Warning! is considered to be the Rooses second best detective novel.

Firstly, the humor and dialogue can match themselves with The Frightened Stiff, but the plot turned out to be more of a mixed bag than I remembered. The holds together for the most part, despite the various, seemingly irrelevant sub-plots and the Troys tramping around the city, especially liked the solution to the impossible stabbing in Central Park – even though it reworks a very old dodge. Nevertheless, I liked how it was put to work here. It just worked for me in this setting. And, yes, one point makes its status as an impossible crime somewhat dubious. I'll take even as a borderline impossible crime. The problem of the attacker getting out of a locked house is nothing special and only a very minor plot-thread/distraction. So don't expect too much from that locked room problem. Nor do I have a problem with the choice of murderer as it nicely fitted the method. Where the Rooses tripped up and robbed themselves of another The Frightened Stiff is the motive.

I'm always annoyed when a writer tacks on the motive at the end as an afterthought. It's not always story-ruining bad, mostly just lazy, something you can even get away when a story's focus is on picking apart alibis, locked rooms or deciphering dying messages and code messages. Or when it's a really basic motive like the victim turning out to have been blackmailer or something. The not at all unimportant and far from basic motive was here not merely tacked on as an afterthought, but dropped on the reader like an ACME anvil. That's why I remembered it and was on the lookout for any kind of clue, hint or trace of foreshadowing. A slight, shaky case can be made it was, sort of, alluded to when (ROT13) Wrss wbxvat fnlf gb Puhpxvr “gurer zvtug or n Anmv ntrag nebhaq,” ohg gung bss-unaqrq, nccneragyl haeryngrq dhvc gb n puvyq pnzr sbhe cntrf vagb gur fgbel. So you can hardly be blamed for having forgotten about that fleeting remark and connected it to that in order to anticipate such a twist and turn of events. Hell, even with remembering it, and knowing it was coming, it still was a jarring turn of events. And genuinely damaged it as a fairly mystery. Why it came up short compared to The Frightened Stiff and had to take second place.

I really hate to nitpick about the motive, because Sailor, Take Warning! is nearly as good as The Frightened Stiff in every other way, but the motive turned out to be rather important. It's just dropped out of nowhere to reveal (ROT13) lbh unir orra ernqvat n dhnfv-fcl zlfgrel gur jubyr gvzr. Not that it couldn't have worked, but not how it was handled here. I think writers of the caliber of William and Audrey Roos should have known better. That being said, Sailor, Take Warning! is still an incredibly fun read for fans of the characters and screwball mysteries in general.

Hopefully, there's some kindly publisher out there who decides to finally reprint There Was a Crooked Man or publish a volume with the Rooses uncollected novellas. Just one for the suggestion box. :)

Every Roos Has Its Thorn: "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by Kelley Roos

Writing under the shared pseudonym "Kelley Roos," William and Audrey Roos formed one of the best, cleverest and funniest writing duos of genuinely funny, cleverly-plotted detective novels starring their bantering, mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy – who appeared in eight novels and a dozen, mostly uncollected, novellas. The first seven novels were published between 1940 and 1949 with a surprising, final entry being published in 1966. And of the dozen, or so, novellas only three were gathered under the title Triple Threat (1949).

Kelley Roos and the Troys may not be as well remembered today as the Norths, the Abbotts or the Duluths, but often they were "a good deal better than their more famous contemporaries." I consider The Frightened Stiff (1942), a personal favorite, to be one of the Great American Detective Novels that even today can still make readers laugh. So wanted to return to Troys for some time now, but the only title left on my wishlist is the frustratingly out-of-print, over priced There Was a Crooked Man (1945). No apparent plans to collect their novellas in a single volume. I decided to hunt down one of their novellas before sampling one of the standalone suspense-mysteries the Rooses collaborated on during the 1960s and '70s.

"Death of a Trouper" originally appeared in the December, 1946, issue of The American Magazine and reprinted in the May, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but something has to be explained first. Jeff and Haila's marriage has not been a perfect one and their last novel, One False Move (1966), begins in the aftermath of their divorce as Haila packed her backs and moved to Texas – only to stumble across another murder. They get back together, of course, but "Death of a Trouper" tells the story of the first crack in their marriage leading to their temporary divorce two decades later.

Similar to the opening in One False Move, this novella begins with the aftermath of a marriage ending fight ("I slapped him... he hit me back"). You have to read the story for yourself to find out what they were fighting and throwing hands over, but it firmly falls in the you-deserve-each-other category. Haila packed her bags and traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to take up acting again. She joins "a real, honest-to-goodness showboat," named The New Sensation, anchored on the bank of the Allegheny River. Haila discovers an old friend among the cast members, Greta Cole, who looks terrible, but things get worse for Greta when Russell Hogan, the leading man, is found stabbed to death in his cabin. Greta becomes the primary suspect, because it turns out she's the only one with a motive.

One of the reasons why Haila had enough of Jeff is "instead of settling down and becoming the fine photographer he could have been, had insisted on chasing about solving murders," but she picks up the telephone to ask him to help clear Greta from suspicion. This reunion between these two stubborn mules, who both refuse to give an inch, goes about as well as expected not helped by Jeff insisting on being funny when Haila wants to have a serious conversation. "Death is a Trouper" is not a lighthearted, thinly-plotted comedy mystery as the plot is absolutely packed!

There's not only the murder of Russell Hogan, but Greta goes missing under very unusual circumstances, Haila is knocked unconscious, a mysterious woman named Vivien somehow figures in the case and the inevitable second murder aboard The New Sensation. I'm delighted to report back the Rooses delivered on all of them!

Firstly, the solution to the murders turns on a tell-tale clue exonerating everyone, except the murderer, when understood of pointed out without needing much further explaining – only that person could have done it. Better yet is the motive for the first murder and how it relates to the second murder or ingeniously simple answer to the Vivien plot-thread. Or why Greta disappeared and the strange things that happened to her preceding the murder. Like I said, the Rooses packed the plot "Death is a Trouper" demonstrating they belonged as much to the Van Dine-Queen School as the screwball, murder-can-be-fun school. Only thing that can really be said against it, is that "Death is a Trouper" is not a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy mystery. So much more could have been done with the showboat backdrop, the characters who work and live there and, yes, the troubles of the Troys. Other than not being a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy mystery, "Death is a Trouper" is an excellent Jeff and Haila Troy novella with all the customary quality of the Rooses writing and plotting. Recommended!

If somebody, anybody, from Crippen & Landru stumbles across this review, the Kelley Roos novellas from The American Magazine would make a great collection like Philip Wylie's Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (2010). Just an idea for the suggestion box.