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.