The Illusionist (1970) by Stephen Frances

Stephen D. Frances was a "South London-born clerk turned journalist turned author" who founded his own publishing company in the mid-1940s, Pendulum Publications, which "released a variety of fiction," but garnered most of his fame as "one of the earliest exponents of the British pseudo-American gangster books" – published as by "Hank Janson." During the 1960s and early '70s, Frances tried his hands at espionage with the John Gail series and wrote at least one standalone adventure-and suspense novel under his own name. That standalone is centered around a very particular problem earning it a listing in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). 

So, normally, that's more than enough to get my full attention, but Frances' The Illusionist (1970) languished for years on my wishlist as the impossibility seemed too slight to prioritize tracking down a copy. Only to come across an interesting review on Fang's Mystery Blog, a Chinese-language blog dedicated puzzle-oriented detective fiction, which I ran through Google translate. That's how I learned there was more to The Illusionist than merely being a largely forgotten suspense novel from the seventies with "the explanations for the two impossible crimes, ancient and modern, being reasonable." There's even a third impossibility sandwiched between the ancient and modern ones, but I'll get to them in a minute.

Firstly, I should point out here that The Illusionist is essentially pulp fiction, but not the Vietnam War inspired pulps of the late '60s and '70s. The Illusionist is a kind of throwback to the pulps from the early twentieth century exemplified by its larger-than-life protagonist, the Magnificent Saki.

The Magnificent Saki "is Hawaiian by birth, American by nationality and a British resident from choice" as well as "a direct descendant of Tupia," the Polynesian King, who holds a triple doctorate in literature, philosophy and science – in addition to being an art connoisseur and "a student of the forgotten knowledge of the primitives." He studied under a Tibetan Llama and financed many archaeological explorations which he has led himself, but Saki also practices martial arts and has the children of the Japanese Consulate General as his students in Ju-Jitsu and Karate. More than anything else, Saki is "a hypnotist, a telepath and a clairvoyant" whose "hobby is creating illusions" and "never performs for payment." A golden-skinned, black-haired enigma with penetrating and hypnotic green-eyes. Saki has a tall, fair-haired youth, Arbuthenot, who he calls Flash ("because I'm always so bloody slow") and acts as the mystic's chauffeur, assistant and companion. And they enjoy bouncing insults back and forth.

So the Magnificent Saki has a reputation that casts a long shadow that guided a well-known expert on the Aztec civilization of ancient Mexico to his doorstep.

Professor Howard Morgan has "excavated ruins, interpreted the Aztec's ancient sign language and translated some of their ancient manuscripts," but during his studies he came across 2000-year-old historical mystery. A mystery centering on the question whether or not "the power of a clever priest is more subtle than the vengeance of a long-dead Aztec King." Yes, I think Frances mixed up the Aztecs with the Maya. Anyway, two-thousand years or a few centuries ago, the High-Priest Xtocoplus betrayed the trust of King Quinatzin when he took away his young bride, Lama, on their wedding night. Xtocoplus boldly claims that "it is the will of the Gods that Lama becomes of her High-priest instead of the King of the tribe," but Quinatzin demands "a sign from the Gods that shows that our Hogh-priest has been specially selected for favour." King Quinatzin orders Xtocoplus to be "sealed in a stone sarcophagus" at dawn and lowered down to the bed of a deep, dark lake. So he can prove his magical powers by returning from his watery prison to claim his bride, but the ancient manuscripts neglected to tell how the story ended.

However, the professor followed the clues in the manuscripts and found the great lake referred
to in the writing, which was dragged and they discovered "the stone sarcophagus of Xtocoplus lying upon the floor of the lake" – only the heavy lid had been wrenched off the coffin "which was quite empty." Saki observed "time and water would eat away all human remains," but the High-priest was sealed away wearing all his gold, gem-studded ceremonial regalia. So the professor wants to know how the High-priest could have either freed himself from the stone coffin or death itself and had to coffin transported to his private museum. The Magnificent Saki and Flash accompany Professor Morgan to his home, where they are going to spend the weekend, to subject the coffin to a close inspection. This is where the second, not so very successfully plot-thread comes into play.

Someone is very obviously trying to kill the professor and failing miserably. Professor Morgan had a close brush with a speeding car, a poisoned arrow and even gets attacked with a sacrificial knife, but a hero is only as good as the villain he has to vanquish. When your hero is the Magnificent Saki, you need a better villain than a feeble-minded, butter-fingered bungler who comically throws around ancient weaponry with the same success rate as Wile E. Coyote. I actually began to suspect Saki was pulling double duty as both hero and villain as the story implied Saki Xtocoplus were one and the same person. I know, I know. I have suspected a character before of being a biological immortal, but, in my defense, Xtocoplus is described as the spitting image of Saki and wouldn't be surprise in the least if Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark series inspired Frances to write The Illusionist (c.f. "The Day of the Wizard," 1964). There was another plot-thread introduced early on in the story that began promising enough with Flash having several encounters in the house with a young woman, but she keeps disappearing and everyone denies her existence. I particular liked the scenes in the kitchen and the butler advising Flash to wean himself off drugs. It was very John Dickson Carr-like in how the mystery was initially presented, but quickly resolved and disposed of.

So the main pull of the plot is the historical mystery of Xtocoplus and the two impossibilities performed by the mystic-detective. Saki is going to spend the night in the locked museum, sealed inside the stone sarcophagus to meditate, which is "swathed in ropes" and transported the next morning to the goldfish pond – where it will be completely immersed in water for "as long as seems satisfactory to everyone." But even when locked and sealed away, Saki's astral projects his essence and appears to the household as a ghostly, purple radiating figure with a sardonic grin. When they unlock the museum, to knock on the coffin, Saki answers with knuckle-rapping from the inside that "sounded gay and mocking." Naturally, he also manages to escape from the submerged sarcophagus in almost nonchalant way.

The astral projection-trick is a modern (1970s) update of an age-old dodge and interestingly linked to Saki's disappearance from a locked museum and sealed sarcophagus, which presents a legitimate locked room-trick. But one part of the trick raises an eyebrow. And marred by Frances unfairly withholding important information from the reader. The simple and straightforward solution to the historical impossibility is much better, which nicely dovetailed past and present as well as making clever use of its setting. But, once again, The Illusionist is not a traditional, fair play detective novel. So you're not getting a change to arrive at the same conclusion as the detective.

Just like Tony Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972), Frances' The Illusionist happened to be mainstream crime/suspense novel centering on an impossible situation or two. So you can't hold them to the same standards as Carr and Hoch. The Illusionist would completely disintegrate, if judged purely as a traditional, fair play mystery novel. However, if you strip down the plot to its impossible crime ideas, you're left with a premise that would be very much at home in some of the better episodes from the Jonathan Creek series. Every now and then, I come across a novel or short story, usually written by an amateur or outsider, which feels so close to Jonathan Creek that's easy to see how it could be rewritten as an episode. Such as John Russell Fearn's Within That Room! (1946), Roger Ormerod's More Dead Than Alive (1980), Roy Templeman's Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998) and David Cargill's The Statue of Three Lies (2011). You can add The Illusionist to that list.

So there's definitely something to recommend here, but you probably need an unhealthy obsession with locked room and impossible crime fiction to be able to see it.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

The Scythe of Time: Case Closed, vol. 73 by Gosho Aoyama + Bonus Mini-Review

The 73rd volume of Gosho Aoyama's long-running Case Closed series, published in Japan and elsewhere as Detective Conan, begins with the two concluding chapters of the fascinating story that ended the previous volume, "The Blade of the Keeper of Time" – a clock-themed impossible crime in the spirit of John Dickson Carr and John Rhode. A seemingly impossible murder announced in a letter that was signed "The Guardian of Time."

Rukako Hoshina is a wealthy family matriarch with an obsession for clocks, but every year, she receives a threatening letter accusing her of disrespecting "the flow of time" and foretells she'll fall to "a shapeless sword" at the time she came into the world. So she hired the well-known sleeping detective, Richard Moore, who's accompanied by Conan and Rachel to the Western-style clock mansion of his client. Unfortunately, they're unable to prevent the murderer from striking down Moore's client.

Just as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake, the lights went out and Rukako Hoshina was stabbed in the chest. When the lights came back on, the murderer appeared to have disappeared through the open door of the balcony, but it had been raining until early in the evening and the ground below was muddy – unmarked by any footprints. So the killer hasn't left the house, but the spray pattern showed the culprit had to be "doused in blood." Nobody had enough blood on them to have delivered the fatal blow. And what happened to the murder weapon?

There are many cogs and wheels moving to make this locked room-trick work, which makes it workmanlike rather than inspired, but what makes the story brilliant is the nature of the shapeless sword, why the murderer didn't get spattered with blood and the "strange description" of the culprit who brushed against several people when the lights went out. A description suggesting "a large, fat, fast-moving woman in a dress." So, on a whole, a very satisfying detective story.

The second story has a familiar premise, a poisoning at a restaurant, which has become one of the specialties of the house in this series, but, more interestingly, it leaves Conan alone with Moore – who rarely, if ever, tackle a case without Rachel being there. Rachel is staying at school overnight to practice with her classmates for the big karate tournament and this means he has to Conan out to have dinner, but Coffee Poirot is closed and they end up at a grimy, rundown noodle shack with "ramen to die for." And the ramen proved to be absolutely delicious!

Conan and Moore learn that the owner is feuding with an unscrupulous real estate developer, Tokumori Saizu, who has been trying to buy out all the stores on the block to make place for a shopping mall. Saizu doesn't shun rough, underhanded tactics to get his way. So when he drops dead in the restaurant, of cyanide poisoning, everyone present has a rock solid motive, but how did the murderer administer this very dangerous poison?

Aoyama is one of the most versatile plotters of our time, who can turn his hand to any kind of chicanery, but, when it comes to doling out poison, he's the uncrowned king of poisoning tricks – even better than either Agatha Christie or Paul Doherty. For example, the ingenious method employed, in volume 15, to poison a loan shark or the murder, in volume 63, at a sushi bar where plates of food can be taken randomly from a conveyor belt. Yes, here too, Aoyama came up with another deceivingly simplistic method to transfer a deadly amount of poison to the victim without him being aware of it. As if the murderer "was pulling his strings from the moment he walked in," but it always makes me a little antsy to see how cyanide is being handled in these stories. Nevertheless, a solid story with a very well done setting and trick.

The third story introduces a new character, Masumi Sera, who's a self-proclaimed high school detective ("a girl Kudo") and recently transferred into Rachel and Serena's class, but she seems very interested in Conan. She becomes involved in a case with him when they're both present when a phone scammer apparently jumped to his death. Conan and Sera astutely deduce that the scammer was cleverly murdered, however, picking apart the carefully planned and executed trick takes some time and ingenuity. Conan has to phone in his part of the solution with his Jimmy Kudo voice. A good introduction to a new character with a trick that used an cast-iron alibi to create an impossible crime.

The premise of the last story immediately reminded me of Ed McBain's Killer's Wedge (1959) with the grieving brother of a dead mystery writer strapping explosives to his chest and taking Richard Moore, Rachel, Sera and three other people hostage at his office – demanding that the famous "Sleeping Moore" solves the murder of his sister. Miku Sawaguri has become one of the youngest, bestselling mystery novelists in Japan, but she apparently committed suicide at a hot spring, inside a locked room, by slitting her wrists. Something her brother refuses to accept and believes that one of the three women, all aspiring mystery writers, who went with her to hot springs murdered her. So, once again, Conan has to assume his old identity over the phone to help Moore identify the murderer. And, hopefully, prevent a bloodbath. This story will be concluded in the next volume.

So, all in all, volume 73 was one of the strongest volumes, in a while, full of clever tricks, good settings (ramen shop) and the introduction of new recurring character with ambiguous intentions. A fine example of why Case Closed is the greatest detective story of our time and criminally ignored by Western mystery readers.

But wait, there's more! In my previous blog-post, I reviewed Michael Dahl's second Finnegan Zwake archaeological mystery novel, The Worm Tunnel (1999), which is a series I described as a cross between Case Closed and the 1990s cartoon-series, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. Something unexpectedly came my way that was perfect to tack on to this review.

During the mid-to late 1990s, HarperCollins published eleven TV tie-in novels of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, written by Brad Quentin, but calling them novels is being generous, because my edition of Peril in the Peaks (1996) only has 110 pages in large print – which probably means you could reissue the entire series as one, or two, short story collections. The Quest Team travel to the remote Tibetan mountains where an ancient ghost plane has been spotted and cargo planes disappear without a trace in place called Cloud Alley. Soon they're embroiled with cloud surfing sky pirates and have to cross swords with the dictator of long-lost valley, named Sharma-La, where people have lived under the cover of a mysterious and magical blanket of clouds for more than fifty years. The people believe the clouds protect their spiritual leader, The Little Lama, who hasn't aged for the better part of a century!

So there's more than enough to do for the Quest Team and Quentin packed those scant, 110-pages with a ton of adventurous scenes and exciting developments, which made for an entertaining, fast-paced read, but the only real reason to pick up one of these tie-in stories is nostalgia and nothing else. If you're feeling nostalgic, Peril in the Peaks will give you a fun hour of childhood escapism.

The Viking Claw (2001) by Michael Dahl

Michael Dahl is the author of more than a hundred books for children and young adults, ranging from fantasy and horror to short stories and non-fiction, but Dahl admitted on his website to have a special fondness for detective stories – naming Agatha Christie as his favorite mystery novelist. An affinity that found expression in the archaeological Finnegan "Finn" Zwake series, published between 1999 and 2002, of which two were shortlisted for the Anthony and Edgar mystery awards. The series-premise alone sounds promising enough, but then I discovered that Dahl penned at least four impossible crime novels!

The Wheels That Vanished (2000) is written for younger, probably preteen, readers than the Finnegan Zwake series, but the plot concerns a bicycle thief who vanishes from a closely watched bridge. The other three locked room novels come from the Zwake series.

The Horizontal Man (1999) reportedly has Finn discovering a dead man in a locked storage room, belonging to his long-missing parents, while in The Worm Tunnel (1999) he comes across a murder inside a sealed tent during an archaeological dig for dinosaur eggs, but the one that attracted my attention is The Viking Claw (2001) – in which people miraculous vanish from a legendary, snow-covered mountain in Iceland. And two of the people who disappeared from Thorsfell (Thor's Mountain) were Finn's parents!

Eight years ago, Leon and Anna Zwake, archaeologists and researchers, traveled to Iceland to hunt for a lost Viking colony, the Haunted City of Tquuli, hidden somewhere in the mountains. According to the legends, Ogar Blueaxe once forced his men to carry a ship up to side of Thorsfell, to hide a treasure of Italian gold in the lost city, but, from the thirteen men who went up, only two returned. This earned him the name of Redaxe and his fabled treasure has remained hidden for over ten centuries! On the third day of the Zwake expedition, the local trackers found the camp abandoned and the only trace was a pair of footprints in the snow, "believed to have belonged to the Zwakes," which began at their tents and ended near "the base of a flat, smooth cliff wall." It looked "as if the Zwakes had been lifted up into the air."

Finding an answer to what happened to the Zwake expedition is the red thread running through this adventure-filled series of globetrotting mystery novels with the shadowy employers of Finn's parents, Ackerberg Institute, lurking ominously in the background. The 14-year-old Finn is accompanied by his uncle, Stoppard Sterling, who's a celebrated, award-winning mystery writer always looking for new plot ideas. So this series is pretty much what you would get if you spliced Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed with the 1990s incarnation of Jonny Quest sprinkled with American and Minnesota pop-culture references. If you ever wanted to read an impossible crime story that references Jesse Ventura's tenure as governor of Minnesota, Dahl has got you covered.

The Viking Claw is the fourth entry in the series and Finn is finally going to Iceland to visit the spot where his now legally dead parents disappeared, because he believes they're still alive and is determined to find out what happened on that snowy slope all those years ago – getting there proves to be arduous journey fraught with danger and sabotage. Uncle Stop has hired two Finnish brothers, Edo and Teema Jokkipunki, as trackers, but Finn and his uncle are not their only clients on that tripe. A second party headed by the Ice Cube King, Ruben Roobick, whose Roobick Cubes sponsors mountain-climbing expeditions all over the world to look for "new brands of ice for their customers." Roobick brought along his wife, Kate, and her personal assistant, Sarah O'Hara. The last member of the expedition is 15-year-old cousin of the trackers, Hrór, who loves weird haiku's and has his own reasons to join the expedition. And this sub-plot actually made good use of a cultural aspect of the setting.

A composite sketch of the suspect

So, as they set out to the spot where the Zwake expedition vanished, they're beset by trouble and setbacks delaying or slowing down their climb. The tires of their minibus are slashed and the motor is wrecked, but the climb itself is not entirely free of danger with its cavernous gas bubbles with thin roofs, "waiting to collapse," and dangerous steam vents in the side of a hundred fifty feet high cliff wall. You can describe the first half of The Viking Claw as a mountaineering adventure with one incident giving Finn an idea about the interrupted footprints in the snow that his parents left behind.

Around the halfway mark of the story, Dahl treats the reader to one of the most imaginative and originally posed impossible disappearances that I have ever come across in a detective story!

The expedition arrives at the one-hundred fifty feet high cliff wall, The Goblin Wall, but hot, white clouds from a steam vent and they can't go any further until they can see clearly again – which forced them to setup a hammock-camp (portable ledges) against the side of the icy cliff. A campsite resembling "a bunch of window washers suspended on the side of a wide, windowless skyscraper." And when they wake up, they discover that one of them had disappeared! The freshly fallen snow lay "undisturbed and printless" a hundred feet below them. What a premise!

Unfortunately, the plot becomes a little muddled towards the end with too many plot-threads that needed tidying up and not enough room to properly tying them together. One of the problems is that the story leaves a lot unanswered when it comes to the disappearance of Zwake's parents.

I've delved a little into this series and apparently Dahl abandoned the series after The Coral Coffin (2002), which left the ongoing storyline unfinished and rendered the coded messages Finn found here pretty much useless. A second problem is the crossing of two plot-threads that resulted in murder, committed very late in the story, but it's the least imaginative or thought out part of the plot. Somewhat of cop-out in one regard. Luckily, the impossible disappearances were handled much better and the no-footprints-in-the-snow situation has an interesting solution. A locked room-trick you don't expect to find in an outdoors setting, but it worked here and was neatly tied to the historical backstory of the setting – leading to an important and shocking discovery. The disappearance from the cliff side of the Goblin Wall is, as to be expected, as novel as its premise and both Finn and his uncle come up with a false-solutions involving portable hang glider and equipment bags!

So, when it comes to the plot, The Viking Claw is a mixed bag of tricks, but there was more good than bad and the story, while muddled towards the end, was well told. More importantly, a good example of the innovation and originality, largely unrecognized, that some of these juvenile detective novels, past and present, brought to the locked room mystery and impossible crime story. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for The Horizontal Man and The Worm Tunnel.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) by Norman Berrow

Norman Berrow was, like Fergus Hume and Arthur W. Upfield, a British-born Antipodean mystery novelist whose parents settled down in Ngaio Marsh's hometown, Christchurch, New Zealand, where he became one of the country's foremost craftsman of the locked room mystery – only Max Afford nipped close at his heels. You can find an entire page worth filled with alluring descriptions of Berrow's original-sounding impossible crime fiction in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

The Bishop's Sword (1948) has no less than three impossible appearances and disappearances, which includes astral-projection and the theft of a sword from a hermetically sealed cabinet. A giant, disembodied thumb crushes a man to death in The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) and Don't Jump, Mr. Boland! (1954) has a body inexplicably vanishing from the bottom of a steep cliff, but my sole exposure to Berrow had been his ambitious take on the 1855 Devil's Hoof-marks of Devon, The Footprints of Satan (1950). An impossible crime novel that turned the footprints-in-the-snow gimmick into a wintry obstacle course.

So what has kept me from exploring Berrow's work further? Honestly, I've no idea. Somehow, Berrow simply slipped through the cracks, but my fellow blogger and locked room fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, has been praising his work for years and served as a reminder to, one of the days, return to Berrow – which brings us to the subject of today's review. Another one of Berrow's detective novels listed in Locked Room Murders with several fantastic-sounding impossibilities.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) is the first title in the Detective-Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith series and has a plot comprising of three isolated, seemingly unconnected disappearance cases defying the laws of space and time.

Winchingham is "a pleasant, peaceful spot" with "an old-world, unhurried atmosphere" populated by "industrious, unassuming and law-abiding" people. A small, quiet town with "no vices," but the Winchingham became the stage of "a triple mystery" that disturbed "the cosmic calm of esoteric circles" in Great Britain and was eventually solved by "a prosaic police officer." An eerie, fantastic case of The Man Who Had No Existence, the Phantom Room and The Stolen Street!

The first fantastic tier begins with a woman, Miss Janet Soames, who lives with her "selfish, domineering old humbug" of a brother and golf was her only escape from the house. Miss Soames was on the verge of becoming a middle-aged spinster when, one day, out of nowhere, Prince Charming appears.

Philip Strong claims to have been in love with her for a long time and they begin each other, in secret, until they decide to elope under the cover of night. Philip brings her to the house of an old friend, Jimmy Melrose, who has become an ardent spiritualist in his old age and even his very own séance room, but Janet has an eerie, unsettling feeling before entering the house – like "a forerunner of the nightmare" that was about to engulf her. Janet witnesses how Philip cheerfully mounting a staircase and waited for the top board to utter its "protesting creak," but she only caught a very deep sigh and, just like that, Philip ceased to exist. Not only had he had vanished, like a popped soap bubble, but everyone denied he was ever there! A cabdriver and Mr. Melrose's butler, Porter, swear up and down Janet had arrived at the house alone. And the Philip Strong they knew had been dead for the past seven years!

The "invisible companion" had been brilliantly used by John Dickson Carr in his well-known radio-play, "Cabin B-13," which later received a highly original treatment at the hands of Edward D. Hoch with "The Problem of the Leather Man" (collected in All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2017), but the solution was underwhelming and the premise clumsily handled. Giving too much away about the overarching scheme to the suspicious-minded armchair detective. There is, however, still so much to come!

In the Second Tier, the reader is introduced to an astute businessman and embezzler, Sherman Stokes, who's in the process of absconding with a modest fortune. But he's interrupted by his private-secretary, Miss Lana Booth. She knows what he has been up to and want to share in the spoils, which comes with an offer to become his "wife" and already has made arrangements. So without much of choice, Stokes agrees and they set-off for South America, but their car breaks down in Winchingham and are forced to stay the night at a haunted roadhouse, The Welcome Inn – which was once the property of an eccentric recluse whose hobby was dabbling in mysticism. Since he died at the turn of the century, the place has been haunted by a mischievous entity that has steadily chased away paying customers. So the place is closing down the following day. Stokes and Miss Booth can only get a room with no service, but what a room!

An old-looking, but royally furnished room, with a fireplace, french-windows, tapestry and huge, Queen-like bed with red, gold-flecked bedspread and "a Tibetan devil-mask" hanging on the wall – located on the second-floor. Only problem is that there's no such room at the inn. The place doesn't even have a second-floor! The phantom room has disappeared together with a valise full of embezzled money!

This second impossibility of a phantom room and a non-existent, second-floor is easily the best of the three with a more carefully handled presentation and a satisfying solution, which is not entirely original at its core. But the idea was very well executed. Coincidentally, the earlier mentioned Hoch collection, All But Impossible, has a short story, entitled "The Problem of the Phantom Parlor," working with the same idea and plot-elements. So did Hoch read The Three Tiers of Fantasy and thought he could improve on the first two impossibilities, because I can see how he saw possibilities for alternative, more original, solutions in the answers to the tier one and two.

Funnily enough, you can find a third story in All But Impossible, "The Problem of the Missing Roadhouse," which has an impossible disappearance that's a mixture of tier two and three. But not nearly as good as the other two stories or this novel.

The third and final tier is a direct ancestor of Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) with an alleyway, haunted by visions of the long-ago past, which has recently began to disappear and reappear again. Mrs. Josephine Prattley has decided to spend the weekend at the house of a local artist, Darcy Cherrington, but, when they arrive at his home, he tells Mrs. Prattley to wait outside as he puts the car away and simply vanishes without a sound – prompting her to enter the garage. She walks straight into "an medieval drinking den" with "medieval-looking people," speaking Shakespearean English, where she sees two of those people being put to the sword. A horrendous crime that took place there in 1597! Mrs. Prattley flies the scene, but, when she returns with a policeman in tow, the whole passageway has vanished. Only to reappear a short while later!

The problem of the stolen street is, sadly, the least impressive, or imaginative, of the three miraculous vanishings and even Detective-Inspector Smith admits the explanation is "disappointingly simple." But, in the defense of the author, there's only so much you can do to make a street disappear and the solution provided an entirely new answer to the problem. So there's that.

Detective-Inspector Smith makes short appearances in each tier to discuss and comment on these fantastic problems, but finally stirs to life in the fourth act, "The Toppling of the Tiers," in which he methodically reconstructs and demolishes the supernatural events that have plagued Winchingham. And there were more than those three apparently supernatural disappearances. The locked séance room of Mr. Melrose is ransacked by an evil, otherworldly, entity and a road barricade proved to have an illusory quality. Framed pictures were flying off the wall and a lift was operated by invisible hands at the inn. A man who left no fingerprints and a hat and coat go missing without anyone having been near them before they disappeared.

One by one, Smith strips them of their unearthly quality to reveal "the underlying sordid, mercenary motive" and, as an impossible crime, fanboy it was joy to read these chapters. You can figure out pretty much everything before you get to these explanatory chapters, but loved how these plot-strands were intertwined and knotted together at the end. Some other, non-impossible aspects of the solution were a bit cliché, but, honestly, I have never seen them put to better use than here.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy has a plot brimming with ghostly activities, supernatural occurrences and inexplicable disappearances, which makes it tempting to draw a comparison with Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but story was not packed a dark, doom-laden atmosphere – more in the spirit of a spirited, pulp-style caper (c.f. Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus, 1951). Or perhaps a better comparison would be some of the later "Carter Dickson" titles in which Carr experimented with murderless detective novels about impossible disappearances, such as Lord of the Sorcerers (1945) and A Graveyard to Let (1949), but written with the vigor of Herbert Brean (e.g. Hardly a Man is Now Alive, 1950).

So, to cut a long, rambling review short, The Three Tiers of Fantasy only failed to tax the brains of the armchair detective, but, in every other aspect, it was a thoroughly entertaining mystery caper crammed with impossible situations and locked room puzzles! Highly recommended, if your taste runs in that direction.