A Tough One to Lose (1972) by Tony Kenrick

Tony Kenrick is an Australian author who started out in advertising and worked as a copywriter in America, Britain and Canada, but abandoned his career in advertising in 1972 to become a full-time writer specialized in comedic capers and heist thrillers – which earned him a favorable comparison to the work of Donald E. Westlake. A number of his novels were optioned or bought by Hollywood with only Faraday's Flower (1985) making it to the big screen as Shanghai Surprise (1986). 

So not a likely writer to wash up on this blog, but Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972) is listed and highlighted in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Praising it as "a pacey, often humorous novel in which the author successfully de-and re-materialized a Jumbo Jet full of passengers." If memory serves me correctly, I have come across a vanishing aircraft only once before in Richard Forrest's Death Through the Looking Glass (1978). When a copy came my way, I snapped it up to see what it's all about.

First of all, Kenrick completely subverted my expectation of how the story would play out. I expected an all out, blockbuster-like heist thriller with the lives of 360 missing passengers and a multi-million dollar ransom at stake, but the story turned out to be surprisingly small scale, almost a traditional detective story, reminiscent of the comedic mysteries by Kelley Roos – like you're following around two side-characters away from the action. There's also this weird balance between the darker, thriller-ish aspects mixed in with the shenanigans of the two protagonists. Somehow, it worked better than it should have done.

William Verecker is a down on his luck lawyer who had been a junior partner in an old, conservative established firm until an embarrassing incident with a society hostess ended up in the paper. The "firm hadn't accepted the explanation and neither had his wife," Annie, who thought Verecker was a better boss than husband. So she came back to work as his secretary in his newly established law firm and mostly spend her working day "being sweet to the many people they owed money to and tough with the handful who owed them." This all changed when Verecker is contacted by an old Air Force buddy, Phil Rinlaub, who now works as a troubleshooter for one of the domestic airline giants, Calair. Rinlaub wants him to identity a pair cuff links belonging to a client of his. A client who's one of more than three hundred passengers caught up in the crime of the century, which is kept under tight wrap by the authorities.

Rinlaud tells Verecker in confidence that "Friday night somebody pulled a stunt that makes the Brink's job look like kid stuff" and called it "the Great Plane Robbery." A 747 Jumbo Jet going from San Francisco to New York vanished from radar about thirty minutes after the flight took off and the authorities quick began to suspect something was up. They couldn't get the passenger list out of the computer, duplicates of the tickets were missing and all the copies of the flight manifest had disappeared, which meant there's "a missing airplane full of people" they "had no record of" – a situation that went from bad to worse. Calair receives a package with items belonging to some of the passengers and a ransom demand of $25 million in uncut diamonds! How do you hide something the size of a Jumbo Jet and where do you store over three hundred hostages? The disappearance of the plane seems like an insoluble problem, but Verecker sees an opportunity to net a huge reward from the insurance company that would solve all their money problem. Verecker unwittingly has a clue in possession that the authorities are unaware of.

On the morning of Rinlaud's visit, Verecker played golf with a client and there was a row of holes on the fairway with burnt-out fireworks at the bottom, but, going back to the golf course to have a second look, he discovers a dozen holes set at ten-yard intervals. Like a makeshift landing strip with flares for a small airplane. A suspicion confirmed by the discovery of twin ruts and an oil slick. Excitedly, Verecker returns to Annie with a branch ("Wonderful. We can use it to beat off creditors") which he uses to make a clever deduction how they can figure out who landed there. So they have an inside track the authorities are unaware of. But don't expect a serious thriller.

William and Annie Verecker begin to follow up on their lead and get caught up absurd, sometimes hilarious situations throughout their investigation. Verecker's discovery at a supposedly empty school would not have been out of place in an episode of Jonathan Creek, while Annie's attempt at an undercover operation would have made Haila Troy proud. Their shenanigans are interspersed with the introductions of the hijackers who are referred to as "The Skycap," "The Bookie," "The Pilot," "The Stewardess" and two baggage men, but there's also a dark horse lurking in the background, "The Bomber." A character who deserved his own novel, because he has a very novel motive. Whenever they appear, together or alone, the story becomes more serious in tone. Such as some of their background stories or when they feel drastic action have to be taken against that meddling lawyer and his ex-wife/secretary, which should have struck a jarring note with the comedic stylings of the Vereckers. But didn't.

So what about the plot? That's a mixed bag of nuts and bolts. Firstly, Kenrick came up with a good solution how (theoretically) a giant airplane with more than three hundred people aboard can disappear and stay hidden, while everyone from the FBI to the insurance investigators are combing the state with a fine tooth-comb, but a few details of the plan were a little hard to swallow – mostly to do with numbers. However, it was something different from what you might expect, because there's only so much you can do to explain away vanishing rooms, houses, streets, trains and airplanes. I appreciate the Vereckers were bouncing false-solutions back and forth throughout the story. Some were more seriously than others ("a 747 was too big to disguise as a diner"), but I thought the half-serious suggestion the hijackers "dug a hole in the desert big enough to take a 747" was as interesting as it was impractical. And the one with a foreign hijacker being flown in to disguise a mass murder as a skyjacking/kidnapping was as practical as it was dark. That trick would probably have worked better (especially in 1972) than the one they settled on.

So that's something the more traditionally-minded mystery reader can enjoy, but don't expect too much from everything surrounding the mystery of the vanishing airplane. Not every detail is fully explained, one plot-thread is left unresolved and the fascinating clues that were introduced during the second-half turned out to be of little relevance to the solution. But, then again, A Tough One to Lose was not written and plotted like a full-blown, traditional detective novel. Kenrick wrote a crime caper that went for both laughs and thrills. In addition to the impossible crime at the center of the plot with all its false-solutions certainly makes it an item of interest to obsessed fans of locked room and impossible crime fiction.

The Flying Boat Mystery (1935) by Franco Vailati

Leo Wollenborg Jr. was the son of a German-born Italian economist and a journalist, who moved to the United States in response to the introduction of the leggi razziali (racial laws) in 1938, but he left behind, what some have called, one of the most beautifully imagined Italian locked room mysteries, Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) – published as by "Franco Vailati." So it was only a matter of time before The Flying Boat Mystery appeared on the radar of John Pugmire's Locked Room International.

The Flying Boat Mystery opens on the surface of the water basins of Ostia Airport, near Rome, where a flying boat is ready to depart for Palermo.

The passenger list comprises of three country tradesmen, Giuseppi Sabelli, Giovanni Marchetti and Pagelli-Bertieri. A middle-class, middle-aged couple, Augusto and Maria Martelli. A fascinating lady dressed in red, named Vanna Sandrelli, who carries "a lizard-green bag" which clashes horrendously with her clothes. Somewhat of a crime in Italy, I imagine. A plucky journalist of the La Gazzetta, Giorgio Vallesi, who only had eyes for another female passenger, Marcella Arteni. The last passenger of the list was supposed to be an Italian-born Greek banker, Francesco Agliati, but a bank-teller, Larini, arrived when the plane was full and ready to go – which forced him to part with a packet of lire to get the mechanics seat in the cockpit. And the mechanic traveled, cushioned with money, in the luggage compartment.

So this was suppose to be a routine, ninety-minutes flight from Ostia to Naples, but, during the flight, Agliati "decided suddenly to retire his large, bulky figure into the small toilet." Agliati never returned to his seat nor did he respond to repeated calls and knocking.

When the flying boat landed, the door was broken down and, to everyone's surprise, the small toilet was completely empty! The door had been locked on the inside and the only possible exit is a small skylight in the roof of the toilet, but its dimensions makes it absurdly impossible for the large, bulky man to have passed through and what reason could he have had for such "an absurd acrobatic exploit" in mid-flight? This eliminates the options of accident, suicide and murder. So what happened?

Vice Questore (Assistant Commissioner) Luigi Renzi reads in the newspaper that his old college friend, Giorgio Vallesi, was on board of the hydroplane when the banker inexplicably vanished and decides to insert himself into the investigation, but the impossible disappearance is swathed in complications – such as finding out everyone's reason for traveling on that plane. And, as to be expected, every single one of them is holding something back from the investigators. But that's not all.

A second, more grisly, problem presents itself when the head and arms of a person, who was on that miraculous plane ride, are found crammed in a suitcase that was left in a train compartment. This adds a complex little puzzle involving a dismembered corpse and suitcases with mysterious numbers written on the inside. Why not? Why settle on just an impossible disappearance from a locked toilet in mid-flight, when you can throw a little corpse-puzzle in the mix. However, the locked room problem, premise and solution, is the high point of the plot.

I figured out an essential part of the vanishing-trick, but only because the locked room situation resembled, in some ways, a unique aspect of a short story that was written in the past twenty-five years. I doubt the writer in question was aware of this Italian mystery novel, but found it interesting to see how they found two very different applications for exactly the same idea. What makes The Flying Boat Mystery such a joy is that Franco Vailati didn't stop there.

Once you figured out the basic principle behind the trick, the problem is still far from solved and you can even say that it becomes more complicated. Vailati showed the craftsmanship of a Golden Age writer with a beautifully done, partially false-solution to explain the second part of the vanishing-trick before Renzi shows the reader what really happened with a simple diagram – destroying a well-hidden alibi in the process. What a shame this was Vailati's only detective novel!

The Flying Boat Mystery was translated by Igor Longo and he wrote an article, "The Italian Mystery Novel," that ended the book and some parts hit a little close to home. Longo mentions that one of the reasons why the traditional detective story is in such a poor state, in Italy, was "the disapproving eye of dons, newspaper critics and other Arbiter Elegantiarum" unduly "praising the tosh written by their own pets" and "the locked room murder was laughed about" – used "only for epitomizing what the "good writer" was called to destroy." You can unfortunately say the same of my country. Where even the traditional detective fiction that had been written have rarely, if ever, been reprinted and have pretty much been forgotten about today or have even become lost altogether.

And to make it even more painful, Longo goes over a whole list of notable Italian writers of traditional detective stories and locked room mysteries! Most of them untranslated! I've a feeling JJ will lose his goddamn mind when he learns there's "a sort of minor Italian Rupert Penny" who's entirely out of his reach. Pugmire really has to make these Italian mystery writers part of the LRI family.

So, all in all, The Flying Boat Mystery is a very short, but fun, novel with a busy plot, good setting, an original vanishing-trick and an interesting use of the partially false-solution, which should satisfy the fanatical locked room reader.

The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) by Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) is a collection of short stories, originally assembled by Crippen & Landru, reprinted in 2013 as an ebook by The Murder Room and gathered all ten short stories about McCloy's series-detective, Dr. Basil Willing – a psychiatric consultant of the district attorney's office. This volume has all ten short stories, including eight previously uncollected stories, that were written about Dr. Basil Willing. A splendid collections demonstrating McCloy's versatility as both a writer and plotter.

There are stories littered with the conventions of the traditional detective, such as locked room puzzles, impossible crimes and unbreakable alibis, but the post-1940s stories show a willingness to adept to a new world. Resulting in some unusual plots or subject matters. Well, unusual when it comes from a writer so closely associated with the genre's Golden Age.

Most notably, there are not one, but two, stories in this collection dealing with a crime rarely touched upon by classic mystery writers: mass murder. Fascinatingly, there's an extraterrestrial element in both stories and they were penned exactly thirty years apart. So it was interesting to see McCloy revisit these ideas so late in her career and wrote a completely different story around them, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's take down these stories from the top.

"Through a Glass, Darkly" is the opener of this collection, originally published in the September, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), but this novella has already been discussed in my 2011 review of All But Impossible! An Anthology of Locked Room and Impossible Crime Stories by Members of the Mystery Writers of America (1981). So moving on!

The second novella of the collection, "The Singing Diamonds," was first printed in the October, 1949, issue of EQMM and is a quasi-impossible crime story plotted around the UFO phenomena. There are entire shelves of detective stories with supposedly malevolent ghosts, family curses and rooms that kill, but not that many have handled the topic of alien visitations. McCloy here mixed a flurry of UFO sightings with mass murder, possible espionage and government conspiracies.

Mathilde Verworn was one of the eyewitnesses who saw the flat, elongated squares, "like the pips on a nine of diamonds," flying in V-formation at a great height, emanating "a strange resonance" like the humming or singing of "a high-tension wire in the wind," but in the last fortnight three witnesses have unexpected died – which is why she decided to consult a specialist, Dr. Basil Willing. The plot he exposes is a clever, well executed interpretation of a trick as classic as it's pure evil. But the story as a whole was marvelous. From the premise of the flying diamonds and dying witnesses to Dr. Willing getting "a lesson in the manufacture of public opinion" as a high-placed Naval Intelligence officer shows him how they manipulated and distorted the press reports on the flying diamonds. Easily one of the better and more memorable stories in this collection.

"The Case of the Duplicate Door" is a completely overlooked locked room mystery with an unusual publishing history, which when it was released, in 1949, as a separately printed story in the Mystery of the Month series of jigsaw puzzles. You had to put together a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle and the completed picture was a clue to the solution. This is probably why even Robert Adey missed it when he was compiling Locked Room Murders (1991). However, the story was reprinted in the February, 1965, issue of EQMM under alternative title, "Into Thin Air," with an added paragraph to replace the jigsaw clue.

This is the EQMM version of the story with its original title restored and a reduced, black-and-white reproduction of the assembled jigsaw puzzle. Purely as a locked room story, this is a curiosity that put a false solution to good use.

Matthew Rex, President of the Conservative Trust, has absconded with $80,000 in cash and $300,000 in bearer bonds, but he sends a panicky radio gram from Bermuda that he can "explain everything" and that he'll return the following day by private-plane – police is waiting for him when he lands. But when they storm the plane, they only find a fedora, a pair of gloves and a shot glass half filled with brandy. Nobody had left the plane after it landed and the pilot swears his boss had been aboard, but Matthew Rex had inexplicably disappeared along with a briefcase that had been chained to his wrist. This is the point where the story does something that's as clever as it's frustrating.

A perfectly logical, but incorrect, solution is proposed that turned the inexplicable disappearance into an unfortunate accident. An accident is not the most desirable explanation to a seemingly impossible situation, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, but this was a genuinely good, reasonable and acceptable answer – directly linked to the actual solution. A weak, uninspired solution that looked much better than it was, because it was backed up by the false solution. Dr. Willing figured out the trick when he spotted the flaw in this perfectly acceptable explanation.

So this is an uneven, but interesting, curiosity and the only reason why it never made any of the locked room anthologies is its obscurity. Hey, it would be an excuse to put McCloy's name on the cover and you can't keep reprinting "Through a Glass, Darkly."

The next story, "Thy Brother Death," was culled from a 1955 issue of This Week and begins when Dr. Willing is consulted by an acquaintance. Dick Blount found an anonymous letter, addressed to his wife, in the morning mail with ominous-sounding lines of poetry from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Suspicion has fallen on a village girl, who had worked for them as a maid, but was dismissed after a diamond brooch went missing. Dr. Willing wants a sample of her handwriting and accompanies Blount to his private office to get some canceled checks she had endorsed, but, when they arrive, the telephone is ringing. The caller was his desperate wife, Clara, who called to say "someone was prowling outside the house" followed by scream and a gunshot. And then silence.

A good, old-fashioned detective story with more emphasis on the how, rather than the who, which hinged on a clever, but ultimately simple, alibi-trick reminiscent of Christopher Bush. A note of warning: the solution is harder to anticipate for readers today, because the hinge of the alibi-trick is specific to that period in time.

"Murder Stops the Music" was first published in This Week in 1957 and Dr. Willing is tasked with solving the murder of a famous concert pianist, Gertrude Ehrenthal, who was stabbed to death during a village square dance for local charity when the place was suddenly plunged in darkness. I think murderer moved around a little too easily in a pitch-black room with people standing around, but the double-clue of the ill-mannered dog was smartly handled. A good, but minor, story.

"The Pleasant Assassin" was originally published in the December, 1970, issue of EQMM and Dr. Willing is consulted by Captain Aloysius Grogan, of the Boston Police Department, who needs his help with ensnaring a respected academic, Professor Jeremiah Pitcairn. Apparently, the professor is deeply involved in the drug trade and capturing involves a quasi-locked room problem of a warning message being transmitted from a closely observed space (c.f. Edmund Crispin's "A Country to Sell," 1955). However, the plot is paper-thin to the point that it barely exists, but stands out for its open, liberally-minded opinion on marijuana and Captain Grogan even endorsed its legalization ("as long as marijuana is illegal it brings young people it brings young people into contact with the criminal world"). Not what you would expect from a Golden Age mystery writer, but good to see McCloy tried to keep up with the times.

"Murder Ad Lib" was originally published in the November, 1964, issue of EQMM and is an unusual poorly plotted detective story. Dr. Willing is only present as a sharp-eyed, quick-witted spectator. Lt. Carson Dawes, of the Los Angeles Police, knows the murderer's identity and that his alibi has crumbled to pieces, but the murderer is blissfully unaware of these development. So all the police lieutenant has to do is sit back and "let him talk himself into the gas chamber," but he allowed a close friend of the suspect to be present and this person managed to give him a warning message. Dawes is the only one who misses the moment when this happened. The reader can only spot this painfully obvious moment, but decoding the message is impossible. So this is the practically inescapable dud you come across in nearly every short story collection.

"A Case of Innocent Eavesdropping" was originally published in the March, 1978, issue of EQMM and is more of a domestic crime than a puzzle detective story.

Mrs. Jessie Markel is an elderly lady who moves in with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, but her daughter-in-law, Maggie, exploits her from all sides. Maggie has taken full control of her income and has her "scrubbing all the pots and pans that can't go into the dishwasher," running the vacuum cleaner, polishing the silver and babysitting her grandson – which gives her little time or energy for anything else. Maggie tells her friends Mrs. Markel needs this work "to recover her identity." There is, however, something sinister going on the Markel household and Mrs. Markel learns a terrifying secret that ends in murder.

However, the only thing Dr. Willing has to do here is exonerate an innocent man by destroying a lie from a cantankerous, dishonest eyewitness. I didn't dislike this story, but hardly one of McCloy's best works.

"Murphy's Law" is another minor, but enjoyable, story originally published in the May, 1979, issue of EQMM and the structure of the plot recalls Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his thief-for-hire, Nick Velvet. The story begins with Gerald Murphy and Professor Allerton plotting to steal "a small album" of ten ancient Greek coins from a notorious collector, Sammy Bork, which have an estimated value of half a million dollars. Naturally, everything goes wrong and Dr. Willing has to exonerate one of them from a potential murder charge. A good short story with multiple, intertwined plot-threads.

This collection ends strongly with the unnerving "The Bug That's Going Around," originally printed in the August, 1979, issue of EQMM and opens with a covert challenge to the reader. In most of Dr. Willing's murder cases, "the essential clue has been some scrap of rare information," but this time, he solved it with common "scraps of knowledge" accessible "to everybody who bothered to read newspapers." The extraordinary problem here is another quasi-impossible puzzle of a scientific nature and the story is in more than way related to "The Singing Diamonds."

The backdrop of the story is a convention of microbiologists at the Forum Hotel, but an inexplicable epidemic has left five people dead and even Dr. Willing's five-year-old grandson has fallen ill. A bizarre micro-organism has been found in the bodies of everyone who died or fell ill at the hotel, but the problem is that the micro-organism appears to be "a new species," violating all "the laws of evolution by appearing too suddenly," which makes the thing a monster – something literally out of this world! So are these micro-organisms "silent, invisible micro-astronauts," who don't need spaceships, because they can survive "all extremes of heat, cold and distance." An alien killer! And if this is the case, how did they get in the air-conditioning system of a Boston hotel?

Dr. Willing finds a logical and rational explanation for "an impossible micro-organism," which he deduced from a doodle on a telephone pad found at the scene of a murder. A genuinely good, slightly unnerving story of mass murder and a potential extraterrestrial threat. A great closer to a great collection!

So, on a whole, The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing is an outstanding collection of McCloy's short fiction that opened strongly with an all-time classic, a highly original novella, a virtually unknown locked room mystery and good alibi story. After these four excellent stories, the quality tapered off a little bit and had one dud, but McCloy returned to form in the last two stories. Highly recommended!

Mr. Monk is Miserable (2008) by Lee Goldberg

Monk was a popular TV-series that run for 8 seasons, comprising of 125 episodes in total, which aired between 2002 and 2009 on the USA Network.

The unlikely hero of the show is the title-character, Adrian Monk, who used to be a homicide detective, but the murder of his wife, Trudy, left him crippled with grief and unable to control a litany of phobias that could fill a number of leather-bound volumes – complete with "footnotes, historical references, photographs, diagrams and a detailed index." Monk also has OCD and wants everything "to be even, straight, balanced, symmetrical, organized and consistent." Everone and everything has to adhere to his "ridiculously arcane rules of order."

On the flip side, Monk has a hyper-analytical mind with a memory like a steel trap and razor-sharp, observational abilities that allows him to tell "the difference between two ticking watches." So ever since the death of his wife, Monk worked as a special consultant to the San Francisco Police Department he "closed hundreds of puzzling cases" for Captain Leland Stottlemeyer.

All the while, he's slowly working on his recovery, in order to earn back his badge, by regularly visiting his long-suffering psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Kroger, and is aided in his work and daily life by a personal assistant, Sharona Fleming – who was replaced in the third season by Natalie Teeger. They had to accompany their phobia-riddled, OCD-plagued employer as he destroys apparently iron-clad alibis (e.g. Mr. Monk and the Marathon Man, 2003) and explains the occasional locked room mystery (e.g. Mr. Monk is On the Air, 2007).

The show also spawned a series of tie-in novels, published between 2006 and 2015, of which the majority were written by Lee Goldberg with an additional four titles penned by Hy Conrad. This blog-post will be looking at one of the titles written by the former.

Goldberg is an author, screenwriter and producer who worked on the superb A&E Nero Wolfe TV-series, SeaQuest DSV and continued the Diagnosis Murder series as a short-lived run of tie-in novels. Goldberg is also one of the founders, together with Max Allan Collins, of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers (IAMTW).

There are altogether nineteen Monk novels and the tie-in books actually outlived the original TV-series by six years!

I had two of the Goldberg books on the big pile, Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants (2007) and Mr. Monk is Miserable (2008), but never got around to reading them because something else was constantly demanding my attention – a gift and a curse, to quote Monk, of the current Renaissance Era of the traditional detective story. Recently, I had the inexplicable urge to revisit the series and decided to finally take a stab at one of the books. And it turned out to be quite different from what I expected.

Mr. Monk is Miserable is the seventh entry in the series and takes place between the events of the previous novel, Mr. Monk Goes to Germany (2008), and the TV episode Mr. Monk is On the Run (2008), which brings Monk and Teeger to Paris, France. Mr. Monk is Miserable can best be described as a comedic travelogue with detective interruptions and the opening chapters really set the tone for the rest of the story.

In the previous novel, Monk, "in an act of desperation and insanity that will probably go down in the annals of stalking history," followed Dr. Kroger to a psychiatric conference in Lohr, Germany, where he became enmeshed in a murder case. Mr. Monk is Miserable picks up where Mr. Monk Goes to Germany left off and begins with Teeger blackmailing Monk into delaying their departure in order to visit France on his dime, because she needed a real holiday and reasoned her employer owed her one for ruining her Hawaiian getaway – which is an ordeal described in Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (2007). However, before they can land in France, a murder is committed aboard the plane.

Adrian Monk by Gosho Aoyama

One of the German passengers is poisoned under unusual circumstances, but Monk immediately deduces the identity of the murderer, motive and the ingenious murder method. I think this poisoning is the cleverest and most original of all the murders in this book, which read like one of those ingenious little stories from Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan, but felt completely wasted in this brief vignette. I think more could have been done with it.

Anyway, the detective elements take a backseat to the comedy bits when Monk and Teeger arrive in France.

The problems in this portion of the story consists of finding a hotel that fit Monk's "unique requirements." A four-star hotel was out of their price range, but a three-star hotel wouldn't do either, because it was "one star short of an even number" and that left Teeger with having to find an affordable, two-star hotel that met her employers standards of cleanliness, attention to detail and preferable with symmetrical architecture. Teeger actually succeeded in finding a place, but their single rooms turn out to be on a floor with an uneven number. So they end up sharing a room on another, even-numbered floor. Monk is not pleased about the prospect of having to share a room with his assistant.

However, the sight-seeing scenes of Paris are not solely played for laughs and giggles. Monk and Teeger share a couple of moments, like when Teeger is overwhelmed by the memories of her dead husband, Mitch, but Monk shielded her outburst with his body from passerby's. And even offered a sanitary wipe.

Mr. Monk is Miserable begins to resemble a detective story again with the halfway mark in sight and begins with a visit to les catacombes, an underground labyrinth where the bones of six million souls rest, but Monk spotted a recent addition to the maze of bones – a skull of a man who been recently murdered. What gave it away? The modern fillings in the teeth of the skull. A small, out-of-pace detail that only Monk would spot and this isn't even the last murder slowly spoiling Teeger's holiday. 

 

Teeger drags Monk along to a restaurant, called Toujours Nuit, where patrons ate in total darkness and were served by blind waiters. A woman, who's introduced as Sandrine, is placed at their table and she tells Monk that she knows who he found in the catacombs, but what happens next amounts to an impossible murder under cover of complete darkness. A dull thunk is heard and when the lights come on the woman is lying on the ground with a steak-knife buried in her chest.

So how did the murderer, if this person came from outside, enter the restaurant unseen? The door was locked with a security camera on the outside and the monitor was constantly watched. The backdoor was unlocked, but this lead straight through the middle of the kitchen where the chefs were at work. And they're not blind. Finally, how did the murderer manage to strike with deadly precision in a pitch-black room littered with people and obstacles?

Sadly, the way the murderer entered the locked and watched restaurant, while fitting in with the overall plot, is horribly outdated and the impossible stabbing in a pitch-black room doesn't really have an inspired solution. My fellow mystery blogger, Puzzle Doctor, would probably place this locked room sub-plot in the only-one-solution-makes-sense school of plotting. So the solution is, logically speaking, acceptable, but Stacey Bishop, John Dickson Carr, Baynard Kendrick and Ellery Queen have all tackled a similar problem with more deviousness and showmanship than Goldberg. I even recall an episode from Foyle's War (The White Feather, 2002) that has a simplistic, but nifty, method for shooting someone in a blacked-out room.

So, plot-wise, Mr. Monk is Miserable is a featherweight and the who, or why, does not add enough extra weight to tip the scales, but the story, as a whole, is incredible readable and genuinely funny at times – which makes for a good chuckle or two. Adrian Monk will stand as one of the great (television) detectives of this century and his character was fully exploited here. Only drawback is that this came at the expense of the plot. However, it was a fun read and will try Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants one of these days, because the plot is reportedly more solid in that one. So this is a story that will definitely be continued on this blog.

On a final, related note: my only real disappointment with Monk is that we never got a crossover with Columbo. I know we'll never see Peter Falk and Tony Shalhoub together on the small screen as Adrian Monk and Lieutenant Columbo, but that we never got them together in a book borders on the criminal.

The Policeman Who Explained Miracles

"Always remember, it's a trick. Keep that in mind and you can figure out how it's done."

- Lt. Columbo (Columbo Goes to the Guillotine, 1989)

Stephen Leather is a former journalist from the United Kingdom, who used to write for The Times and The South China Morning Post, before he became a full-time crime novelist and saw his thrillers translated in a dozen languages – which makes it safe to say that his career switch was a success. However, what caught my attention were not his contemporary crime novels, but a series of classically-styled short stories about Inspector Zhang of the Singapore Police Force.

I don't remember who recommended the Inspector Zhang stories, but remember they were described as a spirited homage to the locked room mystery and the great detective stories of yore. So, of course, they found their way onto my TBR-pile!

Leather penned this series during the early years of this decade, between 2011 and 2013, which were then collected a year later as The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). All of the stories are impossible, or semi-impossible, crime stories that are, mostly, set in "squeaky-clean Singapore." But the main attraction of this collection is the titular police-inspector.

Inspector Zhang is best described as a kindred spirit of ours. A policeman who loves detective stories, in particular locked room mysteries, but crimes of a seemingly impossible nature seldom occur outside of the printed page and rarely on the island state of Singapore – as it boosts one of the lowest crime rates in the world. So, whenever a criminal situation shows some inexplicable peculiarities, Zhang takes the opportunity to give a Carrian locked room lecture or litter his speech with references to Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle and Ellery Queen. The good inspector also revealed he learned Japanese for the sole purpose of being able to read the work of Soji Shimada.

So, the character of Inspector Zhang is both incredible fun and interesting: a policeman who operates in one of the cleanest, safest and low-crime areas on the face of this planet, but with a soul yearning for the kind of problems that faced Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. This makes them especially fun stories for the reader who's as big a fanboy as the inspector.

I better stop this bloated introduction here and start taking a look at each of the eight stories in this collection, because my reviews of short story collections have the tendency to expand to the size of Nero Wolfe's waistline.

The first one of the lot, "Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish," confronts the duo of Inspector Zhang and Sergeant Lee with the murder of an American distributor of plastic products, Peter Wilkinson, who was found in a five-star VIP hotel room with a stab wound to the throat. However, the windows were secured from within and the only door opened on a corridor that is constantly monitored by CCTV, which showed the victim was completely alone and this makes the murder look like a seemingly impossible one – much to the excitement of Zhang. As he confessed to Sgt. Lee, he has been waiting his whole life for an actual impossible murder and uses the situation to give an impromptu dissertation on all of the tricks mentioned by Dr. Gideon Fell in his famous Locked Room Lecture from John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man (1935). Granted, this is used to pad out the story and makes the routine solution, which is a slight variation on an old trick, slightly disappointing, but Zhang's contagious enthusiasm made this a passable effort.

In the second story, "Inspector Zhang and the Falling Woman," Zhang has taken his wife to a restaurant to celebrate thirty years of marriage, but the ending of the evening is spoiled when they came across the prelude of a drama: a young woman was standing on the roof of a twelve-story apartment building and threatened to jump. She acts upon her threat and jumps to an ugly mess on the pavement below, but this routine case of suicide takes a strange twist when the medical examiner takes a closer look at the body. The woman who apparently jumped to her death was drowned!

However, the method was actually not too difficult to figure out and really the only answer that made logically sense, which (for your information) had nothing to do with the medical examiner. I know what some of you were thinking, but that's not the answer. What really was the highlight of this story was not the plot, but Zhang's imitation of Columbo, when he waltzed into the apartment of one of the suspects, speaking irrelevances about "my wife" and even saying "just one more thing." Loved it!

The third story, "Inspector Zhang and the Dead Thai Gangster," finally shows a clever and even an original impossible situation. One that takes place aboard a Boeing 777-200. Zhang and Lee are flying to Thailand, "to collect a Singaporean businessman who was being extradited on fraud charges," but upon landing the inspector is summoned by the captain: a passenger has been found dead in the sparsely occupied business class and the body has a bullet hole in the chest with gunshot residue on his shirt. The shot was fired at close range, but that seemed, under the circumstances, as impossible as getting a gun aboard and then making it vanish again – which is, nonetheless, what appears to have happened. But that's not the only problem facing the inspector.

The name of the victim is Kwanchai Srisai, "a well-known gangster" with "political aspirations," who has been target of several murder attempts before. Zhang contacted his superiors over the telephone, who contacted the Royal Thai Police, and they want him to take a crack at the case and sort out the mess before taking over the case, which means they prefer to come aboard to take the killer into custody rather than taking over the investigation. And, while not every piece of information was fairly shared with the reader, the explanation for the impossible situation was still pretty clever and somewhat innovative. I liked how it came about.

Next in line is "Inspector Zhang and the Perfect Alibi" and the plot shows the inspector is acquiring a reputation, up and down the ranks of the police force, as someone with an uncanny knack for getting "to the heart of seemingly impossible situations." The Deputy Commissioner is stuck with what appeared to be a simple case, which turned into an impossible one, that has the potential of turning the entire police department into a laughing stock. A woman had been murdered in her home, throat cut, but there were clear signs of burglary and there were cast-iron, tale-tell clues pointing towards a known burglar – fingerprints on the murder weapon and a bite-mark on victim. However, the suspect was in custody at the time of the murder. So either the suspect managed to slip from his sealed and guarded prison cell or their forensic scientists made a mistake. Both answers are bad for the police.

A good and intriguing premise, but very simple to solve and you should be able to stumble to the correct answer by the halfway mark. By the way, I did learn something from this story: caning is a legal and perfectly normal punishment in Singapore. It can be given for a wide variety of crimes and offenses. The video I found of a caning looked very, very painful, but makes you almost understand why they have clean streets and a chronic lack of petty criminals.

The fifth story, "Inspector Zhang and the Hotel Guest," is the shortest entry in this collection and is fairly simple, non-impossible problem. A man was found in one of the hotel rooms, booked in the name of a Russian woman, but the man has a bump on the back of his head and no memory of who he is. So the inspector has to make a series of Sherlockian-style deductions based on the man's appearance and study the CCTV footage in order to ferret out the answer to this little conundrum. A short, simple, but passable, story.

There's an original locked room problem at the heart of the next story, "Inspector Zhang and the Disappearing Drugs," which begins with the Senior Assistant Commissioner summoning Zhang to his office in connection with a case of "a highly confidential nature." A sensitive case that requires the mind of "an expert in the field" of seemingly impossible crimes.

A team of Customs officers accidentally came a consignment of drugs, a hundred kilos of Burmese heroine in ten cardboard boxes, which gave the Drug Squad an opportunity to setup a trap by following "the boxes of drugs to the customer who had paid for them" - effectively rolling up the Singapore end of the operation. Well, that didn't happen. The boxes were delivered to a shabby apartment on the eighth floor of a building and were left behind there, but the address was known known to the police. So they made their preparations: CCTV cameras were installed in the hallway and the apartment was under constant police observation, but the boxes were never retrieved from the apartment.

After a week passed, they called off the operation and the police-detective in charge was given to order to enter the apartment in order to retrieve the heroine. But that's when they made a startling discovery: the apartment was empty and the boxes, alongside the drugs, had vanished into thin air!

Zhang is great form and figures out both the method and the culprit based on the CCTV footage and the pesky security on the reinforced front-door of the apartment, which offers the reader with the same opportunity. And that makes this one of the better and most rewarding stories from this collection.

The penultimate story in the collection, "Inspector Zhang Goes to Harrogate," is a fun one. Zhang's wife arranged a holiday to England for his birthday and the main attraction of this present is attending a mystery writers' conference, where he meets a hated writer and publisher, Sean Hyde, who sold over a million ebooks by selling them "for less than the price of a cup of coffee" - which is resented by a lot of people. They claim Hyde is "devaluing books" by selling them so cheaply, but he merely suggested agents and publishers needed to adept to a changing market. Or that some of his vocal colleagues should supply better written books at the right price, because badly written, over priced schlock was doomed to fail. So this made him not the most popular speaker at the conference.

But the situation takes a dramatic turn when Hyde's body is found in his hotel room, hanging from the bathroom door, in what appears to be a suicide: a maid was outside in the corridor outside and saw nobody leaving the room after hearing a thud. So nobody was present when he apparently hung himself. However, this is, technically speaking, not a locked room, because the door was not locked from the inside and the bathroom window was open. It's one of those alibi breaking stories that strongly reminded me of one or two similar tales from Case Closed (e.g. Vol. 57), but it's a fun one, which is strengthened by the setting and the background that delved into ebook publishing. An area not yet widely explored by mystery writers. So this story may very well be an original in that regard.

Finally, there's "Inspector Zhang and the Island of the Dead," which sounds very grim and promising, but the setting, Sentosa Island, is a popular resort that was associated in a dark and distant past with piracy. However, that has very little to do with the story at hand. A domestic affair dressed up as a botched burglary: Dr. Samuel Kwan was found stabbed to death in his study by his wife and Dr. Mayang. They heard a scream emanating from the study, but the door was locked and they had to go round the house to discover that one of the windows of the backdoor had been broken. But this apparently botched burglary turns into another alibi breaking story when Zhang learns the house was a divided one with a divorce in process.

So, not a bad story, but I expected something better from both the title and the last story in this collection, which really should have had a (strong) impossible crime.

In any case, I genuinely enjoyed The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang, which may not have always been perfect or played entirely fair, but, as a whole, the book offers a great band of tribute stories to the locked room mystery and the classic detective story – exemplified in the character of Zhang. His presence and enthusiastic love for detective stories made even the weaker stories fun to read. Hopefully, this is not the last time we got to see him take charge of a curious case involving locked room murders, baffling disappearances that appear to be completely impossible or destroying a cast-iron alibi of a guilty person. All the while he's happily chattering away about Carr, Christie and Doyle.