Ghosts of Christmas Past: "The House That Brought Bad Luck" (2018) by Anne van Doorn

"Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck") is a recently published short story by "Anne van Doorn," a pseudonym of Dutch crime writer M.P.O. Books, which takes place during those long, dark and snowy days of Christmas. An old-fashioned detective story about a haunted house and an elusive figure "who can travel through the air like Santa Claus."

Lucrezia Izelaar is the former wife of a Turkish criminal, Murad Uysal, who used to own a coffee shop, but "the sale of cannabis was his legal activity" and supplemented his income with rip-deals and robbing weed growers – leading to an inevitable spell in prison. Naturally, she divorced him and remarried the director of an export company, Menno Izelaar. Murad had threatened her that he would never allow her to leave him or take their children with him.

This was not a problem, as long as he was locked up, but, as his impending release date drew nearer, the trouble began. So they quietly moved to a villa in Oosterbeek, named De Alpenroos (The Alpine Rose), which has a yard enclosed by a high, thick and "impenetrable hedge." There's a main gate with "an intercom and a security camera directed at the entrance." The garden gate was kept securely locked at all times. A fairly save and secure home, but the place has a dark and tragic history.

De Alpenroos is merely a stone's throw away from the place where the Allied Forces had battled intensely with the Nazis during Operation Market Garden in 1944.

During this period, the Nazis had billeted four soldiers in the villa and three of them died fighting in the surrounding forests, but one of them returned, Günther, who was mortally wounded and collapsed at the front door – banging and screaming to be let in. Only problem is that the then owners of the villa had also been hiding Jews in the attic. So they couldn't let him inside and left him to die outside. Günther cursed them with the last breath in his lungs.

If you know your history, you'll know that Operation Market Garden was the proverbial bridge too far. So the then owners of the villa were summarily executed and "de onderduikers" (people in hiding) were transported to Germany.

Well, the ghost of Günther has stirred from eternal slumber to haunt and torment Lucrezia's family. However, she believes the person responsible for all of the devilry around her house is her ex-husband. Not the ghost of a German soldier from the Second World War. Unfortunately, the police has no interest or the time to tackle a ghost, real or fake, which is why she engaged two particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators), Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong – who are presented with "an impossible case." Corbijn even becomes an eyewitness to one of the ghostly manifestation in the villa on Christmas Eve.

Late in the evening, someone or something began to loudly knock on the front door, as if a clenched fist was repeatedly hammering on the woodwork, but, when they pulled the curtains aside, nobody was standing there. And the knocking continued!

Late in the evening, someone began to loudly knock on the front door, as if a clenched fist was repeatedly hammering the woodwork, but, when they parted the curtains, nobody was standing there. The knocking continued! Corbijn sprinted to the door and there were, at most, two seconds between the last knock and the opening door, but nobody was there. So how did this elusive figure manage to get pass the electronically locked gate and the thick, thorny and impenetrable hedge?

A second, very similar impossibility happened the following night: repeated knocking on the door and this time they heard a disembodied voice screaming and cursing in German, but nobody was standing there when Menno opened the door. However, this time Corbijn had installed a camera-trap and the incident was captured on video. What the camera captured was "a luminescent shadow."

Floor plan of the first floor of De Alpenroos

There's a third impossible situation when Lucrezia's youngest daughter becomes hysterical when she saw a bearded man ticking against her bedroom window, but the wall has no support to cling on to, such as a drainpipe, nor were there any "footprints or impressions of the legs of a ladder" found in the grass below. This is only the beginning. A bearded man visits the villa and leaves behind a dead body in a locked room, which is quickly and easily explained, but this late murder is a only minor side-puzzle in overall plot and murderer's revelation is a type of solution I generally dislike enormously – although the trick was convincingly and properly motivated. So there's that.

The main attraction of the story remains the inexplicable, ghostly activity around a tightly locked and secure house, all of them were clued or foreshadowed, but as pleasantly clever and old-fashioned as the plot was the presentation and structure of the story. There's a floor plan and the policeman in charge even comes up with a false solution. Every aspect of the story, plot, characters and clues stick and work together like the innards of a Swiss watch. I particularly liked how beautifully the method for the impossibilities dovetailed with the identity of the ghost and the motive.

This places "The House That Brought Bad Luck" on par with other more recent Christmas-themed locked room short stories such as Paul Halter's "La marchande de fleurs" ("The Flower Girl") and Szu-Yen Lin's "The Miracle on Christmas Eve" (collected in Realm of the Impossible, 2017). Not a bad company to be in.

"The House That Brought Bad Luck" is a short story with a snowfall of impossible crime material, clues and even an unaccountable murder, which all helped making this story my favorite entry in the series. As you all know, I don't like locked room mysteries. I love them like a deranged stalker with serious boundary issues. So the fact that this one was written by one of my compatriots made it all the more enjoyable

The previews of the upcoming releases promises even more locked room-like short stories! So you haven't seen the last of Corbijn and De Jong on this blog.

The Perfect Alibi: “The Letters That Spelled Doom” (2018) by Anne van Doorn

Previously, I reviewed De student die zou trouwen (The Student Who Was to Get Married, 2018) by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of Dutch crime writer M.P.O. Books, in which I reported that a third novel and a whole raft of brand new short stories were in the offing – scheduled for publication between July, 2018 and September, 2019. The publisher of this series, E-Pulp, recently put out a newsletter with one of these new short stories as a freebie. I decided to take a look at that story as a followup to my previous review.

"De brieven die onheil spelden" ("The Letters That Spelled Doom") takes place during the year-long investigation detailed in The Student Who Was to Get Married and begins when Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong are discussing another missing persons case that has been dragging on since the early 1980s. A case that will be at the heart of the third novel, De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019).

In this story, Corbijn remembers a murder he had handled, when he was still with the police, which showed certain commonalities with the woman who disappeared in 1983. So he tells his young assistant the story of the murdered fruit farmer and a murderer who appeared to have an indisputable alibi.

The backdrop of the story is a tiny, but idyllic, hamlet with "a mill, and old castle and a meandering river" surrounded by orchards, meadows and grain fields – where cherries, pears and apples were harvested. It was the kind of community where everyone knew each other and the people lived a peaceful, happy existence there. Only stain on the place was a deadly brawl in the village pub twenty-five years ago.

Frank van Steenderen is a fruit farmer who had revitalized the family farm and married the nurse of his late father, Fenna Wessendorp, who are expecting their first child. An idyllic existence brutally torn asunder when Frank is murdered in the farm shop and, on the surface, the murder looks like a robbery gone wrong, but the murderer appears to have known his way around the place and a picture of Fenna had been vandalized – cut to pieces with the blood-smeared murder weapon. Nevertheless, the police find a perfect set of fingerprints on the carving knife and they belong to Frank's half-brother, Peter van Steenderen. The black sheep of the family who had been responsible for the deadly brawl in the village pub all those years ago.

A month later, Fenna finds two threatening letters addressed that had been addressed to her late husband. The letters were written by Peter and accused them of having murdered his father, in order to get the family farm, but promised to return to the village "to settle that old account." So, an open-and shut case, but, in spite of the evidence, Peter could not have killed his half-brother. Peter had died the day before Frank was murdered! You can't wish for better person to alibi you than the Grim Reaper.

I'll throw it out here, because someone is bound to bring it up in the comments, but "The Letters That Spelled Doom" bears an interesting resemblance to the plot of Noël Vindry's Le double alibi (The Double Alibi, 1934). However, the stories are very different in solution and execution. And, no, this is not an impossible crime story. 

As Corbijn tells his story, De Jong tries to fit together all of the pieces and comes up with clever, but false, solution implicating the Chestertonian mailman that came with a rock solid motive and provided an answer to the potential question if the letters could have been intercepted – and possibly replaced with threatening ones. A well thought through false solution that are always a joy to find a detective story.

The story ends with Corbijn revealing the only person who could have been the murderer and how the Merrivalean blinkin' cussedness of things in general ruined a potentially perfect crime, which also uncovered a clever, double-layered plot. The story played reasonably fair with the reader, as far as the identity of the murderer is concerned, but you can only really guess at the motive.

On a whole, "The Letters That Spelled Doom" is a good detective story written in the classic mold with an unbreakable alibi, a perfectly acceptable false solution and an intricate, double-layered murder plot. So I have very little to complain about and look forward to the other stories in this series. Particularly the one about the impossible murder on the city bus.

To be continued...

The Student Who Was to Get Married (2018) by Anne van Doorn

During the past year, I reviewed two Dutch short story collections by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of crime novelist M.P.O. Books, in which he laid the groundwork for a series of detective stories about a pair of particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators), Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong – specialized in cases which have lain unsolved for years or even decades. They work primarily on missing person cases and unsolved murders, but occasionally also take on problems too bizarre for the police (e.g. "The Girl Who Stuck Around" from the second collection).

So far, there have been two collections of short stories and two full-length novels with more short stories and a third novel in the offing in the coming months.

De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries (The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries, 2017) collected the first short stories in this series and was followed by the novel-length De ouders keerden niet terug (The Parents Didn't Return, 2017). De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, 2018) appeared earlier this year and was recently followed by De student die zou trouwen (The Student Who Was to Get Married, 2018). There are twelve stories scheduled to be published between July, 2018 and September, 2019 with a third novel to be released that same year – entitled De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Cleared His Conscience, 2019). The third batch of short stories looks very promising and apparently includes two stories of the impossible variety.

I decided to finally take a crack at the novels and, as to be expected from me, I ignored the chronology of the series and picked up the second book, but this time there's a good reason for it. The Student Who Was to Get Married is the conclusion of forty year old missing person case that Corbijn is obsessed with and has been referred to in the short stories numerous times. A second reason is that part of the story takes place in Utrecht. Just look at the beautiful Domtoren (Dom Tower) on the book cover!

The 23-year-old Jan Willem de Geer is the student of the book-title, who completed his study in biochemical engineering in 1976 with honors, which earned him a research grant from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was about to get married to Helma Lansink – after which they would emigrate to the United States. On July 8, 1976, nine days before his wedding and two weeks before they would move to America, De Geer simply vanished from the face of the Earth.

On the day of his disappearance, De Geer had called his fiance, borrowed the bicycle from a fellow student and went to a bookstore in the center of Utrecht. There he ordered a book and bought a newspaper, which will play a key-part in the investigation, but there the trail simply ended. De Geer was never heard or seen of again.

De Geer was in a good mood on the day of his disappearance, although he was worried about something in the preceding days, but nothing to indicate he was planning to cut and run. So the family and his fiance are shocked when, two months later, a young woman by the name of Vicky Kramer turns up out of the blue and claims she's pregnant with De Geer's child – result of a one-night stand back in February. Kramer has a bank check, signed by De Geer, as prove he was to acknowledge their unborn child and cancel the wedding. However, more than a decade later, a DNA-test proved Kramer had been lying and scammed the well-to-do family of De Geer out of a small fortune. The last tangible clue was the borrowed bicycle that was eventually dredged, properly locked, from a rural canal near a hamlet in South Holland. Someone had obviously dumped it there.

This happened forty years ago and the case has not only gone cold, but the statute of limitations, in case of murder, run out in 1994. Only thing the family can really hope for is finding the remains of De Geer and learning what really happened on the sweltering summer day in 1976. So they hire Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover.

Corbijn has been obsessing over this case since the series began and there are numerous references to their tireless investigation in the short stories. In the final story of The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, "De dame die niet om hulp had gevraagd" ("The Lady Who Had Not Asked for Help"), Corbijn tells a story to De Jong about a previous case, while they wait for the identification of a recently unearthed skeleton, which was found when a fallen tree had lay bare a shallow grave – clues found in the grave suggest that the skeleton may belong to the long-missing Jan Willem de Geer. These clues are his watch and the keys of the bicycle. Well, the remains are identified as belonging to De Geer and he was brutally beaten to death before being buried.

Corbijn and De Jong begin their last, exhausting leg of this long-dragging investigation and the path to the truth bridges stretches across an entire year as they question the people who are still alive and (interestingly) let them read the old, 1976 newspaper De Geer had bought on the day he disappeared – hoping this may yield a clue. They also have to answer the puzzling question why the remains of De Geer was unearthed in a secluded area, on the Darthuizerberg near the village of Leersum, on the Utrechtse Heuvelrug and the bicycle in the Woerdense Verlaat. Those two places are at least 40 kilometers apart.

So this reads more like a police procedural than a detective novel. Only difference is that instead of two professional policemen we have a pair private investigators who plow through this case like an unflagging, doggedly-determined Inspector French.

There are traces here of the police procedural in the private lives of Corbijn and De Jong, which, by the way, do not intrude on the story like so many other modern crime series do. There are, however, problems in the personal lives of the two detectives. De Jong has trouble at home stemming from a debt she inherited from her father and Corbijn, who's very keen on his privacy, has several skeletons rattling in his closet throughout the book. This makes me suspect that Corbijn is the man who'll relieve his conscience in the third novel.

There were also several references to the coming stories and some were very interesting to say the least. One of the case they're working on in the background is a murder by strangulation of an American on a city bus, but nobody on the bus saw or heard a thing! A second case they're looking into is a fifty year old murder of a Belgian mine-worker committed hundreds of meters underground! I only wish the mine-murder story was set even further back into the past, because that would given him the opportunity to use the now long-vanished country of Neutral Moresnet. A miniature state that once existed from 1816 to 1920 on the three-country-border between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The country existed around a zinc mine and, due to its special status, was used as a clearing point for liquor smuggling. Moresnet was a Libertarian's wet-dream come true. Somehow, this unique place, brimming with possibilities, was never used in a detective story. Not even in an adventure or spy yarn. Believe me, I looked. Anyway...

The Student Who Was to Get Married is not a detective story, but a police procedural in the private-eye mold and this makes for engaging story, as you follow them along, but you're never placed in a position that allows you to put all the pieces together yourself. There are hints and foreshadowing, but nothing in the way of proper clueing. However, you discover everything at the same time as Corbijn and De Jong. So the book plays fair in regards that the detectives don't keep anything from the reader.

However, despite this not being really a proper detective story, I burned through the pages like an unquenchable forest fire. You see, long before the impossible crime genre stole my heart, I was fascinated by detective stories in which the past rises from the grave to obscure the present by the unearthing of a pile of bones. I also mention this interest in my 2011 review of Bill Pronzini's Bones (1985) and probably explained myself a lot better there. I simply find intriguing how these stories not only piece together the scattered, time-worn pieces of a long-forgotten crime, but often also have reconstruct the past itself. Something that was very well done here as a hot-button political issue of the 1970s and the effects of the seventeen-day heatwave dovetails with the who, how and why of the murder.

The Student Who Was to Get Married was a well-written, compelling crime novel that kept me glued to the pages. I'm looking forward to the coming short stories and one of them will be reviewed before too long.

The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries (2018) by Anne van Doorn

Last year, I reviewed De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries (The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries, 2017) by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of Dutch crime-writer M.P.O. Books, which is a collection comprising of a handful of short stories about two particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators), Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong – who specialize in unsolved cases that have long gone cold. Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover handles everything from long-standing missing person's cases to cold, unsolved homicides and regularly tackle problems too bizarre or unusual for the regular police.

Corbijn is the head investigator of this two-man agency and provides the brainpower that earns them a paycheck, while De Jong pulls triple duty as his pupil, assistant and narrator. They work from an apartment in a residential tower, called the Kolos van Cronesteyn, which stands in Leiden, South-Holland, but their work brings them to every nook and corner of the country. And even beyond.

The first collection of five stories brought Corbijn and De Jong from Den Haag and Groningen to one of the Wadden Sea Islands and the Belgian Ardennes. And they tackled a diverse range of cases and problems such as an inexplicable murder inside a sealed log cabin ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In"), a vanished hiker in the Ardennes ("The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog") and pulling apart a knot of human tragedies closely tied to the death of a child ("The Brat Who Went Too Far") - a modus operandi continued in the second collection of short stories. Nearly every story in this series is an example of how elements of the old-fashioned, traditional detective story can be merged with the modern-day crime genre.

This second volume of stories, titled De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, 2018), consists, like its predecessor, of five short stories. All five of them had been previously published as separate ebooks. So let's take these stories down from the top.

"De boerin die niet wilde sterven" ("The Farmer's Wife Who Didn't Want to Die") is the opening story and presents Corbijn's young assistant with a case of her own.

Lowina de Jong graduated a course that made her an official, licensed private investigator and Corbijn offers her an internship with a friend and colleague in the east of the country – where she'll get an opportunity to gain practical knowledge. During her summer internship, De Jong is consulted by a nurse from Aruba, Liberty Pinho, who had been out of a job ever since the nursing home, where she worked, closed down. Recently, she was offered a position as a live-in nurse at a farmhouse, to take care of a terminally ill woman, but the conditions and circumstances proved to be reason of concern. One of these conditions practically turned her in a prisoner and there are vicious guard dogs prowling the grounds. And even more peculiar, some of the windows are covered with paint and obscure the view of a wooded area behind the farm!

This is not really a detective story, classic or modern, but a homage to the Victorian-era sensationalist fiction with a familial secret hidden away in "an old, dilapidated tower from the thirteenth century." However, the family secret here is a decidedly modern one. So not a bad story, but one that will probably be more appreciated by readers who love Joseph Sheridan Lafuna and Wilkie Collins.

The next story is "Het meisje dat bleef rondhangen" ("The Girl Who Stuck Around") and is easily the standout in this collection. A ghostly tale of murder and deception reminiscent of some of John Dickson Carr's eerily atmospheric detective stories.

Corbijn and De Jong are asked to look into a one-sided car accident on "a completely deserted country road," which is cursed with "a notorious bend," where people have often smashed into a row of trees and this latest accident was seen by two witnesses – who saw the car disappear around the corner. And this was followed by a loud crash. The driver was seriously wounded and, before losing consciousness, asked the paramedics how the little girl was doing. However, nobody else had been involved in this accident. Let alone a child. This was not the only unexplained accident that occurred on that stretch of deserted road.

Several years previously, an identical accident happened on exactly the same spot. Apparently, the driver had tried to avoid hitting someone who was standing in the middle of the road, but nobody was actually there. The driver had not survived the collision with one of the trees. Corbijn and De Jong learn that a child, Marion, had died on that road and her mother, who lives nearby, is convinced that the ghost of the child is haunting her home and the place where she died. The two detectives even get a glimpse of the ghostly girl, "a frightened face," looking at them between the thick, dark trees!

I already mentioned that the story reminded me of the work of my favorite mystery writer, Carr, but the plot really could have been used for one of his own short stories from The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), which is part of a lamentably short-lived series and a literary relative of this one – as both have a penchant for bizarre or even (borderline) impossible crimes. So an excellent story that stands with the best collected in the previous compendium and genuinely tragic on account of the psychological toll the ghostly apparitions had on the grieving parents of the dead girl.

The third story lends its title to this collection, "De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen" ("The Mountains That Do Not Forget"), which brings Corbijn to "the most isolated valley in northern Albania." He's asked by colleague to give a second opinion on an unsolved locked tower murder that happened there in May, 1933!

Corbijn tells the story to De Jong and gives a detailed account of the customs and traditions of the region, which lay at the heart of the plot. Apparently, a lot of the background was drawn from Edith Durham's High Albania (1909). Anyway, a long-lasting bloedvete (blood-vendetta) between two families that had begun the theft of sheep has culminated in dozens of deaths on both side of those cursed mountains. Only during the communist occupation did the weapons cease, because the regime was cracking down on the old customs. Everyone who participated were taken away and executed. And until the 1990s, the mountains were at peace. 

However, ever since the fall of the Soviet Union the old feuds have been resurrected and the murder of woman in 1933 is at the core of this long-standing vendetta, who was shot against the rules of the Code, when she was hiding in the locked attic of a kulla e ngujimit – a so-called "locked-in tower" where the men used to hit when a hit was called on one of them by their rivals. There was only a small, open window at the top of the tower, but it looked out on a sheer drop ending in a river, but could a shot have been fired through the window from the ground? There was no gun found inside the attic room, but there were scorch-marks on the body. Suggesting that she was shot at close range.

Unfortunately, the solution is not only very obvious, but borrowed from a well-known short detective story by an even more well-known mystery writer. And the explanation was used by another writer in an impossible crime story with a very similar setting (i.e. a locked tower room). However, the attraction of this story is its backdrop and the history of its people. And the (hilarious) consequences Corbijn's solution has for him and his colleague. Needless to say, they had to run. :)

The next story is "Het hoertje dat geen spoor achterliet" ("The Whore Who Left No Trace Behind") and, as modern as the title may sound, this was my return to Baker Street, but, in this case, it's De Warmoesstraat. A street where, once upon a time, stood a notorious police station where the man who formally introduced me to the detective story, the late A.C. Baantjer, worked for three decades as a policeman and homicide detective. Bureau Warmoesstraat also featured prominently in his many delightful police/mystery novels. I really miss Baantjer. Anyway...

In this story, "a dingy hotel on the Warmoesstraat" functions as the backdrop. A writer of erotic thrillers, Marlinde Vries a.k.a "Patricia Rooth," caught her husband, Gerhard von Krefeld, with a prostitute in a hotel room and stabbed him to death – or so the evidence suggests. However, her brother simply refuses to accept to the conclusion of the police and hires Corbijn and De Jong to exonerate his sister by finding out who really killed Von Krefeld. A search that begins with finding the prostitute who vanished without a trace after the murder and the police had been unable to find her. She's not only a witness, but a potential suspect as well.

Even without the clues, I anticipated the solution as soon as the murderer entered the picture. But the plot hang together nicely and, as said, there was some clues planted here and there. I really liked this brief return to the most famous street in Dutch detective and police history.

Finally, the last story in this collection, "De dame die niet om hulp had gevraagd" ("The Lady Who Had Not Asked for Help"), ends the collection on a high-note and functions as bridge to the second, full-length novel in this series. But more on that later.

Corbijn is impatiently waiting on a confirmation on whether or not the skeleton remains that were recently found belong to a student who has been missing since 1978. So, to kill the time, De Jong suggests he tells her story about the time he was a still a policeman and he tells him about the curious case of an elderly lady who had not asked them for help. Mrs. Olde Meierink is an old woman who lives in the middle of the woods and her lonely house can only be reached by "a long, dirt road, full of holes and bends, right through the forest," but the police and even the fire department regularly have to traverse that road after a frantic call to the emergency number – only to discover that nothing has happened. Mrs. Meierink claims she never called for help and she can even provide a cast-iron alibi for one of the time she supposedly called the police. So who was making the calls and what is the motive behind them?

Corbijn and De Jong have to root around the deep, dark past and family history of Mrs. Meierink, which reaches all the way back to Drenthe, South Africa and Rhodesia. The phone-calls turns out to be key elements of a delightful revenge plot with a great, motivational drive. I was reminded of Edward D. Hoch's "The Theft of the Onyx Pool," collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (1978), which had a character with a scheme that was similar in nature and with exactly the same motivation, but with a completely different approach. So a solid story to close out this collection.

On a whole, The Mountains That Do Not Forget is a nicely balanced collection of traditional-minded, plot-driven detective stories presented as short story forms of the contemporary misdaadroman (crime novel). They're a sad reminder what the crime genre could have looked like today had modern-day writers not abandoned logically constructed plots, clueing and such delightful tropes as impossible crimes and dying messages. We could have been like Japan!

I can't deny I feel a tinge of nationalistic pride that my country has produced a writer who, in this day and age, writes in the tradition of Doyle, Christie and Carr. It makes me feel all imperial inside. So, yes, I quite enjoyed these five stories.

On a final, related note, that second, full-length novel I mentioned is scheduled for release in May, titled De student die zou trouwen (The Student Who Was To Get Married, 2018), which takes place in my own backyard and naturally love the book-cover. However, I really should read the first novel, De ouders keerden niet terug (The Parents Did Not Return, 2017), before getting around to that second one. So I'll try to worm the first one in, sometime, next month or so. So you better stick around!

Cold Cases

"I cannot understand how the police could have been so blind..."

- The Old Man (Baroness Orczy's "The York Mystery," collected in The Old Man in the Corner, 1908)

Back in May, I reviewed a Dutch short (locked room) story by Anne van Doorn, titled "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In"), which was offered at the time as a freebie by E-Pulp Publishers. A small, independent, publishing outfit that had turned its back on the drab, gloomy realism of the psychological school of modern crime-fiction and vowed to return to "the time of pulp fiction" when mystery and imagination would await all who would seek it – be it in a short story or a full-length novel. So you'll not find a single title in their catalog with the predicate "literary thriller" emblazoned on the front-cover.

Several months have passed since my previously mentioned blog-post and a number of potentially interesting titles were published during that period. One of these releases was Van Doorn's De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries (The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries, 2017), which is a rare, modern-day, collection of short stories and includes "The Poet Who Locked Himself In."

The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries consists of five short stories about Van Doorn's series-characters, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong, who are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in oude zaken (old cases) that the police were unable to successfully bring to a close – which vary from long-standing missing person cases to unsolved murders. Corbijn is both the head and brains of Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover, while De Jong acts as his assistant, pupil and chronicler. She pretty much plays the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. They work from an apartment in a residential tower, called the Kolos van Cronesteyn, standing on the outskirts of Leiden, South-Holland.

This compendium opens with a brief opmerking vooraf (comment in advance), in which Van Doorn laments the lack of room in today's literary landscape for the short story and professed an admiration for the short detective stories by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Baroness Orczy. And told that the five stories that make up this collection were written in the tradition of those three classic mystery writers. Lastly, Van Doorn ended with the suggestion to read the stories in the order they appear and no more than a day, because "each story only comes into its own when you read no more than one per day."

Apparently, that's how Van Doorn learned to read and appreciate short stories. Well, I succeeded in reading them in order, but burned through them in less than five days. What can I say? I'm a wholesale consumer of detective fiction. So, let's take down these stories from the top.

The first story in this collection is the locked room yarn I reviewed back in May, "The Poet Who Locked Himself In," which is why I'm not going to discuss it here again, but, needless to say, it's always a special treat to come across an impossible crime story in my own language – particularly when the locked room trick is a good one. And it was this specific story that inspired me to compile a list of Dutch-language locked room novels and short stories, which you can find here.

The second story lends its name to this collection, "De geliefde die in het veen verdween" ("The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog"), which begins as a modern-day crime story about a missing property developer, who had ties with the underworld, but ended in the most classical way imaginable.

Corbijn and De Jong are approached by the woman living next to the office, Letty Kreft, whose niece, Ingeborg Greshoff, has a boyfriend who has been missing for six-and-a-half years. Guido Eickhout was a project developer and an ardent hiker, but on his last hike in the Belgian Ardennes, in the Hoge Vennen, he simply vanished from the face of the Earth. Tragically, Greshoff learned that he had ordered golden engagement rings and planned to propose to her upon his return.

The local police believes Eickhout had been murdered by one of his criminal associates and the body had been hidden somewhere in "the outstretched forests, marshy peatlands, bogs" and the heathlands. Greshoff is well aware that the murderer might never be caught or has perhaps been killed himself in another criminal related shooting, which is why she now only wants to find the body and give her would-be-fiance a decent burial. Corbijn accepts the case and travels to the misty, boggy Ardennes and slowly begins to unravel the tapestry of a plot as clever and intricate as anything found in Ellery Queen or Edward D. Hoch. A plot that consists of such tricky puzzle-pieces as "a man with a red sports bag," the pealing of the warning bell at a small chapel, once used as a "beacon for wandering hikers," and a local story from the 19th century – about two lovers who got lost on the fens and perished in a snowstorm.

Plot-wise, "The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog" is the strongest of the five stories in this collection and one of my two personal favorites, which goes to show that even in this country some form of shin honkaku detective fiction can exist.

The next story is titled "De arts die de weg kwijt was" ("The Doctor Who Got Lost On the Way") and is a departure from the cold case formula of the series, because the problem at hand is only a couple of days old. And consists of no less than two seemingly impossible situations!

A doctor from the Laakkwartier in Den Haag (The Hague), named Thomas van Ooijen, is in desperate need for an answer as to what has happened to him several days ago. One night, he was called on his smartphone by a patient, who needed special care, but when he arrived in the street where his patient lived he was waited upon by an unknown man and was ushered to a top-floor apartment – where he found a young woman strapped to a bed with an inflamed gunshot wound. A second man, who was present in the room, came across very threateningly and made it abundantly clear that it was in his best interest to help the girl without asking questions. This situation recalls the premise of R. Austin Freeman's The Mystery of 31, New Inn (1912), but what happens next takes the story in an entirely different direction.

When Van Ooijen finished working on the woman, he blacked out and was found later that night by two policemen inside his locked car that had been parked near the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He had a splitting headache, the smell of alcohol clung to him and the keys, with remote control attached to it, lay on the dash board. Only he himself could have locked himself into his own car. So the police had a hard time believing his story, but what made Van Ooijen doubt himself is when the police accompanied him to the address and discovered that the place was a ground-floor house. The stairs and the entire top-floor apartment had disappeared!

The premise of the story and the explanation for the two impossibilities constitute the best aspects of this story. Corbijn practically solves the problem of the vanishing top-floor apartment from his armchair by consulting Google Maps, but the mystery of the locked car is a little bit more involved and requires a practical demonstration to show how it was done. I've seen the principle behind this particular trick before, but to apply this idea to a modern car with a remote control key is a new ripple.

However, I was not very impressed by the ending of the story or how an all-important plot-thread was left dangling in the wind. The story literally ended with “we will probably never know why [redacted] did so much to save her life.” What? That was, like, the entire mainspring of the plot and you leave it hanging in the air! Very, very disappointing. And the reason why this story ended up as the weakest entry in this collection. It began strong, but ended weakly.

Luckily, the next story in this collection, “Het joch dat grenzen overschreed” (“The Brat Who Went Too Far”), is my second favorite and is a good example of, what Bill Pronzini calls, humanist detective fiction. A sad and tragic murder case that would “never have become a case if there was no loneliness.” Or rather if the people involved had someone close to them to care about.

A lawyer, Elvira Guikema, calls in the help of Corbijn and De Jong on behalf of one of her clients, Geertruida Smelinck, who has been convicted for the premeditated murder of her neighbor's nine-year-old son, Ward Koehoorn – who was a regular Denis the Menace. The backdrop of this case is a glumly, dead-end side street with only three houses. It's a neglected neighborhood where people on one of the bottom rungs of society live a dismal, monotonous life. 

Smelinck was a recluse with a dark past and the mother of the victim, Debby, had begun to prostitute herself after she was abandoned by Ward's father. An elderly retiree, Mr. Van den Ham, lived in the third home and filled his days by taking care of his sick wife and was an important witness as to what happened that fateful day. The last person is their landlord, Dirk van Grijpskerk, who lives far more comfortable than his tenants in a brand new bungalow.

On this already gloomy, dismal existence, Ward was an additional burden and the boy had picked Smelinck as his favorite target. So there was no question about her guilt when the boy was found in her garden with a rusty rod sticking out of his body. A year before, Ward had stolen all of the apples from the tree in her garden and everyone assumed he was caught and killed when he tried to repeat it a second time. 

However, Smelinck maintained her innocence and Corbijn, alongside De Jong, travel to the province of Groningen to visit the desolate place where the murder took place three years ago. The plot is not overly complicated and the evidence, consisting of a key of the garden door, fingerprints and the witness statements, eventually bears out the simple truth. A simple truth I almost completely missed, because I was staring myself blind on my own pet hypothesis. I was only correct on a single technical aspect of the plot, but hey, being proven wrong can be as fun as completely solving the case. And really liked the background and story-telling of this one.

Finally, the last story of the lot, "De vluchteling die alles achterliet" ("The Refugee Who Left Everything Behind"), is yet another nail in the coffin of the ludicrous claim that the advance of forensic science, such as DNA, has made clever and classically-styled detective plots absolute – which is simply not true. This claim had already been shattered, decades before it was made, by Isaac Asimov in The Caves of Steel (1954) and again demonstrated to be false by Keigo Higashino's controversial Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005). Van Doorn approach to this is not as grand as those by Asimov and Higashino, but it nonetheless shows how DNA can be used as misdirection when manipulated and/or misinterpreted.

The background of the story has its roots in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. A Bosnian refugee, Zlatko Hodzic, came to the Netherlands in 1994 and vanished from an asylum center in 1996 without a trace.

One day earlier, Susanne Westera, disappeared under equally inexplicable circumstances from her home on the Wadden Island of Terschelling. A thorough police investigation determined that Zlatko and Susanna were in secret relationship, which was confirmed by DNA found in her home, but nothing else materialized from this discovery and they were relegated to never-ending list of missing persons who were never found. And the case remained unresolved for more than twenty years. Now the father of Susanne is terminally ill and wants to make a last ditch effort to clear up the case, which brings Corbijn and De Jong into the picture.

This story is, structurally, similar to the title story of this collection as both begin as apparently modern-crime stories, with a problem rooted in contemporary times, but the resolutions to these two stories are classic examples of old-fashioned misdirection and craftsman-like plotting – topped, in this case, with a nifty trick to get rid of a pesky body. So not a bad story to close out this collection.

All in all, The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries is a solid collection of contemporary detective stories in the classic mold and a fine showcase of the all-but-lost art form known as the short story format. A form preferred by the early Titans of the genre. So it does me great joy to see a mystery writer from my own country continuing this age-old tradition and a second short story collection has already been announced for next year, De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen en andere mysteries (The Mountains That Do Not Forget and Other Mysteries, 2018).

Finally, I want to point out my own objectivity. There were two impossible crime stories in this volume, but my two favorites were "The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog" and "The Brat Who Went Too Far." So maybe my obsession with locked room mysteries hasn't really gone all that far after all! But is that a good thing or have I just let down the spirit of John Dickson Carr?