A Challenger Appears: C.M.B. vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou

Three months ago, I finished Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series with my review of vol. 50 and compiled "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 26-50" as a follow-up to "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 1-25" shortly after – decided to take a short break from Katou's detective fiction. A short break that lasted about a month longer than originally intended. Having "spammed" Q.E.D. reviews earlier in the year, I wanted to return to C.M.B. before starting on Q.E.D. iff.

The first, of two, stories from C.M.B. vol. 5, "Gutenberg Bible," brings a rare visitor to Sakaki Shinra's strange, hidden Museum of Antiquity. A young, foreign woman, Mau Sugal, who carries around a huge, briefcase-like backpack and speaks Japanese perfectly.

What she brought along is a historical treasure: a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible. She wants Shinra, holder of the "C," "M" and "B" rings, to give his expert opinion and, if possible, authenticate it. When he asks where the page came from and under which circumstances it was obtained, Sugal tells him she "cannot reveal that due to the exact wishes of the customer." Shinra flat out refuses to authenticate the page much to the annoyance of his friend, Nanase Tatsuki ("she's in trouble and needs your help"), but he can't risk the Gutenberg page being sold on the black market with his seal of authenticity stamped on it. The black market in stolen art and archaeological artifacts is at the heart of this story, because the page naturally attracts the attention from both criminals and the law. A case that also involves a rumored, hitherto unknown copy of the Gutenberg Bible locked away in a safety deposit box.

So a really fun story, but, plot-wise, impossible to spoil as the story introduces Mau Sugal with the ending revealing and setting her up as an antagonist to Shinra – more like a good natured frenemy. Mau Sugal returns in the next story.

"Spirit of the Forest," second and last story of vol. 5, sees Sugal coming back to Shinra's museum ("are you here to steal again?"). She wants him to accompany her to the jungles of Borneo to help find someone he knows, Sadaman the herbalist, who "can cure people with his knowledge of the different types of herbs growing in the forest." That talent attracted the attention of the CEO of Navaro Pharmaceuticals, Levy Noble. She saw possibilities to create new medicines to combat the bacteria that start to show immunity to current medicines, but an incident happened. Lloyd Shorts, a plant hunter, accompanied by an investigator, John Baits, were dispatched to make contact with Sadaman, but, on their second meeting, Baits was killed ("...his head was cut off") and Lloyd run into the jungle in a panic – screaming he's "gonna be killed by Sadaman as well." This murder comes with a ghostly impossibility. Right before the body was found, someone saw Baits walking across a bridge and followed him, but only bumped into Lloyd on the other side. And he hadn't seen Baits come by. So a dead man walking inexplicably vanished into thin air!

However, "Spirit of the Forest" is more like one of those character-driven puzzles from Q.E.D. in which the importance is on Shinra trying to find and understand the lessons Shadaman taught him as a kid. Not necessarily the criminal scheme playing out behind the scenes. While the ghostly disappearance on the bridge has a glimmer of originality, the solution represents one of those rare instances where the visual language of manga is not at all complimentary to trick. Normally, they show the still largely untapped potential of visual impossible crimes, but this just looked preposterous. A trick that should have been described and left to the imagination. This has not been a great year for finding gems of locked room mystery and impossible crime story.

So, on a whole, a fun enough, if unchallenging, story which also sums up this fifth volume in toto. Fun but not especially challenging, plotwise. You can write that down to being early in the series and having to introduce and setting up recurring characters and storylines. But fine for getting back into the series after a hiatus.

C.M.B. vol. 6 is made up a single, longish story, "Canopus," digging into Shinra's sometimes tragic background. The story takes place in Cairo, Egypt, where a deranged serial killer is taking a scenic tour of the historic city and generally being a bad guest in a foreign country. First stop of this serial killer is Cairo's Museum of Antiquity where a man is shot, killed and mutilated. Only other thing the killer left behind was a shell casing engraved with Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, the bullet damaged an ancient artifact that had been excavated by Shinra's late mother, Haruna. That brings a distraught Shinra to Cairo to hunt down the shooter who damaged the artifact.

Speaking of Shinra's family, "Canopus" is the other part of the crossover with Q.E.D. that began in "Pharaoh's Necklace" from vol. 28. Shinra and his cousin Sou Touma, along with Kana Mizuhara, happened to be in Cairo at the same time, which means they get to interact and exchange advise. Tatsuki uses the meeting to subtly get more background information on Shinra out of Touma and Mizuhara. Meanwhile, the serial killer continues his murder spree as more mutilated bodies and hieroglyphics shell casing turn up near Egypt's historical landmarks.

So there's plenty going on with enough room to work out the three major plot points. Firstly, the very sad, sometimes brutal backstory of Shinra's relationship with his mother and how he lost her. Secondly, while the serial killer doesn't pose a terribly complicated plot-thread, there's reason to the killer's madness to give it that good, old-fashioned whodunit tug. Thirdly, Shinra playing armchair detective to dispel the countless myths, conspiracy theories and apparent anomalies surrounding the construction of the pyramids – acknowledging his take is “just a hypothesis" with "no tangible evidence." I really enjoyed this segment short as it was! It reminded me of MORI Hiroshi's short story "Sekito no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) in which several armchair sleuths pore over an architectural conundrum from 7th century India. The crossover part simply is a bonus!

C.M.B. vol. 6 is a solid, single story volume doing an admirable job in balancing character-and series building with the various plot-threads, past and present. So probably going to read up to vol. 10, before starting on Q.E.D. iff and alternate between the two series. Stay tuned!

Stuff of Legends: C.M.B. vol. 3-4 by Motohiro Katou

Yes, I know, I know. The plan was to have gotten well on the way towards Q.E.D. vol. 50 and the crossover with C.M.B. out of the way, which once again got sidetracked, but this time I have a scapegoat an excuse – namely the "New Locked Room Library." So you can blame Alexander for organizing that massive distraction. That was last year. I intend to pick up where I left off with last years reviews of C.M.B. vol. 1-2 and Q.E.D. vol. 39-40 with a review of C.M.B. vol. 3-4, before finally tackling the crossover event between these sibling series. I recommend taking a look at the review of the first two volumes, if you need a refresher what this series is about.

The first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's C.M.B. vol. 3, "Lost Relief," centers on the three rings, "C," "M," and "B," the three curators of the British Museum gifted to their 14-year-old apprentice, Sakaki Shinra. Whomever possesses one of the rings can count on plenty of funding and unfettered access to normally restricted archives for their research, archaeological digs or building up a collection or museum. So giving all three rings to one person, let alone a teenager, is unprecedented in the 200 year old tradition.

"Lost Relief" introduces a rival for the young museum curator and amateur detective in Shaw Bentley, head of research at the British Museum, who believes Professor Stan, Professor Ray and Professor Morris had no right to hand the rings over Shinra ("those rings have been demoted to a toy for some kid in the east"). So "the youngest researcher in history" is determined to pry one of the rings, but the only way to officially come into possession of a ring is if Shinra gifts him one. Shaw travels to Japan to visit Shinra at his hidden museum to propose a sporting challenge for one of his rings. A month ago, a ship was intercepted with a cargo of stolen historical artifacts, en route to a shady collector, which included a stone relief illustrating an Aztec sacrificial ceremony – except the part depicting the part of the altar has gone missing. Smugglers claimed it was complete, but when it arrived at the Japanese warehouse for inspection, the altar piece was missing.

Shaw proposes that the first one to find the missing piece wins. If he finds it, Shinra has to give him one of the rings, but if Shinra finds it first, Shaw will give him a solid gold statue he found in Columbia for his museum. Shinra even sweetens the deal with a challenge of his own. In case the missing piece isn't found, but Shaw can deduce what's depicted on top of the altar, Shinra will accept defeat. This story is obviously intended to introduce the characters of Shaw Bentley and his bratty, personal chef, Linda, while filling in some of the details of Shinra's backstory. That being said, the problem of the missing relief piece is not half bad and, more importantly, perfectly solvable for the keen-eyed armchair detective. So a good, fun opener of the third volume.

By the way, Shaw called Shinra's museum "a warehouse of trash" that's "full of strange children's junk," which is not true, but also betrays a body without a romantic bone in it and perhaps even lacking a soul. I would love to climb a tree to get into Shinra's museum (it's only entrance/exit) to roam around all those displays with ancient artifacts or horsey-ride the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.

The second story of this volume, "Modern Legend," is one of those strange, character-driven, human-shaped puzzle stories I have come to associate with Q.E.D. A story playing on Japanese urban legends like "Hanako-san of the Toilet" or "The Slit-Mouthed Woman."

Meiyuu Private High School becomes a hotbed for gruesome, terrifying urban legends about bodies being found in horrific circumstances ("a dead body found in the mountains... a body beaten by the branches of a willow... and a body buried in a bamboo grove..."). Shinra sets his classmate searching for the person behind the urban legends when he suggested the stories might have originated from one and the same person. This leads them to the crusty owner of a music store, his shed and talk about a bone-colored boat. But is he's hiding some horrific crime inside that shed? Meanwhile, Nanase Tatsuki, the Kana Mizuhara to Shinra's Sou Touma, learns more about Shinra's family and circumstances. And at the same time trying to civilize socialize him. Another good, fun little mystery with an interesting solution (ROT13: gung'f bar jnl gb fraq fbzrbar n zrffntr, V fhccbfr), but not as solvable (for western readers anyway) as the previous one with the spotlight being on Shinra's character and background. It was really sad seeing Shinra cleaning his museum, open its doors and waiting for visitors who never came. But a good story to close out this volume.

C.M.B. vol. 4 comprises of a single, long story, "Judean Fortune," which is best described as Dan Brown getting the shin honkaku treatment. A international despite has arisen from a potential discovery in the Roman Colosseum, Italy, which was called in by special investigator working on historical sites. A special investigator working for the not so catchy named Private Historical Site Investigation Company, run by Jamie Charles, who was hired by Israel to investigate certain claims regarding a mysteries treasure. Her investigator called in to report he had actually found the treasure, "a Judean treasure," but got himself killed in the ruins of the Colosseum under very mysterious, borderline impossible, circumstances – impaled through the chest with a trident. The place where he was murdered makes it incredibly difficult to effectively wield a trident as a murder weapon. Even if he was attacked from above. Not a full-blown locked room murder, but enough to make for an intriguing howdunit with a visually pleasing solution. The victim also left something that functions as a dying message regarding the treasure.

However, the case started a diplomatic incident between Italy, Israel, the Vatican and the Knights of Malta. So the British Museum is assigned with the investigation as a neutral, third party and they delegated the investigation to the keeper of the three CMB rings. Shinra nearly causes another international incident when he initially refuses the assignment, but agrees when he gets to bring Nanase Tatsuki along to Italy.

"Judean Fortune" basically is "Lost Relief" on a much bigger, grander scale and pretty fun adventure mystery with a couple of clever touches. Most notably, the solution to the quasi-impossible murder at the ruins which has a solution that's just perfect for the visual detective story. There's a second, quasi-impossible situation when they get attacked at night in the streets of Rome by an ax-wielding knight in armor, but, when the police investigates the site of the attack the next day, no strike marks from the ax are found on the walls. Neither are full-blown impossible crimes, but once again, they make for a couple of visually appealing howdunits. The historical plot-thread about the long-lost, hidden treasure has an answer of epic historical proportions with potential world destabilizing consequences. So it ends with (ROT13) gur jubyr guvat trggvat pbirerq onpx hc, but nothing to take away from this extremely fun, richly-plotted historical adventure mystery. Although it cannot be denied that the rich plot would have been more at home in a Ruritanian setting than one resembling the real world.

So have now read the first four volumes, but think I can see the most important difference between C.M.B. and Q.E.D. Katou used the shonen manga format in Q.E.D. as a vehicle for the detective story and the detective story as a vehicle for a shonen manga in C.M.B., if that makes any sense. Which is why Q.E.D. feels more grounded and realistic compared to C.M.B. with its less than realistic premise and a protagonist who's the personification of Peter Pan Syndrome. Sou Touma is just an introverted math genius and teenage detective. You remember the type from high school. But both series compliment each other splendidly. And fascinating how they both use their premises and medium to find new ways to tell a good, old-fashioned detective stories. So very much look forward to their big crossover story, finishing Q.E.D. and exploring C.M.B. further in the near future.

Who Goes Hang? (1958) by Stanley Hyland

Stanley Hyland was a British TV producer for the BBC who worked on most of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's broadcasts from 1964 to 1970 and had previously been employed as a research librarian at the House of Commons, which gave him a thorough understanding of the workings of Parliament – providing a wealth of information for his first of three detective novels. Martin Edwards praised Hyland's Who Goes Hang? (1958) as "a beautifully constructed story which boasts as many twists as an Agatha Christie" and Erik Routley suggested in The Puritan Pleasure of the Detective Story (1972) it's perhaps the last in the line of cerebral stories of detection. Who Goes Hang? received a Japanese translation over twenty years ago and secured the 8th place on the international list of the 2001 Honkaku Mystery Best 10. Although some contrarians are out there today. So let's see where this lands.

Who Goes Hang? begins on tenth of May, 1956, when a workman is carrying out renovations in the Clock Tower, "just beneath the bell-chamber of Big Ben, the Great Bell of Westminster," that uncovers a hidden cavity. Behind the Victorian brickwork, the workman finds the body of man, "shrunken in mummified stillness," dressed in clothes of "of a fashion at least a century old" and a crushed skull ("...struck with something like a sandbag..."). So a clear case of murder.

Any death within one of Her Majesty's palaces, like the Houses of Parliament, needs to be explained to the satisfactory of the Coroner of the Royal Household, even one that happened a hundred years ago – which means an inquest on the mummy. Normally, the setting for an inquest in one of these British whodunits is a village pub or school building, but in Who Goes Hang? it's the Moses Room ("properly the Peers' Robing Room") in the House of Lords with a distinguished jury comprising of everything from a Lieutenant-General of the last war to the Controller-General of the Jewel House. During the inquest, they go over the items found on the body that include a pocket watch engraved with a motto, a phrase ("Effrenate") and a depiction of two tiny masks ("the formal tragic and comic masks of the classical theatre").

Hubert Bligh, Member for the Brackwell Division of Lambeth, recognizes the engravings and links its to an old house in his constituency. A place called Roshy House which house a grotesque looking statue of a humpback.

So what could be the link between the mummified body walled up beneath Big Ben and Roshy House? Considering the time scale involved, the investigation is going to be an academic one rather than a police investigation. After all, whoever killed and entombed the man also died a long time ago. A special committee is proposed and assembled, Bligh Committee, to investigate the historical murder. Mostly, the committee do an excellent job, if like this kind of thing, in going over the historical archives with a fine tooth comb to slowly, but surely, collecting facts and snippets of information in the hope of finding satisfactory answers to all the questions posed by the body in the Clock Tower.

Not a classical, grand-style British whodunit, but an academic reconstruction of the past and a historical crime. If you're one of those people who hated history in school and spend class jabbing away at your wrist with a math compass to make it end, you'll probably find the first two-thirds of the story dry, lifeless and probably very boring. I, on the other hand, enjoyed it for the most part and especially when the time comes for the inquest to resume with Bligh taking the stand – delivering a detailed, apparently watertight account of what happened nearly a century ago. Only for a small, until then overlooked detail to upturn the whole apple cart leaving Bligh in the witness box in a state of utter confusion. Something that puts an entirely different complexion on the case, but, regrettably, the story completely deteriorates in the last quarter. A unfair, drawn out mess of a conclusion to a story that started out so promising. But even before arriving there, the story had already lost me. I didn't care anymore about the body, who put it there and why.

Even worse, Hyland overlooked a golden opportunity to salvage Who Goes Hang? There's one character who screamed out to me to be the murderer and could have been furnished with a first-class motive (SPOILERS/ROT13): gur obql vf erirnyrq gb unir qvrq n ybg zber erpragyl guna svefg gubhtug naq jnf uvqqra va gur Pybpx Gbjre qhevat gur Frpbaq Jbeyq Jne (ernq gur obbx sbe qrgnvyf). Gur zheqrere “xarj gur obql jbhyq or sbhaq naq ur ubcrq vg jbhyq or qvfzvffrq nf na vafbyhoyr uvfgbevpny zlfgrel,” juvpu vf jul gur obql jnf jrnevat 19gu praghel pybguvat naq pneelvat bgure crevbq vgrzf – yvxr gur cbpxrg jngpu naq pbvaf. Fb gur zheqrere vf sne sebz qrnq. Jul abg znxr gur zheqrere gur jbexzna, Serq Nezlgntr, jub qvfpbirerq gur obql? Nezlgntr pbhyq unir orra jbexvat ba gur Pybpx Gbjre qhevat gur jne, gb pneel bhg gur ercnvef, juvpu tnir uvz gur vqrn gb hfr gur pnivgl sbe gur cresrpg zheqre naq cnff uvf ivpgvz bss nf na hafbyinoyr, uvfgbevpny chmmyr. Fb jul jbhyq Nezlgntr erghea gb qvfpbire gur obql, orfvqr zbeovq phevbfvgl gb frr uvf cyna hasbyq? Fvzcyr, gur uvfgbevpny pbvaf va gur ivpgvz'f cbpxrgf! Ng gur gvzr, Nezlgntr unq ab vqrn gur pbvaf jurer jbegu, be jbhyq or jbegu, n cerggl craal hagvy gur obql jnf nyy frnyrq hc. Erzrzore, gur fgbel gnxrf cynpr qhevat gur cbfg-jne znynvfr bs gur svsgvrf naq univat fhpu na vanpprffvoyr arfg rtt zhfg or znqqravat gb na beqvanel jbexzna. Jura gur bccbeghavgl svanyyl neevirf, Nezlgntr creuncf ibyhagrref gb qb jbex (onfrq ba uvf cerivbhf rkcrevraprf) ba gur gbjref, oernxf njnl gur jnyy naq gnxrf nyy ohg bar bs gur pbvaf. Bayl pbva ur zvffrf vf gur ohz craal gung raqf hc qrfgeblvat gur pbzzvggrr'f snyfr-fbyhgvba.

Yes, it's a rough, unpolished idea, but (ROT13) yvxr gur gubhtug bs gur crefba jub qvfpbiref, jung rirelbar vavgvnyyl nffhzrf vf, n 100-lrne-byq zheqre ivpgvz gheaf bhg gb or gur zheqrere nsgre nyy. Now that's an Agatha Christie-style rug-puller from the least-likely-suspect category that would have given the book a claim to the status of a minor, post-war classic of the British detective novel. Unfortunately, for us, Hyland didn't write that kind of detective novel.

So, all in all, Hyland's Who Goes Hang? has a great premise, hobbles along to a splendid, midway twist upturning everything before going to pieces in the most unsatisfactory way. The historical details and color aren't enough to carry the last part of the plot. No recommendation this time and I'll try to pick something good for the next one.

A note for the curious: if you find the idea of "an academic investigation" into a historical mystery fascinating, you might fare better with Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaka satsujin jikes (The Case of the Sharaka Murders, 1983). It's not the best or most well-known Japanese mystery novel to be translated, but the plot is full of historical interest and concerns the search for the identify of an 18th century woodblock print artist, Sharaka – who was only active for ten months. Again, it's not the best or most typical of Japanese detective novels, but better and clearer plotted than Who Goes Hang?

Teacher's 'Tec: Q.E.D. vol. 37-38 by Motohiro Katou

The first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 37, "Murder Lecture," begins with Inspector Mizuhara asking Detective Sasazuka to attend a special lecture, "prepared specially for field officers," to make an extensive report – believing it will benefit their division. Fortunately, Sasazuka does not have to travel down to Izu Peninsula alone as Sou Touma is curious to hear what the FBI profiler has to say and Kana Mizuhara came along for the sea, food, hot springs and "other cool stuff." Just when they arrive, a typhoon is approaching and the weather is not going to be their only problem.

There's a small, select group of attendees comprising of three metropolitan police officers, Arita Seiji, Seto Kokichi and Shigaraki Yotaro, and someone from the prosecutor's office, Imari Yumi. Lastly, the FBI analyst and profiler, Meissen Kutani. So the story begins with these characters listening and discussing the subject material of Meissen Kutani's lecture, which is "all about the theory of probability" and the reason why profiling is only "a supporting tool" and "nothing more." Or using statistics to pinpoint areas prone to crime. Naturally, Touma launches in a couple of mini-lectures touching on the Broken Window Theory, Birthday Paradox and the Law of Large Numbers. So you have all kind of detectives discussing crime solving and prevention techniques, which makes for an interesting read, but the lecture on very real-world crime gets interrupted by a very classically-styled murder when Seto Kokichi fatally stabbed in his room.

Nobody could have left the premise, nobody could have come in from the outside and the rapidly approaching typhoon is keeping the police away for a good twenty-four house – marooning them with a handful of suspects. All of them well versed in murder and how to properly investigate them. "Murder Lecture" proved itself to be an excellent detective story with the murder, not actually an impossible murder, turning on a cleverly contrived alibi. A trick as elegant and ultimately simplistic as the satisfying locked room-trick from "The Detective Novelist Murder Case" (vol. 33). This story also sets the stage, so to speak, for these two volumes in how they creatively utilize floorplans.

The second story, entitled "Anima," is plot-wise a relatively minor entry in the series. One of those character pieces with a small, but this time not unoriginal, puzzle with the solution meant to explain more about the characters involved than merely solving a tricky puzzle.

This time, Kana Mizuhara becomes involved with the woes of a small animation studio. She happened to find a folder containing keyframes, "a very important item in animation," which she returns to the animation studio to the great relief of the production assistant, Ebisawa Kouji. But the keyframes turn out to be copies of the original. And they discover the originals were water damaged. Presumably by a leakage from the kitchen directly above the production room. Why did the popular animation supervisor, Yukimiya Yuko, suddenly leave? Sou Touma gets roped in to sort it all out. So, despite its overall simplicity, the story has several interesting features. Firstly, its use of architecture and a floorplan of the animation studio, "an apartment with its walls knocked down," to find the origin of the water leakage. Yes, a very minor, insignificant puzzle for a detective story, but of integral importance in explaining the actions of Yuko. Secondly, the behind-the-scenes look at an animation studio with a somewhat dark undertone as the people who work their make long days and barely any money, especially a small studio. And that can take its toll on people. So the ending can be a bit of downer, but a really good and solid story.

The first of two stories from vol. 38, "Empty Dream," concerns the son of the wealthy Shimamoto Family, Shigehiko, who continued to finance the disastrous movie projects of his two old school friends, Kuse Yumeji and Tamotsu Enno.

Kuse Yumeji is the hopelessly optimistic, financially irresponsible movie producer who never wavers from his believe he has the next big hit on his hands ("if this fails, I'll commit seppuku") or that their lucky break is just around the corner. Tamotsu Enno is the author who provides him with a never-ending supply of scripts. Their first movie, The Metaphor Murder Case, was also their first, but not last, flop ("...they weren't the runaway hits that we expected, but for, it's like an underground volcano ready to erupt"). Shigehiko kept giving them money, until his family cut him off and threw him out of the house. Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara become involved with them when trying to find a copy of the now obscure The Metaphor Murder Case. Shigehiko takes them along to the house party the producer is throwing to get them a copy of the movie, but, as to be expected, Kuse Yumeji is murdered in his private cinema.

What's unexpected, however, is the way in which the murder is presented and committed, which I'm not going to describe here as it would spoil the effect, but wonderfully imaginative and cleverly executed – which again makes great use of the setting to create a superb alibi-trick. Even allowing for a false-solution as Touma begins to eliminate all the suspects, one by one, before explaining who of the people he just eliminated stabbed the producer. And how it was done. Simply a good detective story with a great idea for an alibi-trick executed with skill. I'm more than satisfied with this one!

The last story from this volume, "17," is one of those odd, impossible to pigeonhole that apparently exist only in this series. The story begins with a short prologue set at the beginning of the 18th century, Edo period, as an elderly man and a young girl oversee the construction of a shrine. They remark that "the one who will be able to solve the mystery of this small shrine, will definitely appear someday" and transcend "the flow of time." Back to the present-day, Kana Mizuhara has bullied Sou Touma into taking a part time job at the shrine to help out the hospitalized priest. The neglected neighborhood around the shrine is experiencing a resurgence in tourism due to a popular historical TV drama. So they want to built a museum to stimulate the renowned interest from the public in the region and local economy, but, in order to do so, the small, neglected and centuries old shrine has to be leveled. And with it with go any chance to decode the mystery the young girl, Aisa tried to leave to the world. Sou Touma takes a crack at the puzzle, but it should be noted Aisa was a 14-year-old math genius.

This story throws together history, math puzzles and the history of math and math puzzles to create one of those human-puzzles. The story is not so much about the cracking the code of the old shrine as trying to understand what, exactly, Aisa tried to tell them from across the centuries with the shrine acting as her telephone. It's a strange kind of archaeology, similar to MORI Hiroshi's short story "Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999), but it worked.

So, all in all, I think it's fair to say there's a nice balance to these two volumes both starting out with a traditionally-styled detective stories sporting two original alibi-tricks, before experimenting a little with their second stories. They all have something to recommend for various different reasons, but gave me practically nothing to nitpick about. Great job, Katou!

Hold on a minute!: I've a burning question for those more knowledgeable on everything Katou. I'm steadily approaching the crossover event between Q.E.D. vol. 41 and C.M.B. vol. 19, but in which order do I need to read them?

Blood from a Stone (1945) by Ruth Sawtell Wallis

Ruth Sawtell Wallis was an American academic, physical anthropologist and author who enjoyed a promising, but regrettably short-lived, stint as a mystery novelist during the 1940s – penning a handful of well-received novels. Anthony Boucher praised Too Many Bones (1943) for its "well-prepared climax, literate writing and some authentic shivers." Too Many Bones also has the rare distinction of being an anthropologically-themed mystery ("gruesome details about preparation of bones aren't stressed but neither are they minimized," Boucher) of a vintage date. John Norris identified one earlier example (Frederica de Laguna's The Arrow Points to Murder, 1937) and reviewed S.H. Courtier's The Glass Spear (1950) on this blog some years ago. On a whole, they simply were not all that common at the time.

In 2020, Stark House Press began reprinting the modest contribution Wallis made to the genre and read Too Many Bones a year later, but the book left me in two minds. On the one hand, Too Many Bones is quietly gripping, well-orchestrated suspense novel with the museum setting and skeleton collection giving the story somewhat of a personality of its own. However, the book is not a triumph of detection and fair play. Fittingly enough, Too Many Bones can be identified as an ancestor of the modern, character-driven crime novel that rose to prominence after the '40s. Not necessarily a bad thing, depending on who you ask, but hard to recommend to the people who follow this blog. However, the Stark House Press edition is a twofer volume also containing Wallis' third (archaeological) mystery novel, Blood from a Stone (1945).

Too Many Bones and Blood from a Stone are the only two novels in which Wallis draws from her anthropological training and firsthand experience in excavating archaeological sites. Wallis discovered the first Azilian skeleton in the French Pyrenees, which is the backdrop of her third go at the detective story. And it sounded promising!

Curt Evans, of The Passing Tramp, draws a comparison in his introduction between Blood from a Stone, "steeped as it is in history and romantic legend," and "the tale of the impossible murder that takes place atop a ruined medieval French tower" (John Dickson Carr's He Who Whispers, 1946) – which is not at all what you should expect. Susan Kent, "another winning anthropologist heroine," is mistaken in the first chapter by some children for a local legend, dame blanche (white lady), but don't expect anything remotely similar to Carr or even Paul Halter. You may end up bitterly disappointed otherwise. What you should expect is short, snappy novel of character heavily leaning on its characters, scenery, archaeological digging and plot coming third or fourth. More on that in a minute.

Blood from a Stone takes place in the summer of 1935 and brings Susan Kent to the valley of St. Fiacre in the French Pyrenees to explore the mountain caves and root around for bones, flints and shards. But the single, red-headed and independent Susan Kent stands out in the ancient land of ruined towers, ghosts and caves. A very old land where people live under the shadow of two fears, "the fear of want and the fear of the supernatural." The fear of the so-called Fear ("La Peur") like ghosts, fairies, werewolves and unnamed shapes, but "the greatest of these is the White Woman." So, naturally, the locals look with suspicion upon the modern anthropological researcher digging for bones in caves ("...where the spirits live") and sharing a house (called The Woman of Bad Habits) with a female friend, Neva Borodin. There's no shortage of suspicious locals taking an interest in Susan or buzzing around her dig site. From the elderly Comte de l'Arize and prodigal son who suddenly returned home to the local clergyman and a British amateur archaeologist. And the incidents surrounding Susan's discovery of a skeleton as complete as it's ancient begin to pile up.

Firstly, Susan very nearly becomes the victim of a deadly simple, but ingenious contrived, death trap in one of the caves ("a beautiful cave full of magnificent paintings made by paleolithic man"). Only genuine clever touch to the plot and almost on par with the out-of-order sign from Agatha Christie's Towards Zero (1944). Secondly, the discovery of the skeleton brings two gendarmes to her doorstep who received an anonymous message that the American girl "has found a body in the Tutto Biouletto." Finally, Susan discovers a second, more recent body in the caves belonging to a man who had been foully murdered. However, the murder is practically irrelevant to the plot as Wallis does not even bother to properly identify the victim. The dead man is a complete outsider who's only role in the story is to make things as difficult as possible for Susan.

I'm afraid that's all I have on this one. Blood from a Stone has some nice scenery, local lore and a bit of archaeology with flashes of romance, but, simply as a detective story, it landed like a damp squib. Blood from a Stone should have been anthropological novel instead of an anthropological detective novel. The detective story element, or puzzle, should have come from an archaeological discovery revealing something of a historical mystery that needs solving. An archaeological puzzle like the one from Motohiro Katou's "Pharaoh's Necklace" (Q.E.D. vol. 28) without the interference of a second, halfhearted and lukewarm corpse would have made Blood from a Stone a truly unique mystery novel. A minor classic even. But this is definitely not that novel. Well, they can't all be winners and will try to pick something better next.

The Scarab Murder Case (1930) by S.S. van Dine

Willard Huntington Wright was an art critic, editor and, under the non de plume "S.S. van Dine," one of the most celebrated and influential American mystery writer of his day – who brought the Golden Age of detective fiction to the United States. Van Dine penned a dozen novels between 1926 and 1939 about aesthete and dilettante detective, Philo Vance. A somewhat divisive character who inspired Ogden Nash to write the now famous line, "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance." Van Dine and Vance have been criticized for their batty plots, dotty logic and Vance's erudition on any subject that happened to be at the heart of the plot. You name the subject and Vance can give you his expert, first-hand opinion on it. But they also have their champions. Mike Grost writes on his website, "the mystery field does not honor Van Dine enough" as "he tried to synthesize the best elements of mystery fiction in his work" and "in doing so he founded a new school, one that opened the door for some of the best detective writing in American history."

My own experience with Van Dine's detective fiction has been spotty. I remember immediately solving The Benson Murder Case (1926) and only recall The "Canary" Murder Case (1927) had a decent locked room-trick. The Greene Murder Case (1928) took an interesting approach to the structuring of a detective story, but hardly a beacon of fair play and read an annoying, poorly dated Dutch translation of The Bishop Murder Case (1929). I think, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that The Kennel Murder Case (1932) is the best Philo Vance (locked room) mystery encountered, so far, but The Dragon Murder Case (1933) completely put me off Van Dine until now. A ludicrously bad detective story about a premeditated murder hinging on two unpredictable assumptions that somehow came off exactly like the murderer planned. It was so ridiculously insulting, the remaining Philo Vance novels were moved to the bottom of the pile.

So never got around to supposedly good novels like The Casino Murder Case (1934), The Garden Murder Case (1935) or The Kidnap Murder Case (1936), but enough water has passed under the bridge to give Van Dine and Vance a second shot. After all, this blog is littered with references to the Van Dine School and reviews of writers like Anthony Abbot, Kelley Roos, Roger Scarlett and Ellery Queen.

The Scarab Murder Case (1930) is Van Dine's fifth detective novels and brings Philo Vance to the East Twentieth Street home of a famous Egyptologist, Dr. Mindrum W. C. Bliss, where he maintained a private museum of Egyptian antiquities – crammed with ancient treasures and trinkets. Dr. Bliss employs an archaeologist and technical expert, Donald Scarlett, who happened to be an old college mate of Vance and turned to him when he made a unsettling discovery in the private museum. Scarlett came to New York with Dr. Bliss as a member of his staff and went to the museum that morning to classify a batch of photographs, but found the body of "that old philanthropist and art patron," Benjamin H. Kyle, lying crumpled in the corner of the room. Kyle's skull had been crushed like an eggshell with a two-foot long statue of the Egyptian goddess of vengeance, Sakhmet, still lying across his head. And his arms encircling the feet of the feet of a life-sized statue of Anubis. The god of the underworld. There are a ton of highly incriminating clues, "the scarab pin, the financial report, and the footprints," which lead straight to Dr. Bliss. Vance warns Markham and Sgt. Heath not to rush to an arrest as "a devilish plot" (is there any other in this series?) has been introduced into Kyle's murder and unraveling that hideous scheme will save an innocent person from the electric chair ("a single false step on our part, and the plot will succeed").

So the story follows the fairly typical pattern of these 1920s and '30s Van Dine-Queen style brownstone mysteries with the lion's share taking place inside the walls of the East Twentieth Street brownstone and the private museum. The scene of the crime and uncovered clues are as closely scrutinized as the other members of the household. There's the wife of Dr. Bliss, Meryt-Amen, who's half Egyptian and her faithful family retainer, Anûpu Hani. A Coptic Christian, of sorts, who believes the murder was Sakhmet's vengeance for the desecration of Egypt's tombs. Lastly, the Assistant Curator of the Bliss Museum and Kyle's nephew, Robert Salveter. So a good, old-fashioned murder mystery with "the mystic and fantastic lore of ancient Egypt" with "its confused mythology and its grotesque pantheon of beast-headed
gods" furnishing the background of the story. Obviously trading on the Egyptian craze that gripped the West for nearly decades following Howard Carter's discovery of the long-lost tomb of Tutankhamen. But how does it all stack up?

First of all, The Scarab Murder Case marked Vance's fifth appearance and Van Dine evidently made some attempts to humanize Vance since debuting him in The Benson Murder Case. Vance still affects British mannerisms ("beastly mess, people getting murdered, what?") and is annoyingly up to date on all things Egyptological, which allows him to decipher a hieroglyphic letter ("let me see how well I remember my Egyptian... it's been years since I did any transliterating..."), but Vance is entirely motivated by preventing a miscarriage of justice and saving the reputations of his friends, Markham and Heath. Vance even show a glimmer of humor when Heath suggests he should have been a lawyer ("I'm only tryin' to save you and Mr. Markham from making a silly blunder. And what thanks do I get? I'm told I should have been a lawyer! Alack and welladay!"). A great improvement on his first appearance as The Benson Murder Case never answered the question how Markham resisted the urge to throttle Vance on the spot. Secondly, the treatment of clues and red herrings is fascinating. Markham refers to them as negative clues and direct clues, but, essentially, the red herrings the murderer planted at the murder scene become clues when Vance identified them as red herrings. That turns his normally annoyingly cryptic remarks into clues. So it's a pity the misdirection has worn a little thin nearly a 100 years after its original publication. I'm sure it worked like a train back in 1930, but, in 2023, it's only going to fool the newest, most innocently-eyed and unblemished of mystery fans.

However, while I spotted the murderer early in the game and cottoned on to all the clues, my only real bone of contention is how Vance disposed of the murderer. It's one thing to believe and lament "this elaborate invention of imbeciles, called the law, has failed to provide for the extermination of a dangerous and despicable criminal," but do the dirty work yourself. For someone of Vance's intellect, it would have been a mere parlor trick to improve on that preposterous death trap and have the murderer's death being written off as a cosmic coincidence or "divine justice." Other than that, The Scarab Murder Case has completely renewed my interest in Van Dine and will excavate The Casino Murder Case, The Kidnap Murder Case and English copy of The Bishop Murder Case from the depths of the big pile. Even more than that, The Scarab Murder Case made me want to reread Clyde B. Clason's The Man from Tibet (1938). So... to be continued.

Broken Pieces: Q.E.D. vol. 27-28 by Motohiro Katou

This series needs no introduction and there have been enough excessively padded blog-posts lately. So let's jump right in.

Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 27 begins with an inconspicuous gem, "Mirror Image," in which
Kana Mizuhara roped Sou Touma into cycling her around town and bring lunch to her father, Inspector Mizuhara – who's investigating a suspicious house fire. A fire had burned through the second floor of a house that had stood abandoned since the previous owner died. This brings what should have been a recurring character into the story, Sakuma Toyokichi, who's a crime scene investigator and "an expert in fire scenes." Toyokichi is going to retire the next day and so the fire in the abandoned house is the last time he'll be sifting through the ashes of a potential crime scene, which he does with decades of experience behind him. Toyokichi brought along a group of rookie investigators to instruct ("don't go into the scene with preconceptions"), demonstrates his ability to identify burned or molten pieces of debris ("he's like a dictionary") and pinpointing the origin of the fire with a bucket of water. I really liked how this old crime scene investigator contrasts and complimented the young amateur detective. Touma is a teenage math prodigy who not always willingly has to play the amateur (armchair) detective and reasons the truth from often abstract clues, while old Toyokichi is an experienced hand whose job simply "is to collect evidence." They worked very well together which brings us to the puzzle component of the story.

There are four suspects to consider, as they were the only people with keys to the house, which include the twin daughters of the late home owner, Reiko and Hanako, who were separated when their parents divorced. Reiko went with her father and Hanako with her mother. So they lived entirely different lives and furthered the effect of being mirror images of each other. They both have a mole on their chin, but Reiko's mole is on her right side and Hanako has one on her left "as they were mirror images of each other," but Hanako, unlike her sister, suffered many financial hardships while living with her mother. So they never really got along and naturally accuse each other. But how does it all relate to the fire? Touma reasons that "behind this case there is a problem not behind the difference of left and right, but it is hidden within the problem of front and back." What follows is a chain of deductions that first exonerates all four suspects, before demonstrating what logically must have happened. Brilliantly reasoned!

So the story is a character-driven character piece, which has to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, but an extremely clever and well done character piece. More importantly, "Mirror Image" is a great example that good detective fiction does not always have to depend tropes and tricks like cast-iron alibis, dying messages, impossible crimes or even something as simple as a body. You can do away with all of these and still produce excellent detective fiction, but, as Q.E.D. has demonstrated countless of times, it requires an appreciation and understanding what makes a detective story trick – something of a series specialty. And the next story is another experimental one.

The second story, "Burden of Proof," mixes high school theatrics and social studies with courtroom dramatics. A mock trial is staged at the school of Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara to familiarize students with the new court and jury system. A lottery is going to randomly pick six names of students who have to sit on the jury and both were drawn for jury duty. The case of the mock trial is a simple one: Toyokawa Tsuneo stands accused of assaulting a woman, Azuma Sachiko, and robbed her of 150,000 yen. The prosecutor presents the jury with a string of circumstantial evidence with the defense showing why there's a difference between direct and circumstantial evidence, which the jurors have to weigh and decide if there's enough to prove the accused is guily beyond reasonable doubt. Touma points out towards the end, "the burden of proof falls entirely on the prosecution" and "the jurists may only make their decision based on the presented evidence." This gives the story a loophole to cheat without actually cheating as the trial is an entirely different matter, legally, than the solution Touma provides at the end ("the prosecution overlooked one possibility").

So, conceptually, "Burden of Proof" is an interesting story, but not nearly as good, or memorable, as the first story. Another excellent and solid volume with two great stories that continued to look for new ways to tell a detective story.

Q.E.D. vol. 28 starts with an archaeological mystery, "Pharaoh's Necklace," which incidentally became my backdoor introduction to Q.E.D.'s companion series C.M.B. Someone warned awhile ago that a crossover story is imminent, but it had simply slipped my mind and now all those plans so carefully laid out in the review of volumes 25 and 26 have come under threat. I really, really want to read C.M.B. now, but first things first. Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara travel to Cairo, Egypt, where an acquaintance from his university days in America discovered a new tomb in the northern part of the Valley of the Kings. Thomas Potter, an archaeologist, tumbled into a tomb containing two mummies and the female mummy has royal necklace around her neck. So it has to be a royal mummy, but, before the untouched tomb can be thoroughly investigated, Potter is struck down by falling rocks – landing him in the hospital. Now he has the sponsor of the excavation on his back and called on Touma to take his place as a favor ("but... this is out of my field"). Touma accepting the assignment confronts him with two mysteries from the past and present.

Why was there a royal necklace in a tomb that appears to have been a commoner's tomb? Why does everyone involved in the excavation keep having unfortunate accidents? Since archaeology is outside of his expertise, Touma calls upon his cousin from his mother's side, Sakaki Shinra, who's the protagonist of C.M.B. and happened to be in Egypt to handle a murder case at the Museum of Antiquities. A story from C.M.B. vol. 6 in which Mizuhara lends him a helping hand in solving that murder. But here, Shinra helps Touma by inspecting the necklace and concludes it's genuine enough. Just completely out-of-time for the date of the tomb in which it was found. The solution to this historical conundrum, simplicity itself, proved to be much better than the contemporary problem of the dig-side accidents. Touma's hypothesis about the two mummies, differing states of preservation, presence of a royal necklace and the sealed entrance is well reasoned and provided a satisfying, if bitter sweet, answer to those ancient questions. That alone is sufficient to make "Pharaoh's Necklace" a personal favorite, but loving crossovers and archaeological mysteries almost as much as impossible crimes and unbreakable alibis also helped a lot. So, on a whole, a pretty good and fun little story!

 

Regrettably, I can't say the same of the second and last story, "Human Firework," which reads like a modern retelling of Edogawa Rampo as a psychological crime story. The story concerns drawing in a sketchbook depicting the body of a woman in various stages of decomposition. Touma compares the sketches to a certain type of Buddhist painting, kusoshi emaki, which "consists of nine parts starting from when someone died until the body decomposes" to make death easier for people to understand, but the sketches look new – like they were drawn "while observing a real body." But do these disturbing possess the power to change someone's behavior? The crux of the story is people who got swallowed by their own darkness. Q.E.D. has a great track record when it comes to making these off-beat, often experimental stories work, but "Human Firework" is not one of them. And perhaps it was the wrong story to follow "Pharaoh's Necklace." But who am I to complain? One out of four stories, spread across two volumes, left me underwhelmed, which is not a bad score at all. So, all things considered, another splendid demonstration why Q.E.D. is the 21st century detective story.

A note for the curious: "Burden of Proof" officially broke the series timeline and continuity. Q.E.D. started out in the late nineties with vol. 2, 3, 4 and 5 covering the period from 1998 to 1999 with vol. 6 taking place days before New Year. After that, the timeline and continuity got a bit blurry, but those earliest stories clearly took place during the late '90s and early '00s. "Burden of Proof" is set in 2007! So, if you follow the original timeline, Touma and Mizuhara should be in their mid-twenties. You tried, Katou. You tried.

Beached (2018) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning's debut novel, Adrift (2017), introduced marine biologist and dive instructor in the Florida Keys, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who's forced by circumstances to play amateur detective when divers begin to disappear around a haunted shipwreck – miraculously reappearing miles away against the current. It earned the book a spot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and likely would have given it a pass without that mention or knew it even existed. Adrift appears a bit too modernistic on the surface and billed as a suspense thriller, but the fast, character-driven storytelling had a traditional bend and had all the promise of a diamond-in-the-rough. So the second and so far last entry in the series, Beached (2018), was added to the wishlist. A story that plunges Mer into the murky, watery world of deep sea treasure hunters and nautical archaeology.

Having now read both Adrift and Beached, I can say this series is closer related to the adventure genre (Indiana Jones and Lara Croft get mentioned in passing) that either the traditional detective story or modern crime novel.

Browning seems to have little interest in murders as the body figuring in Adrift is in the peripheral of the plot that mainly focuses on the haunted shipwreck and Beached is basically a treasure hunt fraught with serious dangers. These both read like Young Adult mysteries with hints of The Three Investigators (The Secret of Skeleton Island, 1966), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! ("A Clue for Scooby-Doo," 1969) and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest ("The Darkest Fathoms," 1996), but written for an adult audience as Mer's personal life and issues hold as much sway over the story as the almost innocent, adventure-style plots. There's the thriller-like opening of Beached that would have been hitting a little too hard in a The Three Investigators novel. 

Beached opens on a quiet, sunny day on the deck of the LunaSea during off season, "today a family of four made up the entirety of the LunaSea's manifest," when spots a dark shape in the water. Mer is still pretty new to the Keys and Captain Leroy Penninichols tells her the dark shape is probably a so-called square grouper, a plastic wrapped bale of marijuana, but the package turns out to contain duct taped bricks of cocaine, a 300-year-old gold contain and some serious trouble – a GPS tracker. And, pretty soon, they got company. So they have to race to get the family out of the water, warn the coast guard and get the hell out of there. Whomever is after them, they are shooting at the fleeing charter boat until a patrol boat could escort them to safety. The square grouper was lost in the chase, but Mer later finds the coin aboard the LunaSea.

A gold coin dated 1733 and inscribed, "Initium sapientiæ timor domini" ("Wisdom begins with the fear of God"), which turns out to be a Spanish escudos, a "portrait dollar," sometimes referred to as a doubloon ("pieces of eight"). A very rare, valuable coin linked to the legend of the Thirteenth Galleon ("...an old legend that tells of cursed gold"). In 1733, a Spanish treasure left the port of Havana, Cuba, to voyage home, but the fleet was caught in a hurricane and "most of the ships ran aground on the reefs dotting the Keys." Supposedly, rumors and legends tell of a thirteenth ship filled with gold had joined the fleet as pirates mostly targeted solitary ships.

The 1733 gold coin proves there's more history than legend to the story of the Thirteenth Galleon and Mer gets caught between two unsavory, dangerous characters. A modern-day treasure hunter, Winslet Chase, who has been bound to a wheelchair ever since an accident during a rogue diving operation and a modern-day pirate/smuggler, Bart Kingston. Mer is not the only person who's caught between them. A Cuban immigrant and ex-archivist from Havana, Oscar, worked in a government archive and found "the coin, the manifest and a note hidden in the binding of an old ship log."

After the high-speed chase scene in the opening chapter and finding the coin aboard the LunaSea, the pace of the story slows down as Mer begins to research the coin to dealing with the two treasure hunters. Not a very pleasant experience. Over the period of a week, Mer goes from being scared to being extremely pissed ("what a difference a week made"). She scraped together a team to find the shipwreck before Chase and Kingston. What follows in the last leg of the story is a cat-and-mouse game above and under the dark, deep blue. There are some good underwater scenes and particular likes the scene in which Mer ("...did most of my research in the Arctic, studying the biogeography of Arctic cephalopods") has a moment with an octopus as she explores its den. But that's about it. Beached is as simple and straightforward as two opposing parties trying to find a sunken treasure and completely lacked the detective pull of Adrift. It really is like a novel from The Three Investigators series written for adults as the opening, ending and some of the characterization is certainly not something you'll read in any juvenile mystery.

However, it's an interesting direction to take in a series presented as modern mystery-thrillers and without the necessity of a murder plot, the stories can focus and workout plot-ideas that would have been merely secondary plot-threads in an ordinary crime or detective novel. I also liked the balance between Mer's "Pandora-sized curiosity" and scientific training, which often lands her in trouble when applied outside of the controlled conditions of an experiment. Something that's also reflected in how a sense of realism is applied to the scrappy, adventure-style plots and how fast things can go south. So would like to have seen this series develop further and, if you follow the theme of the book titles, the fourth book would very likely have been titled Derelict and that can only be a take on the mystery of the Mary Celeste – which would be the perfect mystery for this series. Browning appears to have either put the series on hiatus or abandoned it entirely as she has started a new, more serious series under the name "M.E. Browning." So what began as a precarious swan dive for lost treasure could very well have been Mer's swan song.

So not sure whom to recommend Beached, because readers of this blog will likely find it nothing more than a contemporary curiosity with too many modern intrusions. Adrift is much better in that regards and both remain an interesting take on the thriller/mysteries of today.

Crucified (2008) by Michael Slade

In the previous post, I discussed the twelfth entry in the Bobby Owen series, Suspects—Nine (1939), which is E.R. Punshon's homage to those refined, witty and character-driven novel of manners mystery pioneered during the 1930s by the alternative Queens of Crime – like Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Moray Dalton. So I thought it would be fun to pick something next that is the complete opposite of a classy, satirical 1930s manners mystery novel. Something crude, brutal and horrifying with all the subtlety of a rickety, old chainsaw hacking through guts and bones. Preferably published during the past twenty years. There was only one name on the big pile who fitted the bill. 

"Michael Slade" is the collective penname of Jay Clarke, a Canadian trial lawyer, who collaborated with Rebecca Clarke, Richard Covell and Richard Banks on the "Special X" series. A branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police specialized in hunting down extremely dangerous, completely deranged, criminals and serial killers. Special X series has a not undeserved reputation for its, um, liberal depiction of guts, gore and grisly killings that could teach '80s slasher films a thing or two.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Crucified (2008) back in 2019 and called the book sadistic retro pulp and Slade "a torture porn maven." I don't think John very much approved of me nonchalantly shrugging at the torrent of bloods and guts in Ripper (1994), but, in my defense, the whole story from beginning to end screamed '90s edginess – deliberately trying to be as shocking and stomach-churning as possible. Ripper struck me at times as trying to bait Americans from crushing the head of a critical reviewer with head clamps to evoking the name of Aleister Crowley. So took Ripper about as seriously as a horror flick that tried too hard to be shocking, but appreciated the attempt to give the gore galore a traditional slant with several impossible crimes in a mechanized death-trap house on Deadman's Island. In fact, there are three of Slade novels listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) loaded with locked rooms, impossible crimes and even dying messages of which Crucified sounded the most fascinating. A book that threw everything from archaeology, arcane history and conspiracies to locked rooms, impossible crimes and a secret crusade into the blender to create a mush better than expected.

If Ripper is a product of the '90s, Crucified is clearly a child of the 2000s. The decade of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Passion of the Christ (2004) and conspiracy theories thriving on the internet. Yet, the book is surprisingly tame compared to Ripper. Sure, there's a little bit of disembowelment and exploding skulls scattered, here and there, throughout the story, but no worse than Philip Kerr's recently reviewed Prague Fatal (2011) or your average, dark historical mystery from Paul Doherty. They're more like violent vignettes closely entangled with an increasingly complicated and engrossing narrative that moves around between the past and present. And the many arcane historical puzzles make up the lion's share of the story. So it should be a bit more palpable than Ripper which had skinned corpses dangling from a suspension bridge on meat hooks. 

Crucified begins with a short prologue, of sorts, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in 33 A.D. as the Roman guard look up at the cross and says, "just as your shadow has vanished from the face of the earth, so you will be forgotten." But history ordained otherwise.

The story than begins to move between those long, grim years of World War II and the present-day with the former revolving around the many mysteries surrounding a long-lost Allied bomber, the Ace of Clubs, which was shot down in March 1944 over Germany – while flying a top-secret mission to bomb a specific location. The crew were ordered "to break away from the main bomber stream and fly a solitary run to an isolated target of no apparent value," but got shot down by a lone wolf fighter. So they had to bail and all but three of the crewmen were captured. Lt. Fletch "Wrath" Hannah (pilot), Sgt. Dick "Ack-Ack" DuBoulay and Sgt. Trent "Jonesy" Jones vanished that night without a trace. The impact of the crash destabilized a slope, "causing a landslide to crumble down and bury the plane" and "with bombs dropping night and day, churned-up dirt was the rule, not the exception." So the bomber lay buried and undisturbed for sixty-odd years until its wreck was discovered during road construction. A discovery that brings more to light than merely the answer to an unsolved question from the war.

In 1944, Hitler gave a mysterious individual who tried to betray him the codename "Judas" and "the rumor is that Judas conspired with Churchill to smuggle a package to Britain in the hands of a secret agent who'd been parachuted into the Reich." The Ace of Clubs was downed on "the same night that a Junkers 88 was given extraordinary orders to cripple an RAF Halifax on a solitary run in a way that would kill no crewmen except the rear gunner." So is there's a link between Hitler's Judas and the downed bomber? But there's more. Beside containing something that could topple Hitler, the Judas package includes ancient religious artifacts recovered from the Middle East. If "the resurrected bomber yields a map to the Judas package, Christendom might be rocked to its two-thousand-year-old foundations" and "the fatal nail in the Vatican's coffin."

A secret, modern-day Inquisitor, "the Secret Cardinal," has to stop the Judas relics coming to light at all costs and dispatches a crusader, the Legionary of Christ – who's either insane or possessed by the devil. The Legionary holds some decidedly old-worlds views on how death should be administrated.

The person caught between the long-buried secrets of the past and the increasing bloodshed in the present is a historian, lawyer and writer, Wyatt Rook, who writes historical expose's bringing long-kept secrets to light – earning him the reputation of muckraker and conspiracy theorist. Rook's reputation brings Liz Hannah, granddaughter of the missing pilot, to his doorstep to ask him to help her uncover what happened to her grandfather with the Judas puzzle and herself as a lure. But then one of the last surviving crewman, Mick "Balls' Balsdon, who put together an archive is horrifically tortured to death. And long-buried, apparently impossible murder is discovered inside the wreck of the Ace of Clubs.

Ack-Ack's decayed skeleton is found on the seat of the small, cage-like rear turret with its torso sprawled forward between the guns, but it's not bullets from a Junkers 88 that killed the rear gunner. Someone had stabbed him in the back three times, which appears to be impossible as everyone was in their battle stations and "remained in their combat positions until they bailed out." Slade drove home how hazardously these planes and bombing raids were and how any shot at surviving depended on teamwork over the plane's intercom. So nobody appears to have had an opportunity to stab the rear gunner. This not, strictly speaking, a proper locked room mystery, but an alibi-puzzle that works as a locked room mystery, of sorts, recalling the tangle of alibis that formed a quasi-impossible crime from Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962). Whatever you choose to categorize it as, an unbreakable alibi or impossible crime, Slade's absorbing storytelling turned it the best, most captivating and memorable parts of the plot and story. The circumstances of the murder, a bomber under attack above enemy territory, did wonders in itself for the trick employed. A trick that would not have impressed as much had it been pulled off in an ordinary setting under normal circumstances. This is not the only the historical locked room mystery Wyatt Rook comes across ("Am I being haunted by the ghost of John Dickson Carr?").

The trail leads to a U-boat called the Black Devil that had been on a test run as the first Elektroboot in the North Sea, between Hamburg and Scotland, but run into a destroyer and a fight ensued. Slade's depiction of what went on in that enclosed and sealed submarine as they got destroyed by a depth-charge barrage. It's as good as what happened aboard the Ace of Clubs, but the Black Devil only comes into play during the second-half and the impossibility is not discovered until towards the end. Something was being smuggled to England aboard the Black Devil, but, when the Royal Navy pried open the hatches and searched the submarine inside out, nothing was recovered. So "do you sneak a sardine out of a tin can that's sealed and remains sealed after the sardine is gone?" This one takes only a short while to be solved, but, needless to say, I really liked what it added to the overall story.

It's the historical puzzles and biblical mysteries that take precedent in Crucified with the present-day murders ending up only playing a secondary role. Admittedly, whenever the Legionary makes an appearance, it's not a pretty picture to behold and the double murder of a married couple is downright revolting, but, as said previously, they act like gory vignettes – which can be skipped without missing anything really important. The way in which the Legionary is disposed of shows how unimportant he and his murders were in the end to the story. What matters are the historical plot-threads. Who killed the rear gunner and how? What happened to the three missing crewmen? How were the items removed from a dead, submerged submarine? Who was Hitler's Judas? Who his secret agent and what happened to him? What, exactly, is the nature of the Judas relics and are they, as feared, "a biblical earthshaker?" The answers to all these questions neatly twists together fact and fiction into engrossing, cleverly plotted historical mystery with the last line being a stroke of genius a stupid joke that made me snicker. What a stupidly brilliant way to close out the story. 10/10!

So, all in all, Slade's Crucified turned out to be unexpectedly great. I half jokingly picked it as stark contrast to Punshon's über civilized Suspects—Nine and expected an all-out gore fest with a slightly traditionally-slanted plot, like Ripper, but the excellently executed historical plot-threads and the scenes aboard the bomber and submarine made it so much more than a mere mystery-thriller. Add to this two, archaeological locked room mysteries and a boatload of arcane and historical lectures and bits of knowledge, you have a serious candidate to be included on the third iteration "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Recommended with some reservations for those who really can't stand gore. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to mention Crucified is not a part of the Special X series and appears to be a standalone, which might explain why it doesn't all out with the blood-and-guts-to-the-wall killing. Not as frequently as in Ripper. It makes me want to look at some others moderns on the big pile like Micki Browning, Martin Edwards, D.L. Marshall and Slade's Red Snow (2010), but first I need to get to that landmark volume of Case Closed.