The Illusionist (1970) by Stephen Frances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Moai Murders (2005) by Lyn Hamilton

Lyn Hamilton was a Canadian author who studied cultural and physical anthropology ("as well as English literature") at the University of Toronto and worked in communications for corporations, non-profit organizations and the Canadian government – notably helping to develop an award-winning awareness campaign on domestic violence in the 1980s. When she turned fifty, Hamilton wrote and published her debut novel, The Xibalba Murders (1997), which was the first in a series of eleven archaeological mysteries published over a ten year period. Regrettably, Hamilton was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer while working on her last novel (The Chinese Alchemist, 2007) and passed away in 2009. 

Obviously, the archaeological and historically-themed plots is what first caught my attention, but one title in the series stood out to me for an entirely different reason. This time, it's not the possible presence of a locked room mystery or impossible crime. The novel under review today has a premise that immediately conjured up images of Japanese shin honkaku mysteries like Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Alice Arisugawa's Koto pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989) and about 99% of the stories from The Kindaichi Case Files series. I was not entirely off the mark with this conjecture. 

The Moai Murders (2005) is the ninth title starring Hamilton's series-detective, Lara McClintoch, who's an antique dealer from Toronto and your typical, everyday murder-magnet – drawing out corpses and murderers wherever she goes. Such as on "a tiny island in the middle of nowhere" where the only crime normally is "excessive drinking."

The story begins with a visit from Lara McClintoch's close friend, Moira Meller, who recently recovered from a serious and painful surgery, which made her reevaluate her past and future. Moira drew up a list with things she still wanted to do and right at the top of her bucket list is hugging a Moai statue. So she invites Lara to accompany her on a long overdue, fun-only holiday to Rapa Nui. A tiny, remote island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean more famously known as Easter Island. Lare and Moira's fun-only excursion unluckily coincided with the First Annual Moai Congress at their hotel. A congress with a well-known, but somewhat controversial, keynote speaker, Jasper Robinson.

Jasper Robinson is an amateur archaeologist, self-styled adventurer and considered by some to be "a modern day Thor Heyerdahl" who discovered "a very ancient fortress in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile" and swam "across the Straits of Magellan." Robinson is going to present a paper at the congress proving that there were "two waves of settlement of the island" with the first one bringing "the great stonemasons" of South America to Rapa Nui, which is contrary to the academic consensus that Polynesians had settled the island. There is, however, nobody there to represent the academic community. Not officially. Dr. Gordon Fairweather is an archaeologist who lives on the island and clashed publicly with Robinson, but the rest of the congress attendees and speakers comprises almost entirely of "the lunatic fringe." Or, to be more precise, the members of an internet discussion group called the Moaimaniacs. Every group member has a nickname related to both Rapa Nui and their particular area of interest.

Dave Maddox, a builder and developer, is MoaiMan and is going to present his theory "as to how the moai got from the quarry to the ahu." Seth Connelly is a history teacher and "knows everything there is to know about rongorongo," a now lost language of the island, which is why he picked RongoReader as his nickname. Brian Murphy, or Birdman, is an archaeology graduate who supports himself as a computer programmer, but is there to find himself a job in his chosen field with a special interest in "the site of the bird man cult." Edwina Rasmussen is Vinapu, "because she supports Jasper's theories of settlement from South America." Albert Morris is a retired PR consultant and amateur archaeologist, volunteering at dig sites all over the world, who goes by the nickname Arikimo. Brenda Butters is the congress organizer and is known on the internet group as Avareipu. Enrique Gonzales, or Tongenrique, came to the island to learn more while Lewis Hood is interested in the archaeological survey of Poike, which is why he picked Poikeman as his online handle. Cassandra de Santiago is the most colorful character of the bunch and believes "Rapa Nui may be all that's left of the lost continent of Lemuria." This in additional to archaeologists, locals and a film crew shooting a documentary of Robinson's discovery.

However, the antagonism among the different schools of thought were not known to Lara and Moira when they decided to sign-up to attend the congress for laughs and giggles, but Lara discovers "the feelings went way beyond the professional" and charged with "a level of animosity" that surprised her – which gave her good reasons to be suspicious when a speaker died. Apparently trampled to death by a horse. Corporal Pablo Fuentes, of the Carabineros de Chile, believes it was an accident and Lara carefully poking around is not enough to prevent a second death. This second death could not be easily dismissed as a mere accident. This is also the point where the review is coming to a screeching halt. 

The Moai Murders began very promising with an intriguing premise and a fascinating background, swimming in local color, historical skulduggery and light banter, but Hamilton waited until the final quarter with unloading a lot of relevant information. Some of which should have been divulged at an earlier point to either make the story more fair or less confusing. For example, there were several references early on in the story to the maniacs and their nicknames, but it's not explained the Moaimaniacs is an internet group until very late in the story. I've no idea why this wasn't mentioned when they were introduced, because it would have added some interest and substance to the characters as a group. Or what about the motive? There's not a hint of the real motive until its given away towards the end, but, since its completely useless to identify the murderer, the 1975 scene could have been easily shown in one of the historical flashbacks in the first half. Something that would have made the plot marginally more fair and better. Since she waited until the last possible moment, Hamilton's attempt to do something really clever with the murder methods fell completely flat. There simply was not enough room left to do anything meaningful with it.

So, on the surface, The Moai Murders has all the allure of a Japanese shin honkaku mystery and a tighter plot would have justified the comparison, but, underneath the surface, there's only an amusingly written, historically-themed and lightly-plotted travelogue tramping around the ancient statues of Rapa Nui. Steer clear, if you want at least a half decently plotted detective story.

Blacke's Magic: Revenge of the Esperanza (1986)

Over the past two years, I've come across two novels, a novella and short story that pulled the detective story down to the muted, two-colored world of the seabed littered with shipwrecks, sunken treasure and legends of the deep ocean – revealing a largely untapped basin of possibilities. Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017), Desmond Reid's "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) and John Dickson Carr's "Lair of the Devil-Fish" (collected in The Island of Coffins, 2021) all demonstrated an underwater setting opened up new opportunities to play around with unbreakable alibis and impossible crimes. Something that has been explored decade earlier by Joseph Commings in his 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968). Ho-Ling Wong followed up my review of Forsyte's Diving Death by discussing the Detective Academy Q episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea, which does exactly as described on the tin. 

So these regrettably too rare deep sea detective stories have become a favorite (soggy) rabbit hole of mine to explore. Not in the least because they often combine an archaeological plot with an impossible crime, which are two of my favorite sub-categories of the detective story. There happened to be an episode of Blacke's Magic dovetailing an archaeological mystery with the miraculous disappearance of a 300-year-old Spanish seabed shipwreck. So it was high time to return to that dapper magician-sleuth and his carny father. 

Blacke's Magic was a short-lived American TV-series, created by Richard Levinson, William Link and Peter S. Fischer, which aired on NBC from January 5 to May 7, 1986, starring Hal Linden as magician-detective Alexander Blacke and Harry Morgan as his conman dad, Leonard – appearing together in thirteen episodes pitting their wits "against seemingly magical crimes." The series feels like a 1980s prototype of Jonathan Creek. 

Revenge of the Esperanza (1986) is the fifth episode of the series and begins with Alexander Blacke following “a paper trail of credit card charges, hotels, restaurants, airline tickets” to a luxurious yacht club in Florida. There he finds his father living it large, under the name Farnsworth, but he also appears to have his "feet planted firmly in quicksand." Leonard Blacke has gotten himself involved with four young treasure hunters, Maryanne Thompson, Paul Thompson, Eric Wilson and Clay, who have been trying to locate the wreck of the Esperanza for years. A Spanish galleon that sunk over three centuries ago in a storm with "untold riches" as its cargo, but the one of the investors is getting impatient with the stories about treasure ships and wants her whole one-hundred thousand dollars back. So the discovery of the wreck came in the nick of time. But not for very long.

The members agreed to camp out on the top of the wreck until they have brought up "every last ounce of gold she got," but, during the night, their equipment sounds the alarm and watched how it moved away on sonar – a nifty piece of retro-futuristic, 1980s fictitious technology (see picture). When they dived looking for it, it was gone, but "a 300-year-old shipwreck can't just get up and sail off." But that's what happened.

Alexander Blacke has to stick around to save his father's neck, because the investor has pressed charges against Farnsworth and Sheriff Tyler is becoming very suspicious of the old man. Just as the Esperanza vanished, the locals begin to see an old pirate ship, "quiet like a ghost," cutting through the fog and ships bells clanging mournfully. Finally, one of the treasure hunters is murdered with a dagger that came from the wreck.

So, yeah, there's more here than can be used in a 45-minute episode and the first murder served only to introduce an original clue. A piece of now long-lost technology known as a cassette tape with noise recorded on it and feel rather proud of myself for immediately figuring out what's really on the cassette. And how it could be played back. The second murder felt unnecessary and made the murderer standout, but was pleasantly surprised to discover (ROT13) ur unq na nppbzcyvfu uvqqra va cynva fvtug naq ur jnf chg gb tbbq hfr gb chapu hc gur raqvat. So the plot mainly hinges Sheriff Tyler nipping at Leonard Blacke's heel and the disappearance of the Esperanza, but they were both reasonably well handled. Particularly, the impossible disappearance of the wreck had a believable explanation (despite the dodgy monitoring) with that great cassette clue, but they needed more room to do them any justice. I think cutting the ghost ship and turning two murders into a single assault (leaving the victim unconscious in a hospital bed) would have made for better and much tighter episode.

All on all, Revenge of the Esperanza is a decent, fun enough episode with an intriguing premise and some good idea, but a cluttered 45-minutes were not enough to do anything meaningful with it. But, if you love impossible crimes, it's genuine pleasure to watch one unfold on screen.

Polaris (2004) by Jack McDevitt

Several months ago, I probed A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt, an American science-fiction author, who specialized in futuristic archaeological and historical science-fiction mysteries asking that age-old question, "what in heaven's name is going on here" – strongly influenced by G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. McDevitt prefers the how-the-hell-was-it-done over the whodunit and cites he has "always been a devotee of the locked room murder" with Chesterton's "The Arrow of Heaven" (The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926) as a personal favorite. So you can probably understand how a pure science-fiction writer appeared on my radar. 

McDevitt's admiration for Chesterton's detective fiction found an expression in his series about a space-faring antique dealer, Alex Benedict, who plies his trade among the stars and settled worlds a hundred centuries in the future. Trouble usually knows where to find him through his business dealings in rare and valuable space age artifacts or sticking his nose a little too deep in a historical mystery.

Alex Benedict was introduced as a one-and-done deal in A Talent for War, but the various characters, fascinating premise and the vast, richly detailed setting would have been wasted in a standalone and so he was brought back in the 2000s – adding seven novels and two short stories to the lineup. I believe these additional novels is what earned McDevitt a comparison with Ellery Queen as most of his attention in the first novel was directed to an impressive and convincing piece of world-building. A multi-world civilization, spread out across the stars, populated with a thousand billions human beings and one other intelligent species, the Ashiyyur, that humanity has come across during its exploration of the Milky Way. But there are still some serious limits to the technology that allowed humanity to colonize distant planets. And the humans who inhabit those planets are still very human. They left behind more than ten thousand years of history, space age urban legends and a ton of unsolved mysteries.

There aren't that many examples of world-building in the traditional detective story. You have Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of a Queen (1935), Peter Dickenson's The Poison Oracle (1974) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998). Robert van Gulik's reconstruction of Tang Dynasty-era China in his historical Judge Dee series has been likened to the world-building more commonly associated with the science-fiction genre. So I'm always impressed when someone can make an entire, living and breathing, civilization appear out of thin air.

However, as impressive as the world-building was in A Talent for War, I was glad to discover there was an actual detective hook in the second novel with an intriguing central puzzle. A puzzle that can be summed up as the Mary Celeste in outer space!

There were fifteen years between the publication of A Talent for War and Polaris (2004), which came with a notable change. The books are now narrated by his assistant and superluminal pilot, Miss Chase Kolpath. She has been with him since the Corsarius affair, twelve years ago, which "led to some rewriting of history" and "a small fortune for Alex." This time, they're confronted with another problem that was left open ended in the history books.

Sixty years ago, "six of the most celebrated people in the Confederacy" boarded a luxury, the Polaris, to accompany a scientific expedition to a 6-billion-year-old star, Delta Karpis, "drifting quietly through the great deeps with its family of worlds" – now counting down its final hours. A year previously, a white dwarf entered the planetary system, "scattering worlds and moons," became "a dagger aimed directly at the heart of Delta Karpis itself." So there are several ships closely observing the approaching destruction, which is both spectacular and tragic as one of the planets is the home of "large animals, living oceans, and vast forests." But has this closely observed collision anything to do with what happens next? Polaris is ready to make the jump back home and Captain Madeleine English tells the communication officer at the Indigo Station, "departure imminent," but the starship never appeared on the other side.

Another starship was dispatched to the last-known position of the Polaris and was discovered a week later, substantially off course, without a trace of the VIPs or crew! There's no sign of a struggle or evidence of a hurried departure. Someone, or something, eliminated "the sole witness the investigators might have had" by shutting down the ship's AI. This suggested to some people "the existence of a supernatural power out there somewhere" that's "capable of invading a sealed ship before an alarm could be sent." Since there was no real answer to be found, the incident passed into the realm of conspiracy theories with the most popular explanations inevitably involving a third, unknown race of aliens. Even ghosts enter the picture as people claim to have seen spirits on the now renamed ship.

Sixty years later, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath have discovered and are in the process of exploring the ruins of a giant, eighteen hundred years old Shenji outstation orbiting a blue giant on the on the edge of Confederacy space. The locations of many of these outstations were lost to time and finding one will get the attentions of archaeologists, historians and collectors. Such as Winetta Yashevik, archaeological liaison at the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research, who plan to open a new wing to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Polaris incident. Survey is planning "a two-week-long extravaganza" with a banquet and an auction to sell off some Polaris artifacts that were locked in storage for decades. Alex and Chase seize the opportunity to pick some choice items for themselves with the outstation as exchange, which is both a stroke of luck and a harbinger of doom. A huge bomb explosion at the Survey destroyed the entire Polaris collection except for the artifacts currently in Alex and Chase's possession. That's where the problems really begin for the two antique dealers.

The customers who bought the artifacts receive strange visitors, one aptly named Flambeau, who show great interest in the artifacts, but nothing appears to be stolen or anything to suggest criminal intentions – besides, you know, the bombing of the Survey. But this changes when an attempt is made to get Alex and Chase out of the way. More than once. So, naturally, they begin a deep dive into history as they interrogate virtual rendered avatars of the people ("a projection backed by a data retrieval system") who went missing and talks with some very old witnesses and somewhat lonely AI stuck on a distant outstation. While they're rooting around in the past, they come across a string of missing persons with dodgy records and even some (suspected) murders. More importantly, two hot button issues of the future begin to drift to the surface.

Firstly, one of the VIPs on the Polaris, Professor Tom Dunninger, had devoted his life to cracking the secret of life extension, or practical immortality, "who was reported to have been on the track of a major breakthrough" before boarding that doomed starship. There were rumors that "a few immortals were actually created" who were still out there somewhere. Stuff of legends. However, it got the professor in the crosshairs of some people and groups who believed it would lead to even more over population, which might seem silly when you've got an endless, practically empty, universe to explore and colonize. But there's a logical reason given for this concern. Technically, they could move people from a densely populated world to the virtually empty super continent on Sacracour, but the 1064 superluminals of the Confederacy has an average passenger capacity of twenty-eight people. Just try moving even a fraction of the eleven billion people on Earth to Sacracour with those numbers. So not everyone was happy with Dunninger's work during a time when people already had an average lifespan of more than a hundred years. Secondly, there's the mind wipe and personality adjustment technology used to give incorrigible criminals an entirely new identity, psyche and memories, which comes with more ethical exclamation and question marks than the death penalty. I'm honestly surprised its use was implemented without a huge conflict or an outright, multi-world war. I think mind wipes is something people would go to war over, if it was forced on them.

So the backdrop here is as alive as in the first novel, but what about the mystery? The detective pull of the plot? You have to keep in mind that Polaris is not a traditionally-structured, or plotted, detective story, but the central puzzle was pretty good with the problem of how the people disappeared from the derelict Polaris counting as a legitimate locked room mystery – although one with a relative simple and routine solution. Still a very well presented and handled impossible situation. Much more inspired was the motive behind all these incidents and one person in particular turned out to have been the victim of a truly hellish crime, which definitely had a Chestertonian touch. Something that reminded me of "The Worst Crime in the World" from The Secret of Father Brown (1927). 

Polaris definitely benefited from not having to setup an entire section of the universe, populated with two technically advanced species with tens of thousand years of history between them, which made for a stronger and more focused science-fiction mystery. I very much look forward to the third entry in the series, Seeker (2005). 

Notes for the curious: I couldn't cram this in anywhere else, but one of the little touches to the backdrop that made the setting so convincing and alive is the distribution between alien life and intelligent, technologically advanced species. There's humanity, the Ashiyyur and the fifty-thousand-year-old ruins on a now inhospitable planet, which were once "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" (mentioned in A Talent for War). There's plenty of life to be found on the planets. Alex and Chase visit the previous mentioned Sacracour that has an eight billion year old bio-system complete with "walking plants, living clouds, and, arguably, the biggest trees on record." Polaris also provides an answer how humans can settle all these living worlds without getting sick and dying. Apparently, the viruses and germs on most worlds are incompatible with humans with an occasional exception, like Markop III, where "viruses and disease germs loved Homo sapiens." I doubt this is scientifically accurate, but that's where the fiction in science-fiction comes into play and appreciate the attention to detail. This is something McDevitt easily could have glossed over without anybody noticing.

Utter Death (1952) by John Hymers

I think every long-time mystery reader has one, or more, pet tropes and trappings that draw us in like moths to a flame. Some of you might have noticed my excessive interest in impossible crime fiction or World War II period mysteries compounded by an incurable curiosity for the obscure and arcane, but not every trope or trapping lends itself to indulgence – like the frustratingly rare archaeological detective story. Two of the most well-known examples of the archaeological mystery novel are R. Austin Freeman's The Eye of Osiris (1911) and Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). More recently, I found three short stories, Charles B. Child's "The Thumbless Man" (1955), MORI Hiroshi's "Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) and Simon Clark's "The Climbing Man" (2015), but it remains a shallow pool to draw from. 

So, whenever I come across one, I take special notice and usually end up adding them to the towering, semi-sentient monstrosity that's my stack of unread detective novels. And that brings us to the subject of today's review.

John Hymers is even more obscure and little-known than his only, practically forgotten, contribution to the genre, Utter Death (1952), which brings the reader to the Cairo of the immediate post-war period where an utterly bizarre murder is committed among the members of a small, decaying British Colony – set against the skulduggery of an archaeological dig in the sand hills. So that was more than enough to get my attention, but who was John Hymers? Why has he has been so thoroughly forgotten today? Even lacking his own GADWiki entry.

None of the John Hymers found online seem to fit the timeline in which they could have written Utter Death, but there was a notable, 19th century English mathematician of the same name. So our Hymers could have been a relative carrying on the family name or a mathematician himself who simply picked the name as pseudonym. There might not be a link at all. I simply don't know. Not for sure, anyway, but I can make a tenuous guess as something struck me while reading Utter Death. A story with a little more than a passing resemblance to the early 1960s novels from a husband-and-wife team, Gordon and Vicky Philo, who wrote some magnificent mysteries together as "Charles Forsyte." Utter Death struck me as a very rough, unpolished attempt at the type of detective novels they would so expertly craft a decade later. You can even go as far as saying they pillaged Utter Death and refurbished the material as frameworks for their 1960s mysteries.

For example, the murders in Utter Death and Diplomatic Death (1961) share some resemblance in presentation and their reliance on stage-magic and misdirection. Diving Death (1962) shares its archaeological backdrop with Utter Death, but former takes place in the muted, two-color world of the seabed and the latter on the sun-scorched sands of Egypt. The setting of an isolated group of British characters in the Middle East is at the heart of both Diplomatic Death and Murder with Minarets (1968). Also note the similarity in choice of book titles.

I know I'm probably wrong here and the huge disparity in quality between Hymers' lightly plotted, second-string Utter Death and the Forsyte novels stands as a solid counter argument, but then again, that could have been the reason why they never acknowledged or claimed it – which has one point in its favor. Gordon and Vicky Philo began working on Diplomatic Death sometime during the 1950s, which had to be rewritten multiple times before finally being published in 1962. So, time-wise, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities Utter Death was an early, flawed attempt at the detective story that made it to print. But ended up being embarrassment when the Philos produced a better written, solidly plotted and more polished series of detective stories. This is nothing more than a guess, but there such a thing as a lucky guess. So who knows. Now let's get to the story at hand. 

Utter Death takes place some three miles to the south of Cairo in Mansiut, a so-called "garden city," where stucco villas, green lawns and avenues of poinsettias arose from "the mud which for centuries has been so generously left by the Nile" when a British Colony settled it. The result is not so much a garden as an exclusive, isolated island surrounded by deserts, rice fields and the river with no post office or shops. So you had to be "sufficiently affluent" to own a car to ride into Cairo, if you want to live in Mansiut. A small, dwindling remnant of the Colonial administration and it's social strata try to carry on there as old traditions have all but disappeared and the disillusioned diehards wonder why they ever handed the administration of the country back to the Egyptians. So a holdover from a previous era, but normally a pretty quiet, peaceful place that ends when the excavations begin.

Professor Maurice Selborne is a rising name in the world of Egyptology who's a notoriously difficult and unpleasant person to be around. A bit of an autocrat who's very protective of his excavation sites, which means practically nobody is allowed to come anywhere near. Somebody ignored his wishes! Professor Selborne has been excavating a hillside passageways close to an ancient temple where they have come across several chambers. However, the chambers were empty when they entered it, "not so much as a gold coin lying around," except for the paintings and carvings covering its walls. The odd thing is that they found the centuries old seal on the outer door intact, but the seal on the second door had been broken not so long ago. Yes, Hymers teased a locked room mysteries that unfortunately never materialized. But that's not all!

Someone has been sending Professor Selborne "Pharaonic messages" that can construed as death threats ("for the name of the god who ruleth here is Utter Death") and two workman have died violently on the job. But it neither frightened the archaeologists or put a stop to the excavation. Professor Selborne actually appears to be "playing a game of his own," as "if he had something up his sleeve," while being very keen on keeping the authorities out of his business. All they really know about Professor Selborne is that "he's unfaithful to his wife, is hated by his workmen and has been receiving anonymous warnings" which might be linked to "the present tomb he's excavating" – an explosive cocktail that ends in murder during a social gathering. Professor Selborne's body is found shot to death in his study, slumped over his desk, holding a half-crushed quill pen and a broken pieces of a vase scattered on the ground. The murderer also snatched something from the wall. Enter the Hercule Poirot of the Middle East, Inspector Zaky Bey of the Cairo Police.

Regrettably, there really is not much else that can be said about the story. Utter Death is a genuine enough detective novel, but has a plot as thin and fragile as finely-spun glass with a clumsy, amateurish grasp of clueing and misdirection. It kind of works as a detective story, but not a very good one. Only aspect of Utter Death that really stands out is its depiction of post-war Egypt and the social upheaval following Egyptian independence, which is more fairly put down than the old-world rumblings from the British quarters suggests. Another reason why the Philos could have written it, because they were British diplomats living and working in the Middle East at the time. It would explain why the scenery, social backdrop and some of the characters are so much much better realized than the plot. Even that was almost ruined towards the end with a very bad scene that could have been plucked from the yellowed pages of an opium-fueled, pot smoke filled pulp magazine story.

So, yeah, Hymers' Utter Death is more or less a repeat of my recent encounter with B.J. Kleymens' In de greep van de kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965) with the question "who wrote this" proving to be more interesting than what they wrote. Not recommended unless you have a craving for the utterly obscure or intrigued by the potential mystery of Hymers' identity.

Sorry for the poor, sloppier than usual review, but it was a struggle to pad out this post into something resembling a proper review and will try to pick something less risky for the next time.

A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt

Back in 2013, Ho-Ling Wong introduced the traditional mystery corner of the web to James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), a science-fiction novel that's at its heart a detective story, but on a scale that's impossible to do in a conventional, earthbound mystery novel – landing a comfortable spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100. Hogan's Inherit the Stars left behind a who's who of the classic and modern detective-and crime story. Even science-fiction author and part-time mystery novelist, John Sladek, had to eat dust with his almost universally beloved Invisible Green (1977) trailing far behind Hogan's hard science-fiction tale. Something smelled fishy! 

A closer inspection of Hogan's futuristic puzzle of 50.000-year-old human remains in a spacesuit discovered on the Moon proved to tick "about every single box that we want to see filled" with a "slow, devious, torturous and extremely clever unraveling of a complex puzzle." So we shamelessly appropriated Hogan's Inherit the Stars from the science-fiction genre.

Needless to say, I was not adverse to reading more of these archaeological space mysteries, but only found Ross Rocklynne's 1941 novella "Time Wants a Skeleton." A whowasdunin centering on an out-of-time human skeleton found inside cave on an ancient asteroid. But nothing more came to my attention until recently. 

Jack McDevitt is an American science-fiction author who specialized in archaeological and historical novels set in the far-flung future that often have a detective hook. McDevitt came to my attention as some of his work has been compared to Ellery Queen and probing a little deeper discovered that he credited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown as hugely influential on shaping his Alex Benedict series. This comes with the caveat that McDevitt is not "an enthusiast about detective stories in general," but loves "the magic of Father Brown" that have more to do with "trying to figure out what on Earth happened" than simply whodunit and cites one of Chesterton's well-known locked room mysteries, "The Arrow of Heaven" – collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). So he belongs to the school of thought that believes the how of a crime is often more interesting than the who. A school that has Dorothy L. Sayers as its headmistress and John Rhode as its main lecturers.

So why not give McDevitt a shot and, if I like the series, boldly go where I've seldom gone before by dabbling in some chronological reading. 

A Talent for War (1989) is the first title starring Alex Benedict, an antique dealer, who lives and operates about 10.000 years into the future when "a thousand billion human beings" had settled "several hundred worlds" that formed a troubled Confederacy of planets. The story opens with the news that the flagship of the newest class of interstellars, Capella, had "slipped into oblivion" along with twenty-six hundred passengers and crew members, which failed to reenter linear space. Something that has happened before and none has ever reappeared. So everyone aboard is pretty much lost forever. And legally dead.

One of the passengers was Alex's uncle, Gabe Benedict, who left his estranged nephew his
entire estate and a historical puzzle dating back to "the last great heroic age" which has "provoked historical debate for two centuries." Two hundred years ago, an ever-expanding humanity came across an alien civilization, Ashiyyur, which resulted in an armed conflict between possibly the only technological cultures in the entire Milky Way. Christopher Sim was a history teacher from Dellaconda who became the leader of the Resistance and from the helm of his "immortal warship," the Corsarius, "spearheaded the allied band of sixty-odd frigates and destroyers holding off the massive fleets of the Ashiyyur," which eventually turned the tide as the other planets began to recognize the danger – driving the aliens back to their sullen worlds from which they came. But this victory came at a price. During his famous last stand, Sim was betrayed and abandoned by his crew with the name of navigator, Ludik Talino, becoming synonymous with cowardice. The names of the other deserters were lost to history and so is what exactly went down during that decisive and historically significant battle.

What did Gabe Benedict, an amateur archaeologist, knew that sent him tracking off into a region of space, known as the Veiled Lady, two centuries later? What is the connection with secretive journey of the CSS Tenandrome?

CSS Tenandrome is a big survey ship "involved in exploration of regions deep in the Veiled Lady," a thousand light years from Gabe's home planet, which returned under very mysterious and hushed circumstances. This churned the interstellar rumor mill. Officially, it was reported the ship's Armstrong units were damaged, but all kinds of rumors were flying around alleging it was either a plague ship or there was a time displacement that severely aged the crew members. There even rumors that the ship came across a new race of aliens or "an ancient fleet adrift," but "something among the encrusted ships" had "discouraged further examination" and returned home.

Alex has to take a deep drive into history to not only figure out what really happened two-hundred years ago, but what his uncle knew that could rewrite history. Admittedly, this makes for an engrossing, but slow-paced, read that takes some time to finish.

Alex has to gather and track down a ton of historical records, online and offline, war-time poetry, notebooks and watches simulated reenactments as well as visiting distant worlds, a historical society and even interviewing a representative of the Ashiyyur. But everything moves very slowly with only three points of action in the entire story. One very brief with the other two being saved for the end of the story.

So most of the story has either Alex sifting through information or talking with people, which is approach exceedingly rare in the detective genre and don't think it even has a name. I suppose you could call it a "research novel" with Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaku satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaku Murders, 1983) as the only example that comes to mind, but done on a much smaller scale than A Talent for War. The Case of the Sharaku Murders merely deals with an academic search for the true identity of a mysterious woodblock print artist who was briefly active during the late 1700s under a pseudonym. This makes the puzzle component of the plot is difficult to discuss, because it's as vast as our own star system. However, I was very impressed with the amount of world-building that was done. A massive, multi-worlds world that felt like it's actually populated with a human civilizations.

Over the years, I've read a tiny sampling of science-fiction mysteries and one thing always surprising me is that the earliest titles sketch a picture of the future in which culture and technology has stagnated or even regressed. Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on a drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century, but technology is clunky with references to only 19th and early 20th century literature and culture. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) takes place in mining community around an asteroid belt, but courtroom photographers still use flashbulbs and John Russell Fearn's The Master Must Die (1953) has snail mail between Earth and Mars. One stamp is enough to cover the cost of sending a letter from Mars to Earth. What a difference half a century makes!

I'm not an expert, of course, but I thought technology was much more convincingly handled here with Alex's conversation with an A.I. version of his dead uncle being eerily predictive of the very recent developments with a controversial deepfake technology digitally resurrecting dead relatives or friends. I also appreciated that the Armstrong Drive was not used as a magic wand to simply transport between the stars, because there are some serious limitations as to its reach and maneuvering that required a ship "to materialize well outside star systems" – which "left the traveler with a long ride to his destination." A trip to Andromeda was still off the table. But what I really appreciated where the little historical and cultural touches in combination with current affairs playing out in the background giving you the idea all those worlds truly are swarming with humans.

Every chapter begins with an excerpt or quote from a fictitious piece of future literature, philosophy or commentary on the war and wished McDevitt had told more about the history and myths surrounding the various settled worlds.

Alex reminiscent about his own home world that "only an historian can tell you now who first set foot on Rimway," but "everybody on the planet knows who died in the attempt" and trying to find the wreckage of Jorge Shale and his crew was the first archaeological project of his life. But he never did. Alex also visited a settled water world, appropriately known as the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with a planet that was once the home of an intelligent species, Belarius. A now inhospitable place which houses fifty-thousand-year-old ruins that were "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" before their running into the Ashiyyur. Belarius has been largely given up as it's "an incredibly savage place" crawling with "highly evolved predators" in its dense jungles. What a great backdrop that place would be for an archaeological, space age mystery novel. Something halfway between Agatha Christie and Predator!

But more important is that long-ago battle and the symbol Christopher Sim has become to the Confederacy, which is just as important two centuries later as there's a political crisis brewing in the background of interstellar proportions. Earth is holding "a referendum on the matter of secession" and there are constant clashes along the Perimeter with the Ashiyyur. So hostilities with the Ashiyyur might be "the cement that binds your Confederacy together" and "stem the political power of separatists." This makes finding answers to a 200-year-old mystery potentially dangerous and highly explosive.

McDevitt wrote an imaginative, richly detailed and engrossing story that constructed entire worlds with its own history around the central puzzle with the only drawbacks being the slow pacing and not having quite the detective pull of Hogan's Inherit the Stars. But you can probably put the latter down to having to setup an entire universe while exploring one of that interstellar civilization's many stories. So you can expect a review of his second novel in the not so distant future.

City of Libraries: "The Climbing Man" (2015) by Simon Clark

Simon Clark's novella "The Climbing Man" is a pastiche of Conan Doyle's immortal detective specifically written for an all-original anthology of new Sherlock Holmes stories, entitled The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015), which Brian Skupin listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – describing a honey of an impossibility. This time, it was not the promise of an original-sounding locked room murder that attracted my attention, but the archaeology-theme and backdrop. I love archaeological mysteries and there are not enough of them. The impossible crime here is merely a bonus. 

"The Climbing Man" takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, tasked with stamping out "a vipers' nest" of plunderers determined "to loot Mesopotamia of its ancient riches." A criminal gang who employed Arab riflemen, clad in gray, who passed themselves of as legitimate protection for travelers and archaeologists.

When the story opens, Holmes and Watson have made off with a dhow (sail boat) crammed with stolen artifacts, but the gray-shirts on the riverbank pepper the boat with bullets and they're pretty much sitting ducks – even succeeding in wounding the Great Detective. Only the hand of providence guided the boat away from the gray-shirts, down the Euphrates, "towards one of the most baffling mysteries" they encountered. Holmes and Watson end up at an dig site of two archaeologists, Edward Priestly and Professor Hendrik, where two generations have been working on excavating the subterranean tunnels, basement and vaults of the buried city of Tirrash. A once legendary city referred to as Bibliopolis or the City of Libraries.

Three thousand years ago, the city was attacked and destroyed, but, before the barbarians destroyed and plundered the city, the people emptied the libraries of the clay tablets. These clay tablets were "carefully stored in the basements beneath the houses and sealed shut," which remained intact and undisturbed under the desert sands for most of recorded history. But a perplexing, modern-day mystery is discovered in one of its sealed chambers.

A few years ago, Edward Priestly's brother, Benjamin, vanished without a trace from the excavation site and a week ago, they discovered his naturally mummified body in a place that begs for a rational explanation.

During an exploration of an underground passageway, they discovered one of the many hidden vaults, doorway sealed with stone blocks, which "has not been disturbed in three thousand years" and began their meticulous, scientific examination – cutting a small aperture in the wall to look inside. What looked back at them was Benjamin's dry, shriveled face! A second aperture gave them a better view of the body, but it deepened the mystery only further with a second impossibility. The mummified body clung to the wall, facing the stonework, arms outstretched above his head as if he's climbing or "trying to escape from his grave." So the problem is twofold: how did the body end up in a 3000-year-old sealed and undisturbed chamber with four feet of dust covering the floor and how "the devil was he glued so high up on the wall" like "a gigantic spider?" And to give the problem some urgency, the guards hired by the two archaeologists turn out to be gray-shirts. The game's afoot!

The problem of the body in the underground sealed chamber has, as to be expected from its premise, a two-pronged solution. Firstly, the explanation as to how the chamber was entered is not something that will excite many locked room readers, but how the body ended up stuck to the wall was kind of marvelous. A trick that perfectly fitted, time-wise, with the type of impossible, or weird, detective fiction that being written during the Doylean era of the genre. It's the kind of trick/solution you would expect to find in L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898). Unfortunately, "The Climbing Man" also shares the clunky, uneven clueing of the detective stories from that period. Such as when Holmes was collecting evidence and slipping it into an envelope, but Watson only caught a glimpse of "a glittering item." You have to wait until the solution to find out what, exactly, he found. So you only have some room to do some educated guesswork.

Nevertheless, neither the uneven clueing nor the anti-climatic confrontation with the gray-shirts could spoil this thoroughly entertaining and absorbing story that made excellent use of its archaeological setting. I also appreciate it when a pastiche treats someone's else creation with respect and not unduly temper with the original, which can be simply achieved with Sherlock Holmes by giving him a complicated, knotty problem to occupy "that remarkable brain of his." And that's exactly what Clark did here. 

A note for the curious: "The Climbing Man" was not Clark's first foray into the realm of impossible crimes and locked room mysteries. Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997) contains Clark's "The Adventure of the Falling Star," which is not listed in Skupin, in which Holmes is asked to investigate the disappearance of a meteorite from a collection in a locked laboratory. So, yeah, that story has now been added to my special locked room wishlist. Something else that's now on my wishlist is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes locked room/impossible crime pastiches (Sherlocked!).

Locked and Loaded: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

Last year, I put together a hypothetical locked room anthology, "The Locked Room Reader XI: Locked Out," composed of short stories that were overlooked and never appeared in any of the anthologies published between The Locked Room Reader: Stories of Impossible Crimes and Escapes (1968) and The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths (2020) – a list appended with my personal wishlist. A wishlist with interesting and intriguing-sounding stories that have been rarely been reprinted or stuck in obscure, often hard-to-get magazine publications.

Regrettably, most of the obscure stories on that wishlist remain out of my reach, but the backlog of short locked room and impossible crime stories has grown exponentially over the past twelve months. I've to acknowledge and thank Alexander, of The Detection Collection, who helped padding that backlog.

The backlog has become so cluttered that it was time for another bloated compilation post with review of uncollected stories. So let's dig in!

Table of Content:

"Murder on a Bet" by H.C. Kincaid

"The Loaded House" by Francis Bonnamy 

"The Thumbless Man" by Charles B. Child

"The Man Who Wasn't There" by Charles B. Child

"Murder in a Locked Box" by Patrick Meadows

"Virgil Tibbs and the Fallen Body" by John Ball

"The Gallowglass" by David Braly

H.C. Kincaid's "Murder on a Bet" appeared in the November, 1950, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as an "ultra contemporary" take on the locked room trope with a solution promising “the stuff of tomorrow's news.” A prediction that has since come true.

The story centers around a group of six businessmen who only have two things in common, "an almost fanatical respect for the pledged word" and "predilection for murder mysteries," which lead to a discussion and a challenge at the Malunion Club. A recent issue of EQMM had a locked room story and John Hendrix "vigorously denounced" such stories as unrealistic and gimmicky. Victor Julian challenges his opinion and assures everyone he could device a method without "the use of any mechanical device or any deception of the senses." So a $150,000 challenge is written down on paper.

Hendrix agreed to take residence in a hotel room stocked with enough food and drink to last him a week, which then has to be locked from the inside and the doors as well as the windows sealed shut with strips of adhesive tape – guards from a reputable detective agency were posted in the corridor for the whole week. When the time limit had expired, they opened the hotel room, noting the seals were intact, but Hendrix was dead. And there wasn't a mark on his body or a trace of poison in his system. Doc Kay is called in by the businessmen to help them get out of this mess and clear their names from suspicion.

A clever, two-part trick with the administration of death being a modern update of a trick that seasoned mystery readers will probably recognize, but Kincaid found a new way to use a locked, sealed and closely guarded room. A story worthy to be anthologized. 

Francis Bonnamy's "The Loaded House" was first published in the December, 1950, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as one of the winners of a short story contest. "The Loaded House" impressed the jury as a "bright and amusing" story with "a strange sort of Southern hospitality" and "chockful, ram-jam-loaded with detectives" – as multiple characters contribute to the solution. The breezy, lighthearted and sometimes flippant tone of the story did remind me of Delano Ames and Kelley Roos.

Francis "Frank" Bonnamy is the assistant of the well-known Peter Utley Shane, head of the Department of Criminology at the University of Chicago, but during his wartime stint, he lived in Alexandria, Virginia. The old port is preparing to celebrate its bicentennial and Frank wants to show his wife, Mavis, the place to meet the delightful friends he made there. There is, however, a problem. Every time Frank stays in that part of Virginia, the area "becomes littered with the sudden dead" and his old landlady greets him with, "Oh no! Not Death's advance man!" And the good, old detective curse lives up to it reputation when the Bonnamys gets invited to a housewarming party to unveil a garden-sized swimming pool with a body floating in it! A second body turns up on the doorstep, shot through the head, which is what earned this story a spot in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

However, to qualify the second murder as an impossible crime stretches the definition a little, but I'll allow it as it made splendid use of the historically rich past of the town and the antiques that litter the place. A very well done detective story that convinced me to take a closer look at Francis Bonnamy sometime in the future. I've know become incredibly curious about Death on a Dude Ranch (1939), A Rope of Sand (1944) and The King is Dead on Queen Street (1945).

Charles B. Child's "The Thumbless Man" was originally published as "The Invisible Killer" in the
January 21, 1955, publication of Collier's and reprinted under its current title in the December, 1961, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It's one of those altogether too rare archaeological mysteries with an originally imagined premise and a good solution.

Chief Inspector Chafik J. Chafik, of the Baghdad police, is summoned to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city, Akkar, where two bodies were found in a burial chamber. One of the bodies is close to 4000-year-old with a modern knife in his back and the second, much fresher, body belongs to a representative of the Department of Antiquities, Jamil Goury – who was found with strange strangulation marks on his throat. And those marks suggest he had been killed by someone with exceptionally hard, thumbless hands. What makes the murder an outright impossibility is the passageway into the tomb was very narrow and one section could only be passed by crawling. Goury headed a party into the tomb, but appeared to be attacked, and strangled, while the people behind were unable to help or save him. Only person on the other side is a dusty corpse almost as old as recorded history. 

"The Thumbless Man" is a truly wonderful story with a fascinating backdrop and impossible crime, but it's Chafik who steals the show with his lines and some excellent scenes. Such as when Chafik has a brush with death and awakens inside a tent to immediately admonish the first person he sees by saying, "I did not die here; my corpse should not have been moved." Chafik also channeled John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin when telling the murderer that "the devil and I have much in common" and gave [redacted] a taste of hell by placing [redacted] in Goury's position. I seriously need to go after a copy of Child's The Sleuth of Baghdad (2002).

On a side note: Steve, of MysteryFile, reviewed "The Thumbless Man" back in May and, while he liked the story, questioned why "the killer decided to go to such length to commit such a murder" that's bound to raise more questions than a staged accident. A collapse, or faulty wiring, would have been as dangerous to the murderer in those circumstances as to the victim. So the murderer adopted this roundabout way to create an impossibility that also functions as an alibi.

Charles B. Child's "The Man Who Wasn't There" was published in the April, 1969, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings Chief Inspector Chafik to the home of an Egyptian exile and recluse, Faris Zakir. Constable Abdul Rahim had been called three times to the house in one week on account of an unauthorized person entering the premise. A person who was seen and left "alien footprints" on the stairs to an unoccupied upper floor and vanished, but even more baffling is how this person managed to enter the house. The place was practically a fortress with a heavy bar on the front doors and all of the windows either protected with iron grills or shuttered. Chafik leaves the inexperienced constable in charge of the case, which proves to have fatal consequences.

Unfortunately, Child glosses over the impossibility of the footprints on the stairs, which detracted from the overall quality of the story, but the dangerous game Chafik plays with the murderer to extract an unlawful kind of justice was excellently done. So this one was better written than plotted.

Patrick Meadows' "Murder in a Locked Box" is a short-short story, originally published in the August, 1969, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and takes place in a police station where a "dropout from the underworld was comfortable and coddled" in a prison cell – while closely watched by Chief Delany on TV screen. Chief Delany witnesses "Chops" Moran dropping to floor, twitches twice and then remained eerily motionless. Moran had been poisoned with cyanide and suicide is out of the question, but how then was the poison administrated? Chief Delany makes short work of the case and apprehends the murderer before this person can even begin to feel apprehensive about being caught. This is not bad for something so short, but neither is it particular clever or memorable. A snack sized locked room story and nothing more than that.

John Ball's "Virgil Tibbs and the Fallen Body" was first published in the September, 1978, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings the impossible crime to the modern police procedural. Police Detective Virgil Tibbs is present when body falls with "a violent thud" on the sidewalk of a towering building. Tibbs notices some clues arguing against suicide, but an interview with the building's general manager makes murder equally impossible. Only a few windows in the building can be opened and then only very slightly, which barely allows enough room to crawl through. Since the building is only partially rented out, everything above the thirty-second floor is blocked-off and access is severely restricted. And the dust on the roof was undisturbed. So where did the body come from since "he couldn't have fallen out of the sky."

The solution is interesting, but terribly unconvincing with the who-and why treated as an afterthought and left me somewhat disappointed. It could have worked, if the idea had been elaborated on. No recommendation here. Nonetheless, I've now bumped Ball's Singapore (1986) op my to-be-read pile to see what he did with a novel-length locked room mystery.

David Braly's "The Gallowglass" was originally published in the August, 1986, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and collected in Murder at Teatime: Mysteries in the Classic Cozy Tradition (1996), which will make some of you cringe, but don't despair. This story is not a cozy. "The Gallowglass" is an old-fashioned, traditionally fashioned locked room mystery with everything but a warm, cozy backdrop for a gruesome killing with a medieval weapon.

On a dark, stormy night, Sergeant Brian Sullivan is taking a locksmith to a mansion in the County of Cork, Ireland, which used to belong to a 17th century gallowglass (mercenary) who had built the original house that formed the center of the current building and, when he was slain in battle, cursed the place – swearing he would kill every Englishman "till the crack of doom." However, the ghost is one of the two things that attracted the very English Dr. George and Elizabeth Harrogate to the mansion with the other being that "Ireland doesn't tax authors" (kind of true). Dr. Harrogate makes his money with writing textbooks, science-fiction novels and working on his invention, the sea camera. A combination of photography and computer radar that would show "a lake or sea as being transparent."

They lived there for three years without anything untoward happening, but, during one of the greatest storms the locals can remember, Dr. Harrogate uncharacteristically bolted his study door. And he doesn't respond to his wife's knocking. So she calls the police, but even the locksmith is unable to force the sturdy, solid oak door and the windows were nailed close years ago. When they finally managed to break into the room, they find Dr. Harrogate's body with battleaxe "embedded deeply" in his chest and the papers concerning his invention are missing.

Sergeant Sullivan arrested a well-known housebreaker, who was seen near the house at the time of the murder, but has no earthly idea how he managed to get out of that tightly shut room. So they fly in Detective Chief Inspector Phelim Kane from Dublin to Cork to help Sullivan with that last piece of the puzzle, but Kane is there "to investigate all aspects of the case" and investigate he does. Kane arrives at an entirely different conclusion than his local colleague.

The locked room-trick is fairly simple and straightforward, but not one of those hackneyed, routine solutions so often employed by writers who wanted to write a locked room story without knowing how to plot one – like turning a key with special tweezers or drawing a bolt with string. Braly was a little more sophisticated than that and his explanation nicely dovetailed with the situation of the house, the storm and fitted the murderer perfectly. I also admired how effortlessly the story slipped into an adjacent genre in its closing pages.

Braly's "The Gallowglass" is another story deserving the attention of editors and anthologists for inclusion in a future locked room collection.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed my rambling about all these loose, uncollected locked room and impossible crime stories. Hopefully, they will one day find their way into another locked room anthology. And that I'll have read most of the obscure stories in that hypothetical anthology is a sacrifice I'm willing to make for all of you.