The Theft and the Prophecy: Two Fictional Impossible Crimes

In my previous blog-post, "The Ghost and the Canary," I covered two real-life examples of the impossible crime story and decided it would be a nice touch to follow it up with a look at two fictional locked room problems. There happened to be two, relatively short, works lingering on my big pile. So let's dig in!

Barry Ergang is the former editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine and received a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society for the best flash story of 2006, titled "Vigilante," but on the web Ergang is perhaps better known as a reviewer and member of various mystery-themed groups – such as the now sadly erstwhile JDCarr messageboard. You can find his reviews all over the web, like the GADWiki, which also hosts his parody of "Dr. Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" (2003).

I think Ergang's hardboiled take on one of detective fiction's foremost experts on the locked room puzzle foreshadowed a short story he would come to write only a year later.

"The Play of Light and Shadows" was originally published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, vol. VII, Issue 35: Autumn 2004 and Patrick Ohl accurately described this short story as "a traditionally-told hardboiled story" in his 2011 review. The story is narrated by Dr. Alan Driscoll, a university professor, who's on a sabbatical to escape from department politics and "the hermetic insularity of academia" at the City University of Philadelphia. So to re-familiarize himself with the real world he takes job as a bartender and there he strikes up an acquaintance with a private-eye.

Darnell is a stern man who has no time for small talk, but "discussions about books pierced his reserve" and "evoked a veiled passion." When the story opens, Darnell is sitting at the bar reading The Sound and the Fury. This reminded me of Bill Pronzini's popular private-eye, "Nameless," whose undying love for pulp magazines has even driven the plots of some of his most well-known, highly praised cases – like Hoodwinked (1981) and Bones (1985). Interestingly, they're are perhaps two of the best known examples of the hardboiled locked room story.

However, this story is only indirectly influenced by Darnell's veiled passion for literature and comes about when Driscoll asks how business is going. Darnell simply taps his book and says that he has "lots of time to read."

Well, Driscoll got a phone-call from a colleague, Dr. Barton Gaines, who's the Chairman of the Art History Department and he could really use a detective.

Dr. Gaines is hosting a party the following Saturday afternoon to celebrate the acquisition of a painting by Charles Riveau, entitled Nomad, but the painting came with a back-story and concerns the criminal past of its creator – who once acted as a master forger to an Arséne Lupin-like thief, Paul Marchand. Riveau forged masterpieces, but, instead of selling the forgeries, Marchand "stole the originals from private collections or museums" and "substituted the fakes." However, the police eventually caught up with Riveau and did a spell in prison. After his release, Riveau continued to paint and his original work started to gain a reputation. So he turned down Marchand when he wanted to revive their old partnership, but this disagreement ended with Marchand promising he would destroy all of his original work "to prevent him from attaining the fame he desperately wanted."

Ever since, paintings have disappeared from galleries, museums and the homes of collectors. And this is exactly what happens during the party.

The gallery is a long, wide, white-walled and marble-floored room without windows and the door offered its only way in or out of the gallery, which can only be opened with a set of specially-made keys that can't be duplicated. After the gallery is searched, the door is locked from the outside and Darnell takes his place guarding the door, but when the gallery is unlocked and guests stream in they make a startling discovery – someone, somehow, spirited Nomad from a hermetically sealed and guarded room! But this is not their only problem.

A photographer who was present at the unveiling of the painting, Derek Trevor, is found with a camera-strap looped tightly around his throat and the murderer has taken a 3.5" disk from his photo camera. On a side-note, these diskettes were the predecessor of memory cards.

The writing and characterization clearly shows the influence the private-eye genre had on Ergang, who holds Raymond Chandler's The Long Good-bye (1953) in very high regard, but the plotting also betrays a weakness for cleverly clued, puzzle-oriented locked room mysteries. Ergang planted clues and hints throughout the story subtly nodding in the direction of the solution, which is always a pleasant discovery in a modern detective story, and the excellent writing and dialogue makes "The Play of Light and Shadow" anthology material.

There is, however, one (minor) problem I have with the premise and explanation for the impossible theft, which seems to be indebted to the Jonathan Creek episode The Scented Room (1998). An episode that had lifted its plot directly from Edgar Wallace's "The Stolen Romney," collected in Four-Square Jane (1929), which had been spoofed before by Robert Arthur in The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966) – all four deal with a very similar impossible theft and the explanations play around with the same ideas. Only difference between the Jonathan Creek episode and the novel and short story by Arthur and Ergang is that they put their own spin on the ending of "The Stolen Romney."

So I was glad to discover Ergang took a different direction with his solution, but the close resemblance of the plot to those other impossible crime stories took some of the shine off the story. Regardless, "The Play of Light and Shadow" is a well-written, tightly plotted detective story and a welcome addition to that lamentably short list of hardboiled locked room mysteries.

The second story, or rather a novella, comes from the hands of an incredibly prolific British writer of detective and thriller novels, named Gerald Verner, who was frequently compared to the previously mentioned Edgar Wallace and was noted for his "exiting, fast-action plots" – some of them "recognized as classics of the locked room and impossible crime genres." I don't remember anyone ever hailing Verner as a long-overlooked locked room artisan, but any mention of an impossible crime arouses my curiosity. And one of his impossible crime stories just happened to be in print!

A warning to the reader: my review necessitated something that can be construed as a spoiler, because the plot warranted a comparison with a fairly well-known detective novel by a very famous mystery writer. So, if you have read that fairly well-known mystery, you can probably guess the central idea behind the impossible murder from this novella. The reader has been warned!

The Beard of the Prophet (1937) was originally printed in a November, 1937 issue of Detective Weekly No. 246, later collected in Mr. Budd Again (1939), but was curiously enough reprinted separately in 2011 by Borgo Press. I believe our friend, Philip Harbottle, had a hand in getting Verner's work back in print.

One of Verner's series-character is Robert Budd, an obsese Detective-Superintendent of Scotland Yard, who has deceptively sleepy-eyes, a plodding mind and a taste for beer. Budd is assisted by the melancholic, slow-witted Sergeant Leek and is often "the butt of Mr. Budd's biting sarcasm." These two unassuming, now long-forgotten detective-characters had a long shelf-live. Butt and Leek appeared in more than twenty novels and short stories between 1934 and 1966.

The Beard of the Prophet begins with a series of threatening letters addressed to a celebrated archaeologist, Reuben Hayles, who claimed to have discovered the tomb of Mohammed. One of the letters warned Hayles that his "sacrilege will bring violent death in its train," while another say that "every passing hour brings your doom nearer," but the last letter told the archaeologist "death will come to you on the night of the full moon" – signed The Prophet. After this very specific threat, Budd and Leek are installed in the household. A household filled the usual, and some very unusual, suspects, but their protection proved to be ineffective.

Budd stationed himself in front of the bedroom door and Lees was standing guard outside of the house, underneath the open bedroom window, but, shortly after Hayles wished Budd a good night, a scream and a thud is heard inside the room. Budd flung open the door and greeted by "a deafening crash of thunder," which is hoary, but nice, atmospheric touch. Hayles lay in the center of the room on ancient rug, a gaping wound on the front of his head, clenching a false beard in one of his hands!

Funnily enough, The Beard of the Prophet shares exactly the same strength and weaknesses as "The Play of Light and Shadow." After the opening chapters, it becomes patently obvious Verner had looked at Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) for inspiration and the locked room trick here mimics Christie's (semi) impossible alibi-trick. There's even an archaeological background in Verner's story.

So I doubt this was a mere coincidence, but Verner made the trick his own by tinkering with it and giving it a nifty twist. You can almost say this is the impossible crime version of the ingenious alibi-trick from Christopher Bush's Cut Throat (1932). And this alteration of the nature of the trick neatly tied-in with the identity of the murderer. So this definitely saved the novella from being nothing more than a shameless ripoff.

The Beard of the Prophet is perhaps not very original as a detective story, but Verner's treatment of the idea was transformative enough to make for an enjoyable read with a new variation on a trick we've seen before.

A note for the curious: the trick from Murder in Mesopotamia was also used in a 1950 short story by Charles B. Child, titled "All the Birds of the Air," which was collected in The Sleuth of Baghdad (2002). There you have a short story, a novella and a novel, which toy around with variations of the same (locked room) trick and have a Middle Eastern theme. I'm convinced Verner borrowed from Christie, but wonder how much of an influence she had on Child's short story. In any case, I find it fascinating that this particular trick turned up in stories with such similar backgrounds.

So, a short story and novella, written in two very different periods of time, but, when read back-to-back, turned out to strangely reflect one another. They both resembled more well-known impossible crime stories, which had preceded them, but the well-handled treatment of these older ideas pulled the stories away from being disappointing – especially the more original "The Play of Light of Shadow." Only thing you can hold against these two stories is that they failed to break new ground, but hey, I can easily forgive that.

Jack-in-the-Box (1944) by J.J. Connington

Last year, I finally got around to reading a detective novel by J.J. Connington, namely Murder in the Maze (1927), who was one of the mystery novelist that was smeared as a humdrum writer and dismissed as a relic of the genre's past – a label that was also pasted on Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode. However, the test of time is slowly exculpating their reputation and legacy as they're finding their way back into print. Readers can now judge their stories without emptying their bank account to acquire an overpriced, second-hand copy.

Connington is one of the luckier humdrum writers whose work has been mostly reissued by now as either paperback editions or ebooks, which is why I recently decided to stock-up on his Sir Clinton Driffield series. And a couple of non-series titles. Connington still represents one of the biggest holes in my reading of the classic detective story. I think I have read more detective stories by obscure, long-forgotten writers than of the household names of the era and that's just being impious.

So I plucked Jack-in-the-Box (1944) from this freshly accumulated pile and have to say, as far as mysteries with a World War II background goes, this proved to be memorable example with depictions of the bombing raids by the Luftwaffe – which is used here to camouflage a murder victim as a casualty of war. An idea that only Rhode seems to have played around with in The Fourth Bomb (1942).

Jack-in-the-Box was published in 1944, but the story takes place in 1942 and begins when Sir Clinton Driffield and Squire Wendover are driving through the village of Ambledown and observe the wreckage left behind by the last swarm of Nazi bombers.

Ambledown took "a bit of a knock" in an attempt to destroy a nearby magneto factory, which left forty-three dead and quite some property damage, but the bombers missed their target. So everyone expects them to return and they come back early on in the novel. Connington also touches upon the effect the war has on the day to day lives of ordinary people, rationing, housing shortages and blackouts, which forced the people "to be content with the essentials" and "do without the frills" – one of the reasons why so many traditional mysteries from this period tend to be bleaker than those from previous decades. However, the initial reason Sir Clinton and Wendover drove to Ambledown is not related to the war.

A local archaeologist has unearthed a long-lost treasure trove at a digging site locally referred to as Caesar's Camp.

The place is an old Roman camp, on a tract of wasteland to the west of the village, but the spot probably has as much a connection with Caesar as "the Menai Bridge or Buckingham Palace." There was, however, a legend attached to the Roman camp about a cursed treasure promising death to the unlucky finder. Robert Deverell, President of the Natural History Society of Ambledown, brought "a collection of vessels and utensils" to light when digging for Roman-era coins. All of the objects were of gold and beaten and twisted out of shape, which made the collection easier to transport for the ancient looters who had buried their plunder there so many moons ago. A plunder that obviously came from an abbey.

This treasure belongs to the crown, but Deverell is granted permission to inspect and catalog the treasure, piece by piece, at his own home. But than the Luftwaffe pays a second visit to Ambledown and Deverell is killed by enemy action. Or so it looks like.

Apparently, an incendiary bomb had crashed through the skylight, hitting Deverell on the head, and setting fire to the house. An unlikely way to die, one in a million, but suspicion is aroused when pieces of the treasure turn out to have been taken from the scene – which included a battered crosier. Complications begin to pileup when the village is hit by an outbreak of inexplicable deaths. There are no less than five murders that have to be disentangled by Inspector Camlet, Squire Wendover and Sir Clinton (who's the Chief Constable). And, as if that wasn't enough, there's a super-normal plot-thread that places Jack-in-the-Box on the borders of the impossible crime sub-genre.

I decided to tag this post with the "locked room mysteries" and "impossible crimes" toe-tags, but this is really a borderline case rather than a full-blown impossible crime novel.

Jehudi Ashmun is a mulatto from Liberia and stands at the center of a group, in the village, who are interested in the occult and a technique, which had been lost in the mists of time, called New Force. Ashmun made an ordinary card-table talk and a loudspeaker was disregarded as a possible answer, because you can't hide a loudspeaker in "one of these slim-jim folding affairs" with "a top hardly thicker than plywood" – especially in the 1940s. The ancient powers of New Force is demonstrated by fiddling on a violin and this killed several animals.

Ashum killed an aquarium of minnows, but electricity was eliminated as the invisible killer. After this demonstration, a warren of dead rabbits were found outside. None of the rabbits had a mark on their body or even as much as a minute trace of poison in their system.

On a side note, Nick Fuller, of The Grandest Game in the World, pointed out in his review that similar figures appear in Carter Dickson's The Reader is Warned (1939) and Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940). Interestingly, the character in The Reader is Warned claims to possess a power, called Teleforce, which can be used to kill people from a distance without leaving a mark on their body. Something very similar to Ashum's New Force.

So with stolen treasures, a murder epidemic and super-normal forces abound you need a logical, cool-headed detective to tackle these problems and Sir Clinton is more than up for the task. Sir Clinton pleasantly reviews all of the events and weighs the evidence against all of the possibilities, but doesn't neglect his duties to play the role of Great Detective and teases his friend with his knowledge of the truth. However, Wendover proved to be pretty useful Captain Hastings. He may not have grasped the solution, but his knowledge of local history and family relations helped frame the clutter of events, more specifically the murders, in a tight frame that will help readers who like a shot at beating the detective to the finish line.

Sadly, Connington inexplicably slipped in the final leg of the story when Jack-in-the-Box shifted from a tale of ratiocination into a thrilling shilling shocker with a sadistic murderer drugging and torturing a man, while trying to force another character to sign a piece of paper – a shift that happened from one chapter to the other. And it struck a decidedly false note. Despite this weird, pulpy revelation of the murderer, the plot was excellent and particularly the science behind the murders and borderline impossible events. I especially liked the explanation for the murder of the local drunk, who died of carbon-monoxide poisoning, which turned out to have an ingenious explanation that was tied to one of the bombing raids. Connington should have saved that method for another book instead of burying it in a series of murders.

Anyway, these science-based murders demonstrate that Connington was unquestionable a member of the Humdrum School of Detection.

So, on a whole, Jack-in-the-Box was an excellent mystery novel with a fascinating series of crimes, a well-drawn background and solid detective work, but the revelation of the murderer struck a false note in the story. It's a smudge on the plot, but not one that should deter you from enjoying a mostly well-written, cleverly plotted detective novel.

Quick on the Draw

"I'm sure you have lots of stories about the Old West."

- Mary Best (Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," collected in Nothing is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2014)

Edward D. Hoch's The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997) is the only collection of short stories about his gunslinger character, Ben Snow, who's always "a long way from home," as he travels from town to town, but everywhere he goes he's followed by the ghost of the Wild West's most legendary gunfighter, Billy the Kid – to whom he bears a resemblance.

Snow is lightening quick on the draw and hailed from the State of New Mexico, where Billy the Kid was reportedly shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett, which convinced enough people that the outlaw had survived and adopted the name Ben Snow. This makes him a magnet for all kinds of problems. Everywhere he goes in the Old West, there are people who either want to take a shot at "the ghost of Billy Kid" or "hire the fasted gun in New Mexico." So the series places the traditional detective story within the framework of a Western and it worked like a charm.

I've to note here that I'm not very knowledgeable, or well-read, where Westerns are concerned, but, going by these fairly modern incarnations of that genre, I can understand why horse-and-cowboy tales were once as greedily consumed as the other popular forms of genre-fiction – such as our beloved detective story and the science-fiction genre.

According to the introduction, this collection of the first fourteen stories in the Ben Snow series "is really two books in one."

The first seven stories appeared between 1961 and 1965 in the British and American publications of The Saint Mystery Magazine, which are supposed to be read with "a bit of tolerance for a young writer," but these earlier stories are as good as the later ones. After 1965, Snow rode off into the sunset and would not be seen for another twenty years when Hoch resurrected the series for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It would be a home for the wandering gunslinger until his literary father passed away in 2008.

So, now we got that out of the way, let's take a look at the short stories that makes up this splendid collection of historical mysteries, which all take place during the late 1800s and early 1900s!

"Frontier Street" was the secondly published story in the series, originally appearing in the May 1961 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine (hereafter, SMM), but was intended by Hoch to be the series-opener – which is a mistake that has been corrected in this volume. Ben Snow has been hanging around the titular street for the pass two months, mostly enjoying complete obscurity, but then "the power on Frontier Street," Len Antioch, summons him to the Golden Swan. The gambling boss has gotten wise of the rumors surrounding Snow's identity and wants to hire his gun to get rid of the pesky deputy, Reilly, but his refusal places him a tight, dangerous spot. A spot that's tightened, like a noose, when the gambling boss is clubbed to death with a gun butt on the same day as the hit on the deputy was issued.

This is a pretty good story that only serves as an excellent introduction to the character of Ben Snow, but also has a very decent plot that plays on the least-likely-suspect gambit and how this character is brought to heel is exactly what you'd expect from a Western. Snow challenges the murderer to a showdown in the street with only a single bullet left in the cylinder of his six-shooter, which he spins to make it as dangerous as humanly possible. So he has no clue which chamber holds that all important bullet. It's like Russian Roulette for people who are bored with playing Russian Roulette! A solid opening story of this fine collection of stories.

"The Valley of Arrows" was the first story to be published in the series, printed on the pages of the May 1961 publication of SMM, but had originally been written as the second one and the plot might explain why they were, initially, published out-of-order. It has a relatively simple, but memorable, premise reminiscent of Robert van Gulik's "The Night of the Tiger" from The Tiger and the Monkey (1965). So it was probably picked by the magazine editors as the series-opener, because it would leave a stronger impression on their readers.

The story begins with the arrival of Snow at Fort Arrowhead, "a city in the making" or "a last outpost against the red man," where he came with a serious warning. Snow had come across hoof-prints in the valley, "showing that someone from the fort had met with two Navajos," which obviously was not a place where a peace meeting or truce talk had taken place – suggesting the potential presence of a traitor within the walls of the fort. After his arrival, the body of the legendary commending officer of the fort, Colonel Noakes, is found with "a Navajo arrow protruding from the left side of his neck." However, this is not even the beginning of their problems.

Snow is part of a two-men truce mission, conducted under a white flag, to offer the Colonel's body to the chieftain, Running Bear, in exchange for the safety of the people at the fort. Only problem is that the traitor has promised "the lives of one hundred men," which ends the truce talks in an exciting horse-race back to the fort that's followed by a full-scale siege of the place. So this is more of a Western than a detective, but a very good and memorable one.

"Ghost Town" was originally published in the September 1961 issue of SMM and brings Snow to an abandoned, reputedly haunted, town in a valley, called Raindeer, where he finds an ill-assorted group of people. There's the apparent leader of the group, a priest, whose obviously wearing a gun under his black suit and has two very mismatched companions: an Indian dressed as a cowboy, but with a knife, instead of a gun, on his belt and a foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing old man with a beard. Finally, there's a woman who fired a bullet at Snow and tied him up for the night.

Unfortunately, for the group, the place is living up to its reputation and one of them is gruesomely murdered. The old bearded man is found "pinned to the wall like some giant butterfly" with a harpoon and the floor surrounding the body is soaking wet. As if some "creature from the sea" had struck down a man in "the middle of the desert." A story with a very enthralling, well executed premise, with a mounting body-count that turned the ghost town into a small graveyard, but Hoch did not neglect to drop a clue, or two, that hinted at the truth. Such as how the murderer was able to strike in dark places or the water-drenched floor. I liked it.

"The Flying Man" appeared in the December 1961 issue of SMM and the premise of the story showcased Hoch's sorely missed talent for setting the stage.

Snow has been spending time among the three-hundred odd citizens of Twisted River, "a dried-up hole," which is one day visited by a man in a wagon, Doc Robin, who calls himself The Flying Man. Doc Robin has brought an amazing invention from the East Coast of the United States: a contraption with a giant set of wings that is used in big cities, like New York, to glide off buildings. He has even brought newspaper articles with him to proof his claim and promises a demonstration before taking one-hundred dollar orders from the town folks with a ten buck down payment. But before the big demonstration, Doc Robin approaches Snow with an offer to become his bodyguard and ensure him a safe departure from the town (with the money). Snow refuses the offer.

On the following morning, the town had gathered to watch Doc Robin glide down from the hill on his mechanical wings, but what they saw instead was a man crashing down to earth. And the cause of the crash was a well-aimed bullet. This fact makes the murder a borderline impossible crime, because the shot could've only been made with a rifle and nobody in the crowd was seen carrying a large, cumbersome rifle – or even a simple sidearm. Hoch is daringly fair in dangling the tell-tale clue in front of the reader and the fact that the victim had approached another gunman with his offer provided the plot with a solid motive. Plot-wise, this is easily the best Snow story from the 1960s period of the series.

Assassination of President McKinley

"The Man in the Alley" was printed in the April 1962 issue of SMM and, story-wise, is arguably the most interesting entry in the series for two reasons. One of them is that the plot actually deals with the rumors that Snow is Billy the Kid and the other places him on the scene of the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. I can't say much else about the story except that the plot is a great example, or recipe, of how fiction can be mixed with actual historical events without having to take liberties with the latter (see the final lines of the story).

"The Ripper of Storyville" was originally published in the September 1962 issue of SMM and, according to the introduction, Cornell Woolrich approached Hoch at a Mystery Writers of America cocktail party to tell him personally how much "he admired the story" - which, at the time, was considerable praise for a then still young writer. And the compliment was more than deserved.

Snow is hired by a dying Texan rancher and oil millionaire, Archer Kinsman, whose daughter, Bess, ran away from home and ended up in the red-light district of New Orleans, but Kinsman wants to make amends before his time is up. Snow accepts the assignment and travels to the Storyville, New Orleans, where the preparations of Mardi Gras are in full swing. There is, however, a slight problem complicating his task: a number of woman have been brutally murdered and the general belief is that Jack the Ripper has come to the Americas. Initially, I assumed to plot would prove to be very simple and transparent ("you don't know what I've become"), but Snow uncovers a hidden connection between all of the victims.

A connection that had to be obliterated in order to obscure the all-revealing motive behind a previous crime that fueled the string of murders. This is one of those excellent serial-killer detective stories in the same vein as Ellery Queen's A Cat of Many Tails (1949).

"Snow in Yucatan" was printed in the January 1965 edition of SMM and marked the end of the first period in the series, which went into dormancy until the mid-1980s.

Once again, Snow was offered a big chunk of cash, two-thousand dollars, by three ex-soldiers to murder a man, Wade Chancer, who's a thousand miles away in Mexico. Chancer had served with the ex-soldiers under Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, but had deserted his brothers-in-arms and good men had died as a consequence. So he has to pay with his own life. Only problem is that he has fled to Mexico and made himself a general with the ambition to take over the country. Or a large swath of it. Chancer wants to use to the native population for this purpose and appears to have a magical hold over the Indians, which becomes a problem when the self-appointed general dies under inexplicable circumstances.

The story has a ton of local color and great story-telling, but the plot is rather thin and easily seen through. You can easily guess the source of Chancer's power over the natives and figured out how he died based on the photographic clue, which immediately brought Rufus King's A Variety of Weapons (1943) to mind. So not a bad story, but not particular great either.

"The Vanished Steamboat" marked the resurrection of Ben Snow and made his debut on the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) of May 1984, which also happens to be the first full-blown impossible crime story of the series.

Snow has been hanging around Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he has made some good friends, such as a riverboat gambler, Eddie Abilene, but Snow has to play detective again when a steamboat, known as River Ridge, vanishes impossibly from a stretch of the Mississippi River – as if it had suddenly ceased to exist between two ports. One of the people aboard had been Abilene. So the old gunslinger accepts an offer from the steamboat's owner to find out what happened to the River Ridge and does some old-fashioned detective work to reach the only correct conclusion, which even included a false solution based on Conan Doyle's famous 1898 short story, "The Lost Special."

Hoch came up with a perfectly acceptable and believable explanation for the impossibility of a vanishing steamboat, but one that most readers will probably instinctively guess and the clues only serve as a confirmation of your gut-feeling. A limited range of possibilities will always be a weak spot of impossible crime stories that attempt to make streets, houses, planes, trains or boats vanish into thin air.

"Brothers on the Beach" was published in the August 1984 issue of EQMM and is another story that mixes actual history with fiction, but not quite as successful as "The Man in the Alley."

Roderick and Rudolph Claymore pay Snow to protect a stretch of private beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Orville and Wilbur Wright are planning to make test flight with their heavier-than-air flying machine, which is going to attract a large crowd and the Claymore brothers want Snow to shoo away any trespassers from their private beach – which has something to with an archaeological discovery on the beach. A discovery pertaining to the site of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony of Roanoke.

So there's enough material here for a good story, but the experiment of the Wright brothers only served as background decoration and the plot regarding the murder on the beach, and the archaeological angle, was pretty basic at best. A decent enough story, but nothing more than that.

"The 500 Hours of Dr. Wisdom" was published in the December 1984 issue of EQMM and takes place early on in Snow's career as a cowboy-detective, which can also be labeled as a borderline impossible crime story.

Snow arrives at a far-flung, sleepy town, called Waycliff Station, where the only excitement appears to be the regular visitations of Dr. Wisdom's medicine show. The patent medicine was a staple of the Old West, but this time the charlatan in the covered wagon had something genuinely interesting to sell: an extra hour in the day to spend as they wished. Dr. Wisdom guarantees that time will stand still outside of the town and resume again when the hour has drawn to a close, which he demonstrates on the following Sunday. The only train that day arrives at the station at noon, which is on schedule, but according to all of the clocks in town the train was an hour late. The town was given an "whole extra hour" that day!

I loved this portion of the plot and was placed in the father into the past on account of a historical event, in 1883, that made this time-trick possible, but was less enthusiastic about the murder of Dr. Wisdom and the sub-plot of a missing wad of cash – which cribbed a horrendously bad trick from Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933). However, the resolution to the case was well done and Snow is pretty much run out of town after fatally shooting the murderer.

By the way, Snow shoots and kills nearly two dozen people over the course of only fourteen short stories.

"The Trail of the Bells" was published in EQMM of April 1985 and begins with Snow's discovery of a dying man by a water hole. The name of the man is Tommy Gonzales, a half-Mexican gunman, who had been the right-hand man of a masked outlaw, named "Poder," notorious for robbing banks and stagecoaches all over the New Mexico territory – culminating with the murder of a banker in Tosco. Snow happened to be in town on that day and was hired as a one-man posse to bring the two desperadoes to justice, but the last words spoken by the dying gunman is to "listen to the bells" if wants to find Poder. This dying clue leads Snow to a mission station, in San Bernardino, where he has to figure out which of the priests is moonlighting as a bank robber. What really makes this story memorable is the solution and the deductive reasoning that brought Snow to that conclusion, which evoked the works of both Ellery Queen and Victor Hugo.

"The Phantom Stallion" was originally published in the October 1985 issue of EQMM and is a locked room mystery in spirit of John Dickson Carr, which naturally makes this a personal favorite of mine, because you know me. :)

Snow is hired as a temporarily ranch hand at the Six-Bar Ranch of Horace Grant in West Texas. Grant is a broken man in his seventies and confined to bed, following a fall from a horse, but his sons have made life as pleasant as possible for their father. The bedroom is cooled with an expensive, and early, model of an air-cooling device (i.e. air conditioning) and from his window he can see the construction of a new family home some distance away. However, the man still has intense nightmares about being trampled by his now dead stallion.

Otherwise, everything seems pretty normal at the ranch and they even have a healthy, long-standing rivalry with the owner of the neighboring Running-W Ranch, Nathan Lee ("it's like the Civil War all over again"). However, Snow quickly comes to the conclusion that not everything is what it seems at the ranch and the illusion is shattered when Grant is brutally beaten to death in his bedroom, which had been securely latched from the inside – both the door and the window. The earth beneath the window showed no traces of footprints, but there was "a bloody horseshoe" imprinted on the skull of the victim!

Hoch cobbled together an excellent impossible crime story that made good use of the situation at the ranch, the bed-ridden victim and the air-cooling device, but also supplied a logical reason as to why the bedroom had to be locked from the inside. The locked room here actually function as a clue to the identity of the murderer. Same goes for the murder weapon. So, yes, easily one of my favorites from this collection.

"The Sacramento Waxworks" was published in the March 1986 issue of EQMM and finds Snow in the capacity of adviser to the new owner of a waxwork theater, Seymour Dodge, who plans to add a section of famous, and infamous, Western sheriffs and outlaws – on which he needs advice from an actual cowboy. There is, of course, a darker plot behind all of this, which could very well have placed a noose around Snow's neck. And that's about all that can be said about this fun, but minor, story in the series.

Finally, we come to the last story in this collection, "The Only Tree in Tasco," which originally appeared in the October 1986 issue of EQMM and has Snow arriving in town when they town folks were preparing "the only tree in Tasco for hanging."

Pedro Mapimi, a Mexican, had been tried and convicted of murdering a local banker by nearly cutting his heart out of his chest, but trial had been a quick one and the presiding judge was the victim's son – who had ignored the alibi offered by the accused and backed up by a witness. So the wandering gunslinger takes upon himself to proof that the man had been innocently convicted and tries to delay the hanging by dynamiting the tree, which only slows down the sheriff's determination to have the hanging down before too long. So the only option left is to find the real murderer and the peculiarity of the wound proves to be a dead giveaway.

This is where the story began to bother me: long, long ago, I've seen this exact same story play-out in a TV-series or movie, but can't for the life of me remember the title of the series or movie in question. However, I'm absolutely sure I have seen that wound-trick, in combination with a small town setting, before on the small screen.

Anyway, The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales is easily one of my favorite short story collections by Hoch. The quality of all fourteen stories is not only consistent throughout, but of a high caliber without a single dud among them. Sure, there are one or two minor stories, but they hardly qualify as bad or even mediocre. So I really hope we can look forward, in the hopefully not so distant future, to a second collection of Ben Snow stories, because it has been twenty years since this one was published. I believe there are more than enough stories left to fill out one or two additional volumes.

Well, this review has gone on long enough, like all my short story reviews, but I can tell you that the next one will probably be of a short novel, or novella, in the same Western framework as these stories. It might even have an impossible crime sub-plot, but we'll both see how that pans out in my next post. So stay tuned!