Set in Stone: "The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha" (1999) by MORI Hiroshi

Hiroshi Mori is a Japanese engineer who reportedly started writing detective stories when he was an associate professor, at Nagoya University, to impress his mystery-reading daughter and his debut, Subete ga F ni naru (The Perfect Insider, 1996), netted the first-ever Mephisto Prize – a Sherlock Holmes statuette awarded to unpublished genre fiction. Some of its recipients formed a publishing group in 2012, The BBB: The Breakthrough Bandwagon, to make their work available in English.

One of the members of The BBB is the subject of today's review, Hiroshi Mori, who insists his name to be written "MORI Hiroshi," family name first and in uppercase, regardless of the language. So I will refer to him as MORI from here on out.

The BBB translated and published seven of MORI's detective stories, collected in the appropriately titled Seven Stories (2016), which comprises of five standalone stories and two from the "Professor Saikawa and his student Moe" (S&M) series. But you can also buy the stories separately. So I decided to sample MORI's writing with a short story combining the armchair detective story with an architectural conundrum from 7th century India!

"Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) is one of two S&M stories currently available in English and MORI obviously wrote it as an homage to the Black Widower series by Isaac Asimov.

The premise of "The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha" is the monthly gathering of young detectives belonging to the First Investigation Division, of the Aichi Prefectural Police, at Moe Nishinosomo's residence to discuss their cases – which came to be called "The Banquet of the Black Windows." A reference to both the "huge black windows" in the living room of the apartment and Asimov's The Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984). However, the monthly gatherings were becoming repetitive and Professor Saikawa is asked to come to the next meeting with an interesting topic. What he brings is "a case that is not a usual case," which is "a mystery that is not a usual mystery."

Forty years ago, Moe's father, Dr. Nishinosomo, took part in large-scale surveys of Indian temples and focused his attention on "the so-called rock-cut cave temples." A type of monolithic architectural structures cut, carved and chiseled from "a single slab of rock" that left "completely independent, free-standing structures." A peculiarity of these ancient, rock-cut structures is that they were carved out of the rock top to bottom. During one of these surveys, Dr. Nishinosomo stumbled across an architectural anomaly.

Usually, these rock-cut structures are found in the deep mountains or sheer seashore cliffs, but a group of five stone pagodas, called Five Ratha, were found relatively close to a town and they were all made from a "giant, single rock" – all were connected to the same rock on the ground. So the location of these stone pagodas alone is enough to raise some eyebrows, but what's truly inexplicable is that the carpenters carved the finials, which is supposed to adorn the top of pagodas, some two meters away. As if they were "out of the ground like a plant."

These rock-cut structures were made top-to-bottom, meaning that the carpenters should have started with the finials, but why they were carved is a complete mystery.

A neat little historical puzzle with a simple, logical and, admittedly, a pretty mundane explanation, but the strength of the story is not in the answer. It's in the procession of incorrect answers, or false solutions, preceding it. Everyone in attendance gets to take a crack at the problem and their proposed solutions vary from the logical, or practical, to being drenched in the romanticized intrigues of history – which should delight fans of Anthony Berkeley and Ellery Queen alike.

So, all in all, I found "The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha" to be a fascinating blend of the armchair detective story and historical mystery, but it's a fairly minor detective story that will not satisfy everyone. Personally speaking, I wish there were more armchair detective stories pondering over these obscure, mysterious passages from history. You can definitely expect MORI to return to this blog sometime in the future.

The Worm Tunnel (1999) by Michael Dahl

I began this month with a review of the fourth title in Michael Dahl's five-book Finnegan "Finn" Zwake series, The Viking Claw (2001), which are archaeological mystery novels, written for a teenage audience, best described as a cross between Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest – originally published between 1999 and 2002. More importantly, the series is littered with imaginatively-posed impossible crime scenarios and locked room mysteries!

The Viking Claw treated the reader to a disappearance from an inescapable hammock-camp clamped to the side of a cliff and a no-footprints-in-the-snow puzzle from the past. The second title in the series, The Worm Tunnel (1999), offers a murder inside a sealed, high-tech tent at an archaeological dig in Mexico.

Finnegan Zwake is the now 13-year-old son of two archaeologists, Leon and Anna Zwake, who disappeared while searching for a lost city "tucked somewhere among the frozen volcano-cones of Iceland" (see The Viking Claw) and have been legally declared dead, but Finn knows they're still alive. Finn argues that everyone in his family is "an expert on dead things" and they known "if something is dead or not." One of many dark clouds looming over this teenage detective novel.

So now Finn travels the globe with his famous mystery writing uncle, Stoppard Sterling, in the hope of finding a clue to the whereabouts of his missing parents, which brings them to some exotic, colorful locations and archaeological hotbeds, but the Ackerberg Institute is always ominously lurking in the background – a shadowy organization who used to employ his parents. Apparently, Finn and Uncle Stop had an encounter with agents of the institute in The Horizontal Man (1999) and they dress in "black suits, black ties and black leather gloves" with sunglasses. I like to believe the Ackerberg Institute is a subsidiary of the Black Organization from Case Closed.

The Worm Tunnel brings Finn and his uncle to a fictitious Central American country, Agualar, where, years previously, a 6-year-old Finn had accompanied his parents on an Ackerberg sponsored dig.

A dig that uncovered a historical treasure trove of gold Mayan artifacts, but Hurricane Midge forced them to abandon the campsite and return to the United States. There was, however, "a mysterious thief at the dig site" and, in order to protect a precious artifact, called crocodile de ouro, he "buried the golden crocodile under his tent." Something they learned from his diary and it's still buried there!

Finn wants to dig it up and use it to finance a hunting expedition for his parents, but the place is dangerous to travel to and they are accompanied by their cop buddy, Jared Lemon-Olsen. And one of those dark clouds briefly drifts over the story. Jared points out that forty tourists are killed there every year and tells Finn he intends to bring him back home with his head still attached to his shoulders and all of his fingers in place. So, what he was saying here, is that Finn better listens to him unless he wants to end up in an abandoned warehouse being whittled down by a cartel member with a pocket knife. I never expected to read a line like that in a juvenile detective novel.

When Finn, Uncle Stop and Jared arrive at the old campsite, they find that the former dig site is now occupied by a group of dinosaur hunters and paleontologists, under the guidance of the hated Professor Tuscan Freaze, who found fossilized eggs of a new species of dinosaur – believing the place used to be nesting ground in prehistoric times. Professor Freaze is accompanied by his son, Dr. Tulsa Freaze, who took along his wife, Fleur. There are three other members, Dr. Himmelfarben, José Mirón and Gabriel Paz, who unexpectedly joined by a well-known Chinese paleontologist, Nixon Wu. Wu was one of the scientists who dug up one of "the largest collection of prehistoric eggs ever discovered" in Mongolia and, when he heard that the famous professor was hunting dinosaur eggs in Agualar, he decided to offer his services.

Unrelated Filler Cover

On a side note, Wu was spotted in the opening chapter by Finn, but Jared refused to stop the car and, when they looked out of the back window, Wu had vanished from the empty desert background! As if he had vanished into thin air in a matter of seconds. An impossible disappearance mystery solved in chapter 5.

The Worm Tunnel offers a genuine, double-layered and beautifully executed locked room mystery in chapter 8 when Professor Freaze's body is found sprawled on a cot in the middle of his tent. A "gleaming knife" protruded from his back! The problem is that the high-tech tent was completely closed up and sealed from the inside with zippers and turn-locks, which is why they had to cut their way into the tent. The second impossibility concerns the murder weapon, "a golden knife with feathers carved into the handle," but Finn and his uncle were looking at the knife inside a locked trailer when the murder was discovered. And when they returned to the trailer, the knife had vanished! So how could the knife have been in two places at the same time?

They closely examine the tent, discuss various methods how the zippers, or turn-locks, could have been manipulated and Stoppard discusses one of his own locked room plots, which share some similarities with the sealed tent murder, but the clues that lead them to the solution are a balloon and the victim's dirty socks – unveiling a completely new and satisfying locked room-trick. I was tempted to draw a comparison with the equally original solution to the locked tent murder from Takemaru Abiko's short story "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" (1990), recently translated as "A Smart Dummy in the Tent," but the nature of the trick places The Worm Tunnel right next to Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Arthur Porges' "The Unguarded Path" (collected in These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, 2018). A locked room stories about invisible doorways that only murderers can reach through to get to their victim's when they're all alone in a sealed room. So, needless to say, I rate this locked room-trick quite high.

Unfortunately, this double-layered impossibility is what gave the otherwise skin-and-bones plot some much needed bulk, because the murderer was not difficult to spot and the motive felt tacked on. The motive was briefly foreshadowed, but to actually use it as a motive detracted a little from the fascinating background of fossil hunters. So, very much like The Viking Claw, this turned out to be another mixed bag of tricks, but with the good definitely outweighing the bad.

That being said, taken purely as a locked room mystery, The Worm Tunnels ranks as one of the better, more original, juvenile detective novels and strangely fitting that the book was published at the tail-end of 1999. The 1990s were not particularly well-known for its high-quality impossible crime fiction, not until recently anyway, but that decade is book-ended by Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990) and Dahl's The Worm Tunnel – two teenage crime novels with the best locked room-tricks of the decade. You can now certainly look forward to reviews of The Horizontal Man, The Ruby Raven (1999) and The Coral Coffin (2002). Not necessarily in that order.

The Viking Claw (2001) by Michael Dahl

Michael Dahl is the author of more than a hundred books for children and young adults, ranging from fantasy and horror to short stories and non-fiction, but Dahl admitted on his website to have a special fondness for detective stories – naming Agatha Christie as his favorite mystery novelist. An affinity that found expression in the archaeological Finnegan "Finn" Zwake series, published between 1999 and 2002, of which two were shortlisted for the Anthony and Edgar mystery awards. The series-premise alone sounds promising enough, but then I discovered that Dahl penned at least four impossible crime novels!

The Wheels That Vanished (2000) is written for younger, probably preteen, readers than the Finnegan Zwake series, but the plot concerns a bicycle thief who vanishes from a closely watched bridge. The other three locked room novels come from the Zwake series.

The Horizontal Man (1999) reportedly has Finn discovering a dead man in a locked storage room, belonging to his long-missing parents, while in The Worm Tunnel (1999) he comes across a murder inside a sealed tent during an archaeological dig for dinosaur eggs, but the one that attracted my attention is The Viking Claw (2001) – in which people miraculous vanish from a legendary, snow-covered mountain in Iceland. And two of the people who disappeared from Thorsfell (Thor's Mountain) were Finn's parents!

Eight years ago, Leon and Anna Zwake, archaeologists and researchers, traveled to Iceland to hunt for a lost Viking colony, the Haunted City of Tquuli, hidden somewhere in the mountains. According to the legends, Ogar Blueaxe once forced his men to carry a ship up to side of Thorsfell, to hide a treasure of Italian gold in the lost city, but, from the thirteen men who went up, only two returned. This earned him the name of Redaxe and his fabled treasure has remained hidden for over ten centuries! On the third day of the Zwake expedition, the local trackers found the camp abandoned and the only trace was a pair of footprints in the snow, "believed to have belonged to the Zwakes," which began at their tents and ended near "the base of a flat, smooth cliff wall." It looked "as if the Zwakes had been lifted up into the air."

Finding an answer to what happened to the Zwake expedition is the red thread running through this adventure-filled series of globetrotting mystery novels with the shadowy employers of Finn's parents, Ackerberg Institute, lurking ominously in the background. The 14-year-old Finn is accompanied by his uncle, Stoppard Sterling, who's a celebrated, award-winning mystery writer always looking for new plot ideas. So this series is pretty much what you would get if you spliced Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed with the 1990s incarnation of Jonny Quest sprinkled with American and Minnesota pop-culture references. If you ever wanted to read an impossible crime story that references Jesse Ventura's tenure as governor of Minnesota, Dahl has got you covered.

The Viking Claw is the fourth entry in the series and Finn is finally going to Iceland to visit the spot where his now legally dead parents disappeared, because he believes they're still alive and is determined to find out what happened on that snowy slope all those years ago – getting there proves to be arduous journey fraught with danger and sabotage. Uncle Stop has hired two Finnish brothers, Edo and Teema Jokkipunki, as trackers, but Finn and his uncle are not their only clients on that tripe. A second party headed by the Ice Cube King, Ruben Roobick, whose Roobick Cubes sponsors mountain-climbing expeditions all over the world to look for "new brands of ice for their customers." Roobick brought along his wife, Kate, and her personal assistant, Sarah O'Hara. The last member of the expedition is 15-year-old cousin of the trackers, Hrór, who loves weird haiku's and has his own reasons to join the expedition. And this sub-plot actually made good use of a cultural aspect of the setting.

A composite sketch of the suspect

So, as they set out to the spot where the Zwake expedition vanished, they're beset by trouble and setbacks delaying or slowing down their climb. The tires of their minibus are slashed and the motor is wrecked, but the climb itself is not entirely free of danger with its cavernous gas bubbles with thin roofs, "waiting to collapse," and dangerous steam vents in the side of a hundred fifty feet high cliff wall. You can describe the first half of The Viking Claw as a mountaineering adventure with one incident giving Finn an idea about the interrupted footprints in the snow that his parents left behind.

Around the halfway mark of the story, Dahl treats the reader to one of the most imaginative and originally posed impossible disappearances that I have ever come across in a detective story!

The expedition arrives at the one-hundred fifty feet high cliff wall, The Goblin Wall, but hot, white clouds from a steam vent and they can't go any further until they can see clearly again – which forced them to setup a hammock-camp (portable ledges) against the side of the icy cliff. A campsite resembling "a bunch of window washers suspended on the side of a wide, windowless skyscraper." And when they wake up, they discover that one of them had disappeared! The freshly fallen snow lay "undisturbed and printless" a hundred feet below them. What a premise!

Unfortunately, the plot becomes a little muddled towards the end with too many plot-threads that needed tidying up and not enough room to properly tying them together. One of the problems is that the story leaves a lot unanswered when it comes to the disappearance of Zwake's parents.

I've delved a little into this series and apparently Dahl abandoned the series after The Coral Coffin (2002), which left the ongoing storyline unfinished and rendered the coded messages Finn found here pretty much useless. A second problem is the crossing of two plot-threads that resulted in murder, committed very late in the story, but it's the least imaginative or thought out part of the plot. Somewhat of cop-out in one regard. Luckily, the impossible disappearances were handled much better and the no-footprints-in-the-snow situation has an interesting solution. A locked room-trick you don't expect to find in an outdoors setting, but it worked here and was neatly tied to the historical backstory of the setting – leading to an important and shocking discovery. The disappearance from the cliff side of the Goblin Wall is, as to be expected, as novel as its premise and both Finn and his uncle come up with a false-solutions involving portable hang glider and equipment bags!

So, when it comes to the plot, The Viking Claw is a mixed bag of tricks, but there was more good than bad and the story, while muddled towards the end, was well told. More importantly, a good example of the innovation and originality, largely unrecognized, that some of these juvenile detective novels, past and present, brought to the locked room mystery and impossible crime story. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for The Horizontal Man and The Worm Tunnel.

Diving Death (1962) by Charles Forsyte

Last month, I reviewed Diplomatic Death (1962) by “Charles Forsyte," a shared penname of a husband-and-wife writing tandem, Gordon and Vicky Philo, who, regrettably, wrote only three, classically-styled detective novels and a standalone chase thriller that have a penchant for impossible crimes – published between 1961 and 1968. A surprisingly solid, ambitious and puzzle-oriented debut for the period that made me even more curious about their second detective novel.

Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), alternatively published as Dive into Danger, is the second appearance of Detective-Inspector Richard Left, of Special Branch, who had been "overworked to the point of exhaustion." So he was glad to finally go on a long-anticipated, much deserved holiday in the south of France.

Port-st-Pierre is a fishing village and a holiday resort where Left plans to do little more than relax, eat, swim and trying to avoid his fellow countrymen, but he's recognized by an old acquaintance, Sir Paul Pallett. A world-famous archaeologist who looks like "a more animated Churchill" and speaks (mostly) in telegraphic sentences ("Probably hopes to find a drowned city. Atlantis. Underwater archaeology. All my eye. Good excuse for undergraduates who want a holiday in the Mediterranean"). Sir Paul is not only a celebrated scholar, but a decidedly poor one as well and has to indulge the fancies of a rich, dilettante archaeologist with "intellectual pretensions," Dermot Wilson – who has assembled a respectable crew for an archaeological expedition at sea. An expedition scavenging the sea bottom around the recently uncovered, spongy remains of an ancient Greek shipwreck where Roman coins were found on a previous diving excursion.

Sir Paul was persuaded (read "cornered") to have a look at the site and arranged to have him picked the next day with a motor-boat, but nobody expected Left would be invited by the eminent scholar to come along with him. And unwittingly acts as the fuel powering the engine of the plot!

When they arrive on the spot, the crew aboard the anchored Knossos were getting ready to dive. So the three people on the motor-boat, Sir Paul, Left and the boatman, had to stay on there and watch the divers plunge below the surface to the wreck. An area marked by a couple of buoys moored about a hundred yards apart. The minutes leisurely ticked away when the body of Wilson comes bubbling to the surface with a steel harpoon projecting from a bloody patch on his chest! Left realizes that it will be hours before the French police can get to them, "evidence may have vanished by then," which prompts him to take charge of the investigation until the proper authorities arrive.

An investigation forcing Left "to follow the route that had just been taken by a corpse" and dive to "the muted two-colour world of the sea-bed" where he establishes the time of the murder and searches the bottom for clues – finding a used harpoon-gun, a weight belt and a small hole in the sea-bed. These diving scenes recall the underwater explorations from Vernon Loder's Death by the Gaff (1932) and Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942), which helped make the book standout as something different from your average detective novel. And, here, it's an integral part of the puzzle-plot. But not the whole puzzle.

Left also to untie a tightly-knotted mess of alibis, motives and opportunities of the crew-members. A crew comprising of an experienced, much respected archaeologist, Edward Syce, who made "some unexpected finds on his digs." A younger, inexperienced, but brilliant archaeologist, Sidney Lockhead. The victim's "current girlfriend," the Honourable Julia Ferrers, who's the daughter of an impoverished Irish peer. A student of Wilson, Mary Lawton, who does his secretarial work and mechanic/diving expert, Joe Marshall. Only problem is that everyone has an alibi! The divers alibi each other and everyone on the surface have an alibi as unshakable as a bloodhound! So, where's the impossibility, you may ask? Diving Death qualifies as an impossible crime novel, but it's one of those stories in which the impossibility becomes apparent after the solution.

I compared Diplomatic Death with the detective novels and short stories by Clayton Rawson (stage illusion-inspired crime) and Peter Godfrey (setting), but Diving Death is more in line with Anthony Berkeley and Christopher Bush.

The multiple alibis and the importance of timing is what reminded me of Bush, but Forsyte's brilliant use of false-solutions and grand play on the fallible detective trope was pure Berkeley! Forsyte provided the reader with three false-solutions of which two are tightly intertwined, giving different perspectives to the same story, while a third accounted for the possibility of an outside killer – lovely foreshadowed in the third chapter. Even better is how Left blundered to the solution. Or, to be more precise, how his blundering affected and hampered reaching the correct solution earlier. Left has to pay the devil for his "unforgivable police sin," but, by that time, you probably feel too bad for him to laugh. The physical altercations also give the story a slightly hardboiled edge.

Nevertheless, it was his mistakes and blunders, in combination with the false-solutions, setting and technically-detailed underwater murder, that turned an otherwise routine plot into a first-class detective tale that, like its predecessor, stands out. This all makes for a very satisfying, puzzle-driven detective novel with a superb play on the fallible detective trope that helped to lift the plot above its normal status. My only piece of nitpicking this time is that it occurred to nobody that the harpoon could have been used to stab, instead of having been shot, which is what I expected until the empty harpoon-gun was found. So my expectation were thoroughly subverted.

So, yes, Diving Death comes highly recommended and particular to mystery readers who love their false-solutions, fallible detectives or picking apart alibis and stands as solid argument why these two unjustly forgotten mystery writers deserve to be reprinted.

A note for the curious: locked room murders and impossible crimes under water are relatively rare, but there are two finely-crafted examples that deserve a mention. Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones," collected in The Locked Room Reader (1968), in which a hard-hat diver is murdered while exploring a recently sunken shipwreck. The 15th episode of the Detective Academy Q anime-series, which deals with the body of a diver found in a locked cabin of a sunken ship and the underwater setting allowed for a new variation on an age-old locked room-trick.

The Helm of Hades (2019) by Paul Halter

I've reviewed a sundry of short (locked room) stories over the past two years, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's ghostly "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but my last review of a short story collection was D.L. Champion's The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) – posted back in April of last year. So it was about time I tackled another compendium and John Pugmire's Locked Room International recently published something that fitted the bill.

The Helm of Hades (2019) is Paul Halter's second collection of short stories to appear in English, preceded by the appetizingly The Night of the Wolf (2006), which formally introduced non-French speaking readers to Halter's imaginative brand of detective fiction. This second volume comprises entirely of translated stories that were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine between 2007 and 2019. And celebrated French locked room anthologist, Roland Lacourbe, penned an introduction promising "the wildest impossibilities." Well, that enough to lure me into the back of your van!

"Le gong hanté" ("The Gong of Doom") is the fist of ten stories and takes place at "the meeting-place of a select circle of prosperous Londoners" devoted to "the discussion of puzzling mysteries," The Hades Club, where Dr. Alan Twist tells Superintendent Charles Cullen the story of "a senseless and inexplicable murder" – committed at the end Great War. Colonel Henry Strange has an argument with the prospective husband of his niece, Philip, inside his locked study. During their argument, the haunted gong in the study sounded without being struck and Colonel Strange sank to the floor with an arrow piercing his neck. However, the door of the study was locked on in the inside and the ground overlooking the open window was covered with virgin snow. So there was nowhere any mysterious archer could have hidden to fire the fatal arrow.

A solid and tantalizing premise reminiscent of the locked room situation from Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938), but the solution is a coincidence-laden farce and an absolute cheat! I suppose the farcical slant could, sort of, have worked has the ultimate fate of Philip not cast a bleak shadow over the story. However, I did like the false-solution that made use of the kandjar (a dagger) hanging on the wall. Otherwise, a very poor story that should not have opened this collection.

"L'échelle de Jacob" ("The Ladder of Jacob") is an excellently done short story about a man who fell to his death from a great height without any tall buildings or cliffs at the scene, but have already discussed the story in my review of the massive locked room anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017). The third story is "L'homme au visage d'argile" ("The Man with the Face of Clay"), but read it before and disliked the solution to the locked room shooting. One of my big no-noes.

The next story in line is "La vengeance de l'épouvantail" ("The Scarecrow's Revenge") and succeeded where "The Gong of Doom" failed so miserably.

Dr. Alan Twist is in France where Commissaire Pierre Legrand tells him about an abominable crime that took place in Gondeville, a small village not far from Cognac, which involved a dead, but vengeful, husband and a premonitory dream that came to pass only a few hours later – in "the form of an impossible crime." Janine is haunted by the memory of her late, unlamented husband and has a terrifying nightmare that he came back in the guise of their scarecrow. And killed her father with a pitchfork. This nightmare became a reality when her father is found the following morning lying on the muddy ground beneath the scarecrow with only one set of footprints going from the front door to the scarecrow.

A very well-done, properly motivated impossible crime story with a better and more original solution than the answer to the homicidal snowman from "L'abominable homme de neige" ("The Abominable Snowman," collected in The Night of the Wolf). A solution that both worked and was genuinely tragic without the grim bleakness.

"Les feux de l'Enfer" ("The Fires of Hell") is, plot-wise, one of the weakest story in the collection and revolves around a man who can see visions of the future, which he used to predict a series of "inexplicable fires" that even a police cordon was unable to prevent. However, the firebug is easily spotted and the method was more underwhelming than disappointing. You can find better treatments of the impossible fire-starter gimmick in John Russell Fearn's Flashpoint (1950) and Arthur Porges' "To Barbecue a White Elephant" and "Fire for Peace" (collected in These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, 2018).

Last year, I reviewed "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir") together with "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book") and three other, non-English detective stories in a post entitled "Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories" – which, like this review, turned out to be a mixed bag of tricks. On the one hand, "The Yellow Book" was a wonderfully crafted story with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from one of Halter's earlier novels. In comparison, "The Wolf of Fenrir" was only so-so.

"La balle de Nausicaa" ("Nausicaa's Ball") is the only non-impossible crime story to be found in this collection and seems to be modeled after such Agatha Christie stories as Evil Under the Sun (1941), Towards Zero (1944) and "Triangle at Rhodes" (collected in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937). Dr. Alan Twist is on a much deserve holiday in Corfu, Greece, where he hopes to have a break from all the inexplicable, seemingly unsolvable murders dogging his every step, but, on his first day, bumped into a holidaying Superintendent Cullen. Soon their attention is drawn to the cast and film crew staying at their hotel. And, in particular, the eternal triangle of the group.

Rachel Syms is a gorgeous actress who was the female-lead in a movie that was shot in the same location a year ago, but she fell in love with her young, unknown screen partner, Anthony Shamp, who, according to the critics, played "a marvelous Ulysses" – returning a year later to shoot the sequel. She brought along her husband, George Portman. A perfect recipe for murder! This comes to pass when George's falls to his death from "a series of steps cut into the rock which zig-zag down a hundred feet to the beach," but the lonely, isolated location of the lagoon severely reduces the number of suspects. The solution hinges on pulling apart a carefully-planned alibi, but there's one technical detail that raised an eyebrow. Nonetheless, this story still stands as a nicely done homage to the Queen of Crime from a modern craftsman of the locked room puzzle.

"La tombe de David Jones" ("The Robber's Grave") is a good example of Halter's fertile imagination when it comes to dreaming up new seemingly impossible situations and reviewed it last year, under the title  "Devil's Soil: Halter, Hoch and Hoodwinks," together with a story from the King of the Short Story, Edward D. Hoch.

Lastly, the collection closes out with the most recently translated short story, "Le casque d'Hadès" ("The Helm of Hades"), published in the March/April, 2019, issue of EQMM. This time the detective is the Edwardian-era aesthete and amateur reasoner, Owen Burns, who acts as an armchair oracle as he listens to the tale of a murder that appears "to have been inspired by the prince of darkness himself." A well-known archaeologist, Conrad Berry, who threw a party to celebrate his greatest discovery, the Helm of Hades. A legendary bronze helmet that makes everyone who wears it "as transparent as the air that you breathe." During the party, Berry is savagely attached inside his archaeological room while people were sitting outside.

According to their evidence, they heard the footsteps of "an invisible creature" walking across the creaky floorboards of the room, open and close the door of the archaeological room, carry out a brutal and noisy assault – after which it retraced its footsteps and knocked over a Chinese vase on the way. As if an invisible entity had entered and left the scene of the crime! A very original and grandly staged premise for a locked room mystery, but the solution, while acceptable enough, has a weakness I've come to associate with Jonathan Creek (e.g. Angel Hair, 2003). A type of involved solution that can only work when it's really, really involved.

I used to believe the short story format brought out the best in Halter, because it allowed him to play on his major strengths (plot and imagination), while downplaying his weaknesses, but have only read a selection of (mostly) his better short stories since his first collection was published in 2006. This colored my perception over the years. The Helm of Hades shows he was very hit-and-miss and needs the length of a novel to give his plethora of ideas some breathing space. Halter still produced a some classic short locked room stories, but, in general, I think he's better when writing novel-length impossible crime stories. Just read L'homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) or Le montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019).

So, yeah, The Helm of Hades is, as so often is the case with these collection, a mixed bag of tricks, but the better specimens, such as "The Scarecrow's Revenge," "The Robber's Grave" and "The Yellow Book," still makes it a welcome addition to my locked room library.

The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) by Gigi Pandian

Gigi Pandian is the award-winning author of the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt books, a series of archaeological mysteries, which have been in my peripheral for years, because Pandian is an admirer of John Dickson Carr and has been penning quite a few locked room stories – all with a historical or archaeological background. I love locked room and archaeological mysteries! So why did it take me so long to finally get around to Pandian?

The series has a cozy, girly vibe that was a little off-putting and add the seemingly never ending flood of reprints, translations and classics that kept coming my way, you have the reason why Pandian never got past my wish list. Not until last year, that is.

The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) is billed as "a treasure trove of nine locked room mysteries" and Douglas G. Greene, of Crippen & Landru, wrote a foreword for this collection. Well, that was more than enough to lure this locked room fanboy in. However, my advise is to skip Greene's foreword until you've read the stories, because he reveals a red-thread that runs through them that will probably ruin part of the fun if you're a fanatical locked room – as well as laying bare a general weakness of the collection. Greene's foreword really should have been an afterword. So, with that out of the way, let's get to the stories.

The opening story is a novella original to this collection, "The Cambodian Curse," in which a former con man turned security expert, Henry North, asks Jaya Jones to help him find a statue that was stolen from a museum under seemingly impossible circumstances. A statue from Cambodian, known as The Churning Women, was the museum's centerpiece with curse resting on it. A string of anonymous letters warned the owners to return the statue to Cambodia, but the only precaution they took was moving it to a secure office on the second floor – a room without windows and security cameras outside. This office room is the scene of a seemingly impossible murder and theft.

Jaya Jones spends most of the story looking for the "missing pieces of history" and reconstructing the family history of both the victim and her museum. Unfortunately, the locked room angle is not really examined until very late into the story and the solution is a complete letdown. A type of solution I utterly despise as an explanation for an impossible crime. I hate it even more than the timeworn secreted panels, hidden passages, unknown poisons and pieces of strings or pliers. So not exactly an auspicious beginning of this collection.

The second story, entitled "The Hindi Houdini," was originally published in Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology (2013) and the detective here is not Jaya Jones, but her best friend and stage magician, Sanjay Rai – who's known as The Hindi Houdini and briefly appeared in "The Cambodian Curse." Rai is preparing for a magic show in California's Napa Valley when the theater manager, "a crass womanizer," is murdered in his locked office. Suspicion falls on a former mistress, but Rai clears her name by finding an answer as to how the murderer managed to get pass the locked door. The trick, or rather the principle behind the trick, has a long, storied history in the genre, but was competently handled here. A routine affair as far as locked room stories goes.

Luckily, the third story is easily the best one of the lot and my personal favorite. "The Haunted Room" was originally published in Murder on the Beach (2014), in which Jaya Jones listens to the peculiar history of the titular room in a house dating back to "the post-Gold Rush boom in the late 1800s." The room is not so much haunted as it suffers from a serious case of kleptomania. A nifty twist on the room that kills (e.g. Carter Dickson's The Red Widow Murders, 1935). Over the decades, all kinds of items have inexplicably disappeared from the room, such as children's toys and a ring, but, during the early 1900s, "a valuable scroll" of historical importance disappeared from the room – only problem is that the room had been locked at the time. And the occupant of the room, a scholar, had placed a chair under the door handle.

I know of only one other impossible crime story that uses a hungry (locked) room that gobbles up its content, which can be found in Case Closed, vol. 66, but Pandian had the better solution of the two, because it was more elegant, original and thoroughly clued. If I had to pick a story from this collection for a locked room anthology, it would probably be "The Haunted Room." Really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, I didn't like the next novella at all. "The Library Ghost of Tanglewood Inn" was published in 2017 as an ebook and even won the Agatha Award for Best Short Story, but every idea from the plot was borrowed from other detective stories or series – running from Conan Doyle to Jonathan Creek. The past murder inside the inaccessible library, blocked by a table, gives away that Pandian has seen Jonathan Creek. It's practically identical to one of the episodes!

Granted, the use of a hardcover edition of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) was a clever touch, but even that gimmick came from a rather well-known historical mystery. So, no, I didn't like this story at all.

The next story, "The Curse of Cloud Castle," originally appeared in Asian Pulp (2015) and returns to the exploits of the Hindi Houdini, Sanjay Rai, who finds himself stuck on an artificial island with "a storybook castle." An island that was created only ten years before by a tech billionaire who made his fortune in cloud computing and the cast of characters mostly consist of Silicon Valley people. A good way to replant the classic trope of a closed circle of people in modern times. Naturally, someone is murdered under impossible circumstances, but, once again, the solution turned out to be one of the easiest, most simplistic locked room-tricks in the book.

"Tempest in a Teapot" was first printed in LAdies Night (2015) and the story introduces yet another one of Pandian's detective-characters, Tempest Raj Mendez, who's a magician friend of Sanjay Rai and has an interesting impossible situation – a botched stage trick. A man stepped into a barrel-size wicker basket, situated in the middle of a stage, while an assistant plunged a plastic sword into the basket followed by a scream. When they opened the basket, they found the man curled up inside with "a pool of blood spreading across his stomach." The impossible situation recalls Carter Dickson's Seeing is Believing (1941), but the solution is a play on Edward D. Hoch's favorite technique. And think his fans will most appreciate this story.

"A Dark and Stormy Light" was originally published in Malice Domestic: Murder Most Conventional (2016) and can hardly be described as an impossible crime story, but is, together with "The Haunted Room," the best story of the collection with one of the freshest take on the "gentleman thief" in the West – which should please fans of Maurice Leblanc and rogue fiction in general. Jones tells Rai the story of the second conference of historians as a grad student.

The history conference was sharing the hotel with a mystery writers' conference, "a friendly bunch," who turned out to be even "bigger drinkers than historians" and their guest of honor is a famously reclusive mystery writer, Ursula Light. She takes a firm hand in the investigation of the he disappearance of a keynote speaker of the history conference, Milton York. York claimed to have discovered a diary that would change "some widely held assumptions about why the Dutch lost their stronghold in India," but has not been seen since the pre-conference meetings. The only quasi-impossibility, at a stretch, is a discrepancy in time. However, this is hardly to the detriment of the plot and has a fun explanation for the missing speaker. And revealed a great villain who should be brought back in future stories.

The next story, "The Shadow of the River," originally appeared in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology (2011) and is the shortest story in the lineup. The story begins with Jones being on scene when the body of Dr. Omar Khan, a professor of history, is found behind the locked bolted door of his university office – beaten to death with "a thick wooden figure" of a smiling Buddha. Recently, Dr. Khan had discovered "an ancient map depicting three sacred rivers in India," which was now missing except for a small, torn piece that was found on the edge of the desk. The solution is another golden oldie, but was nicely put to use here and this should probably have been the opening story. If only because it appears to be Pandian's earliest published short story.

Personally, I believe it's better to open a collection, like this one, with a writer's earliest work, because, if the stories are good, shows the reader the author progressed and improved over time. Sticking it at the end show the opposite.

Finally, The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories closes with a novella, "Fool's Gold," which was first published in Other People's Baggage: Three Interconnected Novellas (2012) and has interesting gimmick. Each of the novellas are standalone stories, but are finked together by having the characters from the three different writers ending up with each other's baggage. Admittedly, this is certainly a novel way to link all these characters together without having them actually meet. Hey, I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room puzzle. Anyway, the lost baggage here is only a minor inconvenience to Jones. The real problem is the theft of a golden and silver chess pieces, which were taken from a hotel safe by blowing it open, but the thief never emerged from the room after the explosion. Jones is accompanied by her magician friend on this investigation. A fun, amusing and good story to close out the collection, but not particularly challenging as far as the impossibility is concerned.

My review has been rather lukewarm and this has to do with the problem that was inadvertently highlighted by Greene in his foreword. These stories, without giving too much away, hardly break any new ground with the exception of two stories, "The Haunted Room" and "A Dark and Stormy Light" – standouts of the collections. So you shouldn't go into it expecting a shin honkaku-style locked room puzzles that employ elaborate architecture or severed body parts to craft intricate and original impossible crimes. This is mostly written as a tribute to everyone's favorite mystery trope.

In the end, I think The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories will be more appreciated by fans of the series and modern cozies than the fanatical locked room reader looking for another La nuit du loup (The Night of the Wolf, 2000; Paul Halter), Keikichi Osaka's The Ginza Ghost (2017) or Arthur Porges' These Daisies Told (2018).

Well, so far my tepid review, but good news, I found something promising from the late Golden Age that, thematically, has something in common with this collection. And not just because it's an impossible crime novel with a murder taking place in a locked museum.