"The burning ghost without a name"

"Watching tomorrow with one eye, while keeping the other on yesterday."

- The Real Folk Blues.

When I first started reading detective fiction, I was fascinated with stories of unremembered crimes and their effect on the living when their faded memory is exhumed from oblivion – where they've lain dormant for decades. I mean, just imagine that someone goes missing and two decennia's later a pile of earth-caked bones are discovered by construction workers, confronting family and friends, whom all lived a full life in those twenty years, with the incarnate past – and even though they've become different people in the intermediating years, what matters is what happened twenty years ago. A skeleton has crept into the clock and turned back time.

I guess the concept of the past rising up to obscure the present captivates me, because I suffer from a relatively mild form of chronophobia and although time cultivated my taste and preferences, I still perk up when a detective story focuses on a crime buried deep in the past or uncovers a bundle of dusty bones and a grinning skull. So you can imagine my joy when I discovered that Bill Pronzini's Bones (1985) has his then unnamed detective not only investigating a 35-year-old suicide of a famous pulp writer, but also made him discover a stack of old bones and busting open the door behind a cleverly executed locked room trick. Hey, is it my birthday already!? 

As most of you've noticed by now, I've been zigzagging through this series and it's interesting to observe that none of the books I have picked up are really alike – not only in style but also the constant evolvement of the characters. In this book, nameless already shed his lone wolf persona and has gone into a partnership with Eberhardt, who retired from the force after a fifteen year run as a homicide detective, while the story itself is a Carrian mixture of a dark, but understated, atmosphere and sometimes complete farce. There's a painfully funny sequence, in which nameless and his fiancée are, more or less, forced to spend an evening with Eberhardt and his voluptuous breasted wife-to-be, who, by the way, is also an annoying blabbermouth, at a shabby, second-rate Italian restaurant – and the ensuing diner "conversation" just wants to make you slump to the floor, crawl under the table and die as fast as possible. What else can you do when you're caught in the cross fire of a fatal four-way of that magnitude?

I also enjoyed the parts in which he compared an aggressive guard dog, belonging to one of the suspects, to the burbeling Jabberwock, or when he decided to play Sherlock Holmes and deduced by the state of Eberhardt's clothes that he got laid mere hours ago. Oh, and we should try our hands at that stupid game Russell Dancer and Harmon Crane use to play and come up with the worst possible book titles using the word death. Here's my first shot: Death's Inexhaustible Customer Base. Cringe, my friends! Cringe!

But it's not a story that's entirely compounded of laughs and giggles. It's an exceedingly dark, brooding and sinuous problem that nameless is facing, which begins when he's summoned to the home of a very ill man, who wants him to look into the death of his father, Harmon Crane – a once famous pulp writer who shot himself in his locked study more than three decades ago. His son wants a motive pinned to the deed. The prospective of satisfyingly concluding an assignment like that is nearly non-existent, but nameless, the always enthusiastic pulp fanboy, takes on the case and gives it his best shot – and he acts more as a detective cut from the classic mold here than in any of the other novels I read. He diligently pursues suspects, hears witnesses, follows up on leads and sniffs around for clues while stumbling over no less than three bodies in the process! Jessica Fletcher is a rank amateur compared to this guy.

One of these macabre routine discoveries is made when he's prowling the grounds around the remains of an old cabin, used by Harmon Crane during his lifetime, when the titular pile of bones are brought to light by a recent earthquake, which conveniently reopened an old fissure that was used as a makeshift grave many decades ago, warming up a dead cold trail that eventually leads our gumshoe to the guilty party. I have to say, though, without giving too much away, that the solution is a bit too busy and I wish more attention was bestowed upon the problem of the locked room – but those are minor quibbles, really. I have only one real complaint about this book. Nameless alluded to Sherlock Holmes, but made a small, but not entirely unimportant, mistake: the Victorian maverick detective didn't snort cocaine; he shot-up heroine. Not that that is any better, but hey, with detective stories the importance is in the details. 

I normally have some insightful observations to make on how Bill Pronzini effectively made a statement regarding the genre or how perfectly he dropped off the classic detective story in the real world, like he did in the previous two books I read, but this is not that type of book. Bones is a return to Hoodwink (1982), in which he refuses to make any excuses to have some old-fashioned fun. This is a just a detective story, plain and simple, and you can take it or leave it – and it's your lost if you pick the latter.

On a final note, I want to thank our nameless gumshoe for helping me find the words needed to express my appreciation and gratitude to the author who gave us these little hybrid gems: Mr. Pronzini, "I think you're the cats nuts!" ;)

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

Hoodwink (1981)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)

Nightcrawlers (2005) 

EDIT: the title of this blog entry is a line from the song Gotta Knock a Little Harder. 

"The night is darkest just before the dawn"

"Because most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes."

- Nightcrawler, X2: X-Men United (2003)

Yeah, I know. In my prior blog post, I promised to recommence discussing impossible crime stories, but it was easier to first finish up Bill Pronzini's Nightcrawlers (2005) before starting on a new book – and I was in the mood for a gritty private eye novel anyway. That last part has me worried, though. There has to be something up with me when I pick a modern PI story over an old-fashioned locked room mystery. At first, I thought my personality was finally showing the tell-tale markings of maturity, but that suggestion was met with mock and ridicule by everyone who knows me personally – so I guess writers like Bill Pronzini, William DeAndrea and M.P.O. Books actually managed to shift my fundamentalistic negative opinion on contemporary fiction a little bit closer to the middle. 

Nightcrawlers is a very recent entry into this long-running series, published for the first time a little over six years ago, and there have been a lot of changes since I left Nameless after he suffered and fought through one of his most arduous ordeals in Shackles (1988). First of all, he isn't The Nameless Detective anymore, but Bill (no surname yet), and he's married with an adopted daughter and has given up his existence as a desolate lone wolf op. Instead of running a one-man detective agency he has now gone into business with a young woman, Tamara Corbin, and employed a third detective, Jake Runyon, as a field operative. Unfortunately, these changes resulted in exactly the kind of problems I was afraid of when I read of them in a review of Schemers (2009).

What I admired about the previous Nameless books I read, Hoodwink (1981) and Shackles (1988), was how Pronzini succeeded in making Nameless a fully developed, three dimensional character and still told a good story without sacrificing its plot. The character developments were snippets sprinkled over an entire story, but that's a lot harder to do when you have to flesh-out three different protagonists – and as a result, storytelling and plotting were sacrificed in favor of characterization.

Nevertheless, it's commendable how most of their personal predicaments were still intertwined with the cases at hand and Jake Runyon's story left a favorable impression on me. His estranged son, born out of his first marriage, reluctantly reestablished contact with him after his lover was on the receiving end of brutal beating at the hands of two gay bashers – and there were more victims before him. Runyon promises to get to the bottom of these late-night beltings, not only as a way to reach out to his son but also because the police isn't particular interested in finding the perpetrators themselves, and quickly determines that there's a pattern in what appeared at first to be random attacks. It's not as complex or ingenious as similar type of plots that were popular during the Golden Age of the Detective Fiction, but it's very much in the same tradition and as close as you can possibly get to dropping off the classic detective story in the real world.

Nameless and Tamara also chip-in, but their workload for this book is of secondary concern to the overall plot of the story. The senior partner of the new detective firm, whom we now know to be named Bill, is summoned to the death bed of former pulp-writer Russell Dancer, who played a big part in the locked room novel Hoodwink, and asks him deliver a message and package to Bill's mother-in-law – another former pulp-writer who he has been lusting after for the better part of half-a-century and casts a grim shadow over that previous novel. Pronzini seems to have a penchant for stripping his locked room stories of all their romantic trappings by a shocking revelation in a later story (c.f. Shackles).

The junior partner, the enterprising Tamara, tries her hands at some good old legwork and bumps into a psychotic kidnapper who carries her off to a remote cabin – and the only prospective of escaping is into an early and shabbily dug grave. The main purpose of this plot thread is to give the book an exciting finale as Tamara and a little girl try to escape from their captor.

It's interesting to see how The Nameless Detective shed the imagery of the lonely gumshoe in a shabby office and succeeded stepping into a new era, but I'm afraid I prefer the image of that solitary, capeless crusader of the previous century. Hey, what can I say? I'm a difficult person and a classicist at heart. 

The next update will consist of a review of an impossible crime novel. Cross my heart and hope to die!

Nothing is Impossible!

"The human mind; what a magnificent mechanism! Properly applied it creates miracles. Nothing, basically, is impossible..."

- Brooke (The Newtonian Egg).

Open any anthology of detective stories, published in the pass thirty years, and chances are that most of them contain one or more stories penned by the unequalled Edward D. Hoch – one of the last giants of the genre until he passed away in 2008. He wrote over 900 (!!!) short stories and appeared in every issue of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine from May 1973 until several months after his death. That's an unbroken streak of publications lasting nearly four decades! But his real legacy will be that of the modern master of the impossible crime story.

He was probably more prolific than John Dickson Carr himself, the acknowledged master of all things impossible, and was just as original as Joseph Commings when it came to finding new ways to dispatch people to the great hereafter that completely flies in the face of reality.

Hoch put his prodigious mind and diabolic creativity to use to create such baffling situations as a man jumping from a skyscraper on the top-floor, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground several hours later; fresh corpses turning up in recently unearthed coffins and time capsules; an old haunted oak tree with branches that strangles everyone going near it; a man sitting alone in his car is murdered while stuck in a traffic jam and a shower that miraculously starts spitting daggers are only a few examples.

In All But Impossible! (1981), however, he gives the stage to his fellow composers in crime and allows them to show what tricks are hidden up their sleeves. Unfortunately, this collection turned out to be the usual mixed bag of treats and subsequently touches on all the weak and strong points of a short story collection. There are a handful of stories that you'll absolutely love, some will make you want to chuck the darn book across the room, a couple you've probably seen one time too many in other collections and a few of them have no business being there.

But enough of this palaver, let's take them down from the top:

The Shadow of the Goat by John Dickson Carr

This is one of the first impossible crime stories that John Dickson Carr put to paper, for his school news sheet during his undergraduate days, and introduces the first of his recurring detectives: M. Henri Bencolin. He's a cunning prefect of the Parisian police whose coal black eyes, pointed beard and hair parted in the middle and turned up like horns gives him a Mephistophelean appearance – and his menacing ambience strikes fear in the heart of many. However, he has not yet morphed into the theatrical devil of the novels here and merely provides the answer as to how a man could've vanished from a watched room, commit a murder, and disappear a second time during a disturbed attempt at a second murder. The story has all the familiar elements of later day Carr, but misses its refinement. 

There are more of John Dickson Carr's earlier forays into the mystery genre collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980) – a posthumous compilation showing him grow as a writer from infancy to adulthood. Highly recommended!

The Little House at Croix-Rousse by Georges Simenon (translated by Anthony Boucher)

The literary father of Inspector Maigret wasn't really known for honoring the traditional detective story, but one of his first tales was a full-fledged locked room mystery – in which a man is shot in an empty house surrounded by an observant battalion of policemen. The solution, easily deduced, anticipates John Dickson Carr by nearly a decade, but the whodunit angle leaves its reader with an unnecessary sense of disappointment.

The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms by James Yaffe

Paul Dawn, the only member of the Homicide Squad's Department of Impossible Crimes, listens to Professor Bottle's historical account of the murder of the Roman Emperor Claudius – and the impossible angle to his demise. A poison was administered in his favorite dish of mushrooms that didn't affect the Emperor's food-taster, but threw him in a violent convulsion. I reveled at the double layered structure of the story, that runs for only 14 pages, and James Yaffe, who was only sixteen at the time he wrote it, should be commended for it. A thoroughly enjoyable and sagacious story! 

Douglas Greene had the following to say about this series when I asked if the stories were ever collected in a book: "Emperor's Mushrooms is far and away the best of the lot" and "the others have their moments but I don't think the series as a whole is worthy of being bookformed."  

Still, I wish stories like those from the Department of Impossible Crimes were more easily available for sampling to us that represent the next generation of enthusiastic mystery addicts.

From Another World by Clayton Rawson

This story was the result of a sporting challenge between Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr, in which they competed against one another to see who could come up with the best possible solution to the following premise: a murder has taken place in a room that's not only locked from the inside, but also completely sealed shut with tape! It's one of Rawson's finest tales and I think it won him this little wager with the grandmaster himself.

You can find John Dickson Carr's answer to this challenge in He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) – published under the byline Carter Dickson.

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

A carefully crafted persecution story, in which a young woman lost two great teaching jobs because students and staff were frightened by her ghost-like doppelganger haunting the school grounds. It's an innovative approach to the impossible problem, but like vanishing houses and trains the possible solutions are limited – and every observant reader will stumble to the identity of the perpetrator and motive before the end of the story. However, you can't help but take pleasure in how expertly all the plot threads are tightly woven together. Helen McCloy was an excellent plotter!

This story was extended into a full-length novel and published under the same title in 1950. 

Snowball in July by Ellery Queen

As far as I can tell, finding a logical and rational explanation as to how an entire train, including its cargo of passengers, could've evaporated in between two train stations hasn't been attempted since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle broached the idea in his 1898 short story, "The Lost Special." The solution in this story isn't as spectacular as the one in Doyle's story, but it's one of the few, if not the only, alternative solution to this problem – and it's a workable one at that! 

The Newtonian Egg by Peter Godfrey

The smallest of all locked room mysteries, in which a terminal ill man lectures from his hospital bed on Jacques Futrelle and John Dickson Carr – eats a spoonful of egg, after cracking its perfectly sealed shell, and almost immediately succumbs of cyanide poisoning. So how could poison be introduced in a sealed egg without penetrating its exterior? The answer isn't half as clever as you might expect from such a tantalizing premise and left me a little bit disappointed. The problem required a grander solution.

The Triple-Lock'd Room by Lillian de la Torre

Dr. Sam Johnson and James Boswell try to protect a woman who has confined her concerns regarding the safety of her jewels to them and fix her door with a triple lock, but that didn't stop this apparently invisible prowler from slipping into the room and stabbing her to death. The idea and characters were promising, but the solution De la Torre flings at her readers is one that should've only been uttered by a very dense Hastings-type of character, before being laughed out of the room, or at best proposed as a tongue-in-cheek false solution.

The Brazen Locked Room by Isaac Asimov

This is one of those gimcrack stories that makes you scratch your head in utter amazement at what the anthologist was thinking in adding it to the lineup. It's a pure fantasy tale, in which a miserable man makes a pact with a demon for 10 years of happiness in exchange of becoming a demon himself, and as a final test he has to escape from a solid bronze room – using his newly acquired demonic powers. I kid you not!

The Martian Crown Jewels

The third real dud in a row and another complete waste of space, that could've been used to reprint one of the many uncollected impossible crime stories by such short story specialists as Joseph Commings and Arthur Porges. But instead we get a pseudo-futuristic acid hallucination about a giant talking space chicken, who fancies himself the Martian equivalent of our Sherlock Holmes, looking into a bunch of purloined stones – and a failure to retrieve them may threaten relations between Earth and Mars. Yeah, I'm tapping out on this one.

The Day the Children Vanished by Hugh Pentecost

Hugh Pentecost picks up the slack in this fascinating story, in which a small town is thrown into panic when a school bus of children drives into a dugway and never comes out on the other side – and the solution is as clever as it is simple. But it's not just another cannily plotted locked room mystery, it's also a very well told story in its own right with a smashing end. I also dug the character Pentecost casted for the role of detective and the way in which he confronted the culprits. Possibly my favorite story of the collection!

As If by Magic by Julian Symons

Well, I learned something from this story: Symons wasn't only a first-class prick but also a hypocrite of the first water! You can't go around passing judgment on your contemporaries, for lacking a sense of realism, and than churn out a two-bit short-short, in which a typical amateur detective just so happens to be present at the same amusement pier where a murderer, before disappearing in the masses, starts stabbing away at someone and is invited by the police to help solve the case. Oh wow, that surely gave the genre a much-needed dose of reality, eh? 

I could've forgiven him this blatant hypocrisy, if he had shown Carr and Talbot how the impossible crime story should've been done and came up with something dazzling. But this is just petty and amateurish at best.

The Impossible Theft John F. Suter

This really pains me to say, but I'm developing a slight aversion for this wonderful story. It's a clever little nugget about a bet that involves the theft of a document from a tightly secured vault. The solution is brilliant and can be explained in one short sentence and the first time you read it you probably want to kick yourself, however, I have seen this story too often – and anthologists really aren't doing us a service by continues reprinting it (clever though it is). We're all very familiar with Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," and Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog." Now give us something we haven't read before and haven't already, at least, a dozen copies of in our collection!

Mr. Strange Takes a Field Trip by William Brittain

This pleasant, but minor, diversion tells of a very improbable disappearance of a valuable golden mask from a museum, and the only ones who were swarming that floor at the time was a school teacher and his class. At first, everyone assumes it's a pranks from two boys who sneaked off on their own, but when a search of the floor fails to turn up the missing artifact their protest starts to carry some weight – and there teacher turns detective and comes up with a solution that is both original as well as amusing.

No One Likes To Be Played for a Sucker by Michael Collins

Michael Collins is apparently one of those authors who effortlessly blends hardboiled story telling with a classic locked room puzzle. Here his one-armed private eye, Dan Fortune, is hired to keep taps on someone's business partner, but murder rears its ugly head and it involves a locked room angle. However, Collins takes a turn on that well-trodden path that leads to a slightly different hermitically shut door. The ending involves a particular kind of tough justice fitting for a story about a hardboiled gumshoe.

I really enjoy it when writers like Bill Pronzini and Michael Collins let their private eyes take on a good old-fashioned locked room mystery. It's a nice change of pace from the usual haunted mansions, harboring a boarded up room that kills its occupants, and other supernatural menaces who apparently run amok on this plane of reality.

The Arrowmont Prison Riddle by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini himself also provides a story for this volume of locked room riddles and his impossible problem boosts one of the most convoluted solutions I have ever come across in a short story of this kind, but what a firework display of ingenuity and imagination! The quandary the reader has to ponder over here is how a convicted murderer, a mere minute after his execution, could've vanished from a locked and watched execution shed after being dropped through its roof with a stiff rope pulled tight around his neck. Like I already pointed out, the solution is very convoluted and even knottier than its premise, but you really have to admire anyone who can dream up such a plot. John Dickson Carr would've definitely approved!

This one competes with Huge Pentecost's "The Day the Children Vanished" as the standout story of this anthology.

Box in a Box by Jack Ritchie

This story, in which a man is discovered unconscious next to his dead wife, inside a locked bedroom, and the solution the detective comes up with is only acceptable because Jack Ritchie had his tongue firmly placed in his cheek – and that's how it should be done if you're going to present the reader a hackneyed explanation like that. Yes, I'm looking at you Lillian de la Torre!  

The Number 12 Jinx by Jon L. Breen

I don't know the first thing about baseball, but this story has me intrigued and from what I gather, it’s part of an entire series of puzzle-orientated sports mysteries featuring Ed Gorgan – a major league umpire who regular sheds his sports cap for a deerstalker. In this story he look into a baseball player who, after insisting on playing as the club's jinxed number 12, disappeared under baffling circumstances. Good story, but not the most solvable one of the collection if you're absolutely clueless about the game – like yours truly.

Crippen and Landru (who else?) put out an entire collection under the title Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgan (2003). I think I might take a swing at this collection in the near future. It could be fun and at leasts provides a change of pace

The Magician's Wife by J.F. Peirce

The titular magician makes the equally titular wife disappear in front of a captivated crowd of policeman and their assistant, his sister-in-law, accuses him of having murdered her sister. Nothing really special, but fun enough to read.  

The Problem of the Covered Bridge by Edward D. Hoch

This is the first recorded case of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small town medical practitioner who constantly runs into seemingly impossible murders in the small town of Northmont (Jessica Fletcher has nothing on him!), and this story has him arriving in town and setting up his practice. But the problem that requires his attention the most is the inexplicable vanishing of a horse-and-buggy from a covered bridge. The story is OK, but Hoch hadn't found his stride yet with this series. He threw some really good and even more baffling miracle problems at Dr. Hawthorne as the series progressed. I'm particular fond of "The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery," which was also the first Hoch story I ever read.

There are two collections from this series available: Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and More Things Impossible (2006). A third collection, Nothing is Impossible (20??), is planned for the very near future.

"Nameless here forever more"

 "Your chains are forged by what you say and do..."

- Marley & Marley, The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Well, I haven't been entirely faithful to the tagline scrawled across this blog, "dedicated to the great old detective stories of yore," but the contemporary mysteries I have discussed up to this point were at least defensible because they were written very much in the same vein as the enduring classics of their predecessors. I'm not sure how to justify slipping in a review of Bill Pronzini's Shackles (1988), though. It's not a detective story at all. It's a thriller, plain and simple, but a good one at that! 

He Who Whispers

It's bizarre how, up to this book, I never really saw Bill Pronzini as the present-day grand master of the hard-bitten private eye novel. More like another Edward Hoch with a hardboiled edge to his stories. This is, of course, entirely my own fault as a reader, limiting myself solely to his locked room mysteries – as if he only wrote tough cozies. Yes, I deserve everything, and more, that Nameless had to endure in this book for even thinking of a term like that – let alone publishing it!

Shackles does nothing to reinforce the illusion I had of Bill Pronzini and shows a much darker side of his work, which is really what one should be expecting from a novelist of modern private eye stories and a ardent pulp fan.

The story opens with a prologue, in which Nameless is seized in front of his girlfriend's apartment, weeks before Christmas, by an unrecognizable, whispering man – handcuffed, chloroformed and roughly transported to an isolated mountain cabin in the dead of winter. When the unnamed gumshoe regains consciousness, he finds himself fettered with a leg iron to the wall and his masked captor wises him up on his precarious situation. He will be left there to die, chained to the wall, with just enough provisions, blankets, a dying heater and radio, and some reading and writing materials to prolong his suffering for three long, agonizing months – and cheerfully assures him that suicide is the only means of escape from his diabolically constructed prison cell.  

Captured and sentenced to die, Nameless starts a seemingly hopeless battle to hold a firm grasp on his sanity while he tries to find the tiniest of crack in his escape-proof cell to squeeze through and the reader follows his struggle through diary entries. Nameless' dramatic soliloquy is the best part of the book, in which we don't only learn how he manages to claw his way to freedom, but also a little bit more about himself and how he became the person he was before being snatched away from his regular life and the person he will become if he survives this ordeal.

Pronzini once again demonstrated that good story telling shouldn't be sacrificed in favor of characterization, but that a balance should be established between the two and I think more writers should take notice of that if the thriller crime novel wants to have a chance with a new generation of readers. Perhaps I'm wrong, but from what I can discern they aren't all that popular with us. 

The second part of the story deals with the aftermath of Nameless' solitary weeks in captivity and the hunt for the man who put him there, but these events didn't grab me as much as the first half of the book – with exception of the big reveal of the identity of his jailer and his motivation for putting Nameless through hell and back. Critics are fond of books that humanizes the detective story, well, take notice of this book, because that's how you make an effective statement regarding the detective story. I don't want to give away too much, but suffice to say the antagonist Nameless faces here is someone whom he, and the reader, has met before and effectively shows what happens to the culprit after The Great Detective has done his dramatic dénouement and is lead away by the police to get his just desert. It's dark, it's bleak, and it stripped that previous impossible crime story of all its romantic trappings, but if you want to take that route this is the way it should be done. 

Once again, I'm not a fervent reader of modern thrillers, too many bitter disappointments, but if more of them had even been half as good as this one, I would've picked up a lot more of them along the way – and I will definitely delve deeper into Bill Pronzini's impressive body of work.  

Briefly put, this is a captivating read that will bind the reader to the pages until the end of the final chapter (I wonder how many reviewers before me made those awfully bad puns?).

Note: the next book on my mountainous pile of unread books is the anthology All But Impossible!: An Anthology of Locked Room and Impossible Crime Stories by Members of the Mystery Writers of America (1981), and contains one of Pronzini's short stories that I haven't read yet! :)

The Private Eye Who Read the Pulps

"In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted."

- Nero Wolfe (Champagne for One, 1958)

Hit your print screen key, this is a sight to behold! Not only is this the fourth blog entry in a row that discusses a book from the post-GAD era, but also the second one, posted back-to-back, of which the author, thankfully, is still among us! There's some life welling up in this dusty, cobweb-strewn crypt erected in honor of the great pioneers of the detective story.

Bill Pronzini is one of the lucky few to be carted into this mausoleum who still has a pulse and a healthy color on his cheeks, and the book that put him here, way before his time, is Hoodwink (1981) – a clever impossible crime novel set at a pulp convention that offers two different locked room scenarios.

The Pulpeteers

The case opens with Pronzini's nameless gumshoe kicking back in his office chair with an old pulp magazine, deeply immerged in a story from an old acquaintance, Russell Dancer, a once popular wordsmith of pulp fiction who rapidly descended into hackdom after the pulp market collapsed, when that very same writer drops in on him bearing an invitation to a pulp convention that has a minor favor attached to it.

San Francisco's first annual Western Pulp Con is the setting for the reunion of The Pulpeteers, a social group of people involved in the pulps, primarily intended for writers, but among its members are also an editor and a cover artist, and someone has been littering their mailboxes with extortion notes – accusing each of a 30-year-old plagiarism.

That's were the unnamed shamus comes in. Dancer wants him to prowl around the convention to see if he can pick anything up that might indicate who's behind the blackmail scam, but there's not much he can do at the con besides fawning at his favorite pulp writers, buying pulp magazines missing from his collection and wooing the daughter of two well-known writers – and the only thing he's able to figure out is that there isn't much love lost between the lampoon of pulp legends who euphorically refer to themselves as The Pulpeteers.

Notwithstanding the antagonistic undercurrent, everything seems to go off pretty well and the con promises to be a minor success – until a shot rang out from behind the locked door of Dancer's room and when it's opened, he's hovering over a body with a smoking gun in his hand. The locked and watched environment of the hotel room makes it a physical impossibility for anyone else to have fired the fatal shot, but the hack writer claims that he's innocent and the only one who's willing to believe him is nameless. 

Nameless takes on the case, more or less, pro bono, and digs deeper into the internal relationship between the members of the pulp group, as well as the origin of the extortion notes – and determines that they are closely intertwined with one another, but that doesn't bring him any closer to a actual murderer or how this person managed to escape from a locked and watched hotel room. The case becomes increasingly more complicated when he chances upon the body of another member of the group, whose skull has been split with a double-bitted ax, locked behind the door of a completely sealed shack and the fallen stepladder suggests a freak accident. But nameless is rather skeptical of that theory. 

The locked rooms are expertly and satisfyingly explained, and are as good as anything you might expect from the great old practitioners of the impossible crime story. The murder in the hotel room has a convincing and logical explanation for the locked room illusion, while the method for sealing the shed is delightfully complex and a more workable variation on a trick that we've seen before.

Full marks for Pronzini on that aspect of the plot, but how does the rest of the story measure up against the works of his predecessors? Surprisingly well. Just like Rex Stout, he successfully blends orthodox plotting with hardboiled storytelling and unlike many of his contemporaries; he can tell that story without padding and drowning it in character angst.

That's not to say there isn't any character development in this book, there is, nameless even has a sex live (somewhere, that prick, Julian "Bloody" Symons, is nodding approvingly), however, these moment of characterization are snippets sprinkled over the plot and therefore don't distract the reader from the fact that he's reading a detective story. Heck, I even became interested in these brief moments of character insight, for the sole reason that they were brief and not dwelled on for hundreds of pages, and nameless is a fairly interesting character.

He's described as one of the last of the Lone Wolf private ops, who wanted to become a detective because he loves reading the pulps, and even though he's living his dream, investigating two seemingly impossible murders, the job isn't as banged up as it appears to be in fiction. But he's doing what he dreamed of doing as a kid, he has his collection of pulp magazines and even gets the girl on occasion – and that's stuff dreams are made of for detective geeks.

Now if only a hard-bitten homicide cop would rang my doorbell, imploring me to follow him to an old, rundown mansion of a dysfunctional family where the eccentric matriarch was found strangled to death in a sealed attic room – and left a cryptic dying message on the dust covered floor that implicates the cursed family heirloom, a phantom clock that strikes thirteen at midnight, as the guilty party! That would be achieving true happiness.

You know, I really loathe real-life criminals for their lack of creativity. If they put a little effort in their petty crimes, I could build a career as a famous consulting detective – or at least as a ragged private eye in a shabby raincoat with a messy office in a disreputable neighborhood. 

Oh, woe is I!