The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) by Brian Flynn

The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) is only the second entry in the Anthony Bathurst series, but the plot already showed improvement over Brian Flynn's debut, The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), skillfully unraveling two distinctly different, but inextricably intertwined, murders – committed on the same night while miles apart. Flynn's admiration for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes very subtly bleeds through the story. But more on that later.

The Case of the Black Twenty-Two begins when a solicitors firm, Merryweather, Linnell and Daventry, receive "a rather peculiar commission" from an American millionaire, Laurence P. Stewart.

Stewart is a collector of "articles of great historical significance" and proudly possesses more than two-thousand objects of "historical interest and association," which have found a home in his private museum. Stewart has a strong preference for historical items with a Royal association, but has "a perfect mania" for anything connected to Mary, Queen of Scots. This all-consuming passion is why he reached out to the firm with a curtly worded letter with instructions.

The senior partner, David Linnell, is instructed to act on Stewart's behalf and purchase three historical articles, a collar of pearls, a tapestry fire-screen and a rosary of amber beads, which all have been "indisputably the property of Mary, Queen of Scots" – all three items will be on sale shortly at the Hanover Galleries. A not entirely conventional request, but a snappy telegram from Stewart confirms the commission. So the junior partner, Peter Daventry, goes to the gallery to inspect the articles in question, but, when Linnell goes there the following day, he found the gallery in "a condition of extreme excitement and agitation."

During the night, the gallery was robbed and the three items on Stewart's shopping list, the pearls, fire-screen and rosary, were taken away, but tragically, the night-watchman was brutally murdered during the robbery. And while Linnell is talking with Detective-Inspector Goodall, Daventry calls the gallery to tell his partner that the son of their client, Charles Stewart, has informed him that his father was bludgeoned to death last night in his library at Assynton Lodge. Inexplicably, the library door and french-windows were securely locked or fastened on the inside. Nothing appears to have been stolen from his private museum room. A pretty solid premise!

But before I continue, I've to pause here a moment and point out two interesting facts about the private museum in The Case of the Black Twenty-Two.

Firstly, a collector's private museum, or room where a collection is stored, is a trope commonly associated with S.S. van Dine and his followers, most notably Clyde B. Clason, but Flynn's use of it anticipates Van Dine – who used it for the first time in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). I thought it was very fitting the museum here is the property of an American millionaire. Secondly, there's a gem of a Sherlockian reference hidden in the museum. A reference that was never acknowledged, but one that can unmistakably linked to one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories and, if you spot it, the reference works as a bonus clue to the underlying motive that ties the cases together. What a fanboy!

Daventry has a brother, Gerald, who was peripherally involved in The Billiard-Room Mystery and "never tires of singing Bathurst's praises." So when Charles asks the solicitors to recommend him "an efficient, discreet, and trustworthy private detective," Daventry suggested seeking the help of that budding detective. Anthony Bathurst plays the role of Great Detective with his accustomed vigor and deduces his way from stolen fire-screens and little brown stones in a ink-bowl to a missing bullet and an obscure, murky passage of history. A passage telling of a Cardinal's great gift, the Black Twenty-Two. This titular plot-thread is very much in the Doylean tradition and can be linked to that fantastic Sherlockian reference that can be found in Stewart's private museum.

In my opinion, the historical mystery of the Black Twenty-Two is one of the better and most imaginative aspects of the plot. Only overshadowed by the reconstruction of the murder in the locked library. Unfortunately, there are also some less than stellar aspects of the plot that drags it down to the apprentice level of The Billiard-Room Mystery.

Even if you're really generous, there are only a handful of viable suspect. There's the son, Charles Stewart, the victim's ward, Marjorie Lennox, and his private-secretary, Morgan Llewellyn. You can add the mysterious man and who to the list who are, somehow, connected to the gallery murder. But when the genuinely surprising murderer is revealed, you want to cringe so damn hard you start believing Julian Symons had a point after all. A second drawback is the clumsily handling of the locked room angle, which had an uninspired, routine solution, but it hampered the murderer more than it helped – because leaving the french-windows open would have thrown red herring across the trail. Now all of the focus was on the people inside the house.

So, on a whole, Flynn's The Case of the Black Twenty-Two is an entertaining, well-written, but typical 1920s, detective novel with all the flaws and gusto of a burgeoning mystery writer. What really is impressive, considering the imperfections of The Billiard-Room Mystery and The Case of the Black Twenty-Two, is how the quality of plots and originality shot up like a bottle rocket in his next two novels. The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and The Murder Near Mapleton (1929) are two of the best detective novels from the twenties, which followed on the heels of two apprentice novels. That kind of rapid improvement is something to be admired.

I want to read Invisible Death (1929) or The Orange Axe (1931) next, but I'll probably cram something else in between to keep things a little varied.

Seeds of Murder (1930) by Van Wyck Mason

Last year, I read The Fort Terror Murders (1931) by Francis van Wyck Mason, an importer, historian and writer, who saw battle as a sixteen-year-old artillery officer in the First World War and served as a Chief Historian on General Eisenhower's staff during the Second World War – where he was tasked with documenting the war. Van Wyck Mason's wartime experiences left an indelible mark on his writing.

An anonymous comment was left on my review of The Fort Terror Murders explaining Van Wych Mason's long-running Captain Hugh North series has two main periods.

The first period covers the fourteen novels published between 1930 and 1940, which have the word "murder" or "murders" in their title and "tend to have elements of the Golden Age detective story," but the second period moved away from detection towards more spy-oriented intrigue novels – starting with The Rio Casino Intrigue (1941) and ending with The Deadly Orbit Mission (1968). Apparently, the second period stopped using gorgeous "location maps" such as the layout of the star-shaped fort in The Fort Terror Murders. What a shame!

Another anonymously posted comment confirmed my suspicion that the first title in the series, Seeds of Murder (1930), is a traditional, Golden Age detective novel complete with a Dr. Watson-like narrator, odd clues, charts and a floor plan. Surprisingly, the story turned out to be an American-style mansion mystery in the tradition of S.S. van Dine, Clyde B. Clason and Roger Scarlett!

Seeds of Murders begins in the villa Royal and Phyllis Delancey on Long Island Sound, between Connecticut and Long Island, where they're hosting a house party and a thunderstorm "howled about the villa like a chorus of anguished demons" as guests are dripping in. The guest list comprises of Phyllis' brother, Adrian Courtney, who brought along his present affaire du Coeur, Miss Faustina Welford. Royal Delancey invited his business partner, Jacob Wallace, along with a young redhead, Miss Dolly O'Day, and a long-standing friend from his days as a planter in the Philippines, Fred Burton – who's "a poor but honest henequin planter." Finally, there's the narrator, Dr. Walter Allan, who met that famous detective of the Army Intelligence Bureau during "the dark days of 1917."

Captain Hugh North is described as "probably the best detective this side of Scotland Yard," attached to the Army Intelligence Bureau, but "the Federal Secret Service borrows him a lot of the time." He was supposed to accompany Dr. Allan to the villa, but was delayed by government business and the last to arrive.

Shortly after Captain North arrived, the startled butler, Alonzo, jabbers in Spanish that there's "a dead man upstairs." Jacob Wallace is dangling from "a bright nickel chain," suspended from a hook in the ceiling, in the middle of a spacious bathroom and there are "three small, cream-colored seeds" arranged in "a precise triangle." Captain North suspects this was a murder clumsily disguised as a suicide, but Lieutenant Bullock overlooked the obvious clues and believes it was a simple suicide.

He looks way too happy

Until a second, unmistakable murder is committed that night with three seeds arranged in "a neat, equilateral triangle" beneath the chair of the victim. Someone has attempted to pry open the secondary door of a wall safe that was found with its outer door standing wide open.

The contents of the wall safe revealed that the plot was constructed around a familiar theme in detective fiction at the time, namely the financial shenanigans of bankers, stockbrokers and financiers, which was a response to financial ruination of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression – e.g. Freeman Wills Crofts' Mystery in the Channel (1931). And in this case, the financial wizardry at the brokerage firm of the victim's provided an honest man with the means, opportunity and motive for murder, but did he kill them?

Seeds of Murder has a good premise with a pretty well-done, skillfully handled, but ultimately simplistic, which only has one weakness: the plot has too many moving parts, operating independently, which means you have to accept that all these parts collided at roughly the same time and place. However, Van Wyck Mason presented this string of crimes as convincingly as possible and those individual parts were very well handled. The bungled murder of Jacob Wallace, solved with a quarter of the story left to go, was fairly clued and the clue of the running water was more than just a little clever, while the second murder and attempted safe cracking gave the story some good set pieces – only linked together by the characters and those mysterious seeds underneath the bodies. Van Wyck Mason added a nice touch by making the vital clue to the second murder only available to the narrator and reader. Captain North has to rely on a coded message to lure out the murderer.

All things considered, Seeds of Murder is a relatively short, competently plotted and solidly clued detective novel that you can breeze through in one sitting. So hardly a landmark title in the history of the genre, but a good debut and surprisingly traditional for a writer who would move towards political intrigues and spy-thrillers only a decade later.

Anyway, you can definitely expect more reviews of those earlier, Golden Age-style Captain North mysteries on this blog in the future. So stay tuned!

The Case with Nine Solutions (1928) by J.J. Connington

"J.J. Connington" was the pseudonym of Professor Alfred W. Stuart, a Scottish chemist and lecturer, who produced close to thirty mystery novels over a twenty year period with his series-detective, Sir Clinton Driffield, starring in seventeen of them – fulfilling the role of Chief Constable of a fictitious county. The books garnered critical acclaim from such luminaries as Jacques Barzun and T.S. Eliot. John Dickson Carr praised Connington in his famous 1963 essay "The Grandest Game in the World" (collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections, 1980).

I had read only two of his mystery novels, Murder in the Maze (1927) and Jack-in-the-Box (1944), which bristled with promise, ingenuity and originality. But my third read in this sadly neglected series turned out to be a minor masterpiece.

The alluringly titled The Case with Nine Solutions (1928) is Connington's sixth detective novel, but only the third title in the Sir Clinton Driffield series. Nonetheless, Sir Clinton here's at the top of his game as he delves into a bizarre, quadruple murder case to which there are nine possible solutions. So let's dig in!

The Case with Nine Solutions opens with Dr. Ringwood, who's working locum for the sickly Dr. Carew, but a localized flu epidemic has prevented him from having as much as two hours of continuous sleep – concluding that "general practice is a dog's life." So an unexpected social call from a colleague, Dr. Trevor Markfield of the Croft-Thornton Research Institute, is a welcome distraction from his workload. Until the "stifled malediction" of the telephone bell summons him to the home of Dr. Silverdale.

However, the town of Westerhaven is draped in a thick fog and Dr. Ringwood, who's new to the place, has no idea how to find the place.

Dr. Markfield kindly offers to shepherd Dr. Ringwood to the Silverdale home and they tailgate through the dense fog, but, in spite of his guide, Dr. Ringwood enters the wrong house and makes a terrible discovery. A fair-haired young man lying mortally wounded on a chesterfield in the smoking-room. He has two bullet wounds and the last thing Dr. Ringwood hears him mutter is "...caught me... pistol... shot... thought it was... all right... never guessed." Dr. Ringwood immediately notifies Sir Clinton and then attends to one of the sick maids next door, but when he returns to Silverdale home with Sir Clinton, they find the body of the maid who had admitted the doctor to the house on his earlier visit. She had been strangled "pretty efficiently" with a homemade garroter.

The dead man is identified as Edward Hassendean, "the cub who was hanging round the skirts of Silverdale's wife," Yvonne, who kept the hopeful young man "on her string for her own amusement," but don't waste your sympathies on young Hassendean – because Sir Clinton's excellent detective work reveals he got his just desserts. In any case, this double murder already looks like it's going to be a lot of trouble, but then Sir Clinton receives an anonymously send telegram (signed "Justice"). The message brings them to an empty bungalow where they find the body of Mrs. Silverdale sitting in a big arm-chair with a bullet wound in her head and an automatic pistol lying at her feet. However, the cause of death is hyoscine poisoning!

As noted above, Sir Clinton is in superb form here and makes some excellent deductions leading to the conclusion that the bungalow was the primary stage of two of the three murders. A conclusion that somehow makes the case both simpler and more complicated at the same time.

Sir Clinton tells Inspector Flamborough that "deaths by violence fall under three heads:" accident, suicide and homicide, which includes murder. There were two violent deaths at the bungalow and "in each case the death must have been due to one or other of these three causes." If you take one or two of these three possible ways as the cause of Hassendean and Mrs. Silverdale's deaths, there are "nine different arrangements" (see table). You shouldn't read The Case with Nine Solutions expecting to find something along the lines of E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913), Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) or Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), because the titular solutions are understandably nothing more than possibilities – although a detective novel with eight false solutions would have been amazing! Nevertheless, Sir Clinton competently distills the truth from these nine possibilities by being observant enough to spot the differences between the real and manufactured clues.

The Nine Possibilities

 

The Case with Nine Solution has a truly brilliant plot unhampered by the narrow "circle of inquiry," which comprises of only two or three viable suspects, but, even if you spot the murderer, you're still left with explaining what exactly transpired. An apparently incomprehensible sequence of events that turned out to have an ultimately simple explanation effortlessly reconstructed by Sir Clinton. And this is topped by the final chapter, "Excerpts from Sir Clinton's Notebook," which shows you all the clues you might have missed. Why have I been neglecting Connington for so long?

Patrick Ohl, of the still dormant At the Scene of the Crime, observed in his 2011 review that you can see some of Connington's influence in Carr's work, "particularly the impressive reconstructions of Dr. Gideon Fell," but The Case with Nine Solutions brought the bewildering crime from Carr's The Four False Weapons (1937). If I remember correctly, there's some passing plot-resemblance between them. 

Equally interesting, Connington also seems to have left his mark on the work of another personal favorite of mine, Christopher Bush, whose The Case of the Tudor Queen (1938) was very likely inspired by The Case with Nine Solutions. The Case of the Tudor Queen also concerns a double death in an empty house, which could have been either murder, suicide or a combination of the two. And in both stories, the female victims are found poisoned, sitting in a chair, in an empty room. Not to mention Bush's fondness of these confusing, closely-concurring multiple murders during his early days as a mystery writer (e.g. Dead Man Twice, 1930).

So, a long story short, The Case with Nine Solutions proved to be an cleverly structured, fairly clued and solid plotted detective novel with a simple, but satisfying, solution to a confusing and seemingly inexplicable string of murders – which makes it a minor classic. On top of that, it appears to have influenced two of my favorite mystery writers. You can expect this book to make an appearance on my best-of list of 2019 and I won't wait until 2020 to return to Connington, but my next stop is going to be one of those delightful Japanese locked room mysteries. So stay tuned!

The Gates of Hell (2003) by Paul Doherty

Last year, I tackled the first two parts of Paul Doherty's historical "Telamon Triology," The House of Death (2001) and The Godless Man (2002), which takes place in 334 BC and follows the tribulations of a talented young physician, Telamon – who's the trusted confident of his boyhood friend, Alexander the Great. Alexander and Telamon were raised together, as boys, "in the Grove of Mieza at Aristotle's academy," but Alexander's god-like aspirations ensures an endless supply of challenges for the level-headed physician.

The red-thread running through this trilogy is the escalating war activities between Macedon and the sprawling Persian Empire of Darius III.

Alexander has captured or sacked city after city and has crossed into Asia, but Darius III and his menacing spy, Lord Mithra, have been plotting his downfall and even enlisted a Greek mercenary, Menno of Rhodes. One of the few generals to have defeated Macedonian troops in battle. Persian assassins and spies have been active in Macedonian army camps (The House of Death) and captured cities (The Godless Man), which resulted in a bloody trail of revenge, intrigue and miraculous murders dragged across Alexander's marching route "to the edge of the world" – solved by the agile mind of Telamon. Lion of Macedon was now poised to take "the great prize."

The Gates of Hell (2003) is the final book of the "Telamon Triology" and Alexander has set his sight on the city of Halicarnassus with its deep harbor on the Aegean. If the city falls, every sea port on the Aegean will be Alexander. Something that's easier said than done.

Halicarnassus is well fortified with "towers, walls and citadels" with its southern line "protected by the sea and the Persian navy." A moat has been dug around the city "twenty-five feet broad and very deep," which Alexander has to cross before he can attack the walls, but the conditions outside the walls are extremely unfavorable to an invading army and it's "almost impossible to mine underneath" – making the city practically unconquerable without an Archilles' Heel. Well, if a legend is to be believed, there's a weak spot in the city's defensive bulwark.

Pythias was a sour, embittered, but brilliant, mathematician who claimed King Pixadorus, of Halicarnassus, had "cheated him out of certain treasure," but Pixadorus dismissed these accusations as nonsense. After a while, the king grew tired of accusations and threatened to seize Pythias' wealth. So he fled the city, but left behind a cipher, known as the Pythian Manuscript, which revealed both where the treasure was hidden and "an intrinsic flaw" in one section of the city wall. A "terrible weakness" any besieger could exploit. Alexander is in possession of the cipher!

Pamenes is a skillful scribe "versed in translating secret codes and ciphers," who's one of scholars laboring on deciphering the Pythian Manuscripy, but he has not emerged from his room. A room known as the Ghost Chamber with creaking floorboards that has inspired ghost stories, but sadly, nothing is done with the room. Anyway, the creaking floorboards is how people in the room below heard the scribe pacing up and down. However, the door remained bolted and there's no answer to the knocking. So the door is battered down and the body of Pamenes is found on the pavement outside, under the open window, with bird seed scattered around him, which suggests an accidental fall, but Telamon suspects foul play – begging the question how a murderer was able to enter or leave a locked room. This is not the only (quasi) impossible situation in the story.

Alexander and Telamon believe there's a spy in their camp who, somehow, has found a way to dispatch incredibly detailed messages with "a richness of information" into the besieged city. The messages must have been incredibly detailed that it's very unlikely, if not impossible, someone shot an arrow with a message attached to it over the city wall.

Doherty has never been squeamish about padding the body count of his stories and The Gates of Hell is no exception.

A cook and his daughter are poisoned. A Cretan archer is murdered a mile from Alexander's camp and the murderer took his bow and arrows. A woman is found strangled to death in the Ghost Chamber, which appeared in the room after it had been searched. This all takes place against the bloody siege of Halicarnassus. Needlessly to say, this really pads the body count of the book and that's not even counting a number of executions.

So this makes for a very eventful and exciting story full with epic battles, spy activities, ciphers and bloodshed, but Doherty is at his best when seamlessly intertwines historical events with the detective story and The Gates of Hell fell a little short of the mark – because there was only one plot-thread that delivered. The method the spy used to dispatch detailed information to the besieged city was beautifully simple. And neatly linked to the cipher. I suppose the cipher could be a good second, if the average reader actually stood a chance at solving it.

However, the solution to the locked room murder of Pamenes was disappointing. I would have been happy with something half as clever as the impossible fall from the locked tower room in A Murder in Thebes (1998), but this locked room-trick was uninspired. It didn't help that the clueing was sparse and the main culprit stood out like a sore thumb.

The Gates of Hell is strong on historical content and a fine example of Doherty's talent to write mystery novels as historical epics, brimming with historical battles, events and figures, but this time with a very middling plot – ending the Telamon Triology on a weak note. So not one of Doherty's most successful historical mysteries.

The Kindaichi Case Files: Doll Island Murder Case

Doll Island Murder Case is the sixth entry in The File of Young Kindaichi Returns, originally serialized between October 2015 and January 2016 in Weekly Shōnen Magazine, which was written by Seimura Amagi and illustrated by Fumiya Satō – who drew on the folklore of human-like dolls to dress up the plot. The dolls with their tragic, star-crossed back-stories were used very effectively.

Doll Island Murder Case begins when Hajime Kindaichi is asked by his social studies teacher, Shinobu Tokita, to help her crack a coded message found in a doll that belonged to her late grandmother.

Kindaichi easily deciphers the coded message and it simply tells them to "go to Hitogata Island." Hitogata is a small island not far from Tokyo where, once a year, a doll ceremony is held attended by people from all over Japan together with "the dolls that hide their own feelings."

So Kindaichi, accompanied by Miyuki, travels down to the island to attend the doll ceremony, but, as he reflects back, he had no idea there "an evil and terrifying motive" behind the code – which came to a bloody conclusion on the island of dolls. When they arrive, Kindaichi and Miyuki meet a couple of familiar faces. Inspector Kenmochi has a reason hovering between the personal and professional to partake in the doll ceremony. Yosuke Itsuki is the freelance reporter last seen in The Antlion Trench Murder Case and is accompanied by reporter of Queen Monthly Mystery Magazine, Karin Hoshizaka, who are there to report on three mysterious detective novelists.

Kiriko Kanda, Tomoe Benikoji and Mayako Suzuoka are a writing collective, known as "Persona Doll," who garnered popularity with both their Doll Mystery Series and writing gimmick. The true identity of the three members are a closely guarded and they only appear in public dressed as mute, life-sized dolls with masks. They don't utter a word and only communicate by writing on a small board. There are four more people, Hitomi Shimura, Kagechika Ameno, Soichiro Akagami and Tsuyoshi Tanaka, who all brought a doll with a personal story behind it. Stories full of tragic deaths, murders, suicides and broken lives. And a curse or two.

After they've exchanged the dolls for replacement dolls, miniature copies of the participants, the murderer begins to work like a butcher on piecework.

A headless, legless torso with arms and hands is found clad in the doll costume, one worn by Kiriko Kanda, whose room is spattered in blood and two life-size dolls are standing at the door, but the problem is that even her two colleagues are unable to identify her – because they wrote their novels "through the internet." So even they don't know each others real names or even faces. Naturally, they find out they're trapped on the island, unable to call to mainland for assistance, while someone begins to mutter about a long-dead village elder having returned as the "Cursed Doll."

 

A second body is found at the doll shrine, presumably Mayako Suzuoka, but this time the murderer elegantly posed the severed bottom part among the dolls. However, the real interest comes when the third body is found, which is presented as an impossible crime. And not a bad one either!

What's left of Kiriko Kanda

During the ceremony, Kenmochi looks through the observation window, a narrow slit in the wall, when he notices one of the dolls has a human ear, but, when they enter the shrine, the body of the dolls has inexplicably disappeared – leaving only a severed head with a doll mask "staked on a spear." Kindaichi points out that "everyone who followed the doll ceremony rites," including his prime-suspect, possesses an unimpeachable alibi. They were physically unable to enter the shrine, remove the body of the doll, plant the severed head on the spear and leave the shrine within the minute, or two, between spotting the body and entering the shrine.

This impossible rearrangement of the gruesome scene in the shrine is, plot-wise, the best and strongest part of the whole story. Unlike the other parts of the plot, the locked room-trick was delightfully simple, but very effective and satisfying. I expected some old-fashioned trickery with an identical or mistaken room, but this was so much better. Showing the Japanese are the undisputed masters of the corpse-puzzle.

Unfortunately, everything else manages to be simultaneously incredibly convoluted and infuriatingly easy to solve, because, logically, there was only one character who could have had a hand in it. Why the bodies were cut into pieces was not difficult to figure out. A suspicion confirmed when the mask was removed from the severed head. Granted, the idea behind the masked writers was not without merit, but the answer bordered on cheating as it unfairly muddled the case and gave me the idea the murderer had an accomplice, which would have been more convincing and appeared to be in line with an incident early on in the story – assuming it was a hint foreshadowing this part of the solution. This made me very suspicious of one of the suspects. And he turned out to be completely innocent.

So, on a whole, I would say Doll Island Murder Case is a good, but uneven, entry in the series. The story made good use of the tragedy-stained dolls and a setting steeped in doll-lore with an excellent, but ultimately simple, locked room-trick. On the other hand, the murderer was far too easily spotted with the finer details getting muddled in a convoluted plot playing three-card monte with identities. There were also times when it felt as if the plot went through the motions of a Kindaichi story. We have an isolated island with a closed circle of suspects, the avenger-from-the-past motif, the corpse-puzzle and even the dolls aren't entire new to the series (c.f. the excellent House of Wax).

Still, not too bad of a story with a couple of a good ideas, but just not in the same league as such stories as The Headless Samurai and The Legendary Vampire Murders.

I Want to Play a Game: "With a Twist" (2005) by J.A. Konrath

J.A. Konrath is an American writer of more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly crime and horror fiction, who has won the Derringer Award and Ellery Queen Reader's Choice Award, but my only exposure to his work has been "On the Rocks" – a short story anthologized by Mike Ashley in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006). A good little locked room story featuring the forty-something Chicago homicide detective, Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels. This was not the last time an impossible crime would be dropped into her lap.

"With a Twist" originally appeared in the December, 2005, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and republished in 2011 as an ebook. This story is, in my opinion, a minor classic and I'll tell you why in a moment.

The story opens with Jack Daniels and Herb Benedict, of the Chicago Police Department, standing in the blood-splattered living room of the Edward Wyatt, a 67-year-old retiree, who lies splayed out on the beige carpeting "damp with bodily fluids" – his skull had been shattered and "his spinal column looks like a Dutch pretzel." Evidently, Wyatt had fallen from a great height, but the ceiling is no higher than eight foot and the place had been securely locked up. The front and back door were fitted with so-called privacy locks and dead-bolted from the inside. Same story with the windows, which were also locked from the inside.

You probably think the whole scene was staged by a devious killer, but all of the physical evidence, including the locked doors and windows, point towards an impossible suicide.

There are hundreds of carpet fibers embedded in the body and the wall-to-wall carpeting has a secondary splatter, indicating that the body bounced when it hit the floor, which is all consistent with a fall from a great height. A religiously-worded suicide note is found on the bookshelf. Wyatt could have only taken his own life that way, if he had taken off the roof, "jumped out of a plane" and "landed in his living room." So, either way you look at it, the case is an impossible one.

Where the story becomes truly great is when items in the house reveals the victim to have been "a man who loved mysteries, games, and puzzles." The book shelf was crammed with mystery novels, such as G.K. Chesterton and John Sladek, puzzle magazines, books on logical thinking and some old-fashioned (puzzle) games – like Clue and a 1980s Rubik's Cube. They also found cancer drugs. And this is where the game really begins.

Lt. Daniels quickly comes to the conclusion that this was a very ingeniously contrived and elaborately arranged suicide, staged by a puzzle fiend, who wanted to go out on his own terms and hid tell-tale clues, codes and messages all over the house – somewhat reminiscent to an escape room game. But here it gives you the solution to a seemingly impossible puzzle.

So what exactly makes "With a Twist" a minor classic of the modern locked room story? I hate and loath it when an impossible crime is explained away as a suicide-disguised-as-murder, because it's a bullshit cop-out and, worst of all, hacky. It barely requires any imagination or plotting skills. For example, you can have a stabbing inside a sealed, concrete bunker and explain it away by saying the victim committed suicide by walking backwards into the knife that was wedged in between something.

I never expected to read an impossible crime story, with a suicide, that not only worked, but was good. Konrath pulled it off here by making it clear early on Daniels was investigating a suicide. And she had to figure out how it was done. This approach made for an interesting take on the inverted mystery and helped making the more labored aspects of the plot more acceptable, because you know the victim was a dying man who loved puzzles and why he would go through all trouble of turning his suicide into one big riddle – which I completely respect. I liked it there were basically two impossibilities, an impossible fall and a locked house, of which the latter was better than the former. A simple, straightforward, but effective, locked room-trick that nicely played on an old idea.

So, all in all, "With a Twist" is a good and fun detective story with a victim who played the role of a benevolent Jigsaw Killer, from Saw (2004), which resulted in an unusual, but pleasant, locked room tale. I would like to read his third locked room story, "Mixer" (2015), which he apparently co-wrote with Nick Andreychuk, but it appears to have been scrubbed from the internet. It's not available anywhere. Hopefully, that one will get reprinted, because I would like another shot of Jack Daniels.

Kirin's Horn: Case Closed, vol. 68 by Gosho Aoyama

The 68th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, published in the non-English speaking world as Detective Conan, begins with the final chapter of the story that closed the previous volume and has one of those which-of-the-three setups littering the series, but here it was poorly executed with a painfully obvious solution – resulting in an incredibly mediocre story. Luckily, the next two stories are much better.

The plot of the second story centers on another ill-fated attempt by Rachel to get her estranged parents, Richard Moore and Eva Kaden, back together and the birthday of her mother provides her with an opportunity. Rachel has won a weekend getaway at the Shizuoka Seaside Hotel, which is a perfect location for a small, intimate birthday party, but the series murder-magnet, Conan, tagged along with Rachel, Richard and Eva. So a murder interrupting the birthday party is a question of when, not if.

Eva Kaden is a busy, successful attorney at law and had to reschedule an important meeting to the hotel where she was having her birthday party.

Kaden's client are a former model, Akiho Kokubu, who has been the victim of a stalker and her husband, Takehiko Kokubu. Their appointment was to arrange an out-of-court settlement with the mother of the man who was stalking her, all of whom are in the hotel, but, before their scheduled meeting can take place, Akiho's body "appeared out of nowhere" in Kaden's hotel room when she was taking a shower – which is patently impossible. The hotel room has a door that can only be opened with a key card and has a small window without a balcony. So how did the murderer enter or leave the locked room?

The problem of the locked room is practically immediately solved, but this answer reveals a second problem hiding underneath it. How could the murderer have carried out a certain task requiring two, or more, people? One of the clues gave me an idea how this could have been done, but failed to completely envision the trick before it was revealed. So a good, richly clued story with a sugary ending.

The third story marks the return of my favorite recurring side-character, Jirokichi Sebastian, who's Serena Sebastian's rich uncle and sworn nemesis of that infamously elusive thief, Kaito KID. Jirokichi has attempted to capture KID numerous times, such as in volumes 44, 61 and 65, but it was Conan who, time and time again, prevented KID from getting away with a valuable object – something that gave the old man an idea. Jirokichi has gotten the traditional warning note from KID promising that, when the moon is full, he'll appear again "to take the Kirin's Horn," but this time he had added a post-script. A post-script asking Jirokichi to "put aside childish things" and "settle this like men."

Jirokichi deduces from this that he wants adults present, not children, because "children are Kaito KID's weakness." After all, not even a master of disguise, like KID, can pass himself off as a child. So he places Conan and the Junior Detective League in the limelight. Admittedly, this was certainly the most original way to shoehorn them into a case without them just being there. Conan remained surprisingly cool-headed in the face of all those rollings news camera considering that it could blow his cover wide open. Anita at least pulled her hoodie over her head, but Conan like a deer in the headlights.

Anyway, the Kirin's Horn is "a rare piece of amber" containing "a seed that's ten of thousands of years old," which was recently discovered in a shrine constructed by the devilishly ingenious 19th century craftsman, Kichiemon Samizu – whose "tricky devises" has given Conan and KID hard times on several occasions. However, the presence of his long-dead hand, sort of, gave away the mechanics of the plot.

Nevertheless, the impossible situation that emerged from this setup was an intriguing one: the Kirin's Horn is part of a statue, well hidden inside a mechanical pillar, which stands in the middle of a small room with four differently colored pedestals in each corner. All of these pedestals have keyholes and the four colored keys have to be turned at the exactly the same time to make the statue inside the pillar appear. Jirokichi ordered an electrical current to be placed on the pedestals and placed members of the Junior Detective League in front of the keyholes. Finally, Jirokichi nailed the keys into the wall with a big staple.

Well, in spite of all the security measures, the lights go out as predicted and it takes KID only a minute to steal the horn, but he has a problem, because the trap is sprung and he's trapped inside the shrine – along with the police, a film crew and Jirokichi. Uncharacteristically, KID has taken Conan out with a taser and spends most of the story lying in the middle of the room, like John Kramer, but why?

Seriously, I began to suspect KID had gotten his hands on some short-term APTX 4869 and had taken Conan's place, which would be perfectly acceptable within this universe and this would explain why Anita and Conan acted differently towards the news cameras. You know, KID would look practically identical to Conan as a child. Luckily, this turned out not to be the case and the explanation showed a little but more ingenuity. The locked room trick is mainly a mechanical one, which is hardly a spoiler, but still required enough subterfuge and manipulation of the situation to not make the mechanical aspect feel like a cop-out.

As a bonus, KID gives the reader a second locked room mystery when he appears to be trapped, but simply vanishes when the lights go out for a second or two! The solution is very comic book-like, but have come across it before in a short story and admired the skillfully placed red herring that made it very easy to overlook the solution.

Admittedly, this is far from the best story with either Jirokichi, KID or the lingering presence of Kichiemon Samizu, but still found this to be a wonderfully imagined, cleverly constructed and enjoyable story.

Regrettably, this volume is book-ended by two incredibly mediocre stories and the final story deals with a purse snatcher, disguised in a goofy-looking Hyottoko mask, who targets tori-no-ichi markets and his latest victim is Rachel's best friend, Serena Sebastian – who's determined to get revenge. So they're present when the purse snatcher wounds a man with knife and the victim, before losing conscious, gives Conan a cryptic, near-death-message. However, Western readers rarely have a shot solving the codes or dying messages in this, because they nearly impossible to translate. And this story is no different. So that probably detracted something from this pretty average, uninspired which-of-the-three detective story.

All in all, this was a fairly balanced volume with weak stories opening and closing this collection, but wedged in between you'll find two solid cases and one of them has appearances of some of my favorite recurring side-characters. And those two stories were more than enough to leave me satisfied.