Golden Rain (1980) by Douglas Clark

In my previous two blog-posts, I reviewed Douglas Clark's The Libertines (1978) and Roger Ormerod's An Alibi Too Soon (1987), two British genre conservationists, who attempted to modernize the great detective stories of yore during the post-WWII decades and why I grouped them together as modern, neo-traditionalists – which may need a small correction or footnote. Having read two of their novels back-to-back, I noticed a subtle difference in the way they tried to mix the traditional with the modern. 

Ormerod evidently was closer aligned to the modern, psychological and character-driven crime novels (e.g. The Key to the Case, 1992) than Clark, but with unmistakably traditionalists bend. And reveled in the use of double-edged clues, red herrings, twisted alibis and locked room mysteries (e.g. A Shot at Nothing, 1993). Clark was much more covert in his approach and his novels not only masquerade as modern police procedurals, but apparently tend to underplay the traditional elements of the plot a little. Or, to be more accurately, disguising his plots as pharmaceutical mysteries and poison-puzzles. You can do and get away with a lot of trickery that involves poisons, medicine or the victim's medical condition. An approach that allowed so much room that Clark was even able to wrote something as incomparable as The Longest Pleasure (1981).

However, I've only read a handful of Clark's novels and my observation could be completely wrong. So why not read another one to see if the pattern repeats and what better to use than one of his reputed, uncatalogued locked room mystery novels? 

Golden Rain (1980) is the thirteenth title in Clark's Master and Green series and takes place at Bramthorpe College for Girls, "always referred to simply as Bramthorpe," where Miss Mabel Holland reigns in her double role as beloved headmistress and benevolent dictator – as "discipline was strict and punishments were few." She reformed the school most diplomatically, economized without austerity and was very cross when learning one house had saved money on catering one term. Because "the school was not in business to make a profit out of the girls' food fees." Everything was done under her watch to ensure the girls could realize their full potential that, in turn, raised the academic standard of the school. So nobody could have possibly have had a reason to kill her, but Miss Holland becomes the subject of a precarious murder inquiry. An inquiry in which even Scotland Yard has to tread carefully.

Miss Holland lives in the School House and shares the place with a housekeeper, Mrs. Gibson, who has Tuesday as her day off, but, upon her return, she smelled vomit. A trail lead to the bedroom where she discovered the body of Miss Holland. An autopsy revealed she had been poisoned with laburnum seeds, which grow from a poisonous plant with pea-like, yellow flowers commonly called Golden Rain. Miss Holland was "chock full of the seeds," but the local police is more than willing to settle on an accidental poisoning or suicide. She was alone the house, locked up tight, with "no signs of forcible entry," but some people close to her have good reasons to believe she neither committed suicide or accidentally poisoned herself.

Miss Holland was a level-headed, cheerful and happy woman who looked forward to her holiday in Malta and had written her mother to tell she had "a lovely surprise" that would overjoy her, which hardly suggests a suicidal frame of mind. Secondly, Miss Holland was a biologist and botanist who would be able to identify laburnum seeds and know of their toxic qualities. But how do you force a spoonful of crushed laburnum down someone's throat in a locked house without a struggle or a trace of poison anywhere? So what they needed was a big bug from Scotland Yard to clear up this messy case.

Funnily enough, I've read some recent reviews criticizing Clark's overstaffed cast of police characters as a massive waste of resources and manpower, which made me wonder if he faced similar criticism during his lifetime – because it becomes kind of plot-thread in the first-half of the story. The local police is divided with Detective Inspector Lovegrove intending to squash the case at the inquest to get a verdict of suicide or accidental death. Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Green with Detective Sergeants Reed and Berger arrived less than a day before the inquest, which gives them precious little time to come up with evidence to the contrary. And the prickly, autocratic coroner wants plain facts to bring in any other verdict. The presence of a specialized Scotland Yard team "cost money and time," which makes an exhaustive investigation hard to justify without a shred of evidence in "the face of a coroner's unfavourable verdict."

Unfortunately, this angle is only used to pad out the first-half with Clark holding back all the good and clever bits for the second-half.

First of all, the locked room situation is, as expected, completely underplayed and barely acknowledged, but the locked doors and windows were, sort of, incidental. Some of you likely would not even label it as a locked room mystery or impossible crime. Miss Holland was poisoned in a locked house, but the deviously clever piece of plotting is in the poisoning-trick that's almost as good as the one from Detective Conan's "The Loan Shark Murder Case." But it's not merely a trick. Clark skillfully dovetailed the poisoning-trick with all the other facets of the story and employed something common in schools as an original piece of camouflage. Something that threw me off the scent and was initially a little disappointed as it introduced an until then unknown character into the solution. There was no reason to be disappointed. Clark used it to give the murder something "strange for a major crime" like murder, which revealed the camouflage the murderer draped across the poisoning-trick.

I was equally impressed with the late problem of three sets of fingerprints discovered at School House and particular the third set poses a tricky problem, but the explanation either makes you want to slap Clark's shoulder like a good sport or strangle him with his own necktie – nicely fitted the setting and period. Only problem is that it didn't give enough room to be used to its full potential and give the solution more of a punch. But, other than that, the ending and solution placed Clark back on the same footing with Ormerod as a top-tier, neo-traditionalist mystery writer.

Where they differ is Clark's clandestine alliance to the classics as he tries to sneak all the good stuff pass the reader (or critics?) without trying to draw attention to them like a closeted alcoholic lacing his coffee with booze. Almost like he felt it was necessary to lure the reader in with the premise of a contemporary police procedural before hitting them with the more traditional stuff disguised, or presented, as a pharmaceutical or poisoning mystery. Death After Evensong (1969) appears to be an exception to the rule, but than again, there's nothing subtle about shooting someone point blank with a magic-bullet. However, it showed that his work could have been even better had he continued to embrace and indulge in the traditional, plot-driven side of his detective novels.

So, all things considered, Golden Rain begins slowly and delays the most important plot developments and clues until the second-half, but the end result is an excellent, first-class take on the classic, college-set mystery novel and an admirable dovetailing act. Recommended to everyone who appreciate a good, old-fashioned puzzle plot or detective stories that take place in the world of academia.

Just a heads up, I might bookend these two Douglas Clark posts with reviews of Ormerod. So the next one might be one of Ormerod's 1990s mysteries, but haven't made up my mind yet. However, I'll will return to the Golden Age in one of the next two posts. So don't touch that dial!

The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) by Anthony Boucher

The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) is the ambitious first detective novel from the hands of respected genre critic, editor and science-fiction author, Anthony Boucher, which drew heavily on his college days and knowledge of the detective story – delivering what can only be described as a mystery reader's mystery novel. Boucher also used his debut as a stage for his diverse array of talents and interests.

Boucher was "a natural linguist" who was fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and more than averagely proficient in Sanskrit. During his college days, Boucher was active on-and around the stage as an actor, director and playwright, which are all worked into this academic mystery novel. More importantly, the plot, structure of the novel and storytelling radiates with its authors love and understanding of the Grandest Game in the World. Boucher is more restrained in his later novels (The Case of the Solid Key, 1941), but him going all out here was a treat. I can understand why so many readers consider The Case of the Seven of Calvary to be his best detective novel.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary hits the ground running with its dramatis personae that comes with a footnote: "the reader who approaches a mystery novel as a puzzle and a challenge is cautioned that he need keep his eye only on those characters marked by an asterisk; the rest are merely necessary extras." But it doesn't stop there.

The story begins with a prelude in which Anthony Boucher discusses whether, or not, the Watson is "an outworn device" with one of main characters of the story, Martin Lamb, who's a student and resident of International House at the University of California – where he once acted as a Watson to Dr. John Ashwin. A well-known and celebrated professor of Sanskrit whose translations rank among the indispensable standard works of every library worth its name. Martin begins to tell him the story and promises that his account "shall be a model of fair play."

A story that begins with the arrival of Dr. Hugo Schaedel, an unofficial ambassador of the Swiss Republic, who's on a worldwide lecture tour to preach World Peace and argue in favor of a universal brotherhood of man. A brotherhood as exemplified by the "incredible assortment of nationalities" at International House, which is one of the reason why he decided to address them. So a peaceful and harmless man, who was a complete stranger, but, during an evening stroll, Dr. Schaedel is attacked and killed with an ice pick! The murderer left behind a piece of paper with a symbol on it: "a curious sort of italic F, mounted upon three rectangles shaped like steps."

This symbol is quickly identified as the calling card of the Vignards, "Seven of Calvary," which is an obscure Swiss sect of political and religious sectarians who have fomented and fostered "most of the dissensions which have torn Switzerland." Such as their 1920s secret campaign against the League of Nations, but even Dr. Ashwin finds this possibility "a trifle too early Doyle" for his taste.

Dr. Ashwin acts throughout the story as an armchair detective and uses Martin as an accessory to his reasoning (i.e. a Watson) as they discuss and analyze that immortal trinity of detective fiction – namely Motive, Means and Opportunity. They go over the six motives for murder classified by F. Jesse Tennyson in Murder and Its Motives (1924) and exchange ideas why a murderer would leave behind a cyrptic message. Was it an artistic embellishment? A warning to others? A red herring? There's also the question of opportunity and a peculiarity with the alibis or why the murderer used an ice pick to kill his victim. Was it because it's an uncharacteristic and untraceable, but deadly, weapon? Dr. Ashwin funnily remarks that Sherlock Holmes would have deduced from the ice pick that "the murderer was a cuckold," because "his household still employs an icebox in these days of electric refrigeration" and "most probably occasioned by his wife's intrigue with the proverbial iceman."

Boucher made a gutsy move during the first seven chapters by revealing the truth behind the murder, minus the murderer's identity, which is something that has been done before and since, but usually trotted out as a surprise twist towards the end. A surprise that rarely lands. But here it beautifully paved the way for the second murder. An onstage poisoning during a dress rehearsal of a college play, Don Juan Returns, with another cryptic note left on the stage.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary very much belongs to that category of the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective story (to borrow a phrase from Boucher) sharing the essential facts with the reader and then, "in the manner of the admirable Ellery Queen," challenges them to solve it – referring back to all of the clues in the footnotes of the penultimate chapter. And urges the reader to check their solutions against "the obvious certainty of Dr. John Ashwin." That's how you write a detective story!

Nevertheless, classifying The Case of the Seven of Calvary merely as a solid, puzzle-oriented detective novel in the Van Dine-Queen School would be selling Boucher short as a writer in general. All of the locations in the book are places where Boucher had lived, studied or worked and this allowed him to portray university life in an authentic and convincing manner. It feels like a real place filled with real people. Boucher was very brazen for his time when he touched upon the interracial romances at International House and an abortion, which must have raised some of his readers' eyebrows at the time. You have to remember that the author of The Strawstack Murder Case (1936), Kirke Mechem, had his second manuscript rejected because these subjects were central to the plot. The manuscript was lost to history and Mechem never wrote another detective novel.

So it was quite daring for a debuting novelist to casually throw that into the story, but Boucher didn't stop there. Dr. Ashwin and Martin discuss how a very sordid crime, known as the Twin Peaks Murder, usurped the newspaper headlines. A married man who left behind his mistress, naked and dead, in his own car that was parked on Twin Peaks. The murder weapon, covered with fingerprints, was found nearby. A stark contrast with the puzzling, seemingly motiveless, murder of the visiting emissary and the curious symbol that was left beside the corpse.

But these realistic touches and convincingly drawn backdrop helped massage out a flaw usually found in these overindulgent detective stories that are more than a little conscious that they're a detective story ("Well, I'm that worst abortion of nature, an amateur detective"). As fun as they may be to wholesale consumers of detective fiction, they tend to be a trifle artificial, but that was not the case here. The Case of the Seven of Calvary reads like a storybook murderer had escaped the printed page and there just so happened to be a brilliant professor and a student on hand to help sort out the mess as that "imperishable Master of Baker Street" and his indispensable Watson. I also liked how Boucher handled and used, what could be called, an unrealistic, minutely-timed alibi and cleverly employed in the greater good of the plot. And how it related to the second murder. Very 1930s Christopher Bush! And that's another point in its favor!

So, all in all, The Case of the Seven of Calvary is an enthusiastic and vigorous first detective novel from a well-known, highly respected critic and with logical, fairly clued plot that arguably makes it one of the best debuts of the Golden Decade of the Golden Age. Highly recommended!

Up This Crooked Way (1946) by Hugh Holman

Hugh Holman was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina and "a distinguished Southern US academic," who co-founded the Southern Literary Journal, but, more importantly, Holman authored six detective novels – three of which are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). This is not very surprising since Holman expressed his "highest admiration" for constructors of complex, elaborate plots and impossible crimes. And he was "inordinately proud" that John Dickson Carr dedicated his last novel, The Hungry Goblin (1972), to him.

 

So here we have a long-forgotten mystery writer who wrote good, old-fashioned detective stories, full of southern local color and impossible crimes, but Holman's novels have been out-of-print for decades. It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get around to him had I not been gifted a copy of one of Holman's obscure locked room mysteries, Up This Crooked Way (1946).

Five of Holman's detective novels feature Sheriff John Ewell Macready, who represents the law in the fictitious Hart County, South Carolina, which were written during the 1940s and was followed by a standalone mystery, Small Town Corpse (1951) – published as by "Clarence Hunt." Apparently, the Sheriff Macready stories fused the American regional novel with the campus murder mystery. I suppose you can describe Up This Crooked Way as a mix of Timothy Fuller and Addison Simmons, but with an undeniable, erudite hint of Michael Innes.

Sheriff Macready has to share the stage in Up This Crooked Way with Philip Kent, associate professor of English at Abeton College, who has been living under a dark, secretive cloud of suspicion.

Kent used to teach at Axminster College, in the Mid West, where a public quarrel with a colleague provided him with a motive for murder, but a jury finally gave him "a clean slate." The trial had ruined him in the Mid West. Luckily, the president of Axminster believed him to be innocent and arranged a teaching position at Abeton College. Where he rents a room at the home of Walter G. Parkings, of the Abeton Greeting Card Company, who lets rooms exclusively to college folks, but it has come to his attention Kent had once been indicted for murder and doesn't want a possible murderer living under his roof – gives him his ten days' notice. Kent's anger is described as "a white-hot steel rod, tipped at each end with acid." Something that becomes a problem when, mere minutes later, Parkings is found slumped in his chair with a knife-handle sticking out of his chest.

A second problem is that the only, unlocked, way into that room is the door at the end of a hallway, which was under constant observation. Kent even looked into the room minutes before the body was discovered and saw a very lively leg, in green trousers, moving over the arm of the chair. Since nobody came in, or went out, the front door, "somebody in the house must be guilty."

This small circle of suspects comprises of Jacqueline "Jackie" Dean, a reference librarian at the college, who went in the room to pay her rent and found the body. Steele Carlile, a physics instructor, who had an argument with the victim over an unpaid bill after Kent had received his notices. Robert Herbert teaches history and was upstairs when the body was found. John R. Albert is a pressman in the Parkins printing shop and came to see his boss on "a little union business," but stopped on the way out to chat with the new widow, Mrs. Olga. A woman who turns out to have a very unpleasant personality. And the role of outsider is fulfilled by Jackie's older half-sister, Celia Dean.

He understands Macready

A good and promising opening with a murder in a locked and watched room, but it's Sheriff Macready who carries the story with his personality and the way in which he grappled with the case.

Sheriff Macready is a "big, quiet, uncouth man," honest and friendly, but "almost illiterate in speech and a lover of Chaucer." A man who "never had much schooling," but is often found in the college library reading classic literature, philosophy, history and science books. So not "a country hick who had been lucky on two murder cases" and "will grab up the first suspects he finds to keep his reputation," which is what previous experience had learned Kent, but Kent "hastily revised all former opinions of John Macready" when he attended one of his lectures as a special guest – surprising him when he begins to quote Chaucer. This reminded me of Lt. Columbo in the episode The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case (1977) in which Columbo confessed he had always been surrounded by people who were smarter than him and had to work harder, put in more time and read all the books to make it, which worked as the ending of the episode showed. Macready can be viewed as a rural counterpart to Columbo.

Macready confesses to Kent he still has an "an inferiority complex where smart folks are concerned" and enlists him to help dig around the college town, which is highly irregular, but Macready has never "been famous for regularity." There's more than a seemingly impossible stabbing that comes their way.

There are mysterious letters, a blackmail plot, a second, very gruesome murder and a quasi-impossible disappearance from a guarded house, but the murder of Parkins is the strongest aspect of this relatively light plot. How the murderer got in, and out, of the room is a play on an old, shopworn piece of misdirection, but the bit with the leg lifted the locked room-trick above that of a routine job. However, it's not something that will fool any seasoned mystery reader or anyone who has read a copious amount of Case Closed. If you know how the trick was worked, you can spot the murderer by the end of the third chapter and clumsy handled clue didn't exactly helped either. Holman pretty much directed a bright spotlight on it to ensure the already suspicious-minded armchair detective didn't miss it.

Something else that baffled me is that the Axminster College murder eventually faded out of the story, unresolved, without even giving an explanation why the past and present murder were committed under practically identical circumstances. I've only Up This Crooked Way as an example, but I strongly suspect Holman was a better writer than plotter.

So, plot-wise, Up This Crooked Way is not a perfect example of the kind of complex and elaborate impossible crime stories Holman admired, but it's a spirited attempt at constructing one by someone who was described by Steve Lewis and Bill Pronzini “one of the classiest writers to be published by Phoenix Press” – with an appealing lead detective carrying the story. Sheriff Macready is a character you want to spend time with. So my intention is to return to this series by trying to get my hands on such promising-sounding titles as Slay the Murderer (1946) and Another Man's Poison (1947).

The Art School Murders (1943) by Moray Dalton

Last year, Dean Street Press reissued five novels by the then forgotten mystery novelist Katherine M. Renoir, who wrote twenty-nine detective novels as "Moray Dalton," which our resident genre-historian and blogger, Curt Evans, described as "the finest British crime fiction" of the mid-century period – originally published between 1929 and 1951. I thought The Strange Case of Harriet Hale (1936) was overpraised, but The Night of Fear (1931) and Death in the Cup (1932) were good examples of the sophisticated, character-driven mystery novel closely associated with the Crime Queens.

So it was encouraging to see these new editions were successful enough to bring more of Dalton's long out-of-print, nigh forgotten mystery novels back in print. DSP reissued five further titles in March and, while The Black Death (1934) was not reprinted, the line-up still looked promising!

The Art School Murders (1943) is erroneously listed online as a non-series novel, but Evans reckons it's the tenth title in the Inspector Hugh Collier series. A mystery novel tantalizingly combining three popular mise-en-scènes of the Golden Age detective story: murder at a school for artists during the blacked-out nights of the Blitz.

Aldo Morosini is a well-known, celebrated Italian artist who founded the Morosini School of Art with the lofty dreams of discoursing through its hallways "surrounded by an adoring crowd of students," but the eager, hard-working students were unable to "feed his hungry vanity" and the school ceased to amuse him – still "a paying proposition." So he now only comes around at the end of each term to decide who's to be promoted to the life class and has left the teaching in the hands of two staff masters, John Kent and Mr. Hollis. Not surprisingly, the overly expensive art school is dying a slow death with more students leaving than enrolling. War isn't exactly helping, either. Nor is the presence of a femme fatale.

Miss Althea Greville used to be the favorite model of "a big noise in the art world" and went to pieces when he died, but she retained enough of her beauty and allure to continue working as an artistic model. A year previously, Miss Greville was engaged as a model at the school and turned the heads of many of the male students ("you'd never credit the harm a woman like that can do in three weeks"). At the time, one of the masters had pegged her as "potentially dangerous," but she was allowed to come back when another model canceled and this gig ended with the discovery of her blood drenched body behind the screen in the life classroom!

The local police is confronted with "a formidable list of suspects," forty-five students, two masters, one secretary and the caretaker, who all had access to the school and could have been there at the time of murder without attracting any attention – which is quite a departure from all the locked room mysteries of late. So they decide to immediately call in Scotland Yard, but, before Inspector Hugh Collier really can get to work, a second murder is reported!

One of the students, Betty Hayden, is an avid moviegoer who regularly patronized "a small picture-house," the Corona, catering to people "who would rather see a good old film than a poor one fresh from the Hollywood mint." She always sat all the way in back, on the balcony, which is where her body is found. Someone had stabbed her silently, in the dark, while Fred Astaire was singing on the screen. Betty had been hinting that she had seen someone lurking around who shouldn't have been there.

Usually, these so-called "emergency murders" of pesky witnesses or people who simply know too much add very little to the plot, or story-telling, except to help tighten the noose around the murderer's neck. But that was not entirely the case here.

This second murder places Betty's school friend, Cherry Garth, in possible danger, because the murderer might be under the assumption that Betty shared her secret with Cherry. So this second murder actually furthered the plot and story-telling, but just as interesting was the scene of the crime. Surprisingly, I can only name six detective novels and one short story that use a darkened cinema as a stage for murder and have only read four of them. You have Rex Hardinge's very obscure short story, "The Cinema Murder Mystery" (1927). P.R. Shore's extremely obscure The Death Film (1932). One of the victim's in Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) is stabbed inside a movie theater and Gerald Verner's The Whispering Woman (1949) is on my to-be-read pile. John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and Pattern of Murder (2006) made the best use of the cinema setting.

If you cheat a little, you can add E.R. Punshon's Death of a Beauty Queen (1935) and Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, 2002), but Dalton's The Art School Murders is a genuine, if unusual, addition to the list – using the setting more as a psychological clue rather than a convenient place to silently knife someone. The murderer is someone with "an unusual degree of callousness" and this murder showed it.

Collier whittled down the list with fifty potential suspects down to five, which is mostly done by interviewing suspects and witnesses. Brad, of Ah, Sweet Mystery, calls this approach "dragging-the-marsh," in honor of Ngaio Marsh, which can bog down a story. Once again, that was not the case here as the story never flagged, but all of the clues and hints were hidden in the statements and movements of the characters. This has always been a precarious way to clue a detective story to the full satisfaction of pesky armchair detective, but it can be done and the opportunity was present here. Only problem is that this particular murderer needed more, stronger clueing to have been an good, effective surprise. Now it felt like a wombat being pulled out of top hat. You'll understand why when you read it.

The Art School Murders is not as good as The Night of Fear, or Death in the Cup, but certainly better than The Strange Case of Harriet Hale with a plot that made interesting use of the second murder, cinema setting and the nighttime black-outs – seriously hampering the police in keeping "tabs on anyone after dark." Recommended to mystery readers with a special affinity for the (uncrowned) Queens of Crime.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Murder on the Campus (1933)

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) amended Robert Adey's original 1991 revised edition significantly with the inclusion of TV shows, movies, anime and manga, which served as a reminder that I haven't watched a single episode of either Banacek or Kagi no kakatta heya (The Locked Room Murders) – two detective TV-series wholly dedicated to the impossible crime story. A gross oversight that will be corrected before the year draws to a close! But, for now, I have something else that caught my attention.

Locked Room Murders: Supplement listed Arthur T. Horman's screenplay of Murder on the Campus (1933), a low-budget adaptation of Whitman Chambers' The Campanile Murders (1933), with two intriguing-sounding locked room situations. Normally, I would prefer to read the book before watching the movie, but The Campanile Murders is a long out-of-print, hard-to-get novel and Murder on the Campus is in the public domain. So...

Murder on the Campus was directed by Richard Thorpe and have seen it being advertised as "a solid collegiate whodunit," but, purely as an impossible crime story, it stands as a good example of how the locked room mystery can help prop up an otherwise threadbare plot.

The two lead-characters of the movie are Bill Bartlett (Charles Starrett), a reporter for the Times Star, who's mad about a college student, Lillian Voyne (Shirley Grey), who's currently working her way through college by singing in a nightclub. Bartlett is even willing to risk "a term in prison" to get her out of trouble when she becomes the prime suspect in a murder case, but, surprisingly, not a murder linked to her sleazy nightclub gig.

A student, Malcolm Jennings, is heard playing the carillon on top of the campus campanile, a bell tower, when the chiming all of the sudden stops and a gunshot is heard. A crowd immediately gathered in front the locked door of the bell tower and, until the police arrived, "not a soul" had come through the only way in, or out, of the bell tower. At the top of the tower, they find a body with a gunshot to the head without any powder burns or a weapon, "a plain case of murder," but where did the shooter go – since he, or she, is nowhere to be found inside the tower! The discovery is followed by scene in which Captain Ed Kyne (J. Farrell MacDonald), Sergeant Charlie Lorrimer (Dewey Robinson) and Bartett rattle of a series of potential solutions to the locked room problem. Such as a rifle shot from an elevated position (high buildings or the far-away hills), hiding places (elevator shaft) or the use of a parachute or rope. All of them are discredited on the spot.

Unfortunately, the discovery and brief discussion of the murder, demonstrating the sheer impossibility of the shooting ("nobody left there after the shot"), is as good as Murder on the Campus gets as a locked room mystery... until the solution.

The solution to the impossible murder is an interesting one. A combination of two distinctly different locked room techniques, closely associated with two different groups of locked room specialists, which is somewhat of a rarity, but the potentially good locked room-trick was completely wasted here – withholding the only "clue" until the last twenty minutes. A late clue so blatant that it was insulting. There's a second, quasi-impossible situation concerning the fatal bullet that had been fired with a gun that had been locked-up at the time of the murder, but this second impossibility is given even less thought than the locked bell tower. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have recognized it as an impossible crime had it not been for its inclusion in Skupin's Locked Room Murders. And it didn't help that the obviously possibility turned out to be the solution.

So the presentation and solution to the locked bell tower murder is not without interest, but the poor, threadbare story, wedged in between, makes Murder on the Campus merely a curiosity for impossible crime fans. However, what the movie lacked in plot ingenuity, it made up with likable performances, a good pace and an authentic period charm. Even with a poor plot, Murder on the Campus was still fun to watch, if only to see actual actors from the 1930s act out a detective story from that period. Something even the best modern adaptations can never replicate.

As of now, I've no idea what I'll read, or watch, next, but chances are that it will be another entry from Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Rescue Rangers: Case Closed, vol. 72 by Gosho Aoyama

The 72nd volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published in Japan as Detective Conan, begins with the conclusion to the massive story that covered nine of the eleven chapters of the previous volume, which brought Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to London – where Conan becomes engaged in a hunt for Sherlock Holmes-themed clues. A hunt leading him straight to Wimbledon where he has to prevent the public assassination of the Queen of the Grass Court, Minerva Glass.

Plot-wise, the last act of this story is pretty standard for the series with Conan having to locate the culprit in a capacity-filled stadium, which has been done before, but the tennis setting provided a way to make this culprit stick out "like a sore thumb." However, the plot played second fiddle here to the main-characters and particular the story-line between Jimmy/Conan and Rachel.

The second story begins with Conan and Anita discussing the former's adventure in England. Interestingly, Anita addresses my complaint mentioned in my review of volume 71.

I can see how it made sense to keep Jimmy's predicament a secret from Rachel when the series began, but, in the story, more than two years have passed and the secret has become a story-telling device to create these needlessly complicated personal situations – keeping Jimmy trapped between Rachel and Conan. Logically, she should have been told by now. Aoyama will probably resolve this problem by saying she knew all along and the final panel of the series will show them with their son who's a carbon-copy of Conan.

Anita reminds Conan what he has said about not allowing Rachel to get too close to him, because not being able to be with him would only make her unhappier. So he can't be in the spotlight and has "to hide in the wings until the right moment," but the brats of the Junior Detective League overheard them and misinterpreted it as a suggestion to play a game of hide and seek. One of them knows an abandoned building, scheduled to be demolish, perfect for such a game. During the game, they get "an emergency earthquake alert" on their cellphones and they hear someone knocking out the emergency-code for "Rescue Needed," which leads them to two shady looking construction workers. Conan concludes "a person in need of rescue" from kidnappers is trapped somewhere inside the mostly empty building.

Generally, I dislike kidnapping stories because they're seldom any good, or memorable, but there are two reasons why this story is one of the exceptions. Firstly, the clever way in which Conan and the Junior Detective League used their personalized cellphones to squeeze out of a very tight corner. Secondly, the identity of the kidnap victim came as a genuine surprise. I honestly didn't expect that twist!

The second, complete story of this volume brings Conan, Rachel and Serena Sebastian to Teitan University, renamed here as Baker University, where Richard Moore giving a lecture, but "he's just drooling over college girls" and a group of Film Majors offers them a more palpable sight – a haunted house exhibition. Students are working on a horror movie as their project thesis and want to make it "as realistic as possible." So they created a house of corpses and want to test it on the girls, because Rachel and Serena have seen dead bodies before. The exhibition does what it intended to do... scaring the girls.

One of the film students, Anna Tadami, is strapped to an operating-table and surrounded by dummy surgeons, but, when they walked pass this scene, she started "trembling and thrashing her legs." She shook so hard "it rattled the bed." Anna Tadami was dead! There's "an almond smell" at her mouth and "the remains of capsule between her teeth," which means suicide as Rachel and Serena saw nobody else standing around the operating-table. So a quasi-impossible crime with an obvious murderer, a hack stage-trick and a motive that felt tacked on resulting in an average story at best.

The third case is another kidnap story, of sorts, but this time without Conan, because he's in bed with a serious cold. Conan was supposed to meet the Junior Detective League at Amy's house to play karuta, a Japanese card game, but, when Conan is video chatting with them on his cellphone, a young boy knock's at the door of Amy's department – screaming that there are "bad people" he doesn't know in his apartment. Masao is a boy with a reputation in the apartment building for playing pranks and telling lies, but cries he doesn't know the man and woman who introduce themselves as his parents. And he's dragged back into his apartment. Conan tells them to call the police, but they decide to investigate Amy's neighbors for themselves.

At the heart of the story is a coded message Masao surreptitiously sends under the nose of the culprits to the Junior Detective League over a game of karuta, but this is one of those language-based codes. So practically unsolvable for most non-Japanese speaking readers. Not a bad story, but a pretty minor one.

Sadly, the last chapter is the beginning of new story that will continue in volume 73 and the premise is intriguing, to say the least! Richard Moore is hired to protect the matriarch of the Hoshina family, Rukako Hoshina, who's obsessed with clocks and the ancestral manor house is ticking to the brim with clocks – even has a clock tower. Rukako Hoshina received a death threat accusing her disrespecting "the flow of time" and she'll die at the time she "came into this world." The letter was signed with the moniker, The Guardian of Time. I can't wait to read the rest of the story!

So, all things considered, this volume can be summed up as an average entry with only one good story and the conclusion of the London-case as its sole standout moment. I don't think it helped either that it ended with a teaser of a case that already promises to be much better than the three complete cases that preceded it. Oh, well, here's hoping for the best in the next volume!

The Frozen Teacher: "The Touch of Kolyada" (1989) by Edward D. Hoch

December is nearly upon us and, if you're an incurable mystery addict, you probably have some of festive detective novels, short stories and perhaps even an anthology, or two, lined up to read during the Christmas season – a Victorian tradition that is still very much alive in the detective story. One of my reasons to always start relatively early with reading and reviewing these seasonal mysteries is that the holiday season has the habit to begin prematurely in my country. You can usually get Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas) candy as early as September or October.

Another reason is that I want to give my fellow mystery addicts a recommendation or two, before December, which is why I have tackled so many of the lesser-known Christmas-themed mystery novels. Such as Moray Dalton's The Night of Fear (1931), C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Francis Duncan's Murder for Christmas (1949).

So, today, I have a festive, quasi-impossible crime story that was intended for last year, but didn't get around to reading it then.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Touch of Kolyada" was originally written for a Christmas-themed anthology, Mistletoe Mysteries: Tales of Yuletide Murder (1989), edited by award-winning mystery writer, Charlotte Macleod. The detective of the story is the first detective-character Hoch ever created, Simon Ark, who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest wandering the world in the hope of meeting the devil in combat.

When the story opens, Simon Ark has been living at a university near "the northern tip of Manhattan," where he has been studying medieval legends, but "an unusual situation" has developed among some of his academic friends – a situation Ark described as "a mystery of good rather than evil." There are many Russian emigres on the faculty, who moved there with the family over the past twenty years. But a figure from Russian folklore appears to have followed them to America.

Kolyada is a beautiful elf maiden, cloaked in "a luxurious white robe and hood," who's said to ride a sleigh, from house to house, delivering gifts much as "Santa Claus does in Western countries." Recently, the children of the faculty members claim to have seen Kolyada. She has even entered homes to leave gifts for the children. So a very benevolent mystery, but it takes a dark, sinister turn when Ark and the narrator witness Kolyada appear behind the window of Professor Trevitz house.

A figure in a white-hooded robe carrying a basket, crammed with candy and fruit, who goes from the kitchen into the living-room where she bends over Professor Trevitz, who's sitting in a chair, touches his cheek with her outstretched fingers – only to flee when Ark yells out her name. When they enter the place, they discover the icy cold, solidly frozen body of the professor sitting in the chair. Suggesting that he had instantly frozen to death the moment the robed figure had touched him.

Unfortunately, Hoch never developed this premise into a full-fledged impossible crime and the story, which is not one of his greatest, sheds the intrigue of the opening pages to become regular, somewhat routine, detective story. This was a bit disappointing. Nonetheless, it was still a fun and unusual Christmas-themed detective story with a memorable set piece. I also enjoyed how much of the plot resembled the kind of stories you often find in Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed (Detective Conan) series. I can easily imagine Conan becoming involved with an utterly bizarre, borderline impossible murder apparently committed by ghostly figure from folklore and the motive didn't help dispel that illusion.

A note for the curious: I took "The Frozen Teacher," in the title of this blog-post, from an early Detective Conan story collected in volumes 14 and 15, which have been translated and are currently available in English. Just a friendly reminder that there's gold in those hills.

Anyway, "The Touch of Kolyada" is hardly one of Hoch's greatest detective stories, but a perfectly suitable Christmas read with a great premise, a memorable scene and a serviceable ending. So a little average, perhaps, but certainly not bad.