The Secret of the Pointed Tower (1937) by Pierre Véry

Last year, I reviewed the short story "Le mystére de la chambre verte" ("The Mystery of the Green Room," 1936) by Pierre Véry, "novelist of adventure, novelist of the fantastic," who believed in saving "what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" ("...full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery") – essentially wrote fairy tales for grown-ups. One of his few works to be translated into English is L'assassinat du Pére Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) and is a fine example of Véry's home blend of the formal, 1930s detective story with his brand of gentle surrealism.

I mentioned in the review that the few translations like the previously mentioned seasonal mystery novel and the now even rarer English edition of Le thé des vieilles dames (The Old Ladies' Tea Party, 1937) have since gone out-of-print. There seemed to be no plans or rumors swirling around at the time to translate Véry's other celebrated novels such as Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) and Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934). Little did I know that Crippen & Landru was putting the finishing touches to a brand new translation that was published back in December.

Renaissance man and author of Death and the Conjuror (2022), The Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre (2024), Tom Mead, translated Véry's famous collection of short stories, Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937) – which at the time caught the attention of Ellery Queen. This first English edition opens with a photocopy of a handwritten letter from Frederic Dannay to Véry thanking him for sending a copy of Les veillées de la Tour Pointue and hoped to see some of the short stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Something that would not happen until "The Mystery of the Green Room" appeared in the August, 2011, issue of EQMM. More than sixty years after Dannay wrote the letter and now we have the whole collection.

In addition to translating this collection, Tom Mead penned insightful introduction that presented Pierre Véry as a writer who a "unique path" through the Golden Age of the French detective story. A mystery writer enjoying "the distinction of being both an exponent and a critic of the Golden Age" whose tales of mystery and imagination "often existed outside of the strict parameters of the conventional whodunit." Véry's mystery output consists of everything ranging from everything subversive reimaginings and parodies to the traditional locked room mystery, but always distinguishable by their "often-eccentric blending of genres" and his "taste for the surreal or fantastical."

Before diving into this collection of short stories, I should note that the Crippen & Landru edition neglected to list the original French titles and publication dates. I found the original French titles, but have no idea when, or where, they first published. So, lacking the publication information, this one is going to be slightly less autistic pedantic than most short story collection reviews that can be found on this blog.

The Secret of the Pointed Tower begins with a short chapter, "A Message to the Reader," in which Pierre Véry himself is roaming the streets of nighttime Paris in search of somewhere, anywhere, to hang a man ("such is the morbid fate of mystery writers...") when he accidentally discovered a secret passage – revealing a dark, narrow passage. A passage leading to a hidden attic room in the pointed tower of the police headquarters, on the Quai des Orfevres, where he finds a pile of handwritten reports on "all kinds of crimes, burglaries, mysteries, enigmas." But written down as dry, clinical reports. These are full-fledged stories that Véry immediately began to copy to present to his audience under the title The Secret of the Pointed Tower. A near, simple little framing device to tie these vastly different stories together.

"Le menton d'Urbin" ("Urbin's Chin") is the first of these short stories following a so-called book-taker, "specialist in the theft of rare tomes," named Simonet. A bibliophile book-taker with designs on "a renowned collection of literary rarities" tucked away in the private library of a collector, Urbin. Simonet's carefully prepared burglary goes entirely wrong when coming across the bloodied, curled up remains of Urbin inside a crate, which is how the gardener finds him and the police believe him guilty. Simonet uses his imprisonment to work out whom of the potentially five suspects killed Urbin ("...by keeping quiet I might just be able to turn a decent profit out of this"). This is a fun little mystery caper and solid opening story that reads like a direct ancestor of the Bernie Rhodenbarr series by Lawrence Block. Loved it!

"Police technique" (no translation needed) concerns the murder of Yvette Lemoine and the
problem her death poses the police. Only person who appears to have had the opportunity to deliver the fatal blows is her cousin, Marcel, but he claims to be innocent and has no motive. Then the police are called the bedside of Yvette who says with her dying breath, "my uncles," but both men have "indisputable alibis." Another possible interpretation of those dying words implicates her fiancé, which again leads the police into a dead end. It's not until Véry's lawyer and sometimes detective, Prosper Lepicq, appears to confront the murderer that the case gets solved, but not in the way Lepicq had hoped. I think this story is more interesting for the style than the plot as it pulls a potential locked room mystery, dying message, unbreakable alibis and even some forensic shenanigans from the old bag of tricks – before ending as a dark, psychological crime story. Lepicq actions at the end echoes some of the practices of his American counterparts like Perry Mason and John J. Malone.

The next story "Le disparition of d'Emmeline Poke" ("The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke") is about the disappearance Miss Emmeline Poke. She was last seen by two witnesses walking home through the woods, in the company of her brother, but she never arrived home. Her brothers were both arrested, the ground around their shed dug up and the woods comb through. Not a trace of the body. A problem arises when one of the investigators points out that one of the witnesses is hard of hearing, while the other is extremely long-sighted. So what did they really see in the woods? And what happened to the body, if there's a body? This could have been a good story, but the actions of one of the characters killed it for me. I suppose the moral of the story is (ROT13) qba'g unir nppbzcyvprf jura pbzzvggvat zheqre, rfcrpvnyyl jura gurl'er fghcvq.

"Police montée," translated here as "The Tale of a Tartlet," is one of my favorite stories from this collection. A charming, playful and excellent take on both the classical whodunit and inverted mysteries. Léon Petitquartier is the seventeen year old son of a pastry chef and an arachnid collector who had been given the unpleasant task of euthanizing the old family dog, Vega ("...the animal was quite literally dying on its feet"). Léon poisoned a honey tartlet with cyanide as a final meal for Vega, but, while being distracted for a few minutes, the poisoned tartlet disappears from the kitchen table. So now Léon has to wait nervously for the news to break that someone has been mysteriously poisoned, but the events doesn't quite play out like the teenager expected. This story really benefited from being longest story in the collection and particularly liked how the village community reacted to the news or simply the simple, but excellent, explanation to the whole mystery.

"La multiplication des négres," re-titled for this collection as "The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov," tails a penniless Russian in Paris, "stumbling from weariness and weeping with hunger, desperate and begging," who believes a black policeman is hunting for him – which has to do with a "detestable thing" that happened in a dark, narrow street. Maxim Zapyrov tells his unusual story to a M. Paul. A crime story with a predictable twist and not really my poison, but not bad for what it is.

"Le prisonnier espagnol" ("The Spanish Prisoner") is modeled on the classic and titular confidence trick, which is still around today, but changed and adapted along with the times. You might know it as the Nigerian Prince email scam. In this story, the poor Celestin Lainé who surprisingly receives a letter from someone imprisoned in Spain and needs help to collect a trunk containing nearly two million francs. However, Lainé has four very rich friends and they decide to respond to the letter with somewhat predictable results. The key word there's somewhat, because the devil is always in the details and the end result is a good, solid and fun scam story. I love good scam story and the next one is even better.

"Les 700,000 radis roses" ("The 700,000 Pink Radishes") is not a locked room mystery or impossible crime, of any kind, but this story has a delightful, utterly bizarre plot and premise that will be appreciated by fans of John Dickson Carr and Paul Halter. The great Parisian publisher M. Hippolyte Gour keeps receiving a baffling, one-sided correspondence about the purchase of 700,000 pink radishes ("they are guaranteed fresh and free of worm bites") and an equal amount of radish leaves ("these will be dispatched to your personal address"). And, before long, his personal secretaries either get attacked or kidnapped. The case kicked up so much dust that it attracted "the attention of a band of popular mystery novelists" who "were trying to apply the method of their fictional detectives," but the problem of the 700,000 pink radishes seriously tasked their wits. Until they had their storybook moment, "where the police failed, the amateur sleuths succeeded," which comes with a small, delightful twist at the end. More importantly, this is one of those few detective story that manages to do something meaningful with a kidnapping plot (of sorts).

The next short story is "La soupe du pape" ("Soupe du Pape") and reads like Véry tried to recapture the magic of "Les 700,000 radis roses" without much success. A policeman finds a dozen pearls while shelling peas. So has to figure out where the pearls came from, how they ended up in his bag of peas and who stole them. This story did nothing for me.

The next two short stories are the previously mentioned "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "L'assassin" ("The Killer"), but have already reviewed the former (see link above) and the latter is a short-short barely covering two full pages. Fortunately, The Secret of the Pointed Tower concludes with an absolute banger!

"Cours d'instruction criminelle" ("A Lesson in Crime") is not really a mystery short story, but a science-fiction musing on the distant future, somewhere around the year 2500, where crime fiction "gradually took precedence over all other forms of literature" – until they all "fell into disrepute and then obscurity." In those future years, the great mystery writers of the early twentieth century have become the classics school children study from seventh grade onward. The study and history of the traditional detective story is central in every classroom ("if locked-room Y is shaped like an isosceles triangle ABC and locked-room Z is a hexagon MNOPQR, calculate...") and children ask their mothers how they would poison their dad or quiz their father on how he would snuff out his mistress! The ending is both humorous and very perceptive as it's something I can see happening under those circumstances, but Véry's vision of the year twenty-five hundred nonetheless feels like home. But I'm stuck with you lot. What can you do?

The Secret of the Pointed Tower ends with a parting message to the reader from Véry, "when I have more stories, you will be the first to know," but no idea if a second collection ever materialized. Tom Mead also included several pages of explanatory notes, which I always enjoy to find in translated mystery novels or collections.

So, all in all, the short stories collected in The Secret of the Pointed Tower perfectly demonstrates why Véry considered the detective story to be "the brother of the fairy tale." When blended with Véry's home brewed brand of surrealism, you don't always get the most orthodox or traditionally-styled detective stories. You can hardly call any of the short stories traditional, Golden Age-style mysteries, but that doesn't mean the quality isn't there. "The Tale of the Tartlet," "The 700,000 Pink Radishes," "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "A Lesson in Crime" are all first-rate for variously different reasons. "Urbin's Chin" and "The Spanish Prisoner" are simply good, solid stories. "Police Technique" is not quite as good, or solid, but interesting in how it played with different styles and tropes. Only "The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke," "The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov" and "Soupe du Pape" were off the mark. Not much can be said about the two-page short-short. That's not a bad return for a collection as varied as The Secret of the Pointed Tower. More importantly, the fact that it was translated by Tom Mead is very hopeful for the future. John Pugmire is no longer alone in bringing these French-language novels and short stories to an international audience and the changes of getting a translation of Véry's legendary locked room mystery novel The Four Vipers sooner rather than later has gone up! In short, The Secret of the Pointed Tower is indeed something of a lost classic and comes highly recommended to fans of the short crime fiction.

Three Card Murder (2023) by J.L. Blackhurst

Jenny Blackhurst is a British crime-and thriller novelist who debuted a decade ago with How I Lost You (2014) and has since written seven more psychological thrillers, which are of no interest to me, but last year she started a new series – published as by "J.L. Blackhurst." Three Card Murder (2023) was alluringly touted as "a real puzzle box of a story" with "three deviously clever impossible crimes." Blackhurst described the book herself as "Jonathan Creek meets Hustle" (the BBC TV-series, not the 2019 movie), but you have to be wary these days of novels falsely presented as locked room mysteries. Several reviews appeared assuring that Three Card Murder is the real deal with no less than three genuine locked room murders. What sealed it is that this series is called "The Impossible Crimes Series" with Smoke and Murders (2024) scheduled for release in September.

That somewhat alleviated some of my initial doubt and hesitancy when it comes to modern crime fiction. One of the alarm bells is what's printed on the cover, "One sister is a cop. The other is a con artist. Both of them are suspects," which sounds more like a character-driven crime novel than an intricately-plotted, triple locked room mystery. So was glad to find that the character-arc of the protagonists were integral to the puzzle plot.

Acting Detective Inspector Tess Fox, of Sussex Major Crimes Team, has a secret. She's the daughter of "Brighton and Hove's biggest confidence men," Frank Jacobs, who runs a crew (his "family") with Sarah at his right hand. Fifteen years ago, Tess turned up at their doorstep as the long-lost prodigal daughter and stays with them for six months, but then she and her step-sister Sarah got into some serious trouble, which made Tess decide to leave the Jacobs to join the police as "some kind of redemption quest" – which is a big no-no in the Jacobs family. So fifteen years come, and go, when Tess gets to handle and lead her first murder investigation. A man had his throat cut and thrown from the third-floor balcony of a high-rise flat, but there a few oddities about this brutal murder. Firstly, the front door is both locked and boarded-up on the inside. Secondly, the CCTV showed nobody left the flat after the body landed outside on the pavement. Apparently, "a man who had been sliced from one side of his neck to the other" and "thrown from a third-floor balcony by the invisible man himself."

So more than enough complications to untangle and earn her stripes as an acting detective inspector, but Tess recognizes the victim, knows he had a connection with Sarah and that incident fifteen years ago. There are even clues at the crime scene that hint at it, which should not be possible as only two people knew what really happened. Tess and Sarah.

Tess tries to reconnect with Sarah, not as a suspect at first ("I do illusions, not murders"), but to help explain the murderer's miraculous exit from the scene of the crime. After all, "when it came to illusions and sleight of hand, Sarah had been an expert, even fifteen years ago." However, their uneasy reunion is beset with trouble as nobody is supposed to know Tess is the daughter of the man who heads a crew "consisting of forgers, illusionists, actors, street magicians and all manner of other grifters" – something could get her fired ("every case I've ever worked on would be called into question"). Likewise, Sarah can't be seen with her step-sister who works for the enemy. This makes for great storytelling and their character-arc is nicely braided into an engrossing plot and intriguing locked room-puzzle. I really liked the character of Sarah. Not only because she's a self-declared "student of Dr Fell, a rival perhaps to Merivale (sic) and Dr Hawthorne" who hit upon exactly the same two solutions for the first locked room that immediately occurred to me, which then got demolished as false-solution, but how she dons and shreds disguises and personalities like she's Kaito KID. Blackhurst obviously intended to have some fun with this series. So, as a fan of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series, I found that to be a small treat.

While the two sisters work out their issues, on top of a locked room murder, the invisible killer is still roaming the city and strikes two more times under seemingly impossible circumstances. One man is stabbed by the invisible killer inside an elevator and the third one is shot in a hotel room locked and chained from the inside. Every murder and discovery hands Tess more evidence against Sarah, while simultaneously driving Tess into a corner. Like I said, it all makes for good, fun read with the three impossible crimes giving weight to the plot. But is it any good purely as a detective story and locked room mystery?

 

 

First of all, I think I speak for all rabid locked room fans that we love and adore David Renwick's Jonathan Creek series. If only because episodes like Danse Macabre (1998) and Black Canary (1998) gives us a glimpse of what good, faithfully done adaptations of Carter Dickson, Edward D. Hoch and Hake Talbot would look and feel like. There is, however, a gulf in quality between the best and worst episodes large enough for an entire fleet of aircraft carriers to sail through. Generally, Jonathan Creek is not the best series to use as a model. Blackhurst definitely modelled Three Card Murder on Renwick's plotting. The first locked room (SPOILER/ROT13: erjbexf gur gevpxf sebz gur wbanguna perrx rcvfbqrf ubhfr bs zbaxrlf naq zbgure erqpnc vagb fbzrguvat gung yrsg zr hapbaivaprq, ohg gur nggrzcg vf nccerpvngrq. The stabbing in the elevator has a perfectly fine solution, but is given the least amount of attention as the trick would eventually have revealed itself (va gur nhgbcfl naq gbkvpbybtl ercbegf). The third and last murder has something clever and perhaps even new to offer to the locked room mystery. A good, simple enough trick, but a satisfying one and particular how it's executed. Just one observation: jnf vg ernyyl arprffnel gb uvqr gur zveebe jvgu fhpu n tvzzvpx, orpnhfr vg purncraf gur pber vqrn bs gur gevpx n ovg naq gur cerfrapr bs n zveebe jbhyq abg vzzrqvngryl tvira njnl ubj vg pbhyq or hfrq gb yvar hc gur xvyy fubg.

So while the trio of locked room-puzzles are somewhat uneven in quality, best one saved for last, it's the jack-in-the-box approach to the who-and why that ultimately left me in two minds about Three Card Murder – coming after a thoroughly enjoyable read. But the identity of the murderer is impossible to anticipate. And what drove this person to murder somehow seemed almost flimsy compared to the perceived motive. I remember not everyone appreciated my lukewarm "hot take" on Tom Mead's Death and the Conjuror (2022) and feel a little pang of guilt for ending this review so tepidly, but found the conclusion to this otherwise fun and excellent mystery to be a bit of a letdown. Nevertheless, Three Card Murder is a spirited first stab at the locked room mystery that tried to do something different with it and mostly succeeded. I never expect a writer swim or drown on their first try, especially in a specialized area such as the traditional detective story and locked room mystery. So very much look forward to see where the series goes from here and what it will bring to the locked room revival. One thing is for sure, I really should have waited with "The Locked Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century" until 2025.

Fossils of the Universe: Q.E.D, vol. 4 by Motohiro Katou

Back in July, I reviewed the 3rd volume in the Q.E.D. series, created by Motohiro Katou, which comprised of two excellent, well-balanced novella-length stories that fleshed out some of main-characters and gave the reader a classic, puzzle-oriented detective story – set in an abandoned star observatory on a lonely, snow-capped mountain peak. I ended my review with the half-promise to read the next two volumes in the weeks ahead, but, as you probably noticed, it's 2020 now. And no further reviews have materialized over the past six months.

So, as my belated New Year's resolution, I intend to get as close to volume 10 as possible before end of the year, because I really like Q.E.D. Even though I can't quite put my finger on what exactly intrigues me about series.

The fourth volume of Q.E.D. opens with "1st, April, 1999," a story demonstrating the difference between Q.E.D. and Case Closed, Detective Academy Q or The Kindaichi Case Files, focusing on a scam coinciding with an April Fool's Lying Tournament. Curiously, the scam has a slight hint of Ruritania!

Sou Touma is the 16-year-old protagonist, a boy genius and former MIT graduate student, who won the 1998 April Fool Club's annual contest "to see who can tell the best lie or pull the best prank," but now he has to participate again to defend his title – or else "everyone will be mad." Particularly, the club member who came in second, Miss Gria Elenoar. A second plot-thread is introduced when Touma meets an old acquaintance from his days as an MIT student, Cliff Bhaum, who's Vice-Minister, of Foreign Affairs, of a developing nation, the Kingdom of Clavius. Bhaum is in Japan to entice a group of greedy businessman, who have preyed on his country before, to reinvest a big sum of money and resources into Clavius. But this time, the offer is actually a baited trap. Touma's energetic, plucky school friend, Kana Mizuhara, convinces him to help Bhaum.

Bhaum approaches the group of businessmen, representing D Corporation, with an unappealing, hardly profitable offer to invest in the development of an iron ore mine, but a simple remark gave them second thoughts. When the meeting ended, Bhaum regrettably remarked that "the Japanese are not willing to research "The Fossil" together."

The fossil in question is a tiny, magnetic stone that only has a southern pole. A compass placed on any side of the stone will always "point towards the south direction," which means the stone is made up of monopole particles that, until now, had been purely hypothetical and referred to as fossil particles – as they are considered "a remnant of the beginning of the universe." A discovery that would grant humanity access to "large amounts of energy" and "fame and fortune to the one who finds it."

So you can probably see where this story is going. It's classic con/scam story in which greedy people want to get something for practically nothing and are given practically nothing for something, but don't expect any rug-pulling or surprising reversals that cast the story in an entirely different late. What you see, is what you get. "1st, April, 1999," is a minor, but amusing, story that handily brought two very different plot-threads together in a satisfactory way. The ending was a nice, gentle touch to the characterization of Touma and Mizuhara.

A note for the curious: Mizuhara gives the businessman a demonstration of the monopole stone with a magnet, which you can classify as a quasi-impossible problem, but I can already feel JJ judging me.

The second story, "Jacob's Ladder," sees the return of two characters, Eva and Loki, who previously appeared in "Breakthrough" from the third volume, but what makes this story an interesting curiosity is that it's basically a techno-thriller with hints of a locked room mystery inside a computer-rendered environment! The story is obviously a product of its time.

Touma and Mizuhara are in the downtown area of Tokyo when all of the traffic lights go haywire, paralyzing part of the city with "large-scale traffic jams and train delays" due "to accidents," which ended with 58 injuries and no clear explanation given – suggesting to Touma that "the government is just trying to hush things up." A suspicion that is confirmed when Loki returns to Japan with the news that Eva has been arrested by the CIA in connection with the incident in downtown Tokyo.

Eva is the manager of the Artificial Life lab, at MIT, where they were researching "Artificial Life in computers" and the crash of the traffic control systems was caused by her A.I. But how did it get out? The computers in MIT's laboratory are separated from external connections by "a barrier called a firewall." So how did the A.I. bypass the firewall and ended up on a Japanese server, where it connected with the internet, to wreak havoc on the traffic control system? A second incident shows the threat is spreading with the potential to "crash all the computers in the world." A potential crisis that was on everyone's mind at the time the story was published.

This volume was originally published in September 10, 1999, when many people feared the "Millennium Bug," or Y2K, would crash the computerized world upon the rollover from '99 to '00, which makes the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900 to computers – potentially setting humanity back to the pre-industrialist age. Touma, Mizuhara and Loki have to try to prevent this in order to clear Eva's, which provides the story with a technically fascinating, possibly unique problem. What makes a "clan" of artificially intelligent units tick? Why did this stable, harmonious and peaceful artificially-rendered world ended in an all-out war of aggression? Can an answer be found in one of the four core commands that the units have to obey, no matter what? A set of rules comparable Isaac Asimov's The Three Laws of Robotics. Just not used as fairly as in Asimov's masterpiece, The Caves of Steel (1954).

"Jacob's Ladder" is a techno-thriller mystery story with a ton of plot exposition, explaining all the technical background details to the reader, but the story has a surprisingly depressing ending that humanized "computer programs bound by a set of rules" – steeped in biblical imagery. So, a story with an interesting and even original idea, but the temptation to relay on the "secret passages" (hacking) of detective stories/plot-threads centering on computers killed it as a fair play mystery. Sadly, the reason why the blocked-by-firewall mystery didn't turn into a one-of-a-kind impossible crime. I still sort of liked it though.

On a whole, I don't think the fourth volume was as strong as the previous one with two stories that had better premises than solutions, but, in spite of their imperfections, I quite enjoyed reading them. So you can expect a review of the next volume by springtime (let's start slowly).

Scattershot: Hoch, Line and Sinker

"One's plots are necessarily improbable, but I believe in making sure that they are not impossible."

- Mr. Judd (Edmund Crispin's Buried for Pleasure, 1948)

By the time 1967 came rolling around, the roaring Golden Age of Detective Fiction had calmed down, but many of the stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine were like glowing embers that kept flicking in its hearth. The Giant of Short Stories, Edward D. Hoch, penned nearly a thousand of them and during the year mentioned he wrote three that represented the basic approaches to plotting a mystery – a Who, How-and Whydunit and were reprinted together in the January, 1969 issue of EQMM. You'll be surprise to find out which of the three I liked the most, but then again, that just might have given it away. 

Edward D. Hoch

"Murder Offstage" is a Whodunit in the guise of an inverted detective story as the cast/crew of the critically acclaimed Morning Five are plotting the murder of Leonardo Flood, who has been blackmailing them with a collection of negatives of embarrassing photographs. They hatch a plan, however, the person who was supposed to snuff Flood only dims his lights for a few moments and turns up empty handed after searching the apartment top-to-bottom, but one of them went back to finish the job. But who?

The subplot of a missing, hard-to-find object was a nice nod to Ellery Queen and gave the story shades of the locked room mystery, but I think Hoch wanted to be sure we sympathized with the murderer by going for a darker ending than you would expect from a story about a murdered blackmailer. If you bump off a blackmailer in a GAD story, a bored police constable will, for the briefest of moments, allow himself to be distracted from his paperwork to caution you not to clog the Thames with it before waving you away.

"Every Fifth Man" is a hardboiled narrative set in Constanera, a war torn country of cities and jungle villages, where our nameless narrator goes back to fight the government of General Diam, but they're captured and doomed to be executed. A custom of the country for defeated foes is to send down the following order: Kill every fifth man and release the others. This is what the twenty-three captured men have to look forward to, but the devious General Diam has send down five identical execution orders and what ensues is a mathematical battle-of-wits to save as many lives from the firing squad as possible. And than something goes horribly wrong that raises the question how the narrator cheated the figurative hangman. But the coup de grâce was finding out how in your face the two main clues were and with one of those solutions that explains everything in the very last sentence of the story. This is exactly why Hoch will always be a staple of mystery anthologies.

Note for the curious: you can find these hardboiled puzzles in the series Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, in which recursive reasoning sessions are fought out at gunpoint and bomb races. This fusion of extremely hardboiled situations while maintaining a firm grip on logic can work, that is, if someone who can also plot is writing it.

Finally, we come to "The Nile Cat," in which Professor Patrick J. Boutan of Middle Eastern Civilizations has just finished smashing in the skull of Henry Yardley, a graduate student, in the Egyptian Room of the University Museum. Lt. Fritz is baffled when he learns that the professor had no idea who the man he just murdered in cold blood was and therefore none of the conventional motives apply to him – like money, love or revenge. Professor Boutan begins to explain himself with a story involving one of the artifacts in the room, a statue of a cat representing Bastet, Godess of Joy, recovered in 1922 from the banks of the Nile, and even when only the question of the why has to be answered, Hoch manages to produce something as satisfying as what you'd expect from the best of his who-and howdunits. This ingenious motive was retooled for a TV mystery series from the 1970s, but I can't be more precise than that without giving away Hoch's, because the motive was the only remarkable part about that particular episode. 

Limestone cat of the Goddess Bastet found in 2010 (c)

Hold on! I've found one more story of the interest that I can only describe as the smoking gun proving that the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler has been playing pranks on the members of the mystery blogosphere instead of haunting pubs and hotels to draw in guests like a normal ghost. So if you were one of those doubters who brushed everything away as coincidences, because it's something to be expected within a group of people who read the same kind of books, you can chew on this "coincidence" as an appetizer for crow pie. Richard Curtis wrote a little-known story entitled "Odds Bodkins and the Locked Room Caper."

Godfrey "Odds" Bodkins is the proprietor of a betting parlor off Curzon Street and has a lavishly furnished, soundproof and sealed Horse Room where rich clients can spend their money away from the common people in an environment eliminating any way of information leaking in from the outside. Well, someone has been laboring on an impressive winning streak at the betting table and Bodkins suspect he's being filched – and draws in the help of his friend Tim Tubb. If you just had a sense of déjà-vu, don't worry, it's not a glitch in the matrix, because you can find the premise (and solution) in my barely two month old post "Out of the Tidy, Clipped Maze of Fiction: More Real-Life Locked Room Mysteries."

Luckily, this caper is not just a fictionalized account and Curtis extracts another solution from the actual explanation, which is given halfway through the story, for a fantastic second act with conmen trying to get one over each other – colliding into a genuine treat for a fan of both impossible crimes and shows like Leverage.

Of course, this leaves us with the unsettling, but all telling, question of how likely it's that I found an obscure story in a detective magazine from the sixties that just so happens to be based on a actual locked room mystery that I wrote about only two months ago! You'll probably retort that I read a sizable amount of them/post a lot on the subject and therefore it's not surprising at all that it happened to me, but insist on besmirching the name of a man dead for more than half century in a doomed attempt to translate some of that Golden Age atmosphere to morgue-like sterility of the internet. And that's true, unromantic of you to think so, but absolutely true.

But yes, they're most likely just coincidences, like how I found Curtis' real-life based locked room caper I wrote about through three stories Hoch wrote in 1967, which, coincidently, is the same year the person whose ghost we blame for these coincidences died – making this one, big creepy coincidence. But nothing more than that, I'm sure. ;-)

Last Chance to See

"Thieves find entrances, but grifters... we make them." 

-  Sophie Devereaux (The Inside Job)

Keith R.A. DeCandido's The Zoo Job (2013) is the second tie-in novel to the Leverage TV-show, a resumption of the series in book form after TNT pulled the plug after its fifth season, and continuity is the (unofficial) theme of the story.

The Zoo Job takes place during the fourth season of the television series, somewhere between The Queen's Gambit Job and The Radio Job, and centers on Brillinger Zoo that has been in the hands of the same family since the 1800s, but the place is off the tourist track and falling on hard times. Marney Billinger wants to shake up business with the exhibit of two black rhinos, which she managed to secure through a Malani priest, but the animals never arrive and are now obliged to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the priest – who needs the money to run a struggling medical clinic in a poor country under a dictatorial regime.

One of Brillinger Zoo's younger, but regular, attendees, Zoë Kerrigan, who appeared in The Beantown Bailout Job, nudges her in the direction of the men who helped save the lives of her father and herself, Nathan Ford ("The Mastermind") and his crew.

The only problem is that they're not exactly sure who their mark is. So they do what Fred would've done, if this had been a Scooby Doo episode, and split up the gang. While Parker ("The Thief") and Alec Hardison ("The Hacker") bore themselves with surveillance work of the zoo's board members, Sophie Devereaux ("The Grifter") and Elliot Spencer ("The Hitter") infiltrate the Malani clinic. Malani was a former Portuguese colony and an independent West African kingdom, under King Lionel's rule, until he was over thrown by General Polonia – and third season ties with his corrupt minister of finance sort of makes this book an aftermath of the Damien Moreau-arc.

DeCandido covers nearly every major event from the show, ties-in background stories and name dropped pretty much all of the side characters, which sometimes made the story feel like a companion guide to the TV-series. But is a respect-and artful treatment of the source material really a draw back in a tie-in novel? Not for me, but if you're unfamiliar with the original incarnation of Leverage, you might want to sit through a few episodes before digging into this book. But one thing's for sure, The Zoo Job has more continuity than Burke's Peerage.

If there was one drawback, it was the lack of a clear and proper villain for the crew to target, and as a result, we were deprived of a long con full of fun, but dangerous, pitfalls – which were represented here by Interpol's James Sterling ("The Antagonist") and Malani's finance minister, Aloysius Mbenga, with his armed goons. They've to figure out whom to zoom in on and what the game of their opponent is, before they can put a stop it. And that full picture doesn't emerge until quite late into the book. Leverage was known for trying different approaches of telling the story, but there was always a mark or goal (e.g. beating an unbeatable security system) and it felt a little bit like watching Columbo stumbling around without knowing himself who he's suppose to be hounding.

But that's a minor, fan boyish complaint on an excellent job at translating the characters and atmosphere of the show to paper and weaving a good story around it. I hope these novels do well enough that they commission more of them and perhaps open a new avenue to re-launch the TV series. Here's hoping! 

My review of Matt Forbeck's The Con Job (2012). 

Note of interest for this blog: one of the characters was reading Rex Stout's Murder by the Book (1951).

Out of the Tidy, Clipped Maze of Fiction: More Real-Life Locked Room Mysteries

"Yet once or twice the miracle occurs; the scissors snip a rounded pattern; and with all its orchestra a-blare, life fashions a mightier melodrama than any we have dreamed of."

-  John Dickson Carr (The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 1936; "a Preface for Connoisseurs in Murder.")

If you remember from about a month ago, I compiled a summary of instances where "that tired old plot device," the Locked Room Mystery, crossed the line from fiction into reality and were, surprisingly, domestic in appearance – from a mystery writer's cat showing Edgar Allan Poe how the trick is done to a wizard who does not believe in miracles. 

I know this place probably won't erupt in shrieks of surprise when I say that I wanted to do a follow up, but you'll be amazed when you learn of the treasure I found. A case that was cut in the rounded patterns of fiction, featuring a real-life example of a plot device that's even more unrealistic than an impossible crime, namely, an amateur detective who explains the miracle-crime.

John Scarne was a magician and author with a wealth of knowledge on gambling and con games, which helped him put a stop to the Blondie mob, five young women, who roughly scammed a $1 million from Los Angeles bookies in the 1940s. One particular bookie had what he called a "Horse Room," a sealed and soundproof room, where regular customers are entertained and encouraged to bet on horses. The bettors are sealed inside the room to prevent them for getting information on races before the bookies and the only communication with the outside is a single telephone-line, used to take outside bets and getting the results, which makes cheating impossible. Well, a blonde woman has won a hundred grand on bets and the bookie hired Scarne to see if, and how, she managed to cheat when she was locked-in like everyone else – and cut-off from outside communication. 

One afternoon, it took Scarne one afternoon, to clear up the case and report to his employer that the person who has been supplying the blonde woman with the winning numbers was none other than himself! Before the inside woman placed a winning bet on, lets say, horse number 8, the bookie received a phone call from a confederate of the blonde, who knows the result of the race, to place three bets on another horse in a different race (like $10, $50 and $20) and asks him to repeat her bet – which leaves the other woman with nothing more to do than knocking off the zeroes and adding up what's left to know the number of the winning horse. It's a detective story that wrote itself! You can read an online account of this case here. 

Not as nearly well documented and shrouded in obscurity is the time that the late Edward D. Hoch, King of the Short Stories, was engaged as a private consultant to look into a seemingly impossible theft that took place in mid-air. Steve Steinbock (now holding court in the Jury Box of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) reported on this story on his now dormant blog, The Vorpal Blade, when Hoch passed away 2008. Here's the excerpt from that blog post:

"Ed once told me a true story of how a foreign government once hired Ed to consult on a real life impossible crime: cargo was apparently stolen from an airplane's locked cargo hold - while the airplane was in flight! Ed wasn't able to catch the thieves, but the incident was the inspiration for his story "The Liverpool Kiss" featuring master spy Jeffery Rand."

Ha! Ed wasn’t able to catch the thieves. Yeah, right. I’m sure that foreign government, full of embarrassment, kept everything under wraps after Hoch wandered into the hangar, sipping coffee and biting a donut, strolled around the airplane and told them how it was done. If Hoch had been given a few more years, Steinbock would’ve been given "a small libation," and sneaked in a Sherlockian quotation, "I did not know you quite so well in those days," before explaining how the cargo was purloined all those years ago. 

And with that we're back into the tidy, clipped maze of fiction.

Avengers Initiative

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

- Michael Corleone (The Godfather III, 1990) 

TNT may have canned Leverage after a run of five seasons, but the creative force behind the series are exploring new avenues to pull Nathan Ford and his crew back into the game, which is possible because the show was produced independently, and a movie is a popular rumor at the moment.

In the meantime, they'll keep us fans hooked with a series of paperback tie-ins they've commissioned and the first one in line, The Con Job (2012), proved to be a lot more fun than the bland title would have you believe. Matt Forbeck penned the first novelisation and I think it's a worthy addition to the canon, which also added to it, but the best part is that it still felt like Leverage – and that we can tag along with them again.

The Con Job takes place between The Gold Job and The Radio Job, episodes 16 and 17 of the third season, and Alec Hardison, hacker extraordinaire and resident geek, has found themselves a target: a disreputable dealer, Lorenzo Patronus, whose been filching rare comic-books and valuable cover art from their old creators. These were works from poor, freelance artists who hung on to them as an alternative retirement plan. Well, that pissed off a genius hacker/geek, who has a little Justice League of his own, and they're off to Comic-Con – where their mark intends to sell off the stolen goods.

As to be expected, the plot is littered with pop-culture references, ranging from Star Wars to Spider-Man, cameos from Stan Lee and Patrick Stewart, and even a sub-plot involving the manga publishing industry and a few "play-fights" that the combat hardened Eliot had to participate in – enough material for some of that Leverage humor. The con they play is basically a "Devil's Contract" that could fulfill Patronus' boyhood dream, becoming a recognized comic book artist, which is a cue for Sophie Devereaux's character, talent agent Jess Drew, to discover an unrecognized talent. But there's more than meets the eye (pop-cult reference!), when an old nemesis turns up, the less-than-scrupulous and source of general annoyance Cha0s (Hardison's rival), which is not a weird thing in itself considering that they're at Comic-Con, but when Hardison goes missing – they know that a third party is involved.

However, it's the crew that, as to be expected, stole the show in The Con Job and that’s immediately my only quibble: my favorite character, "The Mastermind," Nathan Ford was pushed into the background and gave Hardison the lead. His reluctance to enter Comic-Con is one of those things that added to the character, but I preferred to have had him a bit more in the front. That aside, I tremendously enjoyed tailing Eliot, Parker and Sophie around the stands and watch them off-page deal with the amount of unusual trouble you'd expect from Leverage. Heck, Eliot and Parker cosplaying as a Stormtrooper and Princess Leia, as they struggle through a crowd, should be the end all argument to bring the series back on the air and kick-off the new season with an adaptation of this book.

Anyhow, what matters are that Leverage is back and Forbeck penned a story that's very much in the spirit of the show. It's just unpretentious fun on an exciting and dangerous job. Far more than I expected from a TV tie-in novel and I'm looking forward to the next one, The Zoo Job (2013), which I probably will get to next month. A warning to the reader: avoid the reading the synopsis on the backcover of The Con Job, it gives away too much.

And to my fellow Leverage fans, if you enjoyed The Con Job for more than just a continuation of your favorite series, than I would like to draw your attention to Mack Reynolds' The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) – a comedic private-eye novel set in the world of SF-and Fantasy fans and features a loveable loser detective. He’s hired to by a bunch of oddball SF-fans investigate alien life on Earth, who have been taking potshots at them with ray guns or dropping them from flying saucers and the investigation takes him to an early SF/F con. It has been reprinted and I think if you liked The Con Job, you’ll love this one as well.

Yes. The blog-to-blog mystery evangelist never lets an opportunity slip through his fingers to harvest a soul or two.

Leverage: The Long Con Before Saying Goodbye

"To say goodbye is to die a little."

- Philip Marlowe (The Long Goodbye, 1953)

In season finale of the fourth season of Leverage, we were left with the promise that more laws would be broken in the course of justice in the fifth, and final, run of the series and The (Very) Big Bird Job has the team squiring off against a crooked airline executive whose Achilles' heel is technical masterpiece from a previous era – Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. The Spruce Goose is one of the largest airplanes ever build, flown only once on November 2, 1942, and Nate Ford and his crew have to find a way to get that machine back in the air in order to take their mark down. Not one of the cleverest (or believable?) episodes, but therefore not any less enjoyable. 

They walk the mean streets of Spade and Marlowe

The Blue Line Job has a son putting the life of his father, an "enforcer" of a minor league hockey team, in the hands of the Leverage team and their opponent is the hockey team's owner – who turned the game into street fight on the ice and even paid players from rival teams to go after his enforcer. But there's one problem. Craig Marko, the enforcer, is literary beaten up to the point that the next bump he takes to the head might kill him, and if that one doesn’t finish him, the one after that may do the job. Enter Elliot Spencer, "The Hitter," who becomes one of the players to prevent this from happening until they can put the team's owner out of the game and the ending shows Nate being very in his role of evil, but just, avenger (c.f. the ending of The Cross My Heart Job). He's like a mask-less and cape-less crusader, but he did have (briefly) a Bat Cave (of sorts) in The Last Dam Job!

In The First Contact Job, a low-grade, but loaded, scientist uses his personal wealth to attract truly talented scientists, pinch their ideas, and claiming them as his own – burying his victims in legal papers in the process. Well, he finally gets the opportunity to make the greatest scientific discovery in history, all on his own, establishing contact with an intelligent alien life form. But remember the rules of the con: when something is too good to be true, it usually is. The French Connection Job takes place at a culinary art school, run by a man who taught Eliot that a knife can do more than just stab people, but the restaurateur has turned the place in the base of operations for an unusual smuggling ring. This premise is also used to build up the characters of Eliot and Parker.

The Gimme a K Street Job has Nate and his Merry Men staring down one of their toughest opponents: politicians! A cheerleader gets seriously injured due to corporate negligence, because cheerleading isn't considered a legitimate sport and therefore doesn't have to comply with safety regulations, and they have to overthrow the unscrupulous owner of the cheerleading squad as well as getting a bill passed through Congress. But as Sophie remarked, after spending a day peddling between Congressmen, "I don't know how anything gets done around here. You have to be a grifter to run government."

FBI uniforms: One Size Fits All (from a first season episode)

Their next con harks back to The Van Gogh Job, in which two stories, from past and present, are told that tie-in, character or plot-wise, towards the end – and the characters from the past are played by the members of the Leverage crew. And there's a clue in there, if you're alert enough, in The D.B. Cooper Job. FBI Agent McSweeten, who still believes Parker and Hardison's cover stories are legit, asks them to take a look at the unsolved 1971 plane hijacking by the legendary D.B. Cooper – who disappeared without a trace after bailing from the plane. McSweeten's dying father was put in charge of the case and never stopped looking for Cooper. I have only one thing to say about this episode: Continuity! (Boom)

The Broken Wing Job is a Parker, "The Thief," of the group, orientated episode, in which the high-flyer is grounded with a broken leg, and bored out of her mind, begins to watch the surveillance cameras of their restaurant, doubling as their hideout, when she notices two shady guys plotting at a table. One of them carrying a gun. Parker has to work as an armchair detective to figure out who they are, what they are planning and how to stop them. We also learn a little bit more of the ongoing storyline, which began in The (Very) Big Bird Job, when the viewer learned that Nate and Hardison are sharing a secret.

The Rundown Job and The Frame Up Job share the same set-up as The Girls' Night Out Job and The Boys' Night Out Job, from the previous season, in which the teams split and have separate jobs to take care off. Eliot, Parker and Hardison are wrapping up business in Washington, when Eliot receives a phone call from the past, asking him to do a hit on someone. Elliot turns down the offer, but he knows if he doesn't take the job, someone else will and attempt to try to stop an assassination – and hit upon on a conspiracy. The Frame Up Job has Nate Ford and Sophie Devereaux, officially an item by this time, playing the bantering, mystery solving couple that were all the rage back in the 1940s and they do it with the same joie de vivre as the Troys and the Browns. Heck. Even the setting and multi-layered plot were very reminiscent of the detective stories usually discussed on this blog. 

James Sterling: "The Antagonist"

Sophie tries to ditch Nate one day with a ticket to a Noir Mystery Movie fest, but traces her steps back to the estate of a recently deceased art collector, where the first painting of a modern master, never before put on display, will be unveiled to the public for the very first time – and Sophie has a personal connection to the painting. Of course, when the vault door swings open, there’s nothing in there to be seen, and as the only infamous (ex) art thief/grifter on the premise, Sophie has a lot to explain when Sterling shows up. The plot twists and turns from an art theft to a murder investigation to forgery, but the best part of the story was seeing Nate and Sophie as detectives/criminals (e.g. John Kendrick Bangs' Raffles Holmes and Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr), and how the characters played off each other, because the plot was predictable. I recognized most of the plot devices and anticipated nearly every twist. A good try and tremendous fun to watch, but for the seasoned mystery fan, it's a walk in the park. The Rashomon Job, from the third season, was perhaps the best plotted episode from the series, in which five separate stories of the same event dovetail into one with the fifth telling and much more reminiscent of Agatha Christie than The Ten Lil' Grifters Job.

In The White Rabbit Job, they receive an unusual request that consists of not taking down a company owner, hell-bent on destroying the company his grandfather build up and the town it supports, but to safe and restore him to his old self again. They decide to give the rarely attempted "White Rabbit" con a go, in which they drug the mark and put him through a series of dream sequences that Hardison conjures up from his computer, but this also poses a plethora of moral objections. Interesting premise, descent episode. The Toy Job opens with a whistleblower warning the team that a company wants to bring a dangerous toy on the market, ready to be released before Christmas, and they rummage around for a rejected/failed toy to re-brand and create a craze to overshadow their mark’s toy. But why pick a doll that looks like Chucky's deformed cousin, who appeared to have been brought into this world with the assistance of a rusty coat hanger?

I think this a good point to mention that I have not yet seen The Low Low Price Job and The Corkscrew Job, and can't remember much of The Real Fake Car Job, which is why they are missing from this overview.

Finally, The Long Goodbye Job has the team making an attempt at obtaining a secret file, known as the Black Book, consisting of all the dodgy transactions made during economical collapse of 2007-08 and the names of people who created the crisis, and use it as a hit list. But when the episode opens, we learn that something has gone horribly wrong and Nate has to relate story of how his team perished during a pursuit for those secret files. I can't tell no more without spoiling anything, but the second half of the episode was almost too light to follow up the high-strung drama of the first part. But not a bad way to bow out. Not bad at all. And note the similarities between the main set-up of The Long Goodbye Job and The Con is Off, the final one for their BBC counterpart Hustle.  

Yes. I had not forgotten about me compulsively obsessing over a Hustle/Leverage crossover that's now never going to happen. Why would anyone cancel a series that can balance between dark/gritty and light/comical and oozes viewer entertainment? Oh well, I can always re-watch Hustle. 

The next post will be a proper review of a classic whodunit.