Far From Impossible

"You're always hearin' that things were better in the good ol' days... I'll tell you one thing that was better—the mysteries. The real honest-to-goodness mysteries that happened to ordinary folks like you an' me. I've read lots of mystery stories in my time, but there's never been anything to compare with some of the things I experienced personally."

- Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Covered Bridge," from Diagnosis Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 1996)

Edward D. Hoch was a giant in the field of short form mysteries, having written roughly nine hundred detective stories since his literary career began in 1955, which were published in such famous periodicals as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine – spawning a sundry cast of series-characters in the process. I know that I'm perhaps slightly biased, but my favorite of Hoch's creations is unquestionably Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

Dr. Sam Hawthorne was a physician in the fictitious New England town of Northmont, but stories are his reminiscences, as an older man, on a period that stretched across three decades. The first story in the series, "The Problem of the Covered Bridge," was published in 1974 and took place in March of 1922, while the final one, "The Problem of the Secret Patient," appeared in 2008 and was set in October, 1944. It's an unusual series in that the stories and characters are not frozen in time, which tends to happen with long-running series.

Time passes at a normal rate in the small town and the people who live there, such as the (semi-) regular characters, are not unaffected by the tick-tock of the clock, but there's one element that's constant and insists on returning with the same regularity as the seasons – namely the locked room murders and other seemingly impossible problems!

Northmont has an average homicide rate that dwarfs Jessica Fletcher's Cabot Cove, but crimes in the former insist on defying the laws of reality: a horse-and-buggy inexplicably vanishes from a covered bridge, a man is strangled by the branches of a haunted tree, a murder is committed in a locked, octagon-shaped room and a solo-pilot is stabbed in mid-air inside a locked cockpit. These are merely a handful of examples from the first two collections of excellent stories, Diagnoses Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (1996) and More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2006), but this review will concern itself with the third volume of stories, which is titled Nothing is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014).

However, before I take a look at the individual stories, I have to make a note here and say that the collection, as a whole, was not as strong as its predecessors. Somehow, the stories lacked that magical touch or failed to live up to their own premise, which really surprised me. Hoch was known for consistency in quality, but that was not on display in this collection. Don't get me wrong: there were a couple of good stories, but none of them as original ("The Problem of the Pink Post Office") or classical ("The Problem of the Octagon Room") as some of the tales gathered in the previous volumes – which really is a pity. Now that I have dampened your spirits and enthusiasm... lets take a look at the stories!

"The Problem of the Graveyard Picnic" was published in the pages of EQMM in June 1984 and takes place in the Spring of 1932. Dr. Sam Hawthorne is moving from his small office in the center of town to a remodeled wing of Pilgrim Memorial Hospital, which is being downsized after the eighty-bed facility had "proven far too large for the town's need." In between moving and seeing patients, Hawthorne pops outside to attend the funeral of a prominent citizen in the cemetery in front of the hospital and comes across a picnicking couple, but the woman gets up and runs away when she sees the doctor – witnesses how an invisible force pushes her over a stone-railing of a swollen creek. A nice, fun little story, but I figured how it was done while the crime was in progress.

The first collection of Dr. Hawthorne stories

"The Problem of the Crying Room" appeared in November 1984 issue of EQMM and the story happens in June of 1932. Northmont is in the midst of the centennial celebration and the high point of the festivities is the opening of the town's very first talking-picture palace. The Northmont Cinema is equipped with a glassed-in, soundproof room for families with babies or small children, called a "Crying Room," but the small room attracts the attention of Sheriff Lens and Dr. Hawthorne when the projectionist commits suicide – leaving a note behind confessing to the locked room murder of Mayor Trenton on opening night. However, the opening night is not until the following night!

Mayor Trenton insists on watching part of the movie from the soundproof room, because the would-be assassin is dead, but a single gunshot goes off and wounds the Mayor. Dr. Hawthorne was with him inside the room and Sheriff Lens was guarding the only door, but all of those precautions failed to stop an aspiring assassin from taking a shot at the prospective victim. I loved the premise and the ideas Hoch was working with, but the solution seemed to lack that magical touch of ingenuity and I'm afraid there might be some medical objections to the method – such as the tendency of blood to coagulate. I still tend to like this story though.

"The Problem of the Fatal Fireworks" was first published a May 1985 issue of EQMM and takes place on the 4th of July of the same year as the previous story. It's also the first really disappointing story from this collection. The elements that were carried over from the previous story were nice and the whodunit-aspect was decent, but the question regarding how "half a stick of dynamite" was inserted into a sealed package of harmless firecrackers was hardly worth the label of an impossible crime.

"The Problem of the Unfinished Painting" was published in EQMM in February 1986 and takes place in the Fall of 1932. A very rewarding story, because it showed a negative side effect to playing amateur detective. Dr. Hawthorne is asked by Sheriff Lens to assist in the locked room murder of Tess Wainwright. She was found slumped in a chair at her easel, strangled to death with a long paint-spattered cloth, but all of the windows were latched from the inside and the cleaning lady was in sight of the only door to the studio – which she claimed was closed the entire time she was there. The fun part of the plot is that the murderer was attempting to hammer out a ironclad alibi, but unforeseen circumstances transformed into a "closed-room situation" and that ruined everything. However, while he was out playing detective something happened at the hospital that makes Dr. Hawthorne decide to devote his full attention to his patients.

"The Problem of the Sealed Bottle" was published in EQMM in May 1986 and the story takes place on December 5, 1933, which was the period when Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected President of the United States and delivered on his promise to repeal Prohibition. Slowly, the US is being stocked, legally, with booze and Northmont is no exception, but the first bottle of spirits to be (legally) unsealed contained a potassium cyanide. I thought the background of the story, death of an era, was more interesting than the plot itself.

"The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat" first appeared in the December 1986 issue of EQMM and takes place before the events from the previous story, during the summer of 1933, when the circus came to Northmont. The story has one of the better impossible problems collected in this volume of stories. Dr. Hawthorne takes Sheriff Lens' nephew, Teddy, to the circus where the death-defying stunts of the five Lampizi Brothers are part of the main attraction, but one of the them vanishes in mid-air and only leaves behind an empty trapeze – "swinging back and forth" as if "supporting the weight of an invisible acrobat." The explanation for the vanished trapeze-artist is clever without being incomprehensible, a semi-sentient being should figure out the main gist of the trick, but the vanishing is tied-in with a second plot-thread involving the body of clown covered in stab wounds. I expected more of these type of stories from Hoch in this collection.

The second collection Dr. Hawthorne stories

"The Problem of the Curing Barn" originally appeared in EQMM in September 1987 and takes place in September 1934. A wealthy business tycoon, Jasper Jennings, who came to Northmont during the depths of the Depression to grow tobacco, but he soon was murdered after the first harvest – a straight-razor slashed across his throat in a dark barn where the plants are being air-cured. Sheriff Lens is glad that it's "not one of those locked-room murders," because barn has "more holes than a rusty sieve," but there was no opportunity to get rid of the murder weapon. I've seen the explanation for the vanishing murder weapon before in stories, but they post-date this one and wonder if the trick originated in this tale.

"The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin" was published in the December 1987 issue of EQMM and takes place in January 1935, which gave the town of Northmont a much needed break from death and crime. Dr. Hawthorne takes his nurse, April, for a weeklong winter holiday in Maine, but not long after his arrival a retired stockbroker is found murdered in his log cabin. Of course, the surrounding area is covered in a blanket of snow marked only with the paw prints of a roaming bobcat, but not of a human predator, which begs the question how the murderer managed to enter and leave the cabin without leaving footprints in the snow. I appreciated the fact that Hoch tried to be original here, but the explanation seems really impractical. It should also be noted that Dr. Hawthorne loses his nurse in this story to marriage here and the next two stories revolve around her replacements.

"The Problem of the Thunder Room" appeared in April 1988 in EQMM and takes place in March of 1935 and May Russo has replaced April (yes, the joke about their names is played up), but she is deadly afraid of thunderstorms and blacks-out when they happen. May has such an attack when a freak storm surprises the town and when consciousness returns tells Hawthorne she had a dream about "a hammer and people being killed," but the problem arises when a message reaches the doctor that someone was bludgeoned to death during the thunderstorm and a witness swear it was May – could she had been in two places at the same time? Unfortunately, the explanation borders on cheating and is a less successful treatment of the whodunit-aspect from "The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat."

"The Problem of the Black Roadster" was published in the November 1988 issue of EQMM and takes place in April of 1935. The story introduces April's final replacement, Mary Best, who came to town during a deadly bank robbery. I did not care for this story, I'm afraid.

"The Problem of the Two Birthmarks" appeared in the May 1989 issue of EQMM and is set in May of 1935, in which the attempted smothering of a food poisoning victim in Pilgrim Memorial Hospital is tied to the destruction of a ventriloquist’s dummy of a restaurant entertainer and a murder by strangulation in a locked and unused operating room – to which the only key was in possession of a doctor with a cast-iron alibi. However, the locked room turns out to not be a locked room at and is somewhat of a cheat. Hoch seems to have been plain out of ideas during this period, which is especially noticeable in the next story.

"The Problem of the Dying Patient" was published in December 1989 in EQMM and takes place in June of 1935. Dr. Hawthorne gives an elderly patient her medication and she washes the pill away with a swig of clean water, but immediately afterwards dies of what is later determined to be cyanide poisoning – which may cost Hawthorne his license to practice medicine and is even suspected of a mercy killing. What I found so immensely disappointing was how the poisoning was presented, as a genuine and baffling impossibility, but the explanation revealed she had something in her mouth prior to swallowing away her medication. It was explained that the item in her mouth was slowly dissolving during her medical examination and, "when it dissolved enough," the cyanide was released and killed her. However, there were no remnants of this item found in her mouth or stomach during the post-mortem? The only thing that makes the story worth a read is the situation Hawthorne finds himself in, but not for the plot, which is atrocious.

"The Problem of the Protected Farmhouse" originally appeared in the May 1990 issue of EQMM and takes place in the final quarter of 1935. A local and paranoid Nazi-sympathizer, Rudolph Frankfurt, fortified his farmhouse to protect himself from anti-Nazi elements – effectively living "behind an electrified fence and locked doors" that's "guarded by a dog." However, an axe-wielding murderer managed to bypass those security measures, but the explanation is simply practical and workman-like instead of original and inspired.

"The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" was published in the December 1990 issue of EQMM and takes place across two centuries, which stretches from the Old West of the late 1800s to New England of the mid-1930s. Because this is a crossover story! Ben Snow had "been a cowboy during the 1880s and '90s" and a selection of his adventures were gathered in a volume entitled The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997), but there was one unexplained episode from his career that has always haunted him. Snow has heard of Hawthorne's "reputation for solving impossible crimes" and decided to tell him the story of a haunted tepee that either killed its occupants or made them sick. It's a nifty variation on the "Room That Kills" theme with lots of historical color that brought a two completely separate series-characters, which is something I love as much as a good locked room mysteries. There are simply not enough crossovers in our genre!

"The Problem of the Blue Bicycle” appeared in the April 1991 issue of EQMM and took place in September 1936, which centers on a girl who went missing as if something from the sky had plucked her from the bicycle. It's an OK story, but nothing special or particular interesting.

Well, that was the final entry in this collection, but I seem to have been slightly more positive when judging the stories on an individual basis. However, the collection as a whole remains the weakest of the three, which is a real shame. I also wish I could've begun this year on a somewhat more positive note, but I happen to pick some less than perfect work. Oh well, better luck with the next one!

Now, if you'll excuse me for a minute, I have to go into hiding, because I'm sure a certain Hoch-fanboy will appear any moment now to point and shriek at me like Donald Sutherland from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Case-Book of the Black Monk

"The real secret of magic lies in the performance."

- David Copperfield 

The 1933 September issue of Pearson's Magazine printed a story by Vincent Cornier, entitled "The Stone Ear," which interposed Barnabas Hildreth (a.k.a. "The Black Monk") of the British Secret Services into the Grandest Game in the world, where they would've languished in literary obscurity – until a certain editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine began to republish the series in 1946.

One half of the Ellery Queen penname, Frederic Dannay, called Barnabas Hildreth "one of the great series of modern detective stories," and while I don't agree entirely, I can understand where Dannay was coming from and there's definitely appeal in the feral imagination of the author. Cornier's elaborate, almost baroque, writing style in itself adds a layer of mystique to plots that were cloaked in an air of mystery to begin with. The Black Monk's case-book is filled with astonishing problems reminiscent of those faced by John Bell (L.T. Meade and R. Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898), but the scientific approach to clear up some of the impossibilities also called Arthur Porges' The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009) to mind and Cornier may have influenced Porges.

However, Cornier's explanations are often steeped in arcane knowledge of (pseudo) science or strand in a twilight area between mystery and science-fiction, which is where I disagree with Dannay. You have to be a polymath in order to solve the stories that are actually solvable! That being said, if you want something out of the ordinary in your crime fiction, you can hardly go wrong with The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth (2011) – another "Lost Classic" from Crippen and Landru.

The opening story, "The Stone Ear," was a nice introductory to the characters as Ingram relates his first brush with murder alongside Barnabas Hildreth, who looks into the sudden death of a relative, Sir Roger Amistead. After his retirement from the bench, Sir Roger wrote his unpublished memoirs and there's a chilling tale for a final chapter when dies of an apparent heart attack at the exact moment that precious goblet of glass vanished from his hand. A well-written story with an intriguing premise, but with the kind of explanation that leaves fans like me very dissatisfied.

"The Brother of Heaven" is a member of the Chinese tong, who turns up dead inside an abandoned warehouse at the Thames, stabbed to death, with an unsettling lack of guilty footprints surrounding the body. The only clues are a peaceful expression on the victims face and orchids. One of the more conventional stories in this collection and not all that bad with exception for the no-footprints situation, which is an answer that usually laughed away in other stories when it’s suggested.

A Doylean treasure hunt is at the heart of "The Silver Quarrel," in which Pagan imagery carved in an elephantine-sized table in a priory room holds the key to finding the hiding place of a family treasure that belonged to a now extinct noble bloodline. Hildreth helps a physician locating the treasure and I tended to like this one. The next story, "The Throat of Green Jasper," also deals with treasures, looted this time from an Egyptian burial chamber that lay undisturbed in the sands for ages, until it was plundered and a curse swept the continents – purging everyone from the Anglo-American expedition that violated the tomb. This could've easily been the best of the Egyptian curse mysteries from the 1930s, if it had not wandered from that terrain.

"The Duel of Shadows" is a pure scientific detective story with a wonderfully imaginative premise: a man settles down in an easy chair, in front of a cozy and crackling fire place, when he's struck by a bullet that was discharged once before and that was more than 200 years ago in a duel – making it slowest bullet on record. But the most rewarding part of this story, is that you don't need Hildreth's arcane knowledge to figure the general idea behind the shooting. "The Catastrophe in Clay" opened equally promising, reporting the discovery of a what appeared to be the body of a gold encrusted creature that some mistook for the remains of a God, but degenerated into a story with an authentic super villain and a secret weapon.

In "The Mantle That Laughed," an old sea captain is trying to sell an item he procured during an expedition of the uncharted regions of Mexico, a golden cloak that’s a thousand years old and has the power to laugh, but does it also has the power to kill? A similar problem faces Hildreth in "The Tabasheeran Pearls," which are the deadly inheritance of a Japanese pearl merchant who westernized hara kiri when he shot himself, however, neither of them left a lasting impression on me despite their interesting subject matter. I guess I missed the game element that are usually present in these type of impossible mysteries and that the explanations often feel dated and/or hokey doesn’t help either. "The Gilt Lily," first published in 1938, is a great example of this. There's a leakage of information at Whitehall and relays on the same device used in C.N. and A.M. Williamson's "The Adventure of the Jacobean House," a short story from 1907!

Luckily, there was improvement in the final two from this collection. "The Monster" is tale of two twins, a small village, animal mutilations and something the law can't touch – even if it maims and kills. It even has a twist on a twist that you were expecting and one that was reworked by Ellery Queen in one of their novels.

"Oh Time, In Your Flight" is the shortest of the lot, but also one of the better stories, plot-wise, in which Hildreth has to break an alibi to solve the murder of a friend and it has been suggested that Frederic Dannay, who collected volumes of poetry, gave this story its title – because Cornier was known for his affinity with the great poets of yore. The personal connection between the victim and Hildreth, like was the case in the opening story, also makes it nice story to round out this volume.

Verdict: I liked most of them as stories, but not as detective stories. So, for me, The Duel of Shadows was a mixed bag of tricks.

Pedigree of Crime

"Every real story is a never ending story."

- Michael Ende.

San Sebastiano is a speck of a principality, situated in the Riviera, that was dreamed up by James Powell in order to unfetter his imagination from the chains of historical accuracy and was fascinated to watch how an imaginary princedom became the most well-rounded character in A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another (2009) – a collection of short stories culled from the pages of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by that indispensable publisher Crippen and Landru.

The principal characters of this collection are four generations of Ambrose Ganelon's, whose ancestral tree is adorned with deerstalkers, fedoras and tools of the detective's trade, scourging the criminals patronizing San Sebastiano. This includes members of Dr. Ludwig Fong's Eurasian crime dynasty, who play the Professor Moriarty to their Sherlock Holmes. Ganelon's multiple casebooks are filled with wonderfully told and imaginative tales of crime and deception, loaded with historical details of San Sebastiano, but they seldom, if ever, adhere to fair play rules. They're more in the tradition of late 19th/early 20th Century thrillers, in which master criminals attempt to overthrow a small country or blow-up the crowned heads of Europe. 

Nevertheless, this was not the let down that it should have been and it speaks volumes of Powell's ability as a writer to not make me want to care about plot – even if the locked room mystery got a similar treatment. Good fiction is good fiction, plain and simple, but how I was going to review these stories left me in a tangle. So I decided to just discuss the four detectives and their cases instead of each individual story.

AMBROSE GANELON I:

The first Ganelon to done the deerstalker and dabble into detection was Ambrose Ganelon I, who reasoned, for the most part, from an armchair and was basically the Sherlock Holmes of San Sebastiano – later known as the Founder of the Ganelon Detective Agency. "The Haunted Bookcase" is my personal favorite, in which a dream of a ghost has a direct bearing on the books he left behind and those same books are being moved around in a locked room. IIRC, this story bears some remarkable resemblances to Norizuki Rintaro's "The Green Door is Dangerous." Other stories included in this section are "The Flower Diet" (involving a mystic's claim that he can draw his nourishments from the odor of flowers, instead of food and drinks, and nobody has caught him eating), "Unquiet Graves" (a scared stiff and body snatching) and "The Priest Without a Shadow" (in which a doomed priest exorcizes a house where a man was decapitated).

AMBROSE GANELON II:

The second Ganelon to turn detective turns to the scientific methods of Dr. John Thorndyke to lead him to the end of a case. In his first big case, he confronts "The Gooseberry Fool," a hired assassin who plagues the European continent each summer and leaves Paris deserted – except for tourists and waiters. "The Verbatim Reply" asks Ganelon II to intercept a wrongly dispatched document and "A Pocketful Noses" shows flashes of Mycroft Holmes, suggesting that he is the Intelligence Services, as he investigates the murder of Serbian subject logging around a half a dozen false noses.

AMBROSE GANELON III:

The grandson of the agency's founder is from the Hardboiled School, battle hardened on the killing fields of war, which is also the stage for the first story in this section, "Harps of Gold." Ganelon III also tangled with a female member of the Fong family in "The Zoroaster Grin" and brought light in another dark plot in "At Willow-Walk-Behind," but most interesting is perhaps that these stories show the effect the three generations of Ganelon detectives had on the principality – having almost entirely eradicated crime he had to expand business and turn in a Pinkerton-like agency.

AMBROSE GANELON IV:

The last of the Ganelon detective's is perhaps the smartest, as well as the unluckiest, of the bunch. His family's success has ruined the detective business and now impoverished is dependant on the soup kitchen for his meals. I think this is an interesting, logical and almost evolutionary progress in the series. San Sebastiano is only a speck on the map and therefore crime could be contained, even eradicated, within its borders and the Ganelon's dove into that pond like a flurry of piranhas, and before long, they had reach the bottom of their food chain – and after only four generations the Grand Detective has disappeared from the Grand Stage of San Sebastiano. Well, not entirely, as Ganelon IV still picks up cases here and there, like the theft of some of the "Coins in the Frascatti Fountain" or the mystery of "The Bird-of-Paradise Man."

I can recommend A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another to fans of Sherlock Holmes and the stories from his creators contemporaries, especially the ones who didn’t take themselves too seriously, and hope to see more of Powell's work collected in the nearby future. But most of all, I hope he compiles a tongue-in-cheek history book of San Sebastiano and the Ganelon Detective Agency. I would love to read a full-account of the Half-Day War and how Ganelon's slyboots thwarted an invading army!

It's possible that the next review posted on here will be of an impossible crime novel written, judging by the book's synopsis, in the same style and spirit as the stories I just reviewed here and the description in Adey's book is very enticing... but I also want to return to the Artemis Fowl series. Choices, choices, choices!

From the Files of All Souls

“All Souls Law Cooperative works like a medical plan. People who can’t afford the bloated fees many of my colleagues charge buy a membership, its costs based on a scale according to their incomes. The membership gives them access to consul and legal services all the way from small claims to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

- Ted Smalley (“The Last Open File,” from The McCone Files, 1995)

They say that behind every good man stands a strong woman, in which case Bill Pronzini can rest easy knowing that "the founding 'mother' of the contemporary female hardboiled private eye" has his back. Marcia Muller has written 29 novels and published two collections of short stories featuring her female private gumshoe, Sharon McCone, who shares her universe with her husbands "Nameless Detective." I realize that mentioning the fact that Muller took home a Private Eyes Writers of America Live Achievement Award should take priority over noting the fact that they occasionally pooled their series detectives, but I really, really love crossovers. I really do.

Anyway, Marcia Muller made a previous appearance on blog when I reviewed Double (1984), in which "Nameless" bumps into Sharon McCone at a conference for private investigators. It was tremendously fun to watch two universes collide and morph into one world, but I had only explored one of them before and therefore missed that small, but essential, part that prevented me from truly appreciating the novel for what it was. I vowed that I would remedy that omission post-haste, but don't pull a third degree on me to get an answer as to why it took six months before I decided to pick up The McCone Files (1995). You should allow some thing to go unexplained.

I expected Marcia Muller to have a similar style as her husband, as both have identified their work as humanistic detective fiction, which is, of course, their main resemblance, but the McCone stories in this collection have without the presence of "Nameless' an entirely different atmosphere. I'm not sure if I can explain this feeling, but the earliest "Nameless" short stories, which, I think, stand the closest in comparison to the ones collected here, have that classical gritty feel – while these stories seem to be written in full-color. I know, it's a lousy way of explaining it, but perhaps it's the way in which Muller use words to paint an evocative landscape or urban setting. It really gives you the feeling that you're right there with Sharon McCone when she's exploring a valley on horseback, wanders through a surrealistically described building where urns are stored or walks up and down the street of a poor and crime ridden neighborhood.  

But let's take them down from the top:  

The Last Open File

This collection opens with a story of how Sharon McCone, after her previous employer kicked her to the curb, for not taking "direction well" and being "nonresponsive to authority figures," became a staff investigator for All Souls – a legal outfit designed to help the less fortunate in society rather than squeeze a few last bucks out of them. McCone's first assignment consists of tracking down a man who left a young, naïve girl with a stack of unpaid bills and a handful of bounced checks. It's an interesting, open-ended story that will find closure in the final story of this volume. 

Merrill-Go-Round

A mother asks All Souls to help her find her child, a 10-year-old girl named Merril, who went missing after a whirl on a merry-go-round, but she's very reluctant to involve the police and the matter is dropped on Sharon McCone's desk – who grapples with it until she has wrestled the truth from it and as a result may have mended a broken family.

Wild Mustard

Sharon McCone has a favorite restaurant, situated above the ruins of San Francisco's Sutro Baths, that she likes to patronize with regular visits and during each meal she observes an old Japanese woman, wearing a colored headscarf, scouring the slopes for edible herbs. But when the old woman fails to put in an appearance, McCone begins to slowly lose her appetite and starts' digging around the place – and what she uncovered is one of those unfortunate tragedies that usually merits no more than a few lines on page 3.

The Broken Men

The longest story in this collection, at forty and some pages, has Sharon McCone moonlighting as a personal bodyguard for a famous clown-duo, Fitzgerald and Tilby, during their gig at the Diablo Valley Clown Festival, but when one of them splits and leaves a body, garbed in his custom, in his wake it becomes one of those regular working days for McCone. A well-written story that is a lot closer to a traditional mystery than the ones preceding it and also has a nicely imagined, tranquil scene in which McCone explores the region on one of the gentlest (read: slowest) horses in the west. 

Ho-Ling would love and hate this story at the same time! 

Deceptions

McCone haunts the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge, where  "some eight hundred-odd lost souls have jumped to their deaths from its decks," hoping to find a vestige of Venessa DiCesare – a young law student who left a suicide note in her car and disappeared. I'm afraid this was, for me, a somewhat forgettable story and the evocative opening was the only thing that stuck to my long-term memory. Well, they can't all be winners.

Cache and Carry (co-written with Bill Pronzini)

It was a nice surprise when I turned over the final page of the previous story and read that this one was co-written with her husband, Bill Pronzini, co-starring his "Nameless Detective," who Sharon affectionately nicknamed Wolf, and the problem he helps her solving is of the impossible variety! The entire story consists of a telephone call between McCone and Nameless, in which she relates to him the facts in the case of a theft of two grand from a locked and secured room at a Neighborhood Check Cashing – and this suggests that the money never left the room but it was stripped-searched without results. So it’s up to "the poor man’s Sir Henry Merrivale" to locate this apparent invisible cubbyhole. Good, short and simple.

Note that McCone has no clue who H.M. is. *shakes head disappointedly*

Deadly Fantasies

Marcia Muller manifests herself in this story as a more traditional plotter and dreams up an ingenious method to administrate poison, in this case, to a young heiress who inherited her fathers multi-million dollar company and came to All Souls because she's afraid that her brother and sister, whose names were conspicuous by their absense in their fathers will, are slowly poisoning her. I, too, suspected that her siblings were feeding her something, such as unfounded suspicions to feed her paranoia and get a court to declare her mentally unsound and usurp the family fortune, but the ending turned out to be quite different – and far more tragic. 

All the Lonely People

A series of burglaries has been tied to a dating service, All the Best People, and McCone has filled out one of their application forms and braves the dating scene – looking for a man with a raccoon mask and a stuffed sack flung over his shoulders. As a crime story, it's not spectacular but a lot is made-up with McCone going on actual dates to probe for a lovelorn housebreaker.

The Place That Time Forgot

Sharon McCone is engaged to track down the estranged granddaughter of an old shopkeeper, Jody Greenglass, whose ramshackle store sneaked away from the march of progress and stands steadfastly in defiance of the rapidly changing world around it. McCone goes through the skeleton-stuffed closet of the Greenglass family and dusts off a lot of old family tragedies, but a catchy and soulful tune leads her to the end of her quarry.

Somewhere in the City

On October 17, 1989, a major earthquake that killed over seventy people and injured thousands struck the San Francisco Bay Area. This is the scene in which Sharon McCone finds herself after her last conversation with an anonymous phone caller, who has been making threatening calls to the Golden Gate Crisis Hotline, but when the city began to shake the last thing she heard, before the connection was broken, was a cry for help. Undoubtedly, the most original and fresh story in this collection.

Final Resting Place

A friend of McCone asks her help in finding out who has been leaving flowers at the San Francisco Memorial Columbarium, where the urn encapsulating her mothers ashes are interred, and what the relation of this person was to her mother – and when she begins to dust-off this problem she naturally uncovers another dreadful secret. The best part of this story was Muller's almost surreal description of the Columbarium where urns are stored under a leaky roof. 

Silent Night

This Christmas tale reminded me of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," but instead of going on a wild goose chase for a fabulous jewel McCone spends her Christmas Eve looking for her missing nephew – and finds out how little she really knew about the boy. Along the way she also meets a few of society's misfits who spend their evening alone and makes for a nice, humanistic story.

Benny's Space

All Souls is engaged on behalf of Mrs. Angeles, a poor and hardworking mother whose social status condemned her to an even poorer neighborhood, who has been bombarded with death threats – after witnessing a local gang leader being shot. The case is referred to their staff investigator, Sharon McCone, and comes to a conclusion that puts the murder in a whole new perspective. This crime story really benefited from the poor, violent neighborhood that functioned as its backdrop. 

The Lost Coast

A local politician and his wife are under siege from a nefarious stalker, who sends dramatically worded death threats and sends floral arrangements suitable for funerals, and Sharon McCone ends up looking into the matter and stumbles over a body before she got hold of the truth – which turns out to be one of the oldest crimes in the book. I wonder if Muller found inspiration for this story in Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin because it strangely felt like one of their cases. Perhaps it was the threatening floral arrangement in combination with the murderer being trapped on an inconsistency in a statement.

File Closed

Sharon McCone's tenure at All Souls has come to an end and opened up an investigation firm of her own, but as she's cleaning out her old office she comes across her first, unclosed file – and decides to give it one last shot to tie-up all the lose ends before opening a new chapter in her life. This is perhaps the best kind of story to end a collection with.

Back off everyone, they're professionals!

"Detective work, gentleman. That is all I can say."

- John Quincannon

Bill Pronzini has garnered most of his laurels with an ongoing series of novels and short stories, in which he depicts the personal and professional life of a San Francisco based detective and these narratives ought to be viewed as a biography in progress. The Nameless Detective, whose full name has become a public secret at this point, is one of the most well-rounded characters in the genre who single-handedly changed the way I perceived private eye stories – and gave me a whole new perspective on the genre. It therefore pains me to no end that I have to relegate him down the list of favorite characters in favor of Pronzini's secondary detectives, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, but at heart I will always remain a classicist and these two plucked at the strings of that instrument.

John Quincannon used to be in the employ of the United States Secret Service as a secret agent, which seems an unlikely occupation for a man who cultivates a conspicuous, gray-flecked freebooter's beard, but gave up that government job to go into business with Sabina Carpenter – a widow of a Pinkerton detective. Quincannon would love to expend their joint partnership into a romantic commitment, but Sabina firmly turns down his advances and continues to work with him on a purely professional basis.

Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998) collects nine stories, penned between 1988 and 1998, in which the titular detective duo are confronted with counterfeiters, grifters, body snatchers and even the occasional locked room murder during the waning years of the 19th century and are topped with a western flavor – making them borderline hybrid stories.

No Room at the Inn

Twas the night before Christmas, when a lone San Francisco gumshoe, chilled to the marrow with a frost-coated beard, braves a snowstorm as he cuts a track through a frozen mountain landscape – in hot pursuit of a quarry with a nice Christmas bonus on his head. The one-man manhunt reaches an impasse at the front door of an inn and its occupants seem to have vanished like Ebenezer Scrooge's ill-tempered demeanor after an intervention from three spirits. Quincannon subsequent search of the place turns up a surprise or two and the plot patterns that emerge from his findings are quite pleasing. This is as good as a Christmas story as Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle."

Burgade's Crossing

Quincannon and Carpenter are engaged to not only figure out who has been toying around with the idea of treating Noah Rideout to an early wake and funeral, but also, if possible, to upset this persons plans. It's not a bad or uneventful story, but I had to thumb back to recall its premise and solution. Not a very memorable story, I'm afraid.

The Cloud Cracker

The womanizing Leonide Zacks is a self-professed "Cloud Cracker," whose portable chemical shack and potion-filled rockets can break any dry spell and offers this service to drought-stricken towns in exchange for some of their liquid assets, but the only torrents he creates are those of voices cursing his name after a sunstroke town finds out that they've been conned. Quincannon can earn a paycheck if he exposes and captures the fraudulent rainmaker, but before he's able to complete his assignment the conman has the bad manners to allow himself to get shot inside his locked shack – and the only other person in there profusely professes his innocence. This is a very diverting tale with an original take on the problem of the locked room, but the guilty party walked a very fine tight-rope during the execution of this seeming impossible crime and must have paid-off Murphy's Law not to show up for work that day.

Lady One-Eye

Quincannon and Carpenter are on a joint undercover assignment at McFinn's Palace Saloon and Gaming Parlor, where they attempt to get a grip on the sleight-of-hand methods of a female cardsharp named Lady One-Eye. But a jealousy-driven undercurrent turns this straightforward affair into a complicated murder case when the husband of the one-eyed card shark, Jack O'Diamonds, is shot in the middle of the crowded saloon – without anyone seeing who dispatched the fatal bullet. The solution is a variation on an old ploy, but one that blends perfectly with the time and setting of the story. Overall, this is just a fun detective story populated with colorful and memorable characters. Definitely one of the standouts of this collection!

Coney Game

Long Nick Darrow is a gifted, but rancorous, counterfeiter who was thrown in the clink thanks to the unrelenting efforts of Quincannon – which earned the bearded operative a top-spot on Darrow's list of unfinished business to take care of once he's out. This is more a western than a mystery, really, in which the problem is resolved with cracking knuckles and blazing guns rather than relaying on wit and intellect. Great fun, though!

The Desert Limited

The detective duo of Carpenter and Quincannon board The Desert Limited, in pursuit of an outlaw with a bounty on his head, but as the train races through a sun-blasted wasteland the fugitive manages to shake off his pursues – and seems to have evaporated from a speeding train. The premise of the story and the semi-improbable disappearance are interesting, but the solution is silly and a letdown. However, I have to note here that this story would probably work a lot better if it were translated to a visual medium. A Carpenter and Quincannon television series?

The Horseshoe Nail

Quincannon once again accepts an undercover job, this time at a sawmill, to ensnarl a sneak thief and retrieve the loot, which he assumes will earn him an easy paycheck, but then the larcenist turns up dead in his cabin – with the only door securely barred from the inside. The answer to this locked room problem is delightfully simple, but clasping the responsible party in irons will proof to be close shave for the 19th century gumshoe. A good story, plain and simple.

Medium Rare

Arguably the best story in this collection, in which Quincannon and Carpenter, masquerading as the fictitious Mr. and Mrs. John Quinn, set-out to expose professor Vargas, head of the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses, as a fraudulent medium – who made an art out of financially draining the grieving. The professor puts on a fantastic spook show in his locked and darkened séance room, where tables move on their own accord and luminous faces from the spirit world take a peek at our plain of existence, but then the Grim Reaper puts in an appearance – and Vargas is stabbed while everyone was holding hands and the locked door prevented any outsider from coming in!

I have a sneaking suspicion that this tale was penned as a tribute to John Dickson Carr. The story has an atmospheric setting and a premise that revolves around apparently supernatural occurrences and an impossible stabbing, but there were also a few laugh-out-loud moments – as Carpenter and Quincannon were channeling the spirit of Sir Henry Merrivale when it was their turn to ask the spirits questions! Full marks for this story!

The Highbinders

This is more a thriller than a proper detective story, in which a war between different factions is brooding in China Town after the body of a Tong Leader is snatched and a lawyer is fatally wounded in the street by a bullet. The only clue are the last words of the lawyer, "blue shadow," which constitutes as a dying message, but the main focus for Quincannon is on preventing a a small-scale civil war in the streets and simply surviving this ordeal. Not a bad story at all, but this time the setting was more interesting than the actual plot.

Overall, a strong compendium of period stories, which either had cleverly constructed plots or told an exciting story combined with evocative settings and colorful characters, that left me craving for more – and I wonder if over the past thirteen years enough new stories have appeared to justify a second collection. These stories are too good to leave them uncollected! 

Killed in All Kinds of Ways

"Maybe the truth is that Bill was a man who believed that fairy tales came true, and that we can live happily ever after – but his fairy tales were more like fractured ones from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show than anything that might have been written by brothers named Grimm. These stories are fairy tales in their way, and at the same time homage to the genre he spent his life immersed in."

- Jane Haddam

Yes, another review of a book that has William DeAndrea's name plastered across the front cover, but this one is special – a posthumous compendium that's an exhibit in miniature scale of his considerable talents as a storyteller and plotter. The first fistful of stories feature Matt Cobb, a specialized trouble shooter for a television network, handling everything that's too ticklish for security and too nasty for public relations, who's job often drags him into high-profile and baffling murder cases connected to the world behind the small screen. The book also includes two Holmesian pastiches, one of them narrated with the voice of the hardboiled detective, and the remaining tales are standalones – one of them the standout story of this collection. Lamentably, he never wrote any short stories that chronicled one of the many cases that were handled by Niccolo Benedetti and Ronald Gentry, and which were alluded to in The Werewolf Murders (1992). 

Murder – All Kinds (2003) opens with a short introduction from his wife, Jane Haddam, who's an accomplished mystery author herself, telling briefly of one of those domestic tragedies that most of us, unfortunately, are all too familiar with from personal experience. But optimistically noted that he produced a lot of work in the final year of his life, and that "it's impossible to tell which were written when he was sick and which when he was well." I found myself agreeing with her, more and more, with each passing story!

Matt Cobb, Special Projects:

Snowy Reception

In this opening story, Matt Cobb is escorted to an airport by two federal government agents to identify a notorious terrorist – who procured a spot on the most wanted list by taking the anchorman of the Evening News hostage and murdering several security guards. The consequences of this on-air killing spree made the fame-seeking terrorist a bit camera shy and upon his escape abroad, he drastically altered his appearance. Cobb identifies him by pointing out the one thing even the best plastic surgeons in the world couldn't alter. This is a fun, but slight, story that reminded me of some of the tales from Detective Conan, in which a single suspect has to be deduced from a suspicious lot of characters.

Killed Top to Bottom

With the sole exception of a sobbing clown, everyone started hugging the concrete floor when an unobserved assailant took aim at the host of a local cable show – a noted professor of linguistics. The smoking gun proves to be as elusive as the shooter and the solution as to how it was obscured is exemplar of DeAndrea's creativity. There's also a hilarious scene, in which Matt Cobb wrestles the half hysterical clown to the ground and is stunned by a security guard, who was under the impression that he had stopped an attempted rape, and this skirmish turns out to contain an important clue!

Killed in Midstream

Justice Quest is a true-crime show that asks its viewers to help them shed some light on unsolved mysteries, but the ratings have been lagging behind that of its competitors and it's given one more shot at reeling in viewers with a high-profile, mind blowing case – and dispatches Matt Cobb and one of the shows executives to the island of an ex-diamond merchant. The merchant and his cat were the only ones who survived a massacre at his store, in which the lives of twenty-seven people were extinguished to safely obtain a pile of precious stones, and whomever was responsible got away with it. But when Matt Cobb and his TV station starts probing the case again, it becomes evident that the police were looking for the mass murderer too far away from home. And the method for hiding diamonds is one of the cleverest I have ever come across in a detective story!

Killed in Good Company

Matt Cobb receives an invitation to partake in a round-table discussion with other famous investigators for a documentary, but the discussions are interrupted by the noisy rattling emanating from the cupboards of skeletons demanding to be let out – with deadly results. Cobb nearly lost his life when he attempted to save a retired private eye from the poisonous fumes that filled his room and the method employed here is both brilliant and original. The story also very much reminded me of Rex Stout's novella "Too Many Detective" (collected in Three for the Chair, 1957) and the gathering of detectives in volume 30 of Detective Conan/Case Closed.

Other Stories:

Hero's Welcome

A short-short Cold War spy story, in which a Soviet agent returns home and there's an expected twist ending. Not a very interesting story, I'm afraid.

Sabotage

This is the standout story I referred to earlier, and I can't tell too much about it without divulging any of its surprises. But it's a story that keeps you guessing until the end which direction the plot is going to take and involves a dedicated psychiatrist, questing for the reason behind the suicide of one of his patients, a promising teenage genius, and its connection with a radical figurehead of the pro-environmental movement – and ties it neatly together with one of the most dreadful tragedies of the modern era. Why can't more modern crime stories be like this?

Friend of Mine

Even in the broadest interpretation used these days, it's impossible to pigeonhole this story as one of crime or detection, however, there is a sense of genuine mystery – but one that's more at home between the crumbling pages of classic tales of horror and adventure. In this modern fable, a soldier, stationed in the artic region, has a brush with Victor Frankenstein's monstrous creation – who has been elevated to Godhood by the locals. It's completely out-of-place in this collection, but nonetheless a very engaging read and a first-rate pastiche of Mary Shelley's immortal horror yarn.

The Adventure of the Cripple Parade (ascribed to Mickey Spillane)

Depending on where you stand, this is either one of the most successful or one of the most disastrous attempts at bonding the European and the American detective story. Here we have the personification of the conventional detective story, who's voice suddenly vibrates with the violent poetry of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane – and vows revenge to whoever beat Watson to a bloody pulp. I guess this is a nod to The Maltese Falcon (1930). Although Sam Spade's motive for finding his partner's assailant wasn't driven by the kind of friendship that Holmes feels for Watson. Anyway, it's a surprisingly amusing story, but not that everyone is going to like.

The Adventure of the Christmas Tree

This is a bona fide attempt at recreating Conan Doyle's magic, in which the forester of a Scottish lord brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson a most singular problem: the Christmas tree he hand picked and marked for his master was spirited away from his private woods, but nevertheless turned up in the ancestral home of his employer! Coincidently, the Lord is entertaining an important German diplomat, while they negotiate the terms of important business deals between their nations, and the tree has an important bearing on these talks. In the end, Holmes and Watson foil a devious conspiracy that might have kicked started WWI prematurely. However, it's not one of the most ingenious Sherlock Holmes stories I have ever read, original or replica, but it's amusing enough and would've made a fun episode with Jeremy Brett.

Prince Charming

A cutesy retelling of the titular fairly tale trope in a contemporary setting with a kidnapping plot woven into the story telling. The story actually managed to utterly fool me, because I was convinced that Prince Charming staged the kidnapping of a young heiress in order to cast himself in the role of her savior and get his hands on all of her fathers money by marrying her – completely forgetting that in fairly tales lovers are supposed to live happily ever after. Oh well...

Murder at the End of the World

This previously unpublished story, set in the 1970s, is basically Orson Welles The War of the Worlds Hoax as perceived by a scribbler of detective stories, in which the military accidentally sends out an erroneous emergency notification to all radio and television stations – entailing that a nuclear strike against the country is imminent. This causes a panic at a small student radio station that leads to a vicious assault on one of them, but what possible motive still stands in the face of a nuclear fall-out? The solution, unfortunately, is uninspired, but that's more than made up by the premise of the story and the surprise of the hidden and understated identity of the detective!  

Altogether, this is a solid collection, comprising of all the short stories William DeAndrea produced during his life time, which is certainly worth acquiring if you're already a fan of his work – or just enjoy kicking back with a bunch of well written stories.