Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence (2019) by P. Dieudonné

I hadn't planned on doing another review of a non-English detective novel, but a small, independent publisher, E-Pulp, kindly provided me with a review copy of Paul Dieudonné's Rechercheur De Klerck en het doodvonnis (Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence, 2019) – who has been billed as the pupil of the late A.C. Baantjer. A former police detective, with four decades of experience, who went on to become the most popular mystery novelist of my country and his work introduced me to the genre. So I was quite curious to see how well Dieudonné's debut stacked up against my fond memories of Baantjer. The answer: surprisingly well.

Paul Dieudonné grew up in the Netherlands, but immigrated with his family in the late 1960s to Canada and ran an antiquarian bookshop in Montreal, until health issues forced him to sell the bookstore, but through Baantjer he continued to maintain a link with his homeland. And this inspired him to follow in the footsteps of the Nestor of the Dutch politieroman (police procedural).

To use his own words, Dieudonné wanted to write "a book with the same feeling and style as a Baantjer." He described his debut novel as his "tribute to the grandmaster" and dedicated the book to his memory. Slowly, the waves of nostalgia began to form.

Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence is set not in Amsterdam, but in the second biggest city in the country, Rotterdam, which was an excellent decision, because Amsterdam has been done to death as a backdrop for Dutch police series – to the point of fatigue. So Rotterdam is a welcome change of scenery for this type of Dutch police novel which often have a strong, regional flavor to them.

The protagonist of the series is the titular policeman, Inspector Lucien de Klerck, who wears sunglasses with a uv-filter, because a genetic defect made his eyes incredibly sensitive to the ultra-violet radiation in sunlight. Personality-wise, De Klerck is the inverse of the typical brooding, cynical and troubled policeman of the contemporary misdaadroman (crime novel). De Klerck is an optimistic, good humored policeman who's married to a farmer's daughter from Friesland, Annie, who live on a house boat and they love to move around the city with it. Since a few months, De Klerck has a new assistant, Ruben Klaver, who he described as "a boisterous talent."

Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence begins with the arrest of "an alleged burglar and safe-cracker," Jacco Fonk, who had been caught by hidden security camera when he slipped into an office building of an investment company, but the details are curious to say the least – because he entered the building without picking any locks. More curiously, the security camera registered how Fonk locked the door behind him and then broke it open again with a crowbar. Even more baffling, the director of the burgled GreenDreamInvest, Bart Bovend'Eerdt, comes to the police station to request the release of Fonk. He claimed the whole burglary was a big misunderstanding and simply part of a bet he had with a friend to test his security system.

So, with the police report rescinded, De Klerck had to let Fonk go, but merely an hour later, Bart Bovend'Eerdt takes his own life in a spectacular and very public way.

Bovend'Eerdt stumbled to the Erasmusbridge, tied one end of "a blue, plasticized washing line" to the railing, placed the noose on the other end around his neck, climbed up and "fell backwards." A number of security cameras caught everything from the moment he appeared on the bridge to how "the fall jerked to a halt" as the body "dangled wildly" at the end of the makeshift noose. More importantly, the footage showed Bovend'Eerdt had been alone on that part of the bridge. De Klerck and Klaven eventually find a suicide note and evidence Bovend'Eerdt has been preparing for the end. What else could it have been than a suicide? De Klerck has his doubts. And not without reason.

A.C. Baantjer's debut (A Noose for Bobby, 1963)

Sadly, the mysterious hanging at the Erasmusbridge is not an impossible crime and the method to hang two more people from the same bridge is as prosaic as it's disappointing. Thankfully, it wasn't done by hypnoses or a mind-altering drug, but the solution was still a bit of a letdown. I was reminded of Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941), in which people are found with a broken neck, but lacked any physical signs of having struggled or resisted their attacker and appeared to have been an impossible crime – a big deal was made about the murder method. Only to be letdown by a very simplistic, uninspired solution.

However, while the how behind the murders was disappointing, to say the least, the who-and why were impressively done and a delightful throwback to the great detective stories of yore! Particularly the choice of murderer is a tip of the hat to the classics. Very well done!

Appie Baantjer preferred to work with a tiny, closed-circle of suspects of four or five credible suspects, but Dieudonné used a slightly larger cast of characters from the victim's private and professional life. There are former employees of the victim's struggling company. Such as a disgruntled bookkeeper and a missing deputy director. An older brother who throws shade at his sister-in-law and refers to her as "the witch." Evidence has come to light linking the victim to a group of hard-bitten, ruthless criminals from Amsterdam and this brings De Klerck to the old capital where he meets a thinly disguised replica of Baantjer's well-known police-detective, Inspector Jurriaan de Cock, who's only referred to as "Jurre." Still a spot-on imitation and love the idea De Cock is still dragging his tired, old feet through the streets of Amsterdam as he patiently hunts down thieves and murderers. This country hasn't been the same without him.

Well, Dieudonné more than delivered on the promise of writing a police novel that felt like it could have been written by Baantjer. Not only is the storytelling and style very reminiscent of Baantjer, but De Klerck and Klaver are typical Baantjer characters. You can see a reflection of De Cock, Vledder and Van Opperdoes in them.

However, Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence is not an outright pastiche of Baantjer. There are many obvious nods and winks to Baantjer, but this series can clearly stand on its own two legs as it basically plays Monk to Baantjer's Columbo. Or should that be Paul Halter's Dr. Alan Twist to John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell? Add to this an engrossing, if slightly imperfect, plot, clueing and the rushes of nostalgia, you have a promising debut of a series that might actually fill the gaping hole in my soul left by Baantjer's passing. Hey, he was my first mystery writer!

So, while the snobby, puzzle-plot purist in me was disappointed by the lack of ingenuity when it came to the tantalizingly-posed bridge-murders, I can easily forgive that when put against the overall quality of the story. For example, the murderer and motive were both very well handled, clued and delightfully classical. This made Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence a good, satisfying and, above all, warm tribute to one of the most important mystery writers I ever picked up and eagerly look forward to Dieudonné's second novel – which is scheduled to be published sometime in 2020. But until then, I have a short story, "Rechercheur De Klerck and de doodsteek" ("Inspector De Klerck and the Death Blow," 2019), to carry me over.

A Quartet of Detectives

"Cause and effect rule this world; they may be a mirage but they are a consistent mirage; everywhere, except possibly in subatomic physics, there is cause each effect, and that cause can be found."

- Trevis Tarrant (C. Daly King's "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem," collected in The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant, 2003)

Frederick Irving Anderson was an American newspaper reporter for the New York World and a premier writer of short stories, who regularly contributed to such periodicals as The Saturday Evening Post and The Popular Magazine, but only a fraction of his work has been collected since the early 1910s – resulting in four volumes in total. The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (1914) was published over a hundred years ago, while The Purple Flame and Other Detective Stories (2016) appeared only last year.

Wedged between these volumes, there is the very obscure The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925) and a widely lauded collection of short stories selected as one of the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone title of detective fiction.

Book of Murder (1930) consists of ten stories and has a peculiar, overarching structure. Six of the stories are about Deputy Parr of the New York Police Department and Oliver Armiston, "the extinct author," who had stopped writing detective and thriller stories years ago, "at the gentle request of the police," because criminals were plagiarizing his fictional schemes – which proved to be surprisingly successful outside of the printed page. So now the retired placed himself at the disposal of the police. However, it should be noted that the policemen in these stories are not clueless idiots or bunglers. On the contrary!

There are three further short stories with a different set of characters, farmer Jason Selfridge and Constable Orlo Sage, which take place somewhere in rustic New England. Regrettably, the rural backdrop turned out to be the only memorable aspect of these stories as the plots were severely lacking.

The tenth and final story is a crossover bringing all four characters together on the same pages. So that was an unusual, but great, ending to a collection of short stories about a pair of distinctly different series-characters and somewhat made up for the weakness of the Selfridge and Sage stories.

I can understand why Anderson is held in high regard by so many critics and readers, because he could write and was not devoid of imagination. Mike Grost placed him close to the scientific school of Arthur B. Reeve, but not Anderson distinguished himself from that movement by aspiring to "the irony, sophistication and wit" of "such writers as Saki and Oscar Wilde" - something that did not always allow for scientific accuracy or realism. Personally, the stories reminded me of those collected in J.E. Preston-Muddock's Dick Donovan: The Glasgow Detective (2005), which is both positive and negative.

On the upside, the stories collected in Book of Murder are mostly excellent specimens of the type of crime-and detective stories published during the early 1900s. When the genre was in a transitional period between the Doylean Era and the Golden Age. However, these stories were all originally published between 1925 and 1929, which almost makes them nostalgia acts during their own time and don't always translate in type of detective story common by the time the 1930s rolled around.

Some of the stories surely tried to aspire to the new standards, but my impression is that Anderson never fully emerged from that transitional period as a full-fledged Golden Age author. But I might be completely wrong about that. So let's take a look at the stories collected in Book of Murder.

This collections opens with one of its better entries, "Beyond All Conjecture," which was first published in the September, 1928 in The Saturday Evening Post and the victim is a wealthy Dutch-American from New York, Cornelius Vlemynck, whose ancestors came from "the delft banks of the Schie" - until an adventurous forebear began to wander and ended up within "the stockade known as Nieuw Amsterdam." Despite his fast wealth, Vlemynck has one simple ambition in life: to die in the house he was born in. A humble wish prevented by a furtive murderer, who administrated a dose of poison, which took hold of its victim when he had posted several letters. And the man died on his way back to his home in the gutter.

An alert medical examiner prevented the death from becoming "a perfect crime" and the two detectives, Deputy Parr and Armiston, expertly unravel the poisoning method. You should immediately know how the poison was ingested, but the details how it ended up in the victim's hand is very clever indeed. Something that made ingenious use of the Dead Letter Office. The relationship between the murderer and victim struck me as an attempt to imitate G.K. Chesterton.

The second story, "The Wedding Gift," was first published in a September, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and the plot shows strains of the scientific detective story.

A dead man was found on a stretch of beach, "as if it had been washed in by the tide with the wind behind it," but the wind wasn't behind the tide on the previous night. The body also lacks any evidence of immersion in salt water and nothing is ever washed up at the beach where the victim was discovered. Parr explains to Armiston that murderer's are usually unaware that "a drowned man has a route" and tries to impress his friend even more by deducing that the body belonged to a left-handed violinist. Startlingly, the victim is identified as Barron Wilkes, the Bull's-Head Bank Defaulter, which throws an entirely new light on the case. One that was satisfactorily resolved and the explanation completely vindicated Parr's deductions.

The third story, "The Japanese Parasol," originally appeared on July 3, 1926 in The Saturday Evening Post and Deputy Parr has a direct hand in an "accidental" coal-dust fire, which has the objective of gaining entrance to an abandoned house belonging to one of the landed families of the island of Manhattan.

A very unorthodox police procedure, but the covert operation yielded result when they find a lead box buried in the cellar, containing human remains, with a tin foot among the pile of bones – positively identifying the body as belonging to Barry Dilk. One of the most unfortunate members of the family, whose mind had "ceased expanding at the age of ten" and had lost a feet when he went "fishing with a stick of dynamite" at the age of twelve, but was nevertheless given "uncounted millions" to squander. So the background of the story is not without interest and the scene of putting out the coal-hole fire was well conceived, but the explanation was pretty common place.

The next three stories, "Dead End," "The Magician" and "A Start in Life," are the New England tales about Jason Selfridge and Orlo Sage, but, as previously noted, the plots of these stories were lacking and really nothing to say about them – except that they were (admittedly) very well written. So on the next story.

One of my two favorite stories from this collection is "Big Time," published in an October, 1927 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, which is a witty impossible crime story that was overlooked by Robert Adey when he compiled Locked Room Murders (1991). A well-known musical coach, named Hector Verblennes, was found pinned to the floor of his music room with an African assagai (spear) snatched from a wall decorated with ancient weaponry. There is, however, one problem: all of "the doors were locked on the inside" and "the transoms held accumulations of undisturbed dust."

Anderson wrote an amusing, but original, take on the locked room problem and the method is good for a fun mental image of the murderer working his magic. Something Edmund Crispin could have written (e.g. "The Name on the Window" from Beware of the Trains, 1935).

The next one, "The Recoil," was published on March 23, 1929 in The Saturday Evening Post and takes it cue from Conan Doyle's "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927). The story opens with Armiston playing armchair detective and (sort of) solving the theft of a harp, but the story then moves on to the shooting death of Culpepper Lea. A dueling pistol, "with its muzzle blown away," was found in the waters near the scene of the crime. So this gives rise to the question whether the shooting was a murder or a suicide made to look like murder, because the recoil on the gun could have been used for the latter. Some potentially good ideas here, but nothing of importance was done with any of them.

The next-to-last story, "Gulf Stream Green," was originally published in a June, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and is another one of Anderson's scientific detective stories, but the explanation also appears to be related to the science-fiction genre. A celebrated diva, Leocadie, has "an anonymous lover," or stalker, who threatens her life and seriousness of these threats are demonstrated when her maid, Berthe, is accidentally killed in her place – because she was wearing her employer's Gulf Stream green clothes. A gimmicky, semi-scientific mystery story reminiscent of those found in such collections as Vincent Cornier's The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth (2011) and Max Rittenberg's The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant (2016).

Finally, we have "The Door Key," published in The Saturday Evening Post of December 28, 1929 and begins with a fishing trip up north, which brings Armiston and Parr into contact with Selfridge and Sage. During the first half, the story focuses on the strange behavior of Ensign Belding. Who appears to have suddenly vacated his country house and left a door key in the care of Selfridge, but when they poke around the place they find a lamp is still burning and a note on the kitchen table – ending with the request to "please blow out the lamp." The second part of the story takes place in the city and satisfyingly resolves the problem that had emerged from the first half, which concerns an empty car that was fished out of the river by Sage.

So the story was definitely successful in contrasting the rural setting of the Selfridge and Sage stories with the big city cases, and criminals, of the longer Parr and Armiston series. And a nifty way to tie otherwise unrelated material together in a single short story collection.

On a whole, Book of Murder is not a bad collection of short detective stories and loved two of them, "Beyond All Conjecture" and "Big Time," but personally, I do not consider them to be cornerstones of the genre. As a collective, the stories are simply not good or influential enough to attach such weight to them. However, I'm sure some of you will vehemently disagree with me on that point.

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.

Mainly Conversation

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

- John Milton (On His Blindness) 

"See if you can beat Henry to the right solution," challenges the back cover of Isaac Asimov's Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), a fourth collection of short stories originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, comprising of twelve of their feasts with puzzles for dessert.

The Black Widowers consists of the patent attorney Geoffrey Avalon, chemist James Drake, code-breaking expert Thomas Trumbull, high school teacher Roger Halsted, novelist Emmanuel Rubin and the artist Mario Ganzalo – and the last two amuse themselves by exchanging snappy remarks as if they were running a private detective agency on West 35th Street.

Once a month, they gather in a private room at an Italian restaurant, Milano, to relish a sumptuous meal and fine drinks, while discussing a variety of topics and grilling the guest of the month. Alternating between members from month to month, they've to bring along a guest and after dinner, they'll ask him to justify his existence and has to answer every question that is put on the table. Unavoidably, they lay bare a problem or an unexplained episode that's fretting their guest, and as proper hosts, they try to find a remedy, but the correct answer always comes from Henry.

Henry is the personal waiter and honorary member of the Black Widowers and perhaps the only "Armchair Detective" who spends an entire story on his feet.

Regrettably, the characters and their conversations are often more interesting than the problems they examine, because you've to be a polymath like Henry in order to solve most of them – often hinging on obscure or arcane knowledge. There are a few that you can solve, but the fun in these stories comes from attending their monthly banquets as an unofficial, eight member of the group and sitting in on their discussions. I often sympathize with Geoffrey when he feels that a problem is intruding on the conversation or breaking up the verbal duel between Rubin and Mario. I have the same warm feelings for these characters as I have for Rex Stout's Wolfe, Archie and Fritz. They're just fun stories to read, even if they don't always excel in the plotting department, but lets take them down from the top.

Sixty Million Trillion Combinations

Tom Trumbull is the stand-in for the guest in the first story from this collection, because he wants to run a problem through them that involves a feud between two brilliant mathematicians – attached to the government and therefore eager to have it resolved. The problem facing him lies in convincing an eccentric mathematician that his rival, and everyone else for that matter, could've cracked his password with sixty million trillion possible combinations! I buy the explanation of how someone working close enough with him could've eventually stumbled to the password, but not in the way Henry figured it out within an hour.

The Woman in the Bar

The protagonist from Murder at the ABA (1976), Darius Just, brings a tale from the Hardboiled School to the table and tells the story of the night that he lied to a beautiful woman in a bar about living and breathing baseball – cumulating in an eventful evening in which he saves the girl without ever knowing what was going on. What a great idea to split a plot between two of your detectives, but if you don't know anything about baseball (note that I'm raising my hand here), it's nearly impossible to solve it yourself.

The Driver

In the after word, Asimov wrote that Frederic Dannay rejected this story, not once, but twice and I can understand why, but the premise and discussions, at least, were interesting: an astronomer tells the Widowers about an international conference on SETI and the search for extraterrestrial life where a driver was killed after drunkenly stumbling in front of a car. Conspiracies and spies abound, but the weakness, as usually, is in the solution.

The Good Samaritan

The Black Widowers is a club exclusively for men and when Mario brings along a woman as his guest, they begin to bicker and fight, before they can help the lady find the young man who helped her after being mugged during her visit to Manhattan – wanting to repay the money he lend her. Alongside "To the Barest," from The Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980), this is one of the rare stories from this series that I did not like to read at all. Hostility among the Widowers strikes a false note, here about a woman and in the other an inheritance from a member we've never heard about before, and their solutions didn't made up for any of it.

Note for the curious: in the after word, Asimov explained that he played around with variations on the rigid format of the series and listed some possibilities: "I have sometimes thought about getting them out on a picnic in Central Park or having them attend a large convention en masse, or separating them and having each do a bit of detective work with Henry pulling the strings together at last (I may try that last bit if I ever do a Black Widower novel, which somehow is not a thought that greatly attracts me)." If that humanoid-looking, fiction producing machine had been given ten more years to operate, that novel had been a fact! 

The Year of Action

Their guest of this month, Mr. Herb Graff, wants to make a screen adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, but before they can go into production an argument has to be settled, in which year did it take place – in 1873 or 1877? Henry compares the text from the operetta with history to answer Mr. Graff's question. Not bad, but only solvable if you know your history and your G&S.

Can You Prove It?

This was for me a new and now one of my favorite Black Widower stories, in which John Smith has a strange adventure in an Eastern European country, tugged away behind the Iron Curtain, when he has trouble identifying himself to a policeman after being mugged – who nonetheless believes him and lets him go. How did the policeman know he was telling the truth and was not a spy? The fairly clued and clever solution made this, for me, a standout in the series.

The Phoenician Bauble

A story full of skullduggery, looters and shady business connections in the world of museums caught in the meshes of international trafficking of ancient artifacts – like a cup of gold and enamel from 1200 B.C. The most interesting aspect of this story is that the Widowers help a curator in retrieving an item that was smuggled out of the Cyprus and purchased on the black market.

A Monday in April

A rather weak and trivial story, in which the Black Widowers probe their guest to find a problem that he did not qualify as such and possibly mended broken relationship in the process.

Neither Brute Nor Human

As unsolvable as most of them, but definitely a lot of fun to read and wholeheartedly agree with Asimov's sentiment in his after word about doing these crackpots in the eye – even if they are fictional ones. Their guest has a sister who's dying from cancer and under the influence of the Cosmic Order of Theognostics, who expel the presence of malevolent aliens with prayer and incantations. How that would stop any being capable of crossing the stars is a mystery Asimov never acknowledged. Anyway, he doesn't care about the money she's leaving them in her will, well supplied with that himself, but he wants to prevent them from gaining their ancestral home and has been posing as a convert to regain possession of the house after she passes away. But to convince her to put him in her will, he has to experience enlightenment that tells them where the aliens originated from and she gave him some vague clues. The story also includes discussions and links with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle and other (early) mystery writers, and a good false solution that will probably be everyone's first guess.   

The Redhead

From all the Black Widower stories I have read, this one has always been my favorite ever since reading it in The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), a compilation and tribute volume, and best of all, it's a genuine locked room mystery. A guest is unsettled by his redheaded wife claiming to be a witch and after an argument in a lobby walks into a restaurant with one-way in-and out and promptly vanishes into thin air. The solution is simple, but absolutely believable and original, and the idea was came to Asimov in a dream – premise and conclusion all wrapped after a refreshing sleep.

The Wrong House

An interesting premise, a man who lives in one of a group of houses known as the Four Sisters, which all look identical on the outside, stumbles into the wrong house one night to find a group of counterfeiters. Asimov plays scrupulous fair in this story and, ironically, that's what did this story in, because they shouldn't have needed Henry to solve this one.

The Intrusion

Just when they were having banquet without a puzzle to untwined, a man storms into the room who has heard of their reputations and wants them to help find the man who took advantage of his mentally sister. They understand that helping the man will have repercussions, however, Henry has some wise, if cruel, advice for what to do with the man. Not a very pleasant of good story to round to this collection out with.  

All in all, I enjoyed reacquainting myself again with the Black Widowers, even if you can't ways read that back in this review, but that's because I try to judge them here on their merits as a detective stories, however, this is one of he few series that I really read just for the characters. Like I said at beginning of this review, I love their interactions and following their discussions with a good plot just being an added bonus. 

I picked the post-title for this review from the chapter Agatha Christie contributed to The Floating Admiral (1931), a round-robin novel she did with members of The Detection Club, which seemed really appropriate to use since Asimov was also a big Christie-fan.