77 North (2023) by D.L. Marshall

Last year, I did my best Herodotus impression and wrote up "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years" tracking the changes of everyone's favorite subgenre over the past two decades – evolving into something of a revival. A revival whose seeds were planted by the reprint renaissance and translation wave, which started showing fruit towards the end of the last decade. So far, the harvest has been plentiful and growing.

Just in the past year, locked room and impossible crime fans were treated to James Scott Byrnside's Monkey See, Monkey Murder (2023), A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023), Anne van Doorn's Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) and Tom Mead's The Murder Wheel (2023). J.L. Blackhurst's Three Card Murder (2023) and Gigi Pandian's Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) and The Raven Thief (2023) are currently residing on the big pile. One of the more intriguing takes today on the traditional detective story and locked room mysteries comes from D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series.

Marshall smashed together the action-packed, 1980s movie thrillers and weaves deceivingly intricate plots throughout the gunfights, standoffs, hand-to-hand combat and betrayals. No matter where on the planet Tyles finds himself, the morally ambiguous mercenary is always confronted with killers who execute their victims under apparently inexplicable circumstances. Anthrax Island (2021) brings Tyler to the post-apocalyptic Gruinard Island contaminated with deadly anthrax spores where the first murder is committed in the locked and watched radio room. Black Run (2021) takes place on an old, rusty Soviet era transport ship filled with modern-day pirates, smugglers and assassins as Tyler's cargo (a prisoner) is knifed to death inside the sealed tank of the ship. Steve, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, called the series "the lovechild of Alistair Maclean and John Dickson Carr." While the impossible crime took a backseat in the second novel, it was still a cracking good read. And looked forward to the third title.

77 North (2023) concludes, what's hopefully, the initial trilogy and wraps up all the ongoing storylines and plot-threads in an unrelenting, action-packed survival thriller – a very clever plot lurking underneath it all. The ending suggests 77 North is not going to be Tyler's last appearance ("one last job"), but a lot happens between the opening and closing pages. Like a lot.

John Tyler is "dead in the eyes of the world" and so has the freedom to move around to extract revenge on the people responsible for killing his older brother, Justin. Tyler takes his bloody vengeance on a world tour as he goes from Rio and the coast of Croatia to Amsterdam to pick off a group of ex-special forces turned private military ("real close-knit team"), which was bound to get him noticed. Tyler is trapped by the man who helped him to die and stay dead. And he needs him to a job. There's a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Golubev, who has setup shop in one of the roughest, most inhospitable parts of Siberia. Somewhere deep into the Arctic Circle, Severnaya Zemlya, stands a Cold War era "hotel" where the KGB experimented with ESP, astral projection and telekinesis. So remote enough to conduct some shady, downright illegal business deals and sales, but Golubev attracted the attention of certain people when he got his hands on a small amount of bioweapons. Normally, those people are not interested in obsolete Soviet weapons, but they are interested in Golubev's bioweapons expert, Professor Balakin, who wants to get out. Professor Balakin is wiling to trade the name of "a Russian double-agent well-placed within NATO" in exchange for a white picket fence in the United States. Only they hit a snag. One of the two agents sent out there was killed under mysterious circumstances. Somehow, the professor knew John Tyler is alive, because he secretly requested Tyler to get him out of there.

This barely touches on all the intricate details, characters and plot-threads of the story's opening pages as Tyler takes the place of the dead undercover agent to get the intel and protect the second agent, Dr. Carr – a legit bioweapons expert. They went to the Arctic hotel undercover of checking out the goods on behalf of General Kayembe, dictator of the central African country Nambutu, who also happens to be a friend of Tyler. So no problem to go down there as the general's man on the ground, but getting to the hotel is an ordeal and sets the tone for the rest of the story. Tyler has to battle both the unforgiving climate ("the Arctic Circle wants you dead, and will try at any opportunity") and creeping, disappearing shape fleeting across the ice shooting at him and leaving behind a burned body. That's just before arriving at the isolated hotel of a Russian arms dealer with a private army who's hosting a who's who of terrorists, cartel members, killers and "probably just a few shady fuckers who wanted big guns."

First of all, the settings is one of the strongest and most attractive part of this mystery-thriller series. John Tyler can be placed in settings and circumstances in a setting that would be off-limits for a "normal" amateur detective or police inspector. For example, I can't imagine Carver's Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow setting foot on Gruinard Island or Byrnside's Rowan Manory getting a fee big enough to board the Tiburon. 77 North does not disappoint in that regard. The place is like a decaying time capsule of the 1970s with portraits of Brezhnev hanging askew on half-collapsed walls with peeling, mustard-yellow wallpaper where Golubev conducts his business. Strewn with relics of the period ("Urbexers or eBay profiteers would have a field day with the kitsch"). But the place also has a "destroyed wing." Decades ago, experiments where carried out there involving psychic and paranormal phenomena to create super soldiers, but one experiment reputedly lead to a deadly fire destroying half the building. This ruined section is sealed off from the rest of the building by a huge steel door ("the kind you'd see on a ship or submarine"). Underneath the old hotel is a nuclear bunker from the Cold War "designed to withstand a two megaton nuclear strike nearby." And with a history like that, the place acquired a ghostly resident. They call the ghost the White Demon or Pozharnyy, "Fire Man," who stalks its dilapidated corridors as a harbinger of doom, death and burned corpses. Great stuff!

The nuclear bunker underneath the hotel naturally becomes the scene for a locked room murder. Tyler is alone with two other people in the sealed bunker when one of them is burned to death, inside a locked section of the bunker, but the relatively small, hermetically bunker had been searched top to bottom – offering no hiding place or escape route for the murderer. And no source of ignition. No our mercenary has a problem with the ruthless arms dealer.

I'm not going to attempt to give you an idea about what happens next as this is only a mere fraction of what goes down during the first half of the story, which is interspersed with flashbacks to Tyler's first time on the job back in 1999 when he joined his brother in Nambutu. And everything is connected to everything.

77 North is first and foremost an first-rate thriller, as intricate as it's exciting, rarely letting up its relentless pace. So while a mystery-thriller, of sorts, it's not a tale of detection or deduction, because the punishing pace and pile-on of incidents, twists and turns simply won't allow for it. However, you're strongly advised to pay attention as the keen eyed armchair detective can pick up enough clues and hints to get a long way towards the correct solution. On top of that, Marshall wonderfully used the melee of the action thriller for some good, old-fashioned trickery and misdirection in a way that would difficult to pull-off in a garden variety murder case. More importantly, this series perfectly demonstrates why having a sound plot and some historical genre awareness is a rock-solid foundation for the characters and story to stand on (*). After all, if this series had been about Tyler simply shooting his way to the final chapter, I would never have bothered with it nor would the series have stood out from the raft of other action-oriented thrillers. Now they are something more than just action-thrillers or locked room mysteries. I suspect genre scholars and locked room fans of the future will look back with great interest to these first three John Tyler novels.

Hopefully, Tyler has enough fuel left in the tank to take on future assignments as I feel the series has not yet ran its course. So much more can be done with those specialized, usually off-limits settings. Something like a black site prison in some jungle outpost where prisoners are killed in locked and guarded cells or a prequel novel with Justin Tyler set during the Yugoslav Wars to give his younger brother a breather. Until then, the Tyler Trilogy comes highly recommended as a truly new and radically different take on the traditional locked room mystery.

*: see my review and comments on Pierre Siniac's Un assassin, ça va, ça vient (Death on Bastille Day, 1981).

Black Run (2021) by D.L. Marshall

D.L. Marshall's Anthrax Island (2021) was one of last year's standouts, a hybridization of the action thriller, espionage and the classically-styled detective story, which introduced his lead-character, John Tyler – a sort of black opts mercenary. Anthrax Island takes him to Gruinard Island where experiments were carried out to weaponize anthrax spores during the Second World War that had rendered the island inhospitable for humans and animals alike. Only pocket of habitability is a sealed research outpost. A small cluster of ten, bright orange cabins on stilts forming a U shape and connected by narrow, plastic tunnels. Tyler is dispatched to the island to help the scientific research team trapped inside the base, but claustrophobic setting and post-apocalyptic aesthetics soon become the backdrop for a good, old-fashioned locked room murder.

Normally, the book cover of Anthrax Island would have been enough to never give the book or author a second glance as it screamed out everything that makes the modern thriller so unappealing to me. I would never haven given it a shot, if Steve Barge had not praised it as "one of the best modern mysteries" and picked it as his 2021 Book of the Year. Toss in an impossible crime and you grabbed my attention. And he was not wrong. Marshall wrote an immersive thriller that worked equally well as a locked room mystery and the quarantined setting, deadly contagion and even a Russian treat makes it the mystery-thriller encapsulating the early 2020s. I'm sure genre historians of the future will have a field day with Marshall's Anthrax Island. So it easily secured a place on this blog's yearly roundup of 2022 as well as an eventual place on "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Whenever I'll get around to updating it again.

Steve also reviewed the John Tyler novel, Black Run (2021), praising it as an "absolute top-draw twisty thriller" and very exciting read, but admitted the locked room ("...the room is very, very locked") murder "seemed more of an afterthought" – which is not the reason why I hesitated to immediately pick it up. I like detective stories that use a strong, evocative and perhaps even unique settings dripping with atmosphere to full effect. Black Run has a pretty tall wave to climb in order to live up to its predecessor. Honestly, I was a little skeptical if this second title could pull it off. But was I right? Well, let's find out!

Marshall's Black Run reads like a novelization of a bullet pumping, blood spurting 1980s style action movie switches back and forth between different timelines of the same story.

Firstly, John Tyler is hired to extract (i.e. kidnap) a target ("a traitorous, murdering scumbag") from the French Alps and transport him back to England, but the target surrounds himself with armed bodyguards. These interspersed chapters tell the story of how Tyler eventually captures the target and countdown to the current, second-half of the story ("Twelve days previously," "Eleven days previously," etc). Secondly, the second-half of the story concerns with the transportation of the target to England and the troublesome, blood-drenched voyage to reach that safe harbor. Tyler goes to an old contact, Captain Miller, who smuggles "pretty much anything else UPS won't carry" on his old, rusty Cold War era transport ship. Tiburon is undeniably a great setting. A dark, grimy old ship with passageways of "damp, dimly lit tunnels of pipes and metal" and "faded Nineties neon paint ran down the walls" like "a ghost train of badly painted Simpsons characters and Sharpied quotes in German" – strange, otherworldly looking "in the flickering light and red emergency lighting." Just one problem: Captain Miller does not smuggle people. So when the crew of modern-day pirates discover Tyler's team brought a captive aboard and somebody issues a one million euro bounty on their “cargo,” the proverbial shit starts hitting the fan... hard. The bodies begin to drop fast and hard in both narratives, but the one of importance is the murder of Tyler prisoner under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Tyler stowed away his prisoner in the old center tank, tied to a chair and a sack over his head, right beneath his cabin. The hatch is the only entrance to the sealed tomb below and covered by a bed, which had to be moved aside to open the hatch. Tyler also put a smartwatch on the prisoner to monitor his heartbeat, but, when he notices on his app that the prisoner's heartbeat has flatlined, he goes inside the sealed room. And finds a body with a knife sticking out of his chest! The data from the smartwatch eventually hands him incontestable proof someone had stabbed his prisoner while he "was lying across the only entrance."

A good, neatly posed locked room problem and liked how it incorporated the evidence of the smartwatch and heartbeat monitor, but the solution to how it was done is immediately obvious. This is the kind of locked room-trick that once you know how it was done, you'll know who did it and probably why as there's only way to do it under the given circumstances. And the main principle behind the trick is almost as old as the genre itself. Not so long ago, I reviewed a mystery with a very similar locked room setup and trick. However, it's something that will only somewhat bother people on deeply entrenched on this side of the fandom rather than those who want to read a nail-biting, action packed thriller. So probably a good decision to treat the locked room here as a minor side-puzzle as it would not have carried the plot. I still appreciated the locked room mystery got to play a small part in what is essentially a hard thriller. Even if the bit part is that of a simple stowaway.

At this point, I began to fear there was nothing left to discuss as the past and present narratives is a twisted thriller crammed with double-crosses, counter-plots, shootouts and Michael Slade levels of gruesome violence – leaving little doubt Tyler is a little more than a morally ambiguous mercenary. Then the story did something that caught me by surprise as it concerns something I tend to dismiss in detective stories.

I've mentioned before how kidnap stories lend themselves poorly to any type of traditional detective story and, to my knowledge, has never produced a classic or writer whose name became synonymous with it. There have been some halfhearted attempts and Gosho Aoyama tries his hands at one every now and then in the Case Closed series with varying degrees of success (e.g. vol. 72), but never a genuine masterpiece like there have been with locked rooms, dying messages, multiple-solutions and least-likely-suspects. It's always a sub-plot or complication to the larger plot. So why expected anything more from a thriller? Well, Black Run might have actually accomplished the impossible by delivering a great, nigh classic, kidnap tale 182 years after Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story by placing a spare heart of the horror genre underneath the floorboards of the locked room in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). Yes, it was stuffed deep within a modern, heavily leaded thriller, but the end dovetailed everything from the two narratives together to great effect. And since the series has one foot firmly in the traditionalists camp with its impossible murders, isolated locations and surprise twists, it counts as a detective story as well. Parts of it anyway. More importantly, it narrowed

And while hidden deep inside a heavily leaded thriller, it beautifully dovetailed everything from the two narratives together. Yes, it was stuffed deeply within a heavily leaded thriller, but, since the series has one foot firmly in the traditionalists camp with its impossible murders and surprise twists, it counts. More importantly, it narrowed what appeared to be a large, yawning gap between Anthrax Island and Black Run. Not quite there on the same level as Anthrax Island, but it pulled through in the end and left me excited to see in what kind of godforsaken hellhole Tyler ends up next. So much can be done with the premise of mystery-thrillers in dangerous, isolated locations. I can imagine Tyler getting locked up in some outpost prison with a serial killer who leaves bodies in locked cells or having to provide protection to an archaeological excavation that comes under siege. Either way, a third Tyler novel is apparently in the work and my basic pattern recognition tells me the title will probably begin with a C (Close Quarters?).

So to cut this long, quasi-coherent ramble short, I recommend starting with Anthrax Island before tackling Black Run, but, let the reader be warned, the latter depicts death and violence with all the subtlety of an old LiveLeak video. Up next... returning to the Golden Age with my favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr.

Anthrax Island (2021) by D.L. Marshall

Observe the book title of today's review, note the publication date and, most important of all, take a close look at the cover and you'll see a typical example of a modern thriller I normally never even notice – let alone giving it a second glance. D.L. Marshall's Anthrax Island (2021) came to my attention with an impressive testimonial and the promise of a clever locked room mystery sweetened the deal. 

Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, praised Anthrax Island as "one of the best modern mysteries" he has read in ages and picked it as his 2021 "Book of the Year." Not to get ahead of the review, but yeah, I can't disagree. Anthrax Island has the exterior of a claustrophobic spy-thriller with an immersive setting, "cloak-and-dagger shit" and plenty of action, which camouflages a clever plot that belongs to the traditional detective story. It has everything from an isolated island setting, chart included, to an impossible murder and a stockpile of unshakable alibis. What really surprised me is how much the plot resembled a Japanese shin honkaku mystery, but more on that in a minute. So let's dive in!

The setting and backstory of Marshall's Anthrax Island is real, Gruinard Island, where during the Second World War experiments were carried out to weaponize "deadly anthrax spores" in order to decimate Germany's livestock and ensure whatever remains is prioritized for the military – as "villages, towns and cities across the Reich starve." A good enough plan to destabilize and break the enemy in their home country, "whilst leaving infrastructure intact," but, despite successfully weaponizing anthrax, the order was never given. So the isolated, uninhabited test site was sealed off from the public and Gruinard Island was declared "a no-go area," because the weaponized spores had rendered the place "inhospitable for humans and animals alike." During the 1980s, the island was finally decontaminated and declared anthrax-free in 1990, but "almost eighty years of mutations had made Gruinard a unique petri dish." Completely by accident, the island had grown and nurtured an aggressive new strain of super-anthrax that's "worth more than plutonium for any government research department."

So these "mutant spores" had been "sleeping quietly under the dirt for years until a storm had brought them to the surface" to "sit in the grass and be eaten by the reintroduced sheep." The island went back under quarantine until the present-day.

An international research team returned to Gruinard Island to do a survey and prepare a second clean-up operation, which the American used to test the airtight design of their newest Antarctic research outpost in a hostile environment. This research outpost (X-Base) has to be described, because it really helped set the scene and give you the idea the story takes place in a dead, desolate post-apocalyptic landscape.

X-Base is a collection of ten, bright orange prefab cabins, on stilts, forming a U shape on a plateau near the south-western coast and each cabin is connected to the next with "a small plastic tunnel." So the layout can be reconfigured suited to the circumstances of its location. Interestingly, every group on the island has its own color of protective suits ("techs, blue. Naturally, Army wear green. Yellow for the scientists") to make identification outside easier. I suppose some of my regular readers will be getting a pretty good idea why Anthrax Island reminded me of a shin honkaku-style mystery and which series in specific. But I'll get to that in a moment. The problems in the story begin when the onsite technician unexpectedly dies and one of the decontamination chambers malfunctioned, which trapped some of the scientific team inside X-Base.

This introduces Marshall's lead-character into the story, John Tyler, who's dispatched to the island to fix the problem and discovers that the door of the decontamination chamber had been sabotages, which is when events begin to snowball and pile up – a dead body disappears, someone tried to take out Tyler and the murders. The first murder happens when the supposed would-be murderer is seen banging on the door of the radio, yelling at the person inside, before entering and a gunshot is heard. When they enter the room they find the radio room's occupant, shot through the eye, but not a trace of his murderer. Everyone assumes the murderer had simply left through the sliding window ("crime isn't a consideration in the Antarctic"). Tyler knows that was the murderer's exit, because he had screwed the window shut before hand. This is not the only team member who receives a "7.65mm lobotomy" when "everyone on the island had an alibi." And then there's the mystery of John Tyler. Who's he and what are his true motives.

I really liked Tyler's almost game-like exploration of the locations on the island and even uncovering a hidden area, which combined with the post-apocalyptic aesthetics added something different to the traditionally-styled plot and detection. I don't recall having ever come across something even remotely similar! Maybe, if your generous, The Kamikakushi Village Murder Case from Detective Academy Q, but the resemblance is merely a distant one.

I'm always tempted to draw comparisons between detective novels, short stories and writers in attempt to show where they, genealogically speaking, stand in the genre and its history. You can blame the influence of Mike Grost's A Guide to Classic Mystery & Detection website. Anthrax Island is not an easy one to place. The book covers a variety of genres and sub-genres, ranging from action and spy-thrillers to the traditional detective story and locked room mystery. Some more specific comparisons can be made. Such as how the disastrous development of biological weapons on a lifeless island recalls Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954), the discussion of the anthrax strains mirroring the "characterization" of the botulism bacteria in Douglas Clark's The Longest Pleasure (1981) and the locked room murder naturally inviting comparisons to John Dickson Carr. John Tyler's character definitely has a touch of Hake Talbot's Rogan Kincaid. However, as the story and plot progressed, I kept thinking of it as a Westernized version of The Kindaichi Case Files.

Firstly, there's the isolated island setting with a tightly-knit, closed-circle of suspects, which is a popular, often used setup in the series and has practically become a part of its formula – e.g. the whole Utashima Island saga. Secondly, the combination of one, or more, impossible crimes with an alibi-puzzle (The Legendary Vampire Murders and The Ghost Fire Island Murder Case). Thirdly, The Antlion Trench Murder Case, which has a setting nearly similar to Anthrax Island. A military research facility, somewhere in a remote desert, comprising of a cluster of pod-like buildings linked together by snake-like corridors and the participants wear color-coded kiminos. This is likely a coincidence as I doubt Marshall has read or is even aware of The Kindaichi Case Files and the locked room-trick suggests Carr was the inspiration for the plot (ROT13: gur gevpx nccrnef (VVEP) gb or n erjbexvat va erirefr bs Gur Guveq Ohyyrg). But found it interesting how it reminded me of Kindaichi. Only with the teenage detective tossed out and replaced with a cynical, quasi-alcoholic action hero.

So whether, or not, the author was familiar with that series, I found the part of the story taking place on the island to be engrossing and a proper detective plot, a locked room murder, pesky alibis and "nosy acronyms" in abundance made it so much more than another flavor-of-the-month thriller. Not only as very well done hybrid of the action, spy, thriller and detective genres, but future genre scholars will also find it an interesting snapshot of the anxieties of the early 2020s concerning deadly deceases, quarantining and even a Russian treat with a possible landing on the island hovering in the background. The last part of Anthrax Island shift gears as Tyler leaves the island and the story begins to resemble a fast-paced 1980s or '90s action movie, but returns in time to HMS Dauntless to tie up all the loose ends. Like a proper detective!

Marshall's Anthrax Island managed to pull an impressive juggling act with the detective, spy and thriller genres, all in their various guises, while the characters plot and counter-plot set against an original and unforgettable setting – beautifully demonstrating that a modern thriller or crime novel doesn't have to be trash. Just a tiny bit of competent plotting can do miracles for even the most modern of modern thrillers. So a lot to recommend here and you can expect to see this one back in December when I do my annual best-of list. And, until then, I'll be looking at the second John Tyler novel, Black Run (2021), which has been jotted down on my wishlist.

On a final, somewhat related note: Damn you, Steve! Damn you! First Paul Doherty, then Brian Flynn and now D.L. Marshall. Well, at least this time you found me one who's still at the ground floor instead of already having a massive backlog or an absolutely obscurity who had been out-of-print for decades.