The Scythe of Time: Case Closed, vol. 73 by Gosho Aoyama + Bonus Mini-Review

The 73rd volume of Gosho Aoyama's long-running Case Closed series, published in Japan and elsewhere as Detective Conan, begins with the two concluding chapters of the fascinating story that ended the previous volume, "The Blade of the Keeper of Time" – a clock-themed impossible crime in the spirit of John Dickson Carr and John Rhode. A seemingly impossible murder announced in a letter that was signed "The Guardian of Time."

Rukako Hoshina is a wealthy family matriarch with an obsession for clocks, but every year, she receives a threatening letter accusing her of disrespecting "the flow of time" and foretells she'll fall to "a shapeless sword" at the time she came into the world. So she hired the well-known sleeping detective, Richard Moore, who's accompanied by Conan and Rachel to the Western-style clock mansion of his client. Unfortunately, they're unable to prevent the murderer from striking down Moore's client.

Just as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake, the lights went out and Rukako Hoshina was stabbed in the chest. When the lights came back on, the murderer appeared to have disappeared through the open door of the balcony, but it had been raining until early in the evening and the ground below was muddy – unmarked by any footprints. So the killer hasn't left the house, but the spray pattern showed the culprit had to be "doused in blood." Nobody had enough blood on them to have delivered the fatal blow. And what happened to the murder weapon?

There are many cogs and wheels moving to make this locked room-trick work, which makes it workmanlike rather than inspired, but what makes the story brilliant is the nature of the shapeless sword, why the murderer didn't get spattered with blood and the "strange description" of the culprit who brushed against several people when the lights went out. A description suggesting "a large, fat, fast-moving woman in a dress." So, on a whole, a very satisfying detective story.

The second story has a familiar premise, a poisoning at a restaurant, which has become one of the specialties of the house in this series, but, more interestingly, it leaves Conan alone with Moore – who rarely, if ever, tackle a case without Rachel being there. Rachel is staying at school overnight to practice with her classmates for the big karate tournament and this means he has to Conan out to have dinner, but Coffee Poirot is closed and they end up at a grimy, rundown noodle shack with "ramen to die for." And the ramen proved to be absolutely delicious!

Conan and Moore learn that the owner is feuding with an unscrupulous real estate developer, Tokumori Saizu, who has been trying to buy out all the stores on the block to make place for a shopping mall. Saizu doesn't shun rough, underhanded tactics to get his way. So when he drops dead in the restaurant, of cyanide poisoning, everyone present has a rock solid motive, but how did the murderer administer this very dangerous poison?

Aoyama is one of the most versatile plotters of our time, who can turn his hand to any kind of chicanery, but, when it comes to doling out poison, he's the uncrowned king of poisoning tricks – even better than either Agatha Christie or Paul Doherty. For example, the ingenious method employed, in volume 15, to poison a loan shark or the murder, in volume 63, at a sushi bar where plates of food can be taken randomly from a conveyor belt. Yes, here too, Aoyama came up with another deceivingly simplistic method to transfer a deadly amount of poison to the victim without him being aware of it. As if the murderer "was pulling his strings from the moment he walked in," but it always makes me a little antsy to see how cyanide is being handled in these stories. Nevertheless, a solid story with a very well done setting and trick.

The third story introduces a new character, Masumi Sera, who's a self-proclaimed high school detective ("a girl Kudo") and recently transferred into Rachel and Serena's class, but she seems very interested in Conan. She becomes involved in a case with him when they're both present when a phone scammer apparently jumped to his death. Conan and Sera astutely deduce that the scammer was cleverly murdered, however, picking apart the carefully planned and executed trick takes some time and ingenuity. Conan has to phone in his part of the solution with his Jimmy Kudo voice. A good introduction to a new character with a trick that used an cast-iron alibi to create an impossible crime.

The premise of the last story immediately reminded me of Ed McBain's Killer's Wedge (1959) with the grieving brother of a dead mystery writer strapping explosives to his chest and taking Richard Moore, Rachel, Sera and three other people hostage at his office – demanding that the famous "Sleeping Moore" solves the murder of his sister. Miku Sawaguri has become one of the youngest, bestselling mystery novelists in Japan, but she apparently committed suicide at a hot spring, inside a locked room, by slitting her wrists. Something her brother refuses to accept and believes that one of the three women, all aspiring mystery writers, who went with her to hot springs murdered her. So, once again, Conan has to assume his old identity over the phone to help Moore identify the murderer. And, hopefully, prevent a bloodbath. This story will be concluded in the next volume.

So, all in all, volume 73 was one of the strongest volumes, in a while, full of clever tricks, good settings (ramen shop) and the introduction of new recurring character with ambiguous intentions. A fine example of why Case Closed is the greatest detective story of our time and criminally ignored by Western mystery readers.

But wait, there's more! In my previous blog-post, I reviewed Michael Dahl's second Finnegan Zwake archaeological mystery novel, The Worm Tunnel (1999), which is a series I described as a cross between Case Closed and the 1990s cartoon-series, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. Something unexpectedly came my way that was perfect to tack on to this review.

During the mid-to late 1990s, HarperCollins published eleven TV tie-in novels of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, written by Brad Quentin, but calling them novels is being generous, because my edition of Peril in the Peaks (1996) only has 110 pages in large print – which probably means you could reissue the entire series as one, or two, short story collections. The Quest Team travel to the remote Tibetan mountains where an ancient ghost plane has been spotted and cargo planes disappear without a trace in place called Cloud Alley. Soon they're embroiled with cloud surfing sky pirates and have to cross swords with the dictator of long-lost valley, named Sharma-La, where people have lived under the cover of a mysterious and magical blanket of clouds for more than fifty years. The people believe the clouds protect their spiritual leader, The Little Lama, who hasn't aged for the better part of a century!

So there's more than enough to do for the Quest Team and Quentin packed those scant, 110-pages with a ton of adventurous scenes and exciting developments, which made for an entertaining, fast-paced read, but the only real reason to pick up one of these tie-in stories is nostalgia and nothing else. If you're feeling nostalgic, Peril in the Peaks will give you a fun hour of childhood escapism.

Pulling a Double Shift

"To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all."

- The Usual Suspects (1995)

Een tip van de sluier (A Tip of the Veil, 2013) is the ninth in De Waal & Baantjer series about a seasoned homicide detective, Peter van Opperdoes, and his loyal colleague and friend, Jacob. Van Opperdoes was one of the old warhorses of the illustrious Bureau Warmoesstraat, but was transferred to Bureau Raampoort after his wife passed away and continued to have conversations with her ghost – which raised some concerns over his mental health.

The supernatural entity, in the guise of a disembodied voice in Van Opperdoes' head, appears to be actually that of his dead wife, because she has knowledge of things yet to come, but observes the rules of fair play by only alluding to them. Actually, the role of the voice has always hovered in the background, but has been reduced even more since De Waal continued the series on his own. Baantjer created Van Opperdoes a few years after his own wife passed away and since the characters are basically stand-ins for the authors, it was personal touch to the old police inspector and probably why the voice is now mainly there to whisper words of comfort or encouragement.

In A Tip of the Veil, a surging storm is rocking the old city of Amsterdam, but Van Opperdoes has taken refuge in his favorite café, sipping a late coffee, while the bartender informs him there has been someone looking for him. It was important enough for the man to brave the storm and return to the café. Bob Pals is the man's name and his businesses are entrenched in real-estate, which is an occupation sometimes associated with the underworld over here and Pals' problem seems to have all the earmarks of the criminal classes – there are plans in the works for his assassination. The tip came from a man calling himself "Frits," but Pals isn't willing to part with more information than Frits' phone number.

Unusually, for this series, the first three quarters of the book are concerned with a routine investigation of vague death-threats with a murder tugged away at the end of the story. However, the solution of the shooting felt disconnected from the rest of the story and a shameless rework of an episode De Waal wrote for the Baantjer TV-series in the mid-00's. The best part was therefore the routine-investigation, which was lively written with a dose of light-hearted humor and populated with likeable characters. The cast of (semi-) regular (forensic) police characters gathering and analyzing evidence in the background often gives the series a CSI-ish feeling, but often used as a good contrast of between Van Opperdoes' old-school methods and modern police forensics.

De Waal succeeded very well in seamlessly meshing Baantjer's style of story telling with his own, which makes this series as enjoyable to read as the original Baantjer series, but there’s one main difference: Simon de Waal is closer to Georges Simenon with De Waal & Baantjer than Baantjer ever was with his DeKok books – which where at least always structured as detective stories. De Waal & Baantjer are stories about detectives rather than detective stories. And, yes, I'm fully aware that I have made that observation before. More than once. But it’s the best possible description of the series.

So, all in all, as enjoyable a read as they come in this series and (sadly) better than it's follow up.

There isn't a literal translation for the book-title of the tenth novel, Een tien met een griffel (Number One With a Bullet, 2014), but the closest equivalent in any language would be a misnomer. The story began promising enough when Jacob whisked Van Opperdoes away from his favorite café to the scene of a crime. A beautiful young woman has been found strangled in the apartment of her neighbor/lover, who's found dead not much later at an abandoned site – shot through the head. It appears to be a murder/suicide until it turns out the "suicide" happened before the murder and suspects begin to appear: an obsessed man and an ex-convict. The murder here is discovered in the first chapter, but the whole book felt more routine than the investigation of its predecessor. Story telling, characters and setting where as well written and brought to life as always, but the plot was abysmally disappointing and simply failed to grab my attention. And plot is kind-of the key point with me.

Oh, well, the synopsis of the next one sounds promising and, hopefully, it'll be as good as Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012). 

By the way, is it just me or does it seem I'm rewriting the same review, over and over again, for this series?

A Legendary Lepidopteron Flutters Above the Murky Waters

"The butterflies fluttered in the blackness, like ghosts wandering without a destination."

– Hajime Kindaichi (The Undying Butterflies, 1997)

You may remember that a few months ago, I posted a compendium of the strength and weaknesses of Yozaburo Kanari's The Kindaichi Case Files by impartially evaluating three volumes I labeled as good, bad and average, but my contempt for the author tainted the neutral tone I intended to adopt for the review. I won't waste time by trodding over ground covered in a previous blog entry, but will simply point you back to that post in case you want to know why I loath him and it's best you read that before continuing reading this one – in which I'll take another shot at putting my personal disdain aside and objectively critique two more titles from this series. I think I can hear someone sceptically mumbling in the back.

The books I opt for in this second-round are The Legend of Lake Hiren (1994) and The Undying Butterflies (1997), which, by themselves, have the framework of a standard, formulaic Kindaichi story, but combined they're lifted slightly above an average effort – as the murderer from the former story resurfaces in the latter and poses an interesting moral question at the end of the second volume.

Still Waters Run Deep

Typically, The Legend of Lake Hiren begins with Kindaichi and Miyuki scoring exclusive invitations to a sumptuous lakeside resort, located at the heart of a secluded valley enclosed by an immense, nearly impenetrable forest with a tottering footbridge as its only route leading back to the civilized world, where the participating members of the traveling group can earn themselves an exclusive and coveted membership once the place officially opens up for business. The participating members of the traveling group include, among other, a former high-school friend of Miyuki, a tacky reporter who goes out of his way to be offense, a kind-hearted doctor with a dark secret, a once promising artist with a morbid fascination for corpses and a gold-digging wife who isn't particular mournful about the sudden and violent passing of her husband – which provides a nice set-up for a good, old-fashioned whodunit.

However, the threat of a menacing murder, lurking from the shadows of the valley as the victims are snatched from their midst, one after another, apparently does indeed seem to come from the outside of the confines of their closed circle – as an alarming radio broadcast notified the public at large that a demented mass murderer escaped from his jail cell. The killer was an avid movie fan who snapped and massacred thirteen people in a single night while dressed as Jason Voorhees, and the vale is beginning to sense his presence when a body turns up with his face torn-off!

Someone torching down the bridge and them uncovering a second, face-less body stuffed in the fridge rapidly follows this. Kindaichi reasons from the facts that the murderer is now "sealed" in with them and that none of their food was stolen must mean that the escaped madman is a clever ruse and that the actual slayer is among them – and here's where Kanari's blatant incompetence as a mystery writer comes into play.

Only a novice would've missed the significance of the shredded faces, a supposed act of random savagery that makes the murderer stand out like a sore thumb, but this could've been solved by taking the personality and modus operandi of the mass murderer into the equation to mislead the reader. The ax-wielding maniac is supposed to be a fiendish movie freak who emulates his on-screen idols and the fact that he neglected to swipe any food from their fridge, after being on the run through the forest for nearly a week without provisions, could've easily been explained away by suggesting that he fed himself with the flesh of the victims – which just so happens to be Hannibal Lecter's favorite snack.

This would've neatly obscured the true motive for mutilating the features of the victims, but then again, what else was I expecting from someone who can only produce an inspired idea when he has a book to copy it from – and the remainder of the story is pretty much what you'd expect from a hack like him who desperately clings to his formula. However, I have to give him props for the way in which he handled the final scene with the murderer who wasn't impressed at all with Kindaichi's attempt at an emo-speech and the semi-original twist he spun on the motive that he loves regurgitating over and over again.

All in all, this is a pretty average entry in the series, impaired by missed opportunities and a lack of truly inspired ideas, and its only saving grace is that it's associated with The Undying Butterflies – as the murderer resurfaces in that story after the murky depths of Lake Hiren swallowed this persons body and was presumed dead.

Note of warning: one of the panels in this story contains a rogue's gallery of murderers from previous cases. The reader is warned. 

The House of the Butterflies

Well, after a stretch of time, in which Kindaichi bumped into a number of murderers, the memories of the grim episode at Lake Hiren begin to dim and accumulate a layer of dust in the attic known as the human brain, but one day he's confronted with a magazine article on a dilettante scholar who rediscovered a rare species of butterfly – and a snapshot depicts the savant standing next to the person he unmasked as the one who was responsible for butchering four people at the lakeside resort.

In tow of a reporter, Kindaichi and Miyuki make a journey to the family mansion of the savant, where thousands of invaluable butterflies swarm the heavily guarded premises, and come face to face with the murderer who found employment as an assistant to the residents patriarch, but claims to have no recollection of a prior life – ever since being dragged from a river. Whether this is true or not, it's unequivocal that this individual is neck deep in another murder case when someone begins killing off the members of the family and leave them pinned like butterflies – beginning with the family's 12-year-old daughter!

The death of a child, coupled with a motive that is accompanied with a minor, but nifty, twist gives this story a decidedly dark tone. Unfortunately, this atmosphere of doom and gloom amounts to nothing more than a thin film covering a familiar exterior as the plot goes through the motions of a standard Kindaichi story – which makes it possible for regular readers to identify the culprit without even glancing at the given clues.

What lifts this story above its basic plot is the inclusion of a murderer from a previous volume, whose hands are undeniably stained with blood but who may be innocent of these butterfly-murders and perhaps even morphed into a completely different person due to the amnesia suffered during a traumatic escape, and a really clever trick to create a unbreakable alibi. Even though he probably nicked that part of the plot from another detective story. Yeah, when it comes to Kanari's hackwork I'm a cynic.

On the whole, The Legend of Lake Hiren and The Undying Butterflies are pretty average fares when tackled separately, but read back-to-back the characters managed to wrestle the plots loose from Kanari's death grip of mediocrity and deliver an overall decent enough story. But more could've been done with them had they been put down on paper by more capable hands guided by a brain possessive of a shred of imagination.  

And thus ends another shoddily written review. I really have to up my game starting with the next blog post. By the way, did I succeed in objectively looking at these stories?! ;)

The Kindaichi Case Files: The Good, The Bad and The Average

"If I plagiarize, it's only because I like someone else's idea better than mine and I want credit for it."

- Anna Chin-Williams

If you would press me to pick my least favorite mystery writer, I would probably blurt out the name of Kanari Yozaburo – who possesses all the originality of a copying machine and imperiously passes swiped plots off as his own stuff. But what's really unforgivable is his failure rate at utilizing these stolen goods to produce at least a half descent story, even if we've seen parts of it before. Instead, he clings desperately to a rigid, hackneyed formula constructed around the avenger-from-the-past theme, closed circle of suspects, cut-off locations and cribbing plot ideas, mostly locked room scenarios, to fluff it all up.

But what I really hate, more than anything else, are Kindaichi's little emo-speeches to the murderers, after he caught them.

The murderer: They were responsible for the death of my kid brother; they deserved to die!

Kindaichi: But your brother wouldn't have wanted you to hurt them... he would've wanted you... to be HAPPY!

The murderer: OMG!1!! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!11! * breaks down sobbing and moaning *

Even though I can't manage to muster up any excitement or enthusiasm for this series, given up on that a long time ago, I will put all my personal disdain aside and briefly, but objectively, discuss three titles that I tagged as good, bad and average to give the readers of this blog a general idea of what to expect when they decide to pick up a volume.

A Short Introduction:

The protagonist of The Kindaichi Case Files is the high school student Hajime Kindaichi, who's the supposed grandson of the famous Kousuke Kindaichi, and, despite an I.Q. of 180, he's a lazy underachiever at school with a knack for attracting corpses wherever he goes – especially when he's taking a field trip or is on holiday with friends from his school.

The Good: House of Wax

I don't know who was being ripped off and repackaged in this volume, but his or her sense for clueing and creating locked rooms is on par with John Dickson Carr and Christianna Brand – and even that second-rate hack wasn't able to dilute the brilliance of the original ideas with his tired old formula and mediocre writing.

The set-up of the story is riddled with tired old clichés and reinforces the flawed image most people have of a classic detective story: Kindaichi and Miyuki are invited by Superintendent Akechi to be his tag-along guests at the House of Wax, a castle transplanted from Germany, where its owner will be throwing a murder party for people who have made a name in the world of crime. There are professional and amateur detectives (including the nephew of Lt. Columbo!), mystery writers, crime reporters and even a pathologist. Upon their arrival they discover the place is filled with lifelike wax dolls, including replicas of the participants, dressed up in fancy medieval costumes, and their mysterious host is only present as a disembodied voice bellowing through the ancient hallways of the castle.

The game's afoot and the guests have to solve the stabbing of one of the wax dolls, but this proved to be an eerie precursor for an actual and identical murder, this time under impossible circumstances, and what follows is an exceptional well-plotted detective story – in which the characters play around with assumptions and have to correctly interpret a galore of double edged clues (e.g. medieval costumes, wax dolls and the flickering of candle light). 

This is one of perhaps only two or three volumes really worth the effort of tracking and hunting down. 

The Bad: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders The Mummy's Curse

 

This is one of the most shameless acts of plagiarism in the series, in which Kanari Yozaburo audaciously lifts the best bits and pieces from Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) and brings nothing to the table himself.

The story follows Kindaichi and Miyuki to a small, hexagram-shaped village were they plan to attend the wedding of a friend. The strange village is littered with themed mansions, and all of them harbor the mutilated remains of a mummified corpse – hinting at a dark secret buried deeply in the faraway past. But whatever was buried starts clawing its way to the surface and shortly after their arrival an impossible murder is committed, inside a locked chapel, and the aristocratic owners of the mansions start dropping like flies.

Yes, I know what you're probably thinking, but don't make the mistake of saying to yourself, "Well, that doesn't sound all that bad." The shaped village, the cutesy themed mansions and the gore fest only serve to distract your attention away from the fact that you're reading a poorly altered and abridged version of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. That's all the story has to offer, the main trick and a rejected solution from that book – everything else is just eye candy or filler.

The Average: Smoke and Mirrors 

Surprisingly, this story broke with the apparently adamant formula and consequently wangled an unexpected solution, but only because, as a regular reader, you were expecting the same old, same old. Still, it's one of the more readable entries into the series.

This time Kindaichi and Miyuki enroll into the school's mystery club, who are in the process of investigating the origin of a bunch of urban legends attached to their school and a possible connection to a shady figure calling himself The After-School Magician – whose been sending warning letters to the school not to tear down his old abode on the campus grounds. But his pleas fall on deaf ears and he decides to force his point home by scattering the school grounds with a few bodies, and he's not too shy to make an appearance in front of live crowd, including Kindaichi, and hang one of their friends in full view of them – only to disappear, together with his victim, from a locked and watched classroom moments later.

You don't have to overtax your brain too much to figure out how the murderer created the locked room illusion, but his identity comes as a genuine surprise if you were expecting the face of the usual Kindaichi killer underneath the magician's mask – and I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

However, much of the praise must be heaped on the translator, who was faced with the problem of an untranslatable dying message and simply, but effectively, cooked up a new one that fitted in with the story and artwork.

I hope that publishers, who may or may not be reading this blog and might be contemplating to publish foreign detective stories, will take notice of that and get themselves a translator who's up on his mystery stuff – like my friend Ho-Ling (whose excellent blog is simply one of the best of the online mystery community, loaded with interesting and enticing reviews, and a connecting link between the detective stories of the West and the East. Oh, and drop him a line asking when the review of The Frightened Stiff will be up. ;))  

Hey, let's end this negative tainted review on a positive note with a few more plugs: At the Scene of the Crime (from a very prolific blogger... seriously, give us a break to catch our breath), Pretty Sinister Books (read this... or else!), Only Detect (great blog), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel (aren't we all?), Classic Mysteries (weekly podcasts of classic whodunits currently in print) and Tipping my Fedora (glad to know there are still classy people with taste).

Of Ancient Gods and Family Skeletons

In recent years, I've developed a strong affinity for the American detective story. Not the hardboiled variety of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but the more traditional approach of Van Dine's literary descendants, such as Kelley Roos, Ellery Queen, Clyde Clason, Anthony Boucher, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, as well as some of the post-GAD era authors like Edward Hoch and William DeAndrea.

The plots these writers crafted were usually adroitly plotted and the often specialized milieus offer up an intriguing picture of a bygone era or providing the reader with fascinating nuggets of arcane information – like in stories set among collectors who own private museums, filled with antique weaponry or artifacts from an ancient civilization, or depicting the inner workings of an early 20th century company. But more than that, I enjoy them for their "Spark of Life," which seems to be deficient in a lot of British mysteries.

For those reasons, I was looking forward to reading The Cat Screams (1934) by Todd Downing, as it seemed to have all the ingredients for a classic American detective story: a hotel in Mexico under quarantine, where violent deaths are presaged by the wailings of a cat, situated in a area, inhabited by many American colonists, plagued by an epidemic of suicides, while old superstitions and antique masks of archaic deities hover in the background.

With all these intriguing plot threads at your fingertips, it's hard to fathom how anyone could churn out a fabulously mundane and sluggish story, devoid of any pace or a graduating tightening atmosphere that should spring naturally from the given situation, but Downing managed to do it. Nobody seems to be worried about the unidentified disease that is slowly killing a young Mexican and how that effects their quarantined condition, and the sudden, violent death of several of their fellow guests is met with almost complete indifference – only towards the end of the book some of them start to show some strained nerves at the sound of the foreboding screams.

Thankfully the book still had a plot with a couple of clues thrown in and a somewhat decent solution, but the only remarkable feature is really just how unremarkable the whole story is. Clyde Clason did this type of detective story much better and more convincing in The Man from Tibet (1938), and has a locked room mystery to boot!

A.B. Cunningham's Death Haunts the Dark Lane (1948), on the other hand, provided a more stimulating challenge to the reader, not only that, but also exhibited that a plot can be elevated by inhabiting the story with well-drawn characters set in a detailed painted surrounding. Here the back drop for murder is the rural town of Deer Lick, where Sheriff Jess Roden has to track down the murderer of a young heiress and bride-to-be who was stabbed to death with an unusual weapon that leaves a bullet-hole-like puncture – a problematic job that involves dragging the rattling skeletons of the county's most influential family from their cupboards.

One of Cunningham's fans was critic and fellow mystery writer Anthony Boucher, who wrote laudatory reviews of his books in which he praised him for depicting convincing backwoods people and the regional flavor of his stories – and judging solely from this book, I can definitely understand his enthusiasm.

The plot provides an intriguing problem for both the reader and Jess Roden, who's a pleasantly active and human detective (somewhere between Roger Sharingham and Inspector Boney), and even though the family, at first glance, appear to be the stock-in-trade dysfunctional family, that overpopulate our beloved Cloud Cuckoo Land, they are convincingly drawn. Heck, where most modern crime writers need hundreds of pages to flesh out intricate family relationships, full of angst and flashbacks of incestuous childhood experiences, Cunningham only needed half a chapter to explain the animosity within the murdered girl's family. The only thing that marred the story is that the clueing wasn't as strong as it could've been and being rushed to a hasty conclusion weakened the ending.   

Still, despite a somewhat poorly executed ending the book's good enough to warrant a further investigation of this writer, who, at one point in time, seems to have been one of the top second-tier names in the field, but is now almost completely submerged in Lethe.

Luckily, there are books out there, like The Anthony Boucher Chronicles, to guide us through the past and introduce us to writers that did their part, however small, in shaping the detective story.

It's been a fun and interesting Odyssey so far!