Department of Juvenile Justice: The Ellery Queen, Jr. Mysteries

Frederic Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, better known by their shared penname of "Ellery Queen," were two of the most important mystery writers, editors and champions of the detective story of the previous century – whose monthly Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine kept the home fire burning during darker times. It's not for nothing, Anthony Boucher proclaimed Ellery Queen to be "the American detective story" incarnate.

There is, however, another reason why Ellery Queen is typically American: the name became one of the earliest examples of a branded franchise in the publishing world.

During the 1960s, Lee's health began to falter and developed a nasty case of writer's block, which forced Dannay to assemble an all-star cast of ghostwriters to continue their work in the sixties and seventies – an assembly that included Avram Davidson, Flora Fletcher, Edward D. Hoch and Theodore Sturgeon. This came on top of the name Ellery Queen branching out in all directions. There was a popular radio-series, a TV show, movies, comic books, a magazine, board games and literal jigsaw puzzles (e.g. The Case of His Headless Highness, 1973). Only thing they missed out on was having their own burger joint in New York. Who wouldn't want to order a Velie Burger with a side of Porter Fries and a Djuna Shake at A Challenge to the Eater?

An EQ venture not as well remembered today is their excursion into the juvenile corner of the genre with the Ellery Queen Junior Mysteries, which produced eleven novels in two (short) series between 1942 and 1966. There also appears to be an unpublished, long-lost twelfth novel, The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly.

Nine of the novels star a recurring side-character from the main series, Djuna, who's the small, gypsy orphan adopted by Inspector Richard Queen when Ellery was attending college. The book-titles of this series follow The [Country] [Noun] Mystery pattern of Queen's early international series, but with colors and animals (e.g. The Black Dog Mystery, 1942). The other two novels are helmed by a specially created character, Gulliver Queen. So I wanted to take a closer look a novel from each of these series.

The Mystery of the Merry Magician (1961) is the first of only two titles in the Gulliver Queen series, but ghostwriters and unauthorized sub-ghostwriters have made determining authorship somewhat of a puzzle – which is discussed by Kurt Sercu on his Ellery Queen website (click on the covers to read more). James Holding was contracted to write the 1960s Ellery Queen Junior novels, but he farmed out the work to sub-ghosts and The Mystery of the Merry Magician was written by the author of the Dig Allen series, Joseph Greene. I understand Lee was not amused.

Gulliver "Gully" Queen is the sixteen-year-old nephew of Ellery and the grandson of Inspector Richard Queen. His father is Ellery's hitherto unknown and nameless brother, an engineer, who's in Europe working on "a long-term United Nations project," which is why Gully is staying an entire year with his uncle and grandfather in New York. The presence of the regular characters from the main series makes the book feel like a crossover and really is what makes it standout as a juvenile mystery. Ellery Queen briefly appears in the opening and closing chapters. Gully is even seen reading one of his uncle's detective novels (The Finishing Stroke, 1958). Nikki Porter is mentioned in passing, but, more importantly, Inspector Queen and my personal favorite side-character from any series, Sergeant Thomas Velie, have supporting roles to play in the story!

I've always been of the opinion it was a gross oversight to never let Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie solve a case without Ellery helping them out. So it was nice to see them here working together in giving support to Gully.

The Mystery of the Merry Magician begins with Ellery having to break his promise to take Gully on a camping trip to the mountains, because the Treasury Department has asked him to go the New Orleans waterfront to investigate some baffling reports – a "strange creature" has been haunting the docks down there. Ellery notices Gully is trying to mask his disappointment and gives him a leather notebook, which he's to use to write down the names, addresses and the story of anyone who might come to see him. And there's only one rule, Gully is not allowed to "go off trying to solve mysteries." He just has to write down the facts in the notebook.

So, as to be expected, the moment Ellery has gone someone comes knocking at the door of the Queen residence. A boy of Gully's age, named "Fisty" Jones, who has a most astonishing story to tell and Captain Foster, "an old buddy of Inspector Queen," told him to go tell it to the inspector's son, Ellery. Gully has to keep a record for his uncle and asks Fisty to tell him the story.

Fisty was visiting Captain Foster and his granddaughter, Peggy, who live on a barge tied up at Pier A of the New York waterfront. On his way back home, Fisty passed a block of mostly abandoned, boarded-up old houses and peeked into the window of an empty story. Fisty described, what he saw, as "a monster from space." A creature with black, smooth skin, big, floppy feet and "one big, round eye," right in "the middle of his face." So they go to have a second look at the empty shop, but discover that the window has been painted black and are told by a tattooed man to mind their own business or else they might get hurt. The tattooed man has designs on the building next door, which is leased to "an old-time magician," Magnus Merlin, who now makes a living by making magic tricks and always accompanied by his happy little dog, Banjo – who proves to be a huge help to the boys throughout the story.

The central plot-thread is very basic for a juvenile mystery novel and therefore easy to figure out, but there were some nice touches that punched it up a bit.

Besides the obligatory dangers and tight corners, there's an attempt to make the role of the merry magician in the plot ambiguous (friend or foe?) and there's an honest-to-god impossible situation witnessed by Gully and Fisty! When they're swimming in the river to find origin of hammering noises heard on the barge, they see "a man walking on water." Solution is not terribly clever, but it fitted the plot. There's also very subtly done "Challenge to the Reader," when Gulliver remarks he has "a strange feeling that all the facts Uncle Ellery will need to solve the case" is in his notebook to which Peggy responds, "well, then, solve it yourself." This made the last chapter, entitled "Gully's Little Notebook," all the better. One of those nice little touches that really helped the plot.

I've to say, though, with all the magicians, magic-tricks, tattooed men and an impossible crime, the story felt more like the junior to Clayton Rawson than Ellery Queen.

All in all, The Mystery of the Merry Magician has pretty decent plot, but it's the characters who stole the show! Gully, Fisty and Peggy can stand with the best teenage detective-characters from the genre's juvenile corner and Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie shined in their supporting roles. So I can highly recommend it to either readers of these vintage juvenile mysteries and die-hard Ellery Queen fans. Something that'll probably give JJ an existential crisis!

Now that we got the first Gulliver Queen novel out of the way, let's move on to the book that almost closed out the Djuna series.

The Blue Herring Mystery (1954) is the eighth and penultimate installment in the Dunja series, which was supposed to have been written by Samuel McCoy, but he hired a sub-ghost, Harold Montanye, to write the last six books on his contract – which were the titles from The Green Turtle Mystery (1944) to The Blue Herring Mystery. Reportedly, Montanye experienced "some difficulties getting his stake in the half share McCoy had." The Black Dog Mystery (1942), The Golden Eagle Mystery (1942) and the unpublished The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly were written by yet another sub-ghost, Frank Belknap Long. More than a decade later, Holding penned the final book, The Purple Bird Mystery (1966). Well, that's what everyone still hopes. What a goddamn mess! No wonder Lee's heart was playing up.

The Blue Herring Mystery is not as strong as The Mystery of the Merry Magician when it comes to character portrayal, or story-telling, but it found an interesting way to use EQ's signature trope, a dying message, in a detective story belonging to a usually murderless branch of the genre.

Djuna has a week-long holiday ahead of him and has a friend from Florida, Bobby Herrick, who's coming over and, in preparation of his arrival, Miss Annie Ellery takes him to Aunt Candy's house to borrow cinnamon for an apple pie. Aunt Candy is the great-granddaughter of a 19th century merchant mariner, Captain Jonas Beekman, who passed away over seventy years ago and muttered something with his last breath – telling people to "lift th' blue herrin." Some believe this was a clue to where he had hidden a fortune in pears he had brought back from the South Seas. Djuna is allowed to thumb through the captain's old logbook and reads some curious entries as well as discovering a page had been torn out.

Coincidentally, a drugstore owner, Doc Perry, is turning Captain Beekman's old house into a museum and is assisted by a mysterious, disheveled man, Professor Kloop, who has taken over the whole project. Doc Perry has become mighty suspicious of Kloop as he's always "peekin' into dark corners in the cellar" or "tappin' walls." So what is he's exactly up to?

Well, this pretty much sums up the whole plot. A paper-thin, but thickly padded, plot hinging on a single idea. The dying message. Admittedly, the solution to the 70-year-old dying message was delightfully simplistic and as believable as the one from Queen's own short-short "Diamonds in Paradise" (collected in Queen's Full, 1965), which why it drowned in this already short novel. This single idea could easily carry a short-short or a short story, but not a whole novel. And the poor characterization didn't help either.

Djuna is used in the opening chapters to explain things to its young readers and, in combination with constantly uttering "Golly" or "Jeepers," he comes across a little dull-witted. Something that strikes a false note when its time to play detective and correctly interpret the dying message of the old sea captain. Most of what happens between the opening and closing chapters is boring padding or just boring. There was such a lack of any interest in the story that it became very noticeable how much the characters were eating all the time, which ranged from apple pie, pancakes and kippers to egg salad sandwiches, baked potatoes and spaghetti – topped with chocolate nut sundaes. This only represents a small selection from their holiday menu! Just padding at its worst.

So, yeah, The Blue Herring Mystery tried to tackle an interesting concept with a good premise and solution, but it was lost in a deadly dull, overly padded story and I simply can't recommend it. I'll definitely tackle the second Gulliver Queen novel in the future, but don't expect me to return to the Djuna series anytime soon.

A note for the curious: I've already mention a missing, presumably unpublished manuscript in the EQ Jr. franchise, The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly, which reminded me of the unpublished, long-lost last novel in The Three Investigator series. Back in 2016, I put together a small selection of lost detective stories and one of them was M.V. Carey's The Mystery of the Ghost Train, which was completed when the series was canceled in 1986 and the manuscript was presumably lost. A website dedicated to the series posted an update in 2018 reporting that the manuscript is in "the possession of the Carey family," but Random House "has expressed no interest in it." Hopefully, this will change in the future.

The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) by Robert van Gulik

Robert van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat, sinologist and writer who penned fourteen novels, two novellas and eight short stories about the 7th century Chinese court magistrate, Judge Dee – a fictionalized rendering of the historical magistrate and statesman, Di Renjie. Van Gulik was not the first writer to place the modern detective story among the vestiges of the distant past, but the Judge Dee series was pivotal in popularizing the historical mystery novel. And helped it evolve into a genre of its own.

The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) was originally published in Dutch as Fantoom in Foe-lai (Phantom in Foe-lai, 1958) and have always considered it to be the best of the Judge Dee novels. But this judgment dates back to the mid-2000s. So it was time to put my long-held conviction to the test and reread the book to see whether or not the story would hold up. Let's find out!

Set in 663, The Chinese Gold Murders is, chronologically, the first, auspicious steps Judge Dee took in a long, distinguished legal career that began with a humble magistrature and ended in the highest office of the country, Lord Chief Justice of China – recorded in Murder in Canton (1966). Only title in the series I've yet to read. Anyway, The Chinese Gold Murders begins with an vigorous, 34-year-old Judge Dee, who has grown "sick and tired" with "dry-as-dust theorizing and paper work" at the Metropolitan Court. So he requested to be assigned to the vacant post of magistrate of the district of Peng-lai.

Peng-lai is a port city on the northeast coast of Shantung Province. A dismal place of "mist and rain" where, according to the stories, "the dead rise there from their graves" on stormy nights and "strange shapes flit about in the mist." Some even say that "weretigers are still slinking about in the woods." What attracted Judge Dee to this dreary, demon-haunted district is the strange, unsolved murder of his predecessor, Magistrate Wang. An apparently impossible to solve case to the test the mettle of legal mind!

Two weeks before, a house steward reported to the senior scribe, Tang, that the bed of the magistrate had not been slept in and the door to his private library was locked on the inside, but there was no response to the insistent knocking. So the headsman was summoned to break down the door.

What they found inside was the body of the Magistrate Wang, lying on the floor in front of a tea stove, with an empty tea cup near his outstretched right hand that had traces of "the powdered root of the snake tree," but the method of administrating this poison is somewhat of a mystery – because the magistrate had been tea enthusiast with a very particular routine. Magistrate Wang fetched his own water from the well in the garden and boiled it on the stove in the library. The teapot, cups and caddy "valuable antiques" that were locked away in a cupboard under the stove. And the tea leaves in the caddy were not poisoned. So how was the tea in the cup poisoned?

Dutch edition

When I read The Chinese Gold Murders in Dutch, I was honestly impressed with both the presentation and explanation of the inexplicable slaying of Magistrate Wang.

At the time, I believed poisonings in locked, or guarded, rooms were very tricky to stage as crimes that appear to be genuinely impossible and difficult to provide such a premise with a satisfying solution, but my locked room reading lacked depth in those days – since then I've come across many innovative takes on the impossible poisoning. One of Van Gulik's literary descendants, Paul Doherty, made the poisoning-in-a-locked-room kind of his specialty, but two excellent examples can be found in the Case Closed/Detective Conan series, "The Loan Shark Murder Case" and "The Poisonous Coffee Case."

So, admittedly, the locked room-trick here is not as impressive the second time around, but still stands as a good, elegant and original solution to genuine locked room mystery. A rarity in Dutch detective fiction! Only problem is the sporadic clueing. There are clues, or hints, an imaginative reader can use to put together a general idea of how the locked room-trick was worked, but don't expect anything along the lines of Christianna Brand or John Dickson Carr. However, the murder in the locked library is merely one of the many major and minor plot-strands that make up the story of The Chinese Gold Murders.

Van Gulik honored the age-old traditions of the Chinese detective story in which the magistrate is at "the same time engaged in the solving of three or more totally different cases." The Chinese Gold Murders is crammed with crimes, danger and intrigue.

A wealthy shipowner, Koo Meng-pin, appears in court during the morning session to report "the prolonged absence" of his wife, Mrs. Koo, who never returned from visiting her father, Tsao Ho-hsien – an eccentric doctor of philosophy. A third case concerns the gruesome discovery of two buried bodies on the property of a farmhouse and a potentially missing third body. There's even a small, quasi-impossible element to this case with three people apparently vanishing into thin air from a stretch of road, but this is still only a fraction of the plot. Judge Dee has an unnerving encounter with the ghost of Magistrate Wang in the courthouse and stories are told of "a headless monk slinking about" an old, abandoned temple. A weretiger is terrorizing the district, smugglers active, shady businesses are being conducted aboard floating brothels, an ever-present Korean element, murderous attempts on officials and a bit of sword play!

I believe the sword play here deserves a special mention. The story begins with Judge Dee traveling, on horseback, to Peng-lai with his right-hand man, Sergeant Hoong, but they're waylaid by two "brothers of the green wood," Hoong Liang and Chiao Tai. A group of outlaws whose code is to only rob officials and wealthy people. They known to help people in distress and have a reputation for courage and chivalry. Judge Dee engages them with his legendary family heirloom, Rain Dragon, the Excalibur of the Orient, which was a nicely done nod at the Robin Hood lore. There's even a touch of the Arthurian legends in the back-story of the sword!

So, while The Chinese Gold Murders didn't quite shine with the same radiant brilliance on my second read, but regardless, I tremendously enjoyed revisiting the story. 

Van Gulik never allowed his readers to be bored for even a single page by packing the plot, cover to cover, but held a firm grip on the various plot-threads throughout the story and tied them all together in orderly fashion by the end – of which the locked room murder is the best realized strand of the plot. There are, however, two elements of the large, overarching solution breaking two cardinal rules of the Golden Age detective story, but they were very well done. And even Carr broke one of those two rules. But, perhaps the best thing about this series, is Van Gulik's world-building skillfully merging history and fiction. I can see how the Judge Dee series helped to legitimize the historical mystery as a (sub) genre.

Long story short, The Chinese Gold Murders is not exactly the masterpiece I remembered from my first reading, but it's still an excellent and recommendable historical detective novel.

The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush retired in 1931 from teaching in order to dedicate himself full-time to his writing career and his twelfth detective novel, The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934), was drawn from his own experiences as a teacher, but, as Curt Evans observed, Bush was "rather glad" to leave the classroom behind him – if judged by the "comments made in his detective novels" (e.g. The Perfect Murder Case, 1929). The Case of the Dead Shepherd gives the reader a depressing and sullen picture of school-life, but with a top-of-the-class plot!

The Case of the Dead Shepherd was published in the U.S. as The Tea Tray Murders and begins when Superintendent George "The General" Wharton invited Ludovic Travers to accompany him to the dismal Woodgate Hill County School.

Woodgate Hill County School is a co-educational school, housed in "a jail-like building" with a nine-foot wall, where one of the masters has been found poisoned in the masters' common room. A young pupil was sent down to fetch some papers, but found the master, Charles Tennant, "crawling on his hands and knees." But when the boy returned with help, the master had died. Curiously, he had been tightly clutching "a perfectly enormous catalogue" of "chemical and physical apparatus" from 1910. A dying message?

Charles Tennant was "the only really cheerful person on the staff" and enlivened faculty meetings by infuriating the despised headmaster, Lionel Twirt, who's a lazy, ego-driven tyrant and self-appointed shepherd with "the habit of haranguing the school on every possible occasion" – making his removal a popular subject of discussion among the teachers. Travers and Wharton have good reasons to believe that the oxalic acid in the sugar bowl was intended to kill the unpopular headmaster. A hypothesis that seems to be confirmed when Twirt's body is found on the school grounds with his skull caved in!

A note for the curious: oxalic acid is not a poison you often come across in detective stories and know of only two, oddly-linked examples, C.H.B. Kitchin's Death of My Aunt (1929) and Richard Hull's The Murder of My Aunt (1934), of which the latter was published in the same year as The Case of the Dead Shepherd. However, Bush is the only one who found a truly clever way to employ this unusual poison (see the ink-mark clue). Anyway, back to the story!

Travers and Wharton take their time to track everyone's movements at the time of the murders, testing those pesky alibis and questioning anyone even remotely linked to the case. And the list of suspects they have to consider is a long one.

There's the always helpful Maitland Castle, a senior master, who's the odds-on favorite to succeed Twirt as headmaster, but he refuses to consider it. Mr. Godman is a junior language master who had suggested it would be easy "to drop some poison" in the headmaster's tea. Miss Holl is a geography teacher and is, what the novelists call, "sex-starved" without a solid alibi. Miss Gedge, or Ma Gedge, is "a bitch of authentic pedigree" who always cuts her classes to gossip with Twirt. Young Furrow had offered his assistance to frame those two for indecent behavior, but was away from the school to attend a wedding at the time of the murders. The daughter of the local police inspector, Miss Daisy Quick, is a secretary at the school and the murdered headmaster had shifted practically all of his daily work on Miss Quick, which gave him more time "to think of still more schemes" – or simply harassing his staff. Such as the groundsman, Vincent, who was regularly threatened with the sack and the caretaker, Flint, has gone missing around the time of the murders. And to complicate the case even further, they even have to consider a few outsiders. A school governor, Mr. Sandyman, was invited by the headmaster to see him on a most particular business and the mysterious Indian visitor, Mr. Mela Ram.

A cast filled to the brim with potential murderers, but there are many more plot-threads to be tidied up. Such as why Mela Ram disappeared or why a shed was burglarized just to empty a pail of water. Or why Tennant was lugging around a heavy, outdated catalogue around when he was dying. And the solutions to most of these questions show why I love Bush so much.

I mentioned in my review of The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944) that nobody has nailed the relationship between the amateur and professional detective quite like Bush. The Case of the Dead Shephard is a good example of Travers and Wharton each solving a piece of the puzzle. Wharton masterfully explains the clever poisoning method used to kill Tarrent and Travers destroyed the rock-solid alibi in the headmaster's murder, but it was Travers' manservant, Palmer, who helped him figure out the meaning of the dying message (of sorts). I find this teamwork between different kind of detectives a pleasing approach to the detective story, but, like rival detectives, something you sadly only find with any regularity in anime-and manga mysteries.

So, all in all, The Case of the Dead Shepherd was a pleasant return to those tricky, clockwork-like plots of early Bush, but, as devilish complex as the story appears on the surface, the overall solution to the murders is marvelously simplistic with all of the plot-threads neatly tied up in the end. Recommended!

The Man Who Relieved His Conscience (2019) by Anne van Doorn

"Anne van Doorn" is the now open penname of a criminally underrated Dutch crime writer, M.P.O. Books, who made his English debut in the September/October issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine with a short impossible crime story, "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," 2017) – translated by Josh Pachter. Here, in the Netherlands, we got the third novel-length detective story in the Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong series, De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019).

The Man Who Relieved His Conscience is unquestionably the strongest entry in the series with not only a technically-sound plot, two locked room murders and a dying message, but also with the revelation of a sub-plot that has run through the background of the series, like a red-thread, from the start. A revelation that honestly floored me!

Robbie Corbijn's past had been largely shrouded in secrecy from the beginning and his assistant, Lowina de Jong, found some inconsistencies in his background story. Such as his claim that he had been a policeman, but "no one by that name had ever been in the corps." However, these inconsistencies were revealed here as cleverly planted clues that Books' long-time readers, like yours truly, should have been able to put together and figure out Corbijn's identity – especially the name John in combination with a character who appeared in one of the short stories. You should be able to piece this part of the puzzle together before it's dropped into your lap.

Sadly, I'm an imbecile whose brain is encased in a thick skull, of reinforced concrete, where the light of reason can't reach it!  

So, when the identity of Corbijn was casually revealed, all I could do was dumbly gape at the page before seriously wanting to kick myself. When I learned who he really was, I couldn't help but look at Corbijn like Scrooge must have done when he clasped eyes on the ghost of Jacob Marley. Yes, to say I was pleasantly surprised is somewhat of an understatement, but this is only relatively minor part of the plot.

Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research and Discover is a particulier onderzoeksbureau (private detective agency) specialized in unsolved murders, missing persons and cases with a highly unusual character. Such as the problem of the haunted road from "Het meisje dat bleef rondhangen" ("The Girl Who Stuck Around," 2017) and the ghostly manifestations in "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018). There are many cold, but open, cases in their archive and one of these open files comprises of little more than "a thin dossier." A sad, long-forgotten case of a woman who disappeared thirty-five years ago.

Tessa Verwold had a rough time before she came to the Christian commune Caritashoeve, in Hooglanderveen, where "vulnerable and derailed youngsters were placed and guided" in order to help them find a way back into society. A place where Tessa felt appreciated and at home. She began to make friends and even got a respectable boyfriend, but there was an older man who was interested in her, named Wilco Krook, who was convinced God had brought Tessa on his path – only his infatuation may have been the root-cause of her going missing. Wilco barely survived a beating at the hands of the men of the commune and they claimed Tessa had incited them to do it, but she couldn't confirm or deny their accusation, because she packed her bags that night and left. Never to be seen again!

Corbijn once remarked to De Jong that, from all the missing people he's searching for, he felt "the strongest kinship" with Tessa, because nobody has ever really looked for her. The family called her a child with "a black, scorched soul" and were relieved when she simply disappeared, which makes them incredibly reticent to give the case renewed attention. Since the law only allows them to act "on behalf of someone with a stake in the matter," such as a close relative, the file remained open and unsolved.

One day, they receive a letter from a dying man, Zoltán Rákóczi, who's a retired psychologist that had been involved with the Caritashoeve.

Rákóczi confesses he murdered Tessa in 1983 and buried the body on the lawn of the Caritashoeve, behind a colossal stone bench, but an excavation at the spot proved him to be liar and Corbijn loses face in the eyes of the authorities – losing a lot of prestige they had garnered with the police over the years. So why did he made a false deathbed confession or was there a kernel of truth in his story? Corbijn and De Jong finally get their client that allows them to work on the case. However, the family is still mostly uncooperative, the church community has disbanded and the people involved in the beating of Krook, on the night Tessa disappeared, had scattered. This makes reconstructing that fateful night a daunting task indeed!

I don't want to divulge more about the plot than that, but there are three side-puzzles, namely the two locked room mysteries and dying message, that deserve some consideration.

Geert Eijkholt is one of the people who was involved with the tragedy on that night, in 1983, who now lives in an old, dirty caravan on the lot of a closed, badly neglected garden center. De Jong tried to get into contact with him throughout the first half of the story, but, halfway through, she finds his body hanging from a coat hook inside the caravan. An unfinished dying message has been written on the filthy surface of the floor. However, the door and the window were securely locked or fastened on the inside!

The explanation to this impossible crime is a variation on a trick that has been used before in this series, but worked much better with a locked caravan and the meaning behind the cryptic, incomplete dying message surely was interesting – because it was a clue to a different piece of the puzzle. And this obscure message only makes sense if it was meant to be read by someone actually looking for the truth, like Corbijn and De Jong. This was quite a gamble and it probably would have made more sense, if he tried to write the name of his murderer. Still, a properly done, Dutch-language dying message is a genuine rarity and I'm glad one was included in this detective novel.

As they dig deeper into the past, Corbijn and De Jong stumble across another seemingly impossible crime, but I can't give you any exact details about that one. That being said, this locked room puzzle was brilliantly handled with a false solution, a dramatic reconstruction and a satisfying solution with a touch of originality. The principle behind the locked room-trick is not entirely new, but I don't remember any examples of it being used like this! A very practical and effective way to create a locked room mystery. A second thing I appreciated is how the personality and psychological fingerprints were all over these two impossible crimes.

There is, however, one (minor) disappointment. A big plot-point is finding the body and this is not revealed until the final page of the book, which felt tacked on and a bit of a letdown. The description of the Caritashoeve made me hope for something along the lines of Arthur Porges' short story "These Daisies Told" (1962), but this is the only thing about the plot that slightly bothered me. Everything else was excellent. 

The Man Who Relieved His Conscience stands as the best and most memorable entry in the series with a strong ending that tipped its hat to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which promises an interesting new direction for Corbijn and De Jong. Add to that two splendidly executed impossible crimes, a dying message and a personal revelation of the protagonist that was as surprising as my first AgathaChristie, you have one of my favorite Dutch detective novels. I honestly can't wait to see where the series goes from here. Highly recommended!

Spitting Image: "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (1969) by Jon L. Breen

Some months ago, I reviewed two short stories by Jon L. Breen, "The House of the Shrill Whispers" (1972) and "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979), which are gentle, but expertly done, parodies of John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne – two iconic detective-characters who are inextricably linked to the timeless locked room mystery. Breen is the genre's resident satirist and has taken the mickey out of many of the greatest mystery writers.

Frederick Dannay was one half of the bodily incarnation of the American detective story, "Ellery Queen," who invited Breen to take a shot at the Ellery Queen character. The result is a parody hearkening back to "the early Ellery of the pure-puzzle days." Naturally, there's a dying message and a challenge to the reader.

"The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" was originally published in the March, 1969, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted in the anthology Ellery Queen's Eyes of Mystery (1981).

E. Larry Cune is a world famous detective and "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" takes him back to "the scene of his first great triumph," Greek Theatre, where he solved the murder of an asthmatic audience member, Mr. Anagopolous – a case commonly known as The Greek Coughin' Mystery. There are many more of these sly nods and winks in the story to EQ ("this is a calamity, Towne").

Orson Coward's new musical comedy, Gold, is debuting at the Greek Theatre and Cune is in the audience, but realizes that his mere presence put "the fear of sudden death in all those around him." The great detective hasn't attended a play or party without having "to solve a murder at some time during the festivities," because potential murderers are champing at the bit "to match wits with him." By the way, this "match wits" line also appears in the challenge to the reader. So is this story where the 1975 Ellery Queen TV-series got the idea for the famous "match wits with Ellery Queen" line? I don't remember it ever being used in any of the novels or short stories. Anyway...

Something is definitely happening, or has happened, backstage. When the show begins, the songs are out-of-order and during the intermission, Cune is told that Coward has been murdered. A weighty volume, entitled The Complete Wit of Orson Coward, appears to have been the murder weapon.

Cune deduces Coward expected to be murdered, but, when he saw Cune sitting in the audience, he knew it was going to be that night and left him a clue to help him identify his murderer, which Coward did by rearranging the songs – a predying message, if you will. Usually, in a detective parody, the answers to these kind of problems are nonsensical (e.g. "The Problem of the Vanishing Town") or disappointing, but the predying message can (sort of) be solved. I think the key to the meaning of the first, out-of-order song, "Never Been Kissed," is a bit more nebulous than "Alone in My Solitude" and "I Know the Score Now." However, if you get those last two, you can probably guess the answer to the first. And certainly pick the murderer's name from the cast of characters.

What has the Lithuanian eraser of the story-title to do with this theatrical mystery? Well, that's the punchline of the story. Something you have to read for yourself.

All in all, "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" is another excellent parody by Breen, who understands the writers he's lampooning, which is what makes them work and this time it even has a clever take on the dying message, but, more importantly, it was funny. My favorite scene is perhaps when Cune walked on stage to tell the audience there has been an unfortunate accident and immediately "men with black bags began making their way to the aisles all over the massive playhouse" (no, we don't need doctors, he's quite dead). This story should have made it into The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018). Definitely recommended, especially if you like Ellery Queen. Or simply in the mood for something light hearted and short.

Kirin's Horn: Case Closed, vol. 68 by Gosho Aoyama

The 68th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, published in the non-English speaking world as Detective Conan, begins with the final chapter of the story that closed the previous volume and has one of those which-of-the-three setups littering the series, but here it was poorly executed with a painfully obvious solution – resulting in an incredibly mediocre story. Luckily, the next two stories are much better.

The plot of the second story centers on another ill-fated attempt by Rachel to get her estranged parents, Richard Moore and Eva Kaden, back together and the birthday of her mother provides her with an opportunity. Rachel has won a weekend getaway at the Shizuoka Seaside Hotel, which is a perfect location for a small, intimate birthday party, but the series murder-magnet, Conan, tagged along with Rachel, Richard and Eva. So a murder interrupting the birthday party is a question of when, not if.

Eva Kaden is a busy, successful attorney at law and had to reschedule an important meeting to the hotel where she was having her birthday party.

Kaden's client are a former model, Akiho Kokubu, who has been the victim of a stalker and her husband, Takehiko Kokubu. Their appointment was to arrange an out-of-court settlement with the mother of the man who was stalking her, all of whom are in the hotel, but, before their scheduled meeting can take place, Akiho's body "appeared out of nowhere" in Kaden's hotel room when she was taking a shower – which is patently impossible. The hotel room has a door that can only be opened with a key card and has a small window without a balcony. So how did the murderer enter or leave the locked room?

The problem of the locked room is practically immediately solved, but this answer reveals a second problem hiding underneath it. How could the murderer have carried out a certain task requiring two, or more, people? One of the clues gave me an idea how this could have been done, but failed to completely envision the trick before it was revealed. So a good, richly clued story with a sugary ending.

The third story marks the return of my favorite recurring side-character, Jirokichi Sebastian, who's Serena Sebastian's rich uncle and sworn nemesis of that infamously elusive thief, Kaito KID. Jirokichi has attempted to capture KID numerous times, such as in volumes 44, 61 and 65, but it was Conan who, time and time again, prevented KID from getting away with a valuable object – something that gave the old man an idea. Jirokichi has gotten the traditional warning note from KID promising that, when the moon is full, he'll appear again "to take the Kirin's Horn," but this time he had added a post-script. A post-script asking Jirokichi to "put aside childish things" and "settle this like men."

Jirokichi deduces from this that he wants adults present, not children, because "children are Kaito KID's weakness." After all, not even a master of disguise, like KID, can pass himself off as a child. So he places Conan and the Junior Detective League in the limelight. Admittedly, this was certainly the most original way to shoehorn them into a case without them just being there. Conan remained surprisingly cool-headed in the face of all those rollings news camera considering that it could blow his cover wide open. Anita at least pulled her hoodie over her head, but Conan like a deer in the headlights.

Anyway, the Kirin's Horn is "a rare piece of amber" containing "a seed that's ten of thousands of years old," which was recently discovered in a shrine constructed by the devilishly ingenious 19th century craftsman, Kichiemon Samizu – whose "tricky devises" has given Conan and KID hard times on several occasions. However, the presence of his long-dead hand, sort of, gave away the mechanics of the plot.

Nevertheless, the impossible situation that emerged from this setup was an intriguing one: the Kirin's Horn is part of a statue, well hidden inside a mechanical pillar, which stands in the middle of a small room with four differently colored pedestals in each corner. All of these pedestals have keyholes and the four colored keys have to be turned at the exactly the same time to make the statue inside the pillar appear. Jirokichi ordered an electrical current to be placed on the pedestals and placed members of the Junior Detective League in front of the keyholes. Finally, Jirokichi nailed the keys into the wall with a big staple.

Well, in spite of all the security measures, the lights go out as predicted and it takes KID only a minute to steal the horn, but he has a problem, because the trap is sprung and he's trapped inside the shrine – along with the police, a film crew and Jirokichi. Uncharacteristically, KID has taken Conan out with a taser and spends most of the story lying in the middle of the room, like John Kramer, but why?

Seriously, I began to suspect KID had gotten his hands on some short-term APTX 4869 and had taken Conan's place, which would be perfectly acceptable within this universe and this would explain why Anita and Conan acted differently towards the news cameras. You know, KID would look practically identical to Conan as a child. Luckily, this turned out not to be the case and the explanation showed a little but more ingenuity. The locked room trick is mainly a mechanical one, which is hardly a spoiler, but still required enough subterfuge and manipulation of the situation to not make the mechanical aspect feel like a cop-out.

As a bonus, KID gives the reader a second locked room mystery when he appears to be trapped, but simply vanishes when the lights go out for a second or two! The solution is very comic book-like, but have come across it before in a short story and admired the skillfully placed red herring that made it very easy to overlook the solution.

Admittedly, this is far from the best story with either Jirokichi, KID or the lingering presence of Kichiemon Samizu, but still found this to be a wonderfully imagined, cleverly constructed and enjoyable story.

Regrettably, this volume is book-ended by two incredibly mediocre stories and the final story deals with a purse snatcher, disguised in a goofy-looking Hyottoko mask, who targets tori-no-ichi markets and his latest victim is Rachel's best friend, Serena Sebastian – who's determined to get revenge. So they're present when the purse snatcher wounds a man with knife and the victim, before losing conscious, gives Conan a cryptic, near-death-message. However, Western readers rarely have a shot solving the codes or dying messages in this, because they nearly impossible to translate. And this story is no different. So that probably detracted something from this pretty average, uninspired which-of-the-three detective story.

All in all, this was a fairly balanced volume with weak stories opening and closing this collection, but wedged in between you'll find two solid cases and one of them has appearances of some of my favorite recurring side-characters. And those two stories were more than enough to leave me satisfied.