Sweet Poison: Case Closed, vol. 74 by Gosho Aoyama

The 74th of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, published in Japan as Detective Conan, begins with the conclusion to the case that closed out vol. 73 in which an armed man with explosives strapped to his chest takes Richard Moore, Rachel, Sera and three aspiring female mystery novelists hostage – demanding that the famous "Sleeping Moore" identifies the murderer of his sister. Miku Sawaguri had become one of the youngest, bestselling novelists of Japan when she was found dead, in a locked room, at a hot spring resort. She apparently committed suicide, but her brother refused that explanation.

Just before she died, Miku posted several messages online indicating she had three visitors to her hotel room, whom she referred to as the elephant, fox and mouse, to ask for an autograph. So one of these three visitors must be the killer, but who and how?

Conan has to assume his original identity and reason with the hostage taker over the phone to both solve a murder, in record time, as well as preventing a small bloodbath, which is done with an excellent use of the false solution – based on the victim's superbly titled novel, The Grim Reaper's Funeral Procession. Conan even gives a brief description of the plot and it's a psychological thriller about a homicide cop investigating his own murders. Anyway, the locked room-trick is nothing special and a slight variation on an age-old trick, but the vital clue pointing straight to the murderer was beautifully hidden in plain sight. So, technically, a good and solid story, but nothing to make it standout in the series.

The second story is going to be hard to properly describe, because the plot appears to be all over the place with recurring characters turning up or being mentioned. A trend that runs, like a red-thread, through the entire volume.

Doc Agasa found an old pot in his shed that he once bought at a flea market and posted a video online asking for an appraisal, but Anita accidentally appeared in the video. Conan is afraid that the video might lead members of the Black Organization to their doorstep, which is exactly what seems to happen when Amy, not Anita, is kidnapped. But the case takes a bizarre turn when they find a cellphone with a note saying, "read the text and follow the orders." Whatever they expected the ransom demand to be, it certainly wasn't that!

I've said several times before that kidnapping stories are my least favorite kind of detective story, because they're rarely any good, but, every now and then, a truly good one turns up and it's usually in this series – such as the excellent second story from vol. 72. This one is even better! I thought it was very clever to (ROT13) pbire-hc bar pevzr (gursg) jvgu nabgure (xvqanccvat) giving gur xvqanccref na rkphfr gb hfr gur eht gb jenc naq pneel Nzl va jvgubhg nggenpgvat fhfcvpvba. Normally, this would be good, if minor, entry in the series, but then there are all the recurring characters suspiciously sneaking around in the background or mysteriously being referred to. Masumi Sera is asking pesky questions and obviously is up to something. Subaru Okiya is spying and eavesdropping on Conan. A lost cat features in the story and has a coincidental link to another familiar face in the series. Black Organization is ominously referred to as "Them."

Somehow, Aoyama got more out of the plot than was originally in out with the result being an excellent and memorable story. A story that comes highly recommended to fans of Edward D. Hoch. You'll know why when you learn the solution. Only disturbing thing is how effortlessly Amy shrugged off her harrowing kidnapping experience. Have the Junior Detective League really become this callous and jaded?

The third story brings Harley Hartwell (Heji Hattori) back to Tokyo, but, before he can tell Conan why, Kazuha calls him to tell that she's detained at a restaurant where a man had died in the bathroom – apparently after eating poisoned candy. A foreign guy had found the body and ordered nobody to leave. And that guy is the FBI agent, André Camel, who previously appeared in vol. 58. Camel overheard the victim talking on his phone to someone he called his childhood friend and admitting to have murdered a man ("I'm the one who poisoned Abe"). Then he heard a groan, broke down the door and found the body. But did Camel correctly understood what he heard? Masumi Sera proposes to use the case to settle the friendly rivalry between the Great Detectives of the East and West, Jimmy Kudo (Conan) and Harley Hartwell.

I imagine Ho-Ling must have loved this story with its linguistic clues and plot balanced on the differences, and nuances, between regional dialects. And how it can even fool native Japanese speakers. A good and decent enough story that, once again, elevated by everything playing out in the background.

The last story tells why Harley traveled to Tokyo, "a letter from a dead man," who expressed his wish to meet the young detective to confess a sin and told him he'll be waiting at "the house of he murdered man" on "the night of the next full moon" – enclosed is a key and an address in Osaka. The writer is the president of design company, Wakamatsu, who was suspected to have been killed by a burglar at his summer villa. But when the appointment was held, they found someone in the bathroom who inexplicably "vanished into thin air." A message had been carved into the wall, "E-Y-E."

Harley arranged a meeting with the victim's family to discuss the case, but they couldn't been inside for more than 30-minutes when one of the family members is impossibly poisoned with a slice of cake. A single slice of poisoned cake that could not have been poisoned or have been forced upon the victim to take. These kind of mysterious poisonings have become a staple of Case Closed and often have solutions that are simultaneously very simple and devilish ingenious (e.g. "The Loan Shark Murder Case" from vol. 15), but this one was a little too simplistic and dangerously careless with cyanide! There's also an obliterated dying message that has to be found at the first crime scene, which is in the hands of two other characters who had previous appearances. Very fitting that they had to be the ones to handle that side of the case. Finally, a second poisoning adds a third victim to the bodycount and ends this volume on a cliffhanger.

On a whole, this was not a bad volume at all, but all of the stories, including the splendid and original second story, used the appearances, cameos and references to all those recurring characters to bolster their plots. For example, the third story would have been a very minor, forgettable case without Agent Camel, Masumi Sera and the battle-of-wits between Conan and Harley. But that's one of the perks of a long-running series that put in the effort to setup an entire fictional universe. So, yeah, an enjoyable volume for fans.

On a last, somewhat related note: three months ago, I posted my fan theory, "Detective Conan: Who's the Boss?," speculating on the true identity of the B.O. leader. Ho-Ling and 8bitorne shot the poor thing to pieces in the comments, but still like the idea of him being Conan's Moriarty.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998), which came to my attention when reading a fascinating description of the plot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – a theft from "a locked trophy house" protected with "trip wires, booby traps and a flock of geese." A bit of detective work revealed that two of the three stories are impossible crime tales! So on the pile it went.

I've never been a huge fan of pastiches and only handful of writers, like Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges, wrote pastiches that truly honored or even added to the original source material instead of staining it. Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery Queen is a good example of a pastiche that should considered canon. More often than not, they're nothing more than glorified fan fiction or aspiring authors hitching their wagons to classic, ready-made characters. This is something that's especially true for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which has become somewhat of a cottage industry.

There is, however, a third, much rarer, kind of pastiche. Pastiches with either good plots, ideas or writing that were depreciated by being presented as imitations.

Templeman's three Sherlock Holmes pastiches definitely fall into this category and can't help but feel that these stories would have been better remembered today, particularly among locked room fans, had he created an original detective character – like a modern-day Rival of Sherlock Holmes. Either that or he should have tried selling the impossible crime ideas to David Renwick, because these stories would have worked remarkably well as Jonathan Creek episodes. Something tells me Templeman had at least watched the first season before he began working on the stories.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" is the first of the three stories and opens with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being summoned by Mycroft Holmes to have a private interview with the Prime Minister and a cabinet member, Sir Simon Clayton. Sir Simon has bizarre story to tell of, what could be, either "a huge confidence trick" or "a world-shattering discovery which could topple Empire." Great Britain could be at "great peril" from it.

Sir Simon recently rekindled an old friendship with a crony from his university days, Rodger Hardy, who came from a family of industrialists with "a flair for invention," but the family went bankrupt and the ancestral home, Halam Hall, became a ruin. Rodger had gone abroad and nothing was seen of him for years until, one day, he turned up again to invite Sir Simon, to Halam Hall, where he wished to show him something. And that something was a sight to behold! Halam Hall is "an unbalanced architectural mongrel" that had been flogged over the decades with the whims of fashion and individual tastes, which includes an underground ballroom that was left unfinished and down there ten grinning Chinamen were constructing "a full-sized ocean-going wooden junk" – over fifty feet in length. But why was he spending six months to construct a large boat in a place where there was no hope of ever getting it out?

Rodger asked Sir Simon to come down every month to observe its construction and promises all

will be revealed upon completion. When the time comes, the completed vessel was surrounded by poles and caged in with strands of copper wire, which appeared to make a buzzing sound. Rodger told his friend the junk is being "electrically energised" and invited him to join him for dinner, but, when they returned two hours later, the huge Chinese junk that had taken up the whole space of the ballroom had simply vanished into thin air. A situation that becomes even more impossible when Rodger drives Sir Simon to the River Thames where the newly build ship was floating on the water.

 

So what's the catch? Rodger claims to have invented a way to transpose "matter through space by means of converting solids, by electricity, into waves, which could then be converted back again into the original solid state." And he's willing to part with the secret for the then astronomical sum of one million pounds. British government wants Sherlock Holmes to find out whether they've got the hands on paradigm shifting invention or if they're being trick, which means finding an explanation how the vessel was removed from the underground ballroom to which the door was "too small to allow exit." And how it reappeared on the River Thames.

A neatly posed locked room puzzle cleverly making use of the underground ballroom, because it immediately excluded the possibility that the architectural monstrosity housed two large, identical rooms – promising something more original than a simple piece of misdirection. I'm glad to report that the solution delivered on the promise made by its premise and the locked room-trick made this story the most Jonathan Creek-like in the collection. No idea why it wasn't included in Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Unfortunately, "Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" also has some flaws and shortcomings preventing it from becoming a true (locked room) classic.

Sherlock Holmes only deduces the motive behind the scheme, but has to relay on subterfuge to find out how the vessel disappeared from the ballroom and reappeared again on the Thames, which came at the expense of the clueing. So what should have been a how-was-it-done type of puzzle detective story becomes a story about a detective tackling a massive locked room mystery. You can only make an educated guess how it was done. A second problem is that the story is a little overwritten with modern attitudes bleeding through in certain parts, which is true for all three stories in this collection. Each story could have been told in half the number of pages without compromising the plots. Still a highly enjoyable story with an originally worked out impossible crime.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" is pretty much a (historical) travelogue of the Peaks District, Derbyshire, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are spending a holiday when they begin to hear about the mysterious death of an old, German watchmaker – who was found in his ransacked home with a head wound. The doctor concluded that the wound was not fatal and that he had died of heart failure, but the villagers believed it was "an unnatural death." A believe strengthened by escaped pet raven of the old watchmaker who has been frantically screaming, "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen," around the village. The message of the raven turns out to be a dying message by proxy that reveals where the old man had hidden his money, but most of the story has Holmes and Watson soaking in the local color and history. There's a darkly humorous anecdote about a mischievous parrot and the history of "the plague village," Eyam, which is remembered for the way "the god-fearing folk contained the pestilence" by isolating themselves that stopped the plague from spreading to other nearby villages. Here's to your memory, Eyam.

So a very minor, but readable enough, story with a simplistic, paper-thin plot and a holidaying detective that makes it one of Holmes' least exciting and memorable cases.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" convinced me Templeman is either a schoolteacher or an (amateur) historian, but probably a teacher, because I heard the voice of a teacher every time one of these stories slipped into lecture mode.

The last story is the one that got listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room," in which Holmes is consulted by Viscount Siddems who recently returned from India with a collection of trophies and eastern armory – building a trophy house-cum-armour museum to store the collection. Viscount Siddems had his house burgled and this made him decide to protect his trophy house, built a few hundred yards away from the hall, with "man-traps, trip-wires to set off shot guns" and "a flock of geese." Geese were used in Roman times as watchdogs because the slightest unusual sound would set up "an unholy honking."

However, these securities measures didn't stop a thief from walking up the trophy house, unlocking the door with a key and taking a Japanese shield from the wall without setting off the flock of geese. So the viscount doubled the number of traps, shotguns and fixed bells to the trip-wire, but the thief simply took away another shield. But how?

Just like the opening story, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" shows a lot of ingenuity and originality with how it presents the impossible situation, but this time that's not reflected in the explanation. Such an elaborate setup requires a scrap of cleverness to either put the traps out of commission or circumvent them with a way to keep the geese quiet, but the solution, while perfectly workable and logical, was a little too facile. And underwhelming. Luckily, the reason behind the thefts was good and something Arsène Lupin would have warmly approved of.

So, as some of you probably noticed, my take on the individual stories don't seem to align with the opening of this review, but I believe the flaws and shortcomings of these three stories were enlarged by being pastiches. It comes with certain expectations that Templeman was unable to live up to. But had he created his own detective characters, Templeman could have told his stories on his own terms with the result being something along the lines of Hal White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008), Andrew May's The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) and Stephen Leather's The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). I think originally created detective characters would have softened some of its flaws.

After all, even as pastiches these were superior detective stories, especially the first one, compared to most what was being published at the time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories is not a timeless classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a well intended collection of stories written by an enthusiastic amateur with a commendable interest in locked room puzzles – something that was too rare in the nineties. So recommended to the ferocious locked room reader and addicted Sherlockian who'll read everything with the name of the Great Detective printed on it.

The Sulu Sea Murders (1933) by Van Wyck Mason

The Fort Terror Murders (1931) served as my introduction to both the pulpy, spy-tinged crime fiction of Francis van Wyck Mason and an exceedingly rare, well hidden subcategory of the locked room and military mystery novel – set in lonely, desolate army posts and fortresses. Since then, I've found two more novels that belong to this very specific subcategory, George Limnelius' The Medbury Fort Murder (1929) and Mason Wright's The Army Post Murders (1931).

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) appended that list with a fourth novel, Van Wyck Mason's The Sulu Sea Murders (1933), which described the locked room problem as the "shooting of a man alone in a room at the guarded top of a tower on a military base." The military base here is a godforsaken outpost on a small, sultry island, Sanga Sanga, on the edge of the Sulu Sea in the southwestern Philippines.

The Sulu Sea Murders is the seventh title in the Captain Hugh North series and begins with Captain North listening to the dying words of a pearl diver, George Lee, who had been shot at a dive bar, but the only substantial thing Lee can tell him is that the shooter had a butterfly tattooed on his arm – mostly rambling and raving about a sunken ship, pearls and the "blue dog's belly." So its up to Captain North, an intelligence officer of the Department of Criminal Investigations, to apprehend his murderer. A task bringing him to the gates of Fort Winfield.

Fort Windfield is an old Spanish fortress, nicknamed Killers' Castle, where the "withering, nerve-blasting heat" made "killing easy" and the natives say that the fort has been unlucky ever since "the bleeding hands of Spanish slaves" had reared its solid walls. A commander during Spanish times had gone on a killing spree and there have always been "an unholy lot of suicides," which makes "a sinister Jolly Roger" more suitable to raise on the top of the guard tower than the Stars and Stripes of the United States. A bad reputation that scarcely improved under the iron rule of the unpopular, much despised commanding officer, Major John Flood.

Captain North feels upon his arrival that something is not quite right, because normally, men tucked away in distant corners of the world welcomed strangers and particularly an army legend, like North, but the "weary, heat-tortured men" reminded him of card players "interrupted by an intruder" – right before a game for high stakes. Why is everyone so interested in the barometer dropping? These are the first signs that the case is not going to be as easy as Captain North had hoped.

The man who killed George Lee is quickly identified as Private Paul Laval, of B Company, who's placed under arrest and confesses to have shot the diver during an argument. But what Captain North learns too late is Laval's past circus career as an acrobat, escape artist and human-fly. When goes to check on the prisoner, Laval had indeed found a way out and left behind a dead guard. A second, practically identical, murder soon follows with the victim dying with that strange phrase on his lips, "blue dog's belly."

The Sulu Sea Murders actually comprises of two different, intertwined, story lines tied together in the last few chapters, but the contrast between the first and second half of the book showed how much this series occupied the borderlands between the adventure, detective, espionage and pulp fiction – colored with the palette of the regional mystery novel. The first half is a mild adventure/thriller with an escaped murderer running loose on "a postage-stamp island" and Captain North eavesdropping military style or diving to the sunken ship without any equipment, which gave the book one of its best and most memorable scenes. Captain North is presented as someone who's as much at home on the pages of an adventure story as he would be tangling with villains in James Bond-style spy thriller, but the second half revealed him to be somewhat of a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Thorndyke!

After the second murder, the primary suspect is kept in protective custody in one of the top rooms of the tower, guards posted at the stairs, with the only other way up being two hundred feet of unbroken masonry. A physically demanding wall to climb and impossible to complete without being seen by the sentries below, but the person who was held there was found with his head blown to pieces. However, the description from Locked Room Murders: Supplement wrongly described that the victim had been all alone, which is incorrect, but a chemical experiment eliminated this suspect when it showed his gun had not fired the fatal shot. Captain North also relies on his scientific knowledge to crack the locked room problem, but not before carefully constructing and then having to discard a "once glittering theory." A unexpected, but nicely done, false-solution.

The correct solution to the shooting at the top of the guarded tower was and unexpectedly good, and interesting, trick, but not for the usual reasons.

Van Wyck Mason shamelessly "borrowed" from two short impossible crime stories written by the same, highly regarded, writer, but I detest those two stories and finding out that their solutions were melted together here to create a superior locked room-trick earned him my forgiveness – because he showed how these tricks should have been used in the first place. Although some will likely disagree with me on that point. But there's more to the second half than the impossible shooting.

I already mentioned Captain North conducting experiments and building theories, but there's also a surprisingly amount of clueing and fair play that almost makes you forget certain details were glossed over. The Sulu Sea Murders has a busy plot and might have missed a thing, or two, but don't believe it was ever explained how exactly Laval got out of his prison cell. You can say he was an escape artist, but the cells are inside a centuries old fortress with thick walls, arrow slit windows and iron eyes where prisoners were shackled to back in the days. So you have to show how exactly he was able to escape. Another thing that remained unexplained is who bandaged the wounded pearl diver.

Nevertheless, in spite of these smudges on some of the finer details, the main plotlines were clearly stated and resolves in a highly readable blend of the traditional, Golden Age detective story and the pulp-style adventure thriller. And these two different styles came together in a spectacular way when Captain North tried to lay a trap for the murderer. Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned! This all helped make The Sulu Sea Murders the best I've read so far by Mason and will be hard to beat as my personal favorite Captain Hugh North title, but The Yellow Arrow Murders (1932), The Hong Kong Airbase Murders (1937) and The Munitions Ship Murders (1941) all look promising. There's always Mason's standalone locked room mystery novel, Spider House (1932). So this blog hasn't seen the last of Mason or Captain North.

Dead Weight (1946) by Addison Simmons

Addison Simmons was an American writers described by our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, as "a prolific professional writer of both short stories and radio plays" who produced two detective novels, Death on the Campus (1935) and Dead Weight (1946), which had been withering away in obscurity – until Coachwhip Publications decided to reissue them in 2018. And, as to be expected, Evans penned an excellent introduction to those brand new editions.

Years ago, I came across a short reference to Dead Weight in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47 (2009), praising the book as a small town mystery with "quite a bit of ingenuity," which earned it a notation on my wishlist.

Needless to say, I was glad to see this little-known novel returning to print, but the due to the deluge of reprints, translations and my crippling impossible crime addiction, it took me more than a year to get to it. So my only regret is that I didn't read it sooner. What an enjoyable and interesting little piece of detective fiction!

Dead Weight centers on the creators of "a nice quiet little radio serial," Ed MacIntyre and Walt Tuttle, who formed "a perfect combination" with Walt cobbling together the plots and Ed writing the dialogue, but Home Town became "the top ranking serial on the air" – playing havoc on Ed's digestive system and nerves. For years, Ed and Walt have been battling their sponsor, Slade Lattimer, who's "one of the wealthiest men in the country" with the habit of treating his employees as stooges who have "to be beaten into line." And every single day, for two years, Lattimer interfered with the scrips and direction of the show. So when an opportunity presented itself to get out, Ed and Walt eagerly grabbed it.

Walt returned to his old home town, Hamsted, where he bought a drug story that came with two full-time registered pharmacists, a store manager and a girl at the soda fountain. Only thing they have to do is learn how to sell the patent medicines, candy and hardware, which will land them a comfy 75 bucks a week!

Shortly after they arrived, Ed discovers Walt's slumped body in one of the ice cream booths at the pharmacy, clutching a torn piece of paper, with an overturned glass of strawberry soda next to him. Someone had shot him! Curiously, on the night of the murder, there were several people from their Chicago past in town. One of them was their old radio-executive, Harry Leibowitz, but also the hotblooded, short-tempered daughter of their former sponsor, Sandra Lattimer, who's passionately in love with Walt and nearly killed him back in Chicago – when she confronted him with a loaded gun. There are also potential suspects closer to home who warrant some consideration. Such as the strawberry soda guzzling village idiot, "Dodo," who's holding something back and the "tight and bitter" Forsythe family. Years ago, 19-year-old Calla Forsythe was murdered and her body dumped in Hamsted Wood, but the murderer was never caught and Ed discovers Walt used the case as a story-line in Home Town.

So, together with his wife, Binnie, Ed decides to get to the bottom of this business, but that's easier said than done when you're dealing with a missing dying message, lying witnesses, hostile suspects and a growing bodycount.

There aren't any references in Dead Weight to other mystery writers, or detective characters, but the plotting and writing suggests Simmons admired Ellery Queen and Craig Rice. Dead Weight has the type of characters and background recalling Queen's Hollywood and Wrightsville novels, but, as Evans described it, "baroque in plot" reminiscent of the earlier, more puzzle-driven, Queen novels. I think the presence of a dying message was the clearest evidence Simmons aligned himself with Queen, but Dead Weight also has a dreamy, slightly surrealistic quality. Ed has some very strange dreams, "like Alice Through the Looking Glass," which actually help him get closer to the solution. Something that reminded me of the often dreamlike detective stories by Rice. Another mystery writer who also greatly admired Queen.

But how well was this Queen-Rice style detective executed in the hands of Simmons? As usually, Anthony Boucher was right when he wrote that Dead Weight has plenty of ingenuity, but this doesn't come into play until the final quarter of the book when the dying message turns up and an alibi-trick came into play – skillfully blindsiding this unsuspecting armchair detective. So I was very pleased with how the story and plot developed and turned out.

Dead Weight is not a shimmering, long-lost classic of the Golden Age detective story, but it's a tremendously enjoyable, well written and handily plotted novel with good ideas, memorable scenes and served with a slice of small town Americana. A fine example of "the entertaining legacy" left behind by those "young detective fiction enthusiasts of eighty and ninety years ago." Recommended, especially if you have a special fondness for the classic American detective stories of writers like Queen and Rice.

Alice's Evidence: "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" (2009) by Dale C. Andrews

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine published a majestic pastiche in their May, 2007, issue, entitled "The Book Case," written by two long-time Ellery Queen fans, Dale C. Andrews and the creator of "A Website on Deduction," Kurt Sercu – anthologized a decade later in The Midadventures of Ellery Queen (2018). Generally, my purist streak makes it nigh impossible to enjoy pastiches, but "The Book Case" and its sequel can be counted among the exceptions.

Dale C. Andrew's "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" has, as far as I can tell, only appeared in the September/October, 2009, issue of EQMM and the story stands with one foot each in a world of the EQ multiverse.

"The Mad Hatter's Riddle" takes place in 1975, a transitional year, in which the twentieth century took "a quick breath as it prepared for the final twenty-five-year dash to the millennium." A now seventy-year-old Ellery Queen had given up on writing detective stories and now only edits the magazine, but Universal Studios has hired him as a consultant on the shooting of a very special episode of NBC's Ellery Queen – based on one of his most popular short stories, "The Mad Tea Party" (collected in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933). The studio wants to use the episode as vehicle to reunite two "fabled stars of yesteryear," Ty Royle and Bonnie Stuart, who are tagged to play Spencer and Laura Lockridge in the episode.

Bonnie and Ty have been out of the public-eye for nearly three decades, redrawing inside a "comfortable cocoon," where they lived a quiet, hermit-like existence. So the episode marks the first time in twenty-five years that "the once-married duo" appeared together. Something that was easier said than done. The studio had to hire another, one-time consultant, Jacques Butcher, who previously appeared in the Hollywood-period EQ novels The Devil to Pay (1938) and The Four of Hearts (1938).

The episode has to be ready to air in six weeks. So, naturally, the whole shoot threatens to come crashing down when Bonnie and Ty announce they are going to be married (again). Something that'll end the quiet, comfortable existence of the people around them.

A second problem comes in the form of a typewritten, acrostic poem reminiscent of an untitled poem by Lewis Carroll that revealed "the name of the real Alice," but this poem only revealed a cryptic message, "trip required no chances" – a prescient "warning in verse." On the day of their announcement, Bonnie and Ty are murdered at the place they were staying for the duration of the shoot (echoing the double death from The Four of Hearts). This is the point where the story, quality-wise, splits in two parts.

The solution to the murders is routine with a decent, but simple, dying message and an alibi-trick that, while a delight to long-time EQ fans, is a trifle unconvincing. I don't believe the huge discrepancy in time would have gone unnoticed. On the other hand, the answer to the titular riddle was excellently handled and the identity of the writer was a pleasant surprise. You've no idea how clever the title of the story is until you have read it. Even if it has a touch of sadness about it.

So, purely as a whodunit, "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" is a disappointingly weak story, but the presence of the acrostic poem elevates it as an excellent code cracker and the respectful treatment of the original characters makes it a first-class pastiche. A better Hollywood-set EQ story than the original and comes highly recommended to other EQ fans.

The Triple Bite (1931) by Brian Flynn

Last year, the indispensable Dean Street Press reissued ten detective novels of one of the unsung, long-forgotten mystery writers of the past, Brian Flynn, who was unearthed by the Puzzle Doctor, Steve Barge, when he found a copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) among his Christmas presents in 2016 – he has been beating Flynn's drum ever since. Fast-forward two years, Flynn got his long overdue reprints and these new editions came with introductions written by the newly-minted crime fiction historian, Steve Barge.

The Triple Bite (1931) is the tenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, "out of all of the first ten Brian Flynn novel," it was by far the rarest of the lot. A novel which had never before been reprinted and only a single copy was located outside of the British Library! So this might be the rarest title DSP has reprinted to date.

The introduction aptly describes The Triple Bite as a "love-letter to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" with a mysterious cipher, hidden treasure and a villain who could have been member of The Red-Headed League.

Young Cecilia Cameron is the story's narrator and she relates the unbelievable events that took place in "a big, ten-roomed bungalow" in Dallow Corner, Sussex, which Colonel Ian Cameron was prompted to buy by a friend of his son, Nigel Strachan – who had a very peculiar reason for doing so. Strachan is a barrister and six months ago, he was called upon to defend "a born thief," Sam Trout, who got a reduction in sentence. Something the old career criminal gratefully remembered when he was dying of pneumonia. Trout wrote a letter to Strachan telling him he had been one of only two people who ever lifted a finger to help him and gives them "an equal chance of a fortune."

An opportunity encoded in "a piece of doggerel" and the only part Strachan had been able to decipher is a location, Dallow Corner, which is why he brought the bungalow to Colonel Cameron's attention. But there are pirates on the horizon!

Colonel Cameron and Cecilia caught whispered fragments of a conversation in a restaurant mentioning Dallow Corner and salmon-fishing, but there's not a stretch of water big enough for such a thing as salmon-fishing within ten miles of Dallow Corner. Someone else is looking for Sam Trout's fortune is confirmed when they're visited by a red-headed giant of a man, "Flame" Lampard, who introduced himself as "the bearer of a warning" and advises Colonel Cameron to immediately leave Dallow Corner. Otherwise, it may be too late. What treads on the heels of this ominous visit is best described as a siege on the bungalow and echoes the plot of Flynn's tremendously enjoyable Invisible Death (1929).

Shots are fired at the bungalow in the middle of the night. The housekeeper is tied to a chair and gagged, while the intruders excavated the garden, which culminated in the apparently death by heart failure of Colonel Cameron – whose body was found lying against the hedge between the bungalow and their neighbor's house. Cecilia is convinced her uncle had been murdered and "send for Anthony Bathurst first thing in the morning." Bathurst not only agrees with her opinion Colonel Cameron had been murdered, but found the page that had been torn from his notebook curled against the hedge. A piece of paper with the dying man's "last message to the world" scrawled on it, "for God's sake, mind the red thing that flies." More than once, this last message is referred to as "the dying message of Colonel Cameron."

Brian Flynn

The dying message is a trope closely associated with Ellery Queen, but this association began with two novels post-dating The Triple Bite, namely The Tragedy of X (1932) and The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), which makes Flynn's novel one of the earliest examples of the dying message story. There are, however, a number of short stories and novels predating The Triple Bite, but I believe Flynn was the first to use the phrase "dying message." Interestingly, Flynn was perhaps the first to use another trope inextricably linked to another American writer, S.S. van Dine, who introduced to concept of a collector's private museum in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). Something that became somewhat of a trope with Van Dine and his followers, such as Clyde B. Clason (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1938), but Flynn was there first with The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928). Flynn was a little ahead of the curve when it came to the Golden Age mindset!

A second, typical American aspect of The Triple Bite are the brief, but unmistakable, "Had-I-But-Known" moments in Cecilia's narrative. A very specific brand of suspenseful mysteries almost exclusively written by American female novelists such as Mary Robert Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

You can find the clearest example of HIBK in the final lines of the opening chapter when Cecilia writer, "had I known, however, what lay in store for us," from "the coming of "Flame" Lampard" to "the night of horror in the darkened room" when the last scene was enacted, she would not have responded so flippantly to salmon-fishing. So not style you expect to find among the works of a male, British mystery writer who debuted in the 1920s.

Anyway, Colonel Cameron's dying message is one of the practically unusable clues to the fanciful method employed to dispose of two men in the story, which also includes "the puffy pink marks" on the bodies, a pink smear of blood and "a ghastly whirring kind of noise" – like "something was zipping through the air." I gathered from these clues and the many allusions to fishing that the murderer was fooling around with a rod and a hook smeared with some kind of exotic poison, but the solution was something else altogether! John Norris described this utterly bizarre method as something "right out of the weird menace pulps." I agree!

Fascinatingly, the method was based on an obscure line from a Sherlock Holmes story, which helped Bathurst tumble to the solution, but he refers to Holmes and Dr. Watson as actual people. And not as fictional characters like he did in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Flynn was such a massive fanboy!

The who-and why were much easier spotted and the coded message, or parts of it, can be deciphered by the reader, but everything is draped in the style of the 19th century detective story and pulp-thrillers. Some bits of the plot might be hard to swallow for the Golden Age purists, but The Triple Bite stands as a warm homage to Conan Doyle and is as enjoyable as the previously mentioned Invisible Death. Just pure, pulpy fun! I think pulp readers and Sherlockians will get the most out of this classic rendition of their favorite reading material.

Well, this leaves me with only two more of Flynn's novels, The Five Red Fingers (1929) and The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930). So, hopefully, we don't have to wait too long for DSP's second serving of Anthony Bathurst cases.