Murder Among Astrologists (1963) by Ton Vervoort

Previously, I looked at a little-known Dutch detective novel, W.H. van Eemlandt's Dood in schemer (Death in Half-Light, 1954), which takes place during a scientific expedition to a remote island to observe a solar eclipse and there was another Dutch mystery on the big pile with an alternative, cosmological-themed plot – contrasting beautifully with Death in Half-Light. Additionally, the covers of both editions suggested it was a detective story with a dying message. 

Peter Verstegen was a Dutch editor, translator and writer who played chess, studied astrology and wrote detective novels under the name "Ton Vervoort."

Between 1962 and 1965, Verstegen penned a handful of novel featuring a dandy, educated policeman, named Floris Jansen, and his close friend and narrator, Tom Vervoort, which together with the title-structure of the series (Murder Among [...]) betrays he aligned himself with S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen – particularly their more surrealistic work. Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) is the third title in the Floris Jansen series and strongly reminded me of the Ellery-in-Wonderland novels like There Was An Old Woman (1943) and The Player on the Other Side (1963). A zany detective story complete with eccentric, crackpot characters, bizarre architecture and a stronger ending than you would expect from the first half of the story.

Christiaan Zoutman is a millionaire art collector and a staunch defender of "the oldest of the sciences," but nobody takes astrology serious in the Netherlands and even in enlightened France they're being laughed at. So he has began to device experiments in order to convince the scientific community of the value of astrology and intends to carry them out according "the strictest objective standards," which is not exactly what transpired. More on that later.

For his first experiment, Zoutman invited ten astrologists of very diverse backgrounds to his villa, in Bloemendaal, where they have to observe each others for a few days to identity everyone's astrological sign. Zoutman reasons a higher than 10% accuracy should give the Royal Academy of Sciences some food for thought.

Ton Vervoort's name is becoming well-known as Floris Jansen's biographer and the cover of Moord onder studenten (Murder Among Students, 1962) stated he was involved in astrology, which likely earned him an invitation, but he's not adverse to either a holiday in Bloemendaal or the 500 gulden (about 1400 euros today) as an expense allowance – gladly accepts the millionaire's generous invitation. Vervoort knows Zoutman is "one of the rare, colorful figures of the Dutch beau monde" with an equally colorful history, but his villa quickly begins to resemble a lunatic asylum with his guests acting as the inmates.

Villa Les 500 Merveilles, Bloemendaal, is an indescribable, modern monstrosity that rested on "iron columns that crisscrossed the different rooms" and there's no inner staircase to the bedrooms on the second floor, which can only be reached by an ornate iron staircase in the garden (imagine going to bed that way in the dead of winter). Second floor has no hallways and every bedroom door opens on a basalt walkway looking out over large garden filled with ponds, hedges and statues of nymphs, fauns, naiads and Bacchuses. One enormous hedge was cut like a "lying nude." A fitting setting for what's going to happen next, but it should also be mentioned that the villa houses Zoutman's 85 million gulden (about 240 million euros today) modern art collection.

The astrologists, amateurs, professional and two additional people, Zoutman has gathered at his home comprises of a young, beautiful widow, Margareta Vlijn, who's a woman of few words and can drink like a man. An amorous and jealous Spaniard, Alberto Gonzales, who's not the only man present to meet his match in Margareta. Herman Staal is a masseur who juggles his believe in astrology with being a born-again Christian. Mrs. Pietsie Tromp is a professional astrologist who spends her nights astral projecting among the stars, Catharina Dwarshuis is a South African painter who brought with her the dark arts of that continent and Boudewijn Scheps is teacher of classic languages. Theo Dopheide is a long-time, skeptical friend of Zoutman who's initiated the challenge and Eduard Dogger is a representative of the press. A late addition to the party is a rich industrialist, Wijnand Paauw, who makes all his business decisions according his astrological charts. Lastly, there's the elderly, infirm mother of their host, Mrs. Zoutman, who looks like "a living cadaver" and our narrator, Ton Vervoort.

So they're all let loose on the estate, and Bloemdaal, but the experiment is everything but scientific and most of the first half is a string of incidents involving nudism, heavy drinking, voodoo rituals, religious mania, botched rendezvous, fights and loopy, pseudo-scientific discussions – which lowered my expectations considerably. I fully expected to have to write another tepid review of an amusing, unchallenging mystery novel, but that all began to slowly change around the halfway mark.

Vervoort is drummed out of bed with the news that the burglar-alarm had been disabled and the lion's share of the paintings had been removed through a cut-out window, but, when they go to tell Zoutman, they find him sitting behind his desk with a knife in his chest. And with his dying strength, Zoutman had traced a symbol on his desk: two vertical stripes, next to each other, with an unfinished, horizontal stripe above it. The astrological sign gemini? A dying clue to his murderer?

Bloemendaal Police has very little-experience with multi-million gulden burglaries and coldblooded murder. So they agree to let Vervoort call in his friend of the Central Police in Amsterdam, Inspector Floris Jansen, whose investigation is as loose and lighthearted as the opening chapters, which also didn't help me prepare for the splendidly done ending. Jansen's interviews everyone involved, but he doesn't drag-the-marshes and the interviews can be so weird Jansen has to ask Vervoort if there's a madhouse nearby. A few lines did made me chuckle a little. 

Tromp: "Did you hear? I've reached the Solid Star!"

Jansen: "That's wonderful. But did you noticed anything about the burglary last night?"

Good god. The ending did not match the fast and loose, sometimes satirical, storytelling and didn't notice how much of a pure, neo-Golden Age detective Murder Among Astrologists really was until Jansen arrested the murderer. Something that at first came as an anti-climax.

I figured this person had to be murderer and had a good idea about the motive, but then Vervoort pulled the rug from underneath my feet and effectively turned the obvious murderer into the least-likely-suspect! When the rug was pulled away, I discovered what had been hidden right under my nose. The identification of the murderer demolished an original alibi-trick and revealed a second murder with a much more detailed motive than I imagined, which is cleverly tied to a criminal scheme concerning the stolen paintings and the simple, uncomplicated dying message – a splendid double-edged clue. You can easily deduce from that the solution that Vervoort was as much influenced by early period Ellery Queen as their later, much weirder detective novels. I also appreciated that the end of the zodiac experiment showed Vervoort could crack a joke at his own expense.

Only thing that can be said against Murder Among Astrologists is that the detection is not as focused as it could have been or the clueing as sharp as it should have been, which makes it a second-string mystery by American or British standards, but the ambitious ending places it far above the average detective novel of the time. I loved how perfectly it contrasted with my previous read. Death in Half-Light over promised and under delivered. Murder Among Astrologists under promised and over delivered. I couldn't have asked for more from what really was nothing more than a gamble. 

A note for the curious: Murder Among Astrologists is part of an unfinished, collaborative series of detective novels, entitled “Zodiac Mysteries,” which was intended to count twelve novels from as many different Dutch detective-and thriller writers – each novel centering on an astrological sign. Supposedly, Robert van Gulik was going to contribute a novel to the Zodiac Mysteries, but the series was abandoned after eight novels. 

Zodiac Mysteries: 

Bert Japin's Een kwestie van leeuwen of dood (an untranslatable pun, 1963)

Ton Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963)

Rico Bulthuis' Het maagdenspel (The Virgin Game, 1964)

John Hoogland's Wat een geschutter (What a Shooting, 1964)

Louis de Lentdecker's Horens voor de stier (Horns for the Bull, 1964)

Bob van Oyen's IJsvogel en de schorpioen (IJsvogel and the Scorpion, 1964)

Yves van Domber's Een schim in de weegschaal (A Shadow in the Scales, 1965)

B.J. Kleymens' In de greep van de kreeft (In the Grip of Cancer, 1965)

The Three Coffins (1935) by John Dickson Carr

Back in 2019, I decided to reread Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr, the warlock of Golden Age detective fiction, because it underwent a reevaluation over the past fifteen years and its status raised from a mid-tier title to one of Carr's ten best novels – a trend that began on the now defunct JDCarr forum and Yahoo GAD group. A trend that continued through this blogging era. Yeah, it was a deserved, long overdue reevaluation of an often overlooked and underappreciated novel in Carr's oeuvre. 

What's not as well deserved, or acceptable, is the simultaneous devaluation of Carr's landmark locked room mystery novel, The Three Coffins (1935; originally published as The Hollow Man).

I noted in my review of Till Death Do Us Part that book earned its new status on technical points rather than a knockout, but The Three Coffins seems to have lost its classic status on points. Sure, technically, it's perhaps not quite as sound as, let's say, She Died a Lady (1943) or He Who Whispers (1944), but I think readers today miss the point why it was considered a monumental contribution to the genre – a landmark only comparable in status to Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The Three Coffins is the utterly bizarre and fantastic done right. An impressive juggling act, traversing a slippery tight-rope, which reached the ending without the intricate, complicated plot becoming a tangled, incomprehensible mess. It worked with all the mad logic of a dream! That's what generations of (locked room) mystery readers admired about it.

However, there's one difference between the mystery readers of yesterday and today: we have a larger frame of reference, as there's more available today, which can give a new perspective on a long-held, settled opinion. Just look at my own downgrade of Robert van Gulik's Fantoom in Foe-lai (translated as The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959). So it was time to give The Three Coffins another read to see how well its reputation stands up to rereading and standing it did. The Three Coffins is written proof that there's no one, past, present or future, who can hold a candle to Carr. He proves it on the very first pages of the story! 

The Three Coffins opens with the statement that "those of Dr Fell's friends who like impossible situations will not find in his case–book any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying" than the murder of Professor Grimaud and "later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street" – committed in such a fashion that the murderer must have been invisible and "lighter than air." A stone cold killer with all the otherworldly qualities of a goblin or mage. Some began to wonder that the killer really was nothing more than hollow shell and that if you took away "the cap and the black coat and the child's false–face," you might reveal someone "like the man in a certain famous romance by Mr H.G. Wells." An extraordinary and confusing murder case, but Carr hastens to add that "the reader must be told at the outset" on "whose evidence he can absolutely rely." Such as the witnesses at Professor Grimaud's house and Cagliostro Street. This is the kind of the confident bravado that separated the masters from their apprentices.

Dr. Charles Grimaud a teacher, a popular lecturer and writer whose specialized in "any form of picturesque supernatural devilry from vampirism to the Black Mass." Every week, Dr. Grimaud holds court at the Warwick Tavern in Museum Street with a small group of his cronies, but, during their last meeting, there was an unexpected guest. A magician by the name of Pierre Fley challenges Dr. Grimaud that there are men who can get out of their coffins, move anywhere invisibly and four walls are nothing to them. Frey claims to be one of them and has a brother who can do even more, but he's dangerous and says either himself or his brother will visit Dr. Grimaud very soon. Dr. Grimaud tells him to send his brother and "be damned."

A few days later, Dr. Gideon Fell is sitting in front of a roaring fire of his library with Superintendent Hadley and Ted Rampole when the latter tells them about the incident at the Warwick Tavern. Dr. Fell immediately springs his immense bulk into action to pay Dr. Grimaud a visit, because he fears the worst has already happened.

The "first deadly walking of the hollow man" took place that night, shortly before Dr. Fell, Hadley and Rampole arrived at the scene, when "the side street of London were quiet with snow" and Dr. Grimaud received a strange, bundled up visitor – whose face was obscured by child's false-face resembling a Guy Fawkes mask. He was seen talking with Dr. Grimaud by the open door of his study, before entering and locking it behind them. A gunshot was heard and when the door was finally opened, they found a dying Dr. Grimaud, but not a trace of the shooter or the gun. There's an unlocked window in the study, but it overlooks a large, unbroken blanket of virgin snow and the locked door was under constant observation.

 

So, according to the evidence, the murderer drifted into the house without leaving any footprints on the sidewalk and floated out of the study window!

Dr. Fell is having a field day with this one and is more actively woolgathering than usual, but he still does it with all the tact of "a load of bricks coming through a skylight." He lumbers through the crime scene, while Hadley is questioning people, as he inspects the slashed painting of three coffins, pounces on the most disreputable-looking volumes on the bookshelves and went down wheezingly to look at the fireplace. Somehow, Dr. Fell combined his observation with Dr. Grimaud's dying words and "interpreted in jig–saw fashion" part of the backstory to the murder that's buried in Transylvania. I had completely forgotten The Three Coffins is not only a monumental locked room mystery, but also made perfect use of the dying message and the correct interpretation is another clue that a master was at work here.

There are many layers to this story, which have to be slowly peeled away, but as layer after layer gets removed, they expose new questions and complications. Such as a second, seemingly impossible, murder.

Cagliostro Street is a little cul-de-sac, no more than three minutes' walk from Grimaud's house, where a man was shot and killed under circumstances suggesting that he was "murdered by magic." Several witnesses at either end of the street heard a voice saying, "the second bullet is for you," followed by a laugh, a muffled pistol shot and man walking in the middle of the street pitching forward on his face – shot close enough that the wound was "burnt and singed black." There were no footprints in the snow but his own. This second murder allows Dr. Fell to reach his full potential as he goes into overdrive. Dr. Fell lectures on ghost stories, gets lectured on magic tricks and culminates with one of the most iconic chapters in all of detective fiction, "The Locked Room Lecture," in which Dr. Fell famously breaks the fourth wall ("because... we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not") to talk about all the known locked room-tricks at the time! Just one of those many touches that makes this is a genuine classic.

The masterstroke comes when Dr. Fell visits Cagliostro Street and observes "a big round–hooded German clock with moving eyes in its sun of a face," in a shop window, "seeming to watch with idiot amusement the place where a man had been killed" and hears church bells in the distance that he finally sees the whole picture – which translates in one of the best surprise solutions of the period! A beautifully executed solution, reversing everything you thought was true, that pays homage to G.K. Chesterton (plot) and Conan Doyle (backstory). Sure, the critics have a small point that the solution is a little improbable in certain places and aspect can be hard to swallow. But, as stated before, it's the utterly bizarre and fantastic done right with all the mad logic of a dream and (impressively) Carr in full control of every moving bit and piece of a staggeringly complex plot, which is still easy to visualize once everything is explained. 

The Three Coffins is an almost otherworldly performance that nobody else could have pulled off except Carr. There have been those who tried. Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (1938), John Russell Fearn's The Five Matchboxes (1948) and Paul Halter's La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) spring to mind. There even have been those who came close, like Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948) and Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but there will never be another Carr or The Three Coffins.

So, no, I don't agree with the downgrading of The Three Coffins at all. It's deservedly the most famous of Carr's many masterpieces and a landmark of the locked room mystery. Recommended unreservedly! I hope my fanboyism didn't bleed through too much.

Familiar Faces: Case Closed, vol. 76 by Gosho Aoyama

The 76th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, a.k.a. Detective Conan, opens with a big, five-chapter long story covering nearly half of the volume and starts out as a fairly standard detective story, but then the plot takes a wild left turn and becomes part of the main storyline – revealing the potential presence of a Black Organization spy. A dramatic, double-layered case that began as a routine assignment. 

Conan built a website for Richard Moore's detective agency, "Private Eye Extraordinair," which netted him the first paying client who hired him over the internet. And the case looks like easy money.

Kei Kashitsuka found a key to a coin locker in the belongings of her recently deceased brother and hired Moore to find the locker, because "it might something important that could be placed in the stiff's coffin," but text messages about scheduling results in missing each other – returning to the office without having met their client. But upon their return, they notice someone has been in the office and they find their client tied up in the bathroom with her assailant, dead as a door nail, sitting on the toilet. Kashitsuka tells them she came to the office and was met by a man claiming to be Moore's assistant, but he knocked her out with a stun gun and came to in the bathroom "bound with duct tape" when Moore with his entourage returned. The man panicked and shot himself. Only minute traces of gunshot residue found on her body and clothes confirm she didn't fire the gun, but Conan has his suspicions.

So this part of the story is basically an inverted mystery with the question how-and why it was done with the shooting being a (borderline) impossible crime and the motive is tied to a botched bank robbery. During the robbery, a bank teller was shot and his last words form one of the most elegant and natural dying messages I've come across since Ellery Queen's short-short "Diamonds in Paradise" (collected in Queen's Full, 1965). This makes for a nice little detective story, but the situation takes an unexpected turn when Conan is kidnapped and everyone comes into action to find him, which include three of the most recently introduced recurring characters, Toru Amuro, Subaru Okiya and Masumi Sera.

All three of them obviously have ulterior motives to hang around Conan and Moore, but the final page of the story suggests one of them is a Black Organization spy, "Bourbon." Considering the three suspects and Aoyama's style of plotting, Bourbon will probably turn out to be a sheep in wolves clothing pretending to be a wolf in sheep's clothing (i.e. a double agent). A good, eventful story with a new development in the ongoing storyline.

A note for the curious: there's a brief reference in this story to the "Silver Witch Case" from vol. 63, which is a fun impossible crime story about a phantom car that can fly!

Unfortunately, the second story is one of the weakest, most unconvincing stories in the series in a very long time and begins when Doc Agasa, Conan and the Junior Detective League are invited to a barbecue at the home of Sumika and Takushi Konno – a married couple who they met and helped during a camping trip. However, they're constantly arguing with each other and ends with Amy seeing Sumika threatening Takushi with a knife and yelling "I've had enough... I'll kill you." But when Agasa and Conan hurry to the scene, it's a wounded Sumika who's on the floor with a knife sticking out of her body. This could have been a decent enough detective story and one line in particular, "you always get carried away with pranks," suggested the Konnos could have prepared a prank for the young detectives by staging a little domestic murder. Takushi simply took advantage of it to take his wife out the picture in a way that looked like self-defense. Sadly, the solution leaned heavily character manipulation and timing, which was neither cleverly done or very convincing. And the happy, lighthearted ending struck a jarring note with all the drama preceding it.

The third and last story of the volume is a Metropolitan Police Love Story, but this time, it's a thriller! Detective Takagi disappears and a package is delivered to his colleague and girlfriend, Sato, which contains a modified tablet with a live stream – showing Takagi in a precarious situation. Takagi lies flat on his back, tied up and gag, on a wooden plank on a very high construction surrounded by tarp. A noose is tied around his neck and without any clues, or demands, they only have his past cases to go in order to find him. A story ending on a cliffhanger that will be concluded in the next volume.

On a whole, it's not too interesting a story (so far), but one aspect of the plot deserves to be pointed out. This is the second time, in the entire series, Western readers have an advantage over Japanese readers when it comes to a language-based clue, which this time was impossible to hide in the English translation. You've to be denser than Arthur Hastings to miss it. You can find that first story in vol. 55.

So, yeah, it's difficult to rate this volume, because all of its strength is in the first story, but followed by a very weak one and something I fear will turn out to be nothing more than thriller-filler. But then again, if you're this far into the series, you'll be more than happy with the first story!

The Resurrection Fireplace (2011) by Hiroko Minagawa

Hiroko Minagawa is a Japanese writer of fantasy, horror and mystery fiction whose Hirakasete itadaki kōei desu (I'm Honored to Open It, 2011) was the recipient of the 2012 Honkaku Mystery Award and Bento Books released an English translation in 2019 – published under a new title, The Resurrection Fireplace. The book was initially announced under the title The Case of the Curious Cadaver in the Dissectorium of Dr. Daniel Burton, but It Was An Honor to Open You Up would have been a better title than The Resurrection Fireplace. It's much closer to the original Japanese title and would have fitted the overall story better. Particularly the ending.

Either way, The Resurrection Fireplace is not your typical shin honkaku mystery and is hard to pigeonhole. For all intents and purposes, it's a historical and cultural travelogue of 1770s London when body-snatchers scavenged the cemeteries and secret autopsies were performed by candlelight, but it's predominantly a character-driven, Dickensian crime novel that still manages to have an ambitious puzzle plot. There are even scraps of the bibliophile detective story, a dramatic courtroom conclusion and more. What's even more astonishing, is that this sprightly and surprisingly consistent hodgepodge mystery was penned by an 80-year-old! So let's begin the postmortem.

The first half of The Resurrection Fireplace tells two different, but intertwined, stories in alternating chapters with the main story centering on the pioneering physician, Dr. Daniel Barton, who recognized that the science of anatomy has barely progressed in England – because "most people took a dim view of dissection" in 1770. Dr. Barton receives only six cadavers annually from the state, which is barely enough and makes his research depended on body-snatchers. For a time, Dr. Barton and his five favored pupils, Nigel Hart, Edward Turner, Clarence Spooner, Benjamin Beamis and Albert Wood, were able to work in peace at the anatomy school during summer recess. When the heat made it impossible to do perform legal dissections. However, their work eventually placed them at odds with the Bow Street Runners and the magistrate for the City and Liberty of Westminster, Sir John Fielding.

Sir John is an actual historical figure who helped his older half-brother and previous magistrate, Henry Fielding, reform the policing of London by replacing the mercenary thief-takers with "trusted officers" who were paid a fixed salary and strictly forbidden to accept bribes. Sir John expanded and strengthened the force with district stations and "working with officers there to apprehend criminals." Since he lost his sight as a young man, Sir John became known as the Blind Beak of Bow Street. I suppose that makes him the first blind detective on record.

Normally, there's nobody to complain when corpses of indigents or beggars get snatched, but the last corpse they purchased turned out to be of a baronet's unmarried daughter, Miss Elaine Roughhead, who was six months pregnant – which is only the beginning of their troubles. Dr. Barton detects traces of arsenic in the body and another body turns up in the dissection room at the same moment Sir John's assistant is their to investigate the Roughhead case. The body is of a young, naked man whose arms were amputated at the elbow and both legs below the knee. An ink stain on his chest is interpreted as a dying message. The Resurrection Fireplace can have 18th century England as its setting all it wants, but the plot is at its heart unmistakably Japanese. More on that in a moment.

I think the chapters covering the tug-of-war between Sir John and Dr. Barton and his pupils will delight fans of Christianna Brand. There's a great deal of affection among the students for their teacher and each other, which is the fuel powering the plot. So they're constantly running interference, temper with evidence, give false or incomplete statements and placing a noose around their own neck to protect someone else. This applies to the second storyline as well.

The second story is woven around a 17-year-old boy, Nathan Cullen, who had "mastered the language and script of an earlier century" and came to London to get his poetry printed, but Nathan also carries old parchment on him with an ancient poem written on it – which he found collecting dust in an attic. During his stay, Nathan befriends two of Dr. Barton's pupils and meets Miss Elaine Roughhead. Who inspires him to write an archaic poem titled Elegy. However, the story of Nathan Cullen has a Dickensian flavor to it as it shows the poor living conditions and injustices suffered by the lower social classes. This comes to a head when Nathan is swept up in an anti-government riot, arrested and imprisoned in Newgate Prison, which was not exactly known at the time as a five-star resort. A notable scene is when Nathan speaks with another prisoner, a mere child, who found a coin in the street and was immediately accused of stealing. Thieves are usually hung and without the money to pay a lawyer, the child was doomed to die, but the court took pity and exiled him to the colonies with a mark "to show he was a criminal." Nathan's troubles continue after his release when he falls into the hands of a villain with designs on his ancient poem and mastery of "the emotive language" of medieval English.

So these are two very divergent storylines about mutilated bodies and ancient poetry, linked together by the characters, but did it work when these strands were pulled together. Technically, no. Yes, the puzzle is not without ambition, but the problem is that there were more red herrings and faked clues than actual clues. This makes the plot, technically speaking, unfair with all the covering, lying and manipulating evidence without any genuine clues. Nevertheless, you can still work out a large part of the plot and anticipate the surprise twist with nothing more than a basic understanding of the tropes of the Japanese detective story. There was something done to one of the bodies that immediately gave away a big piece of the puzzle. Like I said, it's unmistakably a Japanese detective novel, but not a very typical one.

This makes it difficult to sum up, or recommend, The Resurrection Fireplace to readers familiar with the translations of Takemaru Abiko, Yukito Ayatsuji, Soji Shimada and Seishi Yokomizo. Hiroko Minagawa is a little less orthodox here and the result is described as standing somewhere between Katsuhiko Takahashi's quasi-historical Sharaka satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaka Murders, 1983) with its ambitious, but imperfect, plotting and the stylings of NisiOisiN's Zaregoto series: kubikiri saikuru (Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle, 2002). However, you can probably chalk the latter down to having seen the Japanese cover before reading the book and couldn't help seeing the characters as somewhat manga-like. A good example is the relationship between Dr. Barton and his pupils, which is not as strictly academic as it would have actually been in the 18th century. And there other aspects that bleed through the story betraying that it was written by a modern, non-English writer.

So, plotwise, The Resurrection Fireplace is not the best shin honkaku mystery currently available in English and therefore hard to recommend to the regular readers of this blog, but the rich, imaginative storytelling, the Japanese portrayal of 18th century London and characterization stray off the beaten track – making it a perfect read if you're looking for something a little different. Just don't expect to find another Shimada or Yokomizo. 

A note for the reader: Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate, is the detective in a series of historical mystery novel by Bruce Alexander and Blind Justice (1994) is listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). Yes, it's on the big pile. So stay tuned!

A warning to the reader: The Resurrection Fireplace is referred to in several places as a locked room mystery, but the reported locked room and impossible situation were only teased as such. Such as the appearance of the limbless body in the dissection room or a later murder in a disreputable establishment, but there's always an unlocked door, an open window or a hiding spot. Oh, well, you have it all.

Ask DNA: Case Closed, vol. 75 by Gosho Aoyama

The 75th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally titled Detective Conan, begins, as so often is the case with this series, with the conclusion to the story that left the previous volume with an open end, which began with a dead man's letter summoning Harley Hartwell to Tokyo – where he and Conan become involved with the murders of two of the dead man's relatives. Conan and Harley were present when his son ate a randomly picked, poisoned slice of cake and Harley found the body of his mother in her study. However, "she was alone in the study" and "the room was guarded by cops." So it was either suicide or "a locked room murder."

This is a long, involved and somewhat complicated story in which two different cases overlap and the focus in these last two chapters are on the two poisoning-tricks, because the plot-threads revolving around Harley's dead client are quickly resolved through a written confession. Such as who killed him and why his dying message was destroyed. Conan and Harley turn their attention to the brace of seemingly impossible poisonings.

Thankfully, the weak and dangerous explanation to the first poisoning, given in the previous volume, turned out to be a false-solution with the actual solution being so much better, cleverer and more believable – a neat trick making good use of the visual comic book format. The second (locked room) poisoning-trick is a lot harder to swallow and the method struck me as very unreliable. But, in either case, it was disturbing to see how carelessly the murderer flung cyanide around the place like it was candy on the 5th of December.

So, on a whole, a good and decent enough story, but not one of the best Conan/Harley team-up stories. Not by a long shot.

The second story is an interesting one! Conan and Rachel accidentally discover that someone is posing as her father, Richard Moore, who has been visiting the 70-year-old Takae Kiritani and "solving cases free of charge." Moore refusing to accept money? Something smells fishy! Conan and Rachel confront the man posing as the great "Sleeping Moore," Ryohei Onda, who turns out to be a young college student and is engaged to the granddaughter of the old lady, but why the deception. Ryohei explained that she had been afraid of burglars and posing as a famous detective, to help install new locks, helped to make her feel safer, but she kept calling him to give small cases to solve. Such as finding a lost cat or why her TV kept changing the channels even though she "wasn't touching the zapper." Conan decided to help fake Moore solve the case of the living room poltergeist, who kept changing the channels, but then a murder is discovered next door.

A very loud, rude and much disliked resident is found dead when his neighbors forced open the door of his apartment, because his alarm-clock kept beeping, where they find him slumped against a wall with his throat slit and clutching a bloodied knife – a key is lying near the body. Conan immediately deduces that the murderer has to be one of the three neighbors who discovered the body, but the murderer's alibi-trick proved to be a tougher nut to crack than the locked room-trick.

This is undeniably a minor entry in the series, but also a perfect example of Aoyama's abilities and talent as both a plotter and storyteller. A relatively simplistic story with multiple, beautifully dovetailed layers. Firstly, you have the breakdown of the locked room and alibi-tricks. Secondly, the true reason why Ryohei is posing as Richard Moore and why he's so interested in the old lady. Thirdly, why the old lady habitually raises her voice and barks out orders. Everything is connected, one way or another, which include the throwaway problem of the living room poltergeist. Yes, Conan's initial solution was wrong! So, yes, I liked this amusing and clever story.

The third story is another chapter in the ongoing soap, known as the Metropolitan Police Love Story-arc, in which Detective Chiba is entirely oblivious that his first, long-lost love is the new police recruit of the traffic department, Neako Miike. Conan and the Junior Detective League try to bring them together as they're trying to find someone who spray paints cars with the slightly hostile message, "DROP DEAD." The plot hinges on finding a link between the vandalized cars and why they were being targeted, which had been well-clued in advance. Another relatively minor, but good, story.

The fourth and last story ends this volume with a punch to the gut! A dark and sad story as good and strong as "The Poisonous Coffee Case," from vol. 60, which brings Richard Moore to a belated engagement party of an old high school friend, Raita Banba, who will be married to the next day to Hatsune Kamon – only she never makes it to the wedding. Hatsune burned to death that night and evidence at the scene suggests it was murder.

I spotted the key piece of the plot on the second page, but refused to believe what I was reading and didn't expect Aoyama would go there. But he did go there. And how! I know most of you don't read this series and you might have gotten the idea from the bright, colorful covers or cartoon-like premise that Case Closed is a comic cozy, but Case Closed is no stranger to some gloom and doom. I already mentioned the very noir-ish and excellent "The Poisonous Coffee Case" or the second story here has Conan (pretty much a small child) crawling around a dead man who had bled to death in his home. Case Closed is by Western standards not exactly kid friendly (rated T+ in America), but it's still a traditional, puzzle-oriented detective series. And these type of detective stories tend to eschew certain crimes or subjects. For example, I've read an ungodly amount of detective stories, but can only remember three novels in which a rape occurred. While this story uses something very different, I honestly never expected it to be used in this series.

Even with stumbling to it early on in the story, the solution still delivered its intended blow. Even without the tragic ending, the plot is a minor technical masterpiece with a solution woven around to normally unpardonable sins. One of them is a personal dislike and the other a rule that was set in stone nearly a century ago, but miraculously, they both worked under these very specific set of circumstances. Proving once again that the rules and conventions of the detective story can be broken, or bend, but only by people who understand and respect them. Aoyama also demonstrated modern forensic science, like DNA, doesn't have to be a stumbling block or obstacle.

My only complaint is that [redacted] decision seems a little too radical and drastic. There's no denying [redacted] situation is not an enviable one, but surely, there must have been a better solution. Otherwise, this was a very good and memorable story that came close to matching "The Poisonous Coffee Case." The story also introduces a new face to the ever-growing cast of recurring characters, Toru Amuro, who's a private detective.

So, yeah, a pretty solid volume with two minor, but well written and plotted, stories bookended by a big Conan/Harley team-up and one of the most tragic cases in the series. I wasn't disappointed.

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) by James Scott Byrnside

The locked room mystery and impossible crime story comes in many different shapes and forms, opening the door to endless possibilities and variations to kill, or disappear, people under circumstances that can only be described as miraculous – whether the victims were in a sealed room, closely guarded or in an open space. And then there are the miscellaneous impossibilities such as levitation, phantom fingerprints, predictive dreams and the physical alibi. So the possibilities really are endless and mystery writers have been tinkering with it ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841. 

There is, however, one type of impossible crime that appears to be incredibly restrictive without much room for innovation or originality. I'm talking about the no-footprints scenario. 

John Dickson Carr's name is synonymous with the locked room and impossible crime story, but even the master himself only produced two really good and original no-footprints novels, The Hollow Man (1935) and She Died a Lady (1943) – latter published as by "Carter Dickson." If you look at what other mystery writers have written, there are no more than a dozen novels and short stories that stand out as inspired and original. Some examples that come to mind are Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), Norman Berrow's The Footprints of Satan (1950), Douglas Ashe's The Longstreet Legacy (1951), David Renwick's Jonathan Creek episode The Black Canary (1998) and two masterly done short stories, Robert Arthur's "The Glass Bridge" (1957) and Arthur Porges' "No Killer Has Wings" (1960). Japan also produced some fine examples (e.g. Gosho Aoyama's "The Magic Lovers Case") and recently Paul Halter came up with a creative variation on the no-footprints scenario in La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019). This short list of notable titles is why I've come to regard the no-footprints scenario as the most challenging and tricky impossible crime to tackle. A puzzle for experts.

So I was excited when the prodigy child of the Renaissance Era, James Scott Byrnside, announced his third novel featuring a killer who can apparently walk through walls and doesn't leave any footprints in the snow! 

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) is a prequel to Goodnight Irene (2018) and The Opening Night Murders (2019), set in November, 1920, which takes Rowan Manory and Walter Williams, Chicago's finest, to Barrington Hills – located "deep within the recesses of untamed Illinois." Thomas Browning, a rich railway magnate, wants a reputable private detective to debunk a psychic, Madame Cuchla, who has convinced his business partner, Hadd Mades, that turning Barrington Hills in a resort town is a bad idea. Madame Cuchla claims the region is haunted by one of the town's most notorious past residents, Otto Savore. Someone believed by the locals to be a vampire who, in 1875, allegedly killed more than fifty people in a single night with "none of the doors or windows of his victims were trespassed" and "no footprints in the snow." So, quite naturally, the townspeople buried him alive and "no grass ever grows on the vampire's grave." Madame Cuchla warns that death will come if the ground is ever build on.

Manory tells Browning that "any number of Chicago-River gumshoes could explain" the parlor tricks employed by psychics for a third of his price, but Browning wants a reputable detective to convince Mades. Manory certainly delivers the goods as he not only explains Madame Cuchla psychic reading of Williams, ghostly knocking and a floating face that vanished in a puff of smoke, but also gives a solution to the vampiric bloodbath from forty-five years ago. So the opening alone is good enough to be added to the list of debunked séance mysteries, but the problems that follow are of a less conventional nature. And they're all "damned impossible."

A New Mapback!

Early next morning, Mades returns to the remote house, hammering on the front door and yelling blue murder, because the vampire is in the house and Browning is in grave danger. Mades shows Manory the developed photographs that were taken of the house the previous days and one of them shows a grotesque-looking creature standing outside the balcony door, "sharp nails were touching the glass," as if trying to enter. But how did the vampire get on the balcony? There's no way to reach the balcony from the outside and the freezing cold makes it unlikely someone was waiting on the balcony for the right moment to photobomb without being seen. So that's the first impossibility stumping Manory, but "an agonizing scream" quickly announces a second one.

Thomas Browning's body is found in the garage with a twisted spine, broken bones, a slash across his right wrist and two bleeding puncture marks in his neck, but how had the murderer entered, or exited, the garage – only footprints going from the kitchen door to the garage belong to Browning. Another set of footprints goes from the kitchen door into the direction of the forest. A third and fourth set of footprints go from the garage window and back into the forest. Finally, two footprints are found next to the skylight on the garage roof, but none of them explained how Browning could have been attacked and killed. The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is brimming with impossible material. There's a past murder case in which severed hands were left in the bedroom of a locked house and a second murder is committed inside a locked bedroom while Manory was sitting guard in the corridor. However, the story should not be judged solely as an impossible crime novel. 

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire has a small pool of suspects comprising of Browning's much younger wife, Madelaine, who sleepwalks and the reason why they have a live-in specialist, Dr. Sinclair. A daughter from a first marriage, Gertrude, who used to be married with a socialist associated with a band of hardliners, but he was "suicided" in a jail cell. She had not been on speaking terms with her father until he summoned her back home with the promise of a surprise. Howard Amorartis is a writer of supernatural horror and hopes his name will one day be as well-known as Poe, but now he has been commissioned to pen Browning's biography. Belby is the butler-chauffeur who's "not intelligent enough to devise a murder plan," but perhaps "subservient enough to carry one out." And there's always Browning's frightened business partner, Mades.

I think The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is actually more accomplished as a whodunit than as a locked room mystery with a murderer who was hiding in plain sight (always satisfying) who had an original motive to engineer a whole series of otherworldly crimes. Just like in previous novels, the plot resembles a Matryoshka doll with multiple, interconnected problems that not only includes a plethora of impossible crimes and elusive murderer, but a dying message that had to be violently pried from the victim's clenched fist or why the murderer had no option to sever the hands of the second victim – a kind of corpse puzzle you normally only come across in Japanese shin honkaku detective stories. Add to this the excellent clueing, the characterization of the two bantering detectives and all of the various, moving plot-strands grasped in an iron-clad grip demonstrating why Byrnside might very well turn out to be the herald of a Second Golden Age.

A Classic Mapback

But what about the impossibilities? Can they stand toe-to-toe with the ten no-footprints novels and short stories mentioned above? Yes... and no. The plot is crammed with the impossible crimes, but quantity doesn't always mean quality and only two of them are good.

Firstly, while the murder in the snow surrounded garage didn't came up with a new footprint-trick, everything else about this tricky murder made it an excellent impossibility with a good explanation why the witness at the window saw him fight with an invisible entity. Honestly, the whole situation that brought about this murder was quite clever and something that would have gotten the approval of Carr. Secondly, the murder in the locked and guarded bedroom has a routine solution, where the locked door and guard are concerned, but Byrnside succeeded in making one of my biggest no-noes perfectly acceptable and logical. And then there's the reason why the murderer had to cut off the hands. Unfortunately, the explanations to the past case with the severed hands that were left in a locked house or how the vampire was able to reach the balcony were underwhelming.

Nevertheless, when the plot resembles a nesting doll and practically everything is done correctly, the less than impressive explanations to two of the impossibilities is a blow the story can easily absorb without any damage to the overall plot. Byrnside continued to be awesome with how he handled the ending. Chapter 17 is a Challenge to the Reader asking eight questions that have to be answered before the case can be considered solved. Manory gives his explanation of the case at the annual dinner of the Detectives Club and there's a Rival Detective in attendance, Miss Genevieve Pond, who plays armchair detective and tries to deduce the solution before Manory gives it. I suspect she'll either become Manory's love interest in a future novel or become an antagonist when Byrnside decides to tackle the inverted detective story with an impossible, but it's probably the former. After all, Manory needs someone to bounce off on. They're polar opposites, is what I mean.

So, a long, rambling story short, Byrnside performed the hat trick with three back-to-back gems of the Western-style, neo-orthodox detective novel covering various styles and subgenres. All three are historical mysteries written in the typical, hardboiled style of the American pulps, but plotted and clued like a traditional, Golden Age detective stories filled with locked rooms, dying messages and bizarre murders – which all pay subtly homage to some of the greats of that bygone era. Goodnight Irene was an ambitious debut and The Opening Night Murders showed prodigious improvement with its labyrinthine plot, which can also be read as the two of the longest fan letters everyone has ever written to Christianna Brand. Byrnside moved away from using Brand as a foundation stone for his work and the result is The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is a fully realized, modern incarnation of the classic detective story that can stand on its own. One of the bright lights of 2020 and all three come highly recommended.

On a final note: sorry for the flurry of 2020 reviews, but had to rearrange some posts and cram them all in here.

The Elberg Collection (1985) by Anthony Oliver

I've noticed over the years there was a short-lived revival of the traditional, Golden Age-style detective story in the 1980s that began to sputter a decade earlier with William L. DeAndrea, Bill Pronzini and John Sladek, but quickly assumed an identity of its own – complete with identifiable characteristics. An identity best described as a hybrid of the American and British detective story.

Generally, the detectives tend to be either professionals (non-detectives) acting as amateur sleuths or hold some kind of quasi-official position with their cases taking place against specialized backgrounds. Such as the theater, commerce and museums or private collectors. This neon-illuminated age of the traditional detective story even his its own sub-category of pop-culture inspired mysteries that take place at conventions or among fandoms, which began with Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981) and Richard Purtill's Murdercon (1982) added modern fandoms and pop-cult references. Good examples are Patrick A. Kelley's little-known Sleightly Lethal (1986) and Sharyn McCrumb's award winning Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987).

More interestingly, these writers showed a healthy interest in the locked room mystery and often brought new innovative ideas to the fore.

Herbert Resnicow was a former civil engineer who brought his drafting pencil to the detective story and turned the locked room puzzle on its head by turning wide open, three-dimensional and multi-floored spaces into tightly sealed rooms – making him one of the leading lights of this brief revival. Resnicow penned about half a dozen of these innovative locked room puzzles, all with specialized backgrounds, but his best two are The Gold Deadline (1984) and The Dead Room (1987). Marcia Muller is not as closely associated with the impossible crime story as her husband, but she engineered one of her own large-scale, museum-set locked room conundrums in The Tree of Death (1983). Ellen Godfrey cleverly made use of the locked computer room of a software company in Murder Behind Locked Doors (1988) and Kate Wilhelm's experimental Smart House (1989) takes place in a fully automated, computerized house. There are also some British specimens, such as Roger Ormerod's More Dead Than Alive (1980) and Douglas Clark's Plain Sailing (1987), but they have the tendency to stand closer to the European police procedural rather than the American Van Dine-Queen style detective story. But they fit the mold.

So I may be completely wrong here with my narrow, specialized reading creating a pattern, where there isn't any, because similar type of mystery novels were published in the 1970s (Lionel Black's The Penny Murders, 1979) and 1990s (Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds, 1996). Nonetheless, they obviously proliferated during the eighties and gives the impression of a resurgence, short-lived as it may have been, of the traditional detective story. And it coincided with the rise of the shin honkaku movement in Japan! But in the West it petered out after merely a decade.

Why this long-winded introduction? The subject of today's review made me think of all these authors, novels and the possibility of an unrecognized Neon Age (can't think of a better name).

Anthony Oliver's The Elberg Collection (1985) is the third novel in a short-lived series about a retired policeman, John Webber, and his Welsh housekeeper, widowed Mrs. Lizzie Thomas, who appeared together in only four detective novels – published between 1980 and 1987. These four novels appear to have a unifying theme: shenanigans and skulduggery in the world of antique dealers and collectors.

The Elberg Collection begins on the beach of a small, French seaside resort, Le Bosquet, where David and Jane Walton walked, arm in arm, when Jane caught fire and turned into "a flaming torch within seconds." David must have tried to smother the flames, because "their arms were still round each other when the first people got to them." French police believes the wind blew glowing tobacco from David's pipe and "slammed the shower of blazing sparks" into her "highly inflammable" dress. Since the incident was witnessed by a maid and no other footprints to show someone had "approached them on that fatal walk," the French authorities filed it away as a bizarre accident. However, the daughter of the Waltons, Jessica Elberg, refuses to accept the verdict.

A friendly conspiracy between Detective Inspector Snow and Lizzie to put their recently divorced and retired friend, ex-Detective Inspector John Webber, back in the game by landing him his first assignment as a private investigator. Hans Elberg has agreed to foot the bill to help his wife come to terms with the death of her parents.

Webber warns Jessica that he has "never yet inquired deeply into the circumstances of sudden death without upsetting some," but, once all the formalities are settled, they begin a two-pronged investigation with the slightly eccentric, French-speaking Lizzie crossing the channel – snooping around the scene of the crime. Webber stays behind in England to look into the professional side of the case. Walton was a talented potter and part-owner of a pottery firm, which allowed him to help his father-in-law accumulate an impressive collection of antique pottery. What they uncover is a dead witness who left behind a dying message. A rotting corpse of a another murder victim and a disturbingly fresh suicide. A missing, or stolen, manuscript that could throw "a spanner into the international market for English pottery" and a mysterious figure who's willing to spend both money and bullets to get them off the case. And all of this comes with an odd assortment of suspects, motives and clues.

One clue, in particular, deserves to be highlighted. Snow has a young bright son, Alan, who likes computers and dates the story by saying he writes his own programs on a computer with 48 K RAM and "a data transfer rate of 16 bytes a second." Snow gives his son a purely hypothetical situation, two people impossibly burned to death on a lonely beach, to test his analyzing program. It came back with eight possibilities that ranged from flamethrowers, incendiary bombs and missiles to meteors, satellite debris and an Act of God – along with the more plausible murder/suicide or a suicide pact. You won't find the correct solution on Alan's list, but when you learn how it was done, you realize how cleverly it hinted in the right direction.

I think it could have been one of the best and most original clues of the decade had Oliver played the game fairly across the board.

I could have easily forgiven the obvious murderer, who stood out like a billboard, but the sudden, anti-climatic ending revealed that Webber and Lizzie had been investigating only one side of the case. The case has an entirely different angle that throws an entirely new light on the charred bodies, the dying message and the messy suicide, but they were left in the dark until it was time to wrap things up. They're also told that the murderer will never be brought in front of judge, which makes for an unexciting and disappointing payoff to what could have been a first-class detective novel.

Webber at least got the satisfaction of explaining to the big bugs how the Waltons were burned to death and the fire-trick, in theory, is excellent and a perfect example of the impossible crime story moving along with the times. Something fresh and original. Practically, the fire-trick has a glaring weakness that can be partially blamed for the weak ending.

The Elberg Collection is the proverbial mixed bag of tricks. A leisurely paced, thoroughly British detective novel with some good and original ideas, but the weak and botched ending only makes it worth your time if your interested in plot-mechanics or obscure impossible crime novels.