A Chimerical Impossibility

"One of the most extraordinary cases Ellery has ever investigated. The newspaper called it "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean;" more specific identification may not be given here. It is one of the few problems, to my knowledge, which stalemated Ellery; and it is still an unsolved crime."

- J. McC. (Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery, 1935)

Last month, I wrote a blog-post, headed "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," that used a line from an essay by Donald A. Yates, titled "The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, But Not Dead Yet," which attracted the attention of our resident archivist, Mike Gray – who can be found blogging at Ontos. This resulted in a compilation post with links to the essay, articles, blog-posts, a short video-clip and a short story by Yates.

Yates' short story, "The Wounded Tyrolean," began as a Watsonian reference in Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935), which was meant as a nod and a wink at the unrecorded cases noted by Dr. Watson in the official Sherlock Holmes canon. As Ellery Queen observed, Dr. Watson's allusions have "sent Sherlockians screaming into the night hunting for the reference source and finding only a ghostly chuckle," but the consequence of these tantalizing allusions is that people began to write their own Sherlock Holmes stories – which has grown into a sub-genre of its own. The mountain of Holmesian pastiches, parodies and semi-official sequels dwarfs the number of original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So it was only to be expected that Ellery Queen's oblique reference to "The Case of the Wounded Tyrolean" would result in at least one write-up.

According to this blog-post, Yates wrote "The Wounded Tyrolean" during the early fifties and at the time he was "trying repeatedly to write a story" that "he [Fred Dannay] would accept for EQMM." One of the editors, Mildred Falk, suggested writing a story that could carry the title "The Wounded Tyrolean" and "be so perplexing that even Ellery himself had not been able to solve it." Yates picked up the gauntlet and decided to turn his hand to the classic locked room mystery, determined "to come up with a new solution that had never been devised before," but the fruit of his labor was rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and only a Spanish translation of the story made into print – appearing in the Argentine magazine Leoplán in July of 1955. Fifty-seven years after being published in Argentina, the story appeared in English in the Fall 2012 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, published in Ann Arbor, the "very setting where the action of the baffling locked-room murder had been situated." So, let's take a look at the story.

The Austrian-born Professor Behring of the Middleton University physics department is "The Wounded Tyrolean," whose "characteristic limp was the consequence of a leg wound he had suffered in the First World War," but the "indelible figure" of the old professor was cruelly snatched away from the campus-town – stabbed to death in his study. There was a sense of the unreal clinging to the circumstances of the crime, because, from all perceivable angles, it seems like an impossible murder.

Donald A. Yates

Professor Behring had scheduled an appointment with Dr. Gaines and Wenley, the College President, but nobody appeared to be home and when they entered the premise found that only the study door was locked. Dr. Gained and Wenley forced open the door and discovered the body of the professor in the middle of the room, "the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from his back," but they found nobody else inside the windowless room, which had walls lined with bookshelves. The only door was locked from the inside and the modest furnishings, a desk and some chairs, offered no hiding place for the killer.

The rundown of these facts showed a missed opportunity for a false solution and one that would have been as classic as the locked room problem itself, which would have been very similar to such short stories as Agatha Christie's "The Idol House of Astarte" (The Thirteen Problems, 1932) and Peter Godfrey's "The Flung-Back Lit" (The Newtonian Egg, 2002). Essentially, it would have been a play on the "replacement of space-and time" illusion and this trick would have fitted the given facts, but Yates deserves some points for trying to come up with an explanation that was a little bit different.

A bright senior and editor of the student newspaper, John Rossiter, eventually stumbled to the truth "through a feat of inspired logic," but "never revealed the solution to a soul." I think the best part of the plot is explaining how someone like Ellery Queen could have failed to reach the correct answer. I can easily imagine Queen would've read about the case and came to the campus-town to investigate it himself, but by that time, Rossiter had already swept the whole affair under the rug and the tell-tale clues expunged – which makes it very difficult for even the best logicians to reach a sensible and rational conclusion.

With that being said, the locked room facet of the plot under-performed to the who-and why, which were far better imagined and linked than how the trick was pulled off. The locked room was pretty incidental to the whole thing. Not to mention borderline insane and extremely risky. If it weren't for the high concentration of spoilers, I would probably slap together a re-imagining of this plot, because I see an alternative explanation for the locked room that would've served the purpose of the guilty party a whole lot better.

Regardless, "The Wounded Tyrolean" is a good and laudable attempt at an original locked room story by a then still young and ardent mystery enthusiast, which, arguably, required some polishing. But you can read and judge the story for yourself by clicking here.

Trampled Justice

"Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest."

- Cicero 

Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee garnered their fame under a joint pseudonym, "Ellery Queen," which became a franchise that spawned radio plays, TV-series, movies, comic books, board games, jigsaw puzzles and the illustrious Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. All of that sprang from a bibliography as labyrinthine as one of their plots.

After The Finishing Stroke (1958), Lee was plagued by writer's block and the tandem decided to summon a flurry of ghostwriters to flesh-out Dannay's skeletal manuscripts, which was kept under wraps at the time, but the list of writers who operated as Ellery Queen included some interesting names – such as Avram Davidson and Edward D. Hoch. You can easily confuse one ghostwriter for the other, but I wasted a good fifteen minutes searching (angrily) for the hired hand behind The Glass Village (1954). It turned out there was none!

The Glass Village is a non-series novel and therefore I presumed, erroneously, it had to be ghostwritten, but I eventually stumbled to the fact that it was an Ellery Queen original. One of the few Dannay and Lee wrote without Ellery or Richard Queen.

It's an unusual, character-driven courtroom drama/legal thriller set in a sparsely populated, dying backwater, called Shinn Corners, tucked away in the New England countryside.

Shinn Corners lies in a valley, "looking like a cluster of boils on an old man’s neck," with stretches of "untidy land," the dried-up remains of what had "once been a prosperous river" and "the huddle of once white buildings" – giving a home to a dwindling community that has been "reduced to a total population of thirty-six." Over the past hundred years, the towns surrounding the valley had slowly lured away a lot of the working force of the tiny hamlet. The scattered "ruins of houses and barns and mills" and the remnants of a factory building are tangible reminders of a period when the village prospered, which now, in spite of its constant struggle for existence, keeps getting poorer every year. But at least it's a peaceful place.

Judge Lewis Shinn explains to a visiting relative from New York, Johnny Shinn, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, how the grim specter of murder has graced the village only three times in "two hundred and fifty some years" – which occurred between 1739 and fifteen years before the events described in the book. A local boy was killed in an act of self-defense by a hired farm hand from outside of the community, "a furriner," who was acquitted by a court in a neighboring town and that left the villagers feeling deprived of justice. It will have some far-reaching consequences when murder returns to Shinn Corners about a century ahead of schedule.

Ninety-one year old Aunt Fanny, described as "a fabulous old lady," was born in Shinn Corners and became a minor celebrity in her eighties when she began to paint. She made "a fortune out of her Christmas cards, wallpaper and textile designs" and her paintings can fetch up to fifteen hundred dollars. A brief conversation she had with Johnny Shinn revealed her as one of the more kinder, understanding people of the village, but, of course, that was not to last – as someone obliterated her skull with a fire-poker in her paint room.

The brutal murder of Aunt Fanny coincides with the arrival in the village of a Polish tramp, named Josef Kowalczyk, who had been admitted to the United States in 1947, but the villagers, naturally suspicious of outsiders, want swift justice against the foreign element they hold responsible for the death of one of their own. They have evidence backing them: a hundred and twenty-four dollars was missing from a cinnamon jar from Aunt Fanny's home and that amount was discovered "in a dirty knotted handkerchief tied to a rope slung around Kowalczyk's naked waist," which clinches it for the angry villagers.

They refuse to hand over Kowalczyk to outside authorities, remembering what happened fifteen years previously, which lead to an armed standoff with a dozen state troopers. In order to prevent a blood bath, Judge Shinn convinces those outside authorities, including the governor, to stage a show trail in the village. It's a ruse "to allow tempers to cool down so the prisoner can be got safely away" and "tried in the regular way in a court of proper jurisdiction." The trial has to be purposely botched so it can be overturned at a later date.  

Judge Shinn describes himself as "an unmitigated scoundrel" where "defending constitutional democracy and due process is concerned," which is forgivable, but his personal motivation seems a bit snooty and self-aggrandizing – stating that “even in a democracy” people "can't always be trusted" and basically have to be protected from themselves by "individuals here and there." Individuals such as himself. The inhabitants of Shinn Corners are portrayed throughout the book as bone-headed bigots, but the judge is really no different, except that his bigotry appears respectable, by "critically" gazing inwards instead of focusing on outsiders.

You've got to cut the people of Shinn Corner some slack, because here you have a small, dwindling and largely isolated community of hardworking, but very poor, people confronted with a stranger in possession of money that was stolen from one of their own who had just been murdered. It does not excuse the formation of a lynch mob, but I expected at least a small amount of understanding and sympathy for the villagers. There was, however, not a drop of that to be found.

Anyhow, the trial takes up the second part of the book and this is the point where the detective-element of the plot finally begins to manifest itself, which had previously been wrapped up in character-introductions, a tour of the village, a man-hunt and snippets of social commentary about justice, communism, war and McCarthyism. Everyone's whereabouts at the time of the murder are subtly checked, the final painting of Aunt Fanny receives a closer examination and there's the all-important clue of the missing pile of chopped firewood. All of this reveals the real killer in time to prevent a second attempt at lynching the hapless tramp.

The heart of the plot, clues and alibi-trick might have been better suited for a short story or novella, but, on a whole, I found The Glass Village a fascinating read and surprised it was never adapted as a TV-movie or mini-series. It would lend itself perfect for that and today's audience would probably enjoy the morally ambiguous cast of characters. Anyway, it was a very interesting, unusual and surprisingly successful attempt on Ellery Queen's part at writing a more serious crime novel. Because they made similar attempts before and some of them were outright disastrous (e.g. Calamity Town, 1942). It's also the reason why I could not bring myself to title this blog-post The Polish Tramp Mystery.

Well, I guess I did not entirely succeed in picking an orthodox mystery to review, but there's always next time.

Keep Your Head in the Game

"Now, I give you fair warning... either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time!"

- Queen of Hearts (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

The penname of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, "Ellery Queen," is synonymous with such tropes as the "Dying Message" and "A Challenge to the Reader," in which the reader is invited to pick up the gauntlet and solve the problem them self.

So, not very surprisingly, I wormed through practically the entire series when I discovered the phenomenon known as the Golden Age detective story. There is, however, a problematic issue I have nurtured over the years regarding their locked room mysteries and impossible crime tales. They can be too clever for their own good (The Chinese Orange Mystery, 1934), mind numbingly obvious (The Door Between, 1937) or shoot themselves in their own foot with a daft explanation (The American Gun Mystery, 1933), but the worst of them are the ones that are actually pretty good – except that they are buried in bad or little-known, short stories. The King is Dead (1952) and A Room to Die In (1965) are examples of good locked room ploys stuck in horrendous novels and "The Three Widows," from Q.B.I.: Queen's Bureau of Investigation (1955), is a case-in-point of a good, but obscure, story that has one of their cleverest impossible methods. "Snowball in July," from the same collection, also deserves a mention, because it came up with an alternative solution to make a train disappear between two stations. 

Well, I stumbled across another one of their great ideas for a baffling locked room scenario, but, even more baffling, it was condemned to obscurity from its conception. The Case of His Headless Highness (1973) is a Janus Mystery Jigsaw Puzzle with a short, open-ended story by Ellery Queen on the back of the box. You're supposed to solve the mystery before finishing the puzzle and the complete picture will show if you were correct, which is a novel idea, except that it probably didn't reach the audience that their novels, magazine stories, radio plays and TV-and movie adaptations had.

The Case of His Headless Highness begins with Ellery Queen and Inspector Jiggs standing over the slain remains of "His Royal Ex-Highness King Musaka of Zharkan," who escaped to America after a revolt and the new ruler has put a bounty on his head – which made Musaka particular suspicious and wouldn't allow anyone in his room at the boarding house. Musaka was basically a hermit with a strong lock on the door with a peephole in it and the only person allowed to enter was his loyal servant, Igor, but someone still managed to pass the secured door and get away with the king's head!

What makes the solution particular interesting is that it doesn't hinge on manipulating locks, windows or your perception of time-and space, or the "blinkin' cussedness of things in general," but on how to lure a recluse out of a tightly locked room – and still make it appear as if the killer had all the maneuverability of Jacob Marley's ghost. If The Case of His Headless Highness (or idea) had been fleshed in an actual short story, it probably would've been one of their most well-known shorter works of fiction and delivered another classic locked room mystery rivaling "The Lamp of God" (from The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1940). But what did they do with it? A one-page, opened ended story on the back of a box for a jigsaw puzzle!

You can read the story for yourself at Ellery Queen: A Website on Deduction and at the end of the page, you can click a link to a picture of the completed puzzle showing the solution.

By the way, Dannay was reputedly fond of changing story titles when he edited Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and couldn't help but think that The Call of the Land Pirate would've been a great alternative title. If you have read the story and saw the pictured solution, I recommend you read this definition of "Land Pirate" and you'll have to agree with me.

With the Stroke of a Pen

"'Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. 'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles — I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud.

'Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare.

'Exactly so,' said Alice."

- Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

The May issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 2007 contains an Ellery Queen pastiche from the hands of two collaborating fans, Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu, entitled  "The Book Case," in which a near centenarian Ellery attempts to curtail the ravages of time by solving sudoka puzzles and the occasional, locally committed homicide.

Ellery Queen was drawn out of retirement in “The Book Case” when a shady collector of rare, hardcover mystery novels was found murdered in his study, but in his death throws was able to leave the police a clue by sweeping a row of Ellery Queen novels from one of the shelves – implicating the children of the late Djuna. The story works perfectly as a final salute to the Ellery Queen legacy similarly to Charles Ardai's pastiche "The Last Story," from The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), but it was only the first adventure for this twenty-first century incarnation of EQ. In September/October 2009, "The Mad Hatter Riddle" appeared and has Ellery Queen as a consultant on the set of the 1975 TV-series Ellery Queen! Unfortunately, that's a story I missed, but I have just read the third installment, "Literally Dead," which inclusion would not have shamed Queen's Full (1965) – a collection of original short stories by Dannay and Lee.

A native of Wrightsville, a twin town of Cabot Cove, Jennifer Rothkopf taught English at the local high-school and worked on her literary career with kids' verses, however, it was the publication of The Lemon Sand of Abrillion that put her name among the other stars of fantasy fiction. The five succeeding chronicles also made Rothkopf financially independent, but, after the seventh one, The Black Night of Scythallon, she decides that Jonathan Dellerworth's journay has come to an end. Literally and permanently! Rothkopf rescinds the deal she was negotiating to farm out the character and her determination looks to be Dellerworth's Waterloo Reichenbach.

Not long thereafter, Chief Anselm Newby is tasked with finding Jennifer Rothkopf's murderer and, as to be expected, there's a dying message: a colored napkin was pinned to a piece of fruit with a paring knife. But that isn't even the most puzzling aspect of the murder. The doors were locked from the inside and could only be locked from the inside with the sole key fastened to a bracelet, which still clutched to Rothkopf's wrist, and the windows were bare of any traces of tampering.

As the consulted Ellery Queen remarked, "I have encountered more than my share of dying messages over the years, but locked rooms are a bit of a rarity."

However, Queen shows more interest for the locked room angle than Newby does, because he expects to get the answer from the murderer, but it's Queen who, naturally, gets it right – even though the basic gist of the locked room trick is older than EQ himself at this point. Still, it was nicely presented and well clued, as were all three major aspects of this story (whodunit, locked room and dying clue). There were clues for all of them, but only in the EQ universe can a victim, seconds before dying, have all the materials within reach to create a perfectly logical, if often needlessly cryptic, clue for the police. Personally, I would've let Rothkopf (who was, by the way, found slumped over her desk) cradle those three items in an enclosing embrace, which would've given the clue a double meaning (if you have read the story, you should know what I mean), but that's nitpicking from my side. 

Generally, I'm not a fan of pastiches and I echo Stout's sentiment to "let them roll their own," but it's a bit different with Ellery Queen, isn't it? Dannay and Lee infamously worked with ghostwriters themselves and allowed the character to reflect the changing times. Ellery Queen has even known a short, angst-ridden period! So I can't complain if the original authors clearly wouldn't have had a problem with farming out their character – especially when done well and within the pages of their own magazine. Granted, if Dannay had still been alive today, he probably would've altered the titles, but they would've been published.

Briefly put, "Literally Dead" has everything you expect from a proper detective story and more than that from a pastiche.

One last observation on the story (I couldn't wriggle-in anywhere else) is that "Literally Dead" also felt as a wink at Anthony Boucher. The legacy of a fantasy writer recalled Fowler Foulkes creation of Dr. Garth Derringer, an Americanized version of Arthur Conan Doyle's Dr. Challenger, from Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942) and a Gregory Hood radio-play from the late-1940s, "The Derringer Society," collected in The Casebook of Gregory Hood (2009).

"Like a rollin' thunder chasing the wind"

"As an ex-detective you know how to deal with problems... you know the ropes... the meshes of the law."

- Inspector DeKok (Bullets for a Bride, 1993)

Ellery Queen deserves wider recognition among the members that make up today's reading audience, if not for their imaginative and inventive plots than for their willingness to adjust themselves to the movement prevalent at the time they were writing in, spawning a multiverse of crime that has something to offer for nearly everyone.

Personally, I prefer the earlier, puzzle-oriented novels from the international series, the marvels of the Ellery in Wonderland tales, crammed with zany architectural buildings, eccentric characters and dysfunctional families, the short stories (of which they didn't wrote nearly enough) and some of the anomalous books – like Cat of Many Tails (1949) and And on the Eight Day (1964). By the way, has anyone ever noticed how similar the plots of The Village (2004) and And on the Eight Day are, if you cut out the creatures? Of course, Queen's twist was better and it's one of the few mysteries were I hated the detective interruptions, which were weak and uninspired, and the plot would have, IMHO, worked better as a human problem. 

But that aside, I'm less than enthusiastic about the Wrightsville and Hollywood sagas, focusing more on character than plot, but I never thought them to be any more or less realistic than their plot driven stories – and having just read Inspector Queen's Own Case (1956) makes me disliked them even more. Calamity Town (1942) is one of the books that's often cited as an example of a good, character-driven EQ novel, but it left me unimpressed and a diminished interest in plotting didn't exactly help either. And having burned through most of the series, years ago, I had given up hope to find an EQ novel that invested in characters and still felt like you were reading a proper detective story, but Inspector Queen's Own Case did it for me.

Richard Queen has been feeling doleful ever since his mandatory retirement from the police force, finding it difficult to come to terms with his new status as a retiree and an "old man," and with his son Ellery abroad, he came to the Connecticut shore to stay with Abe Pearl, Chief of the Taugus Police Department, and his wife Becky – where he bumps into Jessie Sherwood.

Jessie Sherwood is a well preserved woman in her late forties, whose experience as a pediatric and maternity nurse brought her to Nair Island, a fortified recluse for the rich, where she's taking care of the newest addition to the Humffrey family, baby Michael, whose adoption was a shady affair to say the least, and before long, the house is rocking with more than just the wailing of a crying baby. And who would've thought that a creepy, late-night intruder in the nursery would've been the least of their problems.

Alton K. Humffrey's nephew, Ronald Frost, was relieved from duty as his uncle’s heir in favor of Michael, making him the only person with a motive for hurting a baby, but when Michael is eventually found dead in his crib, Frost’s also the only one in possession of an unshakable alibi. Sherwood remains convinced that the baby was murdered, based on a pillowcase with a dirty handprint that disappeared afterwards, but Richard Queen is the only one who believes her and together they begin to pry into the case – assisted by an Old Boys’ Network of retired colleagues from the force. Not an easy job, if your key witnesses are bumped off in front of you.

David Wayne as Inspector Queen (Ellery Queen, 1975-76)

Two observations: Richard mentions in the story that Ellery is traveling for inspiration for his detective novels, which could mean that this book and the stories collected in Ellery Queen's International Case Book (1964), originally written and published between 1954 and 1955, took place around the same time. The second observation may be an original one, because I never seen it mentioned before and that while it's a typical piece of EQ symbolism. On the one hand we have Michael, smothered at infancy, and on the other Richard, a (re)tired police officer of 63, who finds a completely new life in the home were a very young life was cut short. Or am I over thinking this? 

Inspector Queen's Own Case may not be the best title from the EQ catalogue, but it has a pleasant balance between its characters and plot, and besides, I’ve always liked Richard Queen and it was good to see him reach the end of a case without the assistance of his son (he was an inspector for a reason) and getting a bit of luck in his private life. The only real drawback is that, once you have figured out the solution, the story inevitable becomes too long and you can solve it before the halfway mark. I hope that in my defense of this novel, I have not divulged too much of the plot, but I think this is a far, far cry from Ellery Queen's worst mystery novels and stories (e.g. The Door Between, 1937).  

Oh, and I will be honest, the dead baby can be considered as over doing the "let's go with the times" mindset and it also forced me to cut out a joke that probably would've ended up costing me readers.

I was thinking of following this post up with a review of Appie Baantjer’s DeKok en kogels voor een bruid (DeKok and Bullets for a Bride, 1993), which was the source from which I drew the opening quote, and Baantjer’s roman policier shares some interesting parallels with Inspector Queen’s Own Case... but it's one of his untranslated stories and I'm aware that not everyone likes to read reviews of books that they can't read. So, we'll see.

A Smattering of Crime

"Small crimes always precede great ones."

- J.P. Racine

 

Yesterday, I was condemned to kill a few hours and the gentle breeze rustling through the leaves of the trees in a sun soaked park seemed to beckon me, which would have been a perfect spot to crack open a detective story, were it not for the fact that I forgot to take one with me. Well, I remembered taking a book with me, however, I had accidentally stuffed a few magazines with me. Hey! Absentmindedness is a sure sign of genius, I think. After all, unconsciously, I had the brilliant foresight to take few random issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine with me instead, part of a pile that I wanted to read for eons, so I settled down with an iced coffee, a bottle of iced water and a croissant and read the following stories.

Oh, and no. I did not spend hours reading only this handful of stories, but, after a while, there was nothing left in them I wanted to read and decided to snoop around in a nearby bookstore. But more on that in the next post and now on to the stories:  

The first of this batch of stories comes from one of today's champions of the locked room mystery, Paul Halter, whose "The Man with the Face of Clay" combines a curse, imported from the Middle East, with a miraculous murder offered up as proof. It begins when Archilles Stock tries to chalk up a lost on the record of his friend, Owen Burns, by inviting Miss White to their rooms to tell the tale of her late employer – the archeology enthusiast, Sir Jeremy Cavendish. On one of his latest digs, Sir Jeremy is cursed by one of the locals and upon his return to England he's visited by a creature, whose face resembles a grotesque mask molded from clay, after which he apparently commits suicide. The door was bolted from the inside and the French window, which was ajar, opened up on a sea of unbroken mud and freshly raked and undisturbed flowerbeds. Unfortunately, the solution is of a variety that never fails to disappoint me – no matter how well it was brought or motivated. But I have to say that Halter's strengths dominate his weaknesses when he's writing short stories. And having a good translator helps!

Keith McCarthy's "The Invisible Gunman" has another impossible crime for the reader to work their brains over: a master clock maker is shot to death in his shop and the murderer must have been his brother, they hated each other, but witnesses can place him inside his shop (across the street of his brother) at the time of the murder. Dr. Lance Elliot, his girlfriend Max and his eccentric father try to sort out this snafu. It has some clever misdirection and the solution gives us a neat twist on an otherwise hackneyed plot device. 

Norwegian author Richard Macker also penned a locked room story, "The Intell Club," in which Detective Inspector Rolf Owre takes a closer look at a suspicious suicide at a club for the intellectually gifted. The host of that night's meeting, Roger Aspvik, apparently locked himself up in the den and tasted cyanide before shooting himself. The story and setting are interesting, recalling the Columbo episode The Bye-Bye Sky-High IQ Murder Case (1977), but the solution was of exactly the same variety as the Paul Halter story.

One of the magazines also contained a re-print of Ellery Queen's "The Uncle from Australia." EQ is approached by the quintessential Australian uncle, who made a small fortune Down Under and returned to unload his wealth on either one of his two nephews or his niece. The only girl also turns out to be only one who will inherit, but her beneficiary is beginning to have second thoughts, afraid that the prospects of all that money might proof to be too tempting, and the brassy-looking Oriental paperknife in his back confirms his fears. The ending is a nod to a very famous whodunit and has the added bonus of a believable dying message.

Shamus Award winner Mike Wiecek, writing under the penname of "Mike Cooper," probed the problem of a murder committed in a hermitically sealed room, while the victim was alone, in "Whiz Bang" – which is the name of the complex where a retired billionaire was shot in a locked and moving elevator. A simple, but good, locked room mystery.

Yes, I picked the first cover for the sole reason that it has a portrait of all of the Armchair Reviewers on the front (including Carr and Boucher). The second cover is of the issue that has the Ellery Queen and Richard Macker stories.

Geniuses at Work

"A picture says more than a thousand words."

While browsing through my files, I came across the following snapshot – depicting ten core members from the early days of the Mystery Writers of America who were evidently hard at work and strenuously taxing their mental dexterity. You have to love the fact that Pat McGerr, who was known for fooling around with unidentified bodies, completely immerged herself in the role of corpse in this picture. What dedication! ;-)

The Gang: Georges Simenon, Anthony Boucher, Lawrence Blochman, Harold Q. Masur, Burke Wilkenson, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Fred Dannay, Leslie Ford, Manfred Lee and Pat McGerr.  

Update: I was searching for a website to attach to Burke Wilkenson's name when I found the place I originally snatched this picture from, but I still haven't the faintest idea who he was or what he did.

Nothing is Impossible!

"The human mind; what a magnificent mechanism! Properly applied it creates miracles. Nothing, basically, is impossible..."

- Brooke (The Newtonian Egg).

Open any anthology of detective stories, published in the pass thirty years, and chances are that most of them contain one or more stories penned by the unequalled Edward D. Hoch – one of the last giants of the genre until he passed away in 2008. He wrote over 900 (!!!) short stories and appeared in every issue of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine from May 1973 until several months after his death. That's an unbroken streak of publications lasting nearly four decades! But his real legacy will be that of the modern master of the impossible crime story.

He was probably more prolific than John Dickson Carr himself, the acknowledged master of all things impossible, and was just as original as Joseph Commings when it came to finding new ways to dispatch people to the great hereafter that completely flies in the face of reality.

Hoch put his prodigious mind and diabolic creativity to use to create such baffling situations as a man jumping from a skyscraper on the top-floor, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground several hours later; fresh corpses turning up in recently unearthed coffins and time capsules; an old haunted oak tree with branches that strangles everyone going near it; a man sitting alone in his car is murdered while stuck in a traffic jam and a shower that miraculously starts spitting daggers are only a few examples.

In All But Impossible! (1981), however, he gives the stage to his fellow composers in crime and allows them to show what tricks are hidden up their sleeves. Unfortunately, this collection turned out to be the usual mixed bag of treats and subsequently touches on all the weak and strong points of a short story collection. There are a handful of stories that you'll absolutely love, some will make you want to chuck the darn book across the room, a couple you've probably seen one time too many in other collections and a few of them have no business being there.

But enough of this palaver, let's take them down from the top:

The Shadow of the Goat by John Dickson Carr

This is one of the first impossible crime stories that John Dickson Carr put to paper, for his school news sheet during his undergraduate days, and introduces the first of his recurring detectives: M. Henri Bencolin. He's a cunning prefect of the Parisian police whose coal black eyes, pointed beard and hair parted in the middle and turned up like horns gives him a Mephistophelean appearance – and his menacing ambience strikes fear in the heart of many. However, he has not yet morphed into the theatrical devil of the novels here and merely provides the answer as to how a man could've vanished from a watched room, commit a murder, and disappear a second time during a disturbed attempt at a second murder. The story has all the familiar elements of later day Carr, but misses its refinement. 

There are more of John Dickson Carr's earlier forays into the mystery genre collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980) – a posthumous compilation showing him grow as a writer from infancy to adulthood. Highly recommended!

The Little House at Croix-Rousse by Georges Simenon (translated by Anthony Boucher)

The literary father of Inspector Maigret wasn't really known for honoring the traditional detective story, but one of his first tales was a full-fledged locked room mystery – in which a man is shot in an empty house surrounded by an observant battalion of policemen. The solution, easily deduced, anticipates John Dickson Carr by nearly a decade, but the whodunit angle leaves its reader with an unnecessary sense of disappointment.

The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms by James Yaffe

Paul Dawn, the only member of the Homicide Squad's Department of Impossible Crimes, listens to Professor Bottle's historical account of the murder of the Roman Emperor Claudius – and the impossible angle to his demise. A poison was administered in his favorite dish of mushrooms that didn't affect the Emperor's food-taster, but threw him in a violent convulsion. I reveled at the double layered structure of the story, that runs for only 14 pages, and James Yaffe, who was only sixteen at the time he wrote it, should be commended for it. A thoroughly enjoyable and sagacious story! 

Douglas Greene had the following to say about this series when I asked if the stories were ever collected in a book: "Emperor's Mushrooms is far and away the best of the lot" and "the others have their moments but I don't think the series as a whole is worthy of being bookformed."  

Still, I wish stories like those from the Department of Impossible Crimes were more easily available for sampling to us that represent the next generation of enthusiastic mystery addicts.

From Another World by Clayton Rawson

This story was the result of a sporting challenge between Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr, in which they competed against one another to see who could come up with the best possible solution to the following premise: a murder has taken place in a room that's not only locked from the inside, but also completely sealed shut with tape! It's one of Rawson's finest tales and I think it won him this little wager with the grandmaster himself.

You can find John Dickson Carr's answer to this challenge in He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) – published under the byline Carter Dickson.

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

A carefully crafted persecution story, in which a young woman lost two great teaching jobs because students and staff were frightened by her ghost-like doppelganger haunting the school grounds. It's an innovative approach to the impossible problem, but like vanishing houses and trains the possible solutions are limited – and every observant reader will stumble to the identity of the perpetrator and motive before the end of the story. However, you can't help but take pleasure in how expertly all the plot threads are tightly woven together. Helen McCloy was an excellent plotter!

This story was extended into a full-length novel and published under the same title in 1950. 

Snowball in July by Ellery Queen

As far as I can tell, finding a logical and rational explanation as to how an entire train, including its cargo of passengers, could've evaporated in between two train stations hasn't been attempted since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle broached the idea in his 1898 short story, "The Lost Special." The solution in this story isn't as spectacular as the one in Doyle's story, but it's one of the few, if not the only, alternative solution to this problem – and it's a workable one at that! 

The Newtonian Egg by Peter Godfrey

The smallest of all locked room mysteries, in which a terminal ill man lectures from his hospital bed on Jacques Futrelle and John Dickson Carr – eats a spoonful of egg, after cracking its perfectly sealed shell, and almost immediately succumbs of cyanide poisoning. So how could poison be introduced in a sealed egg without penetrating its exterior? The answer isn't half as clever as you might expect from such a tantalizing premise and left me a little bit disappointed. The problem required a grander solution.

The Triple-Lock'd Room by Lillian de la Torre

Dr. Sam Johnson and James Boswell try to protect a woman who has confined her concerns regarding the safety of her jewels to them and fix her door with a triple lock, but that didn't stop this apparently invisible prowler from slipping into the room and stabbing her to death. The idea and characters were promising, but the solution De la Torre flings at her readers is one that should've only been uttered by a very dense Hastings-type of character, before being laughed out of the room, or at best proposed as a tongue-in-cheek false solution.

The Brazen Locked Room by Isaac Asimov

This is one of those gimcrack stories that makes you scratch your head in utter amazement at what the anthologist was thinking in adding it to the lineup. It's a pure fantasy tale, in which a miserable man makes a pact with a demon for 10 years of happiness in exchange of becoming a demon himself, and as a final test he has to escape from a solid bronze room – using his newly acquired demonic powers. I kid you not!

The Martian Crown Jewels

The third real dud in a row and another complete waste of space, that could've been used to reprint one of the many uncollected impossible crime stories by such short story specialists as Joseph Commings and Arthur Porges. But instead we get a pseudo-futuristic acid hallucination about a giant talking space chicken, who fancies himself the Martian equivalent of our Sherlock Holmes, looking into a bunch of purloined stones – and a failure to retrieve them may threaten relations between Earth and Mars. Yeah, I'm tapping out on this one.

The Day the Children Vanished by Hugh Pentecost

Hugh Pentecost picks up the slack in this fascinating story, in which a small town is thrown into panic when a school bus of children drives into a dugway and never comes out on the other side – and the solution is as clever as it is simple. But it's not just another cannily plotted locked room mystery, it's also a very well told story in its own right with a smashing end. I also dug the character Pentecost casted for the role of detective and the way in which he confronted the culprits. Possibly my favorite story of the collection!

As If by Magic by Julian Symons

Well, I learned something from this story: Symons wasn't only a first-class prick but also a hypocrite of the first water! You can't go around passing judgment on your contemporaries, for lacking a sense of realism, and than churn out a two-bit short-short, in which a typical amateur detective just so happens to be present at the same amusement pier where a murderer, before disappearing in the masses, starts stabbing away at someone and is invited by the police to help solve the case. Oh wow, that surely gave the genre a much-needed dose of reality, eh? 

I could've forgiven him this blatant hypocrisy, if he had shown Carr and Talbot how the impossible crime story should've been done and came up with something dazzling. But this is just petty and amateurish at best.

The Impossible Theft John F. Suter

This really pains me to say, but I'm developing a slight aversion for this wonderful story. It's a clever little nugget about a bet that involves the theft of a document from a tightly secured vault. The solution is brilliant and can be explained in one short sentence and the first time you read it you probably want to kick yourself, however, I have seen this story too often – and anthologists really aren't doing us a service by continues reprinting it (clever though it is). We're all very familiar with Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," and Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog." Now give us something we haven't read before and haven't already, at least, a dozen copies of in our collection!

Mr. Strange Takes a Field Trip by William Brittain

This pleasant, but minor, diversion tells of a very improbable disappearance of a valuable golden mask from a museum, and the only ones who were swarming that floor at the time was a school teacher and his class. At first, everyone assumes it's a pranks from two boys who sneaked off on their own, but when a search of the floor fails to turn up the missing artifact their protest starts to carry some weight – and there teacher turns detective and comes up with a solution that is both original as well as amusing.

No One Likes To Be Played for a Sucker by Michael Collins

Michael Collins is apparently one of those authors who effortlessly blends hardboiled story telling with a classic locked room puzzle. Here his one-armed private eye, Dan Fortune, is hired to keep taps on someone's business partner, but murder rears its ugly head and it involves a locked room angle. However, Collins takes a turn on that well-trodden path that leads to a slightly different hermitically shut door. The ending involves a particular kind of tough justice fitting for a story about a hardboiled gumshoe.

I really enjoy it when writers like Bill Pronzini and Michael Collins let their private eyes take on a good old-fashioned locked room mystery. It's a nice change of pace from the usual haunted mansions, harboring a boarded up room that kills its occupants, and other supernatural menaces who apparently run amok on this plane of reality.

The Arrowmont Prison Riddle by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini himself also provides a story for this volume of locked room riddles and his impossible problem boosts one of the most convoluted solutions I have ever come across in a short story of this kind, but what a firework display of ingenuity and imagination! The quandary the reader has to ponder over here is how a convicted murderer, a mere minute after his execution, could've vanished from a locked and watched execution shed after being dropped through its roof with a stiff rope pulled tight around his neck. Like I already pointed out, the solution is very convoluted and even knottier than its premise, but you really have to admire anyone who can dream up such a plot. John Dickson Carr would've definitely approved!

This one competes with Huge Pentecost's "The Day the Children Vanished" as the standout story of this anthology.

Box in a Box by Jack Ritchie

This story, in which a man is discovered unconscious next to his dead wife, inside a locked bedroom, and the solution the detective comes up with is only acceptable because Jack Ritchie had his tongue firmly placed in his cheek – and that's how it should be done if you're going to present the reader a hackneyed explanation like that. Yes, I'm looking at you Lillian de la Torre!  

The Number 12 Jinx by Jon L. Breen

I don't know the first thing about baseball, but this story has me intrigued and from what I gather, it’s part of an entire series of puzzle-orientated sports mysteries featuring Ed Gorgan – a major league umpire who regular sheds his sports cap for a deerstalker. In this story he look into a baseball player who, after insisting on playing as the club's jinxed number 12, disappeared under baffling circumstances. Good story, but not the most solvable one of the collection if you're absolutely clueless about the game – like yours truly.

Crippen and Landru (who else?) put out an entire collection under the title Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgan (2003). I think I might take a swing at this collection in the near future. It could be fun and at leasts provides a change of pace

The Magician's Wife by J.F. Peirce

The titular magician makes the equally titular wife disappear in front of a captivated crowd of policeman and their assistant, his sister-in-law, accuses him of having murdered her sister. Nothing really special, but fun enough to read.  

The Problem of the Covered Bridge by Edward D. Hoch

This is the first recorded case of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small town medical practitioner who constantly runs into seemingly impossible murders in the small town of Northmont (Jessica Fletcher has nothing on him!), and this story has him arriving in town and setting up his practice. But the problem that requires his attention the most is the inexplicable vanishing of a horse-and-buggy from a covered bridge. The story is OK, but Hoch hadn't found his stride yet with this series. He threw some really good and even more baffling miracle problems at Dr. Hawthorne as the series progressed. I'm particular fond of "The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery," which was also the first Hoch story I ever read.

There are two collections from this series available: Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and More Things Impossible (2006). A third collection, Nothing is Impossible (20??), is planned for the very near future.