The Shanghai River Demon's Curse (1997) by Seimaru Amagi

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the co-creator of The Kindaichi Case Files, Seimaru Amagi, wrote nine "light novels" in the series and four were translated as part of either the Kodansha English Library or Kodansha Ruby Books, which were intended as an educational tool to help improve the English of Japanese readers – not to dazzle Western readers. Hence, each novel ends with a nearly thirty-page long English-Japanese vocabulary list. 

According to our resident expert, Ho-Ling Wong, the English editions enjoyed a long print-run in Japan and there must be "a fair number in circulation," but, in the West, copies have become as rare and elusive as a Kappa. Not quite rare or obscure enough to elude me forever!

Several years ago, I came across Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996), which is possibly the first detective novel to use the internet meaningfully in a traditionally-styled mystery complete with an isolated, snowbound setting and ironclad alibis. You can borrow a digital copy from the Internet Archive. Next one that fell into my hands was Operazakan – aratanaru satsujin (Opera House, the New Murders, 1994), published in English simply as The New Kindaichi Files, but the plain, uninspired title hides a classic, first-rate theatrical locked room mystery – translating into my favorite Kindaichi title to date. Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998) is a very minor, short and somewhat flawed detective story, but you can cross-off some of its shortcomings against an imaginative piece of miniature world-building and an inventive impossible crime. So that left with me with one more title to track down. 

Shanhai gyojin densetsu satsujin jiken (The Shanghai River Demon's Curse, 1997) is the fifth novel in the series and the third to be translated, which turned out to be a bit of an odd duck. 

The Shanghai River Demon's Curse brings Hajime Kindaichi and Miyuki Nanase to Shanghai, China, where the famous Yang Variety Troupe performs a daily, two-hour variety show at the Mermaid Hall. An enormous ship moored along the bank of the Huangpu River. The main event of the show is an acrobatic underwater act, "The Legend of the River Demon," which is patterned after the tale of a creature that's half-fish, half-human that lives at the bottom of the river. A monster with the ability to curse, or even kill, human beings. In some places, it's considered "bad luck to mock such spirits on stage" like "in Japanese ghost stories."

Following a performance of "The Legend of the River Demon," the director of the troupe, Yang
Wang, is found in his office with a bullet in his head, but his body and the floor are unaccountably soaking – water has "the unpleasant odor of freshwater fish." Even stranger is that the murderer scratched a huge Chinese character for “spring,” a meter wide, on the wall. The first word of the lullaby of the river demon's curse. However, the Shanghai police have a very human suspect in their sights.

Once the show begins, with "animals like the tiger and monkey roaming around," the door to the dressing room is locked from the inside and it's "impossible for anyone from the audience to get in," which was still locked from the inside when the show ended. Nearly everyone on that side of the door had an alibi except the victim's son, Yang Xiaolong. His young sister, Yang Lili, writes her Japanese penfriend, Miyuki, a distressed letter saying her brother is suspected to have murdered their father. Miyuki decides to go Shanghai to help by bringing her childhood friend, Hajime Kindaichi, who's "the grandson of the master detective Kosuke Kindaichi" and "solved several cases for the Metropolitan Police Department." But his grandfather's name or reputation is not as well-known in China, which is one of the challenges facing the young detective who became a little timid when landed in foreign country for the first time in his life.

When they finally arrive in Shanghai, there are two big surprises waiting in the wings. Firstly, they find Detective Li Boer, of the Shanghai Police, in the company of their friend in the MPD, Inspector Kenmochi. Recently, the body in a decade old murder case was identified and "a small clue" led the Tokyo police to the Japanese director/producer of the Yang Variety Troupe. But is there's a link to the new murder? Secondly, Kindaichi and Miyuki get to witness a second murder during a performance of "The Legend of the River Demon" when a body plunged down from above the stage into the swimming tank. Another bullet to the head and the Chinese character for "summer" was slashed in the victim's back with a knife. So the murderer was intended to follow the grim lullaby. 

In spring, the boat is flooded,

In summer, the river turns a murky mauve,

In autumn, the traveler must drink putrid water,

In winter, fish no longer swim but sleep.

These murders also have an element of the impossible as the victims were shot with a derringer, which apparently can vanish, or materialize, whenever it's convenient to the murderer. The part of the ship between Yang's office and the dressing room was locked at the time of murder, which meant that nobody went in, or out, before the police arrived. So nobody had an opportunity to dispose of the gun, but they went over the entire ship with dogs and metal detectors without finding anything. They simply assume the murderer found a way to throw it in the river until discovering the second murder was committed with the same weapon! I've seen two variations on this type of vanishing weapon trick before and hated both of them. This one is marginally better, because Amagi tried to make it somewhat convincing. But the trick is still Yozaburo Kanari. Yes, Kanari's name in this context is a euphemism for shit.

Well, so far, it seems like a fairly standard and typical Kindaichi story with exception of the setting and its effect on Kindaichi's normally cocky attitude, but the story moves away from the series formula in the second-half – turning into a chase story with a coming-of-age angle. Kindaichi helps Yang Xiaolong to escape from police custody and they're chased to Shanghai as they make a run to the Yang's home village. A dirt poor place where the children had to grow up faster in order to make money, which is why Xiaolong and his sister acts so much mature than Kindaichi. But, while their on the run, they both find something of themselves they had either lost or never had. This comes at the expensive of the usual plot structure with the alibis, impossibilities and the nursery rhyme theme of the murders being heavily underplayed during the second-half.

I also hated that during the first-half an intriguing, quickly discarded plot-thread was introduced when Kindaichi learned of a former troupe member, Wang Meiyu, who was a superb swimmer, but a bit strange. Meiyu not only swam really well and could stay underwater forever, but "she only ate aquatic plants and freshwater fish." And it was her talent that lead the troupe to adopt the "The Legend of the River Demon" as their signature act. But then strange rumors began to circulate. Members began to talk that every time she took a shower, the bathroom would "reek of fish" with "large fish scales on the floor." So they began to avoid Meiyu and culminated in her committing suicide by jumping into the river from the toilet window. She left four characters scrawled in blood on the wall and has now risen from "the depths of that murky river" to extract revenge. But the plot-thread was quickly brushed aside. And given an even quicker explanation towards the end. So the only reason why it was even brought up was to give the book a snappy title.

Thankfully, the solution was not all bad with a pretty good alibi-trick and an inspired piece of misdirection, which successfully hid the murderer for a good chunk of the story. I eventually figured it out, because if you how the gun can vanish and reappear, you know who pulled the trigger. Not so good is that other parts of the solution stretches things considerably with an unnecessary, rather cruel twist nearly ruining the whole thing. I mean, this murderer is very likely going to be executed. So why throw that revelation out there? Amagi is the Soji Shimada of the anime-and manga detective story who is nearly unmatched when it comes to erecting grand-scale plots with majestic locked room-and alibi-tricks, but when it comes to characters, sometimes he goes one twist too far. Deadly Thunder has a similar problem.

So, on a whole, The Shanghai River Demon's Curse is not entirely without interest and its break with the formula and foreign setting makes it a worthwhile read to long-time fans of the series, but don't expect anything more than an average detective story. Regrettably, the weakest of the four translated novels.

This more or less closes the chapter on The New Kindaichi Files light novels with such untranslated novels as Yūrei kyakusen satsujin jiken (The Ghost Passenger Ship Murder Case, 1995) and Onibijima satusjin jikes (The Ghost Fire Island Murder Case, 1997) remaining tantalizingly out of my reach. Well, the novels are out of my reach, but not the '90s anime adaptations. So I might make one of those my next stop in the series.

In the Grip of the Lobster (1965) by B.J. Kleymens

I closed my relatively recent review of Ton Vervoort's Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Actors, 1963) with a promise to smear out my future explorations of those obscure, untranslated and long out-of-print Dutch detective novels, but curiosity got the better of me – happily tumbling down another rabbit hole. So here we are again. You can blame it wholly on the ghosts of Vervoort and the Frederic Dannay of the Low Countries, Ab Visser. 

Back in March, I reviewed Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963), subtitled "het dood spoor van de tweeling" ("the twins' dead end"), which is the second title in the so-called "Zodiac Mysteries." An ambitious collaborative effort, under the editorship of Visser, who gathered a dozen writers each tasked with writing a detective or crime novel in which one of the twelve signs of the zodiac plays a central and perhaps even a decisive role. This idea had a ton of potential and could have been a notable contribution to the genre, but the project was abandoned after two years and eight novels. You can find a list of the eight published zodiac-themed mysteries in the review of Murder Among Astrologists.

I don't know why the series was abandoned, but it could not have been due to a lack of writers to pen the remaining four novels. While playing internet detective, I came across an archived article from 1964 mentioning the four unpublished contributors. So this opened the door to the elusive Phantom Library with potentially more items of "Lost Media" to add to its shelves.

I already knew Robert van Gulik was one of the four writers and that he "had already finished his story for the series," which was likely published in The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) as the Judge Dee novella "De nacht van de tijger" ("The Night of the Tiger," 1963) and can be read as a backdoor entry in the series – as Judge Dee was born in the year of the tiger in the Chinese zodiac. But what about the other three writers? Leo Derksen was a journalist and writer, but, to my knowledge, not with roots in the detective story. Dick A. van Ruler was the art editor of Utrechts Nieuwsblad and one-time TV presenter who has one detective novel to his credit, Moord op een negatief (Murder of a Negative, 1963), which is currently on the big pile. Jacques Presser was a historian and part-time mystery writer who penned four madcap detective novels between 1953 and 1965. Nothing else to link those three names or their work to that abandoned series beside that one article.

So this begs the question whether the series was, on paper, completed with article mentioned that all twelve writers wrote a novel around one of the astrological signs. What happened?

I suppose the publisher pulled the plug (disappointing sales figures?), but what happened to the unpublished manuscripts Derksen, Presser and Van Ruler contributed to the project? Are the manuscripts slowly crumbling to dust somewhere in a drawer or were they thrown away decades ago? Or did one or two follow the Van Gulik route? Derksen appears to have not written anything in our genre and Van Ruler's only novel was published around the time the series began, which probably got him the gig, but Presser's Moord in de Poort (Murder in the Poort, 1965) possibly could be a lost Zodiac mystery. The window of the time is very narrow, as 1965 was the year the series was canceled, but Murder in the Poort was Presser's last detective novel and the only one to be published by N.V. W. van Hoeve – which also published the Zodiac series. So tracking down a copy has been added to my priority wishlist and finding any trace of an astrological plot-thread should settle the matter.

But what has all of this to do with today's review? While exploring the rabbit warren of the Dutch detective story of the 1950s and '60s, I also stumbled across several contemporary reviews of the Zodiac series. One title, in particular, caught my attention.

B.J. Kleymens' In de greep van de Kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965) was the seventh or eighth novel to appear in the Zodiac series, which received some surprising and suspicious praise from the normally hostile critics. Carl J. Bicker evoked the name of Raymond Chandler and pointed out that the detective-characters introduced in the story were unlikely to carry a whole series, but also noted it was a well put together deduction story. I knew the name of the reviewer sounded familiar and a quick search revealed Bicker was a pseudonym of the editor of the Zodiac series, Ab Visser! A second review was published under his own name. There were a few warning bells, but the premise sounded like something straight out of a Christopher Bush or Brian Flynn mystery. So I took a small gamble and tracked down a copy. But this presented me with another puzzle.

Who was J.B. Kleymens? This is a question with an easy and difficult answer. The easy answer is that it was the shared penname of J. Kleijn and B. Mensen, but the difficult part is answering who they were. A little detective work allowed me to identify the former as the journalist and writer, Jek Kleijn. Jek is an unusual name and his surname means small or short in Dutch, which makes his involvement evident as one of the two journalistic detective-characters is named Jek Groot – whose surname translates as big, tall or long. You can Anglicize those names as Jack Short and Jack Long. Unfortunately, I've been unable to pin down the identity of his co-author, because, without a first name, Mensen returns too many unrelated results. Not a bad piece of genre archaeology, if I say so myself.

Just one more thing before finally getting around to the review. In the Grip of the Lobster is listed in the review of Murder Among Astrologists as In the Grip of Cancer, which is a technically correct translation. But in Dutch, the name of the zodiac Cancer is Kreeft (Lobster) and thought In the Grip of Cancer sounded a little brutal for a well intended, but completely amateurish, detective story. Yeah... I'm afraid the review is going to be significantly shorter than the long, roundabout introduction. 

In the Grip of the Lobster takes place in the small, sleepy and entirely fictitious provincial town of Rooldrecht where normally very little or exciting happens. Least of all during the tri-weekly council meeting at town hall. Jan Frens and Jek Groot in the press box were secretly looking forward to a cold glass of beer in the favorite pub of the local journalists, which is when it happened. An elderly, venerable councilor, P.C. Hooftman, apparently decided to take a nap during the meeting. Very much to the annoyance of the mayor, but Hooftman is not sleeping. He's as dead as a door nail. The doctor determines he had a stroke, but then lightening strikes twice when, an hour later, the town hall messenger dies under similar circumstances and that same evening Frens witnesses a shady individual, face hidden under a big black umbrella, breaking into town hall – rifling through the documents of that day's meeting. So he follows the mysterious man with the black umbrella, but it's Frens who's caught red handed and eventually imprisoned, which places the two local journalists in direct opposition to the police. Frens and Groot are determined to get to the bottom of the business before the police.

What ensues is clumsy, amateurish dance around shady, small town politics with a development project, a dry-as-dust document that everyone wants to get their hands on and a black umbrella with an astrological sign stamped the handle. But nothing particular clever or good is done with any of the plot pieces.

There were one, or two, good ideas with a glimmer of potential. Such as the risky poisoning-trick, which is already unconvincing, but the way in which the poison was delivered could still have made for a good howdunit. But what did they do? They simply tell the reader how it was done without any real detective work. I also expected something clever from the journeying umbrella that was lost, found and lost again. The last time it got lost something suggested it could have been "Chesterton's umbrella," but that possibility would have only fitted an even more unimpressive solution. 

In Grip of the Lobster is written well enough, especially its opening and closing chapters, but, purely as a detective story, it's nothing more than a well intended, clumsily plotted and sparsely clued piece of amateur detective fiction. There were many tells in the story betraying its authors were either the most casual of mystery readers or complete outsiders, but appreciated the attempt to craft a genuine whodunit. So a textbook example of the chase being more fun than the capture.

Murder Among Actors (1963) by Ton Vervoort

This year, I began exploring the work of an unjustly forgotten, long out-of-print Dutch mystery writer, Peter Verstegen, who wrote a handful of lightly written, but smartly plotted, detective novels during the early and mid-1960s – published as by "Ton Vervoort." Just two of his detective novels were reissued, in 1974, as part of Bruna's Zwarte Beertjes pocket series. So none of his detective novels has been in print for half a century and have since disappeared from the public's memory. And the pool of secondhand copies is beginning to dry up. 

Fortunately, the copies that still float around don't cost an arm and a leg or a spare kidney, which made it both urgent and easy to begin collecting them now. Who knows how rare and difficult to obtain some of these titles will become ten years down the road. Not much gets reprinted in my country unless its fashionable or really, really profitable. That hasn't done the Dutch detective genre any favors.

So it was a pleasure to come across Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963), which seemed like an interesting book to contrast with W.H. van Eemlandt's astronomical-themed detective novel Dood in schemer (Death in Half-Light, 1954). 

Amazingly, the detective story centering on the pseudoscience of astrology turned out to be so much better than the whodunit staged during a minutely-timed, scientific observation of a solar eclipse. Murder Among Astrologists under promised and over delivered that came with one of those rare, Dutch-language takes on the Ellery Queen-style dying message, which I read as an open invitation to come back for seconds, thirds and fourths – revealing a top-tier, second-string mystery novelist. Having read three of them over the past few months, I've noticed Vervoort's detective series can be summed up as a bicycle tour through the genre and the Netherlands. 

Murder Among Astrologists is set in the millionaire's enclave of Bloemendaal with a plot that pays homage to the zany, Ellery-in-Wonderland mysteries complete with strange architecture and a dying message. Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) started out as a closed-circle of suspects situation in a 17th century canal house until a serial killer cut loose and goes ham on the invalids of Amsterdam. Striking everywhere from the Rijksmuseum to the rowdy Zeedijk. Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) combines a convent school setting with the festive, seasonal holiday mystery beginning with the strange death of a student playing Saint Nicholas and moved from Amsterdam to Maastricht where the story concludes during the annual, three-day carnival celebrations. Vervoort even threw in a (minor) locked room problem that doubled as a (late) clue.

So he took a different approach in plotting and storytelling in each novel that regularly
ventured outside of the Amsterdam canal belt. This certainly is true for the subject of today's review. 

Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Actors, 1963) is the second novel in the lamentably short Inspector Floris Jansen series and, as the title suggests, takes place among the members of a traveling theatrical company with a big role for his friend and narrating chronicler, Ton Vervoort – who gets to shine as a detective rather than as a Dr. Watson. Vervoort also falls in love here with one of the actresses, Sannah Wigman, whom he married in Murder Among Virgins. This time, it's Jansen who comes to Vervoort to ask him to go undercover as an extra in Erik Le Roy's theatrical company in a quasi-official investigation.

Until two years ago, Erik Le Roy was "one of the top actors who played the municipal theaters," but got too few starring roles to his liking and decided to start freelancing. A disastrous decision that reduced him to doing television bits and only turned his situation around when he began a theatrical company, which traveled "the provinces to bring art to the countryside" and claimed "principled motives" to turn down state subsidies. Although the truth is that the company doesn't qualify for state subsidies. But by doing production in-house, everything from translating and directing to lighting playing dual roles, they managed to turn a profit. Le Roy's financial success and his stance against drama schools acting as gatekeepers to the stage-lights made him popular with both actors and the always hopeful extras.

So who could possibly have a reason to send Le Roy threatening letters saying "you will die soon," "you will be dead very soon" and "it won't be long now." Jansen hopes it's a practical joke, but fears it could be a war of nerves to mentally whittle down the actor or even a murderer-to-be with plans to remove him in a more permanent fashion. Vervoort goes from Watson to independent detective ("quite a promotion") and travels with the company to Winschoten, Groningen, as an extra. But as the opening line of the story betrayed, Vervoort didn't succeed in stopping the anonymous letter writer from becoming a killer.

Someone fired two shots at Le Roy while he was driving and his car ended up in a canal, but only his passenger resurfaced and news of the incident resulted in an attempted suicide and a second murder. This is the point where the story becomes difficult and tricky to discuss.

We all dislike it when an author, or detective, plays his cards too close to his chest, but not Vervoort (the author), who boldly plunked down his cards that suggested a solution that was hard to accept – a solution that thumbed its nose at Father Knox without committing a cardinal sin. But it was so on the nose, I refused to believe it and subsequent information seemed to agree with my skepticism. Or did it? What can be said about the plot is that Vervoort performed a juggling act with multiple alibis, identities and motives to create a detective story that's halfway between an inverted mystery and a whodunit. Or did he? I can't say much more about the plot except Vervoort performed a juggling act with alibis, identities and motives to keep the reader guessing whether they're reading an inverted howdunit or a genuine whodunit. I think fans of Brian Flynn would love this mystery.

Vervoort playing bluff poker with the genre-savvy mystery reader, while playing a more than fair hand, earned Murder Among Actors a place next to Murder Among Astrologists as the strongest entries in this short-lived series. Even if the eventual explanation doesn't exactly leave the reader slack-jawed, Murder Among Actors stands as a good, old-fashioned and technically sound piece of detective fiction that makes it all the more regrettably Vervoort bowed out of the genre so quickly. My country needed a mystery writer like him!

Luckily, I still have Vervoort's Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965) to look forward to and discovered it's not a standalone novel, but part of the Floris Jansen series without Ton Vervoort as the narrator. I've also tracked down one of his short stories and want to reread Moord onder studenten (Murder Among Students, 1962), which I read and reviewed (poorly) some years ago. And have been looking into a few other, long-forgotten Dutch mystery writers. Don't worry. I'll try to smear them out as far apart as possible.

The Forbidden House (1932) by Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl

Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl were French authors of whom little is known outside of their short-lived collaboration in the 1930s, producing three detective novels of "varying quality," but their locked room mystery novel, La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932), is considered "a minor classic" with a courtroom denouement – praised by Roland Lacourbe as "a triumph of Cartesian logic." So a long out-of-reach classic of the French detective story that was finally made available in English by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. 

On first glance, The Forbidden House appears to be a fair representative of the type of impossible crime novel that was written in France at the time. The Forbidden House takes place in a castle-like mansion surrounded by a large, "entirely walled," garden similar to the almost fortified settings in Noël Vindry's La bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934) and Gaston Boca's Les invités de minuit (The Seventh Guest, 1935). A place that proved to be insufficient to protect one, or more, of the characters from being pestered and picked off by an invisible menace, which recalls Boca's The Seventh Guest and Marcel Lanteaume's La 13e ball (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948).

There is, however, one very important difference: Herbert and Wyl's The Forbidden House is the superior detective and locked room novel, which has a plot and unusual story structure made possible only by the French judicial system – weirdly anticipates a well-known, non-French classic of the genre. No. I'm not talking about one of John Dickson Carr's famous locked room fancies, but more on that in a moment.

Marchenoire Manor is a splendid manor house, close to Compiègne, equipped with all the modern comforts, a small guardhouse and a walled park of five hectares situated right in the forest of l'Aigle. But over the years, the place has garnered an unsavory reputation.

Five years ago, the founder of the Société du Crédit Continental, Abraham Goldenberg, built Marchenoire Manor, but, one day, he absconded with twenty-five million francs. A swindle that ruined both "magnates of finance" and "a multitude of small investors," which earned him seven years of hard labor. But he died two months after starting his prison term. So his home was sold and changed hands multiple times over the years, because the owners were either murdered or frightened away by an anonymous letter writer. M. Desrousseaux ignored the warning letter and his body was found in the park "dead from a rifle shot," but succeeding owners cleared out before the second, or third, letter arrived. However, the latest owner refuses to surrender "the residence of his dreams."

Napoléon Verdinage is the founder and executive director of a grocers' association and grocery chain, which made him a multi-millionaire, whose only relatives are some distant cousins. So he moved into Marchenoire Manor with his small, tightly-knit domestic staff. Thérèse Chapon was M. Verdinage's wet nurse who calls him Napo and acts as the steward of the manor. Her husband, Charles Chapon, is the negligent butler who gives more attention to the stock of vintage Pommard in the cellar than performing his duties. Another husband-and-wife team on the domestic staff are the chauffeur and cook, Edmond and Jeanne Tasseau. Adhémar Dupont-Lesguyères is M. Verdinage aristocratic secretary and head of protocol to his nouveau-riche employer on everything from dress conventions to social behavior, which he tends to do with an ironic smirk. Lastly, there's the young, misanthropic valet, Gustave Colinet, who spends his leisure hours shut away in his room and "the vigilant watchdog of the property," Jacques Bénard, who took a cripple, Clodoche, under his wing out of charity – both came with the property. But before the contract could be signed, the first letter is delivered under mysterious circumstances.

The letter warns to not purchase "THE FORBIDDIN HOUSE" (yes, mispelled), if he wants to live. M. Verdinage reasons that "only a prankster would use a fireplace as a letter box" and buys the house with the intention to move in as soon as possible.

A month later, a second warning is delivered under somewhat impossible circumstances. The letter is discovered on the first step leading down to the cellar, but the door was locked and "a very tight fit at the bottom" that "you couldn't thread a hair under it." Let alone a letter. A warning, once again, ignored and another month passed before the third letter is delivered. This time it announced the time his executioner would arrive, but M. Verdinage is not planning to back away from a fight.

M. Verdinage instructs Clodoche to wait at the gates and bring the visitor to him. After which he has to stay on the front steps, "like a good guard dog," whacking everyone with his crutch who leaves without his masters consent. Clodoche is seen escorting a figure to the house with his hat jammed down on his head and his coat collar up around his ears, which made it impossible to see his face as Clodoche's lantern provided only a moving circle of light – casting the figure's upper-body in semi-darkness. Shortly after crossing the threshold, the sound of a gunshot and an agonized cry shakes up the house. M. Verdinage had been shot and killed in the library!

Due to a fault in the construction, the manor "only has one door leading to the outside" and Clodoche was banging on it from the outside and yelling to be let in. So the murderer had nowhere to escape, or hiding place, with every exit either locked or guarded and several witnesses around. Some way, somehow, the murderer had vanished from the house in a puff of cordite smoke! This locked room problem is a lot more trickier and original than the premise suggests.

However, the murderer's vanishing act is not the main attraction of the story, but provides the main act with all the material to make it a main event. This is where the story becomes a treat to every mystery readers with special place in their heart for the multiple false-solution gambit, because The Forbidden House has them in spades!

There are several detectives, official and unofficial, who enter the case with their own ideas and theories, but, as one of them points out, "even the best of their hypothesis explains absolutely nothing" as they can make a case who and why it was done – except explaining "how the murderer left the scene of the crime." So they spend the lion's share of the story building up and tearing down each others theories. Some of the proposed solutions were quite clever while others were a little flimsy ("...he became agitated... that's indisputable proof of his guilt"), but always stamped with the personal motives or personality of the detectives. Lieutenant Taupinois wanted to show the inspector of the flying squad "the gendarmerie was every bit as capable as they were of carrying out an important investigation" and comes to a hasty conclusion (see quote). Paul Malicorne (Substitut du Procureur) and André Pruvost (commissaire divisionnaire de la brigade mobile) come up with more practical answers, but they, too, are unable to explain how the murderer disappeared. Claude Launay, juge d'instruction, is a headline chaser interested only in "celebrity, glory and rapid promotion," but he eventually has to accept the solution of a British private detective, Tom Morrow. And he has a financial stake in the matter as he represents the victim's estranged and disinherited cousins.

Now if any of this sounds vaguely familiar, you're right, because it's pretty much the same approach Leo Bruce took in his comedic masterpiece, Case for Three Detectives (1936). Something that can be boiled down to a group of troublesome, competing detectives who make things unnecessary complicated and difficult. Surprisingly, The Forbidden House has a line echoing a Sgt. Beef quote from Case for Three Detectives that I've never been able to forget.

Halfway through Case for Three Detectives, a tired Sgt. Beef exclaims "because these 'ere private detectives can't mind their own business... with their stepsons, and their bells, and their where-did-the-scream-come from. Why, they try to make it complicated." I always hear those words running through my head when a fictional detective is acting too much like a fictional detective. But before those lines had time to haunt me again, M. Launay gave his opinion on the gendarmes "who serve no other purpose than to send investigations on the wrong track, so as to complicate the simplest situations." Not that he was in any position to criticize any detective or policeman. I think it shows how close both novels are in spirit with one of the two only differences being that one was typically British and the other unmistakably French.

The other difference can be found at the end of the story as both end with the real detective revealing a much simpler, more elegant solution that beautifully contrast with all the fanciful theories that preceded it, but The Forbidden House is not only a who, why-and howdunit – also a who'll-be-the-detective. With the final line promising more adventures from this newly-minted "amateur detective."

There is, perhaps, a third, not unimportant difference between the endings of The Forbidden House and Case for Three Detectives. The latter has sometimes been criticized over its fourth and final solution, which some deemed as routine, unimaginative or disappointing (that's the joke). Herbert and Wyl avoided that pitfall and came up with a locked room-trick that's both better and simpler than all the proposed theories, but also didn't completely destroy the mystic and intrigue of the setup. A kind of locked room scenario and resolution that the master himself could have dreamed up.

So, needless to say, The Forbidden House is a tremendously enjoyable detective novel with a first-class locked room conundrum, which stands head and shoulders above the other French '30s and '40s mysteries published by LRI. Pugmire's tireless to ferry all these non-English impossible crime stories across the language-barrier has given me a better appreciation and understanding what the French were up to at the time. Some of those French mystery writers were a few years ahead of their British counterparts. I hope that statement won't lead to a fifth Anglo-Dutch War. Sorry, my British friends, but facts are facts.

On a final, related note: The Forbidden House has two appendixes on the French judicial system and the French GAD, which Pugmire ended with the comment that "several of the foregoing novels may well be candidates for future LRI publication." So why not tack my personal wishlist of French-language locked room mysteries to this review. The following titles/writers are criminally absent from my bookshelves: Stanislas-André Steeman's Six homes morts (Six Dead Men, 1931) and La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th and 13th, 1931). Pierre Boileau's Six crimes cans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Killer, 1935), which I want more than a lost manuscript by Joseph Commings or Hake Talbot. René Réouven's English-titled Tobie or not Tobie (1980) and Jean Alessandrini's La malédiction de Chéops (The Curse of Cheops, 1989). Any of Vindry's remaining locked room titles.

Murder Among Virgins (1965) by Ton Vervoort

My previous blog-posts were reviews of translations of two non-English detective novels, Mika Waltari's Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofin? (Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll?, 1939) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998), which annoy some of my readers as they tend to have availability issues – either being out-of-print or not on hand in English. So my apologies for rambling about three, non-English detective novels in a row, but wanted to do the hat-trick and end with a Dutch-language mystery. Rest assured, I'll return to the Anglo-American detective sphere in my next post. 

Peter Verstegen is a Dutch author, editor and translator who wrote half a dozen detective novels during the early 1960s under the name "Ton Vervoort."

I've recently discovered Vertegen began writing detectives at the time purely to make a living, which were published as Meulenhoff-pockets with a circulation of 12000 copies. But he only received a nickel per sold book. So he earned "1200 gulden if they sold out" or about a 1000 gulden if they didn't. That's roughly 3000 euros today.

Vervoort likely wasn't profitable enough for Verstegen to continue the series, which was a lost to the genre, because he wrote some authentic, plot-driven Dutch mystery novels penned in a deceivingly light and airy style – packed with all the potential to have been a serious rival to Appie Baantjer. Critic, poet and one-time mystery writer, C. Buddingh', said in the 1950s that if the detective story in the Netherlands wanted to have a personality of its own, it needs "to have a Dutch setting, populated with Dutch characters, where a murder committed by a Dutchman is solved." Vervoort checked all those boxes with novels like Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964), which also possessed many of qualities of his Anglo-American counterparts. Although not quite as good as some of the well-known American and British mystery novelists, but Vervoort unquestionable was a cut, or two, above most Dutch writers who tried their hands at the detective story.

The back cover of Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) says its Vervoort fourth novel, but this has to be a mistake as the publishing date and information online clearly places it as the fifth and final entry in the Floris Jansen series. Who's now a Chief Inspector of the Central Police in Amsterdam. 

Murder Among Virgins is Jansen's last recorded case, but appears only in the opening and closing chapters to begin and close the book on the "sordid history" surrounding a rich toothpaste magnate, Agnes Wels. A history that begins to slowly unravel on the morning after the Sinterklaasviering (St. Nicholas celebration), December 6, when Ton Vervoort reads in the paper about a "strange death" the previous night. Benno Haakman is a 20-year-old student who played Sinterklaas for the children of an orphanage in the Warmoesstraat, but collapsed while the children were singing a song and slipped into a diabetic coma – passing away later that night in hospital. There are, however, one or two aspects begging the attention of the police in the guise of the newly appointed Chief Inspector Floris Jansen. Vervoort gets a front row seat.

Benno had told the orphanage father he played Sinterklaas on behalf of a student-run Sinterklazencentrale, but they had stopped using the year prior. What happened to the man who played Zwarte Piet (Black Pete)? Why did they act so strangely? Doing "a sort of war dance with the sack and rod" and "pretending to take a little boy." Benno is the eccentric, overly sensitive son of the well-known toothpaste magnate, Agnes Wels, but it becomes "a brief investigation" when Jansen and Vervoort discover evidence of suicide. So they have to drop the case.

After only two chapters, Murder Among Virgins changes from a festive, seasonal December mystery into a travelogue with newlyweds Ton and Sannah Vervoort spending their honeymoon during the three-day carnival in Maastricht, Limburg. Same locality and carnival setting used by F. van Overvoorde's Moorden in Maastricht (Murders in Maastricht, 1937). Never imagined I would get an opportunity to reference that obscure mystery novel. Anyway, Vervoort has to be obnoxiously from Amsterdam by calling Maastricht a pleasant enough little town, but "it remains a fairly dozy place for Amsterdammers on honeymoon." But he becomes human again once the drinking and partying begins.

 

 

During their honeymoon they meet a "bilious antique dealer" at the hotel and a curious, old-fashioned, but kindly, priest who has a cabin in the wood, where he prays and meditate, but also enjoyed the brief excursion to the Sint Pietersberg – a "gigantic molehill of marl." A natural and historical labyrinth "where the first Christians hid from the heathens, later the heathens from the Christians, later the Protestants from the Catholics and then the Catholics from the Protestants." This part of the story is interspersed with entries from Sylvia Haakman's diary. Sylvia is the daughter of Agnes Wels and lives at an incredibly stern, Catholic convent boarding school in an old monastery, outside of Maastricht, but she's a rebellious teenager and constantly gets in trouble with the nuns. Ton and Sannah even get to witness one of the nuns hitting Sylvia during a walk in the woods.

I've to note here that, stylistically, Murder Among Virgins is very much a product of 1960s Dutch cultural revolution and secularization, which means that religion and the nuns are not cast in a very flattering light. Such as the morbidly obese Mother Superior who attempted to guilt Sylvia's mother in handing over 25000 gulden. The convent school becomes the scene of two "inexplicable murders" in the second-half of the novel.

Firstly, there's a cleverly done, wonderfully clued poisoning that came close to being a perfect murder and one of those things placing Vervoort among the top-ranked, second-tier mystery writers. Something not wholly unworthy of Agatha Christie or Gosho Aoyama. The second murder at the school surprised as it unexpectedly throw out a locked room mystery! A body is discovered in one of the toilets, locked from the inside, which is why everyone assumes it's the murderer who committed suicide, but don't expect too much from the routine trick. The locked room is only there to serve as a cheeky clue. But I didn't expect to come across one. So it was a nice surprise to add Vervoort's Murder Among Virgins to the growing list of Dutch locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Vervoort obviously tried to do something different with each novel. Murder Among Astrologists is an homage to the zanier, Alice in Wonderland-esque Ellery Queen mysteries with a dying message. Murder Under the Mantle of Love allowed a serial killer to escape from a closed-circle of suspects to wreak havoc on the invalids of the city. Murder Among Virgins mixes the seasonal and scholastic type of mystery novel with a travelogue, which were all written in a worryingly nonchalant, almost careless, style. A very light touch to the storytelling usually translates into a featherweight detective story with scant clueing, but, somehow, Vervoort always succeeded in pulling everything together in the last chapter – revealing an authentic, properly plotted and clued detective story. Murder Among Virgins is no exception in that regard.

There are, however, one or two flaws that places it slightly below Murder Among Astrologists and Murder Under the Mantle of Love. The murderer's motive is a huge gamble, which is acceptable enough (murder is a risky business anyway), but it turned the Sinterklaas murder into one big red herring. One that's not really fair. So don't pay too much attention to that murder. Having now read three of Vervoort's novels in short succession, I've begun to notice he has a preference for cloaking his murderers in a particular type of camouflage. And that made the murderer here standout with the locked room clue eventually confirming my suspicion.

So, overall, Murder Among Virgins is not the strongest entry in the short-lived Floris Jansen series, but certainly not a bad detective novel offering an ingenious poisoning-trick, a surprise impossible crime and dealt a generally fair hand to the reader. More importantly, it ensured Vervoort a permanent place among the troupe of mystery writers I affectionately refer to as my favorite second-stringers. Sadly, I only have to track down a copy of Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Stage Actors, 1963) to complete the series, unless some previously unpublished manuscripts (Moord onder detectives?) turn up somewhere. I can only hope.

Deadly Thunder (1998) by Seimaru Amagi

Earlier this year, I tracked down and reviewed an obscure, hard-to-get Japanese light novel in The New Kindaichi Files series, Operazakan – aratanaru satsujin (Opera House, the New Murders, 1994), written by the Soji Shimada of the anime-and manga detective genre, Seimaru Amagi – who crafted a beautiful, perfectly executed theatrical (locked room) mystery. One of the better entries in the Kindaichi franchise demonstrating Amagi is a mystery writer who's firmly entrenched in the traditions of the shin honkaku school. 

A fact he already proved with another light novel, Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996), which is perhaps the first whodunit to use the internet in a meaningful way. Not to mention his original manga stories/anime adaptation of The Prison Prep School Murder Case, The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders and The Legendary Vampire Murders. So I was eager to get my hands on the other two translations in the series, but those editions were intended for Japanese readers learning to read and speak English. Consequently, the well of secondhand copies in the West is practically empty and bone-dry.

Nevertheless, I managed to get hold of a copy of the sixth title in the series, Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998), which is the fourth and last novel to be translated and is a relatively minor story compared to the bigger, previously mentioned cases – centering on "a spontaneous crime" with an improvised trick. A trick turning an otherwise simple, straightforward murder into an impossible crime! It's not the no-footprints trick that makes Deadly Thunder somewhat standout, but how the plot combined everything from elements of cultural anthropology and entomology to geology and meteorology. All of these different aspects come together in the remote, unique setting of the story with the result reminding me of the regional mysteries by Todd Downing and Arthur W. Upfield. Two names not often associated with the Japanese shin honkaku detective story. 

Deadly Thunder has a standard enough opening with Hajime Kindaichi and Miyuki Nanase traveling to a tiny, remote village to visit a former classmate, Akie Asaki.

The land around Kumoba Village is "shaped like a valley or a basin," which makes it very hot during the summer with clouds forming above the surrounding mountains to produce heavy thunder and rain storms. In the past, the locals thought these thunderstorms were an act of the gods and appeased them with the three-day Thunder Festival. A long-standing, unbroken traditional of 300 years that has preserved to the present-day, but the rain and thunderstorms also gifted the village something special and unique. A kind of clay that's only found in Kumoba Village, which is washed down from the mountains.

Akie comes from a long line of potters whose "curious, translucent white" pots were presented to the Shogun during the Edo period and the ground their family home stands on has the best pottery clay, which is why it's surrounded by a large, foreboding wall with spikes on top – erected by previous generations "to protect the clay from robbers." She has to share the home with her stepmother and stepsister, Hazuki and Shigure Asaki, who Akie and her aunt, Haruko, consider intruders ("those two"). They also have a quasi-residential house guest staying at the annex, Kyoichi Muto, who's an entomologist. Apparently, the village is also rather unique in its "variety and number of cicadas."

So the setting is very well piece of miniature world-building as Amagi created a small, unique geographical area and populated it with a unique, somewhat isolated culture. A culture with its own history, religious practices and even architecture. Such as all the houses being low built, single-storied "to avoid being struck by lightening" with a tall tree in every garden to "serve as a lightening conductor." Another interesting aspect is how rich Deadly Thunder is in sound. Deadly Thunder is filled with the sound of falling rain, claps of thunder, chanting, beating of drums and "the incessant drone of cicadas," which all helped elevate a mostly routine detective story.

This kind of world-building is unfortunately a rarity in the detective genre, but Amagi has done it before, on a much larger scale, for Detective Academy Q with The Kamikakushi Village Murder Case. I co-reviewed the anime adaptation with Jim here.

Anyway, as the story moves towards the halfway mark, everyone begins to prepare for the first day of the annual Thunder Festival, but the celebration, or rather spectacle, ends with Hazuki discovering Muto's body in annex – bludgeoned to death. The body was covered in "hundreds, no thousands, of cicada shells," but even more inexplicable where the two sets of footprints going from the back of the house to the annex. A set of fresh, recently made prints belong to Hazuki, while the older, rain washed tracks were made by the well-worn, easy to identify sandals of the victim. So with the question of time and rain taking into consideration, the tracks turned the murder into a locked room mystery! 

Deadly Thunder has only one body and three suspects, which has been done before in the series (e.g. The Blood Pool Hall Murder), but not very often and the plot really needed a good locked room-trick to give the plot some weight. Thankfully, the locked room-trick delivered as it did something new with the no-footprints scenario, but with all the clues in place necessary to arrive at (nearly) the same conclusion as Kindaichi. Why the body was covered in cicada shells was an inspired piece of plotting functioning as both a clue and a red herring.

The reader has an easier time putting all the pieces together than Kindaichi as he has to deal with a local policeman, Detective Akai, who's more annoyed than impressed by the grandson of "the master detective Kosuke Kindaichi." Even if he "solved several murder cases and mysteries that the police couldn't solve." Detective Akai only sees an ordinary high school student who speaks to adults like they were taking classes together. Kindaichi has to learn and show a little humility before getting an opportunity to prove himself to Detective Akai. One of those many small touches that made the story shine.

There is, however, a minor problem with the solution. Amagi added a last-minute twist that gave the story an ending as black as the ink with which it was printed, but not a fair surprise as it's impossible to anticipate the motivation behind the act. A smudge on an otherwise very well written, competently plotted detective story.

That being said, the good definitely outweighed the bad with a simple, but good, locked room-trick and a splendid, vividly realized setting, which told its story in less than a 130 pages with full-length illustrations. The short length proved to be an asset as it enlarged all its strong points and prevented the story from overstaying its welcome by dwelling on its weaknesses. So, yeah, a perfect detective story to nip at during a lazy summer afternoon.

Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll? (1939) by Mika Waltari

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) has a little-known, often overlooked section tucked away in the end papers, "Foreign-Language Books," which lists a small selection of French, German and Swedish titles alongside a lonesome Finish novel – penned by mainstream novelist and translator, Mika Waltari. Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofin? (Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll?, 1939) introduced Waltari's series-detective, Brigadier Frans J. Palmu, who appeared in three detective novels that have never been translated into English. 

There is, however, an obscure, 1960s Dutch translation of Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll? and a copy of Wie vermoordde mevrouw Kroll? finally came my way. Today's post is going to be a poorly written, pan-European review of the Dutch translation of the Swedish edition of a Finnish detective novel in English. So please be patient, my Anglo-American friends. 

Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll? opens at a shabby, rundown apartment building owned by a strictly religious and wealthy, but stingy, widow, Mrs. Alma Kroll – who lived on the top floor. One morning, the tenants notices "an unpleasant smell of gas" on the staircase and the postman is greeted by a strong, gassy smell when he lifted the flap of Mrs. Kroll's mail-slot. Everything remained deadly quiet inside. So they call in the police to break open the door and discover the bodies of "the old miser" and her dog, which appears to have been an accidental gas-poisoning. A kind of accident that was only too common in those days.

Brigadier Frans J. Palmu is a rough edged, old-school policeman with a much younger, university educated assistant, Toivo Virta, who's completely up-to-date with the scientific literature on criminology and criminal psychology. Virta also doubles as the story's narrator and they beautifully play off each other.

While Virta is the more scientifically grounded of the two, he wishes his superior had "a little bit of imagination," but Palmu tells him if he had any imagination he would have it "surgically removed or resign." Palmu more than once has to reprimand him not to indulge in romanticism, but respects his intelligence with the tendency to take credit for his ideas. So you can compare their partnership to Christopher Bush's Ludovic Travers and Superintendent George Wharton.

Palmu concludes that the death of Mrs. Kroll was not an accidental gas-poisoning, but a calculated, carefully-staged murder. A very "special murder" that's "committed once every ten years." However, the murderer made a few costly mistakes. Firstly, the dog had its neck savagely broken and the murderer had tried to put the body in a natural position on its pillow. Secondly, two-hundred thousand Finnish marks in cash is missing and someone may have tampered with Mrs. Kroll's sleeping pills, but Palmu's inspection also revealed that the murder is an impossible crime in appearance only – which is why I didn't use the "locked room mystery" tag. I can see how it ended up in Adey's Locked Room Murders, but you'll be a little disappointed, if you expect to find one. What can I say? Goddamn Scandinavians!

So the plot becomes primarily concerned with the who-and why with a closed-circle of suspects and motives that were thrown in disarray by a last-minute testament. Mrs. Kroll was a member of the Congregation of Bethlehem, a Protestant sect, who were set to inherit a sizable chunk of her fortune to build a church. But she found out something unsavory about their leader, Pastor Mustapäa. So she immediately changed her testament, which now completely favored her stepdaughter and nephew. Mrs. Kroll hoped to unite them in marriage, but Kirsti Kroll and Karl Lankela had incompatible personalities who don't really like each other. There's also Mrs. Kroll's underpaid, downtrodden lawyer, Mr. Lanne, to consider and Lankela's close friend and surrealistic painter, Kurt Kuurna, to scrutinize.

Palmu and Vitra have to do lot of talking and scraping to get a clear story and gather all of the "tangible clues" they can find, which comprises of a matchstick, shoe prints, drops of blood and a defective lock on a courtyard gate. I know this sounds like Waltari was dragging-the-marshes with a pinch of humdrum detection, but Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll? is a pleasantly told, leisurely paced detective story, which somehow worked really well here. There was some nicely done scenes like an enthusiastic, 15-year-old boy showing Palmu how school boys entered the courtyard by manipulating the defective lock. A discovery that eliminated another obstacle for both the murderer and the detectives.

So you gentle drift towards the solution with perhaps the biggest surprise being tucked away at the end of the penultimate chapter, which ends with a full-blown, Ellery Queen-style "Challenge to the Reader" – announcing that "all the facts are now in the hands of the reader." Why not add a pinch of Americanism? This review is already an international affair. I wasn't able to answer every single question, but did, sort of, figured out the murderer's identity and motive. 

Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll strongly reminded me of C. Buddingh's Vrijwel op slag (Almost Instantly, 1953), a Dutch detective novel, which both attempted to create homegrown strain of the Anglo-American detective story. At the time, they locally were a big fish in a small pond, but, compared to those Anglo-American counterparts, they're nothing more than good, well-intended, second-tier detective novels. So nice to have and read, if they happen to come your way, but nothing to lose sleep over if they never do. 

A note for the curious: John Pugmire and Brian Skupin's mega locked room and impossible crime anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017), has a two-page extract from a Finnish novel, Aleksis Kivi's Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870), discussing and solving a fascinating and original no-footprints mystery.

Murder Under the Mantle of Love (1964) by Ton Vervoort

Three months ago, I reviewed Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) by "Ton Vervoort," a penname of Peter Verstegen, who's (or was?) a Dutch author, editor and translator partial to astrology, chess and detective fiction – penning six detective novels himself during the 1960s. Murder Among Astrologists displayed the influence of S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen on Vervoort's work complete with weird architecture and a dying message. 

Aligning your work with the Van Dine-Queen School is a high bar to clear, especially for a Dutch mystery writer in the '60s, but Vervoort cunningly pulled it off by under promising and over delivering on the plot. An all too rare quality in the Dutch-language detective story and an invitation to return sooner rather than later. So moved another one of his novels to the top of the big pile. 

Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) is the fourth title in the Inspector Floris Jansen series and gives the reader a modern take on the Golden Age serial killer story. A very odd one at that, but a genuine whodunit pull a la Agatha Christie. But despite the Anglo-American touches, it's also one of the most stereotypical Dutch detective novels I've ever come across. 

Murder Under the Mantle of Love begins as a regular detective story with the narrator, Ton Vervoort, perusing the newspaper and reading about the brutal murder of "the well-known doctor, botanist and sinologist," Dr. Ed Hinke – who had his neck broken in his private study. Dr. Hinke had fallen victim to a "terrible disease," polio, which left him partial paralyzed and forced him to retire. Not merely from his medical practice and public life, but from his family as well. Only one with constant, unfettered access to the doctor is his live-in nurse, Anjo Collet. Vervoort reads that the investigation has been placed in the capable hands of Inspector Floris Jansen, of the Amsterdam police, who's an old friend of his. So it takes one phone call to secure a front row seat as his "secretary."

A practice that's not particularly popular with his colleagues and the story notes that there was "a strong animosity" against Jansen's "way of life and methods." But he can get away with it due to his "independent position" at headquarters.

Vervoort follows Jansen to Dr. Hinke's seventeenth century grachtenpand (canal house), on the Keizersgracht, where he lived with all of his immediately relatives, but they're not an ordinary family. Dr. Hinke's oldest son, Hans, is an interior decorator and a pedantic snob with an inferiority complex and posses "a stiff dose of jealousy" towards his younger brother, Maarten. A sensual, womanizing student of medicine with all the wrong friends and an abrasively liberal attitude towards euthanasia ("Hitler discredited the killing of the terminally ill and insane"), which all infuriated their sister, Daphne. She's a geologist and secular puritan who believed that "the morals of the Dutch were in a pitiful state" and passionately disapproved of her brother's openly flaunting his frivolous love life. Something else she hated is having to share the third-floor with her father's secret, long-lost Dutch-Indonesian wife, Topsy, who thought Dr. Hinke had died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp – until she came to the Netherlands. Topsy came to the house a month before the murder and she brought along the 21-year-old son Dr. Hinke had never seen, Tjallie. Lastly, there's Tanny Hinke, Hans' wife, who has a very expensive and luxurious taste and it was costing her husband a pretty penny. This really angered his father. Dr. Hinke believed "a woman should be grateful for every penny awarded to her" and getting into debt to finance her lavish lifestyle was ridiculous. And even offered to pay for the divorce.

So they're practically a happy, tightly-knit and stable household, but the biggest discovery Jansen makes is that Dr. Hinke was addicted to smoking opium. Not only was Dr. Hinke smoking three, or more, pipes a day, he was growing poppies right next to the orchids in his locked attic. We have a victim who made drugs in his attic and suspects who are the flesh-and-blood incarnation of Dutch bluntness. Yes, a prostitute briefly appears as a witness during second-half of the story. I told you this was an unmistakably, bordering on stereotypical, post-war Dutch detective novel.

The murder of Dr. Hinke can be summed up as a traditional whodunit with a new coat of paint to reflect the changing times, but, around the halfway mark, the whole case is turned upside down and inside out.

Nurse Anjo confides in Jansen that she often has "predictive dreams" and had a dream-like prophecy about Dr. Hinke's murder. Before the murder, she dreamed that her employer was killed with a hammer, which is not exactly what happened, but pretty close and she continues to have strange, predictive dreams throughout the second-half of the story – revealing an active serial killer in Amsterdam! A killer preying on invalids who had become embittered with "nothing more to expect from life." These serial murders take the police out of the original crime scene and scatter them across the city which, especially to non-Dutch readers, can come across as a sight-seeing tour of Amsterdam.

A gallery attendant at the Rijksmuseum, who lost all his fingers in an accident with a cutting machine, unexpectedly drops dead among the museum visitors. An invalid with a cigarette-and-candy cart on the boisterous, rowdy Zeedijk is found dead by a window prostitute and a third dream has the police scouring all the cafes in the city for a man with a seeing-eye dog. All of them are poisoned with an uncommon, difficult to trace substance.

So the story moves away from a modern whodunit with a closed-circle of suspects to parapsychological manhunt for not only a serial killer, but the prospective victims with the last murder being somewhat of a tragedy. Just like with Murder Among Astrologists, I began to wonder how Vervoort was going to tie everything together satisfactory as his loose storytelling and small page-count didn't quite promise a neo-Golden Age detective story. What seemed to make the most sense was that Dr. Hinke had, somehow, distributed the poison and someone killed him to put a stop to it, which turned out to be wrong, but it did put me on the right track. Vervoort ended up doing something completely different with the motive, how the murders were carried out and kind of liked how he spun a complications out of inconvenient alibis, accidental clues and vanishing red herrings – some being better and clearer than others. But, on a whole, it made for a good and unusual Dutch detective story.

Only thing that can be said against Murder Under the Mantle of Love is the same as about Murder Among Astrologists. Vervoort had some good and clever ideas, some were even inspired, but he had too light a style, or touch, to utilize them to their full potential. So it doesn't fully measure up to its Anglo-American counterparts.

Nonetheless, it was quite impressive that Vervoort managed to tell two different types of detective stories in his light style with a small page-count, but still managed to link them together with a logical, inevitable solution that didn't feel like a letdown. Vervoort evidently knew what makes a plot tick and wish he had continued writing detective novels, because half a dozen is hardly enough to keep me satisfied. I need more Dutch detective writers like Vervoort!

So his remaining detective novels, Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Stage Actors, 1963), Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) and Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965), have been bumped to the top of my wishlist. I'm also looking into the few short stories he wrote. Such as "Burleske aan de galg" ("Burlesque on the Gallows," 1965) and "Het alibi" ("The Alibi," 1968). Wordt vervolgd!