The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) by Norman Berrow

Norman Berrow was, like Fergus Hume and Arthur W. Upfield, a British-born Antipodean mystery novelist whose parents settled down in Ngaio Marsh's hometown, Christchurch, New Zealand, where he became one of the country's foremost craftsman of the locked room mystery – only Max Afford nipped close at his heels. You can find an entire page worth filled with alluring descriptions of Berrow's original-sounding impossible crime fiction in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

The Bishop's Sword (1948) has no less than three impossible appearances and disappearances, which includes astral-projection and the theft of a sword from a hermetically sealed cabinet. A giant, disembodied thumb crushes a man to death in The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) and Don't Jump, Mr. Boland! (1954) has a body inexplicably vanishing from the bottom of a steep cliff, but my sole exposure to Berrow had been his ambitious take on the 1855 Devil's Hoof-marks of Devon, The Footprints of Satan (1950). An impossible crime novel that turned the footprints-in-the-snow gimmick into a wintry obstacle course.

So what has kept me from exploring Berrow's work further? Honestly, I've no idea. Somehow, Berrow simply slipped through the cracks, but my fellow blogger and locked room fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, has been praising his work for years and served as a reminder to, one of the days, return to Berrow – which brings us to the subject of today's review. Another one of Berrow's detective novels listed in Locked Room Murders with several fantastic-sounding impossibilities.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) is the first title in the Detective-Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith series and has a plot comprising of three isolated, seemingly unconnected disappearance cases defying the laws of space and time.

Winchingham is "a pleasant, peaceful spot" with "an old-world, unhurried atmosphere" populated by "industrious, unassuming and law-abiding" people. A small, quiet town with "no vices," but the Winchingham became the stage of "a triple mystery" that disturbed "the cosmic calm of esoteric circles" in Great Britain and was eventually solved by "a prosaic police officer." An eerie, fantastic case of The Man Who Had No Existence, the Phantom Room and The Stolen Street!

The first fantastic tier begins with a woman, Miss Janet Soames, who lives with her "selfish, domineering old humbug" of a brother and golf was her only escape from the house. Miss Soames was on the verge of becoming a middle-aged spinster when, one day, out of nowhere, Prince Charming appears.

Philip Strong claims to have been in love with her for a long time and they begin each other, in secret, until they decide to elope under the cover of night. Philip brings her to the house of an old friend, Jimmy Melrose, who has become an ardent spiritualist in his old age and even his very own séance room, but Janet has an eerie, unsettling feeling before entering the house – like "a forerunner of the nightmare" that was about to engulf her. Janet witnesses how Philip cheerfully mounting a staircase and waited for the top board to utter its "protesting creak," but she only caught a very deep sigh and, just like that, Philip ceased to exist. Not only had he had vanished, like a popped soap bubble, but everyone denied he was ever there! A cabdriver and Mr. Melrose's butler, Porter, swear up and down Janet had arrived at the house alone. And the Philip Strong they knew had been dead for the past seven years!

The "invisible companion" had been brilliantly used by John Dickson Carr in his well-known radio-play, "Cabin B-13," which later received a highly original treatment at the hands of Edward D. Hoch with "The Problem of the Leather Man" (collected in All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2017), but the solution was underwhelming and the premise clumsily handled. Giving too much away about the overarching scheme to the suspicious-minded armchair detective. There is, however, still so much to come!

In the Second Tier, the reader is introduced to an astute businessman and embezzler, Sherman Stokes, who's in the process of absconding with a modest fortune. But he's interrupted by his private-secretary, Miss Lana Booth. She knows what he has been up to and want to share in the spoils, which comes with an offer to become his "wife" and already has made arrangements. So without much of choice, Stokes agrees and they set-off for South America, but their car breaks down in Winchingham and are forced to stay the night at a haunted roadhouse, The Welcome Inn – which was once the property of an eccentric recluse whose hobby was dabbling in mysticism. Since he died at the turn of the century, the place has been haunted by a mischievous entity that has steadily chased away paying customers. So the place is closing down the following day. Stokes and Miss Booth can only get a room with no service, but what a room!

An old-looking, but royally furnished room, with a fireplace, french-windows, tapestry and huge, Queen-like bed with red, gold-flecked bedspread and "a Tibetan devil-mask" hanging on the wall – located on the second-floor. Only problem is that there's no such room at the inn. The place doesn't even have a second-floor! The phantom room has disappeared together with a valise full of embezzled money!

This second impossibility of a phantom room and a non-existent, second-floor is easily the best of the three with a more carefully handled presentation and a satisfying solution, which is not entirely original at its core. But the idea was very well executed. Coincidentally, the earlier mentioned Hoch collection, All But Impossible, has a short story, entitled "The Problem of the Phantom Parlor," working with the same idea and plot-elements. So did Hoch read The Three Tiers of Fantasy and thought he could improve on the first two impossibilities, because I can see how he saw possibilities for alternative, more original, solutions in the answers to the tier one and two.

Funnily enough, you can find a third story in All But Impossible, "The Problem of the Missing Roadhouse," which has an impossible disappearance that's a mixture of tier two and three. But not nearly as good as the other two stories or this novel.

The third and final tier is a direct ancestor of Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) with an alleyway, haunted by visions of the long-ago past, which has recently began to disappear and reappear again. Mrs. Josephine Prattley has decided to spend the weekend at the house of a local artist, Darcy Cherrington, but, when they arrive at his home, he tells Mrs. Prattley to wait outside as he puts the car away and simply vanishes without a sound – prompting her to enter the garage. She walks straight into "an medieval drinking den" with "medieval-looking people," speaking Shakespearean English, where she sees two of those people being put to the sword. A horrendous crime that took place there in 1597! Mrs. Prattley flies the scene, but, when she returns with a policeman in tow, the whole passageway has vanished. Only to reappear a short while later!

The problem of the stolen street is, sadly, the least impressive, or imaginative, of the three miraculous vanishings and even Detective-Inspector Smith admits the explanation is "disappointingly simple." But, in the defense of the author, there's only so much you can do to make a street disappear and the solution provided an entirely new answer to the problem. So there's that.

Detective-Inspector Smith makes short appearances in each tier to discuss and comment on these fantastic problems, but finally stirs to life in the fourth act, "The Toppling of the Tiers," in which he methodically reconstructs and demolishes the supernatural events that have plagued Winchingham. And there were more than those three apparently supernatural disappearances. The locked séance room of Mr. Melrose is ransacked by an evil, otherworldly, entity and a road barricade proved to have an illusory quality. Framed pictures were flying off the wall and a lift was operated by invisible hands at the inn. A man who left no fingerprints and a hat and coat go missing without anyone having been near them before they disappeared.

One by one, Smith strips them of their unearthly quality to reveal "the underlying sordid, mercenary motive" and, as an impossible crime, fanboy it was joy to read these chapters. You can figure out pretty much everything before you get to these explanatory chapters, but loved how these plot-strands were intertwined and knotted together at the end. Some other, non-impossible aspects of the solution were a bit cliché, but, honestly, I have never seen them put to better use than here.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy has a plot brimming with ghostly activities, supernatural occurrences and inexplicable disappearances, which makes it tempting to draw a comparison with Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but story was not packed a dark, doom-laden atmosphere – more in the spirit of a spirited, pulp-style caper (c.f. Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus, 1951). Or perhaps a better comparison would be some of the later "Carter Dickson" titles in which Carr experimented with murderless detective novels about impossible disappearances, such as Lord of the Sorcerers (1945) and A Graveyard to Let (1949), but written with the vigor of Herbert Brean (e.g. Hardly a Man is Now Alive, 1950).

So, to cut a long, rambling review short, The Three Tiers of Fantasy only failed to tax the brains of the armchair detective, but, in every other aspect, it was a thoroughly entertaining mystery caper crammed with impossible situations and locked room puzzles! Highly recommended, if your taste runs in that direction.

Beware of the Dog: Case Closed, vol. 70 by Gosho Aoyama

The 70th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally titled Detective Conan in Japan, is composed of two grand stories, involving Harley Hartwell and Kaito KID, but the opening chapter concludes the story that began in the last two chapters of the previous volume – in which the Junior Detective League uncover a dark crime in an empty house haunted by piano music. A very minor and forgettable story.

However, the next two stories are wonderfully done homages to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Maurice Leblanc.

One of my favorite recurring side-characters returns in the first story, Jirokichi Sebastian, whose foil is that elusive master magician of thievery, Kaito KID, but this time, the game is played a little bit different without the grand traps and counter plots of their previous encounters – e.g. volumes 61, 65 and 68. Aoyama came up with good reason that makes this such an interesting and unusual story.

The story is set against a revival of public interest in a historical figure, Ryōma Sakamoto, who was revolutionary reformer instrumental in setting the stage for the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Jirokichi Sebastian has opened an exhibition devoted to him at the Great Sebastian Museum and the centerpiece is "the jeweled gun belt" that was gifted to Ryōma, which has "a huge ruby embedded in the buckle." Shishihiko Tarumi is the sleazy owner of the belt and had the item authenticated by a shady appraiser, Masanosuke Hanamura, but refused to sell it to Jirokichi. Only agreeing to loan it to him for exhibition.

Normally, the gun belt would be used as bait in an attempt to trap Kaito KID, however, the thief has announced that he'll be visiting the Ryōma exhibition soon, not to steal the gun belt, but "to return three items" that were stolen twenty years ago – namely a half-finished letter, a drinking cup and a Smith & Wesson model 1 revolver. A gift from America that went with the bejeweled belt. These historical items were stolen by "a famous thief and mistress of disguise from the Showa Era," The Phantom Lady, who employed "theatrical tactics straight out of horror movies" to steal from "corrupt companies and crooked millionaires." And the story suggests she's related to KID.

So here the problem is not how KID is going to take a valuable object from the museum, which Jirokichi turned into "a high-tech rat trap," but how he's going to return the stolen loot from twenty years ago. This involves a minor, quasi-impossible problem: how did KID get the revolver pass the metal detector and three security gates.

On a whole, this was a fun little caper with clever bits, such as why KID's scheme required a rainy day, but the inverted take on the traditional heist stories in this series is what made it a truly memorable meeting between Conan, Jirokichi and KID.

The second story is Aoyama's homage to Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles with a dash of Seishi Yokomizo's Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951), which found a completely new way to explain the presence of a spectral beast hounding members of a cursed family to their deaths. A story that begins when Harley Hartwell and Kazuha visit Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to entice them to join them on a real-life counterpart of the Baskerville case.

Five years ago, the chairman of the Inbushi Group, Tsunechika Inubushi, died of terminal cancer, but, after his death, "tons of people showed up at his family's doorstep" claiming to be his love-children – claims backed up by photos of their mothers with the chairman. However, while the claims could not be fully proved, his widow adopted no less than eight of them! More importantly, the vast family fortune will be divided between them when the now sickly widow dies. And this makes it very suspicious that two of them have died under peculiar circumstances.

One of the victim's fell off a cliff, but lived long enough to tell he had been chased by "a demon dog with a body of blazin' fire." Reputedly, one of the heirs is an impostor with a grudge against the family and is trying to eradicate the bloodline by "summoning a spectral hound."

Hartwell became involved with the case and traveled to Tokyo to talk with one of the heirs, who left the family estate and renounced his inheritance, but they arrived too late. The man is found dead, besides a charcoal stove, with the door and windows sealed with duct tape. A classic locked room mystery, but Conan and Hartwell immediately solve the problem, which I suspected (considering the situation) would borrow its solution from a relatively well-known impossible crime novel by a famous mystery writer – which was not the case. The trick used here is pretty daring and dangerous, but could have been improved by adding a single detail to the murderer's plan.

By the way, the name of the victim happens to be Shinichi Kudo, which is Jimmy Kudo's (Conan) name in the original Japanese manga. There is, however, no deeper meaning to them sharing the same name.

What does deepen the mystery is the explanation to the problem of the sealed room and they decide to go down to the Inubushi estate to tackle the demonic dog head on. But what they got is another murder, a trail of blazing paw-prints and they even witnessed the flaming dog on two separate occasions. On the second time, it attacked one of the heirs before vanishing as if by magic in the dark night.

After a while, the murderer is relatively easily spotted and the explanation for the flaming paw-prints is not entirely convincing, although the clue of the smell of rotten onions was clever, but the trick behind the spectral dog with a body of fire was brilliant – a trick demonstrating that modern innovations hasn't made clever plotting obsolete. This story is basically a retelling of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles with a modern interpretation of the ghost-trick from Jacques Futrelle's "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom" (1907). A great story to close out this milestone volume.

So, all in all, this is a solid volume with two great stories featuring some of the series most popular recurring side-characters, which made the weak story that opened it more than forgivable. And now, onwards to volume 80!

On a final note, I compiled a list back in April of my five favorite locked room mysteries and impossible crimes from this series, which you can read here, if you're interested or missed it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) by Gigi Pandian

Gigi Pandian is the award-winning author of the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt books, a series of archaeological mysteries, which have been in my peripheral for years, because Pandian is an admirer of John Dickson Carr and has been penning quite a few locked room stories – all with a historical or archaeological background. I love locked room and archaeological mysteries! So why did it take me so long to finally get around to Pandian?

The series has a cozy, girly vibe that was a little off-putting and add the seemingly never ending flood of reprints, translations and classics that kept coming my way, you have the reason why Pandian never got past my wish list. Not until last year, that is.

The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) is billed as "a treasure trove of nine locked room mysteries" and Douglas G. Greene, of Crippen & Landru, wrote a foreword for this collection. Well, that was more than enough to lure this locked room fanboy in. However, my advise is to skip Greene's foreword until you've read the stories, because he reveals a red-thread that runs through them that will probably ruin part of the fun if you're a fanatical locked room – as well as laying bare a general weakness of the collection. Greene's foreword really should have been an afterword. So, with that out of the way, let's get to the stories.

The opening story is a novella original to this collection, "The Cambodian Curse," in which a former con man turned security expert, Henry North, asks Jaya Jones to help him find a statue that was stolen from a museum under seemingly impossible circumstances. A statue from Cambodian, known as The Churning Women, was the museum's centerpiece with curse resting on it. A string of anonymous letters warned the owners to return the statue to Cambodia, but the only precaution they took was moving it to a secure office on the second floor – a room without windows and security cameras outside. This office room is the scene of a seemingly impossible murder and theft.

Jaya Jones spends most of the story looking for the "missing pieces of history" and reconstructing the family history of both the victim and her museum. Unfortunately, the locked room angle is not really examined until very late into the story and the solution is a complete letdown. A type of solution I utterly despise as an explanation for an impossible crime. I hate it even more than the timeworn secreted panels, hidden passages, unknown poisons and pieces of strings or pliers. So not exactly an auspicious beginning of this collection.

The second story, entitled "The Hindi Houdini," was originally published in Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology (2013) and the detective here is not Jaya Jones, but her best friend and stage magician, Sanjay Rai – who's known as The Hindi Houdini and briefly appeared in "The Cambodian Curse." Rai is preparing for a magic show in California's Napa Valley when the theater manager, "a crass womanizer," is murdered in his locked office. Suspicion falls on a former mistress, but Rai clears her name by finding an answer as to how the murderer managed to get pass the locked door. The trick, or rather the principle behind the trick, has a long, storied history in the genre, but was competently handled here. A routine affair as far as locked room stories goes.

Luckily, the third story is easily the best one of the lot and my personal favorite. "The Haunted Room" was originally published in Murder on the Beach (2014), in which Jaya Jones listens to the peculiar history of the titular room in a house dating back to "the post-Gold Rush boom in the late 1800s." The room is not so much haunted as it suffers from a serious case of kleptomania. A nifty twist on the room that kills (e.g. Carter Dickson's The Red Widow Murders, 1935). Over the decades, all kinds of items have inexplicably disappeared from the room, such as children's toys and a ring, but, during the early 1900s, "a valuable scroll" of historical importance disappeared from the room – only problem is that the room had been locked at the time. And the occupant of the room, a scholar, had placed a chair under the door handle.

I know of only one other impossible crime story that uses a hungry (locked) room that gobbles up its content, which can be found in Case Closed, vol. 66, but Pandian had the better solution of the two, because it was more elegant, original and thoroughly clued. If I had to pick a story from this collection for a locked room anthology, it would probably be "The Haunted Room." Really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, I didn't like the next novella at all. "The Library Ghost of Tanglewood Inn" was published in 2017 as an ebook and even won the Agatha Award for Best Short Story, but every idea from the plot was borrowed from other detective stories or series – running from Conan Doyle to Jonathan Creek. The past murder inside the inaccessible library, blocked by a table, gives away that Pandian has seen Jonathan Creek. It's practically identical to one of the episodes!

Granted, the use of a hardcover edition of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) was a clever touch, but even that gimmick came from a rather well-known historical mystery. So, no, I didn't like this story at all.

The next story, "The Curse of Cloud Castle," originally appeared in Asian Pulp (2015) and returns to the exploits of the Hindi Houdini, Sanjay Rai, who finds himself stuck on an artificial island with "a storybook castle." An island that was created only ten years before by a tech billionaire who made his fortune in cloud computing and the cast of characters mostly consist of Silicon Valley people. A good way to replant the classic trope of a closed circle of people in modern times. Naturally, someone is murdered under impossible circumstances, but, once again, the solution turned out to be one of the easiest, most simplistic locked room-tricks in the book.

"Tempest in a Teapot" was first printed in LAdies Night (2015) and the story introduces yet another one of Pandian's detective-characters, Tempest Raj Mendez, who's a magician friend of Sanjay Rai and has an interesting impossible situation – a botched stage trick. A man stepped into a barrel-size wicker basket, situated in the middle of a stage, while an assistant plunged a plastic sword into the basket followed by a scream. When they opened the basket, they found the man curled up inside with "a pool of blood spreading across his stomach." The impossible situation recalls Carter Dickson's Seeing is Believing (1941), but the solution is a play on Edward D. Hoch's favorite technique. And think his fans will most appreciate this story.

"A Dark and Stormy Light" was originally published in Malice Domestic: Murder Most Conventional (2016) and can hardly be described as an impossible crime story, but is, together with "The Haunted Room," the best story of the collection with one of the freshest take on the "gentleman thief" in the West – which should please fans of Maurice Leblanc and rogue fiction in general. Jones tells Rai the story of the second conference of historians as a grad student.

The history conference was sharing the hotel with a mystery writers' conference, "a friendly bunch," who turned out to be even "bigger drinkers than historians" and their guest of honor is a famously reclusive mystery writer, Ursula Light. She takes a firm hand in the investigation of the he disappearance of a keynote speaker of the history conference, Milton York. York claimed to have discovered a diary that would change "some widely held assumptions about why the Dutch lost their stronghold in India," but has not been seen since the pre-conference meetings. The only quasi-impossibility, at a stretch, is a discrepancy in time. However, this is hardly to the detriment of the plot and has a fun explanation for the missing speaker. And revealed a great villain who should be brought back in future stories.

The next story, "The Shadow of the River," originally appeared in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology (2011) and is the shortest story in the lineup. The story begins with Jones being on scene when the body of Dr. Omar Khan, a professor of history, is found behind the locked bolted door of his university office – beaten to death with "a thick wooden figure" of a smiling Buddha. Recently, Dr. Khan had discovered "an ancient map depicting three sacred rivers in India," which was now missing except for a small, torn piece that was found on the edge of the desk. The solution is another golden oldie, but was nicely put to use here and this should probably have been the opening story. If only because it appears to be Pandian's earliest published short story.

Personally, I believe it's better to open a collection, like this one, with a writer's earliest work, because, if the stories are good, shows the reader the author progressed and improved over time. Sticking it at the end show the opposite.

Finally, The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories closes with a novella, "Fool's Gold," which was first published in Other People's Baggage: Three Interconnected Novellas (2012) and has interesting gimmick. Each of the novellas are standalone stories, but are finked together by having the characters from the three different writers ending up with each other's baggage. Admittedly, this is certainly a novel way to link all these characters together without having them actually meet. Hey, I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room puzzle. Anyway, the lost baggage here is only a minor inconvenience to Jones. The real problem is the theft of a golden and silver chess pieces, which were taken from a hotel safe by blowing it open, but the thief never emerged from the room after the explosion. Jones is accompanied by her magician friend on this investigation. A fun, amusing and good story to close out the collection, but not particularly challenging as far as the impossibility is concerned.

My review has been rather lukewarm and this has to do with the problem that was inadvertently highlighted by Greene in his foreword. These stories, without giving too much away, hardly break any new ground with the exception of two stories, "The Haunted Room" and "A Dark and Stormy Light" – standouts of the collections. So you shouldn't go into it expecting a shin honkaku-style locked room puzzles that employ elaborate architecture or severed body parts to craft intricate and original impossible crimes. This is mostly written as a tribute to everyone's favorite mystery trope.

In the end, I think The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories will be more appreciated by fans of the series and modern cozies than the fanatical locked room reader looking for another La nuit du loup (The Night of the Wolf, 2000; Paul Halter), Keikichi Osaka's The Ginza Ghost (2017) or Arthur Porges' These Daisies Told (2018).

Well, so far my tepid review, but good news, I found something promising from the late Golden Age that, thematically, has something in common with this collection. And not just because it's an impossible crime novel with a murder taking place in a locked museum.

These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie (2018) by Arthur Porges

Back in September, 2017, I reviewed Arthur Porges' No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman (2017), a slim, 86-page volume comprising half a dozen short detective stories, which were first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine during the early 1960s and finally brought back into print by Richard Simms – who runs The Arthur Porges Fan Site and Richard Simms Publications. I closed my review with the comment that, hopefully, the next collection would gather the stories from the Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie series.

Simms posted in the comment-section that he was seriously considering doing such a collection and eventually received an email from him telling me that he was working on another volume, entitled These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie (2018), which was released in early September.

So that was surprisingly fast considering there was less than a year between my suggestion and publication, but very much appreciated.

The series consists of eleven stories and were mostly published in the previously mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, from 1962 to 1964, with only two of them appearing in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and This Week – a Sunday magazine supplement to The Los Angeles Times, The Salt Lake Tribune and The Cincinnati Enquirer. A final story was published more than a decade later in the May, 1975, issue of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Mystery Magazine. This is the first time they appear in print together.

Prof. Ulysses Price Middlebie is a retired Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science. A keen ornithologist and devout naturalist who began to apply his scientific knowledge in the field of criminology when a former pupil, Detective Sergeant Black, asked his advice in a disappearance case and he has kept coming back ever since – usually with a seemingly impossible problem. I should mention that not every story in this collection is, strictly speaking, an impossible crime or locked room story. They're all howdunits with seven, or so, qualifying as (quasi) impossible crime stories. So a nice little feast for fans of the pure, puzzle-driven detective story.

The opening story, "These Daisies Told," introduces the reader to Prof. Middlebie and how "his universal grasp of nature" helped him to acquire "his niche as consultant in crime" when a former pupil turned up on his doorstep with a tantalizing problem.

Detective Sergeant Black knows Dale Corsi murdered his wife, who has been gone for a week, but is unable to locate the body. A problem exacerbated by the fact that they lived on a small ranch quite off the main highway. So there are more than enough place where Corse could have secreted the body, but Middlebie's mind houses a rich depository of knowledge about the natural world and this helped him spot the hidden location of the body without too much trouble – revealing a truly clever way to dispose of a body. Apparently, Porges thought this was "one of his cleverest ideas" and you can hardly disagree with him. My only complaint is that the central clue required specialized knowledge to get an inkling of the solution. Still a good opening to a solid collection.

The second story, "The Unguarded Path," has a unique premise for a locked room mystery: Middlebie is not asked to help his one-time pupil, Detective Sergeant Black, to solve an impossible crime, but to prevent one from happening. An angle that had never been used before.

Franklin Devoe was the lawyer for the Syndicate and knows "where all the bodies are buried," which makes his ex-employers very nervous, because Devoe is ready to talk and they sicked their best contract killer on him. Joe Vasta is described by Black as "a kind of criminal Professor Middlebie" with a habit of sending "a whole series of letters to the man he's after" and is behind a string of mob hits that "left the police flatfooted" – now he has been sending letters to Devoe promising he'll be dead before he can appear before the Grand Jury. The police has Devoe "covered the way they watched Khrushchev when he came to New York" and his estate is a locked up as tight as a drum with guards patrolling the grounds.

So Black asks his former professor to help prevent a murder that could not possibly happen and Middlebie uses his scientific knowledge to show him "an unguarded path for murder" that "most houses have." The idea of this unguarded path is almost on par with the idea of the Judas window from Carter Dickson's homonymously titled The Judas Window (1938). Easily one of my favorite stories from this collection!

The next story is "The Missing Bow" and the plot is odd one that doesn't really work for me. Howard Cole used to manage a sporting goods store, but more importantly, he was "an expert archer." He even did all trick shots for a Robin Hood TV-series. That all ended when Victor Borden rammed his car into Cole's that killed his wife and 8-year-old daughter. Cole lost an arm and was so mangled below the waist he can only hobble around now, however, he somehow managed to fire an arrow into Borden, but was practically caught in the act in a blind alley and here the problem begins – no weapon, like a bow or crossbow, was found on him. And there was no place or time to hide one. Not to mention the physical impossibility of loosening an arrow with one arm.

Middlebie finds the solution to this conundrum in an old, dusty tome from 1903 and the explanation is legitimate, but unconvincing and Porges must have realized this, because a lot of emphasize is placed on the motive. This is a trick requiring a very dedicated and driven murderer. So it might work for some readers, but I was not impressed by it.

The fourth entry is a short-short, "Small, Round Man from Texas," which reminded me of the shorter works and radio-plays by Ellery Queen. Black and Middlebie assist a French policeman, Inspector Paul Hermite Rameau, to capture a master thief, Cauchy Fourier Boussinesq, who's internationally known as the Chameleon. A man of six feet five inches tall, but has a talent for illusions to make himself unnoticeable and this short-short is a demonstration of his talent. And, no, Porges didn't copy-paste the solution from John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938). So, this was really short, but fun, little story.

The next story is another short-short, "Blood Will Tell," in which Black poses an impossible challenge to Middlebie: a multi murderer is about to go off scot-free unless they can get a blood sample, but the suspect simply refuses to give them a sample and has claimed everything from religious objections to the Fifth Amendment. So the courts has warned Black not "to touch his sacred veins" or else. Middlebie has a trick up his sleeve to get a blood sample and this makes for yet another very short, but incredibly fun, short-short story. As an aside, I think "Blood Without Violence" would have been better title for this impossible challenge.

The next story is one of Porges' best locked room stories, entitled "Coffee Break," which ranks alongside "No Killer Has Wings" and reviewed it separately back in April. So I'll skip it to keep this post as brief as possible. However, one thing I'll note here is that this story finds Middlebie with a taped ankle and this injury forces him to act as an armchair detective in the next couple of stories. And there are numerous comparisons to Mycroft Holmes in them.

The seventh story, "A Model Crime," is minor one and deals with the theft of eight ounces of custom-built transistors from the heavily guarded and secured premises of Morton Electronics, which are worth about twenty-one thousand dollars – "quite a haul." Only a handful of dependable engineers had access to the locked room where the transistors are being kept and taking them from the plant is next to impossible, because the place is run like Fort Knox or Area 51. The method is actually not bad and very practical, given the circumstances, but not as impressive in 2018 as it probably was in 1964.

Next up is "To Barbecue a White Elephant" and the problem of the story is somewhat reminiscent of "The Scientist and the Time Bomb" from The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009).

Black brings a baffling case or arson to Middlebie: a man has inherited a house, or white elephant, which is highly taxed and comes with barely any income. The house is tied to the estate and, if he abandons it, he forfeits the annuity and other benefits. So the man goes on a two-month holiday to Mexico City, a thousand miles from the house, while the place is locked up and closely watched by a security company. After six weeks, "a fire of unknown origin levels the building." Middlebie is tasked with finding out whether there's something like an incendiary device with a six week delayed time-fuse. A clever, scientific detective story with nifty gimmick that's not as insane as the fifteen year fuse from "Time Bomb." You really have to read that Grey story to believe it.

The following story is titled "The Puny Giant" and has an unusual impossible problem. A woman was found dead in the middle of large lawn battered to death by "a broken chunk of solid concrete" that weighed over ninety pounds. Only problem is that Black's primary suspect is her scrawny, sixteen-year-old adopted son who could not have lifted the chunk of concrete to deliver the deadly blows. However, I figured out this trick when his hobbies were mentioned. Still a pretty good yarn with a couple of slightly unsettling final lines.

The next story is "The Symmetrical Murder" and concerns the death of Howard Davis Valind, "a cancer-quack" or "mass-murderer," who preyed on the fatally ill, but was justly murdered when staying at a seaside hotel. He was killed when standing on the balcony to feed the birds when he was smacked in the head by "something moderately heavy and fast-moving" or "something massive," but a lot slower moving. However, the balcony was roofed and the hotel room had been locked from the inside. So how was he killed? I actually figured out the method based on the story-title and remembering a locked room novella with almost exactly the same impossible situation and explanation. I'm sure this is merely a coincidence, because you would expect a writer of scientific mysteries to hit upon a trick like this one.

On a side note, why do so many detective stories force the reader root for the murderer? I try to be a good boy, I really do, but even Middlebie here called the victim a swine who preyed on "the most pitifully helpless human beings." And told Black he would not cry if he failed to build a court case against the murderer.

Finally, this volume ends with the 1975 story, "Fire for Peace," in which Black and Middlebie is confronted the bad combination of "fire and fanaticism." A chemical plant full of inflammable material is working on a nerve gas, but the place is targeted by an arsonist who, inexplicable, has started a dozen fires on the premise and has been sending letters taunting them – all signed "Committee of One, for Peace." The solution here, like "The Missing Bow" is taken from history, but this one was a lot easier to swallow. A good story and decent ending to this altogether too short a series.

On a whole, These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie proved to be an excellent collection of short stories and showed Porges was a genuine maverick when it came to dreaming up miraculous crimes with often very original explanations. Something that's exemplified by such stories as "The Unguarded Path" and "Coffee Break."

Personally, I can't wait the for the upcoming entries in this ongoing series and the next volume is titled The Price of a Princess: Hardboiled Crime Fiction (2019), which I hope will be of the same quality as Edmund Crispin's surprisingly hardboiled short story, "The Pencil," from Fen Country: Twenty-Six Stories (1979). After that, there's a good chance Simm will compile a volume with the four Julian Morse Trowbridge impossible crime stories with the eleven uncollected, standalone locked room stories. And that would give us an almost complete collection of Porges' locked room fiction. The key word there is almost. I hope that Simms will also consider re-reprinting Eight Problems in Space: The Ensign De Ruyter Stories (2008) and The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn (2008).

So we have potentially a lot to look forward to on the Porges front!