Mission Impossible: "The Christmas Caper" (2022) by Gigi Pandian

Back in February, I reviewed the first novel from Gigi Pandian's "Secret Staircase" series, Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022), introducing a former magician, Tempest Raj, who exited the stage following a botched, nearly fatal escape trick – now works for her father's Secret Staircase Construction company. A far from ordinary construction company specialized in expanding their clients with “whimsical features” like “sliding bookcases that hid reading nooks” or “wardrobes that led not quite to Narnia but to secret gardens.” Under Lock & Skeleton Key needed to lay the groundwork for the series by introducing the various (recurring) characters, backstories and the main storyline concerning the disappearance of Tempest's mother. Something that came at the expense of the intriguingly-posed impossibility of a fresh corpse being discovered behind a decades-old brick wall.

The second title in the series, The Raven Thief (2023), reportedly is stronger on the locked room puzzle and investigation with a four-sided impossible crime during a séance. But between the first and second novel, Pandian wrote a special short story for the series entitled "The Christmas Caper" (2022). So decided to hold off on The Raven Thief until having read "The Christmas Caper."

Pandian's "The Christmas Caper," published as an ebook, brings Tempest Raj to the ancestral homeland of her Scottish grandmother, Morag, to revive an old family tradition – celebrating Christmas in Edinburgh. They rented an apartment in the building of Morag and Ashok's friend, Sabrina, who asks Tempest to help her save Christmas. Sabrina is a close friends Ronald Abernathy, curator of the Castle Rock Museum, which recently got robbed in spectacular fashion. The museum recently acquired a previously unknown landscape painting by Alexander Nasmyth that was placed in the skylight room, which has a slanted skylight "to give a view of the castle above." The thief cut a hole in the skylight, slid down a rope to take the painting and escaped by rappelling down the side of the building, but accidentally tripped an alarm when noticing people were watching. There was an event going at the castle and someone spotted the masked thief, dressed in climbing gear, on the museum. However, the thief still managed to get away with the painting.

So where's the impossibility in this elaborate smash-and-grab? The skylight room has floor censors and the police first assumed "the thief swung directly to the painting instead of touching down," but the painting was hanging on a wall "further than could be reached by rope without hitting the ground." Someway, somehow the thief took the painting without triggering the floor censors. Simply a question of figuring out how it was done. Tempest has found an answer to the seemingly impossible before and only too happy to help Sabrina saving Christmas for Abernathy.

"The Christmas Caper" is a locked room mystery at its most leisure ("she was only going to do armchair detecting anyway") investigated, and solved, between the other usual activities in the run up to Christmas like scarfing down "scrumptious treats" at the Christmas Market. And providing the story with recipes for Gingerbread Swirl Cookies and Spiced Hot Chocolate. So the story can feel a little too cozy at times and the plot is light enough it can be put together even if the clues aren't too thickly spread around, but nothing to detrimental enough to take the shine of this charming, fun and seasonal impossible crime story. A hearty recommendation for mystery fans who are always on the look out for Christmas mystery novels and short stories to read in December.

Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) by Gigi Pandian

I recently read J.L. Blackhurst's Three Card Murder (2023) and revisited two of Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini mysteries, The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) and The Headless Lady (1940), which all have one thing in common – applying the art of stage magic and illusions to the detective story. I suppose Clayton Rawson founded, what can be called, the sleight-of-hand school and only recently realized it has some loyal adherents. Not just back then, but today.

Tom Mead praised the Great Merlini series as "the purest example of the overlap between professional magic and professional mystery" ("in both cases, the key to the trick lies in the art of misdirection"). Rawson and the Great Merlini appear to the biggest source of inspiration for Mead's two Joseph Spector locked room mysteries, Death and the Conjuror (2022), The Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre (2024). Mead is not the only locked room champion today who cited Rawson and Merlini as an influence, Gigi Pandian. I reviewed The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) in 2019, but only "The Haunted Room" (2014) stood out to me. However, I probably would have enjoyed the collection a lot more had the introduction not spoiled the theme linking all the short stories together.

In 2022, Pandian started the "Secret Staircase" series entirely dedicated to the traditional craftwork known as locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Pandian is not the first, or last, who in recent years began an impossible crime series. I really should have waited until 2025 with "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years," because a few extra years would given a clearer picture and more to talk about than just the firsts in all these new series – many from debuting and/or self-published authors. So the locked room revival is still very much in its It Walks by Night (1930) phase en route to the modern-day equivalents of The Three Coffins (1935), The Judas Window (1938) and Rim of the Pit (1944). I'm getting off-topic.

Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) is the first of currently two novels and one novella in the "Secret Staircase" series with the third novel, Midnight Puzzle (2024), getting published next month. This series stars a disgraced stage magician, Tempest Raj, who previously appeared in the short story "Tempest in a Teapot" (2015) collected in The Cambodian Curse. A botched escape trick nearly killed her and pretty much ended her career, because everyone assumed she had "replaced the vetted illusions for something far more dangerous" ("...putting her own life and those of many others in danger"). Tempest believes the illusion had been sabotaged by her former stage double, Cassidy Sparrow. Either way, Tempest is back home with her father, Darius, and the family company, Secret Staircase Construction. A business specialized in creating secret rooms and hidden doors like "a bookshelf that slid open when you reached for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" or "perhaps a door in a grandfather clock that led to a secret garden." Tempest has to consider working for her father, if she can't get her career back on track.

Tempest goes with the Secret Staircase crew to the home of a client, Calvin Knight, who bought a 110-year-old house and moved in with his six-year-old son, Justin, but while renovating the place, it seems like the the house is "hiding something" – not counting the secret room they built behind a bookcase. When they break open a very old wall, they discover a dusty sack with black hair sticking out. And inside is the body of Cassidy Sparrow. But how did her body end up inside a wall that hadn't been worked on or tempered with for at least half-a-century?

A fresh, barely cold body inside an old and practically hermetically sealed crawlspace, walled up for the better part of a century, is fantastic premise for an impossible crime story. So it's unfortunate that impossibility is not the focal point of the plot. You can even argue the story turns into something entirely different once the body is pulled out from behind the wall.

After the body's discovery, the story shifts focus to the more personal mysteries surrounding Tempest. Five years ago, her mother disappeared and her ghost has been haunting Tempest ever since she returned to Hidden Creek, which comes on top of the family curse ("the eldest child dies by magic") and a treasure hunt for her inheritance. And introducing recurring characters. So it might appear as if things are happening or being investigated, but, beside the opening and closing chapters, not all that much happens. Just a lot of talking and very little in the way of an actual detective story. Now that can be largely put down to Under Lock & Skeleton Key having to setup the series and the second novel, The Raven Thief (2023), appears to be detection oriented with no less than four impossible crimes, but neither the characters nor the story pulled me in. I like the idea of "a haphazard team of misfit craftspeople" fitting people's home with elaborately hidden reading rooms, nooks, secret doors and fantasy locks or how all of Pandian's series-character occupy a shared universe, but this just didn't do it for me.

That's the double-edged sword of the miracle problem. A reality-defying impossibility or even a simple locked room murder is always a great hook for a classically-styled detective story, but it obliges the author to do something with it – preferably something good or original. So when you pull a freshly murdered corpse from a dark, dusty crawlspace sealed for decades, like a rabbit from a top hat, it sets certain expectations that were ignored. However, the next entry in the series look a lot more promising and apparently begins with a body miraculously appearing during a mock séance. I've noticed a lot of the current locked room revivalists enjoy making bodies impossibly appear instead of making them disappear. That's something to keep in mind, but next up, a return to Case Closed and promising-looking Golden Age whodunit.

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.