A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt

Back in 2013, Ho-Ling Wong introduced the traditional mystery corner of the web to James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), a science-fiction novel that's at its heart a detective story, but on a scale that's impossible to do in a conventional, earthbound mystery novel – landing a comfortable spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100. Hogan's Inherit the Stars left behind a who's who of the classic and modern detective-and crime story. Even science-fiction author and part-time mystery novelist, John Sladek, had to eat dust with his almost universally beloved Invisible Green (1977) trailing far behind Hogan's hard science-fiction tale. Something smelled fishy! 

A closer inspection of Hogan's futuristic puzzle of 50.000-year-old human remains in a spacesuit discovered on the Moon proved to tick "about every single box that we want to see filled" with a "slow, devious, torturous and extremely clever unraveling of a complex puzzle." So we shamelessly appropriated Hogan's Inherit the Stars from the science-fiction genre.

Needless to say, I was not adverse to reading more of these archaeological space mysteries, but only found Ross Rocklynne's 1941 novella "Time Wants a Skeleton." A whowasdunin centering on an out-of-time human skeleton found inside cave on an ancient asteroid. But nothing more came to my attention until recently. 

Jack McDevitt is an American science-fiction author who specialized in archaeological and historical novels set in the far-flung future that often have a detective hook. McDevitt came to my attention as some of his work has been compared to Ellery Queen and probing a little deeper discovered that he credited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown as hugely influential on shaping his Alex Benedict series. This comes with the caveat that McDevitt is not "an enthusiast about detective stories in general," but loves "the magic of Father Brown" that have more to do with "trying to figure out what on Earth happened" than simply whodunit and cites one of Chesterton's well-known locked room mysteries, "The Arrow of Heaven" – collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). So he belongs to the school of thought that believes the how of a crime is often more interesting than the who. A school that has Dorothy L. Sayers as its headmistress and John Rhode as its main lecturers.

So why not give McDevitt a shot and, if I like the series, boldly go where I've seldom gone before by dabbling in some chronological reading. 

A Talent for War (1989) is the first title starring Alex Benedict, an antique dealer, who lives and operates about 10.000 years into the future when "a thousand billion human beings" had settled "several hundred worlds" that formed a troubled Confederacy of planets. The story opens with the news that the flagship of the newest class of interstellars, Capella, had "slipped into oblivion" along with twenty-six hundred passengers and crew members, which failed to reenter linear space. Something that has happened before and none has ever reappeared. So everyone aboard is pretty much lost forever. And legally dead.

One of the passengers was Alex's uncle, Gabe Benedict, who left his estranged nephew his
entire estate and a historical puzzle dating back to "the last great heroic age" which has "provoked historical debate for two centuries." Two hundred years ago, an ever-expanding humanity came across an alien civilization, Ashiyyur, which resulted in an armed conflict between possibly the only technological cultures in the entire Milky Way. Christopher Sim was a history teacher from Dellaconda who became the leader of the Resistance and from the helm of his "immortal warship," the Corsarius, "spearheaded the allied band of sixty-odd frigates and destroyers holding off the massive fleets of the Ashiyyur," which eventually turned the tide as the other planets began to recognize the danger – driving the aliens back to their sullen worlds from which they came. But this victory came at a price. During his famous last stand, Sim was betrayed and abandoned by his crew with the name of navigator, Ludik Talino, becoming synonymous with cowardice. The names of the other deserters were lost to history and so is what exactly went down during that decisive and historically significant battle.

What did Gabe Benedict, an amateur archaeologist, knew that sent him tracking off into a region of space, known as the Veiled Lady, two centuries later? What is the connection with secretive journey of the CSS Tenandrome?

CSS Tenandrome is a big survey ship "involved in exploration of regions deep in the Veiled Lady," a thousand light years from Gabe's home planet, which returned under very mysterious and hushed circumstances. This churned the interstellar rumor mill. Officially, it was reported the ship's Armstrong units were damaged, but all kinds of rumors were flying around alleging it was either a plague ship or there was a time displacement that severely aged the crew members. There even rumors that the ship came across a new race of aliens or "an ancient fleet adrift," but "something among the encrusted ships" had "discouraged further examination" and returned home.

Alex has to take a deep drive into history to not only figure out what really happened two-hundred years ago, but what his uncle knew that could rewrite history. Admittedly, this makes for an engrossing, but slow-paced, read that takes some time to finish.

Alex has to gather and track down a ton of historical records, online and offline, war-time poetry, notebooks and watches simulated reenactments as well as visiting distant worlds, a historical society and even interviewing a representative of the Ashiyyur. But everything moves very slowly with only three points of action in the entire story. One very brief with the other two being saved for the end of the story.

So most of the story has either Alex sifting through information or talking with people, which is approach exceedingly rare in the detective genre and don't think it even has a name. I suppose you could call it a "research novel" with Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaku satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaku Murders, 1983) as the only example that comes to mind, but done on a much smaller scale than A Talent for War. The Case of the Sharaku Murders merely deals with an academic search for the true identity of a mysterious woodblock print artist who was briefly active during the late 1700s under a pseudonym. This makes the puzzle component of the plot is difficult to discuss, because it's as vast as our own star system. However, I was very impressed with the amount of world-building that was done. A massive, multi-worlds world that felt like it's actually populated with a human civilizations.

Over the years, I've read a tiny sampling of science-fiction mysteries and one thing always surprising me is that the earliest titles sketch a picture of the future in which culture and technology has stagnated or even regressed. Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on a drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century, but technology is clunky with references to only 19th and early 20th century literature and culture. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) takes place in mining community around an asteroid belt, but courtroom photographers still use flashbulbs and John Russell Fearn's The Master Must Die (1953) has snail mail between Earth and Mars. One stamp is enough to cover the cost of sending a letter from Mars to Earth. What a difference half a century makes!

I'm not an expert, of course, but I thought technology was much more convincingly handled here with Alex's conversation with an A.I. version of his dead uncle being eerily predictive of the very recent developments with a controversial deepfake technology digitally resurrecting dead relatives or friends. I also appreciated that the Armstrong Drive was not used as a magic wand to simply transport between the stars, because there are some serious limitations as to its reach and maneuvering that required a ship "to materialize well outside star systems" – which "left the traveler with a long ride to his destination." A trip to Andromeda was still off the table. But what I really appreciated where the little historical and cultural touches in combination with current affairs playing out in the background giving you the idea all those worlds truly are swarming with humans.

Every chapter begins with an excerpt or quote from a fictitious piece of future literature, philosophy or commentary on the war and wished McDevitt had told more about the history and myths surrounding the various settled worlds.

Alex reminiscent about his own home world that "only an historian can tell you now who first set foot on Rimway," but "everybody on the planet knows who died in the attempt" and trying to find the wreckage of Jorge Shale and his crew was the first archaeological project of his life. But he never did. Alex also visited a settled water world, appropriately known as the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with a planet that was once the home of an intelligent species, Belarius. A now inhospitable place which houses fifty-thousand-year-old ruins that were "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" before their running into the Ashiyyur. Belarius has been largely given up as it's "an incredibly savage place" crawling with "highly evolved predators" in its dense jungles. What a great backdrop that place would be for an archaeological, space age mystery novel. Something halfway between Agatha Christie and Predator!

But more important is that long-ago battle and the symbol Christopher Sim has become to the Confederacy, which is just as important two centuries later as there's a political crisis brewing in the background of interstellar proportions. Earth is holding "a referendum on the matter of secession" and there are constant clashes along the Perimeter with the Ashiyyur. So hostilities with the Ashiyyur might be "the cement that binds your Confederacy together" and "stem the political power of separatists." This makes finding answers to a 200-year-old mystery potentially dangerous and highly explosive.

McDevitt wrote an imaginative, richly detailed and engrossing story that constructed entire worlds with its own history around the central puzzle with the only drawbacks being the slow pacing and not having quite the detective pull of Hogan's Inherit the Stars. But you can probably put the latter down to having to setup an entire universe while exploring one of that interstellar civilization's many stories. So you can expect a review of his second novel in the not so distant future.

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.

Murder in the Oval Office (1989) by Elliott Roosevelt

Some years ago, "JJ," of The Invisible Event, started a sporadic series of blog-posts entitled "A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat," which turned out to be easier said than done and Jim kindly tied my name to a few abominations – like Andrew Mayne's Angel Killer (2014) and Chris McGeorge's Now You See Me (2019). A series that began promising enough with a review of Elliott Roosevelt's Murder in the Oval Office (1989) concluding that "you could do much worse for writing, plotting, enjoyment and general fun." So a decent locked room mystery novel with a historical hook and gimmick. 

I was recently reminded of JJ's first recommendation by William Harrington's The Grassy Knoll (1993) and decided it was time to take it off the big pile. You see, Murder in the Oval Office and The Grassy Knoll likely have more in common beyond their presidential theme.

Elliott Roosevelt was an American aviator and the son of the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died on April 12, 1945, with Carter Dickson's The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) laying unfinished on his bedside table – ominously bookmarked at the chapter "Six Feet of Earth." Reportedly, President Roosevelt was in the habit of taking a detective novel to bed and the family library was likely stocked with all the luminaries of the detective story's Golden Age. So it's not surprising he paid tribute to his parents with a series of twenty detective novels starring his mother, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as the detective walking those mean streets of Washington, D.C. But did he write them himself or were they ghostwritten under his guidance?

The publisher always billed Elliott Roosevelt as the genuine author of the series and even when he passed away, 1990, the series continued with the explanation that the prolific Elliott had left behind a stack of completed, ready-to-publish manuscripts to pad out the decade. And that's exactly what happened. William Harrington committed suicide in 2000 and revealed in his self-written obituary that he had ghostwritten the presidential mystery novels credited to Elliott Roosevelt and Margaret Truman, which earned him credit on the last book in the Eleanor Roosevelt series (Murder at the President's Door, 2001). However, as noted in my review of The Grassy Knoll, Harrington's claims have not gone entirely undisputed.

So, now that we've got that out of the way, let's take a look at the detective novel that used the most famous room in the United States to stage an old-fashioned locked room mystery. 

Murder in the Oval Office is the sixth title in the series and takes place, in 1934, when Roosevelt was sixteen months into his first term and the White House hosted a dinner in honor of the Secretary-General of the French Foreign Ministry, but Alabama Congressman Winstead Colmer receives a message – excusing himself from the table. This is shortly followed by a gunshot coming from the Oval Office. The double doors between the Oval Office and the secretaries' office had to be broken open and inside they find the body of the congressman with a bullet in his head with the doors "bolted shut from the inside" and all the windows "securely latched." So what else could have been than suicide? There are some nagging details and a surfeit of motives.

Representative Winstead Colmer chaired the Auditing Standards Subcommittee of the House Banking and Currency Committee and "the evidence adduced by him had embarrassed bankers all across America," which allowed his "subcommittee was drafting legislation to tighten auditing standards on banks." But there also rumors swirling around that he impregnated a young girl. And why does his pregnant wife refuse to tell where she was on the night of the murder? Enter Eleanor Roosevelt who has to find a way to juggle her duties as First Lady with playing amateur detective as she assists Gerald Baines, Secret Service, in helping to find the killer. Something that becomes all the more difficult as a headline chasing J. Edgar Hoover tries to horn in on the case.

This is where Murder in the Oval Office becomes a mixed bag of tricks. Firstly, there's the historical content that's littered with cameos of historical characters and future presidents, but it tries to be too cute with its winking at the future. A young Lyndon B. Johnson appears, but Eleanor Roosevelt dismisses him as "an awkward fellow" who "would never amount to much." Louisiana Senator Huey Long also makes an appearance and the President remarks he could spare him, but "wouldn't want to lose him by murder." And that's the nicest thing the book had to say about Long. Honestly, the depiction of Long, while not wholly undeserved or even untrue, comes across as a little petty considering Roosevelt adopted many of his rivals proposals in the wake of Long's assassination and it came across as spiteful – especially with the name of the winner plastered all over the book. On the other hand, I enjoyed the scene in which Eleanor Roosevelt discusses the locked room problem with Major Eisenhower.

Major Eisenhower believes there has to be "some idiosyncrasy" in the locked room and therefore the murderer must be "someone with special, intimate knowledge of the Oval Office." Someone who knows that idiosyncrasy. The locked room puzzle here is not delegated to the background, but is thoroughly investigated and comes with a floorplan of the Oval Office, diagrams of the locks and bolts and the problem how the murderer though a bolted door is thought and talked about. Unfortunately, the locked room-trick is fairly routine. Not unacceptable or anything. Just not very original (particular in 1989) and it's actually the last diagram that gives the trick some weight as it showed the trick was custom-fitted for the Oval Office. You can say the same about the who-and why, which were fine, but nothing outstanding or special except for gathering all the suspects in the Oval Office for the traditional denouement.

So, yeah, my opinion pretty much aligns with JJ. Murder in the Oval Office is a fun, enjoyable mystery novel with decent enough plot and some historical interest, although a bit colored, but it's main attraction is staging an impossible crime in the titular room – a better trick would have made it something more than mere curiosity. Now I can only recommend it to fans of historical mysteries and locked room completists.

By the way, I don't know why, but while reading Murder in the Oval Office, I got a mental image of Joseph Commings' Senator Brooks U. Banner and Erle Stanley Gardner's Doug Selby as President and Vice-President of the U.S. in the GAD universe. What do you say, my American friends, would you have given your vote to a Banner/Selby ticket?

The Grassy Knoll (1993) by William Harrington

William Harrington was an American writer who ended his own life in 2000 and left behind a self-written obituary in which he revealed to have ghostwritten the detective novels credited to the daughter of President Harry S. Truman, Margaret Truman, but his claim has been disputed – describing his role as that of a research collaborator. So, while not the celebrity ghostwriter he claimed to have been, Harrington had written many novels under his own name since the 1960s and penned six original Columbo TV tie-in novels during the 1990s. Now that's something he should have bragged about in his obituary! 

The Grassy Knoll (1993) is the first of Harrington's six Columbo TV tie-in novels and he took an interesting approach to translating the series format, or formula, to the printed page.

All of the usual stuff is there with Columbo and the reader knowing who committed the murder and how it was done, but not why and figuring out the motive gives Columbo an opportunity to act as a proper homicide cop. So it's not merely Columbo stalking to the killers and waging a war on their nerves. It's an inverted whydunit presented as a modern police procedural that unmistakably takes place in the early '90s. 

The Paul Drury Show is the most popular show on the KWLF Los Angeles television station, which is basically a televised radio talk show with call-ins, whose well-known host is obsessed with one of the most famous murder cases in the history of the United States – namely the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Paul Drury had dedicated forty-eight episodes of his show to the JFK murder case, amusingly pitting dogged detectives and researchers against "some asshole who's read three books about it," which made those episodes the most popular of the show. The opening chapter shows that forty-eighth episode about the assassination that include some of the call-ins ("Have you ever heard of the Society of the Illuminati? Nothing happens those guys don't sanction").

So it was a good show and episode, but the would end very badly for Paul Drury. When he arrived home, there were two people waiting for him in his garage, Alicia Graham Drury and Peter Edmonds.

Peter is the producer of The Paul Drury Show and Alicia is his assistant producer, as well as his girlfriend and Paul's ex-wife, who have fabricated an alibi by leaving a time-stamped message with a recording Paul's voice on an telephone answering machine – using a cutting-edge piece of technology known as Sony Walkman. They also staged a burglary and finished the job by putting two bullets in the back of Paul's head. Alicia and Peter hardly can believe their luck when they meet the disheveled Lieutenant Columbo with his tousled head of hair, crumpled raincoat and wandering mind ("what a dolt!"), because, if they could have "picked a detective to investigate this case," they "couldn't have done better than him." But they pretty soon discover that Columbo is "not as dumb as he acts" as he inches towards a solution.

I was tempted to use the locked room and impossible crime tags for this review, because had the book been played as who-and howdunit, the murder Paul Drury would have looked like a quasi-impossible crime. The house is protected with burglar-alarms, hyper sensitive motion detectors and PIN card system that deactivates the system. There's not much of a mystery about it: Alicia simply held on to a spare card and Columbo knows it. The murderers were also a little to familiar with the layout of the house to have been an outsider, but there's another, somewhat dated, technological aspect to the plot.

Paul Drury was with the times and had compiled a "private electronic library" on his computer that contained "the world's largest collection of assassination minutiae," which has "the equivalent of thousands of volumes of information stored in it," but the harddisk had been wiped clean by "an outlaw instruction code" – i.e. a telephone transmitted computer virus. But did he make copies of his digital library? There's a collection of microdiskettes, or floppies, that will come to play an important role in the case. Naturally, Columbo needs some modern experts to help him make sense of these modern-day clues, which is really what sets this book apart from the TV-series.

Columbo is not depicted here as a lone wolf relentlessly stalking and pestering the murderers, like prey, but as a cog in the machine of a large police apparatus and even has an assistant, Detective Martha Zimmer. She proves very helpful in resolving another rather amusing plot-thread as Columbo has is ordered to report at the pistol range to requalify with his service revolver. Only problem is that never carries his revolver, lost it and can't shoot to save his life. More importantly, Columbo relies on the expertise of his colleagues to shed light on the various aspects of the case.

For example, the pathologist and an audio-technician proved very useful in helping breakdown the murderer's alibi, but the lack of a clear motive also forced Columbo to delve deeper into the background of his suspects and interviews several witnesses – which eventually brings him to a Las Vegas casino and Caesars Palace. What he comes across are the last remnants of the glory days of the Italian mafia, the legacy of right wing militias and newly discovered photographs that could shed new light on the Kennedy assassination. Those old, grainy photographs revealed their long-held, hidden details when they're "computer enhanced" and touched-up by an artist. So this may very well be one of the earliest examples of the zoom-and-enhance TV trope and it was used in a TV tie-in novel.

Anyway, you can see how The Grassy Knoll is a little bit different from your average Columbo episode, but Columbo is still Columbo, whose sharp mind is cloaked in a disheveled wardrobe, deceiving befuddlement, cheap cigars and homely anecdotes about Mrs. Columbo. Slowly, but surely, Columbo continues to chip away at the case and closes in on the murderers. Columbo is not able to close the whole case as the historical JFK plot-thread ended up raising more questions than it answered. But then again, I suppose that was kind of the point. I just wish Columbo actually came up with a clever solution to the mystery. Even if he couldn't officially solve it.

Nevertheless, the murder of President Kennedy had an interesting connection to the motive and story proposed an alternative motive that has to be turned into a detective or thriller novel. Columbo learns that the assassination has become "a multimillion-dollar industry" with books, documentaries, movies and television series, but those millions would dry up if Drury had "absolute evidence" proving who did kill Kennedy. It would kill a very lucrative industry, because people enjoy "some deep, dark conspiracy" more than the truth. 

So, on a whole, The Grassy Knoll is not exactly Columbo as seen on TV, but Harrington deserves praise for understanding that a few hundred pages can tell a more fully realized story than roughly 90-minutes of TV and decided to use it to flesh-out the other aspects of the police investigation – while remaining faithful to the original character. Columbo is still Columbo, but Harrington gave fans a little extra by showing more of Columbo as a homicide cop. I enjoyed it and can heartily recommended to other Columbo fans and mystery readers.

You can definitely expect more from Harrington's Columbo novels sometime in the future as I'm already eyeing The Helter Skelter Murders (1994), The Hoffa Connection (1995) and The Hoover Files (1998). But my next read is going to be an obscure, somewhat hard-to-get (locked room) mystery novel from the 1990s. I actually wanted to return to Christopher Bush or Brian Flynn, but that one arrived today and decided not to let it linger too long. So don't touch that dial!

A Dickens of a Crime: "The House of the Red Candle" (2004) by Martin Edwards

One of the luxury problems facing connoisseurs of the traditional detective story today, which is enjoying a veritable renaissance, is the unending avalanche of reprints and translations of once hard-to-find, completely out-of-reach authors, novels and short stories – transforming manageable TBR-piles into mountainous monstrosities. Some of the authors and novels on my pile, like the bodies dotting Mount Everest, seemed to be doomed to be stuck there forever. 

Every now and then, I try to bring one down, but my taste for the obscure and crippling impossible crime addiction tends to take precedence. There is, however, no bullshit excuse why I didn't get to Martin Edwards sooner. An award-winning crime novelist, anthologist, genre historian and a leading light of the current reprint renaissance. So where better to start than with one of his locked room mysteries. 

"The House of the Red Candle" was written for Death by Dickens (2004), an anthology of original stories based on Charles Dickens' work, but Edwards' contribution made Dickens the detective and is accompanied by his drinking buddy and budding novelist, Wilkie Collins – who acts as the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. Story begins with Collins telling the reader that he could have "woven a triple-decker novel of sensation" from "the macabre features" of the murder of Thaddeus Whiteacre. Dickens had told him "the case must never be solved" and Collins had honored that wish, but enough time had passed "to permit the truth to be revealed."

A story that begins in a crowded, Greenwich tavern where Dickens is acting mysteriously and asks Collins to come with him to the House of the Red Candle. A house of ill repute where he wants him to meet a woman, Bella, but asks him not to ask too many questions until then and to completely trust him. Dickens promises his friend that he "will not readily forget tonight."

When they arrive at the house, Dickens handily convinces the fat brothel-keeper, Mrs. Jugg, they're proper gentlemen with a handful of banknotes, but Bella is locked inside her room with another customer. Only then Mrs. Jugg notices Thaddeus Whiteacre had not paid her enough to have Bella for the better part of an hour, but their knocking is answered with a cry for help. So the door is smashed open and discover Whiteacre, dead and naked, tied with his wrists to the bedstead. Bella is nowhere to be found. She vanished from the locked and bolted room "as if she never existed."

A cracking premise for a historical locked room story with an adequately clued solution, which is more than sufficient to put all the pieces together yourself. The who-and why take precedent over the how as the latter is a direct result of the former with a nice peppering of the general cussedness of things. So it's not a terribly complicated detective story, but, to be fair to Edwards, "The House of the Red Candle" was commissioned as a Dickensian crime story and in that the story succeeded admirably – particular the historical shading of the story was very well done. Purely as a historical (locked room) mystery, Edwards' "The House of the Red Candle" can be compared and stand with Paul Doherty's historical mysteries (c.f. the locked brothel mystery in The Herald of Hell, 2015) as neither sanitized and dolled-up the less romantic, dirty and smudged pages of history. And that makes it all the more interesting when they're used as the setting for a classically-styled detective story. Only difference is that Edwards looks to be more character-driven than Doherty.

So, in closing, Edwards' "The House of the Red Candle" is not the most challenging, or puzzling, of detective stories, but still comes recommended as a well-written and realized historical mystery with a Dickens of a crime.

A Brush with Rembrandt: Q.E.D. vol. 13 by Motohiro Katou

So it's been a little over a month since my previous review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 12 and therefore about time to do another one, which brings me to the relatively minor, but fun, volume 13 comprising of two stories perched on two pillars of civilization – namely art and architecture. The first of these stories, entitled "Calamity Man," hearkens back to "1th, April, 1999" from vol. 4 with a plot constructed around an April Fools Day Challenge. But this time, the stakes were much higher! 

Alan Blade is the trillionaire (in Japanese yen) president of Alansoft and his company has developed an OS, Wings2001, which has been "installed on more than 90% of the world's computers," but recently, the quality of his recent employees has gone done. Have they made computers too easy to use and lowered the threshold? So he comes up with a very expensive, tricky plan that involves the teenage genius and high-school detective, Sou Touma.

Eight years ago, Touma was only 9-year-old child prodigy living in the United States and helped out Blade when he started his company from a garage. Touma actually had a part in helping to complete their first OS that "conquered the world." Naturally, he was asked to come work for them after he graduated, but Touma left America without a word to his fellow student (see "Breakthrough" from vol. 3). So now Blade has come to Japan to force Touma to partake into a high-stakes, April Fools Day Challenge and, if he wins, Touma has to come back with him to America to work at his company – renouncing his Japanese citizenship in the process. By the way, Touma holds dual nationality of the United States and Japan. Story mentions Touma has to pick between them when he turns 18.

Although what the challenge, exactly, entails is a little nebulous, but Blade has purchased a luxury cruise ship and turned it into a floating art exhibition of Rembrandt painting. Something a Dutch representative of the Netherlands Rembrandt Art Association "extremely disgraceful" and suspects one "particular piece might even be stolen." Touma's plucky friend, Kana Mizuhara, suggests they steal the painting, but Touma points out "stealing an expensive item like this is not a joke." What else could the challenge entail?

I suspected the direction the story was going to take the moment I read the name of the ship, which suggested two ways in which Touma could outsmart Blade with his dodgy art collection.

Nonetheless, it was a decent and fun enough story that (once more) demonstrated how much Q.E.D. differs from other anime-and manga detective series. Not merely in the very different type of detective stories you can only find in Q.E.D. (e.g. "Serial John Doe" from vol. 7), but it's also the only one with a distinctly international flavor. There have been some foreign excursions or non-Japanese characters in Detective Conan and The Kindaichi Case Files, but here it's part of the DNA of the series.

The second story, "Klein Tower," is more in line with your regular anime-and manga detective stories. Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are asked to lend a helping hand to the university's overburdened research department in photographing and gathering background on a historical structure – ominously called the Tower of Hell. A so-called Sazae Tower with "a double helix pathway" so "there's a single path that leads both in and out," which means "you can go around each floor of a 3 story building in a direct path." The Tower of Hell was built at the beginning of the Showa Era and the builder made it as his personal pathway to paradise. One day, he disappeared inside the tower without a trace and reappeared a year later, as a skeleton, on the top floor of the tower. A historical locked room mystery!

 

Ever since, the tower has been known as an entrance to the underworld, but, over the decades, the village where the tower stands has become "more and more lonely." So the village headman came up with a village revitalization project with the mysterious tower as a marketing ploy. There are, however, some financial hurdles to clear which makes it cheaper to dismantle the tower and rebuild it somewhere else in the village. But they had to know if that's even possible. So the university came to investigate with our two detectives doing the preliminary groundwork.

However, they soon have another task at hand as the current owner and the now very elder daughter of the builder, Umehara Rin, briefly disappears and is found dangling from a rope inside the tower. But it was neither suicide or a locked room murder. The old locked room-trick from the past was used in the present to create an air-tight alibi complete with a timetable. Very clever! But the story has one short coming.

I've had probably a little more exposure to the Japanese detective story than most of my fellow mystery aficionados, but can tell you Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) is par for the course where bizarre and unusual architecture is concerned. Japanese mystery writers have used the corpse-puzzle and unorthodox architecture to completely revitalize the impossible crime and unbreakable alibi tropes. They added a whole bunch of new tricks and possibilities to the genre. So it's always exciting when a Japanese detective story has a building with peculiar features as it's setting, but the alibi/locked room-trick was surprisingly basic and simple. Everything fitted together nicely and liked the explanation to the historical mystery, but nothing outstanding or particular memorable. Something more could have been done with the setting.

So, all in all, a fairly average volume with two good, solid enough stories and, while not standouts in the series, together they were miles ahead of the disappointing stories that made up the previous volume. Things are looking up again!

The Resurrection Fireplace (2011) by Hiroko Minagawa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Revolt (2016) by Paul Doherty

I'm an idiot and chronologically challenged! Back in 2016, I read Paul Doherty's Bloodstone (2011), a book reviving the Brother Athelstan series, which had lain dormant since The House of Shadows (2003) and Doherty began to work prodigiously towards the Great Uprising of 1381 – the major story-arc of the series. I told in my 2018 review of The Straw Men (2013) that it was my intention to read these new novels in chronological order, but, as you probably noticed, the previous review was of The Herald of Hell (2015). There are two novels between The Straw Men and The Herald of Hell, Candle Flame (2014) and The Book of Fires (2015). Somehow, I had already crossed them off the list in my mind. Why? Because I'm an idiot, that's why. You can jeer and mock me in the comments.

The Great Revolt (2016) is the sixteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, set in June, 1831, when the Great Community of the Realm and the Upright Men began their bloody purge of London.

Brother Athelstan is at the mother house of the Dominican order, Blackfriars, where he had been summoned to provide assistance to a papal envoy. The boy-king, Richard II, had returned from a pilgrimage to the tomb of his great-grand father, Edward II, with the conviction his ancestor was a saint and a royal martyr – "a true martyr king" like "other saintly monarchs" in "the misty history of the English crown." So he petitioned "the Holy Father for the formal opening of the process for the beatification and canonisation of Edward II" and since Urban VI has a rival pope, Clement VII, residing in Avignon, which makes it desirable for Rome not to alienate the English crown. Athelstan is asked to help gather evidence in favor of canonization of Edward II, but that's easier said than done. Edward II was a divisive monarch with evidence suggesting the deposed king had been freed and fled to the continent, which would be embarrassing for both King Richard and the Pope. And are the 54-year-old secrets worth keeping to the point of murder?

One of the papal envoys, Brother Alberic, collected evidence against the dead king's reputation in his role as advocatus diaboli (devil's advocate), but when the story open, the door to his room is being battered down. A room with only a very narrow, lancet window and a heavy, elmwood door securely locked and bolted from within, but Alberic had been "brutally stabbed" with "an ancient-looking dagger" nobody recognizes. Even stranger is that Alberic was a former soldier, still young and vigorous, but there's no sign or "even a scratch of any struggle or challenge." Alberic is not the last to die violently on consecrated ground of Blackfriars.

You shouldn't expect too much from the locked room-trick, because it's based on a simple idea that has been explored before, but it was put to good use here and the reason why there wasn't any signs of a struggle was genuinely clever and a splendid hint to the identity of the elusive assassin. Just like Steve, the Puzzle Doctor, something "I haven't seen before." This portion of the plot is basically a historical mystery within a historical mystery, linking the tumultuous events of 1327 and 1381, which proved to be tapestry of long-held, treasured secrets and bloody murder – set against a background resembling the end of days. Brother Athelstan and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, move back and forth between Blackfriars and London.

The footmen of the Upright Men, the Earthworms, were out in full force and directed the grisly
executions and feel slightly guilty for snickering at the lively crowd heckling the unsteady, piss drunk executioners gruesomely botching a beheading as "butter-fingered fumblers." How can you not love the English? But as the revolt drew on, the bloodshed was used to settle old scores and attack the vulnerable as the streets were littered with corpses knifed, garroted or dangling from ropes. So wherever they went there were torn down walls, shredded gates and fences, burning houses and "summary execution at different places along the way." Everywhere they passed where "scaffolds, gibbets and gallows festooned with corpses" or "decorated with bloody body parts and severed heads." Even by Doherty's own standards, The Great Revolt has an incredibly stacked bodycount.

But while they're deep into enemy territory, surrounded by

anarchy and murder, Athelstan and Sir John have their concerns. Sir John wants to be with King Richard when the time comes to meet the rebels and their mysterious leader, Wat Tyler, while Athelstan is deeply concerned about his parishioners. Most of them were taken prisoner and spirited away before the violence erupted, but one of them, Pernel the Fleming, was drowned and her house torched. She may have had a connection to one of the people currently sheltering at Blackfriars. Athelstan also worried about his non-human friends such as his old horse and that wily, one-eyed tomcat, Bonaventure, who had been "his constant dining companion" and credited the cat with "more wit and sense than all his parishioners put together."

So, needless to say, The Great Revolt is an eventful novel in which Doherty took some creative liberties in tying together his fictitious plot-threads with the historical accounts of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the death of Edward II, which he acknowledged in his Author's Note. But, to quote Doherty, historical novels "often reflect a reality based firmly on fact rather than fiction." I think The Great Revolt succeeded in being both an engrossing historical novel and a well done detective story. Definitely recommended!

By the way, how amazing would it be if Doherty's detective fiction was actually history. Just imagine our history books littered with accounts of Egyptian judges, royal clerks and Dominican friars solving locked room murders, dying messages, complicated ciphers and hounding ancient serial killers.

The Herald of Hell (2015) by Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty's The Herald of Hell (2015) is the fifteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, originally published as by "Paul Harding," which takes place in May, 1381, as "the day of the Great Slaughter" of the Upright Men dawned and "the flame of rebellion would burst out" – a period when conspiracies, fear and murder engulfed London. The Herald of Hell is the mysterious envoy of the Upright Men who "appears at all hours of night outside the lodgings of loyal servants to the crown" to intimidate and threaten them with doggerel verses. But the Herald is the least of Brother Athelstan's problem.

John of Gaunt, self-styled regent, protector and uncle of the boy-king, Richard II, has designs of his own with his Master of Secrets, Thibault, secretly meeting with one of the leaders of the Upright Men, Wat Tyler. What they have to say to each other is plain treason concerning the fate of Richard II and an enigmatic cipher, which was seized from one of the Upright Men's courier, Reynard. Only thing that was missing was the alphabet, or key, to decipher the message. Something even the cruel, tortuous interrogations of the time had failed to bring forth. 

Master Thibault allowed Reynard to recover in Newgate with "the opportunity to reflect and mend his ways," which could net him a full pardon from John of Gaunt. And, in the meanwhile, Master Thibault tasked Amaury Whitfield with breaking the cipher. This is where carefully laid plans slowly begin to unravel on all sides.

Amaury Whitfield is a clerk of the secret chancery and skilled in cryptic writing, but recently, he began to understand how far the web stretched and a nighttime visit from the Herald of Hell impelled him, under the cover boon days, to flee to the Golden Oliphant – Southwark's most notorious brothel. There he attended with his minion, Oliver Lebarge, the Festival of Cokayne. But, on the morning following the festivities, Whitfield failed to emerge from his room and the door had to broken down with a battering ram. Inside they find Whitefield dangling from a rope which had been lashed to a lantern hook on the ceiling beam! The key was still on the inside of the lock, eyelet covered, while the windows shutters were closed and barred. The room is situated at the top of the house and overlooked, besides a sheer drop, a garden where guard dogs roam at night. So how could have been anything but suicide?

A highly agitated Master Thibault officially commissions Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, and his secretarius, Brother Athelstan, to investigate the mysteries at the Golden Oliphant. And to unlock the cipher.

The brothel proves to be a hotbed of murder, treachery and intrigue with a second cipher to a long-lost treasure, the Cross of Lothar, the presence of a spy of the Upright Men and a second, quasi-impossible murder late in the story when one the characters tumbles down the steep, narrow staircase – which is still a fraction of what happens in this 200-page novel. Doherty ensures his reader is never bored with his characters constantly plotting, and counter plotting, or dragging cartloads of corpses across its pages. Something is always happening and "everything is connected" like "beads on a string."

One aspect I deeply admire about Doherty's best detective novels is how they're written as historical epics without diluting the detective story elements, such as A Murder in Thebes (1998), which is a trick he repeated in The Herald of Hell. While treason is plotted and the Earthworms, foot soldiers of the Upright Men, openly roamed the city and intervened in executions, the attention on the Golden Oliphant remained tight and focused without making it feel isolated. The solution to this portion of the story is excellent with the events at the Golden Oliphant best described as a Golden Age-style locked room mystery transplanted to 1381.

The first locked room-trick is a variation on an age-old trick and how it was done is easy enough to figure out, but the small variation successfully blinded me about another key aspect of the solution. Second, quasi-impossible murder has an equal simplistic explanation, but the aim of that trick was to create the kind of alibi you would expect to find in a Christopher Bush novel. 

Naturally, there much more to the plot with many moving parts and additional corpses, such as the treasure hunt, ciphers and the personal challenges and dangers the friar has to face before he could move towards "a logical conclusion to a most vexatious problem" – reconstructed, piece by piece, during a lengthy exposition. Something that was necessary to tie everything together, but certainly didn't detract from the overall story. The book ends on a kind of cliffhanger that will be concluded in The Great Revolt (2016), which very likely going to be my next read.

So, all things considered, Doherty has plotted better locked room mysteries, but The Herald of Hell is one of his better historical novels in which he seamlessly blended historical events with pure fiction. Highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: The Herald of Hell is a crossover novel by stealth! One of the places that plays a role in the story is a church, St. Mary Le Bowe, where a hundred years ago a Laurence Duket had fled to for sanctuary. The church was "locked and sealed for the night," but, when it was unlocked the following morning, the priest found Duket hanging from a wall bracket and "the King sent a royal clerk to investigate." I knew this sounded familiar, and yes, it turns out this is a reference to the first Hugh Corbett novel, Satan in St. Mary (1986)! Unfortunately, it spoiled the name of the murderer, but to have iron-clad proof of Athelstan and Corbett living in different timelines of the same fictitious universe is the stuff of fandoms!