Night Terrors: "The Empty Coffins" (1984/2009) by John Russell Fearn

2021 saw the publication of two so-called hybrid mysteries, Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), which introduced the living dead into the environment of the traditionally-styled detective story with two vastly different outcomes – ranging from the horrifying to the philosophical. Imamura's Death Among the Undead is a classic locked room mystery cast like a zombie survival horror flick, while Masaya's Death of the Living Dead simply blurred the lines that once separated the dead from the living. And they are both awesome! 

A successful blending of the traditional, fair play detective story and genres like fantasy, horror and science-fiction is very difficult to pull off without compromising one or the other. Masaya and Imamura showed it can be done even with something as fantastical as the walking dead. There happened to be a (very short) pulp novel on my TBR-pile that tried to play a similar game with vampires. But how successful was it? Let's find out! 

John Russell Fearn began "what was to become a fateful association with a new firm of publishers in London," Scion Ltd, in 1948 and first commissions were for romantic novelettes and later novel-length Westerns, but, during the early 1950s, Scion took the leap to science-fiction and played with the idea of a horror-detective line – which was scrapped in favor of their science-fiction line. Several decades later, Philip Harbottle gained access to Fearn's study, untouched since his untimely death in 1960, when his widow, Carrie Fearn, passed away in 1982. The study proved to be "an Aladdin's Cave of manuscripts, books, and cans of films written and produced by Fearn himself." One of the manuscripts was of an unpublished horror-detective, entitled No Grave Need I (c. 1950), which Scion returned and was put away to collect dust. Harbottle published a small chapbook edition of the novel in 1984 followed twenty-five years later by a professional edition under the title "The Empty Coffins" (2009) "along with all of the other unpublished mss" he salvaged. Harbottle is the only one who just walks in and out of the Phantom Library with his arms loaded with lost books and unpublished manuscripts.

Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" takes place in a small village on the south coast, Little Payling, which comprises of two, tightly intertwined plot-threads. One of these threads concern a young widow, Elsie Timperley, who had married a drunk brute, but she put up with George Timperley's abuses to ensure she inherited everything he owned. A small fortune which would open the way to marry her childhood friend and true love, Peter Malden, who's the local motor dealer and garage owner. Little Payling is a small village populated with typical village people "eager to seize on the slightest hint of scandal" and they found it indecent Elsie has been seen the company of Peter so many times George was "barely cold in the grave." Elsie has a good reason to get married as soon as possible, because a well-known mystic and seer, Rawnee Singh, told her she has "no future beyond the next eight months." And that can only mean death.

The second plot-thread is introduced when a local girl is attacked in the cemetery. Madge Paignton used the cemetery as a short cut one night when a barefooted creature in a funeral shroud attacked her and left "two gashes close to the jugular" on her throat. The country GP and student of the occult, Dr. Meadows, believes it was the work of a vampire, which belongs to the realm of "folklore and legend." But the situation has gotten from bad to worse during Elsie and Peter's honeymoon. A farmer and a local builder were brutally murdered within the span of a week and their bodies were "almost drained of blood." This is not the last deadly attacked in the village with everything pointing to Elsie as the next victim.

What about the detective aspect of the story, you ask? Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" actually did a good job in keeping the reader guessing which events have a supernatural origin and which are faked, but eventually it becomes evident "there's a human hand" behind some of the attacks – one of "the worst criminals ever, apparently." Consequently, "The Empty Coffins" turned out to be crammed with impossible crimes and locked room mysteries, but let the reader be warned, the ending plunges the story deep into pulp territory. So don't expect anything too much from their solutions, because, even by pulp-standards, not everything stands up to scrutiny. Such as (ROT13) vzvgngvat n jryy-xabja fcrpvnyvfg va urneg naq oybbq qvfbeqref jura gur arjfcncre urnqyvarf ner fpernzvat nobhg “Gur Yvggyr Cnlyvat Ubeebe” jvgu nyy gur rlrf va gur pbhagel sbphfrq ba gur ivyyntr or gur cercbfgrebhf tenir fvtug zrpunavfz erirnyrq ng gur raq, which was a little too much. The plot was further marred by gur cerfrapr bs n ahzore haxabja nppbzcyvprf, frperg cnffntrf naq ulcabgvfz with the human culprit standing out like a tombstone on a front lawn.

So not one of Fearn's most inspired attempts to create a hybrid, pulp-style mysteries or his most original impossible novel, which he combined in a much better in fashion in novels like Account Settled (1949) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951). There is, however, a brief shimmer of brilliance in how the (incredibly pulpy) motive and some of the (even more pulpier) methods that explained why the corpses had to be sucked bone dry. And the horror-elements of the story were put to good use to create a couple of good scenes. I particularly liked the illegal, moonlit exhumation of George's grave and Peter's nighttime visitor to his bedroom ("...was foul, unclean—something dead yet still alive"). This helped the faked phenomena blend in with the real ones. You'll probably be surprised to learn which were real and which were fake.

The horror aspect of the story is often very well done and, on a whole, "The Empty Coffins" is a readable, pulp-style mystery centering on the activities of a vampire and that's always going to be a different beast from your regular whodunit or locked room mystery. So adjust your expectations going in and remember "The Empty Coffins" is not Fearn at his best or most creative. Just a quick, dark-light and atmospheric read making a spirited attempt to incorporate vampires into a detective story. 

A note for the curious: So, while Fearn was not entirely triumphant, he unwittingly provided a blueprint on how to do it. Dr. Meadows explains "a vampire proper is the ghost of a suicide, or some such excommunicated person, who seeks vengeance on the living by attacking them and sucking away their blood" – which gives him a pretty good idea who the vampire in their cemetery is. This also gave me an idea how a proper, fair play detective story with real vampires could play out. Just imagine one of those small, ancient English villages where over the span of a year half a dozen people have died from various causes. But no murders or suicides. Or so everyone assumes until villagers get attacked and killed by, what appears to be, a real vampire. So the detective has to discover the vampire by delving into the past of the six recently deceased village to see if the country doctor misdiagnosed a suicide as natural causes or accident. A subplot can be added with someone using the activities of the vampire as a cover to commit a murder and stages a locked room/impossible crime to blame the vampire. Anyway, I'll try to pick something a little more conventional next time.

The Asteroid Murder Case (1970/2011) by Ross Rocklynne and Arthur Jean Cox

Several years ago, I came across a well-known science-fiction novella by Ross Rocklynne, "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941), in which a human, space suited skeleton is discovered on an asteroid dating back to a time before the human race had come into existence – similar to the premise of James P. Hogan's stellar Inherit the Stars (1977). A science-fiction mystery so good, we had to appropriate it. But don't tell the nerds. We convinced them aliens stole it. 

"Time Wants a Skeleton" is a time travel yarn with a detective hook and more science-fiction than a detective story, but Rocklynne tried his hands at an actual hybrid that's part science-fiction and part whodunit in 1970. Rocklynne was "very much at home in the Asteroid Belt" and his original short story, "The Asteroid Murder Case," is "set against that shifting, fragmented landscape." Rocklynne believed the story was worthy of publication, but the editor of Analog, John W. Campbell, turned it down saying "science-fiction and mystery fiction are incompatible." A claim Isaac Asimov obliterated with The Caves of Steel (1951), The Naked Sun (1957) and the Dr. Wendell Urth stories from Asimov's Mysteries (1986). But when the story was also turned down by Galaxy, the story disappeared in a drawer until he showed it to Arthur Jean Cox.

Cox advised Rocklynne to expand the short story into a novel to do justice to both genres and they had "an eye to collaborating on the larger version," but Rocklynne unexpectedly passed away in 1988. So the story was put back in a drawer, but, over the years, Cox remained convinced a finished, posthumous publication of "The Asteroid Murder Case" could be a fitting capstone to his friends career – a Quintessential Ross Rocklynne Asteroid Story. More than twenty years later, Cox got an opportunity to revise and enlarge Rocklynne's short story. All of the original characters, setting and plot were retained, but Cox "embroidered freely and without hesitation" with several new story elements and "a new character who looms rather large in the last few chapters." A novel-length treatment of The Asteroid Murder Case (2011) finally made it to print as a Wildside Double ("flip one book over the read the second title") together with Cox's A Collector of Ambroses and Other Rare Items (2011). The novel was later reprinted in The Second Science Fiction Novel MEGAPACK (2016) and eventually published as a standalone mystery in 2019.

So the story had a long, difficult road from conception to completion and finally publication, but (as some of you know) I'm not a big fan of writers tinkering with somebody else his characters and stories. However, Cox's argument that the short story barely left any room to explore the science-fiction setting or do any justice to the detective plot echoed my own comments on Kendell Foster Crossen's "The Closed Door" (1953). A really great short science-fiction detective story possessing all the material and potential needed in a novel-length treatment to craft a classic. So why not give it a shot? 

The Asteroid Murder Case opens with the arrival of Thomas Dooley, Chief of Security for the American Sector of the Belt, on a dark, lonely asteroid "which bore the rather romantic name of Albion." A rock in the middle of the Big Nowhere with a pressurized tent, or so-called "igloo," on it with the body of UN observer Carl Neal lying inside on a cot. Apparently, a stray meteor had punched a double hole through the igloo, which is one of "the natural hazards" of life in the Asteroid Belt. Dooley notices a spacesuit hanging on the wall without a helmet and he couldn't have walked the ten yards from his anchored clodhopper to the igloo without a helmet. And that means murder. This opens the question what a "fairly rich, fairly young, rather ambitious and very gregarious" man took "starvation wages" to work a lonely and thankless job as UN Observer in the Belt. Could there be a link between the murder and the tension between America and Russia with the possibility of industrial espionage? Russia have been making a marginal profit out of mining the asteroid belt, while it has been a losing proposition for the US and there have been talks about abandoning the Belt entirely. Something that would effectively hand over the mineral market to the Russians.

It also dates and betrays the Cold War origins of the short story version and some clues places the story sometime in the relatively close future. One of the characters mentions "our written history goes back only five thousand year," which is roughly the same as it's today, but, earlier on in the story, Dooley called a .45 caliber pistol "a relic from our glorious past" – consigned in his time to museums. The Asteroid Murder Case likely takes place sometime during the first three, or four, hundred years of the current millennium with the character rounding down the years of recorded history. You can't blame Rocklynne for not knowing in 1970 that the Cold War would be ended before the new millennium rolled around, but Cox could have made it feel a little less dated by swapping the Russians for another competitor to the American Section. Like the EU and the European Space Agency who could have made a pact with the Russians to explore and mine the stars, which would be of great concerns to the Americans. 

However, The Asteroid Murder Case is not a Cold War spy thriller in space. Just that the ghost of one bleeds through the story from time to time, but the story tries it best to align itself with the traditional detective story with numerous references to the classics. Every spaceship arriving, or departing, from the Asteroid Belt has the name of a celebrated mystery writer. You have the S.S. Doyle, S.S. Van Dine, S.S. Christie, S.S. Raskolnikov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) and even a small, elegant flyer named the Rendell. Ralph Phelps, of the Asteroid Regulatory Commission, has been planning for years to write down Dooley's cases in a book and takes the ancient Chinese style, "like the famous Judge Dee stories," as his model with three separate, unconnected storylines running neck-to-neck. Phelps plans to combine the current case, "The Asteroid Murder Case," with accounts of two of Dooley's unrecorded cases ("The Rain of Terror" and "The Russ Rockland Express") under the title The Big Nowhere.

Regrettably, all of this is merely lip service to the detective story as it's really a crime tale that unravels itself with the science-fiction elements only marginally more fleshed out than the detective plot. There's the initial investigation of the crime scene and briefly going over the discovery of intelligent creatures with a primitive culture on Jupiter largest moon, Ganymede, but it's mostly scenery until the end. So rather disappointing as both a detective and science-fiction novel, but, while the science-fiction elements began to dominate the mystery towards the end, it provided the ending with a much needed payoff – namely a strong and memorable motive to string everything together. A truly original and convincing motive which is on the one hand very human and on the other one unmistakably alien. Something a lot people would value as highly, or higher, as the all the gold and platinum in the asteroids. It's these last few chapters that made up the best and most memorable part of the whole story. 

The Asteroid Murder Case had a promising first chapter and a good ending, but there simply was not enough of either the detective or science-fiction genre to give anything more than a faint glimmer of what can be done with a well-balanced hybrid of the two. And that only towards the end. So a quick, enjoyable enough read, but, on a whole, a little thin to be particularly satisfying to fans of both genres.

The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) by Wallace Irwin

Wallace Irwin was an American journalist, satirist and writer whose work covered everything from humorous sketches, political satire and light verse to short stories and novels. Irwin began his literary career as a satirist with a laugh when he and his older brother, Will, were expelled from Stanford University in Palo Alta, California, because they lampooned their professors in campus publications – "an unusual achievement" for "which the Irwins should be fondly remembered." But readers of detective fiction have another reason to remember him fondly. 

When it was first published, The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) was perhaps seen as nothing more than an amusing curiosity, but, over the passing decades, it has become more than a mere genre curio. A mystery novel that, in some ways, was ahead of its time.

First and foremost, The Julius Caesar Murder Case stands as one of the earliest examples of the now popular historical mystery novel. John Dickson Carr's The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), Victor Luhrs' The Longbow Murder (1941), Agatha Christie's Death Comes as the End (1944) and Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee-series were still in the future. However, it's not a historically accurate mystery and can best be described as an alt-history retelling of Caesar's murder with an explanation why historians got it wrong. More importantly, the book predates Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) as a self-aware parody ("had he been born two thousand years later he would have brought out his cigarette lighter") that happens to be a good detective story in its own right. But that's not all!

Robert Adey spotlighted The Julius Caesar Murder Case in his introduction to Locked Room Murders (1991), under "More Golden Age Contributors," as a very odd, but incredibly fun, historical mystery with "the impossible crime, a stabbing by invisible agency, is well handled" – solved by, "in a manner of speaking," the first recorded journalist-detective. The Julius Caesar Murder Case was first published by the D. Appleton—Century Company and remained out-of-print until Ramble House printed a new edition in 2007 with an introduction by Richard A. Lupoff. The introduction points out that the novel is perhaps the very first of so-called "toga mysteries," but I think it might be the only piece of “papyrus pulp” ever written. I'll explain in a minute. First let's get to the story at hand!

Q. Bulbus Apex is the owner and city editor of "the world's first experiment in daily journalism," Evening Tiber, whose star reporter and well-known sports columnist is Publius Manlius "Mannie" Scribo. The best reporter in ancient Rome who goes by the motto, "it's my business to meddle." And meddle he does!

Mannie's journalistic interest is drawn to the seemingly insignificant murder of the General Producer of Pompey's Theater, Q. Bulbus Comma, who lived way out on Hesperides Avenue in a small bungalorium. There he was found, on his front porch, with his throat cut. A case of apparent little importance in a time and place where Gladiatorial killings was a public pastime and the use of a bare fist instead of "a boxing glove stuffed with nails" considered unsportsmanlike. And, generally, a murder rate that could reach "magnificent proportions." Mannie got a lead on the story as the victim was one of the Big Fella's (Julius Caesar) pet poodles. So he puts his personally designed .xxxii dagger in the special breast pocket of his toga and hops on a litter across town. Following him along, on foot, is his slave and strong-arm man, Smith, whom Mannie rechristened Smithicus. A Briton who speaks and acts with all the reserve of a 1930s English butler. They make a magnificent pair and their interactions are among the highlights of the story. What a shame this is their only appearance.

So they begin to poke around the crime scene and city in a time, 44 BC, when "the alliance between the Police Department and the underworld was so well recognized" that "only by his uniform could the hunter be distinguished from the hunted." Something was obviously going on in Rome as the simple minded Sergeant Kellius, of the Homicide Squad, is promoted to Chief of Police, Mark Anthony is showing interest in the Evening Tiber and tries to bribe Mannie's boss with a shipload of papyrus – while rumors buzz along Rome's whispering gallery that "a giant plot was on the fire." Two things that run through the case is the motto Sic Semper Tyrannis (so always with tyrants) and that ever-present warning that has echoed throughout history, "beware the Ides of March!" But political games in ancient Rome can be dangerous. Mannie finds himself backed into a corner on more than one occasion and falls in love with the cherchez la femme ("as the Gauls would have said") of the story.

Yes, if you strip away the togas, marble and historical characters, The Julius Caesar Murder Case resembles a fairly routine, 1930s pulp-style detective story, but Irwin did such a fantastic job in dressing up the plot that I didn't notice it until halfway through the story. He really did a lot with surprisingly little, particularly during the first-half, but the last half gave the plot some much needed weight and depth with an impossible murder, ghostly visitations and a well handles solution.

Mannie witnessed with his own eyes Julius Ceasar walking quite alone, "fully a dozen feet beyond the reach of any assassin's arm," when a knife, "coming out of nowhere," pierced the Dictator through the back – stood "quivering in his bleeding and lifeless body." Not exactly the story that was passed down the ages, but that historical account was printed that very day in the first papyrus edition of the Evening Tiber. So now "contemporary historians would consult the Evening Tiber's files and get the queer, fanciful version" while "future historians would copy the bunk, and improve on it." This made Mannie determined to get to the bottom of the case and he goes down in society quite a bit before he comes back on top with the correct solution.

Solution to the impossible stabbing is, to be fair, not one of the greatest and basically combines two carny tricks not uncommon to the type of pulp-style locked room mysteries Irwin was parodying, but the who-and why were very well handled. Particularly who stabbed Caesar and why and how the two murders were linked together. This weightier ending is one of the many reasons why the story gets away with its shortcomings. 

The Julius Caesar Murder Case really is a second-string mystery that pretends to be first-rate historical detective novel and gets away with it, because it's such a tremendously fun story to read with the two main characters who deserved to be more than mere one-shot detectives. Just to give you an idea how firmly Irwin had his tongue planted in his cheek, he "affectionately dedicated" the book to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler with "the author's feeling that in distance there is security." But don't expect a historical detective comedy a la Blackadder or Monty Python. Irwin was an American and The Julius Caesar Murder Case reminded me of Colin Quinn's one-man show Long Story Short, but told as a typically 1930s, American pulp detective story that refuses to take itself (or anyone else) too seriously. So why is it still so obscure and little-known around these parts? 

Notes for the curious: The Julius Caesar Murder Case was reviewed by Patrick in 2013 and JJ in 2019, which you can read here and here.

Death of the Living Dead (1989) by Yamaguchi Masaya

The first post to appear on this blog in 2020 was a review of a very unorthodox Japanese crime novel, Hirakasete itadaki kōei desu (The Resurrection Fireplace, 2011) by Hiroko Minagawa, which is a historical and cultural travelogue of 1770s London – a time when body-snatchers were emptying the cemeteries and illegal autopsies were performed by candle light. A somewhat strange historical crime novel casting the morgue in a distinctly Dickensian light, but the plot did very little to scratch that detection itch. John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, had me covered there and published an English translation of Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) back in August. 

Death Among the Undead gave expression to the yearning of the Japanese shin honkaku movement for "the kind of impetus" Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) had created over thirty years ago. Something daring and different to refresh the traditional, fair play detective story. Just like they have done with their ghoulish corpse-puzzles and often youthful, college-age detectives. So the path Imamura took was simply to add a fantastical element to an otherwise traditional shin honkaku (locked room) mystery by staging it smack dab in the middle of a small, localized zombie apocalypse. Zombies alter the equation of any closed-circle situation or locked room murder, but the rules of fair play were thoroughly honored. I wanted more of this kind of impetus myself! But where to find it?

Fortunately, an anonymous comment was left on my review saying "that there is actually another famous award-winning zombie-related honkaku mystery," Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989). The comment also mentioned the book had "been completely translated into English," but Masaya "was still looking for somebody to publish it," which immediately dampened my hope as that meant it would probably take another year or two before the book was published – only for Christmas to come unexpectedly early! Back in November, Ho-Ling Wong announced on his blog that he was the one who translated Death of the Living Dead, "widely considered to be one of the more important works of early shin honkaku mystery fiction," which Ammo published last December. Just in time to brighten the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, which ended and began over here with another complete lockdown. So let's dissect this classic!

First of all, Death of the Living Dead is a beast to review. A 400-page detective novel with half of the pages setting up a story populated with over thirty characters (dramatis personae covers an entire page), multiple plot-threads and a series of truly bizarre crimes. One that takes place in a world that has to come to grips with the fact that the gap between the living and the dead is narrowing. 

Death of the Living Dead begins with a prologue demonstrating that very point. A homicide detective, Lieutenant Neville, confronting the culprit of a domestic murder in a blood-spattered room. But, as Neville explains to the murderer that her "whole alibi depends on the hourglass inside that aquarium and the clown doll covered in ketchup," the lips of the corpse quivered. Just a few moments later, the corpse stood up, cried out "I won't let you kill me again" and jumped out of the window. The next chapter explains that the prologue described one of numerous "astonishing incidents that had been happening all across the United States, and indeed the whole world, of the dead coming back to life" – thirteen known occurrences in US within the span of a month. However, these "living dead" are not your typical horror movie zombies, who want to snack on your brains, but have "the same mental capabilities as when they were alive." Some go crazy when they learn they are dead or refuse to believe it, while "others feel like outcasts among the living and fall into depression." So with the dead coming back to live with their full mental capabilities changes quite a few things.

This changed world is explored during the first, lengthy half of the story and introduces the most important character of the story, Francis "Grin" Barleycorn. Steve Steinbock aptly described Grin as "a Punk Ellery Queen living in an otherworldly Wrightsville." An otherworldly Wrightsville known as Tombsville in the countryside of New England. Grin is the grandson of the dying Smiley Barleycorn, head and general manager of the family-run Smile Cemetery, who welcomed back the child of his estranged son. Grin traveled to the Smile Cemetery to meet with his family for the first time and is accompanied by his girlfriend (of sorts), Saga "Cheshire" Shimkus, whose mother (Isabella) is connected to the cemetery.

I think readers who prefer mystery writers to leave their literary pretensions at the door and get to the point might find the first 200 pages a little trying, but you have to give Masaya the space and time to setup the whole story. More importantly, there's a lot of important information, clues and developments in the first half that will become important later on in the story. And, if you love the arcane or macabre, you find a lot to enjoy in those first 200-pages. There's the necessary history of the family of undertakers and Smile Cemetery, but also sidetracks into embalming, cremation and "the unique funeral traditions of the United States" as well as discussions of the dead rising up and live and death in general. But, as mentioned above, there's plenty of relevant information hidden here that will become important later on. Not to mention a very important plot development happens during the first half.

After a family meeting, which resembled "the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland," Grin is poisoned with arsenic, gets sick and dies in his bathroom – waking up from his eternal slumber only a few hours later. Grin only takes one person into his confidence, Dr. Vincent Hearse, who's a professor of Thanatology and special adviser to the local police. There's a rather sad and bitter taste to the scenes of Grin describing and trying to cope with his death and resurrection. Grin tells Dr. Hearse being a living dead feels like being in a dream, or watching a movie, like he was "separated from what's actually happening." This is shown in a very brief, but depressing scene, when Grim tries to sleep, gets up and kicks the bed in frustration. Grin "could see the bed shaking from the shock," but "not feel any pain in his leg" and cried "a tearless howl from the depths of his soul." By the way, typically Japanese storytelling to do either something truly horrible to one of the main protagonists or take them out of the story entirely.

Well, the readers who patiently waited for the plot to finally kick off are richly rewarded when one of the family members is stabbed to death in the viewing room, in front of Smiley's casket, in the West Wing of the Funeral Hall (floorplan included). That wing was "a hermetically sealed space" at the time of the murder and CCTV footage only deepens the mystery. The footage shows someone wearing a hockey goaltender mask, who they simply call "Hockey Mask," enter to the sealed wing unseen to play hide-and-seek with the victim-in-waiting. Only to disappear without a trace! No. The solution is not what you think it is (Fzvyrl qvq abg pbzr onpx gb yvir naq fgnoorq gur ivpgvz), but there's so much to the plot that has everything from hearse races to the possible return of a serial killer, who chainsawed college girls seventeen years previously, to the region. Than there are the murder victims who rise up right after they were struck down to complicate everything even further. Every aspect of the story, philosophical or practical, is used to perfection to build up to a beautifully orchestrated, three-punch ending.

Firstly, there's the wonderful character of the much harassed Richard Tracy, Police Lieutenant of the Marbletown Police Station, who has trouble adjusting to "living in an abnormal world where the dead can come back to life again." More than once, he has to deal with a victim whose murder he's investigation getting up and meddle with his work, exonerating his suspects or even getting physical with them – which results in regular scheduled appointments with a psychiatrist. Lieutenant Tracy battles through and pieces together a brilliant solution presented in a dramatic denouement "like the great detectives in mystery novels do." A false-solution that's immediately picked apart by everyone in the room (living and dead), but it's a false-solution worthy of the underappreciated Simon Brimmer. After the false-solution has been shot to pieces, Grin steps forward to reveal he, too, is dead and then proceeds to explain what really happened during that tea party and the subsequent crimes in an impressive chain of deductive reasoning. Grin has a lot to explain a lot and the explanation is a long one, but every piece of this intricate, maze-like plot is unraveled in a clear and methodical way. What emerges is an extraordinary, but logical, chain of events and crimes that could have occurred only under these very special circumstances that created some highly unusual and original motives. Throughout it all the motives of the living and death are both intertwined and at odds.

Lastly, you have the ending that drove home the fact that, while there will always be a dividing line between the living and living dead, they still have one thing that binds them together. The human element. Something that can be torn away again. This ended in a slightly depressing, bitter sweet conclusion when the time came to say goodbye.

So what more can be said about Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead? Masaya crafted a genuine masterpiece in more way than one. Death of the Living Dead is one of those rare, successful hybrid mysteries in which Masaya logically tackled the problem of murder in a world where "the dead are rising one by one, and can walk, think and talk." Masaya handled and treated humanity's old, morbid fascination with death in an equally fascinating way, which were craftily incorporated into a first-rate plot. A plot that has everything from corpses meddling in their murder cases, impossible crimes and a brilliant use of the false-solution, but it's the who-and why exposed by Grin that stole the show in the end. A wonderful, otherworldly, but also very human, detective story that gave a whole new meaning to a rising bodycount. If Western crime-and detective fiction was half as good as their Japanese counterparts, I wouldn't have the time to fanboy all over these shin honkaku writers.

Polaris (2004) by Jack McDevitt

Several months ago, I probed A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt, an American science-fiction author, who specialized in futuristic archaeological and historical science-fiction mysteries asking that age-old question, "what in heaven's name is going on here" – strongly influenced by G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. McDevitt prefers the how-the-hell-was-it-done over the whodunit and cites he has "always been a devotee of the locked room murder" with Chesterton's "The Arrow of Heaven" (The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926) as a personal favorite. So you can probably understand how a pure science-fiction writer appeared on my radar. 

McDevitt's admiration for Chesterton's detective fiction found an expression in his series about a space-faring antique dealer, Alex Benedict, who plies his trade among the stars and settled worlds a hundred centuries in the future. Trouble usually knows where to find him through his business dealings in rare and valuable space age artifacts or sticking his nose a little too deep in a historical mystery.

Alex Benedict was introduced as a one-and-done deal in A Talent for War, but the various characters, fascinating premise and the vast, richly detailed setting would have been wasted in a standalone and so he was brought back in the 2000s – adding seven novels and two short stories to the lineup. I believe these additional novels is what earned McDevitt a comparison with Ellery Queen as most of his attention in the first novel was directed to an impressive and convincing piece of world-building. A multi-world civilization, spread out across the stars, populated with a thousand billions human beings and one other intelligent species, the Ashiyyur, that humanity has come across during its exploration of the Milky Way. But there are still some serious limits to the technology that allowed humanity to colonize distant planets. And the humans who inhabit those planets are still very human. They left behind more than ten thousand years of history, space age urban legends and a ton of unsolved mysteries.

There aren't that many examples of world-building in the traditional detective story. You have Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of a Queen (1935), Peter Dickenson's The Poison Oracle (1974) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998). Robert van Gulik's reconstruction of Tang Dynasty-era China in his historical Judge Dee series has been likened to the world-building more commonly associated with the science-fiction genre. So I'm always impressed when someone can make an entire, living and breathing, civilization appear out of thin air.

However, as impressive as the world-building was in A Talent for War, I was glad to discover there was an actual detective hook in the second novel with an intriguing central puzzle. A puzzle that can be summed up as the Mary Celeste in outer space!

There were fifteen years between the publication of A Talent for War and Polaris (2004), which came with a notable change. The books are now narrated by his assistant and superluminal pilot, Miss Chase Kolpath. She has been with him since the Corsarius affair, twelve years ago, which "led to some rewriting of history" and "a small fortune for Alex." This time, they're confronted with another problem that was left open ended in the history books.

Sixty years ago, "six of the most celebrated people in the Confederacy" boarded a luxury, the Polaris, to accompany a scientific expedition to a 6-billion-year-old star, Delta Karpis, "drifting quietly through the great deeps with its family of worlds" – now counting down its final hours. A year previously, a white dwarf entered the planetary system, "scattering worlds and moons," became "a dagger aimed directly at the heart of Delta Karpis itself." So there are several ships closely observing the approaching destruction, which is both spectacular and tragic as one of the planets is the home of "large animals, living oceans, and vast forests." But has this closely observed collision anything to do with what happens next? Polaris is ready to make the jump back home and Captain Madeleine English tells the communication officer at the Indigo Station, "departure imminent," but the starship never appeared on the other side.

Another starship was dispatched to the last-known position of the Polaris and was discovered a week later, substantially off course, without a trace of the VIPs or crew! There's no sign of a struggle or evidence of a hurried departure. Someone, or something, eliminated "the sole witness the investigators might have had" by shutting down the ship's AI. This suggested to some people "the existence of a supernatural power out there somewhere" that's "capable of invading a sealed ship before an alarm could be sent." Since there was no real answer to be found, the incident passed into the realm of conspiracy theories with the most popular explanations inevitably involving a third, unknown race of aliens. Even ghosts enter the picture as people claim to have seen spirits on the now renamed ship.

Sixty years later, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath have discovered and are in the process of exploring the ruins of a giant, eighteen hundred years old Shenji outstation orbiting a blue giant on the on the edge of Confederacy space. The locations of many of these outstations were lost to time and finding one will get the attentions of archaeologists, historians and collectors. Such as Winetta Yashevik, archaeological liaison at the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research, who plan to open a new wing to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Polaris incident. Survey is planning "a two-week-long extravaganza" with a banquet and an auction to sell off some Polaris artifacts that were locked in storage for decades. Alex and Chase seize the opportunity to pick some choice items for themselves with the outstation as exchange, which is both a stroke of luck and a harbinger of doom. A huge bomb explosion at the Survey destroyed the entire Polaris collection except for the artifacts currently in Alex and Chase's possession. That's where the problems really begin for the two antique dealers.

The customers who bought the artifacts receive strange visitors, one aptly named Flambeau, who show great interest in the artifacts, but nothing appears to be stolen or anything to suggest criminal intentions – besides, you know, the bombing of the Survey. But this changes when an attempt is made to get Alex and Chase out of the way. More than once. So, naturally, they begin a deep dive into history as they interrogate virtual rendered avatars of the people ("a projection backed by a data retrieval system") who went missing and talks with some very old witnesses and somewhat lonely AI stuck on a distant outstation. While they're rooting around in the past, they come across a string of missing persons with dodgy records and even some (suspected) murders. More importantly, two hot button issues of the future begin to drift to the surface.

Firstly, one of the VIPs on the Polaris, Professor Tom Dunninger, had devoted his life to cracking the secret of life extension, or practical immortality, "who was reported to have been on the track of a major breakthrough" before boarding that doomed starship. There were rumors that "a few immortals were actually created" who were still out there somewhere. Stuff of legends. However, it got the professor in the crosshairs of some people and groups who believed it would lead to even more over population, which might seem silly when you've got an endless, practically empty, universe to explore and colonize. But there's a logical reason given for this concern. Technically, they could move people from a densely populated world to the virtually empty super continent on Sacracour, but the 1064 superluminals of the Confederacy has an average passenger capacity of twenty-eight people. Just try moving even a fraction of the eleven billion people on Earth to Sacracour with those numbers. So not everyone was happy with Dunninger's work during a time when people already had an average lifespan of more than a hundred years. Secondly, there's the mind wipe and personality adjustment technology used to give incorrigible criminals an entirely new identity, psyche and memories, which comes with more ethical exclamation and question marks than the death penalty. I'm honestly surprised its use was implemented without a huge conflict or an outright, multi-world war. I think mind wipes is something people would go to war over, if it was forced on them.

So the backdrop here is as alive as in the first novel, but what about the mystery? The detective pull of the plot? You have to keep in mind that Polaris is not a traditionally-structured, or plotted, detective story, but the central puzzle was pretty good with the problem of how the people disappeared from the derelict Polaris counting as a legitimate locked room mystery – although one with a relative simple and routine solution. Still a very well presented and handled impossible situation. Much more inspired was the motive behind all these incidents and one person in particular turned out to have been the victim of a truly hellish crime, which definitely had a Chestertonian touch. Something that reminded me of "The Worst Crime in the World" from The Secret of Father Brown (1927). 

Polaris definitely benefited from not having to setup an entire section of the universe, populated with two technically advanced species with tens of thousand years of history between them, which made for a stronger and more focused science-fiction mystery. I very much look forward to the third entry in the series, Seeker (2005). 

Notes for the curious: I couldn't cram this in anywhere else, but one of the little touches to the backdrop that made the setting so convincing and alive is the distribution between alien life and intelligent, technologically advanced species. There's humanity, the Ashiyyur and the fifty-thousand-year-old ruins on a now inhospitable planet, which were once "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" (mentioned in A Talent for War). There's plenty of life to be found on the planets. Alex and Chase visit the previous mentioned Sacracour that has an eight billion year old bio-system complete with "walking plants, living clouds, and, arguably, the biggest trees on record." Polaris also provides an answer how humans can settle all these living worlds without getting sick and dying. Apparently, the viruses and germs on most worlds are incompatible with humans with an occasional exception, like Markop III, where "viruses and disease germs loved Homo sapiens." I doubt this is scientifically accurate, but that's where the fiction in science-fiction comes into play and appreciate the attention to detail. This is something McDevitt easily could have glossed over without anybody noticing.

Death Among the Undead (2017) by Masahiro Imamura

Back in late 2018, Ho-Ling Wong posted an intriguing review of Masahiro Imamura's debut novel, Shijinso no satsujin (The Murders in the Villa of the Dead, 2017), which "made enormous waves in the world of Japanese mystery fiction" as it swooped the number one spots in the Kono Mystery ga Sugoi, Weekly Bunshun Mystery Best 10 and Honkaku Mystery Best 10 rankings – marking "the first time anyone had managed to grab the grand spot of these three annual mystery fiction rankings." There's a good reason why the book was a smashing success in Japan spawning "a multimedia franchise" with manga and live-action adaptations. 

Masahiro Imamura accomplished something in his debut that many have attempted, but only few have succeeded in doing. The Murders in the Villa of the Dead blurs the lines between two different genre, namely the detective and horror story, without corrupting or tainting the integrity of either. The book impressively juggles the traditional locked room mystery with an actual zombie outbreak, which isolated the characters to the titular villa and created one of the most original closed-circle situations on record!

So, naturally, I've been banging on about the book getting translated ever since and half-expected Pushkin Vertigo would eventually pick it up, but it was John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, who scooped up the publishing rights – getting out an English translation quicker than I could have asked for. Ho-Ling Wong translated The Murders in the Villa of the Dead, retitled Death Among the Undead, which has a must-read introduction by the "God of Mystery," Soji Shimada. A jealousy-inducing introduction as Shimada goes over the history of the Japanese detective story and particular how "the youngsters belonging to the university mystery clubs" rebelled against the domineering social school of crime fiction. This is now known as the beginning of the shin honkaku boom in Japan. A movement that completely rejuvenated the traditional, plot-oriented detective story and mystery fans everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to them.

However, while the West only recently have gotten a taste of the great shin honkaku school, the movement has been dominant in Japan for decades and readers "yearned for the kind of impetus" that Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) had created. Death Among the Undead gave expression to that yearning and might very well be the signal of "a revolutionary change for the mystery genre" in which authors look to fantastical elements, like "country house murder mysteries which utilize artificial elements" or zombies, to add something new and original to the core-puzzles of their novels. This is both amazing and slightly depressing. I'm poking here through the remains of the brief flareups of the Dutch detective story, while Japan is about to enter their Third Golden Age. 

Death Among the Undead forced that first step towards new grounds, like the shin honkaku movement did in the past, but the story begins as a typical, shin honkaku-style detective story with a university student as the narrator, Yuzuru Hamura – who's loves traditional detective fiction. So he tried to join the Shinkō University's Mystery Club, but its members were more interested in Young Adult fiction and used to club as an excuse to socialize. However, there's a second, unofficial and one-man mystery club on campus run by a third-year student. Kyōsuke Akechi is the president of the Mystery Society and aspires to be Great Detective, known as "The Holmes of Shinkō," who recruits Hamura as his Watson. Akechi and Hamura go around campus solving cases (like "The Case of the Leaked Theology Tests") or looking for lost cats as a part-time job for the Tanuma Detective Agency. Akechi always hoped something truly interesting and worthy would occur around him, but he was not content to wait until something turned up and had the habit to jump in on his own. This is why he has set his eyes on the Film Club's summer trip.

The Film Club has planned a trip to the Villa Violet, a private boarding house, situated near Lake Sabea in S Prefecture where they want to shoot a short, POV-style horror movie, but the trip is also "what some might call a group dating party" – which is why there not too keen on outsiders trying to horn in. A group of students gathering at a boarding house in the summer strikes Akechi as "the perfect place for some incident to occur," but he gets turned down several times. No outsiders! This changes when a note is found in club room asking "who will be the sacrifice this year?" A reference to a female club member committing suicide after their previous summer trip. Like I said, the story starts out like a fairly typical, neo-orthodox detective story. This could easily have been the premise of a story from The Kindaichi Case Files (The Legendary Vampire Murders comes to mind).

So there are a few cancellations and the persistent Akechi is approached by a second-year student, Hiruko Kenzaki, who offers Akechi and Hamura to join them after all. Otherwise, the trip might be canceled all together. What makes her deal so curious, is that they learn she's a detective "who has taken on many difficult and downright inexplicable cases that even the police couldn't handle." Kenzaki solved those cases with her "matchless powers of reasoning," but she comes from an illustrious family and her involvement is covered up with "strict restraints" on the media. So could there anything behind her arranging a place for them on the trip?

Akechi and Hamura become the outsiders in a group comprising of Film and Drama Club members, university alumni's and the manager of the Villa Violet, but, despite the alumni's turning out to be unpleasant characters, there's nothing to suggest all hell is about to break loose. Well, they discover that their smartphones have no signal and can't connect to the internet. There's the sound of ambulance sirens in the distance, helicopters in formation flying over and a brilliant, glowing aura behind the mountains. But everyone assumed that the Sabea Rock Festival was getting wild. Until they ventured out to explore an abandoned hotel in couples on "a Trial of Courage dare." This is where the story becomes unapologetically awesome!

While out in the dark, they can make out several figures descending the mountainside, swaying from side to side, dragging their feet and moaning until they were close enough for the lamp posts to illuminate "about a dozen swaying figures" coming their way – exposing their dark, bloodstained faces and torn clothing. And "the pungent, rotten smell of blood, grease and more." Obviously, these torn creatures are no extras hired to scare them and no-sold a rock thrown at its face. So they left cartoon smoke as they run back to the Villa Violet, but not everyone makes it back as what remains of the group barricade themselves inside. That one line, "things don't always go right," shows why the best storytellers today can be found in Japan.

They hear on the news that there was a possible bio-terror attack at the Rock Festival and the police has sealed off the entire area, but the news is evidently censored and communication cut-off to prevent mass panic. So now they have to survive until (hopefully) rescue comes, but one of them sees "a sign from heaven" in "the appearance of the walking dead" and a change to exact revenge. And the next day, one of the survivors is found dead under gruesome, hard to explain circumstances.

President of the Film Club, Ayumu Shindō, is found dead in his locked room and his death had not been a pleasant one. There were parts of his body that had been bitten off and his face had been gnawed all over, but nobody else had been in the gory, blood-drenched room and the balcony looked down on "the hordes of zombies swarming the grounds below." But they also find a folded piece of paper with "let's eat" scrawled on it. So there you have, what the story calls, "an unprecedented locked room mystery," because only a human could have possibly entered the room, but nobody "showed signs of having bitten Shindō to death." On the other hand, a zombie could have killed him, but "the possibility of a zombie penetrating the double-layered locked room, by accident or coincidence, is zero." Possibilities are explored through a locked room lecture, discussing fictional zombies and analyzing their own homegrown zombie hoard.

Their "brain only seems capable of sending simple orders" and "the coordination of their limbs is so bad they can't even run," easily losing their balance and struggling with obstacles, but they have "unlimited stamina" and feel no pain – which reduce the barricades to temporary obstacles. More importantly, they don't attack human, or each other, to eat, but to infect the living and reproduce. Anyone who's bitten gets infected, dies and rises again as a fully fleshed out zombie. Imamura brilliantly and logically integrated what the zombies can, and can't do, with the plot and story's setting, but how and where the zombies come into play is one of the key-pieces of the puzzle. Not just with the first murder. There's a second, equally gruesome murder in the elevator, where someone has been bitten to death and got his head smashed to a pulp, which is more of a how-was-it-done than an impossible crime. But the solution is ingenious! The third, very late murder is somewhat glossed over, as the body is impossible to reach, but the presence of zombies opened the door to an original twist on an old dodge.

Purely as a traditional, plot-driven detective novel, Death Among the Undead can stand with the best of its kind, past and present, but the story makes a point not to ignore the whydunit angle. Not merely the murderer's motive, but why the murderer employed such dangerous and high-risk methods. The trickery behind the murders can eventually be explained, but here it raises the question why such methods were employed. I really liked the dark duality the solution exposed between the intellectual and emotional facets of both the murders and murderer, which I thought was nicely complemented by an interesting and grim piece of commentary on the murder-magnet trope. I could go on, and on, praising the book, but there's one small detail that bugged me and it would be unfair to ignore or gloss over it.

Masahiro Imamura's succeeded in injecting zombies in a traditional detective story without killing it, but it came with a noticeable side effect. The characters took a more proactive approach to the murders than to the more pressing situation of hundreds of zombies, breaking down the barricades, slowly taking over the villa – floor by floor. They're rather passive when it comes to the zombies with a wait and hope for the best attitude and while coming up with all kinds of false-solutions to the murders, nobody is trying to figure out a way to escape from the villa to their van. Sure, they complain about the rope-ladder or a rope made out of bed sheets, but you're in the epicenter of a small, localized zombie apocalypse. What did they expect? A rooftop slip-and-slide? The zombies standing outside the villa can, theoretically, be bypassed. Just imagine the limited number of zombies as being water and Villa Violet a giant sluice. Eventually, they'll begin flooding the house, but you have control and slowdown the flood by using everything in the house to create either obstacles or a pathway. When one side of the villa has (mostly) cleared of zombies, they can slide down from a balcony, window or even the rooftop from the rope-ladder or bed sheets. And run to the van like the devil is on their heels. I was also slightly annoyed that nobody stumbled to the idea to sharpen the blunted, decorative swords and spears. This would have spared a little muscle power fighting an undead creature whose only advantage is unlimited stamina.

Nonetheless, this minor complaint is nothing to the detriment of the threat these terrifying creatures pose to the people trapped inside the villa. I do not fear Dracula, Freddy Krueger or Godzilla, but zombies never fail to unnerve me in how they can turn friends and family "into enemies in the blink of an eye." Imamura's zombies drive that point home very effectively. This is why an actual zombie apocalypse wouldn't kill us as a society or civilization. It would be the psychological aftermath that would neck us. Particularly if a zombie virus is permanent and turns everyone who dies into a zombie. Just imagine what that would do to people! I think I prefer to deal with malevolent ghosts or demonic children.

So, to draw this overlong and rambling review to a close, Death Among the Undead is close to perfect as a hybrid-mystery novel and has a plot bubbling with exciting new ideas and the spirit of exploration, which earned it a place alongside Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) as a rare classic of its kind. Simply put, the blast I had with Death Among the Undead could have wiped out the dinosaurs a second time. My best and favorite read of 2021! I sincerely hope we can look forward to an English translation of the sequel, Magan no hako no satsujin (The Murders in the Box of the Devil Eye, 2019), in 2022.

On a last, somewhat related note: I didn't want to wait too long with posting my review of this modern masterpiece and crammed as early as possible in my posting schedule. This came at the expense of yesterday's review of three short stories by Joseph Commings. So, if you have missed it, give it a look.

Voodoo (1930) by John Esteven

Samuel Shellabarger was an American educator, scholar and writer who had a passion for history and a linguistic talent, speaking nine different languages, which eventually lead him to the field of historical fiction and copies sold "so briskly" that Twentieth Century Fox bought the screen rights to several novels – amassing "1.5 million dollars for his late-in-life historical novels." So historical fiction is the genre which gave his name literary immortality, but he cut his teeth on "light literature." That's a very nice way of saying detective stories. 

Shellabarger adopted two pennames, "John Esteven" and "Peter Loring," to separate his
scholarly work from his light-headed romantic adventure novels and his somber, outlandishly weird detective fiction. 

The Door of Death (1928), published as by John Esteven, appears to have been his first foray into the genre and introduced one of his short-lived series-characters, Inspector Rae Norse, who made his second and last appearance in Voodoo (1930) – which is listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). While obscure and largely forgotten today, Shellabarger's detective novels were reissued as relatively cheap ebooks in 2013. Why not cross another impossible crime title off my locked room list. 

Voodoo starts off as a conventional, 1930s detective novel as Inspector Rae Norse, of the Metropolitan Police, is consulted by Judge Matthew Frole. A "zealot of the code" who never "swerved to left or right in the interpretation of any law" with a "let the chips fall where they will" kind of attitude, but age had also "hardened, narrowed, dehumanized" him. This hardly endeared him to the people around him. Now the judge being hunted by several thugs with several narrow escapes, but they keep entering his home and his watchdog has disappeared. And they leave behind withered oak leaves. So who's the subtle hand guiding those blunt, brutal men?

Judge Frole's household is crawling with potential candidates. There's his son, Essex, who was convicted and sentenced for liquor smuggling. Judge Frole declined to judge the case and refused his son any help, which earned him praise in the national press, but his wife and daughter where entirely on the side of Essex. Doris married a distant relative, James Ackerson, who used Judge Frole and the law as "unwitting instruments of a cowardly personal spite" to destroy an honorable man. Ackerson used the one-drop rule not only to destroy the career of a navy officer, Dryden Senart, but challenged the right of his 7-year-old daughter to attend a white school and the case was eventually brought to court, which was presided over by Judge Frole – who stripped the child of her privileges. When he later learned of the true background of the story, he washed his hands of Ackerson and kicked him out of the house. However, the damage had already been done.

Inspector Rae Norse recognizes there's potential danger and the judge hardly improved the situation when he announced the drafting of a new will, which would leave his relatives on "scanty rations" and counting pennies. Norse places his house under close guard and positions himself in the silent, pitch-black corridor to Frole's bedroom with a flashlight.

So far, so good. This is unquestionable the best written portion of the story and somewhat reminded me of Roger Scarlett's Gothic-style mystery novel, In the First Degree (1933), which both have the detective present at the bedside of the dying victim. Norse makes an unsettling discovery when he enters the locked bedroom. Judge Frole is sitting up in bed, breathing and conscious, but his entire body is paralyses and unable to speak. What follows is a nightmarish distortion as a doctor attempts to revive him while his loud, impatient family try to get access to the sickroom, which they know stresses the dying man. A scene as bizarre as it's dark that ended with the judge dying and his son on the run. Regrettably, this is also where the story slowly begins to disintegrate and fall apart. You can blame that on Shellabarger going off in every direction without arriving anywhere. 

Voodoo began as a relatively normal detective novel with a premise and bizarre, quasi-impossible murder promising something in the spirit of Virgil Markham, Theodore Roscoe and W. Shepard Pleasants' The Stingaree Murders (1934), but descended to the ranks of second-rate, badly cliched pulp thrillers during its second-half – complete with voodoo savages and a city cult. A pensive Norse has to cross paths with a West Indian voodoo cult in a modern American city and "the practice of cruel, superstitious rites." Practically everyone appears to have some kind of connection to the voodoo cult or the liquor ring, which brings Norse to the mountains of Cuba. This is where the story becomes a kind of hybrid mystery with a strong supernatural flavor as Norse gets the witness a blood sacrifice with the head priestess becoming the physical manifestation of an ancient serpent god. None of it is captivating or particular good. I wish voodooism was used an explanation for everything else, because, as bad as Voodoo is as a pulp-style thriller with magic, it's even worse as a detective story.

Firstly there's the locked room-trick, which is kind of original and novel, but a very bad, mindbogglingly stupid kind of original and novel. I even checked Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement to be sure and was relieved to read the Robert Adey's baffled comment. I'll quote (using ROT13) the solution and Adey's comment, because you have to read it in order to believe it. But would feel guilty, if I tempted any of you in spending a few backs on the ebook. So, if the solution is to be believed, gur zheqrere unq na rkgen xrl sbe gur pbaarpgvat qbbe naq gur ybpx jnf fhpu gung ur jnf noyr gb hfr vg jvgubhg qvfybqtvat gur xrl ba gur vafvqr. Adey's sanely questioned, "jung xvaq bs ybpx nyybjf gur vafregvba bs n frpbaq xrl jvgubhg qvfgheovat gur svefg?" Neither is it much of a whodunit as the murderer's identity is painfully obvious, but there was a nice attempt to serve the reader a confusing red herring. A trick that required the hand of a skilled and practiced plotter, which is why it didn't work here. But appreciated the attempt.

So, yeah, Voodoo is a pretty poor specimen of the genre with an indecisive, directionless writer further weakening an already run-of-the-mill, pulp-style plot and resulted in a mess that's going to be hard to beat as worst mystery of 2021. The reader has been warned!