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.

Give Up the Ghost: Q.E.D, vol. 11 by Motohiro Katou

On January 19, 2020, I reviewed volume 4 of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series and intended to reach volume 10 before the end of the year, which was accomplished in August, but the idea to end 2020 with a review of volume 20 didn't get anywhere – decided to give myself an extension until the end of 2021. So here we are and, hopefully, I'll manage to get closer to volume 30 than 20. 

The eleventh volume of Q.E.D. comprises of the usual two stories with the first one being fairly conventional and not unlike the detective stories that can be found Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed. But the second story is the irregular, off-the-wall kind of mystery that this series has entirely made its own. 

"Sea of Refuge" takes place in a small, seaside village with two kilometers (1.4 miles) from the shore a horse-shaped rock sticking out of the water. At night, at high tide, "only the head of that rock could be seen above the water" and you had to swim at night "to climb the head of the rock," which is why the locals scared their children – telling them they'll be if they ever "touch the head of Horse Rock." A warning that was ignored by four children. Forty years ago, they swam to Horse Rock, but only three returned. The body of the fourth washed up on the beach the next day.

Decades later, the father of the dead boy and his three friends receive an anonymous letter telling them "that there was something suspicious about the accident." And invites them to return to the village.

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara happened to be on a class trip to the beach and they not only become aware of that 40-year-old tragedy, but it's Mizuhara who spots a body floating next to Horse Rock. A body belonging to one of three men who swam to the rock all those years ago. So they begin to poke around the case with Touma doing all the mental work and Mizuhara the legwork, which revealed more than just a murderer. The solution added another, bitter tasting layer to that decades old tragedy. These tragic, very human puzzle stories with an emotional punch (let's call them heart breakers) is another type of detective story that Q.E.D. turned into a series trademark. "The Fading of Star Map" (vol. 3), "The Afterimage of Light" (vol. 5) and "The Frozen Hammer" (vol. 9) are good and strong examples of these heart breakers. So the who-and why are the strongest joints of the plot, but completely undersold a great alibi-trick and clue. More could have been done with that. 

"Sea of Refuge" is a pretty standard fare for this series, but still a good and solid read with an ending showing that the truth is not a soothing balm for the soul.

The second story, "Winter Zoo," is a different story altogether and breaks one of the cardinal sins of the detective story without, technically, breaking or even scuffing it – which is done by employing it as a (mostly) powerless spectator. What can break a rule without actually breaking it, you ask? A restless ghost! 

"Winter Zoo" begins with an aspiring mystery writer, Shitatsumi Nagao, walking down the street with the accompanying text, "this is what I looked like when I was alive." Nagao is on his way to a publishing company, but, without noticing it, he lost his manuscript. Luckily, it was found by Touma and Mizuhara. Touma deduced the manuscript back into its owner's hands, which amazes Nagao and assures Touma he's "going to be an amazing kid detective one day." So all is well that ends well? Of course not. A few panels later, the ghost of Nagao is floating above a body in the closed-off exercise area of a lion's cage and overhears the police drawing all the wrong conclusions. Nagao decides to haunt "that kid detective," which is easier said than done.

 

 

As a ghost, Nagao's ability to communicate with the living is very limited to almost being non-existent. Nagao tries to possess a shop girl helping Mizuhara and whispered "go to the zoo" in her ear while she slept. So she eventually drags Touma to the zoo where they're presented with a three-part problem. Firstly, what happened to the exotic murder weapon? The answer to this question reveals a nifty trick solving that age-old question of how to dispose of that pesky, incriminating instrument of death. Secondly, the problem of the narrow, five-minute window in which the body could have been placed in the lion's cage. A quasi-impossible problem that Touma solved with the assistance of a teddy bear. Thirdly, how the dead man in the lion's cage is linked to a suicide that happened around the same time.

So, yeah, this is a very gimmicky story, one of the most gimmicky in the series, which hinges more of the detectives unwittingly helping a ghost find peace that solving the puzzles, but Q.E.D. is the only series that can get away with it – showing why it's a one-of-a-kind in the genre. Even when you limit the scope to anime-and manga detective series.

Admittedly, there have been better stories and stronger volumes in the series, but these two stories still formed a good, rock solid volume that made me regret putting the series on hold in August. So expect a review of volume 12 before too long!

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

Edward D. Hoch: The Bullet from Beyond and Other Ben Snow Tales

Edward D. Hoch wrote nearly a thousand short stories and created a retinue of detective characters, some with more storied careers than others, who were, as Mike Grost so astutely described it, custom designed "to personify different mystery subgenres" – allowing him to write or indulge in any kind of detective story and trope. Hoch pretty much used his series-characters as a set of skeleton keys to go from the locked room mystery to the historical mystery, police procedural or the spy story. Clever guy!

So everyone has their own favorite series-character, or characters, that tend to reflect their personal taste to some degree. Unsurprisingly, my personal favorite is Hoch's 1930s New England country physician, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who exclusively solves locked room murders and other seemingly impossible crimes. Dr. Hawthorne is nipped at the heels by Ben Snow and Nick Velvet.

The most important difference between these three divergent characters, a country doctor, a gunslinger and a professional thief, is that there have been multiple short story collections featuring Dr. Hawthorne and Velvet, but only one that stars Snow – namely The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997). Since C&L have no immediate plans to publish a second volume, I decided to make up my own collection (all in my head) with uncollected stories.

Ben Snow is a turn-of-the-century gunslinger roaming the Americas around the time modern civilization began to encroach, and tame, the Wild West, but not without a fight. Old customs and legends lingered on, up and down, those dusty trails. Such as Snow's remarkable resemblance to that notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid, who had been reportedly shot and killed in New Mexico! So he regularly comes across people who either want to take a crack at the ghost of Billy the Kid or hire the fastest gun in New Mexico.

I assembled a six-shooter loaded with, as of now, half-a-dozen uncollected Ben Snow tales with story titles or plot descriptions that sounded promising. Yes, my selection includes more than one locked room and impossible crime story. Let's hit the trail!

"The Victorian Hangman" appeared in the August, 1988, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) to the town of Oceanfront, California, where he's hired by the owner of the Oceanfront Hotel, Douglas Rutherford. A guest had apparently hanged himself from the bandstand roof with "the traditional thirteen turns of the rope such as hangmen use," but his wife claims he couldn't even tie a square knot. Shortly after his death, the hotel received an ominous note in the mail: "ONE FOR THE HANGMAN. MORE TO COME." A promise that's kept during Snow's short stay at the hotel and the key to solving the murders is finding the motive linking the victims together. An unusual, but well done, serial killer/whydunit story.

"The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" was published in the June, 1991, issue of EQMM and opens with Snow heading south to avoid the Montana winter, which, one evening, brings him to Buffalo Creek just after sundown. In the gathering gloom, Snow sees with his own eyes a rider, "dressed like a cowhand and urging his horse on with a beating of the reins," who has no face or head! A headless horseman!

Snow meets a local newspaper reporter, Thelma Blake, who tells him that the headless horseman is a recent addition to the town and she has been staking out the place where a regular appears, near the Clayton ranch, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the ghost – which is why he decides to accompany her the next night. They're rewarded with a headless horseman, but, this time, it's not a ghost or someone playing a ghost. It's a headless body riding a horse! Something had just whisked off the head as he rode, but there's no sign of a wire. Very clever to immediately eliminate the possibility of a stretched wire, because it added to the overall mystery.

I'm not sure whether, or not, to classify "The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" as an impossible crime story, but the explanation is excellent and has a first-class, double edged clue alluding to both the who-and how. The answer to the subplot of the ghostly horseman places the story squarely Scooby Doo for grownups territory. One of the better stories in the series with a solid plot, clever clueing and a satisfying end.

"The Granite God" was published in the June, 1995, issue of EQMM and is a minor story, compared to the others reviewed here, which begins when Snow is hired by a retired cavalry officer, Colonel Faraway, to bring back his maid, Esmeralda. Colonel Faraway tells Snow she had "gone to the mountains to see the Lord." The mountain in question is near a silver mine, where they were blasting rocks, when the image of God appeared on a slab of granite. So people began to flock to the granite image, which is where Snow finds Esmeralda, but she's stabbed to death while kneeling in front of the image. I appreciated what Hoch tried to do here, but somehow, it left me completely underwhelmed. So moving on!

"The Bullet from Beyond" was published in the August, 1998, issue of EQMM and brings a creature to turn-of-the-century Oregon commonly found roaming "musty castles and fog-bound streets" of the Old World – an alleged vampire! Snow returned from the Yukon Territory, in Canada, to Grants Pass where he had stabled his horse five months previously. Something had changed since he was away. Six weeks previously, someone, or something, started killing animals and "the veterinarian who examined them said the blood had been drained out of their bodies." Snow is roped in to confront this alleged vampire, Ray Ridge, who's suspected of having "killed his wife up north about twenty years ago" and now lives as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the woods. But what he gets to witness is an impossible murder.

Ray Ridge is shot in front of his eyes, shots were heard outside, but "the windows were unbroken" and "the walls unpunctured," which means that the three armed men outside couldn't have fired the silver bullet. And the two other people inside the cabin were unarmed. So is there's any truth in the old legend that a silver bullet can penetrate a wall, or window, without leaving a mark and still kill a vampire?

Hoch naturally provides the story with a rational explanation, which is not one of his most ingenious locked room-tricks, but a footnote revealed that the solution was plucked from the pages of history. I checked it and, sure enough, it's true. You can read about it here (spoiler warning). So, on a whole, a pretty decent and readable locked room story.

"The Daughters of Crooked River" was published in the November, 1999, issue of EQMM and has Snow arriving in the middle of a racially charged dispute in the small town of Crooked River, Saskatchewan, part of the Northwest Territories – a place settled a generation ago by French-Canadian hunters and fur trappers. Indian women bore their children, the Metis, who now claim the land as their own. But the railroad has opened Saskatchewan to eastern wheat farmers and immigrants who want their share of the land. A complicating factor in the dispute is the death of the Metis leader, Anatole Dijon, who was shot and killed in his cabin with the door bolted on the inside. Only representative of the law, a Mountie, concluded that “his dog put its paw on the trigger of his rifle and fired it.” But not everyone is willing to swallow that story.

Usually, Snow's detective work is limited to observing and noticing small mistakes or incongruities, which spells the truth to him, but here we actually get to see him do some old-fashioned detective work. Snow tries to reconstruct the shooting in the victim's cabin, before realizing that he approached the locked room problem from the wrong angle. The locked room-trick is a good one and neatly fits the exact circumstances of the murder, but it's a variation on a trick that has been used before in the series. However, it's different and original enough to justify it being reused here.

"The San Augustin Miracle" was published in the January, 2001, issue of EQMM and Snow has drifted south to Tucson, a city of about 7,500 residents, located on the often-dry Santa Cruz River. Snow decides to stay when he hears a balloonist, Pancho Quizas, is en route with an hot-air balloon to give an exhibition, but he's not the only one looking forward to see the balloonist. A gruff, old-school gunslinger, Scooter Colt, is waiting for him with his right hand resting on the butt of his gun, but it never comes to confrontation as Pancho miraculously vanishes from the balloon basket as it descended. This situation becomes even more impossible when an irate Colt begins firing his six-shooter at the sky. Believe it, or not, but "the sky fired back." Colt dropped to the ground with a bullet in his eye!

A marvelous setup for one of those rare, two-way impossibilities with the strength of the solution laying in how these two impossibilities, minutes apart, connect and not how Pancho disappeared or how Colt was shot – which, by themselves, are nothing special. But with everything stitched together, you have a good and entertaining detective yarn.

So, all in all, my random selection of stories turned out to be a strong sampling of the Ben Snow series with the quality of stories ranging from outstanding ("The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek") to fairly decent ("The Granite God"), which is not a bad score for a hypothetical short story collection. Hopefully, this review will help a little bit in helping justify that second (official) volume.

A note for the curious: Nothing is Impossible: The Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014) collects a rare crossover story, "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," in which an elderly Snow meets Dr. Hawthorne. I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room mystery and would love to see Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller writing a crossover in which Snow crosses paths with their 1890s San Francisco gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter. I know they'll treat Snow as if he was one of their own characters.

Man of Steel: "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" (1958) by Jerry Coleman

So, as you've probably noticed, I've been on a locked room mystery bender since February and you can blame that on the publication of Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) coinciding with the holidays, which significantly increased the size of my wishlist and to-be-read pile – glutted with more impossible crime stories than usual. I'm now almost done with trimming down my stack of newly acquired locked room and impossible crime novels. You can expect a little more variety to return by the end of the month.

One of the more peculiar titles listed in Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement is entry 2215, "The Super-Key of Fort Superman," written by Jerry Coleman and published in Action Comics, #241, 1958. A 12-page comic book story in which Superman has to find out who, and how, someone gained access to the "locked and impenetrable" Fortress of Solitude.

The Fortress of Solitude is hidden "deep in the core of a mountainside" in "the desolate arctic waste" with the only entrance being a massive door, "sheltered from view by jutting rocks," which can only be opened with "a super-key that weighs tons" – a ponderous key only Superman can lift. There's no one on Earth who can get through "the solid rock out of which it is hewn." A quiet, solitary place where he "conducts incredible experiments, keeps strange trophies and pursues astounding hobbies." Sound like the next best thing to a Batcave, but the Fortress of Solitude is more like the lair of very dedicated stalker or serial killer.

Superman has rooms, or shrines, dedicated to his friends, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Batman, complete with wax dummy replicas, mementos and specially made gifts.

A personally strung-together rope of pearls for Lois, a handmade sports car for Jimmy and a robot-detective for Batman, but they'll only receive these gifts if, not when, Superman dies. What a dick! Lois and Jimmy will probably have been slumbering in their graves for decades by the time he gets a wrinkle or gray hair! Why not give Batman that super advanced, robot-detective to fight crime now? Apparently, Superman is also an abusive animal hoarder with a private, inter-planetary zoo, hoarded from across the galaxies, crammed inside tiny cages – one panel showing several, large-sized alien animals in crate-sized cages. Well, at the very least he keeps the cages in a "locked chamber" and the floors aren't littered with rotting, half-cannibalized carcasses of former pets. So there's that, I suppose.

Anyway, one day, when Superman returns to the Fortress of Solitude, he discovers someone has entered the fortress and left a taunting message on the wall, "I can enter and leave at will! Who am I? How can I do it? I dare you to find out!" This happens another two times with a third message saying, "Kent is Superman." No one else, except Superman, could have lifted the giant key, moved the door or plunge through fifty feet of solid rock. These are the only ways in, or out, of the fortress.

Superman briefly considers some possible solutions. Such as one of his inter-planetary pets "concealing superhuman powers and intelligence" or "that strange apparatus made by Luthor," which can summon beings from the fourth dimension, but the solution unveils a legitimate locked room-trick cleverly modeled around an idea nearly as old as recorded history. And it worked surprisingly well! I expected someone had simply crawled through the large, gaping keyhole, but the solution turned out to be so much better and the identity of Superman's "most cunning opponent" was a nice touch to the who-and why of the plot. A victory for brains over brawn!

I read "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" on the assumption it would be nothing more than an amusing curiosity of the impossible crime story, but didn't expect I would end up liking it. But here we are. More than worth the five minutes it takes to read the story.

The Dead Sleep Lightly: "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) by Carter Dickson

We're steadily nearing the end of the year and the holiday season is close upon us! I already read two seasonal-themed mysteries some months ago, Brian Flynn's The Murders Near Mapleton (1929) and Moray Dalton's The Night of Fear (1931), but they were not intended as part of my annual Christmas reading. So, over the next two months, I'll try to knock the remaining seasonal detective novels and short stories off my list.

I decided to begin with rereading one of the best short stories ever written in this particular sub-category of the detective story.

John Dickson Carr's "Blind Man's Hood," published as by "Carter Dickson," originally appeared in the Christmas edition of The Sketch in 1937 and was republished as "To Wake the Dead" in the December, 1966, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – collected (fairly) recently in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014) and The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018). The story's most well-known appearance is in the original hardcover edition of The Department of Queer Complaints (1940).

"Blind Man's Hood" opens with a young married couple, Rodney and Muriel Hunter, arriving at the home of their friends, Jack and Molly, in "the loneliest part of the Weald of Kent." A seventeenth century country house, named "Clearlawns," but the front door is standing open and nobody responds to their knocking.

So they hoisted their luggage and a box of Christmas presents inside, where they are greeted by an young, pleasant-faced woman, who explains everyone's "always out of the house at this hour on this particular date" – attending a special church service. A custom, or pretext, for more than sixty years to give people an excuse to be away from the house between seven and eight o'clock on Christmas Eve. She tells them a winter's tale in two parts that straddled the genres of the detective and ghost story.

During the 1870s, the house was occupied by a newlywed couple, Edward and Jane Waycross, but on a dark, snowy evening in February, Jane found herself all alone in the house.

There were several witnesses who saw her standing behind a window after the snow had stopped falling, but, the following morning, Mrs. Randall, the old servant, is the first to return and finds "the house all locked up." She gets no response to her knocking and decided to smash in a window. What she finds inside is the stuff of horror stories: the body of Mrs. Waycross was lying on her face in the front hall, "soaked in blood and paraffin," with her throat cut and charred from the waist down. A terrible, gruesome and inexplicable murder. All of the doors and windows were securely locked and bolted on the inside. And the only footprints in the snow outside belonged to one of the witnesses and Mrs. Randall.

So how did Mrs. Waycross' murderer entered, or left, the tightly locked house without leaving any footprints in the snow? The police were never able to provide an answer to these questions, but this is not where the story ends, because eight years later there was a Christmas party at the house and one of the attendees was someone involved with the murder case – who dies under ghostly circumstances during an unnerving game of Blind Man's Bluff. This ghost story is the reason why nobody is ever in the house between the hours of seven and eight on Christmas Eve.

Uncharacteristically, of Carr, the impossibility and revelation of the locked room-trick aren't the centerpiece of the story. You can even say that the whole locked room situation is a little underplayed. For example, there's no theorizing how the murder could have been done. This story slowly unravels itself, which can be a disappointing approach, but Carr was a master stylist and you can't help but be fascinated how seamlessly he merged the detective and ghost story without leaving the reader feeling like they were cheated. The result stands as one of Carr's creepiest and darkest story.

My fellow JDC fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, reviewed "Blind Man's Hood" back in 2016 and he made several astute observations on why Carr was practically unequaled in the genre as a stylist. One of the clearest examples is the contrast between the opening and closing paragraphs of the story. There really was nobody better than Carr.

So, purely as a semi-historical locked room mystery, "Blind Man's Hood" is merely another excellent short story by the Grand Master, but how the ghost story takes possession of the plot without damaging the detective elements makes it a (minor) masterpiece! Highly recommended to everyone who knows how to appreciate good story telling regardless of the genre.