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.

Sable Messenger (1947) by Francis Vivian

Back in 2018, Dean Street Press resurrected another, long out-of-print and forgotten mystery novelist, Arthur E. Ashley, who produced eighteen crime-and detective novels from 1937 to 1959 under his penname of "Francis Vivian" – half of them starring his series-detective, Inspector Gordon Knollis. Vivian's work often straddles the line between the traditional detective story and the then slowly, more character-oriented crime novel with various degrees of success. I wasn't too impressed with The Sleeping Island (1951), a drab, gloomy affair, but The Threefold Cord (1947), The Laughing Dog (1949) and The Singing Masons (1950) were more than deserving of being lifted from obscurity. The Elusive Bowman (1951) distinguished by being one of those very rare, archery-themed mysteries. 

I wanted to continue rooting around in the series, but Vivian and Knollis were buried under an avalanche of Christopher Bush and Brian Flynn reprints rolling of the DSP printing press. A return to Vivian has been long overdue and there has been one title, in particular, that caught my attention. 

Sable Messenger (1947) is the second entry in the Inspector Knollis series and synopsis promised a detective story along the lines of Bush "a crime with no apparent motive" and "a host of alibis," which has to be broken down, one by one, before the situation can be resolved – except that the story played out very differently than expected. The final chapter is almost a story by itself, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story begins with the statement that "if Lesley Dexter had not been a snob her husband might have lived out his three-score-and-ten years." Robert Dexter "wanted to flow easily through life" and enjoy his hobby, collecting Elizabethan poetry and plays, but Lesley had "ideas of advancement by rush methods." She pushed him to study all the subjects that would help him get promoted and began climbing the ladder to become the manager of the Packing Department of the Groots Chemicals Limited. A remarkable accomplish considering his age and size of the company. So they moved from their humble lodgings in Denby Street to Himalaya Villa in River Close. One of the better suburbs where Lesley could play the socialite and get her name in the local paper as being 'among those present' at various functions.

So nothing out of the ordinary, for the English, but, one night, Lesley is keeping Robert awake with her modern poetry and she hears someone knocking on the door of their next door neighbors, the Rawleys. She overhears Margot Rawley directing the midnight visitor to their house and this person gently begins to tap on their front door. Robert goes down stairs to answer the door, but Lesley heard him swear, "oh hell," followed by a thud. And then silence. When Lesley went down to see what happened to her husband, she finds Robert lying on a blood soaked doormat with a knife wound in his chest. The man-in-black with the black velour trilby hat is nowhere to be found.

Inspector Russett, chief of the Burnham Criminal Investigation Department, is immediately sidetracked by the Chief Constable, Sir Wilfrid Burrows, who asks the Yard to immediately dispatch Inspector Gordon Knollis to River Close. Knollis used to hold Russett's position until he solved The Death of Mr. Lomas (1941) and was requisitioned by the Yard, because "the war had justified many unconventional happenings." Now he returns to his old stomping ground with his good natured, intelligent assistant, Sergeant Ellis.

Knollis and Ellis have to cover a lot of ground and collect a ton of puzzle pieces as they attempt to make sense out of a coldblooded murder without the slightest trace of a motive. All though one part of the solution kind of stands out, "it looked all too complicated" and "there were loose ends sticking out at all angles." So, to the reader, Sable Messenger is more of a what-happened and why than a whodunit and you can't help but think the murderer is a complete idiot. As the story progressed, I kept being reminded of that quote from R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke how "the cautious murderer, in his anxiety to make himself secure, does too much" and "it this excess of precaution that leads to detection" – of which Sable Messenger is a textbook example. Such as the cleverly contrived, but insanely risky, alibi-trick. One that never stood a chance when closely scrutinized by the police. If the murderer had simply killed him on his way to work or home and took his wallet, Knollis would have had a very difficult job delivering the murderer to the hangman ("the sable messenger, whose errand knows no mercy").

So, while the bulk of the plot is uneven, the second-half and the last chapter elevated Sable Messenger to a slightly above average mystery novel. Firstly, there's the solution to the presence of the man-in-black and you'll probably crack a smile when you learn what it is. Something you either spot or completely miss. Secondly, the last chapter has a plot (of sorts) of its own when a second crime occurs in River Close. A mysterious man knocking on a front door, but was not seen by the policemen guarding the area and swore no one had entered the close. Yes, an impossible crime that comes with an apparently cast-iron alibi for the culprit. Knollis demolishes the problem almost as quickly as it was presented, but it served its purpose as it made the story, as a whole, suddenly appear much stronger than it actually was. 

Sable Messenger is perhaps not the best entry in the series, but the plot has some clever, if sometimes impractical, touches and the last chapter acted as forceful punctuation mark that helped raise up the weaker aspects of the plot. So not the best place to be begin, but, if you already like Vivian and Knollis, you shouldn't ignore it either.

Well, that about wraps it up for 2021. I wish you all a Happy New Year and hope to see back here in 2022!

A Tough One to Lose (1972) by Tony Kenrick

Tony Kenrick is an Australian author who started out in advertising and worked as a copywriter in America, Britain and Canada, but abandoned his career in advertising in 1972 to become a full-time writer specialized in comedic capers and heist thrillers – which earned him a favorable comparison to the work of Donald E. Westlake. A number of his novels were optioned or bought by Hollywood with only Faraday's Flower (1985) making it to the big screen as Shanghai Surprise (1986). 

So not a likely writer to wash up on this blog, but Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972) is listed and highlighted in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Praising it as "a pacey, often humorous novel in which the author successfully de-and re-materialized a Jumbo Jet full of passengers." If memory serves me correctly, I have come across a vanishing aircraft only once before in Richard Forrest's Death Through the Looking Glass (1978). When a copy came my way, I snapped it up to see what it's all about.

First of all, Kenrick completely subverted my expectation of how the story would play out. I expected an all out, blockbuster-like heist thriller with the lives of 360 missing passengers and a multi-million dollar ransom at stake, but the story turned out to be surprisingly small scale, almost a traditional detective story, reminiscent of the comedic mysteries by Kelley Roos – like you're following around two side-characters away from the action. There's also this weird balance between the darker, thriller-ish aspects mixed in with the shenanigans of the two protagonists. Somehow, it worked better than it should have done.

William Verecker is a down on his luck lawyer who had been a junior partner in an old, conservative established firm until an embarrassing incident with a society hostess ended up in the paper. The "firm hadn't accepted the explanation and neither had his wife," Annie, who thought Verecker was a better boss than husband. So she came back to work as his secretary in his newly established law firm and mostly spend her working day "being sweet to the many people they owed money to and tough with the handful who owed them." This all changed when Verecker is contacted by an old Air Force buddy, Phil Rinlaub, who now works as a troubleshooter for one of the domestic airline giants, Calair. Rinlaub wants him to identity a pair cuff links belonging to a client of his. A client who's one of more than three hundred passengers caught up in the crime of the century, which is kept under tight wrap by the authorities.

Rinlaud tells Verecker in confidence that "Friday night somebody pulled a stunt that makes the Brink's job look like kid stuff" and called it "the Great Plane Robbery." A 747 Jumbo Jet going from San Francisco to New York vanished from radar about thirty minutes after the flight took off and the authorities quick began to suspect something was up. They couldn't get the passenger list out of the computer, duplicates of the tickets were missing and all the copies of the flight manifest had disappeared, which meant there's "a missing airplane full of people" they "had no record of" – a situation that went from bad to worse. Calair receives a package with items belonging to some of the passengers and a ransom demand of $25 million in uncut diamonds! How do you hide something the size of a Jumbo Jet and where do you store over three hundred hostages? The disappearance of the plane seems like an insoluble problem, but Verecker sees an opportunity to net a huge reward from the insurance company that would solve all their money problem. Verecker unwittingly has a clue in possession that the authorities are unaware of.

On the morning of Rinlaud's visit, Verecker played golf with a client and there was a row of holes on the fairway with burnt-out fireworks at the bottom, but, going back to the golf course to have a second look, he discovers a dozen holes set at ten-yard intervals. Like a makeshift landing strip with flares for a small airplane. A suspicion confirmed by the discovery of twin ruts and an oil slick. Excitedly, Verecker returns to Annie with a branch ("Wonderful. We can use it to beat off creditors") which he uses to make a clever deduction how they can figure out who landed there. So they have an inside track the authorities are unaware of. But don't expect a serious thriller.

William and Annie Verecker begin to follow up on their lead and get caught up absurd, sometimes hilarious situations throughout their investigation. Verecker's discovery at a supposedly empty school would not have been out of place in an episode of Jonathan Creek, while Annie's attempt at an undercover operation would have made Haila Troy proud. Their shenanigans are interspersed with the introductions of the hijackers who are referred to as "The Skycap," "The Bookie," "The Pilot," "The Stewardess" and two baggage men, but there's also a dark horse lurking in the background, "The Bomber." A character who deserved his own novel, because he has a very novel motive. Whenever they appear, together or alone, the story becomes more serious in tone. Such as some of their background stories or when they feel drastic action have to be taken against that meddling lawyer and his ex-wife/secretary, which should have struck a jarring note with the comedic stylings of the Vereckers. But didn't.

So what about the plot? That's a mixed bag of nuts and bolts. Firstly, Kenrick came up with a good solution how (theoretically) a giant airplane with more than three hundred people aboard can disappear and stay hidden, while everyone from the FBI to the insurance investigators are combing the state with a fine tooth-comb, but a few details of the plan were a little hard to swallow – mostly to do with numbers. However, it was something different from what you might expect, because there's only so much you can do to explain away vanishing rooms, houses, streets, trains and airplanes. I appreciate the Vereckers were bouncing false-solutions back and forth throughout the story. Some were more seriously than others ("a 747 was too big to disguise as a diner"), but I thought the half-serious suggestion the hijackers "dug a hole in the desert big enough to take a 747" was as interesting as it was impractical. And the one with a foreign hijacker being flown in to disguise a mass murder as a skyjacking/kidnapping was as practical as it was dark. That trick would probably have worked better (especially in 1972) than the one they settled on.

So that's something the more traditionally-minded mystery reader can enjoy, but don't expect too much from everything surrounding the mystery of the vanishing airplane. Not every detail is fully explained, one plot-thread is left unresolved and the fascinating clues that were introduced during the second-half turned out to be of little relevance to the solution. But, then again, A Tough One to Lose was not written and plotted like a full-blown, traditional detective novel. Kenrick wrote a crime caper that went for both laughs and thrills. In addition to the impossible crime at the center of the plot with all its false-solutions certainly makes it an item of interest to obsessed fans of locked room and impossible crime fiction.

The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) by Anthony Berkeley

Nearly a century ago, the Daily Mirror serialized a detective novel by Anthony Berkeley, The Wintringham Mystery (1926/27) as by "A.B. Cox," which was published as a competition that challenged the reader to find an answer to the three basic questions of the detective story – namely who, why and how. The correct solution, "or the entry that is most nearly correct," could earn a first prize of £250. A nice chunk of pocket money in the 1920s! 

A year later, Berkeley revised the original text and The Wintringham Mystery was republished in novel form under the title Cicely Disappears (1927) that was credited to the obviously pseudonymous "A. Monmouth Platts." But, after its publication, the book plunged front cover first into obscurity. Only murmurs that surrounded the story for almost a century is that Archie and Agatha Christie and her husband were runners-up in the competition ("The Crime That Christie Couldn't Crack"). Now, ninety-five years later, HarperCollins has reissued the book as part of their Collins Crime Club series. This new edition restored the original title, but kept the revised text from Cicely Disappears and comes with an insightful introduction by critic, editor and genre historian, Tony Medawar. So let's see how Berkeley's most elusive detective novel measures up to his other mysteries from the period.

Stephen Munro stepped out of the trenches of the First World War decorated with a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross into a nice little inheritance from his late uncle. Figuring he deserved "to have half a dozen years of life and let the future go to pot," Stephen became a carefree, frolicking gentleman of leisure, but now the money has dried up and has been trying to find a job for months – noticing "a distinct slump in the market for promising young men." Fortunately, Lady Susan Carey, at Wintringham Hall, sorely needed a footman now that the old lady has decided to do a bit more entertaining. Stephen is expected to start performing his duties on the day a house party is expected to arrive.

A transition that's awkward enough without some familiar face being part of the house party to make the situation embarrassing. There's an old flame of Stephen, Pauline Mainwaring, who arrives at Wintringham Hall with her fiance, Sir Julian Hammerstein. A well-known stockbroker and one of the wealthiest man in London. Freddie Venables is Lady Susan's nephew and an acquaintance of Stephen who refuses to treat him as a mere servant, which is liable to make "the house feel awkward and the servants' hall resentful." Particularly the butler, Martin, proves to be a thorn in Stephen's side. But they're not the only people present who can make things awkward or difficult.

Lady Susan never forgave her niece, Millicent Carey, for not having being born a boy, because "the glories of Wintringham Hall must be allied to some other name" as there were no male Careys in the direct line. She has a greater affection for Cicely Vernon than "Cicely than for any member of the younger generation" and has "the girl to stay with her on every possible opportunity." The other participants of the house party includes Lady Susan's companion, Miss Rivers. A young and distant cousin of Millicent and Lady Susan, Miss Annette Agnew, who's very direct and modern. Miss Agnew doesn't care very much about another guest, Miss  "Baby" Cullompton, who cultivated a personality matching her nickname. Colonel Uffculme is a long-time friend of Lady Susan and full with stories about his time in India ("when I was in Bengal in '93... or was it '94?"). John Starcross recently garnered fame as an explorer by crossing "some of the hitherto unpenetrated hinterland of South America" and no country house party was no complete without him. Henry Kentisbeare is a gentleman of leisure who lives on the resources of his friends. So a house full with all the potential for trouble.

The trouble begins when Freddie finds a book on witchcraft in the library, describing spells to make people vanish into thin air, suggesting they have "a pop at the disappearing stunt" in preference to playing bridge. Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the idea, but Freddie eventually gets his way and Cicely volunteers to be victim for his vanishing-act which they staged in the drawing room – while Cicely is surrounded with every exit closely guarded. Chapter VI: The Séance has a handy plan of the drawing room marking where everyone sat or stood during the séance. Cicely disappears without a trace from the guarded, pitch-black room amid screams, rapping sounds and the smell of chloroform. Stephen and Pauline turn amateur detective to find Cicely and figuring out how she could have vanished as if by magic.

So, while the detective story that follows is well written and amusing enough, the weight of the plot does not justify the length of the story. The Wintringham Mystery is a short story stretched out to book length. A very well done piece of stretching, but not even Berkeley could disguise that most of the story was padding. Quality padding. But padding nonetheless. Anthony Abbot played a similar game in his short story "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) to much better effect, because it wasn't padded out to a novel-length detective story. That being said, it was interesting to see Berkeley having fun with subverting the reader's expectations and playing around with tropes. Such as (ROT13) vtabevat gur cerfrapr bs n frperg cnffntr nf n fbyhgvba sbe gur ybpxrq ebbz fvghngvba naq gur furanavtnaf jvgu gur qrngu-genc. You can already see the mind at work that would produce The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Jumping Jenny (1933) and his brilliant contribution to The Floating Admiral (1931) a few years later.

But, as it stands, The Wintringham Mystery stands as a fairly entertaining, but thinly-plotted and padded out, curiosity with occasional glimmers, or should that be premonitions, of things to come. However, while not a classic of its kind, I'm still glad I got to read this nearly forgotten, early detective novel by one of the Golden Age greats. I think admirers of Berkeley will be the ones who will appreciate this book the most.

Christmas Quarrels: "Murder Under the Christmas Tree" (1980) by W.L. Fieldhouse

W.L. Fieldhouse is billed online as a legendary and prolific author of action, adventure and western novels, but my interest went out to a series of short detective stories he wrote for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine about Major Clifford Lansing – an American military investigator stationed in Europe. Major Lansing appeared in nineteen short stories, published between 1979 and 1982, which have yet to be collected. So you can only read the series with such tantalizingly-titled stories as "The Two-Star Corpse" (1980) and "The Nuremberg Ripper" (1982) in their original magazine publication. This is perhaps something Crippen & Landru can remedy in the future. 

Fortunately, Fieldhouse's "Murder Under the Christmas Tree," published in the December, 1980, issue of MSMM, happened to come my way and this month seemed appropriate to finally review it.

Christmas for USAEUR personnel, stationed in West Germany, "is at best bitter-sweet and at worst painfully lonely," but even the housing districts with the military built, clone-like apartments buildings, where the married officers with their families live, are not entirely free of heartache. One evening, the dinner party of Captain Robertson is rudely interrupted by shouting, "you bastard! I'll kill you," followed by the sound of shattering glass coming from the apartment above. Major Conglose and his wife, Beverley, have another fight, but they never heard either of them threaten to kill the other before. So they pop upstairs to have a look.

What the downstairs neighbors find is a dead man, lying face down under the Christmas tree, surrounded by fragments of a broken bottle and scarlet stain covering the back of his neck caused by a sliver of glass that severed his spinal cord, but it's not Major Conglose – which places Beverley in a precarious position. Beverley confesses to Major Clifford Lansing, "the best homicide investigator in USAEUR," she has been having an affair for the past two months with the dead man, Staff Sergeant Wayne Selby. However, she has no recollection of what, exactly, happened to Selby. Beverley remembers they had been drinking wine and dozing off, but got slapped in the face and woke up to find her lover dead beneath the Christmas tree. There was nobody else in the apartment!

The front door was closed and the bedroom window unlatched, but there was no fire escape or a ladder extending from the roof above and the window looked out over an empty parking lot two stories below. Major Lansing "found no scratches to indicate that a grappling hook had been used" or "any traces of rope strand." The roof is made of slate, sharply slanted and frozen solid, which practically made it inaccessible and impossible to traverse. So that only left the closed, but unlocked, front door were it not that "people were staring into the corridor after they heard the woman shouting and the glass break." So, if Beverley is innocent, the murderer was either invisible or sprouted wings.

Major Lansing's work is not made easier by the discovery the victim was a womanizer who turned his hobby into a lucrative, but criminal, side-occupation bagging him plenty of suspects and motives. But the key to the case is figuring out how a third person could have entered and left that apartment unseen.

I think Fieldhouse actually came up with not only a new and original solution to a murder in a watched room with no apparent escape, but nicely inverted the concept of a locked room mystery by revealing there was a different kind of impossibility at the heart of the plot. The real puzzle is (ROT13) abg ubj gur zheqrere pbhyq unir rkvgrq gur ncnegzrag jvgubhg orvat fcbggrq, ohg ubj vg jnf qbar jvgubhg oernxvat nal obarf orpnhfr gurer jnf na boivbhf, hathneqrq rkvg va gur ncnegzrag. My only complaint is that the short story format smothered the plot. There were a ton of leads, false trails and clues crammed together and they all needed more room to breath and space to move around in.

Nevertheless, if "Murder Under the Christmas Tree" is indicative of the overall quality of Fieldhouse's stories, the Major Lansing series definitely deserves to be collected. This is a series I want to return to in the future and will keep an eye out for the uncollected stories until a collection materializes.

On a final, related note: I've actually come across quite a few army-themed detective novels and short stories over the years. So here's a brief overview of those reviews.

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Murderer Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942).

Laurence Clarke's "Flashlights" (1918).

Paul Doherty's A Murder in Thebes (1998).

Michael Gilbert's The Danger Within (1952).

George Limnelius' The Medbury Fort Murder (1929).

Van Wyck Mason's The Fort Terror Murders (1931) and The Sulu Sea Murders (1933).

Bob van Oyen's Na afloop moord (Afterwards, Murder, 1953).

Franklyn Pell's Hangman's Hill (1946).

Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936).

Edgar D. Smith's "Killer in Khaki" (1941).

Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough (1944).

Mason Wright's The Army Post Murders (1931).

A Time for Murder (2002/13) by John Glasby

John S. Glasby was a British chemist, mathematician and a prolific fiction writer who wrote everything from science-fiction, supernatural stories and westerns to Foreign Legion sagas, hospital romances and hardboiled private eye novels on commission – producing over 300 novels and short stories under countless pennames. Glasby continued "to write with undimmed power" right up until his death, aged 82, in 2011. Over the past twenty years, a number of Glasby's novels have been reprinted in addition to several posthumous short story collections. One novel, in particular, attracted my attention for obvious reasons. 

A Time for Murder (2002/13) is advertised as an impossible murder of a kingpin of organized crime that's dropped in the lap of Glasby's most well-known series-character, Johnny Merak. A private detective from Los Angeles and one-time crook who spent three years in prison on a frameup and turned on his own organization, which (I think) lead him into becoming a private detective. Not sure how that exactly worked out.

So not exactly top-rate pulp and the Johnny Merak page, on The New Thrilling Detective Website, warns the reader to expect "a lot of breathlessly purple prose" set "in a mythical America populated by mostly over-sexed babes and gangsters" driving big, shiny cars. The page also airs the suspicion "that many, if not all, of the later Johnny Merak novels published since 2007 were actually regurgitated and possibly retitled novels dating back to the fifties." There are some hints in A Time for Murder that stuff has been added to an older story, but I'll get to that in a minute. First let's get to the story.

Johnny Merak is hired by Carlos Galecci, "one of the top man in the Organization," who believes somebody is out to kill him and wants Merak, as an ex-criminal, to dig around a little, but "a man like him makes a lot of enemies on the way to the top" – which makes his job a timely process of elimination. Three days later, Merak is summoned by Galecci's righthand man, Sam Rizzio, to the private, well guarded residence of his client. Rizzio wants to know why Galecci hired Merak, because he's currently trying to find out if anything has happened to him.

Galecci has a private, room-sized vault where he keeps his cash money and a collection of antique clocks worth no less than a hundred grand a piece. Every night, at precisely eleven-fifty, he goes in and comes out again a couple of hours later, but this time he hasn't. Only he knows the combination to open the vault door. When Merak arrives, a man is busy cutting the six-inch thick steel around the lock with an oxy-acetylene torch and eventually the door is opened to reveal the crime boss sitting at a table in the middle of the vault. There was a large metal box on the table stuffed with money ("obviously... robbery wasn't the motive") and the walls were hung with clocks of all sizes and shapes, "ticking away the minutes and seconds," but not a trace of the person who plunged a knife in Galecci's back!

Merak is baffled how a murderer could have entered the solid, steel-lined locked vault with only the dead man knowing the combination and a guards stationed outside the door and around the premise, but feels obligated to find his client's murderer. And that's where his real problems begins.

Sam Rizzio tells Merak he has no further need for his services and is rehired on the spot by the freshly-minted widow, Gloria Galecci, who believes she's next in line to be murdered. Galecci left a will that makes Gloria the sole heir of his criminal fiefdom and she intends on running it, but Merak knows Rizzio isn't going to take it lying down. So he begins to go through the motions of a run-of-the-mill gangster thriller with kidnappings at gunpoint, dangerous driving and speeding bullets, but there was actually a good scene when Merak was spirited away to a remote mansion to meet "a man who basked in the shadows," Enrico "The Boss" Manzelli – head of the entire Los Angeles Organization. Other than that, the only thing that makes the story standout is its locked room mystery full with potentially good ideas and the ghosts of clues.

Merak briefly discusses and rejects a surprisingly simplistic, but elegant, solution to the whole locked room setup. Suggesting the murdered had "knifed Galecci just as he'd opened the vault, carried him inside and set him up in that chair, before letting themselves out" and "closing the door behind them." Regrettably, the circumstances and the plot didn't allow the false and real solution to be switched around, because the simple, no-nonsense false-solution would have fitted the hardboiled style better than the more pulpier one. There were also hints that could have become good clues (ROT13): anzryl Tnyrppv'f ivfvgf gb gur inhyg univat n ebhgvar nf ur qvq “rirelguvat cerpvfryl ba gur qbg” in combination with gur qbpgbe fgngvat ur qvrq nebhaq zvqavtug naq gur pbagrag bs gur inhyg, which stood out in an otherwise very thinly plotted story. So it didn't take me very long to piece together the solution to the locked room puzzle. Glasby also picked an interesting murderer and a somewhat fresh motive, but neither were very well clued or given serious attention until near the end. However, the character is present throughout the story.

So, purely as a hardboiled private eye novel, Glasby's A Time for Murder has nothing particularly noteworthy to offer, but, as locked room mystery, it's an interesting curiosity. One that earnestly tried to introduce a cerebral locked room problem into a fast-moving world populated with tough guys, dangerous dames and menacing crime lords who operate from the shadows. A combination that has been attempted before and since with much more success, but a well intended attempt from Glasby that makes the story an interesting curiosity for everyone who's neck deep into impossible crime fiction. 

Notes for the curious: I mentioned there were clues and hints, here and there in the story, suggesting A Time for Murder is an older story that was touched up a little to be published as a modern P.I. Firstly, you have the historical clues. There are several references to the 1920s. One of the gangster makes a reference to a possible "return to the bad old days of the twenties" and the need to maintain order, which is something a gangster from the (more or less) immediate post-prohibition era would say than towards the end of the century. Another reference comes when a block just behind Central Avenue is described as "one of those places that had been up since the beginning of the century" and "had seen everything from before the roaring twenties to prohibition and the gangster era" before settling down as a collection of "dingy bars, night clubs and strip shows" – which is a brief history placing the story in the 1950s or early '60s. So the story definitely had a pre-2002/2013 publication, or version, but there are also some technological clues suggestion stuff had been added later. Cars, guns and landline telephones are the most sophisticated pieces of technology in the story, which also pushes the dating of the book closer to the fifties or sixties. But it made two things particular stick out. When Merak is brought to the mansion of the big crime boss, he "scanned the corners of the wall for any cameras" that might be studying his reaction. I know CCTV is an inheritance from World War II and the possibility was there as early as 1949 to have a live (unrecorded) monitoring television system, but it was pretty obscure until recording the footage was possible. That didn't happen until 1960s and '70s. A second thing that stood out is when Merak burglarized a shop, he cuts a hidden wire that would trigger an alarm at police headquarters, if he tried to force the window. This kind of (wired) burglar alarm seems too modern for the 1950s and too antiquated for the 2000s and 2010s. So here have a story clearly set somewhere around the middle of the previous century, but with two different publication dates from the next century and stylistic touches suggesting the text was slightly modernized. Long story short, Thrilling Detectives is probably right about the 2000s titles being retitled novels.

An addendum: Philip Harbottle emailed an important correction as the later Merak stories are not rewrites of earlier stories. I was given permission to add his correction as an addendum to the review, because I didn't want to remove or smudge over my mistake. So here is Harbottle's email: 

Pretty fair review of my friend and client John Glasby's novel, for which I thank you, but I would be very grateful if you could remove the rather offensive garbage quoted from that website—which you appear to endorse—that all later Merak stories were rewrites of earlier works. THEY ARE NOT. There were only 2 novels published in the late 50s: Blood on My Shadow (1956) and This Time Forever (1957). A third, The Savage City, followed in 1961, when the original publisher reprinted the first of them with a new title, Racket Incorporated, and when it was reprinted in the US in 1973, it was called The Organization. I preferred Racket Incorporated when I had it reprinted. ALL the others, beginning with A Time to Die, were brand new, original novels which John Glasby wrote at my request. He was halfway through a new one when he sadly died, and the fragment remains unfinished and unpublished. These later novels were of course simply SET in the late 1950s, which is the period Merak operated. Similarly, the text was NOT edited and updated by me, or anyone else. The second novel, This Time Forever (1957) has sadly never been reprinted, only because I have never been able to find a copy! The author never possessed one, since Spencer didn’t provide comps. I suspect it may well be one of the best, judging by Adey’s description.

New Murders for Old: Case Closed, vol. 79 by Gosho Aoyama

The 79th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, published outside of the English-speaking world as Detective Conan, has some big shoes to fill coming right after the ambitious, multi-layered and massive "Mystery Train" story from vol. 78 combining a classically-styled, railroad detective story with a character-driven thriller – cleverly putting the series' cast of recurring characters to good use. In the last chapter of that volume the groundwork was laid for another Kaitou KID heist of the impossible variety! 

Jirokichi Sebastian is one of my favorite recurring characters, a wealthy, semi-retired CEO of a financial company and adventurer, who has become embroiled in a very public rivalry with the modern-day Arsène Lupin. So now he uses his personal fortune to purchase rare artifacts, gems and elaborate traps to lure and ultimately capture Kaitou KID, which makes him the perfect antagonist for that playful antihero. It's like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, but the traps are baited with precious gems and KID escaping from them usually present an impossible situation.

As stated in the previous volume, Jirokichi "never misses a chance to exhibit a gem that might attract the Kaitou KID" and his latest acquisition is a pendant with a red diamond, the Blushing Diamond, which is fastened to the shell of a turtle – named Poseidon. Jirokichi went through great lengths to protect both the turtle and the diamond that's attached to its shell. The aquarium at the exhibit is constructed out of shatter-proof glass and impenetrable wire netting on the top and sides, but the Moonlight Magician kept his word and made the diamond disappear as if by magic. Leaving behind a sealed, but empty, aquarium and a note saying, "the shy mermaid has dissolved into foam in my hand."

These Kaitou KID heists tend to be visual spectacles that handily exploit the comic book format to get away with tricks that would be hard to pull off in prose. Such as his miraculous mid-air walk (vol. 44) or his astonishing transportation-trick (vol. 61), which still succeeded in not being wholly implausible. By comparison, the theft of the turtle and diamond felt very contrived and unconvincing. However, the impossible crime turned out to play second fiddle to the solution revealing a cleverly done inversion of the Jirokichi vs. KID story format. So my impression is that the impossible theft was plotted around that inversion, but it undoubtedly improved an otherwise average KID story with his mistake being the proverbial cherry on top. I liked that there was a large crowd of Kaitou KID fans in front of the exhibition erupting in celebration to the news that "THE KID GOT THE GEM!!"

Speaking of playing second fiddle, the third, vampire-themed story is the headline act of this volume, but the second story, "The Unlocked Locked-Room Murder," should be considered a landmark of the contemporary-traditional detective story. A story that broke new ground with a rough, unpolished idea demonstrating the 21st century has fresh opportunities, not obstacles, to offer to every mystery writers who knows how to plot.

This original piece of detective fiction begins conventionally enough with Harley and Kazuha accompanying Inspector Torotaki, of the Osaka Police, to Tokyo to help investigate a suspicious death, but before picking up Conan at Richard Moore's office – because Harley suspects Conan might be interested in the "outta-reach locked-room murder." A schoolteacher, Hidemichi Mizuki, came to the attention of the police and they place his Tokyo condo under observation, but, on the third day, he failed to come outside for his daily walk. So they decided to enter the house and found his body hanging from a rope in the living room, but the gap between the dangling feet and seat of the chair suggests it could have been murder. But "how could the killer get in and out without being spotted by the cops?"

Harley, Kazuha, Torotaki, Richard, Rachel and Conan (yes, the whole group) travel to the condo to hunt for clues, but Harley becomes disappointed when evidence clearly points towards suicide. So a potentially interesting and tough case was cruelly snatched away from under his nose, but then something unexpectedly happens. When the elevator comes up to their floor, a man is standing inside with a gun trained to his temple and he pulls the trigger in front of their eyes. The doors close again and briefly goes up before coming down again. The doors open to reveal the body of the man lying inside and the word "GOODBYE" scrawled on the inside doors. Whatever trick you think was used, you're wrong. This is not the kind of detective story you can solve by relying solely on your knowledge of detective stories. Aoyama came up with something completely new that can only be described as some straight up reality manipulation. More can be done with this idea, but the execution of it needs a little more fine-tuning and polish.

So this brings us to that previously mentioned headline act that covers the last seven chapters and will be concluded in the next volume, but it better be good, because have been impressed with the story thus far. Conan, Rachel, Harley and Torotaki tag along with Inspector Torotaki to an old-fashioned manor house in the manor. Six months ago, the body of the maid was found in the surrounding forest, "strung upside down from a stake," whose only injury was "a pair of small punctures in her neck" and locals suspected the owner of the manor, Hakuya Torakura – who turned out to have a rock-solid alibi. But lately, he also adopted all the characteristics of a vampire. He sleeps during the day in a coffin, threw out the priceless family silver and told the cook never to use garlic ever again. Inspector Torotaki is asked to look into this case again as favor to his chief (Harley's father).

Upon their arrival at the manor, they find a family of rivaling siblings and their partners who all have their eyes on inheriting the family fortune. It doesn't take very long before all hell breaks loose. Hakuya Torakura is found dead in his coffin with a stake driven through his heart, but the body inexplicably vanishes as if he turned into mist and disappeared. Just like a vampire. Torakura's figure reappears, "filmy and pale like a ghost," during a group photograph, but only Rachel and Kazuha spotted him. Until the photograph is developed. This is the last time his ghostly presence is both seen and felt. Not to mention several (impossible) murders and getting cut-off from the outside world.

Regrettably, the solution to the vanishing body and spirit photograph exposed some very cheap, second-rate tricks unworthy of this great series and already have a pretty good idea who's behind the murders. But that will be revealed in the next volume with a very late, as of yet unexplained impossibility might rescue the story from ending up being uncharactertically poor entry in the series. Fingers crossed!

So, on a whole, this volume distinguishes itself by toying with some fun and even groundbreaking ideas with only the execution of those ideas leaving something to be desired. The third story had potential, but has so far only disappointed me. That unfortunately makes for a very uneven volume. Particularly coming right after the volume that contained a series-classic. Still not a bad volume, all things considered, but that vampire murder case really dragged down the overall quality.

The Murder of Nora Winters (2016) by Robert Trainor

Robert Trainor's The Murder of Nora Winters (2016), the subject of today's review, was recommended by "JJ," of The Invisible Event, who discussed the book back in 2018 as part of his "Adventures in Self-Publishing" blog-series – calling it "an imperfect but extremely game swing at the toughest task going." With December being just around the corner, I wanted to return to the seasonal detective story as I neglected them last year. The spirit of Christmas looked too much like the specter at the feast in 2020 which ruined the mood. So let's see what can be done about that in 2021! 

Trainor is an independent, self-published author whose "novels are very dissimilar from one another and have all sorts of different plots, themes and attitudes." Covering everything from love stories, Gothic tales and fantasy to courtroom dramas and a locked room mystery! 

The Murder of Nora Winters has, as to be expected from most self-published mysteries, some rough, unpolished patches that left plenty of room for improvement, but three things make the book standout with two being (minor) triumphs. First thing that stood out to me occurred in the first chapter that interestingly updated the type of characters who traditionally populate these Christmas family party mysteries.

The story opens on Christmas Eve in the large, ramshackle house of Chad and Nora Winters, in Connecticut, where the whole family has gathered for the first time in five years, but the Winters are a modern dysfunctional family – each burdened by their own and each others various problems. Nora is diagnosed with acute schizophrenia and her symptoms, "an increasing tendency to isolate oneself and an irrational anger or fear directed toward loved ones," worsened when she stopped taking her medication. She's openly hostile to her own children, but in particular to her husband. Chad is a yes-man who "always bent over backwards to please her," but nothing seemed to please her and he sought refuge in an affair. Nora found out about his "little indiscretion" and she moved out of their shared bedroom to a now fortified guest-room. Ken is the oldest son and has been borrowing money from his father to expand his travel agency, which his mother wants to put a stop to during Christmas. She calls him a sponger and "a sexual cripple." Eileen is the oldest daughter and moved to Oregon where she secretly lives with her girlfriend, but her mother figured it out, lost her mind and the ensuing row nearly fractured the family. Jimmy is a 15-year-old teenager who keeps to himself in his room playing video games, listening to grunge rock on max and secretly smoking weed by an open window. Alyssa is the youngest daughter and a good-looking, straight A student who assured her parents she knew how to fend-off boys and looked forward to college, but her younger brother calls her "a little con artist." Jim prophesies to his father that, one of these days, "she's going to slip up, and when she does, you and Mom are going to go crazy."

Unsurprisingly, the Christmas gathering begins to deteriorate with arguments, stuff getting smashed, suicide threats and Nora being told that the best present she could give her family that year is terminal cancer. Chad flees the situation to visit his parents, but things go from bad to worse back home.

A now gin soaked, "totally bombed," Nora discovers a boy in Alyssa's bedroom and actually fired two shots into the room, which brought the other children to the corridor who witnessed a naked boy bolting down the stairs as Nora tossed his clothes out of Alyssa's bedroom window – before retreating to her fortified bedroom. So they called their father who immediately returned, packed three of them off to a motel and decided to wait until morning to deal with the situation. But the next day, Nora doesn't come out of her bedroom or gives any sign of life. Chad uses a ladder to look through her bedroom window and saw her body lying in front of the dressing table with a lot of blood.

She had been shot in the right temple at very close range and everything appears to indicate suicide. The bedroom door is two-inch thick, solid oak wood secured with two sliding-bolts and a keypad operated dead-bolt, which were all securely in place. The locks on the window "were probably as old as the house," slightly rusted and difficult to turn, which were all securely locked from the inside. So, apparently, Nora has committed suicide, but "the very puzzling position of the gun" proves it was murder.

Detective Nick Slater, of the Framingham Police Department, has to figure out why a murderer would "go to the trouble of mysteriously exiting a room and yet leave a very telltale sign that he had been there," because "the placement of the gun and the locked room" didn't go together. A neatly posed impossible crime puzzle with "Chapter 7: Nick Slater's Report" reading like a dressed down locked room lecture. Slater reports to his superior how went over the crime scene with a fine tooth-comb as he experimented and eliminated every possible trick that could been used to enter, or exit, the room without leaving it unlocked. A very enjoyable chapter, if you're fond of impossible crime fiction.

A breakthrough happens when Slater has a flash of inspiration and googles "solutions to locked-room mysteries" with "practically at the top of the page" something that had never occurred to him. Something that suddenly revealed some very incriminating evidence against one of the family members and the police makes an arrest, which briefly turns the story into a full-blown courtroom drama. There's an excellent piece of courtroom wizardry (i.e. Perry Mason-style shenanigans) leading up to an unexpected twist and an original play on the false-solution gambit! Not that the game was played entirely fair with the reader, but kind of loved how the false-solution was put to use here. Yes, it's the second thing that makes this self-published mystery novel standout.

There are, however, some very rough patches and in particular the long, repetitive and sometimes confusing descriptions of Nora's bedroom. Jim is right that these descriptive passages slowed the story down to a crawl and this could have easily been fixed with a diagram. A detailed diagram would have allowed the descriptions to be whittled down to a bare minimum, creating some much needed space to reinforce the plot (like the clueing), but, more importantly, it would have handed Trainor an opportunity to make the payoff to that false-solution ever better – by propping it up with another false-solution. You have to excuse me as I play armchair plotter for a second (ROT13): Fyngre fubhyq unir tbggra gur vqrn sbe uvf snyfr-fbyhgvba sebz n pbyyrnthr, yvxr Zngg be Wnavpr, jub fubhyq unir fhttrfgrq gung gur zheqrere onaxrq ba gur snpg gung onggrevat qbja gur orqebbz qbbe jnf gbb zhpu jbex naq znavchyngrq gur cbyvpr gb qrfgebl rivqrapr ol oernxvat n gnzcrerq jvaqbj – yvxr n zntvpvna sbepvat n pneq. Guvf vf, bs pbhefr, cebira jebat, ohg tvirf Fyngre na vqrn. Guvf unf gur nqqrq orarsvg bs gur svefg snyfr-fbyhgvba fbhaqvat orggre guna frpbaq, fhccbfrqyl pbeerpg naq zhpu zber zhaqnar snyfr-fbyhgvba. Bayl gb unir vg qrzbyvfurq va gur zbfg uhzvyvngvat jnl vzntvanoyr qhevat gur gevny. I think even Jim would agree that it would elevated the book a little above a very game swing at the traditional detective story with a locked room puzzle.

So we arrive at the ending of the story and, once again, the story shifts gears a third time with the introduction of an unexpected detective, Miss Irene Knight, who strongly reminded me of Kay Cleaver Strahan's Lynn MacDonald. She appears like a deus ex machina to explain "something that an eight-year-old could solve in eight minutes." Solution to the whole locked room-puzzle is the third standout of the story. Normally, I'm not a big fan of this type of locked room-trick as it's too often used as a cop out solution to get out of a locked room and destroying it in the process. I can count the stories that used it correctly on one hand and you can count The Murder of Nora Winters among them. Not only did the solution left the locked room principle in tact, but added a twist (ROT13) ol erirnyvat gur ybpxrq ebbz ceboyrz npghnyyl pbaprearq gur cbfvgvba bs gur tha. Only things holding the book back is the shoddy clueing and the overly descriptive, sometimes even sloppy writing (e.g. Nick suddenly being called Luke). Nothing that can't be fine-tuned with a little polish and some rewriting. 

The Murder of Nora Winters certainly stands out as a self-published locked room mystery, despite some of its obvious imperfections, but perhaps even more impressive is that it was likely written by an outsider. I don't think Trainor is a devout reader of impossible crime fiction and suspect he got the idea for the false-solution by actually googling "solutions for locked-room mysteries." That would be an amazing piece of genre awareness compared to some of his self-published colleagues. Just read Jim's review of Steve Levi's The Matter of the Duct Tape Tuxedo (2019) and don't skip the comments. So, yeah, I very much enjoyed my time with this interesting and spirited piece of amateur detective fiction.

A note for the curious: I slapped together the first cover in a few minutes, because the official cover is an atrocity on the eyes.

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931) by Anthony Abbot

"Anthony Abbot" was the pseudonym of Charles Fulton Oursler, an American journalist, editor, playwright and writer, who Mike Grost rightfully called "one of the most of the "little known" mystery writers" and, like Ellery Queen, "an early follower of S.S. van Dine" – distinguishing himself by presenting the traditional Van Dine-Queen detective story as a modern police procedural. The detective in Abbo's detective novel is not an amateur dilettante with police connections, but the Police Commissioner of Greater New York, Thatcher Colt. A well tailored policeman who resorted "to no magic except applied intelligence" and "relying invariably on strict police practice" with the invaluable cooperation of "scientists and their laboratories."

So take Abbot's interest in the latest, cutting-edge police techniques and his skillful handling of  intricate, maze-like plots with a penchant for misdirection, you can understand why so many consider him as one of the more important American mystery novelists of the 1930s. Despite his credentials, Abbot's work has been out-of-print since the fifties. You really need a bit of luck to find reasonably priced copies, especially those from the early thirties.

During the past year, I was lucky enough to come across two novels and a short story, "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932) and About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932), which were both glittering examples of the Golden Age detective story – demonstrating a deft hand at both clueing and misdirection. Recently, I got my hands on a cheap, hardcover copy of About the Murder of the Night Club Lady (1931) in poor condition, but still perfectly readable. A novel that came with the warning that the story showed far less of the colorful storytelling and imaginative plotting than "the best of Abbot's writing," but has "an original impossible crime" as its central puzzle and "this impossibility is the best part of this work." There's actually a second impossibility that's even better!

Firstly, I need to point out that About the Murder of the Night Club Lady strongly reminded me of the detective novels of another little-known writer of the Van Dine-Queen School, Roger Scarlett. Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932) helped shape the Japanese yakata-mono (mansion story) mystery and this novel can be categorized as one with most of the action taking place in the Night Club Lady's spacious penthouse on the twenty-second floor of a New York skyscraper. More on that in a moment. 

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady opens in the Crystal Room of the Ritz, on New Year's Eve, where the District Attorney, Merle Dougherty, has summoned Thatcher Colt and Tony Abbot to discreetly discuss "a highly secret criminal investigation" he has been personally conducting. Something the Police Commissioner not wholly approves of ("the functions of police of the police were too often usurped by the District Attorneys"), but Doughtery apparently discovered a breakthrough in a string of jewel robberies. The D.A. believes the thieves are in cahoots with somebody "who hob-nobs with the swells and plans the jobs." Someone who freely moves around the upper-crust of New York City. Doughterty believes the higher-up is no less a figure than the Night Club Lady.

Lola Carewe is "the most mysterious woman in New York," a "dangerous beauty" better known as the Night Club Lady, who got her break as a cinema performer and became a widow a year after her sensational marriage to a cotton millionaire, Gaylord Gifford – who barely left enough money to pay the undertaker. Yet, she continues to live in luxury and spend money like water. Doughtery wanted to meet Colt at the Crystal Room to get a close-up look of the famous Night Club Lady, but they are in for a surprise! Lola arrives at the Ritz in the company of Vincent Rowland, a well-known, sharp-eyed railroad attorney, who "loved to play Crœsus to modern young painters." The three men observe the two having "a spirited discussion" as Lola scribbles a note, which is passed to their table. Lola wanted to talk serious police business with Colt.

A week ago, Lola's dog unexpectedly died and the day before her parrot died under similar circumstances, which is to say that the animal hospital were unable to determine the cause of death. They could "find no trace of any poison at all." Only an hour ago, she received a threatening letter promising she was going to die before three o'clock that night.

Colt dispatches several detectives to the top floor penthouse on East Fifty-Eighth Street, "an aerie perched high in the New York skyline like the nest of some predatory bird," which Lola shares with several other people. There's her elderly mother, Mrs. Carewe. A close friend of Lola, Christine Quires, who has been living with them for the past few months. They employ a Chinese butler, Chung Wong Duk, whose backstory, as an Oxford educated "civilian observer" in the service of his government, could very well have served as the model for one of C. Daly King best characters, Katoh – who's the Japanese valet/spy of King's gentleman detective, Philip Tarrant (The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant, 2003). Lastly, there's the maid, Eunice James, who has done a bit of domestic spying herself. So, when the police arrives, all the rooms are thoroughly searched and guards posted at every door and window "except the ones that open on a sheer drop to the street." The terrace and rooftop were not overlooked or left unguarded. Everything appears to be secure, but an unguarded moment of carelessness proved fatal.

Lola says she's going to get her cigarette case from the guest-room, ignoring Colt's warning not to go in alone, but, before anyone could go with her, she went inside. Almost immediately followed by piercing scream and the sound of a body falling to the floor. What they find inside is a dying Lola, "contorted almost into the form of a question mark," but without a single suspicious mark or scratch on her body. And she was all alone in the room.

So the entire New York police apparatus is put into motion and "a corps of specialists was being organized and dispatched to the scene," which range from the Medical Examiner and police photographers to the Captain of the local precinct. Detectives who arrived from Headquarters began to search the penthouse again, while others were dispatched to delve into the past histories of persons considered important or check out alibis, but this is merely background chatter compared to a few genuinely interesting pieces of early forensic detective work. Firstly, two young detectives arrive from Centre Street arrive at the penthouse with a special vacuum cleaner and meticulously go over the guest-room collecting "every particle of dust in the room where the crime had been done," which may contain, "somewhere in the multitudes of particles," the vital clue to puzzle. The vacuum cleaner bags and the victim's clothing are send to a retired scientist, Professor George Luckner, who's "at heart a great detective," but "regards detective work as degrading to a scientist" and devotes himself to criminal research only as a special favor to Colt. And he does find the key-clue. Secondly, Colt is very interested in a photograph of a young Frenchman and has it sent to the Paris police by telephoto (wirephoto). A still very new, time consuming and expensive technology that were large machines and required a untied telephone line. The reader gets a brief description of how it exactly works. I love finding these little time-capsules in my vintage detective stories!

While his men doggedly pursue every lead, Colt has to try and make sense out of such bizarre clues as a wrongly-buttoned bathrobe, a small, unpainted wooden box and a missing suspect who was seen by the elevator boy returning to the penthouse – except this person is nowhere to be found. What happened? There are also two outsiders who have to be considered. Lola's former physician, Dr. Hugh Baldwin, was called to her bedside when she was dying and told the police she had a history of heart trouble. But they apparently had a falling out. Guy Everett is a young actor who escorted Christine Quires that evening to a New Year's party, but he also might have had a motive. And his speakeasy alibi is very shaky. But the case becomes even deeper and more perplexing when a second impossibility occurs inside the closely watched and guarded penthouse. Practically under the nose of the police!

A body miraculously appeared in the boudoir, twisted and contorted like a question mark, but, this time, there are terrible welts on the throat. However, the doctor tells Colt that those monstrous marks were put on the victim's throat after death. Not to mention the problem of the body materializing out of thin air in a previously thoroughly searched, closely guarded premise.

So how well does About the Murder of the Night Club Lady stack up as an impossible crime novel? Pretty well, actually, but with some minor qualifications. I don't think many readers today will be too impressed with "the instrumentality of death" as it seems more suited to a pulp thriller instead of a traditional detective story. Abbot used it expertly and smartly didn't wait until the very with revealing how death was delivered. Apparently, it might have actually been employed in a real-life murder as Colt references "the Falk case in Vienna" and mentioned their killer might have knowledge of that case, but the wise, all-knowing internet was unable to find anything. So no idea if this trick was inspired by a real murder case. The impossible appearance of the body in the boudoir is shockingly brilliant! I sort of figured out how it must have been, but that took nothing away from it and added a delightful, creepy afterthought to everything that had previously happened at the penthouse. Very fitting for a Japanese-style mansion story! 

About the Murder of the Night Club Lady is arguably even better as a whodunit with Abbot demonstrating the skillful agility of a practiced card mechanic when dealing the reader their clues and red herrings. Abbot beautifully hid his murderer among a small cast of characters, but giving the reader enough clues, hints and tells to spot this person before arriving at the explanation. And, if there's anything to complain or nitpick about, it's Abbot wasting a brilliant and daring clue. Had he told the reader the name of the dance early on in the story, I would have stood up to applaud his guts and cunning as a mystery novelist. Nevertheless... About the Murder of the Night Club Lady is a very game, boldly executed 1930s detective novel crammed with inexplicable death, impossible situations, strange clues and treacherous red herrings in camouflage. Not every aspect of the plot has aged particularly gracefully, but the pleasingly complex plot retained enough of its radiant, Golden Age ingenuity to make it a worthwhile recommendation.

I hope About the Murder of the Clergyman's Mistress (1931) and About the Murder of a Man Afraid of Women (1937) will find their way into my hands as easily as the last two.