The 5 False Suicides (2021) by James Scott Byrnside

Two years ago, James Scott Byrnside completed his Rowan Manory and Walter Williams trilogy, Goodnight Irene (2018), The Opening Night Murders (2019) and The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020), which in turn performed an amazing hat trick – back-to-back gems of traditionally-plotted, slightly noir-ish, detective novels. Stories brimming with bizarre and sometimes gruesome murders, locked room mysteries, dying messages and false-solutions that can only be compared to the works of Byrnside's Japanese counterparts of the shin honkaku school or Paul Halter at the top of his game. Regrettably, Byrnside is currently the only writer in the Western world who's crafting these kind of ambitious, tightly-plotted and fairly clued detective novels commonly associated today with the East. So it was a joy when his fourth novel was finally published late last year! 

The 5 False Suicides (2021) has a title and premise that immediately invites the reader to draw comparisons with John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons (1937) and The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996). This is not that kind of (locked room) mystery novel. The 5 False Suicides is "some stand-alone, crazy-ass piece of pulp" dedicated to Fredric Brown, which should give you an idea what to expect. Or so you would think! 

The 5 False Suicides takes place in 1947 New Sweden, Maine, where librarian Gretta Grahame formed a book club, the Murder-mystery Appreciation Society of New Sweden (MASONS), on the recommendation of her therapist to combat her shyness. Gretta becomes "incredibly communicative" whenever she gets to talk about the intricacies of the detective story. So why not use it to her advantage. The first two members to join the MASONS were Gretta's only real friends, Faye Withers and Georgie Danvers, but an advert on Gretta's library's whisper wall drew five more members into the group – two couples and a single. Olive Tennant is the daughter of a local toothpick mogul and joined up with her husband, Harry, in addition to an elderly couple of retirees, Tom and Alice Mower. The single is a strongly opinionated hotel porter, Oscar Strom. One of their weekly meetings fills out the first chapter as they kindly bicker and banter about what to read next and picking apart Oscar's homespun impossible crime method, which pleasantly reminded me of the after-dinner discussions from Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series. A chapter ending with the ominous promise that "most of the membership would be dead in a fortnight" and "one of the members would be a murderer."

A long string of tragic deaths that began with Gretta's estranged uncle, Scotty Grahame, calling his niece to inform that her Aunt Suzie died from an overdose of barbiturates and the police ruled it a suicide. A similar fate befell Gretta's mother and she recently tried to take her own life, which apparently runs in the family. But not without a reason.

Scotty tells Gretta that her grandfather, Andrew Grahame, put "a curse on his own flesh and blood," back in 1907, which "has been murdering the Grahame family for the last thirty years" and they're the last two remaining Grahames – very likely next to fall victim of the curse. Andrew Grahame had help with his curse from a Hungarian mystic, or male-witch, named Boroqe Rieszak and he wants to help them lift the deadly curse. So he asks Gretta to come to his hotel room and drive together to the meet the Hungarian witch, but, when she calls back the next day, a policeman answers the phone. Scotty had committed suicide in his hotel room!

Nonetheless, Gretta decides to go through with meeting Rieszak, accompanied by Faye and Olive, who reveals their family and curse is tied to Blood Island. An island on the south coast of Maine connected to the mainland by a natural, limestone bridge and had been cleared in 1825 of its native population to make way for "a heavenly getaway for the wealthy," but one remained behind and hid in the island forest to plot his revenge. And massacred "the best of society" on their first night on the island. So the Indian was hunted down and he cursed his hunters, "may your loved ones suffer the same fate as I," before slitting his own throat. Gretta's grandfather was a Satanist and used to island curse to ensure that a special place in hell reserved for "those who curse their own flesh and blood," but, "when only one descendent of a Soctomah-cursed family remains," that "descendent can be freed of suicide by a ceremony." All Gretta has to do is gather a surrogate family to temporarily replace what she has lost and go to Blood Island, now called Heaven's Gate, to perform the ceremony. This is where the story moves from Carr-Christie territory to the borderlands of Hake Talbot and Theodore Roscoe.

Normally, it's "darn-near impossible to get a reservation on Heaven's Gate" at that time of year, but a wildfire is slowly consuming the south of Maine and a serial killer, "The Burlington Butcher," is likely hiding out in the dense forests of Heaven's Gate – who left a bizarre murder scene on the southernmost beach. A young woman had been butchered with a hunting knife, but "no footprints except those of the victim were found on the beach." So the island was not a particular popular holiday destination that seasons. Gretta goes to the island with Rieszak and some of the MASONS as her surrogate family, but they have hardly arrived before one of them apparently shoots and kills themselves in a cabin with the windows and door locked from the inside. Through the window, they saw the handle of the key sticking out of the keyhole. At the same time, someone else is found hanging from a noose with a mutilated hand. And then, as you can expect from the title, the story really begins to pick up pace.

Before getting to the plot crammed with impossible crimes, red herrings and false-solutions, the wonderfully executed, sometimes dark duality and meta-consciousness of the storytelling has to be highlighted with the MASONS almost being aware they're characters inside a detective story. They disapprove of the case possibly having more than one, independently, moving parts ("I don't like a mystery with too many moving parts") or having the sneaking suspicion they have “already come across the big clue” without having noticed it. So, under normal circumstances, people who prefer the "civilized murder" of fiction to the messy banality of real-life crimes, but, as Detective Brodsky put it so eloquently, "it ain't like those books by Dick Johnson Carter." This resulted in awkward, but very well handled, scene in which the MASONS tell Jack Munt, Ranger of Heaven's Gate, how intrigued and excited they were about his impossible murder on the beach. Munt responds with telling them the girl didn't die right away and how held her hand as she died. So, no, he wouldn't exactly describe the murder as exciting or funny. Even though the characters run around the island, simultaneously playing detective and getting culled, the story becomes quite grim as it nears its conclusion. Sometimes bordering on outright horror ("Gur fxva unq ohooyrq hc naq jnf abj orersg bs nal qrsvavat sbez pnhfrq ol nqurfvba gb gur obar"). Just like the second, gory murder from Goodnight Irene or the severed hands featured in The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire, there's a logical reason for everything in Byrnside's mysteries. This time, it has all the mad logic of dream.

Firstly, there's the locked room-tricks, real and false, which are contracted around principles that have been around for a while, but how they were presented and executed put a new spin on them – which is the next best thing to discovering an original and brand new locked room-trick. I liked how one of the tricks suggested was an updated version of a trick from a fictitious short story, "Five Deaths and One Lock," which surprised readers in 1889 as "they had no idea what [REDACTED] meant." But where The 5 False Suicides stands out is not as a locked room mystery with multiple impossibilities. But how all the moving parts and red herrings came together. And how they were pulled apart again. Planting "the big clue" in plain sight. Blurring the lines between the real and false-solutions culminating in that daring, uncertain, but ambitious ending. Something not every mystery reader is going to appreciate, but you have to keep in mind that this is supposed to be a pulp-style mystery in the spirit of Gerald Verner's The Royal Flush Murders (1948) and John Russell Fearn's The Man Who Was Not (2005) with a distinct touch of madness. I'm very fond of those two second-string pulp mongers. So add in a first-rate plot stuffed with fairly planted clues, treacherous red herring and false-solutions, you leave me with precious little to complain or nitpick about. 

Sure, The 5 False Suicides is perhaps too short a novel with characterization taking a backseat to the plot and storytelling. I can see how readers who like characterization would have appreciated a little more elaboration about certain character revelations. But speaking as an uncouth, plot obsessed detective fanboy with a taste for the pulps, the lack of characterization didn't bother me too much. To quote the great Dr. Gideon Fell, "I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened." I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life and neither does the author of this crazy-ass piece of pulp. 

Byrnside only began to seriously read Golden Age detective fiction in early 2017, published his first detective novel in 2018 and continued to demonstrate the kind of genre awareness and understanding in his next two novels that I always assumed took years to develop and fine-tune. More importantly, Byrnside's four novels demonstrate how you can enrich your stories and plots by building on the rich history of your genre instead of discarding it as out-of-date and obsolete. A genuine prodigy of the genre and The 5 False Suicides carried on the streak of delivering quality, first-class detective fiction that fans and genre scholars of the future might look back upon as the dawn of a Second Golden Age (once again, no pressure). So you future detective fans and scholars better be grateful for having all of his novels at your immediate disposal. We had to wait years for The Jolly Roger Murders, Time Seals All Rooms and Goodmorning Irene to come out.

Through the Walls (1936) by Noël Vindry

Noël Vindry was a French World War I veteran, deputy juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) and a celebrated mystery novelist who wrote a dozen locked room mysteries in the 1930s of "a quality and quantity to rival his contemporary," John Dickson Carr – which is why he was hailed at the time as the master of the roman probleme (puzzle novel). Vindry is "largely forgotten by the French-speaking world and almost completely unknown in the English-speaking" until John Pugmire's Locked Room International published the first English edition of La maison qui tu (The House That Kills, 1932) in 2015. That release was followed by translations of the absolutely fantastical La bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934) and Le double alibi (The Double Alibi, 1934) over the next three years. But nothing new until 2021. 

Last December, Pugmire finally returned to Vindry with the publication of A travers les murailles (Through the Walls, 1936) with no less than half-a-dozen seemingly impossible situations and locked room murders. 

Through the Walls has M. Allou, "considered the best examining magistrate in Marseille," bogged down in boring office and paperwork. Several months had gone by without being "called upon to tackle an important case" to test his famed deductive skills, which he based on La Science et l'Hypothèse, "consists of finding a theory which fits all the facts" and "then investigating anew" – until "the theory is proved or disproved." Only case of apparent interest is "the man who walks through walls" and left the police powerless as "the massacre continues." M. Allou has heard of the case everywhere and glimpsed the newspaper headlines, but the murders took place outside of his jurisdiction and therefore didn't tempt himself by reading the papers. There was nothing he could do. Luckily, the powers governing the universe has him covered.

One evening, Allou is visited by Commissaire Maubritane, of the Police Mobile, who confesses to Allou he had abandoned his post as a defeated man. Maubritane had inserted himself in, what appeared to have been a simple and straightforward affair, but had quickly devolved into an incomprehensible, bloody murder case that had dominated the headlines. Even half-suspecting he had gone crazy and committed the (attempted) murders. Allou sits him down to tell him the whole story from beginning to end. It should be noted here Allou appears only in the opening and closing chapters, which is a similar approach Vindry employed in The Howling Beast and perhaps influenced by G.K. Chesterton (c.f. "The Dagger with Wings," 1924).

Four days before he appealed to Allou, Commissaire Maubritane received a plea for help himself. Pierre Sertat, a retired Customs official, who remembered Maubritane from a case he handled in the region to come to aid of him and his family. Saying they are "faced with a terrible menace" putting all of their lives in grave danger and asks Maubritane to meet him, at ten o'clock at night, in rue Van Gogh. Because the house is under observation. Sertat tells Maubritane someone has been coming into the house at night, where he lives with his wife, daughter and two servants, but the nightly intruder only moves objects around and makes noise when goes up, or down, the creaky staircase – only question is how he entered and exited the house. All of the windows shutters "were firmly locked on the inside" and the bolts on the front door were shot in place. But even to Maubritane, Sertat remains cautious and secretive with what, exactly, is behind this mysterious threat to his family.

Maubritane has to do some unorthodox detective work to discover Sertat's past is not entirely spotless and has a good reason to keep his lips sealed, but my favorite part of the first-half is Maubritane's initial chain of reasoning about the nightly intrusions. I really liked how he tried to bring a bit of sanity to an utterly insane situations with a series of reasonable and logical possibilities, which mostly hinged on an accomplish inside the house. But also appreciated the answer how you can go up, or down, a creaky staircase without a sound. They eventually setup a trap, or sorts, but, when the intruder threatens to escape, Maubritane fires a warning shot. The intruder returns fire, seriously wounding Sertat, before disappearing from the tightly locked house. This is when things really begin to take off.

One of the household members is stabbed in a locked bedroom with the key in Maubritane's pocket, while another is shot and wounded in a dark, empty street surrounded by high walls. The victim swears nobody else was in the street. A third person was killed when "a man suddenly appeared" between the victim and an eyewitness, plunged a dagger in the victim and vanished within a blink of an eye. Finally, a fourth victim is stabbed and wounded in a hospital room with Maubritane sitting in front of the door. This is the point where the plagued policeman throws up his hands in despair and abandoned the scene of the crime "to ask M. Allou's advice."

Unfortunately, this happens to be very close to the point where a lot of readers will throw the book across the room in disgust. While the story is saturated with impossible crime material, the solutions are without exception a let down. Some will even consider the solutions to be outright cheats, but, in Vindry's defense, he didn't intend Through the Walls to be a detective novel of tricks and ideas. The last chapter makes it clear it was supposed to be a demonstration of Allou's "system of philosophy" as he effortlessly, and logically, explains the whole series of utterly baffling, seemingly impossible crimes that baffled Maubritane for the better part of a week – all within a single chapter. But you, the reader, only learns about this in the last chapter. And that's too late to prevent most readers from closing the book disappointed. An impressive piece of armchair detection, to be sure, but, purely as a locked room mystery, Through the Walls is the weakest title to come out of LRI. That includes Ulf Durling's Gammel ost (Hard Cheese, 1971) and Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996).

However, I can easily forgive a dub coming hot on the heels of several absolute bangers of translated locked room mysteries: Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932), Paul Halter's La toile de Pénélope (Penelope's Web, 2001), Tokuya Higashigawa's Misshitsu no kagi kashimasu (Lending the Key to the Locked Room, 2002) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017). The overall solution made me crack a smile when I flipped back to read the introduction, "Noël Vindry and the Puzzle Novel," which mentioned the rumblings of French critics and writers about the plot-oriented, puzzle-driven detective novel. I wonder what Vindry's critics thought of Allou's deconstructionists solution to the fantastical series of events that were described to him. Something I imagine critics of the simon-pure, jigsaw-puzzle detective story would be able to appreciate more than when the impossibilities were accomplished with diabolical, minutely-timed tricks. No matter how clever or original they might have been. So, to cut this rambling post short, I can only recommend Through the Walls to fanatical locked room fans who have been given up by society or to readers with a special interest in armchair detective fiction.

The Forbidden Fruit: Case Closed, vol. 80 by Gosho Aoyama

The 80th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, a.k.a. Detective Conan, begins with the conclusion of the headline act of the previous volume, "Vampire's Mansion," but ended my review with the hope that the concluding chapter would pull everything together in the end – as it had been uncommonly poor story up to that point. There were too many cheap, second-rate tricks and the murderer too easily identified, but the elaborate, fleshed-out explanation gave the plot some much needed polish. Overall, it elevated the story from uncharacteristically poor to passable. There is, however, not enough plot-polish to cover up how hilariously stupid the solution to the last impossibility looks on paper. Things pick up with the next story. 

The second story begins with the Junior Detective League playing soccer when their game is interrupted by a wandering, extremely pettable, stray cat. Conan recognizes the cat as the stray, named Cappy, who hangs around the neighborhood of Richard Moore's office and is fed by the waitress of Coffee Poirot. She named him Captain, or Cappy, after Captain Hastings. But, as Cappy runs off, a thread from Anita hand-knit sweater is caught in its claws and they have to run after him before her entire sweater unravels. Conan and the Junior Detective League follow the cat inside a refrigerated food delivery truck, but they get locked inside and, as the two delivery men continue their route, they make a gruesome discovery among the undelivered packages.

Conan overheard one of the delivery men saying that they "need the alibi to stick" and discovers the body of a man inside an unmarked, cardboard box with crushed, dirty edges and sides – suggesting the box has been rolled around "to keep the body from developing livor mortis." So they caught the delivery men in the act of fabricating an incontestable alibi, but now they're locked inside a refrigerator on wheels and not everyone is warmly dressed. And every delivery made leaves them with less room to hide. Conan has to play MacGyver to put together a (coded) message, get the message out of the truck and hope it finds its way to the correct person before they're either discovered or the cold takes it toll. A splendid concoction of the inverted detective story, the time-ticking thriller and a dash of code cracking, but agree with Ho-Ling that the escape plan only works in-universe "where there are genius detectives all over town." Still a very well done and entertaining story. And liked how pure chance mercilessly obliterated what could have been a perfect crime.

Curiously, the third story also concerns the delivery of food, but here it results in a bizarrely-staged impossible crime instead of a cast-iron alibi. Richard Moore chaperons Conan, Rachel, Serena and Sera to the tapping of a competitive cooking show. A main feature of the show is the closely guarded mystery fruit. On each episode, a huge, double-padlocked iron chest is brought on stage and the contestants have to make something on the stop with the mystery fruit. There's a complicated, old-world encryption system with physical keys to ensure "not even the staff knows what that night's fruit will be until the iron chest is opened." A food service picks the fruit and packs the chest, which is secured with a padlock and send to the TV studio. The producer puts a second padlock on it and sends it back to the food service to have the first padlock removed, which is then returned again to the TV studio. So only the food service knows what kind of fruit is inside the iron chest until its opened.

During the taping, the host opens the iron chest with the producer's key and inside, stuffed among the apples, is the body of food critic and judge on the show. Shotoku Takeki was a severe judge who suspected the winner of the previous six episodes, Chef Shuhei Kurimura, of cheating as he always had the perfect dish ready to go with the mystery fruit. But how could he have known? And how did the body end up in the locked chest? The keys were hard-to-duplicate and "the padlock is alarmed to deter lockpicks," which eliminated the palming-and-swapping usually found in locked room mysteries involving padlocks. Aoyama came up with a genuinely original solution which has a simplicity that nicely contrasted with the complicated setup, but you need to make an inspired guess, or imaginative leap, to get the very late hair-clue and figure out the locked room-trick. That being said, the evidence that's the murderer's undoing is kind of brilliant and disgusting at the same time.

The fourth story focuses on the two female officers of the Traffic Department, Yumi Miyamoto and Neako Miike, who were talking about the former's ex-boyfriend when the latter receives a call from a friend, Sakurako Yonehara – who previously appeared in the optical illusion case from vol. 74 and vol. 75. She works as a housekeeper at the Chateau Baker Condos where she discovered a body, which is where Yumi's ex lives. The victim is, in fact, his next door neighbor, Mrs. Chiyoko Itami, who was found with an arm in a sling hanging from a light fixture in the living room. She had a domestic altercation with her husband, Naganobu Itami, who turned up with a black eye, but everyone with a key to the house have alibis. A spare key is kept in a mailbox with a combination lock on the first floor and the only outsider who knows the combination is Yumi's ex-boyfriend, Shukichi Haneda.

Conan and the Junior Detective League happened to overhear the phone call, scrambled to the condo and crawled all over the crime scene like ants on a picnic blanket, but the story obviously meant to introduce Shukichi Haneda as a new recurring character. This plot-thread is what gave the volume its shogi-themed cover. However, while a fairly minor story, the alibi-trick here is not without interest. I really liked how Aoyama combined something very modern and up-to-date (n fznegcubar) with a related item that's hopelessly outdated and obsolete (n cnlcubar) to create something new and novel.

The last chapter opens a story that will be concluded in vol. 81, but the premise is already full of intrigue and promise. Conan meets with Jodie Sterling in a public park during the Flower Viewing Festival to brief her what happened on the Mystery Train (vol. 78) and what he learned. But they keep being interrupted. Firstly, there's someone who recognizes Jodie from the bank robbery hostage case (vol. 65) and he drops a small bombshell on them. Secondly, a woman begins to scream that someone had stuck a hand in her bag and that there's a pickpocket. A few minutes later, Doc Agasa calls Conan to say he just witnessed a murder in the park!

So, all in all, a pretty good and solid volume with all the complete stories nicely balancing the ongoing, character-driven story-arcs with cleverly constructed, often original plots showing how to incorporate today's world in traditionally-styled detective stories. Very much looking forward to the next volume!

A Scratch in Time: Q.E.D. vol. 15-16 by Motohiro Katou

Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 15 comprises of the usual two novella-length stories with the opening story, entitled "Glass Room," presenting the reader with one of the series more conventional, but deviously plotted, stories which has everything from an impossible crime (of sorts) to a whole host of those pesky alibis – except "this locked room destroys alibis." The story takes place during the last week of December and, if my memory of the series timeline serves me correctly, it's the last week of 2001. 

December is shiwasu in Japan and "shiwasu means a big cleanup day" to start the new year with a clean house and soul, which is why Sou Touma is helping Kana Mizuhara cleaning out her house. Mizuhara comes across a CD she borrowed six months ago from a classmate, Oya Natsumi, but she forgot to give it back. Touma reminds her it's the time of year to return all the stuff you have borrowed, but, when they arrive at the home of their classmate, Inspector Mizuhara is there with the family. Not without reason. Natsumi tells them her grandfather has been murdered!

Oya Etsuro was a man of leisure and an audiophile who dedicated all of his attention and resources to his hobby. Etsuro has his own workshop where he builds his own, old-fashioned amplifiers with vacuum tube bulbs, which produce better sound, but "the number of usable vacuum tube bulbs is decreasing" and "a rare vacuum tube can cost more than 100,000 yen" – ensuring the hobby is an expensive one. Etsuro is found one day in his workshop with a knife plunged into his side and he had three visitors that day, but they all possess unassailable alibis. Etsuro's struggling daughter-in-law, Oya Toyoko, made her weekly visit to bring him a bunto lunchbox. Wakabayashi Yoshikatsu is the president of the Health Foods Marketing Company and came to give Etsuro (who's an investor) a management report. Yamauchi Isao is fellow hobbyist and warned Etsuro that, "sooner or later," he's going to pay for living it up while his family were struggling with a recession. However, they were all seen leaving the premise by the housekeeper, Ogawa Shouko, who was knitting outside the workshop door when Etsuro was still alive. So who murdered this strange and selfish man and how?

The strength of this story is in its denouement as Sou Touma eliminates all of the suspects and every possible way the murderer could have entered, or exited, the workshop. Only to start all over again from scratch in order to demonstrate "there is a third entrance" that completely obliterates the murderer's otherwise unshakable alibi. Touma produces a one-of-a-kind piece of evidence the murderer unwittingly left behind in the flow of time. Punctuating his explanation with cracking the dead man's riddle promising "a present for someone that understands his hobby." A neatly done piece of visual code cracking that only works in a visual medium like comic books or TV.

So, plot-wise, "Glass Room" is a highlight of the series with the third, practically invisible entrance immediately inviting a comparison with Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Arthur Porges' "The Unguarded Path" (collected in These Daisies Told, 2018), but putting the locked room mystery to work to craft a perfect alibi makes it closer to the stories in Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Red Locked Room (2020). Either way, it's a fantastic, neo-classical detective story.

The second story, "Dedekind Cut," brings the focus back on the series-characters as it explores another, unresolved episode from Touma's time as a 10-year-old prodigy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America. At the time, Hilbert Dorn, Professor of Mathematics, had an extremely intelligent and arrogant assistant, John Toll. Professor Dorn and Toll never got along very well, but the professor was forced to terminate Toll's position when he caught him altering a paper on his computer, which is where the incident would have ended – only it appears Toll began to mentally torture the professor. Professor Dorn's constantly finds his office ransacked or items smashed to pieces. Even when the locks were changed, the incidents continued with everything locked up and no signs of forced entry. So the professor asks Touma to be his witness and give evidence in court of what John Toll has done to him, but Touma flat out refuses to do this. Saying that the whole problem is like "a Dedekind cut" (a mathematical "concept that rational and irrational numbers can be cut from a real number line").

Several years later, Professor Dorn travels with Syd "Loki" Green to Japan to ask Touma to finally explain why his problem is like the Dedekind cut. Yes, the story include pages that will give some readers traumatic flashbacks of their math homework, but you can be mathematically illiterate and still piece together the solution. A rather sad solution firmly grounded in the personalities of the characters (Dorn, Toll and Touma) with all the clues fairly on display. So a relatively minor entry in the series, but a good example of a compelling, character-driven detective story.

The 16th volume of Q.E.D. opens with "Sakura, Sakura" and takes place against the preparations of the Flower Viewing Festival in Sakisaka Park. Kana Mizuhara is the class manager in charge of the preparations, but a dark cloud drifts over the preparations when a third-year student, Minegishi, enters the classroom to ask Mizuhara is going out with Touma. Mizuhara vigorously denied it and learns Touma is unable to help her with preparing the flower viewing. Something involving his future and Minegishi. So another character-driven story exploring and fleshing out the two protagonists, but the story comes with three (locked room) mini-puzzles that need to be solved.

So, while in the park, Mizuhara meets three people from a nearby company, but they all have lost something that could potentially spell trouble for them. Two employees lost an important document in the copying room ("it just disappeared in front of our eyes"), which has a very easy and solvable answer. The third employee lost a wedding ring and provides the story with a second locked room-puzzle. Matsushima Shinsuke is kind of the office clown of the company and claimed to "have night vision even at night," which he did to trick his colleagues into making a losing bet. Shinsuke told them to write something on a piece of paper, put it inside a sealed envelope and he would read it in the windowless, pitch-black document room – which has the light switch on the outside. And he did it! A really fun little locked room-trick that becomes even better once you know how it was done, because the premise feels cheap in comparison with the solution.

However, these are merely mini-puzzles with the story really revolving around the undefined relationship between the two protagonists, particularly Touma, as it's implied "someone like that shouldn't be in our world forever" and how "he's definitely going to disappear one day" – like cherry blossoms "he'll fall at some point." So, on a whole, a good and evenly balanced story, but shows Q.E.D. is a series you have to read in order. By the way, the balancing act between the emotional and intellectual is a red thread running through all the characters and stories in this series.

Regrettably, the second and last story, entitled "A Corpse's Tear," ends this volume on a disappointing note, but the story began promising enough with Inspector Mizuhara taking his daughter and Touma on a fishing holiday in the mountains. They are staying with an old friend of the inspector, Ooshiro Yoshirou, who asks the policeman to look at a letter he received. A girl he knew from high school, Awata Ryouko, wrote him to say she fears her violent husband is going to kill her. Next thing they learn is that she's apparently ran away from her husband, but the search for a missing person eventually becomes a murder case and a hasty arrest is made. But did this person really do it? Touma has to answer that question by discovering the place where the body had been hidden before it was discovered. Admittedly, the trick was clever, but something the reader has not been prepared to deal with because it took so long for the body to be found. A seasoned mystery reader can probably make an educated guess where the body could have been hidden, but not really fair in already plain and unremarkable story. You have to expect these kind of duds in a series casting such a large, wide net in a variety of (back) waters of the genre. Some of those waters were previously unexplored.

So, all in all, volume 15 evidently is the stronger of the two volumes with a traditionally-styled, tightly plotted locked room problem and a very well handled and compelling piece of character-building, which is a trick the opening story of volume 16 tried to repeat. But the collection of mini-puzzles stole the show there. Unfortunately, the last story is as unimpressive as it was disappointing, but, on balance, they more than justified my long overdue return to Q.E.D. I'm going to try to double-review my way through the series in 2022 and try the first two volumes of C.M.B. To be continued...

Blacke's Magic: Revenge of the Esperanza (1986)

Over the past two years, I've come across two novels, a novella and short story that pulled the detective story down to the muted, two-colored world of the seabed littered with shipwrecks, sunken treasure and legends of the deep ocean – revealing a largely untapped basin of possibilities. Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017), Desmond Reid's "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) and John Dickson Carr's "Lair of the Devil-Fish" (collected in The Island of Coffins, 2021) all demonstrated an underwater setting opened up new opportunities to play around with unbreakable alibis and impossible crimes. Something that has been explored decade earlier by Joseph Commings in his 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968). Ho-Ling Wong followed up my review of Forsyte's Diving Death by discussing the Detective Academy Q episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea, which does exactly as described on the tin. 

So these regrettably too rare deep sea detective stories have become a favorite (soggy) rabbit hole of mine to explore. Not in the least because they often combine an archaeological plot with an impossible crime, which are two of my favorite sub-categories of the detective story. There happened to be an episode of Blacke's Magic dovetailing an archaeological mystery with the miraculous disappearance of a 300-year-old Spanish seabed shipwreck. So it was high time to return to that dapper magician-sleuth and his carny father. 

Blacke's Magic was a short-lived American TV-series, created by Richard Levinson, William Link and Peter S. Fischer, which aired on NBC from January 5 to May 7, 1986, starring Hal Linden as magician-detective Alexander Blacke and Harry Morgan as his conman dad, Leonard – appearing together in thirteen episodes pitting their wits "against seemingly magical crimes." The series feels like a 1980s prototype of Jonathan Creek. 

Revenge of the Esperanza (1986) is the fifth episode of the series and begins with Alexander Blacke following “a paper trail of credit card charges, hotels, restaurants, airline tickets” to a luxurious yacht club in Florida. There he finds his father living it large, under the name Farnsworth, but he also appears to have his "feet planted firmly in quicksand." Leonard Blacke has gotten himself involved with four young treasure hunters, Maryanne Thompson, Paul Thompson, Eric Wilson and Clay, who have been trying to locate the wreck of the Esperanza for years. A Spanish galleon that sunk over three centuries ago in a storm with "untold riches" as its cargo, but the one of the investors is getting impatient with the stories about treasure ships and wants her whole one-hundred thousand dollars back. So the discovery of the wreck came in the nick of time. But not for very long.

The members agreed to camp out on the top of the wreck until they have brought up "every last ounce of gold she got," but, during the night, their equipment sounds the alarm and watched how it moved away on sonar – a nifty piece of retro-futuristic, 1980s fictitious technology (see picture). When they dived looking for it, it was gone, but "a 300-year-old shipwreck can't just get up and sail off." But that's what happened.

Alexander Blacke has to stick around to save his father's neck, because the investor has pressed charges against Farnsworth and Sheriff Tyler is becoming very suspicious of the old man. Just as the Esperanza vanished, the locals begin to see an old pirate ship, "quiet like a ghost," cutting through the fog and ships bells clanging mournfully. Finally, one of the treasure hunters is murdered with a dagger that came from the wreck.

So, yeah, there's more here than can be used in a 45-minute episode and the first murder served only to introduce an original clue. A piece of now long-lost technology known as a cassette tape with noise recorded on it and feel rather proud of myself for immediately figuring out what's really on the cassette. And how it could be played back. The second murder felt unnecessary and made the murderer standout, but was pleasantly surprised to discover (ROT13) ur unq na nppbzcyvfu uvqqra va cynva fvtug naq ur jnf chg gb tbbq hfr gb chapu hc gur raqvat. So the plot mainly hinges Sheriff Tyler nipping at Leonard Blacke's heel and the disappearance of the Esperanza, but they were both reasonably well handled. Particularly, the impossible disappearance of the wreck had a believable explanation (despite the dodgy monitoring) with that great cassette clue, but they needed more room to do them any justice. I think cutting the ghost ship and turning two murders into a single assault (leaving the victim unconscious in a hospital bed) would have made for better and much tighter episode.

All on all, Revenge of the Esperanza is a decent, fun enough episode with an intriguing premise and some good idea, but a cluttered 45-minutes were not enough to do anything meaningful with it. But, if you love impossible crimes, it's genuine pleasure to watch one unfold on screen.

Apocryphal Plots: "Omar Khayyam, Detective" (1960) by Theodore Mathieson

A few years ago, I reviewed Theodore Mathieson's "Leonardo da Vinci, Detective" (1959), one of the more well-known, reprinted stories from his standalone "Great Detectives" series, "in which a famous person of the past acts as detective just once at a critical point in his career" like Captain Cook, Alexander the Great and Florence Nightingale – published between 1958 and 1973 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first ten stories were collected as The Great Detectives (1960). 

What became clear from my reading of "Leonardo da Vinci, Detective" and comparing it to John Norris' review of The Devil and Benjamin Franklin (1961) is that Mathieson was a better storyteller than plotter. A well intended mystery writer who had a good idea, but his handling of plot and clues were clumsy at best. John even said that the plot of The Devil and Benjamin Franklin would "rankle the hairs of any traditional detective novel fan."

There is, however, an allure to Mathieson's historical detective fiction. Mathieson was not the first to write historical mysteries or even use historical figures as characters, but "most of these had been infrequent or isolated instances" and Robert van Gulik had just began publishing his Judge Dee novels – which made him one of the first to create a series of historical mysteries. While the "Great Detectives" is a series of standalone stories, they are presented as newly discovered and hitherto unchronicled feats of detection revealed by literary archaeologist, Theodore Mathieson. It also helped Mathieson has more than one impossible crime story to his credit. So you can probably guess what brought me back to the series. 

"Omar Khayyam, Detective" was originally published in the February, 1960, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and takes place over 900 years ago in the Seljuk Empire. 

Omar Khayyam was a Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet who garnered the patronage of the Sultan, Malik Shah, through his childhood friend and current Vizier, Nizam al Mulk. The story opens with Malik Shah summoning the astrologer with a request to talk to his Vizier, who's terribly afraid of something and has locked himself away in a turret room, but only tells Omar why he's fearful of his life. Rahim Zaid is the leader of the Assassins, "a fanatical, murderous group of revolutionaries," who's believed to possess magical powers "to be in two places at once" or "walk through stone walls." He has a cast-iron grip on his minions as he's the only one who can supply them with hashish. Nizam had ordered the execution of Zaid's only son and has reasons to believe he's already within the palace. So the Vizier stays behind the heavy, iron-bound and bolted door of his turret room with guards posted outside.

During a performance in the courtyard, the Sultan and Omar witness Nizam in the turret window, "as if struggling with some unseen assailant," before plunging down to the broad stone passageway below the level of the court – a foot-long dagger stuck out of his back. But when they break down the door, no murderer is waiting for them inside! Only a dying message Nizam had circled with wine in a copy of the Rubáiyát. Omar not only has to figure out who killed his friend and how, but he has a three-day deadline to do so. Malik Shah says to Omar, "bring me proof, star-gazer, that the murder was not committed by magic" or he will be exiled.

On a historical side note, I remembered having read something once about proto-detective stories from the Middle East and a quick search did turn up an interesting result. What I remembered turned out to be correct. The earliest known example is "The Three Apples," from One Thousand and One Nights, in which the Sultan orders his Vizier to solve a murder within three days "or be executed if he fails his assignment." So you can say early Arabic detective stories were more like the hardboiled private eye tales of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, while ancient Chinese mysteries represented a more traditional style. The more things change, I guess. :)

Anyway, Omar's handling is not without interest and experiments with the drugs to understand what the Assassins experience under the influence of hashish, which recalls M.P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski (1895) and Joseph B. Carr's The Man With Bated Breath (1934). But the presence of drugs in combination with the setup of the locked room problem had me worried. There's a prosperously bad type of solution to the problem of a murderer vanishing from a locked room in which the victim is slipped a hallucinogenic substance and (accidentally) gets killed during a fit of madness. Somehow that solution has turned up more than once in my locked room reading and the setup would have allowed for it.

Fortunately, Mathieson had something a little better and more traditional in store, but the overall solution, while good in theory, is not entirely spotless and you can write that down mostly to (ROT13) gur cerfrapr bs gbb znal nppbzcyvprf – even though the story (sort of) accounts for it. But it comes across as cheap, needlessly complicated trickery. There are two other aspects of the solution that raised an eyebrow. Firstly, it was extremely risky (more ROT13) gb unir bar-unys bs gur gevpx eryl ba gur cebzvfr bs na rgreany, qeht-vaqhprq cnenqvfr gb gur nqqvpgrq snxr ivpgvz va beqre gb znxr uvz pbzzvg fhvpvqr. Secondly, why did nobody notice (even more ROT13) gung Avmnz'f obql qvqa'g fubj nal fvtaf be jbhaqf lbh jbhyq rkcrpg gb svaq ba n obql gung jnf guebja bhg bs n gbjre gb n fgbar cngu orybj. Even back then that must have stood out, right?!

So, despite my misgivings about the plot, I actually did enjoy reading the story. Mathieson was a better storyteller than plotter and you should approach this series as historical fiction dressed up as detective stories. But, purely as a plotter, he can be very frustrating to the plot-technical (locked room) mystery reader.

The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka (1966) by Josef Skvorecky

Josef Skvorecky was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher, born in former Czechoslovakia, who became an internationally acclaimed author of works like Bassaxofon (The Bass Saxophone, 1967) and Příběh inženýra lidských duší (The Engineer of Human Souls, 1977), but he was also a pillar of support to Czech dissident writers – printing and smuggling their books into the country in defiance of Communist censorship. When he was not thumbing his nose at the totalitarian regime lording over his home country, Skvorecky was "an avid reader of Ellery Queen, R. Austin Freeman, John Dickson Carr, et al."

Skvorecky love of mysteries found expression in a series of detective stories about a melancholic, sad-eyed Czech policeman, Lieutenant Josef Boruvka, who appeared in three short story collections and a novel. The series has been described as "mischievous parodies" of the traditional detective story with Hříchy pro pátera Knoxe (Sins for Father Knox, 1973), a collection with each story breaking one of Father Knox's "Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929), standing as the most well-known representative of that reputation. However, the plots all hinge on a unifying gimmick, like Agatha Christie's The Labours of Hercules (1947), which didn't allow him to really showcase his abilities as a plotter. All he had to do was present a solution or situation that violated one of Knox's ten rules.

There is, however, one of the three collections in the series that has been on my wishlist for ages. Smutek poručíka Borůvky (The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka, 1966) introduced Lieutenant Boruvka in twelve short stories that are either tongue-in-cheek or serious renditions of the classic detective stories of yore, but loaded with bizarre clues, strange crimes and a number of locked room mysteries. Robert Adey listed only three of the stories in Locked Room Murders (1991), but there are several more to be found here. So let's get started! 

"The Supernatural Powers of Lieutenant Boruvka" opens the collection and explains why Constable First Class Sintak is "firmly convinced that Lieutenant Boruvka wielded powers that were not entirely in keeping with normal human abilities," like a wizard, which he irrevocably proved to Sintak in the Semerak case – a case officially handled by Boruvka's young sergeant. Sergeant Malek meets with his superior at the scene of the crime, an attic where an elderly woman was hanging by her neck from a rope tied to a ceiling beam, but enthusiastic sergeant knew it was murder and the whole story is basically a conversation between the two. A conversation that quickly begins to poke fun at the fictional detective who love being complicated for the sake of being complicated. Malek's has complicated timetables, collected a piece from a building as evidence and ordered divers, backed by a helicopter, to go over a pond to look for a discarded bike. Meanwhile, Boruvka tries to get in a word edgewise ("certainly, but..." "it's just that...") and it takes him a while before he can point out something really obvious in the attic. Something proving without a doubt that the old woman had been murdered. 

This story has a very thin plot, which hinges on the obvious, but it was a genuinely amusing take on the exasperating, fictional detectives and Malek gave his amateur counterparts a run for their money. But what made the simplistic solution work is that both detectives were correct. Only difference is that Malek took the long way round and Boruvka a short cut. A great introduction to the lieutenant and his sergeant!

Unfortunately, the second story, "That Sax Solo," is the weakest and my least favorite story from the collection. The lead singer of a Jazz band is murdered at a hotel and Boruvka has to use a musical clue to break down a musical alibi, but the clue was used in the worst possible way to end the story. 

"The Scientific Method" is the third story and one of the stories in the collection that was overlooked by Adey in Locked Room Murders. This is also the first theatrical mystery of the collection and brings Lieutenant Boruvka to the Odeon Theatre where a ballet dancer has been killed, a bullet fired "straight into the nape of her neck," while she was taking a shower, but "a body search of all the ladies" was conducted before they left the showers – no weapon was recovered. Malek remarks they have "a miraculous marksman" on their hands. However, the trick has been done before and the idea behind it can be considered as one of the earliest innovations in impossible crime plotting. But the solution is the first one to show Skvorecky's fascination as a plotter with trajectories and movement along horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. You'll find this approach in his more trickier and complicated stories. 

"Death on Needlepoint" is potential anthology material and reminiscent of the mountaineering, open-air locked room mysteries by Glyn Carr. The story begins with three mountaineers, Patera, Bartos and Jirina, climbing the rocky face of Needlepoint linked by only a rope with a sixty-foot precipice yawning beneath them. Patera is the first one to make it over the overhang of the summit, but then the rope slackens and when Bartos completes his harrowing ascent to the top, he makes a terrifying discovery. Patera sat, "strangely contorted," on the bare summit of the rock with his face between his knees and "the carved handle of a bowie-knife protruding from his back." Bartos recognized his own knife which he assumed was back at the camp in his tent. When the police arrives, Boruvka discovers Patera and Bartos were rivals who tried to win Jirina's affection. But how was the murder carried out?

Boruvka has a crime scene "which the murderer couldn't have reached and from which he couldn't have escaped," but the place is not half as inaccessible as it appears on first sight. There are several very well done false-solutions with the one accusing the third climber, Jirina, standing out as particular ingenious, but the actual solution is no slouch either. Only thing lacking was a diagram. It would have made the tricky solution so much clearer. Unquestionably, one of the collection's stronger stories. 

"Whose Deduction?" is a minor, forgettable story which I already have trouble remembering. The story is part of a character-arc that runs through the collection and concerns a young policewoman, Eva, who was introduced in the third story and Boruvka is beginning to fall in love with her. However, he's a married man with a teenage daughter and an unimpeachable reputation as an inspector, which will cause some serious trouble in later stories. So the modern trope of the troubled policeman rears its ugly head here, but there's kind of a payoff in the stories ahead. This story is not one of my favorites, however, it perfectly demonstrates why I prefer plot over character.

The next story is "The Case of the Horizontal Trajectory," but have previously discussed it in my review of John Pugmire and Brian Skupin's monumental anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017). It's one of the standout stories of the collection and a solid impossible crime story in the tradition of the scientific detective stories by Arthur Porges. 

"A Tried and Proven Method" breaks with the routine of previous stories as Boruvka promised his 17-year-old daughter, Zuzana, to spend a holiday together in Italy ("the home of her mother's family") under the condition her school report turned out well, which she interpreted as not failing her classes – collecting an abundance of Cs, Ds and two As. Boruvka gave in and took Zuzana on her first trip abroad, but the holiday slowly turned disastrous. They run out of gas in the mountains and have to climb on foot to the hotel, but they come across two very unusual sights in their track to the top. Firstly, Zuzana notices that the pale, gold sand on a plateau sixty feet below is disturbed "as though a struggle had taken place there," but no tracks led to the spot. The sand all around was "absolutely smooth." Secondly, they come across a dead woman near the stony path. Boruvka knows its murder, but, as a Red policeman from a communist country, he's regarded with suspicion and mocked to his face ("in your country everyone suspicious"). Besides, the local police knows it must have been suicide. Not murder. 

The gravely ill victim was not bludgeoned to death, but had fallen from a terrific height and likely threw herself out of a cable cart, which she had repeatedly threaten to do. She was seen boarding the cable cart alone and it arrived at the station empty with an open door. Nobody could have gotten to her. Boruvka is still convinced it was murder and comes up with an interesting solution befitting such an unusual, bizarrely staged impossible murder. A solution treading dangerously close to the territory of second-rate pulp trickery, but Skvorecky handled and presented the trick very convincingly. 

"Falling Light" is a sequel, of sorts, to "A Tried and Proven Method" in which Boruvka and Zuzana spend a few days of their Italian holiday as guests of Signor Greffi. A relative of the victim from the previous story and out of gratitude for capturing her murderer, he invited father and daughter to his Venetian residence. Boruvka finds himself in a "linguistic isolation" among the English and Italian speaking guests, which is a situation that's hardly improved by the murder of their host. This story is a quasi-locked room mystery masquerading as a closed-circle whodunit, but this time the solution is unmistakably pulpy in nature. Something you would expect from John Russell Fearn or Gerald Verner. Nonetheless, I can appreciate a good, pulp-style impossible crime and liked the clue of the ugly doll. 

"Aristotelian Logic" begins with the murder of a model during a fashion show, stabbed to death in her dressing room cubicle, but the murder serves as vehicle for an argument between Boruvka and "the policewoman," Eva. Boruvka is annoyed at his infatuation with Eva and becomes quite unpleasant to her over the course of the investigation, which results in him chiding her that "the homicide squad cannot be guided by feminine logic" and "she had no idea what Aristotelian logic was." However, while Eva's view of the case "could hardly be termed strictly Aristotelian logic," she beats Boruvka to the solution. Not the strongest of the stories collected here, but an interesting, well done variation on that rarely used trope of the rival detectives. 

"The End of an Old Tom-Cat" has better storytelling and imagery than plotting beginning on the night Boruvka is kept awake by a whole quartet of cats, wailing a concert on the roof of his house, while an old tomcat lay dying at the other end of the city – foreshadowing next morning's murder case. Boruvka is summoned to the home of a well-known Public Prosecutor, Paul Hynais, who died in his bed that night with all the tale-tell signs of poisoning. Hynais turns out to have been somewhat of roguish tomcat, in human guise, who accepted favors from women to go light on the men in their lives in the courtroom. This angle brings back a character from an earlier story, but, on a whole, the story surrounding the murder was more interesting than the murder itself. Boruvka actually finds part of the solution in Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery (1929).

For some reason, "The End of an Old Tom-Cat" strongly reminded me of the Inspector Ghote novels, like Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade (1966), by H.R.F. Keating. 

"His Easiest Case" is shortest story of the bunch with an incredibly misleading title, because it's kind of brilliant, plot-wise, but how the story is structured and told makes it one of the standouts of The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka. The policewoman who has been occupying Boruvka's thoughts is attacked with meat chopper in a murderous assault and left critically injured, but Sergeant Malek already has a suspect and an indisputable piece of evidence. A thumbprint with "a very clear and distinctive scar." A print that belongs to Boruvka and it was the only print found in the apartment that has been professionally wiped clean. So did he actually took a swing with a meat chopper? Only way out is to find an explanation how the fingerprint could have ended up there and that explanation truly is an inspired piece of plotting. An idea that deserved a novel-length treatment, but the who-and why had equally fascinating solutions. Something you can only, sort of, anticipate if you've paying close attention to one of the previous stories. The same applies to the last story. 

“Crime in a Girls' High School” is best described as an anti-detective story and actually a prologue that was put to better use as an effective closing-act. Boruvka tells Eva how he had to abandon his first profession as a gym teacher, which happened nearly twenty years ago in the wake of a theft. A former private detective was called in, Jaroslav V. Klima, who acts as a hotblooded Hercule Poirot as he follows all the clues to uncover a very different kind of problem. The ending explains to Eva why "deep, infinite sadness" was "ineradicably engraved on the lieutenant's face." There were clues to what's behind his melancholy in previous stories that fitted the clues Klima was tracking down. So, while a little unorthodox, the story is a fitting end to an unusual collection of detective stories solved by a reassuringly human detective.

So, on a whole, The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka follows to the tradition of short story collections by being a little uneven in quality with a few duds and focus shifting from plot to character or storytelling, which resulted in some tightly-plotted locked room mysteries and some more loosely-told character-arcs – although the clueing was a little murky at times. However, the overall result succeeded in venturing off the beaten path while remaining (mostly) true to the fundamentals of the traditional detective story. For example, the last two stories. Skvorecky's The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka is a noteworthy and original contribution to the genre during a period when these type of detective stories were considered old-fashioned or even obsolete. Skvorecky demonstrated early on that you can have a fusion of styles complementing both the classical and modernist schools.

The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) by Wallace Irwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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