Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998), which came to my attention when reading a fascinating description of the plot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – a theft from "a locked trophy house" protected with "trip wires, booby traps and a flock of geese." A bit of detective work revealed that two of the three stories are impossible crime tales! So on the pile it went.

I've never been a huge fan of pastiches and only handful of writers, like Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges, wrote pastiches that truly honored or even added to the original source material instead of staining it. Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery Queen is a good example of a pastiche that should considered canon. More often than not, they're nothing more than glorified fan fiction or aspiring authors hitching their wagons to classic, ready-made characters. This is something that's especially true for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which has become somewhat of a cottage industry.

There is, however, a third, much rarer, kind of pastiche. Pastiches with either good plots, ideas or writing that were depreciated by being presented as imitations.

Templeman's three Sherlock Holmes pastiches definitely fall into this category and can't help but feel that these stories would have been better remembered today, particularly among locked room fans, had he created an original detective character – like a modern-day Rival of Sherlock Holmes. Either that or he should have tried selling the impossible crime ideas to David Renwick, because these stories would have worked remarkably well as Jonathan Creek episodes. Something tells me Templeman had at least watched the first season before he began working on the stories.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" is the first of the three stories and opens with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being summoned by Mycroft Holmes to have a private interview with the Prime Minister and a cabinet member, Sir Simon Clayton. Sir Simon has bizarre story to tell of, what could be, either "a huge confidence trick" or "a world-shattering discovery which could topple Empire." Great Britain could be at "great peril" from it.

Sir Simon recently rekindled an old friendship with a crony from his university days, Rodger Hardy, who came from a family of industrialists with "a flair for invention," but the family went bankrupt and the ancestral home, Halam Hall, became a ruin. Rodger had gone abroad and nothing was seen of him for years until, one day, he turned up again to invite Sir Simon, to Halam Hall, where he wished to show him something. And that something was a sight to behold! Halam Hall is "an unbalanced architectural mongrel" that had been flogged over the decades with the whims of fashion and individual tastes, which includes an underground ballroom that was left unfinished and down there ten grinning Chinamen were constructing "a full-sized ocean-going wooden junk" – over fifty feet in length. But why was he spending six months to construct a large boat in a place where there was no hope of ever getting it out?

Rodger asked Sir Simon to come down every month to observe its construction and promises all

will be revealed upon completion. When the time comes, the completed vessel was surrounded by poles and caged in with strands of copper wire, which appeared to make a buzzing sound. Rodger told his friend the junk is being "electrically energised" and invited him to join him for dinner, but, when they returned two hours later, the huge Chinese junk that had taken up the whole space of the ballroom had simply vanished into thin air. A situation that becomes even more impossible when Rodger drives Sir Simon to the River Thames where the newly build ship was floating on the water.

 

So what's the catch? Rodger claims to have invented a way to transpose "matter through space by means of converting solids, by electricity, into waves, which could then be converted back again into the original solid state." And he's willing to part with the secret for the then astronomical sum of one million pounds. British government wants Sherlock Holmes to find out whether they've got the hands on paradigm shifting invention or if they're being trick, which means finding an explanation how the vessel was removed from the underground ballroom to which the door was "too small to allow exit." And how it reappeared on the River Thames.

A neatly posed locked room puzzle cleverly making use of the underground ballroom, because it immediately excluded the possibility that the architectural monstrosity housed two large, identical rooms – promising something more original than a simple piece of misdirection. I'm glad to report that the solution delivered on the promise made by its premise and the locked room-trick made this story the most Jonathan Creek-like in the collection. No idea why it wasn't included in Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Unfortunately, "Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" also has some flaws and shortcomings preventing it from becoming a true (locked room) classic.

Sherlock Holmes only deduces the motive behind the scheme, but has to relay on subterfuge to find out how the vessel disappeared from the ballroom and reappeared again on the Thames, which came at the expense of the clueing. So what should have been a how-was-it-done type of puzzle detective story becomes a story about a detective tackling a massive locked room mystery. You can only make an educated guess how it was done. A second problem is that the story is a little overwritten with modern attitudes bleeding through in certain parts, which is true for all three stories in this collection. Each story could have been told in half the number of pages without compromising the plots. Still a highly enjoyable story with an originally worked out impossible crime.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" is pretty much a (historical) travelogue of the Peaks District, Derbyshire, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are spending a holiday when they begin to hear about the mysterious death of an old, German watchmaker – who was found in his ransacked home with a head wound. The doctor concluded that the wound was not fatal and that he had died of heart failure, but the villagers believed it was "an unnatural death." A believe strengthened by escaped pet raven of the old watchmaker who has been frantically screaming, "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen," around the village. The message of the raven turns out to be a dying message by proxy that reveals where the old man had hidden his money, but most of the story has Holmes and Watson soaking in the local color and history. There's a darkly humorous anecdote about a mischievous parrot and the history of "the plague village," Eyam, which is remembered for the way "the god-fearing folk contained the pestilence" by isolating themselves that stopped the plague from spreading to other nearby villages. Here's to your memory, Eyam.

So a very minor, but readable enough, story with a simplistic, paper-thin plot and a holidaying detective that makes it one of Holmes' least exciting and memorable cases.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" convinced me Templeman is either a schoolteacher or an (amateur) historian, but probably a teacher, because I heard the voice of a teacher every time one of these stories slipped into lecture mode.

The last story is the one that got listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room," in which Holmes is consulted by Viscount Siddems who recently returned from India with a collection of trophies and eastern armory – building a trophy house-cum-armour museum to store the collection. Viscount Siddems had his house burgled and this made him decide to protect his trophy house, built a few hundred yards away from the hall, with "man-traps, trip-wires to set off shot guns" and "a flock of geese." Geese were used in Roman times as watchdogs because the slightest unusual sound would set up "an unholy honking."

However, these securities measures didn't stop a thief from walking up the trophy house, unlocking the door with a key and taking a Japanese shield from the wall without setting off the flock of geese. So the viscount doubled the number of traps, shotguns and fixed bells to the trip-wire, but the thief simply took away another shield. But how?

Just like the opening story, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" shows a lot of ingenuity and originality with how it presents the impossible situation, but this time that's not reflected in the explanation. Such an elaborate setup requires a scrap of cleverness to either put the traps out of commission or circumvent them with a way to keep the geese quiet, but the solution, while perfectly workable and logical, was a little too facile. And underwhelming. Luckily, the reason behind the thefts was good and something Arsène Lupin would have warmly approved of.

So, as some of you probably noticed, my take on the individual stories don't seem to align with the opening of this review, but I believe the flaws and shortcomings of these three stories were enlarged by being pastiches. It comes with certain expectations that Templeman was unable to live up to. But had he created his own detective characters, Templeman could have told his stories on his own terms with the result being something along the lines of Hal White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008), Andrew May's The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) and Stephen Leather's The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). I think originally created detective characters would have softened some of its flaws.

After all, even as pastiches these were superior detective stories, especially the first one, compared to most what was being published at the time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories is not a timeless classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a well intended collection of stories written by an enthusiastic amateur with a commendable interest in locked room puzzles – something that was too rare in the nineties. So recommended to the ferocious locked room reader and addicted Sherlockian who'll read everything with the name of the Great Detective printed on it.

The Unreachable Past: Q.E.D, vol. 9 by Motohiro Katou

I ended my twofer review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. volumes 7 and 8 with the promise to do another paired review of volumes 9 and 10, but had not counted on volume 10 comprising, entirely, of a novel-length story – making it better suited for a single review. So I decided to discuss volumes 9 and 10 separately.

The 9th volume is another textbook example of what makes Q.E.D so different from other anime-and manga detective series with two stories in which the motives take precedent of the puzzles. These puzzles are perfectly fine with a locked room problem in the second story reminiscent of the impossibly walled-in body from volume 5, but what drove the culprits to create these puzzles is the key to solving them. And the distant, out-of-reach past is the theme tying these stories together.

"The Rules of the Game" revolves around  "a world-class billionaire," Jonas Solomon, who's the chairman of the Solomon Foundation with the power to destabilize the economies of nations "by just flicking his fingers," but the focus here is on his annual private game he hosts behind closed doors – inviting only the smartest people to participate. A huge money prize is awarded to the winner, but the losers have to enter into a conspiracy of silence. They have to keep the secret of the game until death and "even stating an opinion or inquiring about it is forbidden." One of the participants broke the rule with devastating consequences to his company.

Roy Hills, an MIT graduate, build a successful venture enterprise, but needed more money to operate the company and decided to participate in Solomon's private game.

Solomon declared him to be one of the losers. A judgment Hills could not except, because he was convinced he had the correct answer and began asking the other contestants for their answers, but found "an unexpected truth" of the game. And then Solomon began to extract his revenge on him. So he made his escape to Japan where he came across a familiar face, Sou Touma!

Touma graduated at the age of 15 from MIT, but wanted to experience life as an ordinary, Japanese high school student and moved back home. They were in the same class at MIT and Hills tells Touma that, if he want to know more, to enter the game, but Touma tears up the paper – refusing to take part in a potentially dangerous game. Kana Mizuhara disagrees. She ensures her friend receives an invitation in the mail. They soon find themselves as guests at a remote and imposing mansion with geniuses from China and Italy, but the puzzle they have to solve, and the hidden-hidden object puzzle, are not the motor of the plot. The motor is why Solomon created the unusual and even harsh rules of the game, what his dead wife has to do with it and his stubborn personality. And the answers to these questions yield answers to the material puzzles.

One more thing you have to know, to understand "The Rules of the Game," is that it's set during Christmas and can be read as a detective story retelling of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) with Touma playing the Ghosts of Christmas to Solomon's Ebenezer Scrooge. The result is an unconventional, character-driven take on the good, old-fashioned seasonal detective story and the kind of unusual story I've now come to expect from this series.

The second story, entitled "The Frozen Hammer," is another story with a puzzle-within-puzzle, but the motivation of the culprit and the nearly unreachable past provide the keys to the unlocking the truth of these puzzles.

The story begins when part of a dried up, mummified arm with a wristwatch dropped from an iron pipe underneath the Kachidoki Bridge on a passing boat and caused a huge sensation, because the rest of the body is found inside the pipe – in the part of the bridge that raises and lowers. And it's "blocked with steel" at both ends! So, in order to extract the body, the bridge has to be raised which "hasn't been done for 30 years." You have to keep in mind that the story is set in either late 2000 or early 2001, which is important when the police learns that the wristwatch on the corpse was made in 1975! That means that the corpse was placed inside the pipe after the bridge was last opened, but how did the murderer managed to do that? The bridge had to be raised just to get the body out and there's no way it could have been placed there when it was closed. But this is not the only impossibility of the plot.

A piece of paper is found on the corpse with a map of rivers and bridges. Touma recognizes it as a centuries old mathematical problem, Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which poses the question whether it's possible "to cross each bridge only once in a single trip" – a similar problem on the Sumida River area map from 50 years ago. But these puzzles are only means to an end. The raising of the bridge drew quite a crowd and Touma is recognized by an old man, Kishizaki, who attended a lecture given by the boy wonder at Princeton University, which prompted him to invite Touma and Mizuhara to his home. Where he shows them pictures, maps and confesses it was him who placed the body inside the bridge, but challenges the "know-it-all kid" to prove whether that's true or not.

A splendid and original premise for a locked room problem, confined to an iron pipe sealed inside a closed bridge, which is given a good solution that was wonderfully foreshadowed in the way the police tried to extract the body. Touma even provided a solution for the bridge-puzzles, but they're only of secondary importance. A tool to tell the story of the old man and his tragic backstory. A backstory that explains why the body had to be hidden inside the bridge and why Touma decided to keep the truth from the authorities. What I loved most about this story is that the culprit actually succeeded in bringing a brief, but tangible, glimpse of the past back into present! But, as one late panel shows, it came at a cost!

So, all in all, this was an excellent volume with two well done, unusually character-driven puzzle stories and can't understand why this series is not enjoying more popularity among mystery readers from anime/manga corner of the genre. Highly recommended!

My current plan for future Q.E.D. reviews is doing volume 10 as a single review and another twofer review for volumes 11 and 12, because the last story from volume 12 is directly linked to the story from volume 10. I'll probably return to The Kindaichi Case Files before, or after, my review of volume 10. Maybe it's time to give 37 Year Old Kindaichi Case Files a try to see what that series is all about. So stay tuned! 

Murder at Mt. Fuji (1982) by Shizuko Natsuki

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed my affection for the Japanese detective story and have read some twenty novels, several short story collections and countless episodes and volumes of anime-and manga detective series over the years – nearly all of them translated in the past few decades. Since 2000, the number of translations gradually changed from a slow, barely existent drip to a steady stream with Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo and Bento Books regularly adding new titles to the English catalog. Keigo Higashino even became an international bestseller with the translations being deemed good enough to brandish the label "a novel" on their front covers.

For today's review, I picked a much older translation that, regrettably, betrayed the Japanese detective novel wasn't held in the same regard thirty-five years ago.

Shizuko Natsuki was an incredibly productive mystery novelist, writing more than eighty novels and short stories collections, whose detective stories formed the basis for roughly forty movies and six of her novels were translated into English – published between 1984 and 1991. One of Natsuki's most well-known novels is arguably W no Higeki (The Tragedy of W, 1982), translated in '84 as Murder at Mt. Fuji, but the translator, Robert B. Rohmer, took some liberties to make the story more palatable for Western readers.

Ho-Ling Wong noted in his 2012 review that he had no idea why one of the main characters, Jane Prescott, had to be "a double outsider" (a foreign friend of the family) for the story to work, because she's changed to a Japanese women in screen adaptations. An anonymous comment pointed out that the translator had replaced the character from the original with Jane Prescott to give Western readers "an American heroine among all the exotic creatures." Regrettably, this character change is noticeable and unnatural enough to give Murder at Mt. Fuji a sense of inauthenticity. Ho-Ling blamed the title change from the Ellery Queen-inspired The Tragedy of W to the nondescript, uninspired Murder at Mt. Fuji on Orientalism and a lack of interest, or knowledge, of Golden Age detective stories, but it probably was a marketing decision to make the book standout as something different – as it introduced Natsuki to an English-reading audience. But the title certainly oversold the story's background scenery just a little bit. Mt. Fuji is referred to only a handful of times throughout the story.

Yet, in spite of these changes, Murder at Mt. Fuji treats the reader to an unusual inverted detective story that stands much closer to Anthony Berkeley than Ellery Queen. Natsuki is billed as the Agatha Christie of Japan, but her Western debut was pure Berkeley with an altruistic conspiracy and a twisted ending. Although some would probably argue the plot is an inversion of a very famous Christie novel.

Jane Prescott is an American exchange student from the University of Oregon, who specializes in modern Japanese literature at Japan Women's University, but she had to take a part-time job tutoring Chiyo Wada, in conversational English, to cover her living expenses. Chiyo is the grandniece of the family patriarch and president of Wada Pharmaceuticals, Yohei Wada. A tradition of the Wada family is to get together for the New Year's holiday at one of their villas, where the entire clan would spend a few quiet days in seclusion, but this year, Jane had to be invited to help Chiyo prepare for her graduation thesis. Jane travels to their summer villa on the shores of Lake Yamanaka, Mt. Fuji "soaring majestically" in the background, but she's warned by one of Chiyo's relatives that all the men of the Wada family have "a reputation for womanizing." A lecherous trait that "even the men who marry into the family develop." This serves as a prelude to a deadly domestic drama.

That evening, the peace is shattered by a distraught cry, "my god, Chiyo! Why did you do it? Why?" Chiyo had attempted to slash her wrists after stabbing and killing her great-uncle.

Chiyo tells them Yohei had asked her to come to his room later that night, where he tried to rape her, but she defended herself with a fruit knife and, since Chiyo is "the one person everyone loved," they decide to make "every effort to conceal her crime from the police" – voluntarily putting their necks in the noose by tampering with the evidence and concocting an incontestable alibi. Chiyo is send back to Tokyo with the excuse that she had forgotten an essential reference book while the family stage a burglary, but also make it appear as if Yohei was still alive when she left. One of their tricks involves a late-night delivery meal and a stomach pump. Japanese mystery writers really like to play with corpses, don't they? I'll never stop being amazed how easily they wring cast-iron alibis or baffling impossible crimes from a body!

So the first quarter of the story details the conspiracy, showing the reader every step they take, before the faked burglary and murder is reported to the local police, but the amateur conspirators turned out to be no match for the experienced, well-oiled police apparatus. The competent Detective Ukyo Nakazato and mediagenic Superintendent Katsubei Aiura need less than a day to gather enough evidence to prove the murder was an inside job. However, they might have had some help from someone within the Wada family. A mole who wanted to see Chiyo arrested and sabotaged the conspiracy.

On a side note, there's hole in the conspiracy nobody noticed, not the conspirators or the police, which concerns the playing-and score cards. The family wanted to make it appear that Yohei had been playing poker with them, after Chiyo left, but had the cards been dusted for fingerprints the whole scheme would have collapsed, because Yohei's prints would not have been on them.

Just as an inverted mystery novel, Murder at Mt. Fuji has something completely different and fresh to offer, but have to agree with Ho-Ling that the story feels a little light and rushed in parts. Even with the assistance of the Wada mole, the police very easily pulverized an incredibly elaborate plot and cut through the web of lies. A little too easily and a little too fast. This is what makes the story feel lighter, and lighter, with each passing chapter that followed the setup, which is unquestionable the best portion of the book, but the ending gives the reader a glimmer why Natsuki picked an EQ inspired book title – a title that makes sense when you imagine the case from the point-of-view of the police. Everything else screamed Berkeley.

The tragedy of Murder at Mt. Fuji is that it has since been overshadowed by better translations of better novels by some of the grandmasters, past and present, of the Japanese detective story and the translator tinkering with one of the characters certainly didn't do it any favors. It tainted the atmosphere of Murder at Mt. Fuji and this makes it difficult to recommend to anyone who has enjoyed the novels and short stories by Takemaru Abiko, Yukito Ayatsuji, Keikichi Osaka, Soji Shimada and Seishi Yokomizo. But if you enjoy inverted mysteries, Murder at Mt. Fuji comes highly recommended.

The Red Locked Room (2020) by Tetsuya Ayukawa

Tetsuya Ayukawa was a mystery writer who has been described as "the Japanese honkaku mystery story," comparable to how Ellery Queen is called the American detective story, whose forte were cast-iron alibis that were minutely-timed with "the diverse trains" that ran along "the web of railways that covered the islands of Japan" – as well as having a predilection for the locked room mystery. Ayukawa had an interesting perspective on the impossible crime and unbreakable alibi: an alibi is a "locked room in time" while a locked room is an "alibi in space." Just like that, Ayukawa handed us an excuse to include alibi-tricks in the next supplement edition of Locked Room Murders. Get to work, Brian!

Ayukawa created two very different detectives to tackle these, somewhat, specialized tropes.

Chief Inspector Onitsura is "Ellery Queen wearing the face of Inspector French" and his métier is disassembling carefully fabricated alibis, which means that his stories have the outward appearance of a Croftian police procedural, but his cases are crammed with "original tricks and impressive lines of logic." Ryūzō Hoshikage is a dashing, well dressed, but obnoxious, pipe smoking merchant with pencil mustache and "a gifted amateur detective" – who earned the respect and admiration Chief Inspector Tadokoro. Hoshikage mainly acts as an armchair detective who listens to Tadokoro every time he gets stuck in one of those locked room mysteries, mutters some cryptic remarks and than produces a solution that had eluded every one else.

So how can you not be enticed by a traditional detective novelist whose assets were locked rooms and unbreakable alibis? John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, agreed and formally introduced Ayukawa, Hoshikage and Onitsura to Western mystery readers with a collection of specially selected short stories.

The Red Locked Room (2020) comprises of seven stories, originally published between 1954 and 1961, which were translated by our resident tour guide in the world of the Japanese detective story, Ho-Ling Wong. Taku Ashibe penned an informative introduction to Ayukawa and his two series-detectives. So let's investigate.

The first story in The Red Locked Room is "The White Locked Room," which opens with a female student, Kimiko Satō, visiting the snow-covered, cottage-like home of Professor Zama, but the door is answered by the editor-in-chief of New Century, Nobuo Mine – who came to have the professor proofread one of his articles. Nobuo tells Kimiko he arrived only three minutes before her and found the professor's body in the study. Chief Inspector Tadokoro when the murder turns out to be an impossible crime. The whole house had been searched, top to bottom, but "not even a mouse was found" and the only, untampered traces in the snow were the footprints of Kimiko and Nobuo. So how did the murderer entered and left the house without leaving any footprints behind?

Tadokoro decides to consult his friend and celebrated detective, Ryūzō Hoshikage, who acts more as an armchair oracle than an armchair detective. Hoshikage listens to every detail of the case, makes some cryptic remarks and asks a baffling question ("any talk about a cat or dog being burnt in the neighbourhood?"), which he neatly works into a logical and ultimately simple explanation. A clever locked room-trick that uses a well-known impossible crime technique to create a new solution to the no-footprints problem. I don't recall having ever come across this exact solution before. So well done, Ayukawa!

The second story is "Whose Body?" and has a plot suggesting to me that the unbreakable alibi is not the only reason why Ayukawa's Chief Inspector Onitsura novels and short stories are "often categorised as realistic police procedurals." This story hinges entirely on breaking down someone's identity. An important feature of the Realist School.

"Whose Body?" begins with showing why the exterior of a police procedural can be deceiving and exposed it ties to the intuitive school of detective fiction. There are three artists who all receive packages respectively containing a recently fired gun, a rope and an empty bottle of acid. Some get mad, while others assume it was a prank, but the person whose name was used to send the packages claims to be innocent. And then a body is discovered in the basement of a burnt-out building. A headless body with his hands chemically burned, but the victim still had all his possession and the name tags were not ripped out of his clothes – making identification of the mutilated victim suspiciously easy. Chief Inspector Onitsura finds an "exceptionally intelligent" killer who came up with a scheme that would have tricked a less astute policeman. A well-done play on an age-old trick.

"The Blue Locked Room" is the next story in line and starts with a drunken actor, Fuyuto Shinano, assaulting his stage director, Katsuhiko Kashimura, with a knife, but the timely arrival of a police officer prevented them from killing one another. However, the next morning the director is found murdered in his bedroom with the door locked from the inside and the open window overlooking a flowerbed, which was unmarked by any footprints. So, once again, Chief Inspector Tadokoro turns that famous amateur detective, Ryūzō Hoshikage, but the person he fingers as the murderer shocks even him.

A good and decent enough story, but very much a patchwork of old ideas and therefore can across as a trifle weak surrounded by more original and intricately-plotted stories. Edward D. Hoch actually wrote a story so similar to "The Blue Locked Room" that Hoshikage's summation of the case gave me déjà vu, but you can probably ascribe that to Ayukawa and Hoch using the same locked room mystery as their model. However, they both used a different locked room-tricks.

"Death in Early Spring" is an outstanding example of how to apply a classic impossible crime technique to the manufacturing of indestructible alibis! Chief Inspector Onitsura has to find the murderer of a young man, Kazuomi Kokuryō, who had been strangled to death at a construction site on the outskirts of Gofukubashi 3-Chōme – a one, or two, minute walk from the Yaesu Exit of Tokyo Station. Only suspect is a rival in love, Fukujirō Fuda, who possesses an unshakable alibi. Ayukawa assured the reader in the opening of the story that it was "necessary to examine a dry series of railway timetables" to understand "how the culprit managed to mystify the chief inspector without utilizing any special trickery." I count this as a challenge to the reader and perhaps the most fitting story to use it in. Ellery Queen would have approved!

It's very tempting to compare the next story to John Dickson Carr, but "The Clown in the Tunnel" stands much closer to Carr's modern-day followers and imitators. Such as Paul Halter, Jean-Paul Török and David Renwick.

A clown is witnessed entering the lodgings of a band, Swing Wagon Lodge, where stabs the singer to death in the bathroom and than ties up the maid in the kitchen. After the clown had washed his hands and tidied up his custom, his went outside and the maid saw him disappear into the tunnel that connected the house with the streets. There was, however, a traffic accident on the street-side of the tunnel and the policemen on the scene swore that nobody, let alone a clown, emerged from the tunnel. So what happened to the clown inside the tunnel and how was the vanishing-trick pulled off?

Chief Inspector Tadokoro and Ryūzō Hoshikage have to closely examine and weigh every minute that had ticked away between the moment the clown was seen entering the building and was seen escaping through the tunnel to uncover the solution – which revealed one hell of a trick! The previous story used an impossible crime technique to create an alibi, but this story employed the tricks of the alibi story to make a clown vanish into thin air. Something tells me this story is going to turn up in a future anthology of locked room and impossible crime stories.

The next story is "The Five Clocks" and has Chief Inspector Onitsura doggedly pursuing a murderer whose alibi was backed by five different clocks in as many different locations. A clock in the study. The wristwatch of a witness. A radio broadcast. The clock at the murderer's tailor and the clock at the wall of a soba restaurant, but more is not always better and only the trick with the restaurant clock was impressive. So not exactly a classic of the alibi story, but a good example of how to break them down.

Finally, we come to the titular story, "The Red Locked Room," which is a simple red brick building, containing the dissection room, standing on a lonely corner of a university campus. Honestly, a dissection room or mortuary has not been used enough as a setting for a locked room story, because the mood and atmosphere practically creates itself. This time, Tadokoro and Hoshikage are confronted with the body of female student, Katsuki, who had been expertly cut to pieces and left behind the locked door of the dissection room – secured on the outside with a combination-lock. And only one person knows the combination to that lock.

However, if you're familiar with the tropes of the Japanese locked room mystery, or are simply aware of them, you should be able to work out the trick before Hoshikage reveals it to a baffled Tadokoro. Still a solid impossible crime story and another possible candidate for inclusion in a future locked room anthology.

On a whole, The Red Locked Room is an excellent and highly recommended introduction to a writer whose debut novel, Petrov jiken (The Petrov Affair, 1950), was seen as at the time as "a bellwether of the arrival of a new generation of honkaku mystery writers." So, hopefully, this isn't the last we have seen of Ayukawa in the West.

On a last, semi-related note: I didn't want this review to linger in my blogging queue for over a month and decided to find a hole in the schedule to cram it in, but now have to find another hole to play armchair detective. You see, there's a change I might have figured out the true/double identity of the mysterious boss from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed. I know I'm not far enough in the series to officially know about the revelation that was hidden volume 30, but bits and pieces have been spoiled to me over the years. Recently, the pieces began to fall into place. I still have to work out the details in my head, but it makes sense up there. Nobody on the internet seems to have considered this possibility! And even if it collapses, I'll probably still post my little theory just for the fun of it.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) by E. and M.A. Radford

I can't remember where I read this, or who said it, but someone once posited that if the dead who had been murdered and buried as tragic victims of accidents, suicides or simply natural causes would rise from their graves to hold a candle – every cemetery in the world would be brightly lit. Whoever said it, the mystery writing husband-and-wife team of Edwin and Mona Radford would have disagreed with him.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) is the eight case of Dr. Harry Manson and, unlike the previous novels in the series, the book is an inverted detective story in the mold of R. Austin Freeman. In their foreword, the Radfords wrote that they hoped the story may act as "a warning to those people who may think that they can commit a crime" and "get away with it." Because they can't. The Heel of Achilles is a demonstration why the logical, scientifically educated detective invariably gets his man.

The Heel of Achilles takes the classical approach to the inverted mystery with the first part telling the story of the murderer and his victim-to-be, showing every detail of "a cast-iron plot of murder" that "nothing could detect as being other than an accident," while the second part unmercifully lays bare all the mistakes the murderer made along the way – ending the story on a somewhat depressing note. So the book is really two novellas in one that can actually be read as two separate, standalone tales of crime and detection.

In the first part, entitled "Story of a Murder," the reader is introduced to Jack Edwins, a humble garage mechanic, who became the unwitting accomplish in a scheme hatched by a petty crook and racehorse gambler, James Sprogson. A simple burglary to quickly snatch "thousands of pounds' worth of stuff," but a police whistle interrupted them and Edwins was left standing with his pockets stuffed with jewelry! Sprogson was the only one who shot from the house into the waiting hands of the policemen and this meant Edwins had an opportunity to silently make his exit, which he did without being weigh down by the fortune spilling from his pockets. A fortune he used to change his name, marry the love of his life and a buy his own service station, but put some of his hard earned money aside to anonymously repay the owner of the stolen goods.

Sprogson, on the other hand, was sentenced to three years penal servitude and, when he was released, Edwins had vanished from the face of the earth and Jack Porter, of the Green Service Station, had taken his place. Only a fluke brought Sprogson, now James Canley, back to Porter. What he wants is his cut of the money and then some. So he decided to kill Canley in order to keep what he had built for the woman he loved so much.

Porter is "an omnivorous reader of detective stories" and "modelled his plan on the mistakes made by the lawbreakers in the novels he had read," which gave him the idea to stage an accidental death and meticulously goes to work – presenting the local police with a decapitated corpse lying on the track of a railway line. The local authorities are willing to accept that it was nothing more than an unfortunate railway accident, but the railway doctor insisted on calling in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Harry Manson.

As an aside, if The Heel of Achilles had been a regular detective story, the murder would have come very close to being an impossible crime, with a single track of footprints leading from the victim's cottage to the tracks, had it not been for "the long grass verge that edged the track."

The second part of the story, "Cherchez L'Homme," brings Dr. Manson to the scene of the crime and laboriously begins to poke holes in, what seemed to be, a relatively watertight scheme. Dr. Manson patiently explains every step of his investigation and reasoning, but, to do this properly, the local police officers had to be little denser than usual ("very trustworthy, you know, but no thinker").

However, the payoff is that you get to see a painstaking destruction of a carefully laid plan with apparently nothing linking the victim with his killer. A beautiful combination logical reasoning and forensic detective work. On top of that, Dr. Manson tells the story of two locked room murders, over the course of his investigation, as a basic exercises in logic and gives the story of Maria Lee, a.k.a. Black Maria, as the origin of the police van's name – a claim that has since been disputed by the internet. Still, it was a fun little story and coming across these shreds of arcane history and knowledge is always a bonus you get from these vintage detective novels.

Slowly, but surely, Dr. Manson proves the accident was murder and treads closer to the murderer with every passing chapter, which made realize that a truly scientific mystery novel is playing the detective story in god mode. Where the more intuitive or workman-like sleuths have to interpret nebulous clues or pick apart alibis, the scientific investigator can pick up the trail of nameless, faceless killer by studying cigar ash, dust and small fibers. It's almost unfair to the hardworking, sympathetic murderer and even Dr. Manson says at the end of the story that he never "concluded a case with less satisfaction." An ending painfully showing that justice and restoration of order isn't always what it's made out to be.

The Heel of Achilles is a well written and carefully plotted inverted detective novel with the first half focusing on the personal side of the murder and the second half presenting the impersonal examination of the crime, in which Dr. Manson demonstrates that every contact leaves a trace – wringing the truth from the physical evidence the murderer so cleverly tried to alter or destroy. More importantly, the hardest thing to do with an inverted mystery is to keep the reader interested when they already know all of the answers. I believe the Radfords succeeded here by making it a challenge to the reader, of sorts, by serving their readers with a seemingly airtight murder plot and than pointing out the holes. So easily one of the most meticulously plotted inverted detective stories, right up there with John Russell Fearn's Pattern of Murder (2006), and comes highly recommended!