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.

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) by James Scott Byrnside

The locked room mystery and impossible crime story comes in many different shapes and forms, opening the door to endless possibilities and variations to kill, or disappear, people under circumstances that can only be described as miraculous – whether the victims were in a sealed room, closely guarded or in an open space. And then there are the miscellaneous impossibilities such as levitation, phantom fingerprints, predictive dreams and the physical alibi. So the possibilities really are endless and mystery writers have been tinkering with it ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841. 

There is, however, one type of impossible crime that appears to be incredibly restrictive without much room for innovation or originality. I'm talking about the no-footprints scenario. 

John Dickson Carr's name is synonymous with the locked room and impossible crime story, but even the master himself only produced two really good and original no-footprints novels, The Hollow Man (1935) and She Died a Lady (1943) – latter published as by "Carter Dickson." If you look at what other mystery writers have written, there are no more than a dozen novels and short stories that stand out as inspired and original. Some examples that come to mind are Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), Norman Berrow's The Footprints of Satan (1950), Douglas Ashe's The Longstreet Legacy (1951), David Renwick's Jonathan Creek episode The Black Canary (1998) and two masterly done short stories, Robert Arthur's "The Glass Bridge" (1957) and Arthur Porges' "No Killer Has Wings" (1960). Japan also produced some fine examples (e.g. Gosho Aoyama's "The Magic Lovers Case") and recently Paul Halter came up with a creative variation on the no-footprints scenario in La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019). This short list of notable titles is why I've come to regard the no-footprints scenario as the most challenging and tricky impossible crime to tackle. A puzzle for experts.

So I was excited when the prodigy child of the Renaissance Era, James Scott Byrnside, announced his third novel featuring a killer who can apparently walk through walls and doesn't leave any footprints in the snow! 

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) is a prequel to Goodnight Irene (2018) and The Opening Night Murders (2019), set in November, 1920, which takes Rowan Manory and Walter Williams, Chicago's finest, to Barrington Hills – located "deep within the recesses of untamed Illinois." Thomas Browning, a rich railway magnate, wants a reputable private detective to debunk a psychic, Madame Cuchla, who has convinced his business partner, Hadd Mades, that turning Barrington Hills in a resort town is a bad idea. Madame Cuchla claims the region is haunted by one of the town's most notorious past residents, Otto Savore. Someone believed by the locals to be a vampire who, in 1875, allegedly killed more than fifty people in a single night with "none of the doors or windows of his victims were trespassed" and "no footprints in the snow." So, quite naturally, the townspeople buried him alive and "no grass ever grows on the vampire's grave." Madame Cuchla warns that death will come if the ground is ever build on.

Manory tells Browning that "any number of Chicago-River gumshoes could explain" the parlor tricks employed by psychics for a third of his price, but Browning wants a reputable detective to convince Mades. Manory certainly delivers the goods as he not only explains Madame Cuchla psychic reading of Williams, ghostly knocking and a floating face that vanished in a puff of smoke, but also gives a solution to the vampiric bloodbath from forty-five years ago. So the opening alone is good enough to be added to the list of debunked séance mysteries, but the problems that follow are of a less conventional nature. And they're all "damned impossible."

A New Mapback!

Early next morning, Mades returns to the remote house, hammering on the front door and yelling blue murder, because the vampire is in the house and Browning is in grave danger. Mades shows Manory the developed photographs that were taken of the house the previous days and one of them shows a grotesque-looking creature standing outside the balcony door, "sharp nails were touching the glass," as if trying to enter. But how did the vampire get on the balcony? There's no way to reach the balcony from the outside and the freezing cold makes it unlikely someone was waiting on the balcony for the right moment to photobomb without being seen. So that's the first impossibility stumping Manory, but "an agonizing scream" quickly announces a second one.

Thomas Browning's body is found in the garage with a twisted spine, broken bones, a slash across his right wrist and two bleeding puncture marks in his neck, but how had the murderer entered, or exited, the garage – only footprints going from the kitchen door to the garage belong to Browning. Another set of footprints goes from the kitchen door into the direction of the forest. A third and fourth set of footprints go from the garage window and back into the forest. Finally, two footprints are found next to the skylight on the garage roof, but none of them explained how Browning could have been attacked and killed. The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is brimming with impossible material. There's a past murder case in which severed hands were left in the bedroom of a locked house and a second murder is committed inside a locked bedroom while Manory was sitting guard in the corridor. However, the story should not be judged solely as an impossible crime novel. 

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire has a small pool of suspects comprising of Browning's much younger wife, Madelaine, who sleepwalks and the reason why they have a live-in specialist, Dr. Sinclair. A daughter from a first marriage, Gertrude, who used to be married with a socialist associated with a band of hardliners, but he was "suicided" in a jail cell. She had not been on speaking terms with her father until he summoned her back home with the promise of a surprise. Howard Amorartis is a writer of supernatural horror and hopes his name will one day be as well-known as Poe, but now he has been commissioned to pen Browning's biography. Belby is the butler-chauffeur who's "not intelligent enough to devise a murder plan," but perhaps "subservient enough to carry one out." And there's always Browning's frightened business partner, Mades.

I think The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is actually more accomplished as a whodunit than as a locked room mystery with a murderer who was hiding in plain sight (always satisfying) who had an original motive to engineer a whole series of otherworldly crimes. Just like in previous novels, the plot resembles a Matryoshka doll with multiple, interconnected problems that not only includes a plethora of impossible crimes and elusive murderer, but a dying message that had to be violently pried from the victim's clenched fist or why the murderer had no option to sever the hands of the second victim – a kind of corpse puzzle you normally only come across in Japanese shin honkaku detective stories. Add to this the excellent clueing, the characterization of the two bantering detectives and all of the various, moving plot-strands grasped in an iron-clad grip demonstrating why Byrnside might very well turn out to be the herald of a Second Golden Age.

A Classic Mapback

But what about the impossibilities? Can they stand toe-to-toe with the ten no-footprints novels and short stories mentioned above? Yes... and no. The plot is crammed with the impossible crimes, but quantity doesn't always mean quality and only two of them are good.

Firstly, while the murder in the snow surrounded garage didn't came up with a new footprint-trick, everything else about this tricky murder made it an excellent impossibility with a good explanation why the witness at the window saw him fight with an invisible entity. Honestly, the whole situation that brought about this murder was quite clever and something that would have gotten the approval of Carr. Secondly, the murder in the locked and guarded bedroom has a routine solution, where the locked door and guard are concerned, but Byrnside succeeded in making one of my biggest no-noes perfectly acceptable and logical. And then there's the reason why the murderer had to cut off the hands. Unfortunately, the explanations to the past case with the severed hands that were left in a locked house or how the vampire was able to reach the balcony were underwhelming.

Nevertheless, when the plot resembles a nesting doll and practically everything is done correctly, the less than impressive explanations to two of the impossibilities is a blow the story can easily absorb without any damage to the overall plot. Byrnside continued to be awesome with how he handled the ending. Chapter 17 is a Challenge to the Reader asking eight questions that have to be answered before the case can be considered solved. Manory gives his explanation of the case at the annual dinner of the Detectives Club and there's a Rival Detective in attendance, Miss Genevieve Pond, who plays armchair detective and tries to deduce the solution before Manory gives it. I suspect she'll either become Manory's love interest in a future novel or become an antagonist when Byrnside decides to tackle the inverted detective story with an impossible, but it's probably the former. After all, Manory needs someone to bounce off on. They're polar opposites, is what I mean.

So, a long, rambling story short, Byrnside performed the hat trick with three back-to-back gems of the Western-style, neo-orthodox detective novel covering various styles and subgenres. All three are historical mysteries written in the typical, hardboiled style of the American pulps, but plotted and clued like a traditional, Golden Age detective stories filled with locked rooms, dying messages and bizarre murders – which all pay subtly homage to some of the greats of that bygone era. Goodnight Irene was an ambitious debut and The Opening Night Murders showed prodigious improvement with its labyrinthine plot, which can also be read as the two of the longest fan letters everyone has ever written to Christianna Brand. Byrnside moved away from using Brand as a foundation stone for his work and the result is The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is a fully realized, modern incarnation of the classic detective story that can stand on its own. One of the bright lights of 2020 and all three come highly recommended.

On a final note: sorry for the flurry of 2020 reviews, but had to rearrange some posts and cram them all in here.

The Opening Night Murders (2019) by James Scott Byrnside

Last year, James Scott Byrnside debuted with an ambitiously plotted, cleverly written historical (locked room) mystery novel, Goodnight Irene (2018), which he dedicated to one of the uncrowned queens of the Golden Age detective story, Christianna Brand – whose influence on Byrnside left a noticeable mark on the plot. Goodnight Irene was deservedly received with much acclaim and enthusiasm.

Surprisingly, in an interview with "JJ," of The Invisible Event, Byrnside revealed he had only been seriously reading classic detective fiction since January, 2017, when he came across an audio-book of A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922) on YouTube. This makes Goodnight Irene even more remarkable, because the characterization, plotting and writing showed a firm grasp and understanding of the traditional detective story.

I always assumed it took years to discover, develop and fine-tune your taste, which gives you an understanding of the genre as a whole, but Byrnside moved with prodigal speed from listening to Milne's The Red House Mystery to writing a Western equivalent of a Japanese shin honkaku mystery novel – potentially lightening the spark of a second Golden Age. I, on the other hand, can still be genuinely amazed at the sheer volume of detective fiction produced between 1920 and 1960. And the resulting endless procession of obscure, long-forgotten mystery writers who keep clawing to the surface.

So most of us where eagerly looking forward to Byrnside's second impossible crime novel, entitled The Opening Night Murders (2019), which promised to be a detective story along the lines of Brand's superb Death of Jezebel (1948). Well, I was not disappointed.

The Opening Night Murders is set in Chicago, 1935, and begins on a somewhat similar note as Goodnight Irene and Death of Jezebel.

Rowan Manory and Walter Williams are two Chicago-based private-detectives who are essentially Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but interact with each other more like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin without them really resembling any of these characters – which makes them descendants, instead of cheap knockoffs, of those famous detectives. Their next intricately-plotted, elusive and puzzling headache of a case is brought to them by "the finest actress in all of Chicago," Lisa Pluviam.

Lisa and Jenny Pluviam are sisters who been in theater, in one form or another, their entire lives. They started in high school, "farted around flops and dives in Chicago for seven years" and studied in New York, which turned Lisa into a proper stage actress and Jenny became a director/playwright. So an unexpected inheritance from their estranged father placed in the position to open The Red Rising Theater and put on their own productions. The Balcony is one of those productions, written and directed by Jenny Pluviam, with Lisa Pluviam as the lead star of this promising play, but Lisa is "a little spooked" when she receives an anonymous death threat. A note had been left in her office, in the theater, promising she'll die on opening night and there's only a window of twenty-four hours in which the note could have been left – only seven people had access to the theater during that time frame. Two of them are Lisa and Jenny Pluviam. The others include four actors, Timothy Brown, Edward Filius, Allison Miller and Maura Lewis, rounded out by the grizzled stage technician, Sam "Grizz" Thompson.

I think the opening chapter excellently showcases Manory's experience and skill as an old, weather-beaten detective as he mines the story presented to them for facts and details, which allows him to make some accurate deductions about the characters and the play – which is always an open invitation to draw comparisons with Sherlock Holmes. However, here it wasn't done in order to dazzle the client or reader with amazing feats of deductions based on a particular type of clay or scratches on a pocket watch. Manory was earnestly probing the problem and this made him come across, in spite of his verbosity, as an honestly intelligent detective.

Lisa convinces Manory to come to the opening of The Balcony to keep an eye on her and act "sort of like a bodyguard," which might convince her would-be-assassin to abandon his, or her, plan. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case.

On the right side of the stage, there's "a twenty-foot-high tower with the two balconies side by side," on which Lisa and Edward's characters meet, but, during her balcony scene, Lisa toppled over the rail and plunged twenty-feet. She landed face first with "a sharp, sickening crack of her neck." Lisa had been all alone on the balcony and there were two-hundred people in the audience to back up that claim, but Manory is convinced one of his six suspect had planned and carried out, what looked like, the perfect murder. And now the story, or rather the plot, becomes a little tricky to discuss.

Years ago, I compared the plot of M.P.O. Books' De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011), one of the best Dutch detective novels ever written, to a kaleidoscopic photograph. A plot that initially appears to be a confusion of scattered, seemingly unconnected plot-threads, but, as the story progresses, the lens is slowly turned back into focus – creating a complete and coherent picture of the case. Byrnside has a similar plotting-style except with him there's never any doubt the plot-threads are connected, but the effect is pretty much the same. JJ hit the nail on the head when he called the plot of The Opening Night Murders a "mesmerizing, intoxicating performance."

The hook of The Opening Night Murders isn't simply the excellently positioned and executed impossible crime in front of two-hundred witnesses, but the way in which every single aspect and detail of the story logically dovetailed together in the end. This allowed Byrnside to play around with that beloved plot-device of puzzle-plot enthusiasts, the multiple interpretations/solutions, which is used quite effectively towards the end of the story. Simply amazing!

Once more, I can't give you too many exact details about this intricate, maze-like plot, littered with clues, but the second murder deserves a mention. A murder that's the exact opposite of the carefully planned, coolly executed murder of Lisa Pluviam. The second, gory murder was a frenzied killing carried out with a straight razor and kitchen knife. However, the murderer turned out to have a logical reason to go to town on this victim that you normally only see in Japanese shin honkaku mysteries, in which a dismembered or mutilated body often turns out to be a key-piece of the puzzle. Byrnside truly is a neo-orthodox mystery writer!

The Opening Night Murders is not simply a detective of cold, hard logic, but one that becomes very close and personal for the two detectives, which results in an unforgettable ending. Granted, I have read similar kind of endings in detective stories, but not quite like this one!

So, where the characters, plot and story-telling is concerned, I have practically nothing to nitpick about, except that the colorful vernacular of the characters seem very modern at times, but I have a piece of advice for Byrnside. Don't become a one-man tribute band by leaning too heavily on Brand as a foundation for your stories, because it's going to take away from your own ideas in the long run. Instead, you should follow the example of Paul Halter, a disciple of John Dickson Carr, who emerged from his idol's shadow to carve out a legacy of his own as a modern master of the locked room mystery. You can do it!

The Opening Night Murders has rich story-telling that logically navigates a beautifully designed, labyrinthine-like plot to its inevitable conclusion and hopefully a sign from the Gods (Poe, Doyle and Chesterton) that a second Golden Age is on the horizon. I'm eagerly looking forward to the third entry in the series, The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020), which is a prequel and will be released next summer. I'm kind of curious to see how exactly R. Francis Foster's Something Wrong at Chillery (1931) has influenced the interaction between Manory and Williams (see comment-section).

On a final, semi-related note: I crammed this review in between my planned ones (still more than a month ahead of schedule) and this came at the expense of yesterday's review of The Doll Island Murder Case from the Kindaichi series. So, if you missed that blog-post, it's there.

Goodnight Irene (2018) by James Scott Byrnside

Back in 2015, "JJ" of The Invisible Event began a semi-regular blog-series, "Adventures in Self-Publishing," in which he examines independently published detective novels and with the exception of a few clunkers, like The Message in a Bottle (2017) by Merapi Omnut, the quality has been above average from what you'd normally expect from self-published works – most notably Lee Sheldon's Impossible Bliss (2001). Recently, he discussed a novel this series of blog-posts that sounded too good to ignore.

JJ opened 2019 with a review of James Scott Byrnside's Goodnight Irene (2018), a self-published locked room mystery, which he described as "an absolute belter" with "increasingly bizarre and unfathomable crimes" in an isolated house reminiscent of "the pell-mell craziness" of Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935). That alone was enough to get my attention, but then Byrnside turned up in the comments to say he wasn't "interested in writing anything except impossible crime." So that got him fast-tracked to the snow-capped peak of Mt. To-be-Read. Sorry Robert Innes and Adam Roberts. I'll get around to you two eventually.

Goodnight Irene is an ambitiously written, intricately plotted detective novel, certainly for a debut, which generally means the opening chapters are easier to discuss than the later. Here, it's the other way around.

The story opens with a prologue set in Chicago, 1907, giving the reader a glimpse of an appalling crime before moving twenty years ahead, to 1927, when a private-detective, Rowan Manory, made "a terrible error in judgment"  that has caused "irreparable harm" – effectively putting him out of commission for months. Five months later, Manory receives a letter from Robert Lasciva from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who received a death threat in the mail. A threat promising Lasciva will be murdered during the weekend of his fifty-fifth birthday and the murderer will be a guest at his party.

Lasciva has organized "a small, tight-knit celebration" at his remote estate, high upon a ridge, between the Bayou Pierre Mounds and Fort Hill with only one read leading up to the place. There are only three guests, a business associate and staff besides the two detectives of the story.

The guests are an elderly aunt, Bernice Lasciva, and a long-lost English nephew, Charles Lasciva, who brought along his wife, Margaret. Jack Tellum is Robert Lasciva's bodyguard, while Ruth Martice and Willie Aikes respectively fulfill the duties of private-secretary and butler/driver. The party is rounded out by his lawyer, Paul Daniels. Manory decides to take the case, not only for the much-needed three-thousand dollar fee, but the link his client has with the long-forgotten crime from the 1907 prologue and the untimely death of his mother – which probably gives you the impression that the book is a dark, grim and brooding historical crime novel. Goodnight Irene is definitely written in the traditional of the nicotine-stained, booze-fueled American pulp story, but the two main characters have a sense of humor and their comments often lighten the mood.

Coming next...

Manory has an assistant and friend, Walter Williams, who banter back and forth like a couple of married detectives from the comedic mystery novels of Kelley Roos and Herbert Resnicow. And this never strikes a false, jarring note with the pitch-black plot-strands. I believe Byrnside's talent as a writer is in straddling the various forms and tropes of the genre without turning the story and plot in a Frankenstein monstrosity.

Goodnight Irene begins to resemble a classically-situated, traditionally-styled detective story when Jack Tellum is poisoned and mumbles, what proves to be, a dying message, "choke, choke," which is funny coming from a character named Tellum (Tell 'Em). Very subtle, Byrnside. Very subtle. A note is found on Tellem saying "two are now dead" and promising two more "shall perish" before dawn. That second body belongs to the host, Robert Lasciva, whose decapitated body is found clad in a heavy, ancient and costly suit of armor in his office – three feet away sat the helmet propped up with a battle-ax by its side. There are no windows in the office and the door was locked with the key sticking in the lock on the inside.

Lasciva had been in the room with his aunt, Bernice, but the elderly lady could not have committed the murder, because she was physically unable to swing the big battle-ax and there's another problem. When the door was broken down, Bernice had disappeared from the locked, windowless room! What a brilliantly posed, double-edged impossible situation. A third, quasi-impossibility is thrown in for good measure when body parts are found, but the dismembered victim was not a member of the party and the house became inaccessible to outsiders when a flood washed away the only bridge to the mainland.

On a side note, Goodnight Irene is set during the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, known as The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left over 700,000 people homeless, approximately 500 people dead and caused $1 billion in damages. The town of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was one of the places that was flooded in 1927 and is depicted in the story as being drowned in twenty-five feet of water, covering "any signs of civilization," except for a roof or tree here and there. The deluge had even "unearthed the contents of Beulah Cemetery" and forced "the coffins to travel through the town like some unholy pastiche of a funeral procession." These scenes reminded me of the devastating flood in Zelda Popkin's criminally underrated Dead Man's Gift (1941).

Byrnside dedicated Goodnight Irene to one of the uncrowned Queen's of Crime, Christianna Brand, stating that she may not have been "the most prolific or celebrated mystery writer," but "she was the best" and the plot slyly winks to Brand – draping another layer over this peculiarly structured detective story. A detective story that could have been penned by Bill Pronzini and plotted by Paul Halter, but paying homage to a mystery writer whose only flaw is that she didn't write enough detective stories.

The plot has some minor imperfections, such as a rushed ending and words ("pixilated") or phrases ("Five more minutes, Mom") that are or feel out-of-place in 1927, but overall, the quality of this self-published debut novel that I can easily dismiss those flaws as growing pains of a promising mystery writer. If there's anything to complain about, it's the routine solution to the locked office. The dying message of the bodyguard, the reason why the body in the locked room was clad in an armor suit, the disappearance of Bernice, the dismembered remains and the link to the crime from 1907 are all superbly handled, but have seen this locked room-trick more than once – one of the clues made it blatantly obvious this trick was being used. So that was a little bit disappointing.

Byrnside took an ambitious first stab at the detective story with Goodnight Irene and the result is an unconventional historical mystery novel, steeped in the offbeat style of the American pulps, but written around the skeletal frame of the traditional detective story and everything fitted together perfectly. Most promisingly, the solution to the dismembered remains is something you expect to find in a Japanese shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) detective novel. So, hopefully, Goodnight Irene is not only the auspicious beginning of the next John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter, but also the beginning of the end of the current Renaissance Period with the dawn of a Second Golden Age looming on the horizon. No pressure, Byrnside.