Spitting Image: "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (1969) by Jon L. Breen

Some months ago, I reviewed two short stories by Jon L. Breen, "The House of the Shrill Whispers" (1972) and "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979), which are gentle, but expertly done, parodies of John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne – two iconic detective-characters who are inextricably linked to the timeless locked room mystery. Breen is the genre's resident satirist and has taken the mickey out of many of the greatest mystery writers.

Frederick Dannay was one half of the bodily incarnation of the American detective story, "Ellery Queen," who invited Breen to take a shot at the Ellery Queen character. The result is a parody hearkening back to "the early Ellery of the pure-puzzle days." Naturally, there's a dying message and a challenge to the reader.

"The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" was originally published in the March, 1969, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted in the anthology Ellery Queen's Eyes of Mystery (1981).

E. Larry Cune is a world famous detective and "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" takes him back to "the scene of his first great triumph," Greek Theatre, where he solved the murder of an asthmatic audience member, Mr. Anagopolous – a case commonly known as The Greek Coughin' Mystery. There are many more of these sly nods and winks in the story to EQ ("this is a calamity, Towne").

Orson Coward's new musical comedy, Gold, is debuting at the Greek Theatre and Cune is in the audience, but realizes that his mere presence put "the fear of sudden death in all those around him." The great detective hasn't attended a play or party without having "to solve a murder at some time during the festivities," because potential murderers are champing at the bit "to match wits with him." By the way, this "match wits" line also appears in the challenge to the reader. So is this story where the 1975 Ellery Queen TV-series got the idea for the famous "match wits with Ellery Queen" line? I don't remember it ever being used in any of the novels or short stories. Anyway...

Something is definitely happening, or has happened, backstage. When the show begins, the songs are out-of-order and during the intermission, Cune is told that Coward has been murdered. A weighty volume, entitled The Complete Wit of Orson Coward, appears to have been the murder weapon.

Cune deduces Coward expected to be murdered, but, when he saw Cune sitting in the audience, he knew it was going to be that night and left him a clue to help him identify his murderer, which Coward did by rearranging the songs – a predying message, if you will. Usually, in a detective parody, the answers to these kind of problems are nonsensical (e.g. "The Problem of the Vanishing Town") or disappointing, but the predying message can (sort of) be solved. I think the key to the meaning of the first, out-of-order song, "Never Been Kissed," is a bit more nebulous than "Alone in My Solitude" and "I Know the Score Now." However, if you get those last two, you can probably guess the answer to the first. And certainly pick the murderer's name from the cast of characters.

What has the Lithuanian eraser of the story-title to do with this theatrical mystery? Well, that's the punchline of the story. Something you have to read for yourself.

All in all, "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" is another excellent parody by Breen, who understands the writers he's lampooning, which is what makes them work and this time it even has a clever take on the dying message, but, more importantly, it was funny. My favorite scene is perhaps when Cune walked on stage to tell the audience there has been an unfortunate accident and immediately "men with black bags began making their way to the aisles all over the massive playhouse" (no, we don't need doctors, he's quite dead). This story should have made it into The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018). Definitely recommended, especially if you like Ellery Queen. Or simply in the mood for something light hearted and short.

The Ghost It Was: "The House of the Shrill Whispers" (1972) by Jon L. Breen

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed "The Bizarre Case Expert" (1970) by Dennis Lynds, published as by “William Arden," which was reprinted in Ellery Queen's Master of Mysteries (1975) and the brief introduction to the story noted an increase in submissions of impossible crime stories to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – suggesting that the "the locked-room 'tec theme" was experiencing a renaissance at the time. So this prompted me to grab another short impossible crime story from the early 1970s as a follow up.

Jon L. Breen is an acclaimed critic and reviewer, who presided over The Jury Box column in EQMM from 1977 to 2011, but his most endearing contribution to the genre is as a premier short story writer of parodies and pastiches. He penned more than a hundred of them!

Back in 2012, I compiled a short list of parodies, pastiches and homages to everyone's favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, which include William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965), William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" (1965) and Norma Schier's "Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (1966), but Breen was a notable absentee – while he arguably wrote one of the best parodies of master. Only the little gem of a spoof by Brittain is better.

"The House of the Shrill Whispers" was originally published in the August, 1972, issue of EQMM and reprinted in Ellery Queen's Champions of Mystery (1977).

The story opens in a first-class train carriage where Millard Carstairs meets Nancy Williston and they discover they're both headed to The Clifton Place in Warwick-on-Stems. A place better known under its ominous pet name, The House of the Shrill Whispers, where "the ghost of old Admiral Wilburforce Cogsby" has been seen walking "on July 12 of the last year of every decade since 1880." This ghost story is eerily similar to the impossible situation in John Russell Fearn's "Chamber of Centuries" (1940). Lamentably, nothing of note is done with this ghost story. There is, however, an impossible murder looming on the horizon.

Sir Margrove Clifton is the owner of The House of the Shrill Whispers and shortly after altering his will, cutting off three of his children, he has received death threats and as a precaution he has barricaded himself in the guest cottage – secured from the inside with triple-locks and triple-bolts. The cottage was surrounded by artificial snow and four spotlights illuminated "the premises from sunset to sunrise." There were eighteen private-security agents from the Pinkerton agency who guarded the cottage, but all to no avail, because Sir Margrove is murdered. On top of that locked room murder, it turns out that something very large has disappeared from the crime scene. The whole situation was "impossibly baffling."

By the Luck of Lavington, Millard discovered an old friend on the train, Sir Gideon Merrimac, who's the world's greatest detective and "a chuckling blend of Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale." An enormous presence with ruddy cheeks, two monocles (one in each eye) and a flowered handkerchief into which "its proprietor periodically wheezed with earth-shattering volume." This presence is packaged in a black opera cape.

Sir Gideon Merrimac is a splendid parody of Carr's often larger-than-life detective characters and Breen has given him a great line that will make everyone who's read The Hollow Man (1935) smile: "if we were characters in a novel instead of characters in a short story, I'd discourse with you at appropriate length about the foolishness and absurdity of characters in fiction pretendin' they're real." So, purely as a parody, this story is a success.

Unavoidably in a parody, the solution to the bizarre and baffling locked room murder is extremely disappointing, but this is made up by three things: the surprising amount of clueing, the identity of the culprit and the unique motive for the murder, which was delightfully meta. And to be honest, it was necessary for the solution of the locked room to be a letdown to make the rest of it work.

All in all, "The House of the Shrill Whispers" is a funny, well-written parody of Carr with a beautifully imagined, Spitting Image-like caricature of his two famous detectives melted into one character, but it's disappointing that such a wonderful parody of Carr has a disappointing locked room-trick. Even if it was necessary for the plot to work. Still a very enjoyable story.

On a final, unrelated note: I found a practically unknown Dutch mystery novel from the 1930s for my next read and it looks, if it turns out to be any good, to be something along the lines of Christopher Bush. So stay tuned!

The Laughing Cure: "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979) by Jon L. Breen

A week ago, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018), which is the last collection of short stories about a retired New England medico, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who begins every story with pouring a small libation before telling about one of the innumerable impossible crimes that plagued Northmont in the past – a small American town and locked room murder capital of the world. So with the publication of Challenge the Impossible there was nothing left to read in this series. Or is there?

Jon L. Breen is an award-winning mystery critic who took over The Jury Box column in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) from John Dickson Carr in 1977 and relinquished the column in 2011 to Steve Steinbock, but Breen is more than just a critic. Over the decades, Breen has penned over a 100 short stories and garnered a reputation as a "premier parody-pasticher" as he satirized his illustrious predecessors and contemporaries alike. Some of his parodies have been collected in Hair of the Sleuthhound (1982) and The Drowning Icecube and Other Stories (1999).

The Giant of the Short Story was not exempt from a friendly ribbing at the hands of Breen and in the November, 1979, issue of EQMM he aimed "the point of his pen at one of the favorite series characters in EQMM," Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

"The Problem of the Vanishing Town," subtitled "A Chapter from the Memoirs of Dr. Sid Shoehorn, New England General Practitioner," takes place in the small town of Northsouth. A quiet, peaceful place where nothing ever happens except the absolute impossible. An inebriated Dr. Shoehorn begins his tale with relating some of the unholy miracles that have taken place in Northsouth and they're gems.

One day, "the public library disappeared overnight," leaving behind a vacant lot, but the disappearance was "a publicity stunt on the part of the librarian," who are "a militant lot," to protest budget cuts – she put it back the next day. Obviously, this story takes place in the same universe as Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979). A second incident that livened up a pleasantly dull Northsouth summer when an old man, Noah Zark, who claimed he was 2000 years old "challenged the Devil to a duel in the middle of the town square." But he was run through with "a pitchfork that came out of nowhere" in "full view of more than a hundred people." Why has nobody attempted to turn this premise into an actual story?

"The Problem of the Vanishing Town" takes place on a day in late August of 1928 and Dr. Shoehorn had delivered triplets that morning, attended to "a case of the black plague" and learned Sheriff Aperture got a telephone message saying that at three o'clock that afternoon "the whole town of Northsouth will disappear from the map." So they have to figure out how someone can make a whole town disappear.

I'm not sure whether, or not, "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" qualifies as an impossible crime story, because the plot only has a promise of an impossible situation. However, the explanation as to how the town of Northsouth eventually vanished, here played for laughs, could easily be used to explain the miraculous appearance of an entire town. So I decided to tag this post as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime," if only for being a parody of the Dr. Hawthorne series.

Since this is purely parody, there not much else I can say about "The Problem of the Vanishing Town," in terms of plotting or characterization, except that it's a fun, tongue-in-cheek treatment of one of Hoch's most popular and beloved series-characters. Crippen & Landru should have included it as a bonus story in Challenge the Impossible. Just like William Brittain's "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov" in the posthumously published The Return of the Black Widowers (2005). So, long story short, "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" is unreservedly recommended to fans of Hoch and Dr. Hawthorne.

A note for the curious: one of the impossible murders Dr. Shoehorn casually described at the start of the story is the death of a clown, who was "mauled by a lion on the fifth floor of the Northsouth Hotel" when "the lion was in his cage five blocks away" – which was deemed "kind of interesting" by Dr. Shoehorn. Hoch picked up the challenge and turned this idea into a short story, entitled "Circus in the Sky," which was published in Scenes of Crime (2000). So I'll see if I can track down that story for one of my next short story reviews.

Next up on this blog is a review of a very obscure mystery novels from the 1930s that was reprinted last year.

Dead Man's Slang

"You have all the clues, but do you know which ones point to the killer?"

- Ellery Queen (The Adventure of the Disappearing Dagger, 1976) 

Jon L. Breen is what Ellery Queen perhaps would've described as a cat of many tales, who writes novels, short stories, pastiches, editing anthologies and held court in "The Jury Box" of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as the resident reviewer for three decades – following in the footsteps of John Dickson Carr, Anthony Boucher and Allen J. Hubin. In 2011, Breen handed the judicial hammer over to Steve Steinbock in order to devote more time to writing fiction and editing collections.

The (Original) Justice League: Carr, Hubin, Boucher and Breen

"The Jacket Blurbs Puzzle" was featured in the double-sized March/April 2013 issue of EQMM and is set at Worden University's Conference on Bestselling Fiction, where two of the five participants in the bestseller conference are feuding faculty members. Cosmo McDougall from the English Department wrote a handful of political suspense novels and a dash of light verses, which are sprinkled through out the story. And not without a reason. In the other corner we have a physics professor, Amos Bosworth, who has a technically accurate techno-thriller from the Tom Clancy knock-off line to his writing credits. Bosworth has requested a cover blurb for his novel from McDougall, who hates doing them and had hidden a cutesy, if unflattering, message in the quote.

McDougall wrote a cover blurb for each of the panelists, which were reproduced in the story, because they've all got a message hidden in them and this time they're subtler. But not subtle enough, apparently, when someone knifes McDougall. It takes a while to actually get to this point, but what this story is really about is decoding the hidden subtext in the blurbs – one of which contains a motive for murder. The blurbs do require you to look at it and think for a bit, but it's a solvable puzzle gracefully sidestepping the trap of resembling a maddening cipher from the Zodiac Killer.

"The Parson's Nose" is Breen’s contribution to the latest double-sized issue of EQMM and makes Ellery Queen’s favored trope, that of the "Dying Message," the bone of contention in a murder trial. The Rev. Henry Anstruther of the State Street Church is seen at the opening participating in embezzling church funds, but was this the motive for the stabbing of his secretary, Ms. Bancroft, who confided before her death that she was on to something. However, did Ms. Bancroft accuse Anstruther when she drove a letter opener in the picture of the reverend – smack in the middle of his nose, to be precise.

Gordon Moon represents the defense and argues against the interpretation of these last acts, even distancing himself from the trope and fiction itself, "I've seen it many times myself, but always on the pages of fiction." And "Why do you think Ms. Bancroft didn't just write down the name of the killer rather than go this esoteric route?" Quite a bit of lampshading, huh? But hey, even Perry Mason would've disowned Erle Stanley Gardner, if that got a client off the hook. 

Moon points out a number of possibilities, but the solution is suggested in the final lines, which keeps a lingering sense of mystery even after the story had ended. But the implication treads dangerously close to the mask-clock-teaspoon puzzle, described Henri Bencolin in The Four False Weapons (1937), where all the enigmatic clues are rendered pointless when the murder is solved by finding the killer's fingerprint on the victim's collar and I expected something more from the letter opener-picture clue – even if Moon placed the story outside of fiction.

"The Jacket Blurbs Puzzle" and "The Parson's Nose" where both fun mysteries to read, but I think the former was the superior detective story and did the ending where real-life intrudes on the story book reality much, much better.