The Scythe of Time: Case Closed, vol. 73 by Gosho Aoyama + Bonus Mini-Review

The 73rd volume of Gosho Aoyama's long-running Case Closed series, published in Japan and elsewhere as Detective Conan, begins with the two concluding chapters of the fascinating story that ended the previous volume, "The Blade of the Keeper of Time" – a clock-themed impossible crime in the spirit of John Dickson Carr and John Rhode. A seemingly impossible murder announced in a letter that was signed "The Guardian of Time."

Rukako Hoshina is a wealthy family matriarch with an obsession for clocks, but every year, she receives a threatening letter accusing her of disrespecting "the flow of time" and foretells she'll fall to "a shapeless sword" at the time she came into the world. So she hired the well-known sleeping detective, Richard Moore, who's accompanied by Conan and Rachel to the Western-style clock mansion of his client. Unfortunately, they're unable to prevent the murderer from striking down Moore's client.

Just as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake, the lights went out and Rukako Hoshina was stabbed in the chest. When the lights came back on, the murderer appeared to have disappeared through the open door of the balcony, but it had been raining until early in the evening and the ground below was muddy – unmarked by any footprints. So the killer hasn't left the house, but the spray pattern showed the culprit had to be "doused in blood." Nobody had enough blood on them to have delivered the fatal blow. And what happened to the murder weapon?

There are many cogs and wheels moving to make this locked room-trick work, which makes it workmanlike rather than inspired, but what makes the story brilliant is the nature of the shapeless sword, why the murderer didn't get spattered with blood and the "strange description" of the culprit who brushed against several people when the lights went out. A description suggesting "a large, fat, fast-moving woman in a dress." So, on a whole, a very satisfying detective story.

The second story has a familiar premise, a poisoning at a restaurant, which has become one of the specialties of the house in this series, but, more interestingly, it leaves Conan alone with Moore – who rarely, if ever, tackle a case without Rachel being there. Rachel is staying at school overnight to practice with her classmates for the big karate tournament and this means he has to Conan out to have dinner, but Coffee Poirot is closed and they end up at a grimy, rundown noodle shack with "ramen to die for." And the ramen proved to be absolutely delicious!

Conan and Moore learn that the owner is feuding with an unscrupulous real estate developer, Tokumori Saizu, who has been trying to buy out all the stores on the block to make place for a shopping mall. Saizu doesn't shun rough, underhanded tactics to get his way. So when he drops dead in the restaurant, of cyanide poisoning, everyone present has a rock solid motive, but how did the murderer administer this very dangerous poison?

Aoyama is one of the most versatile plotters of our time, who can turn his hand to any kind of chicanery, but, when it comes to doling out poison, he's the uncrowned king of poisoning tricks – even better than either Agatha Christie or Paul Doherty. For example, the ingenious method employed, in volume 15, to poison a loan shark or the murder, in volume 63, at a sushi bar where plates of food can be taken randomly from a conveyor belt. Yes, here too, Aoyama came up with another deceivingly simplistic method to transfer a deadly amount of poison to the victim without him being aware of it. As if the murderer "was pulling his strings from the moment he walked in," but it always makes me a little antsy to see how cyanide is being handled in these stories. Nevertheless, a solid story with a very well done setting and trick.

The third story introduces a new character, Masumi Sera, who's a self-proclaimed high school detective ("a girl Kudo") and recently transferred into Rachel and Serena's class, but she seems very interested in Conan. She becomes involved in a case with him when they're both present when a phone scammer apparently jumped to his death. Conan and Sera astutely deduce that the scammer was cleverly murdered, however, picking apart the carefully planned and executed trick takes some time and ingenuity. Conan has to phone in his part of the solution with his Jimmy Kudo voice. A good introduction to a new character with a trick that used an cast-iron alibi to create an impossible crime.

The premise of the last story immediately reminded me of Ed McBain's Killer's Wedge (1959) with the grieving brother of a dead mystery writer strapping explosives to his chest and taking Richard Moore, Rachel, Sera and three other people hostage at his office – demanding that the famous "Sleeping Moore" solves the murder of his sister. Miku Sawaguri has become one of the youngest, bestselling mystery novelists in Japan, but she apparently committed suicide at a hot spring, inside a locked room, by slitting her wrists. Something her brother refuses to accept and believes that one of the three women, all aspiring mystery writers, who went with her to hot springs murdered her. So, once again, Conan has to assume his old identity over the phone to help Moore identify the murderer. And, hopefully, prevent a bloodbath. This story will be concluded in the next volume.

So, all in all, volume 73 was one of the strongest volumes, in a while, full of clever tricks, good settings (ramen shop) and the introduction of new recurring character with ambiguous intentions. A fine example of why Case Closed is the greatest detective story of our time and criminally ignored by Western mystery readers.

But wait, there's more! In my previous blog-post, I reviewed Michael Dahl's second Finnegan Zwake archaeological mystery novel, The Worm Tunnel (1999), which is a series I described as a cross between Case Closed and the 1990s cartoon-series, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. Something unexpectedly came my way that was perfect to tack on to this review.

During the mid-to late 1990s, HarperCollins published eleven TV tie-in novels of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, written by Brad Quentin, but calling them novels is being generous, because my edition of Peril in the Peaks (1996) only has 110 pages in large print – which probably means you could reissue the entire series as one, or two, short story collections. The Quest Team travel to the remote Tibetan mountains where an ancient ghost plane has been spotted and cargo planes disappear without a trace in place called Cloud Alley. Soon they're embroiled with cloud surfing sky pirates and have to cross swords with the dictator of long-lost valley, named Sharma-La, where people have lived under the cover of a mysterious and magical blanket of clouds for more than fifty years. The people believe the clouds protect their spiritual leader, The Little Lama, who hasn't aged for the better part of a century!

So there's more than enough to do for the Quest Team and Quentin packed those scant, 110-pages with a ton of adventurous scenes and exciting developments, which made for an entertaining, fast-paced read, but the only real reason to pick up one of these tie-in stories is nostalgia and nothing else. If you're feeling nostalgic, Peril in the Peaks will give you a fun hour of childhood escapism.

The Worm Tunnel (1999) by Michael Dahl

I began this month with a review of the fourth title in Michael Dahl's five-book Finnegan "Finn" Zwake series, The Viking Claw (2001), which are archaeological mystery novels, written for a teenage audience, best described as a cross between Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest – originally published between 1999 and 2002. More importantly, the series is littered with imaginatively-posed impossible crime scenarios and locked room mysteries!

The Viking Claw treated the reader to a disappearance from an inescapable hammock-camp clamped to the side of a cliff and a no-footprints-in-the-snow puzzle from the past. The second title in the series, The Worm Tunnel (1999), offers a murder inside a sealed, high-tech tent at an archaeological dig in Mexico.

Finnegan Zwake is the now 13-year-old son of two archaeologists, Leon and Anna Zwake, who disappeared while searching for a lost city "tucked somewhere among the frozen volcano-cones of Iceland" (see The Viking Claw) and have been legally declared dead, but Finn knows they're still alive. Finn argues that everyone in his family is "an expert on dead things" and they known "if something is dead or not." One of many dark clouds looming over this teenage detective novel.

So now Finn travels the globe with his famous mystery writing uncle, Stoppard Sterling, in the hope of finding a clue to the whereabouts of his missing parents, which brings them to some exotic, colorful locations and archaeological hotbeds, but the Ackerberg Institute is always ominously lurking in the background – a shadowy organization who used to employ his parents. Apparently, Finn and Uncle Stop had an encounter with agents of the institute in The Horizontal Man (1999) and they dress in "black suits, black ties and black leather gloves" with sunglasses. I like to believe the Ackerberg Institute is a subsidiary of the Black Organization from Case Closed.

The Worm Tunnel brings Finn and his uncle to a fictitious Central American country, Agualar, where, years previously, a 6-year-old Finn had accompanied his parents on an Ackerberg sponsored dig.

A dig that uncovered a historical treasure trove of gold Mayan artifacts, but Hurricane Midge forced them to abandon the campsite and return to the United States. There was, however, "a mysterious thief at the dig site" and, in order to protect a precious artifact, called crocodile de ouro, he "buried the golden crocodile under his tent." Something they learned from his diary and it's still buried there!

Finn wants to dig it up and use it to finance a hunting expedition for his parents, but the place is dangerous to travel to and they are accompanied by their cop buddy, Jared Lemon-Olsen. And one of those dark clouds briefly drifts over the story. Jared points out that forty tourists are killed there every year and tells Finn he intends to bring him back home with his head still attached to his shoulders and all of his fingers in place. So, what he was saying here, is that Finn better listens to him unless he wants to end up in an abandoned warehouse being whittled down by a cartel member with a pocket knife. I never expected to read a line like that in a juvenile detective novel.

When Finn, Uncle Stop and Jared arrive at the old campsite, they find that the former dig site is now occupied by a group of dinosaur hunters and paleontologists, under the guidance of the hated Professor Tuscan Freaze, who found fossilized eggs of a new species of dinosaur – believing the place used to be nesting ground in prehistoric times. Professor Freaze is accompanied by his son, Dr. Tulsa Freaze, who took along his wife, Fleur. There are three other members, Dr. Himmelfarben, José Mirón and Gabriel Paz, who unexpectedly joined by a well-known Chinese paleontologist, Nixon Wu. Wu was one of the scientists who dug up one of "the largest collection of prehistoric eggs ever discovered" in Mongolia and, when he heard that the famous professor was hunting dinosaur eggs in Agualar, he decided to offer his services.

Unrelated Filler Cover

On a side note, Wu was spotted in the opening chapter by Finn, but Jared refused to stop the car and, when they looked out of the back window, Wu had vanished from the empty desert background! As if he had vanished into thin air in a matter of seconds. An impossible disappearance mystery solved in chapter 5.

The Worm Tunnel offers a genuine, double-layered and beautifully executed locked room mystery in chapter 8 when Professor Freaze's body is found sprawled on a cot in the middle of his tent. A "gleaming knife" protruded from his back! The problem is that the high-tech tent was completely closed up and sealed from the inside with zippers and turn-locks, which is why they had to cut their way into the tent. The second impossibility concerns the murder weapon, "a golden knife with feathers carved into the handle," but Finn and his uncle were looking at the knife inside a locked trailer when the murder was discovered. And when they returned to the trailer, the knife had vanished! So how could the knife have been in two places at the same time?

They closely examine the tent, discuss various methods how the zippers, or turn-locks, could have been manipulated and Stoppard discusses one of his own locked room plots, which share some similarities with the sealed tent murder, but the clues that lead them to the solution are a balloon and the victim's dirty socks – unveiling a completely new and satisfying locked room-trick. I was tempted to draw a comparison with the equally original solution to the locked tent murder from Takemaru Abiko's short story "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" (1990), recently translated as "A Smart Dummy in the Tent," but the nature of the trick places The Worm Tunnel right next to Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938) and Arthur Porges' "The Unguarded Path" (collected in These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, 2018). A locked room stories about invisible doorways that only murderers can reach through to get to their victim's when they're all alone in a sealed room. So, needless to say, I rate this locked room-trick quite high.

Unfortunately, this double-layered impossibility is what gave the otherwise skin-and-bones plot some much needed bulk, because the murderer was not difficult to spot and the motive felt tacked on. The motive was briefly foreshadowed, but to actually use it as a motive detracted a little from the fascinating background of fossil hunters. So, very much like The Viking Claw, this turned out to be another mixed bag of tricks, but with the good definitely outweighing the bad.

That being said, taken purely as a locked room mystery, The Worm Tunnels ranks as one of the better, more original, juvenile detective novels and strangely fitting that the book was published at the tail-end of 1999. The 1990s were not particularly well-known for its high-quality impossible crime fiction, not until recently anyway, but that decade is book-ended by Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990) and Dahl's The Worm Tunnel – two teenage crime novels with the best locked room-tricks of the decade. You can now certainly look forward to reviews of The Horizontal Man, The Ruby Raven (1999) and The Coral Coffin (2002). Not necessarily in that order.

The Viking Claw (2001) by Michael Dahl

Michael Dahl is the author of more than a hundred books for children and young adults, ranging from fantasy and horror to short stories and non-fiction, but Dahl admitted on his website to have a special fondness for detective stories – naming Agatha Christie as his favorite mystery novelist. An affinity that found expression in the archaeological Finnegan "Finn" Zwake series, published between 1999 and 2002, of which two were shortlisted for the Anthony and Edgar mystery awards. The series-premise alone sounds promising enough, but then I discovered that Dahl penned at least four impossible crime novels!

The Wheels That Vanished (2000) is written for younger, probably preteen, readers than the Finnegan Zwake series, but the plot concerns a bicycle thief who vanishes from a closely watched bridge. The other three locked room novels come from the Zwake series.

The Horizontal Man (1999) reportedly has Finn discovering a dead man in a locked storage room, belonging to his long-missing parents, while in The Worm Tunnel (1999) he comes across a murder inside a sealed tent during an archaeological dig for dinosaur eggs, but the one that attracted my attention is The Viking Claw (2001) – in which people miraculous vanish from a legendary, snow-covered mountain in Iceland. And two of the people who disappeared from Thorsfell (Thor's Mountain) were Finn's parents!

Eight years ago, Leon and Anna Zwake, archaeologists and researchers, traveled to Iceland to hunt for a lost Viking colony, the Haunted City of Tquuli, hidden somewhere in the mountains. According to the legends, Ogar Blueaxe once forced his men to carry a ship up to side of Thorsfell, to hide a treasure of Italian gold in the lost city, but, from the thirteen men who went up, only two returned. This earned him the name of Redaxe and his fabled treasure has remained hidden for over ten centuries! On the third day of the Zwake expedition, the local trackers found the camp abandoned and the only trace was a pair of footprints in the snow, "believed to have belonged to the Zwakes," which began at their tents and ended near "the base of a flat, smooth cliff wall." It looked "as if the Zwakes had been lifted up into the air."

Finding an answer to what happened to the Zwake expedition is the red thread running through this adventure-filled series of globetrotting mystery novels with the shadowy employers of Finn's parents, Ackerberg Institute, lurking ominously in the background. The 14-year-old Finn is accompanied by his uncle, Stoppard Sterling, who's a celebrated, award-winning mystery writer always looking for new plot ideas. So this series is pretty much what you would get if you spliced Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed with the 1990s incarnation of Jonny Quest sprinkled with American and Minnesota pop-culture references. If you ever wanted to read an impossible crime story that references Jesse Ventura's tenure as governor of Minnesota, Dahl has got you covered.

The Viking Claw is the fourth entry in the series and Finn is finally going to Iceland to visit the spot where his now legally dead parents disappeared, because he believes they're still alive and is determined to find out what happened on that snowy slope all those years ago – getting there proves to be arduous journey fraught with danger and sabotage. Uncle Stop has hired two Finnish brothers, Edo and Teema Jokkipunki, as trackers, but Finn and his uncle are not their only clients on that tripe. A second party headed by the Ice Cube King, Ruben Roobick, whose Roobick Cubes sponsors mountain-climbing expeditions all over the world to look for "new brands of ice for their customers." Roobick brought along his wife, Kate, and her personal assistant, Sarah O'Hara. The last member of the expedition is 15-year-old cousin of the trackers, Hrór, who loves weird haiku's and has his own reasons to join the expedition. And this sub-plot actually made good use of a cultural aspect of the setting.

A composite sketch of the suspect

So, as they set out to the spot where the Zwake expedition vanished, they're beset by trouble and setbacks delaying or slowing down their climb. The tires of their minibus are slashed and the motor is wrecked, but the climb itself is not entirely free of danger with its cavernous gas bubbles with thin roofs, "waiting to collapse," and dangerous steam vents in the side of a hundred fifty feet high cliff wall. You can describe the first half of The Viking Claw as a mountaineering adventure with one incident giving Finn an idea about the interrupted footprints in the snow that his parents left behind.

Around the halfway mark of the story, Dahl treats the reader to one of the most imaginative and originally posed impossible disappearances that I have ever come across in a detective story!

The expedition arrives at the one-hundred fifty feet high cliff wall, The Goblin Wall, but hot, white clouds from a steam vent and they can't go any further until they can see clearly again – which forced them to setup a hammock-camp (portable ledges) against the side of the icy cliff. A campsite resembling "a bunch of window washers suspended on the side of a wide, windowless skyscraper." And when they wake up, they discover that one of them had disappeared! The freshly fallen snow lay "undisturbed and printless" a hundred feet below them. What a premise!

Unfortunately, the plot becomes a little muddled towards the end with too many plot-threads that needed tidying up and not enough room to properly tying them together. One of the problems is that the story leaves a lot unanswered when it comes to the disappearance of Zwake's parents.

I've delved a little into this series and apparently Dahl abandoned the series after The Coral Coffin (2002), which left the ongoing storyline unfinished and rendered the coded messages Finn found here pretty much useless. A second problem is the crossing of two plot-threads that resulted in murder, committed very late in the story, but it's the least imaginative or thought out part of the plot. Somewhat of cop-out in one regard. Luckily, the impossible disappearances were handled much better and the no-footprints-in-the-snow situation has an interesting solution. A locked room-trick you don't expect to find in an outdoors setting, but it worked here and was neatly tied to the historical backstory of the setting – leading to an important and shocking discovery. The disappearance from the cliff side of the Goblin Wall is, as to be expected, as novel as its premise and both Finn and his uncle come up with a false-solutions involving portable hang glider and equipment bags!

So, when it comes to the plot, The Viking Claw is a mixed bag of tricks, but there was more good than bad and the story, while muddled towards the end, was well told. More importantly, a good example of the innovation and originality, largely unrecognized, that some of these juvenile detective novels, past and present, brought to the locked room mystery and impossible crime story. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for The Horizontal Man and The Worm Tunnel.

Death Knell (1990) by Nicholas Wilde

Back in 2015, I picked up a copy of Robert Arthur's The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) on a whim, but the book unlocked a whole new wing of the detective genre to me, a sub-genre known as juvenile mysteries, where many, often completely unknown, locked room mysteries remained hidden for years or decades – some of them proved to be quite good. Over the years, I found together "JJ," of The Invisible Event, some twenty of these junior locked room novels and short stories.

Just to give everyone who's unfamiliar with these elementary-and high-school equivalents of the impossible crime story an idea what to expect, I cited half-a-dozen of the more notable examples below.

A burglar inexplicably disappears from a house with all of its exits either locked or under observation (Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief, 1950). A car racing down a dangerous, snaking mountain road vanishes into thin air (Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car, 1953). The theft of charity money from a locked school safe and the substitution of an empty box in a watched room (Norvin Pallas' The Locked Safe Mystery, 1954). A 3000-year-old mummy is heard whispering in an unknown, long-dead language (Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, 1965). Paintings being moved around inside a locked, fortress-like studio (William Arden's The Mystery of the Shrinking House, 1972). An elderly, wheelchair bound woman seemingly evaporated from inside a moving, closely watched ski-lift gondola (Clue Club episode "The Real Gone Gondola," 1976).

So, as you can see, these junior detective novels rarely deal with murders, or even natural deaths, but are, as a rule, written around strange disappearances, thefts, buried treasure, haunted house, codes and gangs of criminals – omnipresent tropes of the juvenile detective story. This is not a rule cast in iron and exceptions can be found (e.g. Hugh Lloyd's The Clue at Skeleton Rocks, 1932). An exception that has become more common over the past thirty years.

JJ reviewed Robin Stevens' Murder Most Unladylike series on his blog, most notably the impossible crime novel First Class Murder (2015), while I discussed a Japanese light novel (young adult), Zaregoto series: kubikiri saikuru (Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle, 2002) by "NisiOisN," in which one of the victim's is decapitated inside a locked storage-room. So child-and teenage detectives meddling in murder cases, like good kids, have become more common and a staple of the Japanese anime/manga detective stories. Recently, I came across, what could be, the earliest example of a juvenile mystery novel with an adult plot when thumbing through my copy of Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). An adolescent locked room mystery that could have been penned by John Dickson Carr, Paul Halter or Derek Smith. Yes, it's that kind of a detective story!

Dutch edition

Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990) is an ingenious, classically-styled impossible crime novel with a ghostly murder, steeped in history and legends, inside a sealed crypt with two crime scene maps and a handwritten chart – tabulating alibis, motives and opportunity. However, the book also has a warm, human touch and the teenage protagonists are realistic, convincingly drawn characters.

Tim is a 14-year-old boy from London who takes his friend, Jamie, along for the winter holiday at the old-world vicarage of his grandfather in Lychwood, Norfolk.

Wilde describes Norfolk as a place "not really seen at all, only guessed at" or "half-glimpses sometimes" when "you weren't quite looking" and "slipping into hiding when you looked too hard." A landscape that "watched you from behind your shoulder." So a perfect habitat for ancient legends and old ghost stories! During their holiday, Tim and Jamie are told the haunting story attached to the abandoned church, which dates back to the time of Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the late 1530s, the church was closed down as "a place of the old Catholic worship" and the priest was told to pack his bags, but the priest's old day-book contains three entries following the closure of the church. The first entry warned "God has departed from His house," but, "where God is not," there "shall another power enter in" and "take possession" – a second entry confirms a creature has "come forth from his hiding in the earth." What followed is a historical horror story.

On four, separate occasions, a single stroke of the bell emanates from the locked, deserted church and every time a villager died. One time, a shadowy creature was seen edging away from the church and vanishing into the locked crypt. So the bell was taken down and the middle of the floor of the crypt was sealed tightly with a giant stone resembling "an old, forgotten tombstone." And, as the story ended, the church-bell "tolled one single stroke."

So, when they go to investigate they discover that Old Jefford, who lives at the High House, lying face down on the floor of the crypt with a pick-ax and a bunch of keys next to him. The door is not only locked from the inside, but blocked with the giant stone! Nobody else had been hiding in the room and the crypt has no hidden tunnels, secret passageways or camouflaged doors. Only window is small, narrow with an inch thick glass that was closed when the murder was discovered. So how did the murderer get away? How was the large, unyielding stone lifted and hauled up a flight of stone stairs? The hole situation looked plain impossible!

The vicar believes it was an unfortunate accident, but the police is convinced it was murder and, for months, they uproot and disturb the normally quiet, everyday routine of the village. But by that time, the boys have returned to London and it would take a whole year before they were allowed to spend another (winter) holiday with Tim's grandparents, which is where the story becomes a little more than a well-done locked room mystery for teenagers – showing Tim's grandparents had "aged about twenty years in twelve months" under the strain. Tim and Jamie are determined to get to the bottom of the case, but this is easier said than done, because Jamie, as somewhat of an outsider, can "look at it like a maths problem." On the other hand, Tim is not as detached as his friend as the solution to this math problem will affect his grandparents, their friends and neighbors. A nicely-done, warm human touch to the characterization.

Unsurprisingly, the inquisitive, logical-thinking Jamie is the one who puts together all of the puzzle pieces, but they still work wonderfully together and their investigation in the still-falling snow is full of wintry charm. A search for the truth ending with a great scene in the dark crypt and an emotionally regretful confrontation with the murderer, which makes Wilde's Death Knell one of the best characterized, plotted and written juvenile mystery novels. But, for me, the absolute highlight of the story was the solution to the impossible murder inside the locked crypt and the explanation how a slab of stone came to rest against the door. A very original locked room-trick in the spirit of Carr, Halter and Smith. Seriously, all three of them could have written Death Knell and the book is a must-read for everyone who thinks highly of those lauded mystery writers. You won't be disappointed, I promise!

There are only two things marring the story. Firstly, the seasoned armchair detective will quickly suspect who's behind the murder, which still leaves you with having to pick apart how it was done and that's a bit trickier to do. Secondly, Wilde provided no explanation for the series of ghostly, seemingly impossible, deaths in the 1500s and only served as a ghost story to add some atmosphere to the scene of the crime. Somewhere, there's a good historical mystery hidden in that ghost story.

Putting my nitpicking aside, Wilde's Death Knell is one of the best written and now one of my favorite juvenile detective novels with an a well-imagined, excellently executed locked room-trick worthy of the grand masters of the impossible crime genre. Good, believable characterization and solid storytelling. What a shame Wilde didn't write more of them!

A note for the curious: I read Death Knell in English, but discovered that the book had been translated in Dutch, under the title Doodsklok (Death Clock or Death Bells), but I think Zielenrust would have been a better title. A literal translation of zielenrust is soul rest, but peace of mind would be a more accurate translation and would fit the slightly haunted ending of the story.

Department of Juvenile Justice: The Ellery Queen, Jr. Mysteries

Frederic Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, better known by their shared penname of "Ellery Queen," were two of the most important mystery writers, editors and champions of the detective story of the previous century – whose monthly Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine kept the home fire burning during darker times. It's not for nothing, Anthony Boucher proclaimed Ellery Queen to be "the American detective story" incarnate.

There is, however, another reason why Ellery Queen is typically American: the name became one of the earliest examples of a branded franchise in the publishing world.

During the 1960s, Lee's health began to falter and developed a nasty case of writer's block, which forced Dannay to assemble an all-star cast of ghostwriters to continue their work in the sixties and seventies – an assembly that included Avram Davidson, Flora Fletcher, Edward D. Hoch and Theodore Sturgeon. This came on top of the name Ellery Queen branching out in all directions. There was a popular radio-series, a TV show, movies, comic books, a magazine, board games and literal jigsaw puzzles (e.g. The Case of His Headless Highness, 1973). Only thing they missed out on was having their own burger joint in New York. Who wouldn't want to order a Velie Burger with a side of Porter Fries and a Djuna Shake at A Challenge to the Eater?

An EQ venture not as well remembered today is their excursion into the juvenile corner of the genre with the Ellery Queen Junior Mysteries, which produced eleven novels in two (short) series between 1942 and 1966. There also appears to be an unpublished, long-lost twelfth novel, The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly.

Nine of the novels star a recurring side-character from the main series, Djuna, who's the small, gypsy orphan adopted by Inspector Richard Queen when Ellery was attending college. The book-titles of this series follow The [Country] [Noun] Mystery pattern of Queen's early international series, but with colors and animals (e.g. The Black Dog Mystery, 1942). The other two novels are helmed by a specially created character, Gulliver Queen. So I wanted to take a closer look a novel from each of these series.

The Mystery of the Merry Magician (1961) is the first of only two titles in the Gulliver Queen series, but ghostwriters and unauthorized sub-ghostwriters have made determining authorship somewhat of a puzzle – which is discussed by Kurt Sercu on his Ellery Queen website (click on the covers to read more). James Holding was contracted to write the 1960s Ellery Queen Junior novels, but he farmed out the work to sub-ghosts and The Mystery of the Merry Magician was written by the author of the Dig Allen series, Joseph Greene. I understand Lee was not amused.

Gulliver "Gully" Queen is the sixteen-year-old nephew of Ellery and the grandson of Inspector Richard Queen. His father is Ellery's hitherto unknown and nameless brother, an engineer, who's in Europe working on "a long-term United Nations project," which is why Gully is staying an entire year with his uncle and grandfather in New York. The presence of the regular characters from the main series makes the book feel like a crossover and really is what makes it standout as a juvenile mystery. Ellery Queen briefly appears in the opening and closing chapters. Gully is even seen reading one of his uncle's detective novels (The Finishing Stroke, 1958). Nikki Porter is mentioned in passing, but, more importantly, Inspector Queen and my personal favorite side-character from any series, Sergeant Thomas Velie, have supporting roles to play in the story!

I've always been of the opinion it was a gross oversight to never let Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie solve a case without Ellery helping them out. So it was nice to see them here working together in giving support to Gully.

The Mystery of the Merry Magician begins with Ellery having to break his promise to take Gully on a camping trip to the mountains, because the Treasury Department has asked him to go the New Orleans waterfront to investigate some baffling reports – a "strange creature" has been haunting the docks down there. Ellery notices Gully is trying to mask his disappointment and gives him a leather notebook, which he's to use to write down the names, addresses and the story of anyone who might come to see him. And there's only one rule, Gully is not allowed to "go off trying to solve mysteries." He just has to write down the facts in the notebook.

So, as to be expected, the moment Ellery has gone someone comes knocking at the door of the Queen residence. A boy of Gully's age, named "Fisty" Jones, who has a most astonishing story to tell and Captain Foster, "an old buddy of Inspector Queen," told him to go tell it to the inspector's son, Ellery. Gully has to keep a record for his uncle and asks Fisty to tell him the story.

Fisty was visiting Captain Foster and his granddaughter, Peggy, who live on a barge tied up at Pier A of the New York waterfront. On his way back home, Fisty passed a block of mostly abandoned, boarded-up old houses and peeked into the window of an empty story. Fisty described, what he saw, as "a monster from space." A creature with black, smooth skin, big, floppy feet and "one big, round eye," right in "the middle of his face." So they go to have a second look at the empty shop, but discover that the window has been painted black and are told by a tattooed man to mind their own business or else they might get hurt. The tattooed man has designs on the building next door, which is leased to "an old-time magician," Magnus Merlin, who now makes a living by making magic tricks and always accompanied by his happy little dog, Banjo – who proves to be a huge help to the boys throughout the story.

The central plot-thread is very basic for a juvenile mystery novel and therefore easy to figure out, but there were some nice touches that punched it up a bit.

Besides the obligatory dangers and tight corners, there's an attempt to make the role of the merry magician in the plot ambiguous (friend or foe?) and there's an honest-to-god impossible situation witnessed by Gully and Fisty! When they're swimming in the river to find origin of hammering noises heard on the barge, they see "a man walking on water." Solution is not terribly clever, but it fitted the plot. There's also very subtly done "Challenge to the Reader," when Gulliver remarks he has "a strange feeling that all the facts Uncle Ellery will need to solve the case" is in his notebook to which Peggy responds, "well, then, solve it yourself." This made the last chapter, entitled "Gully's Little Notebook," all the better. One of those nice little touches that really helped the plot.

I've to say, though, with all the magicians, magic-tricks, tattooed men and an impossible crime, the story felt more like the junior to Clayton Rawson than Ellery Queen.

All in all, The Mystery of the Merry Magician has pretty decent plot, but it's the characters who stole the show! Gully, Fisty and Peggy can stand with the best teenage detective-characters from the genre's juvenile corner and Inspector Queen and Sergeant Velie shined in their supporting roles. So I can highly recommend it to either readers of these vintage juvenile mysteries and die-hard Ellery Queen fans. Something that'll probably give JJ an existential crisis!

Now that we got the first Gulliver Queen novel out of the way, let's move on to the book that almost closed out the Djuna series.

The Blue Herring Mystery (1954) is the eighth and penultimate installment in the Dunja series, which was supposed to have been written by Samuel McCoy, but he hired a sub-ghost, Harold Montanye, to write the last six books on his contract – which were the titles from The Green Turtle Mystery (1944) to The Blue Herring Mystery. Reportedly, Montanye experienced "some difficulties getting his stake in the half share McCoy had." The Black Dog Mystery (1942), The Golden Eagle Mystery (1942) and the unpublished The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly were written by yet another sub-ghost, Frank Belknap Long. More than a decade later, Holding penned the final book, The Purple Bird Mystery (1966). Well, that's what everyone still hopes. What a goddamn mess! No wonder Lee's heart was playing up.

The Blue Herring Mystery is not as strong as The Mystery of the Merry Magician when it comes to character portrayal, or story-telling, but it found an interesting way to use EQ's signature trope, a dying message, in a detective story belonging to a usually murderless branch of the genre.

Djuna has a week-long holiday ahead of him and has a friend from Florida, Bobby Herrick, who's coming over and, in preparation of his arrival, Miss Annie Ellery takes him to Aunt Candy's house to borrow cinnamon for an apple pie. Aunt Candy is the great-granddaughter of a 19th century merchant mariner, Captain Jonas Beekman, who passed away over seventy years ago and muttered something with his last breath – telling people to "lift th' blue herrin." Some believe this was a clue to where he had hidden a fortune in pears he had brought back from the South Seas. Djuna is allowed to thumb through the captain's old logbook and reads some curious entries as well as discovering a page had been torn out.

Coincidentally, a drugstore owner, Doc Perry, is turning Captain Beekman's old house into a museum and is assisted by a mysterious, disheveled man, Professor Kloop, who has taken over the whole project. Doc Perry has become mighty suspicious of Kloop as he's always "peekin' into dark corners in the cellar" or "tappin' walls." So what is he's exactly up to?

Well, this pretty much sums up the whole plot. A paper-thin, but thickly padded, plot hinging on a single idea. The dying message. Admittedly, the solution to the 70-year-old dying message was delightfully simplistic and as believable as the one from Queen's own short-short "Diamonds in Paradise" (collected in Queen's Full, 1965), which why it drowned in this already short novel. This single idea could easily carry a short-short or a short story, but not a whole novel. And the poor characterization didn't help either.

Djuna is used in the opening chapters to explain things to its young readers and, in combination with constantly uttering "Golly" or "Jeepers," he comes across a little dull-witted. Something that strikes a false note when its time to play detective and correctly interpret the dying message of the old sea captain. Most of what happens between the opening and closing chapters is boring padding or just boring. There was such a lack of any interest in the story that it became very noticeable how much the characters were eating all the time, which ranged from apple pie, pancakes and kippers to egg salad sandwiches, baked potatoes and spaghetti – topped with chocolate nut sundaes. This only represents a small selection from their holiday menu! Just padding at its worst.

So, yeah, The Blue Herring Mystery tried to tackle an interesting concept with a good premise and solution, but it was lost in a deadly dull, overly padded story and I simply can't recommend it. I'll definitely tackle the second Gulliver Queen novel in the future, but don't expect me to return to the Djuna series anytime soon.

A note for the curious: I've already mention a missing, presumably unpublished manuscript in the EQ Jr. franchise, The Mystery of the Golden Butterfly, which reminded me of the unpublished, long-lost last novel in The Three Investigator series. Back in 2016, I put together a small selection of lost detective stories and one of them was M.V. Carey's The Mystery of the Ghost Train, which was completed when the series was canceled in 1986 and the manuscript was presumably lost. A website dedicated to the series posted an update in 2018 reporting that the manuscript is in "the possession of the Carey family," but Random House "has expressed no interest in it." Hopefully, this will change in the future.