The Ghost Walks: Case Closed, vol. 99 by Gosho Aoyama

So, before getting to the 99th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, some fantastic news for those who have been reading reviews of this series on various blog various blogs, but have been hesitant to pick it up – mainly due to the growing size of the series. I can understand why not everyone wants to start on a new series with a backlog of nearly 100 volumes. Next year, Viz is going to re-release Case Closed in 3-in-1 volumes under its original title of Detective Conan with the names of the main characters restored. Shinichi Kudo instead of Jimmy Kudo. The first of these new omnibus editions, containing vol. 1, 2 and 3, is scheduled for publication in February 2027. Now let's take a look at Case Closed, vol. 99!

This volume starts, as usually is the case, with the conclusion to the story that closed out the previous volume. Conan, Rachel, Serena and Sera attend the birthday party of a classmate and her older sister. During the party, the room was darkened to show slide in the dark when someone collapsed. The victim of cyanide poisoning and someone, somehow, had written the phrase "Divine Punishment" on his forehead with permanent marker in the dark. Fortunately, the spot where the murder took place was "basically a fenced-off area" limiting the number of suspects to just four. A fairly typical Aoyama story with its mysterious poisoning at a restaurant and a pretty solid one at that, but honestly could have done without the complications of the written message. It would have made for much tighter case.

What adds importance to this story are developments and revelations in the ongoing storyline and storylines of the various recurring characters. Note that this story specifically mentions Jimmy Kudo's been missing for the past six months and a similar remark about only 6-8 months have passed since the first volume ("you haven't even been here a year"), which doesn't bother me at all. Who am I to disagree with Aoyama? If he says only about six months have passed than that's what we're going with. That's fine.

The second story is difficult to describe as it's quite an unusual one for this series. Conan and the Junior Detective League accompany their teachers, Kobayashi and Wakasa, to remote farmhouse to get two new chickens for their school – which the farmer donated to them. On the bus to the farm, they meet three, unsavory looking men heading in the same direction intending on making money out of something. Toru Amuro is also on the bus heading to the same destination. When they arrive, they find the farm abandoned, the chicken coop empty and damaged, but things get worse when investigating the wooded area surrounding the farm. Someone gets taken hostage, while others end up being locked inside a cellar with a corpse. And they can only communicate with those above through their detective badges. This story is more of a what-happened-and-will-happen than anything else. Not half bad either for such an unconventional story that took its time to take form. There are also more developments to the main storyline as Amuro discovers an unexpected clue at the farm directly linked to another major plot-thread.

So, on to the next story, which is another rather unconventional case for this series. If I remember correctly, this could actually be the first armchair detective story in the series. Yoko Okino, the famous Japanese idol, visits Richard Moore's office to consult him on something that had happened to her recently.

Yoko Okino is going to play the lead role of a ghost detective in an upcoming TV series joined the group scouting for locations, which included "a classic creepy old manor" where "a woman really, truly went missing" – never to be seen again. When they viewed the location, the manor house was being used as a summer retreat for the family owning it. They would become suspects when Yoko hears someone groaning, followed running down the hallway, which leads to the discovery of a trail of blood ending halfway down a dead end corridor. Someone of the family goes missing and sends a photo of playing cards spelling out a coded message, before being found in the locked attic with a crossbow bolt through his back. So the primary suspects are the victims three relatives, but there's a catch. One of them is in a wheelchair, one is walking on crutches and one has an arm in a sling. So no easy solution to the murder or coded message is found. And why send a coded message instead of a simple text or calling. Yoko came to Moore to ask him to solve the case, but Moore is trapped on the toilet without toilet paper and too embarrassed to call out. Even more so, when he hears the mystery-loving sushi chef Kanenorih Wakita has joined the party, fearing mockery ("...your brain spins as fast as your bathroom roll").

So it's Conan and Wakita who sit down to listen Yoko's story, examine the evidence and try to sort out the case. Surprisingly, the vanishing footsteps and locked attic were easily explained away, but cracking the coded dying message or answering why the victim didn't simply call for help take more work. But answering those two questions leads to a diabolical twist. Who did what and why seems to be the theme of this volume. I liked it!

This volume ends with the first chapter of a story that'll be concluded in the opening chapters of the next volume, but what a story it promises to be! Jimmy/Conan's father is Booker Kudo, a celebrated mystery novelist, who has a reputation as an amateur detective and quasi-official consultant to police – recently made the news. Kudo solved a phony Kaito KID case ("...too shoddy to be the work of the real Kaito KID") and is currently working on a serial locked room murder case. He practically solved the case and is going to reveal the solution on a TV special. But gets taken out by a case of food poisoning. So his wife and famous actress, Vivian Kudo, takes his place and drags in their son Jimmy/Conan to put the finishing touches to the solution. That locked room case is fascinating. Three different, apparently unconnected people were found murdered inside their locked apartment. Each time, the method of murder was different except for the locked apartments and "clutter around the door" showing nobody could have left without disturbing it.

Conan concludes one person committed all three murders using "the same trick to create the locked room," but then his mother goes down with food poisoning. Noboy to take Booker and Vivian Kudo's place. Only for an unexpected person to arrive at the Kudo home. What a great cliffhanger to lead into Case Closed, vol. 100!

So, yeah, Case Closed, vol. 99 is a great volume without a bad story and some exciting developments for long-time fans of the series. Very much look forward to that milestone volume!

This Time Forever (1957) by John Glasby

In 2021, I reviewed A Time for Murder (2002/13) by John Glasby, a prolific fictioneer of the 1950s and '60s, who produced science-fiction, westerns, hospital romances, war stories and crime fiction – nearly 300 novels, novellas and short stories. Glasby made a comeback in the 2000s on the insistence of his literary agent and pulp historian, Philip Harbottle. A Time for Murder was the first new entry in Glasby's series about Johnny Merak, "an ex-con turned private eye," which appeared alongside reprints of the first and third novel from the series' original run. The second novel remained out-of-print due to copies being ultra rare, extremely elusive and practically impossible to come by. That is, until recently!

Some months ago, Wildside Press reprinted This Time Forever (1957) with a short, insightful introduction from Harbottle explaining how it slipped through the cracks and accidentally became a unicorn to collectors. When attempting to track down a copy to reprint, Harbottle contacted known collectors from across the world, but learned "that they too were searching for this elusive title" ever since Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Murders (1991). How a copy eventually turned up and lead to this reprint is something you have to read for yourself or listen to Harbottle tell about it by clicking here.

This Time Forever begins with Johnny Merak and his assistant, Dawn Grahame, being summoned to the offices of a federal investigator, Harry Grenville, who would like to draw on the expertise of an ex-crook. A case dropped on his desk involving Charles Dempster, "a top-line financier and diamond dealer," whose record is spotless making him untouchable to the authorities – lately received some alarming and threatening letters. There was an attempt to kidnap his daughter. What's behind the plot suggests something outside the ordinary criminal business of settling scores, shake downs and protection rackets. But before they can finish their talk, Grenville is called and informed Dempster was found dead twenty minutes ago.

Charles Dempster died from hydrocyanic acid poisoning in his private, windowless study with the door locked from the inside and the only key tucked away in his pocket. So the police at the scene call it a suicide, but the discovery a crumpled playing card in Dempster's hand suggests murder to Merak. A similar playing card had turned up years earlier on the body of a slain gangster and the cards are linked to an underworld figure known only as The Joker. Merak decides to take on this case involving mobsters, hired guns, dangerous dames and trail of dead informants and witnesses, but just as dangerous is his past as an ex-criminal. An ex-criminal turned private investigator asking pesky, nosy questions in a world where asking questions is frowned upon. Even more so when those questions comes from a traitor.

So more than enough happens between the opening and closing stages of this short, fast-paced gangster mystery, but not much (plotwise) can be said about it. It's pretty much Merak trying not to get killed, trying to talk to people before they get killed and keeping an eye out for Dawn. Harbottle wrote in the introduction Glasby's publisher employed some dishonest, unsavory tactics to keep the printing presses running like underpaying authors and guaranteeing their best talent to publish everything they wrote, tempting them "to churn out first-draft material" without "any need for polishing or revision" – ready to be sold and published. There's a definitely a first-draft feeling to This Time Forever and often reads like it was originally published in a 1940s pulp magazine. Which has a charm of its own. Fortunately, there's something to be said (plotwise) about the opening and closing stages which is where This Time Forever has something to offer to detective fans like us.

First of all, the solution to the locked room poisoning is almost too good and too clever for such a straightforward, pulp-style thriller populated with gangsters, hit men and the occasional drive-by shooting. A locked room-trick that could have been plucked from the impossible crime fiction by Arthur Porges. So locked room fanatics and collectors mainly interested in the impossible crime element can be assured the solution doesn't turn on something disappointing or lame like a hidden contraption with a poisoned needle or a swallowed capsule delaying the effects of the poison. Secondly, the choice of murderer here was interesting as well, especially since I considered another character based on a sentence I took as a hint/challenge to the who/why. I was seeing more than was really behind it.

That's where the first-draft, pulpy feel and problem comes into play. A fully fleshed-out, revised and polished version of This Time Forever would likely have given more consideration to the murderer's identity and problem of the locked room poisoning. It would have made for a far more successful fusion of, as Adey described it, "the classic detection novel with the American gangster thriller." As it stands, This Time Forever should not disappoint fans of the (Americanized) pulp-style mysteries by John Russell Fearn, Gerald Verner and James Ronald with pleasantly inventive solution to the locked room poisoning. Something that's always a gamble with these type of pulpy mysteries that play the Grandest Game faster and looser than their counterparts from the detective story proper, but the best of them bring a great deal of imagination and ingenuity to the table. Glasby brought some of that to the table when it comes to the impossible crime. I think most people who pick This Time Forever up today mostly pick it up for the locked room angle.

You haven't seen the last of Glasby on this blog. I have become interested in the Johnny Merak novel The Wheel Spins Thirteen (2009). It's probably not an impossible crime novel, but just like the idea of a man beating a crooked roulette wheel three times on the same night and walks out with a million dollars.

First Contact: Q.E.D. iff vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou

The simply titled story "Even" opens Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 5 and begins when Ashikaga Ren, a second-year university student, tumbles down a cliff and needed to be airlifted to the hospital – except this wasn't an ordinary hiking accident. A note was found at the scene ("Got Dumped, Don't Want to Live") turning an unfortunate hiking accident into an attempted suicide. Only for the case to take an unexpected turn at the hospital.

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are in the hospital visiting Mizuhara's father, Inspector Mizuhara, who was injured in the line of duty. Mizuhara passes the hospital room of the still unconscious Ashikaga Ren when she notices his oxygen mask has been removed and the heart rate monitor turned off. She immediately calls a nurse and begins to look around, which leads to her chasing a masked figure in a white doctor's coat through the corridors and down the staircases of the hospital. This masked, white coated figure runs into a dead end hallway and inexplicably disappears into thin air! A short hallway ending in a double door that's not only locked, but securely chained together and padlocked. Only thing the vanished figure left behind is the white doctor's coat. Touma finds out the victim had three people, all fellow students, who visited the hospital that day. So they begin probing the suspects and their relationship with the victim involving relationship troubles, borrowed money and stolen exam papers.

I think what I liked most about this story is how clearly the problem of who, why and how is presented. And liked how they logically linked together with one springing from the other. However, the solution to the disappearance from the dead end corridor, while visually pleasingly, is so blindingly obvious I rejected it out of hand – which kind of betrayed the who and eventually why. Not to mention the vanishing-trick only worked, in a way, because it was shown and not explained in a block of text. So "Even" is not a thoroughly bad story, but neither is it a top-tier entry in the series.

The second story, "The Imperfect Locked Room," has Inspector Mizuhara back on the job and going over a murder scene a second time. Takamatsu Kiminobu, a retired prosecutor, was found stabbed to death in his bedroom of his house. Only other person present was his nurse, Itami Sayoko, who claimed someone had knocked her out. However, the police found all the windows securely locked from the inside, the house keys inside the victim's pockets and "no suspicious people on the security camera at the entrance way" ("so this was a locked room murder"). So the inspector in charge concluded the nurse was the murderer and arrested her. Inspector Mizuhara has his doubts as a nurse has much easier methods at her disposal to kill an sick, elderly man than a knife and casting herself as the only possible suspects. What he finds is fresh evidence the murder took place in garage. So the nurse was released.

This blunder forces the higher ups to send someone down to direct the local investigation. This person is Tanabata Kikuno, Assistant Inspector of MPD Division, who's a young, eager policewoman ever ready to put the handcuffs on the murderer. She learns from Inspector Mizuhara that this case is not going to be easy, considering the status of the policeman who made the premature arrest. Inspector Mizuhara also tells her the case possibly has a connection to an unsolved, seemingly impossible and unsolved murder, nearly two years ago, when a dying woman was found in one of the toilet stalls of a night club, but CCTV footage showed nobody going inside – except the victim and the people who discovered the murder. So, inevitably, Tanabata Kikuno meets Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara leading to the solution to the two murders. Once again, the plot has its weak points as the murderer stands out and the solutions to the impossible crimes lack Katou's customary imaginative solutions or even simplistic complexity. The locked room-trick used for the murder at the night club toilets was especially unconvincing with the first one turning on the why rather than the how. It really is the strong ending that holds “The Imperfect Locked Room” together.

Fortunately, the two stories making up Q.E.D. iff vol. 6 is a return to form and starts with a character-piece, "The Man Who Claimed to Land on the Earth." This story begins with a prologue set in 1986 when a young woman, Morita Kinue, is living in America with a man named Dominic. Something her parents back in Japan oppose and beg her to come, but she refuses and ends up giving birth to a son, Wataru. Morita Kinue has been cut off by her parents and Wataru grows up in poverty, until he joins a youth gang and dies in a shootout aged 14. The story then moves to the present and marks the return of Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato who last appeared in Q.E.D. Vol. 44. They're now in university and have opened the Mystery Research Society, but this story is not about their usual shenanigans. This time, Mulder seems to have a problem that truly appears to be out of this world.

A blond foreigner, named Simon, turned up out of nowhere at his grandmother's house to start taking care of her, but even stranger is his claim to have landed on Earth from another planet ("...I used a wormhole to shorten the distance"). Naturally, the family's more than a little suspicious, but their grandmother refused to show him the door. And a secret DNA test reveals the mysterious Simon to be related to them. So they go to Sou Touma who becomes very interested when he hears Simon has been talking about "cosmic strings, wormholes, casimir's effect and other such strange terms." Simon showcases some of his other worldly abilities by vanishing from a closely watched changing room and appearing inside a locked house, but don't read this story for those fairly minor locked room situation. This is one of those character-puzzles and it's not even about who Simon really is. It's about why he's there and why he choose to tell such an outlandish story. This is more like the Katou I know and like!

The last story from vol. 6, "Sudden Change," allows me to end this double review on a high note. Kana Mizuhara is on a part time job delivering coffee when she walked into a police investigation.

Egota Wataru is the producer behind the popular TV show Nangoku Cop, "the detective drama where the guy uses handcuffs like an acrobat," who was having a meeting with the cast and crew to discuss the next season of the show. Somehow, he ended up on the roof and either accidentally fell to his death or jumped on purpose, but soon, the possibility of murder turns up. A possibility turning an accidental death or suicide into an impossible murder as nobody could have reached the roof when he fell from it. And everyone has an alibi. You can definitely spot the murderer, one aspect simply invites suspicion, but figuring out how it was done is bit trickier. Touma understands what can happen when someone finds themselves in an inescapable situation. Katou brilliantly fused the problem of the locked room mystery with that of the unbreakable alibi, complimented by an unexpectedly dark twist in the motive. A must-read for fans of Tetsuya Ayukawa and a fantastic story to end this review on.

The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) by Jamie Probin

Last time, I reviewed "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin, a mathematician, who has written a short series of impossible crime and locked room mysteries about a mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who acts as a special consultant to Scotland Yard and Sûreté. "The Episode of the Nine Monets" and The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) form the "Le Fantôme Saga" with the former being a prequel to the latter.

Le Fantôme is the classically-styled, phantom thief who has terrorized the museums and private collectors of France and Britain for years. Only real opposition came from Dr. Harris and Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble of the Sûreté. The last three starred in "The Episode of the Nine Monets" as they try to figure out how their nemesis spirited away a valuable painting from a locked townhouse. They triumph in cracking the locked room problem and get back the stolen painting, but Le Fantôme is still on the loose and more popular than ever. The Thirteenth Apostle is the concluding chapter of this saga.

Before getting to the story and plot, I need to get one thing out of the way first concerning the story's pacing and structure of the plot. Probin pieced out the story in lumps, big and small, which tend to shift around a bit, chronologically speaking, leaving dramatic turns of event hanging to allude to a future crime or go over previous trodden ground – making it somewhat repetitive. I essentially agree with Jim a thorough editing job would have resulted in an ever better detective novel. Superb even! However, the pacing, structuring and lapses of repetitiveness surprisingly didn't bother me at all. The Thirteenth Apostle is a fantastical, seemingly impossible crime caper about a phantom thief toying with the combined police forces and a amateur detective of two countries. So the repetitive patches and the lumpy, dramatic and sometimes episodic nature of the plot gave it the air of a turn-of-the-century French feuilleton. I liked that aspect, but yes, Jim's point still stands. With that out of the way, let's begin.

Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle begins on April 21, 1935, when a dozen of prominent French and English citizens, under the cover of dusk, heading towards the Eiffel Tower. All of them received a politely-worded, but urgent, invitation punctuated by a veiled, hard to ignore threat to show up. Who didn't need to be coerced to come are Dr. Samuel Harris and Henri Toussante, head of the Sûreté, because they know Le Fantôme is up to his old tricks again. And their best shot to finally catch the notorious phantom thief.

Le Fantôme reveals himself to the gathering through a gramophone recording à la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The voice of Le Fantôme announces to them his intention to steal the twin Bombay Diamonds, "their acquisition would be the pinnacle of my calling," of which one permanently resides in the Louvre. Le Fantôme claims to have already stolen the other diamond that was on display at the Palais de Chaillot and informs the group gathered at the Eiffel Tower they're going to help steal the second diamond from the Louvre ("to put it bluntly, you all have secrets..."). Leaving them to deliberate and make a decision, but Toussante is already on the counter offensive and apparently one step ahead. Toussante has brought the diamond Le Fantôme claims to have stolen from Palais de Chaillot.

The setup to this first of numerous impossible crimes is a slow burner, but played to great effect and pay-off as the clandestine meeting on the Eiffel Tower culminates with the disappearance of the closely watched diamond and murder – a poisoning as inexplicable as it's shocking. And why I'm being sketchy on the details to avoid spoilers. So everything and everyone, "suspect and police alike," is subjected to a thorough search without finding the diamond or a even a hint how it vanished in the first place. The poisoning appears to be equally baffling and impossible, but there are more puzzling aspects to the theft and murder. Why was there an abnormally, almost unnecessarily, large dose of poison in the glass? Why did the victim picked up the glass and deliberately smashed it before dying? Why the hell did this dose of poison have such a flair for dramatic timing? You can perhaps count that last one as a third, borderline impossibility.

While a slow burner of a start, the setup to this impossible crime extravaganza is absolutely fantastic with false-solutions being bandied about during the initial investigation at the Eiffel Tower. I'm a sucker for false-solutions! So would have loved for The Thirteenth Apostle to have continued along these lines, while picking up the pace along the way, as it headed towards the next couple of locked room murders. This is the point where the story begins to move on to the next lump of plot as the dramatic, illusory crimes at the Eiffel Tower remain unresolved for the time being. A move bridged with an excerpt from the fictitious book, Ghost in the Machine: the extraordinary career of Le Fantôme, teasing Le Fantôme's "last and most infamous accomplishment" ("the murder in the Oglethorpe Crypt"), but first, there's another impossible crime. An impossible crime pushing Le Fantôme to near mythical status in the minds of the investigators.

Nearly half a year later, in November, everyone who was present "that most unpleasant evening at the top of La Tour Eiffel" reunite at Chateau Lambert in Montanix-des-Alpes, France. Their association with a notorious, unsolved case and status as potential suspects is becoming troublesome ("...our lives will be forever tainted..."), which is why they have decided to get together to try and solve the case themselves. However, the plan to pool their knowledge, go over the facts and attempt to weed out the truth gets ditched when they learn of the local legend.

Chateau Lambert has an ancient, austere and brooding tower, Chambre de Justice, which once served as a holding cell for condemned prisoners and, over time, the tower became the stuff of legend – basically a room-that-kills. A room sparing anyone who's truly innocent, but beheads any person spending the night the tower alone with a serious crime on their conscious ("a room with pretensions of being judge, jury and executioner"). So the gathering decides to let the tower decide who's innocent and guilty. That goes about as well you'd expect, only with a slight twist as the murder is not exactly what was expected from the tower room.

This poorly done, messy review only gives you a fraction of what happened between the prologue and the impossible murder at the Chambre de Justice. So when the story finally arrives at its end stage, The Thirteenth Apostle only has a handful of chapters left to go. I started to wonder what Probin could possibly do with the murder at the Oglethorpe Crypt, which had been alluded to in both the prologue and interlude. It turns out not all that much. Well, not in terms of creating the crowning achievement of that promised trilogy of impossible murders, but at least it served another, not unimportant, purpose. I can see why Jim was disappointed as it hyped as the story's main event.

So, as a locked room mystery, the impossible murder at the Chambre de Justice stands as the best of the three. I very much enjoyed how Probin set it up as a shin honkaku-style impossibility, only to turn around to deliver a very Paul Halter-esque locked room mystery. The inexplicable poisoning and disappearing diamond from the Eiffel Tower stand out more for its dramatic staging, iconic backdrop and some truly first-class misdirection. So two, out of three, is not a bad return for a mystery novel with multiple impossibilities. What actually did disappoint me is how blatantly obvious it's who's behind the Le Fantôme persona. For more reasons than one, Probin made it impossible to ignore this character as a serious candidate to the point I began to second guess myself. I even entertained the idea of two Le Fantômes. The original, happy go-lucky Le Fantôme who robbed museums and the person who usurped his identity to go on a murder spree. That also didn't turn out to be the case and robs the story of some of its mystification (ROT13: gur svefg zheqre naq gursg nera'g unys nf onssyvat jura lbh fhfcrpg gung punenpgre bs orvat gur cunagbz).

Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle is that good, old-fashioned mixed bag of tricks. I think I enjoyed more than Jim, but have to agree there's definitely an even better, tighter-plotted detective novel lurking in there somewhere. That said, The Thirteenth Apostle is still an impressive, ambitious first stab at locked room mystery novel showing how much things had already changed by 2020. Not so long ago, novels like Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and Eric Keith's Nine Man's Murder (2011) were seen as events because they tried or pretended to write retro or modern locked room novels. We come a long way in a very short amount of time.

So definitely going to check out the other two short stories and hope Probin hasn't forgotten about that short story collection Six Impossible Things.

Note for the curious: just one more thing about that over hyped impossible crime in the crypt that was tucked away at the end. This impossible situation was described in the prologue as practically a hermetically sealed tomb with a door can be barred from the inside with a wooden, six inch thick beam that can be placed horizontally in two thick iron brackets. The prologue noted this can only be "done from inside the crypt" and Dr. Harris says "no amount of jiggery pokery could possibly allow the door to be locked from the outside." When I read the prologue, I immediately saw a very simple way to hermetically seal that crypt from the inside. Just place two pieces of ice inside the iron brackets, place the beam on top, step out and close the door. As the ice melts, the beam drops into the brackets barring the crypt from the inside.

The Art of Stealing: "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin

Jamie Probin is a British-born mathematician currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches mathematics at Charleston Southern University and writes detective novels and short stories featuring his mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who's something of a locked room specialist. I should have gotten to this series before now, but it got loss in the mass of reprints, translations and neo-Golden Age mysteries. That's until Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, reviewed Probin's newest, non-series short story "Chapter 17: Perroquet Explains" (2026). So moved this series up the big pile.

I wanted to begin with Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle (2020), but the short story "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) is a prequel and Jim's review suggested reading it before the novel ("...because it sets up the world well..."). What it sets up, or rather introduces, is a duel between the master criminal Le Fantôme and the Sûreté, Scotland Yard and Dr. Harris.

Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble, of the Sûreté, have been trying to put a stop to the shenanigans of Le Fantôme for years, which is easier said than done considering the phantom thief's affinity for the impossible crimes and a gift for disguises – getting bolder with each new scheme. Such as Le Fantôme's latest caper involving the inexplicable disappearance of an early, little-known work by Claude Monet, "never exhibited publicly," belonging to the millionaire banker Jacques DuFresne. It hung in DuFresne's Paris townhouse, securely locked, bolted and barred from the inside, but nevertheless disappeared from the locked townhouse. Even stranger, Le Fantôme exchanged the Monet for a plain, white canvas with "a childish outline of a ghost etched into the centre with a few simple strokes of black paint." I wonder if Probin is familiar with Kaito KID from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series.

Anyway, Dr. Harris is mentioned only in passing, "ask his opinion, see if he has any ideas," but it's the men of the Sûreté who score a point over Le Fantôme. Patrick Larson, in particular, gets to play a big role with his rather unorthodox methods uncovering several copies of the stolen Monet have been sold shortly after the theft. That nicely added another impossibility to the impossible theft: how do you make a whole bunch of near perfect copies of a painting that has never been publicly displayed? Good enough copies to fool a string of collectors. However, the trick to make the Monet vanish from a locked townhouse is the better, more imaginative and fairly-clued of the two impossibilities. More importantly, "The Episode of the Nine Monets" is exactly what a story about an Arsène Lupin-style character pulling off impossible crime capers should be... incredibly fun and entertaining.

I said Sûreté scored a point over Le Fantôme. They cracked the locked room problem, recovered the stolen painting and boosted their reputation, but not "the money Le Fantôme had gained from selling the forgeries" or the criminal himself – who has now captured the public's imagination ("the mood was ripe to embrace a Robin Hood-style folk hero"). The Thirteenth Apostle is going to conclude the Le Fantôme saga featuring "a trilogy of impossible murders." So that one is going to be next and hopefully it lives up "The Episode of the Nine Monets." A highlight of the 2020s impossible crime story and locked room revival.

A note for the curious: the ending half-raises a point I have wondered about before. This series takes place sometime in the early-1930s, several years after "the great depression had thundered through France and the rest of the western world,"
which is why Le Fantôme was becoming an anti-hero here. I have sometimes wondered if the figure the Gentleman Thief could have ever challenged the popularity of the Great Detective. Writers like Maurice Leblanc and E.W. Hornung made their mark with Arsène Lupin and Raffles, but the Rogue School perhaps needed their own Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr more than a great depression. I do wonder sometimes about that strange, alternative universe where the Gentleman Thief overtook (even if only briefly) the Great Detective in popularity.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944) by Kelley Roos

Last time, I reviewed the splendid novella "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by "Kelley Roos," a shared penname of William and Audrey Roos, which finds their normally bantering, wisecracking mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy during a messy breakup – only for a murder to bring them back together. A humorously written, deftly-plotted and clued novella. Its only negative is its short length that left me wanting a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy outing, but have already reread The Frightened Stiff (1942) and There Was a Crooked Man (1945) is (as of this writing) still out-of-print. So decided to reread that other favorite from the series.

Sailor, Take Warning! (1944), fourth in the series, starts on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in
September. Jeff and Haila promised their housekeeper to take her 7-year-old son, Chuckie, off her hands by taking him to Central Park to sail his model boat on the lake. Building and sailing model boats on a small lake or pond is not merely a pass time for children like Chuckie. When they get to the park, Jeff and Haila are introduced to several members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club, which "sails the sea" on "Saturday, Sunday and holiday afternoons."

Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club is headed by the Commodore, Austin Marshall, who's a wealthy man with many, many hobbies and interests. Bernard Marshall is his lazy, younger brother and fellow Knickerbocker as is their young nephew, Carl Marshall, currently on leave from the army. George Penny, a crusty, old and wheelchair bound man, who's accompanied by his daughter, Penny – who's sort of engaged to Carl. Tony Gilbert, a charming, well-known stage actor, who's currently appearing in another Broadway smash hit. Finally, William Philips, another wealthy model ship enthusiast and their cabin boy, Chuckie. So the scenery is near idyllic, "only the silhouette of the towering apartments and hotels" kept "you from forgetting that this was New York," but then the inevitable murder happens. A seemingly impossible murder!

Austin Marshall is seen climbing the stairs to a lonely bench, on promontory, overlooking the park, sat down and enjoyed the scenery. Only person who came to have a chat was Philips, but left him and, ten minutes later, Marshall was found dead with "a thin, nail-like piece of steel" sticking out of his neck. Somebody, within that ten minute window, sneaked up to Marshall and stabbed him. However, that appears to be patently impossible as "there's no dobt that no one went within fifty feet of the victim between the time he talked to Philips and his death." The police points out the stabbing was such "a precision job" that it could not have been projected from a distance.

Now, this is where the story becomes extra hilarious if you have just read "Death is a Trouper." Jeff refuses to have anything to do with the case and not only turns down Lieutenant Hankins, but even intends to return an anonymous delivered, one-thousand dollar fee to find the Marshall's murderer. This horrifies Haila ("...not wanting to witness the Troys' return to poverty...") who takes desperate measures to secure (i.e. steal) the fee and basically forces Jeff to solve the murder. Jeff and Haila's lighthearted banter and bright dialogue are the highlight of the story, which is unquestionable where Sailor, Take Warning! can match wits with The Frightened Stiff. Not that the Rooses neglected to pack the plot with incidents, twists and turns.

For example, I had entirely forgotten Sailor, Take Warning! has not one, but two, impossible crimes: Philips' wife, Diane, is knocked unconscious and her attacked escaped from a locked, observed house. Another trail leads the Troys to Walter Davisson, a radio psychologist known as The Marriage Doctor, whose wife, Marjorie, has a flirtatious affair with Tony Gilbert. A man, by the name of Robert Nichols, pops up out of nowhere pleading with Jeff to find his missing daughter leading to a wild goose chase from New York to Hoboken. Not to mention the Troys get burglarized and Haila finds to her horror that the thousand dollars she stole from Jeff was stolen. So the Troys are busy enough between talking and poking around the members of the Knickerbocker Model Yachting Club.

As noted in the previous review, when the Rooses and Troys are at their best, they were a good deal better than the more famous mystery writing, husband-and-wife teams or snooping couples of their day. There's a reason, both good and bad, why Sailor, Take Warning! is considered to be the Rooses second best detective novel.

Firstly, the humor and dialogue can match themselves with The Frightened Stiff, but the plot turned out to be more of a mixed bag than I remembered. The holds together for the most part, despite the various, seemingly irrelevant sub-plots and the Troys tramping around the city, especially liked the solution to the impossible stabbing in Central Park – even though it reworks a very old dodge. Nevertheless, I liked how it was put to work here. It just worked for me in this setting. And, yes, one point makes its status as an impossible crime somewhat dubious. I'll take even as a borderline impossible crime. The problem of the attacker getting out of a locked house is nothing special and only a very minor plot-thread/distraction. So don't expect too much from that locked room problem. Nor do I have a problem with the choice of murderer as it nicely fitted the method. Where the Rooses tripped up and robbed themselves of another The Frightened Stiff is the motive.

I'm always annoyed when a writer tacks on the motive at the end as an afterthought. It's not always story-ruining bad, mostly just lazy, something you can even get away when a story's focus is on picking apart alibis, locked rooms or deciphering dying messages and code messages. Or when it's a really basic motive like the victim turning out to have been blackmailer or something. The not at all unimportant and far from basic motive was here not merely tacked on as an afterthought, but dropped on the reader like an ACME anvil. That's why I remembered it and was on the lookout for any kind of clue, hint or trace of foreshadowing. A slight, shaky case can be made it was, sort of, alluded to when (ROT13) Wrss wbxvat fnlf gb Puhpxvr “gurer zvtug or n Anmv ntrag nebhaq,” ohg gung bss-unaqrq, nccneragyl haeryngrq dhvc gb n puvyq pnzr sbhe cntrf vagb gur fgbel. So you can hardly be blamed for having forgotten about that fleeting remark and connected it to that in order to anticipate such a twist and turn of events. Hell, even with remembering it, and knowing it was coming, it still was a jarring turn of events. And genuinely damaged it as a fairly mystery. Why it came up short compared to The Frightened Stiff and had to take second place.

I really hate to nitpick about the motive, because Sailor, Take Warning! is nearly as good as The Frightened Stiff in every other way, but the motive turned out to be rather important. It's just dropped out of nowhere to reveal (ROT13) lbh unir orra ernqvat n dhnfv-fcl zlfgrel gur jubyr gvzr. Not that it couldn't have worked, but not how it was handled here. I think writers of the caliber of William and Audrey Roos should have known better. That being said, Sailor, Take Warning! is still an incredibly fun read for fans of the characters and screwball mysteries in general.

Hopefully, there's some kindly publisher out there who decides to finally reprint There Was a Crooked Man or publish a volume with the Rooses uncollected novellas. Just one for the suggestion box. :)

Locked and Loaded, Part 8: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

Back in 2020, I posted the first "Locked and Loaded" blog-post reviewing five, or six, randomly picked, usually uncollected short stories of the impossible variety and covered a 118 year period of short locked room mystery stories in the previous seven reviews – stretching from 1905 all the way up to 2023. So, as to be expected, the quality varies from story to story. However, the stories reviewed in the last two "Locked and Loaded" posts only had one really good short story, James H. Cobb's "Over the Edge" (2007). I wanted to do another one, before the end of the year, hoping to find another really good story or two. Fingers crossed!

So, before delving into the stories making up part 8, you can find my previous "Locked and Loaded" reviews here: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

The first story is James Yaffe's "Mr. Kiroshibu's Ashes," originally published in the March, 1944, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which he wrote when he was a 16-year-old locked room mystery enthusiast. Between 1943 and 1946, EQMM published six of Yaffe's short stories featuring the only member of the Department of Impossible Crimes ("...New York Homicide Squad's most obscure office"), Paul Dawn. This second story in the series takes place aboard the Florida Special where a holidaying Dawn is recognized by Dr. Howard Kiroshibu, of Kiroshibu Brothers Oriental Pottery, who's traveling with a black, copper urn – containing his late brother's ashes. Kiroshibu is afraid something is going to happen to the urn and asks Dawn to take urn to his compartment, but Dawn turns him down as he exclusively deals in impossible crimes. Shortly after their chat, Kiroshibu is shot behind the locked door of a railway carriage. Dawn has his locked room murder and excuse to start investigating.

Well, Yaffe was only sixteen when he wrote "Mr. Kiroshibu's Ashes" and so this story lacks the polish that comes with experience and maturity, but brash, youthful fallibility and the tact of a teenager has a charm of its own. I snickered when Dawn summarized Kiroshibu's story, "so you're traveling to Miami Beach to toss your brother's ashes into the Atlantic," or taking a peek inside the urn ("Henry Kiroshibu was of a non-descript, grayish color, and he only filled about half the urn"). Yaffe's choice of murderer and method aren't without interest, but failed to present the overall solution as something even remotely plausible or convincing. So not bad, but not great either.

Next up is "The Headmaster Helps One of His Boys," published in the January, 1982, issue of EQMM, written by the author of the Lyon and Bea Wentworth series, Richard Forrest. Several novels from this series are locked rooms and impossible crimes, but Forrest proved to be an extremely frustrating novelist. Forrest had some good impossible crime ideas, such as the false-solution from A Child's Garden of Death (1975) or the whole locked room setup and trick in Death at King's Arthur Court (2005), but always mired in bad or mediocre novels. So was curious to see what Forrest could do with the impossible crime in short story format.

Forrest's "The Headmaster Helps One of His Boys" reads like the introduction of a new series, but, apparently, this is the only appearance of the unnamed headmaster-detective of Greenfield Academy, New England – who helps out a student named Braxton. Braxton has serious problems back home as his mother is indicted for murdering her second husband, because she was the only other person inside their securely locked bedroom. So the headmaster decides to help his troubled pupil and begins to call in favors from ex-students to get his hands on information in order to solve the murder. It's funny how this short story is the exact opposite of Forrest's novel-length mysteries. This is a good, well-written short story with a fun detective who could have headed his own series, but the impossible crime and locked room-trick is rubbish. Forrest remains the most frustrating writer of locked room mysteries.

Bill Pronzini netted his first Shamus Award for best P.I. short story with "Cat's Paw." A short story originally published in 1983 as a hardcover booklet.

"Cat's Paw" finds the Nameless Detective patrolling the grounds of San Francisco's Fleishacker Zoological Gardens during a cold, foggy night when the fog "makes everything look like capering phantoms or two-dimensional cutouts." Nameless has been hired as an extra guard following the theft of several rare birds and some other endangered animals that go for premium prizes on the black market, but the zoo covers roughly seventy acres and difficult to police with only a few guards. This was still a few years before security cameras became more widely adopted. While patrolling the grounds, a gunshot rings out from the Lion House where Nameless and a colleague discovers the body of another night guard lying in an empty, locked feeding case – shot through the chest and clutching a gun. So it appears to be suicide as the building was locked up and they arrived less than 30 seconds after hearing the shot. That makes the only possible exit through one of the open cat-grottos at the rear of the Lion House, but "those cats would maul anybody who went out among 'em." Nameless knows this dodgy looking suicide is murder and, fortunately, he knows his way around a locked room murder.

Overall, Pronzini's "Cat's Paw" is a good and very fine P.I. short story making full use of its backdrop, especially in the lead-up to the shooting. Nameless likened walking around a zoo by night to a graveyard ("...ordinary enough during daylight hours... downright eerie after dark"). But as a detective story with a locked room mystery, it's neither spectacular nor particular fair. I still liked it as a P.I. short story and it's always fun to tag along with Nameless, but as an impossible crime story it was very little to offer. Fortunately, the next tale of the impossible by Pronzini is a different story!

Pronzini's "Ace in the Hole" originally appeared in the anthology Mean Streets (1986) in which Nameless has to act as an armchair detective, while drinking beer and playing poker. Eberhardt had made a bet with the other guys around the table he could "make sense out of the Gallatin thing within twenty-four hours." Lt. Jack Logan, one of the man around the poker table, who nearly nailed Frank Gallatin for racketeering and extortion charges. What they needed was an incriminating file from an accountant, named Lamar Trent, but, when they went to Trent's office, they heard a gunshot behind his locked office door. Only two people were inside when the shot was fired: Frank Galletin and Trent slumped behind his desk with a bullet in his skull. Just a handful of problems. Firstly, the office is thoroughly searched without the murder weapon or incriminating files turning up. And no gunshot residue on his hands. There simply was no time to dispose of the gun, files and a pair of gloves ("locked doors, disappearing guns—screwball stuff"). Even worse, Galletin claims somebody came up or down the fire escape, shot Trent through the open window and disappeared the same way. They checked this story and nobody could have used the fire escape, unless they happened to be invisible. So they Galletin shot Trent, but nothing can be done unless they figure out how he made all the evidence disappear from a locked office with police standing at the door ("just your kind of case, paisan").

For the next two hours, or so, they play five-card stud and drink beer while Nameless mulls over the puzzle. And, of course, he pieces everything together and only left the poker table to get a cold beer. Nameless takes joy in drawing out his solution as payback for making him work instead of just playing poker. I liked how the simple locked room-trick and solution revealed the supposedly clever Galletin to have been prize idiot after all. Fantastically fun!

By the way, I think an anthology of hardboiled, pulp-y P.I. locked room mysteries and impossible crimes is long overdue. Pronzini's "Ace in the Hole" or "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" (1980) would be perfect for such an anthology (Tough Nuts to Crack).

John Nelson's "Magwitch Returns," originally published in the April, 1986, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, is an odd one and perhaps not truly a locked room mystery – at least not in the traditional sense. The setup is conventional enough as it begins with the police being called to the scene of an unmistakable suicide. A neighbor of one Andrew Thornton heard a gunshot coming from his apartment and when the landlord unlocked the door, they found him with a bullet in his head and gun on the floor. Thornton, "a police buff and a Dickens fanatic," left behind a string of clues turning the police investigation into a scavenger hunt. I wonder if J.A. Konrath was aware of Nelson's “Magwitch Returns” when he wrote "With a Twist" (2005), because the premises are strikingly similar. Konrath got so much more out of the idea than Nelson. Still an amusing take on the detective story, but poor purely taken as a locked room mystery.

Finally, John L. French's "Open and Shut," published in the July/August, 2003, issue of AHMM, which is obviously product of its time when CSI: Crime Scene Investigation along with its spin-off shows were at the height of their popularity. French is a retired crime scene supervisor who wrote articles ("A Brief History of DNA," 2006) for Future Mystery Anthology Magazine and occasionally had a short story published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. "Open and Shut" is French's only impossible crime story featuring a crime scene technician, Grace, who's called the scene of a suicide in College Town. A student shot himself behind the locked door of his bedroom while his roommates were still in the house. So an apparently routine case of "another overachieving high school student who couldn't handle the shock of getting B's in college," but a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories gives a classical twist to the case. When it comes to the locked room problem, I don't think this story will excite the pickier of locked room fanatics, but I enjoyed the overall story and how (SPOILER/ROT13) gur cybg jrag sebz fhvpvqr gb zheqre naq onpx gb fhvpvqr ntnva, orsber frggyvat ba na nppvqragny fubbgvat. Like I said, this story is very much a product of its time.

This was another poor, unexciting and rather disappointing haul for this blog series. Not necessarily because the stories were bad, most weren't, but Pronzini's "Ace in the Hole" is the only story that stands out and shines as a locked room mystery. So maybe the time has come to either retire "Locked and Loaded" or put it on hiatus for the foreseeable future. I'll try to pick something good, none-impossible crime related next. Stay tuned!

The Glass Tower Murders (2021) by Mikito Chinen

Last year, I came across the work of fan-lator Mitsuda Konno, formerly known as Mitsuda Madoy, who's translating first-rate Japanese detective fiction with "cosmmiicnana" such as Kie Houjou's superb "The Ryuuzen Clan" series and Danro Kamosaki's insane "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series – which have become personal favorites. I keep my fingers crossed Houjou's Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019), Katou no raihousha (Visitors to the Isolated Island, 2020) and Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) get official releases one day. I consider them to be the classics of tomorrow and a glimpse of what the detective story could involve into over the course of this century. That's a story for another day.

Mitsuda Konno has a few more pieces of forbidden fruit fanlations on his website and one title especially has been beckoning me for months.

Mikito Chinen's Garasu no tou no satsujin (The Glass Tower Murders, 2021) is described by Konno as "a mystery fan's mystery novel" that's "extremely tropey, and extremely self-aware about how tropey it is," which incidentally also makes it "good as an introduction to modern J-mystery" – dedicating "a lot of page time to explaining the appeal of its own genre." Ho-Ling Wong praised The Glass Tower Murders in his 2022 review for the meaningful way it used the genre's familiar tropes and concepts to create "a very entertaining puzzles that presented a surprising deep look at the genre" ("...basically a love letter to the shin honkaku subgenre"). Chinen's The Glass Tower Murders sounded like a trickier, more complicated and deeper shin honkaku version of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936). Well, I'm game!

The glass tower of the title is the setting of the story and home to Kozushima Tarou, a retired professor of biotechnology, who invented TRIDENT that "completely altered the course of gene therapy." This invention also made him a very rich man and allowed him to built the tower. A towering, cone-shaped building erected on the slope of Mt. Chogatake with glass walls and a spiral staircase at the center linking together the floor and rooms. The point of this cone-shaped building is called the Display Room where the "Kozushima Collection" is kept. Kozushima is not only a biotech genius, but "a devotee of mystery fiction" and has accumulated a huge collection of detective memorabilia from across the world ("is this Columbo's coat?"). Fittingly, the normally reclusive Kozushima has invited a small group of people to the Glass Tower to make an important announcement.

First of all, there's Kozushima's doctor, Ichijou Yuma, who pulls double duty as a Dr. Watson narrating the story. Sakaizumi Taiki, a chef, who's always called upon to cook lavish meals for Kozushima's events. Aoi Tsukiyo, a self-proclaimed Great Detective, styles herself after Sherlock Holmes, but another guest, Kagami Tsuyoshi of the Nagano Prefectural Police, says she always turns down cases that look too difficult to solve. Kuruma Koushin is a celebrated mystery novelist who made his name during the early days of the shin honkaku movement and "particularly known for his skill at creating locked room mysteries." Yumeyomi Suishou, a TV psychic, is the star of the Psychic Detective Case Files. Sakyo Kousuke is the editor-in-chief of Super Mystery Monthly Magazine known for its "scattershot approach" by "placing proper honkaku stories of logic and reasoning next to unbelievable tales of the paranormal." Lastly, the loyal butler and maid.

So there you have a fairly basic and typical setup for a conventional shin honkaku mystery novel. Conventional to the point you almost get déjà vu, however, that's the point as the story slowly, and playfully, begins to take a different track with these classic, time-honored tropes. Yuma not only narrates the story, playing the witless Watson to Tsukiyo's Sherlock Holmes, but this Watson is also a murderer who has an urgent reason to slip his employer a poisoned pill loaded with tetrodotoxin – which is the poison in pufferfish. Yuma figured if he declared Kozushima's death the result of a heart attack, "it won't be considered a crime," but his plan is completely derailed when Kozushima cries out for help over the telephone. That gives Yuma precious little time to get out of the room and create a very basic locked room setup, which he hopes will do the trick. When the door is opened with the master key, Yuma discovers Kozushima left a clue before dying. The letter "Y" written on the floor ("it must be a dying message"). Tsukiyo, of course, rejects any notion Kozushima died from natural causes or committed suicide. She gets to play detective as an avalanche blocked the road and the police won't be able to get to them for another day or two.

Roughly, the first quarter of The Glass Tower Murders plays out like a darkly humorous inverted mystery in which the murderer finds himself assisting the self-appointed Great Detective investigating his own crime. Something that could have come straight from an Anthony Berkeley or Leo Bruce novel! Yuma is not the only murderer roaming the Glass Tower. A second locked room murder soon follows the second one as Oita Shinzo, the butler, is brutally stabbed to death in the dining room with the door securely latched from the inside. The door being latched from the inside is not even the strangest aspect of the case. Somehow, the dining table was on fire with a message, "SPIRITED AWAY FROM CHOGATAKE," written on the tablecloth ("...a reference to a series of murders that happened in this region over a decade ago").

So now Yuma has a potential scapegoat and more than ever determined to help Tsukiyo find the murderer by being her Watson. However, the murderer is not done yet with creating locked room murders and other impossible situations. The Glass Tower Murders is not about its locked room murders and tricks. It's a detective novel about detective fiction with a cast of genre-savvy mystery readers who discuss various authors, novels, styles and history of the genre – particularly the development of the shin honkaku mystery. Not to mention the plot-thread about an mysterious, unpublished manuscript Kozushima's claims to have discovered that "completely overturn the history of the genre." And, of course, occasionally winking at the fourth wall ("maybe we are characters in a honkaku mystery set in a creepy mansion and just don't realize it"). Don't mistake The Glass Tower Murders for lightweight fluff or an excuse for Mikito Chinen to fanboy all over his favorite mystery writers, novels and series. The Glass Tower Murders is an incredibly dense, layered detective novel pulling off something truly amazing.

The Glass Tower Murders basically gives you three different, deeply intertwined mystery novels for the price of one. Firstly, there's the Berkeley-style inverted mystery involving Yuma poisoning Kozushima. Secondly, the conventional, classically-styled shin honkaku mystery ticking every box needed for such a novel. And that includes two challenges to the reader! This conventional portion of the novel concludes with Tsukiyo's equally conventional solution to exactly such a mystery, but the story is not over yet. So the last part offers an alternative take turning everything that happened before upside down. And brilliantly so! I can't say much more without risking serious spoilers, except how it reminded me just how popular and influential Ellery Queen is in certain non-English speaking parts of the world. Something that's not always appreciated or even noticed in the West.

Mikito Chinen's The Glass Tower Murders stands as a truly exceptional, self-aware meta-mystery novel that demonstrated you can have your cake and eat it too. You have, on the one hand, a typical shin honkaku mystery with a eccentric mansion, locked room murders, a dying message, cracking codes and a closed circle of suspects – completely shut off from the outside world. The solutions to the various mysteries of this conventional shin honkaku novel aren't half bad. Like the locked room-tricks behind the second and third murders, which give you everything you hope to get from a series of impossible crimes in a bizarre mansion. At the same time, the story goes much deeper than merely references to Hercule Poirot or the “Bizarre House Mysteries” series by Yukito Ayatsuji. Only to escape its own confines to prepare the firework show that would end the story. Simply fantastic!

I'm just not sure I would recommend The Glass Tower Murders as an introduction to the shin honkaku mystery, or the genre in general, because the plot demands some level of familiarity with the detective story. Not just for knowing who's who, or who wrote what and when, but in following the plot along as it twists and turns towards its inevitable conclusion. Today, it's easier than ever to read up on the Japanese shin honkaku mystery novel. Enough to fully appreciate The Glass Tower Murders.

So, in closing, all that's left to say is Chinen really took the meta-mystery to another level of consciousness with The Glass Tower Murders. Highly recommended.

Half-Mast Murder (1930) by Milward Kennedy

Milward Kennedy was an English civil servant, journalist, literary critic, reviewer and mystery writer, who was a founding member of the Detection Club, but the bulk of his novels and short stories have been out-of-print and largely forgotten about for decades – even during the reprint renaissance of the past ten years. So my only exposure to Kennedy's work has been through his small, modest contributions to the Detection Club's round-robin novels The Floating Admiral (1931) and Ask a Policeman (1933).

I have been aware of Kennedy and two of his mystery novels, The Corpse on the Mat (1929) and Death to the Rescue (1931), have been longtime residents of my locked room mystery wishlist. Kennedy's detective fiction is still waiting to be swept up by that reprint wave. Only two novels, Half-Mast Murder (1930) and Murder in Black and White (1931), returned to print over the years. I decided to just give Half-Mast Murder a shot to see what this forgotten Detection Club member could do on his own with a novel-length mystery novel.

Half-Mast Murder is Kennedy's fourth mystery novel taking place at Cliff's End, "a house of some social standing," situated on the coast and property of "one of the Big Noises of the world," Professor Paley, who's an authority on international politics, economics and war – playing "a big part in the creation of the Succession States to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire." Professor Paley's books and strong opinions make him "very unpopular with some people." Currently, the professor is working on his next book supposedly to contain some remarkable revelations about the Great War ("moral dynamite") and has come down from London to Cliff's End to write the book. Professor Paley has brought along a nice, close-knit group of future suspects.

There's his widowed sister, Mrs. Arkwright, and his niece, Cynthia, who has a brother, Julian, who works for an armaments manufacturer and is not on speaking terms with his anti-war uncle. Julian is in the neighborhood. A longtime friend of the professor, Bertie Trent, who was nevertheless overheard saying Paley's "only fit for heaven." And the sooner the better. George Shipman, a man of leisure, is only there for Cynthia. Finally, a visitor from America, a Mr. Quick, who came to see the professor as a representative of the Association for World Harmony (Inc.). This first chapter ends with the party rushing down to the octagonal-shaped summerhouse, where the professor has been working, after the butler failed the get an answer. So they break down the door to discover the professor slumped in a chair with a knife-handle sticking out of his chest.

Superintendent Guest and his men arrive at Cliff's End to take charge, but the problem facing them is a multifaceted, messy tangle of clued, red herrings and uncooperative suspects. For one, there's the problem of the locked summerhouse and why the murderer created a locked room puzzle, because, even without the locked door, it looked too dodgy to be suicide. And there are other puzzling peculiarities to the case. Why was the flag on the roof of the summerhouse flying half-mast? Why was there a bloodstained bathing suite stuffed into the safe? What's the stain of the sliver wood Guest too from railing? What's the significance of the camera and a spool of fishing-line found at the crime scene? However, the plot and Guest's investigation primarily revolves around picking apart everyone's movements around the time of the murder and making time tables.

So, yes, Half-Mast Murder is firmly rooted in the much maligned, so-called “humdrum” school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode, but two chapters standout – Chapter XV ("EXAMINES EVIDENCE") and Chapter XXI ("AUGURS AN ARREST"). In Chapter XV, Guest tackles the problem of "how came the summer-house to be locked and the key inside?" Admittedly, the possibilities Guest considers and the actual locked room-trick could hardly be called original even in 1930, but have seen put to worse used than here. Chapter XXI ends with Guest giving the Chief Constable, what he then thinks is, the correct solution. Only for it to be reduced to a false-solution. I'm afraid Kennedy's Half-Mast Murder is a very bad case of the false-solution outshining the correct solution. More on that in a moment.

I should first mention Half-Mast Murder has a strange peculiarity that should have been a drawback, but ended up saving the book from becoming a total loss. Half-Mast Murder is still very much an early, 1920s drawing room mystery at heart as the crime scene resembled a busy thoroughfare with practically everyone popping in-and out at the time the professor was being murdered. So more than one person had a hand in creating the confusing crime scene, which is always a bit hard to swallow and takes some talent to pull-off convincingly. But here it safeguarded the story's best parts from the insultingly bad ending. Such as what happened to the missing material for the professor's next book and why the flag was half-mast. And I still enjoyed the (basic) locked room puzzle.

So I would have been perfectly happy with Guest's false-solution from Chapter XXI as it bundled those best ideas and plot-points in the best possible solution to the murder as it was presented – while using those last few chapters plugging the gaps. Sure, it would not have been a blistering original, rug-puller of a whodunit, but would have happily recommended it to fans of Crofts and Rhode. Kennedy thought the ending needed something more than mere competence and opted for pulling a "surprise twist" out of his ass. It stunk! I don't know what's the worse offense here: the flagrant lack of fair play (you can't even guess the who or why) or the solution to who and why. Something so cringe, you want to hide it from outsiders (SPOILER/ROT13: gur ohgyre qvq vg). I hope the Detection Club put Kennedy on trial for this faux pas and had to pay Rhode's bar tab as punishment.

Milward Kennedy has always been one of those notable gaps in my Golden Age detective reading and hoped more for Half-Mast Murder, but it ended up dampening my interest in Kennedy just a little bit. On the other hand, even the best of Kennedy's contemporaries had some terrible mystery novels to their name. Martin Edwards praised Kennedy in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017), "a leading exponent of the village mystery," highlighting The Murderer of Sleep (1932), Poison in the Parish (1935) and the previously mentioned Death to the Rescue. A mystery novel based on a real-life case that was withdrawn from circulation after a libel lawsuit. So I won't write Kennedy off completely, but the next one better be good.

Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912) by Victor L. Whitechurch

Rev. Victor L. Whitechurch was an Anglican churchman, author and creator of Thorpe Hazell, a vegetarian railway enthusiast, who's one of the oddest "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" appearing in a short-lived series of nine short stories from 1905 to 1906 – collected in Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912). Whitechurch started out as a turn-of-the-century mystery writer in the Doylean tradition, but also got the participate in the early Golden Age of the British detective story with novels like The Crime at Diana's Pool (1927), Murder at the Pageant (1930) and Murder at the College (1932). Not to mention being a founding member of The Detection Club and penning the first chapter ("Corpse Ahoy!") for the round-robin mystery The Floating Admiral (1931).

Whitechurch is best remembered today for the railway detective and thriller stories written during the first decade of the previous century, which extends pass the Thorpe Hazell series. That gives them some historical importance. Mike Grost pointed out Whitechurch's "stories appeared early in the Impossible Crime movement" and "very early in the Technological Detective movement" that "had already been piloted by L.T. Meade in this era, but just barely." Thrilling Stories of the Railway and Whitechurch's other railway mysteries were fairly obscure and out-of-print for decades, until they entered the public domain. They have since been bundled together and reprinted by different publishers. I wanted to finally take a look at this collection of pioneering detective stories.

The first story is "Peter Crane's Cigars," originally published in the July, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine as "The Ingenious Ruse of Mr. Crane," which briefly introduces Thorpe Hazell. A book collector, railway enthusiast and amateur detective "whose knowledge of book editions and bindings was only equaled by his grasp of railway details," but what made Thorpe Hazell an odd duck at the time was another one of his eccentricities – "a strong faddist on food and physical culture." A vegetarian to the extreme who was constantly practicing strange, outlandish physical exercises.

So this first story presents a fairly minor problem as Hazell has to deal with a tobacconist undercutting his competition by selling quality cigars at bargain prices ("...only paid fivepence each for them"). That brand can be "picked up very cheaply in Holland or Belgium," but not resold at those low prices unless they were smuggled into the country without paying the duties. Hazell dons a disguise to tail Crane on his monthly excursion abroad, but even the railway detective is baffled how Crane was smuggling the cigars. So you can categorize this story as a borderline impossible crime story and not something as banal or disappointing as the cigars being smuggled pass customs inside the books Crane was lugging around on his travels. Whitechurch came up with something more ambitious for the core solution, but its dependence on (ROT13) haxabja nppbzcyvprf detracts from the overall plot. Still a fun, enjoyable introduction to the series.

"The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern," originally published in the August, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine, begins with Hazell perusing the morning newspaper when a headline, "SHOCKING ACCIDENT ON THE RAILWAY," catches his eye and attention. An unidentified man was found leaning out of one of the windows of an express, on the London and Mid-Northern Railway, who had a wound on the back of his head and an ear torn off. So the authorities assume the man was looking out of the window and struck his head against one of several bridges over the line, but Hazell would like to know more about the incident. Between stretches and dumbbell exercises, Thorpe Hazell becomes Thorpedyke Hazell and follows a trail of physical evidence right to the murderer's doorstep. As noted before, these are early, pre-Golden Age mysteries that reads like a blueprint of what's coming, but often lacked fair play. So Hazell is as much as an oracle as an detective. Still a fun story.

Interestingly, Whitechurch's "The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern" appears to have been the blueprint for another impossible crime story from the same decade. This story sounded so familiar, I started looking over the "Train Mysteries" tag and came across "The Unseen Hand" by M. McDonnell Bodkin from The Quests of Paul Beck (1908) and anthologized in Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016). "The Unseen Hand" was published in the December, 1907, issue of The Royal Magazine. So assume Bodkin had been aware of Whitechurch's story and tried to improve on it, because it doesn't seem like a blatant copy/paste job.

"The Affair of the Corridor Express," first published in the September, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine, is an interesting one. A distressed Mr. F.W. Wingrave, a master at Shillington School, comes to Thorpe Hazell asking him to help find a 10-year-old school boy, Horace Carr-Mathers, who's the son of a millionaire and impossibly vanished from a moving train – vanished right under the nose of the school masters! So the London express was thoroughly searched, every compartment, luggage rack and passenger, but Horace was nowhere to be found. Hazell can see "a distinct plot" in Wingrave's account and accepts the case. I think this is the first story with a plot that has aged surprisingly well. Not only does it indulge in some clueing and foreshadowing, but the visual image of how Horace vanished from the train makes for a memorable visual image. That poor kid! One of those rare detective stories that manages actually do something with a kidnap plot.

"Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture," originally published in the October, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine under the title "The Car That Vanished" and anthologized in The Realm of the Impossible (2027), is another early highlight of the impossible crime story. A case that "found a prominent place in Thorpe Hazell's notebook" and for good reason. Sir Gilbert Murrell has three paintings on loan to an expedition, but they inexplicable disappear in transit, on a goods train, along with its entire waggon on a non-stop right. And to top it all off, the vanished waggon with the paintings was in the middle of the train! I don't know how feasible the disappearance-trick is or whether it can be pulled-off on a first try, but the idea is ambitious, original and light years ahead of its time when it comes to the impossible crime story. A good and entertaining impossible crime caper.

"How the Bank was Saved," published in the November, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine as "The Frustration of Kinch," begins with admitting "Thorpe Hazell always looked upon the affair of the Birmingham Bank from a distinctly humorous point of view" – "not worth calling a railway mystery or adventure." I agree. This is a mild crime comedy in which Hazell helps a bank thwart a plot to destroy their credibility over a personal grievance. A plot involving a robbery aboard a train, but Hazell has a counter plot. A fun, light, but forgettable, criminal farce.

"The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box," originally published in the December 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine and previously anthologized in Vintage Mystery and Detective Stories (2005). This time, Thorpe Hazell gets to play a cross between Arsène Lupin and James Bond. Hazell is approached by Mostyn Cotterell, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affair, who has an unusual request. How do you steal back stolen document from a German diplomat traveling from London to the Continent by the ordinary boat train? The documents in question being carried in a locked dispatch-box. So, on this case, Hazell is not solving a train heist, but organizing and carrying one out. A daring assignment on paper ("...the most daring case which he ever undertook..."), but, as the ending showed, not half as dangerous or impossible when you have the backing of the British Empire. Still an amusing yarn regardless and not half bad for the time.

"How the Bishop Kept His Appointment," originally appearing in the January, 1906, issue of The Royal Magazine, is a mild, humorous adventure story in which Hazell helps a bishop get to his important speaking engagement after their train derailed. So not much to say about this one except that it has one or two good moments.

"The Adventure of the Pilot Engine," first published in the February, 1906, issue of The Royal Magazine, takes place at "a juncture when European politics were considered by diplomatists to be in a very delicate state" when Count von Neglein arrived in the country – scheduled to have "an interview with the English Prime Minister" ("...in presence of the King"). A small group of spies, headed by a man named Dubourg, plot to prevent this meeting from ever happening and the plot he has hatched makes this the most technically complicated stories in the series. A complicated and fiendish scheme involving a particular stretch of railway with quadruple tracks and switch boxes. There's even a map of that stretch of railway line. Refreshingly, Dubourg admits "there are several weak spots in the plan" and "must trust to luck." Nobody could have planned on a certain railway detective playing deus ex machine to spoil their carefully laid out and executed plot. So not too bad for a vintage spy thriller.

Note for the curious: one of the characters involved in the plot is a Russian spy, named Koravitch, who's probably the same character from Whitechurch's The Adventures of Captain Ivan Koravitch (1925). That could mean Whitechurch could have written the first, or one of the first, crossovers in the detective genre. Something deserving of being footnoted.

"The Stolen Necklace," originally published in the March, 1906, issue of The Royal Magazine, concludes this short-lived series on an underwhelming note. A short story from the late 1800s or early 1900s about stolen or misplaced diamond necklaces, strings of pearls and gold rings tend to feel like filler stories – because rarely something really is clever is done with it. This story is no exception. Hazell helps a woman retrieve a diamond necklace she lost on a train, but turn out to have been stolen. An OK story by itself (and for the time), but forgettable and very weak to end this series on. At least Hazell was satisfied with his ending ("...glad to think that the last of my little investigations of railway mysteries has cleared a good man of suspicion...").

Hold on! There are six more, non-Thorpe Hazell thrilling stories of the railway in this collection beginning with another locked room murder aboard a train.

"The Mystery of the Boat Express," published in the February, 1912, issue of The Royal Magazine, begins with a passenger of the Great Southern Boat Train paying the guard a half-crown to lock his compartment ("...I do not wish to be disturbed"). When the train arrived at its destination, the guard unlocks the compartment and discovers the passenger has been shot through the head. So it appears to be a case of suicide, but the evidence screams murder. How can a man alone inside a locked compartment, on a moving train, have been shot? The solution to that conundrum makes "The Mystery of the Boat Express" another footnote worthy title. I think the locked room aficionados has seen a variation, or two, on this trick before, but this story predates them all by more than twenty years. Other than that, very much a short story of its time.

"How the Express was Saved," originally published August, 1911, issue of The Royal Magazine, runs along similar lines as some of the previous stories. It revolves around a group of disgruntled railway strikers who were told by their employer to hit the road. So they hatch a plot to derail the train, on which their General Manager is traveling, pitching it straight into the river. In my opinion, the best written of Whitechurch's railway thrillers complimented by a beautiful map of the scene where the train is to be derailed.

 

 

I have very little to say about the last four, fairly minor short stories from The Royal Magazine. "A Case of Signalling" (1911) has a maid and her railway worker boyfriend spoil a burglary. "Winning the Race" (1911) is another affair of international intrigue and concerns trying to get one train to arrive before the other. "The Strikers" (1911) is much the same as "How the Express was Saved," but not as good. Finally, "The Ruse That Succeeded" (1911), in which the Russian spy Koravitch has to be smuggled out of Britain. I guess this story comes from The Adventures of Ivan Koravitch.

So, all in all, Whitechurch's Thrilling Stories of the Railway is an interesting, but mixed, collection of short stories. The best of these stories are "The Affair of the Corridor Express," "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture," "The Mystery of the Boat Express" and "How the Express was Saved" followed at some distance by "The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern" and "The Adventure of the Pilot Engine." You have to judge these stories by the standards (or lack of standards) of the pre-Golden Age period when the detective story of the 1930s and '40s slowly started to take its form. That's perhaps the biggest strength of Thrilling Stories of the Railway is showing this transition from one period to the other. Like the best from this period, they read like a blueprint or premonition of the coming Golden Age (e.g. Isabel Ostrander's The Clue in the Air, 1917). Whitechurch's railway mysteries belong to that category with its technical, more ambitious and complicated plots, impossible crimes, diagrams and floor plans. Whitechurch was not the first to include floor plans and diagrams, but they were still far from a staple of the detective genre. So definitely enjoyed this collection and its historical window into the development of the detective story. Recommended not only to vintage crime fans, but fans of vintage fiction in general.