Reconstructive Nostalgia: Q.E.D. vol. 17-18 by Motohiro Katou

"Disaster of a Disastrous Man" is the first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 17 and marks the return of the CEO of Alansoft, Alan Blade, who previously appeared in vol. 13 to force the teenage detective, Sou Touma, to partake in an April Fools' Day Challenge – a potentially life changing challenge with high stakes. If he had lost the challenge, Touma had to renounce his Japanese citizenship and come to America as Blade's employee. Touma won the battle-of-wits handily, but the software giant has been scheming and plotting ever since. And he seems to have hit on a failure-proof plan to ensnare Touma in his corporate empire. 

Alan Blade's birthday is coming up and hatches a plan with his personal secretary, Ellie Francis, to invite "the people who refused an offer in the company" to his summerhouse on a private island. There he will offer each guest a million dollars cash to come and work for Alansoft, which they will likely refuse. So the plan is to make his guests indebted to his company by having Ellie steal the money from their beach huts.

Sou Touma receives an invitation as well as his friend and MIT student, Syd "Loki" Green. Touma and Loki brought along Kana Mizuhara and Eva Scott. The third to receive an invitation used to "a world-famous hacker," Elliott Webb, who was caught by the FBI and put on probation, but the person who helped the FBI catch Webb was a software magnate, Liu Han – a man who was "once called the pioneer of the computer world." Liu Han was one of the founders of "the famous Grape Computer Enterprise," but Alansoft drove the company out of business and reduced the pioneer to managing a small software company as he refused to work for Blade. Han got the fourth and last invitation. So the plan is set in motion as the four suitcases with a million dollars a piece, one by one, begin to disappear from the beach huts, but it appears someone took the suitcases before Ellie could get to them. They searched everywhere, but the money appears to have vanished without a trace from a tiny island with only eight people on it.

This story and its central puzzle would probably provoke a discussion on whether it's a closed-circle situation or a locked room mystery/impossible crime. Katou kind of presented the story as an impossible crime, but it really is only a closed-circle as the suitcases could be hidden in several places that were never considered. They could have been hidden on the roofs of the hut, buried on the beach or sealed in weighted, waterproof bags and submerged into the bay of the crescent-shaped island. So more of how-was-it-done with an interesting, but risky, solution which could have easily misfired by either a rush of irrationality or a spot of honesty. However, the ending will make every plot purist and stickler for fair play crack a smile. All in all, not a bad story.

The second story from this volume, "Black Nightshade," has Inspector Mizuhara acting as a security guard/paparazzi regulator on a film set as personal request from "the giant of Japanese cinema," Director Oosawa Kazumasa. Kana Mizuhara and Sou Touma have backstage access and witness the filming of the scene in which the lead actress, Kurokawa Misa, stabs the male lead, Nangou Haruhiko, but the prop knife with a retractable blade turned out to be very real – killing him practically instantly as she plunged the knife into his body. So who could have swapped the prop knife for a real one and why? Nangou Haruhiko was known as "an extreme womanizer" whose name is attached to many incidents, but Kana (doing the legwork) learns that the mysterious actor was also known as a really nice guy and even his conquests didn't have a bad word to say about him. And then the case takes an unexpected, dramatic turn when the apparent murderer commits suicide. But the keyword there is apparently as it's really a murder presenting both Sou and the reader with a highly original locked room puzzle.

There's a small, high-walled makeshift prop-room with an open ceiling on the studio lot put together with some worn out plywood from the set, which has one door that can be blocked-shut from the inside with a table. The supposed murderer has locked himself inside that windowless prop-room and the thin walls, while very high, can't support the weight of an adult trying to climb over it. Sou Touma is the shortest and lightest person present and has go over the plywood wall to unblock the door. What they find inside is a body with his throat cut and a suicide note. The locked room-trick has a simplistic brilliance to it, but the answer to the rice cooker clue is probably beyond the comprehension of most readers. Still a very clever piece of plotting with a locked room-trick on par with the best impossible crime stories by Edward D. Hoch. Let's not forget about the first murder, which is not too difficult to solve, but the strange motivation and distraction used to swap the knives makes it stand out. An unusual, but effective, detective story and ends the volume on a high note.

The first of two stories from Q.E.D. vol. 18, "Arrival of the Famous Detective(s)," is a case in point of the bizarre, sometimes downright experimental or quirky, but often original, detective stories you can find nowhere else – except in this series. This time, Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are reduced to mere background characters for most of the story. Only appearing at the beginning and end to setup and close the case. A case that followed around the three members of the Sakisaka Private High School Detective Club, Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morita "Mulder" Orisato, who try to be real-life detectives without much success. Even when a case happens in their own club room. Who ate the cheese cake that Queen had left behind in the club room for them to eat after classes were done for the day? They try to come up with explanations, but they are completely inapt as "Holmes" is incredibly bad at drawing deductions and "Mulder" simply wants to blame ghosts. And their investigation only uncovers more mysteries. Such as a ghostly image in one of the mirrors of the school bathroom and even a minor locked room mystery when the statuette of a cat dressed as Sherlock Holmes is knocked over in the locked club room. All of these smaller problems only get resolved when "Queen" notices she always sees Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara around when the incidents happened and decides to question them about it.

A pure, tongue-in-cheek parody with a simple, lightweight plot, but therefore not any less amusing and loved Nagaie's preposterous false-solution to the locked room problem. Suggesting the culprit had hammered out a hole next to the locked door of the club room, locking the door after he was finished and repaired the wall like it was new ("it is but a simple trick"). Another fun bit of trivia is that the opening revealed Sou is as a tone deaf as Conan Edogawa from Case Closed.

The second and last story to close out the volume, "Three Birds," is another perfect example of the series straying not only from the conventions of the shin honkaku-style, anime-and manga detectives, but the traditional detective story in general. I should hated "Three Birds" as it's the complete opposite of what I want to find in my detective fiction, but loved this nostalgia-driven, psychological crime drama.

 

Detective Sasazuka is a colleague of Kana Mizuhara's father, Inspector Mizuhara, who hears on the news the skeleton remains of a man and woman were discovered in the mountains of Y City, T Prefecture, which is his hometown – skeletons were found close to place where he used to play. Sasazuka had a secret tree-hut where he hang out with two childhood friends, but the discovery of the remains coincide with a reunion of the three friends and Sasazuka makes a discovery of his own. There are worrying gaps in his childhood memories like not being able to remember he had an expensive toy pistol, but has it anything to do with the remains of the two people who apparently committed suicide thirteen years ago? The story is interspersed with an illustrated children's story about three bird friends and gold coin who lived at the peak of a tree. This is such weird, but effective story with the ending laying bare some genuine crimes. Or, to be more precise, criminal and moral misdeeds, but not the ones you might expect. Once more, the series produces an atypical, but original, crime/detective story with the problem of Sasazuka's memory having something new to offer (ROT13: gur phycevg gelvat gb genafsre uvf gebhoyrq zrzbevrf ba gb uvz). So never let it be said again I only care about plot and tricks!

On a whole, Q.E.D. vol. 17 and 18 were both splendid with either strong or simply entertaining stories which represented the reader with the best the series has to offer. Surprisingly, "Three Birds" ended up stealing the show, which is not going to do my reputation as the resident locked room fanboy any good, but let the record show I fanboyed over the impossible crime from "Black Nightshade." Anyway, Q.E.D. deserves more appreciation and attention.

The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews

The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) is a tribute to the American detective story, Ellery Queen, which collected a selection of quality pastiches, parodies and a potpourri of short stories paying tribute or poking fun at all things Elleryana – written by a who's who of the traditional detective genre. A smorgasbord of laudatory tributes from such notable short story writers as Jon L. Breen, William Brittain, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges and mystery novelists like Lawrence Block and Pat McGerr. The anthology was apparently successful enough for Wildside Press to commission the editors, Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews, to put together two additional volumes with The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020).

I've not gotten around to The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe with the exception of one short story, Thomas Narcejac's "L'orchideé rouge" ("The Red Orchid," 1947), because it has a lot of excerpts from larger works. And that doesn't really appeal to me. The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen, on the other hand, has been near the top of the pile for nearly two years and the reason why I only just got around to it is my obsession with obscure, rarely collected or anthologized short (impossible crime) stories. 

The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen has a similar structure as The Misadventures of Ellery Queen with anthology being divided in five parts, "Prologue," "Pastiches," "Parodies," "Potpourri" and "Postscript," but the stories from both anthologies compliment each other – continuing and even completing a few short-lived series. For example, it contains the second of two Celery Green stories by Porges and a second case for Pachter's young E.Q. Griffen. So put on your pince-nez, pretend you went to Harvard and jump into the Duesenberg. We're going on a road trip through Ellery's Wonderland.

The collection opens with J. Randolph Cox's "The Adventure of the Logical Successor," originally published in the September 1982 publication of the Baker Street Journal, which serves as the collection's prologue. It's not really a detective story, but tells the story of a retired Sherlock Holmes who has "succeeded in replacing the pursuit of the underworld with the keeping of bees." However, the Great Detective keeps getting visitors who aspire to take on his mantle. There were two Americans, Nick Carter and Craig Kennedy. A Montenegrin of "somewhat corpulent proportions" and "a little Belgian fellow with an enormous ego," but only when a young Ellery Queen comes knocking does Holmes sees a potential and logically successor to his legacy. But only "if he can overcome his affectations" and "tendency to impress people with how correct he is in his deductions." And "if he is fortunate enough to find the right Boswell." So a fun little opening yarn playing on one of my guilty pleasures (crossovers).

The second part with pastiches begins with Maxwell E. Siegel's "Once Upon a Crime," written in 1951 when Siegel "was seventeen and besotted with Ellery Queen," but the story was not published until it appeared in Old-Time Detection #16 (2007). Siegel story's casts Ellery as a middle aged writer who's "running out of ideas for his novels" and his turned to children's books, fairy tales and nursery rhymes for inspiration. But, one evening, his study is burglarized, vandalized and the book-lined walls strewn with flowers. This sets in motion is a string of bizarre, seemingly unrelated incidents without apparent rhyme and reason. Ellery is struggling to find a logical link to tie them all together, which he eventually does. Admittedly, the story is nicely done piece of fanfiction, but, even in the world of EQ, it seems like (ROT13) n ebhaqnobhg jnl gb qryvire n zrffntr.

The next story is actually the first half of Chapter 11 from Marion Mainwaring's Murder in Pastiche (1954), but skipped it as the book is currently awaiting trial on the big pile.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Circle of Ink," originally published in the September/October, 1999, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, resettles the series in modern times and finds Ellery Queen lecturing applied criminology at a university – reflecting on how casual classroom dress had become and the presence of laptop computers. Wherever Ellery goes in the world, or time, there's usually a murder or two waiting just around the corner. And he soon learns that Professor Androvney was shot and killed in his office at the university. A murder linked to four other shootings on the Upper West Side during the past few weeks, which all have two things in common: the victims were shot with .22-caliber target pistol (likely equipped with a silencer) and "a small red circle on the back of each victim's left hand." That's where the commonalities end. So do they have a Son of Sam-type serial killer on their hands? Ellery cautions that serial killers shouldn't be confused with series killers "who kill a certain number of people with some goal in mind." While they're both insane, the series killer's insanity is "twisted into a pattern the killer can see." Find the pattern and you know whodunit. Since this is an EQ story, there's method to the murderer's madness with a decidedly classical touch to the motive. Leave it to Hoch to deliver one of the better and more entertaining detective stories of the collection!

Mă Tiān's "The Japanese Armor Mystery" (2005) was translated from Chinese by Steve Steinbock and is my favorite story from the collection as its plot is firmly rooted in the Japanese shin honkaku school of detective fiction. The story is set in a small, unassuming town, Montreux, where Joseph Marlow retreated to raise his four adopted children in quiet luxury, but, as the old patriarch got old, he also got sicker. And, as the story opens, he's dying of cancer. During a cold, winter night, the family mansion becomes the scene of a bizarre double murder. A noise rouses the household and they find the body of a local troublemaker outside in the snow, but what's weird is that the body is clad in "a suit of samurai armor made completely of wood." He had been shot at close range without any footsteps in the surrounding snow! A second shot is heard and Marlow is discovered dead in his bed. Fortunately, Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter happened to be in the neighborhood to lend the local police a helping hand. What's uncovered in less than 15 pages could have easily supported a novel-length story as it has literary everything. A snowy country house. A murdered patriarch and an impossible crime that form a "two-body problem." Alibis and clues. A somewhat surprising solution that I should have seen coming, but was too busy starring myself blind on a completely wrong pet theory. But loved the story. It reminded me of what you would get if you combined a 1930s Christopher Bush novel with John Dickson Carr-style impossible crime.

The next story is "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" (2009) by Dale C. Andrews, but already read and reviewed the story back in 2020. However, it has to be said that the title of the story ended up outshining most of the plot. You have no idea how brilliant it's until you read the solution. 

"A Change of Scene" by Jane Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is original to this anthology and has Ellery Queen, Nikki Porter and Inspector Queen going to Chicago during the holiday season to do some sight seeing, Christmas shopping and watching the Christmas parade with floats – celebrating both the season and the city's storied history. During the parade, William Nagel was in the crowd with his wife and relatives. One minute he was right there beside his wife and the next moment he was gone. Did he disappear voluntarily or did his union job get him into trouble with the mob? Either way, Nikki has "a desire to beat Ellery to a case's solution" and begins to investigate on her own. A pleasant, lightweight detective story with a quasi-impossible problem that made good use of its historical setting.

Arthur Porges' "The Indian Diamond Mystery" first appeared in the June, 1965, issue of EQMM and is reprinted here for the first time to open the volume's parody section. So who better to do the honors than Celery Green. This is almost a direct sequel to the previous Celery Green tale, "The English Village Mystery," in which Inspector Dewe East "scored a minor triumph" in titular village with assistance of the well-known American detective, Celery Green. Not before "almost the entire population had been exterminated." Inspector East has an opportunity to redeem himself when a tip puts him on the trail of a well-known, international jewel thief, Fanfaron Mironton, who "stole the hundred-thousand-guinea Indian diamond." Mironton is trapped inside a hotel, tries to shoot himself out of a tight corner and is eventually arrested, but "there was no trace of the Indian Diamond." Luckily, Celery Green is still in England and usually needs no more than a few hours to solve a crime. And he quickly figures out how the diamond could have vanished from a closely guarded hotel. The solution is in principle not impossible, but Porges made it extremely silly.

The second parody is Jon L. Breen's "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (1969), but also reviewed that story back in 2019. So moving on to the next EQ spoof. 

"The Little Sister in Crime" by Theodore B. Hertel, Jr. originally appeared in a chapbook that was put together for the 1997 Bouchercon with Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949) as a kind of unifying theme. All of the stories had to be titled "The Little Sister in Crime" and had to be set a fictional Bouchercon between 1920 and 1941 with a number of obligatory references and scenes that had to be included. So the story gave Ellery a little sister, Hillary Queen, who accompanied her father and brother to Bouchercon where they meet all the famous detectives like Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason – most of whom either employ ghost writers to get their names out or trying to find one. Ellery Queen hires two cousins in New York to put together stories based on his cases and pays them "a pittance to do so." One of the attendees is a depressed Barnaby Ross who hasn't much work since Drury Lane's Last Case (1933) was published. But was it the reason why he committed suicide in his hotel room? And was the message scrawled in blood a dying message or a suicide note? There's a "Challenge to the Reader," but the solution couldn't have been more telegraphed if the story had been stuck in an anthology entitled The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen. Still a fun little story.

Jon L. Breen and Josh Pachter's "The German Cologne Mystery" had a long road to publication and began sometime during the 1970s as solo-effort by Pachter to write an EQ parody, which was originally titled "The Cologne Cologne Mystery." But the story was turned down by EQMM. Years later, Breen got to tighten up the story and was published in the September/October, 2005, issue of EQMM thirty years after it was originally conceived. The celebrated mystery writer and amateur detective, Celery Breen, is playing cards in a room of the Hotel Madrid when someone gets himself killed down the hall. Carlos Nacionale is lying in a pool of blood and clutching a pair of ordinary dice between his right thumb and forefinger, but Celery ensures his father, Inspector Wretched Breen, the victim had been poisoned and the slit throat was simply a shaving accident as all the classic symptoms of poisoning are there – no heartbeat, no pulse, no nothing ("Q.E.D."). Celery believes the dying message will reveal the source of the poison, but Inspector Breen draws a different conclusion. A very fun take on both the fallible detective and the exasperating sleuth who can't get to the point.

Rand B. Lee is the son of one half of the EQ writing team, Manfred B. Lee, whose "The Polish Chicken Mystery' is published here for the first time and has three famous detectives answering that age-old question. Why did the chicken cross the road? I didn't care much for Miss Marple's solution, but liked the one Sherlock Holmes came up with and Ellery Queen had the best answer. Although he had more to work with it. A fun short-short.

One of the highlights of the previous anthology was Josh Pachter's "E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name" (1968), which he wrote when he was sixteen and concerns the eleven children of a policeman all named after famous detective characters. “E.Q. Griffen's Second Case” is the sequel and first appeared in the May, 1970, issue of EQMM and has E.Q. assisting his father with the murder of a hippie, poet and children's author. Garrett Conway was stabbed while walking down the street, but Conway, "long familiar with the doings of children," scrawled a dying message on the concrete. A simple "1 2 3." The answer to the problem is not bad and a child would likely catch on to the meaning of the dying message faster than an adult, but the Author's Note explained that readers at the time complained about the dying clue. There's a technical flaw in it and a few simple changes would have improved the story, but Pachter decided to leave it as he originally wrote it. I agree and respect that. This story and premise of the whole series is nothing to be ashamed off considering how old he was when he wrote it. I still want that Gideon Fell Griffen locked room story!

Arthur Vidro's "The Mistake on the Cover of EQMM #1" (2018) was first published on the EQMM website and is more of a snacksized puzzle than a story with the story title summing up the puzzle. However, this short-short puzzle is loaded with Easter eggs and there's a lengthy Editor's Note ("Easter in the Autumn") pointing them all out. 

"The Pink Pig Mystery" by Jeffrey Marks is original to this anthology and visits an often overlooked patch of the Elleryverse, the Ellery Queen Jr. series. Between 1942 and 1966, eleven juvenile mystery novels were published with nine starring a young Djuna and his Scottish terrier, Champ. Marks returned took a stiff dose of childhood nostalgia and returned to the series with a story set during the Second World War. There were talks in Manhattan "about bomber strikes like the ones in London" or "the kamikaze attacks on Pearl Harbor." Ellery packed up Djuna and Champ to the country side, but there they become involved (together with two other kids) in the mystery of a pristine pink pig in a muddy pigsty. Very much a children's mystery with a simple, straightforward plot, but perfectly replicated those vintage juvenile mysteries and the EQJR series.

The collection ends with a postscript from the real "Ellery Queen," Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, which is an anecdote illustrating "the authors' recognition (and humility) that their deductive powers do not match those of their fictional detective." The piece is fittingly titles "The Misadventures of Ellery Queen" and made perfect ending to the collection. 

So, on a whole, my opinion of The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen is pretty much the same as The Misadventures of Ellery Queen. Not every story is a winner or will stick in your mind, but not a single truly bad story or even one I just disliked. An impressive accomplishment for any short story collection, but especially impressive when it's an anthology of pastiches, parodies and homages written by a bunch of unapologetic fanboys and fangirls – which makes it even more impressive I liked both anthologies. As some of you regulars know, I'm not very big fan of pastiches in general and stand with Rex Stout that authors should “roll their own,” but never had much of problem with EQ pastiches. Probably because the series (sort of) allows for all these alternative universes to exist. Hopefully, a third anthology is somewhere in the future as their should be more than enough material left. There's Donald A. Yates' "The Wounded Tyrolean" (c. 1955), Rintaro Norizuki's "Midori no tobira wa kiken" ("The Lure of the Green Door," 1991), Dale C. Andrews' "Four Words" (2020) and the uncollected radio scripts. Highly recommended to every EQ fan!

A note for the curious: I don't know if there anymore Misadventure anthologies in the work, but there's American detective character with the name recognition and more than enough material associated with him to cobble together The Misadventures of Philo Vance.

The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka (1966) by Josef Skvorecky

Josef Skvorecky was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher, born in former Czechoslovakia, who became an internationally acclaimed author of works like Bassaxofon (The Bass Saxophone, 1967) and Příběh inženýra lidských duší (The Engineer of Human Souls, 1977), but he was also a pillar of support to Czech dissident writers – printing and smuggling their books into the country in defiance of Communist censorship. When he was not thumbing his nose at the totalitarian regime lording over his home country, Skvorecky was "an avid reader of Ellery Queen, R. Austin Freeman, John Dickson Carr, et al."

Skvorecky love of mysteries found expression in a series of detective stories about a melancholic, sad-eyed Czech policeman, Lieutenant Josef Boruvka, who appeared in three short story collections and a novel. The series has been described as "mischievous parodies" of the traditional detective story with Hříchy pro pátera Knoxe (Sins for Father Knox, 1973), a collection with each story breaking one of Father Knox's "Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929), standing as the most well-known representative of that reputation. However, the plots all hinge on a unifying gimmick, like Agatha Christie's The Labours of Hercules (1947), which didn't allow him to really showcase his abilities as a plotter. All he had to do was present a solution or situation that violated one of Knox's ten rules.

There is, however, one of the three collections in the series that has been on my wishlist for ages. Smutek poručíka Borůvky (The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka, 1966) introduced Lieutenant Boruvka in twelve short stories that are either tongue-in-cheek or serious renditions of the classic detective stories of yore, but loaded with bizarre clues, strange crimes and a number of locked room mysteries. Robert Adey listed only three of the stories in Locked Room Murders (1991), but there are several more to be found here. So let's get started! 

"The Supernatural Powers of Lieutenant Boruvka" opens the collection and explains why Constable First Class Sintak is "firmly convinced that Lieutenant Boruvka wielded powers that were not entirely in keeping with normal human abilities," like a wizard, which he irrevocably proved to Sintak in the Semerak case – a case officially handled by Boruvka's young sergeant. Sergeant Malek meets with his superior at the scene of the crime, an attic where an elderly woman was hanging by her neck from a rope tied to a ceiling beam, but enthusiastic sergeant knew it was murder and the whole story is basically a conversation between the two. A conversation that quickly begins to poke fun at the fictional detective who love being complicated for the sake of being complicated. Malek's has complicated timetables, collected a piece from a building as evidence and ordered divers, backed by a helicopter, to go over a pond to look for a discarded bike. Meanwhile, Boruvka tries to get in a word edgewise ("certainly, but..." "it's just that...") and it takes him a while before he can point out something really obvious in the attic. Something proving without a doubt that the old woman had been murdered. 

This story has a very thin plot, which hinges on the obvious, but it was a genuinely amusing take on the exasperating, fictional detectives and Malek gave his amateur counterparts a run for their money. But what made the simplistic solution work is that both detectives were correct. Only difference is that Malek took the long way round and Boruvka a short cut. A great introduction to the lieutenant and his sergeant!

Unfortunately, the second story, "That Sax Solo," is the weakest and my least favorite story from the collection. The lead singer of a Jazz band is murdered at a hotel and Boruvka has to use a musical clue to break down a musical alibi, but the clue was used in the worst possible way to end the story. 

"The Scientific Method" is the third story and one of the stories in the collection that was overlooked by Adey in Locked Room Murders. This is also the first theatrical mystery of the collection and brings Lieutenant Boruvka to the Odeon Theatre where a ballet dancer has been killed, a bullet fired "straight into the nape of her neck," while she was taking a shower, but "a body search of all the ladies" was conducted before they left the showers – no weapon was recovered. Malek remarks they have "a miraculous marksman" on their hands. However, the trick has been done before and the idea behind it can be considered as one of the earliest innovations in impossible crime plotting. But the solution is the first one to show Skvorecky's fascination as a plotter with trajectories and movement along horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. You'll find this approach in his more trickier and complicated stories. 

"Death on Needlepoint" is potential anthology material and reminiscent of the mountaineering, open-air locked room mysteries by Glyn Carr. The story begins with three mountaineers, Patera, Bartos and Jirina, climbing the rocky face of Needlepoint linked by only a rope with a sixty-foot precipice yawning beneath them. Patera is the first one to make it over the overhang of the summit, but then the rope slackens and when Bartos completes his harrowing ascent to the top, he makes a terrifying discovery. Patera sat, "strangely contorted," on the bare summit of the rock with his face between his knees and "the carved handle of a bowie-knife protruding from his back." Bartos recognized his own knife which he assumed was back at the camp in his tent. When the police arrives, Boruvka discovers Patera and Bartos were rivals who tried to win Jirina's affection. But how was the murder carried out?

Boruvka has a crime scene "which the murderer couldn't have reached and from which he couldn't have escaped," but the place is not half as inaccessible as it appears on first sight. There are several very well done false-solutions with the one accusing the third climber, Jirina, standing out as particular ingenious, but the actual solution is no slouch either. Only thing lacking was a diagram. It would have made the tricky solution so much clearer. Unquestionably, one of the collection's stronger stories. 

"Whose Deduction?" is a minor, forgettable story which I already have trouble remembering. The story is part of a character-arc that runs through the collection and concerns a young policewoman, Eva, who was introduced in the third story and Boruvka is beginning to fall in love with her. However, he's a married man with a teenage daughter and an unimpeachable reputation as an inspector, which will cause some serious trouble in later stories. So the modern trope of the troubled policeman rears its ugly head here, but there's kind of a payoff in the stories ahead. This story is not one of my favorites, however, it perfectly demonstrates why I prefer plot over character.

The next story is "The Case of the Horizontal Trajectory," but have previously discussed it in my review of John Pugmire and Brian Skupin's monumental anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017). It's one of the standout stories of the collection and a solid impossible crime story in the tradition of the scientific detective stories by Arthur Porges. 

"A Tried and Proven Method" breaks with the routine of previous stories as Boruvka promised his 17-year-old daughter, Zuzana, to spend a holiday together in Italy ("the home of her mother's family") under the condition her school report turned out well, which she interpreted as not failing her classes – collecting an abundance of Cs, Ds and two As. Boruvka gave in and took Zuzana on her first trip abroad, but the holiday slowly turned disastrous. They run out of gas in the mountains and have to climb on foot to the hotel, but they come across two very unusual sights in their track to the top. Firstly, Zuzana notices that the pale, gold sand on a plateau sixty feet below is disturbed "as though a struggle had taken place there," but no tracks led to the spot. The sand all around was "absolutely smooth." Secondly, they come across a dead woman near the stony path. Boruvka knows its murder, but, as a Red policeman from a communist country, he's regarded with suspicion and mocked to his face ("in your country everyone suspicious"). Besides, the local police knows it must have been suicide. Not murder. 

The gravely ill victim was not bludgeoned to death, but had fallen from a terrific height and likely threw herself out of a cable cart, which she had repeatedly threaten to do. She was seen boarding the cable cart alone and it arrived at the station empty with an open door. Nobody could have gotten to her. Boruvka is still convinced it was murder and comes up with an interesting solution befitting such an unusual, bizarrely staged impossible murder. A solution treading dangerously close to the territory of second-rate pulp trickery, but Skvorecky handled and presented the trick very convincingly. 

"Falling Light" is a sequel, of sorts, to "A Tried and Proven Method" in which Boruvka and Zuzana spend a few days of their Italian holiday as guests of Signor Greffi. A relative of the victim from the previous story and out of gratitude for capturing her murderer, he invited father and daughter to his Venetian residence. Boruvka finds himself in a "linguistic isolation" among the English and Italian speaking guests, which is a situation that's hardly improved by the murder of their host. This story is a quasi-locked room mystery masquerading as a closed-circle whodunit, but this time the solution is unmistakably pulpy in nature. Something you would expect from John Russell Fearn or Gerald Verner. Nonetheless, I can appreciate a good, pulp-style impossible crime and liked the clue of the ugly doll. 

"Aristotelian Logic" begins with the murder of a model during a fashion show, stabbed to death in her dressing room cubicle, but the murder serves as vehicle for an argument between Boruvka and "the policewoman," Eva. Boruvka is annoyed at his infatuation with Eva and becomes quite unpleasant to her over the course of the investigation, which results in him chiding her that "the homicide squad cannot be guided by feminine logic" and "she had no idea what Aristotelian logic was." However, while Eva's view of the case "could hardly be termed strictly Aristotelian logic," she beats Boruvka to the solution. Not the strongest of the stories collected here, but an interesting, well done variation on that rarely used trope of the rival detectives. 

"The End of an Old Tom-Cat" has better storytelling and imagery than plotting beginning on the night Boruvka is kept awake by a whole quartet of cats, wailing a concert on the roof of his house, while an old tomcat lay dying at the other end of the city – foreshadowing next morning's murder case. Boruvka is summoned to the home of a well-known Public Prosecutor, Paul Hynais, who died in his bed that night with all the tale-tell signs of poisoning. Hynais turns out to have been somewhat of roguish tomcat, in human guise, who accepted favors from women to go light on the men in their lives in the courtroom. This angle brings back a character from an earlier story, but, on a whole, the story surrounding the murder was more interesting than the murder itself. Boruvka actually finds part of the solution in Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery (1929).

For some reason, "The End of an Old Tom-Cat" strongly reminded me of the Inspector Ghote novels, like Inspector Ghote's Good Crusade (1966), by H.R.F. Keating. 

"His Easiest Case" is shortest story of the bunch with an incredibly misleading title, because it's kind of brilliant, plot-wise, but how the story is structured and told makes it one of the standouts of The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka. The policewoman who has been occupying Boruvka's thoughts is attacked with meat chopper in a murderous assault and left critically injured, but Sergeant Malek already has a suspect and an indisputable piece of evidence. A thumbprint with "a very clear and distinctive scar." A print that belongs to Boruvka and it was the only print found in the apartment that has been professionally wiped clean. So did he actually took a swing with a meat chopper? Only way out is to find an explanation how the fingerprint could have ended up there and that explanation truly is an inspired piece of plotting. An idea that deserved a novel-length treatment, but the who-and why had equally fascinating solutions. Something you can only, sort of, anticipate if you've paying close attention to one of the previous stories. The same applies to the last story. 

“Crime in a Girls' High School” is best described as an anti-detective story and actually a prologue that was put to better use as an effective closing-act. Boruvka tells Eva how he had to abandon his first profession as a gym teacher, which happened nearly twenty years ago in the wake of a theft. A former private detective was called in, Jaroslav V. Klima, who acts as a hotblooded Hercule Poirot as he follows all the clues to uncover a very different kind of problem. The ending explains to Eva why "deep, infinite sadness" was "ineradicably engraved on the lieutenant's face." There were clues to what's behind his melancholy in previous stories that fitted the clues Klima was tracking down. So, while a little unorthodox, the story is a fitting end to an unusual collection of detective stories solved by a reassuringly human detective.

So, on a whole, The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka follows to the tradition of short story collections by being a little uneven in quality with a few duds and focus shifting from plot to character or storytelling, which resulted in some tightly-plotted locked room mysteries and some more loosely-told character-arcs – although the clueing was a little murky at times. However, the overall result succeeded in venturing off the beaten path while remaining (mostly) true to the fundamentals of the traditional detective story. For example, the last two stories. Skvorecky's The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka is a noteworthy and original contribution to the genre during a period when these type of detective stories were considered old-fashioned or even obsolete. Skvorecky demonstrated early on that you can have a fusion of styles complementing both the classical and modernist schools.

The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) by Wallace Irwin

Wallace Irwin was an American journalist, satirist and writer whose work covered everything from humorous sketches, political satire and light verse to short stories and novels. Irwin began his literary career as a satirist with a laugh when he and his older brother, Will, were expelled from Stanford University in Palo Alta, California, because they lampooned their professors in campus publications – "an unusual achievement" for "which the Irwins should be fondly remembered." But readers of detective fiction have another reason to remember him fondly. 

When it was first published, The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) was perhaps seen as nothing more than an amusing curiosity, but, over the passing decades, it has become more than a mere genre curio. A mystery novel that, in some ways, was ahead of its time.

First and foremost, The Julius Caesar Murder Case stands as one of the earliest examples of the now popular historical mystery novel. John Dickson Carr's The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936), Victor Luhrs' The Longbow Murder (1941), Agatha Christie's Death Comes as the End (1944) and Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee-series were still in the future. However, it's not a historically accurate mystery and can best be described as an alt-history retelling of Caesar's murder with an explanation why historians got it wrong. More importantly, the book predates Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) as a self-aware parody ("had he been born two thousand years later he would have brought out his cigarette lighter") that happens to be a good detective story in its own right. But that's not all!

Robert Adey spotlighted The Julius Caesar Murder Case in his introduction to Locked Room Murders (1991), under "More Golden Age Contributors," as a very odd, but incredibly fun, historical mystery with "the impossible crime, a stabbing by invisible agency, is well handled" – solved by, "in a manner of speaking," the first recorded journalist-detective. The Julius Caesar Murder Case was first published by the D. Appleton—Century Company and remained out-of-print until Ramble House printed a new edition in 2007 with an introduction by Richard A. Lupoff. The introduction points out that the novel is perhaps the very first of so-called "toga mysteries," but I think it might be the only piece of “papyrus pulp” ever written. I'll explain in a minute. First let's get to the story at hand!

Q. Bulbus Apex is the owner and city editor of "the world's first experiment in daily journalism," Evening Tiber, whose star reporter and well-known sports columnist is Publius Manlius "Mannie" Scribo. The best reporter in ancient Rome who goes by the motto, "it's my business to meddle." And meddle he does!

Mannie's journalistic interest is drawn to the seemingly insignificant murder of the General Producer of Pompey's Theater, Q. Bulbus Comma, who lived way out on Hesperides Avenue in a small bungalorium. There he was found, on his front porch, with his throat cut. A case of apparent little importance in a time and place where Gladiatorial killings was a public pastime and the use of a bare fist instead of "a boxing glove stuffed with nails" considered unsportsmanlike. And, generally, a murder rate that could reach "magnificent proportions." Mannie got a lead on the story as the victim was one of the Big Fella's (Julius Caesar) pet poodles. So he puts his personally designed .xxxii dagger in the special breast pocket of his toga and hops on a litter across town. Following him along, on foot, is his slave and strong-arm man, Smith, whom Mannie rechristened Smithicus. A Briton who speaks and acts with all the reserve of a 1930s English butler. They make a magnificent pair and their interactions are among the highlights of the story. What a shame this is their only appearance.

So they begin to poke around the crime scene and city in a time, 44 BC, when "the alliance between the Police Department and the underworld was so well recognized" that "only by his uniform could the hunter be distinguished from the hunted." Something was obviously going on in Rome as the simple minded Sergeant Kellius, of the Homicide Squad, is promoted to Chief of Police, Mark Anthony is showing interest in the Evening Tiber and tries to bribe Mannie's boss with a shipload of papyrus – while rumors buzz along Rome's whispering gallery that "a giant plot was on the fire." Two things that run through the case is the motto Sic Semper Tyrannis (so always with tyrants) and that ever-present warning that has echoed throughout history, "beware the Ides of March!" But political games in ancient Rome can be dangerous. Mannie finds himself backed into a corner on more than one occasion and falls in love with the cherchez la femme ("as the Gauls would have said") of the story.

Yes, if you strip away the togas, marble and historical characters, The Julius Caesar Murder Case resembles a fairly routine, 1930s pulp-style detective story, but Irwin did such a fantastic job in dressing up the plot that I didn't notice it until halfway through the story. He really did a lot with surprisingly little, particularly during the first-half, but the last half gave the plot some much needed weight and depth with an impossible murder, ghostly visitations and a well handles solution.

Mannie witnessed with his own eyes Julius Ceasar walking quite alone, "fully a dozen feet beyond the reach of any assassin's arm," when a knife, "coming out of nowhere," pierced the Dictator through the back – stood "quivering in his bleeding and lifeless body." Not exactly the story that was passed down the ages, but that historical account was printed that very day in the first papyrus edition of the Evening Tiber. So now "contemporary historians would consult the Evening Tiber's files and get the queer, fanciful version" while "future historians would copy the bunk, and improve on it." This made Mannie determined to get to the bottom of the case and he goes down in society quite a bit before he comes back on top with the correct solution.

Solution to the impossible stabbing is, to be fair, not one of the greatest and basically combines two carny tricks not uncommon to the type of pulp-style locked room mysteries Irwin was parodying, but the who-and why were very well handled. Particularly who stabbed Caesar and why and how the two murders were linked together. This weightier ending is one of the many reasons why the story gets away with its shortcomings. 

The Julius Caesar Murder Case really is a second-string mystery that pretends to be first-rate historical detective novel and gets away with it, because it's such a tremendously fun story to read with the two main characters who deserved to be more than mere one-shot detectives. Just to give you an idea how firmly Irwin had his tongue planted in his cheek, he "affectionately dedicated" the book to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler with "the author's feeling that in distance there is security." But don't expect a historical detective comedy a la Blackadder or Monty Python. Irwin was an American and The Julius Caesar Murder Case reminded me of Colin Quinn's one-man show Long Story Short, but told as a typically 1930s, American pulp detective story that refuses to take itself (or anyone else) too seriously. So why is it still so obscure and little-known around these parts? 

Notes for the curious: The Julius Caesar Murder Case was reviewed by Patrick in 2013 and JJ in 2019, which you can read here and here.

The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) by Peter Shaffer

Anthony and Peter Shaffer were twin brothers, celebrated playwrights, screenwriters and novelists with three revered, frustratingly rare and highly sought after detective novels to their name that have gained an almost mythical reputation over the decades – ensuring a small circulation among collectors. Two of the three novels have vainly topped the wishlists of impossible crime fans for nearly seven decades.

During those seven decades, The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951) and Withered Murder (1955) enchanted mystery readers with their oracular reputation of unheralded, long-lost classics. Regrettably, the Shaffers "resisted numerous offers to republish them" and the hefty, triple-digit price tags (plus shipping) on the limited number of secondhand copies kept them elusive collector's items. And when a copy turns up, it's usually gone within a blink of an eye.

So you can imagine how much locked room readers rejoiced when the British Library announced they were reissuing The Woman in the Wardrobe!

The Woman in the Wardrobe not only lived up to its near-mythical reputation, but is guaranteed to win this year's Reprint of the Year Award. A comedic take on the classic detective story that at first seemed to take the lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek approach of Leo Bruce, R.T. Campbell and Edmund Crispin, but the writing, characterization and even the plotting have a biting, sardonic sense of humor – a tone you would expect from a mean-spirited deconstruction rather than an homage. But it worked! And the ending delivered "a brilliant new solution" to the locked room problem.

Mr. Verity is an unflattering, acerbic parody of the Great Detective and very likely modeled on John Dickson Carr's famous detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale.

Verity is "an immense man" with startling brilliant eyes, a chestnut Van Dyke and a winter cloak who has been "a noted figure in the world of detection" and enjoys the respect of the Yard, but he was "almost as much respected as disliked." He was actually very much disliked, because he was so often right and solved murders, "between tea and supper," with "a mixed display of condescension and incivility" towards the regular police – who were dead and spent with fatigue. A loud, highly opinionated man with questionable ethics (having "more archaeological thefts to his credit than the governing body of any museum in Europe") and prone to giving elaborate lunchtime lectures who annoying made himself indispensable by always being right. And he knows it! Mr. Verity is also abnormally curious and when he sees a man climbing furtively out of a first-floor window, of the Charter Hotel, he decides to ask the manager, Miss Framer, whether it's hotel custom to use windows as an exit.

They're interrupted by one of the guests, Mr. Paxton, flying down the stairs screaming blue murder. Paxton found the body of another hotel guest, Mr. Maxwell, but when they go up to investigate, they discover that the door of Maxwell's room was now locked on the inside. And at that same moment, a police constable enters the hotel with yet another guest, Mr. Cunningham, who caught coming out of one of the first-floor windows.

So the door is forced open and discovered a ransacked, blood-soaked room with Maxwell's body laying among the debris on the floor and the hotel waitress, Alice Burton, tied up in the wardrobe. A wonderfully intricate, neatly posed locked room problem that was succinctly summarized as follow:

"A murder is committed in a room. Two men are immediate suspects. Suspect A enters by the window and leaves by the door. Suspect B enters by the door and leaves by the window. Suspect A can lock the window but not the door. Suspect B can lock the door but not the window. Neither can lock both—yet both are locked: and from the inside. And all the while a body, which medical evidence proves could not have done the locking itself before it expired, leaks blood over the carpet of an empty room."

Detective Inspector Rambler enters the fray and perhaps the only man who stands on equal footing with the Great Detective. Only difference between them is that Verity has a temper and a beard, while Rambler is a professional who could afford neither, but Verity "respected the tamed logic in Rambler" and "Rambler the explosive vision in Verity" – together they pour over this pretty puzzle. They review possibility, suggest solutions and pry clues from the various suspects and witnesses, which include the amusing character of Richard Tudor. A pretender to the throne of England who claims to be a direct descendant of King Edward the Sixth, son of King Henry the Eighth, who died unmarried at the age of fifteen.

There's not much else that can be said about the plot, or investigation, because The Woman in the Wardrobe is a very short, tautly written story with the page-count padded out with some nice sketches of the main characters by Nicolas Bentley (son of E.C. Bentley). So it really had no right to be anything more than a comedic curiosity, but the explanation to the locked room, in combination with the identity to the murderer, turned it into an unmitigated classic. A superb and truly original locked room mystery!

The Woman in the Wardrobe is the novel Ulf Durling tried to write with Gammel ost (Hard Cheese, 1971), which could have worked had Durling not occupied himself with gutting the plot of everything that made it a detective story. Shaffer succeeded in both sardonically poking fun at the genre and doing a bit of deconstruction on the side without comprising the essence of a detective story. Chuck in a startling original solution and you have something special and memorable that cemented a top spot on my list of favorite locked room mysteries. Highly recommended!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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