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 Red Death Murders (2022) by Jim Noy

February 2022 was one for the history books, storms in Europe, traffic jams in Canada and Russians in the Ukraine, which our very own Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, deemed to be the perfect time to release his debut novel, The Red Death Murders (2022) – re-imagining Edgar Allan Poe's plague tale "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842) as a detective story. A densely plotted detective novel packed from start to finish with grisly, seemingly impossible crimes in an isolated castle during a deadly plague. Since Jim is a notoriously difficult person (always disagreeing with my nuggets of wisdom), he made sure the book is difficult and tricky to review. But I'm going to give it the good old college try. 

The Red Death Murders takes place during the first year of a hideous, deadly pestilence, known as the Red Death, "attacking any living thing within reach" and "granted at most an hour in which to suffer before expiring." The pestilence spread through blood contact and the symptoms were unmistakable, which should have easily tamed the disease. But then animals got infected. And "rats were living for up to ten days with the Red Death upon them." So the Red Death became an uncontrollable epidemic.

Prince Prospero summoned hundreds of powerful men and women to his castle, "many were convinced that he had a plan to push back the tide of the Red Death," but the Prince's only intention was to wait out the plague in a sealed environment where he hosted "exclusive and lavish parties" – which is why people had been "drifting away from the castle since that first day." The Red Death Murders begins when the laughter, partying and revelry has died down and only nine people remain at the castle. However, I will only focus on the detectives of the story as Jim wrote in a blog-post, "Give 'Em Enough Tropes – Genre Conventions in Writing The Red Death Murders," he has hates character lists and wishes "it would vanish from the face of the Earth." This is his novel. And my excuse to focus solely on the plot.

The main character of the story really the 13-year-old servant boy, Thomas, who was raised by Sir William Collingwood and his brother, Sir Marcus Collingwood. They take it upon themselves to bring clarity to the series of murky, apparently impossible and inexplicable crimes.

First of these impossibilities happened before the story's opening. Prince Prospero was attacked in his bedroom by someone wearing the costume of the Red Death, a scarlet colored, long-sleeved robe with a hood and the bleached skull of a horse as a mask, who was chased out of the Prince's bedroom. Somehow, the robed figure vanished in front of his pursuers as if by magic! After the attack on the Prince and ensuing confusion, they notice Sir Oswin Bassingham is missing. So a search begins of the castle and the story really begins on page one with Thomas discovering a streak of blood coming from underneath the door of a makeshift privy.

There were no servants left (besides Thomas) to empty out the toilet stands of the guests. So a bay window, hanging over the moat, was turned into a toilet with two wooden screens and a door in the middle fastened shut from the inside with a piece of twine – tightly wrapped around two nails. This may sound like a ramshackle locked room mystery, but the structure proves itself to be surprisingly sturdy as the scene of an impossible murder. Sir William believes Sir Oswin didn't slit his own wrists, but how did the murderer get out of the privy? Slowly, but surely, both their numbers and supply begin to dwindle with two additional impossibilities that need a rational explanation. One being a clever variation on the miraculous poisoning in which the victim drank from a cup that was harmless to others and another murder-disguised-as-suicide in a locked room. There also the murder of someone who was touched by the Red Death and a gruesome incident that could have been plucked from the pages of a Japanese shin honkaku mystery. Say what you want, but Jim knows what his costumers want! 

The Red Death Murders is very a mystery reader's detective novel and a huge part of the enjoyment came from the three detectives meticulously picking apart the problems (sometimes even the crime scenes) in order to find some much needed answers. They form theories, test them and you never quite sure which one is going to stand or fall, but, more impressively, is how all the theorizing and testing was building towards a cerebral firework display of multiple, false-solutions. Someone has obviously been reading Anthony Berkeley and Christianna Brand! Just as important as their role as detectives in the story, is the genuine affection between Thomas and his two warden. A flicker of light in their plague ravaged surroundings with a murderer on the loose and provided a human element to what otherwise would have been a grim and nightmarish detective fantasy. But what about the finer plot-details, you ask? There are some technical and historical details to nitpick about.

Jim wrote in the previously mentioned blog-post that he's "pretty sure two of those impossibilities have never been devised before." As the resident locked room fanboy, I can confirm Jim very likely came up with two brand new solutions to the locked room/impossible crime, but the trick with the fastened privy sorely needed a diagram. I had to reread certain parts to see if I correctly understood the trick and still not entirely sure if it would actually work (every time), which is where a diagram could have brought some clarity. On the other hand, the cheeky solution to the impossible poisoning had no ambiguity to it and loved how the method tied to other incidents throughout the story. Not to mention the excellent clueing and misdirection. A truly inspired piece of plotting! There are just two details about the presentation that irked me a little. Firstly, Jim has (ROT13/SPOILER) n irel cevfgvar vzntr bs whqvpvny unatvatf orsber gur zvq-gb yngr 1800f jura rkcrevzragf ortna jvgu gur ybat qebc gb oernx gur arpx bs gur pbaqrzarq. Qhevat gur praghevrf orsber gurfr ersbezf, gur qrngu cranygl jnf n chavfuzrag gb or raqherq naq nggenpgrq pebjqf bs fvtugfrref jub pnzr gb frr gur pbaqrzarq qnapvat ng gur raq bs n ebcr. Wvz qrfpevorq n unatvat Gubznf nggraqrq nf n 5-lrne-byq (“gur obql bs gur pbaqrzarq zna qebccvat guebhtu gur ungpu, gur arpx pyrnayl oebxra, naq gur ybbfr fgvyyarff bs gur fhfcraqrq sbez frrzvat fhqqrayl avtugznevfu va ubj dhvpxyl gur yvsr unq fvzcyl inavfurq sebz vg”) jbhyq unir erfhygrq va n evbg, orpnhfr n pebjq sebz guvf crevbq jbhyq srry gurl jrer eboorq bhg bs n tbbq fubj. Vs V erzrzore pbeerpgyl, gur svefg pebjq gung nggraqrq n unatvat jvgu gur ybat qebc jrag njnl irel qvfnccbvagrq. Secondly, how the murder was staged and presented maybe took it one step too far. It was still very convenient it happened at the right, dramatic moment and can't help but feel if the trick hadn't been better served had been presented like the murder on the staircase landing from Carter Dickson's The Reader is Warned (1939). It would have made the murder look less impossible, but it would have how it was done, in combination with the other none-impossible murder, even grander when it's revealed – especially in light what happens after the murders. But these are really very minor, stylistic complaints. 

The Red Death Murders is a passionate love letter to the detective story and without name dropping his favorite mystery writers, you can easily see which writers he valued by what he did and where in the story. G.K. Chesterton would have approved of the murderer's motive! More importantly, The Red Death Murders demonstrates that you can create magic when you build on the rich history of your genre instead of rejecting it. Nearly a century ago, Edogawa Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story to Japan, which evolved into the Golden Age inspired honkaku-style and resurged in the 1980s as the shin honkaku movement. A movement that revitalized the traditional detective story with their tailor-made crime scenes and gruesome corpse-puzzles. Now those revitalized ideas have begun to journey back West to help stoke the fires of a Second Golden Age. Just as it should be! Great job, Jim! Great job.

City of Libraries: "The Climbing Man" (2015) by Simon Clark

Simon Clark's novella "The Climbing Man" is a pastiche of Conan Doyle's immortal detective specifically written for an all-original anthology of new Sherlock Holmes stories, entitled The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015), which Brian Skupin listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – describing a honey of an impossibility. This time, it was not the promise of an original-sounding locked room murder that attracted my attention, but the archaeology-theme and backdrop. I love archaeological mysteries and there are not enough of them. The impossible crime here is merely a bonus. 

"The Climbing Man" takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, tasked with stamping out "a vipers' nest" of plunderers determined "to loot Mesopotamia of its ancient riches." A criminal gang who employed Arab riflemen, clad in gray, who passed themselves of as legitimate protection for travelers and archaeologists.

When the story opens, Holmes and Watson have made off with a dhow (sail boat) crammed with stolen artifacts, but the gray-shirts on the riverbank pepper the boat with bullets and they're pretty much sitting ducks – even succeeding in wounding the Great Detective. Only the hand of providence guided the boat away from the gray-shirts, down the Euphrates, "towards one of the most baffling mysteries" they encountered. Holmes and Watson end up at an dig site of two archaeologists, Edward Priestly and Professor Hendrik, where two generations have been working on excavating the subterranean tunnels, basement and vaults of the buried city of Tirrash. A once legendary city referred to as Bibliopolis or the City of Libraries.

Three thousand years ago, the city was attacked and destroyed, but, before the barbarians destroyed and plundered the city, the people emptied the libraries of the clay tablets. These clay tablets were "carefully stored in the basements beneath the houses and sealed shut," which remained intact and undisturbed under the desert sands for most of recorded history. But a perplexing, modern-day mystery is discovered in one of its sealed chambers.

A few years ago, Edward Priestly's brother, Benjamin, vanished without a trace from the excavation site and a week ago, they discovered his naturally mummified body in a place that begs for a rational explanation.

During an exploration of an underground passageway, they discovered one of the many hidden vaults, doorway sealed with stone blocks, which "has not been disturbed in three thousand years" and began their meticulous, scientific examination – cutting a small aperture in the wall to look inside. What looked back at them was Benjamin's dry, shriveled face! A second aperture gave them a better view of the body, but it deepened the mystery only further with a second impossibility. The mummified body clung to the wall, facing the stonework, arms outstretched above his head as if he's climbing or "trying to escape from his grave." So the problem is twofold: how did the body end up in a 3000-year-old sealed and undisturbed chamber with four feet of dust covering the floor and how "the devil was he glued so high up on the wall" like "a gigantic spider?" And to give the problem some urgency, the guards hired by the two archaeologists turn out to be gray-shirts. The game's afoot!

The problem of the body in the underground sealed chamber has, as to be expected from its premise, a two-pronged solution. Firstly, the explanation as to how the chamber was entered is not something that will excite many locked room readers, but how the body ended up stuck to the wall was kind of marvelous. A trick that perfectly fitted, time-wise, with the type of impossible, or weird, detective fiction that being written during the Doylean era of the genre. It's the kind of trick/solution you would expect to find in L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898). Unfortunately, "The Climbing Man" also shares the clunky, uneven clueing of the detective stories from that period. Such as when Holmes was collecting evidence and slipping it into an envelope, but Watson only caught a glimpse of "a glittering item." You have to wait until the solution to find out what, exactly, he found. So you only have some room to do some educated guesswork.

Nevertheless, neither the uneven clueing nor the anti-climatic confrontation with the gray-shirts could spoil this thoroughly entertaining and absorbing story that made excellent use of its archaeological setting. I also appreciate it when a pastiche treats someone's else creation with respect and not unduly temper with the original, which can be simply achieved with Sherlock Holmes by giving him a complicated, knotty problem to occupy "that remarkable brain of his." And that's exactly what Clark did here. 

A note for the curious: "The Climbing Man" was not Clark's first foray into the realm of impossible crimes and locked room mysteries. Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997) contains Clark's "The Adventure of the Falling Star," which is not listed in Skupin, in which Holmes is asked to investigate the disappearance of a meteorite from a collection in a locked laboratory. So, yeah, that story has now been added to my special locked room wishlist. Something else that's now on my wishlist is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes locked room/impossible crime pastiches (Sherlocked!).

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998), which came to my attention when reading a fascinating description of the plot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – a theft from "a locked trophy house" protected with "trip wires, booby traps and a flock of geese." A bit of detective work revealed that two of the three stories are impossible crime tales! So on the pile it went.

I've never been a huge fan of pastiches and only handful of writers, like Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges, wrote pastiches that truly honored or even added to the original source material instead of staining it. Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery Queen is a good example of a pastiche that should considered canon. More often than not, they're nothing more than glorified fan fiction or aspiring authors hitching their wagons to classic, ready-made characters. This is something that's especially true for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which has become somewhat of a cottage industry.

There is, however, a third, much rarer, kind of pastiche. Pastiches with either good plots, ideas or writing that were depreciated by being presented as imitations.

Templeman's three Sherlock Holmes pastiches definitely fall into this category and can't help but feel that these stories would have been better remembered today, particularly among locked room fans, had he created an original detective character – like a modern-day Rival of Sherlock Holmes. Either that or he should have tried selling the impossible crime ideas to David Renwick, because these stories would have worked remarkably well as Jonathan Creek episodes. Something tells me Templeman had at least watched the first season before he began working on the stories.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" is the first of the three stories and opens with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being summoned by Mycroft Holmes to have a private interview with the Prime Minister and a cabinet member, Sir Simon Clayton. Sir Simon has bizarre story to tell of, what could be, either "a huge confidence trick" or "a world-shattering discovery which could topple Empire." Great Britain could be at "great peril" from it.

Sir Simon recently rekindled an old friendship with a crony from his university days, Rodger Hardy, who came from a family of industrialists with "a flair for invention," but the family went bankrupt and the ancestral home, Halam Hall, became a ruin. Rodger had gone abroad and nothing was seen of him for years until, one day, he turned up again to invite Sir Simon, to Halam Hall, where he wished to show him something. And that something was a sight to behold! Halam Hall is "an unbalanced architectural mongrel" that had been flogged over the decades with the whims of fashion and individual tastes, which includes an underground ballroom that was left unfinished and down there ten grinning Chinamen were constructing "a full-sized ocean-going wooden junk" – over fifty feet in length. But why was he spending six months to construct a large boat in a place where there was no hope of ever getting it out?

Rodger asked Sir Simon to come down every month to observe its construction and promises all

will be revealed upon completion. When the time comes, the completed vessel was surrounded by poles and caged in with strands of copper wire, which appeared to make a buzzing sound. Rodger told his friend the junk is being "electrically energised" and invited him to join him for dinner, but, when they returned two hours later, the huge Chinese junk that had taken up the whole space of the ballroom had simply vanished into thin air. A situation that becomes even more impossible when Rodger drives Sir Simon to the River Thames where the newly build ship was floating on the water.

 

So what's the catch? Rodger claims to have invented a way to transpose "matter through space by means of converting solids, by electricity, into waves, which could then be converted back again into the original solid state." And he's willing to part with the secret for the then astronomical sum of one million pounds. British government wants Sherlock Holmes to find out whether they've got the hands on paradigm shifting invention or if they're being trick, which means finding an explanation how the vessel was removed from the underground ballroom to which the door was "too small to allow exit." And how it reappeared on the River Thames.

A neatly posed locked room puzzle cleverly making use of the underground ballroom, because it immediately excluded the possibility that the architectural monstrosity housed two large, identical rooms – promising something more original than a simple piece of misdirection. I'm glad to report that the solution delivered on the promise made by its premise and the locked room-trick made this story the most Jonathan Creek-like in the collection. No idea why it wasn't included in Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Unfortunately, "Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" also has some flaws and shortcomings preventing it from becoming a true (locked room) classic.

Sherlock Holmes only deduces the motive behind the scheme, but has to relay on subterfuge to find out how the vessel disappeared from the ballroom and reappeared again on the Thames, which came at the expense of the clueing. So what should have been a how-was-it-done type of puzzle detective story becomes a story about a detective tackling a massive locked room mystery. You can only make an educated guess how it was done. A second problem is that the story is a little overwritten with modern attitudes bleeding through in certain parts, which is true for all three stories in this collection. Each story could have been told in half the number of pages without compromising the plots. Still a highly enjoyable story with an originally worked out impossible crime.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" is pretty much a (historical) travelogue of the Peaks District, Derbyshire, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are spending a holiday when they begin to hear about the mysterious death of an old, German watchmaker – who was found in his ransacked home with a head wound. The doctor concluded that the wound was not fatal and that he had died of heart failure, but the villagers believed it was "an unnatural death." A believe strengthened by escaped pet raven of the old watchmaker who has been frantically screaming, "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen," around the village. The message of the raven turns out to be a dying message by proxy that reveals where the old man had hidden his money, but most of the story has Holmes and Watson soaking in the local color and history. There's a darkly humorous anecdote about a mischievous parrot and the history of "the plague village," Eyam, which is remembered for the way "the god-fearing folk contained the pestilence" by isolating themselves that stopped the plague from spreading to other nearby villages. Here's to your memory, Eyam.

So a very minor, but readable enough, story with a simplistic, paper-thin plot and a holidaying detective that makes it one of Holmes' least exciting and memorable cases.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" convinced me Templeman is either a schoolteacher or an (amateur) historian, but probably a teacher, because I heard the voice of a teacher every time one of these stories slipped into lecture mode.

The last story is the one that got listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room," in which Holmes is consulted by Viscount Siddems who recently returned from India with a collection of trophies and eastern armory – building a trophy house-cum-armour museum to store the collection. Viscount Siddems had his house burgled and this made him decide to protect his trophy house, built a few hundred yards away from the hall, with "man-traps, trip-wires to set off shot guns" and "a flock of geese." Geese were used in Roman times as watchdogs because the slightest unusual sound would set up "an unholy honking."

However, these securities measures didn't stop a thief from walking up the trophy house, unlocking the door with a key and taking a Japanese shield from the wall without setting off the flock of geese. So the viscount doubled the number of traps, shotguns and fixed bells to the trip-wire, but the thief simply took away another shield. But how?

Just like the opening story, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" shows a lot of ingenuity and originality with how it presents the impossible situation, but this time that's not reflected in the explanation. Such an elaborate setup requires a scrap of cleverness to either put the traps out of commission or circumvent them with a way to keep the geese quiet, but the solution, while perfectly workable and logical, was a little too facile. And underwhelming. Luckily, the reason behind the thefts was good and something Arsène Lupin would have warmly approved of.

So, as some of you probably noticed, my take on the individual stories don't seem to align with the opening of this review, but I believe the flaws and shortcomings of these three stories were enlarged by being pastiches. It comes with certain expectations that Templeman was unable to live up to. But had he created his own detective characters, Templeman could have told his stories on his own terms with the result being something along the lines of Hal White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008), Andrew May's The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) and Stephen Leather's The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). I think originally created detective characters would have softened some of its flaws.

After all, even as pastiches these were superior detective stories, especially the first one, compared to most what was being published at the time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories is not a timeless classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a well intended collection of stories written by an enthusiastic amateur with a commendable interest in locked room puzzles – something that was too rare in the nineties. So recommended to the ferocious locked room reader and addicted Sherlockian who'll read everything with the name of the Great Detective printed on it.

Fiendish Flattery: A Review of Three Detective Pastiches

One of the many titles listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) that has always fascinated me is a short story docketed as entry #1361, Thomas Narcejac's "L'orchideé rouge" ("The Red Orchid," 1947), which is part of a series of pastiches he wrote during the late '40s and were collected a decade later in Usurpation d'identity (Identity Theft, 1959) – published as by Boileau-Narcejac. "The Red Orchid" is, as you might expect from the title, a pastiche of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

The story was originally translated into an English by Lawrence G. Blochman, published in the January, 1961, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but a new translation was commissioned for its inclusion in The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020; edited by Josh Pachter). Rebecca Jones previously translated Narcejac's "Le mystère des ballons" ("The Mystery of the Red Balloons," 1947) for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018; edited by Pachter and Dale C. Andrews).

I'll come back to The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe some time later this year, but now, I want to concentrate on "The Red Orchid." A story that, peculiarly enough, gives Archie and Wolfe an impossible crime to annoy each other with. I believe the closest Stout ever came to the locked room genre was in Champagne for One (1958) and The Doorbell Rang (1965). But that combination is probably what attracted me to the story.

Isabella Tyndall is the niece of an inventor and savant, Sir Lawrence Tyndall, who has been experimenting in "absolute secrecy" with ultrasound and has developed "a simple machine that allows the user to stop engines from miles away," but, around the same time, the attacks began – a bullet grazed his head in the park and there was poison in his herbal tea. These attacks coincided with the disappearance from the house of a bottle of sherry, a ham and a Cheshire cheese. And worst of all, the press smells a story and the place is now "besieged by a crowd of journalists." Sir Lawrence can't work anymore and wants a private detective to clear up the case, but someone predicted Wolfe would refuse the case because he rarely goes out.

Nero Wolfe is "more sedentary than the Empire State Building" and has to be bribed and prepared, like an over-sized child, with a big fee, promise of food and a rare orchid. One of Sir Lawrence discoveries is a way to influence the development and coloring of flowers, which resulted in a red Coelogyne pandurata. Wolfe has tried for two years to breed one in red and refuses to believe it was done outside of his rooftop greenhouse.

Archie finally succeeds in getting Wolfe out of the house and on the road to an earning an easy fee, but when they arrive, the orchid has been stolen and the potato masher has disappeared. During the night, Archie discovers various members of the household, relatives and boarders, sneaking around the place and the next morning they have to break down the door of Sir Lawrence's bedroom – behind it they find his body. Sir Lawrence, clad in pajamas, lay collapsed against the wall with a disfigured face suggesting a nasty dose of poison. The way in which the locked room-trick worked was surprisingly inventive, even if it required a bit of luck, but something you would never associate with Stout. Same goes for the clueing, which was not always one of Stout's strong suits. But the way in which Archie and Wolfe tackled the case was typically Stout. Wolfe reasons the answer while laying in bed and tests Archie's patience when he uses him to test his deductions ("Listen, boss, I'm a patient guy, but..."). So, yeah, I enjoyed it.

Even with the out-of-place locked room poisoning, Narcejac's "The Red Orchid" is a good and well done pastiche of Archie, Wolfe and Stout. One that can even be enjoyed and appreciated by barbarians readers who don't like Archie, Wolfe and Stout.

Well, since "The Red Orchid" is a pastiche, I decided to use it as an excuse to expend this review with two more pastiches that have been lingering on my to-be-read pile for ages.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Wrightsville Carnival" has only appeared in the Sep/Oct, 2005, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings an elderly Ellery Queen to an altered, modernized Wrightsville. The corner store now occupied the entire block and the local ice cream parlor was turned into a Starbucks, while many of the old inhabitants had either passed away or moved elsewhere.

Police Chief Anselm Newby made his debut in Ellery Queen's "The Death of Don Juan," collected in Queen's Full (1965), who recognizes Ellery and tells him about the new editor of the Wrightsville Record, Polly Watkins. Ellery learns through Polly about the town's bad boy, Sam Nation, who's the reason why Janice Collins left her husband and Polly had used the newspaper to hound him out of the town, but there was a baby and Janice put it up for adoption – which infuriated Sam when he found out. And demanded to know where his son was. Sam has returned to Wrightsville working as a roustabout at the carnival, which comes to the town every year in August.

So he naturally becomes the primary suspect when Janice is found bludgeoned to death in her home, but Ellery effortlessly deduces the correct solution and escapes the clutches of an enraged murderer with "only minor bruising."

Hoch's "The Wrightsville Carnival" has something curious in common with Narcejac's "The Red Orchid." Character-wise, the detectives echo their originals incarnations, but the plots are a little uncharacteristic. Stout barely touched the locked room mystery, but "The Red Orchid" has Wolfe solving an honest to God locked room murder. "The Wrightsville Carnival" lacked any of the usual Ellery Queen tropes. No dying, or coded, message. No ingenious false-solution or multi-faceted clues. Not even a challenge to the reader. Just an alibi that has be destroyed. It's not exactly an alibi-trick that will fool many seasoned and suspicious-minded armchair detective, but I suppose the novelty of this story comes from seeing Ellery interact with the modern, ever-changing world. And the many references to the original stories.

So a more than decent pastiche with some sense of continuity, but not even close to being one of Hoch's best detective stories.

The last of these three pastiches is a short-short by Arthur Porges, "In Compartment 813," which was originally published in the June, 1966, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and has a double-layered solution with the final twist being the true identity of one of the characters – somewhat reminiscent of John Dickson Carr's "The Gentleman from Paris" (collected in The Third Bullet, 1954). You can probably guess by the title of the story who's playing detective, but we'll pretend it's not Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin.

The story opens with a young and an old man sharing Compartment 813, of the Cote d'Azur Express, when the old man, Monsieur Sernine, recognizes the younger man as the grandson of an old friend, Bertrand de Monsoreau. Sernine asks Bertrand to kill the time and tell him about the night he attended one of Baron Duclaux's dinner parties. During the party, Baron Duclaux showed his guests the Tiger's Heart, "a fabulous ruby," which he had just bought for two million francs. The ruby "was passed from hand to hand" and, all at once, "no one had the ruby." Nobody had left the room when the police arrived, but nobody had the ruby on them and it was not found anywhere in the room. The ruby had "utterly vanished."

Considering the short length of the story (barely 4 pages), I suspected the good old camouflage-trick with the ruby having been secreted in a glass of wine or hidden in the chandelier, but Porges came up with an unexpectedly different kind of solution. A good trick that would have been better had there been room to drop some clues and more hint. Yes, even in this short-short, Porges was able to foreshadow the solution. Porges was such a good and underrated mystery writer!