Out of Time

"The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story—that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest."

- S.S. van Dine (Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, 1928) 

I came across an entry for An Old-Fashioned Mystery (1983) by Runa Fairleigh while thumbing through Robert Adey's Locked Room Mysteries (1991), a regular feeder line these days, and the publishing date in combination with the detectives being listed put the book (possibly) in the same category as Herbert Resnicow's excellent Alexander and Norma Gold series from the 1980s. 

However, Sebastian and Violet Cornichon weren't the wisecracking, mystery solving husband-and-wife team I expected to find, but a brother and sister who exchange snappy remarks. Oh, and they're twins. Sebastian was born four minutes before Violet and therefore inherited everything, which now finances his lavish and loose lifestyle, and cultivated a penchant for making remarks/jokes that could be argued suffer from bad timing. In defense of my favorite character from the book, and to quote comedian Doug Stanhope, "they just died, it's perfectly timed." On the other hand, Violet had to work hard on her cosmetic line and earned the moniker of Society-Girl Detective by helping the police close one or two open cases – which proved to be the best kind of advertisement for her business money can't buy.

But first things first, because if I have to start anywhere, it's with the introduction, entitled "The Mystery Runa Fairleigh," written by crime novelist L.A. Morse, on the manuscript of An Old-Fashioned Mystery and the questions left behind by its author. Thee decades before, Fairleigh purchased one of the smaller of the Thousand Islands, somewhere near the border between the United States and Canada, where she lived the solitary existence of a hermit before disappearing from the face of the Earth – leaving only 288 pages of a type written manuscript behind. Morse ends the introduction with the following observation: "However, it might equally well have been titled The Last Mystery, since it is most definitely the mystery to end all mysteries. Indeed, it may be the eschatology of the mystery." Well, that's a case to be decided by the individual reader, but it's without a doubt one of the most flattering homage’s to Agatha Christie I have read to date. 

The first and obvious inspiration for An Old-Fashioned Mystery was And Then There Were None (1939) and the backdrop is an old, gothic-style manor house, complete with battlements, on the isolated Komondor Island. It's a place with a chequered history: a cursed place where rumors of buried treasure from the Revolutionary War linger on and people continue to die under mysterious or absurd circumstances. A previous owner and notorious prankster was shot in the face when he sneaked up on someone who was fooling around with a shotgun. Komondor Island is the place Rosa "Mousey" Sill has picked to celebrate her 25th birthday and gaining full control of her trust fund, but the party that has been put together couldn't have ended any other way than in bloodshed.

First of the unlikely table companions is Mrs. Cassandra Argus, Mousey's deranged godmother and involved in the boating accident that killed her mother, which took a toll on her mental conditions and now shrieks eerie sounding prophecies. Beatrice "Budgie" Dijon is Mousey's aunt and the wife of the insufferable Colonel Nigel Dijon, who seems obsessed with smacking people and actually shocked to find out the cook, Mr. Ching, is an "Oriental." You have to be pretty racist, if that is your first complaint considering the quality of Mr. Ching's cooking. Derrick Costain is Mousey's well-dressed fiancé and rumored gold digger. Mr. Eustace Drupe is the dome-headed lawyer and trustee of Mousey's funds, but, since this is a detective story, Drupe is one of those "Wicked Uncle Andre" types. Cerise Redford and the housekeeper, Mrs. Hook, round out the party and they mix, socially, as well as soccer fans of opposing teams and beer.

Fortunately, they soon stumble over the first body in the coal pile and it's been neatly chopped up, and from here on out the plot is compartmentalized in murder blocks: a murder is committed and Viola thinks she has pieced together the solution only to be upset by another murder. The (false) solution that tied together the first three murders can easily stand on its own (great clueing) and the case Violet made against her own brother was simply amusing – an (unconscious) spoof of the case against Roger Sheringham from Anthony Berkeley's Jumping Jenny (1933)? I surely got the impression Morse Fairleigh knew her classics. By the way, Drupe was killed in a locked room, but Violet completely forgot about the impossible angle until the story was nearing its end and the explanation was perhaps the only part of the story that should've stayed in the past (somewhere around the mid-to late 1800s). 

This compartmentalized story telling helped in keeping the insanity in proper bounds, until the end, because the mounting terror of being picked off one-by-one wasn't enough. There had to be a radio broadcast on the only station they could receive, Big Band Era station, announcing a mass murderer had escaped from a high security prison – and he's familiar with the island. On a side note: I suspect Kanari Yozaburo from lifting bits and pieces of the plot for The Legend of Lake Hiren (1994) and given his own interpretation to other aspects of the plot, which wouldn't be the first time. The Mummy's Curse (1993) is basically an abridged version of Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981). I know the line between emulation and copyright infringement can be sketchy at times, but Yozaburo walked that line as if it was the Silk Road during its heyday. Picking up ingredients here and there when it was time to hand in a new manuscript. But I'm getting off-topic here and long-winded. 

I'm not sure what I liked more about An Old-Fashioned Mystery: the story or the solution. The former has a lot of interesting detective work and a galore of red herrings for genre savvy readers to slip on. I had solutions based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Death on the Nile (1937) and After the Funeral (1953), but the actual explanation is something else. Originality is a bit of an overused cliché when reviewing books, but here you might actually have something that's original and you could even argue "transcends" the genre. Some will love it (I think I do), while others will probably hate it and call shenanigans, but it was fairly clued – though I can definitely see why some would label it a rule breaker. But if it's a rule breaker, it's a classic of its kind. A great play on playing with the readers' expectations. And appreciated the cameo of a famous mystery writer in the final chapter. 

I would recommend An Old-Fashioned Mystery the strongest to devotees of Agatha Christie and people who have read altogether too many mysteries. They'll probably appreciate the book the most!

Let the reader be warned: the book contains a few puns and word jokes. No idea why everyone hates them. And to readers new to Golden Age detectives and neo-classical mysteries: never, ever take Van Dine's rules too seriously.

A Fling With a Ghostly Thing

"This world is far more mysterious than we give it credit for."

- Victoria Coren (Q.I.: J Series, "Jargon")

Back in late November of 2011, I was handed the scoop on a new, collaborative series of mystery novels, concocted between Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, starring their 1890s San Francisco-based gumshoes from Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998) – among other uncollected short stories and some earlier, full-length adventures (e.g. Beyond the Grave, 1986).

Despite being the one who broke the news, I was fairly late with actually reading The Bughouse Affair (2013) and I didn't do much better with The Spook Lights Affair (2013). In my defense, however, the book wasn't supposed to be published until this year. But enough of this palaver and lets see if I can add anything of substance to the pile of reviews of this still recent release.

The Spook Lights Affair has John Quincannon, formerly attached to the U.S. Secret Service, and Sabina Carpenter, an ex-Pinkerton detective, assigned (once again) to separate cases, but you can't complain in what are still economic rough times – especially if your clients can afford to squander money on a private-eye. Sabina finds herself in the role of matron and has to "baby-sit" Virginia St. Ives, who's being watched by her family to prevent her sneaking off with Lucas Whiffing. The family does not approve of the young family, but the surveillance of Virginia cumulates in a confrontation at a fancy dress party and storms outside with Sabina in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, the only thing Sabina can do for Virginia is getting help after watching her jump to her death from a fog-enwrapped parapet, however, a search beneath the spot only turns up a handbag containing a suicide note and a piece of cloth. The body is nowhere to be found!

Somewhere, around the same time, the ghosts of Quincannon's forebears, who left the Old World for the New One, must've been living vicariously through their descendent as Quincannon goes above and beyond to get his hands on a ten percent reward in the case of the Wells, Fargo Express heist. A daring and masked robber relieved the company of $35,000 and Quincannon is determined to get his $3,500 cut for giving it back to them. Regrettably, a tip from a squeamish gambling addict, Bob Cantwell, leads the detective straight to a days old crime-scene and the traditional scuffles with suspects. I sometimes get the impression detectives related to the Hardboiled School take more bumps than a pro-wrestler on a Pay-Per-View night. All of the (semi)-hardboiled detectives I remember reading ended up trading blows or gunfire with one character or another in pretty much every single story I have read, which sometimes makes them come across as overconfident, street-level Batman's – all they need is alcohol, prospect of a fee, two fists and an ugly mug to land them on. I understand it’s tradition, but, writers, do you have to aim for the head every single time? Can't a guy get a door slammed in his face or his tires slashed every once in a while to get shaken off by his quarry? I'm just suggesting it doesn't always has to be an assault or attempted murder.

A third case is introduced when Mr. Barnaby L. Meekers, from the Western Investment Corporation, wants to engage on a "matter of bizarre nature," which turn out to be spook lights haunting a scattering of abandoned horse-traction cars nearby a beach at a place named Carvill-by-the-Sea (a.k.a. Spook Central). Meeker chased the apparition twice and described as a humanoid shaped, white glow and "the dune crests were unmarked along the thing's path of flight." There weren't impressions of any sort with exception of claw marks on the walls and roofs of the cars "as if the thing had the talons of a beast." 

The explanation for the mysterious disappearance of Virginia’s body and the appearances of the Carville Ghost takes a page from the type of impossible crime stories dating from roughly the same period (in mystery terms) in which The Spook Lights Affair is set such as L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898) and The Thinking Machine's dismissals of the supernatural. However, even though Pronzini and Muller weren’t able to fool me with their seemingly impossible trickery this time (nice try though), they were able to herd every part of the plot into a coherent narrative and The Spook Lights Affair simply works as a well put together mystery novel brimming with fascinating characters, exciting scenes and places from a by-gone time now forever altered by time. The brief interruption from the bughouse Holmes, which annoy Quincannon to no end, were also more than welcome and it's still funny picturing him as Jeremy Brett – playing the part of the "Scattered-brain" Holmes with the same conviction as that of the original. I hope he'll be back in the next novel.

I couldn't fit this in anywhere else, but if you've read Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services, you'll notice that a scene towards the end of The Spook Lights Affair was borrowed from one the stories from that collection. I also posted in December on an actual (solved) spook lights case in my, ahum, popular series of real-life locked room mysteries and you can find that post here.

Well, in closing, I think it was the previous novel with a blurb saying Pronzini and Muller make beautiful music together, but Carpenter and Quincannon, like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, must be wonderful instruments to play on.

With the Stroke of a Pen

"'Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. 'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles — I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud.

'Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare.

'Exactly so,' said Alice."

- Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

The May issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 2007 contains an Ellery Queen pastiche from the hands of two collaborating fans, Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu, entitled  "The Book Case," in which a near centenarian Ellery attempts to curtail the ravages of time by solving sudoka puzzles and the occasional, locally committed homicide.

Ellery Queen was drawn out of retirement in “The Book Case” when a shady collector of rare, hardcover mystery novels was found murdered in his study, but in his death throws was able to leave the police a clue by sweeping a row of Ellery Queen novels from one of the shelves – implicating the children of the late Djuna. The story works perfectly as a final salute to the Ellery Queen legacy similarly to Charles Ardai's pastiche "The Last Story," from The Return of the Black Widowers (2003), but it was only the first adventure for this twenty-first century incarnation of EQ. In September/October 2009, "The Mad Hatter Riddle" appeared and has Ellery Queen as a consultant on the set of the 1975 TV-series Ellery Queen! Unfortunately, that's a story I missed, but I have just read the third installment, "Literally Dead," which inclusion would not have shamed Queen's Full (1965) – a collection of original short stories by Dannay and Lee.

A native of Wrightsville, a twin town of Cabot Cove, Jennifer Rothkopf taught English at the local high-school and worked on her literary career with kids' verses, however, it was the publication of The Lemon Sand of Abrillion that put her name among the other stars of fantasy fiction. The five succeeding chronicles also made Rothkopf financially independent, but, after the seventh one, The Black Night of Scythallon, she decides that Jonathan Dellerworth's journay has come to an end. Literally and permanently! Rothkopf rescinds the deal she was negotiating to farm out the character and her determination looks to be Dellerworth's Waterloo Reichenbach.

Not long thereafter, Chief Anselm Newby is tasked with finding Jennifer Rothkopf's murderer and, as to be expected, there's a dying message: a colored napkin was pinned to a piece of fruit with a paring knife. But that isn't even the most puzzling aspect of the murder. The doors were locked from the inside and could only be locked from the inside with the sole key fastened to a bracelet, which still clutched to Rothkopf's wrist, and the windows were bare of any traces of tampering.

As the consulted Ellery Queen remarked, "I have encountered more than my share of dying messages over the years, but locked rooms are a bit of a rarity."

However, Queen shows more interest for the locked room angle than Newby does, because he expects to get the answer from the murderer, but it's Queen who, naturally, gets it right – even though the basic gist of the locked room trick is older than EQ himself at this point. Still, it was nicely presented and well clued, as were all three major aspects of this story (whodunit, locked room and dying clue). There were clues for all of them, but only in the EQ universe can a victim, seconds before dying, have all the materials within reach to create a perfectly logical, if often needlessly cryptic, clue for the police. Personally, I would've let Rothkopf (who was, by the way, found slumped over her desk) cradle those three items in an enclosing embrace, which would've given the clue a double meaning (if you have read the story, you should know what I mean), but that's nitpicking from my side. 

Generally, I'm not a fan of pastiches and I echo Stout's sentiment to "let them roll their own," but it's a bit different with Ellery Queen, isn't it? Dannay and Lee infamously worked with ghostwriters themselves and allowed the character to reflect the changing times. Ellery Queen has even known a short, angst-ridden period! So I can't complain if the original authors clearly wouldn't have had a problem with farming out their character – especially when done well and within the pages of their own magazine. Granted, if Dannay had still been alive today, he probably would've altered the titles, but they would've been published.

Briefly put, "Literally Dead" has everything you expect from a proper detective story and more than that from a pastiche.

One last observation on the story (I couldn't wriggle-in anywhere else) is that "Literally Dead" also felt as a wink at Anthony Boucher. The legacy of a fantasy writer recalled Fowler Foulkes creation of Dr. Garth Derringer, an Americanized version of Arthur Conan Doyle's Dr. Challenger, from Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942) and a Gregory Hood radio-play from the late-1940s, "The Derringer Society," collected in The Casebook of Gregory Hood (2009).

This Game of Murder!

"Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil's pet baits."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle")

Ton Vervoort was the non-de-plume of Peter Verstegen, born in 1938 in The Hague and if the absence of a date of death on his wikipedia page is any indication, he will be celebrating his 75th birthday on July 30 of this year. A few days ago, Ton Vervoort, one of those all-but-forgotten mystery writers reappeared on my radar screen when "Plaat-van-de-Maand," a monthly item on a Dutch thriller blog high-lighting the works of forgotten authors, picked him for March and I just happened to have his first mystery novel kicking around – but have no recollection where and when I picked it up.

Murder Among Students (1962)

Moord onder studenten (Murder Among Students, 1962) introduces the readers to the character of Ton Vervoort, student and hand-picked chronicler of a slightly eccentric inspector of the Amsterdam police force, Floris Jansen, who broke with the traditional, sober minded Dutch policeman that usually prowl these tales and have discussed a few of them on previous occasions (e.g. Cor Docter and Tjalling Dix). Jansen is aware that he's playing a role and modeled himself on the popular detectives from fiction, like Philo Vance and early-period Ellery Queen, but gave a somewhat plausible explanation for breaking the mold. Before he arrived on the scene, the newspapers had no reason to mimic their overseas colleagues when it came to sensational murder cases, but now that they had one of those fancy detectives, he simply helps selling the story. However, there's more: Jansen grandmother was an impoverished Russian noblewoman, who married a Dutch painter in France, and his Eastern-style home, leisurewear and half-Persian wife also gives Jansen a dash of Prince Zaleski – minus the decadence and social withdrawnness. And wasn’t M.P. Shiel also Prince Zaleksi's narrator?

Verstegen was a very genre savvy mystery writer whose characters converse on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, deductive vs. intuitive reasoning and quote Agatha Christie, and if that wasn't enough, he dusts off a few props from his predecessors – and an official police investigator is the only concession made to realism. You could almost classify it as a pastiche. 

Murder Among Students opens with Ton Vervoort stumbling to his feet, after an unknown assailant knocked his lights out when he was going upstairs to ask the wife of their landlord, Mrs. Van Duinhoven, if they she wanted to join an impoverished birthday party for a fellow tenant, Grandpa Hobbema. Vervoort was lucky enough to escape with his life, because the person who bumped into him had just returned from stabbing Mrs. Van Duinhoven in her bedroom and purloin a valuable blue diamond. The stone was kept in a safe and only used to gaze into during private séances, however, the replica Mrs. Van Duinhoven wore was missing, too! 

Peter Verstegen a.k.a. "Ton Vervoort."

Before I continue, I have to make a note here on the title of the book, which is a bit of a misnomer. It implies a murder at a student hostel, but the setting is an apartment complex were a few rooms are let to students and quite of few of the suspects are related to Mrs. Van Duinhoven.

There's the unpleasant and not much loved landlord, Mr. Van Duinhoven, and their children, son Robbert and daughter Jos, and Hugo ter Laak, a son from Mrs. Van Duinhoven's first marriage. Otto Warendorf is Jos' fiancé and an active member in various student societies. Willie Klook is another promising, beautiful student and secretly engaged to our narrator. Iwan Mulder studies medicine and had a special friendship with Mrs. Van Duinhoven. Eighty-year-old birthday boy, Grandpa Hobbema, loves to go to funerals of strangers, getting away with it by being mistaken for a long-forgotten great uncle, and finally we have the hustling neighbors Mr. and Mrs. De Boer. Their "shenanigans" make for an involving plot that is, at times, very aware of itself. One of the students even addresses the problem of the book title by commenting on the newspaper that is placing the murder in university circles. The students do play a part in the plot, but the title is rather, uhm, arbitrary? I think Moord onder huurders (Murder Among Tenants) would've been a better and funnier title, because it's the landlords who drop like flies among their own tenants.

Yes! Mr. Van Duinhoven croaks as well and was found in his bed not long after stumbling into the home, drunk and out of his mind, pointing an accusing finger at Vervoort and yelled shrilly, "Jij! Jij! Jij hebt het gedaan!" ("You! You! You have done it!"). A "lovely Poe-effect," Jansen remarks, in reference to Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Thou Art the Man," but the poisoning of Mr. Van Duinhoven is a clever piece of plotting in itself. Thrown together with the jumble of the stolen stones, clues consisting of a lingering whiff of cigarette smoke, clocks, cats and a false solution that played on a classic plot device made for an entertaining read. Murder Among Students is not a book you pick up for it's great writing or grasp on characterization, but absolutely perfect if you are in one those pulpy moods and crave for a story with a complicated murder plot, stolen diamonds, a scheming master detective, a capricious killer and enough references to play "spot-the-nod."

There's just one thing that bugged me: Jansen bragged that his detectives were very good at searching, but somehow they missed a safe that was hidden behind a few books?

Ton Vervoort/Peter Verstegen bibliography (untranslated):

Moord onder studenten (Murder Among Students, 1962)

Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Performers, 1963)

Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologers, 1963)

Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Cloak of Love, 1964)

Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965)

Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965)

De zaak Stevens (The Stevens Case, 1967)

De zuivelduivel (The Dairy Devil, 1975; a SF-detective)

A Thieving Lot

"He thinks he's Sherlock Holmes in the flesh."

- Robert Arthur's "The Adventure of the Single Footprint" (Mystery and More Mystery, 1966)

In November of 2011, I reviewed Carpenterand Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998), a collection of short stories originally penned during the 1990s, in which John Quincannon abandoned a dwindling career with the United States Secret Service to begin his own detective agency with Sabine Carpenter, a former Pinkerton operative, in San Francisco of the 1890s.

The collection turned out to be a splendid farrago of period stories filled with colorful character and beloved tropes that trudge around in evocative settings, but the finishing touch came when Bill Pronzini informed me that he and Marcia Muller were collaborating on series of Carpenter and Quincannon novels – and gave me permission to announce The Bughouse Affair (2013) and The Spook Light Affair (2014) to the public. And yes. Considering the fact that I had the scoop, I should've reviewed this one a lot sooner. I was late with placing the order, and when the book finally arrived, I was deeply immersed in Jan Ekström's Deadly Reunion (1975). But enough excuses. 

In this first of what's hopefully to be an annual affair, Carpenter and Quincannon have separate assignments to take care of that are a part of the daily routine of a detective agency. 

Sabina has to snuff out an elusive and particular nasty pickpocket from the crowds patronizing an amusement park, a torch-lit bazaar and the throng of people walking the evening Cocktail Route, but the trail soon leads away from San Francisco's entertainment district to a seamier part of town. And a rather nasty murder. Somewhere else, John Carpenter is spending an uncomfortable evening in the shrubbery to stake out a house, in the hopes of catching a burglar in the act, but when his reward is almost within in his grasp he lets it literally slips through his fingers. Oh, and he's also held at gunpoint, mistaken as a fleeing thief in the night, by a venerable colleague from England. Or at least he claims to be.

During the opening of The Bughouse Affair, a newspaper scribbling by Ambrose Bierce touted that the world's most-celebrated detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, has emerged from Reichenbach Falls and found his way to their city where's spending a period of leisure a the home of a prominent family – who happened to be neighboring the burgled house. Quincannon shares Bierce's opinion that he's a crackbrain, adding that he also has the routine of a conman, and that appears to be the opinion of everyone who's aware that Sherlock Holmes disappeared alongside his arch nemesis in the gorge of Reichenbach Falls, which makes it even funnier if you imagine Jeremy Brett as the bughouse Holmes.

Whether he's an impostor or the actual Sherlock Holmes, he's playing the role like a violin, and even accompanies Quincannon on his next stake-out, where the case goes from bad to worse after the furtive burglar assaults the owner of the house – leaving him dead inside a locked room and than manages to disappear from the house unseen!

Pronzini usually dabbles in two kinds of illusions: practical ones that might actually work off-page and complex trickery that would not disgrace the stage of a famous illusionist (e.g. "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle," collected All But Impossible, 1981). I won't divulge under which header I place this impossible crime, but I definitely enjoyed it. Now that I think about it, the only one of these kind of stories (by Pronzini) that I disliked was "Proof of Guilt" (collected in Murder Impossible, 1990), which left me under whelmed after the editors praised it as "one of the very best impossible shorts written over the past 50 years." The solution was also a take-off on a trick that I loath and, IMHO, as dated as poisonous snakes and trapdoors. I hated it when Clayton Rawson used it and hated when Pronzini gave it a spin. Not to mention that Pronzini wrote at least a handful of other impossible shorts that were miles better (e.g. "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" and "Booktaker," collected in Casefile, 1983, or "Medium Rare" in the previously mentioned Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services). Anyway, back to the review at hand! 

As to be expected in a detective story, evidence from Sabina’s pickpocket case turns up in Quincannon’s investigation, and slowly, everything begins to come together in a most satisfying way. The manner in which Quincannon, Sabina and the presumptive Mr. Sherlock Holmes take part in the explanation was very reminiscent of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) – especially how the bughouse detective's solution echoed one of the tales from the canon. A conscious nod to one of their predecessors whose most famous novel is also one of the most successful parodies of the storybook detective ever written?

The Bughouse Affair is more than just flight-of-fancy through a time and place now long gone by, however, the busy tourist strip, chute-rides at the amusement park, fire-lit bazaars, crowded brothels, moldy pawnshops and the many gaudy underworld figures that populate this story adds color and details to an already imaginative and absorbing plot.

If your taste runs in the direction of a classically-styled whodunit, inexplicable crimes committed in sealed rooms, Holmesian pastiches and/or historical fiction than The Bughouse Affair is your book and I recommend you track down a copy ASAP. It might give publishers an incentive to publish more of these stories.   

What the Hex is Going On?

"This is too strange for school, Hadji."

- Jonny Quest (East of Zanzibar)

One of the umpteen entries in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) that caught my interest was R.H.W. Dillard's The Book of Changes (1974), which has a problem of the impossible variety that is described as follow: "death of a man inside a locked room that could only be locked from the outside, yet the sole key was in the victims stomach."

A brief search on the web revealed that the book is still available in paperback, a 2001 reprint from the Louisiana State University Press, but this good news was accompanied with a sobering and off-putting review – calling the book "pointless experimentation" and "potsmoke prose, accompanied with babygoo beatifics." I was still intrigued though and bumped the book up my list of priorities, but now I have to review a story as disjointed as a recently unearthed skeleton.

To understand this, I can easily place this book in the canon of the genre alongside Virgil Markham's Death in the Dusk (1928), Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand (1945) and Fredric Brown's Night of the Jabberwock (1950), stories with either a nightmarish or dreamlike quality that ditch realism at the side of the road and string together a series of often episodic events that defy common sense, and Dillard goes all out in The Book of Changes! The stories switches from scene to scene, era to era and from characters to characters and none of them seem to make much sense. One of the persons we follow around, throughout many decades, is the consulting detective Sir Hugh Fitz-Hyffen, a distorted, funhouse mirror reflection of Sherlock Holmes, whose cases lead him from the home of an English matriarch, after a number of the local women turned up dead and a wolf is seen dancing on its hind legs, to Chicago where a Zodiac killer stalks its citizens and a man turns up dead in a locked room.

Regrettably, Fitz-Hyffen's cases are more anti-detective stories than proper mysteries and readers like yours truly should expect not much from them. The explanation for the problem of the locked door was even more disappointing than venomous animals, secret passageways or another Isreal Zangwill rip-off – while another, simple but elegant, solution presented itself based on the evidence given in the story. According to the pathologist, who dug the key from the victims innards, it was acid bitten and might not have properly worked if they tried the lock. Dillard could have easily made that key a false one, while the murderer used the actual key to lock the door.

The episodes set on a street named Life, where the moral fabric is slowly disintegrating, were, perhaps, my favorite segments in this book and showed that Dillard had more than just a nodding acquaintance with the genre. Inhabitants of Life includes, alongside Oscar Wilde, a pair of twin brothers, separated at birth, named Leslie Ford and David Frome, and a couple who listen to the names of Michael Venning and Daphne Sanders. Everyone can come across as genresavy by referencing Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle and Sgt. Cuff, but I bet those four names would go over a lot of readers heads nowadays. Oh, and did I mention this weird plot also involves The Moonstone and the Mask of Fu-Manchu? Both of them nicked.

I think this makes the "potsmoke prose" and "babygoo beatifics" the least of the books problems, if they are problems, because the style seems to fit what Dillard set out to do and you can’t fault an author for doing that. It would be akin to lambasting Dashiell Hammett for not writing village cozies featuring Nanny Spade. The real problem is that The Book of Changes is a story without a payoff and Adey mentioned that liking this book depends on your allegiance to the genre. I guess I'm not that enlightened yet to embrace a book like this, but what amplified this weakness, for me anyway, is that I know of three, much earlier, books (mentioned above) that did this long before Dillard and they all did it better than him. Heck, even Rogers' The Red Right Hand was better and I belong to the group who think it's overrated. 

So I can only recommend this if you’re in the mood for something goofy.  

Sealed Rooms and Ghoulish Laughter: Tributes to John Dickson Carr

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

The man who explained miracles...

After perusing the article "C is for... John Dickson Carr," an unabashed piece of hero worship from fellow blogger Sergio, a germ of an idea began to fester and grow in my mind, but with it came a knock on the door and found a problem on my doorstep. The instrument I exert to trumpet his praise broke after beating a dead horse with it and more than enough people are already of the opinion that I should get a room for me and the ghost of John Dickson Carr. So I decided to adjust my focus for this post and take a look at some of the stories that he inspired others to write.

Well, I guess I have to start with the late William Brittain, a novelist and school teacher, who scattered the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine with an abundance of short stories – including "The Man Who Read" series. It's a series of stand-alone mysteries centering on readers of detective fiction that are put in a position where they have to apply the knowledge culled from the stories of their favorite mystery writer to solve a problem of their own... or to create one.

William Brittain (1930-2011)

"The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" is a young orphan, named Edgar Gault, who discovered the undisputed master of the locked room mystery at the impressionable age of fourteen, imbuing him with the conviction that, one day, he will bring his stories to life – preferably with his unpleasant uncle as the victim. The trick of the locked door is almost as good as the final sentence of the story, which is a real kicker, and it's just overall an amusing and a very rich story. It places the inverted mystery in the convinces of the locked room and even gives you, somewhat, of a character study of the protagonist, but, above all, it's just fun story to read. I wish the entire series, all ten of them, were gathered in one easily accessible volume. Messrs Crippen and Landru, are you taking notes? Until then, you can find this story in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998).

Norma Schier was another mystery writer who had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek when she began to pen a series of short stories for The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, in which she harlequinade her most famous predecessors – from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh to Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr. Most of her stories perfectly captured the heart and soul of the originals and have the added bonus of being anagram puzzles. You can figure out whodunit and who's being spoofed by simply decoding the anagrams.

"Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (published under the byline Handon C. Jorricks) was her nod to John Dickson Carr, which takes place in a reputable restaurant where it's not the custom to spike a glass of champagne with poison and then pass it around, but that's exactly what happened. Enter Sir Marvin Rhyerlee! Who's miffed that he can't enjoy a quiet lunch without someone dying under impossible circumstances. Schier admitted that her little pastiche does little justice to Carr's plotting technique and knack for coming up with impossible situations, but the attempt that was made here is definitely being appreciated. You can find this story in the collection The Anagram Detectives (1979).

Alex Atkinson wrote another parody, "Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains," which is more a spoof on Carr's detectives than his plotting technique and someone on the JDCarr forum noted that the more Carr you've read the more you'll appreciate it. I agree. It's a brief, but fun, distraction and can be read in the anthology Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990). 

Another humorous excerpt, lampooning Dr. Gideon Fell, comes from the word processor of one of our very own, Barry Ergang, who was inspired to write "Dr. Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" after a comment from Nick Fuller berating the atrocity that was The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries – a TV series that butchered a number of Gladys Mitchell's most enjoyable novels. Here is Nick's full-comment that can double as a synopsis for Barry's story: "It is like adapting Carr, and making Dr. Fell a cantankerous hard-drinking medico on the sleazy streets of London's East End who deals with professional crime of the hard-boiled variety and with an awful number of demented blondes, without an impossible crime in sight." The story can still be read by clicking here (GAD archive).

William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" was written in a more serious and darker vein, when the author was only 18-years-old, and almost reads like a love letter to John Dickson Carr and the locked room mystery. Krohn's introduction to the genre came a few years previously, when he read The Three Coffins (1935) and the Cult of Carr welcomed another member in their midst. The story itself dribs with Carrian influences, involving the stabbing of a magician in closed and moving elevator, with a solution that does not rely on gizmos like a certain other story I could mention – and I can only imagine that Carr himself must have beamed with pride after finishing the story (it was published during his lifetime). Krohn penned a second story for the EQMM, but it was rejected as too complex and eventually moved away from detective fiction to become a film critic and expert on Alfred Hitchcock. I wonder if a copy of that story survived. Anyway, as Darrell from The Study Lamp remarked, the story has been deservedly reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2007).

By the same token, I should also mention Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987), whose Dr. Alan Twist is a "thinly" disguised version of Dr. Gideon Fell, and Jean-Paul Török's The Riddle of Monte Verita (2007), but I already discussed them in depth on this blog. However, Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1997) should be mentioned, even if it's more of a general wink at the genre than one specifically meant for Carr. The bloodhounds of the title are a group of fanatical mystery fans, ranging from locked room enthusiasts to hardboiled fanatics, who meet once a week to discuss detective stories – until one of them is murdered aboard a locked houseboat. A very clever, fun and eerily recognizable book that should belong on the shelves of everyone who's permanently under the weather with the sleuth flu. It's about us!

I probably missed a few and could probably find more, but I think this was more than enough hero worship for this Sunday. My next sermon will be on how Carr has fed our hungry brains and banished mediocrity from our bookshelves. Thank you Carr for unlocking doors and forgiving our sins, like you did with the murderers in so many of your books, past, present and future. In name of the Father (Edgar Allan Poe), the Son (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the Holy Spirit (G.K. Chesterton). Amen.  

The Labyrinthine-Shaped Enigma

"What we need is some fearless iconoclast who will come out boldly against this damnable tyranny, saying ‘Fiction is stranger than truth.’"

- Henri Bencolin (The Lost Gallows, 1931)

When the 20th century dawned, there was hope that science and reason would usher in an age of reason. It was to be an era in which logic and education would expel the hobgoblins from the dark nooks and crannies of our minds, like a nightmare after turning on a bedside lamp, but humans are a stubborn breed and dragging them from a hansom cab to shove them into a space shuttle was not enough to make them stop believing in ghosts and miracles.

An example of such a miracle in modern times can be found in the belly of Monte Verita (Hill of Truth), situated in the Swiss town Ascona, where a mystic proclaiming to be the reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz, the founder of the Rosicrucian Order, settled down in the mountain during the early 1900s, however, the locals were anything but hospitable towards them and their leader decided to lock himself up in a grotto – in order to reflect, meditate and pray. The entrance of the grotto was sealed with rocks, nobody was able to get in or out, but when they returned, after four days, to release their leader from his self-imposed imprisonment, all they found was an empty cavern! His disappearance was left unexplained, but even greater mysteries lay ahead when the town, in 1938, hosted a worldwide convention on the detective story and thus begins Jean-Paul Török's L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) – a well-written homage to John Dickson Carr with a plot that twists and turns like an insomniac snake.

Török is a French movie historian, critic, scenarist, director and apparently has a professorship in narratology and wrote this gem with malice aforethought as a traditional whodunit – drawing heavily on the works of the grandmaster of the locked room mystery. In fact, Török skillfully weaved the plot in such a way that it finished with the same sentence as (the French translation of) The Burning Court (1937), but you could also find vestiges of other Carr novels in the plot.

Solange is a woman who could've easily substituted for Fey Seton or Lesley Grant, who, at the opening of this book, accompanies her newly wed husband, Pierre Garnier, to the mystery conference in Ascona – where she becomes the heroine in something that eerily resembles one of the novels that her Uncle Arthur pens for a living. Pierre is a man who has done his homework on the detective story and is looking forward to spending time among kindred spirits, but even the crisp, clean air of the Swiss countryside is eventually polluted with the toxic fumes emanating from Nazi Germany. A German psychiatrist, police consultant and card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, Dr. Hoenig, turns up and challenges one of the lectures, who claims that impossible crimes are only perpetrated by fictional criminals, stating that he will prove him wrong in a lecture, of his own, that will expose a secret –  and makes his sinister purpose clear beforehand in a conversation with Pierre. Dr. Hoenig claims that he has, in his capacity as a police consultant, knowledge of the fact that his wife has buried three husbands, which were most likely murders disguised as suicides and a natural death, two of them discovered inside a locked room, but can Pierre believe that his wife is multiple murderess – even though he has to admit that he knows very little about her past.

Naturally, Dr. Hoenig never had a ghost of a chance to deliver on his promise as a woman, wearing a headscarf, stabs him in front of two policemen and seals up the house from within before disappearing as if in a puff of smoke. The body of Dr. Hoenig also disappears from the locked premise after it was discovered and was even seen walking the streets with a knife sticking in his back, before he ended up in the grotto with the solid bars, covering the only entrance, still in tact. The efficient Brenner of the Swiss police is put on the case, but the expertise of the mystery writer and impossible crime expert, Sir Arthur Carter Gilbert, is needed to successfully fiddle with the lock of this sealed room and he goes about it in a way that immediately recalls H.M. and Dr. Gideon Fell.

The patterns that emerge from this plot are pleasant to watch and fans of John Dickson Carr will recognize a lot of similarities between this book and the work of the master himself, some of them are pointed out in the back of the book, but I also have to admit that the locked room scenarios weren't very original. I immediately spotted and worked out the false solution, which was nonetheless an admirably done reworking of a trick that I have seen more than once, and the correct one was literarily a redressing of one of the oldest tricks in the book. It was done well and fitted the story, but it plays too much like the original and this familiarity tends to make this a predicable story for readers who know their classics.

But rest assured, this took, for me anyway, nothing away from the book, not only because it was written by someone who knew what he was writing about, but also enjoyed writing it, and for a "mere" pastiche this is an absolute first rate effort! Predictability aside, The Riddle of Monte Verita wonderfully captures and evokes the glory days of the detective story, when plots were allowed to roam unshackled and free to explore even the ridiculous. However, we will vehemently deny to our last breath that Harry Stephen Keeler is part of the mystery genre. See? His name doesn't even link to a GADwiki profile page. I told you, not one of our writers.

And last but not least, I have to commend John Pugmire for delivering another fine translation and you can support him to continue investing his time in translating these wonderful books by simply buying them. Hey, if you're going to buy detectives, anyway, why not pick this one up as well, right?

Killed in All Kinds of Ways

"Maybe the truth is that Bill was a man who believed that fairy tales came true, and that we can live happily ever after – but his fairy tales were more like fractured ones from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show than anything that might have been written by brothers named Grimm. These stories are fairy tales in their way, and at the same time homage to the genre he spent his life immersed in."

- Jane Haddam

Yes, another review of a book that has William DeAndrea's name plastered across the front cover, but this one is special – a posthumous compendium that's an exhibit in miniature scale of his considerable talents as a storyteller and plotter. The first fistful of stories feature Matt Cobb, a specialized trouble shooter for a television network, handling everything that's too ticklish for security and too nasty for public relations, who's job often drags him into high-profile and baffling murder cases connected to the world behind the small screen. The book also includes two Holmesian pastiches, one of them narrated with the voice of the hardboiled detective, and the remaining tales are standalones – one of them the standout story of this collection. Lamentably, he never wrote any short stories that chronicled one of the many cases that were handled by Niccolo Benedetti and Ronald Gentry, and which were alluded to in The Werewolf Murders (1992). 

Murder – All Kinds (2003) opens with a short introduction from his wife, Jane Haddam, who's an accomplished mystery author herself, telling briefly of one of those domestic tragedies that most of us, unfortunately, are all too familiar with from personal experience. But optimistically noted that he produced a lot of work in the final year of his life, and that "it's impossible to tell which were written when he was sick and which when he was well." I found myself agreeing with her, more and more, with each passing story!

Matt Cobb, Special Projects:

Snowy Reception

In this opening story, Matt Cobb is escorted to an airport by two federal government agents to identify a notorious terrorist – who procured a spot on the most wanted list by taking the anchorman of the Evening News hostage and murdering several security guards. The consequences of this on-air killing spree made the fame-seeking terrorist a bit camera shy and upon his escape abroad, he drastically altered his appearance. Cobb identifies him by pointing out the one thing even the best plastic surgeons in the world couldn't alter. This is a fun, but slight, story that reminded me of some of the tales from Detective Conan, in which a single suspect has to be deduced from a suspicious lot of characters.

Killed Top to Bottom

With the sole exception of a sobbing clown, everyone started hugging the concrete floor when an unobserved assailant took aim at the host of a local cable show – a noted professor of linguistics. The smoking gun proves to be as elusive as the shooter and the solution as to how it was obscured is exemplar of DeAndrea's creativity. There's also a hilarious scene, in which Matt Cobb wrestles the half hysterical clown to the ground and is stunned by a security guard, who was under the impression that he had stopped an attempted rape, and this skirmish turns out to contain an important clue!

Killed in Midstream

Justice Quest is a true-crime show that asks its viewers to help them shed some light on unsolved mysteries, but the ratings have been lagging behind that of its competitors and it's given one more shot at reeling in viewers with a high-profile, mind blowing case – and dispatches Matt Cobb and one of the shows executives to the island of an ex-diamond merchant. The merchant and his cat were the only ones who survived a massacre at his store, in which the lives of twenty-seven people were extinguished to safely obtain a pile of precious stones, and whomever was responsible got away with it. But when Matt Cobb and his TV station starts probing the case again, it becomes evident that the police were looking for the mass murderer too far away from home. And the method for hiding diamonds is one of the cleverest I have ever come across in a detective story!

Killed in Good Company

Matt Cobb receives an invitation to partake in a round-table discussion with other famous investigators for a documentary, but the discussions are interrupted by the noisy rattling emanating from the cupboards of skeletons demanding to be let out – with deadly results. Cobb nearly lost his life when he attempted to save a retired private eye from the poisonous fumes that filled his room and the method employed here is both brilliant and original. The story also very much reminded me of Rex Stout's novella "Too Many Detective" (collected in Three for the Chair, 1957) and the gathering of detectives in volume 30 of Detective Conan/Case Closed.

Other Stories:

Hero's Welcome

A short-short Cold War spy story, in which a Soviet agent returns home and there's an expected twist ending. Not a very interesting story, I'm afraid.

Sabotage

This is the standout story I referred to earlier, and I can't tell too much about it without divulging any of its surprises. But it's a story that keeps you guessing until the end which direction the plot is going to take and involves a dedicated psychiatrist, questing for the reason behind the suicide of one of his patients, a promising teenage genius, and its connection with a radical figurehead of the pro-environmental movement – and ties it neatly together with one of the most dreadful tragedies of the modern era. Why can't more modern crime stories be like this?

Friend of Mine

Even in the broadest interpretation used these days, it's impossible to pigeonhole this story as one of crime or detection, however, there is a sense of genuine mystery – but one that's more at home between the crumbling pages of classic tales of horror and adventure. In this modern fable, a soldier, stationed in the artic region, has a brush with Victor Frankenstein's monstrous creation – who has been elevated to Godhood by the locals. It's completely out-of-place in this collection, but nonetheless a very engaging read and a first-rate pastiche of Mary Shelley's immortal horror yarn.

The Adventure of the Cripple Parade (ascribed to Mickey Spillane)

Depending on where you stand, this is either one of the most successful or one of the most disastrous attempts at bonding the European and the American detective story. Here we have the personification of the conventional detective story, who's voice suddenly vibrates with the violent poetry of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane – and vows revenge to whoever beat Watson to a bloody pulp. I guess this is a nod to The Maltese Falcon (1930). Although Sam Spade's motive for finding his partner's assailant wasn't driven by the kind of friendship that Holmes feels for Watson. Anyway, it's a surprisingly amusing story, but not that everyone is going to like.

The Adventure of the Christmas Tree

This is a bona fide attempt at recreating Conan Doyle's magic, in which the forester of a Scottish lord brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson a most singular problem: the Christmas tree he hand picked and marked for his master was spirited away from his private woods, but nevertheless turned up in the ancestral home of his employer! Coincidently, the Lord is entertaining an important German diplomat, while they negotiate the terms of important business deals between their nations, and the tree has an important bearing on these talks. In the end, Holmes and Watson foil a devious conspiracy that might have kicked started WWI prematurely. However, it's not one of the most ingenious Sherlock Holmes stories I have ever read, original or replica, but it's amusing enough and would've made a fun episode with Jeremy Brett.

Prince Charming

A cutesy retelling of the titular fairly tale trope in a contemporary setting with a kidnapping plot woven into the story telling. The story actually managed to utterly fool me, because I was convinced that Prince Charming staged the kidnapping of a young heiress in order to cast himself in the role of her savior and get his hands on all of her fathers money by marrying her – completely forgetting that in fairly tales lovers are supposed to live happily ever after. Oh well...

Murder at the End of the World

This previously unpublished story, set in the 1970s, is basically Orson Welles The War of the Worlds Hoax as perceived by a scribbler of detective stories, in which the military accidentally sends out an erroneous emergency notification to all radio and television stations – entailing that a nuclear strike against the country is imminent. This causes a panic at a small student radio station that leads to a vicious assault on one of them, but what possible motive still stands in the face of a nuclear fall-out? The solution, unfortunately, is uninspired, but that's more than made up by the premise of the story and the surprise of the hidden and understated identity of the detective!  

Altogether, this is a solid collection, comprising of all the short stories William DeAndrea produced during his life time, which is certainly worth acquiring if you're already a fan of his work – or just enjoy kicking back with a bunch of well written stories.