A Haunting At Maplewhite

"Just as an octopus may have his den in some ocean cave, and come floating out a silent image of horror to attack a swimmer, so I picture such a spirit lurking in the dark of the house which he curses by his presence, and ready to float out upon all whom he can injure."

- Rev. Charles Mason (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist, 1926)

A staple of today's historical crime genre is transplanting the influential figures from our history books to the fictional realm of the detective story and plant the proverbial deerstalker on their heads. Aristotle, William Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci have all assumed the role of detective, but the most popular historical characters for this purpose appear to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini – who appeared (together) in numerous historical mystery novels.

Conan Doyle most well-known appearance as a fictional-character was as the Dr. Watson to Dr. Joseph Bell's Sherlock Holmes in the Murder Room TV-series created by David Pirie. There were also three novels, The Patient's Eye (2001), The Night Calls (2002) and The Dark Water (2004), based on the TV series. Doyle made further appearances, as a detective, in a short-lived series by Mark Frost and teamed up with Lewis Carroll in four books written by Roberta Rogow.

Houdini looks to have been more in demand as a character than his friend and rival, Doyle, because he made countless appearances in fiction, but the most notable ones are three locked room novels, The Dime Museum Murders (1999), The Floating Lady Murder (2000) and The Houdini Specter (2001), penned by Daniel Stashower – known perhaps better for his award-winning Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (1999). Stashower also made Houdini appear alongside Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man (1985).

And on at least one occasion, Conan Doyle and The Great Houdini appeared alongside each other on the pages of the same detective novel.

Walter Satterthwait's Escapade (1995) is the first of three novels about his Pinkerton operative, Phil Beaumont, who comes across as an homage to the hardboiled detective and his task in on his first recorded outing is to protect the famous artist, Harry Houdini – who he always refers to as "The Great Man." Houdini is stalked and threatened by a music hall magician and master of disguise, "Chin Soo." A shadowy enemy who appears to have followed him all the way to Devon, England, where Houdini is expected to attend a seance at a historical manor house.

Maplewhite is the ancestral home of the Earl of Axminster, an elderly, bed-ridden man, who has temper tantrums and, while he screams, starts "throwing things about his room." The reason for these outbursts is that he can't flog his own son, Lord Robert Purleigh.

Lord Bob, as he liked to be known, is an aristocratic Bolshevist and plans to open Maplewhite to "the toiling masses" when he inherits the title and estate, which displeases the old Earl immensely and soured the relationship between the two – as his son vows that "the swine" will be "the first to go" when the revolution comes. Wedged between father and son is Lord Bob's wife, Lady Purleigh, "a lovely woman" with "a natural, effortless kindness and grace" and their dazzling daughter, the Honorable Cecily Fitzwilliam. And the group of people they invited to stay the weekend makes it very clear that Escapade is one of those typical, modern re-imaginations of the traditional country house mysteries of yore.

The first of the invitees are Lady Purleigh's fat cousin, Mrs. Marjorie Allardyce, who's being accompanied by her paid companion, Jane Turner. She has two frightful encounters with the ghosts haunting the manor house and the vast grounds surrounding the estate.

Secondly, there's Dr. Erik Auerbach, the Viennese psychoanalyst, who freely lectures on Dr. Freud's Oedipus complex in the drawing room, which shocks and revolt Houdini to the point that he has to withdraw for a lie-down. Sir David Merridale, a wise-crack, took the conversation (and everything else) on a less serious note, but he was neither "so witty nor so handsome as he believes" and the "extremely charming" Mrs. Venessa Corneille finds him to be "a dreadful man." Lastly, there's Madame Sosostris, the renowned European medium, who's there to make contact with "the ghost of Maplewhite," Lord Reginald. A distant ancestor of the Earl and Lord Bob.

She's also the reason why Harry Houdini and Conan Doyle are present. Doyle is present as a believer and ally to spiritualism, while Houdini has vowed to expose every trick Madame Sosostris is bringing to the seance table – which sadly remained an under played aspect of the plot and overall story. But, as you probably gathered from this roll call, the book is more of a detective parody than a proper historical mystery novel. The story takes place in August, 1921, but the only aspect that places the book within that period of time are Lord Bob's references to the toiling masses.

There were, however, enough fascinating plot-threads that initially held my attention. On their first night, Turner has a ghostly bedside visitation and later encounters a pair of ghosts, of a woman and a small boy, at the ruins of an old mill house, which is followed by a rifle shot that was fired from the edge of the woods – narrowly missing the Great Man! So did his nemesis manage to find him? These events culminate with the death of the Earl, shot to death, behind the locked and barred door of his bedroom.

The murder occurred towards the end of the first half of the book, but had high hopes for the second half and the locked room angle when Houdini immediately provided a false solution. A solution that involved lock picking and manipulating the bar with "a strong piece of wire." Sure, the explanation was routine, as far as these locked room murders are concerned, but it was only to demonstrate that a murderer could have left a locked crime-scene behind. So I began to hope that the eventual solution would be something clever or even original, but Satterthwait pulled one of the oldest, time-worn solutions from his moth-eaten bag of tricks. And after that, my interest rapidly began to wane.

I'll grand you that the story was not an unreadable one. On the contrary, I quite liked the hardboiled character of Phil Beaumont and the portrayal of the slightly hubristic, but kind, Houdini. Doyle did not have big part to play in the story, but was glad he was included. Hey, who doesn't like Doyle? And there were moments when the author showed he possessed plot-awareness. Such as the clue of Turner's nearsightedness, when she saw the ghosts at the mill house, and how that related to the first shooting incident. A writer, like John Dickson Carr, could have spun quite a ripping yarn out of that single plot-thread.

I also have to admit that the secret behind the ghost at the manor house and how that haunting resulted in murder was not entirely without interest, but the answer obviously revealed the hand of a modern writer. However, all of these points of interest were lost on the larger canvas of the story.

I'm sure readers of contemporary crime novels will be delighted by this modern take on the classic country house mystery, but actual readers of the classic detective story will not be overly impressed with the end result of Escapade. A spirited and well-meant attempt to imitate the greats of yesteryear, but not a classic in its own right. You can almost entirely blame that on the plot not living up to its own potential.

Well, just like last year, this year of blogging ends with a badly written, piss-poor review of a disappointing read, but I'll trick to pick something good to kick-off the New Year with. So I'll end this letdown of a blog-post and wish you all the best in the coming year. I hope to see you all back in 2018!

Serpents in the Garden

"Stories rife with words inane,

Tears in hand, all shed in pain;

These, the author holds—a fool,

Who else can make their thread unspool?"
- Cao Xueqin

Recently, our resident tour guide in the world of shin honkaku, Ho-Ling, posted a review of Akechi Kogorou tai Kindaichi Kousuke (Akechi Kogorou vs. Kindaichi Kousuke, 2002) by Taku Ashibe, which is a collection of short stories from his Exhibition of Great Detectives series – a flattering "showcase of pastiches starring famous detectives from both East and West." Ho-Ling's enticing review was a helpful reminder that, not only, is there an English translation available of one of Ashibe's detective novels, but also that the book in question was residing on my TBR-pile. So I felt compelled to finally take a crack at this very strange and peculiar locked room mystery. Yes, I know, but what did you expect from me?

Ashibe is an award-winning novelist with close to forty books to his name, "spanning the gamut from horror to courtroom dramas," but seems to have a fondness for "highly detailed pastiches." And his sole work (thus far) appearing in English can definitely be described as a meticulously constructed homage.

Koromu no satsujin (Murder in the Red Chamber, 2004) takes place in the world Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber (1791), widely regarded as one of the four classic novels in Chinese literature, which received a thorough translation under the title The Story of the Stone and consists of more than two thousand pages – spread out over five volumes. I've not read this 18th century novel of manners and therefore every single reference flew pass me unnoticed, but Murder in the Red Chamber can perfectly be read as a standalone work. Some might even be inspired to pick up the book that inspired this imaginative, blood-soaked take-off.

There is, however, one drawback to the fact that the fundament of the plot stands on the premise of a two-hundred year old book of more than two thousand pages, which is that it comes with a large, sprawling cast of characters. Only recently, "JJ," mentioned in his review of Jan Ekström's Ättestupan (Deadly Reunion, 1975) how he found the genealogy of the central family to be confusing, but the family tree from that book is dwarfed by the one printed in this one. It comprises of roughly thirty names, dead and alive, spanning several generations and the dramatis personae lists thirty-four active characters! Even Michael Innes' Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) has not as big a cast as that.

So this makes the book a bit of an ordeal to properly review, which is why the primary focus of this blog-post is on the plot and its profusion of impossible crime material. It's a farrago of impossibilities comparable to Paul Halter's Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997), but Ashibe, arguably, wrote a better story around those half a dozen locked room situations.

Murder in the Red Chamber opens with the return of Jia Yuan-chun to her ancestral home. She was once a maid of the Imperial Palace, but has since risen to the position of Imperial Consort and Jia clan erected a garden compound in her honor – a walled paradise christened Prospect Garden. The book also includes a beautifully illustrated and numbered map of Prospect Garden, which shows all of the locations within its walls. It's very similar to the maps found in the Judge Dee novels by Robert van Gulik.

Japanese edition

Anyway, the first of many tragedies also take place within those walls: one of the maidens of Prospect Garden, Ying-chun, who was seen across a lake, resting on a stool beneath the arched roof of a pavilion, when "a pair of arms sprouted from the darkness" – grasping her by the throat and eventually dragging the body "into the lifeless void behind her." The body of water between this horrifying scene and the onlookers on the opposite bank of the lake prevented immediate actions, but when everyone recovers from the first shock and comb the garden they find the body of Ying-chun in a stagnant pond not far from the lake. However, the shadowy killer seems to have escaped and "vanished from a heavily guarded garden." And this would not be the only inexplicable event haunting the characters of this story.

One of the woman from Jia clan, Wang Xi-feng, disappears from a locked and watched room, in which "a looming shadow" was flitting across the sliding door, but when the room was opened the only occupant was the chief maid, Patience – who was tightly bound and clasping the key of the room. But this is only the first act of a three-part (miracle) trick: outside they see "a swath of silk floating nearly seventy feet up in the air." It's a tailored garment that's recognized as Wang Xi-feng's robe and the body that was supposed to be inside this piece of clothing miraculously reappears inside "a courtyard locked from all sides."

Note that these are still only half of all the seemingly impossible situations in the story: the body of a third woman, Shi Xiang-yun, inexplicably appeared in a bed of petals and fourth, named Caltrop, vanished mere seconds after being seen inside a locked room and her body was later found on an outside field. Lastly, an apparition manifests itself by the lake and tries to drag a woman into the water, but this attempt is thwarted and the manifestation sinks back into the underworld.

Well, that's a hefty parcel of miracles and naturally not every single one of them is a classic example of the form: the impossibilities at the lake, the first and last one, where rather theatrical in nature and wonder if they would actually work or fool anyone, but they're good for what they are – especially the first one. The disappearance of Wang Xi-feng and the intruding shadow from the locked room was pretty routine, as was her reappearance inside the locked courtyard, but loved the bit about her ghostly garment floating in the air. It was wonderfully silly and a bit Scooby Doo-ish. I found the answer as to how Caltrop vanished from her locked and watched room a bit sketchy, but the explanation for how a body suddenly appeared in a bed of flowers was as clever as it was imaginative. A similar kind of trick was used in The Undying Butterflies (1997), from The Kindaichi Case Files, to create an alibi-trick and the idea might have been cribbed from that story. Regardless, Ashibe added some noticeable color to the idea. I loved it!

Dream of the Red Chamber

All of these apparent impossibilities are directly connected to the family history of the characters, inter-connecting relationships, past sins and the cultural mores of the time, which form an intricate maze of illusions and treachery – which is navigated by Lai Shang-Rong. A bright government official whose impressive casebook lifted him from the rank of lowly prefect to full-fledged Inspector of the Ministry of Justice. He's enjoyable and energetic investigator who sees mere trickery were others are blinded by the apparent supernatural, but his final conclusion has a blemish or two.

The first one is that the clueing is rather sparse and the second one is the revelation of what's behind this extraordinary chain of events, which is rather anticlimactic as it does not show any kind of grand design one expects from such a elaborate, twisted and complicated plot. However, this is partially made up when an intervening force is revealed to have meddled in the murders and the motive for the interference is what makes The Murder in the Red Chamber a genuine original piece of crime-fiction.

So, The Murder in the Red Chamber is far from being a classic in its own right, but the large scope of the story, the maze-like nature of the plot, the plethora of impossible situations and the final explanation definitely makes the book worth a shot. In particular if you're a fan of locked room conundrums, historical mysteries, foreign crime novels, pastiches or simply loved the source material that Ashibe drew upon for this book.

A note for the curious: some time ago, I took an enthusiastic shot at reading one of The Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature, A Journey to the West (c. 1592) by Wu Cheng'en, which consists of two-thousand pages and the faithful, but terse, translation covered four volumes. Actually, the first volume, detailing Sun Wukong's rebellion against Heaven, was very readable, but got burned out in the second volume. It's a great and fantastic epic, but not the kind of literature that lends itself for binge reading. However, I still want to return to the third and fourth volume, because I still remember where I ended (the kidnapping of Tang Sanzang).

So far another one of my overlong, rambling reviews. I'll try and make an effort to ease off on the impossible crimes, but again, no promises.

Dark Are the Days of Winter

"There is, at Christmas, a spirit of goodwill. It is, as you say, "the thing to do." Old quarrels are patched up, those who have disagreed consent to agree once more, even if it is only temporarily."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas, 1938)

Back in May, I reviewed Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015), edited by Martin Edwards, who is known as an award-winning crime novelist, genre-historian and the author of The Golden Age of Murder (2015), but now Edwards is building a reputation as the resident anthologist of the British Library Crime Classics – compiling a rapidly growing number of themed mystery anthologies for them.

Thus far, the stack includes Capital Crimes: London Mysteries (2015), Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (2016) and Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes (2016), but potentially the best collection of short stories is still in the pipeline: Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). But that anthology won't be released for another six or seven months. So, for the moment, I will have to make do with what has already been published, which brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.

Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries (2016) is an offering of "vintage crime stories set in winter" and a sequel, of sorts, to Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries (2015), which became "one of the UK's fastest-selling crime anthologies" and this lead to the commission of a second compendium of wintry tales – as there's "no denying that the supposed season of goodwill" is "a time of year that lends itself to detective fiction." Edwards succeeded in cobbling together a collection of rare, interesting and often excellent detective stories breathing the spirit of Yuletide. Let's take these stories down from the top.

Fergus Hume's "The Ghost’s Touch," culled from the pages of The Dancer in Red (1906), acts as this collection's curtain-raiser and some aspects of the plot anticipates John Dickson Carr's other famous radio-play, "The Devil’s Saint," which has several versions – two of them I discussed here and here. Hume's story is narrated by Dr. Lascelles, who relates the terrible Christmas of 1893, when he accompanied a friend, Percy Ringan, to his ancestral home. Percy's father accumulated wealth as a gold prospector in Australia, but his poorer cousin, Frank, inherited the family title and estate. So their relationship is both familial and mutually beneficial.

Frank invited both of them to spend Christmas at the Ringan estate, Ringshaw Grange, which resembles "the labyrinth of Daedalus" and has a cursed chamber, the Blue Room, haunted by the ghost of Lady Joan – who reputedly touches occupants of the room "who were foredoomed to death." As to be expected, one of the cousins decide to sleep in the Blue Room, but Dr. Lascelles intervenes in their plans and effectively demonstrates the mortality of the accursed ghost of the room. Not really a rug puller of a detective story, but a good, solid example from "The Room That Kills" category (i.e. a ghost story with a logical explanation).

The second story comes from "The King Kong of the Thriller," Edgar Wallace, whose predilection for lurid sensationalism and hoary dramatics has a repellent effect on me, but the few short stories I read seem to contradict his reputation as a writer of dated melodrama – which is certainly true for "The Chopham Affair." 

Originally, the story was published in one of Wallace's own collections, The Woman from the East (1934), and can be described as a crime story with a twist: one of the main characters of the tale is an old-fashioned rogue, "Alphonse or Alphonso Riebiera," who passes himself off as a Spaniard, but has a passport from one of those shady South American republics. Riebiera eked out a living as a blackmailer of women of rich husbands and turned this in "a well-organized business," but one day, the husband of one of his victims accidentally receives a blackmail note. As a result, the husband decides (as Sherlock Holmes would call it) to extract some private revenge. However, this result in an unusual and hard to explain situation: the blackmailer is found in the snow, shot through the head, alongside the body of a car thief. How this situation came about is the twist in the tail of the story. I liked it and should try one of his full-length novels in the not so distant future.

Margery Allingham's "The Man with the Sack" was first published as "The Case of the Man with the Sack" in a 1936 issue of the illustrious Strand Magazine, which plays a familiar tune on the theme of stolen jewels during a Christmas house party. Reluctantly, Mr. Albert Campion accepts Lady Turrett's invitation to come to Pharaoh's Court on Christmas Eve, because she fears one of her guests, Ada Welkin, is in danger of being relieved from her valuables. Campion is, however, unable to prevent the place from being burglarized, but promptly identifies the guilty person and finds the place where this person stowed away the loot. It's not one of the most original short stories in this anthology, but good and competent enough for what it is.

S.C. Roberts was a renowned publisher and a distinguished Sherlockian, who once played a round of golf with Conan Doyle, which was enough to brag about as a fanboy, but Roberts also wrote and published several pastiches – one of those stories, "The Case of the Megatherium Thefts," is apparently very good. However, the Sherlockian pastiche that's collected here is a short stage-play, "Christmas Eve," in which a problem is brought to Holmes and Watson by Miss Violet de Vinne. She acted as a secretary to Lady Barton, "the owner of a very wonderful pearl necklace," but the pearls have gone missing. Holmes immediately sees there’s a second story hidden beneath her account and cleverly ferrets the truth out of her.

The resolution of the case tore a page from "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), which also happened to be a Christmas-time story about a lost gemstone. As a matter of fact, I think that story may very well be the arch-type of these festive tales about stolen and/or lost stones.

One of the main reasons for jumping on this anthology is the next novella-length story: Victor Gunn's "Death in December," originally published in Ironsides Sees Red (1948), which is an impossible crime tale set in a snowbound castle during Christmas – solved by a wonderful character in the mold of Sir Henry Merrivale, Andy Dalziel and Arthur Bryant.

Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell, or simply "Old Iron," is a grumpy character who is dragged by his highborn subordinate, Johnny Lister, to the ancestral seat of his family. A place as dark and gloomy as the past, named Cloon Castle, perched on the top of desolate mountain in the Peak District. So "Old Iron" had enough material to grumble for the entire length of the journey, but, upon their arrival, the holiday is slowly turning into a busman's holiday for the two. On the driveway of the castle, they saw "an extraordinary figure," garbed in a dark cloak, stumbling across a snowy field and vanish, but the figure failed to leave any footprints in his wake. And this would not be the only apparently supernatural event at the castle.

Cloon Castle has one of those haunted rooms, known as the Death Room, but the head of family, General Lister, refuses to tell the back-story of the room to his guests. However, this fails to dampen the enthusiasm of the house party and one of them ends up sleeping in the haunted room. As is pointed out in the story, these experiments usually end with the house party finding "the occupant of the haunted room stretched out cold and stark on the floor," but this time around the events take a different turn: a blood-spattered corpse appears inside the room in the middle of the night. But when everyone goes back to check, the body has vanished and not a trace of blood is found on the floor! This cannot be tagged as a locked room, but how the bloodstains vanished can be marked as an impossible situation.

The subsequent investigation by "Old Iron" was quite fun, which lead from the Death Room to "a cold, gloomy, family crypt" and back to his bedroom where a nasty surprise was waiting, but I have a bone to pick about the impossible situation regarding the footprints. I do not believe the trick would leave behind a spotless field of unbroken snow and it would be very easy to make a slipup in its execution, which would ruin the whole effect. All in all, I liked this novella and have written Victor Gunn down as a person of interest for the near future.

Christopher Bush's "Murder at Christmas" was first published in 1951, in The Illustrated London News, under the title "The Holly Bears a Berry," which features his series-character, Ludovic Travers, who is spending Christmas-weekend as the house guest of the Chief Constable of Worbury – which is usually a quiet, peaceful place. However, one of the neighboring inhabitants is a rather notorious characters and an ex-convict, named John Block Brewse, who was "the last of the line of financial swindlers." So hardly surprising when someone strangles him to death in the nearby woods and Travers solves the case by smashing the murderer's alibi to pieces, but I always wonder if these alibi-tricks work when you have to manually strangle the victim. Otherwise, a fairly good short-short detective story.

The next entry in this anthology is also a fairly short-short story, but one that quickly became a favorite of mine, "Off the Tiles" by Ianthe Jerrold, who also authored the magnificent Dead Man's Quarry (1930) and the splendid There May Be Danger (1948). Jerrold has undergone a personal renaissance, after all four of her mystery novels were reissued by the Dean Street Press, which were supplemented during the 1950s with a handful of short detective stories in The London Mystery Magazine.

This one is a great showcase of her talent as a writer, as well as a demonstration of her cleverness, as Inspector James Quy investigates the deadly fall of a woman from a roof onto the street below. Was it an accident or a cleverly contrived murder? The plot that Quy uncovers is fairly original and one that could be considered both a success as well as an abject failure. So I really hope all of Jerrold's short stories gets gathered in a single volume. I would love to read more from her.  

Macdonald Hastings' "Mr. Cork's Secret" was printed in the December, 1952 issue of the monthly magazine of Lilliput magazine, which was offered as a Christmas competition and promised a reward of 150 pounds to everyone who could deduce the titular secret. The solution and winners were announced several months later. Interestingly, Edwards posted the answer to the secret at the end of the book. So you can try and challenge yourself. Plot-wise, this twist in the tail turned this fairly ordinary crime story into one of the best and most original Christmas stories about stolen jewelry. A genuinely clever piece that involves bloodied corpse in a hotel room, several famous thespians, a newspaper reporter and a well-mannered burglar. A very fun and eventually clever story.

Unfortunately, I did not care all that much for the next pair of stories, Julian Symons' "The Santa Claus Club" and Michael Gilbert "Deep and Crisp and Even," which is convenient excuse to skip them and not further bloat this blog-post.

Finally, the last entry, Josephine Bell's "The Carol Singers," was first published in Murder Under the Mistletoe (1992) and the story ends this collection on a fairly dark, grim and sad note – even for a collection of detective stories about bloody murder and thievery. Old Mrs. Fairlands occupies the ground floor flat of a converted Victorian family home, which once housed her entirely family and a domestic staff, but this became untenable by the late 1940s. So the house was converted and the floors rented out as apartments. The reader is also told how old age is catching up with the poor woman, who needs a solid hour to get dressed and sometimes too tired to make supper, which leaves her faint and thirsty, but the worst is yet to come.

Circumstances lead her to be all alone in the large house on Christmas, which provided an opportunity to a small group of home-invaders, pretending to be carol singers, to overtake Mrs. Fairlands. She was tied to a chair and gagged. And there she was left and eventually take her last, labored breathe after being completely "exhausted by pain, hunger and cold." It's even sadder when you realize the carol singers who did this were children! However, the ending showed Bell was not willing to plunge the reader in an all-encompassing darkness and provided a cop-out ending, but it remains a well-written, powerful and chilling story. In particular the part up until her death.

So, all in all, Crimson Snow is a nicely balanced collection of holiday-themed detective-and thriller stories, which managed to avoid all of the usual suspects and consists almost entirely of rarely anthologized short stories – even a couple of genuine rarities. And that's always a plus for these kind of short story collections. I really enjoyed breezing through all of these stories and will have to take a look at some of these other collections. I just hope I haven't breezed through this review too fast. By the end, it was basically just banging on the keyboard. 

Well, that's it for this blog-post and I'll try to lay-off the Christmas/wintry mysteries for now, because last year it actually burned me out. 

The Voice of Reason

"Our lives are drawing towards eventide and old faces and old scenes are gone forever. And yet, as I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, for a while the past rises up to obscure the present and I see before me the yellow fogs of Baker Street and I hear once more the voice of the best and wisest man whom I have ever known: 'Come, Watson, the game's afoot.'"

- Dr. John H. Watson (John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Red Widow," from The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, 1954) 

The 1930-and 40s are generally considered to be the glory years of the detective story, but what's often overlooked is that the genre prospered around the same time as radio dramas experienced their golden age and detective stories thrived as much on the airwaves as they did on the printed page – reaching an audience of millions of listeners.

During that time, there was a wide variety of crime shows to be found across the radio dial. Radio shows such as Suspense, Murder by Experts, Cabin B-13 and The Inner Sanctum offered episodic, standalone stories, but there was also a whole slew of recognizable sleuths who got their own regular program. These shows included The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, Casey, Crime Photographer and The Adventures of Sam Spade.

You probably noticed I omitted one very well-known and recognizable name from that short overview, but rest assured, I had not forgotten about the immortal Sherlock Holmes and the indispensable Dr. Watson. Who could forget about them?

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was one of the popular radio shows of the day, which ran from 1939 to 1947, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson – cementing a place for itself in the Holmes fandom. But enthusiasts of classic mysteries also remember the show, because the series was co-written by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green. Both men collaborated on another popular show, The Casebook of Gregory Hood, and Boucher himself was a very respected as both a mystery novelist and reviewer. 

During the late 1980s-and early 90s, the series experienced a brief resurgence when a whole slew episodes were released on cassette tape and these eventually numbered twenty-six volumes in total. However, the object of interest of this blog-post is the book spawned by this project, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1989), which consists of about a dozen short stories adapted from the original radio-plays by Boucher and Green.

Ken Greenwald is the author of the book and the introduction goes over how this collection of short stories came into being, which stretched all the way back to when he was ten years old, "tucked safely in bed with the lights out," listening to the show on a small radio next to his bed and these childhood memories came back in the late 1980s – when, as one of the archivists for a radio museum, he "learned of a long run of missing Sherlock Holmes radio shows from 1945." This lead to the episodes being released and his colleagues came to him with the suggestion of writing a book based on radio-plays, which was grateful task and the end result is a charming homage to the work of Boucher, Green, Rathbone and Bruce.

As Greenwald stresses, The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is not a close imitation of the writing by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but instead tried "to be true to the writings of Green and Boucher" and utilize as much of their material as possible – which seems to have succeeded at. He also emphasizes that he adapted these stories with the original (voice) actors in mind and asks the reader to "think of Rathbone and Bruce in the roles of the great detective and his companion."

So now that we got that out of the way, lets take these stories down from the top and I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. I'm painfully aware that the size reviews of short story collection tend to resemble a bloated canal corpse.

The opening story, "The Adventure of the Second Generation," takes place after Sherlock Holmes retired to the countryside and dedicated all of his attention to tending his bees, but an extended visit from his old friend, Dr. Watson, coincided with a plea for help from the daughter of Irene Adler – who finds herself in the clutches of a blackmailer. She is being blackmailed by Holmes' awful neighbor, Mr. Litton-Stanley, who has "some rather indiscreet letters" in his possession and expects a small fortune for their return, but Holmes and Watson encounter a snag when they try to retrieve them. There's also a nifty twist towards the ending that I actually foresaw. A charming little story. 

The second story, "The Adventure of the April Fool's Adventure," occurred not long after the first meeting between Holmes and Watson, which makes the latter slightly uncomfortable when a friend, James Murphy, draws him in a conspiracy with the objective of pulling a prank on the promising detective. Lady Ann is going to call on Holmes and ask him to help her find the famous Elfenstone Emerald. Apparently, the stone was lifted from her wall safe and the joke is that all of the planted clues identify Holmes as the thief, but, after they all had a laugh at his expense, the stone vanishes for real – and he has to figure out who used the prank as a cover for the theft. You can probably guess the hiding place for the stone, but the real surprise is the secret identity of the thief.

I'm afraid I didn’t care for the third story, "The Case of the Amateur Mendicants," in which Watson is called upon by a woman, "dressed in rags and tatters," who, in a surprisingly cultured voice, assures she came on "a matter of life and death." So he allows her to bring him to a luxuriously furnished basement, strangely filled with dirty looking beggars, where he's shown a dead man with a broken neck. However, the people there are opposed to his presence and he quickly takes his leave, but, alongside Holmes, returns to that basement and uncovers a dark conspiracy that could endanger the whole of England. A story with an interesting premise, but I was impressed with the resolution of the plot.

Luckily, the fourth entry, "The Adventure of the Out-of-Date Murder," turned out to be one of my favorite stories from this collection. Holmes has been overworking himself and Watson senses "an attack of nerves and total breakdown approaching," which makes him decide to pull his friend out of his private laboratory for a holiday in Eastbourne. Both men decide to meet up with an old acquaintance, Professor Whitnell, who recently garnered fame with the discovery of a network of underground caverns – saturated with "a heavy deposit of lime" that have "the property of rapidly mummifying any flesh," human or animal, "deposited in them." What they find in them pertains to several men who went missing in the area over the past two-or three hundred years. I love archeological mysteries and this story should have been adapted for the Jeremy Brett TV-series.

The next story, "The Case of the Demon Barber," has a theatrical background and concerns a well-known actor, Mark Humphries, who is playing the lead role in Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but now fears the personality of Sweeney Todd has taken possession of his subconscious. Several times, he has woken up to find that his boots were caked with mud and his razorblade stained with blood. A good and tantalizing premise, but the attraction of the plot is mainly derived from using the tale of Sweeney Todd as a template and Holmes taking over the role from Humphries – after he apparently committed suicide in his dressing room. 

In "Murder Beyond the Mountains," Holmes finally tells Watson about one of his many adventures in Tibet, which read like one of Glyn Carr's mountaineering mysteries as perceived by Robert van Gulik. 

Holmes is braving the harsh conditions of the Tibetan mountains, as Olaf Sigerson, in the hope of getting permission at the monastery of Puncha-Pushpah to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa, but his traveling party and equipment gets obliterated in an avalanche – wandering delirious in the white, desolate mountains of Tibet. Luckily, he's saved by an American missionary, Miss Farley, who travels with him to the monastery and they're joined by a Russian envoy, Borodin. All of them seek permission to enter the forbidden city, but the Chinese emissary, Wah-tzun, refuses to give permission. So, before long, Holmes has to investigate the murder of the emissary, which is a relatively simple affair. The main strength here definitely lies in the backdrop of the story.

The following story, "The Case of the Uneasy Easy Chair," provides the collection with its first or three (borderline) impossible crime stories, which is brought to Holmes and Watson by a young woman, Miss Harriet Irvin. Her father, Sir Edward Irvin, was stabbed to death in his study and "the only entrance to the study through an anteroom," but that room was occupied by his secretary, Robert Binyon, who "swore that no one had entered or left the study." The problem is that Sir Edward was strongly opposed to the blossoming love between his daughter and secretary, which provided the young man with both a motive and opportunity. So the police arrested him on suspicion of murder. Well, the how-aspect of the crime is easily solved, but whodunit-angle had a small surprise that showed even Holmes was prone to misjudging a situation.

Initially, I really wanted to like the next story, "The Case of the Baconian Cipher," but ended up not caring for it. Holmes is engaged in a discussion with a French colleague and friendly rival, Francois la Villard, who asserts that "the English criminal is a very dull dog" and in order to prove him wrong Holmes introduces him to The Agony Column – which is "liable to contain anything from a lover’s frantic appeal" to "a ransom note." Immediately, they find a coded message that could be a call for help and this lead them to a house where a wheel chair bound man might be in mortal danger. But the only interesting aspect of the plot is Mycroft Holmes' off-page cameo and how this affected the events in the story.

The next story, "The Case of the Headless Monk," is a very atmospheric, Carrian tale that offered a borderline impossible crime to Holmes and Watson. A restless Holmes and Watson are bound to their rooms in Baker Street by a thick, impenetrable mist that drowned the city of London for the better part of a week, but rescue came when they received a visit from Mortimer Harley – a specialist in the supernatural. Harley has been presented with a rare opportunity to investigate one of Cornwall's legendary ghosts, the Headless Monk of Trevenice Chapel, which has recently become very active again. The specialist of the supernatural wants to know whether the phenomena is genuine or driven by human agency, in which case it's a problem for someone like Holmes.

Holmes and Watson gratefully accept this unusual invitation to escape from foggy London and accompany him to Cornwall, but they are unable to prevent a deadly stabbing in the disused and closely watched chapel. However, the explanation for the semi-impossible circumstances of the murder will be considered a cheat by many readers, but, technically, the witness did not lie. I still kind of liked the story. But, yes, I recognize that these type of plots have been done better and far more competent than this. So keep that mind when you read it for yourself.

The plot of "The Case of the Camberwell Poisoners" began as a classic tontine-scheme: Edmund Lovelace comes to Baker Street to ask Holmes if wants to save four lives. Lovelace lives with four cousins in an old house in Camberwall, which was left to them by their grandfather, but the place and a sizable fortune came to them under the sole condition that they "live together and maintain the family unit" – everything will eventually go to the last surviving cousin. The problem arose with his cousin Gerald, administrator of the estate, who was found to be in possession of cyanide-filled syringe, but upon their arrival in Camberwall it becomes apparent that the story was going to be one of human interest. One with a rather obvious explanation. But not too bad of a story.

The next story, "The Adventure of the Iron Box," is a fine and fun yarn, which is definitely one of the highlights from this collection. An old friend, Sir Walter Dunbar, invites Dr. Watson to spend the New Year's Eve at Dunbar Castle in Scotland. Of course, Holmes accompanies him there. Sir Walter has a very special reason for inviting his friend and personal chronicler of Europe's most celebrated detective. The late father of the current lair of the castle, Sir Thomas Dunbar, returned severely wounded from the battle of Waterloo and left his unborn child an iron box filled with gold, but there was a condition attached to this legacy: the box was to be given to his son on New Year's Eve before his twenty-first birthday.

There is, however, one snag that Sir Thomas did not foresee on his deathbed: his son was born on February 29th, which made him a "leapling" and therefore had to wait for over eight decades before to finally come into his inheritance. Unfortunately, Holmes has to play the specter at the feast and informs everyone that, due to a technicality, 1900 is not going to be a leap year. So the old Lord has to wait another four years. As to be expected, this casts a shadow over the proceedings and leads to the unsettling discovery that Sir Walter has disappeared. It's a very Ellery Queen-ish story (c.f. "The Mad Tea Party" from The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1933) and another example of a plot that would have lent itself perfectly for a television adaptation.

The next story, "The Case of the Girl with the Gazelle," is the last of the three locked room stories from this collection, which has the ominous presence of Moriarty hanging over the case of a stolen painting. In the opening of the story, the reader is informed that illustrious Napoleon of Crime has particular love for the paintings of Jean Baptiste Greuze and his hand is clearly at work when an authority on the work of that famous painter vanishes from his hotel room in London – which puts Holmes and Watson on the trail of recently purchased work by Greuze. Sir Henry Davenant paid a small fortune for the titular painting and has safely stored away in a small, steel-walled strong room equipped with a combination-and time lock, but, somehow, someone managed to switch the real painting for a fake.

The explanation for the theft from the secured strong room is almost disappointingly simple, but it is very workable and its simplicity nearly fooled Holmes. As a result, this nearly ended in a tie between Holmes and Moriarty, but I think round should go to Holmes – because he prevented the theft of the painting. All in all, a pretty nice and fun little story.

Finally, "The Adventure of the Notorious Canary Trainer" began as a messy story as Holmes and Watson, during a holiday, are confronted with a young woman who's being stalked by a man she is trying to escape from, but this man turns out to be attached to the Foreign Office and knows Mycroft Holmes. A second plot-strand involves Wilson, the notorious canary trainer, who Holmes had sent to prison in 1895, but he escaped and since then he has apparently assumed the identity of a Mr. Wilson. However, when he notices Holmes he confesses to a murder at the inn and commits suicide in front of Holmes and Watson, but nobody is aware anyone had died at the inn. Let alone murdered. Here the plot begins to become a bit clearer and the suicide of Wilson proves to be a cleverly disguised story. So a decent story to round out this collection.

I should also note that Watson meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this story and Holmes reveals he has collaborated with Dr. John Thorndyke in R. Austin Freeman's The Red Thumbmark (1907), which was a nice touch and nod.

So, all in all, a nice and pleasant collection of short stories, which may not be overflowing with stone-cold classics, but a fun bundle of stories nonetheless and that's coming from someone who usually hates (Holmesian) pastiches. I'm often annoyed at the liberties some writers take with someone else's creation, but this was an obvious labor of love and that makes every minor inconsistency in the characters or canon somewhat easier to forgive. Anyhow, recommended to everyone who loves Sherlock Holmes and Basil Rathbone's interpretation of the famous detective.

Well, I completely failed to keep this review as short as possible. Oh well. I just hope this blog-post was not too much of a mess and I'll try to keep somewhat shorter for the next post.