Inspector De Klerck and the Dark Web (2022) by P. Dieudonné

Last year, I reviewed P. Dieudonné's Rechercheur De Klerck en moord in scène (Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene, 2021) and wrote how the series is the first to succeed in emerging from the shadow of the master of the Dutch politieroman (police novel), Appie Baantjer, whose formula has often been copied – only superficially and rarely as good. Dieudonné retained the familiar style, format and storyteller, but changed the backdrop from the overused Amsterdam to Rotterdam and gave more weight to the plots than his illustrious predecessor. This series is also much more grounded in today's world. 

So while Rechercheur De Klerck en het doodvonnis (Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence, 2019) and Rechercheur De Klerck en het duivelse spel (Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game, 2020) would not be out of place among Baantjer's own work, you can't say the same about the subsequent novels. Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020) combined three seemingly impossible disappearances with the daredevil antics of a fugitive motor cyclist and Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene camouflages a finely-plotted whodunit with an American-style rivalry between two rap groups. You can call it a contemporary take on the theatrical mystery that's inextricably linked to the traditional detective story.

It has been tremendously fun and rewarding to have seen this series getting build from the ground up, which continues to improve while trying to do something different with each novel. And the latest title in the series is no exception. 

Rechercheur De Klerck en het duistere web (Inspector De Klerck and the Dark Web, 2022) is the sixth title in the series and is not so much about whodunit as what-is-going-on-here as Dieudonné's two detectives, Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver, tumble down a rabbit hole of internet conspiracies – nearly igniting a small, localized popular revolt on the way down. This all begins when an elderly lady turns to De Klerck to anonymously report a crime of enormous proportions. She believes there's a powerful network of highly placed pedophiles and "a dark web has been stretched to catch children," but De Klerck is surprised when she names a prominent prosecutor, Simon Bödeker, as "the spider in this dark web." Even more curious is the story she presents De Klerck as evidence. She went to Bödeker's home to confront him, but he didn't answer the door and she heard "the helpless whimper of a child" that was locked inside the house. So now she's afraid to get murdered to ensure her silence.

De Klerck is a sober-minded, skeptical policeman and believes a plot does not necessary have to be found in "the shadowy catacombs of the conspiracy theorists." He believes "a dark web is beings spun with the intent to discredit some high-ranking people" and "to besmirch their reputation," but facts begin to turn against the prosecutor when the body of the elderly lady is dragged out of the water near his home. She had been hit over the head with a brick and drowned. Bödeker does precious little to diminish suspicion heaped upon him by his questionable, highly unethical behavior. De Klerck and Klaver begin to feel pressure from both the public and the higher ups.

On the one hand, they have to deal with a citizen journalist and crusader, Patrick Plaggenmarsch, whose website is the main source of the suggestive, subtly presented accusations against the prosecutor – tiptoeing the line between free speech and libel. The website has a dedicated following that can be mobilized and present a volatile element in the case, which is not helped when Plaggenmarsh begins to comment on the investigation. Demanding justice for their fallen heroine, accusing the Rotterdam police of a lack of professionalism and promising his readers new revelations. On the other hand, De Klerck begins to wonder if Plaggenmarsh accidentally hit the mark with his conspiracy theory as some potential key witnesses or suspects died under what could be termed suspicious circumstances. De Klerck also crosses swords with the acting Chief of Police, Commissioner De Froideville, who tries to prevent De Klerck from bothering the beleaguered prosecutor. So is there an actual conspiracy and an attempt to hush it up?

Like I said previously, Inspector De Klerck and the Dark Web is more of a what-is-going-on-here than a proper whodunit and the murderer's identity, as well as the motive, suggested itself early on in the story (ROT13/SPOILER: V nyjnlf rlr Tbbq Fnznevgnaf jvgu tenir fhfcvpvba va qrgrpgvir fgbevrf). A grave suspicion that became a certainty when a second murder is discovered and the victim left behind a dying message "written in blood." Dying messages are even rarer in Dutch detective fiction than locked room murders and impossible crimes with the only examples coming to mind being Ton Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and Anne van Doorn's De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieves His Conscience, 2019). So it was nice to come across another one here.

So while the ending failed to take me by complete surprise, the intention of Inspector De Klerck and the Dark Web was not necessarily figuring out whodunit, but what had happened and you need to fill a lot of details to get a complete picture of the plot – which logically fits together and beautifully contrasts with its conspiratorial premise. Not quite as good as Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death and Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene, but maintains the high standard of the previous entries in the series. I eagerly look forward to the next title which could very well be Dieudonné trying his hands at a pulpier version of the Dutch politieroman. Rechercheur De Klerck en een dodelijk pact (Inspector De Klerck and a Deadly Pact, 2022), scheduled to be published in November, concerns the owner of a sporting goods store who "went up in smoke" before his body is found sitting at the banks of the water with "a bright blue frog" on his head. Like one of those brightly colored, poisonous frogs or a tattoo? I'm already intrigued!

Murder Most Scientific: "The Shredded Rose" (1978) by Lynwood Sawyer

Lynwood Sawyer was twenty-five when he submitted his first and only short story, "The Shredded Rose," to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and it was published in the July, 1978, issue as the magazine's 500th "First Story" – a "whodunit-howdunit" with an armchair detective and "a scientific type of locked room." Frederic Dannay, one half of "Ellery Queen" and editor-in-chief of EQMM at the time, wrote in his introduction that Sawyer's "The Shredded Rose" is "a detective story that flashed our memories back to the Golden Age." That's all I needed to know! 

"The Shredded Rose" is really a short-short covering a little more than five pages and begins with Sheriff Fedder visiting Dr. Austin Lyle, professor emeritus or organic chemistry at Medlin College, to consult him on strange case. A possible murder without a hint of foul play.

Sheriff Fedder is investigation the death of a botanist and health nut, Professor Tate, who used his bathroom as a greenhouse and had a whirlpool installed in his bathtub. On the evening of his untimely death, Professor Tate told his housekeeper he was going to take his whirlpool bath, but, when she returned the following morning, the bathroom door was still locked and she could hear whirlpool machine still running – except there was no response to her knocking. So the police broke down the door and found the professor's body in the tub "as if he had fallen asleep." There was "a sort of shredded rose on the floor" and "a vase split in half on top of it." Officially, Professor Tate died of natural causes, because the autopsy was unable to find any other cause of death. How exactly did the professor die? And, if it's murder, how did the murderer entered a locked bathroom with the only window closed that's covered on the outside with a thick, strong grille.

Dr. Lyle asks Sheriff Fedder whether the dust on the floor was in little circles, "almost like dust which has been struck by rainwater," which reveals a simplistic, science-based method that came close to producing a perfect crime. Since the method often reveals the criminal, Dr. Lyle is able to tell Sheriff Fedder the murderer's name as "the murder could have borne his signature." As clever as this little short-short is, I don't believe Sawyer intended his story to be a throwback to the Golden Age of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke series. "The Shredded Rose" struck me as a conscious imitations of Arthur Porges' scientific locked room puzzles like "Dead Drunk" (1959), "Coffee Break" (1964) and "The Scientist and the Exterminator" (1974). Either way, "The Shredded Rose" is clever little short-short that impressively rolled an armchair detective story, locked room mystery and scientific detection into barely a handful of pages. So not bad for a first try and definitely a short-short editors should consider for inclusion in a future locked room/impossible crime anthology. 

A note for the curious: Dannay introduced Lynwood Sawyer who earned his degree in organic chemistry from New College, Sarasota, Florida, but retired early to found a music company and "working the graveyard shift as a package sorter at United Parcel Service" – while spending his free time reading, writing, fishing or wine making. Sounds like "the patchwork multi-activity background of a blossoming author," which made me curious. What else has Lynwood Sawyer written? I found out Lynwood Sawyer is Clyde Lynwood Sawyer, Jr. who co-wrote An Uncertain Currency (1999) with Frances Witlin and has an IMDb page as Lynwood Shiva Sawyer. Interestingly, Sawyer is still credited as the author of EQMM's 500th First Story, but wrongly titled "The Tattered Rose." It's also possible Sawyer submitted the story under the title "The Tattered Rose" and Dannay changed it to "The Shredded Rose."

Murder Without a Net (1962) by Martin Meroy

"Martin Meroy" was the penname of Charles Ewald, a French journalist, radio producer and writer, who penned a series of typical, 1960s tough-guy novels starring a hardboiled private eye of the same name, Martin Meroy, which differed in one important respect from other tough-guy fiction of the period – an alluring "fondness for impossible crimes." The series has never received an English translation, but thirteen of the novels were translated into Dutch as part of De Schorpioen's Inter-Pol Collectie. A now obscure, not always easy to obtain line of mostly American flavored English, French and German crime-and detective fiction. I say mostly because the series include one of the scientific mystery novels by E. and M.A. Radford (Death on the Broads, 1957). 

So the Dutch translations of the Martin Meroy novels are not entirely out of my reach and actually (poorly) reviewed Du plomb pour la familie (Lead for the Family, 1959) and Meurtre en chambre noire (Murder in a Darkened Room, 1960) back in 2011. They were fun, fast-paced and short private eye stories with simple, straightforward solutions to the locked room puzzles. More workmanlike than truly inspired takes on the impossible crime tale, but good enough to keep an eye out for the other Dutch translations. And that took a little longer than expected. But finally got my hands on another one!

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Brett Halliday's Mike Shayne or Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective found themselves transported to Anthony Abbot's About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932)? Martin Meroy's Meurtre sans filet (Murder Without a Net, 1962) has the answer.

Martin Meroy is a French detective, who lives and operates in New York City, but the opening of Murder Without a Net finds him back in France on the day he's supposed to go back to America to when Commissioner Blaise Chateau calls him at his hotel – requesting his immediate presence at Circus Wallace. Judging by the Commissioner's tone, Meroy suspects "that there's a brand new corpse on display." And not any old regular corpse!

Gloria Suzin belongs to a group of three flying trapeze artists, called the Berena's, who retreated to her caravan following a late night training session, but didn't came out the next morning. So they broke one of the windows on the door to open door and discovered Gloria had been shot to death in her bed under very strange, almost impossible circumstances. The bullet "entered the crown, cut right through the neck and ended up in the stomach." A peculiar entry and trajectory, but just as peculiar is how the murderer entered and left the caravan. The caravan has a double-wing door with the left wing being locked in place, top and bottom, while the right wing door was secured on the inside with a hook-lock. There was precious little room in the crammed, over stuffed caravan to hide or any opening that lined up with the trajectory of the bullet. Since she's a circus artist with a backstory, the circus terrain is teeming with colorful suspects and certain danger.

There are the other two Berena's, Simone Lhardy and Pierre Rouget, who immediately replaced Gloria with Dorothy Hardt. An English trapeze artist who happened to be Paris and was available to take her place. Fred Saint-Brieuc is the aristocratic looking owner of Circus Wallace and entangled with Gloria in more ways than one. Cyril Beaton is an animal tamer who took great risks with both wild animals and his money, which is why he owed Gloria a ton of money. Arthur Raymondini used to be a flying trapeze artist himself, but nearly died in an accident and, when he returned, discovered that his then student Pierre Rouget had stolen his whole act. And now limps around the circus ring as Nanave the Clown. Bernard Dreville is a magician, escape artist and locked room specialist who references Meroy's success in Murder in a Darkened Room. Jacques Graillet aspired to be a world famous musician, but ended up as a circus orchestra master and Raoul Anderson is circus-technician who knows how to put a gadget together. Last, but not least, is the Goliath strongman, David Rezeff, who strongly objects to nosey parkers, like Meroy, sticking his nose in their business.

So the Goliath provides Meroy with a physical challenge to overcome, but Meroy, while an expert in impossible crimes, belongs to the tough-guy school of detectives and spends every morning hardening the sides of his hands karate-chopping "hard objects" – allowing him to end their first encounter with double axe-handle smash to the neck. But resorted to some dirty tactics during their next few encounters with the blow-off threatening to end in a disappointing brawl to the back. Fortunately, that was not the case. Another moment Meroy got to shine as a hardboiled gumshoe is when he found a bomb under the hood of his car, removed it and casually dropped it into his pocket. Meroy is booked strongly here.

Most of you are more interested in the plot than the action and, like mentioned at the beginning, the series differentiated itself from its contemporaries with stronger plot often centered on an impossible crime. The back cover of the Dutch edition even called Meroy "de specialist van moorden in gesloten ruimten" ("the specialist of murders in closed spaces") and he certainly lives up to his reputation in Murder Without a Net. Considerable attention is given to the locked room problem as numerous possibilities are considered (a hidden panel) and eliminated (reconstructing the pane of glass to look for signs of tampering), which resulted in a nicely-done false-solution towards the end. Regrettably, the actual, two-part solution turned out to be a mixed bag of tricks. The locked room-trick itself is a reasonable well-done variation on an old dodge of the impossible crime story (if you know your locked room fiction), but there was something genuine daring and original about the murder itself – which bordered on pure pulp. No, it has nothing to do with the mischievous, popgun wielding monkey. Only reason why it didn't entirely worked is that all the relevant clues and scraps of information were withheld from the reader until the last possible moment. Such as the wet smear of paint.

On the other hand, the murderer had a gem of a motive to stage the murder as a locked room mystery and Meroy got solve two equally baffling, even borderline impossible crimes towards the end in record time. One of these two deaths is staged inside the circus tent filled to capacity, which is very similar to the murder from Abbot's About the Murder of the Circus Queen, but with a completely different solution. A trick that almost feels wasted how it was tacked on at the end of this short, fast-paced novel.

So, all in all, Martin Meroy's Murder Without a Net could have been better, but it also could have been a lot worse and, if my memory is to be trusted, the best of three read so far. It's definitely the title I would recommend to translate to a publisher, like Locked Room International, as it scratches that impossible crime itch. Even with the eventual solution being marred by the late clueing and partially relying on a rather routine trick. But still good enough to keep on the lookout for the other translations.

Orange Pulp: "The Jewelry of a Widow" (c. 1960s) by Ton Vervoort

Last year, I delved into the work of a long-forgotten, out-of-print Dutch mystery writer, Peter Verstegen, who wrote five classically-styled and plotted detective novels during the 1960s about a dandy, educated Amsterdam homicide cop, Floris Jansen – published as by "Ton Vervoort." The Ellery Queen-inspired Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) were among last years highlights, but don't overlook the very game Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Actors, 1963) and Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965). So that left me with one last novel from the series, Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965), but wanted to take a little detour first to one of only three known short stories Vervoort wrote during the sixties. A story with a slightly unusual publishing history. 

Between 1962 and 1965, Vervoort wrote and published his five Floris Jansen novels, but bowed out of the genre a few years later with a special, expensive and time consuming project. Vervoort wrote and put together a dossier roman (crime dossier) a la Dennis Wheatley. De zaak Stevens (The Stevens Case, 1967/68) was commissioned to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the European Chemical Corporation in Rotterdam. Vervoort plotted and wrote the story, but it took twenty people, eleven days and 10.000 gulden (roughly 25.000 euros today) to produce two-thousand handmade copies. Surprisingly, copies are not exceedingly rare. Just a little pricey.

Vervoort modeled The Stevens Case on an unpublished short story, "De juwelen van een weduwe" ("The Jewelry of a Widow"), which eventually found its way into the fifth, 1974 edition of a short-lived, now obscure publication Pulp – printed as the original Stevens Case. However, the plots of the short story and dossier roman appear to be very different with former concerning missing jewelry, while the later is a murder case in which the victim is found super-glued to the crime scene. Yes, a short story centering on missing or stolen jewelry reeks of uninspired routine and filler material. Leave it to Vervoort to give this routine premise a fresh coat of paint! 

"The Jewelry of a Widow" begins when Tilda Stevens comes to Floris Jansen to report that pieces of expensive jewelry belonging to her late mother-in-law were either stolen or have gone missing. Mrs. Ruby Stevens (née Perlmutter) was according to Tilda a wealthy, widowed lady, but stingy where money was concerned. She never financially supported her son's art dealership "because she believed her son should fend for himself." When Mrs. Stevens died naturally in her sleep, Tilda Stevens discovered "a pearl necklace, a brooch and a ring with a ruby" were missing, but here's the kicker. Nobody has ever seen the items in question. So how does she know they even exist and may have been stolen? Before she passed away, Mrs. Steven had "a very precise portrait" painted showing all her wrinkles and the expensive-looking pieces of jewelry. She also withdrew two-hundred thousand guldens over a two-year period, which she unlikely spend all on her holiday trips abroad.

Tilda is convinced the necklace, brooch and ring exist and rightfully belongs to her husband, but suspects Mrs. Stevens' leeching nephew, Harry Stevens, is in cahoots with the painter, Schaafsma, who claims it was all a practical joke – concocted between himself and the old widow. Tilda refused to take that answer and "practically tore down the house on the Leidsegracht to find the jewelry" without result. So now it's up to Floris Jansen to probe the problem and quickly discovers the situation and people involved are not quite as Tilda had outlined to him.

I think seasoned mystery readers will immediately spot one part of the solution when a certain clue is described (ROT13: "n obggyr bs erq ivgnzva cvyyf"), but the overall solution to the missing jewelry is well enough handled (especially the why). My only complaint is that Vervoort tried to have his cake and eat it too with a last-second twist erirnyvat gung Zef. Fgriraf jnf zheqrerq. This ended the story with too many fingers in the pie and comes across like the jewelry plot needed reinforcement in the end to make the read worthwhile. It really didn't need that last twist. But other than that, Vervoort's "The Jewelry of a Widow" is a decent, if very minor, short detective story that largely succeeded in doing something different with the problem of missing jewelry.

Night Terrors: "The Empty Coffins" (1984/2009) by John Russell Fearn

2021 saw the publication of two so-called hybrid mysteries, Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), which introduced the living dead into the environment of the traditionally-styled detective story with two vastly different outcomes – ranging from the horrifying to the philosophical. Imamura's Death Among the Undead is a classic locked room mystery cast like a zombie survival horror flick, while Masaya's Death of the Living Dead simply blurred the lines that once separated the dead from the living. And they are both awesome! 

A successful blending of the traditional, fair play detective story and genres like fantasy, horror and science-fiction is very difficult to pull off without compromising one or the other. Masaya and Imamura showed it can be done even with something as fantastical as the walking dead. There happened to be a (very short) pulp novel on my TBR-pile that tried to play a similar game with vampires. But how successful was it? Let's find out! 

John Russell Fearn began "what was to become a fateful association with a new firm of publishers in London," Scion Ltd, in 1948 and first commissions were for romantic novelettes and later novel-length Westerns, but, during the early 1950s, Scion took the leap to science-fiction and played with the idea of a horror-detective line – which was scrapped in favor of their science-fiction line. Several decades later, Philip Harbottle gained access to Fearn's study, untouched since his untimely death in 1960, when his widow, Carrie Fearn, passed away in 1982. The study proved to be "an Aladdin's Cave of manuscripts, books, and cans of films written and produced by Fearn himself." One of the manuscripts was of an unpublished horror-detective, entitled No Grave Need I (c. 1950), which Scion returned and was put away to collect dust. Harbottle published a small chapbook edition of the novel in 1984 followed twenty-five years later by a professional edition under the title "The Empty Coffins" (2009) "along with all of the other unpublished mss" he salvaged. Harbottle is the only one who just walks in and out of the Phantom Library with his arms loaded with lost books and unpublished manuscripts.

Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" takes place in a small village on the south coast, Little Payling, which comprises of two, tightly intertwined plot-threads. One of these threads concern a young widow, Elsie Timperley, who had married a drunk brute, but she put up with George Timperley's abuses to ensure she inherited everything he owned. A small fortune which would open the way to marry her childhood friend and true love, Peter Malden, who's the local motor dealer and garage owner. Little Payling is a small village populated with typical village people "eager to seize on the slightest hint of scandal" and they found it indecent Elsie has been seen the company of Peter so many times George was "barely cold in the grave." Elsie has a good reason to get married as soon as possible, because a well-known mystic and seer, Rawnee Singh, told her she has "no future beyond the next eight months." And that can only mean death.

The second plot-thread is introduced when a local girl is attacked in the cemetery. Madge Paignton used the cemetery as a short cut one night when a barefooted creature in a funeral shroud attacked her and left "two gashes close to the jugular" on her throat. The country GP and student of the occult, Dr. Meadows, believes it was the work of a vampire, which belongs to the realm of "folklore and legend." But the situation has gotten from bad to worse during Elsie and Peter's honeymoon. A farmer and a local builder were brutally murdered within the span of a week and their bodies were "almost drained of blood." This is not the last deadly attacked in the village with everything pointing to Elsie as the next victim.

What about the detective aspect of the story, you ask? Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" actually did a good job in keeping the reader guessing which events have a supernatural origin and which are faked, but eventually it becomes evident "there's a human hand" behind some of the attacks – one of "the worst criminals ever, apparently." Consequently, "The Empty Coffins" turned out to be crammed with impossible crimes and locked room mysteries, but let the reader be warned, the ending plunges the story deep into pulp territory. So don't expect anything too much from their solutions, because, even by pulp-standards, not everything stands up to scrutiny. Such as (ROT13) vzvgngvat n jryy-xabja fcrpvnyvfg va urneg naq oybbq qvfbeqref jura gur arjfcncre urnqyvarf ner fpernzvat nobhg “Gur Yvggyr Cnlyvat Ubeebe” jvgu nyy gur rlrf va gur pbhagel sbphfrq ba gur ivyyntr or gur cercbfgrebhf tenir fvtug zrpunavfz erirnyrq ng gur raq, which was a little too much. The plot was further marred by gur cerfrapr bs n ahzore haxabja nppbzcyvprf, frperg cnffntrf naq ulcabgvfz with the human culprit standing out like a tombstone on a front lawn.

So not one of Fearn's most inspired attempts to create a hybrid, pulp-style mysteries or his most original impossible novel, which he combined in a much better in fashion in novels like Account Settled (1949) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951). There is, however, a brief shimmer of brilliance in how the (incredibly pulpy) motive and some of the (even more pulpier) methods that explained why the corpses had to be sucked bone dry. And the horror-elements of the story were put to good use to create a couple of good scenes. I particularly liked the illegal, moonlit exhumation of George's grave and Peter's nighttime visitor to his bedroom ("...was foul, unclean—something dead yet still alive"). This helped the faked phenomena blend in with the real ones. You'll probably be surprised to learn which were real and which were fake.

The horror aspect of the story is often very well done and, on a whole, "The Empty Coffins" is a readable, pulp-style mystery centering on the activities of a vampire and that's always going to be a different beast from your regular whodunit or locked room mystery. So adjust your expectations going in and remember "The Empty Coffins" is not Fearn at his best or most creative. Just a quick, dark-light and atmospheric read making a spirited attempt to incorporate vampires into a detective story. 

A note for the curious: So, while Fearn was not entirely triumphant, he unwittingly provided a blueprint on how to do it. Dr. Meadows explains "a vampire proper is the ghost of a suicide, or some such excommunicated person, who seeks vengeance on the living by attacking them and sucking away their blood" – which gives him a pretty good idea who the vampire in their cemetery is. This also gave me an idea how a proper, fair play detective story with real vampires could play out. Just imagine one of those small, ancient English villages where over the span of a year half a dozen people have died from various causes. But no murders or suicides. Or so everyone assumes until villagers get attacked and killed by, what appears to be, a real vampire. So the detective has to discover the vampire by delving into the past of the six recently deceased village to see if the country doctor misdiagnosed a suicide as natural causes or accident. A subplot can be added with someone using the activities of the vampire as a cover to commit a murder and stages a locked room/impossible crime to blame the vampire. Anyway, I'll try to pick something a little more conventional next time.

The Red Death Murders (2022) by Jim Noy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Illusionist (1970) by Stephen Frances

Stephen D. Frances was a "South London-born clerk turned journalist turned author" who founded his own publishing company in the mid-1940s, Pendulum Publications, which "released a variety of fiction," but garnered most of his fame as "one of the earliest exponents of the British pseudo-American gangster books" – published as by "Hank Janson." During the 1960s and early '70s, Frances tried his hands at espionage with the John Gail series and wrote at least one standalone adventure-and suspense novel under his own name. That standalone is centered around a very particular problem earning it a listing in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). 

So, normally, that's more than enough to get my full attention, but Frances' The Illusionist (1970) languished for years on my wishlist as the impossibility seemed too slight to prioritize tracking down a copy. Only to come across an interesting review on Fang's Mystery Blog, a Chinese-language blog dedicated puzzle-oriented detective fiction, which I ran through Google translate. That's how I learned there was more to The Illusionist than merely being a largely forgotten suspense novel from the seventies with "the explanations for the two impossible crimes, ancient and modern, being reasonable." There's even a third impossibility sandwiched between the ancient and modern ones, but I'll get to them in a minute.

Firstly, I should point out here that The Illusionist is essentially pulp fiction, but not the Vietnam War inspired pulps of the late '60s and '70s. The Illusionist is a kind of throwback to the pulps from the early twentieth century exemplified by its larger-than-life protagonist, the Magnificent Saki.

The Magnificent Saki "is Hawaiian by birth, American by nationality and a British resident from choice" as well as "a direct descendant of Tupia," the Polynesian King, who holds a triple doctorate in literature, philosophy and science – in addition to being an art connoisseur and "a student of the forgotten knowledge of the primitives." He studied under a Tibetan Llama and financed many archaeological explorations which he has led himself, but Saki also practices martial arts and has the children of the Japanese Consulate General as his students in Ju-Jitsu and Karate. More than anything else, Saki is "a hypnotist, a telepath and a clairvoyant" whose "hobby is creating illusions" and "never performs for payment." A golden-skinned, black-haired enigma with penetrating and hypnotic green-eyes. Saki has a tall, fair-haired youth, Arbuthenot, who he calls Flash ("because I'm always so bloody slow") and acts as the mystic's chauffeur, assistant and companion. And they enjoy bouncing insults back and forth.

So the Magnificent Saki has a reputation that casts a long shadow that guided a well-known expert on the Aztec civilization of ancient Mexico to his doorstep.

Professor Howard Morgan has "excavated ruins, interpreted the Aztec's ancient sign language and translated some of their ancient manuscripts," but during his studies he came across 2000-year-old historical mystery. A mystery centering on the question whether or not "the power of a clever priest is more subtle than the vengeance of a long-dead Aztec King." Yes, I think Frances mixed up the Aztecs with the Maya. Anyway, two-thousand years or a few centuries ago, the High-Priest Xtocoplus betrayed the trust of King Quinatzin when he took away his young bride, Lama, on their wedding night. Xtocoplus boldly claims that "it is the will of the Gods that Lama becomes of her High-priest instead of the King of the tribe," but Quinatzin demands "a sign from the Gods that shows that our Hogh-priest has been specially selected for favour." King Quinatzin orders Xtocoplus to be "sealed in a stone sarcophagus" at dawn and lowered down to the bed of a deep, dark lake. So he can prove his magical powers by returning from his watery prison to claim his bride, but the ancient manuscripts neglected to tell how the story ended.

However, the professor followed the clues in the manuscripts and found the great lake referred
to in the writing, which was dragged and they discovered "the stone sarcophagus of Xtocoplus lying upon the floor of the lake" – only the heavy lid had been wrenched off the coffin "which was quite empty." Saki observed "time and water would eat away all human remains," but the High-priest was sealed away wearing all his gold, gem-studded ceremonial regalia. So the professor wants to know how the High-priest could have either freed himself from the stone coffin or death itself and had to coffin transported to his private museum. The Magnificent Saki and Flash accompany Professor Morgan to his home, where they are going to spend the weekend, to subject the coffin to a close inspection. This is where the second, not so very successfully plot-thread comes into play.

Someone is very obviously trying to kill the professor and failing miserably. Professor Morgan had a close brush with a speeding car, a poisoned arrow and even gets attacked with a sacrificial knife, but a hero is only as good as the villain he has to vanquish. When your hero is the Magnificent Saki, you need a better villain than a feeble-minded, butter-fingered bungler who comically throws around ancient weaponry with the same success rate as Wile E. Coyote. I actually began to suspect Saki was pulling double duty as both hero and villain as the story implied Saki Xtocoplus were one and the same person. I know, I know. I have suspected a character before of being a biological immortal, but, in my defense, Xtocoplus is described as the spitting image of Saki and wouldn't be surprise in the least if Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark series inspired Frances to write The Illusionist (c.f. "The Day of the Wizard," 1964). There was another plot-thread introduced early on in the story that began promising enough with Flash having several encounters in the house with a young woman, but she keeps disappearing and everyone denies her existence. I particular liked the scenes in the kitchen and the butler advising Flash to wean himself off drugs. It was very John Dickson Carr-like in how the mystery was initially presented, but quickly resolved and disposed of.

So the main pull of the plot is the historical mystery of Xtocoplus and the two impossibilities performed by the mystic-detective. Saki is going to spend the night in the locked museum, sealed inside the stone sarcophagus to meditate, which is "swathed in ropes" and transported the next morning to the goldfish pond – where it will be completely immersed in water for "as long as seems satisfactory to everyone." But even when locked and sealed away, Saki's astral projects his essence and appears to the household as a ghostly, purple radiating figure with a sardonic grin. When they unlock the museum, to knock on the coffin, Saki answers with knuckle-rapping from the inside that "sounded gay and mocking." Naturally, he also manages to escape from the submerged sarcophagus in almost nonchalant way.

The astral projection-trick is a modern (1970s) update of an age-old dodge and interestingly linked to Saki's disappearance from a locked museum and sealed sarcophagus, which presents a legitimate locked room-trick. But one part of the trick raises an eyebrow. And marred by Frances unfairly withholding important information from the reader. The simple and straightforward solution to the historical impossibility is much better, which nicely dovetailed past and present as well as making clever use of its setting. But, once again, The Illusionist is not a traditional, fair play detective novel. So you're not getting a change to arrive at the same conclusion as the detective.

Just like Tony Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972), Frances' The Illusionist happened to be mainstream crime/suspense novel centering on an impossible situation or two. So you can't hold them to the same standards as Carr and Hoch. The Illusionist would completely disintegrate, if judged purely as a traditional, fair play mystery novel. However, if you strip down the plot to its impossible crime ideas, you're left with a premise that would be very much at home in some of the better episodes from the Jonathan Creek series. Every now and then, I come across a novel or short story, usually written by an amateur or outsider, which feels so close to Jonathan Creek that's easy to see how it could be rewritten as an episode. Such as John Russell Fearn's Within That Room! (1946), Roger Ormerod's More Dead Than Alive (1980), Roy Templeman's Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998) and David Cargill's The Statue of Three Lies (2011). You can add The Illusionist to that list.

So there's definitely something to recommend here, but you probably need an unhealthy obsession with locked room and impossible crime fiction to be able to see it.

The 5 False Suicides (2021) by James Scott Byrnside

Two years ago, James Scott Byrnside completed his Rowan Manory and Walter Williams trilogy, Goodnight Irene (2018), The Opening Night Murders (2019) and The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020), which in turn performed an amazing hat trick – back-to-back gems of traditionally-plotted, slightly noir-ish, detective novels. Stories brimming with bizarre and sometimes gruesome murders, locked room mysteries, dying messages and false-solutions that can only be compared to the works of Byrnside's Japanese counterparts of the shin honkaku school or Paul Halter at the top of his game. Regrettably, Byrnside is currently the only writer in the Western world who's crafting these kind of ambitious, tightly-plotted and fairly clued detective novels commonly associated today with the East. So it was a joy when his fourth novel was finally published late last year! 

The 5 False Suicides (2021) has a title and premise that immediately invites the reader to draw comparisons with John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons (1937) and The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996). This is not that kind of (locked room) mystery novel. The 5 False Suicides is "some stand-alone, crazy-ass piece of pulp" dedicated to Fredric Brown, which should give you an idea what to expect. Or so you would think! 

The 5 False Suicides takes place in 1947 New Sweden, Maine, where librarian Gretta Grahame formed a book club, the Murder-mystery Appreciation Society of New Sweden (MASONS), on the recommendation of her therapist to combat her shyness. Gretta becomes "incredibly communicative" whenever she gets to talk about the intricacies of the detective story. So why not use it to her advantage. The first two members to join the MASONS were Gretta's only real friends, Faye Withers and Georgie Danvers, but an advert on Gretta's library's whisper wall drew five more members into the group – two couples and a single. Olive Tennant is the daughter of a local toothpick mogul and joined up with her husband, Harry, in addition to an elderly couple of retirees, Tom and Alice Mower. The single is a strongly opinionated hotel porter, Oscar Strom. One of their weekly meetings fills out the first chapter as they kindly bicker and banter about what to read next and picking apart Oscar's homespun impossible crime method, which pleasantly reminded me of the after-dinner discussions from Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series. A chapter ending with the ominous promise that "most of the membership would be dead in a fortnight" and "one of the members would be a murderer."

A long string of tragic deaths that began with Gretta's estranged uncle, Scotty Grahame, calling his niece to inform that her Aunt Suzie died from an overdose of barbiturates and the police ruled it a suicide. A similar fate befell Gretta's mother and she recently tried to take her own life, which apparently runs in the family. But not without a reason.

Scotty tells Gretta that her grandfather, Andrew Grahame, put "a curse on his own flesh and blood," back in 1907, which "has been murdering the Grahame family for the last thirty years" and they're the last two remaining Grahames – very likely next to fall victim of the curse. Andrew Grahame had help with his curse from a Hungarian mystic, or male-witch, named Boroqe Rieszak and he wants to help them lift the deadly curse. So he asks Gretta to come to his hotel room and drive together to the meet the Hungarian witch, but, when she calls back the next day, a policeman answers the phone. Scotty had committed suicide in his hotel room!

Nonetheless, Gretta decides to go through with meeting Rieszak, accompanied by Faye and Olive, who reveals their family and curse is tied to Blood Island. An island on the south coast of Maine connected to the mainland by a natural, limestone bridge and had been cleared in 1825 of its native population to make way for "a heavenly getaway for the wealthy," but one remained behind and hid in the island forest to plot his revenge. And massacred "the best of society" on their first night on the island. So the Indian was hunted down and he cursed his hunters, "may your loved ones suffer the same fate as I," before slitting his own throat. Gretta's grandfather was a Satanist and used to island curse to ensure that a special place in hell reserved for "those who curse their own flesh and blood," but, "when only one descendent of a Soctomah-cursed family remains," that "descendent can be freed of suicide by a ceremony." All Gretta has to do is gather a surrogate family to temporarily replace what she has lost and go to Blood Island, now called Heaven's Gate, to perform the ceremony. This is where the story moves from Carr-Christie territory to the borderlands of Hake Talbot and Theodore Roscoe.

Normally, it's "darn-near impossible to get a reservation on Heaven's Gate" at that time of year, but a wildfire is slowly consuming the south of Maine and a serial killer, "The Burlington Butcher," is likely hiding out in the dense forests of Heaven's Gate – who left a bizarre murder scene on the southernmost beach. A young woman had been butchered with a hunting knife, but "no footprints except those of the victim were found on the beach." So the island was not a particular popular holiday destination that seasons. Gretta goes to the island with Rieszak and some of the MASONS as her surrogate family, but they have hardly arrived before one of them apparently shoots and kills themselves in a cabin with the windows and door locked from the inside. Through the window, they saw the handle of the key sticking out of the keyhole. At the same time, someone else is found hanging from a noose with a mutilated hand. And then, as you can expect from the title, the story really begins to pick up pace.

Before getting to the plot crammed with impossible crimes, red herrings and false-solutions, the wonderfully executed, sometimes dark duality and meta-consciousness of the storytelling has to be highlighted with the MASONS almost being aware they're characters inside a detective story. They disapprove of the case possibly having more than one, independently, moving parts ("I don't like a mystery with too many moving parts") or having the sneaking suspicion they have “already come across the big clue” without having noticed it. So, under normal circumstances, people who prefer the "civilized murder" of fiction to the messy banality of real-life crimes, but, as Detective Brodsky put it so eloquently, "it ain't like those books by Dick Johnson Carter." This resulted in awkward, but very well handled, scene in which the MASONS tell Jack Munt, Ranger of Heaven's Gate, how intrigued and excited they were about his impossible murder on the beach. Munt responds with telling them the girl didn't die right away and how held her hand as she died. So, no, he wouldn't exactly describe the murder as exciting or funny. Even though the characters run around the island, simultaneously playing detective and getting culled, the story becomes quite grim as it nears its conclusion. Sometimes bordering on outright horror ("Gur fxva unq ohooyrq hc naq jnf abj orersg bs nal qrsvavat sbez pnhfrq ol nqurfvba gb gur obar"). Just like the second, gory murder from Goodnight Irene or the severed hands featured in The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire, there's a logical reason for everything in Byrnside's mysteries. This time, it has all the mad logic of dream.

Firstly, there's the locked room-tricks, real and false, which are contracted around principles that have been around for a while, but how they were presented and executed put a new spin on them – which is the next best thing to discovering an original and brand new locked room-trick. I liked how one of the tricks suggested was an updated version of a trick from a fictitious short story, "Five Deaths and One Lock," which surprised readers in 1889 as "they had no idea what [REDACTED] meant." But where The 5 False Suicides stands out is not as a locked room mystery with multiple impossibilities. But how all the moving parts and red herrings came together. And how they were pulled apart again. Planting "the big clue" in plain sight. Blurring the lines between the real and false-solutions culminating in that daring, uncertain, but ambitious ending. Something not every mystery reader is going to appreciate, but you have to keep in mind that this is supposed to be a pulp-style mystery in the spirit of Gerald Verner's The Royal Flush Murders (1948) and John Russell Fearn's The Man Who Was Not (2005) with a distinct touch of madness. I'm very fond of those two second-string pulp mongers. So add in a first-rate plot stuffed with fairly planted clues, treacherous red herring and false-solutions, you leave me with precious little to complain or nitpick about. 

Sure, The 5 False Suicides is perhaps too short a novel with characterization taking a backseat to the plot and storytelling. I can see how readers who like characterization would have appreciated a little more elaboration about certain character revelations. But speaking as an uncouth, plot obsessed detective fanboy with a taste for the pulps, the lack of characterization didn't bother me too much. To quote the great Dr. Gideon Fell, "I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened." I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life and neither does the author of this crazy-ass piece of pulp. 

Byrnside only began to seriously read Golden Age detective fiction in early 2017, published his first detective novel in 2018 and continued to demonstrate the kind of genre awareness and understanding in his next two novels that I always assumed took years to develop and fine-tune. More importantly, Byrnside's four novels demonstrate how you can enrich your stories and plots by building on the rich history of your genre instead of discarding it as out-of-date and obsolete. A genuine prodigy of the genre and The 5 False Suicides carried on the streak of delivering quality, first-class detective fiction that fans and genre scholars of the future might look back upon as the dawn of a Second Golden Age (once again, no pressure). So you future detective fans and scholars better be grateful for having all of his novels at your immediate disposal. We had to wait years for The Jolly Roger Murders, Time Seals All Rooms and Goodmorning Irene to come out.

The Asteroid Murder Case (1970/2011) by Ross Rocklynne and Arthur Jean Cox

Several years ago, I came across a well-known science-fiction novella by Ross Rocklynne, "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941), in which a human, space suited skeleton is discovered on an asteroid dating back to a time before the human race had come into existence – similar to the premise of James P. Hogan's stellar Inherit the Stars (1977). A science-fiction mystery so good, we had to appropriate it. But don't tell the nerds. We convinced them aliens stole it. 

"Time Wants a Skeleton" is a time travel yarn with a detective hook and more science-fiction than a detective story, but Rocklynne tried his hands at an actual hybrid that's part science-fiction and part whodunit in 1970. Rocklynne was "very much at home in the Asteroid Belt" and his original short story, "The Asteroid Murder Case," is "set against that shifting, fragmented landscape." Rocklynne believed the story was worthy of publication, but the editor of Analog, John W. Campbell, turned it down saying "science-fiction and mystery fiction are incompatible." A claim Isaac Asimov obliterated with The Caves of Steel (1951), The Naked Sun (1957) and the Dr. Wendell Urth stories from Asimov's Mysteries (1986). But when the story was also turned down by Galaxy, the story disappeared in a drawer until he showed it to Arthur Jean Cox.

Cox advised Rocklynne to expand the short story into a novel to do justice to both genres and they had "an eye to collaborating on the larger version," but Rocklynne unexpectedly passed away in 1988. So the story was put back in a drawer, but, over the years, Cox remained convinced a finished, posthumous publication of "The Asteroid Murder Case" could be a fitting capstone to his friends career – a Quintessential Ross Rocklynne Asteroid Story. More than twenty years later, Cox got an opportunity to revise and enlarge Rocklynne's short story. All of the original characters, setting and plot were retained, but Cox "embroidered freely and without hesitation" with several new story elements and "a new character who looms rather large in the last few chapters." A novel-length treatment of The Asteroid Murder Case (2011) finally made it to print as a Wildside Double ("flip one book over the read the second title") together with Cox's A Collector of Ambroses and Other Rare Items (2011). The novel was later reprinted in The Second Science Fiction Novel MEGAPACK (2016) and eventually published as a standalone mystery in 2019.

So the story had a long, difficult road from conception to completion and finally publication, but (as some of you know) I'm not a big fan of writers tinkering with somebody else his characters and stories. However, Cox's argument that the short story barely left any room to explore the science-fiction setting or do any justice to the detective plot echoed my own comments on Kendell Foster Crossen's "The Closed Door" (1953). A really great short science-fiction detective story possessing all the material and potential needed in a novel-length treatment to craft a classic. So why not give it a shot? 

The Asteroid Murder Case opens with the arrival of Thomas Dooley, Chief of Security for the American Sector of the Belt, on a dark, lonely asteroid "which bore the rather romantic name of Albion." A rock in the middle of the Big Nowhere with a pressurized tent, or so-called "igloo," on it with the body of UN observer Carl Neal lying inside on a cot. Apparently, a stray meteor had punched a double hole through the igloo, which is one of "the natural hazards" of life in the Asteroid Belt. Dooley notices a spacesuit hanging on the wall without a helmet and he couldn't have walked the ten yards from his anchored clodhopper to the igloo without a helmet. And that means murder. This opens the question what a "fairly rich, fairly young, rather ambitious and very gregarious" man took "starvation wages" to work a lonely and thankless job as UN Observer in the Belt. Could there be a link between the murder and the tension between America and Russia with the possibility of industrial espionage? Russia have been making a marginal profit out of mining the asteroid belt, while it has been a losing proposition for the US and there have been talks about abandoning the Belt entirely. Something that would effectively hand over the mineral market to the Russians.

It also dates and betrays the Cold War origins of the short story version and some clues places the story sometime in the relatively close future. One of the characters mentions "our written history goes back only five thousand year," which is roughly the same as it's today, but, earlier on in the story, Dooley called a .45 caliber pistol "a relic from our glorious past" – consigned in his time to museums. The Asteroid Murder Case likely takes place sometime during the first three, or four, hundred years of the current millennium with the character rounding down the years of recorded history. You can't blame Rocklynne for not knowing in 1970 that the Cold War would be ended before the new millennium rolled around, but Cox could have made it feel a little less dated by swapping the Russians for another competitor to the American Section. Like the EU and the European Space Agency who could have made a pact with the Russians to explore and mine the stars, which would be of great concerns to the Americans. 

However, The Asteroid Murder Case is not a Cold War spy thriller in space. Just that the ghost of one bleeds through the story from time to time, but the story tries it best to align itself with the traditional detective story with numerous references to the classics. Every spaceship arriving, or departing, from the Asteroid Belt has the name of a celebrated mystery writer. You have the S.S. Doyle, S.S. Van Dine, S.S. Christie, S.S. Raskolnikov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) and even a small, elegant flyer named the Rendell. Ralph Phelps, of the Asteroid Regulatory Commission, has been planning for years to write down Dooley's cases in a book and takes the ancient Chinese style, "like the famous Judge Dee stories," as his model with three separate, unconnected storylines running neck-to-neck. Phelps plans to combine the current case, "The Asteroid Murder Case," with accounts of two of Dooley's unrecorded cases ("The Rain of Terror" and "The Russ Rockland Express") under the title The Big Nowhere.

Regrettably, all of this is merely lip service to the detective story as it's really a crime tale that unravels itself with the science-fiction elements only marginally more fleshed out than the detective plot. There's the initial investigation of the crime scene and briefly going over the discovery of intelligent creatures with a primitive culture on Jupiter largest moon, Ganymede, but it's mostly scenery until the end. So rather disappointing as both a detective and science-fiction novel, but, while the science-fiction elements began to dominate the mystery towards the end, it provided the ending with a much needed payoff – namely a strong and memorable motive to string everything together. A truly original and convincing motive which is on the one hand very human and on the other one unmistakably alien. Something a lot people would value as highly, or higher, as the all the gold and platinum in the asteroids. It's these last few chapters that made up the best and most memorable part of the whole story. 

The Asteroid Murder Case had a promising first chapter and a good ending, but there simply was not enough of either the detective or science-fiction genre to give anything more than a faint glimmer of what can be done with a well-balanced hybrid of the two. And that only towards the end. So a quick, enjoyable enough read, but, on a whole, a little thin to be particularly satisfying to fans of both genres.