Exit for a Dame (1951) by Richard Ellington

Richard Ellington was an American radio actor, announcer and scenarist, who was the main writer on Dashiell Hammett's The Fat Man, but between 1948 and 1953, he also penned a handful of "deftly plotted, satisfyingly complex mysteries" with "an appealing medium-boiled hero" – an actor turned private investigator, Steve Drake. Ellington abandoned his writing career to run a small hotel, Gallows Point, on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. You can read more about Ellington's fondly remembered hotel in the comments of a 2008 review of It's a Crime (1948) posted on the MysteryFile blog.

The Thrilling Detective described the Steve Drake novels as "one of the unfairly forgotten P.I. series" of the period that at times "seemed to be almost wandering into amateur sleuth territory" with one of them "recalling an Ellery Queen impossible crime story."

Exit for a Dame (1951) is the fourth entry in this short-lived series and is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) with no less than three, distinctly different impossibilities, but there are five in total – although the additional two are variations on the other impossibilities. So why is a detective novel littered with impossible crime material hardly remembered today? Well, the book has somewhat of a poor reputation. Barry Ergang told me to avoid it, because the impossibilities were "not fairly clued" or easily guessed at. And responded to my question on whether, or not, the impossibilities were at least somewhat original with a short, "no, not at all." A double negative!

So you can hardly call that encouraging, but, as a hopeless detective addict with an insatiable craving for locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, the prospect of a mediumboiled detective novel with a string of impossible situations still had its appeal. Since my expectations had already been blown to pieces, I decided to take the plunge without any expectations and turned out to be much better than expected! Not anywhere near an unrecognized masterpiece of the impossible crime story, but neither is it to be avoided. And now having read it myself, I understand why the story has left so many locked room readers crestfallen.

Exit for a Dame begins strongly with an excellently written, detailed account of the multi-impossibilities, covering the first seven chapters, which have the potential to deceive the unsuspecting reader into believing he's reading something on par with Norman Berrow's The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947), Herbert Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) and Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) – topped with a slight hint of Theodore Roscoe and Hake Talbot. Sadly, this side of the story was pushed aside in Chapter 8 to make room for a much more mundane, sordid and run-of-the-mill crime story. However, it did regain some of its earlier magic in the chapters explaining the various miraculous disappearances and ghostly occurrences.

Exit for a Dame has a great opening that begins on "one of those windy, screwball days in late March" when "spring decided to open the door on winter and gets kicked in the teeth for trying" on streets of Greenwich Village, New York.

Steve Drake is on an early morning stroll through Greenwhich Village when his hat is knocked off by a piece of heavy brown cardboard with "HELP" crudely scrawled on it with crayon. Drake noticed an elderly lady sitting in the open, second-floor window of one of the apartment buildings and her eyes are staring straight down at him. She kept staring at him in silence and unnervingly began to nod when he pointed to the piece of cardboard, but she remained silent and kept nodding her head. When the building's superintendent opened the door, they discovered that the old lady has been dead for over a week!

So how did the very dead corpse of Old Mrs. Vogelmeir nod her head? Who moved the curtains? How did this person, if there was somebody else in there, managed to get out of the apartment without being seen? And it was out of the question that anyone could have left through the windows. Drake witnesses a second impossibility when he returns there and is confronted with old Mrs. Vogelmeir's empty rocking chair creaking "gently back and forth against the bare floor" of the locked apartment. One of the two impossibilities not mentioned in Adey's Locked Room Murders.

I think the problem of the nodding corpse and her supposedly haunted apartment is one of the two highlights of the story, which is given a wonderfully simplistic, but entirely acceptable and believable, explanation – imaginatively used to create two very different impossibilities. Ellington would have done his idea and legacy a service had he condensed it into a short story, or novella, as it's too good to be stuck in this mostly mediocre novel.

Another impossibility comes to light with the introduction of Drake's ex-girlfriend, Marge Lewis, who walked into the apartment building minutes after the body of the old lady was found, but immediately walked out when she heard the police were on their way. She later explains that one of the residents of the apartment is Virginia May Roundtree, a female Uriah Heep, who had played a very dirty trick that had cost Marge a very good and cushy job. So he has a good reason to hate her, but now she fears the police will think she had motive to get rid of her, because Virginia Roundtree "literally vanished" in front of her eyes. One second Marge saw Virginia walking along the sidewalk towards her and the next she was gone. She had simply vanished in the blink of an eye!

An excellently posed and presented miraculous vanishing with several references to the unsolved disappearance of New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Crater, in 1930, but the practical solution is both disappointing and uninspired. Comparable to the strange, but disappointingly explained, vanishings from Brean's Wilders Walk Away.

The second highlight of the story comes when Drake is inspecting Virginia's "well-filled bookcase" crammed with book-of-the-month club novels, some of the obvious classics, bibles and "a sprinkling of mysteries," but there are also several hidden books of a more mature nature that leads him to a secondhand book dealer, Sydney Scales – who sells under the counter smut. Virginia's reading taste also included the occult with a special interest in demonology, witchcraft and voodoo. Drake found a copy on her shelves of Tom Toms in Top Hat and Tails written by a well-known paranormal investigator, Carol Sleet. One of the chapters detailed a series of experiments with the Yi King, an ancient Chinese book dealing with divination and magic, which "had been written long before the time of Confucius." An experiment with a set of so-called magic wands that could open a doorway to another world, but it ended with the strange, inexplicable disappearance of the woman who had attempted to open that phantom door. A trick that would later be repeated with Sleet's maid vanishing from a closely watched room.

Regrettably, the disappearance mentioned in the book is left unexplained, but you have to assume Sleet made it up in order to "fluff up" his material and the solution to the last vanishing is almost an insult to the reader's intelligence! Just mindbogglingly stupid.

There's not much that can be said about the seedier, mediumboiled side of the story. A murder in a secondhand bookshop is, or could possibly, be linked to the large sum of money that had been taken from Mrs. Vogelmeir's apartment, Virginia's mysterious disappearance and a couple who cheat on each other, but it was all done halfheartedly. And there were some missed opportunities. Such as the suggestion of a name-based alibi or the underwhelming identity of the murderer, because the relationship between the murderer and victims had an interesting aspect that should have been used as a red herring earlier on in the story. It could have made the reveal a genuine surprise.

Exit for a Dame was published around the time Ellington was winding down his writing career to move to the Virgin Islands (having already purchased the land in 1948) and strongly suspect he wanted to use as many of his best ideas before bowing out. So what he did is smash together two, or even three, different stories together to create Exit for a Dame. You can even see the seams where he stitched the plots together! For example, the parade of impossibilities in the opening chapters turn out to be incidental to the culprit. You'll know what I mean when you read it.

I can see why some people would end up hating it, but with your expectations dialed back to zero, Exit for a Dame can be an entertaining, pulp-style detective novel with the various impossibilities and linked plot-threads giving the plot a pleasant, maze-like quality – even if it failed to do something really good with it. So, year, it's mostly a mediocre novel, but I didn't hate it. And should not be avoided by rabid locked room readers. Just don't expect too much from it.

The Whistling Legs (1945) by Roman McDougald

Roman McDougald was a little-known, now long-forgotten, American detective novelist, who's usually grouped with the hardboiled writers, but his private investigator, Philip Cabot, is "a clever, sophisticated man about town" – whose "cases always seem to involve locked rooms, impossible crimes and the like." Philip Cabot's page, on Thrilling Detective, states that the dusting of "slightly hardboiled prose" can't disguise that McDougald's novels were "more traditional and genteel than most private eye stuff of their era."

A comparison is drawn with S.S. van Dine's Philo Vance and John Dickson Carr, but having now read two of his novels, The Whistling Legs (1945) and The Blushing Monkey (1953), I can say McDougald was one of the odd ducklings in the Van Dine-Queen School. A group of writers whose novels share some features of the Van Dine traditional without exactly fitting in. Such as Anthony Abbot, Harriette Ashbrook, Kelley Roos and Roger Scarlett.

The Whistling Legs is set in the home of a member of New York City's upper crust and the plot has ties to the impossible crime story, in which the movements of suspects around the house is crucial to the puzzles. Cabot is not only friendly terms with the authorities in charge, but is married to the sister of the District Attorney, Jefferson Boynton. Where the series differs is that Cabot is not some genius amateur sleuth, to whom detective work is nothing more than an intellectual exercise, but a normal, commonsense private investigator and The Whistling Legs has this weird, almost misplaced, lighthearted and satirical tone – reminiscent of Roos and the Lockridges. McDougald also included a rival detective who's both an amusing and exasperating parody of Sherlock Holmes and Philo Vance.

The Whistling Legs begins on the day Cabot married his secretary, Deb, who's the sister of the D.A. and they have ten days to spend together before he has to leave New York in the uniform of a Captain of Artillery. And on their first evening together, Cabot receives a phone call from someone who sounded "crazy in a very casual manner."

Darryl Rand is the manufacturer of a new kind of explosive, called Magnamite, which creates "a sort of artificial earthquake" that offers "tremendous possibilities in warfare" and landed him a contract with the War Department. But the story he has to tell is even weirder. Rand is convinced that somebody in his home will be murdered and fears that the police investigation will establish "a reasonably strong suspicion" that he committed the murder, which the members of his household will support with testimonies that he had been overworked due to his wartime responsibilities. And that he had simply buckled under great nervous strain. A theory that will be confirmed when they find his body besides a suicide note that he had admitted to have written, but he wanted Cabot to come along to give him all the details. Somehow, he decides to go.

The dwelling on Riverside Drive houses some of the usual, and some unusual, characters who could potentially fit the role of murderer or victim.

Gail is Darryl's beautiful wife and he's devoted to her, but this puts him at odds with her more intelligent sister, Miss Jan Utley, who lives with them and she doesn't like Darryl – which is entirely mutual. Greg Rand is Darryl's second-cousin who he had treated like he was a son, but Greg only has kind words for Gail. A more unusual character is a young, twenty-some man, "Deb," who had been run over and now has lost his memory. Darryl had witnessed the accident and rushed him to the hospital. And he has good reasons to believe the amnesiac has a link to one of the people living under his roof. Cabot quickly discovers there's an undercover private investigator among the staff members, but the best character of the lot is his rival detective, Carlo Pugh.

Carlo Pugh is the brother of Darryl's first wife and an analytical chemist, who came into the company when it was organized, but, more importantly, he's "America's Number One Mystery Novel Fan." The walls of his room are lined with "the brilliantly colored jackets of mystery novels," hundreds of them, which also doubles as forensic laboratory. There's a table with a large microscope, test tubed and a photographer's darkroom. Pugh has been carrying out an investigation long before Cabot arrived on the scene and has already discovered the murderer, but he missed one essential thing to make his case complete. A corpse!

Throughout the story, Pugh talks in the pompous, self-aggrandizing tone of Philo Vance, while trying to come across like Sherlock Holmes, which should have made him an intrusive joke on an otherwise moody and serious detective story. Pugh does crawl around the corpse with a tape measure before saying that he would "not state categorically that the killer was an ape," but that it was definitely someone, or something, with "apelike characteristics." But some of his detective work actually got results that helped Cabot putting all the pieces together. So you're never sure whether he's sincere or playing a deep game.

Purely seen as a rival detective, Carlo Pugh is a precursor of Simon Brimmer from the 1975 Ellery Queen TV-series.

Anyway, Cabot took precautions to prevent a murderer from striking at the obvious candidates and, if it happened, it would be "one of those sealed room things," but the murderer did strike and left behind a body – as well as his client in a drug-induced stupor. However, the plot becomes a bit tricky to discuss in detail, because a lot involves the movements of the various characters, but the storytelling never sacked. And the numerous impossibilities, and quasi-impossibilities, were put to good use to keep the story moving.

The first murder is not, strictly speaking, a locked room mystery, but it shows the murderer's peculiar ability to appear inside room that were thought to be either unoccupied or locked. Only the family cat, Cotton, has the ability to sense the murderer entering a room before appearing. This is always accompanied by "an unprecedentedly strange sound." A sort of whispering or whistling sound in the darkness. So the murderer has the unnerving presence of a dark, tangible shadow who can only be glimpsed from the corner of your eye. You can sort of see the comparison with Carr.

A second and third impossibility are introduced quite late into the story. Someone manages to get to third floor when the upper floors were under close police surveillance and the fingerprints of an innocent person on a bloodstained knife that the police laboratory determined to have been "physically impossible" to "have been made by anyone except the last person who grasped the handle." Sadly, none of the solutions showed any ingenuity, or imagination, but they were put to good use to advance the overarching plot and kept the story rolling – although the reason why Cabot had to be knocked unconscious was a clever piece of the puzzle. Something else that stood out is that the second murder was not merely treated as getting rid of annoying witness to pad out the story, but the elusive shadow coldly murdering this person was genuinely depressing and made the first murder even more tragic in light of the solution. Very well done!

So, while not an unsung (locked room) classic, The Whistling Legs stands as an engrossing, slightly unconventional detective novel in which McDougald expertly turned a relatively simple, uncomplicated plot into a maze-like structure. A maze with filled with frightened cats, solid shadows, rival detectives and impossible crimes. More than once, it managed to confuse and throw me off the trail, but there are worst places to get lost in. Warmly recommended to fans of the American Golden Age detective story.

Good news! The Whistling Legs is available as an inexpensive ebook from Phocion Publishing.

The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush has been described as one "the most reliable and resourceful" mystery novelists of his day, who made his name in the 1930s as a craftsman of elaborate and magnificently baroque detective novels, but the turmoil of the Second World War took the series in a different direction – starting with The Case of the Murdered Major (1941). The first title in Bush's wartime trilogy that began the transformation of Ludovic Travers from an unofficial affiliate of Scotland Yard to licensed, but genteel, private investigator. A change that was influenced by the American hardboiled school of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which reached its zenith in the early fifties with such novels as The Case of the Corner Cottage (1951) and The Case of the Fourth Detective (1951).

I noted in my review of The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) that then 70-year-old Bush was probably feeling a little nostalgic when he wrote the book, because the plot reminded me J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts and R. Austin Freeman. Early writers of the Realist School. A school Bush has always been associated with on account of his expertise in taking apart seemingly unbreakable alibis and whose early practitioners he must have read as a young man. So it's not unlikely Bush returned in his old age to the type of detective stories he read and enjoyed in the 1910s and 1920s.

That's the impression The Case of the Flowery Corpse left on me and The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) strengthens that observation with a typically Croftian alibi, false identities and a (hidden) criminal scheme, but no idea if this is actually a third phase in the series – or simply brief, nostalgic nods to a bygone era. Either way, the results were very satisfying.

The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel is the forty-first entry in the series and begins with Ludovic Travers, chairman and owner of the Broad Street Detective Agency, personally accepting a routine assignment.

Henry Clandon is a publisher who served at a place called Larentza, in Sicily, where "an unsuccessful night attack" had left him "in no-man's-land with a lump of shrapnel in his belly." A young officer from another regiment, David Seeway, had brought him in and had later come to see him in hospital, but only for a few minutes with sister nervously fluttering around the bed. Clandon never got to properly express his gratitude and now feels "damnably ungrateful" to the young soldier, which is why he wants the agency to find Seeway, but he only has a general description of the man – an infantryman in his mid-twenties who probably came from a place called Bassingford. A quiet little town about twenty-five miles north of London. A second clue is that Seeway made a reference to a man named Archie Dibben.

Travers believes there's something "remarkably peculiar" about the case and decides to make the opening moves himself, but all he has to work with are two names and a location. Soon he learns that Archie Dibben is a two-bit comedy actor who used to be part of a touring company that spent one week, in 1939, in Bassingford to perform Under My Thumb. So why would Seeway reference an obsure actor at the bedside of the wounded Clandon? What exactly happened during that week that made them completely disappear from the map?

The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel is a tightly knotted affair, but the complexity is not derived from an overly elaborate plot, but the way in which the problems are presented. The story begins with a simple request to find a person and the only clues are a couple of names, but every piece of information that's unearthed also brings more questions to light.

So the plot becomes more complex as the story progresses and it's not until the twisted, dimly-lit path of the past brings Travers to a small house, where he finds the body of the titular “colonel,” that the problem begins to assume a definitive shape – which brings one of my favorite policemen to the scene, Chief Superintendent George Wharton. Wharton has lost some of his luster here ("looking a bit tired" and "his huge shoulders were more hunched than usual"), but it was good to see him again working alongside Travers. I really missed Wharton in The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) and The Case of the Flowery Corpse.

The murders provides more physical clues to get a handle on the case, such as two faded photographs and a mysterious fingerprints, which Travers and Wharton use to meticulously reduce the number of suspects. And by the end of the story, there are only two of them left. There is, however, a complication that demonstrated why Bush was a craftsman: one of these suspects fabricated an alibi, while the after had left an incriminating fingerprint at the scene of the murder. So who killed the colonel and how does that explain either the alibi or fingerprint of the other suspect? How is it possible that there a mystery readers who don't like Bush?

All in all, The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel is a gratifying detective novel with a deceivingly uncomplicated front, but the clever writing and story structure spins a great deal of complexity around, what really is, a simple and uncomplicated plot. This allowed Bush to get more out of the situation than what originally was in it. I don't think you give a mystery writer a bigger compliment. Another great reprint from Dean Street Press.

Hoch's Ladies (2020) by Edward D. Hoch

Hoch's Ladies (2020) is the tenth Crippen & Landru collection of short stories from the master of short form detective fiction, Edward D. Hoch, which collects all the stories with Hoch's three female detective-characters, Libby Knowles, Susan Holt and Annie Sears – who share seventeen appearances between them. This collection has, as to be expected, one or two stories of the impossible persuasion!

Hoch's Ladies begins with the eleven stories with Susan Holt, a promotions manager in Manhattan's largest department store, who can be considered as the female counterpart to William L. DeAndrea's Matt Cobb. A corporate, business-minded woman who inexplicably keeps getting herself entangled in dark, murderous plots during office hours or business trips. And even the more puzzle driven stories in the series can be classified as medium-boiled crime stories.

I'll seriously try keep my discussion of each individual story as brief as possible in a futile attempt to prevent this review from bloating to the size of beached wale carcass. So let's dig in!

Susan Holt debuted in "A Traffic in Webs," originally published in the Mid-December, 1993, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), in which Holt travels to Tokyo, Japan, to view a display of "bizarrely beautiful" spiderwebs – created by Professor Hiraoka who fed weed and LSD to spiders. Holt has to secure the exhibition as next year's Christmas display, but, upon arrival, she's nearly pushed in front of speeding car and the manager of the Japanese store is shot and killed in his office. The quasi-futuristic Japanese setting with its lifelike automatons and talking escalators is the best part of the story, because the plot makes it fairly average crime story. So not exactly a perfect beginning and it takes a couple of stories before the series starts to get really good.

"A Fondness for Steam" was published in the July, 1994, issue of EQMM and brings to Holt to Reykjavik, Iceland, to get a look at a line of quality woolen garments with new designs and colors, but she learns that an employee of the woolen mill was bludgeoned to death near one of the city's swimming pools. Unfortunately, the solution runs along very similar lines as the previous story and makes the story feel like a rewrite with the setting outperforming the plot. Thankfully, the next story is truly excellent!

"A Parcel of Deerstalker" originally appeared in the January, 1995, issue of EQMM and begins with an absolute screamer: the Mayfield's department store is planning to do a Sherlock Holmes promotion and ordered a dozen deerstalkers from Meiringen, Switzerland, but the parcel was delivered "a severed human ear" lay on top of the merchandise – a crime straight out of Conan Doyle's "The Cardboard Box" (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894). Holt has to travel down to Reichenbach Falls to prevent the Swiss side to back out of the deal over the murder, but the Sherlockiana is not merely a gimmick to prop up a weak plot. This is an expertly constructed, fairly clued and beautifully executed detective story with a solution that satisfyingly tied the opening scene to the conclusion. The master has awakened!

The fourth story, "An Abundance of Airbags," was first published in the July, 1995, issue of EQMM and provided this volume with its striking cover, but, more importantly, Hoch found a new scenario and solution to the locked room mystery. Susan Holt flew and drove from Manhattan to Des Moines to organize a fall promotion around the theme of ballooning ("Values Up, Prices Down"), which is why she's meeting a balloon enthusiast, Duncan Rowe. She arrives in an open field with more than twenty, multicolored balloons, but a dark shadow hangs over the motley field of balloons. A balloonist had died the previous week when he fell out of his balloon and Holt is now on scene to witness another balloonist plunging to his death. And they were both all alone when they tumbled out of their baskets.

The story features a brief discussion of some locked room stories by John Dickson Carr and C. Daly King, which revealed one of the clues to have been a red herring, or a clue masquerading as a red herring (you decide), but the solution is delightfully original and relatively simple in theory – strenghtened with an all-revealing clue that was brazenly dangled in front of the reader. Someone was feeling confident when he was penning this story. One of the absolute highlights of this collection!

Curiously, "An Abundance of Airbags" is one of the many short stories and novels Brian Skupin missed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). See? I wasn't being an impossible crime fiction junkie when I said we desperately needed another supplementary edition.

"A Craving for Chinese" was originally published in the December, 1995, issue of EQMM and, unusually, opens in a prison where a convicted murderer, David Feltzer, is counting down the last hours of his life. Feltzer was convicted for murdering a hostage during a botched robbery and requested Chinese food as his final meal, but they couldn't prepare that in the prison kitchen and they had to send for it. But he had barely tasted the food when he slumped to the floor. He couldn't have been more dead had they executed him. A cyanide compound was all through the food, but who poisoned the food and how? So how does Susan Holt come into the picture?

David Feltzer's brother, Simon Feltzer, is the promotions manager of Brookline, a chain of department stores headquartered in West Caroline, which has been bought out by Holt's Manhattan department store and she's there to organize a special promotion held when the store changes its name. She smells a case and decides to meddle in it. The plot sticks together well enough, but not very difficult to piece together who and why a man about to be executed was poisoned. A decent story.

"A Parliament of Peacocks" originally appeared in the June, 1996, issue of EQMM and Holt is in London, England, where she saves the life of a nightclub singer who was assaulted and nearly killed by a knife-wielding man and this incident may have a link to the murder of a parliamentary aide – who was found stabbed to death in a hotel room. A little more than a mediumboiled tale about a sordid and seedy kind of crime with a simplistic, uncomplicated resolution. So not outstanding, but not exactly bad either.

The next story, "A Shipment of Snow," first appeared in the December, 1996, issue of EQMM and has a highly imaginative premise and quasi-impossible crime. Holt is flying to Florida to see "a truckload of snow" arriving at the Gulfpalm shopping mall. A large, refrigerated truck is on a two-day, 1500 mile journey to bring some of Buffalo's recent snowfall to Gulfpalm to launch its Christmas shopping season, but it wouldn't be a typical business trip for Holt without a good murder. When the truck is being unloaded, the body of the president of Gulfpalm, Benjamin Vangridge, is found underneath the snow. However, the truck had been on the road, non-stop, for two days and people had seen the president only the day before. So how did his body end up in the back of the truck? A very original premise with an intriguingly posed problem, but the solution reveals the story to be a rewrite of "A Traffic in Webs" and "A Fondness for Steam." Although this version showed a lot more ingenuity.

"A Shower of Daggers" was originally published in the June, 1997, issue of EQMM and famously collected in Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006), which helped make the story the best known in the series and one of Hoch's iconic locked room stories – not without reason. The story opens with Susan Holt being held in police custody on suspicion of murder! Holt had flown to LaGuardia to oversee the opening of a new branch store and met with her contact there, Betty Quint, who invited Holt back to her apartment. Quint decided to take a shower with Holt sitting on the toilet seat, talking to her, when Quint screamed that was followed by a thump as her body went down in the tub.

Holt yanked back the shower curtain and stared down at Quint's body with "a slender dagger" sticking out of a bloody wound in her back and "a second, identical dagger lay in the tub near her foot," but otherwise, "the tub was empty." So the police arrested the only logical suspect. I had forgotten how close this story stands to the impossible crime stories by Carr. If you take away the modern trappings, you have a locked room puzzle that could have the graced the pages of a Dr. Gideon Fell novel or a short story in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). I don't think you can give an impossible crime story a bigger compliment than that.

"A Busload of Bats" was originally published in the November, 1998, issue of EQMM and has a better backdrop than plot that is as American as it can get. Susan Holt is in Phoenix to secure an exclusive, two year promotional deal to handle some of the newer, higher-priced merchandise of a brand new baseball team, Tri-City Comets, but the deal is threatened when the battered body of a woman is found in an abandoned bus. A murder presented as an impossible crime, but completely deflated by plain, uninspired solution. Unfortunately, the last two Holt stories are more of the same.

Susan Holt went on an eight year hiatus and suddenly reappeared in "A Convergence of Clerics," published in the December, 2006, issue of EQMM, which finds her as director of promotions on the maiden transatlantic voyage of one the largest and most luxurious cruise ships afloat, Dawn Neptune – where she's the gauge public reaction to the opening of Mayfield's branch on the ship. The cruise ship is bound for Rome and is overrun with priests en route to a papal conference, but tragedy strikes when one of them is stabbed to death in his cabin. Holt is able to find his murderer by spotting the odd-man-out. So not a particularly clever or memorable story, but the shipboard setting was nicely realized.

The final Susan Holt story, "A Gateway to Heaven," was published in the January, 2008, issue of EQMM and centers on a recurring side-character, Mike Brentnor, who used to the buyer of Mayfield's and appeared, or was mentioned, in practically every story. Brentnor dropped off the radar towards the end and suddenly turned up again to ask Holt is she wants to invest in a racetrack. An offer she politely declines, but soon they're up to their neck hair in trouble when Brentnor is found handcuffed to a radiator very close to a fresh corpse. Solution is more than a little obvious, but it gives the series a nice sense of closure.

The next three stories follows the exploits of an ex-policewoman, Libby Knowles, who dated a crooked cop involved in a cocaine scandal and died when he smashed up his car, which made her decide to resign from the force to become a bodyguard – working closely together with her former colleague, Sergeant O'Bannion. Libby Knowles and the type of cases that come her way reminded me of the private-eye novels and short stories by Anne van Doorn, Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini.

The first story in the series, "Five-Day Forecast," originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Anthology #48 (1983), in which a meteorologist of a private weather-forecasting service hired Libby Knowles to protect his life. Bryan Metzger is afraid that he'll will follow in the footsteps of his colleague and inexplicably kill himself. A few days ago, Horace Fox had leaped out of the seventh floor window of their office and Metzger has since found himself "drawn to the window behind his desk." Libby suspects there's more to his request than meets the eye and uncovers a criminal application for weather forecasting. An interesting character debut, to say the least.

"The Invisible Intruder" made it first appearance in the Mid-December, 1984, issue of EQMM and is a good example of a story that could have easily been written by Van Doorn or Pronzini. Libby Knowles is hired by Frederick Warfer, an industrial consultant, whose home is fitted with a "highly sophisticated burglar-alarm system" that "not only wired the doors and windows," but also threw "a pattern of invisible beams across rooms and doorways" – someone keeps getting in at night and setting off the alarms. Someone who never leaves any "sign of forced entry" and vanishes without a trace. Warfer believes someone is trying to harm him. And this person is getting closer!

Libby Knowles is now spending the nights at the home of her new client, sleeping fully dressed with a snub-nosed Cobra revolver under her pillow, but it's not until the second night that she finds an answer to the titular intruder. But as she finds an answer to one impossibility, she immediately discovers a second one. Someone had found a way to the enter the locked house and slice Warfer's throat open without being seen by Knowles. An excellent and well-constructed detective story showing that Hoch knew his classics.

The last Libby Knowles story, "Wait Until Morning," appeared in the December, 1985, issue of EQMM and is a music-themed detective story in the spirit of Paul Charles' The Ballad of Sean and Wilko (2000). Knowles is hired by music promoter and manager, Matt Milton, who represents the young rock singer, Krista Steele. He wants to hire her to help him keep Krista away from drugs. An unusual, but relatively easy, case that pays and nothing that could really go wrong. Until a master tape with three songs is stolen and a fiery car crash takes someone's life. A nicely plotted little story, but what makes it standout is the original motive and the rock music background.

Hoch's Ladies closes with the only three cases starring Annie Sears, a homicide cop, who moved from El Paso to San Diego and her stories are firmly rooted in the American police procedural, but she first appeared as a passing amateur snoop in, what has to be, one of the oddest stories Hoch has ever penned.

"The Cactus Killer" was originally published in the October, 2005, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and has Annie Sears making a stop on her way to San Diego, in Cactus Valley, to watch the town's annual festival – where she learns of the oddest active serial killer in America. Over the past two years, someone has been going around with a high-powered rifle and drilling the cactuses, some over a hundred years old, full of holes. So why would anyone drive around and shoot cactuses? I can already tell you that my answer (because 'merica!!!) proved to be incorrect, but "The Cactus Killer" is a very inventive and intricate detective story. Sadly, it's also the shortest story in this collection.

"First Blood" made its first appearance in the March, 2007, issue of AHMM and covers Annie Sears first day on the job in San Diego. She immediately dispatched to Essex Jewelers, in Emerald Plaza, where the vice-president of the company was shot and killed during a robbery. The security tape showed a person, clad in a long black coat, gloves and rubber Batman mask, shooting the vice-president, but soon its proven that this was an inside job. A story easily solved, if you can spot the tale-tell clue.

Lastly, Hoch's Ladies ends with the last Annie Sears story, "Baja," which was originally published in the September, 2008, issue of AHMM and has Annie Sears accompanying Detective Sergeant Frank Munson to Baja California, Mexico, to bring back a prisoner being extradited to the United States. Dunstan Quentis killed a police officer during a robbery, but Sears makes a mistake during transport and Quentin manages to make his escape. So the hunt begins of, what appears to be, a very contemporary crime story. Nevertheless, the final part of the story and solution revealed the plot of this very modern crime story had some surprising puzzle aspects and clues hidden in it. Not a very complex or intricate plot, but good enough to close out this collection.

So, on a whole, Hoch's Ladies is a solid collection of short stories shining a light on the contemporary side of Hoch's expensive catalog of detective stories, but with most of the plots still slanted to the traditional, Golden Age-type mystery and topped with the occasional locked room puzzle – something that will always have my personal seal of approval. "A Parcel of Deerstalkers," "An Abundance of Airbags," "A Shower of Daggers," "The Invisible Intruder" and "The Cactus Killer" were the gems of this collection and completely overshadowed the handful of stories that were a little underwhelming. A welcome addition to the growing list of Hoch collections.

On a final, related note: Hoch's Ladies announced that, after twelve years or so, that Funeral in the Fog: The Occult Cases of Simon Ark is finally forthcoming in 2020! At this rate, we might get that second Ben Snow collection before 2025!