The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.

Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) by Brett Halliday

Last time, I reviewed a juvenile detective novel by Enid Blyton, The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944), that confronted the Find-Outers with the apparently impossible theft of the titular, prize-winning Siamese cat and gave me the idea to pick the subject of today's review as my next read – as it's an interesting contrast to Blyton's children's detective fiction. A hardboiled, tough-guy 1944 locked room mystery obviously not intended to be read by 8-12 year old's. 

"Brett Halliday" was the pseudonym of an American writer, Davis Dresser, who was married to the well-known mystery novelist Helen McCloy and together they ran a literary agency called Halliday and McCloy. They also founded the Torquil Publishing Company, but Halliday is best-known as the creator and first writer of the Michael "Mike" Shayne series. A hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen complete with different series-periods (Miami and New Orleans), ghost writers and a short fiction magazine (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine).

Mike Shayne is seen by knowledgeable, better informed readers as "one of the most popular private detectives ever," whose cases are "generally very well plotted and pleasantly complex," but the earlier books have been called "surprisingly traditional" in nature – something that doesn't really surprise me anymore. The tough-guy private eye school is supposed to be the antithesis to my beloved, plot-driven detective stories of ratiocination, which is not entirely untrue. But my experience is that a lot of them were excellent plotters and either tried their hands at the locked room mystery or even made it a specialty. Just look under the "Private Eyes" tag. 

Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) is the tenth novel in the Mike Shayne and Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, picked it as one of her recommendations to locked room enthusiasts based on the reviews in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47 (2001-09). Anthony Boucher praised the "clever locked-room murder method" and "typical Halliday hard-paced action." So let's see what this series is all about. 

Murder and the Married Virgin takes place shortly after Shayne moved from Miami to New Orleans and setup shop in two-room suite, on the fourth floor of the International Building, with a brand new secretary, Lucy Hamilton – who apparently played a role in a previous novel. From what I gathered, Lucy is the Nikki Porter of the series, but with more character consistency. Anyway, Shayne gets two different cases on his desk that conveniently took place under the roof of the same household.

Firstly, a Mr. Teton, of Mutual Indemnity, hires Shayne to recover an emerald necklace that had been insured for $125000, but, in the present gem-market, "the necklace would easily bring two hundred thousand." The necklace, belonging to a Mrs. Lomax, was presumed stolen during a burglary and was supposed to be in the bedroom safe, which the burglar didn't touch. That's why nobody missed the necklace until the day their maid committed suicide in her locked, third-floor bedroom. Katrin Moe was a Norwegian immigrant engaged to be married to a young army lieutenant, Ted Drinkley, who, dazed and broken down, turns to Shayne. He wants to know why she committed suicide the day before their marriage. Or was she perhaps murdered? And how?

Shayne remarks that "Philo Vance might be able to sort out the truth from the lies, but I'll be damned if I can." However, he does a decent job in tangling with the locked room problem with no less than two false-solutions. Shayne spots the possibility of an old-dodge and pieces together a technical, but not uninspired, false-solution which accounts for both the locked door and why Katrin appeared to welcome death with "outflung arms and a smile." The actual locked room-trick achieves the same effect, but is a bit cruder in execution and not as fairly clued. Regardless, these locked room bits and pieces were, too me, the highlight of the story.

But in every other regard, Murder and the Married Virgin is a seedy, hardboiled private-eye novel and Shayne has to through the whole shebang to tie the stolen necklace to an impossible murder. There's the dysfunctional Lomax family made up of "an old man married to a wife with young ideas" with a stone-cold, perpetual bored daughter, a wannabee playboy son and a chauffeur with movie-star looks – not to mention a dead maid. He also has to tangle with a troublesome dame, a shady club owner and armed torpedoes, which comes with the customary whack to the back of the head and "a murder frame" around his neck.

Shayne has to do a lot of talking, thinking and downright dirty work to get himself out of a very tight spot. Such paying for "witnesses" to place a certain someone at the scene of a murder, which disgusts Lucy to the point where she's ready to walk out on Shayne ("...I thought you were decent"). Funnily enough, I picked Murder and the Married Virgin as a simple contrast to a children's (locked room) mystery novel from the same year, but both stories have their detectives seriously tampering with evidence. One of them was done out of mischievous, child-like innocence, while the other was the result of adult cynicism in a dog-eat-dog world ("scruples are something the boys write about in detective novels"). So incredibly different, and yet, I can't help but see a family resemblance.

My sole complaint is that the ending felt a little like fiddling with a combination lock, trying different combinations with the known numbers, but other than that, it's a solid, fast-paced private eye novel and a notable example of the hardboiled locked room mystery. So the other three Halliday novels on my big pile will be moved up a few places.

The Chinese Doll (1946) by Wilson Tucker

Wilson Tucker was an American movie projectionist, theater technician and science-fiction writer who made his start in the science-fiction fandom as a fanzine publisher, notably The Planetoid and Le Zombie, which he did intermittently from 1932 to 2001 – coining the term "space opera" and invented "tuckerization." Tucker is considered to be one of the earliest and most influential figure in the fandom, but he put his name to something far more important. He wrote detective novels! 

Tucker's series-character is a small town private investigator, Charles Horne, who helmed a handful of novels beginning with the subject of today's review, The Chinese Doll (1946).

The series is written in the hardboiled tradition with treacherous dames, dangerous gangsters and crooked politicians or bend coppers, but The Chinese Doll has a plot praised by Anthony Boucher in The San Francisco Chronicle. Boucher applauded the sound writing, exciting plot and "the surprise ending" with "a trick which Agatha Christie might well envy." So that earned it a top spot on my wishlist and recently stumbled across a cheap, battered copy of the Dell mapback edition. Why not? And the story definitely lived up to its promise. But you won't realize it until the penultimate chapter! The hallmark of a good detective story, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Charles "Chuck" Horne is the only private investigator in the small town of Boone, Illinois, who was abandoned by the woman he loved, Louise, three years ago. Louise is a political reporter and her work brought her to the capitol, but promised to return in five years under one, nonnegotiable condition – he had to write her everyday. So every chapter is a letter to "my dearest Louise" in which Horne recounts what happened to him that day. And from these letters emerges a bizarre, complicated case that appears to be all over the place. But looks can be deceiving. 

The Chinese Doll opens in Horne's office where's killing time, trying to keep warm and working on his book, Lost Atlantis, when "the goddamnedest thing" happened. A powerful, barrel-chested, but apprehensive, man entered the office and tossed "a lovely heap" of green bills on his desk. Harry W. Evans tells Horne that tomorrow, or the next day, he'll be in jail, but has no idea why. It could be for carrying a gun, spitting on the sidewalk or ignoring a stoplight. Evans simply doesn't know, but he wants Horne to be there to bail him out or contact his lawyer. So what he expects is to be framed, but nothing like goes on in Boone and the local publications "certainly wouldn't stand for monkey business in the police department." But a job's a job. Except that this one doesn't pan out quite as he expected.

Horne watches from his office window his departing, but Evans had taken five or six steps from the curb when a sedan smacked him down and "killing him deader than hell."

So starts a typical, hardboiled roller coaster ride taking Horne from Boone to Chicago, but the plot needed, or two, coincidences to keep everything moving with one of them being a little hard to swallow – which happened when Horne met a beautiful Chinese woman in a sedan. She mistakenly picks him up and drops him off at a remote barn. A place where things happen that aren't, strictly speaking, legal and turns out to be closely-linked with his dead client. Otherwise, the story moved along nicely as it began piling on the incidents and complications. Such as a body pulled from a frozen lake with a burned matchstick stuck in its throat, a Chinese symbol connecting various characters and incidents, Horne's expired detective license which somehow cannot be renewed and Evans membership to an amateur press association. Boucher remarked in his review that the press association plot-thread was fascinating, but "badly integrated" into the story. Tucker definitely indulged himself a little, but it didn't detract from the overall story and gave it a memorable scene.

Horne travels to Chicago to meet with an amateur publisher, Joquel Kennedy, who he coincidentally meet before their scheduled appointment in front of a store window. In the window, "stomping mechanically," is "zombilike something in striped trousers and frock coat" billed as "Roboto – The Electric Man! Is He Human or is He Monster?" There was a thick electric cable snaking from an outlet to an opening in the trousers, but Horne and Kennedy are the only ones who are skeptical. After all, they argue, "a real robot wouldn't be wasted in a drugstore window selling hair oil." Horn even subtly, and very politely, hackles the robot. I liked it.

There's not much else what happens between the opening and closing chapters, but turned out to be practically identical as my recent experience with Roger East's Twenty-Five Sanitary Inspectors (1935). 

Twenty-Five Sanitory Inspectors, too, began as a well written, amusing enough mystery, but halfway through, you begin to wonder if its going anywhere and whether there's enough to make the ending payoff. Surprisingly, it managed to do just that! The Chinese Doll played the same game. It gives the reader the impression that they're reading a loosely plotted, coincidence laden dime novel that belongs on a drugstore pulp rack only to pull the rug from underneath the reader's feet in the end – revealing some of sliest clueing and misdirection I've come across in a long time. Now, not everyone's going to buy that audacious ending, but it was fairly done and a marvelously tricky tightrope walking act across a slippery wire. Tucker reached traversed it without losing his balance and breaking his neck. Most satisfying of all is how it was all done in the open!

So, all in all, The Chinese Doll might look like a run-of-the-mill, pulp-style dime novel, but with a great surprise waiting for the reader at the end of the ride and marred only by the many coincidences needed to link every thing together. Beside that one caveat, The Chinese Doll deserves to be better known just on the strength and originality of its solution and clueing. Even if it may raise an eyebrow or two.

Murder at Monk's Barn (1931) by Cecil Waye

John Street was one of the more prolific mystery writers of the genre's heydays, producing nearly a 140 novels in two long-running series under two different pennames, "John Rhode" and "Miles Burton," but Tony Medawar discovered a third, previously unsuspected pseudonym, "Cecil Waye" – adding another four titles to his already impressive bibliography. Not that this revelation made copies any less scarce. 

Even during the current reprint renaissance, only a minuscule amount of Street's work has been reissued and honestly didn't expect the Cecil Waye novels to find their way back into print anytime soon. Dean Street Press decided differently and reprinted Murder at Monk's Barn (1931), The Figure of Eight (1931), The End of the Chase (1932) and The Prime Minister's Pencil (1933) back in February. Medawar provided these brand new editions with an informative introduction about this almost forgotten, short-lived series.

A noteworthy point of the Cecil Waye novels is that the detective duties are performed by a brother-and-sister team, Christopher and Vivienne Perrin, who Medawar described as private investigators in the tradition of the 1920s Young Adventurers – like Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. And, to my knowledge, there practically were no other sibling detectives during this period.

Anyway, three of the four novels are "metropolitan thrillers," but the first novel is a detective story "very much in the style of the John Rhode and Miles Burton books." What's more, the synopsis promised the unraveling of an impossible crime! There you have another title for that third, hypothetical supplement edition of Locked Room Murders. 

Murder at Monk's Barn opens on a cold, dark winter evening in the village of Fordington when Constable Burden returns to his cottage, but duty soon calls again as "a sharp report" brings him back out on the street. A parlor-maid comes running out of Monk's Barn yelling that the master's been shot in his dressing room. Upstairs, the constable finds the body of Gilbert Wynter, an electrical engineer, slumped in front of the dressing-table with a shaving mirror on it and "a bullet wound in the centre of his forehead." Someone had fired a shot from the garden through the window, which requires an "amazing accuracy of aim," but more on that angle in a moment.

The public opinion and local police, represented by Superintendent Swayne, have their sights on Wynter's second gardener, Walter Mintern, who was sacked on the Saturday before the murder. Walter took it very badly and loudly threatened in the public-house "he would get his own back," but Gilbert's younger brother and business partner, Austin, suspects "the whole damn gang" at Fordington of "a damned low-down plot" without exactly knowing why – determining him to find out who killed his brother. So he turns to two private investigators, Christopher and Vivienne Perrin, who have a knotty tangle to unsnarl.

One of the knots is that the murder is something of an impossibility. How did the murderer enter the garden, fired a shot from the shrubbery and escaped unseen with Constable Burden standing in the street within seconds of the shot being heard? How did the murderer knew where to aim? The shot was fired through a closed window with the thick, heavy curtains closely drawn and the bullet had left a small hole in it. So how could the murderer have shot Gilbert? You can't see "a shadow doesn't show through a thick curtain" much less "hit it with a rifle bullet."

You can always rely on Rhode to come up with a nifty trick, or gimmick, good enough to carry the plot and sustain the story, which is a bare necessity with Rhode as his murderers tend to be easily spotted. Murder at Monk's Barn is no exception to the rule. The murderer here is not difficult to find and a second murder removed any doubt, but, once again, you can rely on Rhode to make a second murder as distinctly interesting as the first murder. This time, Rhode used the second murder to show the reader how a plot-technician handles a box of poisoned chocolates and made a good attempt along the way to misdirect readers who had already caught on to the murderer's identity.

So the entire plot rests on how these murders were committed and they were designed to hold it up, but it should be noted that despite the strong how-was-it-done element, it's not a humdrum affair at all – much more lively than your average Rhode or Burton novel. You can ascribe that to having two 1920s-style Bright Young Things as detectives and they added another complication to the case. Austin and Vivienne began to fall in love the moment the police directed their attention at Austin's beautiful motive, ample opportunity and a non-existent alibi, which made her rush towards the solution ahead of her brother. She pieces together the solution from physical clues (e.g. pottery shards) helped by her understanding of human nature. A very well done combination of the intuitionists and realists approach and one of the many details that made this such a rich and rewarding read.

In many ways, Murder at Monk's Barn is a typical Dr. Priestley or Desmond Merrion novel with the how being more important than who-and why, but the detective-characters make all the difference here in both presentation and storytelling. So even with all the familiar touches and usual craftsmanship, Murder at Monk's Barn has something new to offer to readers already familiar with Rhode, but readers who'll be getting their first taste of Rhode can get an idea what to expect (plot-wise) from his other series. If you like what you read, I recommend you track down copies of The Bloody Tower (1938) and Invisible Weapons (1938).

The Black Gold Murders (1959) by John B. Ethan

Hillel Black was an author, editor and publisher who passed away in 2016, aged 86, but, curiously, not one of the obituaries online makes any mention of the short-lived detective series he wrote as "John B. Ethan" at the tail-end of the genre's Golden Age – comprising of three novels published in 1959 and 1960. I've only been able to track down a scant few sites that identify Black as Ethan with an entry in Allen J. Hubbin's Crime Fiction IV: Part 8 being the most reliable one. Everything seems to check out. 

So why did Black (or his estate?) ignored his brief career as a mystery writer? Were they badly written? A commercial failure? Or did the image of a paperback writer of crime stories with tough guys and sexy dames strike a jarring note with his much more respectable career as a literary editor? 

ThrillingDetective.Com has a page for Ethan's series-detective, Victor Grant, which describes the series as specializing in "catching business thieves and resolving other samples of corporate skullduggery" with the caveat that it's "a low-energy three-book series." An interesting comment considering that two of three novels were jotted down by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). So this begs the question, did Black/Ethan do something as unbecoming as writing traditional, plot-driven detective novels and tried to parade them around as thrilling, action-packed tough guys novels? He wouldn't have been the only writer at the time who tried to do that. Fortunately, I stumbled across a dirt cheap copy of his first novel and it's one of the two titles listed in Locked Room Murders. 

The Black Gold Murder (1959) introduces the reader to the high-prized management consultant and confidential business investigator, Victor Grant, who runs the one-man operation Victor Grant Associates with a staff consisting of a research assistant and four legman on retainer – each stationed in a different part of the country. There's also a beautiful, brainy blonde secretary, Jan, who moonlights as Grant's wife. Grant explains to the reader that he makes his living by exposing the great myth of the American businessman as "the shrewdest horse trader in the world" when the American businessman is "the biggest dope when it comes to running his own business," which is where Grant enters the picture.

Grant's caseload is as varied as finding out why a $300,000,000 airplane manufacturing contract has fallen behind schedule to exposing trusted, long-time, but disgruntled, employees who were "dipping into the boss's cash register or stealing his goods." So these first few pages were obviously meant as an introduction to Victor Grant and the arrival of a new client provides him with an opportunity to showcase his detective skills and business prowess.

Albert Blaugh became one of the most successful businessmen in the United States as the president of the Oklahoma Oil Corporation, a multi-billion dollar company, who came to Grant with a potential reputation destroying problem. Grant suspects Blaugh is holding something back and had to demonstrate he, too, "played in the same league" as the oil tycoon before getting the full, unredacted story.

One of his long-time employees, Tom Hanssen, who's office is in Amarillo, Texas, was in the process of leasing and buying potentially the most valuable land in the state with "a huge, untapped oil field" underneath it – one hundred million dollars' worth of black gold. Hanssen has suddenly disappeared without a trace and his disappearance coincides with the theft of the invaluable oil maps. These oil maps were kept in "a special locked room," a map room, which has restricted access and only a few top executives and engineers know the combination to the safe. As an extra security measure, Blaugh had a hidden photo camera installed with a timing mechanism, to automatically turn on-and off, that's triggered by two photoelectric cells next to the safe. So everyone who opens the safe after office hours will be secretly photographed. But the charts were taken from the locked safe in the secure map room. And nobody appeared on the film! 

Grants accepts the assignment and embarks on his client's private plane to Texas, but they have to crash land and Grant is very suspicious of this accident. Unfortunately, this brief scene practically undoes the whole image of Grant as a high-prized corporate detective/trouble shooter from the opening pages. Grant suspects somebody was trying to buy him "a one-way passage in a six-foot box," but only his wife, Blaugh and the two pilots knew about the secret, last-minute trip to Texas. But he never asks himself the obvious question: who was the intended target? Grant brushes the incident aside as an accident and it's not until the end that the murderer confirms the plane was sabotaged with the intention to kill Blaugh.

It's these kind of little details betraying The Black Gold Murders as a second-string mystery. Another thing that bugged me is that the ending mentioned sending someone to "Aruba in Curaçao," which are two separate islands in the Dutch Antilles.

Anyway, what follows is, what I imagine to be, pretty standard fare for a tough guy novel from this period with Grant having numerous physical altercations, usually at gunpoint, but also has to jostle with an ex-jailbird and the beautiful, spiteful daughter of his client, Ann Blaugh – who's a hunter and "the animals she hunts are men." Not to mention the employees of Oklahoma Oil. There are two murders along the way, one of them clumsily disguised as suicide, which hands Grant his only opportunity to play a proper detective and deduces it was murder based on the dregs in a coffee cup. Otherwise, there are only two things that makes this bland detective story standout.

Blaugh gives Grant a VIP tour of the map room and the chapter includes one of the strip maps, which came with a short lecture on oil prospecting. I didn't expect a map to be included in this novel, but they're always a welcome addition to any detective novel or short story. Secondly, Grant staged the final act of the case during a crucial meeting of the board of directors.

Regrettably, the identity of the murderer and motive were uninspired nor do you have to pick your jaw up from the floor when you learn how the maps were stolen. There was a clever piece with a mix-up during the thefts, but nothing truly inspired or ingenious. The Black Gold Murders reminded me in that regard of Curtiss T. Gardner's Bones Don't Lie (1946), which introduced the first big business detective on record and used a steel manufacturing plant as a fascinating backdrop, but the unremarkable plot made it nothing more than a curiosity. I feel the same about The Black Gold Murders. 

The Black Gold Murders is light, passable stuff that could have done so much more with its original premise, but it didn't, which makes it another curiosity recommendable only to fanatical collectors and readers of locked room mysteries.

The Case of the Curious Client (1947) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Curious Client (1947) is the 32nd Ludovic Travers novel and it is, as it says on the tin, a curious case with an interesting take on the WWII-themed mysteries and can be grouped with the British postwar WWII detective novels – a period of austerity, social malaise and a crumbling empire. However, the plot is rooted in the rise of Oswald Mosley's "Blackshirts" in the 1930s when the South Coast of England was "a hotbed of Fascism." So it was fascinating to read a detective novel built around the periods bookending the Second World War. 

The Case of the Curious Client opens on Guy Fawkes Day, 1945, which is the first one to be celebrated with bonfires and fireworks since the war started and the papers were full with "the old pre-war kind of gossip about the Bonfire Boys of Lewes and the South Coast." A fact that will function as one of the hinges of the plot.

At the time, Ludovic Travers is still learning the ropes of the private eye business from Bill Ellice, of the Broad Street Detective Agency, and is holding the fort when the agency receives an urgent telephone call from a prospective client. Herbert Dorvan wants the detective agency to track down his nephew, Robert Dorvan, who had recently returned to England as a "prisoner of war in Japanese hands," but never got in touch with his uncle and he needs him "as a sort of bodyguard" – because he believes his life is in danger. There already had been attempt made on his life. So they schedule an appointment at the Southern Hotel that afternoon, but, when Travers arrives, Dorvan has already returned home. He left behind a note asking Travers to meet him in two days time at the village of Midgley.

Midgley is situated very near the southern English coast, but Travers, once again, never gets to see his client. Not alive anyway. Travers finds the house locked up with a note pinned on the door, "away till Wednesday," but naturally, he doesn't trust the situation and eventually has the local police break open one of the doors. What they find inside is Dorvan, lying in the living room, with a bullet in his head! Dorvan had been dead for some days and it seems his murderer had used the "squibs and fireworks" of Guy Fawkes Night to hide the sound of the gunshot.

I've to mention here that The Case of the Curious Client is, perhaps, the tidiest and clearest of Bush's late 1940s novels with a relatively simple and straightforward that would have been better fitted for a short story, or novella, but Bush managed to get a whole novel out of the plot – which he accomplished without any needless padding or stretching. For example, there are only three suspects to consider (a who-of-the-three type of detective story I've come to associate with Gosho Aoyama). All three are nephews of the victim. There's the previously mentioned Robert Dorvan and his half-brother, Sidney Dorvan, who's the owner of a London nightclub, the Ginger Cat. Gerry Bruff is a radio-impressionist with his own shown on the BBC.

However, Robert, Sidney and Gerry all have alibis, some better than others, but what they lack is a strong motive, because there was very little money coming their way. So could the motive for Dorvan's murder be hidden somewhere in his questionable, pre-war activities?

During the 1930s, Dorvan blamed the ruination of his furniture business on "Jewish undercutting” and "declared war, as it were, on Jews in general." Dorvan had a sign on his door, "NO YIDS NEED APPLY," but also contributed funds to the British Fascist Movement, spoke at meetings and "recognised as one of the big men by those in the know." When France fell to the Germans, Dorvan was interned under Defense Regulation 18B, his business was closed down and his nephews, who were close associates, were out of a job too. 

So, yeah, this is really neat and tidy whodunit and you can put together the whole puzzle before the explanation is given, certainly after the second murder and a £200 clue, but it's not too obvious at the start of the story. You need to do some puzzling to reveal this person, which is not bad when you only have three suspects to work with. The Case of the Curious Client has other bits and pieces that added interest to the story.

In his 1950s novels, like The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) and The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956), Bush began to show an interest in forensics and technology as tools of the law, but he already played with it here. Travers takes part in a "bugging" operation of the Ginger Cat and the floor over the nightclub is secretly taken over, "requisitioned by a Government Department as an overflow for old documents and correspondence," where a microphone has been placed under the floorboards and them listening to the fragments of conversation coming through the earphones is hands down the best scene in the book – even if it's not exactly ethical. And at the scene of the second murder, the police has "a temporary telephone" installed to better coordinate the investigation. I don't remember ever having come across one of these temporary telephones in detective fiction, but it makes sense to do so and wonder if these were ever actually used or something Bush imagined would be a good idea.

However, the absolute highlight of the story is the return of the Old General of the Yard, Superintendent George Wharton, who had lost of him luster in the 1950s titles (looking old and tired), but he was his old self again here. Wharton is a showman and a master of his craft who "disguises his height with a stoop" and dons antiquated spectacles for his own "obscure and deceptive purposes." A pure showman whose "sleeves are crammed with innumerable tricks" and "his personality alert with innumerable disguises to be assumed on each apt occasion," which makes him a perfect contrast to his more introspective and theoretical friend. Travers has "the crossword kind of brain" that "loves problems and is quick to find solutions," but his "fluent theorising" is not always correct (one out of three theories) and this can count on some good-natured mockery on Wharton's part. Although he's already too willing to assimilate such theories when they're proven right. They play off each other so well when they're both at the top of the game and, more than once, Wharton beat Travers to the solution, which adds a whole different layer to this series.

I've said this in my review of The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944), but I'll say it again: nobody else, past or present, nailed the relationship between the (quasi) amateur detective and the professional policeman as perfectly as Bush did with Travers and Wharton. I think it's not too late for modern mystery writers to learn a thing or two from Bush.

So, all in all, The Case of the Curious Client is not one of the most complex novels in the series, but it's a tidily written, competently plotted detective novel with Bush getting more out of the story than what was put into it. Something that only very rarely happens with detective stories, but this is one of those rarities. A must-read for dedicated fans of the series or readers with a special interest in WWII-themed mysteries.

Lending the Key to the Locked Room (2002) by Tokuya Higashigawa

The map of the detective story is dotted with charming, unassuming and sleepy hamlets, villages and small towns, but, as Sherlock Holmes observed, "the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin" than those tiny, outwardly peaceful communities – some of these fictional places have an alarmingly high bodycount. Murder, She Wrote had to turn Jessica Fletcher into a globetrotting mystery writer to not completely deplete the population of Cabot Cove and Midsomer Murders takes place in the undisputed murder capitol of the genre, Midsomer County. You can also find such crime-ridden hellholes, like Agatha Christie's St. Mary Mead, Ellery Queen's Wrightsville and Edward D. Hoch's Northmont, on the printed page. 

So a location can be as much a murder magnet as the detective, such as Midsomer County, but the latest translation from John Pugmire's Locked Room International found a new way to use this trope. 

Misshitsu no kagi kashimasu (Lending the Key to the Locked Room, 2002) is the first novel by comedic mystery writer and current president of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan, Tokuya Higashigawa, whose Ikagawa City series features "an ensemble cast with different colorful characters all solving part of the mystery" – or "they make things more confusing." The series is a personal favorite of the translator, Ho-Ling Wong, who did a sterling job in delivering another one of these tantalizing Japanese locked room mysteries to our shelves. 

Lending the Key to the Locked Room begins with a prologue introducing the reader to a once thriving and growing port, Ikagawa City, where squid fishers became rich overnight, but "the massive armies of squid have not visited the port once in the last twenty years." So the place began to lose its luster and the aging mayor feared "the city would eventually be drained of its youth," which is why he initiated the creation of the first college in the city. Ikagawa City College is not ranked particular highly, but attracted attention all over Japan as the only college with a Film Department.

Ryūhei Tomura is a student of the Ikagawa City College Film Department, who "dreamt of becoming a legendary director," but, as a third-year student, he came to realize his limitations and decided to secure a normal, stable job within the industry – drawing on a connection he has with a small production company. Kōsaku Moro was a fourth-year student when Ryūhei was in a first-year student and helped him on his graduation project. They have been friend ever since. Kōsaku ensures Ryūhei he has a job with the IKA Film Company when he graduates, which leads to an angry, relationship ending row with his girlfriend. Yuki Konno accuses him of giving up on his dreams and they have an embarrassing, somewhat public breakup.

This situation sets up one of the more ambitious, intricately plotted, but ultimately simple, detective novels I've read in a while and presented a truly baffling problem with only a few characters.

Ho-Ling introduced Tokuya Higashigawa on his blog as a numerous writer who uses comedic antics as a "camouflage for cleverly-plotted mysteries" and his storytelling is certainly tongue-in-cheek, but not as funny as, let's say, Takemaru Abiko's Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989) nor did it camouflage the cleverness of the plot – as the opening chapters stressed that the author was playing a deep game. Setup of the story is littered with timestamps and it becomes very obvious the movement, or locations, of the characters are a key-element of the plot. A setup culminating with Ryūhei finding himself in an apartment with a dead body in the bathroom, but all of the windows were locked with a crescent latch and the sturdy, steel front door is chain-locked. 

Ryūhei knows didn't commit the murder, but finding himself in the middle of an honest to God locked room mystery is not his only problem. Another person was killed that night and Ryūhei is the only link between the two victims, which places him in the cross-hairs of Chief Inspector Sunagawa and Detective Shiki. So he turns to the only person who could possibly help him, Morio Ukai, who's Ryūhei's ex-brother-in-law and a private detective who advertises with "Welcome Trouble!" Admittedly, Ukai dragging Ryūhei around the place as they impersonate police detectives, when Sunagawa and Shiki were unaware there was a second body, was genuinely amusing. I much more admired the undisguisable clever plotting, clueing, red herrings and the false solutions.

One of the false solutions is proposed by a homeless man, Kinzō, who hopefully returns in a later novel, or short story, because he would be perfect as a one-shot detective who operates in the cardboard section of Ikagawa City. By the way, the story mentioned his name literally means "moneybags" in Japanese. It would be a waste not to use him again. 

Lending the Key to the Locked Room tries to pass itself off as a comedic mystery novel, but everything about the plot, despite some modern touches, reminded me of early period Christopher Bush with a plot revolving around two murders committed within "a very short time-frame" and the two detective each finding a part of the overall solution – not to mention the presence of a brilliant alibi-trick with the locked room angle being a bonus. Nearly everything fits together perfectly, clues, red herrings and the general cussedness of things, but there are a few smudges and imperfections. Most glaring flaw being the question of motives, which is obfuscated until either very late into the story or only revealed at the end. It's not unimportant to the solution either and robs the reader of the opportunity to put all the pieces together themselves.

Secondly, there's a rather important aspect to the solution to one of the murders that's not brought up until quite late in the story and not every reader is going to appreciate the answer, but personally, I didn't dislike it. It could have been clued a bit better and earlier, but suppose you can chalk that down to a debuting writer being anxious not to give the whole game away too early because otherwise the clueing was top-notch.

So barring these minor smudges and imperfection, Lending the Key to the Locked Room is now one of my favorite titles to come out of LRI and another testament to the greatness of the shin honkaku school. Not only have the Japanese been awesome custodians of the detective story and rejuvenated the genre, showing an old dog can learn new tricks, but their first novels usually hit the ground running. Not always entirely perfect. But they're usually impressive first stabs at the genre. Tokuya Higashigawa's Lending the Key to the Locked Room is no exception. Highly recommended!

My apologies for cramming this review so shortly after the one of Marcel Lanteaume's La 13e balle (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948), but had nowhere else left to put it before the end of the year. Yes, this one has earned a spot on my 2020 best-of list.

Spent Matches (1996) by Shelly Reuben

Shelly Reuben is a New York private detective, arson investigator and an Edgar nominated crime novelist whose goal is to bring "the emphasis on values, heroism and moral conflict" which "so characterized the great novels of the nineteenth century" – updated to reflect "the issues, settings and circumstances of our time." Spent Matches (1996) certainly resembles a Victorian-era serial novel with its multiple, interwoven storylines with a shared cast of characters and settings. But that's not what put the book on my radar.

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) erroneously lists Spent Matches as a 1986 novel concerning the "destruction of paintings by fire in a secure museum" and impressed me as something similar to Herbert Resnicow's 1980s impossible crime novels. A completely wrong impression that was corrected upon reading. I was surprised my second, more informed impression proved to be spot on when I found Reuben's quote about wanting to enlarge the scope and scale of the nineteenth century novel to include modern issues and settings. She definitely succeeded in summoning the ghost of the Victorian serial novel with these three, interconnected stories about firebugs and the man who brings them to justice, Wylie Nolan. But what about the locked room, you ask? Good question!

Luckily, Spent Matches deserves to be listed in Skupin's Locked Room Murders and the stated problem is a genuine impossibility, complete with a false solution, that takes up the majority of the story.

Wegman Zigfield is an 80-year-old entrepreneur who bought an old church and converted it into the Zigfield Art Museum, exhibiting only representational art, classic or contemporary, but his son, Former, is "an ardent admirer" of Sarkin Zahedi – who's also his closest friend. However, Zigfield hates all abstract art and forbade his son to bring Zahedi's work into his museum. So he concocted a scheme and, behind his father's back, Fromer applied for a grant, printed catalogs and sent out press releases to the media. Canceling the exhibit would mean getting entangled in expensive litigation, but Zigfield punished Fromer by replacing him with Jiri Hozda as associate director. A man who has a very personal reason to dislike modern art. Zigfield also reduced the exhibit from ten to five paintings and moved it to the Parlor Gallery, which has "stained glass windows, restricted wall space and skylights." But that's where the trouble begins.

On an early Friday morning, the museum guard is put into the action by the smoke alarm in the Parlor Gallery, but when he unlocks the door, shielding his nose with one hand, he discovers nothing was on fire inside. The Sarkin Zahedi collection was "reduced to empty rectangles suspended on sooty walls" over "neat piles of debris that had accumulated on the floor."

The laying down of the problem of the locked gallery demonstrated a reassuring awareness of the impossible crime story. The heavy door and windows were securely locked with no evidence of "forcible entry into the gallery prior to the fire" or even anyone entering the museum during the night. A keypad automatically records everyone entering on a printout in the security room and the motion detectors in the corridors weren't triggered. Zigfield tells Nolan that he doesn't like locked room mysteries and Nolan has to admit it's "one of the weirdest damn fires" he has ever encountered, because it looks as if the room either committed suicide or a ghost did it – a ghost who burned the paintings one by one. Solution to this locked room problem is good and delightfully demonstrates, metaphorically, "why so many arsonists become their own victims." However, you can make a rough guess what happened, because putting the clues and significance of certain things together requires some expert knowledge. Nolan even had to consult a higher authority on a piece of evidence. Still a very well done impossible crime with an original premise and satisfying conclusion.

On a side note, I suspected a slightly different solution, based on the layout of the gallery,
resembling the brilliant locked room-trick from "Petals of Envy" (Fire Investigator Nanase, vol. 1).

There are two more storylines in Spent Matches. One of these

Seems fitting

storylines centers on Mathilda Yee, an attorney, who has her office in the same building as Nolan, but lately, someone has been starting fires in the ladies' room. Whoever is responsible is trying to frame her. Nolan makes quick work of this case and have nothing else to say about it. This plot-thread was a little too modern for my taste.

Strangely enough, I found the third and last plot-strand weirdly compelling and this one focused on a young man, Camden "Camelot" Kimcannon, who has an extreme, almost retroactive, case of arrested development – who lives with his verbally abusive mother. Nevertheless, he's, what can be called, an eccentric dreamer who dresses like an artist, or poet, from a bygone era and even writes with a quill pen! His attic room is crammed with books on King Arthur and nothing else that "wasn't conceived of earlier than a century ago." A dreamer who has buried his soul deep in the past, but in a stunted, childlike manner. Camden volunteers at the museum in the naive hope of getting to help with the exhibition of pre-Raphaelite paintings, but the guest curator, Georgina Weeks, decides to allow him to help her. She also tries to get him away from his mother, but this will disastrous consequences when he becomes the suspect in an arson homicide. Nolan again goes to the scene of a fire to look at the evidence the flames left behind.

Nolan annoyed me when he appeared in the gallery case, but improved as a character over the course of the story and shined, as an arson investigator, in the last case as he gave a brief and interesting look at how an arson/crime scene investigator works – comparing his method to that of a forensic pathologist. Years later, these kind of scenes would form the basis for the whole CSI franchise. 

Spent Matches is despite its Victorian-like plot structure and an original locked room problem a modern, character-driven crime novel and had no reason to like it, but quite enjoyed this modern curiosity. Not a classic of its kind. Certainly not! But a fascinating curiosity of the locked room mystery tucked away in modern crime novel with balanced characterization showing both the darker and lighter facets of human nature. So not recommended to everyone who reads this blog, but if it can keep the Grand Inquisitor of the Plotting Department reading, you also might find it worth your time.

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) by James Scott Byrnside

The locked room mystery and impossible crime story comes in many different shapes and forms, opening the door to endless possibilities and variations to kill, or disappear, people under circumstances that can only be described as miraculous – whether the victims were in a sealed room, closely guarded or in an open space. And then there are the miscellaneous impossibilities such as levitation, phantom fingerprints, predictive dreams and the physical alibi. So the possibilities really are endless and mystery writers have been tinkering with it ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841. 

There is, however, one type of impossible crime that appears to be incredibly restrictive without much room for innovation or originality. I'm talking about the no-footprints scenario. 

John Dickson Carr's name is synonymous with the locked room and impossible crime story, but even the master himself only produced two really good and original no-footprints novels, The Hollow Man (1935) and She Died a Lady (1943) – latter published as by "Carter Dickson." If you look at what other mystery writers have written, there are no more than a dozen novels and short stories that stand out as inspired and original. Some examples that come to mind are Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), Norman Berrow's The Footprints of Satan (1950), Douglas Ashe's The Longstreet Legacy (1951), David Renwick's Jonathan Creek episode The Black Canary (1998) and two masterly done short stories, Robert Arthur's "The Glass Bridge" (1957) and Arthur Porges' "No Killer Has Wings" (1960). Japan also produced some fine examples (e.g. Gosho Aoyama's "The Magic Lovers Case") and recently Paul Halter came up with a creative variation on the no-footprints scenario in La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019). This short list of notable titles is why I've come to regard the no-footprints scenario as the most challenging and tricky impossible crime to tackle. A puzzle for experts.

So I was excited when the prodigy child of the Renaissance Era, James Scott Byrnside, announced his third novel featuring a killer who can apparently walk through walls and doesn't leave any footprints in the snow! 

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) is a prequel to Goodnight Irene (2018) and The Opening Night Murders (2019), set in November, 1920, which takes Rowan Manory and Walter Williams, Chicago's finest, to Barrington Hills – located "deep within the recesses of untamed Illinois." Thomas Browning, a rich railway magnate, wants a reputable private detective to debunk a psychic, Madame Cuchla, who has convinced his business partner, Hadd Mades, that turning Barrington Hills in a resort town is a bad idea. Madame Cuchla claims the region is haunted by one of the town's most notorious past residents, Otto Savore. Someone believed by the locals to be a vampire who, in 1875, allegedly killed more than fifty people in a single night with "none of the doors or windows of his victims were trespassed" and "no footprints in the snow." So, quite naturally, the townspeople buried him alive and "no grass ever grows on the vampire's grave." Madame Cuchla warns that death will come if the ground is ever build on.

Manory tells Browning that "any number of Chicago-River gumshoes could explain" the parlor tricks employed by psychics for a third of his price, but Browning wants a reputable detective to convince Mades. Manory certainly delivers the goods as he not only explains Madame Cuchla psychic reading of Williams, ghostly knocking and a floating face that vanished in a puff of smoke, but also gives a solution to the vampiric bloodbath from forty-five years ago. So the opening alone is good enough to be added to the list of debunked séance mysteries, but the problems that follow are of a less conventional nature. And they're all "damned impossible."

A New Mapback!

Early next morning, Mades returns to the remote house, hammering on the front door and yelling blue murder, because the vampire is in the house and Browning is in grave danger. Mades shows Manory the developed photographs that were taken of the house the previous days and one of them shows a grotesque-looking creature standing outside the balcony door, "sharp nails were touching the glass," as if trying to enter. But how did the vampire get on the balcony? There's no way to reach the balcony from the outside and the freezing cold makes it unlikely someone was waiting on the balcony for the right moment to photobomb without being seen. So that's the first impossibility stumping Manory, but "an agonizing scream" quickly announces a second one.

Thomas Browning's body is found in the garage with a twisted spine, broken bones, a slash across his right wrist and two bleeding puncture marks in his neck, but how had the murderer entered, or exited, the garage – only footprints going from the kitchen door to the garage belong to Browning. Another set of footprints goes from the kitchen door into the direction of the forest. A third and fourth set of footprints go from the garage window and back into the forest. Finally, two footprints are found next to the skylight on the garage roof, but none of them explained how Browning could have been attacked and killed. The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is brimming with impossible material. There's a past murder case in which severed hands were left in the bedroom of a locked house and a second murder is committed inside a locked bedroom while Manory was sitting guard in the corridor. However, the story should not be judged solely as an impossible crime novel. 

The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire has a small pool of suspects comprising of Browning's much younger wife, Madelaine, who sleepwalks and the reason why they have a live-in specialist, Dr. Sinclair. A daughter from a first marriage, Gertrude, who used to be married with a socialist associated with a band of hardliners, but he was "suicided" in a jail cell. She had not been on speaking terms with her father until he summoned her back home with the promise of a surprise. Howard Amorartis is a writer of supernatural horror and hopes his name will one day be as well-known as Poe, but now he has been commissioned to pen Browning's biography. Belby is the butler-chauffeur who's "not intelligent enough to devise a murder plan," but perhaps "subservient enough to carry one out." And there's always Browning's frightened business partner, Mades.

I think The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is actually more accomplished as a whodunit than as a locked room mystery with a murderer who was hiding in plain sight (always satisfying) who had an original motive to engineer a whole series of otherworldly crimes. Just like in previous novels, the plot resembles a Matryoshka doll with multiple, interconnected problems that not only includes a plethora of impossible crimes and elusive murderer, but a dying message that had to be violently pried from the victim's clenched fist or why the murderer had no option to sever the hands of the second victim – a kind of corpse puzzle you normally only come across in Japanese shin honkaku detective stories. Add to this the excellent clueing, the characterization of the two bantering detectives and all of the various, moving plot-strands grasped in an iron-clad grip demonstrating why Byrnside might very well turn out to be the herald of a Second Golden Age.

A Classic Mapback

But what about the impossibilities? Can they stand toe-to-toe with the ten no-footprints novels and short stories mentioned above? Yes... and no. The plot is crammed with the impossible crimes, but quantity doesn't always mean quality and only two of them are good.

Firstly, while the murder in the snow surrounded garage didn't came up with a new footprint-trick, everything else about this tricky murder made it an excellent impossibility with a good explanation why the witness at the window saw him fight with an invisible entity. Honestly, the whole situation that brought about this murder was quite clever and something that would have gotten the approval of Carr. Secondly, the murder in the locked and guarded bedroom has a routine solution, where the locked door and guard are concerned, but Byrnside succeeded in making one of my biggest no-noes perfectly acceptable and logical. And then there's the reason why the murderer had to cut off the hands. Unfortunately, the explanations to the past case with the severed hands that were left in a locked house or how the vampire was able to reach the balcony were underwhelming.

Nevertheless, when the plot resembles a nesting doll and practically everything is done correctly, the less than impressive explanations to two of the impossibilities is a blow the story can easily absorb without any damage to the overall plot. Byrnside continued to be awesome with how he handled the ending. Chapter 17 is a Challenge to the Reader asking eight questions that have to be answered before the case can be considered solved. Manory gives his explanation of the case at the annual dinner of the Detectives Club and there's a Rival Detective in attendance, Miss Genevieve Pond, who plays armchair detective and tries to deduce the solution before Manory gives it. I suspect she'll either become Manory's love interest in a future novel or become an antagonist when Byrnside decides to tackle the inverted detective story with an impossible, but it's probably the former. After all, Manory needs someone to bounce off on. They're polar opposites, is what I mean.

So, a long, rambling story short, Byrnside performed the hat trick with three back-to-back gems of the Western-style, neo-orthodox detective novel covering various styles and subgenres. All three are historical mysteries written in the typical, hardboiled style of the American pulps, but plotted and clued like a traditional, Golden Age detective stories filled with locked rooms, dying messages and bizarre murders – which all pay subtly homage to some of the greats of that bygone era. Goodnight Irene was an ambitious debut and The Opening Night Murders showed prodigious improvement with its labyrinthine plot, which can also be read as the two of the longest fan letters everyone has ever written to Christianna Brand. Byrnside moved away from using Brand as a foundation stone for his work and the result is The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire is a fully realized, modern incarnation of the classic detective story that can stand on its own. One of the bright lights of 2020 and all three come highly recommended.

On a final note: sorry for the flurry of 2020 reviews, but had to rearrange some posts and cram them all in here.