Fatal Flaws: A Short Overview of Ruined Detective Stories

"These little things a very significant."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, 1976)

Earlier this month, I reviewed Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls, which took an unconventional approach to telling an inverted detective story and the narrative had all the elements of a genre-classic, but was unable to sustain itself and ended with a whimper – an open-ending that managed to be simultaneously lazy and pretentious. So hardly a satisfying and rewarding read. However, the book made me reflect back on similar detective novels that were on their way of becoming (minor) classics, but slipped with the finish-line in sight.

It has been a while since I slapped together a filler-post and thought doing a quick rundown of a handful of them would make for a nice fluff piece. You may abandon this post, if you want, and come back for one of my regular review, which should be up within the next day or so. Or stick around. It's entirely up to you.

I'll be running through this short list in non-specific order and will begin with Agatha Christie. Or rather with an observation about one of her series-characters, Miss Jane Marple, who's one of Christie's two iconic detective figures, but there's remarkable difference between the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series – namely a severe lack of classic titles in the former. Miss Marple never handled a case of the same caliber as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A.B.C. Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). However, there's one Miss Marple novel that came close to matching the brilliance of her Belgian counterpart.

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) has an American starlet of the silver screen, Marina Gregg, descending upon the sleepy village of St. Mary Mead, but soon learns that an English village can be as dangerous as a dark, grimy back alley in the States. One of her house-guests dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail and the explanation for this specific murder was one of Christie's last triumphs.

The relationship between the victim and murderer, combined with the powerful and well-hidden motive, stuck together with simplistic brilliance, but the equally powerful effect the explanation could've achieved was ruined when Christie allowed the murderer to become completely unhinged – committing several additional murders along the way. It cheapened and lessened the impact of the reason behind the first murder, which robbed the series of a book that could've stood toe-to-toe with such Poirot titles as Peril at End House (1932), Sad Cypress (1940) and Five Little Pigs (1943).

Logically, the murderer should've been stone cold sane, completely unrepentant and never went pass that first murder, which had a solid, original and very human reason behind it. I've always wondered if a much younger Christie would've made the same mistake. A textbook example that sometimes less can be more.

You can also ruin a potential series-classic by punctuating the plot of the story with sheer stupidity. Case in point: The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen.

The American Gun Mystery had all the potential to be one of the best entries from Ellery Queen's plot-orientated nationality series, which has a great premise and a memorable backdrop: a sports arena, the Colosseum, where a horseback rider is gunned down during a rodeo show with twenty thousand potential suspects and eyewitnesses in attendance – topped off with the impossible disappearance of the murder weapon. I distinctly remember how much I had been enjoying this slice of old-fashioned Americana, presented as an original puzzle detective, but all of that enthusiasm dissipated upon learning how the gun was made to vanish. It was one of those rare instances I actually wanted to fling a book across the room in frustration and the hiding place of the gun seems to be a stumbling block for most readers.

And that's why The American Gun Mystery is never mentioned in the same breath as The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) and The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932).

Sometimes you can be on the right track, but simply bite off more than you could chew and a good example of this is Herbert Brean's still beloved Wilders Walk Away (1948).

Curt Evans described the plot of the book as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr," which is an apt description, because the story is basically one of Queen's Wrightsville novels as perceived by Carr. The protagonist is a freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who travels to Wilders Lane, Vermon, which is named after the founding family of the place. A family with a peculiar tradition dating back to eighteenth century: members of the Wilders clan have the tendency to escape the yawning grave by simply vanishing into thin air.

So what's not to like, you might ask? Well, the solutions to all of the impossibilities have some of the most routine, common-place explanations you could imagine. It stands in stark contrast with everything that came previous in the book. Barry Ergang hit the nail on the head, in his review, when observing that Wilders Walk Away appeared as "a companion to The Three Coffins (1935) and Rim of the Pit (1944) for ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" and that's how I felt when reading the book. A very likable and readable detective story, but the wasted potential is painful to behold. Everything about the book screamed classic... until you reached the ending.

Brean would go on to redeem himself with the superb Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1952), the equally good The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) and the very amusing The Traces of Brillhart (1961), but they (sadly) never garnered the same attention as Wilders Walks Away.

Finally, I have a prize-winning book, Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929), which could have become a personal favorite of mine, but shot itself in the foot in a way that's very similar to Rolls' Family Matters.

Footprints garnered some attention upon its publication for toying with conventions and plot-devices that were not very well established or popular at the time. One of them is that the book qualifies as a semi-historical mystery novel and this past story is entirely told through a series of old, crumbling letters. A story that took place on an Oregon farm in the early 1900s, which has, rather originally, a murder that could one of two types of impossible crimes: either the murderer escaped from a locked room to get to the victim or passed over a field of snow without leaving any footprints.

So you can imagine I was completely hooked by the halfway mark. I loved the depiction of family life on an American farm in the early twentieth century with an apparently innovative impossible crime plot at its core, but the vaguely written ending only hinted at the murderer's identity. And not a single letter was wasted on attempting to explain the impossible situation. A postmodernist would no doubt love such an ending in a structured genre like us, but I wanted, as Carr would say, strangle the author and lynch the publisher. They were really lucky they had already kicked the bucket when I finished the book.

Cleaver did redeem herself with her second locked room novel, Death Traps (1930), which was a competent, if rather conversational, piece of work with an actual ending!

So far my lamentations on several detective novels I really wanted to like, but proved to be a let down, in one way or another, when the final chapter rolled around. I hope this will be, for now, the last blog-post with my whining about bad or disappointing detective stories. My next review looks to be that of a good mystery novel and have something interesting (and untranslated) for the one after that. And both of them fall in the locked room category. Please try to act a little bit surprise about that!

The Renaissance Era: Returns from the Bowels of Obscurity

"By a route obscure and lonely..."

- Edgar Allan Poe (Dreamland, 1844)

I've several ideas for blog-posts (read: filler-posts) on the back burner, such as my favorite impossible crimes from Case Closed or updating the best-of lists, which has actually been requested numerous times, but they require actually time and preparation ("show prep") - placing them at the back of my priority list. So I decided to finally start cleaning out the Augean stables.

You should not expect them to appear all at once over the next couple of weeks or months, because I plan to spread them out over the entirety of 2017. And that probably means that some won't get written and posted until 2018. However, I'll make a genuine effort to get around to as many of them as possible and particularly my best-of lists, but still haven't decided on whether I'll update the old posts or simply re-post them as new lists.

Anyway, we'll eventually see how long it will take for this ship to crash on the rocky shores of broken promises. But for now, I actually have something for you that came from the backseat of my priority list.

Back in December of 2014, I posted a blog-post about the revival of the traditional detective story, entitled "The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction," which commented on the smash success of a reprint edition by J.J. Farjeon's obscure Mystery in White (1937) – becoming a runaway bestseller that sold over 60.000 copies! I said in my post how this change had been in the air for over a decade. When the advent of the internet reestablished a middle market where secondhand book dealers and small, independent publishers found a willing audience for the long-neglected detective stories of yore.

Since that post, we've been buried in an avalanche of reprints and thought the time was ripe to write an addendum to it, because there was another important side-effect to the internet opening up a new and open market place – namely making it easier for the casual readers to explore the never-ending rabbit hole that's our genre.

Before the internet, you could easily get your hands on such writers as Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout. They never really went out-of-print and their work saturated the secondhand book market, but going beyond the usual suspects required specialization, serendipitous luck and some money. Basically, you had to be a fan with the fanaticism of a true believer. Just look at the slew of new names and book titles regularly excavated by Curt Evans and John Norris. I'm not exactly a casual mystery reader and consider myself to be a fairly knowledgeable fan, but I never cease to amaze at what has been lost and how rich a history our genre has. So imagine how unlikely it must have been for a casual readers to get an easy opportunity to read Robin Forsythe, Kelley Roos and Joseph Commings in the pre-internet days. The changes were very, very slim.

I wanted to do a post looking at the authors who were (IMHO) most successful in riding the wave of this Renaissance Era and succeeded in either reclaiming their past glory or even proved to be more successful than they probably were in their own lifetime. And the first name might surprise you know.

Anthony Berkeley was, arguably, one of the most important British mystery writers of the 1930s and some of his work has definitely inspired some of Christie's most celebrated novels (c.f. The Silk Stockings Murders (1928) with The ABC Murders, 1936). His share to the first round-robin novel by the Detection Club is what made The Floating Admiral (1931) surprisingly successful, because he tied everything logically together in the final chapter. He also predicted the rise of the psychological thriller, but, by the 2000s, Berkeley had been all but forgotten. Until a publishing outfit, The House of Stratus, started to reprint his mystery novels.

I always got the impression from browsing the archives of the old GAD Yahoo Group that Berkeley found a whole new audience in the early 2000s. Many of the readers on that group, whose opinions and reviews were my guidebook through the genre, acquired there first Berkeley's through HoS and avid collectors were able to add or even complete the series. I believe the new editions of The Layton Court Mystery (1925) and Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) were welcomed with open arms.

The House of Stratus were very important with helping kick-start the Renaissance Era by bringing this historically important writer back in print, but they also brought back other, once big-name, writers: Michael Innes, Freeman Wills Crofts and Edgar Wallace. However, I think Berkeley is the big winner of the lot, because he was the first big name to make a return and his work may have been as instrumental in bringing this new era about as he was during the Golden. Hey, you know what they say: a classic never goes out of style.

On a side note, "JJ," from The Invisible Event, placed a crown on Berkeley's brow as one of the Crime Kings. The post is titled "The Kings of Crime – III: Anthony Berkeley, the King of Diamonds."

A second name I have pointed out before, but must noted, is that of the Empress of the Renaissance Era, the Great Gladys Mitchell. Down, JJ. Down! Allow me to explain. Nobody has made a return as big and thorough as Mitchell. She was one of the most obscure writers of the genre in the early 2000s. Most of her books were never reprinted as paperbacks and were mostly available to collectors who were willing to spend money to possess rare hardcover editions. One of the few titles that were relatively easy to get was a paperback edition of Watson's Choice (1950) and some Green penguins.

There were two names during that time who helped kept her work alive: Nick Fuller who now infrequently blogs at "Escape to Adventure" and the man behind "The Stone House, a Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site." They made a great case for Mitchell and were very honest about her flaws, but pleaded that she was an acquired taste who deserved a chance. Personally, I'm very glad I did, because Mrs. Bradley is one of my favorite detective characters and when her creator had a firm grasp of all her plot-threads the books were often excellent. She made a good impression when the now defunct Rue Morgue Press reissued such titles as Death at the Opera (1934) and When Last I Died (1941), which Crippen & Landru compiled a collection of all her short stories under the title Sleuth's Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others (2005). Soon, Mitchell's rarest titles, such as Brazen Tongue (1940) and The Worsted Viper (1943), were reissued by the Minnow Press as hardcover editions and they apparently had a limited print run – because they went out-of-print within a blink of an eye. Eventually, she was picked up by Vintage/Penguin and they reissued all of her mystery novels. I think she has been more read in the past few years than during her own lifetime.

Let's continue with two more odd-ones-out: the first is the previously mentioned Farjeon, who was the least likely writer to reappear from obscurity, but Mystery in White came at the right time and was read more than during its original publication – ensuring further reprints. Farjeon is, like Mitchell, an acquired taste, but his comeback was amazing! Maurice Leblanc is the other odd name, one of the leading lights of the Rogue School, but I don't think his name was well-remembered outside of the Francophone world before the 2000s. But then Wildeside Press began to reissue translations, which consisted of the marvelous The Exploits of Arsène Lupin (1907) and 813 (1910). Leblanc is still not one of the most widely read names in the genre, but he probably would not even have been known about without these editions.

I already mentioned the Rue Morgue Press and their role in Mitchell's return, but they had an extensive catalog that included Nicholas Blake, Glyn Carr, Clyde B. Clason, Kelley Roos and Craig Rice. However, the one that seems to have really stuck around, after they closed down for business, is Stuart Palmer. The run of reprints by the RMP saw the return in print of the extremely scarce The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934) and a good swath of Palmer's mystery novels are still available as ebooks. So I found it interesting Palmer is the one who emerged as sort of a mainstay, because his competition included the great John Dickson Carr, Craig Rice and Delano Ames. But it is good that he's being read again.

Leo Bruce also deserves a mention as pretty much all of his mystery novels, featuring either Sgt. Beef or Carolus Deene, were brought back into circulation by Chicago Press, which included the much touted Case for Three Detectives (1936) and the obscure Case with Four Clowns (1939) – once considered as one of the scarcest books by a well-known Golden Age authors. Curt Evans also made him the subject of an essay, “The Man Who Was Leo Bruce.” A name who's (justly) well-regarded among connoisseurs of detective stories and glad to see his work is easy to get nowadays. Particularly, the Sgt. Beef series.

Lately, we have seen an outpouring of reprints from such publishers as the British Library Crime Classics-wing of the Poisoned Pen Press, The Detective Club from HarperCollins, Coachwhip Books, Ramble House and the Dean Street Press. A profusion of once well-known and completely obscure, long-forgotten writers were republished by them in the past few years, which makes it hard to say who will end up leaving a somewhat lasting impression, but there already some remarkable comebacks in this tsunami of reprints. 

 

E.R.Punshon is one of those familiar names from a bygone era and was highly regarded among both his readers and peers. Sayers once famously asked, "what is distinction," followed by holding up one of Punshon's mysteries and pointed to it, but he fell quickly from public memory after his death in the 1950s. 

Over the past few years, his work has been brought back into by print on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by two different publishers – one of them printing paperback editions and the other ebooks. My regularly readers are well aware of my high opinion on Punshon and regard his return to our bookshelves as important as the rediscovery of Berkeley. I would have loved to know what "kindly Mr. Punshon" would have thought of the renewed interest in his work in that far-flung year of 2016.

Dean Street Press, who did digital end of Punshon's comeback, has also brought back a number of unjustly neglected woman mystery writers. Some who could have easily claimed the title of Crime Queen had they written more of some novels that currently found their way back into our hands. Ianthe Jerrold wrote the traditionally-styled classic Dead Man's Quarry (1930) and Harriet Rutland was the authoress of the delightful Bleeding Hooks (1940), but all of the books from their small body of work is well wroth a read and sincerely hope they will stand the test of time – because they could have been serious rivals to the other Crime Queens. But time will tell.

The British Library also did their fair share in bringing a host of long-forgotten mystery writers back in the limelight, but the most interesting reprints were Anthony Wynne's The Silver Scale Mystery (as Murder of a Lady, 1931) and Christopher St. Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935), because we all want to see more from these authors – as they are obscure and secondhand editions of Wynne come with a hefty price-tag. So, hopefully, they'll break through as well. But we're drifting away from the purpose of this overlong, rambling blog-post that begins to eerily begins to resemble sponsored content. Badly written sponsored content. But rest assured, I do this for free.

Wow, this "addendum" is really about the size of a Van Dinean footnote! Anyhow, let's get going.

One of the strangest appearance on the scene is a Golden Age-style writer who's still alive, namely Paul Halter, who was known in the early 2000s as the second coming of Carr, but John Pugmire had trouble finding a publisher for his translations – since nobody wanted to touch a live GAD writer. So he went into business for himself and founded Locked Room International, but we, as the thoroughly spoiled children that we are, began to pick like a child at the English editions. Going, "well, this is not what expected." And then to think we sacrificed children to get the translations.

However, we're all very grateful to finally get an opportunity to read his locked room novels. Pugmire is still diligently working on a catalog of impossible crime fiction from France, Sweden, England and Japan.

Japan gave us another peculiar, living specimen from Japan's neo-orthodox movement, Keigo Higashino. The first novel to be published, Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005), was chosen by the American Library Association as Best Mystery Novel of 2012. On the cover was affix "A Novel," but it was a mystery novel at heart. Even though that point was heavily debated. But some of the subsequent translation were more purer mystery novels and I think Higashino garnered the most mainstream recognition from all the writers mentioned thus far.

Well, I feel as if I lost the thread of this blog-post halfway through, because I wanted to write about the successes of some returns, but churned out a simple, drawn-out rundown. Not one that's even all that complete, but this one gone long enough. Well, I never claimed to have been anything more than your resident hack reviewer. I'll try to keep future blog-posts of this nature shorter and keep them on the intended course. Next blog-post will be regular review. So you can keep an eye out for that.

The Locked Room Reader II: An Overview

"The idea is there, locked inside, and all you have to do is remove the excess stone."

- Michelangelo (1475-1564)

This is going to be a filler post in commemoration of the two-hundredth post tagged as a "locked room mystery," which is a poorly contrived excuse to ramble about the impossible crime stories I previously rambled about on this blog. So it's basically the blog-post equivalent of a clip show episode. Enjoy!

In late February of 2011, I began this blog and Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948) was the first review to be tagged as a locked room mystery. The plot is as clever as it complex and deals with the onstage murder during a reenactment of a medieval pageant by a seemingly invisible assailant. It was an extremely scare and coveted collectors items for decades, but was finally brought back into circulation by Mysterious Press in 2013 – as a modern ebook. I heartily recommend it, because Death of Jezebel stands alongside Green for Danger (1944) as a fine example of Brand's craftsmanship.

The explanation for an impossible problem can be tricky, complex and sometimes result in an over complicated, unconvincing answer – which has often invited comments along the lines of "oh, that could never happen in real-life." Over the past several years, I compiled five filler-posts with real-life examples of the locked room mystery intruding upon reality. Some of them are practically pre-written cases waiting for a mystery writer to commit them to paper. You can find all five parts here: I, II, III, IV and V.

I have accumulated a number of lists over the past four years and two of the most popular blog-posts in this category are "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries I: The Novels" and "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries II: Short Stories and Novellas," which are constant occupants of best read blog-posts – a list that can be found on your right under the header Most Consulted Dossiers This Week.

In contrary to these best-of lists, I threw together one entitled "The Reader is Warned: A List of My Least Favorite Locked Room Mysteries." It's a shorter selection of novels that include Joseph Bowen's abysmal The Man Without a Head (1933), Randall Garrett's overrated Too Many Magicians (1967) and Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) – an atrocity comparable only to the horrors of trench-warfare from WWI.

Obviously, the television-and movie format of the detective story have been grossly neglected on this blog, but their under-representation is mainly due to barely watching any TV-and movie mysteries anymore. I used to watch quite a few of them, but have become increasingly frustrated with them over the years and you can't re-watch Columbo for eternity.

Nevertheless, I was able to work my way through a couple of episodes from various TV-series and the occasional mystery movie, which, to absolutely nobody's surprise, were by and large locked room mysteries. I reviewed Columbo Goes to the Guillotine (1989) that deals with two impossible scenarios: a decapitated illusionist in a locked, upper-floor apartment room and a remote-viewing trick – which the lieutenant wonderfully replicates in order to pad out the episode. So, yes, that part is padding, but good padding. I mean, it's Columbo giving a sound and logical explanation for an apparently genuine demonstration of supernatural powers, under test-conditions, at a highly secure location. What's not to love about that?

I've also reviewed a handful of episodes from Colonel March of Scotland Yard, under the post-title "Miraculous Shades of Black and White," which was a TV-series based on the short stories from John Dickson Carr's The Department of Queer Complaints (1940) – published under the byline of "Carter Dickson." I have also several reviews from the locked room-series Jonathan Creek, but they're mainly review of the poorly written, abominably plotted episodes from the final season. So I'd recommend my review of Time Waits for Norman (1998) and the best-of list posted in anticipation of the disappointment that buried the series.

Occasionally, I produce a filler-ish post that contains some particles of substance, which are rare, but they do occur from time-to-time. A case can be made this was the case with a post entitled "The Sealed Room: A Literal Stronghold," in which I touch upon the many death certificates issued to our beloved genre and an essay titled "The Locked Room: An Ancient Device of the Story-Teller, But Not Dead Yet." My conclusion is that we keep coming back because Edgar Allan Poe buried a soft, thumping organ beneath the floorboards of the locked room mystery when he invented the genre in his 1841 short story known as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

"Sealed Rooms and Ghoulish Laughter" is an overview of primarily short stories paying tribute or parodying my favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, who's primarily known as the undisputed Master of the Locked Room Mystery – covering such classics as William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" and William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr."

Speaking of the "Grand Master," I've read most of his best and most well-known novels and short stories, before I began to blog, which resulted in namedropping him more than posting actual reviews. It's something that needs to be fixed in the future, but I did cobble together a few, unworthy reviews of some of his classics: The Judas Window (1938), The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942), She Died a Lady (1943), The Bride of Newgate (1950) and Fire, Burn! (1957). 

Of course, Carr is an old favorite of mine, but I made some new, excellent discoveries over the past few years.

I had been aware of Bill Pronzini in short story form, but it wasn't until 2011 I began to read his full-length novels about the "Nameless Detective," which is a series containing two of my all-time favorite locked room mysteries – Hoodwink (1981) and Scattershot (1982). They're a pair of interconnecting stories that strung together no-less than five impossible crimes and demonstrates the locked room trope can be as much at home in a contemporary, gritty environment as in the stately homes of the 1930s. Pronzini drove this point home a third time in Bones (1985), which is an exceedingly dark and brooding story with a locked room murder in the distant past and a pile of bones being revealed by an earthquake. I recommend all three of them without hesitation.

On a lighter note, over the past couple of years, Pronzini and Marcia Muller has been collaborating on a series of historical mysteries about a pair of late-1800s gumshoes, which all include one or more seemingly impossible situation. There are three titles to date: The Bughouse Affair (2013), The Spook Lights Affair (2013) and The Body Snatchers Affair (2014).

Herbert Resnicow is still one of my favorite discoveries, because he brought an entirely new perspective to the genre from his previous career as a civil engineer and constructed locked room mysteries on a completely new scale. Large, open spaces inside enormous buildings were sealed as tight as your stock-in-trade bolted bedroom or locked study. This also have rise to a couple of unique set-ups with one-of-a-kind explanations, which are especially exemplary in The Gold Deadline (1984) and The Dead Room (1987). The only downside is that he wrote so few of them!

Finally, as far as new discoveries are concerned, I should mention historian and prolific writer of historical mysteries, namely Paul Doherty, of whom I learned through In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel – and have been hooked ever since. I particularly enjoyed the cheekily plotted The Spies of Sobeck (2008) and The Mysterium (2010), which had a very Carrian atmosphere with two seemingly impossible crimes.

On the international market, John Pugmire has been doing yeoman's work in gathering locked room novels from across the globe and translate them for an English-speaking reading audience. The catalogue of Pugmire's independent publishing-house has a swelling list of Paul Halter novels, but also contains the Carrian homage L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) by Jean-Paul Török and Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) – which, technically, isn’t a locked room mystery. But that shouldn't spoil the fun. 

To my own surprise, I also found a handful of locked room mysteries from my own backyard and some of them were very decent: Willy Corsari's De voetstappen op de trap (Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937), Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) and M.P.O. Books' Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013). You can find more about Dutch-language locked room stories on this page, but it’s in dire need of an update.

Well, I'm halfway through a third wall of text, which really tells nothing more than I already did in the individual blog-posts I linked to. So this post is really proving itself a waste of time, but I might as well finish it now and run down some of the novels reviewed on here – because they make up the bulk of the locked room label.

Roman McDougald's The Blushing Monkey (1953) and Helen McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968) belong to a rare strain of miracle crimes, because the problems being tackled within their respective pages revolve around unlocked rooms. However, they're still locked room mysteries, but you have to read for yourself how they managed to pull that off. It goes almost without saying that McCloy's book is absolutely brilliant.

Plot-wise, Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1941) and Beverley Nichols' The Moonflower (1955) have one only one thing in common: the ending of both novels reveal one of the deaths to have been an impossible murder all-along. I liked both of them, but the former was definitely superior to the latter. However, they're both worth your time.

In the depart of rare, lesser-known, but excellent, locked room mysteries I would definitely recommend Anthony Wynne's The Silver Scale Mystery (1931), W. Shepard Pleasants' The Stingaree Murders (1932) and Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way (1935).

However, its not just full-length, locked room novels I have read and reviewed, but also the occasional short story and short story collections. I should begin with mentioning The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009) by Arthur Porges, which almost entirely consist of impossible problems solved by a wheelchair-bound scientist. They're pretty good and amusing stories that deserve to be better known.

Earlier this year, I wrote a seven-part review of a nine-hundred-page anthology, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014), which could all be read by clicking here. I didn't cover every single story in that mammoth anthology, because I had read a significant portion of them before, but I think seven separate posts is reviewing doing some justice to nearly thousand pages worth of impossible crime material.

I guess I'll end this dictionary definition of filler by pointing to the review of one of my all-time favorite short stories, "Eternally Yours" by H. Edward Hunsburgen, which was reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006) alongside one of my least favorite stories – "Death and the Rope Trick" by John Basye Price. It's somewhat baffling both shared pages in the same anthology, but it shows an interesting contrast in quality.

Well, I'll end this overlong overview here and apologize for wasting your time, because it really turned out to be nothing more than pointing towards old reviews and blog-posts, but, hopefully, there was something of interest in it. 

I'll try follow up yesterday's review of The Death Angel (1936) by Clyde B. Clason with a regular and proper review as soon as possible.

Where the Truth Lies

"Well, whatever it is, it sure must be most unusual. Uh, the reason I say that is because, you know, when my wife and I try to remember what happened yesterday or the day before, well, we don't agree on anything."

- Lt. Columbo (Dagger of the Mind, 1972)

A warning to the reader: this is going to be a filler-post involving conflicting memories, parallel universes, Columbo and Dr. Watson's brain. This is your only chance to turn away and come back within a day or two when I have regular review up. You've been warned!

Recently, I stumbled across a website, The Mandela Effect, collecting shared, alternate memories of events and popular culture that contradict the recorded history of our plain of reality – indicating to some that we're sliding between parallel universes.

A popular series of children's books, The Berenstain Bears, is central to this phenomenon, because people across the world swear they remember the name being spelled as BerenSTEIN.

It became enough of a thing that (reputedly) the son of the creators, Mike Berenstain, felt compelled to respond to a particular blog-post to explain the history of his family name and how "most people have just misread the name." A reasonable that has done nothing to make the debate subside. Other examples include confusion over the date of Nelson Mandela's death, the number of states within the U.S. and the titles of TV-series or movies. 

Dr. John H. Watson

As a consummate reader of detective fiction, I was immediate reminded of a phenomenon known within mystery circles as Dr. Watson's faulty memory, which is especially notable in two particular short stories: "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" from His Last Bow (1892) and "The Adventure of the Resident Patient" from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893).

The stories open on a very similar, almost identical scene that has Holmes performing a mind-reading trick on Watson, which was the result of some editorial acrobats, but in their universe it's Watson's unreliable memory that recollected that moment at the start of two completely different cases. And this wasn't the only time Watson's mind became fuzzy on the finer details. He ascribed the first name of James to both Holmes' arch-nemesis, Prof. James Moriarty, and his brother, Col. James Moriarty, which makes no sense at all!

So I agree with Mike Berenstain's simple explanation. However, I can understand why some people would freak out over this, because I have a crispy clear memory of an alternative ending to one of my favorite Columbo episodes. A faulty memory I had shelved away as a Watsonian lapse of the mind, but when I came across the Mandela effect I saw an opportunity for a filler post! 

Columbo: Oh, the mind boggles, sir!

Try and Catch Me (1977) is arguably one of the greatest Columbo episodes, in which Lt. Columbo's opponent is one of the most likeable murderers you'll ever meet on the small screen: a small, somewhat elfish-looking mystery writer, named Abigail Mitchell, who avenged her niece by locking the murderer inside her walk-in safe – which eventually began to lack the oxygen needed to breath.

Well, I was quite surprised, even a little shocked, upon re-watching Try and Catch Me for the second time, because I remembered a completely different ending to the episode. I remembered Columbo allowing Abigail Mitchell to get away and even handed over the car keys, a key piece (pun!) of evidence, to her, but that was not the ending I saw the second time around. On the contrary! Columbo makes no bones about it: she's coming with him to the police station.

Abigail Mitchell even asks Columbo if he "would consider making an exception" in her case. After all, she's "an old woman, quite harmless, all in all." To which Columbo replies, "you're a very professional person in your work and so am I." However, the episode ends with a line suggesting an alternate time-line, "if you had investigated my niece's death, all this need never have happened," but that would've made for an entirely different story altogether.

There's nothing in the episode that would justify the ending I initially remembered, but I've got a possible explanation as to why my mind butchered my recollection of the episode: it was during the time I began to discover the detective genre in earnest and wanted everything to be exactly like my favorite detective stories, which, at the time, included Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) – which is a book that shares in the blame of turning me into the mystery addict you know today. If you know the solution of that mystery and its morally ambigious ending, you probably understand why my mind did what it did.

Well, that's all I've to say on this subject. I wish I could've delivered the definitive proof of dual realities, but hey, what you gonna do.

Hopefully, I have a new review up before long and meanwhile, you could check out my recent reviews of Freeman Wills Crofts' classic debut novel, The Cask (1920), or Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee at Work (1967), which is collection of short stories.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for wasting your time with this post.