The Body in the Library

"Surely a collection of old books is harmless enough?"

- Bobby Owen (E.R. Punshon's Comes a Stranger, 1938)

Jill Paton Walsh is a British novelist, who began her career as an author of children's fiction, but during the early 1990s she turned her eye to detective stories and her first, tentative steps in the genre were shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award – which was an auspicious beginning. However, Paton garnered most of her fame, as a mystery novelist, when she was tapped by the estate of Dorothy L. Sayers to complete her unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Thrones, Dominations (1998). She has since then penned three additional books based on the characters created by the Queen of the Literary Detective Novel.

As a purist snob, I tend to curl my upper lip in absolute disgust at the mere idea of pastiches. I share Rex Stout's sentiment when he said that writers should "roll their own," but there are a few, rare exceptions that even I found impossible to condemn, because they actually respected and did justice to the original – one of these exceptions to the rule was Walsh's Thrones, Dominations.

Walsh's commentary on the completion of the unfinished manuscript showed the kind of respect you should expect from a writer handling someone else's creations. She mentioned that "the fragmented notes made it clear who the murderer was," but felt tempted to "invert her scheme" and make "the victim top the murderer." But it was Sayers' book and therefore Walsh followed her pattern, which is what made Thrones, Dominations and A Presumption of Death (2002) such pleasant reads.

So the remaining titles in this continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, The Attenbury Emeralds (2010) and The Late Scholar (2013), were jotted down on my never-ending wishlist years ago, but also wanted to sample some of Walsh's own crime-fiction. I actually collected all but one of them over the years and dumped them on the big pile. It was kind of time I finally took a look at one of them.

The Wyndham Case (1993) is the first of four novels about Walsh's own series-character, Imogen Quy, a college nurse attached to the fictional St. Agatha's College, Cambridge. My reason for picking this particular title is that I had seen it billed as a locked room mystery, but that turned out not to be the case. However, it was still a good detective novel in the tradition of such (lesser-known) literary Crime Queens as Dorothy Bowers, Joanna Cannan and Elizabeth Gill.

The story begins with Walsh's heroine, Nurse Quy, being dragged by the Master to the Wyndham Library where the body of Philip Skellow, a history student with a scholarship, was found spread-eagled beneath the famous "Wyndham Case" - a ginormous, "two-storey bookcase of ancient oak" with "a little gallery running along it."

Wyndham Library was bequeathed to the college by a seventeenth century occultist, Christopher Wyndham, who was a "passionate opponent of Sir Isaac Newton," but the Wyndham Bequest came with a series of conditions that proved to troublesome as the time went on.

A permanent, overpaid library keeper was to be appointed and his only task was to make sure no books were taken out, or added to the collection, which consisted of books dealing with such obscure and rejected ideas that they were only of interest for "their splendid binding" or the insight they offered on "the history of typography" - which means they were "reverently inspected, but never read." Wyndham also designed the special lock on the door and only two people were supposed to be in possession of the keys: the library keeper and an (unknown) auditor. One every century, on an unknown date, the college is visited by an auditor to inspect the library. So a lot of trouble to simply become the custodians of a burdensome collection of ancient, yellowing tomes without any appear to scholars, but the college was in financial dire straits in 1692 and could not afford to turn the bequest down.

All of the conditions Wyndham placed on the college was the first domino stone to fall in a long series of events that resulted in several deaths, but I'll return to that aspect of the plot later on in the review.

First of all, there's the police investigation and Quy finds herself working on the inside of the college to help her policeman friend, Mike Parsons, with clearing up the numerous questions surrounding the death of the young student. One of them is what Philip was doing in the library, after dark, and how he obtained access to the vault-like room, but there's also the inexplicable pool of wet blood around the head of the stiffened body – as he was not a haemophiliac. Quy is the kept the busiest with sorting out the mess of Philip's college life. Philip was "a grammar-school boy," with poor parents, who was not very popular with his more well-to-do peers, such as his roommate, but lately, he had ready cash to spend. Who did he get the money? Why did his roommate, Jack Taversham, suddenly disappear? And how is all of this related to the drowning of a medic student in the fountain pool?

What impressed me the most about all of the plot-threads is not only how tightly they're interwoven with one another, but how they're depended upon one another to have played out in the way they did. It's like one, long row of falling domino stones that began in the late 1600s and if one thing had gone differently nobody would have died.

If the Wyndham Bequest had not such idiotic, strenuous conditions the subsequent tragedies would simply not have happened. If the Domestic Bursar of St. Agatha's College had assigned Philip and Jack to different rooms, the former probably would not have died on the cold floor of the library. If Philip had not planned an Easter holiday in Kashmir or forgot his appointment with Quy to get holiday inoculations he would certainly not have died (etc, etc, etc).

It's one of the best examples of the Merrivalean "blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general" at work, which is a lovely way to structure a plot, but it should be pointed out that the actual clues are rather thinly spread around – which might be a problem for an armchair detective. There is, however, an important clue hidden early on in the story that should tell you what Philip was doing in the library and how he got pass the locked door, but, as you probably guessed from this blog-post, that's only a minor part of the overall plot. So you have to keep that in mind when you pick up The Wyndham Case.

All in all, The Wyndham Case is a well-written mystery novel, like a modern Crime Queen, with a tricky plot structure that's as unusual as it satisfying, but not one that really lends itself to the reader who wants to play armchair detective. Once again, you have to keep that in mind. However, in spite of this minor reserve, The Wyndham Case is light-years ahead, in overall quality, of pretty much 99% of what has been published since the 1960s under the banner of crime-and detective fiction. I can specifically recommend the book to readers who love the Golden Age Crime Queens and their followers.

Finally, the next blog-post will probably be a review of a locked room novel, but I'm torn between two options. One of them is a writer from the seventies and eighties who penned three locked room mysteries and the other one is an obscure Dutch novel from the early 2000s with a very unusual impossible situation. Ah, luxury problems!

The Long Way Down

"You make it sound like something out of a dime novel."

- Shirley Taggert (Edward D. Hoch's "The Long Way Down," collected in Hans Stefan Stantesson's The Locked Room Reader: Stories of Impossible Crimes and Escapes, 1968)

Kel Richards is an Australian journalist, broadcaster and author whose bibliography is stuffed with crime-fiction, such as Sherlockian pastiches, thrillers and traditional detective stories, but what beckoned me to his work were a number of historical mysteries – which threw the mantle of Sherlock Holmes over such literary figures as G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Oh, there's also the fact that these novels are saturated with impossible crime material.

So I was compelled to take a gander and see how Richards handled everyone's favorite plot-device, because hey, any excuse to further bloat the locked room label. We're getting close to 250 blog-posts! But, for now, let’s take a look at one of these locked room novels.

The Floating Body (2015), originally published in Australia as The Floating Corpse, entered third in a series about the author of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), C.S. Lewis, who now has a penchant for getting involved in murder cases – usually of the impossible variety. The person responsible for drawing Lewis into these cases is one of his former pupils, Tom Morris, who seems to be the true murder magnet of the series.

Tom Morris is the Acting English Master at Nesfield Cathedral School, located in the fictional town of Nesfield, which Richards (admittedly) borrowed from Michael Innes' The Weight of Evidence (1944). The Author's Note at the end points out that Innes, the penname of Prof. J.I.M. Steward, was "a colleague of Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in the English School at Oxford." So that's a nice touch to the story and the narrative has several of these literary Easter Eggs. For instance, Morris confiscated a lurid crime novel from one of the schoolboys, The Purple Gang, which is "a non-existent mystery novel referred to a number of times in the comic novels and short stories of P.G. Wodehouse."

I got the impression Richards tried to emulate the kindly, lighthearted tone of the Gervase Fen mysteries by Edmund Crispin. A tone that become particular audible in the plot-thread concerning the shenanigans of some of the schoolboys.

The Floating Body begins with the introduction of this particular plot-thread, which happens when Morris has to order the school bully to release his prey, "young Stanhope of the Fourth," from his stranglehold, but the Acting Master discovers the boy has a propensity for trouble – trying to use his father's standing and money to get one of his fellow students to steal next week's exam paper for him. However, not everyone appreciated how the School Toff approached them, nose high in the air and "an ingrained look of vast superiority to the world around him," which placed a pair of nasty bullies on his tail.

Regardless of his faults, Stanhope is only a small boy who still has some things to learn and Morris asks a group of friends, who refer to themselves as "The Famous Four," to play the role of guardian angels to the young boy. This storyline runs, like a red-thread, through the entire plot of the book and breaths some real life in the school setting. It's also a lovely throwback and homage to the long-gone era of school-and sporting stories from the boy's magazines of yore, which were, if I'm not mistaken, at their zenith during the 1920-and 30s – diminishing in popularity after the Second World War. You can also make a case that this plot-thread ties the book to juvenile crime-fiction.

However, not everything is fun and games at the school: Morris ensnared his former university tutor, C.S. Lewis, to come down to Nesfield and fill the spot of guest speaker, but eventually has to play detective when he witnesses a seemingly impossible murder.

The young Mathematics Master, Dave Fowler, is seen going to the roof of one of the school building, "well away from all noisy schoolboys," where he plans to enjoy the summer weather and a mystery novel – which happens to be the then recently published The Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers. By the way, the story takes place at the start of the summer of 1935. Anyway, Lewis and Morris witness how Fowler is arguing with an invisible person on the roof, who stabs him in the stomach, which is followed by the math teacher staggering unsteady across the roof. He then "seemed to lose his balance" and "disappeared from view as he plunged over the far side of the roof," but what they find where the body was supposed to be was "a bare, gravel road." The body seems to have vanished on the way down.

Fowler's corpse is eventually found where it was supposed to be, after it was seen tumbling from the rooftop, but not for another twenty-four hours. As if the body had been suspended in midair, completely invisible, before falling down to the ground on the following day.

The explanation was surprisingly simple, somewhat reminiscent of Leo Bruce's Nothing Like Blood (1962) and the rejected solution from a fairly well-known locked room short, but these ideas were used here to form a nice little impossible crime. My only grip about this part of the plot is the knifing of the victim, which unnecessarily complicated matters for the murderer. I think this person should have used a crook-handle cane, instead of a knife, to work Fowler over the edge of the rooftop. If you know how the murderer remained invisible to onlookers, you know how the crook of the cane could be employed and used as a clue that nodded in the direction of the murderer. Otherwise, I enjoyed trying to work out possible explanations for the invisible assailant and the midair disappearance of the body.

On the other hand, I was not as impressed with the who, why and the fair-play of the overall plot. One of the potential motives, linked to a hidden sub-plot and false solution, is simply thrown into the story and the actual explanation felt uninspired, which can be explained by all of the attention spend on the schoolboy-angle, the impossible crime and Lewis' exhortations on Christianity – which sometimes made the book feel like a sermon with detective interruptions.

So I feel very divided about The Floating Body: there's some things to like about the story, but, purely as a fair-play mystery, it has its fair share of flaws. However, I'll further investigate his work before giving my final judgment. After all, I read some positive responses to the second book in the series, The Corpse in the Cellar (2013), which is also a locked room mystery. I'll get back to him sooner rather than later.

Finally, allow me to apology for any sloppy mistakes in this blog-post, but I cranked this one out rather hurriedly and was foolishly attempting to multi-task. I promise better for my next blog-post. In the meantime, you might be interested in this interview with Kel Richards. The next book in the series sounds interesting as well: a beheading in a locked room? I'll take a dozen of those, please!

Death and His Brother Sleep

"I'm afraid you'll think I haven't exactly been minding my own business. Why should I, anyhow? Two months in this place ought to reveal all our secrets, if we have any. Mind you, it was a sheer accident in the way it happened..."

- Captain Charles Mallinson (James Hilton's Lost Horizon, 1933) 

There are several well-known documented cases of hobby deformation among mystery readers, which include associating the literary father of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne, with The Red House Mystery (1922) and Gaston Leroux with Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) instead of La fantôme de l’opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1910).

Well, was it murder?

Similar examples dot the landscape of the genre, but there's one writer I'll never be able to associate solely with his one-off contribution to the detective-and thriller genre.

James Hilton was an English novelist best known today for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934) and a wonderful adventure-fantasy novel, Lost Horizon (1933), which I read during a short period when I was reading "Lost World" stories. There were, however, only a small amount of such books available at the time. So it was only a brief excursion outside of the detective story, but it did put Hilton's sole mystery novel on my radar.

Was it Murder? (1931) originally appeared as Murder at School, under the byline of "Glen Trevor," which remained an obscure fact for decades after success came knocking on Hilton's door and one presumes the book was filed away as a youthful indiscretion – until Dover Publications brought it back in circulation in the late 1970s.

I enthusiastically bought a copy years ago, but continuously put off reading it after perusing some decidedly mixed reviews of the book. Well, the book left me with some mixed feelings now that I have read it myself. Lets begin at the beginning...

The backdrop of the book is a minor, unassuming public school, named Oakington, where a student by the name of Robert Marshall fell victim of a peculiar accident when a heavy, old-fashioned gas fitting crushed his skull in the dormitory during the night. Dr. Robert Roseveare, current Head of Oakington, would've let the dead rest in peace were it not for a strange note he found inside the boy's algebra-book, telling that "if anything should happen to me, I leave everything to my brother Wilbraham" – which aren't the kind of thoughts you'd expect to be on the mind of a public school boy.

Dr. Roseveare calls in the help of an old student, Colin Revell, who once solved "a little affair at Oxford" when "a rather valuable manuscript had disappeared from the College libraby" and had solved the case "by means of a little amateur detective-work." The first impressions of Revell begs for comparisons with Roger Sheringham and Philip Trent, but there's a difference between the fallibility of the later two and the incompetence of the former.

A Mysterious Story of a Different Kind

Oh, there's enough to enjoy about Revell's handling of the case for the plot-driven reader. There are plenty of possible explanations bandied about and leads to follow up on around the school grounds, but Revell never appears to be fully on the mark and eventually has to leave without having cleared up the first death – not to the readers satisfaction anyway. I mean, why were the students who were sleeping right next to Marshall never considered to be suspects or even questioned as potential witnesses? That's just sloppy.

There are several months between Revell's first and second visit to Oakington, which occurs when learning about the supposedly accidental death of Wilbraham Marshall in the empty swimming baths of the school. It smacks of murder and has attracted the attention of an actual detective from Scotland Yard, Guthrie, but he only gives off the impression of being more competent than Revell and eventually leaves empty handed after a third fatality – which is annoying because I had correctly figured out the correct solution at this point.

And they were still roughly a 150-pages removed from stumbling across the solution themselves, but Hilton's pleasant, often light-hearted style has to be commended here as it sustained my interest in the story. The "surprise" revelation fell somewhat flat, but the effort was appreciated.

I also found it interesting that, in spite of the witty writing, there's somber shadow cast over the story by the Great War and its lingering affect it had on some of the characters. I've always been interested in detective stories that are tied to the World Wars of the 20th century, but I don't remember having ever read one in which the ghost of World War I was almost background character in itself. A very interesting aspect of the book.

Anyway, Was it Murder? is a prime-example of the amateur detective and mystery novel, but whether that's a good or bad thing is up to the individual reader. I'm still very divided on that question, but I do want to re-read Lost Horizon now, because that's a prime-example of an excellent potboiler!

In the Mist of Time

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit the facts."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892)

In my previous blog posts, I reviewed Keigo Higashino's Seijo no Kyusai (Salvation of a Saint, 2008) and the fifty-second volume from the long running Case Closed series by Gosho Aoyama, which were two distinctively different works of Japanese crime fiction that were recently translated.

So, I thought, why not complete the hat trick and diminish the pile of recently published, but unread, mysteries at the same time?

That brings us without too much delay to Katsuhiko Takahashi and Sharaku satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaku Murders, 1983), which the Mystery Writers of Japan honored with an Edogawa Rampo Award. Thames River Press published a translation of The Case of the Sharaku Murders in 2013, but the book appears to have already fallen into obscurity, because even Ho-Ling seems to be unaware of Takahashi – and he's one of the few who isn't depended on translations.

The opening chapters of The Case of the Sharaku Murders gives the impression of setting up a British-style university mystery, which begins when the body of Saga Atsushi is fished out of the ocean off the coast of Cape Kitayama – located near Tanohata in Shimohei County. Saga was a renowned calligrapher and one of the foremost authorities on ukiyo-e in the country. It was a genre/style of woodblock printing and paintings that were popular in Japan from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Professor Nishijima was a rival of Saga and who managed to garner an unprecedented amount of influence and power in their niche-corner, which he managed to do by helping students gain positions in museums and universities – making him popular professor to have as a student aspiring to be paid one day. The vehicles of this simmering rivalry are both men are members of, Edo Art Association (EAA) and Ukiyo-e Connoisseurship Society, but despite all of this the death is filed away as a suicide and the story moves in a different direction.

A young, promising ukiyo-e scholar, Ryohei, and research assistant of Professor Nishijima becomes engrossed in the mystery of "Sharaku," who was a famous woodblock print artist and active for only ten months – between May 1795 and February 1796. Sharaku was assumed to be a Noh player, but the matter of his identity became a touchy subject in the ukiyo-e establishment in the wake of the Shunpoan Affair of 1934.   

Ryohei came across a possible clue pointing in the direction of a person who could've been Sharaku, tugged away in an art catalogue that was printed in 1907, but you have to appreciate history or art to enjoy what follows. This investigation swallows up the entire middle section of the book and covers several centuries of obscure, Japanese history on woodblock printing and oil paintings – from the early 1600s to the late 19th century.

However, these scholarly enquiries are done and presented as proper and vigorous detective work. The ten month period of Sharaku's activity is used to check if figures from the era have an alibi for that period and there's an interesting takedown of multiple hypotheses that have accumulated over the decade, which includes pseudonyms of closely related figures and even an entire workshop – explaining the prolific output over a short period. 

In this slow, meticulous way, a nearly 200-year-old web of relationships and cultural influence is uncovered and Takahashi densely packed it with historical background information. A reader expecting an academic mystery might get more than they bargained for and feel like they're reading a fictionalized textbook, but I think it's the best part of the story – especially compared to the overarching plot book-ending this story-within-story.

On a brief side note: this part also strangely reminded me of the historical subplot of the fleeing Revolutionary War soldier from Herbert Brean's underrated Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1952).

Upon his return from his excursion into the past, Ryohei finds himself in the middle of academic skullduggery, which leads to a fatal house fire and a tragic hit-and-run, but the slow pace really began to bog down the final half of the book.

The Case of the Sharaku Murders has an involved, somewhat ambitious plot, but the explanation doesn't pull the rug from underneath your feet and that's begins to frustrate when the story keeps retracing its own steps – filling in blanks here and there with each explanation. There's even a long, written confession by one of the persons involved explaining that persons actions in the whole case and the book didn’t end with that letter.

As explanatory plunge in obscure nook of Japan’s history, The Case of the Sharaku Murders was as interesting as the tattoo lore from Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948), but, as a detective story, I feel as divided about it as Togakushi densetsu satsujin jiken (The Togakushi Legend Murders, 1994?) by Yasuo Uchida. 

Well, that put a stop to that short-lived streak of positive reviews of really good mystery novels. 

A Bridge Too Far?

"Let's not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let's candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book."

- Dr. Gideon Fell (The Hollow Man, 1935) 

J.C. Masterman may've been one of the last of the erudite, university dons who saw the detective story as a fertile playground of the mind and interrupted his scholarly pursuits twice to pen a full-length mystery novel: An Oxford Tragedy (1933) and The Case of the Four Friends (1957). The sleuth in both stories is a German lawyer, Ernst Brendel, with a European reputation and his occasional utterances in his native tongue completed the image of the reputable foreigner with a deep understanding of the English people and human nature in general, i.e. a literary descendant of Hercule Poirot. 

 Fittingly, I began with the second book in this two-part series, which is subtitled "a diversion in pre-detection," and put a new spin on a then (fairly) new angle that Leo Bruce's Case with Four Clowns (1939) and Pat McGerr's Follow As the Night (1951) introduced to the inverted detective story – a who-will-be-done-in-and-by-whom! A story in which you not only have to figure out the identity of the killer, before he strikes, but the name of the victim-in-waiting as well!
 

The Case of the Four Friends has a story within a story structure and is narrated by Brendel to three of his friends in the Senior Common Room at St. Thomas' College, Oxford, after a game of bridge deteriorates into a discussion about crime detection. Brendel showcases his deductive abilities similar to Philo Vance's dubious poker scheme from The Canary Murder Case (1927) by analyzing and exposing the weaknesses in the playing styles of his friends. I've to pause here for a moment and wonder how it's possible, after plowing through fields of mysteries of British stock, to still know next to nothing about bridge. If Brendel had given his expose in Chinese, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. And yes... the post-title is a pun (tee hee!). 

Anyway, there's a story behind the intellectual posturing of Brendel, but, like a reluctant vampire about to turn down an invitation, has to be nearly pressured in staying late to tell his pre-construction of a crime that was prevented – which is interspersed with their analyzes and commentary. 

Charles Sandham stands at the head of an old-established and respected firm of solicitors, Sandham, Sandham and Bovis, dating back four generations and has a traditional New Years golf-and bridge holiday which originally began with three of his WWI army comrades. But, one by one, they fell off and were replaced. Currently, the other three "friends" consist of Evelyn Bannister, his oldest friend, Toby Barrick, a junior partner in the firm, and Bannister's nephew, Piers Gradon. In the first part of this pre-construction, the chess pieces are introduced and we learn of what goes on behind the pristine reputation of Sandham's firm – from embezzlement and petty rivalries to blackmail. 

Meanwhile, in the Senior Common Room, Brendel's narrative is interrupted not only to discuss the story itself, but also to lecture on (for example) the unpopularity of blackmailers in fiction – where as thieves, highwaymen and pirates often become the hero of the tale. There's also an exemplary piece of plot-driven characterization that I particularly liked. A heiress of major interest to both Barrick and Gradon, Dhalia Constant, is described as an "advanced yet static pawn," a piece that had been "boldly advanced two or three squares at the commencement of the game, thereafter remains static" and "its capture is the darling wish of one player... its defense the sustained endeavor of the other." 

The following section of the story has Brendel as the narrator and a participating character, because he was staying at the same hotel as the New Year's Party of Sandham and becomes a player in the events on a very peculiar night. The night in question is seen from the view point of the various characters, adding up to rashomon-like accounts of what happened, but I think the conclusion can be experienced as disappointing by some readers and they'll be glad to find that one of Brendel's friends provided an alternative solution after he retired from the room. The solution I was suspecting (by the way) and one that owed some debt to a very famous mystery novel. But hold one, Masterman has tucked away the introduction to The Case of the Four Friends at the end of the book and you could call it a defense of his own story. The English language would allow him to call it that. Sure. Here's a direct quote from the "introduction" by Masterman: "This, My Lord... is a very bad book, and it is my painful task, without undue prolixity, to expose its manifest faults and absurdities". As you can understand, the afterword made me feel justified for liking the book. Masterman was a good chap, as Cap. Hastings would've said. 

Finally, I should’ve mentioned Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), which shares similarities in structure (a group discussing a murder), but I felt The Case of the Four Friends is what Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table (1936) would've been like if the setting had been used to develop the central idea from the short story "Wasp's Nest," first collected in Double Sin and Other Stories (1961), into a full-fledge novel.

Memories Lost

"Time is a terrible thing, because it erases joys and pains at the same time."

- Gosho Aoyama

Coincidently, this is the third post in as many days that I'll be discussing a detective story, or rather a compendium of stories, from the comic book spectrum and you might have noticed that another Case Closed/Detective Conan review has been long overdue.

The 45th installment of this long-running series begins, as often is the case with this series, with a story that was set-up in the previous volume and this yarn fits in with another theme that's prevalent on this blog – seemingly impossible crimes! The setting is a high school where a student, Hosaka, tumbled down a flight of stairs to his death and his ghost appears to be playing malicious pranks on his old classmates. At the conclusion of the previous book, they found his desk in the school courtyard with a note on it that said, "I HAVE YET TO SETTLE MY GRUDGE," but the rain that had fallen moments before left the note bone-dry and the field of mud surrounding the desk was bare of any footprints.

Conan does an excellent job in pointing out the prankster among the group of friends and Aoyama worked with numerous tropes popular in Japanese (manga) mysteries for this one (e.g. scholastic setting with legends haunting the hallways and the avenger-from-the-past theme), but here, IMO, it resulted in one of the best examples I have read to date. I guess it's because it didn't result in a gruesome murder case and stayed on a human level that fitted the backdrop and characters. 

Aoyama's art in Case Closed is always great to look at, especially when clues are abound, but it was here that it struck me how beneficial it can be for a story on an emotional level – because there's nothing that Hosaka's friends could have said that gave the reader more of a connection with him than showing his smiling face in class whenever they're talking about him. Much better than biography-approach you find a lot of contemporary crime and thriller novels.

The materialization of Hosaka's desk in the muddy courtyard carried the mystery aspect of the story, showing the strength of a well thought out, but non-violent, locked room gambit, but was also surprised to find out that it was practically the same explanation I had dreamed up for the no-footprints situation in William L. DeAndrea's Killed on the Rocks (1990). That was the only real good solution I ever came up with for the no-footprints situation. Oh, well.

Next up, Conan, Doc Agasa and the Junior Detective League take time to go on a fishing trip, and before long, they find themselves enmeshed in another case that has all the earmarks of an impossible crime: an angler sitting on his regular fishing spot, a pile of tetrapods sticking far out of the water, is found more dead than alive and foul play is suspected. However, nobody approached the man until they noticed that something was up and while he's rushed to the mainland, Conan is unsnarling the events of that day. Aoyama packed a nice bag of tricks for this volume and his solution is rather ingenious, but risky, method for poisoning someone from a distance – a versatile mind to be sure and one that should please a lot of my fellow mystery enthusiasts, if they ever decide to pick this series up. But be warned, it take six to seven volumes before the stories become really good.

Anyway, the third case is an out-and-out homage to Columbo and just about as enjoyable. Richard Moore is invited to come to Okinawa for a TV conversation with Toshizo Nose, a famous baseball player for the Jaguars, and the moderator is a former teammate and sports reporter – Motoyama, who harbors a grudge against Nose. A grudge that drives him to murder and constructs a cast-iron alibi to get away with it. Conan pops up every now and then to ask pesky questions, before he has given him enough rope to hang himself.

Finally, we are treated to a three-chapter story that will be concluded in the next volume and involves astronomy, an outstretched forest that hide a skeleton and a dying message, invitations from a missing man and a fresh corpse.

Exams Can Be Murder

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it... and expose every inch of it."

- Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

From what I've read, Libbe van der Wal was a well regarded and remarkable individual within the academic circles of his time, who held the position of rector at a gymnasium in Delft and was appointed a professorship at the Delft University of Technology in 1952 – which he combined with his work for the Humanist Society until he retired in 1966. Fortunately, these exalted labors still allowed him the time needed to work on his books, of which two were works of fiction, Een kogel voor Oedipus (A Bullet for Oedipus, 1954) and Moord op het eindexamen (Murder During the Final Exams, 1957), published under the byline Tjalling Dix.

Van der Wal was one of the Dutch Dons of Crime, a noted academician who wasn't too stuffy to be distracted from his noble pursuit of enlightenment to dabble around with red herrings and alibis, and you'll understand why when you read an anecdote from one of his former students. He seems to have been a man who escaped from the pages of a Michael Innes novel! The story comes from a pupil of his school who one day slipped from his class, to take bathroom break, when, on his way back, he heard how another, disobedient class was on the receiving end of a verbal tirade from Van der Wal – who angrily stormed out of the room to decide their faiths. But to his very great surprise, he saw, when peeking around a corner, that the rector had burst into a violent fit of laughter. He wasn't angry at all, must have even thought they were amusing, but it was his task to discipline them – and after molding his face back into a mask of stern disapproval, failing several times, he marched back into the classroom to dish out their just desserts. What a fun docent he must have been!

Moord op het eindexamen (Murder During the Final Exams), his second and final detective story, is set at a small-town gymnasium during exam period – and the author draws from his own experience as rector of such a school to bring the book alive. The high strung-nerves of the graduating students, the hustle-and-bustle in the staff room and the visiting delegates make this a wonderful period piece depicting the educational system of the 1950s – and the vendetta between Termols, a math teachers who's at odds with everyone and everything in possession of a heartbeat, and the beloved and popular rector of the institute furnishes the plot with a classic set-up for a good, old-fashioned murder case.  

Termols is a particular nasty piece of work, unscrupulous and scorned by virtually everyone in the environs of the school, who jeopardizes students educational careers, and thus their future, if he can score a grubby point with it in his feud with the rector and one has to wonder why nobody cut his lifeline short before – but the inevitable eventually happens when his body is discovered, locked-up in his own classroom, after falling to be present at an important staff meeting. Nope. Unfortunately, this is not a locked room mystery, even though it was teased as such for a brief moment, as the murderer could've snatched either the spare key of the room or made an exit through the open fire escape.

Enter Joris de Corthe: a police inspector who appears to be a literary relative of John Appleby and Roderick Alleyn and he does a competent enough job at figuring out who bludgeoned the unpopular math teacher to death, but the solution he comes up with is workmanlike rather than artistically inspired – hinging on faked blood spatters, a missing piece of paper, a hidden alibi and a trivial piece of information the murderer couldn't possibly possess if this persons hands weren't stained with blood. However, there are touches of ingenuity in the opening chapter, which contains a clever bit of misdirection, and I have to give props for skillfully handling the weakness surrounding the motive. We're not provided with any hints that point to a motive, making it very hard to confirm your deductions or suspicions, but De Corthe is faced with the same problem as the reader – since he grabs as much in the dark were motivition is concerned until after the final confrontation with the murderer, and that's, IMHO, entirely fair.

Overall, this book is neither a tour-de-force nor a disaster, but a proficient stab at having a little bit of fun from an otherwise occupied scholar – and that attitude definitely rubbed off on me. It should also be noted that he seems to have something in common with Hake Talbot and John Sladek: both men published two detective novels during their lifetime with one of them standing out as a enduring masterpiece, while the second one is considered to be an afterthought. Well, from what I understand, Moord op het eindexamen fulfills the position of the latter, while Een kogel voor Oedipus apparently was his magnum opus – one critic even proclaims it as one of the best Dutch detective stories ever written and an exempli gratia of fair play. Looks like I have to go hunting again!

Prof. L. van der Wal

a.k.a. 

"Tjalling Dix"

1901-1973

The Student Body

I alluded in an earlier review to the intricate relationships and ever changing combinations of the participating members of a collaborative writing team, primarily known under the shared penname of Patrick Quentin, and the near impossibility to shortly summarize the inner workings of the group for a simple review as this one. Therefore, I will confine myself to the rudimentary facts, and tell you that Death and the Maiden (1939) was written by Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb, one of the regular tandems of the group, and was signed as by Q. Patrick (as "inconspicious" as an anonym as "Carter Dickson").

Ruckus on the Campus

Death and the Maiden is easily one of the best detective stories I read this year, and has all the ear-marks of a first-rate whodunit: an elaborate, multi-layered woven plot, well-rounded, believable characters and a fairly good setting, however, the best part of the story is that the Webb and Wheeler have taken the intelligence and experience of their readers into the equation. The observant and experienced mystery reader will probably spot the murderer, either deductively or instinctively, before the final chapter, but the story is so diabolically clever and trickily plotted that you're in for a surprise no matter how solid your deductions were or how sensitive your intuition is.

Being able to gauge your readers' intelligence and knowledge of the genre, and acting on them to cleverly mislead them, is one of the greatest gifts a mystery writer can possess – and makes for a satisfying read. It's like both men crossed time and space to point and snicker at me, while saying, "Ha! You thought we came at you from this angle, but then we turned around come at you from that spot." Well played, guys. Well played.

This fiendishly cunning story revolves around Grace Hough, not one of the most popular woman on campus, who's been receiving a string of special delivery letters – which everyone presumes to be love notes from a mysterious admirer or even a secret lover. But the letters become sinister tell-tale clues, when, after a short disappearance, her body is dragged from the river of a small town – twenty miles removed from the campus grounds.

The efficient Lieutenant Trant is put on the case and skillfully unsnarls a tangled and complicated web of lies, motives and clues to discover who from the small pool of suspects, consisting of fellow students and faculty members, murdered the unpopular and dangerous Grace Hough – who's final actions resembled that of a kamikaze pilot. It's really no wonder she ended up with a dent in the back of her skull.

Lieutenant Trant is a memorable detective without being an overbearing, eccentric snob who spouts Latin phrases and quotes obscure passages from Shakespeare every five minutes. He's a shrewd, scheming homicide detective who's cut from the same mold as his colleague Lieutenant Columbo. Just like him, Lt. Trant has a knack for wreaking havoc on the nerves of suspects and knows how to give them more than enough rope to hang themselves with. In a way, his personality and police methods makes it almost disappointing that the plot wasn't constructed as an inverted detective story.

On a final note, I have to say that Patrick Quentin has impressed me as a mature equivalent of Ellery Queen. Quentin's detective stories boost the same complex, multi-layered plots and clueing as Ellery Queen, but their tone was more serious, their themes darker and they were simply better at creating characters.

Concisely, this is a five-star detective story – worthy of being labeled a classic.