Blacke's Magic: Revenge of the Esperanza (1986)

Over the past two years, I've come across two novels, a novella and short story that pulled the detective story down to the muted, two-colored world of the seabed littered with shipwrecks, sunken treasure and legends of the deep ocean – revealing a largely untapped basin of possibilities. Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017), Desmond Reid's "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) and John Dickson Carr's "Lair of the Devil-Fish" (collected in The Island of Coffins, 2021) all demonstrated an underwater setting opened up new opportunities to play around with unbreakable alibis and impossible crimes. Something that has been explored decade earlier by Joseph Commings in his 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968). Ho-Ling Wong followed up my review of Forsyte's Diving Death by discussing the Detective Academy Q episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea, which does exactly as described on the tin. 

So these regrettably too rare deep sea detective stories have become a favorite (soggy) rabbit hole of mine to explore. Not in the least because they often combine an archaeological plot with an impossible crime, which are two of my favorite sub-categories of the detective story. There happened to be an episode of Blacke's Magic dovetailing an archaeological mystery with the miraculous disappearance of a 300-year-old Spanish seabed shipwreck. So it was high time to return to that dapper magician-sleuth and his carny father. 

Blacke's Magic was a short-lived American TV-series, created by Richard Levinson, William Link and Peter S. Fischer, which aired on NBC from January 5 to May 7, 1986, starring Hal Linden as magician-detective Alexander Blacke and Harry Morgan as his conman dad, Leonard – appearing together in thirteen episodes pitting their wits "against seemingly magical crimes." The series feels like a 1980s prototype of Jonathan Creek. 

Revenge of the Esperanza (1986) is the fifth episode of the series and begins with Alexander Blacke following “a paper trail of credit card charges, hotels, restaurants, airline tickets” to a luxurious yacht club in Florida. There he finds his father living it large, under the name Farnsworth, but he also appears to have his "feet planted firmly in quicksand." Leonard Blacke has gotten himself involved with four young treasure hunters, Maryanne Thompson, Paul Thompson, Eric Wilson and Clay, who have been trying to locate the wreck of the Esperanza for years. A Spanish galleon that sunk over three centuries ago in a storm with "untold riches" as its cargo, but the one of the investors is getting impatient with the stories about treasure ships and wants her whole one-hundred thousand dollars back. So the discovery of the wreck came in the nick of time. But not for very long.

The members agreed to camp out on the top of the wreck until they have brought up "every last ounce of gold she got," but, during the night, their equipment sounds the alarm and watched how it moved away on sonar – a nifty piece of retro-futuristic, 1980s fictitious technology (see picture). When they dived looking for it, it was gone, but "a 300-year-old shipwreck can't just get up and sail off." But that's what happened.

Alexander Blacke has to stick around to save his father's neck, because the investor has pressed charges against Farnsworth and Sheriff Tyler is becoming very suspicious of the old man. Just as the Esperanza vanished, the locals begin to see an old pirate ship, "quiet like a ghost," cutting through the fog and ships bells clanging mournfully. Finally, one of the treasure hunters is murdered with a dagger that came from the wreck.

So, yeah, there's more here than can be used in a 45-minute episode and the first murder served only to introduce an original clue. A piece of now long-lost technology known as a cassette tape with noise recorded on it and feel rather proud of myself for immediately figuring out what's really on the cassette. And how it could be played back. The second murder felt unnecessary and made the murderer standout, but was pleasantly surprised to discover (ROT13) ur unq na nppbzcyvfu uvqqra va cynva fvtug naq ur jnf chg gb tbbq hfr gb chapu hc gur raqvat. So the plot mainly hinges Sheriff Tyler nipping at Leonard Blacke's heel and the disappearance of the Esperanza, but they were both reasonably well handled. Particularly, the impossible disappearance of the wreck had a believable explanation (despite the dodgy monitoring) with that great cassette clue, but they needed more room to do them any justice. I think cutting the ghost ship and turning two murders into a single assault (leaving the victim unconscious in a hospital bed) would have made for better and much tighter episode.

All on all, Revenge of the Esperanza is a decent, fun enough episode with an intriguing premise and some good idea, but a cluttered 45-minutes were not enough to do anything meaningful with it. But, if you love impossible crimes, it's genuine pleasure to watch one unfold on screen.

The Murder on the Boat Deck (1941) by Vanno

During the first years of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Bruna published two detective novels by an unknown, pseudonymous author, "Vanno," who crime fiction collector Wim van Eyle identified as Charles van den Dool and the war likely ended more than just his writing career – reportedly executed in 1944 as a member of the Dutch resistance. However, I've been unable to find anything to corroborate the report of his execution. So take that as you will. 

Fortunately, I stumbled across Vanno's second detective novel, De moord op het sloependek (The Murder on the Boat Deck, 1941), which not only sounded promising, but delivered most of the goods. A much needed uptick in quality after my previous two excavations of the Dutch detective story, Dick A. van Ruler's Moord op een negatief (Murder of a Negative, 1963) and B.J. Kleymens' In de greep van de kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965), turned out to be paper thin affairs. 

The Murder on the Boat Deck is, as the title suggests, a shipboard mystery and entirely takes place aboard a luxury cruise ship, the Princesa Marya, which lifted anchor in Venice, Italy, embarking on a holiday trip in the Aegean Sea – along "the smiling shores of Yugoslavia" and "the beautiful, ancient edifices of Athens." There are two detectives aboard on a well deserved, long overdue holiday. Inspector Barney D. Weston, of the New York Metropolitan Police, who's a typical, hardboiled homicide cop occasionally hampered by a short-fused temper. Weston is accompanied by a friend and "a detective of some notoriety," Charles Venno, whose methods of deductions is described by Weston as "screwy, quasi-psychological lectures" comparable to a "fantasy sleuth from the detective novels." But he gets results. And their fellow passengers are determined to turn their last three days aboard into a busman's holiday.

Rex Corbin is a manufacturer of undisclosed goods and his chronic jealously not only makes his wife, Elsie Corbin, terribly unhappy, but makes her very susceptible to the charms of the cruise's troublemaker. Allan Hunter is a land surveyor and, as someone aboard described him, a "damned, self conscious womanizer." Hunter is very unhappy as he spend years in a remote corner of Venezuela as a land surveyor for an oil company, living in a primeval forest away from civilization, which is why he's determined to have some fun. Robert Jones is a lean, sinewy and funny looking man who accompanied Tom and Mary Vane on the cruise. Daisy Mitchell is a holidaying secretary who had a brief, but intense, holiday romance with Allan Hunter. Ted Randell is a writer who mockingly confides in Venno and Weston that he would be ashamed to use what happened on the Princesa Marya as a plot for one of his books, because it has "the level of a dime store detective novel." But he has important information to share with the two detectives. Vanno and Weston also get help from a lonely, middle-aged passenger, Miss Alice Ferris, who hungers for adventure and romance, but even she has to admit the movies pale in comparison to "these wonderfully frightening and yet so terrifying-exciting events" that surround a real-life murder. Gordon Waller is a representative on holiday and has been chasing Mrs. Corbin during the entire trip, but now had to look on as Hunter threatened to snatch her away from him and her husband. There also two school teachers, Dorothy Campbell and Louise Coburn, and a businessman, Aloys F. March. But the trouble really began with another passenger, Dr. James R. Holton.

James Holton is an ethnologist who's asked why there's a small, snakeskin tube attached to his watch chain, like a good luck charm, but, even more importantly, what's inside it – which turns out to be a miniature model of a poison smeared arrow. Curare, to be precise. A very potent poison that kills within seconds when enters when it enters the bloodstream! So a very dangerous object that has to be carefully handled, but, somehow the tube with the poisoned arrow disappears. Everyone simply assumes it had been mislead somewhere, but, later that evening, they discover there was a much more sinister reason why it got lost.

The murder is preceded by an late night, shipboard game, called "Paspoort," in which everyone has to draw a piece of paper from a hat. All but one of the papers has the word passport written on it and they have to scatter and hide in couples, while someone playing the customs officer is tasked with finding the person who drew the blank paper. However, the game is merely an excuse to fool around the boat deck. This naturally leads to some tension among the participants.

Later that night, the group decided it was too late and warm to go to bed. So they agreed to wait until sunrise and go for an early morning swim, but Hunter told them he was going to shave first ("I have a beard like a robber") in his cabin. The rest of the group placed deck chairs in front of the cabin door to talk and tell jokes, but, a few minutes later, they hear a heavy thump inside. Hunter inexplicably died without a sign of a death struggle and only the pale, bluish tint of the face betraying he didn't die naturally. The ship doctor determines he was poisoned with curare, which not only ended Venno and Weston's holiday, but presented him with a seemingly impossible poisoning in a cabin with the door both blocked and watched by a whole group of people!

They neither find a trace of poison or the stolen arrow in the cabin, which poses a real puzzle as both the ship doctor and the medical literature aboard that death was a question of seconds. Not minutes. Hunter had been alone in his cabin for several minutes when he was poisoned. So how was it done? A poisonous puzzle that leads to two false-solutions, but Vanno and Weston belong to the category of fallible detectives as they overlook some pretty obvious flaws in their solutions – one of them pointed out by a potential suspect. Nonetheless, I very much enjoyed these bits and pieces of theorizing and constructing false-solutions. Only to see them get demolished like sandcastles. This time, the false-solutions didn't outshine the real solution! Although one of the false-solutions, implicating the ship doctor, could have been explored a bit more in depth as there are many variations possible on that idea. For example, Hunter could have become actually sick and the doctor, who has a ghost of a motive, could have pricked or scratched Hunter when he looked him over. Hunter could also have had some kind of stomach problem, like ulcers, which would open the possibility of introducing curare into his bloodstream via the stomach by way of a curare laced drink. This perhaps could have delayed death a few minutes. Maybe...

Nevertheless, the actual poisoning-trick is more practical (considering the murder weapon) and something I should have immediately caught, but imagined something from the period completely wrong. What tripped me is that it was fairly mentioned, but not described in detail. Not that it was necessary at the time. But some reader's today might miss it. Needless to say, the impossible poisoning-trick is one that Paul Doherty would no doubt approve of. 

The Murder on the Boat Deck is not merely a shipboard locked room mystery, because there are two more murders and various plot-threads to keep Vanno and Weston hopelessly tied-up, while only having a few days to clear everything up – before having to hand over the case to the Yugoslavian authorities. A prospect nobody is looking forward to. While not every plot-thread knocks out of the park and the ending misses that Agatha Christie, rug-pull-like effect Vanno (the writer) was aiming, I was nevertheless impressed how everything dovetailed together. A scheme that started out as a subtle and relatively crime slowly collapsed under weight of the cussedness of all things general. There was something else I really loved about the solution. When the who-and why began to dawn on me, I wondered why the murderer didn't kill Hunter during a quiet moment and dumped the body in the sea. It seemed like the simplest and safest approach to accomplish what was taking shape. Well, the ending answered why that scenario didn't happen.

Vanno evidently put some thought into the plot. Even though he didn't think every single thing through to its logical conclusion. Such as the possibilities suggested by the false-solutions, but regardless, The Murder on the Boat Deck turned out to be a pleasant surprise and a solidly plotted detective novel complete with false-solutions and a locked room murder – which I honestly didn't expect to find in this mystery. I merely picked it because of its cruise ship setting. Who doesn't love a good shipboard mystery in sunny climes? So my only complaint is a stylistically one. The Murder on the Boat Deck was published in 1941 and has old-fashioned, now very dated, spelling littered with extra e's and ch's. Secondly, the characters are supposed to be Americans, but act and talk like Dutch characters. However, this has nothing to do with wartime censorship, like with Italian detective story, because pre-1950s Dutch detective fiction more often than not had foreign characters and settings. This is why there was a call in the fifties for the Dutch detective story to have Dutch characters, crimes and setting.

So, on a whole, Vanno's The Murder on the Boat Deck is a welcome addition to that too short list of genuine, Dutch-language Golden Age detective novels. And, while only a second-string mystery compared to the best of its American and British counterparts, I'm always beaming with pride whenever I come across one that does a decent job of holding its own. Hopefully, I'll be able to add more Dutch mysteries from the 1920-40s period to the big pile in the future, because they have become a little easier to find.

You can legally download (PDF) The Murder on the Boat Deck from the Delpher website for private use or as study material. Over the past year, or so, they uploaded a modest, but interesting, selection of vintage Dutch detective novels. So I'll be rooting around in their collection for hopefully something good and unjustly forgotten. Wordt vervolgd!

Sunken Secrets: "Death Dives Deep" (1959) by Robert Arthur (writing as "Brett Halliday")

Back in June, I read Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, which came recommended to me as hard-paced locked room mystery and introduced to Halliday's private eye, Michael "Mike" Shayne – a hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen. A series with distinctively different periods and localities, a monthly short story magazine and eventually a who's who of ghostwriters. 

Murder and the Married Virgin was as solid as a punch to the face and invited further investigation, which added several impossible crimes and a potentially interesting-looking World War II mystery to the big pile. But what really caught my attention was a short story by one of Halliday's well-known ghostwriters. A beloved writer around these parts of the internet with a legacy of his own. 

Robert Arthur was a pulp and mystery writer who famously created a radio anthology series, The Mysterious Traveler, but most readers today will remember him as the creator and first author of The Three Investigator series – producing ten novels before passing away in 1969. But his dalliance with the juvenile mystery novel represents only a small portion of his output. Arthur mainly wrote short stories that were published in everything from Amazing Stories and Black Mask to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

During the late 1950s and early '60s, Arthur wrote two short Mike Shayne stories under the Halliday name. One of the stories sounded like it could belong with Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942), Charles Forsythe's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017) and Joseph Commings' short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953) to that rare subcategory of detective stories with submerged setting. So let's walk the plank and find out. 

"Death Dives Deep" was first published in the January, 1959, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and collected in Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve (1961).

Mike Shayne, "tough as raw leather" and "not afraid of cops or crooks," is asked by Sandra Ames to undertake a job where he has two employers and "must keep an eye on both" to "see that one doesn't try to double-cross the other" – something "umpires do it every day of the baseball season." So he has no particular objections and deduces that his second employer is Captain Tod Tolliver. Shayne received a package that afternoon with an old, worn Spanish gold coin minted in 1670 and a note telling that "there's more where this came from." Before he can meet his second employer and get to work, Shayne is knocked unconscious and Captain Tolliver is kidnapped from his office by two thugs.

This is where the narrative begins to twist and turn like the Queen of Hearts maze with body around every corner. Seven in total! So you're never quite sure what to expect or what kind of detective story you're actually reading. Early on in the story, I began to suspect "Death Dives Deep" was cleverly played con-game with a hidden, quasi-impossible crime, but it didn't turn out to be one of those hard-hitting, cerebral private eye stories. Just a very well written piece of hardboiled pulp fiction and enjoyed it very much.

I particularly liked the treasure hunt and what, exactly, lay hidden on the seabed. Is it an old Spanish ship with "a strong room full of treasure" collected from all over South America or something more recently? And while the entire story takes place on the surface, the diving expedition is aptly incorporated into the plot and briefly turned the story into survival thriller when Shayne is stuck on a raft in the open ocean. Another point of interest is that, early on in the story, Shayne has a beauty parlor girl, named Ireneabelle, who is linked to the kidnappers and he calls another woman with her own beauty shop – requesting her call all her friends in the business and ask them. If they don't know, she has to ask them each to call five friends and keep the ball rolling until she's located. This is the exact same "Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup" system Jupe, Pete and Bob would go on to employ in The Three Investigators series (e.g. Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, 1965).

So, all in all, "Death Dives Deep" is an engaging, hardboiled private eye story with some good action scenes (the helicopter!) and an excellently used backdrop, which once again made me understand why so many people are fascinated by the figure of the tough private eye figure. I remember someone compared the private eye to comic book superheroes who matured and lost their cape, but stubbornly continued to try to do something good in a hard, crime-ridden world where it's practically impossible to keep your hands entirely clean. Sometimes it seems pointless, but characters like Shayne continue to try to do right thing and restore some good to the world. No matter how many times they get knocked out or crack a knuckle. Arthur's "Death Dives Deep" is a good example where a lot of bad things have to happen before a little good can come out of it.

That being said, you expect something more traditional and plot-oriented in the next post. So stay tuned!

Murder of a Negative (1963) by Dick A. van Ruler

Last month, I reviewed In de greep van de kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965) by "B.J. Kleymens," a shared penname of J. Kleijn and B. Mensen, whose only detective novel was their contribution to the "Zodiac Mysteries" – a collaborative project of twelve writers and an editor. Ab Visser gathered twelve writers each tasked with writing a detective novel in which one of the astrological signs plays a central or even decisive role. But the project was abandoned and left unfinished after eight novels. So what happened? 

I used my review of In the Grip of the Lobster to burrow deeper into the mystery of the missing "Zodiac Mysteries." I was unable to discover why the series was abandoned or canceled, but Robert van Gulik's novella "De nacht van de tijger" ("The Night of the Tiger," 1963) from The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) was originally intended to be his contribution to the series. There's a possibility, as noted in my review, Jacques Presser's Moord in de Poort (Murder in the Poort, 1965) is another lost Zodiac mystery that made it to print. Maybe. So this left only two contributors unaccounted for.

One of them, Leon Derksen, has to my knowledge never written or published a single detective story, but the subject of today's review did put one to his name. I was more than a little intrigued by his sole detective novel on record.

Dick A. van Ruler studied theology at the Rijksuniversiteit of Utrecht in the 1950s and began to work as a journalist for the Utrechts Nieuwsblad in 1961, but gained national fame as the presenter of popular NCRV TV programs such as Hoe bestaat het – which translates to How It Exists or How Does It Work. A pop-science show from the 1960s and the second picture in this review comes from a newspaper teaser about that program. Yes, Van Ruler is pulling "the weight of eight train wagons" or "five and a half thousand times the weight of Dick van Ruler." You had to tune in that evening to learn the trick behind his incredible feat of strength. Regrettably, I've been unable to find even a few seconds of footage online.

More importantly, Van Ruler penned a detective novel around the same time, Moord op een negatief (Murder of a Negative, 1963), which the back cover tells showcases his interest in pastoral matters. Van Ruler is not so much interested in the crime solving techniques of the police as he's in those who come into contact with the police. Murder of a Negative is not about the who and/or how, but the why and the far-reaching, sometimes unforeseeable consequences of murder. So the result is a quasi-social crime novel similar to K. Abma's De hond was executeur (The Dog Was Executor, 1973) with the difference being Van Ruler tried to write something resembling a Dutch politieroman.

Before going over the story, I need to briefly return to the "Zodiac Mysteries" and Van Ruler's contribution that never materialized or remained unpublished. I didn't expect Murder of a Negative to be a lost Zodiac title, but postulated in my review of In the Grip of the Lobster it might have caught the eye of Visser and earned him a seat at the table – a guess which could be closer to the truth than I imagined. Murder of a Negative more or less, likely without intending it, low key setup a sequel in the background that could tie-in to and be part of the Zodiac series. The wife and confident of the police detective, Mary, "hung her believes and soul" on astrology (well, sort of) and knew her way around the field. She could advise her husband in a murder case involving one of the Zodiac signs. This raises a question: did Van Ruler penned a sequel that was part of the "Zodiac Mysteries" and, if he did, what happened to the unpublished manuscript? Did it survive or did it get lost or even destroyed as there was little chance of it ever getting published? Questions that will probably never get answered and this elusive, hypothetical second novel is so intangible that it can't even be entered into the Phantom Library of Lost Detective Stories. But let's get to the story. 

Murder of a Negative dogs the footsteps of Chief Inspector Leendert M. van Dop, of the judicial police in Utrecht (cheap pop!), who gets "de Kruit-affaire" dropped on his desk.

Johan Kruit was a valued, highly respected and pious financial manager of an import-and export company in Utrecht, De Giec, who was the first to clock in and the last to leave – never taking any vacations. When he finally took a holiday and boarded a ship with his wife to the United States, he discovered too late that his sleeping powders contained a cyanide. And he died on the floor of his cabin. Suicide is quickly dismissed by both the authorities aboard and the Americans, which made them decide to return the body and accompanying problem back to the Netherlands.

Van Dop can begin his investigation quietly and unhurried, but is getting nowhere as he's confronted with a broken, disunited family. Mrs. Kruit is silent, submissive woman who "intoxicated herself with the past" and refused to acknowledge her husband's flaws "so as not to get from the others." Namely their two children. There's a 13-year-old girl, Bertje, but she barely appears. She has a much older brother, Hans, who Van Dop finds to be an "odd boy" suffering from his "learned indifference." And he was not on the best of terms with his father. There's the problem of the two-sided, negative image of the victim.

Johan Kruit had a squeaky clean, public image of an honest, hardworking man who sat on several church and school boards, but back home he acted like "an Old Testament patriarch" who was quick to judge and hated compromises. An image that is completely shattered in the wake of his death when it's discovered he stole tens of thousands of guldens from his employer. And they're not the only victims of Kruit's financial shenanigans. Van Dop even comes across a secret mistress. So there are more than enough motives to go around.

I already said the who-and how take a backseat to the reasons behind the murder and its consequences. The murderer is not difficult to spot (ur'f ba gur pbire) and there's nothing really clever hiding behind the poisoning, which is limited to going pharmacists to ask if anyone bought some cyanide. Murder of a Negative is almost entirely focused on the why and showing how easily a situation can spin out of control. Even when someone does something horrible with the best of intentions. Some detective stories can best be compared to complicated riddles or intricate, maze-like crossword puzzles while others are character studies, but Murder of a Negative is simply watching dominoes falling down – as one bad deed leads to another ending a second murder. A death as inevitable as it's dark and tragic. So not particular satisfying as a fan of the plot-driven detective story, but readers who prefer the social and realist approach will find something of interest between its pages.

Van Ruler's Murder of a Negative is another demonstration that the Dutch detective story is all over the place, which refuses to be defined by a single school of thought or time-period. This makes finding your way not unlike groping around a pitch-black labyrinth. You take what you can get hold off and what you get is not always what you like or were looking for. Sometimes you get lucky and find a Cor Docter or Ton Vervoort. Other times you get a Bob van Oyen. Van Ruler falls into the category of interesting, but not to my liking. That being said, I did enjoy following a typical Dutch police character down all those familiar streets under the watchful eye of the Dom Tower. I just wish it had been more of a proper detective novel.

The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked room murder and impossible crimes, but not as well-known, or appreciated, was his pioneering work as a historical mystery novelist and writing some of the most suspenseful radio-plays to ever hit the airwaves – even contributing to the war effort with propaganda plays. These were "so effective" that "they led the BBC, unsuccessfully, to urge the American authorities to allow Carr to remain in the United Kingdom for the duration of the war." Carr contributed to some of the popular and classic radio shows, like Suspense and Murder by Experts, but one radio program, Cabin B-13, appeared to have been lost to time. 

Well, all except two, or three, recordings have been lost, but, in the early 1990s, twenty-three scripts were discovered in the Library of Congress. Three decades later, Crippen & Landru gathered those manuscripts under the title The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021). Tony Medawar wrote an insightful foreword, "Suspense at Sea," with "Notes for the Curious" at the end of each play. 

Medawar's foreword and notes are scattered with little gold nuggets of equally fascinating and frustrating pieces of background information. Such as Carr's plan to have Cabin B-13 series-character, Dr. John Fabian, identified as the Man in Black from Suspense or references to his uncompleted and abandoned novels. 

Cabin B-13 was broadcast as two series, or seasons, between July 5, 1948, and January 2, 1949, which originated as a 1943 episode of Suspense – also titled "Cabin B-13." Suspense episode takes place aboard a luxury cruise-liner, Maurevania, which connects all the stories in the series as the protagonist is its "ship's surgeon, world traveler, and teller of strange and incredible tales of mystery and murder," Dr. John Fabian. His role in the story differs from story to story. Sometimes he simply acts as a storyteller and other he plays a minor role in the story itself, but, every now and then, he acts as the detective. When he plays detective, it's usually because the story is a rewrite that requires Dr. Fabian to take over the role of one of Carr's well-known detectives.

So, now that we got the introduction to the collection out of the way, you have to excuse me for a moment as I fanboy all over these radio-plays. 

"The Man Who Couldn't Be Photographed" tells the story of "the greatest romantic film-star in the first decade of talking pictures," Bruce Ransome, who feels like he has outgrown the people he used to care about. This results in a confrontation with his "social secretary" and love interest, Miss Nita Ross. She puts a curse on him before committing suicide. A curse promising that the conceited actor never faces a camera again, which apparently comes true when Ransome is turned away from every photographer in Paris like a leper. A very neat play and a clever inversion on an old urban legend that originated in a now obscure, 1920s detective story. 

"Death Has Four Faces" is different from the play of the same title Carr wrote for BBC's Appointment with Fear. This is a psychological crime tale, of sorts, in which Superintendent Bellman meets a young Canadian on the train, named Steve West, who asks to be handcuffed and escorted to the hotel like a criminal – where a perfect crime is foiled. Not my favorite play in the collection, but it was decent enough. And thought the lingering presence of the Second World War was put to good use. 

"The Blind-Folded Knife Thrower" is one of the highlights of the collection with a minor role for Dr. John Fabian in a tragedy that has become "a grim and evil memory" of what befall Madeline Lane on a previous voyage to Portugal. Madeline is haunted by the ghost, or memories, of her spiteful mother who committed suicide ten years ago by drinking acid. She has begun to haunt her daughter with disembodied whispers and a promise to visit Madeline on her first night in Lisbon. So the people who care about her place her in a room with solid walls, floor and ceiling and two windows "so closely barred that you couldn't even get your hand through." There are two people sitting outside the door until morning, but a figure of a woman with acid-burns round her mouth appears in the room as miraculously as she disappears again! Colonel Da Silva, Chefe da Policia Secreta, discovers a very tricky explanation for the nighttime visitation and the result is a better, fairer and much more convincing take on a particular locked room-trick that would turn up in one of Carr's later novels. 

"No Useless Coffin" is another highlight of the collection, but this time, Carr reworked an earlier short story with Dr. Fabian acting as a stand-in for one of his famous series-detectives. Dr. Fabian is accompanying the recently engaged couple on a picnic to a cottage where many years ago a 12-year-old girl, Vicky Fraser, disappeared from with all the door and windows locked from the inside, which left her parents nearly frantic, but two nights later she reappeared "through the locks and bolts" – "tucked up in bed as usual." Vicky claims to possess an "occult power" giving her the ability to vanish when she likes, where she likes, which the now adult Vicky promises to repeat during the picnic. She disappears "like a soap-bubble under the eyes of witnesses," but, this time around, the fairy tale of the vanishing girl has a dark and gruesome ending. The solution to the impossible disappearance is one of the most original and startling Carr has ever dreamed up. Just as good as the original short story with the only real difference being the detective and motive. 

"The Nine Black Reasons" is, curiously enough, a whydunit and brings "well-known writer of detective-stories," Frank Bentley, to Marseilles, France, where he discovers the body of a murdered man in the Royal Turkish Baths of a hotel. A short while later he meets an old acquaintance, Helen Parker, who witnessed the inexplicable murder of her uncle at the same hotel. Inexplicable because there's no earthly reason why the respectable Mr. Herbert Johnson killed the respectable Mr. Fredric Parker. Two complete strangers! The motive, while good, sorely needed polishing and fine-tuning, which makes it all the more frustrating that Carr abandoned a 1961 novel of the same title despite having completed eight chapters. And, of course, "the typescript of the eight chapters has long been lost."

"The Count of Monte Carlo" has Dr. Fabian coming to the rescue of a young man, Bart Stevens, who's engaged to Janet Derwent, but foolishly has gotten himself involved in "a love-affair to end all love-affairs." Bart has been fooling around with another woman, "Dolores," who's engaged to the Count of Monte Carlo, Jean Ravelle. A messy, tangled square that ends with a murder and two people confessing to have done the dirty deed. A good, but relatively minor, story with an original murder method that Carr reused to much better effect in a later novel. 

"Below Suspicion" shares its title with the contentious Dr. Gideon Fell novel Below Suspicion (1949), but the story has nothing else in common except, perhaps, that Carr would rewrite it in the 1950s as a Dr. Fell short story. Dr. Fabian tells the story of a stage actress, Valerie Blake, who retired from the stage before her time to retreat with her new husband on the Italian coast. Regrettably, Ralph Garrett proved to be a poor husband and two of her old friends came to the rescue, but they were too late to prevent her murder and struggle to find an explanation, because "the murderer must have walked on air" to have left her body on the beach – since there were no footprints except Valerie's. This story is actually better than the later version with a better developed backstory to the murder and always liked the clue of the rifle shots, which helped strengthening a somewhat sketchy murder method. 

"The Power of Darkness" is indelibly "one of his most audacious impossibilities" with two people traveling "back three hundred years in time" and witnessed "a whole suburb disappear" to reveal a scene from centuries ago. Dr. Fabian keeps telling everyone he's "not a detective," but he certainly had a guiding hand in revealing the sordid truth beneath this time shattering miracle. Some of you probably know how fond I'm of these rare kind of time-tampering impossibilities and enjoyed this one as much as the other version Carr wrote. The episode was originally intended to be titled "Last Night in Ghost-Land." A much better title and a pity it was never used for another story. 

"The Footprint in the Sky" is a fairly conventional impossible crime story, but told in a very unconventional way. The luxury liner Maurevania is tossed around during a storm at sea and Dr. Fabian, the ship's surgeon from Cabin B-13, is asked to come down to C-24 where a passenger, Marcia Tate, has lost her mind – believing it's Christmas over a year ago and asking "why she hasn't been hanged for murder." What follows is a backstory recounting a broken engagement and a new one, which resulted in murder with two sets of footprints in the snow pointing an accusatory finger at Marcia. The police "solved that 'studio-mystery' over a year ago" and Dr. Fabian has to retreat their steps to help Marcia regain her memory. A good framing device for a detective story, but have always found the solution to this particular no-footprints scenario to be cheap, hack and unworthy of the maestro. 

"The Man with the Iron Chest" is the nickname given "the best jewel-thief in the trade" whose "only burglar's tools are his ten fingers" and "an iron chest weighing sixty pounds." Why does he drag around a big iron chest? That's something the police from seven cities across the European continent would like to know and he nearly got caught in Amsterdam, which forced him to leave behind his ornamental iron chest. So he remained elusive until a young married couple, Don and Joyce, caught a glimpse of his face during a burglary, which lead the Greek police straight to his doorstep. But he then pulled of a minor miracle by making "an iron chest and a hundred diamonds vanish" from a locked and guarded room "as though they had never existed." A great piece of impossible crime fiction showcasing the author's love for stage magic and illusions. 

"The Street of the Seven Daggers" is a rewrite of one of my favorite short stories by Carr, but he improved the plot with a backstory and setting that really speaks to the imagination of readers who tend to like Carr. Like yours truly. Dr. Fabian is asked by a passenger, Miss Betty Parrish, to prevent her father from going to a certain street in Cairo or he'll be murdered. Who is going to kill him? Absolutely nobody! Mr. Edmund Parrish is "a superstition-breaker" and his attention has now been drawn to a little, dead-end alley called the Street of the Seven Daggers, which used to be the street of the hired killers in ancient times. Three hundred years ago, a bigwig of the Ottoman Empire "got annoyed about hired assassins" and had them executed in front of their houses – burnt out the street. But then people began to die and the rumors began. The "street's full of invisible people" and anyone who walks through the alley, "after midnight and alone," you're supposed to die with a dagger in your back. Dr. Fabian stands at the mouth of dagger-alley when Parrish is knifed while walking down the dark passageway alone. Only someone who's invisible could have stabbed the man, but Dr. Fabian reasons a more earthly explanation from the clue of the two wallets. Great stuff and even better than the original! 

"The Dancer from Stamboul" takes place in Port Said, at the gateway to the Suez Canal, where Dr. Fabian bumps into a New York policeman, Detective Lieutenant Jim Canfield of the Homicide Squad, who came with extradition-papers to take back a dangerous man-eater. Lydia White is suspected of having poisoned three men and the police has received information that she's somewhere in Port Said. So he asks Dr. Fabian to assist him comb out the port town, which leads to the titular dancer and her two lovers. A French fencer and an Italian nobleman. This ends in a duel at a fencing saloon and another poisoning. I liked the fencing scene, but otherwise an unremarkable as a detective story. 

"Death in the Desert" is not a detective or crime story, not even a horror yarn, but a historical adventure with a detective/espionage hook and presented as "a story out of my parents' time," namely 1895, which is set in the Sudanese desert. The crux of the plot is the completion and testing of an improved machine gun. A good story, if you like this kind of historical romancing. 

"The Island of Coffins" is, as Medawar rightly noted, "the most extraordinary story" in the series and demonstrated Carr didn't need to lean on the fancies and phantasms of the impossible crime to be the greatest mystery writer who ever lived. Story begins when the Maurevania, passing the Abyssinian Coast, sees a distress signal coming from Hadar Island. A very small, uninviting island with a big house where someone had sustained a serious bullet-wound. Dr. Fabian is shocked when he finds an elderly lady, Mrs. Almack, who was shot in the arm. She has retreated to the island with her grandson and two children (now all adults) to keep him company. But, when they arrived on the island, she "turned back the calendar to the year 1900." Those were "the only years that were worth living" and the current date on the island is November 12, 1920. Mrs. Almack kept her three wards on the island for two decades and they've no idea about the outside world. But why? And are the coffins on the island really filled with people who tried to leave? Dr. Fabian has to doctor out where the insanity lies and proof "tyrants aren't always so powerful as they think." Nearly as good and unforgettable as Carr's best radio-play, "The Dead Sleep Lightly."

"The Most Respectable Murder" is another one of those complicated eternal triangle stories littering the series. This time, Dr. Fabian goes to the Paris Opera where the future of two friends depended entirely on him finding an explanation how a "murderer could leave behind him a room locked up on the inside," which is easier said than done as Dr. Fabian recognizes it was "done in a completely new way" – openly admires the murderer's intelligence. The locked room-trick is the selling point of the story as it's genuinely original, but Carr would use it to much better effect in one of his late-period novels. No wonder that novel struck me as his last hurrah as the master of all crimes impossible. He came up with the trick a decade earlier! 

"The Curse of the Bronze Lamp" is a condensed version of the Merrivale novel of the same title in which an ancient bronze lamp discovered in a cursed Egyptian tomb is held responsible for blowing its owner to dust "as though she never existed." Regrettably, the shorter version exposed just how weak and unfair the impossibility really is, which needed the novel-length treatment to prop it up more convincingly. Now it felt more like the plot of a season 4 episode of Jonathan Creek. Anyway, whether it's the novel-length version or a short radio-play, I agree with Nick. This should have been "a full-blown Egyptian curse story, set in the Valley of the Kings, with murders in the pyramids, cobras at camp-sites and trouble in the tombs."

"Lair of the Devil-Fish" was an unexpected surprise as it belongs to that rare category of so-called "submerged mysteries," which tend to be impossible crimes and recommend you read my reviews of Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and Micki Browning's Adrift (2017) to get more background on this type of story – including more links. Carr might have been the first to experiment with this type of setting as the earliest example I've come across previously was Joseph Commings' short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953), but, strangely enough, it's not truly an impossible crime. Unless you believe the deep, dark blue ocean is the natural habitat of Lovecraftian monsters. So the story takes place off the southeast coast of Cuba where a small expedition has gotten permission to dive to the wreck of a cabin-cruiser, which sank in a bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898 with a fortune in silver dollars. Legend has it the cabin-cruiser was "dragged under" by the giant, slimy tentacles of a monstrous octopus. What nearly killed their diver? A monster or something a little more human? A solid and entertaining addition to those rare underwater mysteries. 

"The Dead Man's Knock" is a weird crime story in which brash American secret service agent and a British crime writer have to figure out how to kill a closely guarded man in order to protect him. Not really a locked room mystery, but a fun how-can-it-be-done. 

"The Man with Two Heads" is a low-key great story in which Dr. Fabian meets Leonard Wade on the top deck of a bus. Wade is a well-known and celebrated thriller author who might have become the victim of a diabolical plot as he has become a wandering ghost. Or so it feels. And not without reason. Dr. Fabian reads his obituary in the newspaper and Wade tells him he saw his own body in his study. Somewhat reminiscent, in spirit, to Helen McCloy's famous doppelgänger novel Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), but with a slightly more convincing setup and solution. What a shame Carr never expended this idea into a novel-length mystery. 

"Till Death Do Us Part" is another one with an awfully familiar-sounding title, but the plot has no resemblance, whatsoever, to Till Death Do Us Part (1944). This is Carr venturing into the territory of domestic suspense with the backstory to an attempted murder-suicide in a remote house, which comes with a twist in the tail. Anthony Gilbert would have loved it!

So, on a whole, The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 is a stronger than your average collection of short detective stories with the quality ranging from very good to pretty decent, but not a single average or bad story – which says something how good Carr really was. Only drawback is the lack of truly new material as Carr used this series to try out new ideas or retool old tricks or stories. But who cares? Carr is always a treat to read and this volume finally gave us back Carr's obscure, long-lost series-detective. Highly recommended!

A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt

Back in 2013, Ho-Ling Wong introduced the traditional mystery corner of the web to James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), a science-fiction novel that's at its heart a detective story, but on a scale that's impossible to do in a conventional, earthbound mystery novel – landing a comfortable spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100. Hogan's Inherit the Stars left behind a who's who of the classic and modern detective-and crime story. Even science-fiction author and part-time mystery novelist, John Sladek, had to eat dust with his almost universally beloved Invisible Green (1977) trailing far behind Hogan's hard science-fiction tale. Something smelled fishy! 

A closer inspection of Hogan's futuristic puzzle of 50.000-year-old human remains in a spacesuit discovered on the Moon proved to tick "about every single box that we want to see filled" with a "slow, devious, torturous and extremely clever unraveling of a complex puzzle." So we shamelessly appropriated Hogan's Inherit the Stars from the science-fiction genre.

Needless to say, I was not adverse to reading more of these archaeological space mysteries, but only found Ross Rocklynne's 1941 novella "Time Wants a Skeleton." A whowasdunin centering on an out-of-time human skeleton found inside cave on an ancient asteroid. But nothing more came to my attention until recently. 

Jack McDevitt is an American science-fiction author who specialized in archaeological and historical novels set in the far-flung future that often have a detective hook. McDevitt came to my attention as some of his work has been compared to Ellery Queen and probing a little deeper discovered that he credited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown as hugely influential on shaping his Alex Benedict series. This comes with the caveat that McDevitt is not "an enthusiast about detective stories in general," but loves "the magic of Father Brown" that have more to do with "trying to figure out what on Earth happened" than simply whodunit and cites one of Chesterton's well-known locked room mysteries, "The Arrow of Heaven" – collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). So he belongs to the school of thought that believes the how of a crime is often more interesting than the who. A school that has Dorothy L. Sayers as its headmistress and John Rhode as its main lecturers.

So why not give McDevitt a shot and, if I like the series, boldly go where I've seldom gone before by dabbling in some chronological reading. 

A Talent for War (1989) is the first title starring Alex Benedict, an antique dealer, who lives and operates about 10.000 years into the future when "a thousand billion human beings" had settled "several hundred worlds" that formed a troubled Confederacy of planets. The story opens with the news that the flagship of the newest class of interstellars, Capella, had "slipped into oblivion" along with twenty-six hundred passengers and crew members, which failed to reenter linear space. Something that has happened before and none has ever reappeared. So everyone aboard is pretty much lost forever. And legally dead.

One of the passengers was Alex's uncle, Gabe Benedict, who left his estranged nephew his
entire estate and a historical puzzle dating back to "the last great heroic age" which has "provoked historical debate for two centuries." Two hundred years ago, an ever-expanding humanity came across an alien civilization, Ashiyyur, which resulted in an armed conflict between possibly the only technological cultures in the entire Milky Way. Christopher Sim was a history teacher from Dellaconda who became the leader of the Resistance and from the helm of his "immortal warship," the Corsarius, "spearheaded the allied band of sixty-odd frigates and destroyers holding off the massive fleets of the Ashiyyur," which eventually turned the tide as the other planets began to recognize the danger – driving the aliens back to their sullen worlds from which they came. But this victory came at a price. During his famous last stand, Sim was betrayed and abandoned by his crew with the name of navigator, Ludik Talino, becoming synonymous with cowardice. The names of the other deserters were lost to history and so is what exactly went down during that decisive and historically significant battle.

What did Gabe Benedict, an amateur archaeologist, knew that sent him tracking off into a region of space, known as the Veiled Lady, two centuries later? What is the connection with secretive journey of the CSS Tenandrome?

CSS Tenandrome is a big survey ship "involved in exploration of regions deep in the Veiled Lady," a thousand light years from Gabe's home planet, which returned under very mysterious and hushed circumstances. This churned the interstellar rumor mill. Officially, it was reported the ship's Armstrong units were damaged, but all kinds of rumors were flying around alleging it was either a plague ship or there was a time displacement that severely aged the crew members. There even rumors that the ship came across a new race of aliens or "an ancient fleet adrift," but "something among the encrusted ships" had "discouraged further examination" and returned home.

Alex has to take a deep drive into history to not only figure out what really happened two-hundred years ago, but what his uncle knew that could rewrite history. Admittedly, this makes for an engrossing, but slow-paced, read that takes some time to finish.

Alex has to gather and track down a ton of historical records, online and offline, war-time poetry, notebooks and watches simulated reenactments as well as visiting distant worlds, a historical society and even interviewing a representative of the Ashiyyur. But everything moves very slowly with only three points of action in the entire story. One very brief with the other two being saved for the end of the story.

So most of the story has either Alex sifting through information or talking with people, which is approach exceedingly rare in the detective genre and don't think it even has a name. I suppose you could call it a "research novel" with Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaku satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaku Murders, 1983) as the only example that comes to mind, but done on a much smaller scale than A Talent for War. The Case of the Sharaku Murders merely deals with an academic search for the true identity of a mysterious woodblock print artist who was briefly active during the late 1700s under a pseudonym. This makes the puzzle component of the plot is difficult to discuss, because it's as vast as our own star system. However, I was very impressed with the amount of world-building that was done. A massive, multi-worlds world that felt like it's actually populated with a human civilizations.

Over the years, I've read a tiny sampling of science-fiction mysteries and one thing always surprising me is that the earliest titles sketch a picture of the future in which culture and technology has stagnated or even regressed. Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on a drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century, but technology is clunky with references to only 19th and early 20th century literature and culture. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) takes place in mining community around an asteroid belt, but courtroom photographers still use flashbulbs and John Russell Fearn's The Master Must Die (1953) has snail mail between Earth and Mars. One stamp is enough to cover the cost of sending a letter from Mars to Earth. What a difference half a century makes!

I'm not an expert, of course, but I thought technology was much more convincingly handled here with Alex's conversation with an A.I. version of his dead uncle being eerily predictive of the very recent developments with a controversial deepfake technology digitally resurrecting dead relatives or friends. I also appreciated that the Armstrong Drive was not used as a magic wand to simply transport between the stars, because there are some serious limitations as to its reach and maneuvering that required a ship "to materialize well outside star systems" – which "left the traveler with a long ride to his destination." A trip to Andromeda was still off the table. But what I really appreciated where the little historical and cultural touches in combination with current affairs playing out in the background giving you the idea all those worlds truly are swarming with humans.

Every chapter begins with an excerpt or quote from a fictitious piece of future literature, philosophy or commentary on the war and wished McDevitt had told more about the history and myths surrounding the various settled worlds.

Alex reminiscent about his own home world that "only an historian can tell you now who first set foot on Rimway," but "everybody on the planet knows who died in the attempt" and trying to find the wreckage of Jorge Shale and his crew was the first archaeological project of his life. But he never did. Alex also visited a settled water world, appropriately known as the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with a planet that was once the home of an intelligent species, Belarius. A now inhospitable place which houses fifty-thousand-year-old ruins that were "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" before their running into the Ashiyyur. Belarius has been largely given up as it's "an incredibly savage place" crawling with "highly evolved predators" in its dense jungles. What a great backdrop that place would be for an archaeological, space age mystery novel. Something halfway between Agatha Christie and Predator!

But more important is that long-ago battle and the symbol Christopher Sim has become to the Confederacy, which is just as important two centuries later as there's a political crisis brewing in the background of interstellar proportions. Earth is holding "a referendum on the matter of secession" and there are constant clashes along the Perimeter with the Ashiyyur. So hostilities with the Ashiyyur might be "the cement that binds your Confederacy together" and "stem the political power of separatists." This makes finding answers to a 200-year-old mystery potentially dangerous and highly explosive.

McDevitt wrote an imaginative, richly detailed and engrossing story that constructed entire worlds with its own history around the central puzzle with the only drawbacks being the slow pacing and not having quite the detective pull of Hogan's Inherit the Stars. But you can probably put the latter down to having to setup an entire universe while exploring one of that interstellar civilization's many stories. So you can expect a review of his second novel in the not so distant future.

A Brush with Rembrandt: Q.E.D. vol. 13 by Motohiro Katou

So it's been a little over a month since my previous review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 12 and therefore about time to do another one, which brings me to the relatively minor, but fun, volume 13 comprising of two stories perched on two pillars of civilization – namely art and architecture. The first of these stories, entitled "Calamity Man," hearkens back to "1th, April, 1999" from vol. 4 with a plot constructed around an April Fools Day Challenge. But this time, the stakes were much higher! 

Alan Blade is the trillionaire (in Japanese yen) president of Alansoft and his company has developed an OS, Wings2001, which has been "installed on more than 90% of the world's computers," but recently, the quality of his recent employees has gone done. Have they made computers too easy to use and lowered the threshold? So he comes up with a very expensive, tricky plan that involves the teenage genius and high-school detective, Sou Touma.

Eight years ago, Touma was only 9-year-old child prodigy living in the United States and helped out Blade when he started his company from a garage. Touma actually had a part in helping to complete their first OS that "conquered the world." Naturally, he was asked to come work for them after he graduated, but Touma left America without a word to his fellow student (see "Breakthrough" from vol. 3). So now Blade has come to Japan to force Touma to partake into a high-stakes, April Fools Day Challenge and, if he wins, Touma has to come back with him to America to work at his company – renouncing his Japanese citizenship in the process. By the way, Touma holds dual nationality of the United States and Japan. Story mentions Touma has to pick between them when he turns 18.

Although what the challenge, exactly, entails is a little nebulous, but Blade has purchased a luxury cruise ship and turned it into a floating art exhibition of Rembrandt painting. Something a Dutch representative of the Netherlands Rembrandt Art Association "extremely disgraceful" and suspects one "particular piece might even be stolen." Touma's plucky friend, Kana Mizuhara, suggests they steal the painting, but Touma points out "stealing an expensive item like this is not a joke." What else could the challenge entail?

I suspected the direction the story was going to take the moment I read the name of the ship, which suggested two ways in which Touma could outsmart Blade with his dodgy art collection.

Nonetheless, it was a decent and fun enough story that (once more) demonstrated how much Q.E.D. differs from other anime-and manga detective series. Not merely in the very different type of detective stories you can only find in Q.E.D. (e.g. "Serial John Doe" from vol. 7), but it's also the only one with a distinctly international flavor. There have been some foreign excursions or non-Japanese characters in Detective Conan and The Kindaichi Case Files, but here it's part of the DNA of the series.

The second story, "Klein Tower," is more in line with your regular anime-and manga detective stories. Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are asked to lend a helping hand to the university's overburdened research department in photographing and gathering background on a historical structure – ominously called the Tower of Hell. A so-called Sazae Tower with "a double helix pathway" so "there's a single path that leads both in and out," which means "you can go around each floor of a 3 story building in a direct path." The Tower of Hell was built at the beginning of the Showa Era and the builder made it as his personal pathway to paradise. One day, he disappeared inside the tower without a trace and reappeared a year later, as a skeleton, on the top floor of the tower. A historical locked room mystery!

 

Ever since, the tower has been known as an entrance to the underworld, but, over the decades, the village where the tower stands has become "more and more lonely." So the village headman came up with a village revitalization project with the mysterious tower as a marketing ploy. There are, however, some financial hurdles to clear which makes it cheaper to dismantle the tower and rebuild it somewhere else in the village. But they had to know if that's even possible. So the university came to investigate with our two detectives doing the preliminary groundwork.

However, they soon have another task at hand as the current owner and the now very elder daughter of the builder, Umehara Rin, briefly disappears and is found dangling from a rope inside the tower. But it was neither suicide or a locked room murder. The old locked room-trick from the past was used in the present to create an air-tight alibi complete with a timetable. Very clever! But the story has one short coming.

I've had probably a little more exposure to the Japanese detective story than most of my fellow mystery aficionados, but can tell you Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) is par for the course where bizarre and unusual architecture is concerned. Japanese mystery writers have used the corpse-puzzle and unorthodox architecture to completely revitalize the impossible crime and unbreakable alibi tropes. They added a whole bunch of new tricks and possibilities to the genre. So it's always exciting when a Japanese detective story has a building with peculiar features as it's setting, but the alibi/locked room-trick was surprisingly basic and simple. Everything fitted together nicely and liked the explanation to the historical mystery, but nothing outstanding or particular memorable. Something more could have been done with the setting.

So, all in all, a fairly average volume with two good, solid enough stories and, while not standouts in the series, together they were miles ahead of the disappointing stories that made up the previous volume. Things are looking up again!

The Darkest Fathoms: "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) by Desmond Reid

The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014) is one of the most important publications to have come out of John Pugmire's Locked Room International as it collected the classic locked room novel Whistle Up the Devil (1954), the exceedingly rare Come to Paddington Fair (1997) and the previously unpublished Model for Murder (1952) – a long-lost contribution to the massive Sexton Blake Library. Pugmire speculated Smith's Model for Murder was probably "too cerebral for the audience" and thought it very unlikely I would ever read another Sexton Blake novel or short story. 

Less than a year later, I came across an anonymously published short Sexton Blake story, "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909), which turned out to be a surprisingly decent locked room mystery for the period. Suddenly, I began to notice how many Sexton Blake novels and short stories were listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). One title in particular beckoned my attention. 

Caribbean Crisis (1962) is a novella, a chapbook really, representing the first published work by noted science-fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock, which he co-wrote with Jim Cawthorne and published under a house name, "Desmond Reid" – a name that was shared between at least thirty authors for SBL. Adey's Locked Room Murders described a fascinating impossibility concerning a murder and disappearance from a submerged bathysphere (diving bell)! I also found it interesting Caribbean Crisis was published in the same year as Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962).

I naturally tempered my expectations, as it would be unfair to expect something along the lines of Joseph Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968), but the presentation and explanation to the impossible murder and disappearance were unexpectedly good. Something that deserved to have been in a better (detective) story. 

Caribbean Crisis opens on the research ship of the famous "boy-professor" and marine biologist, Hoddard Curtis, who perfected a new kind of bathysphere and is ready to explore "the deepest marine valley known to man." Curtis hopes to find evidence at the bottom of the Tanangas Deep of "a prehistoric fish," or creature, because stranger things have been found in the lower ocean ("fragments of bone and scales the size of dinner plates"). So he spent years and thousands of dollars to find out what "lurks down there unknown," but, the moment his dreams began to be realized, tragedy struck in the most unexpected way.

During his time away from the research ship, two of his assistants, Jules Harben and Jim Linwood, took the bathysphere for "a joy-ride in the deep," but, when they reached a depth of seven hundred feet, the radiophone began to crackle with frantic calls to pull them back up – in between screams of "it's awful" and "it's going to kill us." Shortly followed by unearthly sound, like "the bellow of some enormous sea-beast erupted from the ocean," and the bathysphere being torn from the fine, woven cords of steel. The bathysphere began to sink to the bottom of the Tanangas Deep! But it gets better.

Curtis puts on a large, heavy and untested deep-sea diving suit in an attempt to find his brainchild and this diving scene is the best one of the story. Miraculously, the damaged bathysphere is resting on a rocky ledge and can be salvaged, but, when Curtis shines his torch through the porthole, he discovers "one of its two occupants had disappeared." The body of the other man was floating in the sphere with a knife in his back! The hatch could not have been opened, or closed again, at that depth and the pressure would have killed anyone who tried to escape the sphere. And the newspaper called it "a mystery worthy of a Holmes or a Blake."

What a marvelous and original setup for a double barreled impossible crime story with a diving bell serving as a claustrophobic sealed room slowly descending into a silent, alien-like world of slime-green, swirling darkness where only God knows what may be lurking – ready to strike at anyone, or anything, disturbing its peace. I truly wish the name on the cover had either been Theodore Roscoe or Hake Talbot. The premise and locked room-trick would have turned into gold in their hands!

Unfortunately, Caribbean Crisis is not that kind of detective story. Sexton Blake reads about the bathysphere mystery in the newspaper and makes a personal inquiry, but what brings him to the island Republic of Maliba (where the ship is anchored) is a rich client. Sir Gordon Sellingham is a sugar millionaire who owns "a great deal of the Maliban sugar industry," but the current, potentially explosive political situation in the Caribbean is threatening both his business and his idealistic son. Peter Sellingham is using his mother's inheritance to bankroll a rebel group who want to overthrow the government and there might be a communist element to the impending rebellion.

Blake is not only a private detective, but also a Special Service Operative of the British government and it falls on him to prevent "a repetition of the Castro business in Cuba" and stop Maliba from becoming another Russian satellite. So the poor man's Sherlock Holmes becomes some kind of Poundland James Bond as he goes undercover as an insurance investigator and gets caught in a three-way dance between the government of Present Nonales, the rebel outlaws in the hill and communist infiltrators – tangling along the way with double agents and dodgy allies. I can't say these chapters were a chore to read, but the Cold War spy thriller is not my kind of crime fiction. I love pure, undiluted detective stories crammed with double-edged clues, treacherous red herrings, dying messages and locked rooms solved by either competent policemen or a clever amateur.

For me, the only time Caribbean Crisis came close to matching its opening chapters was Blake's explanation of the miraculous murder and disappearance, "when the impossible has been eliminated, what remains must be the truth," which turned out to be so much better than expected. A good, fairly original idea that was wasted on this otherwise run-of-the-mill, Cold War-style pulp thriller.

So, on a whole, the first chapters and locked room-trick had all the ingredients and potential necessary to craft a classic, timeless detective novel, but Caribbean Crisis allowed all of that to go to waste and therefore can only recommend it to the fantastical locked room reader as an interesting curiosity.