Adrift (2017) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning is an FBI National Academy graduate who learned that police work is as much about documenting crime as it's about fighting it and now draws on her first-hand experience as "wonderful fodder for her current career as a full-time writer," which began with her award-winning debut novel, Adrift (2017) – a modern thriller that normally falls outside of my scope. Brian Skupin listed Adrift in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) with two intriguingly described impossibilities during a diving expedition and Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) intrigued me enough to search out more of these submerged locked room mysteries. 

So here we are and, while I was a little skeptical beforehand, Adrift defied expectations by not being an ultra-modern, character heavy thriller with some mild impossible crime elements.

There are still some notable modern touches to the characterization and storytelling, but the end result can best be summed up as Scooby Doo for grownups! It certainly is an interesting addition to Forsyte's Diving Death, Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968) and the Detective Academy Q 2003 episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea as an example of that rare impossible crime story set among divers. 

Adrift introduces Browning's series-detective and marine biologist, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who recently returned from a research project in the Arctic, but new research opportunities remained elusive and she took a job in the Florida Keys – teaching scuba diving and acting as first-mate to Captain Leroy. Story begins with the first of three (not two!) impossible situations. Mer saves a diver who's frightened out of his wits and claims to have seen a ghost, "green and kind of see-through" shaped "like a man," but the truly inexplicable part is that he was exploring the shipwreck of the USS Spiegel Grove and was fished out of the Molasses Reef. Five miles away with "the current's going in the wrong direction" and they were radioed that a diver had gone missing off the Spiegel. So how could the distressed diver travel five miles from the Spiegel Grove to Molasses Reef without "the use of teleportation, a TARDIS, or a wormhole."

The rescue and the diver's rambling is filmed, uploaded to social media and goes viral, which brings "a boatload of ghost hunters" to the Florida Keys to investigate the now most haunted spot in America.

Ishmael Styx, of Spirited Divers Paranormal Scuba Team, arrive shortly after the incident to film a documentary about the ghost of the Spiegel Grove for the Expedition Channel and they want to charter a boat for multiple, nighttime trips to the wreck – asking Mer to serve as a safety diver on the trips. The diving scenes is what makes the book stand out and excellently used the USS Spiegel Grove, purposely sunk in 2002 to make an artificial reef, as a setting for two ghostly impossibilities. Firstly, when they're inside the wreck, the underwater camera malfunctions and continues to strobe during which Styx vanishes. A subsequent rescue search of Spiegel Grove recovered his mask and a member of the paranormal diving team saw him looking at "the opening in the side of the ship," like "something scared him," before "something pulled him into the hole." Secondly, Mer returned to the wreck later in the story and witnesses the ghost with her own eyes, "green and hazy," lifting an arm and pointing at her, which is a blow to her rational, naturalistic and scientific understanding of the world. Someone who firmly believes "paranormal activity falls into the realm of pseudoscience" and "only one step above nonsense." Now the whole sordid case tied her good name to ghosts, mermaids and other supernatural phenomena.

Mer is practically dragged into the case to act as an amateur detective. She agrees to continue working on the documentary to spare her friends and colleagues a wrongful death-suit. When she nearly gets killed, the case became her business (and she has a point there), but that places her at odds with the police.

The scenes that take place on the surface, which is most of the story, show those previously mentioned modern touches to the characterization and storytelling. Such as an old summer fling of Mer, who has a secretive backstory, reentering her life and a traumatic, near-death experience as a child that convinced her there's nothing beyond the grave ("I've been to the other side. There's nothing there") or learning that Mel has a CD collection of movie soundtracks – which I understand is a trope of the contemporary crime novel. However, I liked Mer's clashes with a snooty news reporter or learning how to take fingerprints by watching YouTube videos.

Fortunately, these scenes never turn into overwritten, angst-ridden mini-biographies of the characters that push the plot aside. The primary focus of Adrift is always the ghostly activities at the shipwreck and the characters directly involved with it.

So how well does the plot stack up? You shouldn't expect a neo-orthodox detective story with sharp, multi-faceted clues and treacherous red herrings. The clueing is pretty crude and the leads to some of the most pertinent questions are not treated, or discovered, until very late into the story. Nevertheless, the seasoned armchair detective has no need for in-depth clueing to figure out what exactly is happening, because the biggest accomplish of Adrift is finding a modern, updated garb for an age-old trick. A trick that needed a more experienced hand to have pulled it off more convincingly.

I know all of this sounds like Adrift was a bit of a letdown, but quite enjoyed this diamond-in-the-rough with some interesting and promising aspects. I also found it very promising Browning leaned much more towards the traditional detective story than the modern crime novel. A good example are the fuzzy details surrounding the body Mer discovers at a seedy motel, which is not as important to the plot as the ghostly activities and impossibilities surrounding the shipwreck. 

Adrift is a spirited first attempt to find a balance between characterization and plot and the classic and modern style of the genre. So readers of my blog are advised not to expect a modern incarnation of the Golden Age detective novel, but it's a fast, enjoyable and promising read with some excellently written diving scenes – reminiscent of Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942) and Forsyte's Diving Death. Browning is very much a writer to keep an eye on because she might turn out to one of us (we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us). Interestingly, the last chapter of Adrift sets up its sequel, Beached (2018), which takes a plunge into the watery world of nautical archaeology. You can expect a review of that one sometime in the not so distant future and, hopefully, it will confirm that we have another James Scott Byrnside, P. Dieudonné or Robert Innes on our hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diving Death (1962) by Charles Forsyte

Last month, I reviewed Diplomatic Death (1962) by “Charles Forsyte," a shared penname of a husband-and-wife writing tandem, Gordon and Vicky Philo, who, regrettably, wrote only three, classically-styled detective novels and a standalone chase thriller that have a penchant for impossible crimes – published between 1961 and 1968. A surprisingly solid, ambitious and puzzle-oriented debut for the period that made me even more curious about their second detective novel.

Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), alternatively published as Dive into Danger, is the second appearance of Detective-Inspector Richard Left, of Special Branch, who had been "overworked to the point of exhaustion." So he was glad to finally go on a long-anticipated, much deserved holiday in the south of France.

Port-st-Pierre is a fishing village and a holiday resort where Left plans to do little more than relax, eat, swim and trying to avoid his fellow countrymen, but he's recognized by an old acquaintance, Sir Paul Pallett. A world-famous archaeologist who looks like "a more animated Churchill" and speaks (mostly) in telegraphic sentences ("Probably hopes to find a drowned city. Atlantis. Underwater archaeology. All my eye. Good excuse for undergraduates who want a holiday in the Mediterranean"). Sir Paul is not only a celebrated scholar, but a decidedly poor one as well and has to indulge the fancies of a rich, dilettante archaeologist with "intellectual pretensions," Dermot Wilson – who has assembled a respectable crew for an archaeological expedition at sea. An expedition scavenging the sea bottom around the recently uncovered, spongy remains of an ancient Greek shipwreck where Roman coins were found on a previous diving excursion.

Sir Paul was persuaded (read "cornered") to have a look at the site and arranged to have him picked the next day with a motor-boat, but nobody expected Left would be invited by the eminent scholar to come along with him. And unwittingly acts as the fuel powering the engine of the plot!

When they arrive on the spot, the crew aboard the anchored Knossos were getting ready to dive. So the three people on the motor-boat, Sir Paul, Left and the boatman, had to stay on there and watch the divers plunge below the surface to the wreck. An area marked by a couple of buoys moored about a hundred yards apart. The minutes leisurely ticked away when the body of Wilson comes bubbling to the surface with a steel harpoon projecting from a bloody patch on his chest! Left realizes that it will be hours before the French police can get to them, "evidence may have vanished by then," which prompts him to take charge of the investigation until the proper authorities arrive.

An investigation forcing Left "to follow the route that had just been taken by a corpse" and dive to "the muted two-colour world of the sea-bed" where he establishes the time of the murder and searches the bottom for clues – finding a used harpoon-gun, a weight belt and a small hole in the sea-bed. These diving scenes recall the underwater explorations from Vernon Loder's Death by the Gaff (1932) and Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942), which helped make the book standout as something different from your average detective novel. And, here, it's an integral part of the puzzle-plot. But not the whole puzzle.

Left also to untie a tightly-knotted mess of alibis, motives and opportunities of the crew-members. A crew comprising of an experienced, much respected archaeologist, Edward Syce, who made "some unexpected finds on his digs." A younger, inexperienced, but brilliant archaeologist, Sidney Lockhead. The victim's "current girlfriend," the Honourable Julia Ferrers, who's the daughter of an impoverished Irish peer. A student of Wilson, Mary Lawton, who does his secretarial work and mechanic/diving expert, Joe Marshall. Only problem is that everyone has an alibi! The divers alibi each other and everyone on the surface have an alibi as unshakable as a bloodhound! So, where's the impossibility, you may ask? Diving Death qualifies as an impossible crime novel, but it's one of those stories in which the impossibility becomes apparent after the solution.

I compared Diplomatic Death with the detective novels and short stories by Clayton Rawson (stage illusion-inspired crime) and Peter Godfrey (setting), but Diving Death is more in line with Anthony Berkeley and Christopher Bush.

The multiple alibis and the importance of timing is what reminded me of Bush, but Forsyte's brilliant use of false-solutions and grand play on the fallible detective trope was pure Berkeley! Forsyte provided the reader with three false-solutions of which two are tightly intertwined, giving different perspectives to the same story, while a third accounted for the possibility of an outside killer – lovely foreshadowed in the third chapter. Even better is how Left blundered to the solution. Or, to be more precise, how his blundering affected and hampered reaching the correct solution earlier. Left has to pay the devil for his "unforgivable police sin," but, by that time, you probably feel too bad for him to laugh. The physical altercations also give the story a slightly hardboiled edge.

Nevertheless, it was his mistakes and blunders, in combination with the false-solutions, setting and technically-detailed underwater murder, that turned an otherwise routine plot into a first-class detective tale that, like its predecessor, stands out. This all makes for a very satisfying, puzzle-driven detective novel with a superb play on the fallible detective trope that helped to lift the plot above its normal status. My only piece of nitpicking this time is that it occurred to nobody that the harpoon could have been used to stab, instead of having been shot, which is what I expected until the empty harpoon-gun was found. So my expectation were thoroughly subverted.

So, yes, Diving Death comes highly recommended and particular to mystery readers who love their false-solutions, fallible detectives or picking apart alibis and stands as solid argument why these two unjustly forgotten mystery writers deserve to be reprinted.

A note for the curious: locked room murders and impossible crimes under water are relatively rare, but there are two finely-crafted examples that deserve a mention. Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones," collected in The Locked Room Reader (1968), in which a hard-hat diver is murdered while exploring a recently sunken shipwreck. The 15th episode of the Detective Academy Q anime-series, which deals with the body of a diver found in a locked cabin of a sunken ship and the underwater setting allowed for a new variation on an age-old locked room-trick.

Seven Dead (1939) by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Last year, Martin Edward reported on his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name, that there were some exciting reprints forthcoming in the Crime Classics imprint of the British Library in 2020, which will include a pair of once obscure, long out-of-print locked room mysteries – namely John Bude's Death Knows No Calendar (1942) and Peter Shaffer's The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). So, in anticipation of these impending reissues, I picked a British Library title from the highlands of my to-be-read pile.

I've read less than a handful of J. Jefferson Farjeon's novels, but the superbly realized child narrator from Holiday Express (1935) and the gentle, snowy magic of Mystery in White (1937) indicated he was a less than conventional mystery novelist. Even the more traditionally presentable The Third Victim (1941) ended on an unconventional note with a solution hearkening back to the days of 19th century sensationalist fiction. And the only truly conservative aspect of Seven Dead (1939) is its continuation of that tradition.

Seven Dead has a strong, memorable opening with a hungry thief, named Ted Lyte, who's nervously graduating from "petty pilfering and pickpocketing" to housebreaking.

Lyte comes across a lonely place, Haven House, with an open gate, shuttered windows and half-dressed in dilapidated vines. So he grabs his courage together and finds a way into the house, where he helps himself to the silverware and food in the pantry, but, when he entered the shuttered room, he vacated the premise "as if he had been fired out of it from a cannon" – only to be apprehended outside. But the shocked man is unable to utter a word. When the police decides to inspect the burgled house, they make a horrifying discovery.

The shuttered drawing-room resembled a Chamber of Horrors with seven bodies strewn across the room, six men and one woman, who are "emaciated, filthily clothed" and "nothing on any of them to identify any one of them." As if they had gone through a Hellish ordeal. The shutters weren't merely bolted, they were nailed shut. A bullet hole disfigured a picture of a young girl hanging in the dining room and on the mantelpiece stands a slender silver vase with "an old cricket ball," green-yellow with age, on top. Most tantalizing clue is a crumpled piece of paper bearing the message "with apologies from the Suicide Club" and a cryptically penciled note scribbled on the other side of the paper.

One hell of a way to start a hard-to-define crime story! What follows is a two-pronged investigation by the protagonists, Detective Inspector Kendall and Tom Hazeldean.

Tom Hazeldean is a freelance reporter and yachtsman, who helped to apprehend Lyte, but his "romantic disposition" makes him want to meet the girl in the picture, Dora Fenner, who's the niece of the owner of Haven House, John Fenner – who has taken Dora to Boulogne. Hazeldean sets sail to France to find Dora and finds himself in the middle, what some have called, a romantic thriller with suspicious servants and silk merchant who seems to follow him around. Back in England, Detective Inspector Kendall conducts an investigation more in line with Freeman Wills Crofts as he reconstructs how, and why, the picture was fired upon, tracking down tire tracks and scrutinizing footprints. This is the only piece of genuine detective work in the story.

Just like Mystery in White, I think Seven Dead is too gentle to be a thriller (in spite of the body-count) and too light on detection to be a proper detective story, which you can only solve, if you happen to be a clairvoyant. And to a purist, like myself, that's an unpardonable sin. And then came that sublime ending! A conclusion that more than made up for any shortcomings the story has as either a detective or thriller story. If there's anything to complain about, it's that story has been told the wrong way round.

Seven Dead should have started out with that disastrous tragedy and expending those fascinating diary entries to fill the middle portion of the story, because who wouldn't want to read a detailed account of people battling an army of penguins? The last quarter should have told of the return to England, culminating in wholesale murder, ending with the discovery of the bodies and perhaps a newspaper clipping – reporting on the gruesome, inexplicable crime discovered at Haven House. I think this would have turned the story in a timeless classic and a lovely inversion of a famous detective novel published around the same time. Alas, the road not taken...

Farjeon was not your average, Golden Age mystery novelist, but a writer who spun fanciful yarns of wonder and imagination, which just so happen to take the shape and form of the detective and thriller story. Seven Dead is a fine example of how impossible it's to pigeon-hole Farjeon and his work. So he comes highly recommended to mystery readers who are looking for something a little different in their vintage crime fiction.

And if anyone from the British Library happens to stumble across this review, you should consider reprinting the splendid and highly original Holiday Express. If there's one obscure, long out-of-print novel by Farjeon deserving to be reprinted it's Holiday Express.

Plain Sailing (1987) by Douglas Clark

Back in October, I read an excellently written and plotted post-Golden Age detective novel, entitled Death After Evensong (1969), which constituted my introduction to the work of a pharmaceutical executive turned mystery novelist, Douglas Clark – a specialist in medical puzzles and inventive methods of poisoning. Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) listed Death After Evensong as Clarke's sole contribution to the impossible crime sub-genre, but I found two more titles to add to the list. One of these titles is Clarke's penultimate novel.

Plain Sailing (1987) is the twenty-sixth entry in the Detective Chief Superintendent George Masters and DCI Bill Green series. A lot of has changed between them since their second outing in Death After Evensong eighteen years previously.

All of the animosity and antagonism, permeating and poisoning their professional relationship, has not only completely dissipated, but they have become close friends outside of work. Masters was introduced as a tall, vain and unrepentant bachelor, but is now married to Wanda Masters and they have a young child together, Michael – who has Bill and Doris Green as "honorary grandparents." A very close relationship that was unthinkable two decades earlier. The opening of Plain Sailing has them even going on a much deserved holiday together, but, barely a day has gone by, when a patrol car pulls up in front of their cottage with terrible news.

Jimmy Cleveland is the 26-year-old son of a colleague and friend of Masters, DCS Matthew Cleveland, who has just found himself a good job, a nice flat and "a steady girlfriend," Janet. He also has a passion for sailing and took part in the King's Cup Week, but died unexpectedly under seemingly inexplicable circumstances "a mile or two out to sea in a small dinghy."

Jimmy had been out on the water for an hour and a half when the only other occupant of the dinghy, Harry Martin, raised the alarm and an American doctor answer the call for help. This doctor immediately recognized the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, which is where the problems begin. Cyanide is "the sort of stuff that works immediately," but Jimmy hadn't eaten or drank anything on board and gelatin capsule would have dissolved within twenty minutes. Suicide is very unlikely and Martin has no conceivable motive to kill him. So how did the murderer administer a dose of cyanide to a man isolated in a small boat out at sea? A situation somewhat like "one of those locked room mysteries."

A rather interesting aspect of the investigation is the reversal when it comes to emotional attachment to the case.

Generally, the detectives are the impartial outsiders, especially when they're police detectives, but the suspicious death of the likable young man, like Jimmy, seems to have made no impact on the large gathering of sailors, because they're "chattering about everything else under the sun" – except Jimmy's sudden death. This situation gives the story an unusual atmosphere befitting the strange circumstances of the murder. 

However, the clever little poisoning-trick acts as the single support column for the entirety of the story and plot. And to be quite honest, the who-and why of the murder weren't as good, or inspired, as the how with exception of the tragic mistake that lies at the heart of the story. Something that wasn't helped by some obvious padding of the page-count.

Masters states early on in the story that they have to "soak in everything" and get "to know all there is to know about sailing." So we get some technical details and, in combination with the weakly handled who-and why, it became evident that the trick had come before the story. And the whole story was erected around it. Showing that Clark had lost some of his story-telling ability since the early Death After Evensong, which was as well written as it was plotted without any stretching to pad it out.

All of that being said, the poisoning-trick of the impossible crime was fairly original and fitted the sailing theme of the story. The kind of impossible poisoning Paul Doherty began to specialize in during the 1990s (e.g. The White Rose Murders, 1991) or you can find with some regularity in the Case Closed series (e.g. "The Loan Shark Murder Case"), but the idea and setting would probably have been better served had the novel been whittled down to a short story – which might have resulted in a classic sporting detective story centered on an impossible crime. Such a tale could have been an anthology staple!

Everything considered, Plain Sailing wasn't a bad detective novel, particular for its time, but it was a step, or two, down from the much earlier Death After Evensong. So my next read in the series is going to be a title from the early-and mid period with such promising sounding, poisonous puzzles as Sweet Poison (1970), Sick to Death (1971) and The Gimmel Flask (1977). Dread and Water (1976) has a premise reminiscent of one of those mountaineering mysteries by Glyn Carr. So my exploration of this series will be continued.

By the way, the quality of my reading appear to have taken a drop when I sidelined Harriette Ashbrook for a moment. A sign she'll be ignored no longer and have to return to the Spike Tracy series the moment 2020 rolls around?

Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories

Exactly a year ago, I reviewed a collection of short stories, The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018) by James Holding, which gathered all ten short stories about two mystery writers, Martin Leroy and King Danforth, who play armchair detectives with their wives during a world cruise – which were originally published between 1960 and 1972 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Obviously, this series is hugely indebted to Ellery Queen falling somewhere between Queen's International Case Book (1964) and the Puzzle Club stories from Queen's Experiments in Deduction (1968). But with story-title structure of the early international series (e.g. The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932).

So, I was a little surprise to learn that the man behind Wildside Press, John Gregory Betancourt, penned a brand new "Leroy King" story. You read that correctly. Betancourt wrote a pastiche of a pastiche!

"The Jamaican Ice Mystery" was originally published in Malice Domestic 13: Murder Most Geographical (2018) and reissued earlier this year, in ebook format, as a separate short story, in which Martin Leroy and King Danforth are reappear as two octogenarians – adding another layer of EQ lore to the "Leroy King" series. You see, Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu wrote a superb pastiche, entitled "The Book Case," in which a 100-year-old Ellery Queen solves the murder of a collector of detective novels in 2007. This story is collected in a recent Wildside Press anthology, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018).

The story opens during one of the yearly cruises of Martin Leroy and King Danforth, accompanied by their wives, Carol and Helen, who are enjoying the Caribbean sun on the deck of the Jamaica Queen. There are complaints about how the bartender doesn't know how to mix a gimlet and their disastrous Netflix miniseries. They reminiscence about "the unsettled '60s" and observe that they didn't have "a decent murder to solve in decades." And as on cue, a porter informs them a woman had been murdered and robbed in the suite next to the Danforths.

Obviously, Betancourt was having too much fun with resettling the characters into a contemporary setting, which came at the expense of the plot. They're using smartphones, Google and Twitter, but the plot is paper-thin and the two problems, a poisoning and theft of a necklace, pose no challenge to the reader whatsoever – especially when the borrowed ice bucket is mentioned. So, purely as a detective story, I can't really recommend it, but, if you're a fan of the original series, you might want to pick it up to see how Martin and King are doing.

The second story comes from one of the founding members of the shin honkaku school of detective fiction in Japan, Takemaru Abiko, who debuted last year in English with a translation of Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989). A funny and clever impossible crime novel translated by Ho-Ling Wong and published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. This time, they ferried a short story across the language barrier with a practically unique detective-character.

The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu

Ho-Ling Wong called "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" ("The Puppet Deduces in the Tent") quite good as a locked room mystery and deemed it the best of four short stories from Abiko's Ningyou wa kotatsu de suiri suru (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu, 1990). The translation changed the story-title to "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" and can be found in this years double June/July issue of EQMM.

The detective of the story, or to be more precise, the vessel for the detective is a young, shy ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, whose puppet-character is the more outspoken Mario Marikōji, but this is more than merely a ventriloquist act – because Tomonaga has a split personality. And that other personality expresses itself through the puppet, Mario. Was this series the inspiration for that atrocious anime detective-series, Karakurizōshi ayatsuri Sakon (Doll Puppeteer Sakon)?

"A Smart Dummy in the Tent" takes place on the opening day of carnival, among the colored tents on large vacant lot, where Tomonaga performs in the big circus tent with Mario, but the festivities are canceled when one of the performers is found murdered. Panda Gotanda was a "slapstick magician," like Tommy Cooper, who was found beaten to death in one of the partitioned dressing rooms on the western end of the tent. The entrance to the dressing room was "under observation," until the body was found, while the hemline of the tent fabric is secured to the ground with metal anchor pins. You need a special instrument to pull them out. So this leaves the police with only a single viable suspect, Mutsuki Seno'o, who's a friend of Tomonaga. And one of the few people who know about his split personality. She encourages him to help the police solve the locked-tent murder.

The solution to the locked-tent is excellent and entirely original, which makes you wonder why nobody else came up with it before. My only complaint is the unnecessary final twist in the story's tail, but suppose it fits Abiko's tongue-in-cheek approach. Other than that, "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" is a welcome addition to the steady growing pile of shin honkaku detective stories and novels.

By the way, Abiko made a reference to "the protagonist from that famous comic by the legendary Osamu Tezuka," Jack Black, which must have pleased Ho-Ling to no end.

The next story is Paul Halter's "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir"), published in the double March/April, 2015, issue of EQMM, which was ranked by JJ as Halter's eighth best short story back in February – placing it above "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Robber's Grave." See, JJ, this is exactly why we had four Anglo-Dutch wars.

"The Wolf of Fenrir" opens in the winter of 1912 in the comfortable flat of Owen Burns, in St. James's Square, where he tells Achilles Stock the story of woman who was attacked and killed by a wolf in France. She was all alone in a cabin, in the wood, which was surrounded by snow and the only prints in the snow belonged to the victim and the animal she believed had been tamed. Naturally, this turns out to be a deviously contrived murder, but the solution turns out to be two very basic locked room-tricks spliced together. So not very impressive. However, the no-footprints scenario is arguably the hardest type of impossibility to plot and even harder to be original. And the rest of the plot was pretty solid.

So, on a whole, "The Wolf of Fenrir" is not a bad detective story, but Halter has written better ones. Some of those stories appeared were ranked lower by JJ.

Luckily, Halter and JJ redeemed themselves with the excellent "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book"), published in the July/August, 2017, issue of EQMM and coming in third on JJ's best-of list of Halter short stories – beaten only by "La nuit du loup" ("The Night of the Wolf") and the unrivaled "La hache" ("The Cleaver"). Seriously, "The Cleaver" is one of the best impossible crime short stories ever written!

"The Yellow Book" takes place during the winter of 1938 in a small village on the outskirts of Verdun, Malenmort, where a group of people meet once or twice a month at the home of Daniel Raskin "to invoke the spirits of the dear departed." When the story opens, the group receives a message from the spirits that one of them has been murdered and they discover "the sacrificial obsidian knife in the glass-fronted bookcase" has been stolen, but nobody at the gathering has been murdered. However, one of the regular members, Captain Marc Santerre, had called earlier in the day to excuse himself. And he lives in "a small, isolated house, less than five minutes' walk" from Raskin's house.

Captain Santerre is found beaten and stabbed to death in "a chalet locked from the inside" and "surrounded by virgin snow," which had been revealed by the spirits, who accused one of the people linking hands at the table. An inexplicable crime, if there ever was one. Luckily, Dr. Alan Twist happens to be in the neighborhood and unravels this tangled skein without leaving his armchair. I love these kind of armchair detective stories!

When the yellow book and mental state of the victim was brought up, I was afraid this was going to be house-of-monkeys-style shenanigans and wanted to tar-and-feather JJ, but the explanation took a decidedly different turn with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from an earlier Halter novel – which worked even better as a short story. So, yeah, this is without doubt one of Halter's better short stories. Highly recommended!

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk"

Finally, I have a short story from my own country: "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" ("The Corpse That Went For a Walk," 2019) by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of M.P.O. Books, who can be credited with having penned one of the best Dutch detective novels, De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011).

Several years ago, Books abandoned Inspector Bram Petersen of District Heuvelrug and introduced two new series-characters in 2017, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong, who are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in cold cases. This series succeeded admirably in marrying the traditional detective story to the modern misdaadroman (crime novel) and littered with impossible crimes. One of my favorite stories is the locked room mystery "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018). "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" is not an impossible crime tale, or even an old-fashioned whodunit, but the setting makes it somewhat of a standout in the series.

Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover is located on the fifth floor of a residential tower, the Kolos van Cronesteyn, standing on the outskirts of Leiden, South-Holland. One evening, the woman living next door, Lettie Kreft, comes to them with the astonishing story that she found a body of woman, in the hallway of an apartment, on the thirteenth floor. A knife was sticking from her back. The apartment belongs to a sleazy, womanizing artist, Hans Molica, but when they arrive the body has disappeared! So what happened the body, if there was a body? And how do you dispose of a body on one of the top floors of a residential tower?

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk" is a relatively minor story, compared to some of the other entries in the series, but loved the idea of a murder-without-a-body problem with the Kolos van Cronesteyn as a backdrop. So, plot-wise, not one of the top Corbijn and De Jong stories, but still found it to be a good and fun read.

On a final note, I've some good news for all you non-Dutch speaking mystery readers: the very first Corbijn and De Jong short story, "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," 2017), has been translated into English and will be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – either later this year or sometime in early 2020. Hopefully, this will kick open the door to get Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) and "The House That Brought Bad Luck" translated.