The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews

The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) is a tribute to the American detective story, Ellery Queen, which collected a selection of quality pastiches, parodies and a potpourri of short stories paying tribute or poking fun at all things Elleryana – written by a who's who of the traditional detective genre. A smorgasbord of laudatory tributes from such notable short story writers as Jon L. Breen, William Brittain, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges and mystery novelists like Lawrence Block and Pat McGerr. The anthology was apparently successful enough for Wildside Press to commission the editors, Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews, to put together two additional volumes with The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020).

I've not gotten around to The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe with the exception of one short story, Thomas Narcejac's "L'orchideé rouge" ("The Red Orchid," 1947), because it has a lot of excerpts from larger works. And that doesn't really appeal to me. The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen, on the other hand, has been near the top of the pile for nearly two years and the reason why I only just got around to it is my obsession with obscure, rarely collected or anthologized short (impossible crime) stories. 

The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen has a similar structure as The Misadventures of Ellery Queen with anthology being divided in five parts, "Prologue," "Pastiches," "Parodies," "Potpourri" and "Postscript," but the stories from both anthologies compliment each other – continuing and even completing a few short-lived series. For example, it contains the second of two Celery Green stories by Porges and a second case for Pachter's young E.Q. Griffen. So put on your pince-nez, pretend you went to Harvard and jump into the Duesenberg. We're going on a road trip through Ellery's Wonderland.

The collection opens with J. Randolph Cox's "The Adventure of the Logical Successor," originally published in the September 1982 publication of the Baker Street Journal, which serves as the collection's prologue. It's not really a detective story, but tells the story of a retired Sherlock Holmes who has "succeeded in replacing the pursuit of the underworld with the keeping of bees." However, the Great Detective keeps getting visitors who aspire to take on his mantle. There were two Americans, Nick Carter and Craig Kennedy. A Montenegrin of "somewhat corpulent proportions" and "a little Belgian fellow with an enormous ego," but only when a young Ellery Queen comes knocking does Holmes sees a potential and logically successor to his legacy. But only "if he can overcome his affectations" and "tendency to impress people with how correct he is in his deductions." And "if he is fortunate enough to find the right Boswell." So a fun little opening yarn playing on one of my guilty pleasures (crossovers).

The second part with pastiches begins with Maxwell E. Siegel's "Once Upon a Crime," written in 1951 when Siegel "was seventeen and besotted with Ellery Queen," but the story was not published until it appeared in Old-Time Detection #16 (2007). Siegel story's casts Ellery as a middle aged writer who's "running out of ideas for his novels" and his turned to children's books, fairy tales and nursery rhymes for inspiration. But, one evening, his study is burglarized, vandalized and the book-lined walls strewn with flowers. This sets in motion is a string of bizarre, seemingly unrelated incidents without apparent rhyme and reason. Ellery is struggling to find a logical link to tie them all together, which he eventually does. Admittedly, the story is nicely done piece of fanfiction, but, even in the world of EQ, it seems like (ROT13) n ebhaqnobhg jnl gb qryvire n zrffntr.

The next story is actually the first half of Chapter 11 from Marion Mainwaring's Murder in Pastiche (1954), but skipped it as the book is currently awaiting trial on the big pile.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Circle of Ink," originally published in the September/October, 1999, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, resettles the series in modern times and finds Ellery Queen lecturing applied criminology at a university – reflecting on how casual classroom dress had become and the presence of laptop computers. Wherever Ellery goes in the world, or time, there's usually a murder or two waiting just around the corner. And he soon learns that Professor Androvney was shot and killed in his office at the university. A murder linked to four other shootings on the Upper West Side during the past few weeks, which all have two things in common: the victims were shot with .22-caliber target pistol (likely equipped with a silencer) and "a small red circle on the back of each victim's left hand." That's where the commonalities end. So do they have a Son of Sam-type serial killer on their hands? Ellery cautions that serial killers shouldn't be confused with series killers "who kill a certain number of people with some goal in mind." While they're both insane, the series killer's insanity is "twisted into a pattern the killer can see." Find the pattern and you know whodunit. Since this is an EQ story, there's method to the murderer's madness with a decidedly classical touch to the motive. Leave it to Hoch to deliver one of the better and more entertaining detective stories of the collection!

Mă Tiān's "The Japanese Armor Mystery" (2005) was translated from Chinese by Steve Steinbock and is my favorite story from the collection as its plot is firmly rooted in the Japanese shin honkaku school of detective fiction. The story is set in a small, unassuming town, Montreux, where Joseph Marlow retreated to raise his four adopted children in quiet luxury, but, as the old patriarch got old, he also got sicker. And, as the story opens, he's dying of cancer. During a cold, winter night, the family mansion becomes the scene of a bizarre double murder. A noise rouses the household and they find the body of a local troublemaker outside in the snow, but what's weird is that the body is clad in "a suit of samurai armor made completely of wood." He had been shot at close range without any footsteps in the surrounding snow! A second shot is heard and Marlow is discovered dead in his bed. Fortunately, Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter happened to be in the neighborhood to lend the local police a helping hand. What's uncovered in less than 15 pages could have easily supported a novel-length story as it has literary everything. A snowy country house. A murdered patriarch and an impossible crime that form a "two-body problem." Alibis and clues. A somewhat surprising solution that I should have seen coming, but was too busy starring myself blind on a completely wrong pet theory. But loved the story. It reminded me of what you would get if you combined a 1930s Christopher Bush novel with John Dickson Carr-style impossible crime.

The next story is "The Mad Hatter's Riddle" (2009) by Dale C. Andrews, but already read and reviewed the story back in 2020. However, it has to be said that the title of the story ended up outshining most of the plot. You have no idea how brilliant it's until you read the solution. 

"A Change of Scene" by Jane Hutchings, editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is original to this anthology and has Ellery Queen, Nikki Porter and Inspector Queen going to Chicago during the holiday season to do some sight seeing, Christmas shopping and watching the Christmas parade with floats – celebrating both the season and the city's storied history. During the parade, William Nagel was in the crowd with his wife and relatives. One minute he was right there beside his wife and the next moment he was gone. Did he disappear voluntarily or did his union job get him into trouble with the mob? Either way, Nikki has "a desire to beat Ellery to a case's solution" and begins to investigate on her own. A pleasant, lightweight detective story with a quasi-impossible problem that made good use of its historical setting.

Arthur Porges' "The Indian Diamond Mystery" first appeared in the June, 1965, issue of EQMM and is reprinted here for the first time to open the volume's parody section. So who better to do the honors than Celery Green. This is almost a direct sequel to the previous Celery Green tale, "The English Village Mystery," in which Inspector Dewe East "scored a minor triumph" in titular village with assistance of the well-known American detective, Celery Green. Not before "almost the entire population had been exterminated." Inspector East has an opportunity to redeem himself when a tip puts him on the trail of a well-known, international jewel thief, Fanfaron Mironton, who "stole the hundred-thousand-guinea Indian diamond." Mironton is trapped inside a hotel, tries to shoot himself out of a tight corner and is eventually arrested, but "there was no trace of the Indian Diamond." Luckily, Celery Green is still in England and usually needs no more than a few hours to solve a crime. And he quickly figures out how the diamond could have vanished from a closely guarded hotel. The solution is in principle not impossible, but Porges made it extremely silly.

The second parody is Jon L. Breen's "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (1969), but also reviewed that story back in 2019. So moving on to the next EQ spoof. 

"The Little Sister in Crime" by Theodore B. Hertel, Jr. originally appeared in a chapbook that was put together for the 1997 Bouchercon with Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister (1949) as a kind of unifying theme. All of the stories had to be titled "The Little Sister in Crime" and had to be set a fictional Bouchercon between 1920 and 1941 with a number of obligatory references and scenes that had to be included. So the story gave Ellery a little sister, Hillary Queen, who accompanied her father and brother to Bouchercon where they meet all the famous detectives like Philip Marlowe, Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason – most of whom either employ ghost writers to get their names out or trying to find one. Ellery Queen hires two cousins in New York to put together stories based on his cases and pays them "a pittance to do so." One of the attendees is a depressed Barnaby Ross who hasn't much work since Drury Lane's Last Case (1933) was published. But was it the reason why he committed suicide in his hotel room? And was the message scrawled in blood a dying message or a suicide note? There's a "Challenge to the Reader," but the solution couldn't have been more telegraphed if the story had been stuck in an anthology entitled The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen. Still a fun little story.

Jon L. Breen and Josh Pachter's "The German Cologne Mystery" had a long road to publication and began sometime during the 1970s as solo-effort by Pachter to write an EQ parody, which was originally titled "The Cologne Cologne Mystery." But the story was turned down by EQMM. Years later, Breen got to tighten up the story and was published in the September/October, 2005, issue of EQMM thirty years after it was originally conceived. The celebrated mystery writer and amateur detective, Celery Breen, is playing cards in a room of the Hotel Madrid when someone gets himself killed down the hall. Carlos Nacionale is lying in a pool of blood and clutching a pair of ordinary dice between his right thumb and forefinger, but Celery ensures his father, Inspector Wretched Breen, the victim had been poisoned and the slit throat was simply a shaving accident as all the classic symptoms of poisoning are there – no heartbeat, no pulse, no nothing ("Q.E.D."). Celery believes the dying message will reveal the source of the poison, but Inspector Breen draws a different conclusion. A very fun take on both the fallible detective and the exasperating sleuth who can't get to the point.

Rand B. Lee is the son of one half of the EQ writing team, Manfred B. Lee, whose "The Polish Chicken Mystery' is published here for the first time and has three famous detectives answering that age-old question. Why did the chicken cross the road? I didn't care much for Miss Marple's solution, but liked the one Sherlock Holmes came up with and Ellery Queen had the best answer. Although he had more to work with it. A fun short-short.

One of the highlights of the previous anthology was Josh Pachter's "E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name" (1968), which he wrote when he was sixteen and concerns the eleven children of a policeman all named after famous detective characters. “E.Q. Griffen's Second Case” is the sequel and first appeared in the May, 1970, issue of EQMM and has E.Q. assisting his father with the murder of a hippie, poet and children's author. Garrett Conway was stabbed while walking down the street, but Conway, "long familiar with the doings of children," scrawled a dying message on the concrete. A simple "1 2 3." The answer to the problem is not bad and a child would likely catch on to the meaning of the dying message faster than an adult, but the Author's Note explained that readers at the time complained about the dying clue. There's a technical flaw in it and a few simple changes would have improved the story, but Pachter decided to leave it as he originally wrote it. I agree and respect that. This story and premise of the whole series is nothing to be ashamed off considering how old he was when he wrote it. I still want that Gideon Fell Griffen locked room story!

Arthur Vidro's "The Mistake on the Cover of EQMM #1" (2018) was first published on the EQMM website and is more of a snacksized puzzle than a story with the story title summing up the puzzle. However, this short-short puzzle is loaded with Easter eggs and there's a lengthy Editor's Note ("Easter in the Autumn") pointing them all out. 

"The Pink Pig Mystery" by Jeffrey Marks is original to this anthology and visits an often overlooked patch of the Elleryverse, the Ellery Queen Jr. series. Between 1942 and 1966, eleven juvenile mystery novels were published with nine starring a young Djuna and his Scottish terrier, Champ. Marks returned took a stiff dose of childhood nostalgia and returned to the series with a story set during the Second World War. There were talks in Manhattan "about bomber strikes like the ones in London" or "the kamikaze attacks on Pearl Harbor." Ellery packed up Djuna and Champ to the country side, but there they become involved (together with two other kids) in the mystery of a pristine pink pig in a muddy pigsty. Very much a children's mystery with a simple, straightforward plot, but perfectly replicated those vintage juvenile mysteries and the EQJR series.

The collection ends with a postscript from the real "Ellery Queen," Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, which is an anecdote illustrating "the authors' recognition (and humility) that their deductive powers do not match those of their fictional detective." The piece is fittingly titles "The Misadventures of Ellery Queen" and made perfect ending to the collection. 

So, on a whole, my opinion of The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen is pretty much the same as The Misadventures of Ellery Queen. Not every story is a winner or will stick in your mind, but not a single truly bad story or even one I just disliked. An impressive accomplishment for any short story collection, but especially impressive when it's an anthology of pastiches, parodies and homages written by a bunch of unapologetic fanboys and fangirls – which makes it even more impressive I liked both anthologies. As some of you regulars know, I'm not very big fan of pastiches in general and stand with Rex Stout that authors should “roll their own,” but never had much of problem with EQ pastiches. Probably because the series (sort of) allows for all these alternative universes to exist. Hopefully, a third anthology is somewhere in the future as their should be more than enough material left. There's Donald A. Yates' "The Wounded Tyrolean" (c. 1955), Rintaro Norizuki's "Midori no tobira wa kiken" ("The Lure of the Green Door," 1991), Dale C. Andrews' "Four Words" (2020) and the uncollected radio scripts. Highly recommended to every EQ fan!

A note for the curious: I don't know if there anymore Misadventure anthologies in the work, but there's American detective character with the name recognition and more than enough material associated with him to cobble together The Misadventures of Philo Vance.

The 5 False Suicides (2021) by James Scott Byrnside

Two years ago, James Scott Byrnside completed his Rowan Manory and Walter Williams trilogy, Goodnight Irene (2018), The Opening Night Murders (2019) and The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020), which in turn performed an amazing hat trick – back-to-back gems of traditionally-plotted, slightly noir-ish, detective novels. Stories brimming with bizarre and sometimes gruesome murders, locked room mysteries, dying messages and false-solutions that can only be compared to the works of Byrnside's Japanese counterparts of the shin honkaku school or Paul Halter at the top of his game. Regrettably, Byrnside is currently the only writer in the Western world who's crafting these kind of ambitious, tightly-plotted and fairly clued detective novels commonly associated today with the East. So it was a joy when his fourth novel was finally published late last year! 

The 5 False Suicides (2021) has a title and premise that immediately invites the reader to draw comparisons with John Dickson Carr's The Four False Weapons (1937) and The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996). This is not that kind of (locked room) mystery novel. The 5 False Suicides is "some stand-alone, crazy-ass piece of pulp" dedicated to Fredric Brown, which should give you an idea what to expect. Or so you would think! 

The 5 False Suicides takes place in 1947 New Sweden, Maine, where librarian Gretta Grahame formed a book club, the Murder-mystery Appreciation Society of New Sweden (MASONS), on the recommendation of her therapist to combat her shyness. Gretta becomes "incredibly communicative" whenever she gets to talk about the intricacies of the detective story. So why not use it to her advantage. The first two members to join the MASONS were Gretta's only real friends, Faye Withers and Georgie Danvers, but an advert on Gretta's library's whisper wall drew five more members into the group – two couples and a single. Olive Tennant is the daughter of a local toothpick mogul and joined up with her husband, Harry, in addition to an elderly couple of retirees, Tom and Alice Mower. The single is a strongly opinionated hotel porter, Oscar Strom. One of their weekly meetings fills out the first chapter as they kindly bicker and banter about what to read next and picking apart Oscar's homespun impossible crime method, which pleasantly reminded me of the after-dinner discussions from Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series. A chapter ending with the ominous promise that "most of the membership would be dead in a fortnight" and "one of the members would be a murderer."

A long string of tragic deaths that began with Gretta's estranged uncle, Scotty Grahame, calling his niece to inform that her Aunt Suzie died from an overdose of barbiturates and the police ruled it a suicide. A similar fate befell Gretta's mother and she recently tried to take her own life, which apparently runs in the family. But not without a reason.

Scotty tells Gretta that her grandfather, Andrew Grahame, put "a curse on his own flesh and blood," back in 1907, which "has been murdering the Grahame family for the last thirty years" and they're the last two remaining Grahames – very likely next to fall victim of the curse. Andrew Grahame had help with his curse from a Hungarian mystic, or male-witch, named Boroqe Rieszak and he wants to help them lift the deadly curse. So he asks Gretta to come to his hotel room and drive together to the meet the Hungarian witch, but, when she calls back the next day, a policeman answers the phone. Scotty had committed suicide in his hotel room!

Nonetheless, Gretta decides to go through with meeting Rieszak, accompanied by Faye and Olive, who reveals their family and curse is tied to Blood Island. An island on the south coast of Maine connected to the mainland by a natural, limestone bridge and had been cleared in 1825 of its native population to make way for "a heavenly getaway for the wealthy," but one remained behind and hid in the island forest to plot his revenge. And massacred "the best of society" on their first night on the island. So the Indian was hunted down and he cursed his hunters, "may your loved ones suffer the same fate as I," before slitting his own throat. Gretta's grandfather was a Satanist and used to island curse to ensure that a special place in hell reserved for "those who curse their own flesh and blood," but, "when only one descendent of a Soctomah-cursed family remains," that "descendent can be freed of suicide by a ceremony." All Gretta has to do is gather a surrogate family to temporarily replace what she has lost and go to Blood Island, now called Heaven's Gate, to perform the ceremony. This is where the story moves from Carr-Christie territory to the borderlands of Hake Talbot and Theodore Roscoe.

Normally, it's "darn-near impossible to get a reservation on Heaven's Gate" at that time of year, but a wildfire is slowly consuming the south of Maine and a serial killer, "The Burlington Butcher," is likely hiding out in the dense forests of Heaven's Gate – who left a bizarre murder scene on the southernmost beach. A young woman had been butchered with a hunting knife, but "no footprints except those of the victim were found on the beach." So the island was not a particular popular holiday destination that seasons. Gretta goes to the island with Rieszak and some of the MASONS as her surrogate family, but they have hardly arrived before one of them apparently shoots and kills themselves in a cabin with the windows and door locked from the inside. Through the window, they saw the handle of the key sticking out of the keyhole. At the same time, someone else is found hanging from a noose with a mutilated hand. And then, as you can expect from the title, the story really begins to pick up pace.

Before getting to the plot crammed with impossible crimes, red herrings and false-solutions, the wonderfully executed, sometimes dark duality and meta-consciousness of the storytelling has to be highlighted with the MASONS almost being aware they're characters inside a detective story. They disapprove of the case possibly having more than one, independently, moving parts ("I don't like a mystery with too many moving parts") or having the sneaking suspicion they have “already come across the big clue” without having noticed it. So, under normal circumstances, people who prefer the "civilized murder" of fiction to the messy banality of real-life crimes, but, as Detective Brodsky put it so eloquently, "it ain't like those books by Dick Johnson Carter." This resulted in awkward, but very well handled, scene in which the MASONS tell Jack Munt, Ranger of Heaven's Gate, how intrigued and excited they were about his impossible murder on the beach. Munt responds with telling them the girl didn't die right away and how held her hand as she died. So, no, he wouldn't exactly describe the murder as exciting or funny. Even though the characters run around the island, simultaneously playing detective and getting culled, the story becomes quite grim as it nears its conclusion. Sometimes bordering on outright horror ("Gur fxva unq ohooyrq hc naq jnf abj orersg bs nal qrsvavat sbez pnhfrq ol nqurfvba gb gur obar"). Just like the second, gory murder from Goodnight Irene or the severed hands featured in The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire, there's a logical reason for everything in Byrnside's mysteries. This time, it has all the mad logic of dream.

Firstly, there's the locked room-tricks, real and false, which are contracted around principles that have been around for a while, but how they were presented and executed put a new spin on them – which is the next best thing to discovering an original and brand new locked room-trick. I liked how one of the tricks suggested was an updated version of a trick from a fictitious short story, "Five Deaths and One Lock," which surprised readers in 1889 as "they had no idea what [REDACTED] meant." But where The 5 False Suicides stands out is not as a locked room mystery with multiple impossibilities. But how all the moving parts and red herrings came together. And how they were pulled apart again. Planting "the big clue" in plain sight. Blurring the lines between the real and false-solutions culminating in that daring, uncertain, but ambitious ending. Something not every mystery reader is going to appreciate, but you have to keep in mind that this is supposed to be a pulp-style mystery in the spirit of Gerald Verner's The Royal Flush Murders (1948) and John Russell Fearn's The Man Who Was Not (2005) with a distinct touch of madness. I'm very fond of those two second-string pulp mongers. So add in a first-rate plot stuffed with fairly planted clues, treacherous red herring and false-solutions, you leave me with precious little to complain or nitpick about. 

Sure, The 5 False Suicides is perhaps too short a novel with characterization taking a backseat to the plot and storytelling. I can see how readers who like characterization would have appreciated a little more elaboration about certain character revelations. But speaking as an uncouth, plot obsessed detective fanboy with a taste for the pulps, the lack of characterization didn't bother me too much. To quote the great Dr. Gideon Fell, "I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened." I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life and neither does the author of this crazy-ass piece of pulp. 

Byrnside only began to seriously read Golden Age detective fiction in early 2017, published his first detective novel in 2018 and continued to demonstrate the kind of genre awareness and understanding in his next two novels that I always assumed took years to develop and fine-tune. More importantly, Byrnside's four novels demonstrate how you can enrich your stories and plots by building on the rich history of your genre instead of discarding it as out-of-date and obsolete. A genuine prodigy of the genre and The 5 False Suicides carried on the streak of delivering quality, first-class detective fiction that fans and genre scholars of the future might look back upon as the dawn of a Second Golden Age (once again, no pressure). So you future detective fans and scholars better be grateful for having all of his novels at your immediate disposal. We had to wait years for The Jolly Roger Murders, Time Seals All Rooms and Goodmorning Irene to come out.

Death of the Living Dead (1989) by Yamaguchi Masaya

The first post to appear on this blog in 2020 was a review of a very unorthodox Japanese crime novel, Hirakasete itadaki kōei desu (The Resurrection Fireplace, 2011) by Hiroko Minagawa, which is a historical and cultural travelogue of 1770s London – a time when body-snatchers were emptying the cemeteries and illegal autopsies were performed by candle light. A somewhat strange historical crime novel casting the morgue in a distinctly Dickensian light, but the plot did very little to scratch that detection itch. John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, had me covered there and published an English translation of Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) back in August. 

Death Among the Undead gave expression to the yearning of the Japanese shin honkaku movement for "the kind of impetus" Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) had created over thirty years ago. Something daring and different to refresh the traditional, fair play detective story. Just like they have done with their ghoulish corpse-puzzles and often youthful, college-age detectives. So the path Imamura took was simply to add a fantastical element to an otherwise traditional shin honkaku (locked room) mystery by staging it smack dab in the middle of a small, localized zombie apocalypse. Zombies alter the equation of any closed-circle situation or locked room murder, but the rules of fair play were thoroughly honored. I wanted more of this kind of impetus myself! But where to find it?

Fortunately, an anonymous comment was left on my review saying "that there is actually another famous award-winning zombie-related honkaku mystery," Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989). The comment also mentioned the book had "been completely translated into English," but Masaya "was still looking for somebody to publish it," which immediately dampened my hope as that meant it would probably take another year or two before the book was published – only for Christmas to come unexpectedly early! Back in November, Ho-Ling Wong announced on his blog that he was the one who translated Death of the Living Dead, "widely considered to be one of the more important works of early shin honkaku mystery fiction," which Ammo published last December. Just in time to brighten the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, which ended and began over here with another complete lockdown. So let's dissect this classic!

First of all, Death of the Living Dead is a beast to review. A 400-page detective novel with half of the pages setting up a story populated with over thirty characters (dramatis personae covers an entire page), multiple plot-threads and a series of truly bizarre crimes. One that takes place in a world that has to come to grips with the fact that the gap between the living and the dead is narrowing. 

Death of the Living Dead begins with a prologue demonstrating that very point. A homicide detective, Lieutenant Neville, confronting the culprit of a domestic murder in a blood-spattered room. But, as Neville explains to the murderer that her "whole alibi depends on the hourglass inside that aquarium and the clown doll covered in ketchup," the lips of the corpse quivered. Just a few moments later, the corpse stood up, cried out "I won't let you kill me again" and jumped out of the window. The next chapter explains that the prologue described one of numerous "astonishing incidents that had been happening all across the United States, and indeed the whole world, of the dead coming back to life" – thirteen known occurrences in US within the span of a month. However, these "living dead" are not your typical horror movie zombies, who want to snack on your brains, but have "the same mental capabilities as when they were alive." Some go crazy when they learn they are dead or refuse to believe it, while "others feel like outcasts among the living and fall into depression." So with the dead coming back to live with their full mental capabilities changes quite a few things.

This changed world is explored during the first, lengthy half of the story and introduces the most important character of the story, Francis "Grin" Barleycorn. Steve Steinbock aptly described Grin as "a Punk Ellery Queen living in an otherworldly Wrightsville." An otherworldly Wrightsville known as Tombsville in the countryside of New England. Grin is the grandson of the dying Smiley Barleycorn, head and general manager of the family-run Smile Cemetery, who welcomed back the child of his estranged son. Grin traveled to the Smile Cemetery to meet with his family for the first time and is accompanied by his girlfriend (of sorts), Saga "Cheshire" Shimkus, whose mother (Isabella) is connected to the cemetery.

I think readers who prefer mystery writers to leave their literary pretensions at the door and get to the point might find the first 200 pages a little trying, but you have to give Masaya the space and time to setup the whole story. More importantly, there's a lot of important information, clues and developments in the first half that will become important later on in the story. And, if you love the arcane or macabre, you find a lot to enjoy in those first 200-pages. There's the necessary history of the family of undertakers and Smile Cemetery, but also sidetracks into embalming, cremation and "the unique funeral traditions of the United States" as well as discussions of the dead rising up and live and death in general. But, as mentioned above, there's plenty of relevant information hidden here that will become important later on. Not to mention a very important plot development happens during the first half.

After a family meeting, which resembled "the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland," Grin is poisoned with arsenic, gets sick and dies in his bathroom – waking up from his eternal slumber only a few hours later. Grin only takes one person into his confidence, Dr. Vincent Hearse, who's a professor of Thanatology and special adviser to the local police. There's a rather sad and bitter taste to the scenes of Grin describing and trying to cope with his death and resurrection. Grin tells Dr. Hearse being a living dead feels like being in a dream, or watching a movie, like he was "separated from what's actually happening." This is shown in a very brief, but depressing scene, when Grim tries to sleep, gets up and kicks the bed in frustration. Grin "could see the bed shaking from the shock," but "not feel any pain in his leg" and cried "a tearless howl from the depths of his soul." By the way, typically Japanese storytelling to do either something truly horrible to one of the main protagonists or take them out of the story entirely.

Well, the readers who patiently waited for the plot to finally kick off are richly rewarded when one of the family members is stabbed to death in the viewing room, in front of Smiley's casket, in the West Wing of the Funeral Hall (floorplan included). That wing was "a hermetically sealed space" at the time of the murder and CCTV footage only deepens the mystery. The footage shows someone wearing a hockey goaltender mask, who they simply call "Hockey Mask," enter to the sealed wing unseen to play hide-and-seek with the victim-in-waiting. Only to disappear without a trace! No. The solution is not what you think it is (Fzvyrl qvq abg pbzr onpx gb yvir naq fgnoorq gur ivpgvz), but there's so much to the plot that has everything from hearse races to the possible return of a serial killer, who chainsawed college girls seventeen years previously, to the region. Than there are the murder victims who rise up right after they were struck down to complicate everything even further. Every aspect of the story, philosophical or practical, is used to perfection to build up to a beautifully orchestrated, three-punch ending.

Firstly, there's the wonderful character of the much harassed Richard Tracy, Police Lieutenant of the Marbletown Police Station, who has trouble adjusting to "living in an abnormal world where the dead can come back to life again." More than once, he has to deal with a victim whose murder he's investigation getting up and meddle with his work, exonerating his suspects or even getting physical with them – which results in regular scheduled appointments with a psychiatrist. Lieutenant Tracy battles through and pieces together a brilliant solution presented in a dramatic denouement "like the great detectives in mystery novels do." A false-solution that's immediately picked apart by everyone in the room (living and dead), but it's a false-solution worthy of the underappreciated Simon Brimmer. After the false-solution has been shot to pieces, Grin steps forward to reveal he, too, is dead and then proceeds to explain what really happened during that tea party and the subsequent crimes in an impressive chain of deductive reasoning. Grin has a lot to explain a lot and the explanation is a long one, but every piece of this intricate, maze-like plot is unraveled in a clear and methodical way. What emerges is an extraordinary, but logical, chain of events and crimes that could have occurred only under these very special circumstances that created some highly unusual and original motives. Throughout it all the motives of the living and death are both intertwined and at odds.

Lastly, you have the ending that drove home the fact that, while there will always be a dividing line between the living and living dead, they still have one thing that binds them together. The human element. Something that can be torn away again. This ended in a slightly depressing, bitter sweet conclusion when the time came to say goodbye.

So what more can be said about Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead? Masaya crafted a genuine masterpiece in more way than one. Death of the Living Dead is one of those rare, successful hybrid mysteries in which Masaya logically tackled the problem of murder in a world where "the dead are rising one by one, and can walk, think and talk." Masaya handled and treated humanity's old, morbid fascination with death in an equally fascinating way, which were craftily incorporated into a first-rate plot. A plot that has everything from corpses meddling in their murder cases, impossible crimes and a brilliant use of the false-solution, but it's the who-and why exposed by Grin that stole the show in the end. A wonderful, otherworldly, but also very human, detective story that gave a whole new meaning to a rising bodycount. If Western crime-and detective fiction was half as good as their Japanese counterparts, I wouldn't have the time to fanboy all over these shin honkaku writers.

The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940) is the 22nd novel in the Ludovic Travers series, written and published 1926 and 1968, which formed with The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) a two-book arc and "a heartfelt tribute" to the French nation – a nation that would soon be invaded and occupied. Curt Evans noted in his introduction that the "glimpses of a peacetime world" in these Tour de Frances of Bush brought back "better and far less jaded days" when "death could still be treated as a game." This is true enough in spirit. But they also standout as unconventional in plotting and storytelling that makes them hard to recommend to anyone who isn't already a fan of the series. Something that's even more true of The Case of the Climbing Rat than The Case of the Flying Donkey. 

The Case of the Climbing Rat begins interesting with two, apparently unrelated, problems with one of them sending Ludovic Travers to France to confront the black sheep of the family.

Gustave Rionne is a disgraced Harley Street surgeon and the uncle of his wife, Bernice, who once made a name as "the very first plastic surgeons who really did anything worth while," but an abortion and a botched skin-grafting operation got him stricken off the list. Some of these were done while practicing under a false name, which lead to his expulsion from Luxembourg and Switzerland. Rionne went, "or escaped," to France where lived on a small pension bequeathed by Bernice's late Aunt Emily, but she warned Bernice that Rionne might begin pestering her for money, which is exactly what has happened and the second letter was horrible – raking up things and "hinting at making trouble." Travers is travels to Hótel de Sud, Carliens, to have a word or two with Uncle Gustave.

The second problem is of an entirely different magnitude: Inspector Laurin Gallois, of the Sûreté, receives an anonymous phone call telling him that the reports Armand Bariche's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Armand Bariche was, or is, a notorious slippery serial killer and not even the grisly career of Henri Landru was as "horrifying than that of Bariche." A serial killer who, unlike Landru, picked his victims from "a superior class" whose scandal-shy relatives would do everything to avoid publicity, which is why the police believe most of his victims were still unknown. Gallois believes there are likely many people "who guessed that some daughter or female relative had been a Bariche victim," but would never dare risk "scandal in their own localities." Everything the police knew about Bariche came out when he supposedly died in a fire together with his last victim. So all Galois knew about the serial killer came from words on paper and secondhand impressions, but he always believed he was still alive. And here he finally had a potential lead.

So two very different, unconnected problem concerning a pesky relative who spends too much money and the potential presence of an active serial killer in the South of France, but Gallois and Travers cross paths when Rionne is stabbed to death in a public lavatory. You can see the hardboiled influence creeping into Bush's writing with this murder, because I don't remember another detective novel from this period in which someone was murdered in a public lavatory while in "the act of urinating." Not exactly the libraries or private studies commonly associated with the classic detective story.

Anyway, there's a second murder of a Swiss national, Georges Letoque, who was shot and killed at the villa he rented in the Rue des Pins, which was preceded by a suspicious-looking car accident involving Gallois' secretary and right-hand man, Charles Rabaud – who was on his way to meet the anonymous informant. But the story becomes a little muddled and slower once everything has been setup. Only to become remarkably clearer in the final chapter. 

The Case of the Climbing Rat is more of a rambling shaggy dog story than a normal, conventionally structured detective story with clues and suspects to examine. It more about who's exactly who or what their part in the story really is with the only constant being the possible presence of Bariche and three masked trapeze artists rumored to be either German anti-Nazis or relatives of the late Tsar. What's exactly the role of their little small white rat who, "brave as a lion," climbed the rope to the top of the tent to fly through the air with trapeze artist? Why did it refuse to climb the rope one night and died shortly after? Regrettably, The Case of the Climbing Rat is one of those novels where having France as a setting is an excuse to slacken the pace and loosen the plotting (e.g. E.R. Punshon's Murder Abroad, 1939). It's not until the last chapter that most of the loose, fuzzy plot-threads are pulled tight to reveal that there was something good and clever hidden underneath it all. Such as one of Bush's patent alibi-tricks, but some structure and substance to the middle portion would have been bigger benefit to the overall plot than a surprisingly clear and stronger ending closing an otherwise pretty muddled detective yarn.

So, yeah, The Case of the Climbing Rat is, plot-wise, not a highlight of the series and can only be recommended to readers who are already fans of Bush and Travers, but they'll be able to appreciate the dynamic between Travers and Gallois – who's a very different kind of foil than Superintendent Wharton. While they have mutual admiration and respect, there's a hint of rival-detectives between them. A plot-device not always appreciated by Western mystery writers, but Bush excellently made us of it here to give the story a good and solid ending.

If you're new to Bush and not prejudiced against cherry picking, I recommend you begin with The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) or his home front trilogy, The Case of the Murdered Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942). You can also go for some old-fashioned, Golden Age baroque with Dead Man Twice (1930) and Dancing Death (1931) or his John Dickson Carr-style impossible crime novel, The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935). I also liked Cut Throat (1932), but practically everyone disagrees with me on that one.

Murder Under the Mantle of Love (1964) by Ton Vervoort

Three months ago, I reviewed Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) by "Ton Vervoort," a penname of Peter Verstegen, who's (or was?) a Dutch author, editor and translator partial to astrology, chess and detective fiction – penning six detective novels himself during the 1960s. Murder Among Astrologists displayed the influence of S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen on Vervoort's work complete with weird architecture and a dying message. 

Aligning your work with the Van Dine-Queen School is a high bar to clear, especially for a Dutch mystery writer in the '60s, but Vervoort cunningly pulled it off by under promising and over delivering on the plot. An all too rare quality in the Dutch-language detective story and an invitation to return sooner rather than later. So moved another one of his novels to the top of the big pile. 

Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) is the fourth title in the Inspector Floris Jansen series and gives the reader a modern take on the Golden Age serial killer story. A very odd one at that, but a genuine whodunit pull a la Agatha Christie. But despite the Anglo-American touches, it's also one of the most stereotypical Dutch detective novels I've ever come across. 

Murder Under the Mantle of Love begins as a regular detective story with the narrator, Ton Vervoort, perusing the newspaper and reading about the brutal murder of "the well-known doctor, botanist and sinologist," Dr. Ed Hinke – who had his neck broken in his private study. Dr. Hinke had fallen victim to a "terrible disease," polio, which left him partial paralyzed and forced him to retire. Not merely from his medical practice and public life, but from his family as well. Only one with constant, unfettered access to the doctor is his live-in nurse, Anjo Collet. Vervoort reads that the investigation has been placed in the capable hands of Inspector Floris Jansen, of the Amsterdam police, who's an old friend of his. So it takes one phone call to secure a front row seat as his "secretary."

A practice that's not particularly popular with his colleagues and the story notes that there was "a strong animosity" against Jansen's "way of life and methods." But he can get away with it due to his "independent position" at headquarters.

Vervoort follows Jansen to Dr. Hinke's seventeenth century grachtenpand (canal house), on the Keizersgracht, where he lived with all of his immediately relatives, but they're not an ordinary family. Dr. Hinke's oldest son, Hans, is an interior decorator and a pedantic snob with an inferiority complex and posses "a stiff dose of jealousy" towards his younger brother, Maarten. A sensual, womanizing student of medicine with all the wrong friends and an abrasively liberal attitude towards euthanasia ("Hitler discredited the killing of the terminally ill and insane"), which all infuriated their sister, Daphne. She's a geologist and secular puritan who believed that "the morals of the Dutch were in a pitiful state" and passionately disapproved of her brother's openly flaunting his frivolous love life. Something else she hated is having to share the third-floor with her father's secret, long-lost Dutch-Indonesian wife, Topsy, who thought Dr. Hinke had died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp – until she came to the Netherlands. Topsy came to the house a month before the murder and she brought along the 21-year-old son Dr. Hinke had never seen, Tjallie. Lastly, there's Tanny Hinke, Hans' wife, who has a very expensive and luxurious taste and it was costing her husband a pretty penny. This really angered his father. Dr. Hinke believed "a woman should be grateful for every penny awarded to her" and getting into debt to finance her lavish lifestyle was ridiculous. And even offered to pay for the divorce.

So they're practically a happy, tightly-knit and stable household, but the biggest discovery Jansen makes is that Dr. Hinke was addicted to smoking opium. Not only was Dr. Hinke smoking three, or more, pipes a day, he was growing poppies right next to the orchids in his locked attic. We have a victim who made drugs in his attic and suspects who are the flesh-and-blood incarnation of Dutch bluntness. Yes, a prostitute briefly appears as a witness during second-half of the story. I told you this was an unmistakably, bordering on stereotypical, post-war Dutch detective novel.

The murder of Dr. Hinke can be summed up as a traditional whodunit with a new coat of paint to reflect the changing times, but, around the halfway mark, the whole case is turned upside down and inside out.

Nurse Anjo confides in Jansen that she often has "predictive dreams" and had a dream-like prophecy about Dr. Hinke's murder. Before the murder, she dreamed that her employer was killed with a hammer, which is not exactly what happened, but pretty close and she continues to have strange, predictive dreams throughout the second-half of the story – revealing an active serial killer in Amsterdam! A killer preying on invalids who had become embittered with "nothing more to expect from life." These serial murders take the police out of the original crime scene and scatter them across the city which, especially to non-Dutch readers, can come across as a sight-seeing tour of Amsterdam.

A gallery attendant at the Rijksmuseum, who lost all his fingers in an accident with a cutting machine, unexpectedly drops dead among the museum visitors. An invalid with a cigarette-and-candy cart on the boisterous, rowdy Zeedijk is found dead by a window prostitute and a third dream has the police scouring all the cafes in the city for a man with a seeing-eye dog. All of them are poisoned with an uncommon, difficult to trace substance.

So the story moves away from a modern whodunit with a closed-circle of suspects to parapsychological manhunt for not only a serial killer, but the prospective victims with the last murder being somewhat of a tragedy. Just like with Murder Among Astrologists, I began to wonder how Vervoort was going to tie everything together satisfactory as his loose storytelling and small page-count didn't quite promise a neo-Golden Age detective story. What seemed to make the most sense was that Dr. Hinke had, somehow, distributed the poison and someone killed him to put a stop to it, which turned out to be wrong, but it did put me on the right track. Vervoort ended up doing something completely different with the motive, how the murders were carried out and kind of liked how he spun a complications out of inconvenient alibis, accidental clues and vanishing red herrings – some being better and clearer than others. But, on a whole, it made for a good and unusual Dutch detective story.

Only thing that can be said against Murder Under the Mantle of Love is the same as about Murder Among Astrologists. Vervoort had some good and clever ideas, some were even inspired, but he had too light a style, or touch, to utilize them to their full potential. So it doesn't fully measure up to its Anglo-American counterparts.

Nonetheless, it was quite impressive that Vervoort managed to tell two different types of detective stories in his light style with a small page-count, but still managed to link them together with a logical, inevitable solution that didn't feel like a letdown. Vervoort evidently knew what makes a plot tick and wish he had continued writing detective novels, because half a dozen is hardly enough to keep me satisfied. I need more Dutch detective writers like Vervoort!

So his remaining detective novels, Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Stage Actors, 1963), Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) and Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965), have been bumped to the top of my wishlist. I'm also looking into the few short stories he wrote. Such as "Burleske aan de galg" ("Burlesque on the Gallows," 1965) and "Het alibi" ("The Alibi," 1968). Wordt vervolgd!

The Lucky Policeman (1938) by Rupert Penny

Rupert Penny's The Lucky Policeman (1938) is the fourth, of eight, detective novels in the Chief Inspector Beale series and Penny's present-day champion, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, named it his best novel in his blog-post "Policeman's Lot – Ranking the Edward Beale Novels" – praising it as Penny at his "most potent." A recommendation from Jim always need to be approached with some caution and his praise for Sealed Room Murder (1941) is dodgy as hell. But fair's fair, he was kind of right about Policeman in Armour (1937) and Policeman's Evidence (1938). 

So I decided not to cynically go with the bottom-ranked title, She Had to Have Gas (1939), as my next Penny, but blindly trust Jim's judgment on this one. What could possibly go wrong?

First of all, The Lucky Policeman turned out to be a little different from what I expected. I thought it was going to be Penny's take on the Golden Age-style serial killer story, in which the detective has to find the common-link in a series of apparently random murders, but The Lucky Policeman is played like a straight detective story with the serial killings taking place in the background. Well, more or less.

Professor Hilary Peake is an American psychiatrist and "the gold-star alienist" who came to England, in 1931, where he bought a large, old mansion in New Forest and converted it into a private asylum – only has two patients on his hands when the story begins. A religious maniac and a man, Simon Selby, who's quite normal most of the time, but, every five or six weeks, "he breaks out into mental eruptions." Strangely enough, the only thing to lessen the periodic attacks is to let his hair grow unrestricted and denied him the attentions of a barber for the past three years. Nothing else was achieved and Selby became Peake's most puzzling patient. And then he unexpectedly escaped under very peculiar circumstances!

The nurse discovered a dummy in Selby's bed, two of the outside windows bars were ripped away and missing. Selby was gone and nowhere to be found. A week after his escape, people began to disappear from the area of New Forest: a servant girl, a girl hitchhiker and a reporter, which called for a wide and intensive search. But during the search, Sergeant Lee goes missing and his body is later found lying near a tree with a stabbed with something that left a hole "as big as a two-shilling piece" behind his right ear. Even weirder is that the murderer had taken the sergeant's left boot. Over the next few days, more bodies turned up with identical wounds and their left shoe missing.

Chief-Inspector Edward Beale, accompanied by Anthony Purdon, takes on the case and the multi-faceted problem gives them much food for thought. So they're not just preoccupied with chasing an escaped, homicidal maniac.

One of the central puzzles is how Selby managed to wrench two bars from stonework, scaled a brick, twelve feet high wall in his pajamas and evaded capture without supplies – making it a borderline impossible crime. Just a shame he didn't went all out with it as the explanation for the removal of the bars could have been used in two different ways to create a tight locked room scenario. However, the story was already quite packed and another plot-thread that has to be examined is Peake's backstory and why he left America, which happened when he got caught in the meshes of a New York matriarch who led "a home-made army against half the world" in 1929. She has her own reasons to suddenly reappear. There are the finer details of the case, like the shoes, weapon and a burglarized cottage, but Penny overlooked the body the reporter. I don't recall it was mentioned anywhere that his body was found, which made me very suspicious (in combination with something else) and distracted me from the real solution.

Having now read four of his novels, it becomes noticeable how much Penny liked his backstories and background details. Penny wrote and plotted like a historian, which is a double-edged sword as it could easily kill a story. This approach did murder the pace of Sealed Room Murder to the point where even the admittedly original locked room-trick couldn't save the whole mess, but it certainly benefited Policeman's Evidence with its historical subplot and treasure hunt. Penny's fondness for locked rooms, timetables and intricate, maze-like plots probably kept him in check, but shudder to think what the result would have been had he been more interested in characterization than plotting. Thankfully, we got the Rupert Penny puzzle edition.

Penny knows how to occupy his reader's attention with the various plot-threads and then abuse it to distract them, although not always fairly, but the equal amount of attention given to the clues makes it a pardonable offense. 

The Lucky Policeman is, technically speaking, a sound piece of work with the who, why and how neatly coming together in the last chapter, preceded by a false-solution with an excellently handled twist, but I couldn't help feel a little let down – as some things turned out to be less inspired than anticipated. For example, I thought the clue of the stockings was much better than the shoe business.

So, all in all, The Lucky Policeman is a technically-sound, fair play detective novel with enough clues and red herrings to keep you busy for three or four hours, but, somehow, it wasn't quite as convincing or satisfying as it could have been. And while its light years ahead of Sealed Room Murder, I wouldn't place it above either Policeman in Armour or Policeman's Evidence. That being said, The Lucky Policeman still offers a highly unusual take on the GAD-type serial killer and it definitely helped that the murderer's identity was somewhat off the beaten path, which makes it well worth the attention of every fan of puzzle-oriented mysteries. Beale is starting to grow on me as a character ("Damn! I never thought of that"). You can expect more Penny in the future.

Locked and Loaded, Part 2: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

I cobbled together a hypothetical anthology in a 2019 blog-post, "The Locked Room Reader XI: Locked Out," which comprised of short impossible crime and locked room stories that were unjustly overlooked, or ignored, by editors and never appeared in any of the well-known, locked room-themed anthologies – published between 1968 and 2020. I ended the post with a personal wishlist filled with obscure, long out-of-print stories with intriguing and promising-sounding premises. Why wait for an anthologist to get the hint and get to work on a personalized anthology? 

Last year, I reviewed seven, relatively obscure, short stories under the title "Locked and Loaded: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories," which included an item listed from my original wishlist. Alexander, of The Detection Collection, deserves all the credit for helping me in my, uhm, scholarly pursuit. This time, he helped me cross even more titles from the big list. So let's get started!

Table of Content:

Edgar D. Smith's "Killer in Khaki" (1941)

James Yaffe's "Cul de Sac" (1945)

Bruce D. Pelletier's "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1961)

Don Knowlton's "The Room at the End of the Hall" (1961)

Edward D. Hoch's "The Weapon Out of the Past" (1980)

John Hudson Tiner's "The Preacher and the Locked Shed" (1990)

 

Edgar D. Smith's "Killer in Khaki" was originally published in the February, 1941, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly and reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine of August, 1948. EQMM introduced the story as "one of the most ingenious variations" on "the always fascinating theme of the invisible man," but equally fascinating is the backdrop of the story. 

"Killer in Khaki" takes place in an army boot camp, located in the Canadian Rockies, where a man who should never have been a soldier has blended with the rest of his khaki-clad comrades and is now "moving with a quiet stealth" through the camp – knifing and bayoneting soldiers right and left. Someone who can "kill in the presence of a sentry" and "then vanish under everyone's nose." The bodies continue to litter the camp grounds until Private Enly realizes they've "gone about solving this case in the wrong way" and corners the elusive killer. I don't think the solution to the how, or who, is quite as ingenious as the introduction suggests, but the overall story is pretty solid and can only be compared to John Dickson Carr's massively underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955). 

James Yaffe's "Cul de Sac" appeared in the March, 1945, issue of EQMM and is one of half dozen short stories the then teenage prodigy wrote about Paul Dawn, of the NYPD, who's the head and sole member of "an obscure office of the Homicide Squad." An office known as the Department of Impossible Crimes.

Paul Dawn is "the foremost authority" on "murderers who disappeared as if by magic, corpses in impossible positions" and "all the headaches that surround the locked room." The problem brought to him in "Cul de Sac" concerns a spy who had been trapped by two policemen in a cul-de-sac with an incriminating document on him, but the man had been searched, X-rayed and practically turned inside out without result. Nor were there any places in the cul-de-sac where the document could have been secreted. Regrettably, the solution has a glaring flaw and Robert Adey mentioned in Locked Room Murders (1991) that in a subsequent issue of EQMM, the Yaffe and the editor apologized for not knowing the trick would never work. And that makes it the weakest story of the lot.

Bruce D. Pelletier's "The Hedgehog and the Fox" was published in the April, 1961, issue of EQMM and combines the armchair detective story with the locked room mystery to craft an impossible crime tale in the tradition of Carr, G.K. Chesterton and Paul Halter – which were threatened with extinction in the sixties. The hedgehog and fox of the title are Inspector Ishikawa, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and a professor of Moral Philosophy, John Balfour. Inspector Ishikawa called upon Professor Balfour to sound him out on "how it is that an old man can be stabbed in full view of people," during a closed door conference, "without even one of then knowing he was dead." Let alone having seen the murderer plunging the knife into the victim.

Admittedly, the mechanics of the impossible murder can be considered as fairly routine and not very difficult to solve, but what makes it standout is the philosophical underpinnings (religious and political) of the crime, which governed the actions of both the murderer and victim. Professor Balfour understands these philosophical underpinnings are as important as the physical clues and dovetails them to reveal a beautifully reasoned, somewhat Chestertonian, solution to the murder. So very well-written short story with an excellently realized backdrop and should be considered for inclusion in a future locked room anthology.

Don Knowlton's "The Room at the End of the Hall" was published in the July, 1961, issue of EQMM and is a fine example how a changing world opened, not closed, new avenues to explore. You just have to know your way around a plot to find them. 

"The Room at the End of the Hall" was published EQMM as a Crime Story and right up until the solution it plays out like a serious crime drama with some psychological touches as the protagonist seems to be going mad – one way or another. One night, Gerald Cartright is stumbling home from a class reunion with more than one drink behind him when he comes across a house. The house is in complete darkness except for "a brilliantly lighted room at the far end of the house" and, peeking through the window, Gerald can look down into a room at the end of a hallway. And what he witnesses, sobers him up immediately.

Gerald sees a beautiful woman standing in the center of the room with a tall, sinister-looking man standing behind her and he plunges a knife, up to the hilt, between her shoulder blades. She sank to the floor and the lights went out! Gerald hastened to the local police station and they smelled alcohol on his breath, but, to be sure, a constable goes to the house to investigate and finds that everything is quiet and peaceful. There's neither a body to be found in the house or a room brilliantly lighted by a big chandelier. So what did he witnessed? The police is willing to dismiss the incident as a drunken mistake, but words get around the "overgrown village" and begins to have serious consequences for Gerald's personal and professional life. Because he's either crazy or a drunk.

I instinctively guessed the solution, but dismissed it very quickly as it didn't appear to fit the tone of the story. Nonetheless, it turned out to be correct and some might find it a touch to light as an answer as to what, exactly, caused the disintegration of Gerald's marriage and career. Still a good, well-written crime story that interestingly used the time-honored locked room trope as a framing device for a psychological crime/suspense story. 

Edward D. Hoch's "The Weapon Out of the Past" was published in the April, 1980, issue of EQMM and stars his reputedly 2000-year-old paranormal investigator, Simon Ark, who believes he's destined to do "battle with Satan himself." Until then, Ark brings light in all kinds of weird, or seemingly impossible, crimes and inexplicable occurrences. "The Weapon Out of the Past" brings one of those weird, long-forgotten incidents to the present when an old, recently discovered, diary gives an account of a raid on a farmhouse in 1755. A raid locally remembered as the Battle of Lonely Tree during which an Indian hunting knife, "hurled by a French colonel," vanished in thin air. There was a "hint of witches and dark doings" about the vanishing knife, which is exactly what attracted Ark's attention.

Two hundred and twenty-five years later, the farmhouse has become the scene of a lively pageant reenactment of the skirmish with one notable difference: someone, dressed as a Colonial officer, is struck down by an old hunting knife in the very spot where it had vanished mid-air all those years ago! A wonderful premise and Hoch nicely tied to the two problems together, but I preferred the treacherous, double-layered solution to the vanishing knife more than how it reappeared two centuries later. On a whole, it's a good and solid Hoch story with a clever historical clue and red herring. I also liked how Ark had to conduct his investigation while people dressed as soldiers and Indians were running around the place and rubber-tipped arrows showered from the sky.

John Hudson Tiner's "The Preacher and the Locked Shed" is a short-short purely focused on the locked room puzzle and has, to my knowledge, appeared only in the December, 1990, issue of EQMM. The titular, nameless preacher is "legally insane" and the ethical adviser of Freedholder Enterprise. During a weekly staff meeting, the preachers hears of their intention to sack the company's ground keeper as the person responsible for the equipment in the shed, which he closed and padlocked on Friday evening – only to discover on Monday that everything of value had been stolen. Even the garden tractor was gone! I think seasoned (locked room) mystery readers will immediately recognize the trick, as they'll probably read one or two stories with variations of the trick, but Tiner was the first one to use it... in the 1990s. Hoch has a superior version of the trick that predates this short-short by a good three decades.

Interestingly, "The Preacher and the Locked Shed" only explains how the equipment was stolen, but not who's behind it. The preacher tells the staff that he never promised "to catch a thief," but "merely show a set of circumstances" showing someone else could have looted the padlocked garden shed. So not too bad for a short-short.