The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) by Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) is a collection of short stories, originally assembled by Crippen & Landru, reprinted in 2013 as an ebook by The Murder Room and gathered all ten short stories about McCloy's series-detective, Dr. Basil Willing – a psychiatric consultant of the district attorney's office. This volume has all ten short stories, including eight previously uncollected stories, that were written about Dr. Basil Willing. A splendid collections demonstrating McCloy's versatility as both a writer and plotter.

There are stories littered with the conventions of the traditional detective, such as locked room puzzles, impossible crimes and unbreakable alibis, but the post-1940s stories show a willingness to adept to a new world. Resulting in some unusual plots or subject matters. Well, unusual when it comes from a writer so closely associated with the genre's Golden Age.

Most notably, there are not one, but two, stories in this collection dealing with a crime rarely touched upon by classic mystery writers: mass murder. Fascinatingly, there's an extraterrestrial element in both stories and they were penned exactly thirty years apart. So it was interesting to see McCloy revisit these ideas so late in her career and wrote a completely different story around them, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's take down these stories from the top.

"Through a Glass, Darkly" is the opener of this collection, originally published in the September, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), but this novella has already been discussed in my 2011 review of All But Impossible! An Anthology of Locked Room and Impossible Crime Stories by Members of the Mystery Writers of America (1981). So moving on!

The second novella of the collection, "The Singing Diamonds," was first printed in the October, 1949, issue of EQMM and is a quasi-impossible crime story plotted around the UFO phenomena. There are entire shelves of detective stories with supposedly malevolent ghosts, family curses and rooms that kill, but not that many have handled the topic of alien visitations. McCloy here mixed a flurry of UFO sightings with mass murder, possible espionage and government conspiracies.

Mathilde Verworn was one of the eyewitnesses who saw the flat, elongated squares, "like the pips on a nine of diamonds," flying in V-formation at a great height, emanating "a strange resonance" like the humming or singing of "a high-tension wire in the wind," but in the last fortnight three witnesses have unexpected died – which is why she decided to consult a specialist, Dr. Basil Willing. The plot he exposes is a clever, well executed interpretation of a trick as classic as it's pure evil. But the story as a whole was marvelous. From the premise of the flying diamonds and dying witnesses to Dr. Willing getting "a lesson in the manufacture of public opinion" as a high-placed Naval Intelligence officer shows him how they manipulated and distorted the press reports on the flying diamonds. Easily one of the better and more memorable stories in this collection.

"The Case of the Duplicate Door" is a completely overlooked locked room mystery with an unusual publishing history, which when it was released, in 1949, as a separately printed story in the Mystery of the Month series of jigsaw puzzles. You had to put together a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle and the completed picture was a clue to the solution. This is probably why even Robert Adey missed it when he was compiling Locked Room Murders (1991). However, the story was reprinted in the February, 1965, issue of EQMM under alternative title, "Into Thin Air," with an added paragraph to replace the jigsaw clue.

This is the EQMM version of the story with its original title restored and a reduced, black-and-white reproduction of the assembled jigsaw puzzle. Purely as a locked room story, this is a curiosity that put a false solution to good use.

Matthew Rex, President of the Conservative Trust, has absconded with $80,000 in cash and $300,000 in bearer bonds, but he sends a panicky radio gram from Bermuda that he can "explain everything" and that he'll return the following day by private-plane – police is waiting for him when he lands. But when they storm the plane, they only find a fedora, a pair of gloves and a shot glass half filled with brandy. Nobody had left the plane after it landed and the pilot swears his boss had been aboard, but Matthew Rex had inexplicably disappeared along with a briefcase that had been chained to his wrist. This is the point where the story does something that's as clever as it's frustrating.

A perfectly logical, but incorrect, solution is proposed that turned the inexplicable disappearance into an unfortunate accident. An accident is not the most desirable explanation to a seemingly impossible situation, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, but this was a genuinely good, reasonable and acceptable answer – directly linked to the actual solution. A weak, uninspired solution that looked much better than it was, because it was backed up by the false solution. Dr. Willing figured out the trick when he spotted the flaw in this perfectly acceptable explanation.

So this is an uneven, but interesting, curiosity and the only reason why it never made any of the locked room anthologies is its obscurity. Hey, it would be an excuse to put McCloy's name on the cover and you can't keep reprinting "Through a Glass, Darkly."

The next story, "Thy Brother Death," was culled from a 1955 issue of This Week and begins when Dr. Willing is consulted by an acquaintance. Dick Blount found an anonymous letter, addressed to his wife, in the morning mail with ominous-sounding lines of poetry from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Suspicion has fallen on a village girl, who had worked for them as a maid, but was dismissed after a diamond brooch went missing. Dr. Willing wants a sample of her handwriting and accompanies Blount to his private office to get some canceled checks she had endorsed, but, when they arrive, the telephone is ringing. The caller was his desperate wife, Clara, who called to say "someone was prowling outside the house" followed by scream and a gunshot. And then silence.

A good, old-fashioned detective story with more emphasis on the how, rather than the who, which hinged on a clever, but ultimately simple, alibi-trick reminiscent of Christopher Bush. A note of warning: the solution is harder to anticipate for readers today, because the hinge of the alibi-trick is specific to that period in time.

"Murder Stops the Music" was first published in This Week in 1957 and Dr. Willing is tasked with solving the murder of a famous concert pianist, Gertrude Ehrenthal, who was stabbed to death during a village square dance for local charity when the place was suddenly plunged in darkness. I think murderer moved around a little too easily in a pitch-black room with people standing around, but the double-clue of the ill-mannered dog was smartly handled. A good, but minor, story.

"The Pleasant Assassin" was originally published in the December, 1970, issue of EQMM and Dr. Willing is consulted by Captain Aloysius Grogan, of the Boston Police Department, who needs his help with ensnaring a respected academic, Professor Jeremiah Pitcairn. Apparently, the professor is deeply involved in the drug trade and capturing involves a quasi-locked room problem of a warning message being transmitted from a closely observed space (c.f. Edmund Crispin's "A Country to Sell," 1955). However, the plot is paper-thin to the point that it barely exists, but stands out for its open, liberally-minded opinion on marijuana and Captain Grogan even endorsed its legalization ("as long as marijuana is illegal it brings young people it brings young people into contact with the criminal world"). Not what you would expect from a Golden Age mystery writer, but good to see McCloy tried to keep up with the times.

"Murder Ad Lib" was originally published in the November, 1964, issue of EQMM and is an unusual poorly plotted detective story. Dr. Willing is only present as a sharp-eyed, quick-witted spectator. Lt. Carson Dawes, of the Los Angeles Police, knows the murderer's identity and that his alibi has crumbled to pieces, but the murderer is blissfully unaware of these development. So all the police lieutenant has to do is sit back and "let him talk himself into the gas chamber," but he allowed a close friend of the suspect to be present and this person managed to give him a warning message. Dawes is the only one who misses the moment when this happened. The reader can only spot this painfully obvious moment, but decoding the message is impossible. So this is the practically inescapable dud you come across in nearly every short story collection.

"A Case of Innocent Eavesdropping" was originally published in the March, 1978, issue of EQMM and is more of a domestic crime than a puzzle detective story.

Mrs. Jessie Markel is an elderly lady who moves in with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, but her daughter-in-law, Maggie, exploits her from all sides. Maggie has taken full control of her income and has her "scrubbing all the pots and pans that can't go into the dishwasher," running the vacuum cleaner, polishing the silver and babysitting her grandson – which gives her little time or energy for anything else. Maggie tells her friends Mrs. Markel needs this work "to recover her identity." There is, however, something sinister going on the Markel household and Mrs. Markel learns a terrifying secret that ends in murder.

However, the only thing Dr. Willing has to do here is exonerate an innocent man by destroying a lie from a cantankerous, dishonest eyewitness. I didn't dislike this story, but hardly one of McCloy's best works.

"Murphy's Law" is another minor, but enjoyable, story originally published in the May, 1979, issue of EQMM and the structure of the plot recalls Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his thief-for-hire, Nick Velvet. The story begins with Gerald Murphy and Professor Allerton plotting to steal "a small album" of ten ancient Greek coins from a notorious collector, Sammy Bork, which have an estimated value of half a million dollars. Naturally, everything goes wrong and Dr. Willing has to exonerate one of them from a potential murder charge. A good short story with multiple, intertwined plot-threads.

This collection ends strongly with the unnerving "The Bug That's Going Around," originally printed in the August, 1979, issue of EQMM and opens with a covert challenge to the reader. In most of Dr. Willing's murder cases, "the essential clue has been some scrap of rare information," but this time, he solved it with common "scraps of knowledge" accessible "to everybody who bothered to read newspapers." The extraordinary problem here is another quasi-impossible puzzle of a scientific nature and the story is in more than way related to "The Singing Diamonds."

The backdrop of the story is a convention of microbiologists at the Forum Hotel, but an inexplicable epidemic has left five people dead and even Dr. Willing's five-year-old grandson has fallen ill. A bizarre micro-organism has been found in the bodies of everyone who died or fell ill at the hotel, but the problem is that the micro-organism appears to be "a new species," violating all "the laws of evolution by appearing too suddenly," which makes the thing a monster – something literally out of this world! So are these micro-organisms "silent, invisible micro-astronauts," who don't need spaceships, because they can survive "all extremes of heat, cold and distance." An alien killer! And if this is the case, how did they get in the air-conditioning system of a Boston hotel?

Dr. Willing finds a logical and rational explanation for "an impossible micro-organism," which he deduced from a doodle on a telephone pad found at the scene of a murder. A genuinely good, slightly unnerving story of mass murder and a potential extraterrestrial threat. A great closer to a great collection!

So, on a whole, The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing is an outstanding collection of McCloy's short fiction that opened strongly with an all-time classic, a highly original novella, a virtually unknown locked room mystery and good alibi story. After these four excellent stories, the quality tapered off a little bit and had one dud, but McCloy returned to form in the last two stories. Highly recommended!

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) by Soji Shimada

On January 31th, 2019, Pushkin Vertigo is finally going to release the long anticipated translation of Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1981), his second novel to appear in English, which Ho-Ling Wong characterized as a detective story in the vein of "the classics of the good old age" – complete with an entirely original locked room-trick. So I decided to commemorate this upcoming release by rereading his bloody tour-de-force.

Soji Shimada is considered to be "the doyen of the Japanese form of Golden Age detective fiction," known in Japan as shin honkaku, which can be traced back to the publication of his debut novel, Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). A horrific, labyrinthine jigsaw-puzzle involving severed body parts and a seemingly impossible murder.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is the case of "the Umezawa serial murders" which took place in Japan in 1936. One of the most elusive mysteries in the annals of crime and the story opens more than forty years later, but is prefaced with the last will and testament of Heikichi Umezawa – a mentally unbalanced artist with a deranged plan. Umezawa is obsessed with creating "the perfect woman of supreme beauty," Azoth, who wants to bring into existence. A dark, demented fantasy requiring the body parts of "six virgins of different zodiacal signs" and fate has handed him the women he needs on a silver platter. Namely his daughters and nieces!

Umezawa begins to plot the genocide of his own relatives and strictly follows the rules of alchemy, in correspondence with the astrological signs of the victims, but he's inexplicably murdered before he could carry out his plan. Umezawa had installed iron bars over the windows and skylights. The door of the studio was "a Western-style, single-panel door" that opened outwards with a bar to secure it from the inside, which was in place when Umezawa was murdered. So how did his murderer enter or leave the studio?

However, this is only the beginning of what would become the "genocide of the Umezawa family" and "consist of three separate cases."

The second case is the murder of Umezawa's stepdaughter, Kazue Kanemoto, who was raped, beaten to death and her rooms were ransacked, which made it look like "a run-of-the-mill murder" to the police – probably by a burglar. You would think rape was the one crime you can't possibly use in an traditionally-structured, plot-driven detective novel, but Shimada actually shaped a disgusting rape-murder into an important piece of the puzzle. Finally, there are "the Azoth multiple murders." Someone had carried out the dead artist's instructions to the letter.

Over a one-year period, the six mutilated, often badly decomposed bodies of Umezawa's daughters and nieces are found buried all over Japan. The bodies were found in places corresponding with the metallic elements specified in Umezawa's notes. All of the victim's were missing various body parts. This added one last, tantalizing question to the case: was the murderer successful in "creating the monster," Azoth, and where's this patchwork body buried?

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders never stopped to capture the imagination of the public and it periodically became "a fad to try to solve the mystery," but the case remained unsolved for more than forty years. Until one day, Kiyoshi Mitarai, an astrologer, fortune-teller and self-styled detective, received a client with a letter from her dead father. The letter throws a new light on the baffling aspect of the disposal of the bodied, but the woman wants Mitarai to unearth the whole truth. And clear her father's reputation.

What follows is arguably one of the most composed, cerebral detective stories ever written. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has a plot involving dismembered bodies reminiscent of Resurrection (1999) and can go toe-to-toe with Michael Slade's Ripper (1994) when it comes to gory murders, but the story takes place forty years after the killings. So the investigation is purely focused on solving the puzzles.

Mitarai spends most of the first half listening to the narrator, Kazumi Ishioka, who's "a huge fan of mysteries" and gives him all the details of the case. During these parts, Mitarai comes up with good, but wrong, explanation for the locked studio that the police took a month to work out – helped by letter-writing armchair detectives of the public. A false solution that was obviously modeled on a very well-known short story by an English mystery writer. Once he has been filled on all the details, Mitarai takes Ishioka to speak with as many people as possible who were linked to the murders. And are still alive. The only real hitch they have in their investigation is that circumstances imposes a deadline on them, but the focal point remains piecing together all of the pieces.

My copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is the original 2005 hardcover Stone Bridge edition and is littered with crime-scene diagrams, maps, charts and illustrations, which helped selling the historical aspect of the 1936 murders. There are enough maps, charts and illustrations to give you the idea of a murder-mystery presented as a case-file story. I appreciated the story had not one, but two, challenges to the readers that fitted the pure puzzle aspect of the plot.

There are, however, one or two blemishes. Firstly, the solution to the problem of the locked studio is fairly routine and surprisingly uninspired. I remember being slightly more impressed with it the first time around, but then again, there are nearly a thousand locked room stories between my first and second read. So I probably have become a bit harder to impress when it comes to the impossible crime genre. Secondly, the motive is weakly handled and tacked on at the end as an afterthought, which would explain the epilogue because it tried really hard to give the murderer the motivation need to carry out such a risky and insane plan – only it felt like it came way too late in the game. It actually came when the game was already over. The reader should have given hints to the motive a lot earlier in the story.

Nonetheless, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is an impressive debut and the central puzzle of the plot, tying all three cases together, is nothing short of ingenious. Stuff of classics! On top of that, the cleverly hidden murderer is as skillfully handled as John Dickson Carr's tight-rope act in The Plague Court Murders (1934; published as by "Carter Dickson"). Personally, I can't think of a bigger compliment to give to a writer of traditionally-styled detective novels than that.

I'm looking forward to the release of The Murder in the Crooked House and I'll probably be reading, or rereading, another Japanese locked room mystery for my next post. I just have to decide which one.

Ripper (1994) by Michael Slade

Jay Clarke is a Canadian lawyer specialized in criminal insanity and a novelist who writes under the pseudonym of "Michael Slade," a penname he has shared with Rebecca Clarke, John Banks and Richard Covell, who collaborated on fourteen novels about the Special X division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – published between 1984 and 2010. I understand that the series is written on three concentric levels: who-and howdunit form the core of each story that's wrapped in psychological horror tinged with supernatural elements. The outer layer, or outward appearance, is that of a modern-day police procedural. Stories are stuffed with gore. Lots of gore.

So you're probably wondering why a gentleman of taste and a connoisseur of the traditional detective story, like yours truly, is doing with a gory serial killer thriller from the 1990s.

The Special X series was lauded by John Dickson Carr's grandson, Wooda H. McNiven, who praised Ripper (1994) as "a fair play whodunit" in "the Grand Guignol tradition" with one seemingly impossible, ultra-gruesome killing taking place after another and the story is littered with references to the master of the locked room conundrum – who, according to McNiven, would probably have given the book "two thumbs up." Apparently, Carr was an enormous influence on the series and there are two additional titles crammed with impossible crimes.

Crucified (2008) has impossible murders committed on an airborne bomber and a submerged U-boat, while Red Snow (2010) has two locked room puzzles and a dying message. Ellery Queen is another writer who greatly influenced the series. I was tempted to begin with Crucified, but settled on Ripper as it seemed to be one of the more highly regarded titles in the series.

Firstly, I have to say that the writing, structuring and background of Ripper reminded me of Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series, because the plot is steeped in the lore of Jack the Ripper, Aleister Crowley, Tarot cards and Satanism. I suppose the similarities are not entirely coincidental as Fowler started out as a horror writer who has since dabbled in the locked room sub-genre when he began writing the PCU books. Only drawback is that the background material, concerning the shenanigans of Jack the Ripper and Crowley, tend to read like textbook excerpts, which is not something every reader can appreciate, but it didn't bother me at all here – even helping to give to story itself a (sort of) personality. But let's take a closer look at the plot of the story.

The plot of Ripper consists of two, intertwining plot-threads beginning with the gruesome killing of a prominent American feminist, named Brigid Marsh, who was "strangled, stabbed, skinned and strung up like a piece of meat." She was dangling by a hooked chain, spiked into the base of her skull, from the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge. A homeless witness below saw the body come over the bridge and heard the footfalls of two people on the bridge. 

 

Corporal Nicholas Craven of the Mounted Police is the police-detective in charge of the investigation, but, since the victim is a citizen of the United States, he has to contact the Commander of the Special External Section of the Mounted Police (Special X), Robert DeClercq – whose unit handles criminal cases in Canada with a foreign link. This specialized police unit, "staffed by those who'd once spied for the now-defunct Security Service," is another aspect that reminded of me of Fowler's PCU series.

Craven and DeClercq work (more or less) together on the case and their attention is soon drawn to a recently, independently published horror novel, entitled Jolly Roger, which was written by "Skull & Crossbones." Only problem is that the murder preceded the publication of the book. So the book is a direct link to the murderers, but the small-time publisher, Fly-By-Night Press, have no idea who the author, or authors, really are. The only line of contact between the publisher and writer is through a Vancouver postbox. As an interesting side-note: a minor sub-plot of the story is the torture and murder of a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Chas Fowler, who had described Jolly Roger as "the nadir of horror fiction" and an "argument for censorship" – which ended with him getting his head squeezed by mechanical plates until his face split in two and the skull collapsed in on itself. I would really like to know if Slade had a particular reviewer in mind when he wrote that passage.

A second, interesting aspect, of this first plot-thread that should be mentioned is that entomology plays an important role in tracking down the killer. The first victim had been stabbed numerous time in the abdominal region and lice were found there that are normally only found on animals, which are eventually identified as having come from a very specific and endangered animals. This kind of foreshadowed the CSI craze of 2000s and shows how much Slade liked to blur the borders between different (sub) genres.

During this investigation, which takes up half of the book, we get the setup of the second plot-thread.

A woman by the name of Elvira Franklen lives with a gang of cats, all of them named after fictional detectives and mystery writers, and she has been writing "interactive mysteries" since the 1930, but none of them prompted a response like Shivers, Shudders and Shakes: Seance With a Killer – which had been purchased by an unknown buyer and this person had given her strict instructions. A select group of people were to be gathered and brought to Castle Crag on Deadman's Island. Only thing they needed for the charity event was "a real sleuth" and DeClercq had promised Franklen he would provide them one.

Inspector Zinc Chandler was a member of Special X, but he had been shot through the head during the events described in Cutthroat (1992) and, as a consequence, had been sidelined for several years. Unfortunately, the powers that be are reluctant to bring him back into the fold. So DeClercq asks him to go the charity event on Deadman's Island. However, shortly after his arrival there, he quickly stumbles to the conclusion that he has walked into a veritable death-trap as people die left and right in what can only be described as a wholesale slaughter. And several of these killings are of the impossible variety.

A deadly crossbow bolt is fired from a nook in the dining room, where the dust and cobwebs were undisturbed, which has a secondary impossibility of how the antique crossbow could have been fired. As it would have fired itself immediately had it been cocked, loaded and then replaced, because "the heavier weight of the crossbow squeezed the handle toward the stock." There's even an illustration of the crossbow explaining how to operate it. The explanation for this impossibility is deadly simple and finds a new use for a classic locked room technique.

A second impossibility occurs when Chandler witnesses someone entering the Turkish bath, but when he enters only a moment later this person is laying on the floor with his throat cut and a "Y" had been drawn in blood on the tiled-floor – a dying message. Unfortunately, the dying message was rather weak, because it was left unfinished, but the locked room-trick itself was acceptable enough. And these are only two of the murders that took place there over a short period of time. Nearly all of those murders are the result of ingenious and psychotic booby traps that have been rigged up all around the castle.

Japanese edition

A good example of these booby traps is when two of the guests, while having sex in a canopy bed, are trapped inside a net with together venomous baby snakes. Why baby snakes, you ask? The reason given in the book is that adult snakes conserve venom by giving dry bites, but young one (of every species) are barbarians. So, a baby snake, who is frightened by humans, "will empty their poison glands."

So, as you can probably guess, my favorite part of Ripper was the Grand Guignol-style massacre at Castle Crag and this portion of the story reminded me of the mechanical, death-trap house from John Russell Fearn's Account Settled (1949) – which also featured a number of seemingly impossible murders. Only difference is that the murders in Fearn's novel were very clean in comparison the slaughter perpetrated between the pages of Ripper.

Anyway, the Jolly Roger murders and the brutal killings on Deadman's Island turn out to be inextricably linked, which were tied together better than you'd expect from a slasher, with an ending that took its cue from The Burning Court (1937). One of the last lines ("the Hollow Man was hollow no more") really drove home that the author likes Carr.

This has left me in two minds. On the one hand, the graphic serial killer story is not my genre at all, but on the other, the plot was better than it has any right to be. Sure, this is not exactly a neo-Golden Age detective novel, but Slade effectively demonstrated here that even a guts-and-gore-type of thriller can have a degree of logic to it and this is something I really appreciated about Ripper. And the impossible crimes were the cherries that topped this pile of mutilated corpses.

On a whole, I was not entirely blown away by Ripper, but, as a genre classicist, I appreciated Slade's more traditional slant on the contemporary serial killer novel and his obvious love and respect for Carr's work. So you can expect reviews of his other locked room thrillers sometime in the future.

The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews

Recently, Wildside Press published a long overdue anthology, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018), edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews, who collected sixteen pastiches, parodies and short stories inspired by the Dean of the American Detective Story, Ellery Queen – written by such short story luminaries as William Brittain, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges. The anthology has three (short) introductions by the editors, Richard Dannay and Rand Lee.

In their introduction, Pachter and Andrews touched upon the ill-fated publication of The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944), edited by Queen, which was withdrawn when Conan Doyle's estate used "a minor permission snafu" for Sherlock Holmes material used in 101 Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841-1941 (1943) as leverage "to halt all further distribution." They also reveal that the idea for this anthology dates as far back as the early 1970s. Fredric Dannay apparently liked the idea, but it would take four decades before the first version of this anthology appeared in print.

Six years ago, the chairman of the Japanese EQ fanclub, Iiki Yusan, edited and published a 400-page, Japanese-language anthology consisting of parodies, pastiches and homes to Queen – appropriately titled The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2012). So the idea for an English edition was pulled out of cold storage in 2015 and was finally published in early March of this year.

Pachter and Andrews note that the publication of this anthology was their attempt "to close a circle that opened almost 130 years ago" with the publications of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1934) and The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. I believe they succeeded.

Richard Dannay is the son of Fredric Dannay and a copyright lawyer, who briefly points out the legal perils that lay between parodies and pastiches, but ends his introduction with the remark that he welcomes both parodies and pastiches of Ellery Queen as long as they "represent affection and respect." Something I wholeheartedly agree with, because the way in which some alleged writers handles the literary legacy of actual writers borders on the criminal.

Rand Lee is the son of the other half of the EQ partnership, Manfred B. Lee, who very briefly wrote that his father liked pastiches and would have been greatly amused by this anthology.

So, now we got the background and introduction to this anthology out of the way, let's take a closer look at the stories.

Thomas Narcejac's "Le mystère des ballons rouge" ("The Mystery of the Red Balloons") was first published in Usurpation d'indentité in 1947 and has the honor of being the first Ellery Queen pastiche ever written and this is its first-ever publication in English – as well as being the only representative in this anthology of the genre's Golden Age. So we have an actual débutante opening this collection, but one with a hardboiled edge to it. The police of New York City are confronted with a series of murders, which appear to be unrelated on the surface, but a red balloon is found at each scene. One day, a policeman on the grounds of Jonathan Mallory's estate and this time they get to the victim before he can be murdered and they station themselves inside the house. Something that displeases the crusty Mallory immensely. The subsequent events nearly costs Sgt. Velie his life, who's critically wounded, before Ellery uncovers the murderer.

The murderer is rather obvious, but, as stated by the "Challenge of the Reader," detection is not "a matter of guessing" or "stumbling upon the answer by chance." You have to analyze all of the data and clarify issues that seemed unimportant. You might have spotted the murderer, but the next question is how and why these murders were committed. So this story is more of a why than a who-dun-it. Not an out-and-out classic, but I liked it. Solid, old-fashioned Ellery Queen.

I previously reviewed "Dying Message" by Leyne Requel in my 2011 review of Norma Schier's The Anagram Detective (1979).

Jon L. Breen's "The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue" was originally published in the double anniversary issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1999 and Breen tells in his introduction that Dannay and Lee always set their stories in the present-day. Ellery stayed "more or less the same age from decade to decade." So we get EQ in the nineties with references to Star Wars, Y2K and rap music. One of the suspects is even a rapper (Daddy Trash).

Ellery is invited by Gil Castberg to take a trip aboard the luxurious Sea Twin and cruise the Californian coastline. The headline entertainer is a former client of Castberg, Ozzie Foyle, who used be part of a comedy duo, but the partnership imploded and Foyle fully dedicates himself to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan – while his former partner, Jim Dugan, faded into obscurity. All of their grudges come bubbling back to the surface when they're reunited aboard the cruise ship and the result is murder.

Obviously, Breen had fun writing new lyrics for "I've Got a Little List" from The Mikado ("that superior freeloading detective novelist: I don't think he'd be missed, I'm sure he'd not be missed."), but this is not merely a comedic detective story. There's a clever, humorous dying message and an interesting alibi-trick, but I feel the short story format constrained the plot. The story ended rather abruptly and perhaps needed an extra clue or two, because the central clue (dying message) requires a more than passing familiarity with the work of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Still, this was a fun little story and only wished the editors had also included Breen's “The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery,” which I have wanted to read for ages.

Francis M. Nevins' "Open Letter to Survivors" was first published in the May, 1972 issue of EQMM and was written under the tutelage of Dannay, who ripped the original version of the story apart with "a surgical precision" that "was more than justified," and then they "began to build the story up again." Dannay always struck me as pillar of support to everyone who dared to pick up a pen, no matter who they were, and even published stories from teenagers in EQMM. And we'll get to two of those later on in this review.

Contain "Open Letter to Survivors"

"Open Letter to Survivors" is written around a line from Ten Days' Wonder (1942), "there was the case of Adelina Monquieux" and "the remarkable solution" that "cannot be revealed until before 1972," which is studded with Queenian motifs, but the detective in this story remains nameless – even though its obviously him. Ellery is in the middle of writing a book, but concludes that his plot is some vital element and decides to consult "the foremost political analyst of the generation," Adelina Monquieux (pronounced Mon-Q). Monquieux is the mother of three adopted sons, Xavier, Yves and Zachery, who are monozygotic triplets and completely identical right down to their fingerprints. A problem when their mother is murdered during Ellery's visit to their home. So who of the identical triplets committed the murder and what prevented the truth from coming out until 1972?

This is interesting story for sure and how the triplets are used is kind of brilliant, as are Ellery's deductions, but I think the ending makes this somewhat of an anti-detective story. However, Nevins did a good job making hay out of a throw-away reference.

I previously reviewed "The Reindeer Clue" by Edward D. Hoch in my 2011 review of Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Errors (1999).

Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" was originally published in the May, 2007 issue of EQMM, which I have read before, but my opinion of it remains unaltered. Generally, I'm not too big a fan of pastiches, however, "The Book Case" would make my best-of list of detective pastiches, because it feels like it could be part of the actual canon. This betrays that the story was written by two of the biggest EQ fanboys in the United States and Europe.

The story has a contemporary setting and the series-characters have aged or passed away. Ellery Queen is now a venerable, 100-year-old man, who seemed "to move only through the sheerest will power," but not old or helpless enough to look into the murder of Dr. Jason Tenumbra – an oncologist and an avid collector of mystery novels. Tenumbra appears to have left a dying message by throwing all of his Ellery Queen novels on the floor, but the case becomes a personal one when it becomes clear that the children of Djuna are involved. And one of them dies!

Andrews and Sercu not only succeeded admirably in placing their story snugly within the confines of the original series, but also has a very clever and tricky plot demonstrating (once again) that the wonders of modern forensic science has not made ingenious plots in detective fiction obsolete – which made this the standout story of this anthology. Loved it!

By the way, one of the detectives in "The Book Case" is the elderly Harry Burke, who's closing in on his retirement, and he had appeared previously in Face to Face (1967). And the ending tells us what became of Nikki Porter. Just a couple of the nods to the original series.

J.N. Williamson's "Ten Month's Blunder" is a silly, good-natured parody about a character named Celery Keen, who helps his father solve the murder of a pawnshop owner, which cements his reputation as an amateur sleuth across the world. However, when Keen returns from a world-tour of snooping, his father has some unpleasant news for him.

Arthur Porges' "The English Village Mystery" was originally printed in the December, 1964 issue of EQMM and is the first of only two parodies he wrote about a character named Celery Green.

The story takes place in the tiny village of Tottering-on-the-Brink, which only has fourteen inhabitants, but twelve of those have been shot, stabbed, strangled and blown to pieces. Inspector Dew East has been given 48 hours to close the case and, out of desperation, turns to a gifted and well-known amateur detective, Celery Green – who happened to be visiting England at the time. You would expect the solution to be as ridiculous and silly as its premise, but there's a trace of reason to all of this madness. I think this shows, even with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, Porges was one of the masters of the short detective story. Only overshadowed by the King of the Short Story, Edward Hoch.

Dennis M. Dubin was a high-school senior when his short story, "Elroy Quinn's Last Case," appeared in the July, 1967 issue of EQMM and took a similar route as Andrews and Sercu by casting the title-character as an old man. And his last case is precariously balanced on international politics that could set the world ablaze.

The king of Ubinorabia has arrived in the United States "to begin talks about on the huge oil deposits recently discovered in his country," but one of his royal bodyguards has been shot and later an attempt is made on the king himself – who's critically wounded. A bizarre array of clues consist of a Roman helmet, a statuette of two seemingly identical Thai cats, a wooden shoe and a small replica of a mummy case. So Inspector Thomas Valie, Jr. turns to the old maestro for help and the solution takes its cue from a famous EQ short story and one of their lesser-known mystery novels. A story that will delight every reader who loves EQ.

James Holding's "The Norwegian Apple Mystery" is the first of ten stories about King Danforth and Martin Leroy, originally published in the January, 1961 issue of EQMM, who are mystery writers and the creators of the Leroy King series. Apparently, the stories take place during a round-the-world cruise, but they encounter more murderous plots on their extended holiday than when they were writing detective novels back home. I think this first story has a really novel way of telling a detective story.

Danforth and Leroy become intrigued by the "perfectly natural accidental death" of one of their fellow passengers, Angela Cameron, who had choked to death on a piece of apple while reading in bed. They find it an intriguing premise for a detective story and, together with their wives, speculate how this accidental death could have been a cleverly disguised murder. Only to discover in the final sentence that their ideas were spot on. A good and original variation on the how-dun-it.

William Brittain's "The Man Who Read Ellery Queen" appeared together with "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" in the December, 1965 issue of EQMM and is a detective with a warm, beating heart.

Arthur Mindy is an old man living at the Goodwell Home and took a complete collection of Ellery Queen novels with him. Mindy has always dreamed of solving a mystery "just the way Ellery does" and finally gets an opportunity when another resident, Gregory Wyczech, had his precious 1907 ten dollar gold piece stolen, but he caught the thief, Eugene Dennison, in act – only problem is that the coin is not found on him. Even after Dennison stripped naked. Mindy deduces where the gold piece is hidden based on a shaving cut and why Dennison preferred to take the stairs instead of the elevator. The way this theft is resolved gives the story a warm, sweet and sugary ending. And to top it all off, the solution showed this was also a (borderline) impossible crime! What more do you want?

Josh Pachter was sixteen when he wrote "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name" and seventeen when it was published in the December, 1968 issue of EQMM.

Ellery Queen Griffin is the 16-year-old son of Inspector Ross Griffin, of the Tyson County Police Force, who had grown up on "a rich diet of detective fiction" and had named all of his eleven children after a famous detective character. A Griffen child earned his name by solving "a criminal problem in the manner of his namesake," but Ellery had yet to earn his name. There are two problems in this story that could provide that opportunity: who stole the apple pies from Leora Field's windowsill and how was a precious necklace stolen from a locked jewelry shop. This is only nominally a locked room mystery and the solution to the locked shop problem is a bit of a cheat, but the real point is that Ellery (logically) deduces the identity of the thief. And thereby earning his name.

I really liked this story and it should have been the start of a juvenile mystery series with each story concentrating on one of the Griffin children. A missed opportunity, because eleven of those stories would have made for a wonderful collection. If you're reading this, Pachter, I want a Gideon Fell Griffin story. I want it, I want it, I want it!!!

Patricia McGerr was no stranger to turning the conventions of the detective story upside down (e.g. Pick Your Victim, 1946) and "The Last Check," a short story first published in the March, 1972 issue of EQMM, can only be described as a parody-pastiche – as it lands somewhere between the two. A gray area not often frequented by mystery writers. The story is about the murder of Stephen Coleman, a collector of Ellery Queen, who was shot to death in his study, but left a dying message by scribbling his name on a blank check. A clue that appeared either meaningless or implicate every single suspect. Luckily, the policeman on the case, Captain Rogan, is also an avid reader of Ellery Queen.

So who's better fitted for the job of deciphering a dying message, left by a dying EQ reader, than a policeman who also reads EQ? Once again, I liked this story, but the murderer was a little too obvious.

Lawrence Block's "The Death of the Mallory Queen," originally published in Like a Lamb to the Slaughter (1984), is actually more of a Nero Wolfe pastiche than a take on Ellery Queen. Block wrote two novels about a Nero Wolfe wannabe named Leo Haig, Make Out With Murder (1974) and The Topless Tulip Caper (1975), who's assisted by Chip Harrison – a young lad was reinvented as a private detective after appearing in two coming-of-age novels, No Score (1970) and Chip Harrison Scores Again (1971). Reportedly, Rex Stout was not amused with the result.

This short story has Mavis Mallory of Mavis Publications consulting Haig, because she fears being murdered, which happens in the most extraordinary circumstances imaginable. During a panel discussion at Town Hall, held in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Mallory's Mystery Magazine, the lights go out. And when they turn back on, Mallory has been stabbed, shot, bludgeoned and poisoned. The explanation is about as credible as anything you'll see on Monty Python, but that didn't made the story any less fun to read. I really have to look further into this series.

Arthur Vidro's "The Ransom of EQMM #1" was first published online on the Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine website and is a story that'll be especially appreciated by collectors of (pulp) magazines.

Homer Slocum is an avid collector of EQMM from Shinn Corners (The Glass Village, 1954) and owns a complete run of the magazine, up to the latest issue, which attracts the attention of the Shinn Corners Courier, but their article attracted locals to his house – who all wanted to see The Collection. But when he finally got around to putting his collection back in order, Slocum noticed that the Fall 1941 issue of EQMM was missing! The first of more than 800 issues. A $500 dollar ransom note soon follows, but Slocum notices something slightly off about the photograph that accompanied the note. A short, simple, but fun, story.

Finally, Joseph Goodrich's "The Ten-Cent Murder," published in the August, 2016 issue of EQMM and follows the tradition of the modern historical detective story by casting two real-life persons in the role of detectives – namely Fredric Dannay and Dashiell Hammett. According to the introduction, everything in this story is true with the exception of "a slight case of murder." Hammett taught a class of mystery writing at the Jefferson Institute in Manhattan and Dannay used to be an occasional guest lecturer. So why not take this situation and throw in a good murder? It makes sense.

The school registrar, Morris Rabinowitz, was stabbed to death and a closely guarded list of students was missing. The political climate of days plays a role in this story, but, in order to solve this case, Dannay has to figure out why the victim was clutching a dime. And all of the suspects have names that can refer or sound like coins. The explanation to the dying clue a bit of a pun, but acceptable and believable enough in the circumstances of the story.

On a whole, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen is an excellent anthology without any duds. Practically every short story collection or anthology has one, two or three duds, but this anthology has a well-balanced selection of stories and this becomes a real accomplishment on the part of the editors when you realize all of the entries are parodies or pastiches – which are not always known for their high-standard or quality. There were some stories I liked more than others, but not a single one I really disliked. So, if you like Ellery Queen, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen comes highly recommended.

On a last note, I want to direct your attention to a story that was omitted from this anthology, but would have snugly fit in the potpourri section: Donald A. Yates' "The Wounded Tyrolean" (c. 1955), which was based on a Watsonian reference from The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935).