The Thirteenth Bullet (1948) by Marcel Lanteaume

Thirteen years ago, the name of Marcel Lanteaume figured on, what's objectively, the best internet best-of list of the 2000s, John Pugmire's "A Locked Room Library," which described him as an impossible crime author who, like so many French mystery writers, appreciated "a touch of fantasy" in his crime fiction – which remained tantalizingly inaccessible to non-francophone readers. That is, until last October. 

Lanteaume's La 13e balle (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948) is the latest translation published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International and comes with an introduction by French anthologist and genre scholar, Roland Lacourbe. A short introduction that will both fascinate and horrify every obsessive locked room reader.

Lacourbe presents Lanteaume as a shooting star, "a temporary streak of light in the night sky," who wrote "three exceptionally works" between 1942 and 1944 to battle boredom during his captivity in a German prisoner-of-war camp, which actually reminded me of Joseph Commings – who wrote short stories to amuse his army comrades. Lacourbe compared Lanteaume to the "brilliant and fleeting" wonder of Hake Talbot, because they both disappeared after only a few novels. La Labyrinth published his three novels following the liberation of France and contained "a mouth-watering list of books in preparation," but they were never published following poor sales numbers. Disappointed with his failure, Lanteaume destroyed the unpublished manuscripts with such intriguing-sounding titles as Crime rue des fantasques (Crime in Weird Street), Le barbier massacré (The Butchered Barber) and La plaine sous le soleil (The Plain Under the Sun). Lost forever!

So, lamentably, we have to add Lanteaume's name and about a handful of his novels to the shelves of the Phantom Library of Lost Detective Stories. Thankfully, one of his novels that was published finally made its way, through LRI, to our our shelves. 

The Thirteenth Bullet is, to quote one of the characters, "pure pulp fiction" reminiscent of Alexis Gensoul and Charles Grenier's La mort vient de nulle part (Death Out of Nowhere, 1945), John Russel Fearn and Gerald Verner. One of those wildly imaginative, hardly credible, but terribly fun, fairground rides that chases a serial killer who threatens the stability of France.

An average looking, clean-shaven man wearing a gray overcoat with a trilby of the same color is often the last person seen with the victims on a growing list of murders, usually harmless bachelors, whose only tangible link are the bullets that ended their lives – which were all fired from the same pistol. The press christened the murderer the man in gray, but, as the bodycount rises, the murders begin to have political implications. So the noted biologist and criminologist, Professor Fernand Richard, is asked to take charge of the case. Professor Richard predicts the man in gray is going to give them a lot of trouble, because murderers who think they're clever complicate things. This killer simplifies, "a sign of superior men," with clean and simple murders (a bullet to the heart). And he was right.

The first half of the story mostly consists of "running to prefectures of police all over France" to look "at bodies of males of various ages" and "questioning witnesses who have heard nothing and seen nothing." These dead men are nothing more than names in the story with exception of the shopkeeper, René Grandjean, who's described as a neighborhood detective with "astonishing powers of deduction." René Grandjean had used his deductive skills to solve baffling crimes "based on simple indications in the newspapers" or more "practical problems brought to him by his friends." So a whole series of untold armchair detective stories about a sharp-minded shopkeeper cruelly ended here with the detective falling prey to a serial killer or did get one or two of his stories get told? But they were among the destroyed manuscripts. These are the kind of questions that keeps an unrepentant fanboy, like myself, awake at night.

Anyway, the bodycount is close to touching double-digits before Professor Richards discovers something that puts them on the trail of the next victim, but they arrive too late and find another victim. But this time, the murder was committed in a house locked and bolted on the inside with steel shutters covering the windows. A murder with far reaching consequences that turns this almost routine serial killer story into a ripping pulp yarn that stockpiled wild twists and far-fetched turns.

Firstly, the murder in the locked house brings the real detective into the story, Bob slowman, who has "a prodigious intuition" allowing him to reach a conclusion Professor Richard "can only arrive at after fastidious and methodical effort." Slowman is a detective halfway between Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake who makes some astonishing deductions about the locked house mystery, which places a crown witness in their hands. A witness who has to be protected at all costs. So they decide to place him inside an impenetrable bunker.

A bunker with walls and ceiling a meter thick and four meters of earth on the top and around it. The floor is a concrete slab and the thick, steel door has two bolts on the inside and can only be opened two keys – one of them in possession of the Gouverneur Militaire de Paris. Sentries are placed all around the bunker. Nobody could have gotten inside to kill their prized witness, but the next day they have to cut through the door frame with a blowtorch. What they find inside is a familiar scene: a dead man with a bullet in his heart. I can see why Pugmire picked The Thirteenth Bullet to translate. The premise alone is great and while the solution has a core element locked room readers will recognize, Lanteaume unexpectedly turned the idea on its head. It also helped a lot that the locked room-trick is the strongest clued part of the plot. You can't figure out what peculiarity connects all the victims together or how that links up with the fabulous motive, but there are definitely clues to the locked room-trick. And when you know how it was done, you know who has done it. Or so you think. Lanteaume keeps throwing twists, surprises and dangers before, during and after the unmasking of the "super-criminal" who had terrorized an entire nation. 

The Thirteenth Bullet is a glorious, unapologetic flight of fancy and can stand with the best pulp-style locked room mysteries, but you have to appreciate Fearn and Verner to be able to appreciate Lanteaume. I sure did. Hopefully, translations of the other two novels by the French Talbot will not be far behind.

In Plain Sight: Arthur Porges' "The Invisible Tomb" (1967) and Edward D. Hoch's "The Flying Fiend" (1982)

I've not done as many single, or uncollected, short story reviews in 2020 as in the previous two years and, consequently, the number of short stories, mostly locked room mysteries, on my to-be-read list has swelled considerably – which means I'll probably do another anthology post towards the end of the year. But for now, I bring you two stories from two masters of the short detective story, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges.

Porges' "The Invisible Tomb" was first published in the February, 1967, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and is one of only four stories in the short-lived Julius Morse Trowbridge series.

Trowbridge physically resembles "a dissipated gnome badly hungover from too much fermented toadstool juice" with a vast, pallid face, but "inside the big, bullet-shaped head was a remarkable brain" – packed with "esoteric knowledge instantly available on call." Once he had been a child prodigy, graduating from Harvard at fourteen, until he broke down and fled the academic world. Now he lived as a 50-year-old man in "a ramshackle house," crammed with books, "where he acted as a kind of neighborhood Solomon" by handing out free and usually quite good advice "to all those who asked for it."

One of the people who regularly consults him is a policeman, Captain Gregg, who's often confronted with "seemingly impossible puzzles" involving "tricky hiding places."

This time, Captain Gregg is stumped by the inexplicable disappearance of a woman, or rather the disappearance of her body, because he knows her husband killed her. Neighbors heard them fighting again, before everything went eerily quiet. He claimed she had simply walked out of the house, but nobody had seen her leave and he had no opportunity to bury, or dispose, of the body around the house – a roomy suburb with miles of tidy lawns. So the body had to be somewhere in the house, but the police had searched the place for hours without finding anything. And they returned several times to see if they could catch the whiff of a decomposing body. But even that was missing.

"The Invisible Tomb" is only five pages long, closer to a short-short than a short story, but there are enough clues and hints to enable the reader to make an educated guess where the titular tomb is located. Not a classic of its kind, but a good and solid story that's perfect for its short length. I've always loved these type of impossible crime tales about invisible hiding places, phantom pathways and Judas windows that can only be used by criminals and detected by detectives.

On a related side note: I recommend everyone who's new to Porges to read the article "A Talent to Burn: A Guide to the Mystery Fiction of Arthur Porges" by Richard Simms. Porges was a massively underrated mystery writer who deserves to be rediscovered!

"The Flying Fiend" was originally published in the mid-July, 1982, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and is part of Hoch's short-lived series of lighthearted tributes to the Great Detectives of the Golden Age, embodied by Sir Gideon Parrot (pronounced parroe), whose name recalls two of the all-time great detective characters – John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Two of the five stories in the series are full-blown homages to the impossible crime story.

"The Flying Fiend" finds Sir Gideon Parrot on holiday on a small island retreat in the Strait of Georgia, on the American-Canadian border, where he learns upon arrival that a maniac is terrorizing the cluster of islands. Several weeks ago, the body of a young man was found on the beach with his throat cut, but there were no footprints except his own leading up to the spot. So everyone figured the sleeping man had been attacked by a buzzard, "believing he was dead." This was only the beginning.

Some time later, a sunbather was killed under identical circumstances and she was immediately found by her husband, who heard her scream, but, when he arrived, there was nobody else in sight – no other footprints but the victim's own. Another man is killed, on one of the Canadian islands, while all alone on the beach. Sir Gideon arrived in time to be there when the fourth murder is announced. And this time, the murderer left a calling card.

I didn't know exactly what to expect from "The Flying Fiend" going into it and the opening pages suggested that uncovering a hidden link between the victims was going to be more important than the impossibilities. The names of some of the victims, such as King and Quinn, were very suggestive. I began to half suspect that the murderer was in a boat and used a fishing took (like a steel-gaff hook) to kill, but the story proved to be more interesting as an impossible crime story than as a who-or whydunit. Hoch used something here that has turned up in other impossible crime stories from the 1970s and '80s. Amazingly, they all managed to get something completely different out of it, in presentation and solution, with Hoch's contribution being the most conventional of the lot.

So a good and fun detective story for most readers, but an item of interest for locked room and impossible crime fiends!

The Edge of Terror (1932) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Edge of Terror (1932) is the twelfth title in the Anthony Bathurst series and part of the much deserved, long overdue second set of reprints, published by Dean Street Press, which nearly became "the book that got away" as not even Flynn's estate had a copy of it – only copy for sale came with "a stratospheric price tag." Luckily, a generous collector came to the rescue and made his copy available to Steve Barge and DSP.

However, the extreme scarcity of copies explains why The Edge of Terror never figured or was even mentioned in connection with a very exclusive list of vintage detective novels and short stories. The serial killer tale!

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, wrote in his introduction that the serial killer "posed a problem for the writer of the pure mystery," mainly centering on the motive, which leaves the writer with "two primary options." The victims are either linked or picked at random. The locked room mystery, the closed-circle of suspects and the dying message as restrictive tropes, but, compared to the serial killer, they're open worlds that are still being explored today. And how ironic it's that the serial killer has become a staple of the modern crime novel.

Now, to be honest, the giants of the past were very hit-and-miss when trying to tackle the serial killer with Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949) standing as the iconic, Golden Age serial killer novels, but John Dickson Carr's Captain Cut-Throat (1955) and William D. Andrea's The HOG Murders (1979) found two nifty variations on the two previously mentioned options – cementing a spot right underneath Christie and Queen. But there were also some real stinkers. Such as Philip MacDonald's massively overrated Murder Gone Mad (1931) and Jonathan Stagge's lackluster Death's Old Sweet Song (1946), but opinions differ on those two. Carr heralded Murder Gone Mad as one of the best crime novels of all time (no idea why) and Curt Evans valiantly defended Death's Old Sweet Song against its detractors in the linked review. We shouldn't overlook Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon (1945), which offers the reader an experience all of its own.

So, as said above, the result varies enormously, but where does Flynn's The Edge of Terror rank on the list of Golden Age serial killer novels? Let's find out!

The Edge of Terror is narrated by Dr. Michael Bannerman, village physician of Great Steeping, who six months previously was taken into the confidence of Inspector Goodaker about a threatening warning letter they received. A letter promising to remove "one of the most prominent citizens of your most atrocious town" by "by the 31st day of August next" and “the matter may not end there." The letter signed "The Eagle." They assume it's a hoax or someone trying to stir the pot, but, on August 31, Goodaker calls Dr. Bannerman to tell he had received a second letter announcing the murderer's arrival. And the next morning, Dr. Bannerman receives a second call informing him a milk boy had found the body of Walter Fredericks in Taggerts Lane with his throat cut.

Walter Fredericks was one of the richest men in the district and owned, among other things, two big cinemas. So the murderer couldn't have picked a better victim to create a first-class sensation, but what the murderer couldn't have foreseen is the presence of a holidaying murder-magnet, Anthony Bathurst, who's immediately roped into the case by the Chief Constable. When the murderer strikes down another member of the Frederick family, the motive appears to be a personal one, but a third murder seems to break the link. It's this third murder that's the most interesting of the lot.

Fredericks owned two cinemas and in one of them, Beaufoy Cinema, the people in attendance were startled by "a piercing scream that was easily separable from the "talkie" to which they were listening." The body of the girl in charge of the confectionery counter was found lying close to the top of a flight of stairs with a knife wound.

John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and Pattern of Murder (2006) made me wonder if there were any more detective novels with a cinema setting, which was actually rarely used, but have since found several additional titles – one of them being another DSP reprint, Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943). The Edge of Terror definitely belongs on that list and gives the reader a brief, but welcome, peek behind the scenes of a 1930s cinema through the questioning of a uniformed boy who sold chocolates and cigarettes to the patrons ("on a tray suspended from his neck") and found the body. This leads to the clue of "little blurred blot of pink cream" that "is going to bring a man to the gallows."

There's not much more I can tell about the plot, because, as Steve noted in his own review, The Edge of Terror is something of fairground ride of novel, but have to compliment Flynn for his use of a neighborhood patrols as a response to mounting body count. A logical response to a vicious killer roaming a small community that's too often absent in these kind of serial killer stories, e.g. Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1997). Secondly, Flynn once again shows here that he was to the false identity what Christopher Bush was to the unbreakable alibi and Carr to the locked room mystery. It's fascinating how some writers succeeded in making their names synonymous with certain tropes.

My sole complaint is that the finer details of the motive, which is the linchpin of the serial killer story, were obscured until Bathurst's explanation, but, on a whole, it was tremendously fun read and a good, early attempt to wring a proper detective story out of the work of an apparent homicidal maniac. The Edge of Terror doesn't soar to the same heights as The ABC Murders, Cat of Many Tails or Captain Cut-Throat, but it's mostly certainly a cut, or two, above most of the other, lesser-known Golden Age serial killer novels. Flynn was great!

Edward D. Hoch: The Bullet from Beyond and Other Ben Snow Tales

Edward D. Hoch wrote nearly a thousand short stories and created a retinue of detective characters, some with more storied careers than others, who were, as Mike Grost so astutely described it, custom designed "to personify different mystery subgenres" – allowing him to write or indulge in any kind of detective story and trope. Hoch pretty much used his series-characters as a set of skeleton keys to go from the locked room mystery to the historical mystery, police procedural or the spy story. Clever guy!

So everyone has their own favorite series-character, or characters, that tend to reflect their personal taste to some degree. Unsurprisingly, my personal favorite is Hoch's 1930s New England country physician, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who exclusively solves locked room murders and other seemingly impossible crimes. Dr. Hawthorne is nipped at the heels by Ben Snow and Nick Velvet.

The most important difference between these three divergent characters, a country doctor, a gunslinger and a professional thief, is that there have been multiple short story collections featuring Dr. Hawthorne and Velvet, but only one that stars Snow – namely The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997). Since C&L have no immediate plans to publish a second volume, I decided to make up my own collection (all in my head) with uncollected stories.

Ben Snow is a turn-of-the-century gunslinger roaming the Americas around the time modern civilization began to encroach, and tame, the Wild West, but not without a fight. Old customs and legends lingered on, up and down, those dusty trails. Such as Snow's remarkable resemblance to that notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid, who had been reportedly shot and killed in New Mexico! So he regularly comes across people who either want to take a crack at the ghost of Billy the Kid or hire the fastest gun in New Mexico.

I assembled a six-shooter loaded with, as of now, half-a-dozen uncollected Ben Snow tales with story titles or plot descriptions that sounded promising. Yes, my selection includes more than one locked room and impossible crime story. Let's hit the trail!

"The Victorian Hangman" appeared in the August, 1988, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) to the town of Oceanfront, California, where he's hired by the owner of the Oceanfront Hotel, Douglas Rutherford. A guest had apparently hanged himself from the bandstand roof with "the traditional thirteen turns of the rope such as hangmen use," but his wife claims he couldn't even tie a square knot. Shortly after his death, the hotel received an ominous note in the mail: "ONE FOR THE HANGMAN. MORE TO COME." A promise that's kept during Snow's short stay at the hotel and the key to solving the murders is finding the motive linking the victims together. An unusual, but well done, serial killer/whydunit story.

"The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" was published in the June, 1991, issue of EQMM and opens with Snow heading south to avoid the Montana winter, which, one evening, brings him to Buffalo Creek just after sundown. In the gathering gloom, Snow sees with his own eyes a rider, "dressed like a cowhand and urging his horse on with a beating of the reins," who has no face or head! A headless horseman!

Snow meets a local newspaper reporter, Thelma Blake, who tells him that the headless horseman is a recent addition to the town and she has been staking out the place where a regular appears, near the Clayton ranch, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the ghost – which is why he decides to accompany her the next night. They're rewarded with a headless horseman, but, this time, it's not a ghost or someone playing a ghost. It's a headless body riding a horse! Something had just whisked off the head as he rode, but there's no sign of a wire. Very clever to immediately eliminate the possibility of a stretched wire, because it added to the overall mystery.

I'm not sure whether, or not, to classify "The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" as an impossible crime story, but the explanation is excellent and has a first-class, double edged clue alluding to both the who-and how. The answer to the subplot of the ghostly horseman places the story squarely Scooby Doo for grownups territory. One of the better stories in the series with a solid plot, clever clueing and a satisfying end.

"The Granite God" was published in the June, 1995, issue of EQMM and is a minor story, compared to the others reviewed here, which begins when Snow is hired by a retired cavalry officer, Colonel Faraway, to bring back his maid, Esmeralda. Colonel Faraway tells Snow she had "gone to the mountains to see the Lord." The mountain in question is near a silver mine, where they were blasting rocks, when the image of God appeared on a slab of granite. So people began to flock to the granite image, which is where Snow finds Esmeralda, but she's stabbed to death while kneeling in front of the image. I appreciated what Hoch tried to do here, but somehow, it left me completely underwhelmed. So moving on!

"The Bullet from Beyond" was published in the August, 1998, issue of EQMM and brings a creature to turn-of-the-century Oregon commonly found roaming "musty castles and fog-bound streets" of the Old World – an alleged vampire! Snow returned from the Yukon Territory, in Canada, to Grants Pass where he had stabled his horse five months previously. Something had changed since he was away. Six weeks previously, someone, or something, started killing animals and "the veterinarian who examined them said the blood had been drained out of their bodies." Snow is roped in to confront this alleged vampire, Ray Ridge, who's suspected of having "killed his wife up north about twenty years ago" and now lives as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the woods. But what he gets to witness is an impossible murder.

Ray Ridge is shot in front of his eyes, shots were heard outside, but "the windows were unbroken" and "the walls unpunctured," which means that the three armed men outside couldn't have fired the silver bullet. And the two other people inside the cabin were unarmed. So is there's any truth in the old legend that a silver bullet can penetrate a wall, or window, without leaving a mark and still kill a vampire?

Hoch naturally provides the story with a rational explanation, which is not one of his most ingenious locked room-tricks, but a footnote revealed that the solution was plucked from the pages of history. I checked it and, sure enough, it's true. You can read about it here (spoiler warning). So, on a whole, a pretty decent and readable locked room story.

"The Daughters of Crooked River" was published in the November, 1999, issue of EQMM and has Snow arriving in the middle of a racially charged dispute in the small town of Crooked River, Saskatchewan, part of the Northwest Territories – a place settled a generation ago by French-Canadian hunters and fur trappers. Indian women bore their children, the Metis, who now claim the land as their own. But the railroad has opened Saskatchewan to eastern wheat farmers and immigrants who want their share of the land. A complicating factor in the dispute is the death of the Metis leader, Anatole Dijon, who was shot and killed in his cabin with the door bolted on the inside. Only representative of the law, a Mountie, concluded that “his dog put its paw on the trigger of his rifle and fired it.” But not everyone is willing to swallow that story.

Usually, Snow's detective work is limited to observing and noticing small mistakes or incongruities, which spells the truth to him, but here we actually get to see him do some old-fashioned detective work. Snow tries to reconstruct the shooting in the victim's cabin, before realizing that he approached the locked room problem from the wrong angle. The locked room-trick is a good one and neatly fits the exact circumstances of the murder, but it's a variation on a trick that has been used before in the series. However, it's different and original enough to justify it being reused here.

"The San Augustin Miracle" was published in the January, 2001, issue of EQMM and Snow has drifted south to Tucson, a city of about 7,500 residents, located on the often-dry Santa Cruz River. Snow decides to stay when he hears a balloonist, Pancho Quizas, is en route with an hot-air balloon to give an exhibition, but he's not the only one looking forward to see the balloonist. A gruff, old-school gunslinger, Scooter Colt, is waiting for him with his right hand resting on the butt of his gun, but it never comes to confrontation as Pancho miraculously vanishes from the balloon basket as it descended. This situation becomes even more impossible when an irate Colt begins firing his six-shooter at the sky. Believe it, or not, but "the sky fired back." Colt dropped to the ground with a bullet in his eye!

A marvelous setup for one of those rare, two-way impossibilities with the strength of the solution laying in how these two impossibilities, minutes apart, connect and not how Pancho disappeared or how Colt was shot – which, by themselves, are nothing special. But with everything stitched together, you have a good and entertaining detective yarn.

So, all in all, my random selection of stories turned out to be a strong sampling of the Ben Snow series with the quality of stories ranging from outstanding ("The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek") to fairly decent ("The Granite God"), which is not a bad score for a hypothetical short story collection. Hopefully, this review will help a little bit in helping justify that second (official) volume.

A note for the curious: Nothing is Impossible: The Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014) collects a rare crossover story, "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," in which an elderly Snow meets Dr. Hawthorne. I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room mystery and would love to see Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller writing a crossover in which Snow crosses paths with their 1890s San Francisco gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter. I know they'll treat Snow as if he was one of their own characters.

The Kindaichi Case Files: The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case

The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case was originally serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine in 2015 and collected, together with the second half of The Antlion Trench Murder Case, in volumes 6 and 7 of Seimaru Amagi's The File of Young Kindaichi Returns – praised as "surprisingly refreshing" to long-time readers. Since I've always had a love-hate relationship with this series, I decided to pick The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case over the new 37-Year-Old Kindaichi Case Files as my next stop in the series.

The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case brings Hajime Kindaichi, Nanase Miyuki and Saki (#2) to a Western-style mountain inn, in Yozakura Village, where they intend to research an old murder case for their school's Mystery Club. The inn used to be a private sanatorium, in the 1960s, but the arrival of Dr. Kigata Ouryuu coincided with the disappearance of a worrying number of patients.

On a dark evening, in late winter, a night nurse caught him burying a dismembered patient under the cherry blossom trees, where the police later found a private graveyard, but Dr. Ouryuu had already disappeared – never to be seen again. But when spring came, something unbelievable happened. Where the bodies had been buried, the trees bloomed with "crimson-colored cherry blossoms" that "looked like they'd sucked blood." So the story stuck in the public imagination, but everyone in the village prefers to forget it ever happened and that includes the elderly owner of the inn, Aizen Yoshino. She advises the three students to enjoy the crimson cherry blossoms and then return home. But things are never that easy in a detective story!

When they arrive at the inn, they meet Fuyube Sousuke, Etou Chinatsu and Onoda Kyouichirou, who have been friends since their schooldays and visit the village each year during the cherry blossom season. Miyazawa Shouku is an artist who comes each year to paint the crimson cherry blossoms. Toramoto Katsuo is an old man with a facemask and does very little except intently observing the cherry blossoms. The place is staffed by two part-timers, Hazaki Shiori and Shikishima Daigo, and a cook, Kitayashiki Gouzou.

So had this not been a Kindaichi story, there would have been scarcely a hint of the bloodletting awaiting them the next morning when Onoda didn't turn up at the breakfast table. The door of his room is locked and has to be opened with the master key. What they found behind that locked door was a spectacle, even for this series!

Onoda Kyouichirou is lying in the middle of the room with petals covering his body and the branch of a bloodthirsty cherry blossom piercing his heart, as if a small tree had grown out of his chest overnight, but equally curious is a braided cord "tied in a complicated manner" to the branch – a cord with the room key on it. The key is "an old model, German-made key" with a complicated design that's hard to duplicate and the master key was kept in a safe. A safe to which one person held the key and another the passcode. And with the windows securely fastened, Kindaichi and Inspector Kenmoichi are faced with a locked room murder.

 

Naturally, the murderer is not done yet and one of the subsequent murders is committed under practically identical circumstances in a locked and guarded room, but with a very different kind of solution. A solution that was audaciously foreshadowed in a much earlier chapter. However, the locked room-tricks are not the main draw of the story and neither is the who or even the well handled why. One of the locked room-tricks can only be described as routine and the other is a daring play on a true-and-tried impossible crime technique, while the murderer (purposely?) stands out in the cast of characters.

So what makes The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case a noteworthy entry in the series is the way in which Amagi toyed and subverted the expectations of long-time readers who are more than familiar with the cliches and tropes of the series.

A good example of Amagi toying with readers expectations is the first page, a one-panel prologue, which made think, "ah, this old song and dance again," but then it was openly admitted to and discussed about a quarter into the story – something that has never been done before in the series. Amagi delivered on the promise with a nicely done spin on the motive that has been done to death in Kindaichi. The identity of the murderer, while a little obvious, proved to have a surprise in store when it was revealed why the murders were presented so bizarrely. But were ultimately very simplistic.

So the (relative) simplicity of the locked room murders were a worthwhile sacrifice, because they served a clear purpose that paid-off in the end. And what a coincidence, I decided to read The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case right after Graham Landrum's The Rotary Club Murder Mystery (1993), which ended up doing the opposite.

All in all, The Bloodthirsty Cherry Blossom Murder Case is not the best title the series has produced, but it's a top-rank title on account of how creatively Amagi played with the expectations of his readers. The story almost reads like a knowledgeable, fan-written pastiche that had fun with the established cliches and tropes of the series. Recommended to fans of the series!

The Longest Pleasure (1981) by Douglas Clark

Last year, I tumbled across the work of Douglas Clark, a British mystery writer, who wrote, what appeared to be, typical post-World War II police procedural novels, but with classically-styled plots crammed with medical puzzles, ingenious poisoning methods and the occasional impossible crime – closely aligning himself with R. Austin Freeman and John Rhode. So you can argue that Clark was the last true Golden Age mystery writer to arrive on the scene.

An anonymous commentator left a handful of insightful comments on my review of the excellent Death After Evensong (1969) and recommended two specific titles, Premedicated Murder (1975) and The Longest Pleasure (1981).

I had already been looking at such promising-sounding novels as Sweet Poison (1970), The Gimmel Flask (1977), The Libertines (1978) and The Monday Theory (1983), but The Longest Pleasure had an unusual and intriguing premise. Curt Evans praised it in his 2016 review as "a smartly designed and original police procedural." So, for once, I decided to listens to my peers instead of diving head first for one of the impossible crime novels in the series and moved The Longest Pleasure to the top of the pile.

The Longest Pleasure could easily have been one of the oddest detective stories I've come across in a long time had it not been for my recent reading of Edward D. Hoch's "The Cactus Killer," collected in Hoch's Ladies (2020), which found a weirdly compelling way to combine a medical and scientific mystery with the serial killer story – poured into the mold of a modern crime novel/police procedural. The focal point of the plot is a string of manufactured outbreaks of botulism that either made people gravely ill or killed them!

The first outbreak occurred on Exmoor where Mr. and Mrs. Burnham with their two children, aged eight and ten, were taking a camping holiday and ate a tin of ham with their tea. On the following day, two students on a walking tour found the family lying around the campsite and their serious condition is aggravated on account that "no medical help had been given until thirty-six hours after the suspected ham had been eaten." And two of them pass away. A second and third outbreak rapidly follow each other and they can all be traced back to strip-cans of beef and luncheon meat. All three of the infected tins came from the same chain of stores, Redcoke Stores.

Detective Chief Superintendent George Masters and DCI Bill Green, of Scotland Yard, have been handed the investigation, but they hardly know where to begin as this particular has a dazzling array of possibilities and avenues to explore – without giving them a proper foothold to get started. One of the first hurdles they have to take is a quasi-locked room mystery and deals with how the culprit was able to send "dollops of botulism bugs" into a can of meat "without puncturing the skin." Botulism spores are "totally anaerobic" and can't tolerate any oxygen, which is why they a can of food from which all air has been dispelled before "they can thrive and produce their exotoxins." There's also the questions how the culprit had been able a pure and rare type of botulism, why this person has been targeting Redcoke Stores and how many more contaminated strip-cans are still on the shelves or residing in "the larders of unsuspecting housewives."

Masters wants to alert the public and warn them against the Redcoke strip-cans, but the higher-up refuse to comply and believe such "a warning would cause a panic" and "a consequent breakdown of medical services," because everyone who has recently eaten from a Redcoke strip-can (potentially millions) would immediately start filling sick. And their demands to be tested would swamp the laboratories. On top of that, Masters doesn't want to help the culprit with vilifying and destroying Redcock Stores ("a national asset"). So they have to work hard and fast to get to the bottom of the case before more people fall ill or die.

The Longest Pleasure has all the ingredients of a modern thriller with dangerous bacterium or killer virus on the loose, but Clark's treatment can almost be described as cold and clinical with research being the primary method used to tackle the problem – which covers a large swath of this relatively short novel. I suppose some would call The Longest Pleasure a fictionalized textbook with Clark acting more as a lecturer than an author. However, the subject matter and how it was cultivated to act as pure and dangerous poison is fascinating enough to keep reading. An approach that betrayed how incredibly close Clark's detective fiction is linked to such scientific mystery writers as R. Austin Freeman, Arthur Porges and the Radfords.

Around the halfway mark, Masters decides to sprint towards a resolution with "a long shot" that reduced the number of suspects from tens of millions to a small and select group of people. A long shot that would have been a decidedly unfair shortcut had the reader not been prepared for it early on in the story.

But, however you look at it, The Long Pleasure is an anomaly that can not be compared to anything that qualifies as a traditional detective story. A detective story in which the victim's are names in newspaper articles or police reports and the murderer does not appear until the end, which also reveals a motive that would actually been more at home between the pages of a serial killer thriller. Instead, the lion's share of the attention goes to a primitive micro-organism and what makes that little rod-shaped bacteria tick. You can safely say that the botulism bacteria is best fleshed out character in the story.

So I don't know whether, or not, to like The Long Pleasure. The book has a fascinating premise and an oddly compelling, if a little dry, approach to the multifaceted problem, but, on a whole, it was not even half as satisfying as Death After Evensong or Plain Sailing (1987) – two genuine neo-classical detective novels. This is why the next stop in the series is going to be The Libertines. A novel promising two poisonings of which one is mathematically and the other physically impossible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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