City of Libraries: "The Climbing Man" (2015) by Simon Clark

Simon Clark's novella "The Climbing Man" is a pastiche of Conan Doyle's immortal detective specifically written for an all-original anthology of new Sherlock Holmes stories, entitled The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015), which Brian Skupin listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – describing a honey of an impossibility. This time, it was not the promise of an original-sounding locked room murder that attracted my attention, but the archaeology-theme and backdrop. I love archaeological mysteries and there are not enough of them. The impossible crime here is merely a bonus. 

"The Climbing Man" takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, tasked with stamping out "a vipers' nest" of plunderers determined "to loot Mesopotamia of its ancient riches." A criminal gang who employed Arab riflemen, clad in gray, who passed themselves of as legitimate protection for travelers and archaeologists.

When the story opens, Holmes and Watson have made off with a dhow (sail boat) crammed with stolen artifacts, but the gray-shirts on the riverbank pepper the boat with bullets and they're pretty much sitting ducks – even succeeding in wounding the Great Detective. Only the hand of providence guided the boat away from the gray-shirts, down the Euphrates, "towards one of the most baffling mysteries" they encountered. Holmes and Watson end up at an dig site of two archaeologists, Edward Priestly and Professor Hendrik, where two generations have been working on excavating the subterranean tunnels, basement and vaults of the buried city of Tirrash. A once legendary city referred to as Bibliopolis or the City of Libraries.

Three thousand years ago, the city was attacked and destroyed, but, before the barbarians destroyed and plundered the city, the people emptied the libraries of the clay tablets. These clay tablets were "carefully stored in the basements beneath the houses and sealed shut," which remained intact and undisturbed under the desert sands for most of recorded history. But a perplexing, modern-day mystery is discovered in one of its sealed chambers.

A few years ago, Edward Priestly's brother, Benjamin, vanished without a trace from the excavation site and a week ago, they discovered his naturally mummified body in a place that begs for a rational explanation.

During an exploration of an underground passageway, they discovered one of the many hidden vaults, doorway sealed with stone blocks, which "has not been disturbed in three thousand years" and began their meticulous, scientific examination – cutting a small aperture in the wall to look inside. What looked back at them was Benjamin's dry, shriveled face! A second aperture gave them a better view of the body, but it deepened the mystery only further with a second impossibility. The mummified body clung to the wall, facing the stonework, arms outstretched above his head as if he's climbing or "trying to escape from his grave." So the problem is twofold: how did the body end up in a 3000-year-old sealed and undisturbed chamber with four feet of dust covering the floor and how "the devil was he glued so high up on the wall" like "a gigantic spider?" And to give the problem some urgency, the guards hired by the two archaeologists turn out to be gray-shirts. The game's afoot!

The problem of the body in the underground sealed chamber has, as to be expected from its premise, a two-pronged solution. Firstly, the explanation as to how the chamber was entered is not something that will excite many locked room readers, but how the body ended up stuck to the wall was kind of marvelous. A trick that perfectly fitted, time-wise, with the type of impossible, or weird, detective fiction that being written during the Doylean era of the genre. It's the kind of trick/solution you would expect to find in L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898). Unfortunately, "The Climbing Man" also shares the clunky, uneven clueing of the detective stories from that period. Such as when Holmes was collecting evidence and slipping it into an envelope, but Watson only caught a glimpse of "a glittering item." You have to wait until the solution to find out what, exactly, he found. So you only have some room to do some educated guesswork.

Nevertheless, neither the uneven clueing nor the anti-climatic confrontation with the gray-shirts could spoil this thoroughly entertaining and absorbing story that made excellent use of its archaeological setting. I also appreciate it when a pastiche treats someone's else creation with respect and not unduly temper with the original, which can be simply achieved with Sherlock Holmes by giving him a complicated, knotty problem to occupy "that remarkable brain of his." And that's exactly what Clark did here. 

A note for the curious: "The Climbing Man" was not Clark's first foray into the realm of impossible crimes and locked room mysteries. Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997) contains Clark's "The Adventure of the Falling Star," which is not listed in Skupin, in which Holmes is asked to investigate the disappearance of a meteorite from a collection in a locked laboratory. So, yeah, that story has now been added to my special locked room wishlist. Something else that's now on my wishlist is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes locked room/impossible crime pastiches (Sherlocked!).

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998), which came to my attention when reading a fascinating description of the plot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – a theft from "a locked trophy house" protected with "trip wires, booby traps and a flock of geese." A bit of detective work revealed that two of the three stories are impossible crime tales! So on the pile it went.

I've never been a huge fan of pastiches and only handful of writers, like Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges, wrote pastiches that truly honored or even added to the original source material instead of staining it. Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery Queen is a good example of a pastiche that should considered canon. More often than not, they're nothing more than glorified fan fiction or aspiring authors hitching their wagons to classic, ready-made characters. This is something that's especially true for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which has become somewhat of a cottage industry.

There is, however, a third, much rarer, kind of pastiche. Pastiches with either good plots, ideas or writing that were depreciated by being presented as imitations.

Templeman's three Sherlock Holmes pastiches definitely fall into this category and can't help but feel that these stories would have been better remembered today, particularly among locked room fans, had he created an original detective character – like a modern-day Rival of Sherlock Holmes. Either that or he should have tried selling the impossible crime ideas to David Renwick, because these stories would have worked remarkably well as Jonathan Creek episodes. Something tells me Templeman had at least watched the first season before he began working on the stories.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" is the first of the three stories and opens with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being summoned by Mycroft Holmes to have a private interview with the Prime Minister and a cabinet member, Sir Simon Clayton. Sir Simon has bizarre story to tell of, what could be, either "a huge confidence trick" or "a world-shattering discovery which could topple Empire." Great Britain could be at "great peril" from it.

Sir Simon recently rekindled an old friendship with a crony from his university days, Rodger Hardy, who came from a family of industrialists with "a flair for invention," but the family went bankrupt and the ancestral home, Halam Hall, became a ruin. Rodger had gone abroad and nothing was seen of him for years until, one day, he turned up again to invite Sir Simon, to Halam Hall, where he wished to show him something. And that something was a sight to behold! Halam Hall is "an unbalanced architectural mongrel" that had been flogged over the decades with the whims of fashion and individual tastes, which includes an underground ballroom that was left unfinished and down there ten grinning Chinamen were constructing "a full-sized ocean-going wooden junk" – over fifty feet in length. But why was he spending six months to construct a large boat in a place where there was no hope of ever getting it out?

Rodger asked Sir Simon to come down every month to observe its construction and promises all

will be revealed upon completion. When the time comes, the completed vessel was surrounded by poles and caged in with strands of copper wire, which appeared to make a buzzing sound. Rodger told his friend the junk is being "electrically energised" and invited him to join him for dinner, but, when they returned two hours later, the huge Chinese junk that had taken up the whole space of the ballroom had simply vanished into thin air. A situation that becomes even more impossible when Rodger drives Sir Simon to the River Thames where the newly build ship was floating on the water.

 

So what's the catch? Rodger claims to have invented a way to transpose "matter through space by means of converting solids, by electricity, into waves, which could then be converted back again into the original solid state." And he's willing to part with the secret for the then astronomical sum of one million pounds. British government wants Sherlock Holmes to find out whether they've got the hands on paradigm shifting invention or if they're being trick, which means finding an explanation how the vessel was removed from the underground ballroom to which the door was "too small to allow exit." And how it reappeared on the River Thames.

A neatly posed locked room puzzle cleverly making use of the underground ballroom, because it immediately excluded the possibility that the architectural monstrosity housed two large, identical rooms – promising something more original than a simple piece of misdirection. I'm glad to report that the solution delivered on the promise made by its premise and the locked room-trick made this story the most Jonathan Creek-like in the collection. No idea why it wasn't included in Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Unfortunately, "Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" also has some flaws and shortcomings preventing it from becoming a true (locked room) classic.

Sherlock Holmes only deduces the motive behind the scheme, but has to relay on subterfuge to find out how the vessel disappeared from the ballroom and reappeared again on the Thames, which came at the expense of the clueing. So what should have been a how-was-it-done type of puzzle detective story becomes a story about a detective tackling a massive locked room mystery. You can only make an educated guess how it was done. A second problem is that the story is a little overwritten with modern attitudes bleeding through in certain parts, which is true for all three stories in this collection. Each story could have been told in half the number of pages without compromising the plots. Still a highly enjoyable story with an originally worked out impossible crime.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" is pretty much a (historical) travelogue of the Peaks District, Derbyshire, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are spending a holiday when they begin to hear about the mysterious death of an old, German watchmaker – who was found in his ransacked home with a head wound. The doctor concluded that the wound was not fatal and that he had died of heart failure, but the villagers believed it was "an unnatural death." A believe strengthened by escaped pet raven of the old watchmaker who has been frantically screaming, "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen," around the village. The message of the raven turns out to be a dying message by proxy that reveals where the old man had hidden his money, but most of the story has Holmes and Watson soaking in the local color and history. There's a darkly humorous anecdote about a mischievous parrot and the history of "the plague village," Eyam, which is remembered for the way "the god-fearing folk contained the pestilence" by isolating themselves that stopped the plague from spreading to other nearby villages. Here's to your memory, Eyam.

So a very minor, but readable enough, story with a simplistic, paper-thin plot and a holidaying detective that makes it one of Holmes' least exciting and memorable cases.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" convinced me Templeman is either a schoolteacher or an (amateur) historian, but probably a teacher, because I heard the voice of a teacher every time one of these stories slipped into lecture mode.

The last story is the one that got listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room," in which Holmes is consulted by Viscount Siddems who recently returned from India with a collection of trophies and eastern armory – building a trophy house-cum-armour museum to store the collection. Viscount Siddems had his house burgled and this made him decide to protect his trophy house, built a few hundred yards away from the hall, with "man-traps, trip-wires to set off shot guns" and "a flock of geese." Geese were used in Roman times as watchdogs because the slightest unusual sound would set up "an unholy honking."

However, these securities measures didn't stop a thief from walking up the trophy house, unlocking the door with a key and taking a Japanese shield from the wall without setting off the flock of geese. So the viscount doubled the number of traps, shotguns and fixed bells to the trip-wire, but the thief simply took away another shield. But how?

Just like the opening story, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" shows a lot of ingenuity and originality with how it presents the impossible situation, but this time that's not reflected in the explanation. Such an elaborate setup requires a scrap of cleverness to either put the traps out of commission or circumvent them with a way to keep the geese quiet, but the solution, while perfectly workable and logical, was a little too facile. And underwhelming. Luckily, the reason behind the thefts was good and something Arsène Lupin would have warmly approved of.

So, as some of you probably noticed, my take on the individual stories don't seem to align with the opening of this review, but I believe the flaws and shortcomings of these three stories were enlarged by being pastiches. It comes with certain expectations that Templeman was unable to live up to. But had he created his own detective characters, Templeman could have told his stories on his own terms with the result being something along the lines of Hal White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008), Andrew May's The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) and Stephen Leather's The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). I think originally created detective characters would have softened some of its flaws.

After all, even as pastiches these were superior detective stories, especially the first one, compared to most what was being published at the time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories is not a timeless classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a well intended collection of stories written by an enthusiastic amateur with a commendable interest in locked room puzzles – something that was too rare in the nineties. So recommended to the ferocious locked room reader and addicted Sherlockian who'll read everything with the name of the Great Detective printed on it.

Lifting a Tip of the Veil: Jonathan Creek vs. "Sherlock Holmes"

"All will be revealed in due course."

- People who plot and scheme

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) with Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith)

While the BBC hasn't released any official air dates or synopses for the upcoming Jonathan Creek episodes, Radio Times announces yet another incarnation of the immortal Sherlock Holmes as an enticing plot-thread and rival detective for Creek in the opener of the fifth season.

In a third season episode, Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999), Jonathan Creek's investigation of a possible case of astral projection is hampered by a growing legion of fans, who follow him around like a flock of mimicking lovebirds. This new character, Ridley, is studying criminology and also admirers Creek as a detective, however, Ridley takes his cue from another, even more famous sleuth.

Ridley wears "a black coat, has a thick crop of dark hair and an eye for observing details" and the actor playing the part, Kieran Hodgson, studied Benedict Cumberbatch's recent interpretation of Sherlock for inspiration. Unfortunately, for the fans of Holmes' modern day reinvention, series-creator David Renwick reportedly wrote the episode as a spoof. I suspect from the article Ridley will be somewhere along the lines of the oddball Sherlock from Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Bughouse Affair (2013), which also happens to be a locked room mystery. Radio Times further reports Jonathan Creek is due to air on BBC1 in February.

Well, to pad out this notification, and in anticipation of the upcoming season, I'll post a short list of my favorite episodes as an excuse to babble about impossible crimes. Also known as the part where you can stop reading without the fear of missing anything of importance. 

Jack in the Box (1997)

The standout episode of the first season with an original, satisfying answer for the problem of the retired comedian found dead in the disused nuclear shelter, heavy door locked from the inside, underneath his home. Creek reasons the truth from a toilet basin and a light bulb. 

Danse Macabre (1998)

A well-known and controversial author of sensational horror stories is shot dead on All Hollows' Eve, and her murderer was dressed for the part, clad in a tight skeleton suit, but during the escape from the house the shooter kidnaps the daughter of the victim and they're eventually trapped in the garage. The place is surrounded, but when the door is opened the shooter has disappeared from a locked, windowless room that was constantly guarded. Even if the police should've solved this one immediately, it's still a good trick and overall a very good episode.

Time Waits for Norman (1998)

Read my full review of this episode here. 

Black Canary (1998) 

A once famous illusionist, known as the "Black Canary," apparently took her own life after chasing away a limping man dressed in rags from the snow covered garden, which was witnessed by her wheelchair-bound husband, but a post-mortem reveals his wife died hours before her committing suicide. The man in rags he saw limping away from his wife must have been lighter than air, because the blanket of snow was bare of any footprints! I still think this the series' masterpiece. 

Satan's Chimney (2001) 

The seemingly impossible murder of an actress during a movie shoot, struck by a bullet fired through a window without breaking the glass, leads Jonathan Creek to an ancient castle with a room where the devil consumed the souls blasphemers. I did not think much of the first plot-thread, but the miraculous disappearance from the dungeon room and the whodunit-aspect were very well put together.

The Tailor's Dummy (2003) 

A truly great episode from the last, regular season until the irregular, seasonal specials took over and begins when a bad review leads a designer to commit suicide, which sets a delightfully piece of a Carrian revenge in motion – in which a man changes his physical appearance in matter of seconds.

Well, I hope to be back before long with a regular review, but a few orders began to arrive around the same time (I was behind on a few series) and now I’m going through something of an existential crisis. I'll sort it out though.

Learning from the Best: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes

"The trouble is that as usual you are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment."

- Nero Wolfe (Fer-de-Lance, 1934) 

"Dupin was a very inferior fellow" and "by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine," opined Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) after his trusty companion, Dr. John Watson, mentioned that Holmes reminded him of Dupin – remarking that he had "no idea that such individuals did exist out of stories." Holmes may not have recognized an equal in Dupin, but the trick his Parisian counterpart employed to deliver the killer in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to his doorstep still worked for Holmes half a century later. No. I'm not referring to their first case.

First we've to go back to Paris, 1841, where the terrific shrieks rouse the inhabitants of the Rue Morgue to the doorstep of Madame L'Espanaya and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L'Espanaye, but the premise is secured from within and the gateway had to be forced with a crowbar. The cries had ceased by this time, however, when they moved upstairs they hear a pair of rough voices, but when the second and last door was broken down there was nobody there that was alive to tell them what had happened. Madame L'Espanaya was decapitated, Camille stuffed up the chimney and a crime-scene that resembles a battle field without an apparent escape route for the murderer – leaving the police baffled. All except for Dupin, who sees the plain truth in the sheer impossibility and brutality of the case as well as some great deductive reasoning on the multilingual perception of the voices that were heard from the locked, upper floor room.

One of Sherlock Holmes' cases of lesser repute, "The Adventure of Black Peter," collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903), provided the Great Detective with a problem that featured similar outré characteristics and his method echoed Dupin.

The retired Captain Peter Carey earned his nickname, "Black Peter," for his villainy and was known the flog his wife and daughter through the park in the dead of night and had a private retreat, a wooden outhouse he called the "cabin," which is where he died – pinned to the wall like a butterfly with a harpoon. Naturally, Holmes is ahead of the police, who arrest the wrong man along the way, reasoning where to look for the killer based on a pouch of tobacco and the strength needed to pin a rugged, ill-tempered seaman to the wall.

I don't want to cast any aspersions on Conan Doyle's character, but I suspect him of having had a bit of fun at the expensive of his readers who've read "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." I've always got the impression from this story that Doyle wanted to put the suggestion into the readers head that he's going for a similar solution, from the background of the characters to the force needed to pull off the crime, before presenting a far more rational answer as opposed to Poe's fancy solution – which made the whole story really nightmarish. That image of the murderer wielding a razor blade like a mad barber is perfect for a Tim Burton movie. With Johnny Depp as Dupin, of course!, and Jude Law as the nameless narrator. Just to screw with the Sherlock Holmes movie franchise. But seriously, I would love to see a Burton/Depp adaptation of Poe's Dupin.

At the end of the day, Dupin and Holmes reasoned truth from different clues that told in essence the same story, but their understanding of the physical strength involved made interpreting everything else all the more easier. And based on their deduction, Holmes followed Dupin's example to place an ad that lured the culprit to their rooms. But this begs the question... was remembering that story what made Holmes dash off to the butcher's shop, in the wee hours of the morning, for an experiment (we know he read Poe) and did he acknowledge this by using Dupin's ruse to ensnarl the murderer? 

Well, I guess we simply don't have enough data to make a solid brick, but I always felt this story was as much in the Dupin/Poe spirit as "The Speckled Band," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), and The Sign of Four (1890) - even though it does not contain a locked room or an atmosphere of horror.

A Thieving Lot

"He thinks he's Sherlock Holmes in the flesh."

- Robert Arthur's "The Adventure of the Single Footprint" (Mystery and More Mystery, 1966)

In November of 2011, I reviewed Carpenterand Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998), a collection of short stories originally penned during the 1990s, in which John Quincannon abandoned a dwindling career with the United States Secret Service to begin his own detective agency with Sabine Carpenter, a former Pinkerton operative, in San Francisco of the 1890s.

The collection turned out to be a splendid farrago of period stories filled with colorful character and beloved tropes that trudge around in evocative settings, but the finishing touch came when Bill Pronzini informed me that he and Marcia Muller were collaborating on series of Carpenter and Quincannon novels – and gave me permission to announce The Bughouse Affair (2013) and The Spook Light Affair (2014) to the public. And yes. Considering the fact that I had the scoop, I should've reviewed this one a lot sooner. I was late with placing the order, and when the book finally arrived, I was deeply immersed in Jan Ekström's Deadly Reunion (1975). But enough excuses. 

In this first of what's hopefully to be an annual affair, Carpenter and Quincannon have separate assignments to take care of that are a part of the daily routine of a detective agency. 

Sabina has to snuff out an elusive and particular nasty pickpocket from the crowds patronizing an amusement park, a torch-lit bazaar and the throng of people walking the evening Cocktail Route, but the trail soon leads away from San Francisco's entertainment district to a seamier part of town. And a rather nasty murder. Somewhere else, John Carpenter is spending an uncomfortable evening in the shrubbery to stake out a house, in the hopes of catching a burglar in the act, but when his reward is almost within in his grasp he lets it literally slips through his fingers. Oh, and he's also held at gunpoint, mistaken as a fleeing thief in the night, by a venerable colleague from England. Or at least he claims to be.

During the opening of The Bughouse Affair, a newspaper scribbling by Ambrose Bierce touted that the world's most-celebrated detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, has emerged from Reichenbach Falls and found his way to their city where's spending a period of leisure a the home of a prominent family – who happened to be neighboring the burgled house. Quincannon shares Bierce's opinion that he's a crackbrain, adding that he also has the routine of a conman, and that appears to be the opinion of everyone who's aware that Sherlock Holmes disappeared alongside his arch nemesis in the gorge of Reichenbach Falls, which makes it even funnier if you imagine Jeremy Brett as the bughouse Holmes.

Whether he's an impostor or the actual Sherlock Holmes, he's playing the role like a violin, and even accompanies Quincannon on his next stake-out, where the case goes from bad to worse after the furtive burglar assaults the owner of the house – leaving him dead inside a locked room and than manages to disappear from the house unseen!

Pronzini usually dabbles in two kinds of illusions: practical ones that might actually work off-page and complex trickery that would not disgrace the stage of a famous illusionist (e.g. "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle," collected All But Impossible, 1981). I won't divulge under which header I place this impossible crime, but I definitely enjoyed it. Now that I think about it, the only one of these kind of stories (by Pronzini) that I disliked was "Proof of Guilt" (collected in Murder Impossible, 1990), which left me under whelmed after the editors praised it as "one of the very best impossible shorts written over the past 50 years." The solution was also a take-off on a trick that I loath and, IMHO, as dated as poisonous snakes and trapdoors. I hated it when Clayton Rawson used it and hated when Pronzini gave it a spin. Not to mention that Pronzini wrote at least a handful of other impossible shorts that were miles better (e.g. "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" and "Booktaker," collected in Casefile, 1983, or "Medium Rare" in the previously mentioned Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services). Anyway, back to the review at hand! 

As to be expected in a detective story, evidence from Sabina’s pickpocket case turns up in Quincannon’s investigation, and slowly, everything begins to come together in a most satisfying way. The manner in which Quincannon, Sabina and the presumptive Mr. Sherlock Holmes take part in the explanation was very reminiscent of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) – especially how the bughouse detective's solution echoed one of the tales from the canon. A conscious nod to one of their predecessors whose most famous novel is also one of the most successful parodies of the storybook detective ever written?

The Bughouse Affair is more than just flight-of-fancy through a time and place now long gone by, however, the busy tourist strip, chute-rides at the amusement park, fire-lit bazaars, crowded brothels, moldy pawnshops and the many gaudy underworld figures that populate this story adds color and details to an already imaginative and absorbing plot.

If your taste runs in the direction of a classically-styled whodunit, inexplicable crimes committed in sealed rooms, Holmesian pastiches and/or historical fiction than The Bughouse Affair is your book and I recommend you track down a copy ASAP. It might give publishers an incentive to publish more of these stories.   

The Spoils of Conquest

"I need more chaos to reconstruct. I read and I read, but it's never enough."

- Victorique (Gosick: The Novel, 2008)

Yesterday, I marched into a vast, open event hall that was this months stronghold for the Boekenfestijn (book fest), where mainly leftover or returned books are disposed of directly to the consumer at bargain prices, and armed with an inventory I charged the rows of tables – and was able the claim the following tomes as war booty: 

Paul Doherty's Domina (2002), The Plague Lord (2002) and The Queen of the Night (2006)

Admittedly, Paul Doherty's historical romances were the primary objective of this year's crusade to the book fest, but the result was rather disappointing – as none of the books I swooped up were listed on the scrap of paper I was carrying on me. Unsurprisingly, I was questing for his impossible crime stories, especially the ones set in ancient Egypt, but was unable to turn up even one of them. Nevertheless, the synopsis of The Plague Lord entails a lot of promise.

Jill Paton Walsh's Debts of Dishonor (2006) and The Bad Quarto (2007)

Walsh garnered fame within the GAD community when she completed Dorothy Sayers' uncompleted manuscript, Thrones, Dominations (1998), in which she perfectly captured the essence of the erudite Crime Queen – and showed that a pastiche can be good depending on who's wielding the pen. She also authored a series of her own, in which a college nurse, Imogen Quy, unravels classically conceived plots of the murkiest kinds in a scholastic setting. I picked up the last two entries in that series.

Georges Simenon's My Friend, Maigret (1949)

According to the gold standard utilized on this blog (roughly 1920-1950), this is the only novel published during that prosperous, golden era that I was able to obtain on this journey. Not that I had any hopes of excavating a copy from the catalogues of the Rue Morgue Press or Crippen & Landru, but you can't stop that flicker of hope igniting itself when you pick-up a war chariot (i.e. trolley) at the entrance and catch that glimpse of the first pile of books. In any case, the description on the book cover promises an interesting story.

The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Method and Mysteries of the World's Greatest Detectives (2009)

A readers companion to the investigative methodology of the world's most famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. It's apparently also chock-full of Holmesian trivia and whatnot. This book could turn out to be fun as well as a disaster (or a combination of both), but at these prices it would almost be criminal not to take a gamble.

Well, there you have it, booty of war, which I will continue fondling in public as I knock them off my to-be-read list and review them for this blog in the months ahead of us. Speaking of reviews, there will be one up tomorrow.

Touring Baker Street with Vincent Price

"Well, tonight it's back to Baker Street. Back to that unlikely London of the nineteenth century where high adventure awaits all who would seek it, in a hansom cab or under a gas lamp in an Inverness cape."

- Orson Welles, The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

Normally, I blaze across the pages of any detective novel that stands in my way, and even a brush with a 400-page behemoth, whose sheets are covered with turgid prose, hardly effect my pace, but somehow I was thrown off my game this week – and have been trotting through Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939), without reaching the final chapter, for over three days now! Social obligations also make it unlikely that I will arrive there before Thursday; however, this provides me with an opportunity to post this filler recent discovery.

Back in the 1980s, the incomparable Vincent Price guest hosted a television show, in which he introduced the viewers at home to a new Sherlock Holmes episode, starring Jeremy Brett as the maverick detective from Baker Street, and closed the hour with a final thought – which are minor gems and usually very insightful. It's also a delight to hear him cite Ellery Queen as a source when introducing Silver Blaze as one of the finest sports detective yarn ever written. They can be found scattered all over YouTube, but here you can have a peek at his opening and closing statements regarding a personal favorite of mine, The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual. Take note of the brilliant, second part of the video!