The Red Locked Room (2020) by Tetsuya Ayukawa

Tetsuya Ayukawa was a mystery writer who has been described as "the Japanese honkaku mystery story," comparable to how Ellery Queen is called the American detective story, whose forte were cast-iron alibis that were minutely-timed with "the diverse trains" that ran along "the web of railways that covered the islands of Japan" – as well as having a predilection for the locked room mystery. Ayukawa had an interesting perspective on the impossible crime and unbreakable alibi: an alibi is a "locked room in time" while a locked room is an "alibi in space." Just like that, Ayukawa handed us an excuse to include alibi-tricks in the next supplement edition of Locked Room Murders. Get to work, Brian!

Ayukawa created two very different detectives to tackle these, somewhat, specialized tropes.

Chief Inspector Onitsura is "Ellery Queen wearing the face of Inspector French" and his métier is disassembling carefully fabricated alibis, which means that his stories have the outward appearance of a Croftian police procedural, but his cases are crammed with "original tricks and impressive lines of logic." Ryūzō Hoshikage is a dashing, well dressed, but obnoxious, pipe smoking merchant with pencil mustache and "a gifted amateur detective" – who earned the respect and admiration Chief Inspector Tadokoro. Hoshikage mainly acts as an armchair detective who listens to Tadokoro every time he gets stuck in one of those locked room mysteries, mutters some cryptic remarks and than produces a solution that had eluded every one else.

So how can you not be enticed by a traditional detective novelist whose assets were locked rooms and unbreakable alibis? John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, agreed and formally introduced Ayukawa, Hoshikage and Onitsura to Western mystery readers with a collection of specially selected short stories.

The Red Locked Room (2020) comprises of seven stories, originally published between 1954 and 1961, which were translated by our resident tour guide in the world of the Japanese detective story, Ho-Ling Wong. Taku Ashibe penned an informative introduction to Ayukawa and his two series-detectives. So let's investigate.

The first story in The Red Locked Room is "The White Locked Room," which opens with a female student, Kimiko Satō, visiting the snow-covered, cottage-like home of Professor Zama, but the door is answered by the editor-in-chief of New Century, Nobuo Mine – who came to have the professor proofread one of his articles. Nobuo tells Kimiko he arrived only three minutes before her and found the professor's body in the study. Chief Inspector Tadokoro when the murder turns out to be an impossible crime. The whole house had been searched, top to bottom, but "not even a mouse was found" and the only, untampered traces in the snow were the footprints of Kimiko and Nobuo. So how did the murderer entered and left the house without leaving any footprints behind?

Tadokoro decides to consult his friend and celebrated detective, Ryūzō Hoshikage, who acts more as an armchair oracle than an armchair detective. Hoshikage listens to every detail of the case, makes some cryptic remarks and asks a baffling question ("any talk about a cat or dog being burnt in the neighbourhood?"), which he neatly works into a logical and ultimately simple explanation. A clever locked room-trick that uses a well-known impossible crime technique to create a new solution to the no-footprints problem. I don't recall having ever come across this exact solution before. So well done, Ayukawa!

The second story is "Whose Body?" and has a plot suggesting to me that the unbreakable alibi is not the only reason why Ayukawa's Chief Inspector Onitsura novels and short stories are "often categorised as realistic police procedurals." This story hinges entirely on breaking down someone's identity. An important feature of the Realist School.

"Whose Body?" begins with showing why the exterior of a police procedural can be deceiving and exposed it ties to the intuitive school of detective fiction. There are three artists who all receive packages respectively containing a recently fired gun, a rope and an empty bottle of acid. Some get mad, while others assume it was a prank, but the person whose name was used to send the packages claims to be innocent. And then a body is discovered in the basement of a burnt-out building. A headless body with his hands chemically burned, but the victim still had all his possession and the name tags were not ripped out of his clothes – making identification of the mutilated victim suspiciously easy. Chief Inspector Onitsura finds an "exceptionally intelligent" killer who came up with a scheme that would have tricked a less astute policeman. A well-done play on an age-old trick.

"The Blue Locked Room" is the next story in line and starts with a drunken actor, Fuyuto Shinano, assaulting his stage director, Katsuhiko Kashimura, with a knife, but the timely arrival of a police officer prevented them from killing one another. However, the next morning the director is found murdered in his bedroom with the door locked from the inside and the open window overlooking a flowerbed, which was unmarked by any footprints. So, once again, Chief Inspector Tadokoro turns that famous amateur detective, Ryūzō Hoshikage, but the person he fingers as the murderer shocks even him.

A good and decent enough story, but very much a patchwork of old ideas and therefore can across as a trifle weak surrounded by more original and intricately-plotted stories. Edward D. Hoch actually wrote a story so similar to "The Blue Locked Room" that Hoshikage's summation of the case gave me déjà vu, but you can probably ascribe that to Ayukawa and Hoch using the same locked room mystery as their model. However, they both used a different locked room-tricks.

"Death in Early Spring" is an outstanding example of how to apply a classic impossible crime technique to the manufacturing of indestructible alibis! Chief Inspector Onitsura has to find the murderer of a young man, Kazuomi Kokuryō, who had been strangled to death at a construction site on the outskirts of Gofukubashi 3-Chōme – a one, or two, minute walk from the Yaesu Exit of Tokyo Station. Only suspect is a rival in love, Fukujirō Fuda, who possesses an unshakable alibi. Ayukawa assured the reader in the opening of the story that it was "necessary to examine a dry series of railway timetables" to understand "how the culprit managed to mystify the chief inspector without utilizing any special trickery." I count this as a challenge to the reader and perhaps the most fitting story to use it in. Ellery Queen would have approved!

It's very tempting to compare the next story to John Dickson Carr, but "The Clown in the Tunnel" stands much closer to Carr's modern-day followers and imitators. Such as Paul Halter, Jean-Paul Török and David Renwick.

A clown is witnessed entering the lodgings of a band, Swing Wagon Lodge, where stabs the singer to death in the bathroom and than ties up the maid in the kitchen. After the clown had washed his hands and tidied up his custom, his went outside and the maid saw him disappear into the tunnel that connected the house with the streets. There was, however, a traffic accident on the street-side of the tunnel and the policemen on the scene swore that nobody, let alone a clown, emerged from the tunnel. So what happened to the clown inside the tunnel and how was the vanishing-trick pulled off?

Chief Inspector Tadokoro and Ryūzō Hoshikage have to closely examine and weigh every minute that had ticked away between the moment the clown was seen entering the building and was seen escaping through the tunnel to uncover the solution – which revealed one hell of a trick! The previous story used an impossible crime technique to create an alibi, but this story employed the tricks of the alibi story to make a clown vanish into thin air. Something tells me this story is going to turn up in a future anthology of locked room and impossible crime stories.

The next story is "The Five Clocks" and has Chief Inspector Onitsura doggedly pursuing a murderer whose alibi was backed by five different clocks in as many different locations. A clock in the study. The wristwatch of a witness. A radio broadcast. The clock at the murderer's tailor and the clock at the wall of a soba restaurant, but more is not always better and only the trick with the restaurant clock was impressive. So not exactly a classic of the alibi story, but a good example of how to break them down.

Finally, we come to the titular story, "The Red Locked Room," which is a simple red brick building, containing the dissection room, standing on a lonely corner of a university campus. Honestly, a dissection room or mortuary has not been used enough as a setting for a locked room story, because the mood and atmosphere practically creates itself. This time, Tadokoro and Hoshikage are confronted with the body of female student, Katsuki, who had been expertly cut to pieces and left behind the locked door of the dissection room – secured on the outside with a combination-lock. And only one person knows the combination to that lock.

However, if you're familiar with the tropes of the Japanese locked room mystery, or are simply aware of them, you should be able to work out the trick before Hoshikage reveals it to a baffled Tadokoro. Still a solid impossible crime story and another possible candidate for inclusion in a future locked room anthology.

On a whole, The Red Locked Room is an excellent and highly recommended introduction to a writer whose debut novel, Petrov jiken (The Petrov Affair, 1950), was seen as at the time as "a bellwether of the arrival of a new generation of honkaku mystery writers." So, hopefully, this isn't the last we have seen of Ayukawa in the West.

On a last, semi-related note: I didn't want this review to linger in my blogging queue for over a month and decided to find a hole in the schedule to cram it in, but now have to find another hole to play armchair detective. You see, there's a change I might have figured out the true/double identity of the mysterious boss from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed. I know I'm not far enough in the series to officially know about the revelation that was hidden volume 30, but bits and pieces have been spoiled to me over the years. Recently, the pieces began to fall into place. I still have to work out the details in my head, but it makes sense up there. Nobody on the internet seems to have considered this possibility! And even if it collapses, I'll probably still post my little theory just for the fun of it.

Death and the Professor (1961) by E. and M.A. Radford

A year ago, Dean Street Press reissued three detective novels by a British husband-and-wife writing team, Edwin and Mona A. Radford, who together concocted close to forty complex, scrupulously plotted and richly clued forensic detective novels – strongly influenced by R. Austin Freeman and Ellery Queen. Murder Isn't Cricket (1946) and Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947) were two of the titles specially selected as strong examples of their ability in constructing and tearing down intricate, unpadded plots. Radfords peppered their detective stories with challenges to the reader!

Nearly a year later, on March 3, DSP is going to release a further three novels, introduced by Nigel Moss, each "quite different in approach and style," but "retaining the traditions" of the great detective stories of yore.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) is an inverted mystery and Death of a Frightened Editor (1959) an impossible crime novel about a poisoning on a London-to-Brighton train, but the obscure Death and the Professor (1961) is of particular interest to every locked room reader. A collection of short stories structured as a detective novel with seven of the eight stories covering an entire page in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

The stories from Death and the Professor are centered around a small, exclusive dinner club, The Dilettantes' Club, whose distinguished members gather once a fortnight at a Soho restaurant where they dine in a private-room and debate any problem "besetting mankind" – a varied "selection of brains" browsing "the bric-à-brac of events and happenings in the world." Every member is "a doyen of his own particular profession." Sir Noël Maurice is an eminent surgeon and "one of the world's greatest authorities on the heart." Norman Charles is a psychiatrist of international repute and Alexander Purcell a Cambridge mathematician who holds a Chair in Mathematics. William James is a pathologist and Sir Edward Allen, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, whose presence places these stories in the same world as the Dr. Harry Manson series! A very rare, but genuine, Golden Age detective crossover!

The sixth and last member of the club is a former Professor of Logic, Marcus Stubbs, who's an elderly, mild-mannered man with a goblin-like head, a shock of gray hair, "gig-like spectacles" and a stammer. A quiet, unimposing figure of a man, but appearances can be deceiving. Very deceiving! Professor Stubbs is nothing less than an armchair oracle who uses strict logic and reasoning to find solutions to the most unfathomable mysteries discussed by the club.

Nigel Moss compared The Dilettantes' Club to the Crimes Circle from Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series, but I think Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime (1929) is actually a lot closer to Death and the Professor. I've seen Partners in Crime being described as a nostalgic farewell to the 1920s with a thread running through the stories that tied everything together. Death and the Professor was published in the early 1960s, when the Golden Age had come to an end, which gives you the idea it was written as a fond farewell to that period with an armchair detective and plots paying tribute to some of its greatest hits – like a tribute band playing all the old songs. There's a red-thread running through the stories ending in knotted twist.

If a novel such as Who Killed Dick Whittington? demonstrated the Radford's plotting skills, Death and the Professor is an exhibit of their knowledge and love of the traditional, puzzle-driven Golden Age detective story. So let's dig into these (untitled) stories!

The first story briefly goes over how Professor Marcus Stubbs became the sixth member of the club before they settled down with port and cigars to listen and discuss "a very intriguing problem" brought to them by Sir Edward. A problem of a possible criminal nature that took place in the The Lodge Guest House, in Coronation Road, South Kensington, where one of the nine residents was an unlikable businessman, Frederick Banting, who was "cordially disliked by one and all." One day, after dinner, Banting retreated to his upstairs room, annoyingly slamming the door behind him, which was followed by "a second bang." A gunshot!

So the whole household rushed upstairs, opening the door with a spare key, where they find Banting lying on the floor with a revolver besides him, but the local police inspector, who spent twenty minutes in the room, called in the Murder Squad – because papers were missing. But how? Every possible exit, doors and windows, were either locked or under observation. There were only two minutes in which to commit the murder and the eight guests alibi each other. So how did the murderer manage to vanish into thin air without leaving a trace? Stubbs logically reasons his way to the answer, "logic, purely applied, can make no error," but the locked room-trick and left-handed clue are old hat. However, I appreciated how the clue eliminated all of the innocent suspects in one fell swoop!

The second story brought the distinguished company concerns two people, John Benton, who's a 68-year-old jeweler and his much younger, more ambitious, partner, Thomas Derja. Benton and Derja boarded a 9.18 train to London to personally deliver a £5,000 necklace to a client and, along the way, Derja bought a packet of wrapped sandwiches from a trolley. Derja cut the sandwiched in half and gave one piece to Benton, who took a bite, gave "a kind of gurgle" and slipped down half under the table as dead as a door nail. A post-mortem revealed cyanide had been mixed with his food and the necklace turns out to be a forgery! So did Benton commit suicide, because he knew the necklace would be recognized as fake? Or was he cleverly murdered? More importantly, how was it possible that only one piece of the sandwich was poisoned?

Stubbs uses irrefutable logic to demonstrate Benton had not committed suicide, but was murdered, why and how his sandwich was poisoned. Arguably, this is the best impossible crime in the collection with the blemish being that a well-known mystery writer used exactly the same solution in a 1950s short story.

The third story begins with a discussion on the difference between truly unsolved, practically perfect murders and murderers who are known to authorities, but there's no evidence to convict. Sir Edward tells his fellow dilettantes about "the most perfect murder" committed in Sam Reno, on the Italian Riviera, where four dead men were seated around a table – a pile of large, pigeon-blood rubies lay on the table. Three of the victims were British who were known to the police as receivers of stolen goods and the police had followed a suspicious trail to the doorstep of Villa Pinetta. Where they discovered the bodies. But how were they poisoned? Why did the murderer leave the £6,000 worth of rubies behind?

Sir Edwards ends his stories with a list of five questions, illustrating the impossibility of the murders, that "modern detective skill" have "failed to find the answers." Stubbs doesn't have to think very long to come up with the answers and an explanation how the rubies were smuggled pass customs. Solution to the impossible poisoning is another golden oldie.

The fourth story brings another jewel haul and one of those "dashed locked room problems" to The Dilettantes' Club. Ambrose & Company in Conduit Street, jewelers of some standing, where looted when burglars bypassed the steel grilled windows, treble locks and anti-burglar alarm by breaking into the tailor's shop next door and drilling through the wall – getting away with £18,500 in merchandise. The police recognized the modus operandi of a certain group of a men and the safe-cracker of the crew is a character known as "Lady Dan." A dandy, impeccably dressed womanizer who followed "every pair of trim ankles which came into his line of vision," but the police had no evidence and the case gets another dimension when the body of Lady Dan is found inside a bolted, first-class sleeping compartment of the Blue Train. He had died of a heart attack with an expression on his face of "complete and utter stupefaction."

Police found a half-full bottle of champagne and two tumbles, one with traces of a strong sleeping draught, in the compartment. Lady Dan had been seen with the lady from the next compartment, Liza Underwood, but she "disappeared as though she had never been" and there has never been passport issued in that name! And the communicating door between the compartments were bolted on both side. So how did she vanish? Stubbs gracefully thanks Sir Edwards for the "intellectual labyrinths" he has presented for their consideration and explains facts that do not conform, or are "alien to logical explanation," are impossible and therefore unacceptable. And demolishes the case. The problem of the locked compartments has a simplistic, routine answer, but the explanation for the stupefied expression on the body's face was a nice, perfectly done touch to the plot that clicked together with the premise like two puzzle pieces.

The next story is the only non-impossible crime story of the collection and is, as Moss described it, "a cleverly plotted 'eternal triangle' murder" a la Agatha Christie (c.f. "Triangle at Rhodes" collected in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937). Stubbs is the one who brings the problem to the attention of the Dilettantes.

Stubbs is convinced that the conviction of John Parker for the murder of Mary Bloss was a grave miscarriage of justice. Parker is a businessman and an enthusiastic lepidopterist (a moth collector) who had a motive, means (killing bottles loaded with cyanide) and opportunity to poison to dental cream of his mistress, Miss Bloss – who had also been a close friend of his wife, Eileen. A sordid, dime-a-dozen murder that ended with Parker being convicted for premeditated murder. So they go over the sordid history, examining every detail, with Sir Edwards representing the police case and Stubbs taking on the defense – "demolishing by pure logical reasoning" their case point by point. And, in the process, reveals what really happened. Undoubtedly, the most original and best story in the book!

Sadly, this excellent story is followed by the worst story in the collection, which is called in the story "The Strange Case of the Sleepers," in which people inexplicably lose consciousness and are robbed without remembering a thing. A very pulp-like, uninspired story reminiscent of Max Rittenberg's "The Bond Street Poisoning Bureau" (The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant, 2016) and C.N & A.M. Williamson's "The Adventure of the Jacobean House" (The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, 2000). But this is the only real dud in the series.

The seventh story centers on another locked room murder, known as "the Chelsea flat puzzle," brought to the Dilettantes by Sir Edwards. Three days ago, the body of Miss Menston had been found in her ransacked flat, strangled to death, but various witness statements and a side door to an outside passage, closed from the inside by a thumbscrew bolt, turned the case into a locked room mystery. However, the whole plot borrowed a little to liberally from S.S. van Dine's The Canary Murder Case (1927). It goes way beyond saluting a past master or a classic detective novel.

Thankfully, Death and the Professor ends strongly with a two-pronged story of a man who had been murdered at 7.30, but "was seen alive at 10 o'clock" and "again at 10.30" by two different witnesses. Once again, the solution to the impossibility is not terribly original, but there's a twist in the tail tying all of the stories together that beautifully tipped its deerstalker to two classic pieces of detective fiction. I can say no more without giving anything away.

So, on a whole, Death and the Professor was obviously written as a nostalgic tribute, or a fond farewell, to the detective story's Golden Age brimming to the rim with all the classics from locked room murders and stolen gems to mysterious poisonings and a surprise ending. A tribute tour that came at the expense of the ingenuity and originality that can be found in the Radford's novel-length detective stories, but every, long-time mystery addict will appreciate this warm homage to their drug of choice.

The Helm of Hades (2019) by Paul Halter

I've reviewed a sundry of short (locked room) stories over the past two years, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's ghostly "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but my last review of a short story collection was D.L. Champion's The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) – posted back in April of last year. So it was about time I tackled another compendium and John Pugmire's Locked Room International recently published something that fitted the bill.

The Helm of Hades (2019) is Paul Halter's second collection of short stories to appear in English, preceded by the appetizingly The Night of the Wolf (2006), which formally introduced non-French speaking readers to Halter's imaginative brand of detective fiction. This second volume comprises entirely of translated stories that were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine between 2007 and 2019. And celebrated French locked room anthologist, Roland Lacourbe, penned an introduction promising "the wildest impossibilities." Well, that enough to lure me into the back of your van!

"Le gong hanté" ("The Gong of Doom") is the fist of ten stories and takes place at "the meeting-place of a select circle of prosperous Londoners" devoted to "the discussion of puzzling mysteries," The Hades Club, where Dr. Alan Twist tells Superintendent Charles Cullen the story of "a senseless and inexplicable murder" – committed at the end Great War. Colonel Henry Strange has an argument with the prospective husband of his niece, Philip, inside his locked study. During their argument, the haunted gong in the study sounded without being struck and Colonel Strange sank to the floor with an arrow piercing his neck. However, the door of the study was locked on in the inside and the ground overlooking the open window was covered with virgin snow. So there was nowhere any mysterious archer could have hidden to fire the fatal arrow.

A solid and tantalizing premise reminiscent of the locked room situation from Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938), but the solution is a coincidence-laden farce and an absolute cheat! I suppose the farcical slant could, sort of, have worked has the ultimate fate of Philip not cast a bleak shadow over the story. However, I did like the false-solution that made use of the kandjar (a dagger) hanging on the wall. Otherwise, a very poor story that should not have opened this collection.

"L'échelle de Jacob" ("The Ladder of Jacob") is an excellently done short story about a man who fell to his death from a great height without any tall buildings or cliffs at the scene, but have already discussed the story in my review of the massive locked room anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017). The third story is "L'homme au visage d'argile" ("The Man with the Face of Clay"), but read it before and disliked the solution to the locked room shooting. One of my big no-noes.

The next story in line is "La vengeance de l'épouvantail" ("The Scarecrow's Revenge") and succeeded where "The Gong of Doom" failed so miserably.

Dr. Alan Twist is in France where Commissaire Pierre Legrand tells him about an abominable crime that took place in Gondeville, a small village not far from Cognac, which involved a dead, but vengeful, husband and a premonitory dream that came to pass only a few hours later – in "the form of an impossible crime." Janine is haunted by the memory of her late, unlamented husband and has a terrifying nightmare that he came back in the guise of their scarecrow. And killed her father with a pitchfork. This nightmare became a reality when her father is found the following morning lying on the muddy ground beneath the scarecrow with only one set of footprints going from the front door to the scarecrow.

A very well-done, properly motivated impossible crime story with a better and more original solution than the answer to the homicidal snowman from "L'abominable homme de neige" ("The Abominable Snowman," collected in The Night of the Wolf). A solution that both worked and was genuinely tragic without the grim bleakness.

"Les feux de l'Enfer" ("The Fires of Hell") is, plot-wise, one of the weakest story in the collection and revolves around a man who can see visions of the future, which he used to predict a series of "inexplicable fires" that even a police cordon was unable to prevent. However, the firebug is easily spotted and the method was more underwhelming than disappointing. You can find better treatments of the impossible fire-starter gimmick in John Russell Fearn's Flashpoint (1950) and Arthur Porges' "To Barbecue a White Elephant" and "Fire for Peace" (collected in These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, 2018).

Last year, I reviewed "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir") together with "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book") and three other, non-English detective stories in a post entitled "Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories" – which, like this review, turned out to be a mixed bag of tricks. On the one hand, "The Yellow Book" was a wonderfully crafted story with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from one of Halter's earlier novels. In comparison, "The Wolf of Fenrir" was only so-so.

"La balle de Nausicaa" ("Nausicaa's Ball") is the only non-impossible crime story to be found in this collection and seems to be modeled after such Agatha Christie stories as Evil Under the Sun (1941), Towards Zero (1944) and "Triangle at Rhodes" (collected in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937). Dr. Alan Twist is on a much deserve holiday in Corfu, Greece, where he hopes to have a break from all the inexplicable, seemingly unsolvable murders dogging his every step, but, on his first day, bumped into a holidaying Superintendent Cullen. Soon their attention is drawn to the cast and film crew staying at their hotel. And, in particular, the eternal triangle of the group.

Rachel Syms is a gorgeous actress who was the female-lead in a movie that was shot in the same location a year ago, but she fell in love with her young, unknown screen partner, Anthony Shamp, who, according to the critics, played "a marvelous Ulysses" – returning a year later to shoot the sequel. She brought along her husband, George Portman. A perfect recipe for murder! This comes to pass when George's falls to his death from "a series of steps cut into the rock which zig-zag down a hundred feet to the beach," but the lonely, isolated location of the lagoon severely reduces the number of suspects. The solution hinges on pulling apart a carefully-planned alibi, but there's one technical detail that raised an eyebrow. Nonetheless, this story still stands as a nicely done homage to the Queen of Crime from a modern craftsman of the locked room puzzle.

"La tombe de David Jones" ("The Robber's Grave") is a good example of Halter's fertile imagination when it comes to dreaming up new seemingly impossible situations and reviewed it last year, under the title  "Devil's Soil: Halter, Hoch and Hoodwinks," together with a story from the King of the Short Story, Edward D. Hoch.

Lastly, the collection closes out with the most recently translated short story, "Le casque d'Hadès" ("The Helm of Hades"), published in the March/April, 2019, issue of EQMM. This time the detective is the Edwardian-era aesthete and amateur reasoner, Owen Burns, who acts as an armchair oracle as he listens to the tale of a murder that appears "to have been inspired by the prince of darkness himself." A well-known archaeologist, Conrad Berry, who threw a party to celebrate his greatest discovery, the Helm of Hades. A legendary bronze helmet that makes everyone who wears it "as transparent as the air that you breathe." During the party, Berry is savagely attached inside his archaeological room while people were sitting outside.

According to their evidence, they heard the footsteps of "an invisible creature" walking across the creaky floorboards of the room, open and close the door of the archaeological room, carry out a brutal and noisy assault – after which it retraced its footsteps and knocked over a Chinese vase on the way. As if an invisible entity had entered and left the scene of the crime! A very original and grandly staged premise for a locked room mystery, but the solution, while acceptable enough, has a weakness I've come to associate with Jonathan Creek (e.g. Angel Hair, 2003). A type of involved solution that can only work when it's really, really involved.

I used to believe the short story format brought out the best in Halter, because it allowed him to play on his major strengths (plot and imagination), while downplaying his weaknesses, but have only read a selection of (mostly) his better short stories since his first collection was published in 2006. This colored my perception over the years. The Helm of Hades shows he was very hit-and-miss and needs the length of a novel to give his plethora of ideas some breathing space. Halter still produced a some classic short locked room stories, but, in general, I think he's better when writing novel-length impossible crime stories. Just read L'homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) or Le montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019).

So, yeah, The Helm of Hades is, as so often is the case with these collection, a mixed bag of tricks, but the better specimens, such as "The Scarecrow's Revenge," "The Robber's Grave" and "The Yellow Book," still makes it a welcome addition to my locked room library.

The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) by D.L. Champion

Back in January, I reviewed D.L. Champion's "The Day Nobody Died," a richly plotted locked room mystery from the pages of Dime Detective Magazine, which resembled one of those clever short stories by Ellery Queen, but as good as the plot were the cast of series-characters – spearheaded by an angry, bitter and unhinged former police detective. Deputy Inspector Allhoff of the New York Police Department was "the NYPD's ace detective" until "bullets from a mobster's machine gun robbed him of his legs."

Allhoff was too good a detective to lose and the department creatively doctored the books to keep him, unofficially, employed and refer to him "such cases as the department couldn't or wouldn't handle." Lamentably, the consequences of that botched arrest and shootout would continue to extract a heavy toll on everyone involved.

Deputy Inspector Allhoff lost not only his legs and a promising career, but had to move into a filthy, cockroach infested flophouse across from headquarters. As a result, his sanity buckled under the traumatic injuries to both his mind and body, turning him into "a bitter misanthrope," who delighted in verbally abusing and mentally torturing the man he personally holds responsible for his situation, Patrolman Battersly – who Allhoff demanded be assigned to him as his personal assistant. Battersly is routinely bullied by Allhoff with "grotesquely embellished" accounts of his "momentary cowardice." This has left the young policeman in a constant state of anxiety.

Stuck between this rock and a hard place is the narrator of the series, Sergeant Simmonds, who had been "dragged down from a good desk job" to take care of the paperwork, but is to ensure Allhoff and Battersly don't kill each other. And he was slowly going nuts as he had to watch Allhoff's "cunning mind devise new methods of torturing the younger man."

A few years ago, Altus Press began reissuing this series, seventeen of the twenty-nine stories, which were collected in The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) and The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 2 (2018) with an introduction by Ed Hulse. I'm not overly familiar with the pulps, but, going by what little I have read, this series was certainly better than "the typical penny-a-word prose found in the Bloody Pulps." So let's take these stories down from the top.

I'll try to keep the reviews of the individual stories as brief as possible to prevent this blog-post from becoming a bloated mess.

This collection opens with "Footprints on a Brain," originally published in the July, 1938, issue of Dime Detective Magazine (hereafter, DDM) and brings Detective-Sergeant Carrigan, of the Chicago Police, to New York when the person he had been assigned to protect died under suspicious circumstances – which could have either been a suicide or murder. Richard B. Hadley was dying of cancer and had been working on a tell-all memoirs, but, when he had completed the manuscript, he apparently turned a gun on himself and pulled the trigger. However, Carrigan believes he had been murdered. Allhoff agrees with his opinion and deduces part of the truth from such clues as a pack of razor blades, a postage stamp and the chattering of Chimney Swallows. The other part, namely ensnaring the murderer, requires the setting of a clever little trap.

So, as the introductory story in this series, Champion had to establish his series-characters and their bizarre, borderline sadomasochistic relationship. This means there's more abuse here than normally. Allhoff really goes to town on poor Battersly and, by the end of the story, he's reduced to a broken, sobbing mess of a human being. Allhoff deserves sympathy for having lost his legs, but makes it impossible to give him any, because he's a first-ballot Hall of Fame piece of shit.

The next story, "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead," originally appeared in the September, 1938, issue of DDM and this time it's not Battersly who takes the brunt of Allhoff's abuse, but one of "the smartest and crookedest lawyer" in town, Philips – who had "bought more juries than Jim Brady had diamonds." Philips made the mistake to call Allhoff a legless, smug little gnome and proceeded to throw coffee in his face. So now he's determined to nail the lawyer for the murder of his business partner, Gregory L. Somers, who was found with a bullet in his head on the floor of his office.

Don't worry, this is an inverted detective story, of sorts, in which Allhoff plays a risky game of cat-and-mouse with a crooked, but highly influential, lawyer. Sergeant Simmonds even remarks that, if he can think his way out of this mess, he'll "go down in history as Machiavelli, the second." Allhoff undeniably has a Machiavellian streak and a complete disregard for the rule of law, which is a fatal combination that planted Philips in the electric chair. So a good how-to-catch'em type of crime story.

The third story, "Lock the Death House Door," was originally published in December, 1938, issue of DDM and is the second impossible crime in this series listed by Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). But I hope there are more in this, until recently, incredibly obscure and hard-to-get series.

Battersly has had a date with Ruth Manning and she happens to be the daughter of a convicted murderer, Morris Manning, who Allhoff put on death row and is less than twelve hours removed from his execution, which Allhoff sadistically use as cudgel – telling Battersly to remember he put her father on the chair when he's wiping away her tears. However, Battersly has an unpleasant surprise for Allhoff. The D.A. office is “digging out a pardon for Manning” on the strength of evidence Battersly has uncovered. Someone even confessed to have been the murderer. Allhoff is beyond himself with fury and vindictively sets out to destroy the newly surfaced evidence, because Manning must and shall burn in the hot seat – a problem complicated when the man who had confessed is murdered in locked and guarded prison cell. This is another how-to-catch'ems with a simplistic locked room mystery thrown in the works.

So not quite the classic locked room story, like "The Day Nobody Died," but still a good story.

The next story is "Cover the Corpse's Eye," first published in the July, 1939, issue of DDM, which began on a positive note for the downtrodden, browbeaten Battersly. He was instrumental in the arrest of a notorious murderer, Ronnie Regan, who appears to have shot and robbed a well-known banker, Alfred Sontag. Allhoff was livid and relentlessly started to rain on his parade by finding someone else to put in the electric chair. The solution is not entirely original and very pulpy, but it was adeptly handled here by Champion.

"Dead and Dumb" was originally published in the October, 1939, issue of DDM and opens with the absolutely impossible, not a murder in a hermetically sealed room, but peace and tranquility reigning in the slum office of Allhoff, which has miraculously persisted for five days. Sergeant Simmonds even heard him singing fragments of The Missouri Waltz! This changes the moment a cab-driver staggered into the room, supporting a mortally wounded man, who had demanded to be brought to Allhoff instead of the hospital.

Unluckily, the victim is a deaf mute and he dies before he can communicate with them, but Allhoff is clever enough to link this murder to a reported suicide at the Rickerts Institute, on Long Island, which is an asylum for deaf mutes – where a third murder is committed right under Allhoff's nose. A suicidal move when you're faced with an unforgiving, vindictive and merciless opponent, like Allhoff, who only finds pleasure in cornering people. And watch them squirm. Another good story with an interesting background and a clever take on a very EQ-like motive.

The next story, "A Corpse for Christmas," was originally published in the December, 1939, issue of DDM and is, without question, the standout story of the collection.

The story opens two days before Christmas and Allhoff is bah-humbugging the merriment of the season. A merry period in which "a million morons get drunk" and go home "to beat their wives" or the Nazis who'll "undoubtedly blow thousands of British into little pieces," but the demented Ebenezer Scrooge in deerstalker is visited by his very own Ghost of Christmas – who becomes one of his most formidable opponents in this series. A breathtakingly beautiful woman visits the slum apartment on behalf of the Society League's Holiday Aid Organization. She brought a covered basket with "a real old-fashioned Christmas dinner to the worthy poor."

Allhoff is furious at this kindly offer, but exploded when the woman tells him not to let his "foolish pride" stand in the way of a delicious turkey, because why would he deprive himself of "two fat legs." That remark was the proverbial match that lit the powderkeg. However, Allhoff has not seen the last of this unflappable woman. She turns up again in a bizarre murder/suicide case on Long Island, but she possesses a cast-iron alibi. At the time of the double shooting, she was in the apartment getting yelled at by Allhoff. So, if she did it, how could she have been in two places at the same time. An excellent detective story with an alibi-trick worthy of the alibi-breaking stories by Christopher Bush. 

 

The next story is "Sergeants Should Never Sleep" was originally published in the March, 1940, issue of DDM, which turned out the be only dud in the collection. The story began promisingly with Sergeant Paul Hamtrack requesting to be temporarily assigned to Allhoff, in order to study his method's first hand, but Sergeant Hamtrack is notorious career yes-man. Adding an additional strain to the torturous, daily routine of Battersly and Simmonds. Unfortunately, the apparent problem of "a killing done by a sneak thief" degenerates into a World War II spy tale with an obvious solution.

The next story, "Turn in Your Badge," was culled from the pages of the June, 1940, issue of DDM and opens with the news that the body of Lieutenant Mike Arnold, of the Racketeering Squad, had been pulled out of the river with his feet in a block of concrete and his tongue cut out – complemented by nine bullet holes. Allhoff is shocked by the news and annoyed that his daily reports from Headquarters are late, but this has a very good reason. Acting Commissioner Blakely has decided to sever their "unofficial connection" and gives him a week to sort out his affairs. Allhoff was fucking furious.

Blakely arrested a well-known gangster for the murder of Sergeant Arnold and Allhoff is convinced the murderer disguised his work as a mob killing, because it was complete overkill. So he wants to find the real murderer and uses the life of an innocent man to mercilessly destroy Blakely and secure his unofficial standing within the department. Battersly and Simmonds were not happy with this outcome, to say the least. And they were so close to freedom they could actually taste it.

"There Was a Crooked Man" is the penultimate story, originally published in the August, 1940, issue of DDM and has Allhoff rudely turning down a huge fee to privately investigate a murder, but accepts an offer to investigate the very same murder when a crippled man asks him to. Champion used a lot of handicapped characters in his stories and, in this volume alone, there are blind characters, deaf mutes and cripples, which also play some part in the solution. So I was able to foresee which direction the plot was taking. Still a very well put together story, but the solution was not difficult to anticipate.

Finally, the collection closes with "Suicide in Blue," first published in the October, 1940, issue of DDM, which is a quasi-impossible crime about a series of threatening extortion letters demanding money and refusal to pay has fatal consequences – accurately predicting the date and time of their date. One of the victim's a policeman, Sergeant Wheeler, who apparently committed suicide with his own Service Revolver. Obviously, this turned the suicide into a murder, but Allhoff disagrees and sets out to prove a suicide and find a murderer. And, of course, he pulls it off. However, Allhoff pulls one of his nastiest trick to date on poor Battersly. Something that could have easily pushed him over the edge. What can I say? Allhoff is a bit of a dick.

So, all in all, The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff is an excellent volume of high-quality pulp detective stories full with grotesque, broken characters, sordid murders and often clever plots, but not every reader today will be able to put up with the vindictive, acid-tongued Allhoff. A truly sadistic, mentally unhinged character and the ultimate anti-hero. In my opinion, the only true weaknesses is that every single story goes over the series origin story, which becomes repetitive after the third or fourth story. You can easily skip these endlessly rewritten passages after the first story. My second complaint is that only one of the stories, "A Corpse for Christmas," came close to the superb "The Day Nobody Died." Most of the stories here were pretty good, but not anywhere near that classic short story.

However, this will not deter me from getting the second volume. Despite the sadistic, broken and weary main-characters, Champion created an original and unforgettable series like no other in the genre. Simply fascinating and highly recommended, if you think you can stomach Allhoff.