The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked room murder and impossible crimes, but not as well-known, or appreciated, was his pioneering work as a historical mystery novelist and writing some of the most suspenseful radio-plays to ever hit the airwaves – even contributing to the war effort with propaganda plays. These were "so effective" that "they led the BBC, unsuccessfully, to urge the American authorities to allow Carr to remain in the United Kingdom for the duration of the war." Carr contributed to some of the popular and classic radio shows, like Suspense and Murder by Experts, but one radio program, Cabin B-13, appeared to have been lost to time. 

Well, all except two, or three, recordings have been lost, but, in the early 1990s, twenty-three scripts were discovered in the Library of Congress. Three decades later, Crippen & Landru gathered those manuscripts under the title The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021). Tony Medawar wrote an insightful foreword, "Suspense at Sea," with "Notes for the Curious" at the end of each play. 

Medawar's foreword and notes are scattered with little gold nuggets of equally fascinating and frustrating pieces of background information. Such as Carr's plan to have Cabin B-13 series-character, Dr. John Fabian, identified as the Man in Black from Suspense or references to his uncompleted and abandoned novels. 

Cabin B-13 was broadcast as two series, or seasons, between July 5, 1948, and January 2, 1949, which originated as a 1943 episode of Suspense – also titled "Cabin B-13." Suspense episode takes place aboard a luxury cruise-liner, Maurevania, which connects all the stories in the series as the protagonist is its "ship's surgeon, world traveler, and teller of strange and incredible tales of mystery and murder," Dr. John Fabian. His role in the story differs from story to story. Sometimes he simply acts as a storyteller and other he plays a minor role in the story itself, but, every now and then, he acts as the detective. When he plays detective, it's usually because the story is a rewrite that requires Dr. Fabian to take over the role of one of Carr's well-known detectives.

So, now that we got the introduction to the collection out of the way, you have to excuse me for a moment as I fanboy all over these radio-plays. 

"The Man Who Couldn't Be Photographed" tells the story of "the greatest romantic film-star in the first decade of talking pictures," Bruce Ransome, who feels like he has outgrown the people he used to care about. This results in a confrontation with his "social secretary" and love interest, Miss Nita Ross. She puts a curse on him before committing suicide. A curse promising that the conceited actor never faces a camera again, which apparently comes true when Ransome is turned away from every photographer in Paris like a leper. A very neat play and a clever inversion on an old urban legend that originated in a now obscure, 1920s detective story. 

"Death Has Four Faces" is different from the play of the same title Carr wrote for BBC's Appointment with Fear. This is a psychological crime tale, of sorts, in which Superintendent Bellman meets a young Canadian on the train, named Steve West, who asks to be handcuffed and escorted to the hotel like a criminal – where a perfect crime is foiled. Not my favorite play in the collection, but it was decent enough. And thought the lingering presence of the Second World War was put to good use. 

"The Blind-Folded Knife Thrower" is one of the highlights of the collection with a minor role for Dr. John Fabian in a tragedy that has become "a grim and evil memory" of what befall Madeline Lane on a previous voyage to Portugal. Madeline is haunted by the ghost, or memories, of her spiteful mother who committed suicide ten years ago by drinking acid. She has begun to haunt her daughter with disembodied whispers and a promise to visit Madeline on her first night in Lisbon. So the people who care about her place her in a room with solid walls, floor and ceiling and two windows "so closely barred that you couldn't even get your hand through." There are two people sitting outside the door until morning, but a figure of a woman with acid-burns round her mouth appears in the room as miraculously as she disappears again! Colonel Da Silva, Chefe da Policia Secreta, discovers a very tricky explanation for the nighttime visitation and the result is a better, fairer and much more convincing take on a particular locked room-trick that would turn up in one of Carr's later novels. 

"No Useless Coffin" is another highlight of the collection, but this time, Carr reworked an earlier short story with Dr. Fabian acting as a stand-in for one of his famous series-detectives. Dr. Fabian is accompanying the recently engaged couple on a picnic to a cottage where many years ago a 12-year-old girl, Vicky Fraser, disappeared from with all the door and windows locked from the inside, which left her parents nearly frantic, but two nights later she reappeared "through the locks and bolts" – "tucked up in bed as usual." Vicky claims to possess an "occult power" giving her the ability to vanish when she likes, where she likes, which the now adult Vicky promises to repeat during the picnic. She disappears "like a soap-bubble under the eyes of witnesses," but, this time around, the fairy tale of the vanishing girl has a dark and gruesome ending. The solution to the impossible disappearance is one of the most original and startling Carr has ever dreamed up. Just as good as the original short story with the only real difference being the detective and motive. 

"The Nine Black Reasons" is, curiously enough, a whydunit and brings "well-known writer of detective-stories," Frank Bentley, to Marseilles, France, where he discovers the body of a murdered man in the Royal Turkish Baths of a hotel. A short while later he meets an old acquaintance, Helen Parker, who witnessed the inexplicable murder of her uncle at the same hotel. Inexplicable because there's no earthly reason why the respectable Mr. Herbert Johnson killed the respectable Mr. Fredric Parker. Two complete strangers! The motive, while good, sorely needed polishing and fine-tuning, which makes it all the more frustrating that Carr abandoned a 1961 novel of the same title despite having completed eight chapters. And, of course, "the typescript of the eight chapters has long been lost."

"The Count of Monte Carlo" has Dr. Fabian coming to the rescue of a young man, Bart Stevens, who's engaged to Janet Derwent, but foolishly has gotten himself involved in "a love-affair to end all love-affairs." Bart has been fooling around with another woman, "Dolores," who's engaged to the Count of Monte Carlo, Jean Ravelle. A messy, tangled square that ends with a murder and two people confessing to have done the dirty deed. A good, but relatively minor, story with an original murder method that Carr reused to much better effect in a later novel. 

"Below Suspicion" shares its title with the contentious Dr. Gideon Fell novel Below Suspicion (1949), but the story has nothing else in common except, perhaps, that Carr would rewrite it in the 1950s as a Dr. Fell short story. Dr. Fabian tells the story of a stage actress, Valerie Blake, who retired from the stage before her time to retreat with her new husband on the Italian coast. Regrettably, Ralph Garrett proved to be a poor husband and two of her old friends came to the rescue, but they were too late to prevent her murder and struggle to find an explanation, because "the murderer must have walked on air" to have left her body on the beach – since there were no footprints except Valerie's. This story is actually better than the later version with a better developed backstory to the murder and always liked the clue of the rifle shots, which helped strengthening a somewhat sketchy murder method. 

"The Power of Darkness" is indelibly "one of his most audacious impossibilities" with two people traveling "back three hundred years in time" and witnessed "a whole suburb disappear" to reveal a scene from centuries ago. Dr. Fabian keeps telling everyone he's "not a detective," but he certainly had a guiding hand in revealing the sordid truth beneath this time shattering miracle. Some of you probably know how fond I'm of these rare kind of time-tampering impossibilities and enjoyed this one as much as the other version Carr wrote. The episode was originally intended to be titled "Last Night in Ghost-Land." A much better title and a pity it was never used for another story. 

"The Footprint in the Sky" is a fairly conventional impossible crime story, but told in a very unconventional way. The luxury liner Maurevania is tossed around during a storm at sea and Dr. Fabian, the ship's surgeon from Cabin B-13, is asked to come down to C-24 where a passenger, Marcia Tate, has lost her mind – believing it's Christmas over a year ago and asking "why she hasn't been hanged for murder." What follows is a backstory recounting a broken engagement and a new one, which resulted in murder with two sets of footprints in the snow pointing an accusatory finger at Marcia. The police "solved that 'studio-mystery' over a year ago" and Dr. Fabian has to retreat their steps to help Marcia regain her memory. A good framing device for a detective story, but have always found the solution to this particular no-footprints scenario to be cheap, hack and unworthy of the maestro. 

"The Man with the Iron Chest" is the nickname given "the best jewel-thief in the trade" whose "only burglar's tools are his ten fingers" and "an iron chest weighing sixty pounds." Why does he drag around a big iron chest? That's something the police from seven cities across the European continent would like to know and he nearly got caught in Amsterdam, which forced him to leave behind his ornamental iron chest. So he remained elusive until a young married couple, Don and Joyce, caught a glimpse of his face during a burglary, which lead the Greek police straight to his doorstep. But he then pulled of a minor miracle by making "an iron chest and a hundred diamonds vanish" from a locked and guarded room "as though they had never existed." A great piece of impossible crime fiction showcasing the author's love for stage magic and illusions. 

"The Street of the Seven Daggers" is a rewrite of one of my favorite short stories by Carr, but he improved the plot with a backstory and setting that really speaks to the imagination of readers who tend to like Carr. Like yours truly. Dr. Fabian is asked by a passenger, Miss Betty Parrish, to prevent her father from going to a certain street in Cairo or he'll be murdered. Who is going to kill him? Absolutely nobody! Mr. Edmund Parrish is "a superstition-breaker" and his attention has now been drawn to a little, dead-end alley called the Street of the Seven Daggers, which used to be the street of the hired killers in ancient times. Three hundred years ago, a bigwig of the Ottoman Empire "got annoyed about hired assassins" and had them executed in front of their houses – burnt out the street. But then people began to die and the rumors began. The "street's full of invisible people" and anyone who walks through the alley, "after midnight and alone," you're supposed to die with a dagger in your back. Dr. Fabian stands at the mouth of dagger-alley when Parrish is knifed while walking down the dark passageway alone. Only someone who's invisible could have stabbed the man, but Dr. Fabian reasons a more earthly explanation from the clue of the two wallets. Great stuff and even better than the original! 

"The Dancer from Stamboul" takes place in Port Said, at the gateway to the Suez Canal, where Dr. Fabian bumps into a New York policeman, Detective Lieutenant Jim Canfield of the Homicide Squad, who came with extradition-papers to take back a dangerous man-eater. Lydia White is suspected of having poisoned three men and the police has received information that she's somewhere in Port Said. So he asks Dr. Fabian to assist him comb out the port town, which leads to the titular dancer and her two lovers. A French fencer and an Italian nobleman. This ends in a duel at a fencing saloon and another poisoning. I liked the fencing scene, but otherwise an unremarkable as a detective story. 

"Death in the Desert" is not a detective or crime story, not even a horror yarn, but a historical adventure with a detective/espionage hook and presented as "a story out of my parents' time," namely 1895, which is set in the Sudanese desert. The crux of the plot is the completion and testing of an improved machine gun. A good story, if you like this kind of historical romancing. 

"The Island of Coffins" is, as Medawar rightly noted, "the most extraordinary story" in the series and demonstrated Carr didn't need to lean on the fancies and phantasms of the impossible crime to be the greatest mystery writer who ever lived. Story begins when the Maurevania, passing the Abyssinian Coast, sees a distress signal coming from Hadar Island. A very small, uninviting island with a big house where someone had sustained a serious bullet-wound. Dr. Fabian is shocked when he finds an elderly lady, Mrs. Almack, who was shot in the arm. She has retreated to the island with her grandson and two children (now all adults) to keep him company. But, when they arrived on the island, she "turned back the calendar to the year 1900." Those were "the only years that were worth living" and the current date on the island is November 12, 1920. Mrs. Almack kept her three wards on the island for two decades and they've no idea about the outside world. But why? And are the coffins on the island really filled with people who tried to leave? Dr. Fabian has to doctor out where the insanity lies and proof "tyrants aren't always so powerful as they think." Nearly as good and unforgettable as Carr's best radio-play, "The Dead Sleep Lightly."

"The Most Respectable Murder" is another one of those complicated eternal triangle stories littering the series. This time, Dr. Fabian goes to the Paris Opera where the future of two friends depended entirely on him finding an explanation how a "murderer could leave behind him a room locked up on the inside," which is easier said than done as Dr. Fabian recognizes it was "done in a completely new way" – openly admires the murderer's intelligence. The locked room-trick is the selling point of the story as it's genuinely original, but Carr would use it to much better effect in one of his late-period novels. No wonder that novel struck me as his last hurrah as the master of all crimes impossible. He came up with the trick a decade earlier! 

"The Curse of the Bronze Lamp" is a condensed version of the Merrivale novel of the same title in which an ancient bronze lamp discovered in a cursed Egyptian tomb is held responsible for blowing its owner to dust "as though she never existed." Regrettably, the shorter version exposed just how weak and unfair the impossibility really is, which needed the novel-length treatment to prop it up more convincingly. Now it felt more like the plot of a season 4 episode of Jonathan Creek. Anyway, whether it's the novel-length version or a short radio-play, I agree with Nick. This should have been "a full-blown Egyptian curse story, set in the Valley of the Kings, with murders in the pyramids, cobras at camp-sites and trouble in the tombs."

"Lair of the Devil-Fish" was an unexpected surprise as it belongs to that rare category of so-called "submerged mysteries," which tend to be impossible crimes and recommend you read my reviews of Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and Micki Browning's Adrift (2017) to get more background on this type of story – including more links. Carr might have been the first to experiment with this type of setting as the earliest example I've come across previously was Joseph Commings' short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953), but, strangely enough, it's not truly an impossible crime. Unless you believe the deep, dark blue ocean is the natural habitat of Lovecraftian monsters. So the story takes place off the southeast coast of Cuba where a small expedition has gotten permission to dive to the wreck of a cabin-cruiser, which sank in a bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898 with a fortune in silver dollars. Legend has it the cabin-cruiser was "dragged under" by the giant, slimy tentacles of a monstrous octopus. What nearly killed their diver? A monster or something a little more human? A solid and entertaining addition to those rare underwater mysteries. 

"The Dead Man's Knock" is a weird crime story in which brash American secret service agent and a British crime writer have to figure out how to kill a closely guarded man in order to protect him. Not really a locked room mystery, but a fun how-can-it-be-done. 

"The Man with Two Heads" is a low-key great story in which Dr. Fabian meets Leonard Wade on the top deck of a bus. Wade is a well-known and celebrated thriller author who might have become the victim of a diabolical plot as he has become a wandering ghost. Or so it feels. And not without reason. Dr. Fabian reads his obituary in the newspaper and Wade tells him he saw his own body in his study. Somewhat reminiscent, in spirit, to Helen McCloy's famous doppelgänger novel Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), but with a slightly more convincing setup and solution. What a shame Carr never expended this idea into a novel-length mystery. 

"Till Death Do Us Part" is another one with an awfully familiar-sounding title, but the plot has no resemblance, whatsoever, to Till Death Do Us Part (1944). This is Carr venturing into the territory of domestic suspense with the backstory to an attempted murder-suicide in a remote house, which comes with a twist in the tail. Anthony Gilbert would have loved it!

So, on a whole, The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 is a stronger than your average collection of short detective stories with the quality ranging from very good to pretty decent, but not a single average or bad story – which says something how good Carr really was. Only drawback is the lack of truly new material as Carr used this series to try out new ideas or retool old tricks or stories. But who cares? Carr is always a treat to read and this volume finally gave us back Carr's obscure, long-lost series-detective. Highly recommended!

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.

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.

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!