When We Dead Awaken

"And now for something completely different."

- John Cleese (Monty Python's Flying Circus)

The disadvantages of maintaining a bustling blog dedicated to fostering an environment in which a Silver Age of Detection can blossom have been few and far between, but one that has been bugging me, as a direct result of becoming a blogger, is that the detective story has usurped every inch of my reading list. I have been longing to return to Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl-series for over a year now. So I decided to make this place prone for occasional side distractions and took a dib in the few, unread, manga books stacked up on my to-be-read pile and came up with the 12th volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service – a sort of humanistic horror series covered with dark touches of humor and touching stories. 

As pointed out previously, I'm not a devoted or active participant in the anime and manga community, however, I do consider myself as a casual fan who picked up one or two series after immersing myself in Detective Conan and have come to admire the gift of Japanese story telling – especially when they tell it through a visual medium like a comic book. Whether it's about an ancient board game or a bored Shinigami, if they are from the hand one of their top-notch writers, they are almost impossible to put down or turn-off. Readers of this blog might want to consider giving the animated series Death Note a try. It's a supernatural thriller bound to rules in the spirit of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the plot twists and turns like smoke in a curl, in which everyone is constantly plotting and scheming. A very intense and intelligent thriller with a daring and dramatic twist halfway through. 

The "skeleton staff" of the KCDS.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a company specialized in locating discarded and forgotten bodies, in order to fulfill their last wish, usually assisting them in taking care of unfinished business, and consists of five graduate students from a Buddhist university – all of whom possess a special gift or talent. Kuro Karatsu is a student Buddhist monk and the psychic of the group who communicates with the corpses they find and can even (temporarily) reanimate them. He also has a spirit, Yaichi, lingering near him. Ao Sasaki is the brain of the outfit, as well as a computer expert/hacker, who takes care of the practical side of business. Makoto Numata is a dowser who can detect dead bodies instead of water and it’s up to him to find clients. Yuji Yata is a bit on the introversive side and wears a grotesque hand puppet, which he uses to the channel the conscience of a bad mannered, wisecracking alien intelligence. Keiko Makino looks like a sweet and innocent girl, but she studied in America to become a fully licensed embalmer and as a result has become somewhat of an outcast in Japanese society. Embalming is seen as an unclean profession over there.

"I ain't afraid o' no ghost"

In the earlier volumes, most of the stories were short-short stories, covering a single chapter, but they expanded over the course of the series and now span for several chapters, however, they can still be read as individual stories – making it easy to sample the series before you decide to read on. After all, it's a series with "explicit content" and you have to take that quite literal. The portrayal of corpses in various stages of decomposition, nudity and violence show that Housui Yamazaki has quite a skill with the pencil, but, personally, it never felt that they were just included to gross out the reader or to service its fans (see: fan service). Because gutted bodies and sex isn't this series selling point... it's the wonderful, varied stories and its cast of gargoyles. The best things I remember from the earlier volumes aren't the gruesome depictions of dead bodies, except, perhaps, for the alien, but the stories that were either moving or funny (this series is the first one to poke fun at itself) or even borderline detective stories or full-blown supernatural thrillers. The second volume is basically a novel-length story in which the Kurosagi-crew uncovers a cruel exploitation of the dead.

The 12th volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service begins where it all began: Jukaiyama. It's an immense forest and a popular haunt of the lost souls of society to watch the sun rise or set one last time before taking their own lives – because business, as usual, was not booming and they need a client. Unfortunately, Numata’s pendulum only turns up a napping woman, Yuka Suzuki, who's attached to a credit agency and looking for an ex-debtor. Mr. Kawai paid his debts and moved to Jakaiyama Village, a secret settlement somewhere in the woods where people who have grown tired of life and contemplated suicide find sanctuary, except that he’s still around and the crew even speaks with him, but Suzuki insists that he’s an imposter! It's a twisty and gloomy story that brutally molests satirized a part of 21st century life and ends on a note as wonderfully cynical as MacKinlay Kantor's "The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz."

Shakuya nailed it!

My favorite story from this volume is the second one and puts the spotlight on two young people: Nene and Shakuya. Nene is a nightclub hostess who can separate her spirit from her body at will and uses this nifty trick to lure in customers. One evening, while gazing at the city lights, her eyes fall on Shakuya, an aspiring actor/comedian who lives in houses, where the previous tenants were murdered or committed suicide, for a living (so the landlord can present a clean record of the previous tenant to the next one), and decides to beckon him in. A bond is a swiftly forged between the two as it cruelly broken when Shakuya is murdered in the apartment they had just moved into. The Kurosagi-crew are basically there to mend two souls torn asunder and the resolution had a nice decorative touch of lampshade hanging.

In the last story, the guys find an old man pushing a wheelchair along the river with a life-size doll of a woman in it. The doll is a replica of what his sister might have looked like if she hadn't died as a child during the great air raid on Tokyo. The man is also involved with a gang of foreign agents, who kidnap them, and the spirit of his dead sister, through the doll, asks the Kurosagi-crew for help and the solution involves a dictator, more dolls and guardian spirit. The story also briefly looks at Yata's past again, who was the sole survivor when his parents tried to take their kids with them in a suicide pact, but I have no idea if this was brought up because there are parallels between his and the old man's story or to suggest that his hand puppet might have a different origin.

All in all, an excellent collection of stories that were well worth the wait, but I hope the next release will be within a 12-month period. Anyway, I hope this was not too much of intrusion and a regular review will be up as soon as possible.

Hooray for Homicide: One Year Anniversary!

Statler: "I loved it!"

Waldorf: "So what? You also loved World War II."

- The Muppet Show.

Life of the party

One year ago, today, I was launched into the blogosphere with a brief and flimsy review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946) and gathered momentum in the weeks and months that followed – mainly due to the people who took the time to read and comment on my vague ramblings.

It is, therefore, with a great deal of embarrassment that I have nothing to mark the occasion, like a cross-blog examination of a writer or a slew of themed reviews, which makes me feel like a clueless host who finds a throng of partygoers on his doorstep and has to inform them that there isn't a party today. I wish there was one, but time has only permitted me to post regular reviews, however, once I have unpinned myself from underneath its pointed handles I will vary my output again.

So, once again, I would like to thank everyone who has turned this blog into one of their regular haunts on the web and hopefully you will continue to patronize this blog in the future. And if you want to know how this blog came about, you should read this post.

Clipped Wings

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

-  George Bernard Shaw

Let the reader beware: extremely vague ramblings are ahead of you!  

Recently, Xavier Lechard added an addendum to a response he compiled earlier this month to the projectile vomiting an article signed by Philip Hensher, in which the savant took a fresh and much needed stance by opposing the unchallenged conventions of the rule bound mammoth that is the crime genre – and labeled its perfervid followers as the un-evolved troglodytes they really are. But as Xavier already spewed his cerebral guts all over the article, there's not much left for me to add except to seize this opportunity to make one or two general observations of my own.

In the opening of his addendum, Xavier restated one of his previous observations that the genre being "rule-bound" doesn't mean it is necessarily adverse to originality and innovation, but I think that is putting it weakly – since the genre would've never prospered as it once did had any of the practitioners in the field taken serious notice of the scribbles produced by S.S van Dine and Ronald Knox.  

Mysteries were virtually unique as a genre fiction during their golden period in the fact that they were hard to define and had a scattered fan base. For decades, a discussion raged on what constituted as a mystery as the wings of the genre seemed to encompass the entire literary globe. Within the scope of the crime-ridden genre itself there were many different denominations: the fair-play whodunit, action packed thrillers, inverted crime stories, gothic novels of suspense and maidens in distress, police procedurals, rogue adventures, spy thrillers etc.

This is not a problem found with gritty westerns, science-fiction yarns, blood curdling horror stories or sweet, diabetic inducing, romance novels. They are, for the most part, what they are and still easily identified if they crossed-over in unfamiliar territory – where as the detective story blends in almost naturally with every surrounding it is put in. The prime example of this genre bending is, of course, Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954), which places a traditionally plotted mystery in a futuristic setting peppered with social commentary, but you could just as well write a legitimate detective set in Transylvania featuring a protagonist who has to exonerate Count Dracula from a murder committed in a locked and nearly impenetrable castle tower – whose only point of entrance is a tiny, top-floor window large enough for a bird or bat to pass through. A creative writer can pull it off.

As far as rules go, I have pretty much given up on them. Until recently, I clung to the necessity of a plot and strict fair play, however, that proved to be incompatible with a lot of writers and books I absolutely love and adore (e.g. Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc, Rex Stout and H.R.F. Keating). I still consider cleverly plotted detective stories that play fair with their readers as a personal favorite, but that's just a preference for one of the many forms the genre can be molded into by a talented pair of hands guided by an intelligent and imaginative brain. That's how I see the genre these days... as a mass that can be molded in any shape you want and should provide a gifted writer with unlimited freedom.

Lamentably, that's a potential that is rarely tapped into these days and there's not much left of that once majestic, free-roaming bird who soared over the printed pages of nearly every genre after it was captured, clipped and put in a cage too small to even stretch it wings properly.

Enter any bookstore, and it's the same old, same old. So called literary thrillers saturated with character angst and lengthy, pointless descriptions of absolute nonsense. No imagination. No experimentation. No longevity. And there's where you find the true tragedy of this problem. The people who threw themselves up as innovators with the purpose of "transcending" the genre are effectively bleeding it to death and hopefully their publishers will take notice, before it's too late, that the new generation of readers aren't all that interested in these self-proclaimed, literary masterpieces – that make pungent comments on society and whatnot. I realize that it's very vulgar of me, Ho-Ling and Patrick to admit, openly and unapologetically, that we read mysteries mainly for our enjoyment, but perhaps our generation simply isn't literate enough to appreciate lengthy descriptions of angst-ridden childhood recollections, bladder problems and CD/DVD collections.

As my fellow aficionado concluded, we should (or rather they) make the tent bigger and be more inclusive as well as stopping with that childish, unfounded phobia for the "I" word, but then again, maybe we're better off if the genre, as it stands now, withers away so we can begin anew.

And on a side note: I'm midway through another impossible crime novel (it's not an addiction, I can stop whenever I want!) and the review will be up within the next two days or so.

Why Nero Wolfe Never Ages

"I don't know how a brain that is never used passes the time."

- Nero Wolfe (The Final Deduction, 1961)

Maury Chaykin as the immortal Nero Wolfe

The attentive readers of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin stories are likely to be familiar with the apparent immortality of the characters, whose aging processes seems to be have been in suspended animation during the period between their first recorded appearance in Fer-de-Lace (1934) until their final bow in A Family Affair (1975). This is most notable in A Right to Die (1964), in which a character from Too Many Cooks (1938) reappears and has morphed from a young adult into a middle aged man with a grown son. There's also the advent of technology in the later books – so time does, in fact, move on outside of the brownstone, but does seems to have had a very weak grip, if any, on its inhabitants.

What's the secret of their perpetual robustness and everlasting good looks? To be honest, I don't have a clue, however, I do have one or two theories to offer on this matter – and they make so much sense that I want to consider them as part of the corpus. But hey, I am open to rivaling theories. ;)

Theory #1: if you're a habitual visitant of the brownstone on West 35th Street, then you probably have noticed that not everyone lived to tell about it. There's an impressive list of people who drew their last breath in (and around) Wolfe's abode, which could mean that the fundaments of the house rests on an ancient, sacrificial altar and needs a blood offer every now and then to appease some archaic God of Death – who resides on the greenhouse roof in the human guise of Wolfe's orchid nurse, Theodore.

Theory #2: taking Nero Wolfe's personality into consideration, it's also possible that he simply repudiates the idea that time is irretrievable and who couldn't envisage him looking up from a book to glare at a ticking clock and muttering, "pfui!" If the passage of time wants to encroach on Nero Wolfe's time it has to check with Archie Goodwin first to make an appointment – just like everyone else.

Theory #3: Wolfe's greenhouse roof is stuffed with plants and flowers imported from that mythical place high-up in Tibetan mountain region, Shangri-La, emanating fragrances that considerably slows down bodily decay and mental rot of the residents of that famous brownstone.

Yes, the next book in the queue just so happens to be an entry from the Wolfe and Goodwin series, which prompted me to post this. Now, if only I had a quiet moment to work my way through the first couple of chapters. Hm. I'm afraid I just wasted such a moment on this nonsense. Oh, well.

Geniuses at Work

"A picture says more than a thousand words."

While browsing through my files, I came across the following snapshot – depicting ten core members from the early days of the Mystery Writers of America who were evidently hard at work and strenuously taxing their mental dexterity. You have to love the fact that Pat McGerr, who was known for fooling around with unidentified bodies, completely immerged herself in the role of corpse in this picture. What dedication! ;-)

The Gang: Georges Simenon, Anthony Boucher, Lawrence Blochman, Harold Q. Masur, Burke Wilkenson, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Fred Dannay, Leslie Ford, Manfred Lee and Pat McGerr.  

Update: I was searching for a website to attach to Burke Wilkenson's name when I found the place I originally snatched this picture from, but I still haven't the faintest idea who he was or what he did.

The Zombie Factory

"A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others."

- Charles Darwin.

Well, it appears that the mystery community has a large-scale, Harlequin-like holocaust to deal with and we haven't even come to terms yet with the previous massacre perpetrated against innocent, harmless and defenseless books of an advanced age. The news hit us a mere few hours ago when awrobins, a long-time member over at the JDCarr.Com message board, opened a thread relating the horrific discovery he made when thumbing through his newly acquired and recently reprinted edition of Ask a Policeman (1933) – the text of the original story had been altered!

The offenders of these abominable crimes against literature operate under the aptly chosen name of The Resurrected Press, but I think The Zombie Factory would've been even more fitting – because that's what you really produce when you churn out books that have been modified without consent of the person who put them to paper (and if the author is no longer among us you simply keep your stumpy, sweaty paws of their work). The concept of a zombie is the only monstrosity that stumbles around in horror stories and movies that ever made me genuinely shiver (and that's coming from someone who nearly chocked on his own laughter when he saw The Exorcist for the first time) because their origin is truly frightening. They aren't ancient bloodsuckers who curl up during the daytime in a coffin to take a nap or cursed people who grow a tail and whiskers during a full moon, but actual people whom we might have known during their lives, loved ones even, who rise from their graves as hollow shells of their former selves and make the living miserable – and that, in a nutshell, is the catalogue of this fifth-rate publishing outlet.

They've taken stories that we've enjoyed reading or were hoping to have the pleasure of reading in the near future and stripped them of their identity. The only reason they could've had for desecrating these books is to pander to 21st century sensitivity or a misplaced sense of creative superiority – because back then they really didn't know what they were doing, but their Übermensch of an editor does as he she it goes through the story with a blue pencil to decide what's appropriate for a modern, sensitive audience and what our innocent eyes need to be shielded from. Just imagine being confronted with an unenlightened opinion or remark from the past! It can take seconds, maybe even up to a full minute, to get over it! Seriously though, haven't we learned anything from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Thankfully, a chunk of their catalogue consists of public domain work and uncensored copies can be obtained from print-on-demand publishers like The Echo Library and The Dodo Press, and especially the latter one delivers decent editions of these copyright-free books. Finally, Curt Evans was surprised that The Resurrected Press had permission to reprint The Detection Club novels, since Harper Collins has only recently reissued one of them, The Floating Admiral (1931), and this might give their "legal department" a big headache. That wasn't me chuckling, I swear!

Oh, there will be a new review up tomorrow.

My 150 Favorite Mysteries (Updated: July 1, 2012)

"There are those among us who claim that the detective story is a form of escapist literature. Lovers of the genre will deny this, and they are right to do so, for the detective story addict is not content to sit back and enjoy what is called "a cosy read." For full enjoyment of the story, the reader needs to use his brains. A problem has been set before him, and the true addict obtains pleasure from doing his best to solve it."
- Gladys Mitchell.

Last month, fellow blogger and mystery enthusiast Sergio, who's better known under his shadowy aliases of Cavershamragu and Bloodymurder, posted an assemblage of his favorite mystery and crime novels – which is an idea I have been chewing on ever since opening up this blog for business. His post prompted me to start laboring on a list of all-time favorite mysteries of my own and today I was finally in the right mood to put the finishing touches to that compilation, however, this list will look completely different a year or so from now – and I will probably have to extent it to 150 200 favorite mysteries. There are already a few glaring omissions in this one, but at least I tried to make it as varied as possible. My picks range from classic, puzzle-orientated stories to modern hardboiled private eye novels.

A regular review will be up within the next two or three days, but in the mean time you could hop over and take a look at Ho-Ling's blog – who has been on a posting binge the past few days and just uploaded a critique of Bertus Aafjes' Een ladder tegen een wolk (A Ladder Against the Clouds, 1969).

My 150 favorite mystery novels and short story collections:

Lampion voor een blinde (Bertus Aafjes, 1973)

Murder Points a Finger (David Alexander, 1953)

Mystery and More Mystery (Robert Arthur, 1966)

Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov, 1954)

The Naked Sun (Isaac Asimov, 1957)

The Return of the Black Widowers (Isaac Asimov, 2003)

De dertien katten (A.C. Baantjer, 1963)

Een dodelijke dreiging (A.C. Baantjer, 1988)

The Sullen Sky Mystery (H.C. Bailey, 1935)

Black Land, White Land (H.C. Bailey, 1937)

Jumping Jenny (Anthony Berkeley, 1933)

Trial and Error (Anthony Berkeley, 1937)

A Question of Proof (Nicholas Blake, 1935)

Head of a Traveller (Nicholas Blake, 1949)

The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (Lawrence Block, 1994)

De laatste kans (M.P.O. Books, 2011)

The Case of the Solid Key (Anthony Boucher, 1941)
The Case of the Seven Sneezes (Anthony Boucher, 1942)

Exeunt Murders (Anthony Boucher, 1983)

Green for Danger (Christianna Brand, 1944)

Death of Jezebel (Christianna Brand, 1948)

London Particular (Christianna Brand, 1952)

Hardly a Man is Now Alive (Herbert Brean, 1952)

The Traces of Brillhart (Herbert Brean, 1961)

Holiday Express (J. Jefferson Farjeon, 1935)

Night of the Jabberwock (Fredric Brown, 1950)

Case for Three Detectives (Leo Bruce, 1936)

Chinese Red (Richard Burke, 1942)

The Youth Hostel Murders (Glyn Carr, 1952)

Poison in Jest (John Dickson Carr, 1932)

The Three Coffins (John Dickson Carr, 1935)

The Four False Weapons (John Dickson Carr, 1937)

The Crooked Hinge (John Dickson Carr, 1938)

The Problem of the Green Capsule (John Dickson Carr, 1939)

Till Death Do Us Part (John Dickson Carr, 1944)

He Who Whispers (John Dickson Carr, 1946)

Captain Cut-Throat (John Dickson Carr, 1955)

The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler, 1943)

The Complete Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton, 1911-35)

Partners in Crime (Agatha Christie, 1929)

The Mysterious Mr. Quin (Agatha Christie, 1930)

Peril at End House (Agatha Christie, 1932)

Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie, 1934)

The A.B.C. Murders (Agatha Christie, 1936)

Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie, 1937)

After the Funeral (Agatha Christie, 1953)

The Man from Tibet (Clyde B. Clason, 1938)

Poison Jasmine (Clyde B. Clason, 1940)

Half-Moon Investigations (Eoin Colfer, 2006)

Banner Deadlines (Joseph Commings, 2004)

The Case of the Gilded Fly (Edmund Crispin, 1944)

The Long Divorce (Edmund Crispin, 1951)

The HOG Murders (William L. DeAndrea, 1979)

Killed on the Rocks (William L. DeAndrea, 1990)

The Werewolf Murders (William L. DeAndrea, 1992)

Murder – All Kinds (William L. DeAndrea, 2003)

The Plague Court Murders (Carter Dickson, 1934)

The Unicorn Murders (Carter Dickson, 1935)

The Punch and Judy Murders (Carter Dickson, 1937)

The Judas Window (Carter Dickson, 1938)

Nine-and Death Makes Ten (Carter Dickson, 1940)

She Died a Lady (Carter Dickson, 1943)

The Department of Queer Complaints (Carter Dickson, 1944)

Death in the Back Seat (Dorothy Cameron Disney, 1936)

The Strawstack Murders (Dorothy Cameron Disney, 1939)

The Anubis Slayings (Paul Doherty, 2000)

The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887-1921)

Full Dark House (Christopher Fowler, 2004)

Ten Second Staircase (Christopher Fowler, 2006)

The Eye of Osiris (R. Austin Freeman, 1912)

The Stoneware Monkey (R. Austin Freeman, 1939)

Something Nasty in the Woodshed (Anthony Gilbert, 1942)

Smallbone Deceased (Michael Gilbert, 1950)

The Danger Within (Michael Gilbert, 1952)

Dead Skip (Joe Gores, 1972)

What a Body! (Alan Green, 1949)

The Chinese Gold Murders (Robert van Gulik, 1959)

The Red Pavilion (Robert van Gulik, 1961)
Necklace and Calabash (Robert van Gulik, 1967)

The Fourth Door (Paul Halter, 1987)

Night of the Wolf (Paul Halter, 2007)

The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett, 1930)

An English Murder (Cyril Hare, 1951)

Spelen met vuur (Heuvel and De Waal, 2004)

The Devotion of Suspect X (Keigo Higashino, 2005)

On Beulah Heights (Reginald Hill, 1998)

Murder on Safari (Elspeth Huxley, 1938)

Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (H.R.F. Keating, 1971)

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (H.R.F. Keating, 1978)

Under a Monsoon Cloud (H.R.F. Keating, 1986)

The Body in the Billiard Room (H.R.F. Keating, 1987)

The Whistling Hangman (Baynard Kendrick, 1937)

The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi (Okamoto Kido, 2007)

Obelists Fly High (C. Daly King, 1935)

The Exploits of Arsène Lupin (Maurice Leblanc, 1907)

813 (Maurice Leblanc, 1910)

The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Gaston Leroux, 1907)

The Columbo Collection (William Link, 2010)

Bloodhounds (Peter Lovesey, 1996)

The Far Side of the Dollar (Ross MacDonald, 1965)

Surfeit of Lampreys (Ngaio Marsh, 1941)

Points and Lines (Seicho Matsumoto, 1957)

Mr. Splitfoot (Helen McCloy, 1968)

The Blushing Monkey (Roman McDougald, 1953)

Pick Your Victim (Pat McGerr, 1946)

The Seven Deadly Sisters (Pat McGerr, 1948)

The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (Gladys Mitchell, 1929)

Come Away, Death (Gladys Mitchell, 1937)

St. Peter’s Finger (Gladys Mitchell, 1938)

Merlin’s Furlong (Gladys Mitchell, 1953)

The Glass Mask (Lenore Glen Offord, 1944)

The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (Stuart Palmer, 1933)

Nipped in the Bud (Stuart Palmer, 1951)

The People vs. Withers and Malone (Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, 1963)

Death and the Maiden (Q. Patrick, 1939)

Verdict of Twelve (Raymond Postgate, 1940)

Hoodwink (Bill Pronzini, 1982)

Bones (Bill Pronzini, 1985)

Shackles (Bill Pronzini, 1988)

Carpenter and Quincannon (Bill Pronzini, 1998)

The Greek Coffin Mystery (Ellery Queen, 1932)

The Adventures of Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen, 1935)

Cat of Many Tails (Ellery Queen, 1949)

The Tragedy of Errors (Ellery Queen, 1999)

The Adventure of the Murdered Moth and Other Radio Plays (Ellery Queen, 2005)

Black Widow (Patrick Quentin, 1952)

Death from a Top Hat (Clayton Rawson, 1938)

The Gold Deadline (Herbert Resnicow, 1984)

The Gold Frame (Herbert Resnicow, 1986)

The Dead Room (Herbert Resnicow, 1987)

The Case of the Little Green Men (Mack Reynolds, 1951)

Death on the Board (John Rhode, 1937)

Home Sweet Homicide (Craig Rice, 1944)

The Frightened Stiff (Kelley Roos, 1942)

Sailor, Take Warning! (Kelley Roos, 1944)

Murder on the Way! (Theodore Roscoe, 1935)

The Sleeping Bacchus (Hilary St. George Saunders, 1951)

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1928)

Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1933)

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (Soji Shimada, 1981)

Black Aura (John Sladek, 1974)

Too Many Cooks (Rex Stout, 1938)

Some Buried Caesar (Rex Stout, 1939)

The Tattoo Murder Case (Akimitsu Takagi, 1948)

The Hangman’s Handyman (Hake Talbot, 1942)

Rim of the Pit (Hake Talbot, 1944)

The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Török, 2007)

The Maine Massacre (Janwillem van de Wetering, 1979)

The Silver Scale Mystery (Anthony Wynne, 1931)

The Inugami Clan (Seichi Yokomizo, 1951)

 

Cue "how could you forgot" or "why didn't you include" comments in 3... 2... 1...

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you"

"There are many doors to Fantasia, my boy. There are other such magic books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends on who gets his hands on such books."

- Mr. Coreander, The Never-Ending Story (1979). 

I always had a weakness for crossovers. It's difficult to explain where this fascination came from, but there's something positively thrilling about watching two different universes collide with one another and merge into one – and a character from one book acknowledging a character from another book, as an actual person, is enough to send a tingling down my spine. It's for this reason that I enjoy Rex Stout's non-series detectives as much as the ones he wrote featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. They are jam-packed with places and secondary characters that make it very clear they all inhabit the same universe, but, to my great sorrow, Wolfe, Fox and Hicks were never destined to cross paths.

So you can imagine my glee when, a few years ago, I discovered that Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice had collaborated on a bunch of short stories, collected in The People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), in which their series detectives actually worked together on half a dozen cases (was there a god, after all?)!

But as great and fun as the stories were, and the experience of reading them, they somewhat pale in comparison to what happened after I turned over the final page. This is not a book review, but an account of the night I stepped through one of the Fantasia's hidden doors and met Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone face-to-face. ;-)  

The Dream

I swear, they're sneaking up on me!

I vividly remember the night that my conscious mind dislodged itself from my sleep-wrapped brain, entered an alternate dimension, and walked into a dimly-lit room, dressed sharply like a 1930s gumshoe (think Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin, but I felt more like Sam Tyler at that moment), and there, on the floor, was the body of a man. Near him lay a revolver that hadn't given up smoking yet.

Well, here was a unique opportunity to prove my prowess as the cerebral detective I always fancy myself to be, and went down on all four to methodically study the remains and the murder weapon, when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone burst onto the crime-scene. They grabbed me, each under one of my arms, and started dragging me out of the room. The police were on there way, they told me, to arrest me for this murder, but rest assured, they would prove me to be innocent of this dirty deed – and all this time I was kicking and screaming that I didn't want their help, because they always make things worse than they already are.

Then the dream cuts to a bizarre, almost surrealistic car chase with a few dozen patrol cars. I'm locked in the trunk by the dynamic duo, banging and screaming to be let out, and lurched over the steering wheel (with a gleam of madness in her eyes) is Hildegard Withers – while Malone hangs out of the side window, with an half empty bottle of whiskey, hollering a song about pretty girls and booze.

And then I woke up... but was it all a dream? Well, I can tell you it was one of the most realistic and lifelike ones I ever had in my life. Withers and Malone weren't vague, dreamy images but actual, three-dimensional human beings. I remember the pressure of their grip on my arms. Heck, I even smelled the booze on Malone's breath!

This means one of the following things: a) my brain couldn't fully comprehend that I had just read an actual GAD-crossover, and as a result I was having a full-sensory hallucination b) the stories were so epic that they ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and allowed me to travel to a parallel universe were detective stories are the reality c) for a brief moment, my sleep induced mind figured out how to open one of the doors leading to Fantasia.

But what do regular visitors who haunt this blog think?