Blacke's Magic: Revenge of the Esperanza (1986)

Over the past two years, I've come across two novels, a novella and short story that pulled the detective story down to the muted, two-colored world of the seabed littered with shipwrecks, sunken treasure and legends of the deep ocean – revealing a largely untapped basin of possibilities. Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017), Desmond Reid's "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) and John Dickson Carr's "Lair of the Devil-Fish" (collected in The Island of Coffins, 2021) all demonstrated an underwater setting opened up new opportunities to play around with unbreakable alibis and impossible crimes. Something that has been explored decade earlier by Joseph Commings in his 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968). Ho-Ling Wong followed up my review of Forsyte's Diving Death by discussing the Detective Academy Q episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea, which does exactly as described on the tin. 

So these regrettably too rare deep sea detective stories have become a favorite (soggy) rabbit hole of mine to explore. Not in the least because they often combine an archaeological plot with an impossible crime, which are two of my favorite sub-categories of the detective story. There happened to be an episode of Blacke's Magic dovetailing an archaeological mystery with the miraculous disappearance of a 300-year-old Spanish seabed shipwreck. So it was high time to return to that dapper magician-sleuth and his carny father. 

Blacke's Magic was a short-lived American TV-series, created by Richard Levinson, William Link and Peter S. Fischer, which aired on NBC from January 5 to May 7, 1986, starring Hal Linden as magician-detective Alexander Blacke and Harry Morgan as his conman dad, Leonard – appearing together in thirteen episodes pitting their wits "against seemingly magical crimes." The series feels like a 1980s prototype of Jonathan Creek. 

Revenge of the Esperanza (1986) is the fifth episode of the series and begins with Alexander Blacke following “a paper trail of credit card charges, hotels, restaurants, airline tickets” to a luxurious yacht club in Florida. There he finds his father living it large, under the name Farnsworth, but he also appears to have his "feet planted firmly in quicksand." Leonard Blacke has gotten himself involved with four young treasure hunters, Maryanne Thompson, Paul Thompson, Eric Wilson and Clay, who have been trying to locate the wreck of the Esperanza for years. A Spanish galleon that sunk over three centuries ago in a storm with "untold riches" as its cargo, but the one of the investors is getting impatient with the stories about treasure ships and wants her whole one-hundred thousand dollars back. So the discovery of the wreck came in the nick of time. But not for very long.

The members agreed to camp out on the top of the wreck until they have brought up "every last ounce of gold she got," but, during the night, their equipment sounds the alarm and watched how it moved away on sonar – a nifty piece of retro-futuristic, 1980s fictitious technology (see picture). When they dived looking for it, it was gone, but "a 300-year-old shipwreck can't just get up and sail off." But that's what happened.

Alexander Blacke has to stick around to save his father's neck, because the investor has pressed charges against Farnsworth and Sheriff Tyler is becoming very suspicious of the old man. Just as the Esperanza vanished, the locals begin to see an old pirate ship, "quiet like a ghost," cutting through the fog and ships bells clanging mournfully. Finally, one of the treasure hunters is murdered with a dagger that came from the wreck.

So, yeah, there's more here than can be used in a 45-minute episode and the first murder served only to introduce an original clue. A piece of now long-lost technology known as a cassette tape with noise recorded on it and feel rather proud of myself for immediately figuring out what's really on the cassette. And how it could be played back. The second murder felt unnecessary and made the murderer standout, but was pleasantly surprised to discover (ROT13) ur unq na nppbzcyvfu uvqqra va cynva fvtug naq ur jnf chg gb tbbq hfr gb chapu hc gur raqvat. So the plot mainly hinges Sheriff Tyler nipping at Leonard Blacke's heel and the disappearance of the Esperanza, but they were both reasonably well handled. Particularly, the impossible disappearance of the wreck had a believable explanation (despite the dodgy monitoring) with that great cassette clue, but they needed more room to do them any justice. I think cutting the ghost ship and turning two murders into a single assault (leaving the victim unconscious in a hospital bed) would have made for better and much tighter episode.

All on all, Revenge of the Esperanza is a decent, fun enough episode with an intriguing premise and some good idea, but a cluttered 45-minutes were not enough to do anything meaningful with it. But, if you love impossible crimes, it's genuine pleasure to watch one unfold on screen.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Murder on the Campus (1933)

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) amended Robert Adey's original 1991 revised edition significantly with the inclusion of TV shows, movies, anime and manga, which served as a reminder that I haven't watched a single episode of either Banacek or Kagi no kakatta heya (The Locked Room Murders) – two detective TV-series wholly dedicated to the impossible crime story. A gross oversight that will be corrected before the year draws to a close! But, for now, I have something else that caught my attention.

Locked Room Murders: Supplement listed Arthur T. Horman's screenplay of Murder on the Campus (1933), a low-budget adaptation of Whitman Chambers' The Campanile Murders (1933), with two intriguing-sounding locked room situations. Normally, I would prefer to read the book before watching the movie, but The Campanile Murders is a long out-of-print, hard-to-get novel and Murder on the Campus is in the public domain. So...

Murder on the Campus was directed by Richard Thorpe and have seen it being advertised as "a solid collegiate whodunit," but, purely as an impossible crime story, it stands as a good example of how the locked room mystery can help prop up an otherwise threadbare plot.

The two lead-characters of the movie are Bill Bartlett (Charles Starrett), a reporter for the Times Star, who's mad about a college student, Lillian Voyne (Shirley Grey), who's currently working her way through college by singing in a nightclub. Bartlett is even willing to risk "a term in prison" to get her out of trouble when she becomes the prime suspect in a murder case, but, surprisingly, not a murder linked to her sleazy nightclub gig.

A student, Malcolm Jennings, is heard playing the carillon on top of the campus campanile, a bell tower, when the chiming all of the sudden stops and a gunshot is heard. A crowd immediately gathered in front the locked door of the bell tower and, until the police arrived, "not a soul" had come through the only way in, or out, of the bell tower. At the top of the tower, they find a body with a gunshot to the head without any powder burns or a weapon, "a plain case of murder," but where did the shooter go – since he, or she, is nowhere to be found inside the tower! The discovery is followed by scene in which Captain Ed Kyne (J. Farrell MacDonald), Sergeant Charlie Lorrimer (Dewey Robinson) and Bartett rattle of a series of potential solutions to the locked room problem. Such as a rifle shot from an elevated position (high buildings or the far-away hills), hiding places (elevator shaft) or the use of a parachute or rope. All of them are discredited on the spot.

Unfortunately, the discovery and brief discussion of the murder, demonstrating the sheer impossibility of the shooting ("nobody left there after the shot"), is as good as Murder on the Campus gets as a locked room mystery... until the solution.

The solution to the impossible murder is an interesting one. A combination of two distinctly different locked room techniques, closely associated with two different groups of locked room specialists, which is somewhat of a rarity, but the potentially good locked room-trick was completely wasted here – withholding the only "clue" until the last twenty minutes. A late clue so blatant that it was insulting. There's a second, quasi-impossible situation concerning the fatal bullet that had been fired with a gun that had been locked-up at the time of the murder, but this second impossibility is given even less thought than the locked bell tower. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have recognized it as an impossible crime had it not been for its inclusion in Skupin's Locked Room Murders. And it didn't help that the obviously possibility turned out to be the solution.

So the presentation and solution to the locked bell tower murder is not without interest, but the poor, threadbare story, wedged in between, makes Murder on the Campus merely a curiosity for impossible crime fans. However, what the movie lacked in plot ingenuity, it made up with likable performances, a good pace and an authentic period charm. Even with a poor plot, Murder on the Campus was still fun to watch, if only to see actual actors from the 1930s act out a detective story from that period. Something even the best modern adaptations can never replicate.

As of now, I've no idea what I'll read, or watch, next, but chances are that it will be another entry from Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Detective Conan: The Villa Dracula Murder Case

Last year, I reviewed three multi-part episodes of an anime based on Gosho Aoyama's successful, long-running manga series, Detective Conan, which included the superb The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldy and The Case of the Séance Double Locked Room – two unsung classics of the impossible crime genre. The Black Wings of Icarus was a fairly minor detective story in comparison, but had a good, old-fashioned alibi-trick Freeman Wills Crofts would have appreciated.

These episodes were highlighted, here and here, by Ho-Ling Wong on his blog and recommended two more episodes in August that were written by the same screenwriter, Hirohito Ochi.

Ochi is a writer with a reputation for crafting "insanely tightly structured" plots and his best episodes are "excellent examples of synergy in mystery fiction" where everything is intricately, but logically, linked together. The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly and The Case of the Séance Double Locked Room are great examples of Ochi's webwork plotting. And the reason why those two episodes ended up being my favorite locked room tales of 2018.

The Villa Dracula Murder Case is a two-part episode, originally aired on January 26 and February 2, 1998, which is not exactly in the same league as those previously mentioned episodes, but was still an excellent specimen of the locked room mystery – one that fully exploited its surroundings. This anticipated the maze-like, double locked room murder from The Case of the Séance Double Locked Room.

The episode begins with Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan driving to the clifftop home of a famous horror novelist, Daisuke Torakura, who's better known among horror fans and readers as "Mr. Dracula." Torakura earned his fame as a writer of vampire stories and even named his home, Villa Dracula, after that fanged icon of the horror genre. At the Villa Dracula, Moore, Rachel and Conan meet several people and acquaintances of the horror novelist. There's his wife, Etsuko Torakura, and a personal assistant/student, Toshiya Tadokoro. And two house-guests: the editor-in-chief of the Monthly Horror Times magazine, Fumio Doi, and a researcher from the North Kantou University's Folklore Research Center, Shuichi Hamura.

Initially, Richard Moore, the Great Sleeping Detective, is disappointed when he learns Torakura had summoned him to investigate his wife, but a one-million yen fee proved sufficient to paper over any potential hurt feelings. Anyway, a snow storm forces them to stay for the night.

Later that evening, Torakura withdraws to his private study to finish a manuscript. This private study is an octagon-shaped room semi-attached to the main house by a covered corridor. A balcony goes around the room and looks out over the sea (see map below).

However, Torakura never emerged from his study and the main door is securely locked from the outside, but, when they go onto the balcony, they found the french window standing open – inside they make a gruesome discovery. Torakura is crucified to a giant wooden cross, standing against the wall, with a stake driven to his heart and the body was lighted up by a film projector. A splendid and macabre scene.

 

 So how did the murderer enter the study? The door on the corridor side was locked on the inside and, while the french window was standing open, there were only footprints directly in front of it. The path to the french window was bare of any footprints. And there's another quasi-impossibility: how did the murderer snatched the stake from the locked or watched collection room that's full with horror movie memorabilia. Yes, the murder weapon was a movie prop.

Firstly, the impossible murder in the octagon-shaped study was more difficult to solve than expected, because the qualities of crime-scene brought two particular locked room stories to mind. The round shape of the room and balcony with its long corridor makes it look like a key-hole, which is nearly identical to the locked room crime-scene from Edmund Crispin's "The Name in the Window" (collected in Beware of the Trains, 1953) – which also looks "like a key-hole." The round balcony around the octagon room and the wooden stake also brought The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders from the Kindaichi series to mind. And the explanation of that Kindaichi story would have nicely explained why there were only footprints by the french window.

Fortunately, the resemblance to those two locked room stories were only superficial and the original solution was as simple as it was satisfying. Logically explained the bizarre setup of the murder and the clueing was excellently done. Such as the smell of oil paint, a small piece of wood and weird marks in the snow on the roof above the collection room. Everything fitted neatly together and foreshadowed the plot synergy that propelled The Case of the Séance Double Locked Room to classical status. In my book anyway.

Something that was as well done as the intricately presented, but ultimately simple, locked room-trick was the neatly posed false solution. A potential answer to the impossible murder that was shattered to pieces in a dramatic scene when it was revealed that there were no footprints on the roof of the covered corridor, which made it appear as the murderer could have only reached the study had he flown there – "like a vampire." My only complaint is that the murderer's identity was painfully obvious, but the excellently-handled impossible crime made more than up for that.

So, all in all, The Villa Dracula Murder Case was a cleverly plotted, clued and well handled locked room story. Not of the same high caliber as some of Ochi's later episodes, but still highly recommendable to locked room fans. Even if you don't like anime or manga.

Ho-Ling also recommended Entrance to the Maze: The Anger of the Giant Statue of the Heavenly Maiden, but I'll be saving that one for another day.

Clue Club: The Real Gone Gondola (1976)

Previously, I reviewed a book recommended by "JJ" of The Invisible Event, namely Impossible Bliss (2001), which was written by Lee Sheldon, a game designer and scriptwriter, who published the book independently, but the overall quality of the story is notably better than your average self-published novel – particularly the splendid detective-character, Herman Bliss. Sheldon stumbled across JJ's review and left some interesting comments.

In one of his comments, Sheldon posted a list of all the impossible crime fiction he has written and tacked on some brief, but enticing, plot-description. A story-line from the mystery-themed soap opera, The Edge of Night, has a "murder by strangulation with a chain in a gazebo surrounded by snow" with "only the victim's footprints leading to the gazebo." There are a number of episodes from Blacke's Magic listed and an unpublished, untitled short story about a murder inside "a glass revolving door" with only "the victim inside and police both inside and out." Surprisingly, the one that intrigued me the most came from an obscure, 1970s cartoon show.

The Real Gone Gondola (1976) is the third episode of the Hanna-Barbera produced Clue Club, a bargain basement Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, which has an elderly, wheelchair bound woman evaporating from a closely observed ski-lift gondola as it rises up a mountain – commenting that he's certain that "the solution to this one has never been used." I'm afraid I have some bad news about that, but I'll get to that later.

Clue Club originally aired on CBS from August 14, 1976 to September 3, 1977 and had replaced Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in the Saturday morning lineup.

The one-season series had sixteen episodes that followed the escapades of a group of teenage detectives, Larry, Pepper, D.D. and Dottie, who are accompanied by two dogs, Woofer and Whimper. The dogs here can only talk with each other, but the whole setup really can only be described as a discount Scooby-Doo. This made the cleverly constructed puzzle of a vanishing woman from a moving, closely observed gondola stand out like a sore thumb. Who would expect an authentic impossible disappearance with actual clues in an obscure cartoon show like this?

Mrs. Coldwell is the elderly, wheelchair bound woman and owner of the Blizzard Mountain ski resort, but lately, she has been receiving threatening letters from "some cook," signing his letters as Vortex, demanding two million dollars – or else "he'll disintegrate her." Sheriff Bagley and Larry of the Clue Club watch how Mrs. Coldwell is wheeled into the gondola by her nephew, Tom Coldwell, who goes back to fetch her a blanket, but she already started the gondola when he comes running back. And when it reached the top of the mountain, Sheriff Bagley and Larry are greeted by an empty wheelchair with a hat and a pile of clothes on it! Vortex had made good on his promise!

Admittedly, this is a grand premise for an impossible crime and this series has no right to something as good as this, but it didn't stop with a neatly posed and baffling disappearance.

A false solution is (briefly) raised when it was suggested Mrs. Coldwell could have been moved into an adjacent gondola traveling downward, which is not a bad idea had the door of the downward gondola not have been on the opposite side. Even then, you probably would not have enough time to make the switch. There are clues to the two, separate parts of the vanishing-trick. The clue to the first part of the trick is one of those tell-tale clues that practically tell you all that you need to know and showed that the obvious suspect was indeed guilty, but the target audience probably wouldn't be able to figure out the second part – which is more technical in nature. So the impossible problem really stands as something exceptionally good in an otherwise mediocre, knock-off cartoon.

A second, quasi-impossible situation occurs when the Clue Club encounters a snow mobile patrolling the area, but without a driver on it. You can easily guess the solution to this one. However, it was a nice little extra and sort of is another nod at the guilt of the culprit. The rest of the episode is fluff and filler with the two dogs acting as comedy fodder. Mrs. Coldwell's disappearance from a closed, moving and watched gondola is the only reason to watch this episode. So only to be recommended to locked room and impossible crime addicts.

Sheldon had said he was certain the solution to this impossible situation has never been used and mentioned here above that I had some bad news. Well, it has been used before. More than once. There's a short story from the same period as this episode that uses exactly the same trick and a locked room novel from 1942 uses an interesting variation. Another variation on this idea can be found in locked room novel from 1940.

So not exactly a first, but still a well done impossible crime story that deserved a better medium than this show to be told in.

Lastly, Sheldon wrote another locked room mystery for Clue Club, entitled The Walking House Caper (1976), in which an "impregnable safe built in a room vanishes" even though "it is too large to pass through any doors or windows." So I might return to this series for just that one episode, but first I want to see if I can track down those Edge of Midnight episodes.

Detective Conan: The Black Wings of Icarus

Earlier this year, I reviewed two, multi-part episodes of Detective Conan, an anime based on the successful, long-running manga series by Gosho Aoyama, entitled The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly and The Case of the Séance Double Locked Room, which Ho-Ling Wong recommended on his blog – both of his reviews can be found here and here. Ho-Ling had another recommendation for me in the comments, episodes 203-204, as it features "a return of the Cursed Masks most popular original characters." I finally got around to watching it.

The Black Wings of Icarus is a two-part episode, originally aired in August, 2000, but was

not as grand or elaborate a detective story as the previous episodes discussed on here. All the same, the episodes had a solid, well-constructed plot with a minor locked room problem and a daring alibi-trick that would have made Freeman Wills Crofts proud.

The moral of the story

Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan are spending a couple of days at a remote hotel, near the mountains, where the twin maids, Minaho and Honami, who previously appeared in Cursed Masks now work. And they spot another familiar face at the hotel.

One of the guests is a well-known actress, Bizen Chizuru, who's staying at the hotel with her husband, Shiromoto, who has development plants for the area and this may threaten a nearby mountain plateau – where there are many "rare butterflies and plants." Something that worries the hotel manager, Arimori. Chizuru and Shiromoto are joined later that evening by the president of a drama production company, Miyabe Kouta, who begs Chizuru to voluntary relinquish a movie role, because the sponsors want a younger actress to take her place. This scene ended with Chizuru's biggest outburst of the day.

Conan observed early in the episode that "her image is different from TV and the movies." Chizuru has been adversarial and unpleasant the moment she crossed the threshold of the hotel, publicly humiliating her husband, talking down to the staff and shamelessly flirting with Moore, but getting replaced on a movie angered her. She makes a veiled threat of suicide and storms off to her room. However, everything appears to be normal the following morning.

Some of the hotel guests and staff are going picnicking on the plateau, while Moore settles down on the coach with a VHS of a Yoko Okina TV-drama. Moore is given the master keys of the hotel and is left with the twins, the cook and Chizuru – who remains sulking in her room. So, when at the end of the day, she still has not shown herself they decide to go up and take a look, but the door-guard was engaged and the door had to be forced open. Chizuru is hanging inside from a ceiling fan.

As always, Conan subtly drops hints to help Moore and the local police figure out this is a case of murder clumsily disguised as suicide. Surprisingly, it was Moore who immediately figured out the, admittedly, simplistic locked room trick when he sees the scratch marks on the door-guard. So the locked room is only a tiny aspect of the story and the meat of the plot is found on the murderer's Croftian alibi. A seasoned mystery addict can instinctively point out the murderer, because there are so many tells, but the real challenge lies in demolishing this persons apparently cast-iron alibi.

Admittedly, the risky alibi-trick is not entirely believable, mostly the first part of the trick, but it had glimmer of originality and, somehow, felt pleasantly old-fashioned – like one of the alibi stories I read by Crofts (e.g. Mystery in the Channel, 1931). I still liked it. Conan dismantled the alibi with such clues as the air conditioning, lighting on the hotel roof and a white, powdery substance on the victim's dress. So the plot stuck together pretty well, but, where the story is briefly lifted to the same heights as Cursed Mask and Double Locked Room, is when Conan (through Moore) speaks those sad, final lines to the murderer – ending the episode on a somber note.

So, on a whole, not as good as the two previously mentioned episodes, but still pretty good by itself with a daring alibi-trick that will delight fans of Crofts. I hope you're taking notes, JJ.

Detective Conan: The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room

Last month, I reviewed a one-hour TV-special from the Detective Conan anime series, entitled The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly, which first aired on March 13, 2000 in Japan and the episode has a splendid plot with a terrifying, brand new locked room trick – a grisly paragon of originality. I was alerted to the existence of this TV-special by Ho-Ling Wong and since then he has brought another, three-part episode to my attention. A three-parter with a pair of equally original impossible crimes.

The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room originally aired in January and February of 2010, covering episodes 603-605, which were written by the same screenwriter as The Cursed Masks Laughs Coldly, Ochi Hirohito. You can clearly see his style of plotting and ideas reflected in the locked room tricks from both of these (multiple) episodes.

Just like in my previous Detective Conan post, I'll be using the English names given to some of the characters in the U.S. editions of the original manga series, re-titled Case Closed, because I already reviewed volumes 38-65. So a reversal back to the Japanese names might be confusing, but feel free to cool your purist rage in the comment-section below.

This three-part episode opens on a dark, misty road in a wooded area and Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan are, as the latter accurately predicted, completely lost, but a lonely mansion with a lighted window is spotted in the distance and they decide to seek shelter there – only to get a startling surprise when the door is opened. A cabal of cloaked figures answer the door, cowls drawn over the heads, but one of them recognizes the famous "Sleeping" Moore. Koji Yatsukawa is an assistant director working for Nichiuri TV and apparently made his first appearance as a TV original character in the two-part episode The Seven Wonders of the Hiroshima Miyajima Tour, which actually sounds like a potentially interesting detective story. Something along the lines of Yasuo Uchida's Togakushi densetsu satsujin jiken (The Togakushi Legend Murders, 1994), but hopefully with a better ending.

Anyway, the group introduce themselves as a fanclub of the late Miyahara Kira, a cosplay idol and actress, who was supposed to star in the movie adaptation of The Blackmagic Girl. A popular occult manga created by the owner of the mansion, Reiki Hirasaka, but Kira drove her car over the edge of a cliff and her body was never recovered – resulting in the movie getting canned. However, she's not at rest. Rumors are swirling around claiming Kira, like the protagonist from The Blackmagic Girl, has risen from the dead and became a witch in order to extract revenge on those who have betrayed her in life.

Several weeks ago, Hirasaka's production editor was fatally wounded in a knife attack and he left a dying message in his own blood that read "Kira."

So the fanclub decided to gather at the home of Hirasaka, who's well versed in the occult, to conduct a séance in his Meditation Room and summon the ghost of Kira, but the séance turns out to be sham performance and the two detective who happened to presence, Moore and Conan, immediately uncover a whole host of gadgets that were responsible for the apparently supernatural manifestations when they made contact with the spirits – like exploding candles, voices coming from framed posters, shaking lamps and plates tumbling out of cupboards. I think readers who love a good debunking of a séance in their detective fiction will particularly like this scene. 

 

Thackeray Phin gave an expose in John Sladek's marvelous Black Aura (1974) of some of the most well-known tricks spiritual mediums used in the old days and, if I remember correctly, he only overlooked the cheese cloth smeared with luminous paint, but this episode added a couple of new tricks to repertoire. And some of these tricks double as clue for the locked room murder later that night.

During the night, they all receive a text message from one of their fellow club members, Shoko Utakura, which says "I have come back to life" and is signed with "Kira," but Utakura is nowhere to be found and search leads them to the door of the Meditation Room – which has, somehow, been padlocked from the inside. Moore has to break a window in the door, in order to smash off the padlock, and when they enter the room they discover that all of the posters have been taken out of their picture frames and the frames are in disarray on the floor. The body of Utakura lies on top of the séance table, arms sprawled out at her sides, but the only problem is that the only other exist is a closed window high up the wall. So how did the murderer left a perfectly sealed room?

This is, however, not the only impossible murder committed that night: Hirasaka is locked inside his room and is unresponsive, which prompted one of the people to take a peek inside the room through the open transom above the door. A transom that only opened for about ten centimeters and through it you could see Hirasaka body lying on a coach with a toppled bottle of wine on the table.

Obviously, he had taken a swig of poisoned wine, but this problem gets even more baffling when Moore breaks open the door.

The decorative posters that were taken from the Meditation Room were torn to pieces and piled inside this second locked room, but even more inexplicable is that the key to this room and that of the padlock were found in a drawer of Hirasaka's desk – which also had been securely locked. Finally, the rope that was used in the first murder lay next to the heap of shredded posters!

Ho-Ling was, to use his own words, "a bit disappointed" by this second locked room trick and appeared to him "unambitious for someone who created a masterpiece" like The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly. I admit that the central idea behind this impossibility is derivative of the locked room trick from The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly, but it's used here in an entirely different and far more practical manner, which I found to be almost as satisfying as the gruesome trick from that previous episode. One thing I have come to appreciate, after nearly tagging 400 blog-posts with the "Locked Room Mystery" label, is innovation and originality.

However, I completely agree with Ho-Ling that this second impossibility is (further) strengthened when you see it in the light of the locked room trick in the Meditation Room, which definitely ticks the boxes for being innovative and original – as well as wonderfully clued. A great advantage of telling a traditionally plotted detective story in the medium of comic books or animation is that you can blatantly show what is going on without the danger of giving anything away.

As the viewer, you can probably gauge the escape route of the murderer from the Meditation Room, but how this person managed to do that is another story and one you won't have a shot at answering if you don't connect it with what happened in that other room. And that's where this episode becomes somewhat of classic locked room story.

John Dickson Carr described the perfect detective story as being a ladder of clues or a pattern of evidence, "joined together with such cunning that even the experienced reader may be deceived," which is perfectly exemplified in the plot and solution The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room – which has a sound and logical reason for everything that happened during the night of the murders. Everything is linked together by logic and reason. The murderer even has a good motive for making the murders look impossible. Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale lectured in The White Priory Murders (1934) and The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) on all of the possible motives a murderer could have for going through the trouble of creating a sealed room illusion, but I don't think this one was mentioned. And that's another aspect making this a more than noteworthy impossible crime tale.

So, as a locked room mystery, this one is almost as great as The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly, but this three-parter also shares the same weakness as that one-hour special: the who-and why behind the murders are very obvious. However, you shouldn't watch these episodes for the who or why behind the murders, but how the murders were perpetrated and why the murderer went through all that trouble to present the crimes as complete and utter impossibilities. 

I really think my fellow locked room enthusiast should start looking at these detective anime and manga series, because they have some truly excellent and original miracle crimes. And, as visual (animated) mediums, they can do more with the form than the written word or even a live-action TV-series or movie. The locked room tricks The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly and The Case of the Séance's Double Locked Room are good examples of this. I can't recommend them enough!

Jonathan Creek: Daemons' Roost

"Revenge is sweet and not fattening."

- Alfred Hitchcock

After an hiatus of five years, Jonathan Creek returned to the small-screen nearly eight years ago with an entertaining and promising New Years special, The Grinning Man (2009), which received irregular followups in the succeeding years – culminating in a short season consisting of three episodes in 2014. Sadly, the quality of these episodes and specials left a lot to be desired.

The Judas Tree (2010) was an abomination of an episode and represents an all-time low in the series. Yes, some of the poorest and mediocre episodes, such as The Seer of the Sands (2004) and Gorgons Wood (2004), were definitely superior to whatever that atrocity was. It was a potential series-killer. There was a gap between The Judas Tree and the next Easter special, The Clue of the Savant's Thumb (2013), which was, regardless of some imperfections, an improvement on its predecessor and everyone seemed to assume the tone was set for the first regular, if short, season since the 2003-04 series – which included the excellent The Tailor's Dummy (2003). Oh, boy, where we wrong!

Jonathan & Polly Creek

David Renwick gave his series and detective-character a thorough makeover: Jonathan Creek shed his duffle coat, moved out of his iconic windmill, stopped working for Adam Klaus and was married off to Polly. Admittedly, this reinvigorated the comedic element of the series and gave the stories a dynamic, somewhat, similar to the wisecracking, mystery solving couples from the 1930-and 40s.

Unfortunately, the plots of these three episodes were either very slight (The Letters of Septimus Noone, 2014), boring and uneventful (The Sinner and the Sandman, 2014) or just average (The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, 2014). So this highly anticipated season quickly turned into a huge disappointment and seemed to be universally hated, even Alan Davies appeared to be bored, which looked as if the series had finally reached the end of its lifespan – ending, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Surprisingly, the story of Jonathan Creek did not end with those three episodes.

Last year, a brand new Christmas special was announced, entitled Daemons' Roost (2016), which impressed me as Renwick's mea culpa for the aforementioned episodes. The special still had some problems with plot, pacing and padding, but it was an improvement over its immediate predecessors. And the story was also written as potentially a final performance for Creek and Polly. It was an introspective story, with a glimpses of Creek's childhood and references to previous cases, but who knows, maybe there will be another holiday special this or next year. But, for now, lets take a gander at the latest one.

Daemons' Roost is the name given to a creepy, decaying mansion, which had once belonged to Sir Jacob Surtees, "a heartless nobleman of dark Satanic powers," who had his private chamber of horrors – where he chained women to the floor and forced them to watch a devilish magic trick. They would see how an invisible force plucked their loved from a cage and fly them through the air into a huge, burning furnace!

A charming homestead to raise a family. Or so a director of "cheesy horror movies," Nathan Clore, assumed when settling down there with his wife and three stepdaughters, but the place soon becomes a house of mourning. One after another, Clore's wife and two of her daughters passed away under mysterious circumstances. So Clore decides to pack up and send away the third one, Alison, who is left with "fifteen years of nightmares" and childhood memories of secretly overhearing the source of mothers fears – a creature known as “the hobgoblin.” After all these years, Clore has summoned Alison and her husband back to the home, to tell her what happened to her mother and sisters all those years ago, but, once again, tragedy struck. Clore suffered a crippling aneurysm and is now unable to communicate.

One hell of a trick!

So, while the story at the mansion slowly progresses, Creek was able to finally sell the windmill and the place had to be cleared out. As long-time viewers remember, the place was stuffed to the rafter with stage props, vintage theatrical posters and magic tricks, but also childhood mementos. We learn for the first time Creek had a brother, Terry, who's responsible for kindling an interest in magic and wonders. But these are not the only memories stalking Creek.

One of his biggest fans, Rev. Wendell Wilkie, tells him that the murderer from The House of Monkeys (1997) was released from prison, but "the monster in his breast is vanquished." Well, not entirely true, as he can be seen stalking Creek throughout the episode with a sharp knife in his hands.

We also learn of a so-called untold case, "The Striped Unicorn Affair," which took place six years ago and had Creek acting as consulting detective in a poisoning case. The wife of a research chemist, Stephen Belkin, had been receiving threatening letters, signed "Anti-Money," which unsettled her and precautions were taken – securely locking and bolting the bedroom door and windows. One night, they took "a brand-new sealed bottle of mineral water” with them, but the glass she poured for herself, somehow, contained poison. And not a trace of it was found in the bottle or his glass of bedside water. So, naturally, the police arrests him on suspicion of having killed his wife, but Creek figured out how a third party could have introduced poison inside the locked and bolted bedroom.

By the way, the flashback shows Creek in his old, trademark duffle coat, which was a nice little nod to the past! Anyhow...

The poisoning trick was not bad, clever even, but there was a single objection against Creek's original explanation and perception of the case. One that could have been smoothed over with the introduction of a simple coaster. After all, when there's a coaster on the table, you're very likely to place your glass or mug on it without a second thought. Just saying.

Old-School JC

In any case, this old poisoning case is connected to the problems going on at

Clore's mansion: Stephen Belkin remarried and his second wife is Alison. So, remembering Creek helped out her husband, she contacts him, but he's unable to prevent a second, baffling impossibility. Alison and Stephen are taken from the home, to the mysterious chamber from the local legend, where Alison sees how figure, dressed in a red, uses magic to pull Stephen from a cage in the wall and make him fly through the air – straight into a burning furnace. Honestly, I loved the grand simplicity of this seemingly impossible situation, which is, somewhat, in the same tradition as Satan's Chimney (2001) and The Grinning Man. And for all his flaws, Renwick really knows how to handle such type of tricks.

Well, that being said, Daemons' Roost is far from perfect: the padding of the plot is murderous to the pace and you can nitpick a thing or two about the overall story. One of them is how the culprits seem to scheme like a bunch of incomprehensible comic-book villains and some viewers will probably have reservations about how Creek was (forced) to dispose of one of them. Or why Creek pretty much threw away his entire childhood. Some of that stuff impressed me as the last tangible memories about his (dead?) brother. But the plot was still miles removed from being the mess that was The Judas Tree nor was the story as sleep inducing as The Sinner and the Sandman. A bit padded and drawn out? Yes. But nowhere near as bad as some past episodes.

So, to cut a long review short, I was not disappointed about Daemons' Roost. Not one of the best in the series, but also far from the worst. I'm glad the series (potentially) ends with this one instead of the previous three episodes.