First Contact: Q.E.D. iff vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou

The simply titled story "Even" opens Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 5 and begins when Ashikaga Ren, a second-year university student, tumbles down a cliff and needed to be airlifted to the hospital – except this wasn't an ordinary hiking accident. A note was found at the scene ("Got Dumped, Don't Want to Live") turning an unfortunate hiking accident into an attempted suicide. Only for the case to take an unexpected turn at the hospital.

Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara are in the hospital visiting Mizuhara's father, Inspector Mizuhara, who was injured in the line of duty. Mizuhara passes the hospital room of the still unconscious Ashikaga Ren when she notices his oxygen mask has been removed and the heart rate monitor turned off. She immediately calls a nurse and begins to look around, which leads to her chasing a masked figure in a white doctor's coat through the corridors and down the staircases of the hospital. This masked, white coated figure runs into a dead end hallway and inexplicably disappears into thin air! A short hallway ending in a double door that's not only locked, but securely chained together and padlocked. Only thing the vanished figure left behind is the white doctor's coat. Touma finds out the victim had three people, all fellow students, who visited the hospital that day. So they begin probing the suspects and their relationship with the victim involving relationship troubles, borrowed money and stolen exam papers.

I think what I liked most about this story is how clearly the problem of who, why and how is presented. And liked how they logically linked together with one springing from the other. However, the solution to the disappearance from the dead end corridor, while visually pleasingly, is so blindingly obvious I rejected it out of hand – which kind of betrayed the who and eventually why. Not to mention the vanishing-trick only worked, in a way, because it was shown and not explained in a block of text. So "Even" is not a thoroughly bad story, but neither is it a top-tier entry in the series.

The second story, "The Imperfect Locked Room," has Inspector Mizuhara back on the job and going over a murder scene a second time. Takamatsu Kiminobu, a retired prosecutor, was found stabbed to death in his bedroom of his house. Only other person present was his nurse, Itami Sayoko, who claimed someone had knocked her out. However, the police found all the windows securely locked from the inside, the house keys inside the victim's pockets and "no suspicious people on the security camera at the entrance way" ("so this was a locked room murder"). So the inspector in charge concluded the nurse was the murderer and arrested her. Inspector Mizuhara has his doubts as a nurse has much easier methods at her disposal to kill an sick, elderly man than a knife and casting herself as the only possible suspects. What he finds is fresh evidence the murder took place in garage. So the nurse was released.

This blunder forces the higher ups to send someone down to direct the local investigation. This person is Tanabata Kikuno, Assistant Inspector of MPD Division, who's a young, eager policewoman ever ready to put the handcuffs on the murderer. She learns from Inspector Mizuhara that this case is not going to be easy, considering the status of the policeman who made the premature arrest. Inspector Mizuhara also tells her the case possibly has a connection to an unsolved, seemingly impossible and unsolved murder, nearly two years ago, when a dying woman was found in one of the toilet stalls of a night club, but CCTV footage showed nobody going inside – except the victim and the people who discovered the murder. So, inevitably, Tanabata Kikuno meets Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara leading to the solution to the two murders. Once again, the plot has its weak points as the murderer stands out and the solutions to the impossible crimes lack Katou's customary imaginative solutions or even simplistic complexity. The locked room-trick used for the murder at the night club toilets was especially unconvincing with the first one turning on the why rather than the how. It really is the strong ending that holds “The Imperfect Locked Room” together.

Fortunately, the two stories making up Q.E.D. iff vol. 6 is a return to form and starts with a character-piece, "The Man Who Claimed to Land on the Earth." This story begins with a prologue set in 1986 when a young woman, Morita Kinue, is living in America with a man named Dominic. Something her parents back in Japan oppose and beg her to come, but she refuses and ends up giving birth to a son, Wataru. Morita Kinue has been cut off by her parents and Wataru grows up in poverty, until he joins a youth gang and dies in a shootout aged 14. The story then moves to the present and marks the return of Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato who last appeared in Q.E.D. Vol. 44. They're now in university and have opened the Mystery Research Society, but this story is not about their usual shenanigans. This time, Mulder seems to have a problem that truly appears to be out of this world.

A blond foreigner, named Simon, turned up out of nowhere at his grandmother's house to start taking care of her, but even stranger is his claim to have landed on Earth from another planet ("...I used a wormhole to shorten the distance"). Naturally, the family's more than a little suspicious, but their grandmother refused to show him the door. And a secret DNA test reveals the mysterious Simon to be related to them. So they go to Sou Touma who becomes very interested when he hears Simon has been talking about "cosmic strings, wormholes, casimir's effect and other such strange terms." Simon showcases some of his other worldly abilities by vanishing from a closely watched changing room and appearing inside a locked house, but don't read this story for those fairly minor locked room situation. This is one of those character-puzzles and it's not even about who Simon really is. It's about why he's there and why he choose to tell such an outlandish story. This is more like the Katou I know and like!

The last story from vol. 6, "Sudden Change," allows me to end this double review on a high note. Kana Mizuhara is on a part time job delivering coffee when she walked into a police investigation.

Egota Wataru is the producer behind the popular TV show Nangoku Cop, "the detective drama where the guy uses handcuffs like an acrobat," who was having a meeting with the cast and crew to discuss the next season of the show. Somehow, he ended up on the roof and either accidentally fell to his death or jumped on purpose, but soon, the possibility of murder turns up. A possibility turning an accidental death or suicide into an impossible murder as nobody could have reached the roof when he fell from it. And everyone has an alibi. You can definitely spot the murderer, one aspect simply invites suspicion, but figuring out how it was done is bit trickier. Touma understands what can happen when someone finds themselves in an inescapable situation. Katou brilliantly fused the problem of the locked room mystery with that of the unbreakable alibi, complimented by an unexpectedly dark twist in the motive. A must-read for fans of Tetsuya Ayukawa and a fantastic story to end this review on.

Every Roos Has Its Thorn: "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by Kelley Roos

Writing under the shared pseudonym "Kelley Roos," William and Audrey Roos formed one of the best, cleverest and funniest writing duos of genuinely funny, cleverly-plotted detective novels starring their bantering, mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy – who appeared in eight novels and a dozen, mostly uncollected, novellas. The first seven novels were published between 1940 and 1949 with a surprising, final entry being published in 1966. And of the dozen, or so, novellas only three were gathered under the title Triple Threat (1949).

Kelley Roos and the Troys may not be as well remembered today as the Norths, the Abbotts or the Duluths, but often they were "a good deal better than their more famous contemporaries." I consider The Frightened Stiff (1942), a personal favorite, to be one of the Great American Detective Novels that even today can still make readers laugh. So wanted to return to Troys for some time now, but the only title left on my wishlist is the frustratingly out-of-print, over priced There Was a Crooked Man (1945). No apparent plans to collect their novellas in a single volume. I decided to hunt down one of their novellas before sampling one of the standalone suspense-mysteries the Rooses collaborated on during the 1960s and '70s.

"Death of a Trouper" originally appeared in the December, 1946, issue of The American Magazine and reprinted in the May, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but something has to be explained first. Jeff and Haila's marriage has not been a perfect one and their last novel, One False Move (1966), begins in the aftermath of their divorce as Haila packed her backs and moved to Texas – only to stumble across another murder. They get back together, of course, but "Death of a Trouper" tells the story of the first crack in their marriage leading to their temporary divorce two decades later.

Similar to the opening in One False Move, this novella begins with the aftermath of a marriage ending fight ("I slapped him... he hit me back"). You have to read the story for yourself to find out what they were fighting and throwing hands over, but it firmly falls in the you-deserve-each-other category. Haila packed her bags and traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to take up acting again. She joins "a real, honest-to-goodness showboat," named The New Sensation, anchored on the bank of the Allegheny River. Haila discovers an old friend among the cast members, Greta Cole, who looks terrible, but things get worse for Greta when Russell Hogan, the leading man, is found stabbed to death in his cabin. Greta becomes the primary suspect, because it turns out she's the only one with a motive.

One of the reasons why Haila had enough of Jeff is "instead of settling down and becoming the fine photographer he could have been, had insisted on chasing about solving murders," but she picks up the telephone to ask him to help clear Greta from suspicion. This reunion between these two stubborn mules, who both refuse to give an inch, goes about as well as expected not helped by Jeff insisting on being funny when Haila wants to have a serious conversation. "Death is a Trouper" is not a lighthearted, thinly-plotted comedy mystery as the plot is absolutely packed!

There's not only the murder of Russell Hogan, but Greta goes missing under very unusual circumstances, Haila is knocked unconscious, a mysterious woman named Vivien somehow figures in the case and the inevitable second murder aboard The New Sensation. I'm delighted to report back the Rooses delivered on all of them!

Firstly, the solution to the murders turns on a tell-tale clue exonerating everyone, except the murderer, when understood of pointed out without needing much further explaining – only that person could have done it. Better yet is the motive for the first murder and how it relates to the second murder or ingeniously simple answer to the Vivien plot-thread. Or why Greta disappeared and the strange things that happened to her preceding the murder. Like I said, the Rooses packed the plot "Death is a Trouper" demonstrating they belonged as much to the Van Dine-Queen School as the screwball, murder-can-be-fun school. Only thing that can really be said against it, is that "Death is a Trouper" is not a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy mystery. So much more could have been done with the showboat backdrop, the characters who work and live there and, yes, the troubles of the Troys. Other than not being a novel-length Jeff and Haila Troy mystery, "Death is a Trouper" is an excellent Jeff and Haila Troy novella with all the customary quality of the Rooses writing and plotting. Recommended!

If somebody, anybody, from Crippen & Landru stumbles across this review, the Kelley Roos novellas from The American Magazine would make a great collection like Philip Wylie's Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (2010). Just an idea for the suggestion box.

Locked and Loaded, Part 7: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

So lately, I noticed an unaccountable, unacceptable dearth in locked room and impossible crime reviews which needed immediate correction to bring this blog back to its previous acceptable conditions, standards and core values – only one way to do it. There are actually two ways to do it, but the reprint of Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) is not out for another six months. I decided to do another "Locked and Loaded" instead.

In 2020, I posted the first part of the extremely irregular "Locked and Loaded" series and have now compiled seven of them covering locked room and impossible crime stories covering a period of 118 years stretching from 1905 to 2023. You can read my reviews, not in chronological order, in "Locked and Loaded" part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. So let's start on part 7.

Fredric Brown's "The Djinn Murder," originally published in the January, 1944, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, begins when Professor John E. Trent, teaching Psychology IV (Abnormal), is approached by Harvey Glosterman – who really needs a specialist in the occult. Glosterman's retired brother, John Glosterman, collects "objects connected with primitive superstitions" like "old idols, spirit gongs, juju masks, voodoo drums" and recently brought a djinn bottle home from his travels. An earthenware bottle, "Seal of Solomon on the wax," supposedly emprisoning a very powerful, dangerous demon named Eydhebhe. John Glosterman foolishly broke the seal on the bottle and promptly vanished into thin air. However, the impossibility is not Glosterman's disappearance, but how he continued to communicate with his brother through "spirit rappings" coming from the study. Trent believes Glosterman was cleverly disposed and catches his killer by replicating the rapping sounds.

Now, ghostly tapping and other disembodied sounds tend be minor stuff when it comes to impossible crime fiction. Usually little more than small plot-thread or side issue explained away with variations of the same answers pulled from the spiritual medium's bag of tricks, but Brown offered an entirely new solution to the problem. Or, at least, one that's new to me. Still very minor stuff as both an impossible crime and detective story, but a very entertaining, pulp-style mystery.

Anthony Boucher's "The Anomaly of the Empty Man," first published in the April, 1952, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, tries to take a page from John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) by presenting a puzzle with a logical and supernatural solution. "The Anomaly of the Empty Man" is told by a man named Lamb, but not sure if this the Martin Lamb from Boucher's The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937). Anyway, Inspector Abrahams calls Lamb to the apartment of James Stambaugh, collector of early operatic recordings and philanderer, who disappeared from the clothes he had been wearing ("...sucked dry of its fleshly tenant") – which is tighter impossibility than my description suggests ("...try slipping your foot out of a laced-up shoe and see if you can get that result"). What follows is a bit of a trip, but it boils down to Lamb being presented with two solutions to the problem. The supernatural solution comes from Dr. Verner believing the disappearance was caused by a haunted record from dead opera singer whom he believed carried The Death Wish ("men who knew her too well hungered no longer for life"). Inspector Abrahams found a much better, more convincing and really neat answer for how a man can be disappeared from inside his own suit of clothing. Needless to say, I prefer the inspector's solution over Dr. Verner's cursed record.

And no, the culprit was not a tall, green insect-like individual using his javelin-tipped tail as a sippy straw. If that had been Dr. Verner's alternative solution, I would have sided with him over Inspector Abrahams.

Joseph Commings "The Fraudulent Spirit" originally appeared in the September/October, 1960, issue of Mystery Digest (as by "Monte Craven") and reprinted in the anthology Wicked Spirits: Mysteries, Spine Chillers and Lost Tales of the Supernatural (2024). A few years before the story's opening, Mrs. Jasmine Leslie fell to her death from the outdoor terrace of her New York penthouse, twenty stories up, which the police dismissed as an unfortunate accident – because she had gardening gloves on and a a trowel was left on the terrace. Years later, Jasmine's widowed husband, Fergus Leslie, becomes engaged to Suzanne Dittner and falls under the spell of a spiritual medium, Mme. Olympe. She has done the usual routine with spirit writing appearing on the ceiling during a séance in a locked room, making objects drop out of thin air and claiming to have "greater levitation powers" than D.D. Home ("he floated in and outta upper windows of a house on Jermyn Street in London"). Mme. Olympe also needs money to start her own spiritualist movement and Leslie is willing to provide the funds, but only if she perform a truly convincing séance.

Suzanne Dittner turns to Lt. Barney Grant, of the NYPD, for help. Fortunately, Grant just so happens to have Senator Brooks U. Banner as a visitor. Banner is an old hand when it comes spiritual mediums and the fundamentally impossible, but, even better, Banner remembers Mme. Olympe when "she was dressed in a leopard-skin, leading a carnival parade on the biggest elephant at the Minnesota State Fair." So they attend the séance during which Jasmine's ghost appears on the terrace, disappears and reappears moments later on the terrace of the penthouse across the street! Not really an impossible situation involving levitation, but teleportation and not necessarily a bad one. Just a bit muddled in parts and that knocks it down a peg. "The Fraudulent Spirit" started out as a companion in miniature to Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but ended up being a kindred spirit of David Renwick's Jonathan Creek series (ROT13: yvxr gur hfr bs na haxabja nppbzcyvpr gb perngr gur vzcbffvoyr fvghngvba). So while not one for the best-of list, "The Fraudulent Spirit" should not fail to entertain fans of these type of impossible crime stories involving séances, fraudulent mediums and ghostly murders.

Jeffry Scott's "The Brick Overcoat," originally published in the December, 1990, issue of EQMM, slowly moves away from the recurring themes of the previous three short stories, but not entirely as one, of two, impossibilities whispered threats – coming from nowhere. Jenny is working on reviving the once derelict Malreward Theater, currently between productions, which has seen its fair share of tragedy over its hundred year history. But did it pick up a few ghosts along the way? Jenny confides in Detective-Sergeant Nick Flinders she has heard a disembodied voice whisper a chilling threat, "I'll make you a brick overcoat," when she was all alone in the empty, locked theater. Nick Flinders is a hardened skeptic ("half the theaters in England are supposed to be haunted"), but promises to investigate and begins to comb through the old theater, "an untidy labyrinth of grimy brick cells," for answers. Flinders finds an answer, but is it the correct answer? It's enough to reassure Jenny, but Flinders soon returns to the theater when his half-answer could be the key to another case. A case in which a package unaccountably disappeared from a locked room. While more of a modern crime story than a traditional, fair play mystery, "The Brick Overcoat" is not a bad story at all and appreciated its classical trimmings.

Simon Clark's "The Adventure of the Fallen Star" was originally written for Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997). I reviewed Clark's other Sherlock Holmes pastiche "The Climbing Man" (2015) back in 2021, which presented the Great Detective with a fresh corpse discovered inside a sealed, undisturbed 3000-year-old archaeological site – like it enough to track down this particular pastiche. Sherlock Holmes is asked a favor by Professor Charles Hardcastle, specialized in metallurgical sciences, who once helped him "lay to rest the matter of the golden bullet murders in King's Lynne." Professor Hardcastle is interested in "aerolites" (i.e. meteorites) and has a collection of them in his private laboratory at his home in Homestead. A particular meteorite had recently been taken from the locked laboratory and turned up again in his son's bedroom. Holmes is asked to look if there's something to the case, but, when he arrives with Watson, they find a half mad Hardcastle. The backstory of the meteorite reveals who's behind it all and why, but now how this person got through locked doors. And the answer to that question is a big meh.

Elizabeth Elwood's "The Chess Room," first published in the November/December, 2019, issue of EQMM, closes out this random selection on a high note. The first-half of the story introduces Chloe Helms, a cleaning lady, who works at the Hanover building owned by the wheelchair bound, octogenarian chess fanatic, Jacob Russell – who takes a liking to her. So "the Hanover grapevine buzzed with the rumor that she had become the latest threat to David's inheritance" and David, Jacob's son, is not amused ("the exact term he used was gold digger") causes nothing than misery for Chloe. This situation culminates with the pressure getting too much shooting himself inside his beloved chess room storing his collection of varied chess boards and pieces. Chloe was one of the people standing outside the door when the shot was heard and every other exit was either locked or under observation. The second-half takes a procedural approach to the locked room problem as Detective Constable Annie Blake and her team take charge. There's a part of the locked room-trick that hard, if not impossible, to anticipate, but loved the classically-styled twist.

So, all in all, not a spectacular haul, but not a thoroughly bad one either. When it comes to the locked rooms and impossible situations, only Boucher truly impressed and Brown scoring bonus points for originality. Elwood is a good, solid second. Commings' take on the miraculous levitation/transportation is fun, but too muddled to be really good. I enjoyed Scott's story more for its storytelling than its plotting and Clark's pastiche was meh. Let's hope that the next installment of randomly thrown together impossible crime stories uncovers a real gem, but next up is a classic locked room reprint.

Cross Marks the Spot (1933) by James Ronald

Last year, the Moonstone Press completed their ambitious, massive reprinting project of James Ronald's nearly forgotten, long out-of-print pulp and detective fiction spread out over a dozen volumes – which started with Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 1: The Dr. Britling Stories (2023). A volume collecting Ronald's earliest endeavors as a writer and included the once obscure, sought after novel Six Were to Die (1932), but Murder in the Family (1936) and They Can't Hang Me (1938) from vol. 2 and 4 proved to be the true highlights from this run of reprints. A run that closed out with the publication of Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 12: She Got What She Asked For (2025).

The last time I visited Ronald's pulpy brand of detective fiction was more than a year ago when reviewing The Secret of Hunter's Keep (1931) and The Sealed Room Murder (1934) from Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 11: The Sealed Room Murder (2024). So high time I returned to Ronald and decided to go with Cross Marks the Spot (1933) collected in Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 6: Cross Marks the Spot (2024).

Cross Marks the Spot is the first, of two, novel-length novels featuring Ronald's best realized, regrettably short-lived series detective, Julian Mendoza, who's an ex-adventurer turned ace reporter for the Morning World – becoming known the Bloodhound of Fleet Street. Mendoza also appeared in five (short) novels that appeared in The Thriller Library series and a rewrite of Cross Marks the Spot under the title The Frightened Girl (as by "Michael Crombie"). The first chapter here gives an excellent introduction of Mendoza while neatly setting up the plot.

Mendoza has lived the life of a "reckless adventurer" since he was a youth, until a near fatal encounter with a lion left one of his legs "a pitiful scarred and shrunken limb," which forced him to return to London. Restless as ever, Mendoza decided to be come crime reporter ("criminals are merely men with the instincts of animals") and hunt down murderers for the Morning World despite his handicap ("in a civilized city half a man is as good as a whole one"). When the story opens, Mendoza has become restless again and goes out in streets looking for a good story. And what he gets hold of turns out to be next morning's headline. Mendoza spots a young, beautiful, but obvious frightened, woman fleeing the Dorian Building. A building of luxurious apartments where the famous movie magnate, Jacob Singerman, who had an appointment with the frightened woman that went disastrous.

Shortly after this scene, Hyman Singerman arrives at Dorian House to discover his brother's body with a bullet hole in his head. Mendoza worms himself into the case by impersonating a Scotland Yard detective and goes over the scene, before the official police has even arrived. Mendoza discovers the frightened woman is an aspiring movie actress, Cicely Foster, but, when he tracks her down, she says she had only hit him when became physical ("...there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for me if I would be nice to him"). If she didn't shot Singerman, who did and how? As it must have been done within the short window of time between Cicely Foster's hasty exit and Hyman Singerman's arrival. Just in time as the police finally catches up Mendoza, but convinces Inspector Howells to work on the case alongside him. That brings him to Jacob and Hyman Singermans' Colossal Film Company.

Now it has been commented upon in the past how classic British mysteries taking place at film studios rarely tend to be good detective stories, even from normally top-tier mystery authors like Edmund Crispin (Frequent Hearses, 1940) or Carter Dickson (And So to Murder, 1950). One reason given is too much focus on the background and mise-en-scène than story and plot. That's not the case as Ronald opted for a series of short, sharp scenes that show the plain, ugly woodwork behind the scenes of the movie studio business covering everything from struggling, poverty stricken actors to the higher ups at the studio and the power they wield over everyone below them – providing another plot-thread that could have been its own novel. Colossal Film Company is currently paying through their nose to produce a film directed by the mad scientist of the movie industry, Gustav von Blom, who can spend thousands of pounds to make a foot of film. Von Blom is also a typical, temperamental and abusive artist who's notoriously difficult to work with.

The movie Von Blom is shooting involves an internal triangle, but found the emotions and passion of the cast lacking in realism. So fired the whole cast and started from scratch by engaging two actors and an actress, Russell Clayton, Philip Dressler and Norma Lavery, who are involved in a real-life love triangle. Von Blom contracted them separately and only told them a day before rehearsals. They, of course, refuse to take part in, what's essentially, an emotional snuff movie, but they already signed the contracts ("...murder will be done before it's finished"). Add to this Von Blom rooms at Dorian House and has a motive, an attempted murder of a studio employee and Mendoza demonstrating what a one-legged man can do in an ass kicking when he knows his jiu jitsu, Cross Marks the Spot never bores for a second. More importantly, the plot holds up a lot better than the second Mendoza novel, Death Croons the Blues (1934), which fell apart with its ridiculous solution. Fortunately, the solution here held together even when parts of Ronald's pulp roots came to the surface. Not a bad conclusion either. Perhaps not quite as good, overall, as Murder in the Family and They Can't Hang Me, but a good, solid and well-deserved third place. Recommended as a good, fun and fast-paced mystery novel with pulp tendencies and great introduction to James Ronald and one of his best, too short lived detectives.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024) by Benjamin Stevenson

Benjamin Stevenson, an Australian stand-up comedian and mystery author, delivered two highlights of the current Golden Age revival, Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone (2022) and Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2023), but had to wait with third Ernest Cunningham novel on account of it being a "Christmas Special" – springtime was too early (or too late) to read/review a Christmas mystery. I was tempted to put up a review of Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024) during the summer, but decided to wait until the days started to shorten.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is also a bit shorter in length than the previous two novels. Practically a novella padded with decorated pages and others as white as every Christmas Day should be, but fair's fair, it makes the hardcover edition a very wraptable present to give over the holidays. More importantly, it's as good as the first two despite being much smaller in scope and introduced a completely new, seasonally-themed gimmick. There are twenty-four chapters and twenty-three end with an illustration of a small, opened door or window revealing the clue from that chapter. So like an advent calendar of clues!

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret begins a week before Christmas and Ernest is busy with Juliette planning their wedding when Ernest receives a plea for help from his ex-wife, Erin, who's been arrested on suspicion of murdering her new partner, Lyle Pearse – an ex-Hollywood actor turned philanthropist. Erin had woken up that morning to discover she was covered in blood, a bloody knife at the top of the stairs and Pearse lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. A dying message, "CHRISTMAS," scrawled on the floor with a bloody finger. So, having solved two murder sprees, Ernest travels to Katoomba to try prove Erin's innocence, but that's not as easy as she "stuck with the worst version of the story." That version involves first, of two, impossible situations Ernest encounters on his third case. Erin listens to white noise to fall asleep, "Tokyo Railway in the Rain," but she remains a very light sleeper. So, if the murder was a frame job, how could the murderer have dumped blood on Erin without waking her up? Admittedly, the impossibility is not as self apparent as described, kept wondering why Ernest called it an impossible murder, but the ending made it very apparent it can be counted as an impossible crime. And not a bad one, either! Just not as clearly stated as it could have been, however, the best is yet to come.

Lyle Pearse's abandoned his acting career and returned to Australia following the death of his brother, overdosed on bad drugs, which drove him to create a foundation to help ex-addicts get back on their feet – creating "long-lasting reform" by igniting passion. So many of the foundation's graduates of the program ended up working in theaters build by the foundation like The Pearse Theater in Katoomba. Every year, they have a tour with all of their success stories ending with a black-tie Christmas finale in Katoomba.

This year, the tour finale, now memorial, is headlined by the victim's friend and stage magician, Rylan Blaze. The big illusion of the night is a combination of the guillotine and bullet-catch trick. But by that time, Ernest has picked up enough bits and pieces of what could be clues that he believes the wax bullet had been swapped for a real bullet. And rushes the stage causing absolute pandemonium. Blaze is effectively trapped inside the guillotine, because the gun with presumably a live round has a laser trigger activated by movement. When the timer hits zero and the blade drops, Blaze's head rolled over the stage! Something that should be impossible, because the dangerous looking blade is nothing more than "flimsy paper." Ernest has his work cutout with two murders, two impossible crimes, a bloody dying messages, stockings worth of clues and a cast of suspects comprising of the magician's assistant, a stagehand, a hypnotist, twins and even a dead guy.

Now this probably doesn't sound a whole lot smaller in scope, or shorter, than the previous two novels, but it really is about the half shorter. Stevenson simply spun a great deal of complexity out of an ultimately simple case with skill and humor. Not just depending on the two impossible situation to give weight and bulk to the plot.

Firstly, there are the everyone and secrets from the book title. A festive, tinseled web of secrets complicating everything and beautifully making use of Christmas traditions, old and new. Secondly, gimmicky as it sounds, the advent calendar guarantees a richly-clued, fair play detective story with the clues forming, as John Dickson Carr described it, a pattern of evidence that, when put together, reveals the whole design – which is the hallmark of great detective fiction. So the advent calendar gimmick made the clueing even better. Not to mention Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret fulfills its obligation to actually do something with the story's holiday theme and found a way to use some Christmas traditions, old and new, to tell a detective story. And, yes, the solution to the impossible decapitation on stage is grand. Not terribly complicated or disappointingly simple and fairly original when it comes to inexplicable beheadings topped off with a memorable denouement when Ernest begins to eliminate his suspects, until the murderer remains. Where and how it happens is what makes it memorable. That poor guy is starting to look like a battered warhorse!

So as a modern, retro-GAD detective novel, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is a treat for the holidays with nothing to complain or nitpick about. Beside the story and an excellent plot, the main attraction of the series remains Ernest Cunningham as the narrator ("reliable narrator here"). Well, that and the return to the plotting standards of the Golden Age, but have taken a real liking to Ernest's narrative style. Like giving spoilers of what's ahead in the story, but his spoilers have all the quality of a wish granted by a monkey's paw. There's always a catch or twist. So to say I enjoyed Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret would be an understatement and had I read it last year, it would have easily made "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories." If reading Christmas mysteries is one of your December traditions, Stevenson's Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is as good as they come. I very much look forward to Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026).

It's the Numbers That Count: Q.E.D. vol. 44-46 by Motohiro Katou

I ended the review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 42-43 with the plan to have this series wrapped before July, which can be done at the current rate in four twofer reviews, but alluded to similar plans and intentions before – rarely panned as originally intended. Going by past results, it probably would have meant a review of vol. 50 wouldn't have materialized until January or February 2026. I'm going to step up with two threefer reviews this month, review vol. 50 next month and tidy it all up with part two to "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 1-25." After that, I'll turn my attention to Motohiro's C.M.B. series interspersed with reviews of Q.E.D. iff. I've not forgotten about that recommendation of the archery-themed murder case from The Gordian Knot series. So that concludes these household notes, unto to the review!

The first, of two, stories from Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 44, "Tuba and Grave," brings back the three disaster magnets of the Sakisaka Private High School Detective Club, Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato.

This time, they caused a minor uproar when mistaking a sleeping drunk, on a park bench, for a victim of foul play with their wildly incorrect deductions ("the suspect is possibly an alien, because we didn't find footprints"). So the "absolute imbeciles" get reprimanded, loose access to their club room for a week and warned their club will be disbanded if they get involved in another incident. Before long, those three find themselves in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation when they witness an actual murder: a man being strangled behind a building and his body dragged into an abandoned factory. They decide to call-in an anonymous tip and the police turns up with the man they recognize as the killer to open the factory, which searched top from bottom starting with a suspicious looking case – containing a tuba. A second, obvious place is what looks like a makeshift grave, but only contained a visually pleasing arranged collection of garbage. Props to the police detective for clearing away the junk to continue digging. No evidence of a body or crime was discovered.

So where could the body have been hidden when the police "turned the entire place upside down and didn't find a thing?" The detective club, once again, turn to Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara to bail them out, but Touma tells them the police will figure it out without their help ("...make sure that you behave and get the club back"). His advice falls on deaf ears as the club goes ahead with their own investigation and Mizuhara doing some legwork in the background, until Touma reappears to reveal what really happened at the factory. Touma's solution to the problem turns, what appeared to be an impossible disappearance of a corpse, into a Columbo-style breakdown of the murderer's alibi and ends up hanging him with his own incriminating words.

So a really excellent and entertaining story. Loved the cheekiness of the method even though (ROT13) vg'f abg n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel ng nyy, ohg nppvqragnyyl nccrnerq gb or bar qhr gb gur qrgrpgvir pyho'f vagresrerapr. Gur zheqrere bayl jnagrq gb evt hc na nyvov. By the way, I'm starting to develop a soft spot of the Detective Club. They're absolutely useless idiots, but they mean well.

The second story from vol. 44, "Questions," is one of those puzzles-with-a-heart that are scattered across this series. Touma receives a cryptic invitation to a getaway at a luxurious villa. The invitation is a card with the word "QUESTION" on the front and Fermat's Last Theorem on the inside. And he was not the only one to receive an invitation. Several people going through a divorce have gathered at the villa with similar, cryptically-worded invitations. What follows is basically a cross between a treasure hunt and personal journey's of rediscovery. Touma primarily functions as a sideline oracle giving mini-lectures on mathematics, history of mathematical ideas and "an ever-expanding universe of numbers" ("...didn't understand a thing...").

A decent, if not particular memorable, entry in the series and Katou has done better puzzles-with-a-heart stories before. However, the ending admittedly made for a nice finishing touch to this character-driven story.

The first story from Q.E.D. vol. 45, "Venus," is a somewhat off-beat whodunit. Himichi Sayaka, a second year college student, is arrested on suspicion of having killed her ex-boyfriend, Mizushima Takuya – a third year student. Mizushima Takuya was found beaten to death in his apartment with door and windows securely locked from the inside, however, Himichi Sayaka has a spare key. She was seen near the apartment at the time of the murder and a bloodied baseball bat was discovered behind her own home. They had been fighting over money he owed her. So the prosecution can prove means, motive and opportunity, but the prosecutor has her doubts and asks Touma to see if he can spot a frame job. Mizuhara remains perplexed important people keep asking Touma for help ("but... this guy is still in high school"). If she has been framed for murder, the crime becomes an impossible one.

This story is, strangely enough, interspersed with comic-y vignettes in which a Venusian space girl, named Serge, teaches a talking raccoon in dungarees about the solar system. I really liked the one panel blending the retelling of how the murder was discovered with a floor plan of the crime scene. Some artistic touches that helped to make it stand out and cushion two notable short comings: a murderer who suspiciously stands out and a surprisingly routine locked room-trick for this series. That being said, the conclusion is solid enough with Touma eliminating all but one of the suspects before trapping them with their own words ("...something only the murderer could have known..."). A fair effort.

The second story in vol. 45, "First Love," can be read as an improvement on the previous story. Koba Tomotoshi is pretty average, second year student at Sakisaka High School. And to his very great surprise, Nitobe Rena asked him one day to be her boyfriend.

Nitobe Rena is the beautiful, popular girl at school and their relationship painted a target on his back. Something happened some time later when he took her back to his house and barely inside, they hear a thump coming from the balcony. What they find on the balcony is the body of a fellow student wrapped inside a bag. So how did the body end up on the balcony? It couldn't be a bizarre suicide, because the apartment is on the seventh floor of a twelve floor building and the body would have landed on an upper apartment balcony. Since this incident, Nitobe's parents have forbidden to see Koba. In desperation, he turns to the teenage genius and classroom detective of his school. Touma is currently engaged on, what they call, the Rakugo Artist Case. Mizuhara gets to play detective, collect evidence and contribute a pretty solid false-solution to the story. I had the most fun with this story playing armchair detective. I had a good idea about the who and why, but was stumped by the how. Something I should have figured out, but somehow missed entirely. Yes, I can be very dense at times, but well played regardless!

The first story from Q.E.D. vol. 46, "Broken Heart," is the Rakugo Artist Case and is one of those stolen money stories Katou has done before, but this one has a neat and original wrinkle on the classic locked room situation. The setting of the story is the comedy theater Shitamachi where the princely sum of five million yen is stolen from the senior Rakugo artist, Tsubakiya Kamekichi, who brought the money along for safekeeping. And to ensure its safety during the performance, the money was locked inside a wallet with padlock secured to the handle of a steel ornamental jar. Only to discover later that evening the stacks of bills had somehow been replaced with blank paper! So how was the money taken from the locked wallet? The locked wallet-trick is only a relative small part of this character piece with its theatrical backdrop and backstory of young, aspiring actress/comedian/narrator, but just loved the visual imagery of the locked wallet hanging on a jar.

You don't find that many impossible crime novels or even short stories fiddling around with padlocks, because you have to ignore the fact they're not all that reliable and easily picked open. Suppose the same holds true for this story and the possibility alone should have made the person watching over the jar the primary suspect. Just going with the story, Katou demonstrated yet again you can achieve great effects with relatively simple, straight forward tricks. Loved it!

For those sick and tired of me droning on about locked rooms and alibis, the next story is for you. "Pilgrimage" is probably the darkest, most disturbing story this series has told and has Touma reconstructing a long-forgotten, deeply buried secret dating back to the Second World War. The story begins in the present with Uchibori Koyuki, a proof reader, finding an unpublished manuscript written by her late father, Shoichiro, who was a non-fiction writer. Manuscript is titled Pilgrim and has three handwritten notes on the cover, "rejected," "coincidence?" and "intentional?" Why was it rejected and shelved? She shows the manuscript to Touma and he found the subject matter more interesting than the reason why it was rejected. Pilgrim tells the tragic story from the early 1940s of a serial robber who accidentally killed one of his victims, a young newlywed woman, which forced him to flee the country. Yamai Seimei was eventually captured in Hanoi, Vietnam, ensuring "the bastard will get the death penalty." Usui Shigeru, victim's husband, travels to Hanoi under wartime circumstances, but halfway through he decides to continue the journey to Hanoi on foot – about a 1000 km journey. Two months later, Usui Shigeru arrives at the court in Hanoi and asks the court to spare his wife killer by commuting his death sentence to a prison sentence. But why? More importantly, why was it not enough to save the killer from death? And, of course, the reason is also why the manuscript remained unpublished.

A very dark, disturbing reason. Not that you would get that impression from the description, so far, because “"Pilgrimage" starts out with a human touch of Chestertonian wonder. A man forgiving and sparing the life of his wife's murderer following a mysterious, self-imposed pilgrimage and the wonder what he could have experienced during those two months. Only for it to turn in a terrifying, pitch-black and nightmarish horror plucked from the pages of an Edgar Allan Poe tale. Or, in this case, Edogawa Rampo. Bravo!

So, on a whole, not a bad collection of stories covering these three volumes. "Tuba and Grave," "First Love" and "Pilgrimage" are the obvious standouts and personally liked "Broken Heart" for its locked wallet mystery. Only "Question" and "Venus" trailed behind, but even they had their moments. Far from disappointed and look forward to the next three volumes, which you can expect before too long.

Ho-Ho-Homicide: "A Murder in Christmas Village" (2015) by Alex Colwell

I first read about Alex Colwell's short story, "A Murder in Christmas Village" (2015), on a now long since deleted website, "The Locked Room Mystery," containing a page listing nineteen seasonal detective novels and short stories – titled "A Locked Room Christmas." Colwell's "A Murder in Christmas Village" was the last, then most recent entry on the list and introduced as the first in "an exciting new cozy mystery series set in quaint, idyllic Christmas Village" where "no one locks their door but locked room mysteries and impossible murders abound."

Normally, the phrase "cozy mystery" is enough to make me turn around, but the idea, or gimmick, of an annual series of Christmas-themed locked room mysteries appealed to me (of course!). So chucked the short story on the big pile and forgot about it.

I recently went through the archived pages of the defunct "The Locked Room Mystery" website and it reminded me "A Murder in Christmas Village" was still residing on the big pile. So looked up the series, to see what has been added to it in the intervening years, but Colwell appears to have abandoned the series after only a single short story – proceeded to drop off the map. A second short story, or novel, seems to have been in the works with "Halloween Villa" in the title. Nothing materialized and this short story is no longer available. I got my hands on a lost locked room mystery, before it got lost 

Alex Colwell's "A Murder in Christmas Village" is a short, sweet and simple seasonal locked room mystery with the kind of killing one doesn't usually associate with cozies. Willard "Wild Willy" Wilkinson, of Wild Willy's Western World, got his throat cut in the property room of the Crestview Theater. The body is lying some five feet into the room and the floor is covered in fresh sawdust, which has impressions of two sets of print, but "neither of which could have belonged to the killer." No weapon was found in the room and the only door locked.

So a double impossibility with a body inside a locked room and a murderer who left no footprints in the fresh sawdust on the floor. Maybe even a triple impossibility, if you count the absence of a murder weapon as an impossible problem. Sheriff Fell is tasked with investigating this bizarre, locked room slaying assisted, sort of, by Mrs. Maribel Claus ("yes, he's my husband"). The clueing here is so fair blatant, the solution is not too difficult to put together before Mrs. Claus passes Sheriff Fell that to-do note to catch the murderer. "A Murder in Christmas Village" only true shortcoming, however, is not that it's too easy to solve, but that it could very well have been a minor locked room gem had it been just a little more original. The solutions to the problems of the locked door, no-footprint and absentee murder weapon are all tricks more than a little familiar to mystery fans – especially those obsessing over impossible crimes. The tricks were put to good use, but not enough to make it anything more than a charming, if bloody, little holiday locked room mystery perfectly suited to warm and brighten those cold, dark days of December. Hey, freshly spilled blood from a severed carotid artery is bright and warm!

A shame Colwell gave up on this series after only a single short stories, and writing in general, because would have liked to see him develop and continue this tradition of holiday-themed impossible crime stories. A tradition that would eventually have added up to a charming (Crippen & Landru?) collection of short stories (Ho-Ho-Homicide: Mrs. Claus Celebrates the Holidays).

13 to the Gallows (2008) by John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Douglas G. Green's founding of Crippen & Landru, a small publishing firm specialized in short story collections, whose first publication was John Dickson Carr's Speak of the Devil (1994) – a BBC radio serial originally written and broadcast in 1941. C&L was decades ahead of the curb and gave mystery fans a taste of the coming reprint renaissance with their "Lost Classic" series. A series of short story collections comprising of such early gems as Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), Craig Rice's Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002), Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin (2003), Joseph Commings' Banner Deadlines (2004) and Ellery Queen's The Adventure of the Murdered Moths (2005). Not to mention Queen's previously unpublished novel collected in The Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999).

There are fortunately no signs C&L is slowing down or stopping anytime soon as Jeffrey Marks, "the award-winning author of biographies of Craig Rice and Anthony Boucher," took over from Douglas Greene as publisher in 2018.

In March, I reviewed one of their latest publications, Pierre Véry's Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937). A collection of imaginative short mystery stories, translated from French by Tom Mead, published in 2023, but was unaware of the C&L's 30th anniversary and neglected to mention it when I wrote the review. It was not until a review of Edward D. Hoch's The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) appeared on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel that I was reminded of C&L's 30th anniversary. So a good excuse to finally move those Anthony Berkeley, William Brittain and Hoch collections to the top of the pile, but not before revisiting one of my favorite C&L collections from my all-time favorite mystery writer.

13 to the Gallows (2008) is a collection of four, never before published manuscripts of stage plays John Dickson Carr wrote during the early 1940s and collaborated on two of the plays with his friend and then Director of Drama at the BBC, Val Gielgud – who had a "shared interest in detective stories and fencing." Gielgud wrote detective novels himself and you would think the name of a British broadcast legend on the covers of Death at Broadcasting House (1934), Death as an Extra (1935) and The First Television Murder (1940) is a guarantee to keep them in circulation, but they have all been out-of-print for ages. This collection of stage plays is the first time his name appeared on a piece of detective fiction in over thirty years. What a way to make a comeback!

Just one more thing before delving into these plays. 13 to the Gallows is edited and introduced by Tony Medawar, a researcher and genre archaeologist, who also littered it with Van Dinean footnotes and even included "Notes for the Curious." Medawar's detailed introduction should give you an appreciation of the time and work that went into the making of this volume of "Lost Classics." One of the many fascinating background details is that it was "the late Derek Smith who first conceived of this collection." So with that out of the way, let's raise the curtain on this collection of stage plays from a once forgotten period of Carr's writing career.

The three-act play "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" (1942) is the first of two collaborations between Carr and Gielgud, which is also the first of two plays that take place in a BBC radio studio. In this case, it's the cellar below a country house on the outskirts of a provincial town that was taken over by the BBC as an emergency security set of studios. When the story begins, they're rehearing the first episode of a true crime program called Murderer's Row starring ex-Chief Inspector Silence to talk about the Kovar case. It was his first big case ("I hanged the criminal") in which Thomas Kovar shot his wife's lover. A part of the program is a dramatic reenactment of the shooting, but the producer, Anthony Barran, made the unfortunate call to cast Elliott Vandeleur and Lanyon Kelsey as the murderer and victim – because Kelsey is rumored to be involved with Vandeleur's wife, Jennifer Sloane. So all the ingredients for murder all there, cooped in a small radio studio, while an air-raid goes on over their heads outside.

One of them gets fatally shot during the on-air performance, but who pulled the trigger and perhaps more importantly how was it done? Silence is on hand to handle the case, until the police arrives, collects two .22s from the studio, but one "has never been fired" ("...barrel's unfouled") and "the other was full of blanks." So what happened to the murder gun? Silence turns the studio inside out and has everybody searched without finding as much as a shell casing. Nobody could have drawn or ditched a gun without being seen, but somebody, somehow, managed to pull it off. The impossibility of a shooting in a closed spaced by an apparently invisible killer and the puzzle of the vanishing gun are perfectly played out, which both have simple, elegant and yet satisfying solutions that simply works on stage. These impossibilities are dressed with the personal and backstage drama of the characters mirroring the old murder case and the running joke of Silence being frightened of microphones. Simply the kind of story fans of Carr and impossible crimes in general. However, "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" is not even the best play in this volume.

A note for the curious: Medawar noted in the afterword to the play that the impossible murder recalls one of Carr's short stories, "although the details of the mystery are entirely different," but I think Max Afford's The Dead Are Blind (1937) warrants a mention here. A locked room mystery staged inside a radio studio. You can also find similar impossible shootings with vastly different solutions in Stacey Bishop's Death in the Dark (1930) and Christopher Bush's The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935).

The second, three-act Carr-Gielgud collaboration, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944), is set this time in a Midlands school converted into a wartime emergency studio for the BBC. The program being produced is a spin-off episode, of sorts, of In Town Tonight entitled Out of Town – a series of special items split up between three towns in Britain. Barran from "Inspector Silence Takes the Air" returns to produce Barchester part of the program, but, during the rehearsals, slowly sees the whole thing disintegrating in front of his eyes. Even having to entertain the idea of interviewing a man who trains and imitates sea lions. Fortunately, the town has something of a notorious local celebrity, Wallace Hatfield.

Hatfield is a builder who had converted the school into a radio studio and, several years before, was tried for the murder of his wife, Lucy. Not only was he acquitted, but the death dismissed as a tragic accident as the prosecution couldn't even prove it was murder. Lucy had fallen from the belfry, "seventy or eighty feet," scattered round the body were flowers with Hatfield being the only person near the tower. What saved his neck is that the police found only Lucy's footprints in the dust up in the belfry. So nobody could have pushed her. Hatfield still believes she murdered and agrees to be interviewed, which initially was supposed to be conducted by an ex-Scotland Yard inspector. Program director, Sir John Burnside, insists on his old OC, Colonel Sir Henry Bryce, former head of the Indian Police. Sir John gushing over his old OC is another strain for the harassed producer culminating with Barran calling the old OC "son of a cock-eyed half-caste Indian constable" right when Colonel Sir Henry Bryce his entree. Just in time for history to repeat itself as an invisible killer throws another person from the belfry.

Medawar notes in the introduction "Carr clearly contributed to the mystery and Gielgud the authentic details of broadcasting" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" very clearly has Carr's fingerprints all over the plot and storytelling. From the comedy and clueing to the impossible crime reworked from his Suspense radio-play "The Man Without a Body" (1943). Only smudge is that the murderer is an absolute idiot, but other than that, as good and solid a mystery as its predecessor. A vintage Carr. A pity he never considered reworking "The Man Without a Body" and "Thirteen to the Gallows" into a Sir Henry Merrivale mystery. I gladly would have traded one of the final three Merrivale novels for The New Invisible Man.

The last two plays were solo projects, "a version for the stage of his famous BBC series Appointment with Death," beginning with the short play "Intruding Shadow" (1945), which is tightly-plotted little story of domestic murder – staged at the home of a well-known mystery writer. Richard Marlowe is the author of such celebrated detective novels as Death in the Summer-House, Murder at Whispering Lodge and The Nine Black Clues, but the story finds him dabbling in true crime of the fictitious kind. Marlowe wants to scare the pants of Bruce Renfield, a West End blackmailer, to make him back off from one of his victims and hand over the blackmail material. In order to achieve his goal, Marlowe is going to make both of them believe he's about to murder Renfield. After all, this is Golden Age mysteries in which a blackmailer is the type of person "who deserves to die" or "to be scared within an inch of his life." A plan that spectacularly backfires when Marlowe finds a dying Renfield on his doorstep shortly followed by Inspector Sowerby.

Apparently, "Intruding Shadow" was met with some reserved praise from the critics, but on paper, it's easily the best of the four plays Carr wrote during the war years. A short, pure undiluted detective story recalling that small gem "Who Killed Matthew Corbin?" (1939/40). Both stories are essentially Carr successfully pulling an Agatha Christie-style whodunit without any locked rooms or other impossible crimes. There is, however, a typical, Carrian Grand Guignol scene involving the corpse. So a great detective tale all around!

The fourth and last (short) play, "She Slept Lightly" (1945), belongs together with The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) and the previously mentioned radio-play, Speak of the Devil, to Carr's earliest experiments in mixing the detective story with historical fiction, which he kind of pioneered starting with plays and short stories – e.g. "The Other Hangman" (1935) and "Blind Man's Hood" (1937). After the 1940s, Carr began to write fully fledged historical mystery novels decades before the historical mystery became a subgenre of its own. Regrettably, Carr's historical (locked room) mysteries and thrillers either criminally underrated or outright ignored. A real shame as some of the Carr's best work from the 1950s and '60s can be found among his historical novels. Captain Cut-Throat (1955) is one of the best historical mystery-thrillers ever written and one of Carr's finest novels from the post-war period.

Just like Captain Cut-Throat, "She Slept Lightly" is a mystery-thriller set in Napoleonic France and brings several characters together in the home of Belgian miller while the Battle of Waterloo rages on in the background. Firstly, there's the elderly Lady Stanhope, "her enemies might call her a little mad," whose carriage overturned and needs the miller to guide her through the French lines. The second arrival is a wounded British soldier, Captain Thomas Thorpe, who's looking for the young girl in Lady Stanhope's company. She, however, denies the existence of the girl. Major von Steinau, a Prussian Hussar, is another one who's interested in this apparently non-existent woman and not without reason. He hanged her only a year ago for spying ("I saw the rope choke out your life"). So how could she be alive and walking around?

Like I said, this is more of a historical mystery-thriller than detective story with the apparent impossibility of a woman who was hanged and lived to tell about it as a small side-puzzle, but I can see why this historical melodrama is not going to excite everyone. I enjoyed it. However, I'm also very, very partial to the type of historical mystery as envisioned by Carr, Robert van Gulik and Paul Doherty. So feel free to disagree on this one.

So the quality of the plays, purely as detective and thriller stories, is uniformly excellent, but, more importantly, 13 to the Gallows plugged another fascinating, once completely forgotten gap in Carr's body of work – similar to the obscure radio-plays collected in The Island of Coffins (2021). That's the greatest contribution C&L had made in helping to restore Carr back to print. A highly recommendable, must-have volume for the true JDC aficionado and might pick up The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror and Adventure (2022) before tackling the Brittain and Hoch collections.

Slings and Arrows: Q.E.D. vol. 35-36 by Motohiro Katou

The first of two stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 35, "Two Suspects," is a surprisingly uncomplicated, straightforward case of burglary gone wrong when the owner of a moving company, Yoshimitsu Ryozo, discovers a burglar in the manager's office – working on the safety deposit box. So the burglar takes a crowbar to the owner's skull and leaves him seriously wounded. Yoshimitsu Ryozo is either unable, or unwilling, to identify his attacker, because due to his own past "often hired those with criminal backgrounds." Only viable suspects are two of his staff members, Saburo Mikawa and Kurose Yasumasa, who have several counts of theft and assault on their record.

So a simple, but tricky, case handled by Inspector Mizuhara's subordinate, Asama Kiyori, who's very keen to impress his superior. Naturally, Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara come along to drop by something for Detective Sasazuka and Kiyori is surprised when he asks Touma's opinion on the burglary ("why are you asking that stuff to a kid?"). Sasazuka explains Touma is "a genius who is respected by Inspector Mizuhare" ("so... the inspector has some like that?"). Kiyori asks Kana Mizuhara to rope in Touma to help him solve the case. After all, if the subordinate bungles an investigation, it reflects poorly on his superior, i.e. her father.

While there are only two suspects, they both have a financial motive and their alibis "only supported by someone very close to them." Just having two, or three, suspects can make things a lot more difficult and complicated than an entire swarm of suspects, which these manga detective series regularly demonstrate. Touma is not easily fooled and points out that the one difference between the suspects is "your impression of good or bad with regards to their circumstances." Logically untangles that neat, knotted little problem. A very minor, but solid, story that curiously leaves one small plot-thread unresolved.

The second story, "Christmas Present," sounds out-of-season, but the December holiday is only a small, unobtrusive decoration to a fun parody of the theatrical mystery – even poking fun at the shin honkaku-style locked room puzzles. This story centers on two of Sakisaka High School clubs. Firstly, the Drama Club whose president is a brilliant, promising young actor, Shiroi Kentarou, but despite his acting skills ("...almost at par with the professionals") is the reason why the club is bleeding members ("...he's clumsy as hell"). Always making some thoughtless mistake leading to one members, after another, giving up on the club and now they're given an ultimatum: get new members after the Christmas show or get disbanded! The notorious Detective Club comes to the rescue, but their president, Enari "Queen" Himeko has one condition. It has to be a mystery play. Not that they have script ready, but Detective Club has that covered as well, which means turing to Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara for help. Touma is tasked with penning a script on the spot. Which he does.

So, of course, the collaboration between the two clubs is not exactly going smoothly and even is threatened to be canceled all together, but, for me, the highlight is the trick Touma's dreamed up for the mystery play, Murder at the Pentagon House. The play is about a murder committed in a small, pentagon-shaped house with the door and windows locked from the inside. Sure, the locked room-trick is completely tongue-in-cheek ("W-wow, such a trick exists?! No wonder it's called Pentagon House"), but nonetheless quite clever and original. More importantly, the trick can be easily used in an actual comedy mystery play. A fun, cheeky send-up of the theatrical mystery and shin honkaku impossible crime tales.

"Kurogane Villa Murder Case" is the first of two stories from Q.E.D. vol. 36 and brings Sou Touma to the Kyoto to meet with Jinnai Ryozaburou.

Jinnai Ryozaburou is a lecturer at K University whose mentor, Yanosuke Kurogane, hanged himself at his home five days previously and nobody knows why. Professor Kurogane lectured on theoretical physics for thirty years and renowned as a great researcher, but had treated a promising assistant professor badly. Namely trying to take credit. Karasuma Renji is viewed by the police as a person of interest in their ongoing investigation, but he's "impossible to handle" and tries to make himself look suspect ("this detective is an idiot"). A second murder happens when all of Professor Kurogane's friends and associates gathered at his home to mourn him. One of his potential successors is hit with an arrow while walking down an outside, roofed corridor that poses something of a problem, because long corridors like that were used for archery competitions during the Edo period – where the trick lies in distance combined with the low ceiling. A target at the end of the corridor with a low ceiling overhead limits the angles in which an arrow can be loosened. So the murder is an impossible one as "it'd require the power of a rifle" and "the aim was even a bit off..." On top of that, Karasuma Renji alluded before the murder to Zeno's Arrow Paradox.

Touma gives a clue to the solution to Kana, "the key to solve this case is why did the culprit choose an arrow as the weapon," but the arrow-trick should have been offered as a false-solution – a trick that sounds nice enough in theory. But would simply not work in practice. No matter how skilled the archer who shoots the arrow. Even if it can be done as described, there's no way it can be accurately aimed to hit a fatal spot. And, no, I don't think (ROT13) n funqbj frra sebz n guveq-sybbe ebbsgbc, cbxvat bhg sebz gur pbirerq oevqtr nqwnprag gb pbeevqbe, vf rknpg rabhtu gb uvg gur ivpgvz evtug va gur arpx. A pity as I like archery-themed detective stories of which there are only a scant few. On the other hand, the solution to the murder-disguised-as-suicide of Professor Kurogane had a much simpler, elegant solution. That murder is a quasi-impossible crime with the question being how the killer managed to enter and leave the house without being seen or leaving footprints in the snow outside the study. A mixed bag of a story.

The second and last story from this volume, "Q & A," is one of those unorthodox, character-oriented puzzles drawing on Touma's time as an MIT student in the United States.

Glass Rosfeller is an American banker who helped Touma securing research grants, when he was still studying abroad (see previous reviews), but Rosfeller intends to retire and wishes to hand over the business to one of his four children, Ian, Walter, Freya and Wood. So has an unusual favor to ask from Touma. Rosfeller wants him to select the most suitable one to succeed him and in order to do so has them gathered in a luxurious villa, on an island, in the middle of Aegean Sea. Touma brings along Kana and his younger sister, Yuu Touma. Only other people present on the island is the caretaker and his son. This all appears to be conventional enough and most readers will probably expect someone to be murdered, likely under seemingly impossible circumstances, but what happens is a series of minor and more serious incidents. There's a blackout. The gas and warm water gets turned off. The son of the caretaker is injured and finally an explosion. This short, strange series of events is retold several times from the perspective of everyone present on the island. Every time one of these incidents happened, they were all scattered around the villa or the island. A story with a really, really razor-thin plot, but Katou deserves credit for how he handled it and making it feel more substantial than it actually is. So not entirely without interest, but a minor and unmemorable entry in the series.

Obviously, vol. 36 is on a whole weaker than vol. 35 with "Christmas Present" being the standout of the two collections and the first story, "Two Suspects," standing as a solid, no-frills detective tale. "Kurogane Villa Murder Case" is not a bad story, but the arrow-trick is hard to credit and "Q & A" is one of those stories I've completely forgotten when getting to the next two volumes. Still an enjoyable read overall. You can probably expect the next Q.E.D. review by the end of the month.