The Thirteenth Bullet (1948) by Marcel Lanteaume

Thirteen years ago, the name of Marcel Lanteaume figured on, what's objectively, the best internet best-of list of the 2000s, John Pugmire's "A Locked Room Library," which described him as an impossible crime author who, like so many French mystery writers, appreciated "a touch of fantasy" in his crime fiction – which remained tantalizingly inaccessible to non-francophone readers. That is, until last October. 

Lanteaume's La 13e balle (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948) is the latest translation published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International and comes with an introduction by French anthologist and genre scholar, Roland Lacourbe. A short introduction that will both fascinate and horrify every obsessive locked room reader.

Lacourbe presents Lanteaume as a shooting star, "a temporary streak of light in the night sky," who wrote "three exceptionally works" between 1942 and 1944 to battle boredom during his captivity in a German prisoner-of-war camp, which actually reminded me of Joseph Commings – who wrote short stories to amuse his army comrades. Lacourbe compared Lanteaume to the "brilliant and fleeting" wonder of Hake Talbot, because they both disappeared after only a few novels. La Labyrinth published his three novels following the liberation of France and contained "a mouth-watering list of books in preparation," but they were never published following poor sales numbers. Disappointed with his failure, Lanteaume destroyed the unpublished manuscripts with such intriguing-sounding titles as Crime rue des fantasques (Crime in Weird Street), Le barbier massacré (The Butchered Barber) and La plaine sous le soleil (The Plain Under the Sun). Lost forever!

So, lamentably, we have to add Lanteaume's name and about a handful of his novels to the shelves of the Phantom Library of Lost Detective Stories. Thankfully, one of his novels that was published finally made its way, through LRI, to our our shelves. 

The Thirteenth Bullet is, to quote one of the characters, "pure pulp fiction" reminiscent of Alexis Gensoul and Charles Grenier's La mort vient de nulle part (Death Out of Nowhere, 1945), John Russel Fearn and Gerald Verner. One of those wildly imaginative, hardly credible, but terribly fun, fairground rides that chases a serial killer who threatens the stability of France.

An average looking, clean-shaven man wearing a gray overcoat with a trilby of the same color is often the last person seen with the victims on a growing list of murders, usually harmless bachelors, whose only tangible link are the bullets that ended their lives – which were all fired from the same pistol. The press christened the murderer the man in gray, but, as the bodycount rises, the murders begin to have political implications. So the noted biologist and criminologist, Professor Fernand Richard, is asked to take charge of the case. Professor Richard predicts the man in gray is going to give them a lot of trouble, because murderers who think they're clever complicate things. This killer simplifies, "a sign of superior men," with clean and simple murders (a bullet to the heart). And he was right.

The first half of the story mostly consists of "running to prefectures of police all over France" to look "at bodies of males of various ages" and "questioning witnesses who have heard nothing and seen nothing." These dead men are nothing more than names in the story with exception of the shopkeeper, René Grandjean, who's described as a neighborhood detective with "astonishing powers of deduction." René Grandjean had used his deductive skills to solve baffling crimes "based on simple indications in the newspapers" or more "practical problems brought to him by his friends." So a whole series of untold armchair detective stories about a sharp-minded shopkeeper cruelly ended here with the detective falling prey to a serial killer or did get one or two of his stories get told? But they were among the destroyed manuscripts. These are the kind of questions that keeps an unrepentant fanboy, like myself, awake at night.

Anyway, the bodycount is close to touching double-digits before Professor Richards discovers something that puts them on the trail of the next victim, but they arrive too late and find another victim. But this time, the murder was committed in a house locked and bolted on the inside with steel shutters covering the windows. A murder with far reaching consequences that turns this almost routine serial killer story into a ripping pulp yarn that stockpiled wild twists and far-fetched turns.

Firstly, the murder in the locked house brings the real detective into the story, Bob slowman, who has "a prodigious intuition" allowing him to reach a conclusion Professor Richard "can only arrive at after fastidious and methodical effort." Slowman is a detective halfway between Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake who makes some astonishing deductions about the locked house mystery, which places a crown witness in their hands. A witness who has to be protected at all costs. So they decide to place him inside an impenetrable bunker.

A bunker with walls and ceiling a meter thick and four meters of earth on the top and around it. The floor is a concrete slab and the thick, steel door has two bolts on the inside and can only be opened two keys – one of them in possession of the Gouverneur Militaire de Paris. Sentries are placed all around the bunker. Nobody could have gotten inside to kill their prized witness, but the next day they have to cut through the door frame with a blowtorch. What they find inside is a familiar scene: a dead man with a bullet in his heart. I can see why Pugmire picked The Thirteenth Bullet to translate. The premise alone is great and while the solution has a core element locked room readers will recognize, Lanteaume unexpectedly turned the idea on its head. It also helped a lot that the locked room-trick is the strongest clued part of the plot. You can't figure out what peculiarity connects all the victims together or how that links up with the fabulous motive, but there are definitely clues to the locked room-trick. And when you know how it was done, you know who has done it. Or so you think. Lanteaume keeps throwing twists, surprises and dangers before, during and after the unmasking of the "super-criminal" who had terrorized an entire nation. 

The Thirteenth Bullet is a glorious, unapologetic flight of fancy and can stand with the best pulp-style locked room mysteries, but you have to appreciate Fearn and Verner to be able to appreciate Lanteaume. I sure did. Hopefully, translations of the other two novels by the French Talbot will not be far behind.

The Great Revolt (2016) by Paul Doherty

I'm an idiot and chronologically challenged! Back in 2016, I read Paul Doherty's Bloodstone (2011), a book reviving the Brother Athelstan series, which had lain dormant since The House of Shadows (2003) and Doherty began to work prodigiously towards the Great Uprising of 1381 – the major story-arc of the series. I told in my 2018 review of The Straw Men (2013) that it was my intention to read these new novels in chronological order, but, as you probably noticed, the previous review was of The Herald of Hell (2015). There are two novels between The Straw Men and The Herald of Hell, Candle Flame (2014) and The Book of Fires (2015). Somehow, I had already crossed them off the list in my mind. Why? Because I'm an idiot, that's why. You can jeer and mock me in the comments.

The Great Revolt (2016) is the sixteenth title in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, set in June, 1831, when the Great Community of the Realm and the Upright Men began their bloody purge of London.

Brother Athelstan is at the mother house of the Dominican order, Blackfriars, where he had been summoned to provide assistance to a papal envoy. The boy-king, Richard II, had returned from a pilgrimage to the tomb of his great-grand father, Edward II, with the conviction his ancestor was a saint and a royal martyr – "a true martyr king" like "other saintly monarchs" in "the misty history of the English crown." So he petitioned "the Holy Father for the formal opening of the process for the beatification and canonisation of Edward II" and since Urban VI has a rival pope, Clement VII, residing in Avignon, which makes it desirable for Rome not to alienate the English crown. Athelstan is asked to help gather evidence in favor of canonization of Edward II, but that's easier said than done. Edward II was a divisive monarch with evidence suggesting the deposed king had been freed and fled to the continent, which would be embarrassing for both King Richard and the Pope. And are the 54-year-old secrets worth keeping to the point of murder?

One of the papal envoys, Brother Alberic, collected evidence against the dead king's reputation in his role as advocatus diaboli (devil's advocate), but when the story open, the door to his room is being battered down. A room with only a very narrow, lancet window and a heavy, elmwood door securely locked and bolted from within, but Alberic had been "brutally stabbed" with "an ancient-looking dagger" nobody recognizes. Even stranger is that Alberic was a former soldier, still young and vigorous, but there's no sign or "even a scratch of any struggle or challenge." Alberic is not the last to die violently on consecrated ground of Blackfriars.

You shouldn't expect too much from the locked room-trick, because it's based on a simple idea that has been explored before, but it was put to good use here and the reason why there wasn't any signs of a struggle was genuinely clever and a splendid hint to the identity of the elusive assassin. Just like Steve, the Puzzle Doctor, something "I haven't seen before." This portion of the plot is basically a historical mystery within a historical mystery, linking the tumultuous events of 1327 and 1381, which proved to be tapestry of long-held, treasured secrets and bloody murder – set against a background resembling the end of days. Brother Athelstan and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, move back and forth between Blackfriars and London.

The footmen of the Upright Men, the Earthworms, were out in full force and directed the grisly
executions and feel slightly guilty for snickering at the lively crowd heckling the unsteady, piss drunk executioners gruesomely botching a beheading as "butter-fingered fumblers." How can you not love the English? But as the revolt drew on, the bloodshed was used to settle old scores and attack the vulnerable as the streets were littered with corpses knifed, garroted or dangling from ropes. So wherever they went there were torn down walls, shredded gates and fences, burning houses and "summary execution at different places along the way." Everywhere they passed where "scaffolds, gibbets and gallows festooned with corpses" or "decorated with bloody body parts and severed heads." Even by Doherty's own standards, The Great Revolt has an incredibly stacked bodycount.

But while they're deep into enemy territory, surrounded by

anarchy and murder, Athelstan and Sir John have their concerns. Sir John wants to be with King Richard when the time comes to meet the rebels and their mysterious leader, Wat Tyler, while Athelstan is deeply concerned about his parishioners. Most of them were taken prisoner and spirited away before the violence erupted, but one of them, Pernel the Fleming, was drowned and her house torched. She may have had a connection to one of the people currently sheltering at Blackfriars. Athelstan also worried about his non-human friends such as his old horse and that wily, one-eyed tomcat, Bonaventure, who had been "his constant dining companion" and credited the cat with "more wit and sense than all his parishioners put together."

So, needless to say, The Great Revolt is an eventful novel in which Doherty took some creative liberties in tying together his fictitious plot-threads with the historical accounts of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the death of Edward II, which he acknowledged in his Author's Note. But, to quote Doherty, historical novels "often reflect a reality based firmly on fact rather than fiction." I think The Great Revolt succeeded in being both an engrossing historical novel and a well done detective story. Definitely recommended!

By the way, how amazing would it be if Doherty's detective fiction was actually history. Just imagine our history books littered with accounts of Egyptian judges, royal clerks and Dominican friars solving locked room murders, dying messages, complicated ciphers and hounding ancient serial killers.

The Marloe Mansions Murder (1928) by Adam Gordon Macleod

Adam Gordon Macleod is one of those thoroughly forgotten mystery novelists, who's so obscure that the Golden Age of Detection Wiki doesn't even list his name, but five minutes of playing internet detective revealed that he was an engineer and a World War I veteran – who passed away in 1945 aged 62 (dates check out). During the 1920s and '30s, Macleod signed his name to (at least) four detective novel and one of them is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). You're surprised, I know.

The Marloe Mansions Murder (1928) was reprinted as a two-part serial in the March 14 and 21, 1936, issues of The Thriller under the titles "The Marloe Mansion Murder" and "The Murderer of Mr. Slyne." And that was the last time the story appeared in print until Black Heath reissued it as an ebook in 2017. Nearly 90 years later!

The Marloe Mansions Murder seems to be the first novel starring Sir William Burrill, late of the Yard, who was the younger son of a younger son with far-off expectations of an inheritance, but unexpectedly succeeded to baronetcy. So he retired holding the rank Detective Superintendent and retreated to the family seat, Scawdel Hall, where he dedicates his time to fishing, shooting, stamp collection, writing a standard work on criminology and maintaining "a full-bodied beard," which had been "born and nursed to maturity during the long watches of 1914-1918" – while mine-sweeping in the North Sea. Sir William is accompanied in The Marloe Mansions Murders by his fair, blue eyed and clean shaven nephew, Robert "Bobby" Burrill, who wears a patch over his right eye. A souvenir from "a very gallant performance some years ago by one Temporary Second-Lieutenant R. Burrill." The ghosts of the First World War lurk in the dark and shadowy corners of the story.

Sir Burrill enters the story not as a detective, but as a stamp collector who goes to Marloe Mansions, London, to see Ganthony Slyne (a villainous name, if there ever was one) on some rare postage stamps. But when they arrive, the elevator door opened to reveal the huddled and bloodied remains of Slyne!

They immediately notify Scotland Yard and Inspector Ellershaw is dispatched to Marloe Mansions, but when they go to investigate the victim's apartment, plunged in darkness, Ellershaw "vanished as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed him." The hall door had been locked behind them and all the windows were securely fastened on the inside, which makes his disappearance next to impossible without him being hidden somewhere. Ellershaw is nowhere to be found... until his body turns up in an unlikely place somewhere else in the building.

So the investigation, and style, of the story is split in two parts: Bobby is chasing the mystery woman of the story, Miss Sheelagh Vaile, who was seen leaving the building right after the body was discovered and Bobby is determined to clear her of every ounce of suspicion – which is easier said than done because Miss Vaile believes she killed Slyne. This is mostly done behind the backs of Sir William and Inspector Brett. Bobby's share of the story is, for the most part, a typical and mild thriller of the period with the only jarring note being Bobby threatening to torture information from a suspect using a red hot poker. You rarely come across such scenes in a traditional detective and, despite its thriller-ish trappings, The Marloe Mansions Murder is very much a traditional detective story.

Sir William stays behind with Inspector Brett to continue the investigation and he does some surprising scientific detective work. Such as determining whether a tiny hole in one of the window panes was drilled from the outside or the inside and there was a clever piece of trick photography, which felt a little out of place, or time, but special effects are almost as old as photography itself. So it feels out of place/time because it's not very often used in these vintage mysteries. A second point in favor of the plot is the locked room-trick, which is crude and clunky by Golden Age standards, but not as crude and clunky as a secret passage or "one of those fantastic doors of fiction" with hinged and movable frames. The locked room idea is much better than that and somewhat ahead of its time, because it would be another 70-80 years until two locked room artisans used this idea to its full potential.

I don't want to overpraise The Marloe Mansions Murder too much, because it's a very minor detective novel and, on a whole, the book is nothing more than an amusing curiosity, but it gives you the idea its better than it really is. The opening chapters braced the reader for a lurid, badly dated thriller with detective interruptions and half-expected, based on a bloody print of a mutilated hand, the murderer to be a disfigured WWI veteran who Slyne had hidden away from the world and it would place a line from the prologue ("Am I so repellent?") in a very different light – only it turned out to be a detective novel with a few thriller-ish interruptions. I don't think the eventual solution will blow anyone away and it's not particularly well clued, but those final lines were genuinely sad and tragic.

So, yeah, The Marloe Mansions Murder is an old-fashioned and uneven, but interesting, curiosity from the 1920s that is perhaps best read as a transitional mystery novel with some good and fresh ideas and two detective characters who stand out. But it was mostly handled and presented as a crude turn-of-the-century dime novel, which will never make it anymore than that. Nonetheless, I might still try one of his two 1930s novels, The Case of Matthew Crake (1932) and Death Stalked the Fells (1937).

A note for the curious: a plot linking a harmless hobby, like stamp collecting, to the horrors of the First World War is unusual, but it was done successfully in Harriette Ashbrook's A Most Immoral Murder (1935).

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

The Edge of Terror (1932) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Edge of Terror (1932) is the twelfth title in the Anthony Bathurst series and part of the much deserved, long overdue second set of reprints, published by Dean Street Press, which nearly became "the book that got away" as not even Flynn's estate had a copy of it – only copy for sale came with "a stratospheric price tag." Luckily, a generous collector came to the rescue and made his copy available to Steve Barge and DSP.

However, the extreme scarcity of copies explains why The Edge of Terror never figured or was even mentioned in connection with a very exclusive list of vintage detective novels and short stories. The serial killer tale!

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, wrote in his introduction that the serial killer "posed a problem for the writer of the pure mystery," mainly centering on the motive, which leaves the writer with "two primary options." The victims are either linked or picked at random. The locked room mystery, the closed-circle of suspects and the dying message as restrictive tropes, but, compared to the serial killer, they're open worlds that are still being explored today. And how ironic it's that the serial killer has become a staple of the modern crime novel.

Now, to be honest, the giants of the past were very hit-and-miss when trying to tackle the serial killer with Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders (1936) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949) standing as the iconic, Golden Age serial killer novels, but John Dickson Carr's Captain Cut-Throat (1955) and William D. Andrea's The HOG Murders (1979) found two nifty variations on the two previously mentioned options – cementing a spot right underneath Christie and Queen. But there were also some real stinkers. Such as Philip MacDonald's massively overrated Murder Gone Mad (1931) and Jonathan Stagge's lackluster Death's Old Sweet Song (1946), but opinions differ on those two. Carr heralded Murder Gone Mad as one of the best crime novels of all time (no idea why) and Curt Evans valiantly defended Death's Old Sweet Song against its detractors in the linked review. We shouldn't overlook Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon (1945), which offers the reader an experience all of its own.

So, as said above, the result varies enormously, but where does Flynn's The Edge of Terror rank on the list of Golden Age serial killer novels? Let's find out!

The Edge of Terror is narrated by Dr. Michael Bannerman, village physician of Great Steeping, who six months previously was taken into the confidence of Inspector Goodaker about a threatening warning letter they received. A letter promising to remove "one of the most prominent citizens of your most atrocious town" by "by the 31st day of August next" and “the matter may not end there." The letter signed "The Eagle." They assume it's a hoax or someone trying to stir the pot, but, on August 31, Goodaker calls Dr. Bannerman to tell he had received a second letter announcing the murderer's arrival. And the next morning, Dr. Bannerman receives a second call informing him a milk boy had found the body of Walter Fredericks in Taggerts Lane with his throat cut.

Walter Fredericks was one of the richest men in the district and owned, among other things, two big cinemas. So the murderer couldn't have picked a better victim to create a first-class sensation, but what the murderer couldn't have foreseen is the presence of a holidaying murder-magnet, Anthony Bathurst, who's immediately roped into the case by the Chief Constable. When the murderer strikes down another member of the Frederick family, the motive appears to be a personal one, but a third murder seems to break the link. It's this third murder that's the most interesting of the lot.

Fredericks owned two cinemas and in one of them, Beaufoy Cinema, the people in attendance were startled by "a piercing scream that was easily separable from the "talkie" to which they were listening." The body of the girl in charge of the confectionery counter was found lying close to the top of a flight of stairs with a knife wound.

John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946) and Pattern of Murder (2006) made me wonder if there were any more detective novels with a cinema setting, which was actually rarely used, but have since found several additional titles – one of them being another DSP reprint, Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943). The Edge of Terror definitely belongs on that list and gives the reader a brief, but welcome, peek behind the scenes of a 1930s cinema through the questioning of a uniformed boy who sold chocolates and cigarettes to the patrons ("on a tray suspended from his neck") and found the body. This leads to the clue of "little blurred blot of pink cream" that "is going to bring a man to the gallows."

There's not much more I can tell about the plot, because, as Steve noted in his own review, The Edge of Terror is something of fairground ride of novel, but have to compliment Flynn for his use of a neighborhood patrols as a response to mounting body count. A logical response to a vicious killer roaming a small community that's too often absent in these kind of serial killer stories, e.g. Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1997). Secondly, Flynn once again shows here that he was to the false identity what Christopher Bush was to the unbreakable alibi and Carr to the locked room mystery. It's fascinating how some writers succeeded in making their names synonymous with certain tropes.

My sole complaint is that the finer details of the motive, which is the linchpin of the serial killer story, were obscured until Bathurst's explanation, but, on a whole, it was tremendously fun read and a good, early attempt to wring a proper detective story out of the work of an apparent homicidal maniac. The Edge of Terror doesn't soar to the same heights as The ABC Murders, Cat of Many Tails or Captain Cut-Throat, but it's mostly certainly a cut, or two, above most of the other, lesser-known Golden Age serial killer novels. Flynn was great!

Lost and Found: "The End of the Train" (2007) by Mike Wiecek

One thing I noticed when thumbing through my copy of Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) is the increase of novels, short stories and TV episodes in which cars, houses, ships, large statues and trains disappear, or reappear, under seemingly impossible circumstances – making them a little less rare than I believed. In particular, the stories about vanishing locomotives and modern, high-speed trains.

Henry Leverage wrote an early locked room mystery, entitled Whispering Wires (1918), but Skupin listed a second novel, The Purple Limited (1927), centering on the "disappearance of a locomotive from a section of track monitored at both ends." Three years later, John Coryell wrote a Nick Carter novel, The Stolen Pay Train (1930), with a similar positioned impossibility, but there were also two modern-day writers who tackled the problem of how to make a train vanish like a burst bubble. Andrew M. Greeley lost "a rapid transit train between stations" in The Bishop and the Missing L Train (2000) and there's a short, ambitiously-plotted thriller story in which a computer-monitored train with 32 cars "disappeared off the face of the earth."

Mike Wiecek's "The End of the Train" has, as of this writing, only appeared in the June, 2007, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

"The End of the Train" takes place around the train yards in Newark, New Jersey, where David Keegan has worked for nearly four "tumultuous decades" as a Special Railway Officer. Keegan is now close to retirement and in charge of "two thousand miles of track" crawling with "more vandals, thieves, vagrants, criminal rings, and white-collar fraud" than "anywhere else in North America" – never before had an entire train vanished! One morning, Keegan is summoned to the yard's dispatch center, overlooked by "a 360-degree glass tower," already overflowing with executive limos and police cars.

Train number 432 was en route to Tennebrul, a flat yard in Connecticut, when the GPS equipped locomotive "just blipped out a few miles past Croxton." A nearby maintenance-of-way crew checked a twenty mile stretch of track, but didn't see or find anything. Somehow, "half a mile of rolling iron" had unaccountably gone missing.

Unusually, the train was transporting a dangerous cargo of industrial tankers full of toxic and flammable chemicals to place without much heavy industry. Disturbingly, a multi-million dollar ransom note is emailed to the authorities or they'll "detonate the entire package." This package is the train with its specially assembled cargo that, when detonated with explosives, creates "a cloud of poison" that "could kill people for miles around."

Mike Grost aptly described "The End of the Train" on his website as "an impressive combination of the techo-thriller and the impossible crime tale" and the technological elements are not only the motor and fuel of the plot, but provided the story with a new variation on the one-track solution to make an entire train disappear – which, out of necessity, all run along similar lines. Wiecek's technological spin completely reinvigorated the idea and made it feel fresh again! Add the specialized setting with an inside look at a modern, largely computer operated/supervised train system and you got is a 21st century take on Freeman Wills Crofts.

My sole complaint is that "The End of the Train" is a short story instead of a fleshed-out, full-length novel that took the time to show the reader all the nuts and bolts of the plot. So much more could have been done with the characters, setting, impossible disappearance and the technical-and thriller parts of the story. Nonetheless, Wiecek's "The End of the Train" is still a good and interesting blend of the detective story and techno-thriller. More importantly, Wiecek demonstrated that even in the world of today a train monitored by computers and tracked by satellites can vanish without a trace.

Firestorm (1996) by Nevada Barr

Nevada Barr is the author of a series of suspense-driven mystery-and thriller novels centering on the tribulations of a National Park Ranger, Anna Pigeon, beginning with the Anthony Award-winning Track of the Cat (1993) and seems to have ended with Boar Island (2016) – comprising of nineteen titles in total. A series "loosely based" on Barr's experiences as a ranger and partially inspired by the vividly written detective novels by the great Australian mystery writer, Arthur W. Upfield.

What lured me to this series is the inclusion of the fourth title, Firestorm (1996), in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) with an original-sounding impossible crime, "death by stabbing of a victim apparently alone in a fire shelter." An inexplicable murder during a raging firestorm? It sounded to me more like the premise of a disaster/survival thriller than a proper locked room mystery, but, predictably, it still got my attention.

So I decided to look the series up and made some surprising discoveries that warranted further investigation.

My first surprises were Barr naming the traditionally overlooked, or ignored, Upfield as one of her favorite (past) mystery writers and the possibility that she has another locked room novel to her credit, Blind Descent (1998), which takes place in a dangerous, endless underground cavern system – not listed in Skupin's Locked Room Murders. This potentially second, unlisted locked room novel lead me to a third, pleasant, surprise when learning Barr often included "a very professional and useful map" in her stories. Honestly, the underground map from Blind Descent alone was enough to get it short-tracked to the snowy peaks of my to-be-read pile. So I knew enough to get myself a copy of Firestorm.

Firestorm opens on the tenth day of battle between an army of firefighters and California's "Jackknife Fire," which started near Pinson Lake and has taken "two newsworthy sacrifices" when it started, a camper and his dog, but the fire has since spread out "over thirty thousand acres of prime timberland." Consuming everything and everyone crossing its path. As the Jackknife Fire "cut a black swath" through the Caribou Wilderness and Lassen Volcanic National Park, in northern California, small camps ("spikes") were springing up along the fire-line.

Anna Pigeon volunteered as a medical technician, to help staff the medical units, where she spends more than a week bandaging cuts, treating blisters and handing out supplies at one of these tented, village-like spike camps – a "city of a thousand souls" that appeared "suddenly in the wilderness." A cold front moving in over the Cascades coincides with a call to Pigeon's medical unit to rescue Newt Hamlin, a swamper with the Forest Service out of Durango, Colorado, who busted a knee when a log rolled down on him. Unfortunately, as they returned with the wounded swamper, the cold front gave "a spectacular swan song" to the Jackknife as it exploded into a firestorm. This is where the book becomes a truly engrossing and superb disaster/survival thriller!

Pigeon's team is confronted with "tornadoes of pure fire shrieking through the treetops" slaking "a hunger so old only stones and gods remembered." Tragically, they have to leave Newt behind on his stretcher to die and run for their lives, until coming across a Safe Zone, where they can huddle down in a small, silver pup tent to protect them from the scorching winds and fire. When the unit reemerge, they face a devastated landscape and a second casualty, Leonard Nims, whose body is found inside his fire shelter with a knife-handle sticking out of his back, but the murderer had to have walked "through fire to accomplish the task."

Something that was, if not outright impossible, unthinkable. A murder in the middle of a firestorm is not even their most dire problem.

The storm front that caused the blowup brought snow and sleep in its wake, which grounded air support and the long, twisted road leading to the remote spike camp had to be cleared. So they're stuck on a snowy ridge in the Cascades with scant, dwindling supplies, untreated burn wounds and batteries running low as they fight against cold, hunger and insanity – while a murderer walks among them. What a phenomenal setup for a detective story!

It's tempting to compare Barr's Firestorm to Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), but the only point of commonality they have is a massive forest fire marooning the characters on a patch of land surrounded by "a sea of black and flame." Firestorm is a full-scale disaster novel with a detective plot and the only thing that comes close enough to it is Izo Hashimoto's manga pulp-series, Fire Investigator Nanase, but written with same verve and strong sense of setting as one of her favorite Golden Age mystery writers, Arthur Upfield. Barr has a similar talent as Upfield when it comes to vivid, lifelike descriptions of scenery, wildlife or simply the weather that reminded me of Upfield's written portraits of sandstorms (Winds of Evil, 1937), droughts (Death of a Lake, 1954) and the desolate Nullarbor Plain (Man of Two Tribes (1956). So, where setting and story-telling is concerned, Barr inherited the mantle of Upfield as the top geographical mystery writer of her time.

I only have Firestorm as an example, but, if its indicative of her other novels, you should only read her for the vivid scenery, action and thrills, because the characterization is dull and intrusive. The plot is ultimately disappointing.

Firestorm is set in the middle of a disaster area, in which the characters have to survive with a murderer among them, but the immersion is broken by the dry patches of characterization and in particular the scenes with Frederick Stanton – "an offbeat FBI agent" and love-interest of Pigeon. Stanton is an outside line of information to the isolated unit, but his musings about his ex-wives, disappointing children, wood carvings and his feelings had no place in this otherwise gripping disaster thriller. Same goes for Pigeon. She was at her best when grappling with their precarious situation or diverting her mind by analyzing the murder.

Actually, the best bit of characterization is that of an foolish, unlikable firefighter, Hugh Pepperdine, who somehow managed to "pass his step test to become a red-carded firefighter" and is slowly cracking under the pressure. I suppose this part of the story is one of the reasons why Firestorm has been compared with Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and Pigeon even compared him with "one of the wretched little boys in Lord of the Flies." Firestorm needed more of that, but Pigeon had to put him in his place the hard way "to keep him from tearing their fragile society apart." So that's where that story ended.

Unfortunately, the solution to the apparently impossible and fantastical murder in the firestorm failed to deliver on its promise with a simplistic, underwhelming explanation. I can already hear JJ frowning disapprovingly at its status as an impossible crime novel. The weak clueing and the finer details of the motive coming out of nowhere didn't exactly help either, but, what annoyed me the most, is that the story suggested a far more elegant and satisfying solution.

Here's the solution I pieced together (ROT 13 with minor spoilers): Svefg bs nyy, lbh unir gb xabj gung vg jnf fhttrfgrq Yrbaneq Avzf jnf erfcbafvoyr sbe gur nppvqrag bs Arjg Unzyva naq Cvtrba sbhaq n unaqshy bs pehzof va “gur fdhner pnainf rairybcr gung ubhfrq uvf sver furygre,” juvpu fhttrfgrq gb Cvtrba gung Avzf unq orra “gbb ynml gb pneel gur nqqrq jrvtug bs gur nyhzvahz grag” naq “wrggvfbarq vg va snibe bs rkgen sbbq.” Jura gurl erghea gb gur cynpr jurer gurl yrsg Unzyva oruvaq, gurl svaq gung gur sverfgbez unq oybja uvf furygre njnl naq ohearq uvf obql gb n pevfc. Fb jung V svtherq unccrarq vf gung Avzf erghearq gb Unzyva gb gnxr uvf furygre naq, nf n “tbbq Pngubyvp obl,” pbasrffrq jung ur qvq gb gur qrnq pnzcre (nf ur qvq gb gur erny zheqrere) gb gur fbba-gb-or-qrnq Unzyva, ohg guvf cebirq gb zhpu sbe Unzyva naq ortna gb fgehttyr jvgu Avzf – va na nggrzcg gb znxr uvz qvr jvgu uvz va gur synzrf. Unzyva vf obhaq gb uvf fgergpure naq ab zngpu sbe Unzyva, juvpu vf jul, bhg bs qrfcrengvba, ur cynagrq n xavsr va uvf onpx. Ohg gur jbhaq vf abg vafgnagyl sngny. Fvapr ur jnf ehaavat ba nqeranyvar, Avzf znxrf vg gb gur fnsr fcbg jvgu uvf fgbyra furygre naq qvrf fubegyl nsgre penjyvat vafvqr.

Gur bayl gjb bowrpgvbaf gb guvf fbyhgvba nccrnerq gb or gur snpg gung gurer jrer avar fheivibef jvgu bayl rvtug furygref naq Avzf' cresrpgyl rerpg furygre, ohg V svtherq fbzrbar unq jvgarffrq gur fgnoovat naq gevrq gb cebgrpg gur zrzbel bs gung qrnq obl ol qrfgeblvat nal rivqrapr gung pbhyq or yvaxrq gb uvz. Fhpu nf gur fgbyra sver furygre naq ercynpvat vg jvgu uvf/ure bja. Gur pbecfr unq orra frnepurq naq fhfcrpgrq guvf jnf qbar gb erzbir na rkgen xavsr gb znxr vg nccrne nf ur unq orra fgnoorq jvgu uvf bja xavsr. Guvf nyfb znqr vg nccrne nf vs gur zheqrere jnf fgvyy nzbat gurz.

So, purely as a detective story, Firestorm is a good example why I'm always so hesitant with modern crime writers, especially when they have close ties to the character-driven thrillers of today, but, as a disaster/survival thriller and geological crime novel, they probably don't come any better than Firestorm. And the reason why I'm still going to read Blind Descent.