Death Among the Undead (2017) by Masahiro Imamura

Back in late 2018, Ho-Ling Wong posted an intriguing review of Masahiro Imamura's debut novel, Shijinso no satsujin (The Murders in the Villa of the Dead, 2017), which "made enormous waves in the world of Japanese mystery fiction" as it swooped the number one spots in the Kono Mystery ga Sugoi, Weekly Bunshun Mystery Best 10 and Honkaku Mystery Best 10 rankings – marking "the first time anyone had managed to grab the grand spot of these three annual mystery fiction rankings." There's a good reason why the book was a smashing success in Japan spawning "a multimedia franchise" with manga and live-action adaptations. 

Masahiro Imamura accomplished something in his debut that many have attempted, but only few have succeeded in doing. The Murders in the Villa of the Dead blurs the lines between two different genre, namely the detective and horror story, without corrupting or tainting the integrity of either. The book impressively juggles the traditional locked room mystery with an actual zombie outbreak, which isolated the characters to the titular villa and created one of the most original closed-circle situations on record!

So, naturally, I've been banging on about the book getting translated ever since and half-expected Pushkin Vertigo would eventually pick it up, but it was John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, who scooped up the publishing rights – getting out an English translation quicker than I could have asked for. Ho-Ling Wong translated The Murders in the Villa of the Dead, retitled Death Among the Undead, which has a must-read introduction by the "God of Mystery," Soji Shimada. A jealousy-inducing introduction as Shimada goes over the history of the Japanese detective story and particular how "the youngsters belonging to the university mystery clubs" rebelled against the domineering social school of crime fiction. This is now known as the beginning of the shin honkaku boom in Japan. A movement that completely rejuvenated the traditional, plot-oriented detective story and mystery fans everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to them.

However, while the West only recently have gotten a taste of the great shin honkaku school, the movement has been dominant in Japan for decades and readers "yearned for the kind of impetus" that Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) had created. Death Among the Undead gave expression to that yearning and might very well be the signal of "a revolutionary change for the mystery genre" in which authors look to fantastical elements, like "country house murder mysteries which utilize artificial elements" or zombies, to add something new and original to the core-puzzles of their novels. This is both amazing and slightly depressing. I'm poking here through the remains of the brief flareups of the Dutch detective story, while Japan is about to enter their Third Golden Age. 

Death Among the Undead forced that first step towards new grounds, like the shin honkaku movement did in the past, but the story begins as a typical, shin honkaku-style detective story with a university student as the narrator, Yuzuru Hamura – who's loves traditional detective fiction. So he tried to join the Shinkō University's Mystery Club, but its members were more interested in Young Adult fiction and used to club as an excuse to socialize. However, there's a second, unofficial and one-man mystery club on campus run by a third-year student. Kyōsuke Akechi is the president of the Mystery Society and aspires to be Great Detective, known as "The Holmes of Shinkō," who recruits Hamura as his Watson. Akechi and Hamura go around campus solving cases (like "The Case of the Leaked Theology Tests") or looking for lost cats as a part-time job for the Tanuma Detective Agency. Akechi always hoped something truly interesting and worthy would occur around him, but he was not content to wait until something turned up and had the habit to jump in on his own. This is why he has set his eyes on the Film Club's summer trip.

The Film Club has planned a trip to the Villa Violet, a private boarding house, situated near Lake Sabea in S Prefecture where they want to shoot a short, POV-style horror movie, but the trip is also "what some might call a group dating party" – which is why there not too keen on outsiders trying to horn in. A group of students gathering at a boarding house in the summer strikes Akechi as "the perfect place for some incident to occur," but he gets turned down several times. No outsiders! This changes when a note is found in club room asking "who will be the sacrifice this year?" A reference to a female club member committing suicide after their previous summer trip. Like I said, the story starts out like a fairly typical, neo-orthodox detective story. This could easily have been the premise of a story from The Kindaichi Case Files (The Legendary Vampire Murders comes to mind).

So there are a few cancellations and the persistent Akechi is approached by a second-year student, Hiruko Kenzaki, who offers Akechi and Hamura to join them after all. Otherwise, the trip might be canceled all together. What makes her deal so curious, is that they learn she's a detective "who has taken on many difficult and downright inexplicable cases that even the police couldn't handle." Kenzaki solved those cases with her "matchless powers of reasoning," but she comes from an illustrious family and her involvement is covered up with "strict restraints" on the media. So could there anything behind her arranging a place for them on the trip?

Akechi and Hamura become the outsiders in a group comprising of Film and Drama Club members, university alumni's and the manager of the Villa Violet, but, despite the alumni's turning out to be unpleasant characters, there's nothing to suggest all hell is about to break loose. Well, they discover that their smartphones have no signal and can't connect to the internet. There's the sound of ambulance sirens in the distance, helicopters in formation flying over and a brilliant, glowing aura behind the mountains. But everyone assumed that the Sabea Rock Festival was getting wild. Until they ventured out to explore an abandoned hotel in couples on "a Trial of Courage dare." This is where the story becomes unapologetically awesome!

While out in the dark, they can make out several figures descending the mountainside, swaying from side to side, dragging their feet and moaning until they were close enough for the lamp posts to illuminate "about a dozen swaying figures" coming their way – exposing their dark, bloodstained faces and torn clothing. And "the pungent, rotten smell of blood, grease and more." Obviously, these torn creatures are no extras hired to scare them and no-sold a rock thrown at its face. So they left cartoon smoke as they run back to the Villa Violet, but not everyone makes it back as what remains of the group barricade themselves inside. That one line, "things don't always go right," shows why the best storytellers today can be found in Japan.

They hear on the news that there was a possible bio-terror attack at the Rock Festival and the police has sealed off the entire area, but the news is evidently censored and communication cut-off to prevent mass panic. So now they have to survive until (hopefully) rescue comes, but one of them sees "a sign from heaven" in "the appearance of the walking dead" and a change to exact revenge. And the next day, one of the survivors is found dead under gruesome, hard to explain circumstances.

President of the Film Club, Ayumu Shindō, is found dead in his locked room and his death had not been a pleasant one. There were parts of his body that had been bitten off and his face had been gnawed all over, but nobody else had been in the gory, blood-drenched room and the balcony looked down on "the hordes of zombies swarming the grounds below." But they also find a folded piece of paper with "let's eat" scrawled on it. So there you have, what the story calls, "an unprecedented locked room mystery," because only a human could have possibly entered the room, but nobody "showed signs of having bitten Shindō to death." On the other hand, a zombie could have killed him, but "the possibility of a zombie penetrating the double-layered locked room, by accident or coincidence, is zero." Possibilities are explored through a locked room lecture, discussing fictional zombies and analyzing their own homegrown zombie hoard.

Their "brain only seems capable of sending simple orders" and "the coordination of their limbs is so bad they can't even run," easily losing their balance and struggling with obstacles, but they have "unlimited stamina" and feel no pain – which reduce the barricades to temporary obstacles. More importantly, they don't attack human, or each other, to eat, but to infect the living and reproduce. Anyone who's bitten gets infected, dies and rises again as a fully fleshed out zombie. Imamura brilliantly and logically integrated what the zombies can, and can't do, with the plot and story's setting, but how and where the zombies come into play is one of the key-pieces of the puzzle. Not just with the first murder. There's a second, equally gruesome murder in the elevator, where someone has been bitten to death and got his head smashed to a pulp, which is more of a how-was-it-done than an impossible crime. But the solution is ingenious! The third, very late murder is somewhat glossed over, as the body is impossible to reach, but the presence of zombies opened the door to an original twist on an old dodge.

Purely as a traditional, plot-driven detective novel, Death Among the Undead can stand with the best of its kind, past and present, but the story makes a point not to ignore the whydunit angle. Not merely the murderer's motive, but why the murderer employed such dangerous and high-risk methods. The trickery behind the murders can eventually be explained, but here it raises the question why such methods were employed. I really liked the dark duality the solution exposed between the intellectual and emotional facets of both the murders and murderer, which I thought was nicely complemented by an interesting and grim piece of commentary on the murder-magnet trope. I could go on, and on, praising the book, but there's one small detail that bugged me and it would be unfair to ignore or gloss over it.

Masahiro Imamura's succeeded in injecting zombies in a traditional detective story without killing it, but it came with a noticeable side effect. The characters took a more proactive approach to the murders than to the more pressing situation of hundreds of zombies, breaking down the barricades, slowly taking over the villa – floor by floor. They're rather passive when it comes to the zombies with a wait and hope for the best attitude and while coming up with all kinds of false-solutions to the murders, nobody is trying to figure out a way to escape from the villa to their van. Sure, they complain about the rope-ladder or a rope made out of bed sheets, but you're in the epicenter of a small, localized zombie apocalypse. What did they expect? A rooftop slip-and-slide? The zombies standing outside the villa can, theoretically, be bypassed. Just imagine the limited number of zombies as being water and Villa Violet a giant sluice. Eventually, they'll begin flooding the house, but you have control and slowdown the flood by using everything in the house to create either obstacles or a pathway. When one side of the villa has (mostly) cleared of zombies, they can slide down from a balcony, window or even the rooftop from the rope-ladder or bed sheets. And run to the van like the devil is on their heels. I was also slightly annoyed that nobody stumbled to the idea to sharpen the blunted, decorative swords and spears. This would have spared a little muscle power fighting an undead creature whose only advantage is unlimited stamina.

Nonetheless, this minor complaint is nothing to the detriment of the threat these terrifying creatures pose to the people trapped inside the villa. I do not fear Dracula, Freddy Krueger or Godzilla, but zombies never fail to unnerve me in how they can turn friends and family "into enemies in the blink of an eye." Imamura's zombies drive that point home very effectively. This is why an actual zombie apocalypse wouldn't kill us as a society or civilization. It would be the psychological aftermath that would neck us. Particularly if a zombie virus is permanent and turns everyone who dies into a zombie. Just imagine what that would do to people! I think I prefer to deal with malevolent ghosts or demonic children.

So, to draw this overlong and rambling review to a close, Death Among the Undead is close to perfect as a hybrid-mystery novel and has a plot bubbling with exciting new ideas and the spirit of exploration, which earned it a place alongside Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) as a rare classic of its kind. Simply put, the blast I had with Death Among the Undead could have wiped out the dinosaurs a second time. My best and favorite read of 2021! I sincerely hope we can look forward to an English translation of the sequel, Magan no hako no satsujin (The Murders in the Box of the Devil Eye, 2019), in 2022.

On a last, somewhat related note: I didn't want to wait too long with posting my review of this modern masterpiece and crammed as early as possible in my posting schedule. This came at the expense of yesterday's review of three short stories by Joseph Commings. So, if you have missed it, give it a look.

Voodoo (1930) by John Esteven

Samuel Shellabarger was an American educator, scholar and writer who had a passion for history and a linguistic talent, speaking nine different languages, which eventually lead him to the field of historical fiction and copies sold "so briskly" that Twentieth Century Fox bought the screen rights to several novels – amassing "1.5 million dollars for his late-in-life historical novels." So historical fiction is the genre which gave his name literary immortality, but he cut his teeth on "light literature." That's a very nice way of saying detective stories. 

Shellabarger adopted two pennames, "John Esteven" and "Peter Loring," to separate his
scholarly work from his light-headed romantic adventure novels and his somber, outlandishly weird detective fiction. 

The Door of Death (1928), published as by John Esteven, appears to have been his first foray into the genre and introduced one of his short-lived series-characters, Inspector Rae Norse, who made his second and last appearance in Voodoo (1930) – which is listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). While obscure and largely forgotten today, Shellabarger's detective novels were reissued as relatively cheap ebooks in 2013. Why not cross another impossible crime title off my locked room list. 

Voodoo starts off as a conventional, 1930s detective novel as Inspector Rae Norse, of the Metropolitan Police, is consulted by Judge Matthew Frole. A "zealot of the code" who never "swerved to left or right in the interpretation of any law" with a "let the chips fall where they will" kind of attitude, but age had also "hardened, narrowed, dehumanized" him. This hardly endeared him to the people around him. Now the judge being hunted by several thugs with several narrow escapes, but they keep entering his home and his watchdog has disappeared. And they leave behind withered oak leaves. So who's the subtle hand guiding those blunt, brutal men?

Judge Frole's household is crawling with potential candidates. There's his son, Essex, who was convicted and sentenced for liquor smuggling. Judge Frole declined to judge the case and refused his son any help, which earned him praise in the national press, but his wife and daughter where entirely on the side of Essex. Doris married a distant relative, James Ackerson, who used Judge Frole and the law as "unwitting instruments of a cowardly personal spite" to destroy an honorable man. Ackerson used the one-drop rule not only to destroy the career of a navy officer, Dryden Senart, but challenged the right of his 7-year-old daughter to attend a white school and the case was eventually brought to court, which was presided over by Judge Frole – who stripped the child of her privileges. When he later learned of the true background of the story, he washed his hands of Ackerson and kicked him out of the house. However, the damage had already been done.

Inspector Rae Norse recognizes there's potential danger and the judge hardly improved the situation when he announced the drafting of a new will, which would leave his relatives on "scanty rations" and counting pennies. Norse places his house under close guard and positions himself in the silent, pitch-black corridor to Frole's bedroom with a flashlight.

So far, so good. This is unquestionable the best written portion of the story and somewhat reminded me of Roger Scarlett's Gothic-style mystery novel, In the First Degree (1933), which both have the detective present at the bedside of the dying victim. Norse makes an unsettling discovery when he enters the locked bedroom. Judge Frole is sitting up in bed, breathing and conscious, but his entire body is paralyses and unable to speak. What follows is a nightmarish distortion as a doctor attempts to revive him while his loud, impatient family try to get access to the sickroom, which they know stresses the dying man. A scene as bizarre as it's dark that ended with the judge dying and his son on the run. Regrettably, this is also where the story slowly begins to disintegrate and fall apart. You can blame that on Shellabarger going off in every direction without arriving anywhere. 

Voodoo began as a relatively normal detective novel with a premise and bizarre, quasi-impossible murder promising something in the spirit of Virgil Markham, Theodore Roscoe and W. Shepard Pleasants' The Stingaree Murders (1934), but descended to the ranks of second-rate, badly cliched pulp thrillers during its second-half – complete with voodoo savages and a city cult. A pensive Norse has to cross paths with a West Indian voodoo cult in a modern American city and "the practice of cruel, superstitious rites." Practically everyone appears to have some kind of connection to the voodoo cult or the liquor ring, which brings Norse to the mountains of Cuba. This is where the story becomes a kind of hybrid mystery with a strong supernatural flavor as Norse gets the witness a blood sacrifice with the head priestess becoming the physical manifestation of an ancient serpent god. None of it is captivating or particular good. I wish voodooism was used an explanation for everything else, because, as bad as Voodoo is as a pulp-style thriller with magic, it's even worse as a detective story.

Firstly there's the locked room-trick, which is kind of original and novel, but a very bad, mindbogglingly stupid kind of original and novel. I even checked Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement to be sure and was relieved to read the Robert Adey's baffled comment. I'll quote (using ROT13) the solution and Adey's comment, because you have to read it in order to believe it. But would feel guilty, if I tempted any of you in spending a few backs on the ebook. So, if the solution is to be believed, gur zheqrere unq na rkgen xrl sbe gur pbaarpgvat qbbe naq gur ybpx jnf fhpu gung ur jnf noyr gb hfr vg jvgubhg qvfybqtvat gur xrl ba gur vafvqr. Adey's sanely questioned, "jung xvaq bs ybpx nyybjf gur vafregvba bs n frpbaq xrl jvgubhg qvfgheovat gur svefg?" Neither is it much of a whodunit as the murderer's identity is painfully obvious, but there was a nice attempt to serve the reader a confusing red herring. A trick that required the hand of a skilled and practiced plotter, which is why it didn't work here. But appreciated the attempt.

So, yeah, Voodoo is a pretty poor specimen of the genre with an indecisive, directionless writer further weakening an already run-of-the-mill, pulp-style plot and resulted in a mess that's going to be hard to beat as worst mystery of 2021. The reader has been warned!

The Crimes in Cabin B: Case Closed, vol. 78 by Gosho Aoyama

The 78th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published as Detective Conan, which has the longest story since vol. 58 that was setup in the previous volume and covers seven chapters with the second, three-chapter story acting as its aftermath – while the last chapter sets the stage for the return of Kaitou KID. A return alluded to in the opening chapter as KID's long-time nemesis, Jirokichi Sebastian, announced he was planning to use the Mystery Train to exhibit "one of his rare gems." Somewhat of a baited trap, as usually, but more on that in a moment. 

The Bell Tree Express is the "Mystery Train," owned by the Sebastian Conglomerate, which hosts an annual murder mystery game with "no stops until the final destination." A "murderer" and "victim" are chosen at random from from among the guests with the other passengers playing detective and "try to solve the mystery before the train reaches the station."

Anita presented Conan with a Mystery Train Pass Ring in the previous volume to lay the groundwork for a truly special kind of detective story. A story that succeeded in being both a classically-plotted, baroque-style mystery with no less than two impossibilities and a character-driven thriller with a galore of recurring characters and some major plot developments.

Firstly, the murder mystery game begins early when Conan and the Junior Detective League receive a note telling them they've been selected as the detectives and to follow instructions, namely visiting "Cabin B of Carriage 7 in ten minutes," where they witness a shooting – turning the murder mystery into "a game of tag" with the fleeing assassin. But when they meet one of the conductors, he tells them the mystery game is scheduled to begin in about an hour. So they rush back to Cabin B, which is when they make a startling discovery. Carriage 7 has "disappeared from a moving train" along with the victim in Cabin B!

Conan only needs a handful of pages to solve the impossibility of the vanishing train carriage, but the reappearance of Cabin B presents him with another miraculous murder. This time, the victim is actually dead with a very real bullet in his head, but the cabin door was "chained shut" from the inside and the conductor in the corridor "didn't see anyone enter or leave the cabin." A seemingly impossible murder in Cabin B begs to be compared to John Dickson Carr, but the story is unmistakably a clever and warm tribute to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934). There are many nods and winks to the story and Aoyama very effectively recreated a well-known scene for his own ends. Most amusing of all is Richard Moore badly imitating Hercule Poirot throughout the story and he barely broke character.

However, the story is not merely a lighthearted sendup of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express as the plot is quit good. The locked room-trick is a clever combination of simple trickery and elaborate misdirection strengthened by some good clues like the defective light above one of the cabin doors.

So the puzzle-side of the story is absolutely solid and a first-class specimen of the railway mystery, but there's a darker, parallel story taking place in the background involving a ton of recurring characters and agents of the Black Organization.

Black Organization received intelligence Anita, or "Sherry," is traveling on the Bell Tree Express, "a steel cell on wheels," which means the hunt is on and they intend to "flush her out like a deer" – catching a bullet as she leaps out. The opening pages revealed "Bourbon" is tasked with hunting down and eliminating Anita, but his, or her, identity has never been revealed. And, as to be expected, more than one familiar face has boarded the train who can all be the mysterious Bourbon. What follows is dangerous and explosive battle-of-wits crossed with a game of hide-and-seek, while Conan is busy investigating the impossible murder in Cabin B. A very well-done and handled piece of storytelling that not only added an extra dimension to the regular murder investigation, but furthered the ongoing story-arc and revealed the identity of Bourbon. My sole complaint is the surprise cameo, which pretty much was put to use as a deus ex machina. They were so lucky [REDACTED] decided to put in an appearance.

The second story is a strange and mixed bag of tricks, but not for the reasons you might think, because it's mostly a pretty decent detective story. The problem is that the various components don't "gel" together all that well.

A story best described as the aftermath of the previous case and "the Mystery Train was such a disaster" that "the Sebastian family decided to make up for it" and invited Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to their villa in Izu – apparently famous for its tennis court. When they arrive, they find a group of college tennis players who use the court to practice and one of them gives Conan a light concussion with a flying tennis racket ("mada mada dane"). Bourbon is also there under the identity he was introduced to the reader. Conan is the only one who knows it. This seriously hampers his investigation when he wakes up in his room with a body blocking the inside the door, which places him smack in the middle of another locked room murder.

I liked the premise of Conan waking up in a locked room with a murder victim and the solution to the locked room found a new and original way to use an age-old trick. Something that has often been used for a very different type of impossible crime, but the premise and locked room-trick should have been two separate stories. I think it's a waste to not have used the premise for a story in which Conan is the only suspect. You can even have a never-before encountered police inspector who learns Conan has been involved in a ton of murder cases and begins to suspect he's a homicidal child. I don't think it helped the murderer stood out like sore thumb or that the plot played second fiddle to Bourbon looking over Conan's shoulder.

The last chapter sets the stage for another Kaitou KID heist, which was alluded to in the opening chapter, but Jirokichi Sebastian had to move the exhibit in the wake of the Mystery Train disaster. But the challenge to the master thief stands. KID already promised to steal the Blushing Mermaid on the opening night of the exhibition. Something that's easier said than done, because the pendant with a red diamond is stuck to the back of a turtle, named Poseidon, who swims in a large, bulletproof aquarium surrounded by twenty guards – which is as good as burglarproof. KID lives up to his reputation and stages a grand magic trick that makes both the turtle and pendant vanish from the aquarium. And leaves behind a note saying "the shy mermaid has dissolved into foam in my hand." This story will continue in the next volume.

So, on a whole, a pretty strong and interesting volume, but with all of its strength and interest lying in the Mystery Train story. The second story was not bad, but uneven and can't judge the Kaitou KID story until I've read vol. 79. A volume containing another promising-sounding, half-a-dozen chapters spanning impossible crime story involving vampire lore. More than enough to look forward to!

Beware of Snakes: Case Closed, vol. 77 by Gosho Aoyama

This year, Viz Media will be publishing a translation of vol. 80 in Gosho Aoyama's long-running, immensely popular detective-series, Case Closed a.k.a. Detective Conan, which is amazing considering the first English release dates back to September, 2004 – roughly a decade and fifty volumes behind the original Japanese releases. So that backlog will be reduced to about twenty volumes by the end of 2021! 

Unless there's a drastic change in their schedule, Viz should catch-up with the Japanese releases sometime this decade and hand me the excuse needed to finally reread the series. While complaining about having to subsist on one or two new releases a year. But that's a post-2025 problem.

So, for now, let's tackle vol. 77, which begins with the conclusion to the kidnapping case that ended the previous volume on a cliffhanger. Detective Takagi, of the Metropolitan Police, disappears without a word and the next day a package is delivered to police with a stripped and modified tablet showing a live camera feed of the missing policeman – gag and tied to a plank on a high-rise construction with a noose around his neck. Conan helped track down the kidnapper, but this person slipped through their fingers and now it has become a race against the clock to find the ever weakening and fatigued Takagi. Satisfyingly, the ending revealed the story was a little more than merely thriller-filler.

I'm not overly fond of kidnap stories as they tend to be an author's excuse for lazy plotting, but Aoyama regularly proves himself to be the exception to the rule and knocks out a good one every now and then (e.g. vol. 72). This story is another one of his demonstrations that some ingenuity can be applied to a kidnapping plot, but here it also helped that one of the character-centered plot-threads ran through the story. So not a bad start to a new volume.

The second story is fairly simple and straightforward with a who-of-the-three situation, which is typical for the series, but the plot has a great take on the alibi problem.

Conan, Anita and Takagi happen to be nearby when a sleazy tabloid publisher, Daisuka Katsumoto, dropped to his dead from a top-floor of a condo building with a phone in his shirt pocket, which has a recent message he texted to multi people – cleverly used to isolate the three suspects from the crowd of onlookers. Conan resents the message and three phones in the crowd began to buzz. All three suspects live in the same building as the victim and even worked under him, which turns out to give them a motive as he used them to concoct a dirty smear story. A story that resulted in a suicide. Only problem is that they all possess a very unusual alibi.

The three suspects lived on the third floor of the condo complex and the victim resided on the 26th floor, but "they claimed they could prove they'd been in their condos" and could not have made the seven-minute trip to the victim's condo. And reappear seconds later on the sidewalk. What they give as evidence is "a beer with fresh foam... steam from a coffee cup... and smoke from a cigarette." So no tinkering with clocks or people's perception of time, but foam, steam and smoke that gave the suspects a solid, ten-minute alibi!

I can think of one other detective story that played with a similar idea, Arthur Porges' "Black Coffee" (1964), in which a burning cigarette and a cup of hot coffee in a locked room were the ingredients of a clever alibi-trick. The trick here is a little simpler in idea and execution, but, what propped it up, is (ROT13) gung gur zheqrere unq vzcebivfr ba gur fcbg. This made an otherwise simple trick a little bit more impressive. So, yeah, I liked it.

Unfortunately, the next story began very promising, but deteriorated and crumbled into one of the worst stories in the entire series!

Ten years ago, a nursery school principal stumbled on an uneven stone pavement with a fish bowl in his arms and was stabbed in the chest by a glass shard, but "the kanji for death was written in blood beside the corpse" – suggesting the hand of a murderer or even a serial killer. Conan/Jimmy's father dismissed and abandoned the case, unresolved, assuring everyone that they'll "never again see this bloody kanji." A decade later, a body is discovered in an alleyway with the kanji of death written in blood. However, the police defers the case to the division investigating thefts and robberies. So why do the homicide detectives refuse to touch the kanji deaths? Regrettably, the solution is preposterous and stretches credulity beyond what's reasonable to expect a reader to accept. You can blame that on the second death. I can accept that happening once, but not twice. This aspect of the story should have been solely focused on that past, unresolved case.

Only thing that somewhat saves this story is the ongoing, character-oriented story-arcs running in the background and the development in this story is very significant. Subaru Okiya observes Conan doing his Jimmy voice over the phone!

The closing story is mostly filler in order to setup vol. 78 and furthering those ongoing story lines, which begins with Anita giving Conan a Mystery Train Pass Ring to the Bell Tree Express. A steam locomotive, "made up to look like the Orient Express," which the Junior Detective League will be riding next week and Anita tells Conan she hopes "that's the only resemblance to an Agatha Christie novel" – a story that will be centerpiece of the next volume. I really look forward to its publication, but now they're on their way to a campsite in the woods. Naturally, they caught someone red handed trying to bury a body near a "Beware of Snakes" sign and this lands them in a heap of trouble. But the focus of the story is on how Anita is going to get them out of it (predictable) with ending showing that her identity, too, is compromised. 

A note for the curious: Anita packed the (temporary) antidote to APTX 4869, but refuses to share it with Conan, because he would use it "to play out your little romantic comedy." I've been saying for years that the only logical flaw in the series is Conan/Jimmy continue to keep his secret from Rachel. The third story here showed why it's cruel to keep her out of the loop ("Don't creep me out like that! You're already the spitting image of him") and the ending why it would be valuable to have her in on it. It's not like she would be any more or less danger than usual.

So, on a whole, this was a very uneven volume, but liked the conclusion to the kidnap story and the alibi-trick of the second story with the two weaker stories benefiting greatly from all the character-development and story progression being played out in the background. Not too badly. I really look forward now to reading the next volume!

City of Libraries: "The Climbing Man" (2015) by Simon Clark

Simon Clark's novella "The Climbing Man" is a pastiche of Conan Doyle's immortal detective specifically written for an all-original anthology of new Sherlock Holmes stories, entitled The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015), which Brian Skupin listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – describing a honey of an impossibility. This time, it was not the promise of an original-sounding locked room murder that attracted my attention, but the archaeology-theme and backdrop. I love archaeological mysteries and there are not enough of them. The impossible crime here is merely a bonus. 

"The Climbing Man" takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, tasked with stamping out "a vipers' nest" of plunderers determined "to loot Mesopotamia of its ancient riches." A criminal gang who employed Arab riflemen, clad in gray, who passed themselves of as legitimate protection for travelers and archaeologists.

When the story opens, Holmes and Watson have made off with a dhow (sail boat) crammed with stolen artifacts, but the gray-shirts on the riverbank pepper the boat with bullets and they're pretty much sitting ducks – even succeeding in wounding the Great Detective. Only the hand of providence guided the boat away from the gray-shirts, down the Euphrates, "towards one of the most baffling mysteries" they encountered. Holmes and Watson end up at an dig site of two archaeologists, Edward Priestly and Professor Hendrik, where two generations have been working on excavating the subterranean tunnels, basement and vaults of the buried city of Tirrash. A once legendary city referred to as Bibliopolis or the City of Libraries.

Three thousand years ago, the city was attacked and destroyed, but, before the barbarians destroyed and plundered the city, the people emptied the libraries of the clay tablets. These clay tablets were "carefully stored in the basements beneath the houses and sealed shut," which remained intact and undisturbed under the desert sands for most of recorded history. But a perplexing, modern-day mystery is discovered in one of its sealed chambers.

A few years ago, Edward Priestly's brother, Benjamin, vanished without a trace from the excavation site and a week ago, they discovered his naturally mummified body in a place that begs for a rational explanation.

During an exploration of an underground passageway, they discovered one of the many hidden vaults, doorway sealed with stone blocks, which "has not been disturbed in three thousand years" and began their meticulous, scientific examination – cutting a small aperture in the wall to look inside. What looked back at them was Benjamin's dry, shriveled face! A second aperture gave them a better view of the body, but it deepened the mystery only further with a second impossibility. The mummified body clung to the wall, facing the stonework, arms outstretched above his head as if he's climbing or "trying to escape from his grave." So the problem is twofold: how did the body end up in a 3000-year-old sealed and undisturbed chamber with four feet of dust covering the floor and how "the devil was he glued so high up on the wall" like "a gigantic spider?" And to give the problem some urgency, the guards hired by the two archaeologists turn out to be gray-shirts. The game's afoot!

The problem of the body in the underground sealed chamber has, as to be expected from its premise, a two-pronged solution. Firstly, the explanation as to how the chamber was entered is not something that will excite many locked room readers, but how the body ended up stuck to the wall was kind of marvelous. A trick that perfectly fitted, time-wise, with the type of impossible, or weird, detective fiction that being written during the Doylean era of the genre. It's the kind of trick/solution you would expect to find in L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898). Unfortunately, "The Climbing Man" also shares the clunky, uneven clueing of the detective stories from that period. Such as when Holmes was collecting evidence and slipping it into an envelope, but Watson only caught a glimpse of "a glittering item." You have to wait until the solution to find out what, exactly, he found. So you only have some room to do some educated guesswork.

Nevertheless, neither the uneven clueing nor the anti-climatic confrontation with the gray-shirts could spoil this thoroughly entertaining and absorbing story that made excellent use of its archaeological setting. I also appreciate it when a pastiche treats someone's else creation with respect and not unduly temper with the original, which can be simply achieved with Sherlock Holmes by giving him a complicated, knotty problem to occupy "that remarkable brain of his." And that's exactly what Clark did here. 

A note for the curious: "The Climbing Man" was not Clark's first foray into the realm of impossible crimes and locked room mysteries. Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997) contains Clark's "The Adventure of the Falling Star," which is not listed in Skupin, in which Holmes is asked to investigate the disappearance of a meteorite from a collection in a locked laboratory. So, yeah, that story has now been added to my special locked room wishlist. Something else that's now on my wishlist is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes locked room/impossible crime pastiches (Sherlocked!).

The League of Matthias (1934) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The League of Matthias (1934) is the fourteenth entry in the once criminally overlooked and now justifiably revived Anthony Bathurst series, courtesy of Dean Street Press and Steve Barge, which is another shimmering example of Flynn's versatility as a writer and plotter – who tried to do something different with each novel. So what you get is the best of two worlds as the series offers the advantages of both the standalone and series novels. Flynn effortlessly moved from Victorian-era melodrama and pulp-style mysteries to courtroom drama, whodunits and impossible crimes while unapologetic fanboying all over Conan Doyle. 

You can easily see where Doyle and Sherlock Holmes might have influenced The League of Matthias. A thriller-like detective novel concerning "one of the biggest criminal organisations ever known" that had "entered the arena of Continental crime" screams Professor Moriarty, but Flynn might have been looking at two of his contemporaries, John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie. The League of Matthias struck me as Christie's The Big Four (1927) as perceived by Carr. However, the book anticipates most of Carr's more well-known chase mysteries like The Blind Barber (1934), The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1937). 

The League of Matthias begins with Lance Maturin touring the continent with two of his friends, Adrian Fawcett and Dennis Hilleary, to help him recover from a broken heart and spirit.

So, after a couple of months of touring, the trio arrive in Antwerp, Belgium, where they visit a dingy cabaret place, the Scarlet Flare, with a beautiful dancer, Philippa, whose frightened eyes seem to be sending "a message from her soul" to Lance – not just him imagining things. Lance is handed a folded note pleading him to come to her dressing room as she's in "deadly peril." Philippa asks Lance to pretend to be her husband as protection against the sinister intentions of Raoul de Verviac and, before he knows it, he accompanies her to a lodging-house in the Rue du Sacré Coeur. Where he wears the pyjama-suit of another man and sleeps next to strange woman, clutching a revolver, to protect her from the villainous De Verviac. It was quite a night. A night that ends with a deadly shootout at the lodging-house and Lance and Philippa fleeing from the Belgian police.

However, it's not De Verviac's body laying at the bottom of the staircase with a bullet in his head, but a Scotland Yard detective, Chief-Inspector Rawlinson, who had "journeyed to Antwerp to deal primarily with three matters."

Chief-Inspector Rawlinson and Anthony Bathurst, working in conjunction with Scotland Yard, were tasked with investigating two seemingly unconnected disappearances and "the sinister activities of the League of Matthias." Firstly, the activities of the league had left a trail of bizarre murders that littered Belgium with the bodies of a convicted abortionist, a discredited actors with a forgery charge hanging over his head and "the most audacious embezzlers of modern times" who "despoiled literally thousands of homes in the Netherlands." So he got what he was due! Stranger even is that all of the deaths took "rather fantastic routes to the Styx."

One victim had his veins opened with pieces of broken glass, while another was burned to a crisp inside a baker's oven. A later victim is "drugged and then tied to the railway lines," but never a gun, knife or poison. Only a tiny, tangible clue filtered through the murky, criminally cautious network and that's the number 13 – "nothing more—nothing less." Anthony Bathurst and Chief-Inspector Rawlinson have another problem on their hands of an entirely different magnitude, but with enough pull to throw the whole affair in complete disarray.

Two people of very different plumage have disappeared. Firstly, there's the daughter of the Bishop of Longbarrow, Miss Philippa Castleton, whose disappearance "excited a tremendous amount of interest throughout the entire country." But, eventually, the excitement died down without her being found. Secondly, there's the disappearance of a distinguished member of the Diplomatic Service, Lance Marutin, whose disappearance is difficult to date. But the authorities have every right to be concerned. Two months previously, a colleague of Maturin had vanished under similar circumstances until his body was fished from the Scheldt.

So, as you probably noticed, the narratives of Lance and Bathurst concern the same characters and locations, but the details either don't seem to fit or out of focus and it takes some work to dovetail everything into a fitting pattern. I can't give anymore details without giving away too much, but I can gush how brilliantly Flynn handled this highly fantastical, sometimes unbelievable, mystery novel.

You see, The League of Matthias can hardly be called credible as a detective, or thriller, which considerably stretches credulity with how all the characters are linked or how the lodging-house "became the centre of a circle with various radii reaching the circumference" – seriously testing readers who want some semblance of plausibility in their detective fiction. And yet... The League of Matthias has this dark, grim edge of realism that makes the whole story much more believable than it has any right to be. And it's not the gruesome nature of the murders, the untimely death of Rawlinson or the demented truth behind the league. It's how the romantic subplot between Lance and Philippa is resolved, which dodged all the usual cliches and beautifully fitted this grim, fairy tale-like detective story. How neatly everything else fell into place was just a bonus.

Just like Carr's The Hollow Man (1935), Flynn's The League of Matthias is the utterly bizarre and fantastic detective story done right while maintaining the integrity of detective story with a clues and clever piece of misdirection. It's also another demonstration why Flynn was to the false-identity what Christopher Bush was to the unbreakable alibi and Carr to the locked room mystery! Flynn comes highly recommended to everyone who loves pure, undiluted vintage detective fiction and has now came dangerous close to replacing Bush as my favorite DSP author.

The Darkest Fathoms: "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) by Desmond Reid

The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014) is one of the most important publications to have come out of John Pugmire's Locked Room International as it collected the classic locked room novel Whistle Up the Devil (1954), the exceedingly rare Come to Paddington Fair (1997) and the previously unpublished Model for Murder (1952) – a long-lost contribution to the massive Sexton Blake Library. Pugmire speculated Smith's Model for Murder was probably "too cerebral for the audience" and thought it very unlikely I would ever read another Sexton Blake novel or short story. 

Less than a year later, I came across an anonymously published short Sexton Blake story, "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909), which turned out to be a surprisingly decent locked room mystery for the period. Suddenly, I began to notice how many Sexton Blake novels and short stories were listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). One title in particular beckoned my attention. 

Caribbean Crisis (1962) is a novella, a chapbook really, representing the first published work by noted science-fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock, which he co-wrote with Jim Cawthorne and published under a house name, "Desmond Reid" – a name that was shared between at least thirty authors for SBL. Adey's Locked Room Murders described a fascinating impossibility concerning a murder and disappearance from a submerged bathysphere (diving bell)! I also found it interesting Caribbean Crisis was published in the same year as Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962).

I naturally tempered my expectations, as it would be unfair to expect something along the lines of Joseph Commings' "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968), but the presentation and explanation to the impossible murder and disappearance were unexpectedly good. Something that deserved to have been in a better (detective) story. 

Caribbean Crisis opens on the research ship of the famous "boy-professor" and marine biologist, Hoddard Curtis, who perfected a new kind of bathysphere and is ready to explore "the deepest marine valley known to man." Curtis hopes to find evidence at the bottom of the Tanangas Deep of "a prehistoric fish," or creature, because stranger things have been found in the lower ocean ("fragments of bone and scales the size of dinner plates"). So he spent years and thousands of dollars to find out what "lurks down there unknown," but, the moment his dreams began to be realized, tragedy struck in the most unexpected way.

During his time away from the research ship, two of his assistants, Jules Harben and Jim Linwood, took the bathysphere for "a joy-ride in the deep," but, when they reached a depth of seven hundred feet, the radiophone began to crackle with frantic calls to pull them back up – in between screams of "it's awful" and "it's going to kill us." Shortly followed by unearthly sound, like "the bellow of some enormous sea-beast erupted from the ocean," and the bathysphere being torn from the fine, woven cords of steel. The bathysphere began to sink to the bottom of the Tanangas Deep! But it gets better.

Curtis puts on a large, heavy and untested deep-sea diving suit in an attempt to find his brainchild and this diving scene is the best one of the story. Miraculously, the damaged bathysphere is resting on a rocky ledge and can be salvaged, but, when Curtis shines his torch through the porthole, he discovers "one of its two occupants had disappeared." The body of the other man was floating in the sphere with a knife in his back! The hatch could not have been opened, or closed again, at that depth and the pressure would have killed anyone who tried to escape the sphere. And the newspaper called it "a mystery worthy of a Holmes or a Blake."

What a marvelous and original setup for a double barreled impossible crime story with a diving bell serving as a claustrophobic sealed room slowly descending into a silent, alien-like world of slime-green, swirling darkness where only God knows what may be lurking – ready to strike at anyone, or anything, disturbing its peace. I truly wish the name on the cover had either been Theodore Roscoe or Hake Talbot. The premise and locked room-trick would have turned into gold in their hands!

Unfortunately, Caribbean Crisis is not that kind of detective story. Sexton Blake reads about the bathysphere mystery in the newspaper and makes a personal inquiry, but what brings him to the island Republic of Maliba (where the ship is anchored) is a rich client. Sir Gordon Sellingham is a sugar millionaire who owns "a great deal of the Maliban sugar industry," but the current, potentially explosive political situation in the Caribbean is threatening both his business and his idealistic son. Peter Sellingham is using his mother's inheritance to bankroll a rebel group who want to overthrow the government and there might be a communist element to the impending rebellion.

Blake is not only a private detective, but also a Special Service Operative of the British government and it falls on him to prevent "a repetition of the Castro business in Cuba" and stop Maliba from becoming another Russian satellite. So the poor man's Sherlock Holmes becomes some kind of Poundland James Bond as he goes undercover as an insurance investigator and gets caught in a three-way dance between the government of Present Nonales, the rebel outlaws in the hill and communist infiltrators – tangling along the way with double agents and dodgy allies. I can't say these chapters were a chore to read, but the Cold War spy thriller is not my kind of crime fiction. I love pure, undiluted detective stories crammed with double-edged clues, treacherous red herrings, dying messages and locked rooms solved by either competent policemen or a clever amateur.

For me, the only time Caribbean Crisis came close to matching its opening chapters was Blake's explanation of the miraculous murder and disappearance, "when the impossible has been eliminated, what remains must be the truth," which turned out to be so much better than expected. A good, fairly original idea that was wasted on this otherwise run-of-the-mill, Cold War-style pulp thriller.

So, on a whole, the first chapters and locked room-trick had all the ingredients and potential necessary to craft a classic, timeless detective novel, but Caribbean Crisis allowed all of that to go to waste and therefore can only recommend it to the fantastical locked room reader as an interesting curiosity.

Adrift (2017) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning is an FBI National Academy graduate who learned that police work is as much about documenting crime as it's about fighting it and now draws on her first-hand experience as "wonderful fodder for her current career as a full-time writer," which began with her award-winning debut novel, Adrift (2017) – a modern thriller that normally falls outside of my scope. Brian Skupin listed Adrift in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) with two intriguingly described impossibilities during a diving expedition and Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) intrigued me enough to search out more of these submerged locked room mysteries. 

So here we are and, while I was a little skeptical beforehand, Adrift defied expectations by not being an ultra-modern, character heavy thriller with some mild impossible crime elements.

There are still some notable modern touches to the characterization and storytelling, but the end result can best be summed up as Scooby Doo for grownups! It certainly is an interesting addition to Forsyte's Diving Death, Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968) and the Detective Academy Q 2003 episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea as an example of that rare impossible crime story set among divers. 

Adrift introduces Browning's series-detective and marine biologist, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who recently returned from a research project in the Arctic, but new research opportunities remained elusive and she took a job in the Florida Keys – teaching scuba diving and acting as first-mate to Captain Leroy. Story begins with the first of three (not two!) impossible situations. Mer saves a diver who's frightened out of his wits and claims to have seen a ghost, "green and kind of see-through" shaped "like a man," but the truly inexplicable part is that he was exploring the shipwreck of the USS Spiegel Grove and was fished out of the Molasses Reef. Five miles away with "the current's going in the wrong direction" and they were radioed that a diver had gone missing off the Spiegel. So how could the distressed diver travel five miles from the Spiegel Grove to Molasses Reef without "the use of teleportation, a TARDIS, or a wormhole."

The rescue and the diver's rambling is filmed, uploaded to social media and goes viral, which brings "a boatload of ghost hunters" to the Florida Keys to investigate the now most haunted spot in America.

Ishmael Styx, of Spirited Divers Paranormal Scuba Team, arrive shortly after the incident to film a documentary about the ghost of the Spiegel Grove for the Expedition Channel and they want to charter a boat for multiple, nighttime trips to the wreck – asking Mer to serve as a safety diver on the trips. The diving scenes is what makes the book stand out and excellently used the USS Spiegel Grove, purposely sunk in 2002 to make an artificial reef, as a setting for two ghostly impossibilities. Firstly, when they're inside the wreck, the underwater camera malfunctions and continues to strobe during which Styx vanishes. A subsequent rescue search of Spiegel Grove recovered his mask and a member of the paranormal diving team saw him looking at "the opening in the side of the ship," like "something scared him," before "something pulled him into the hole." Secondly, Mer returned to the wreck later in the story and witnesses the ghost with her own eyes, "green and hazy," lifting an arm and pointing at her, which is a blow to her rational, naturalistic and scientific understanding of the world. Someone who firmly believes "paranormal activity falls into the realm of pseudoscience" and "only one step above nonsense." Now the whole sordid case tied her good name to ghosts, mermaids and other supernatural phenomena.

Mer is practically dragged into the case to act as an amateur detective. She agrees to continue working on the documentary to spare her friends and colleagues a wrongful death-suit. When she nearly gets killed, the case became her business (and she has a point there), but that places her at odds with the police.

The scenes that take place on the surface, which is most of the story, show those previously mentioned modern touches to the characterization and storytelling. Such as an old summer fling of Mer, who has a secretive backstory, reentering her life and a traumatic, near-death experience as a child that convinced her there's nothing beyond the grave ("I've been to the other side. There's nothing there") or learning that Mel has a CD collection of movie soundtracks – which I understand is a trope of the contemporary crime novel. However, I liked Mer's clashes with a snooty news reporter or learning how to take fingerprints by watching YouTube videos.

Fortunately, these scenes never turn into overwritten, angst-ridden mini-biographies of the characters that push the plot aside. The primary focus of Adrift is always the ghostly activities at the shipwreck and the characters directly involved with it.

So how well does the plot stack up? You shouldn't expect a neo-orthodox detective story with sharp, multi-faceted clues and treacherous red herrings. The clueing is pretty crude and the leads to some of the most pertinent questions are not treated, or discovered, until very late into the story. Nevertheless, the seasoned armchair detective has no need for in-depth clueing to figure out what exactly is happening, because the biggest accomplish of Adrift is finding a modern, updated garb for an age-old trick. A trick that needed a more experienced hand to have pulled it off more convincingly.

I know all of this sounds like Adrift was a bit of a letdown, but quite enjoyed this diamond-in-the-rough with some interesting and promising aspects. I also found it very promising Browning leaned much more towards the traditional detective story than the modern crime novel. A good example are the fuzzy details surrounding the body Mer discovers at a seedy motel, which is not as important to the plot as the ghostly activities and impossibilities surrounding the shipwreck. 

Adrift is a spirited first attempt to find a balance between characterization and plot and the classic and modern style of the genre. So readers of my blog are advised not to expect a modern incarnation of the Golden Age detective novel, but it's a fast, enjoyable and promising read with some excellently written diving scenes – reminiscent of Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942) and Forsyte's Diving Death. Browning is very much a writer to keep an eye on because she might turn out to one of us (we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us). Interestingly, the last chapter of Adrift sets up its sequel, Beached (2018), which takes a plunge into the watery world of nautical archaeology. You can expect a review of that one sometime in the not so distant future and, hopefully, it will confirm that we have another James Scott Byrnside, P. Dieudonné or Robert Innes on our hands.

Familiar Faces: Case Closed, vol. 76 by Gosho Aoyama

The 76th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, a.k.a. Detective Conan, opens with a big, five-chapter long story covering nearly half of the volume and starts out as a fairly standard detective story, but then the plot takes a wild left turn and becomes part of the main storyline – revealing the potential presence of a Black Organization spy. A dramatic, double-layered case that began as a routine assignment. 

Conan built a website for Richard Moore's detective agency, "Private Eye Extraordinair," which netted him the first paying client who hired him over the internet. And the case looks like easy money.

Kei Kashitsuka found a key to a coin locker in the belongings of her recently deceased brother and hired Moore to find the locker, because "it might something important that could be placed in the stiff's coffin," but text messages about scheduling results in missing each other – returning to the office without having met their client. But upon their return, they notice someone has been in the office and they find their client tied up in the bathroom with her assailant, dead as a door nail, sitting on the toilet. Kashitsuka tells them she came to the office and was met by a man claiming to be Moore's assistant, but he knocked her out with a stun gun and came to in the bathroom "bound with duct tape" when Moore with his entourage returned. The man panicked and shot himself. Only minute traces of gunshot residue found on her body and clothes confirm she didn't fire the gun, but Conan has his suspicions.

So this part of the story is basically an inverted mystery with the question how-and why it was done with the shooting being a (borderline) impossible crime and the motive is tied to a botched bank robbery. During the robbery, a bank teller was shot and his last words form one of the most elegant and natural dying messages I've come across since Ellery Queen's short-short "Diamonds in Paradise" (collected in Queen's Full, 1965). This makes for a nice little detective story, but the situation takes an unexpected turn when Conan is kidnapped and everyone comes into action to find him, which include three of the most recently introduced recurring characters, Toru Amuro, Subaru Okiya and Masumi Sera.

All three of them obviously have ulterior motives to hang around Conan and Moore, but the final page of the story suggests one of them is a Black Organization spy, "Bourbon." Considering the three suspects and Aoyama's style of plotting, Bourbon will probably turn out to be a sheep in wolves clothing pretending to be a wolf in sheep's clothing (i.e. a double agent). A good, eventful story with a new development in the ongoing storyline.

A note for the curious: there's a brief reference in this story to the "Silver Witch Case" from vol. 63, which is a fun impossible crime story about a phantom car that can fly!

Unfortunately, the second story is one of the weakest, most unconvincing stories in the series in a very long time and begins when Doc Agasa, Conan and the Junior Detective League are invited to a barbecue at the home of Sumika and Takushi Konno – a married couple who they met and helped during a camping trip. However, they're constantly arguing with each other and ends with Amy seeing Sumika threatening Takushi with a knife and yelling "I've had enough... I'll kill you." But when Agasa and Conan hurry to the scene, it's a wounded Sumika who's on the floor with a knife sticking out of her body. This could have been a decent enough detective story and one line in particular, "you always get carried away with pranks," suggested the Konnos could have prepared a prank for the young detectives by staging a little domestic murder. Takushi simply took advantage of it to take his wife out the picture in a way that looked like self-defense. Sadly, the solution leaned heavily character manipulation and timing, which was neither cleverly done or very convincing. And the happy, lighthearted ending struck a jarring note with all the drama preceding it.

The third and last story of the volume is a Metropolitan Police Love Story, but this time, it's a thriller! Detective Takagi disappears and a package is delivered to his colleague and girlfriend, Sato, which contains a modified tablet with a live stream – showing Takagi in a precarious situation. Takagi lies flat on his back, tied up and gag, on a wooden plank on a very high construction surrounded by tarp. A noose is tied around his neck and without any clues, or demands, they only have his past cases to go in order to find him. A story ending on a cliffhanger that will be concluded in the next volume.

On a whole, it's not too interesting a story (so far), but one aspect of the plot deserves to be pointed out. This is the second time, in the entire series, Western readers have an advantage over Japanese readers when it comes to a language-based clue, which this time was impossible to hide in the English translation. You've to be denser than Arthur Hastings to miss it. You can find that first story in vol. 55.

So, yeah, it's difficult to rate this volume, because all of its strength is in the first story, but followed by a very weak one and something I fear will turn out to be nothing more than thriller-filler. But then again, if you're this far into the series, you'll be more than happy with the first story!

The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) by Herbert Brean

Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) is the fourth and final novel starring Reynold Frame, a freelance writer, photographer and amateur detective, which began life as a short story in the June, 1952, issue Cosmopolitan – expanded two years later as a suspenseful mystery. A thriller with a detective plot that has one of the best and most memorable take on Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). 

I've wanted to take a second look at The Clock Strikes Thirteen ever since rereading Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950), but then 2020 happened and decided to put it aside. You see, the story takes place on a desolate, rocky island where germs and viruses are being weaponized.

So it's not merely the presence of a murderer that puts the small, isolated group on edge, but also a splash of weaponized bacteria and viruses let loose on the island. Not exactly a comfort read. Rupert Penny's Policeman's Evidence (1938) convinced me it would be a waste not to use a quarantine-style detective novel to close out 2020. Go hoard some rolls of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, because we're about to enter a viral hotspot. 

The Clock Strikes Thirteen begins with a midnight phone call to freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who's to take the place of a Russian-born photographer on a secret assignment to Kilgore Island, Maine – twenty-four miles out in the Atlantic. North Wayland is the current owner of the island who used to be the "most skilled brain surgeon in the world," but became a changed man when he lost his wife and children in the war. Wayland became a bacteriologist and dedicated his life to researching the kind of science "doing its darnedest to kill off man in wholesale lots," namely biological warfare, which is why he located to the remote island and erected a private laboratory. Wayland apparently has developed a biological weapon capable of "wipe out an entire country" and "conquer the rest of the world." So, naturally, the U.S. military is deeply involved in the project and the reason why the original photographer failed to get security clearance.

Reynold Frame and Leon Exeter, a writer for Picture magazine, voyage to Kilgore Island with Major Harry Geddes and Captain Jonas Kilgore, who was born and raised on the island, but now refuses to stay there. Not without reason. Kilgore Island resembles "the other side of the moon." A bleak, rocky protrusion in the sea crowned with a clump of dead, prickly trees. Wayland lives and works there with his assistants, Val Chesnikoff, Susy Smith, Clare Quarles and Dr. Mike Inglehart – who's the chief assistant in charge. Finally, there's an overworked cook and her slow-witted son, Tom. And it doesn't take very long before things go south.

Wayland shows Frame around the laboratory and he wants to take a photograph of the bacteriologist holding a test tube, but Wayland corrects him that they chiefly use Petri dishes. So he goes to get some samples, but when doesn't return, Frame begins to look for him and discovers his body on the floor of the barn. Slashed to death with a scalpel and covered with fragments of broken glass with "a gelatinous substance" stuck to the shards. What has been spilled in there is agar, which is used for growing cultures. If there were bacteria cultures in it, they're now all over the place. That's very bad news, if they contained Wayland's secret weapon. But it gets worse!

Since they've no idea what the incubation periods is, they have everything from twelve hours to two, or three, days before they know what they're up against. But it gets even worse. North's taste for fresh food means that there's no canned food on the island and they can't eat any uncovered food, due to contamination, which means they now have to survive on water and some eggs until Old Jonas returns – ensuring a few days of extreme dieting. On top of that, Tom disappeared around the time of murder and Frame's lack of motive finds him a captive of Major Geddes. Oh, and there's no radio to contact the mainland. Can any more go wrong for Frame? The answer is yes. Yes, it can.

As noted above, The Clock Strikes Thirteen is an expanded short story and the core of the plot, who, why and how, is relatively simple and straightforward. Something you would expect from a short, 10-page story with the highlight being a brief lecture on "the essence of a perfect alibi." During this short lecture, Frame mentions the main principles of the alibi-trick (booby traps, concealed weapons, manipulated clocks and the unconsciously coached witness) and demolishes everyone's alibi by demonstrating that "the really perfect alibi" is "the one that is so natural and ordinary that it is never even suspected." Sadly, this lecture covers only the last two, or three, pages of Chapter 9, but should still delight fans of Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts.

So, as far as the plot is concerned, The Clock Strikes Thirteen is decent enough, but compared to Wilders Walk Away (1948), Hardly A Man is Now Alive and The Traces of Brillhart (1960), is Brean's thinnest detective novel. The Clock Strikes Thirteen is mainly carried by its storytelling, setting and a truly original premise, which has to my knowledge never been done before or since.

When I read it for the first time, the story struck me as a good, old-fashioned piece of detective fiction spiced with some cold war paranoia, but, having lived through 2020, their situation became much more relatable – although nobody ever mentioned toilet paper. Neither is there the same level of mental breakdown among the characters as in Berkeley's Panic Party, Christie's And Then There Were None or Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937), which is replaced with the gloom of a possible death sentence hanging over their heads and a growing, gnawling hunger. This situation makes one scene, in particular, very effective when Frame finds himself in the role of "someone in a story from the Arabian Nights" and had "rubbed a magic lamp." Only for the mention of germs for reality to come crashing down all around him. An absurd, but good, intermezzo reminiscent of those Baghdad-on-the-Thames scenes in John Dickson Carr. 

The Clock Strikes Thirteen is, plot-wise, not quite as good as Brean's other detective novels, but the writing and its suspenseful take on the closed-circle of suspects/isolated island situation helped elevate the story to something very much worth your time. Even more so if you like these type of mysteries centering on a small, isolated cast of characters. Brean was great even when playing with a weak hand.

So, in closing, I want to wish everyone of you a happy new year and hope 2021 will treat us all better than 2020 has, but if 2021 decides to outdo its older brother, I'll be seeing some of you in the trenches. We will identify to each other with the phrase, "you have been to Afghanistan, I perceive."