The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments (2024) by Tom Mead

I mentioned in my review of the third Joseph Spector novel, Cabaret Macabre (2024), Tom Mead has been a busy bee with not only working on the fourth title in the series, The House at Devil's Neck (2025), but branching out in translating French detective short stories and novels – starting with Pierre Véry's Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937). Mead has been commissioned by Bedford Square Publishers to translate Paul Halter's impossible crime novels. Fingers crossed for a translation of Le voyageur du passé (The Traveler from the Past, 2012). But wait... there's more!

Last November, Crippen & Landru published a short story collection with a selection of Mead's own work. The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments (2024), introduced by Martin Edwards, containing eleven short stories. Three of which appearing in print for the first time. I thought it would make for a perfect follow up to the previous review of John Dickson Carr's collection of short stories The Men Who Explained Miracles (1963). So let's dig in!

"The Indian Rope Trick," originally published in the July/August, 2020, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, finds Joseph Spector refereeing a challenge between two magicians, Ferdinand le Sueur and Doctor Gupta, who have been arguing about the Indian Rope Trick – former claims to have come up with "a perfect mechanism for working the trick." Something entirely new and revolutionary. Doctor Gupta performs the trick under traditional circumstances, inside a theater, but Le Sueur demonstrates his version of the trick under an open sky! Even more, he pulls off the trick and that alone should earn the story a spot in a future locked room anthology. But murder interrupts the challenge when one of the magicians is strangled without leaving behind a single footprint on the muddy driveway. Spector is the impartial witness to the cast-iron alibi of both suspects.

The solution to the impossible murder is not bad. Just a bit skeptical about one part of the trick, because I don't think doing that, so casually, is as easy as the story suggests. Even with that to help. Still a pretty good impossible crime story, overall, succeeding where John Basye Price's abysmal "Death and the Rope Trick" (1954) failed all those decades ago.

I can only imagine "The Octagonal Room," originally published in the anthology Millhaven Tales (2018), came about after Mead read the shin honkaku mysteries by Soji Shimada, Yukito Ayatsuji, Takemaru Abiko and saying, "I'll give it the old college try." Spector is drawn to the home of Simon Eldridge, an American writer, who moved to England and took residence of a reputedly haunted house, Black Mill. Beside stories of robed figures, satanic rites and "bonfires blazing in unoccupied rooms," Black Mill has an architectural mystery. The place has a strange, octagonal room not any of the original architectural plans and sketches, but nobody knows who or when it was added to the house. Some malevolent, otherworldly force or eldritch horror appears to reside in the octagonal room and has taken possession of Eldridge. Spector is not the only one who came to Black Mill to investigate, but the magician-detective eventually has to solve another impossible crime when Eldridge's decapitated body is found lying inside a pentagram in the locked octagonal room.

I figured out for the most part how the trick was pulled off and who was behind it, but nothing to the detriment of this fantastic and original locked room mystery, nor my immense enjoyment. "The Octagonal Room" is the best short story in this collection and now my favorite Mead locked room mystery.

"Incident at Widow's Perch," originally published in the September/October, 2019, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, has a great backdrop for a detective story with impossible crime to match taking place at a house built into peak – known as Widow's Perch. A desolate summit so remote "it was accessible only by cable car." Giles Latimer's body was found by his wife, Margot, sprawled on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. The police wrote it off as an unfortunate accident, but Margot has good reasons to believe he was murdered and now murderer is out to get her. So she turns to the magician-detective, Joseph Spector, who quickly loses his client under seemingly impossible circumstances. Spector is one of the people who sees Margot enter the cable car alone, pulled the glass door shut and began its descent downwards from the peak, but mid-way through, Margot burst into flames. So another rock solid impossible crime story, curiously more reminiscent of Arthur Porges than Clayton Rawson.

"The Sleeper in Coldwreath," originally published in the March/April, 2023, issue of EQMM, wonderfully plays on that old, hoary trope from the pulps. Hypnosis! Something that makes most of us shudder whenever it turns up in a proper detective story or locked room mystery, but Mead found a good use for it in this short story.

Forty years earlier, in 1893, the house known as Coldwreath was the property of a psychic researcher, Dr. Peberby, who specialized in "sleep, dreams and hypnosis" ("a cocktail of mysticism and blasphemy"). One day, Peberby locked horns with a skeptic, Lester Brownlow, who challenged him to demonstrate and prove his hypnotic powers. What happened next has haunted Coldwreath ever since. Peberby invited Brownlow to Coldwreath to be placed in a hypnotic trance, while witnesses were present, before being guided to an upstairs bedroom – commands him to lock and bolt the door behind him. Thirty minutes later, the house is rocked by an unearthly scream and three men had to break down the bedroom door, but the room was empty without a trace of Brownlow. Ever since, the place has been haunted by an apparition with half-lidded eyes as though in a trance ("a phantom sleepwalker, wandering between the worlds"). Spector comes to investigate and naturally is present when somebody else impossibly vanishes from a locked room and a body turns up under equally impossible circumstances of the no-footprints variety. This story would have made for a great Jonathan Creek episode and enjoyed the solution to the disappearance from the locked bedroom. A trick based on a locked room idea, or concept, that always amuses me (ROT13: qbbef gung nccrne gb or ybpxrq, obygrq naq frnyrq).

"The Footless Phantom," originally published in the March/April, 2022, issue of EQMM, brings Spector to the dying mining village of Greeley in the Cotswolds of western England. A village that had been dealt a fatal wound when a mining accident killed numerous miners and workers moved to others mines in the region, which left behind a dwindling population who stuck around. So the village has problem of its own and more problem is added to the list when the troublesome Danny Snape is found dead with the back of his head caved in at the foot of a cliff. There's only a single track of footprints going from Snape's van to his body and if the weapon was dropped from the top of the cliff, then what happened to it? So it appears the murder could have only been committed by "a weightless, invisible assassin."

Not a bad premise for an impossible crime story, nor is the backdrop of a dying mining village, but plot-wise, it felt ropy – especially how the whole impossibility was rigged up. So not the best impossible crime story to be found in this collection.

"What Happened to Mathwig," first published in the anthology Wrong Turn (2018), is Mead's take on Herbert Brean's The Traces of Brillhart (1961). A Harley Street psychiatrist begins a relationship with one of his patients, Claire Mathwig, who ends up agreeing to kill her husband, Chester Mathwig. And how! Chester Mathwig ends up with three bullets ("...final bullet hit him in the skull...") before disappearing into the waters of the Thames. So imagine the murderer's shock when his victim turns up, alive and well, with nary a scratch or flesh wound. Enough to run to Spector to confess and ask him to explain how Mathwig pulled a Rasputin. The solution is as grim as that historical, hard-to-kill figure. One of the better and stronger plotted stories in the collection with a tantalizing premise that has barely been scratched by impossible crime and locked room specialists, past and present.

The next non-series short story, "Invisible Death" (2018), but already reviewed it a few years ago together with Mead's "The Walnut Creek Vampire" (2020).

"The Three-Minute Miracle," first of the three previously unpublished short stories, which combines the problem of the unbreakable alibi with the head scratching phenomena of bi-location. Spector is consulted by his old friend, Inspector George Flint, who's investigating the murder of a rich philanthropist, Mrs. Anthea Wheeldon. She was shot and killed by her no good, criminally charged nephew, Alec Mellors, whose little blackmailing enterprise is possibly going to land him in prison. And his aunt is determined to cut him out the will. Alec not only has a motive, but he was seen entering the house and pulling the trigger by an impartial witness. There is, however, another equally credible witness swearing he was fifty miles away, three minutes before he was seen firing the fatal shots!

I'm in two minds whether, or not, the story qualifies as an impossible crime. I think most of you are aware of my hesitation to qualify unbreakable alibis as impossible crime, unless the alibi hinges on the murderer appearing to have been physically incapable of having carried out the crime. Not when the alibi turns on witnesses or paperwork. On the other hand, the murder committed in front of a witness in combination with the alibi gives it the appearance of bi-location. Either way, Spector finds a way to break his cast-iron alibi down with the only smudge on his ingenious solution is that one, not unimportant, detail is impossible to anticipate. Other than than, "The Three-Minute Miracle" will please fans of Christopher Bush and Tetsuya Ayukawa.

"The Problem of the Velvet Mask," second previously unpublished short story, takes place during Christmas, 1931, which begins when Juliette Lapine comes to Joseph Spector on behalf of her father, Lucien Lapine – a retired French diplomat. She believes her father is in danger from their new next door neighbor, Eustace Dauger, who arrived in a funeral car ("like the grim reaper himself") and always wears a velvet black mask. Lucien Lapine reacted to his arrival "as though he had been expecting him for many years." Eustace Dauger possibly is Felix Duchesne. One of the two main players in the "the Duchesne Affair," an espionage case from some twenty-five years ago, whose downfall came at the hands of Lapine. Felix Duchesne, "accused spy," reportedly died as a prisoner on Devil's Island. Or did he?

Lucien Lapine is shot and killed in "an impenetrable room" with the windows locked from the inside, the door locked with the key inside the lock and the two detectives were standing outside the door. Not the mention that the snow outside is unmarked. Interestingly, there's a good amount of "the blinkin' cussedness of things in general" going on, but not used to create the locked room murder. A route Carr would have taken. Here it takes place all around the locked room murder, which has a somewhat prosaic solution, but also a good example a touch of cleverness and ingenuity can be applied to a simple idea. I was entertained!

"Lethal Symmetry," third and last of the previously unpublished stories, is one of the shortest works in the collection and an unexpected gem. Inspector Flint calls upon Spector to help him out with the strange murder of Conrad Darnoe. A man who "prized symmetry above all things" and got himself impossibly poisoned in a locked room. The brilliant solution is a clever and even original variation on a impossible poisoning situation/trick I've seen only once before. No idea if Mead has read that particularly story, but this is a good, new way to use that trick.

There's one last story, "Jack Magg's Jaw" (2022), but reviewed it last year as part of "Locked and Loaded, Part 4." The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments ended on a high note for me with the strong, short and excellent "Lethal Symmetry."

Strong, short and (mostly) excellent perfectly sums up The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments. A collection of a short impossible crime stories representing another fresh and promising page in the budding locked room revival and should entertain fans of the Joseph Spector novels until The House at Devil's Neck is released.

Speaking of the locked room revival, I've accumulated a small pile of modern impossible crime novels over the past two months and holidays. So I'll begin decimating it presently, but first, back to the Golden Age!

Cabaret Macabre (2024) by Tom Mead

Previously, I revisited The Red Widow Murders (1935) by John Dickson Carr, writing as "Carter Dickson," which got a long overdue reprint from Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics and their new edition comes with an introduction from the rising locked room specialist, Tom Mead – who has been a busy bee lately. Beside writing introductions, Mead translated Pierre Véry's famous short story collection, Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937), published by Crippen & Landru in 2023. And, of course, working on the third title in the Joseph Spector series of historical locked room mystery novels.

I got off to a rocky start with the Joseph Spector series. I thought Death and the Conjuror (2022) was a promising debut with its heart in the right place, but not the second coming of John Dickson Carr. That opinion received some daggerish glares. The Murder Wheel (2023) vastly improved on its predecessor and a noteworthy locked room mystery purely on the strength of the third, brilliantly-staged impossibility of a body materializing inside a sealed trunk on stage. So hoped the next one continued this streak. I'm glad to report Cabaret Macabre (2024) not only continued this upward trend, but ended up being leagues ahead of Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel as a modern-day, Golden Age detective novel. A detective novel that can be summed up as Brian Flynn meets Paul Halter.

Cabaret Macabre begins with the discovery of a steamer trunk washed ashore on Rotherhithe beach, "it smelt worse than anything the Thames had ever spewed up before," which contains the decomposing body of a man – his face turned to pulp from numerous blows with a hard object. Before Inspector George Flint, of Scotland Yard, can give the problem of the faceless man in the trunk his full attention another problem presents itself.

Miss Caroline Silvius comes to see Flint on behalf of her older brother, Victor Silvius, who has been locked away as a patient in a private sanatorium, The Grange. Nine years ago, Victor was a 19-year-old youth who attacked and nearly killed the infamous hanging judge, Sir Giles Drury. Victor was madly in love at the time with Miss Gloria Craine, who worked as private secretary to the judge, but she died under mysterious circumstances ten years ago during a Christmas gathering at the Drury's country retreat, Marchbanks. The police wrote her death off as a suicide, but why take your own life using strychnine? Victor believed Sir Giles had killed her and attacked him with a knife, which was a costly mistake ("men like Sir Giles Drury make powerful enemies"). Sir Giles is a member of an influential drinking club, "The Tragedians," whose members include the experimental psychiatrist and head of The Grange clinic, Dr. Jasper Moncrieff ("...also cheerfully performed the odd lobotomy on troublesome sons or daughters of his high-society friends"). Caroline is convinced they're now trying to kill her brother ("...started with slivers of glass in his mashed potato").

At the same time, Lady Elspeth Drury contacts Joseph Spector, retired magician and consulting detective, because someone wants her husband dead. Sir Giles has been receiving poison pen letters and she believes the person responsible is Victor who has resumed his campaign of terror against her husband. What's more, the whole family is gathering again at Marchbanks in the run-up to the Christmas celebrations. There are Sir Giles and Lady Elspeth's troublesome sons, Leonard and Ambrose Drury. Sir Giles' illegitimate son, Sylvester Monkton, and Lady Elspeth's son from a previous marriage, Jeffrey Flack. Leonard is accompanied by his secretary, Peter Nightingale, who recently returned after working abroad for the explorer Byron Manderby. Marchbanks is only a stone throws away from The Grange. What could possibly go wrong?

Spector is right there when the first body is found, lying in a rowboat, in the middle of a small lake frozen over with a thin layer of ice. That facts turns this murder into Schrödinger's crime. If the body had been placed inside the boat and shoved from the jetty into the lake, before it began to freeze, all the suspects "have fairly solid alibis," but, if it was done after midnight, the murder suddenly becomes an impossible crime – because the ice is "not solid enough to take the weight of two grown men." So was "it a problem of time or space?" Mead wrote in his acknowledgments that has been delving into "the byzantine complexity" of several Japanese mystery writers and Tetsuya Ayukawa was no doubt on that pile. The second impossibility, a brutal shotgun murder, has another wonderful setup that to my knowledge has never been used before. I'm not going to give anything away here, but it sure is one way to break open a locked and watched room. As far as the solutions go, I think I enjoyed the trick to the second murder better than the first (MILD SPOILERS/ROT13) fubjvat lbh pna tb onpx gb gur jryy naq ersheovfu na byq gevpx nf ybat nf lbh pna nqq fbzrguvat arj be qvssrerag gb vg, juvpu pregnvayl vf gur pnfr urer. And it worked like a charm! However, the solution to the first impossible murder is not to be overlooked (SPOILERS/ROT13), juvyr n grpuavpny-gevpx (gung graq gb or yrff fngvfslvat guna gevpxf cynlvat jvgu fcnpr/gvzr), Zrnq perngrq n yrtvgvzngr ybpxrq ynxr zlfgrel. Hayvxr gur cebzvfrq ybpxrq ynxr zlfgrel V erivrjrq rneyvre guvf lrne.

Jim, of The Invisible Event, once compiled a list with locked room mysteries where "the setup is baffling and the solution ingenious." If I ever put together my own version of that list, Cabaret Macabre is a strong contender to make the final ten. However, the two excellently handled locked room murders only represents one aspect of larger, incredibly elaborate webwork-like plot.

The challenge to the reader, or the interlude, notes Cabaret Macabre has thrown out "more bodies, more clues, more deceptions, than even Joseph Spector is accustomed to" ("a webwork of murder"). This is really a densely-plotted detective novel in the best tradition of webwork plotting, which also makes it tricky to give an idea just how dense without giving anything away. Just that the story, plot and even the characters turn, twist and curl right up until the last page like a bucket full of epileptic snakes and bringing it all to a convincing (enough, overall) conclusion is Mead's greatest accomplishment to date – which could have easily gone the other with an ambitious, webwork-like plot like this one. Particularly (SPOILER/ROT13) jura gurer ner frireny zheqreref ehaavat nebhaq. Some pieces of the overall plot are better, or more convincingly, presented and resolved than others. For example, the dark, bleak answer to what really happened to Miss Moira Crain showing that Mead, like Halter, is no writer of snug, cozy mysteries. Great stuff! On the other hand, there's the final, final twist (ROT13: ...tebff) In bringing this Swiss watch of a mystery novel together that fitted, Mead has delivered a glorious tribute to the Golden Age detective novel that perfectly captured the bright, vivid imagination and daring ingenuity of the 1930s locked room mystery.

Nearly as important, Cabaret Macabre showed my comments about giving this new generation of traditional, Golden Age-style mystery writers time to grow and hone their skills is better than rolling out blind praise Death and the Conjuror could never live up to. This is what nearly tripped Halter's entry to an international audience when the translation of Le roi du désordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1996) failed to deliver on the years of hype and myth building. It took Carr himself a solid five to ten years and a dozen novels to go from It Walks by Night (1930) and The Bowstring Murders (1933) to The Three Coffins (1935) and The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). Good news here, of course, is that it has only been three years and the third Joseph Spector novel can actually be compared to some of Carr slippery, early wire-walking acts, plot-wise, like The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Unicorn Murders (1935). So there's much to look forward to! And I very much look forward to the fourth title in this series.

A note for the curious: I know some are worried whether this current renaissance can be maintained, but don't worry, that genie isn't going back in the bottle. Just look who took up the banner of the traditional detective story and locked room mystery: Tom Mead, Gigi Pandian, Martin Edwards and recently J.L. Blackhurst joined the party with her brand new "Impossible Crime" series. Not to mention a very strong, innovative independent scene with the likes of James Scott Byrnside, A. Carver, J.S. Savage, K.O. Enigma and H.M. Faust. So give everything time, space to breath and enjoy your front row seat to the blossoming of a second Golden Age.

The Secret of the Pointed Tower (1937) by Pierre Véry

Last year, I reviewed the short story "Le mystére de la chambre verte" ("The Mystery of the Green Room," 1936) by Pierre Véry, "novelist of adventure, novelist of the fantastic," who believed in saving "what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" ("...full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadow and mystery") – essentially wrote fairy tales for grown-ups. One of his few works to be translated into English is L'assassinat du Pére Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) and is a fine example of Véry's home blend of the formal, 1930s detective story with his brand of gentle surrealism.

I mentioned in the review that the few translations like the previously mentioned seasonal mystery novel and the now even rarer English edition of Le thé des vieilles dames (The Old Ladies' Tea Party, 1937) have since gone out-of-print. There seemed to be no plans or rumors swirling around at the time to translate Véry's other celebrated novels such as Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) and Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934). Little did I know that Crippen & Landru was putting the finishing touches to a brand new translation that was published back in December.

Renaissance man and author of Death and the Conjuror (2022), The Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre (2024), Tom Mead, translated Véry's famous collection of short stories, Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937) – which at the time caught the attention of Ellery Queen. This first English edition opens with a photocopy of a handwritten letter from Frederic Dannay to Véry thanking him for sending a copy of Les veillées de la Tour Pointue and hoped to see some of the short stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Something that would not happen until "The Mystery of the Green Room" appeared in the August, 2011, issue of EQMM. More than sixty years after Dannay wrote the letter and now we have the whole collection.

In addition to translating this collection, Tom Mead penned insightful introduction that presented Pierre Véry as a writer who a "unique path" through the Golden Age of the French detective story. A mystery writer enjoying "the distinction of being both an exponent and a critic of the Golden Age" whose tales of mystery and imagination "often existed outside of the strict parameters of the conventional whodunit." Véry's mystery output consists of everything ranging from everything subversive reimaginings and parodies to the traditional locked room mystery, but always distinguishable by their "often-eccentric blending of genres" and his "taste for the surreal or fantastical."

Before diving into this collection of short stories, I should note that the Crippen & Landru edition neglected to list the original French titles and publication dates. I found the original French titles, but have no idea when, or where, they first published. So, lacking the publication information, this one is going to be slightly less autistic pedantic than most short story collection reviews that can be found on this blog.

The Secret of the Pointed Tower begins with a short chapter, "A Message to the Reader," in which Pierre Véry himself is roaming the streets of nighttime Paris in search of somewhere, anywhere, to hang a man ("such is the morbid fate of mystery writers...") when he accidentally discovered a secret passage – revealing a dark, narrow passage. A passage leading to a hidden attic room in the pointed tower of the police headquarters, on the Quai des Orfevres, where he finds a pile of handwritten reports on "all kinds of crimes, burglaries, mysteries, enigmas." But written down as dry, clinical reports. These are full-fledged stories that Véry immediately began to copy to present to his audience under the title The Secret of the Pointed Tower. A near, simple little framing device to tie these vastly different stories together.

"Le menton d'Urbin" ("Urbin's Chin") is the first of these short stories following a so-called book-taker, "specialist in the theft of rare tomes," named Simonet. A bibliophile book-taker with designs on "a renowned collection of literary rarities" tucked away in the private library of a collector, Urbin. Simonet's carefully prepared burglary goes entirely wrong when coming across the bloodied, curled up remains of Urbin inside a crate, which is how the gardener finds him and the police believe him guilty. Simonet uses his imprisonment to work out whom of the potentially five suspects killed Urbin ("...by keeping quiet I might just be able to turn a decent profit out of this"). This is a fun little mystery caper and solid opening story that reads like a direct ancestor of the Bernie Rhodenbarr series by Lawrence Block. Loved it!

"Police technique" (no translation needed) concerns the murder of Yvette Lemoine and the
problem her death poses the police. Only person who appears to have had the opportunity to deliver the fatal blows is her cousin, Marcel, but he claims to be innocent and has no motive. Then the police are called the bedside of Yvette who says with her dying breath, "my uncles," but both men have "indisputable alibis." Another possible interpretation of those dying words implicates her fiancé, which again leads the police into a dead end. It's not until Véry's lawyer and sometimes detective, Prosper Lepicq, appears to confront the murderer that the case gets solved, but not in the way Lepicq had hoped. I think this story is more interesting for the style than the plot as it pulls a potential locked room mystery, dying message, unbreakable alibis and even some forensic shenanigans from the old bag of tricks – before ending as a dark, psychological crime story. Lepicq actions at the end echoes some of the practices of his American counterparts like Perry Mason and John J. Malone.

The next story "Le disparition of d'Emmeline Poke" ("The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke") is about the disappearance Miss Emmeline Poke. She was last seen by two witnesses walking home through the woods, in the company of her brother, but she never arrived home. Her brothers were both arrested, the ground around their shed dug up and the woods comb through. Not a trace of the body. A problem arises when one of the investigators points out that one of the witnesses is hard of hearing, while the other is extremely long-sighted. So what did they really see in the woods? And what happened to the body, if there's a body? This could have been a good story, but the actions of one of the characters killed it for me. I suppose the moral of the story is (ROT13) qba'g unir nppbzcyvprf jura pbzzvggvat zheqre, rfcrpvnyyl jura gurl'er fghcvq.

"Police montée," translated here as "The Tale of a Tartlet," is one of my favorite stories from this collection. A charming, playful and excellent take on both the classical whodunit and inverted mysteries. Léon Petitquartier is the seventeen year old son of a pastry chef and an arachnid collector who had been given the unpleasant task of euthanizing the old family dog, Vega ("...the animal was quite literally dying on its feet"). Léon poisoned a honey tartlet with cyanide as a final meal for Vega, but, while being distracted for a few minutes, the poisoned tartlet disappears from the kitchen table. So now Léon has to wait nervously for the news to break that someone has been mysteriously poisoned, but the events doesn't quite play out like the teenager expected. This story really benefited from being longest story in the collection and particularly liked how the village community reacted to the news or simply the simple, but excellent, explanation to the whole mystery.

"La multiplication des négres," re-titled for this collection as "The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov," tails a penniless Russian in Paris, "stumbling from weariness and weeping with hunger, desperate and begging," who believes a black policeman is hunting for him – which has to do with a "detestable thing" that happened in a dark, narrow street. Maxim Zapyrov tells his unusual story to a M. Paul. A crime story with a predictable twist and not really my poison, but not bad for what it is.

"Le prisonnier espagnol" ("The Spanish Prisoner") is modeled on the classic and titular confidence trick, which is still around today, but changed and adapted along with the times. You might know it as the Nigerian Prince email scam. In this story, the poor Celestin Lainé who surprisingly receives a letter from someone imprisoned in Spain and needs help to collect a trunk containing nearly two million francs. However, Lainé has four very rich friends and they decide to respond to the letter with somewhat predictable results. The key word there's somewhat, because the devil is always in the details and the end result is a good, solid and fun scam story. I love good scam story and the next one is even better.

"Les 700,000 radis roses" ("The 700,000 Pink Radishes") is not a locked room mystery or impossible crime, of any kind, but this story has a delightful, utterly bizarre plot and premise that will be appreciated by fans of John Dickson Carr and Paul Halter. The great Parisian publisher M. Hippolyte Gour keeps receiving a baffling, one-sided correspondence about the purchase of 700,000 pink radishes ("they are guaranteed fresh and free of worm bites") and an equal amount of radish leaves ("these will be dispatched to your personal address"). And, before long, his personal secretaries either get attacked or kidnapped. The case kicked up so much dust that it attracted "the attention of a band of popular mystery novelists" who "were trying to apply the method of their fictional detectives," but the problem of the 700,000 pink radishes seriously tasked their wits. Until they had their storybook moment, "where the police failed, the amateur sleuths succeeded," which comes with a small, delightful twist at the end. More importantly, this is one of those few detective story that manages to do something meaningful with a kidnapping plot (of sorts).

The next short story is "La soupe du pape" ("Soupe du Pape") and reads like Véry tried to recapture the magic of "Les 700,000 radis roses" without much success. A policeman finds a dozen pearls while shelling peas. So has to figure out where the pearls came from, how they ended up in his bag of peas and who stole them. This story did nothing for me.

The next two short stories are the previously mentioned "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "L'assassin" ("The Killer"), but have already reviewed the former (see link above) and the latter is a short-short barely covering two full pages. Fortunately, The Secret of the Pointed Tower concludes with an absolute banger!

"Cours d'instruction criminelle" ("A Lesson in Crime") is not really a mystery short story, but a science-fiction musing on the distant future, somewhere around the year 2500, where crime fiction "gradually took precedence over all other forms of literature" – until they all "fell into disrepute and then obscurity." In those future years, the great mystery writers of the early twentieth century have become the classics school children study from seventh grade onward. The study and history of the traditional detective story is central in every classroom ("if locked-room Y is shaped like an isosceles triangle ABC and locked-room Z is a hexagon MNOPQR, calculate...") and children ask their mothers how they would poison their dad or quiz their father on how he would snuff out his mistress! The ending is both humorous and very perceptive as it's something I can see happening under those circumstances, but Véry's vision of the year twenty-five hundred nonetheless feels like home. But I'm stuck with you lot. What can you do?

The Secret of the Pointed Tower ends with a parting message to the reader from Véry, "when I have more stories, you will be the first to know," but no idea if a second collection ever materialized. Tom Mead also included several pages of explanatory notes, which I always enjoy to find in translated mystery novels or collections.

So, all in all, the short stories collected in The Secret of the Pointed Tower perfectly demonstrates why Véry considered the detective story to be "the brother of the fairy tale." When blended with Véry's home brewed brand of surrealism, you don't always get the most orthodox or traditionally-styled detective stories. You can hardly call any of the short stories traditional, Golden Age-style mysteries, but that doesn't mean the quality isn't there. "The Tale of the Tartlet," "The 700,000 Pink Radishes," "The Mystery of the Green Room" and "A Lesson in Crime" are all first-rate for variously different reasons. "Urbin's Chin" and "The Spanish Prisoner" are simply good, solid stories. "Police Technique" is not quite as good, or solid, but interesting in how it played with different styles and tropes. Only "The Disappearance of Emmeline Poke," "The Salvation of Maxim Zapyrov" and "Soupe du Pape" were off the mark. Not much can be said about the two-page short-short. That's not a bad return for a collection as varied as The Secret of the Pointed Tower. More importantly, the fact that it was translated by Tom Mead is very hopeful for the future. John Pugmire is no longer alone in bringing these French-language novels and short stories to an international audience and the changes of getting a translation of Véry's legendary locked room mystery novel The Four Vipers sooner rather than later has gone up! In short, The Secret of the Pointed Tower is indeed something of a lost classic and comes highly recommended to fans of the short crime fiction.

Locked and Loaded, Part 4: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

I always try to somewhat vary the type of detective novels and short stories discussed on this blog. For example, I recently reviewed James Ronald's pulp-style impossible crime novel Six Were to Die (1932) followed by a character-driven whodunit by Nicholas Blake (The Dreadful Hollow, 1953), two Japanese manga mysteries (Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 35-36) and J.S. Savage's retro-GAD The Mystery of Treefall Manor (2023) – which I think is varied crosscut of our corner of the genre. There's, of course, a difference between trying and succeeding. A firmly established tradition on this blog is that the locked room mystery is omnipresent and impossible to escape. Whether discussing Golden Age mysteries, their modern-day descendants or the detective stories currently getting ferried across multiple language barriers. The locked room is always present.

So, despite my attempts to keep everything somewhat varied, the blog regularly goes through periods where every other review is tagged with the "locked room mysteries" toe-tag. I'm simply obsessed fascinated with the damn things. This blog is currently going through one of those periods, but this time, I've an excuse a pretty good reason to fanboy all over them make a rigorous study of them.

Last year, I put together "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years." I very soon realized I should have waited until 2025 as two more years would have given a much clearer picture of the current developments. So the plan is to eventually do a follow-up focusing solely on the ten-year period 2015-25, which is why I have been building a small pile of contemporary, retro-GAD mysteries. Not all of them are of the impossible variety, but most are and intend on decimating that pile in the two, three months ahead – interspersed with some golden oldies. So that's what you can expect in the coming weeks and months, but first need to get some odds and ends out of the way.

I previously compiled three posts under the title "Locked and Loaded," part 1, 2 and 3, which reviews uncollected short stories. This time, I had a handful of uncollected stories from the past 60 years (1963-2023) that I needed to get out of the way.

Lawrence G. Blochman's "Murder Behind Schedule," originally published in Clues for Dr. Coffee (1963) and reprinted as "Young Wife" in the November 17, 1963, publication of This Week. A very short, but legitimate, impossible crime story somehow not mentioned in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). This is the perfect filler material for locked room-themed anthology as it's short, simple and not devoid of interest. Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, chief pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, is trying to work on New Methods of Post-mortem Diagnosis of Drowning when Lieutenant Max Ritter whisks him away to the scene of a very curious crime ("...like a case for that Dr. Gideon Fell you made me read about last summer"). Michael Waverly is a patron of the arts and a hard businessman, "people either worshiped him or hated his guts," who collected enemies left and right. Even at home. Waverly's marriage is on the rocks as his wife is having an affair with the second violinist of the Waverly String Quartet and someone tried to kill him only a week ago. Ritter received a frantic call from Waverly, "he's after me again," followed by a groan, loud banging noises and then utter silence. So what, exactly, happened and how did the murderer manage to escape from a locked room?

Like I said this is a very short, good and cleverly constructed detective story with an interesting and even realistic take on the classic trope of a murder inside a locked room. A locked room situation that would not be out of place in an episode of CSI. Despite being, what can called a realistic impossibility, Mike Grost points out on his website that the story "contains a gracious homage to John Dickson Carr" and "Carr in turn was a fan of Blochman" praising "his stories in print" – which got Clues for Dr. Coffee moved nearer the top of the pile. This short story and praise from Carr is enough to warrant further investigation.

Edward D. Hoch's wrote "The Locked Room Cipher" for a game-themed anthology, Who Done It? (1980), which hid the identity of the authors behind a code. So the story is not particularly well-known either as a work from Hoch's hand or as a locked room mystery.

"The Locked Room Cipher" stars the one-shot detective and newspaper columnist, Ross Calendar, who's invited by Terry Box to attend a high profile reunion. Terry Box had once worked in Washington, "doing something with codes and computers," but nowadays owns and runs "the hottest new disco restaurant since Studio 54," Sequin City – a place with some peculiar features. Beside giving its patrons the feeling they're in Hollywood or Las Vegas, every room and corner is under the watchful eye of closed-circuit TV cameras. The mirrored panels are actually one-way glass allowing viewers from above to watch the action below without being seen ("...something more suitable to a bank or gambling casino than a New York disco"). Now there's a reunion with three of Box's former colleagues from Washington who all worked with computers, ciphers or both. During the reunion, Box and Calendar witnesses one of them getting shot and killed on live CCTV inside the private dinning room with the door securely bolted from the inside. When they break down the door, the murderer has vanished and the only clue is a computer print-out of a cipher found in the victim's pocket.

Just as to be expected from Hoch, "The Locked Room Cipher" is a competently put together detective story, but the most difficult one to crack. The murderer is easily spotted and the method to create the illusion of an unseen shooter vanishing from a bolted room under camera surveillance is easy to anticipate. However, the passage of time turned it into a historically noteworthy "modern" impossible crime story. Sure, the technology used in the story is hopelessly outdated today, crude and clunky, but that crudeness gives it a charm of its own. More importantly, it's technological crudeness is what allowed Hoch to put a new spin on an old trick. In 1980, "The Locked Room Cipher" must have impressed as a promising example of what can be done with the classical locked room in a high-tech environment.

I wonder if detective fans of the future will look back on a story like "The Unlocked Locked Room Murder" (Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 79) as crude and clunky, but quaint and pleasantly old-fashioned? After all, by that time they should be experiencing (which replaced reading) detective stories in which murderers create unbreakable alibis with AI-operated, holographic doubles or creating locked rooms with nanomaterials that can form a sealed door. Anyway...

M.P.O. Books' "De schilder die de waarheid liefhad" ("The Painter Who Loved the Truth," 2019), published as by "Anne van Doorn," shamelessly lingered on the big pile for years. And pretty much one of the main reasons for doing this compilation post. If you're not familiar with previous reviews, Books is the only Dutch crime-and mystery writer, past or present, who has written (good) impossible crime fiction in a significant quantity. From the early De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010) and the excellent Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) to De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019) and Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) under the Van Doorn name. And more than half a dozen short stories.

"The Painter Who Loved the Truth" could have just as easily been titled "The People Who Played Dominoes," because the story is plotted around the domino-effect as "crime sometimes takes the form of a game of dominoes, which are placed half a stone apart and upright" ("if the first one falls, they all fall"). That proved to be the case when an outgoing minister, Herman van Grootheest, is shockingly shot to death in his vacation home on Texel, "the first assassination of a prominent politician since Pim Fortuyn," but the police soon have a prime suspect, Joost Leijendekker – a house painter who was in possession of the murder weapon. And that's not the only damning evidence the police uncovers. During a reconstruction on the island, Leijendekker manages to escape and his flight ends on the doorstep of the two private investigators of Research & Discover, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong.

Leijendekker pleads he's innocent and Corbijn wants to help "the most wanted man in the Netherlands," but the painter is not exactly making it easy by insisting the gun was in his possession at the time of the murder. Not only in his possession, but safely under lock and key! Nobody except him knows the code to the safe. The trick to explain this impossibility is a neat one. However, this story is even better in its cause-and-effect structure as Corbijn and De Jong have to pick apart a series seemingly unconnected incidents that proved to be domino stones toppling one after another, which created the circumstances allowing for the murder to happen. It's a pleasing effect.

Tom Mead is a prominent member of today's locked room revivalists who signed his name to three novels, Death and the Conjuror (2022), The Murder Wheel (2023) and the upcoming Cabaret Macabre (2024), and a growing list of short stories – which I wish were easily available. Preferably in one place like a proper short story collection. One easily accessible short story from Mead you can read right now is "Jack Magg's Jaw" (2022).

"Jack Magg's Jaw" was published on The Strand Magazine website on September 30, 2022, as part of a competition to win a Locked Room Prize pack comprising of a hardcover copy of Mead's Death and the Conjuror, Otto Penzler's Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022) and tickets for an escape room. All you had to do is solve the problem of the titular jaw and a small matter of a seemingly impossible murder. Joseph Spector, a retired magician and amateur detective, travels to the dark, rambling country house of Cliver Stoker to attend a slightly macabre weekend party. Stoker has his own private black museum ("behold... my museum of murder") and his most prized possession is the jawbone of a notoriously brutal highwayman, Jack Magg, who was executed in 1740. Every guest at the house party wants it. Stoker tells them they'll get to bid on it the following day, but, until then, it's locked away behind a steel door protected with a time lock that's "utterly impenetrable." When the morning comes and time lock runs out, the door opens to reveal a body inside what should have been a completely inaccessible vault. A very short, but good and fun little impossible crime story in which Mead's love for Clayton Rawson and Jonathan Creek bleeds through.

After last year's Monkey See, Monkey Murder (2023), James Scott Byrnside is currently working on a collection of short stories featuring his two Chicago gumshoes from the Roaring Twenties, Rowan Manory and Walter Williams. On the last day of 2023, Byrnside posted the first short story from that future collection, "The Silent Steps of Murder," on his blog as a New Year's present. Thanks! Very much appreciated and enjoyed!

"The Silent Steps of Murder" begins with Rowan Manory and Walter Williams out and about on New Year's Eve, "Chicago was ready to bid farewell to 1927," when they hear someone yelling murder. A young beat cop, Quinn, who immediately recognizes Chicago's famous detective and tells Manory he heard a loud crash, or noise, coming from one of the apartment buildings on his beat. When he goes to investigate, Quinn finds the body of the woman who lives there with a gunshot wound to the chest and stab wounds to the face. The state of the room suggests a robbery gone wrong or, perhaps, arranged to appear like a botched burglary that ended with a brutal murder. Just one problem. The murderer has to be still in the building, because the only footprints in the snow outside belong to Quinn. Manory assures Williams that Quinn is not the murderer, but, if not Quinn, who else could have left the place without leaving footprints?

There's a challenge to the reader, "Rowan has already solved the case. Have you? Here are some questions you should be able to answer," but it took me until after that point until things began clicking into place. Even then, I considered another variation that was actually mentioned in the comments. However, the solution deserves a blue ribbon. A bold move turning the story from an impossible crime story into a grand-style whodunit. This is exactly what I hoped envisioned would emerge from the Golden Age renaissance of the past decade. Go read it now and I look forward to complete collection which appears to have an overarching storyline.

So this rambling has gone on long enough. Next up is a (non-impossible) gem (I hope) from the 1930s.

The Murder Wheel (2023) by Tom Mead

Tom Mead is a British writer, playwright and a self-described student of the impossible crime story, "there is something about a locked room mystery that speaks to me in a way that no other genre does," but "student" is a euphemism here for fanboy – a massive one at that. Mead has been championing the locked room mystery and cutting his teeth on short stories, before finally publishing his first novel-length (historical) locked room mystery in 2022.

I thought Death and the Conjuror (2022) worked better as a retro whodunit than a classically-styled locked room mystery with its two overlapping casts of characters each nestled deeply within a tightly-woven, entangled web of plot-threads. The trio of impossibilities were, regrettably, not quite as good and particular the solutions to the disappearance of a painting and a body materialization inside a sealed elevator left me underwhelmed. Not everyone appreciated my tepid review, but miracle crimes is the hook of the "Joseph Spector Locked Room Mystery" series and it would be unfair to claim the three impossibilities can vie with the best from John Dickson Carr. Not yet, anyway.

If you have read my reviews of writers like James Scott Byrnside and P. Dieudonné, you know I'm a big fan of affording this new crop of neo-GAD authors the same room as their illustrious predecessors to hone their skills, building a series and finding their own voice – an essential to today's neo-GAD writers. Byrnside started out with a two novel-length fan letters to Christianna Brand and Dieudonné's debut is a better than average imitation of A.C. Baantjer, but both became less derivative with each novel to make room for their own skills and ideas to shine. For example, Baantjer could never have written Dieudonné's third novel, Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020). So never expected Death and the Conjuror to be the modern-day counterpart to The Three Coffins (1935), Rim of the Pit (1944) or Black Aura (1974). Just the first step in the creation of one.

Despite my reservations about the locked room merits of Death and the Conjuror, I looked forward to the see how this series would develop further in the second novel. And, to cut straight to the chase, The Murder Wheel (2023) improved tremendously on its predecessor. Well, with a few caveats. More on that in a moment.

First of all, the first improvement is the introduction of a young, up-and-coming solicitor, Edmund Ibbs, who hopefully becomes a recurring character in the series. Ibbs is a character cut from the same cloth as the young heroes with a penchant for getting into trouble you'll find all over Carr's work. The Murder Wheel has Ibbs acting as an assistant to Sir Cecil Bullivant, QC, acting for the defense in "the matter of the Crown versus Carla Dean." Mrs. Carla Dean is not only the primary suspect in the so-called "Ferris Wheel Murder Case," but the only possible suspect. On the night of August 19th, Dominic Dean took his wife to the Golders Green fairground as a treat, but Dean kept looking over his shoulder "as though someone were following him." Carla even became convinced they were being followed by a suspicious-looking character with a limp as they made their way round the fair. So, of course, Dominic and Carla decided to take a spin on the Ferris Wheel, but, when their carriage reached the top, people below heard a gunshot. The next thing that happened is a screaming Carla, "help, help," sticking her head over the side of the car that her husband has been hurt. When the carriage came back down, Dominic was found to have been shot in the stomach at close range, and dying, while Carla held the smoking gun in her hand. Nobody except Carla could have fired the fatal shot. The defense has their work cut out as their only hope is to convince a jury that "somebody other than Mrs. Carla Dean could have killed her husband on top of that Ferris wheel," which is not as easy as it sounds when the sealed crime scene is basically "a ready-made collar."

However, the "Ferris Wheel Murder Case" merely furnishes a backdrop to, what can be called, the "Pomegranate Theatre Murder Case." The case against Carla Dean occupies Ibbs professionally, but what drew him to the Pomegranate Theatre is a personal pastime.

Edmund Ibbs is a passionate amateur magician and recently got his hands on a newly released copy of a tell-all book, The Master of Manipulation, written by the pseudonymous "Dr. Anne L. Surazal" who evidently knew the tricks of the trade – "all the mysteries and wonders of the stage dispelled at a stroke." Particularly the book of tricks a magician who recently returned to the London stage. Professor Paolini had been away on a five-year world tour, "playing stages from Australia to Utrecht," whose return lured a who's who of magicians, like Joseph Spector, to the Pomegranate Theatre ("Ibbs was agog"). The show gets off to a great start with Ibbs getting to participate in a notorious trick and gets to watch Paolini's variation on the Assistant's Revenge, but the death defying bullet catch trick proves to be the least dangerous and baffling trick of the evening. Paolini last trick is to bring a disassembled suit of armor by placing the pieces on a mannequin and placing it inside a locked trunk. When the trunk is opened, the lifeless mannequin falls out together with a dead body that appears to have materialized out of thin air! A body belonging to someone peripherally involved in the shooting of Dominic Dean.

The inexplicable appearance of the body in the trunk is not the last impossibility the Pomegranate baffling Inspector George Flint, Joseph Spector and especially Edmund Ibbs. That third impossibility concerns a shooting in a locked dressing room leaving behind a dead body and an obvious, living and breathing, suspect clutching the murder weapon, but swears he didn't do it and had been knocked unconscious. However, nobody besides the victim and suspect could have gotten in, or out, the dressing room after it had been locked. But why commit an apparently motiveless murder under such incriminating circumstances ("this is starting to sound like the Dean case all over again")?

So how well did The Murder Wheel perform, as a locked room mystery, compared to Death and the Conjuror? A huge improvement, overall, but have something to nitpick about the first and last locked room. I appreciated what Mead tried to do with the Ferris Wheel murder, whodunit-wise, which is not unheard of (ROT13: ntngun puevfgvr'f ybeq rqtjner qvrf), but staging a murder like that in such a sealed, high-up location makes the solution utterly unconvincing. A better fairground attraction for the murder would have been a haunted house ride, (ROT13) fb rira n qlvat Qbzvavp Qrna pbhyqa'g gryy gur crbcyr jub ehfurq gb uvf nvq jura gurl pnzr bhg. Gurer jbhyq or nf zhpu vapevzvangvat rivqrapr ntnvafg Pynen (natyr bs gur fubg naq svatrecevagf ba gur tha) nf fbzr fbyvq pbhagre nethzragf (ynpx bs zbgvir naq jul pbzzvg zheqre haqre fhpu evqvphybhf pvephzfgnaprf), which I think would have made for a more dynamic puzzle minus the burden of expecting a locked room-trick worthy of its premise. I mean, The Murder Wheel gives an explanation to one of Paolini's illusions and how the trick works would be considered cheating in a detective story (vg'f n qbhoyr), but Paolini is a stage magician – not a mystery writer. A magician has no obligation to explain the audience how they were fooled, but the story is different for mystery writers. Even more so, if you evoke the locked room mystery and toss out false-solutions. It sets expectations for the locked room-angle that were not met by the titular murder.

Fortunately, the third locked room mystery pulled itself together in the longer than expected epilogue and turned out to be something of a nail biter, because dreaded the direction in which the solution appeared to be heading. And when Spector proposed his solution, I feared I had to churn out another lukewarm "hot take" to be disapproved and frowned upon. Mead went all out in the epilogue and fanboyed all over the locked room genre. I can sympathize. Mead's enthusiasm here was infectious enough to go along and forgive the patchwork nature of the locked room-trick, but what the modern-day, neo-GAD locked room mystery needs more of today is the kind of ingenuity and plotting that created the illusion of the materializing body inside the sealed trunk on stage. A superb example of what can be done by intertwining the art of conjuring with the craftiness of the detective story and loved the diagram of the trunk to explain the intended illusion. Hopefully, the quality of the trick with the trunk will become the standard of the series.

The Murder Wheel is not only about a string of miraculous murders. Just as important and integral to the overall plot is the material, who and why, stringing those three impossible crimes together. Honestly, Mead so far appears to be better at the who-and why as once again dexterously dovetailed overlapping casts of characters, numerous plot-threads, clues, red herrings and hidden motives-and relationships – like cutting and manipulating a deck of cards. Toss in a good, old-fashioned "Challenge to the Reader" and a solution strewn with footnotes referring back to the pages containing all the clues, you have pleasingly captive, well crafted detective novel that succeeded in capturing and evoking the Golden Age of the Grandest Game in the World. So eagerly look forward to Mead's third Joseph Spector miracle extravaganza, Cabaret Macabre (2024). The locked room mystery novel is walking again! Now I only need to get my hands on some of those other short stories.

On a final, unrelated note: I know the non-English, post-GAD locked room mysteries have once again dominated this blog, but rest assured, I do plan to eventually return to Christopher Bush, Moray Dalton and Brian Flynn.

Death and the Conjuror (2022) by Tom Mead

Earlier this month, I reviewed two of Tom Mead's short-form locked room mysteries, "Invisible Death" (2018) and "The Walnut Creek Vampire" (2020), while eagerly awaiting the delivery of my copy of his debut novel, Death and the Conjuror: A Joseph Spector Locked Room Mystery (2022) – which promised to be a magician's prop box of miraculous crimes. I thought the two short stories were ambitious in concept and a trifle weak in execution as the clueing left a lot to be desired. Clues and red herrings are vital ingredients of the traditional, fair play detective and indispensable to the plot-driven kind like the locked room mystery. However, I suspected Mead might be a mystery writer who needs a novel-length canvas to work his magic on to full effect. I was right. 

Tom Mead's Death and the Conjuror is set in 1936 and has two different, overlapping casts of characters whom together present a whole array of puzzling issues to the ageless magician, Joseph Spector.

Dr. Anselm Rees is a well-known psychologist who had lived and worked his entire life in Vienna, Austria, but he had reasons to emigrate and arrived in England with his personally trained daughter, Dr. Lidia Rees. Dr. Anselm Rees told upon his arrival in England to the assembled press "he had no intention of taking on any new patients," but, less than a month later, he has taken on three patients in secret. Their identities were kept in strict confidence and "in his notebooks he referred to them only as Patients A, B, and C." Patient A is a musician, Floyd Stenhouse, who's "one of the finest violinists the Philharmonic had ever known." Patient B is "one of the greatest actresses of the age," Della Cookson, who's also a kleptomaniac. Patient C is a typical, reclusive writer type, Claude Weaver, who writes mystery novels. The second cast of characters is flocked around an impresario, Benjamin Teasel, who's producing and directing a "little Grand Guignol" at the Pomegranate Theatre, Miss Death, in which Della Cookson and Lucy Levy respectively play first and second female lead. Joseph Spector is there as the stage-play is built on the back of his tricks and illusions.

One evening, Dr. Rees tells his housekeeper, Olive Turner, that he expects a visitor and instructs her to direct him to his study. A visitor announces himself without giving a name, a hat pulled over his forehead and a thick scarf obscuring his face. Ah, the seasoned locked room reader shouts out, but, half an hour later, the mysterious visitor leaves the house. Olive Turner goes to check on Dr. Anselm and talks to him through a locked door. She even hears him answering the telephone to talk to a patient and the scratching of his pen on a notepad. But when another visitor turns up unannounced, Dr. Anselm no longer responds to Olive's knocking. When they finally manage to get the door open, they discover the doctor's body with "his throat cleaved by a hideous crimson gash" that nearly decapitated him, but the door and french windows are locked from the inside – keys still in the keyholes. There's a stretch of flowerbed outside the french windows, which "an assailant would have to trample to get out that way," but "none of the footprints led anywhere near the house." So how did the murderer vanish from a locked room with a witness standing outside the door?

Inspector George Flint represents the official side of the investigation and he knows, like every experienced policeman, "most murders are sordid back-street affairs" with "no mystery or magic to them." But lately, Inspector Flint has become aware of "a burgeoning subgenre of crime" known as impossible crimes. There's been an alarming uptick of these impossible crimes as "men in locked rooms were killed under impractical circumstances" or bodies "found strangled in a snowy field with only a single set of footprints trailing backward from the corpse." I like it! This is Mead assuring the reader that his criminals and murderers have style, take pride in their handy work and put a little effort in their thefts and murders. Mead's murderers don't lower themselves to something as vulgar as revolver shots through an open car window or a blackjack in a pitch-black alleyway. Just full-blown locked room murders. And the question how "Anselm Rees had his throat slit in a perfectly sealed room" is not the only impossibility on Inspector Flint's plate.

During a party at Benjamin Teasel's home, a valuable painting goes missing without a trace. Teasel had locked the painting away in a large, wooden box underneath his bed and kept the keys on a cord around his neck, while every room in the house was locked up tight as he's not "very particular about people wandering around his upstairs." Only the front door was unlocked. There were two maids stationed there to welcome latecomers and they swear nobody walked out with a large canvas.

Inspector Flint admits he doesn't have the kind of brain to pick apart these murders staged as puzzles and turns to a specialist, Joseph Spector. A former music hall conjuror who looks like he belongs to a bygone era and could be aged "anywhere from fifty to eighty." Flint called it one of Spector's most fascinating tricks as he seen him grow older or younger depending on the situation, which is an illusion the magician carefully maintains. Jokingly referring to how the Spanish Armada ruined his tenth birthday and keeping his real name a secret. So you can't help but catch a glimpse of Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark in Joseph Spector. Although with him it's unquestionable all smoke and mirrors ("we cheat"), but exactly the kind of mind the police needs with cases like these.

The historical, 1936 period setting is no obstacle to discuss the then recently published The Hollow Man (1935), also known as The Three Coffins, in which Joseph Spector's "mutual friend Mr. John Dickson Carr has written a fairly comprehensive study of the locked-room problem" providing several categories of solution – which they crosscheck against their own locked room murder. Not a bad way to go over and use the famous "Locked Room Lecture" as it eliminates variations on the most well-known solutions and drives home just how impossible the murder under investigation really appears to be. These are the kind of treats locked room fans love! But the impossible crimes are not the only plot-strands requiring the attention of Flint and Spector. There's basically a whole tangle of complicated, possibly interconnected relationships, closely-guarded secrets and potential motives that need to be picked apart. So basically who did what, why and how, which at times tried to mimic the psychological whodunits of Helen McCloy. One of the mystery writers Mead names in “Acknowledgments” as writers who "enthuse and inspire" him, which also include Carr, Hoch, Hake Talbot and Clayton Rawson. They all appear on his "Top 10 Impossible Crimes" and, yes, Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (1938) is on there. Just like Rawson in Death from a Top Hat, Mead fanboyed a little too hard and tried to cram too much into a single novel. That began to result in some diminishing returns. Regrettably, that's especially true of the three impossible crimes with the third one happening when a body miraculously materialized inside "an apparently hermetically sealed elevator" under observation.

The impossible murder of Dr. Anselm Rees has an acceptable enough explanation, but not one that will blow most readers away and the strength is not in the locked room-trick. But everything packed around that trick that makes Death and the Conjuror more successful as an old-fashioned, neo-Golden Age whodunit than a classic locked room mystery. For example, the way in which Mead builds up towards the murder recalls Carr's The Hollow Man and La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932) by M. Herbert and E. Wyl, which likely was done on purpose to the misdirect the experiences, keen-eyed locked room fanboys. Going in a completely different direction once the bundled-up figure disappeared through the front door. Add the intricate, web-like circle of suspects and you have a modern rendition of the classic, 1930s mystery novel. Only weakness is that the motive linking the murderer and victim is rag-thin.

So the primary impossible situation is not perfect, but well-wrought as a pure, old-school detective story with the locked rooms as a little extra. And while the locked room-trick is not blistering original, it's actually a locked room mystery. Something that can't be said about the problem of the stolen painting. The only reason why it appeared to be an impossible theft is that the story conveniently ignored (ROT13) gung gur cnvagvat pbhyq unir orra gnxra bhg bs vgf senzr, gur senzr oebxra vagb cvrprf naq guebja bhg bs n jvaqbj until it was time to explain how it was done, but it was the first possibility that occurred to me. However, where the thief stowed away the painting was clever and very well done. The problem of the sealed elevator felt a little out of place here and the incredibly pulpy, somewhat hacky method would have been better served in a short homage to the pulp fiction of yesteryear like the Don Diavolo mysteries by one "Stuart Towne." That being said, the presentation of this problem was not without interest. Recently, I reviewed one of Hoch's short story collections, Funeral in the Fog (2020), which has a story, "The Way Up to Hades" (1988), about a rock star who vanishes from moving and watched elevator. Normally, a sealed elevator is the scene of a murder, but Hoch and Mead used it to make their victim disappears or appear out of thin air. I thought it was interesting to see how Hoch and Mead approaches the same problem from opposite directions and came away with completely different solutions. 

You might assume from my review that the conclusion soured me on the whole story, but that's not the case. Yes, as a classically-styled locked room mystery, Death and the Conjuror leaves something to be desired. It's simply not in the same class as Carr, Hoch or Talbot. But as a detective story, Death and the Conjuror gives the reader a sound continuation of the 1930s mystery novel. I want to echo Isaac Stump, of Solving the Mystery of Murder, who summed up the book as follow, "a fantastic crime novel… which has a locked-room mystery, and not, unfortunately, a fantastic locked-room mystery." I agree. There's another, very good reason why I loved the book. For close to fifty years, people who enjoy Golden Age detective fiction didn't have to wait for the new Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen to be published with the only real hurdle posed by obscure, long out-of-print writers and novels that were hard to come by – which the internet has since smoothed out and lead to a Renaissance Era. Now we can see the first flickers of the sparks that will light the fires of the Second Golden Age with M.P.O. Books, James Scott Byrnside, P. Dieudonné, Robert Innes, D.L. Marshall and Tom Mead giving us the authentic Golden Age experience of getting to watch them building a series from the ground up as they hone their skills and improve as they go on. So as far as I'm concerned, Death and the Conjuror is Mead's It Walks by Night (1930) that will eventually lead to a modern-day The Hollow Man in 2027. No pressure, though. :)